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Trade In Fantasy Ch. 4: Modes Of Transport, Pt 4


This entry is part 12 in the series Trade In Fantasy

Finally! After the diversions caused by Rafts and boats, today the series focuses on Ships at sea, with a bonus sci-fi section or two on the side.

The original plan was to also include Weather at Sea and Exotic Transportation Modes but the former has quickly grown to the point where the post would not be ready to publish if I insisted on including it.

So, even though I’ve put 1900 words into it already, those sections have been excerpted from this post and relegated to part 13, soon to follow – I have some original game mechanics for weather that I want to get down on ‘paper’ before I forget them, so I will be trying to strike while the iron is hot!

Unfortunately, there also wasn’t time to convert my quick-and-dirty spreadsheet into a fully-functional version to give away as a bonus freebie. Besides, if I did one for rafts – a minor side-note within the bigger topic – I would then have to ask why I hadn’t done one for more important parts of the system, and the answer of “too complicated, too little time” would have sounded rather hollow. The process is there and clear, and that will have to do, I’m afraid.

Table Of Contents: In part one of Chapter 4: Modes Of Transport

4.0 A Word about Routes

    4.0.1 Baseline Model
    4.0.2 Relative Sizes
    4.0.3 Competitors
    4.0.4 Terrain I
    4.0.5 Terrain II
    4.0.6 Multi-paths and Choke Points

      4.0.6.1 Sidebar: Projection Of Military Force

    4.0.7 Mode Of Transport

4.1 Backpack / Litters / Shanks Pony

    4.1.1 Capacity
    4.1.2 Personalities / Roleplay

4.2 Horseback

    4.2.1 Capacity
    4.2.2 Requirements
    4.2.3 Personalities / Roleplay

4.3 Mule Train

    4.3.1 Capacity
    4.3.2 Requirements
    4.3.3 Personalities / Roleplay

4.4 Wagons

    4.4.1 Capacity
    4.4.2 Requirements
    4.4.3 Other Exceptions – Animal Size

      4.4.3.1 Sidebar: Road Trains

    4.4.4 Fodder / Food & Water Needs

      4.4.4.1 People
      4.4.4.2 Horses
      4.4.4.3 Mules
      4.4.4.4 Oxen / Cattle
      4.4.4.5 Elephants
      4.4.4.6 Other

    4.4.5 Personalities / Roleplay

In Part 2:

4.5 River Boats & Barges

    4.5.0 A Splice Of Maritime History

      4.5.0.1 Dugouts & Canoes
      4.5.0.2 Rafts
      4.5.0.3 Boats
      4.5.0.4 Poled Rafts & Barges
      4.5.0.5 Oars
      4.5.0.6 Land-based motive power
      4.5.0.7 Sail
      4.5.0.8 Better Sails
      4.5.0.9 Trading Ships
      4.5.0.10 Warships & Pirates
      4.5.0.11 Beyond the age of sail
      4.5.0.12 Riverboats
      4.5.0.13 Sources

    4.5.1 Riverboat Capacity
    4.5.2 Favorable Winds

      4.5.2.1 The Beaufort Wind Scale

    4.5.3 Favorable Currents
    4.5.4 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements
    4.5.5 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions
    4.5.6 Extreme Weather Events
    4.5.7 The Tempest Scale
    4.5.8 Vessel Rating
    4.5.9 Weather Cataclysms

In Part 3:

4.6 Rafts

    4.6.1 Rowing Time & Exhaustion
    4.6.2 The basics of vector sums

      4.6.2.1 An Example
      4.6.2.2 A better example
      4.6.2.3 With Maths
      4.6.2.4 Simplified Vector Sums
      4.6.2.5 Multi-hour Vector Sums

    4.6.3 Raft Design & Operation

      4.6.3.1 Buoyancy
      4.6.3.2 Raft Calculation Process
      4.6.3.3 Why all this matters
      4.6.3.4 Category 1 Raft Table
      4.6.3.5 Category 2 Raft Table
      4.6.3.6 Category 3 Raft Table
      4.6.3.7 Category 4 Raft Tables
      4.6.3.8 Category 5 Raft Tables
      4.6.3.9 Category 6 Raft Tables

    4.6.4 Overloaded Rafts
    4.6.5 Raft Breakup
    4.6.6 Construction Time
    4.6.7 A final word on Overloading Capacities

4.7 Canoes etc

    4.7.1 Proportions
    4.7.2 Frontal Dimension
    4.7.3 Base Speed

In today’s post:

4.8 Seagoing Vessels

    4.8.0 Logistics At Sea and In Space

      4.8.0.1 “But I don’t need to know this stuff, my PCs aren’t Space Traders…”
      4.8.0.2 Using the analogy
      4.8.0.3 A Word on Historical Accuracy

    4.8.1 Capacity
    4.8.2 Ships As Monsters
    4.8.3 Ship Specifications

      4.8.3.1 Physical Dimensions
      4.8.3.2 Movement Parameters
      4.8.3.3 Functionality
      4.8.3.4 Combat
      4.8.3.5 Data Sources
      4.8.3.6 Ship Specifications

    4.8.4 Some Thoughts About Cannon

      4.8.4.1 Having Your Cannon And Your Flavor, Too
      4.8.4.2 Crippled Land-Cannon
      4.8.4.3 Personal Firearms
      4.8.4.4 Bombs and other explosive devices

    4.8.5 Exotic Crews

      4.8.5.1 Human Height Adjustments
      4.8.5.2 Non-human Height
      4.8.5.3 Non-human Proportions
      4.8.5.4 Crew Strength
      4.8.5.5 Handling and other parameters

    4.8.6 Mixed Crews

In the next post:

    4.8.7 Weather At Sea

      4.8.7.1 An Introduction to Weather (oversimplified)
      4.8.7.2 Accumulated Potential and Threshold
      4.8.7.3 Seasonal Weather Averages
      4.8.7.4 Seasonal Weather Trends
      4.8.7.5 Daily Temperature Variation
      4.8.7.6 Weather Change Threshold
      4.8.7.7 Humidity
      4.8.7.8 Clouds & Rain
      4.8.7.9 Winds

           4.8.7.9.1 Favorable Winds
           4.8.7.9.2 Becalmed
           4.8.7.9.3 Unfavorable Winds
           4.8.7.9.4 Violent Winds
           4.8.7.9.5 Extreme Winds: Hurricanes etc

      4.8.7.10 Currents

           4.8.7.10.1 Favorable Currents
           4.8.7.10.2 Still Currents
           4.8.7.10.3 Unfavorable Currents
           4.8.7.10.4 Violent Waves
           4.8.7.10.5 Extreme Waves: Tsunamis & Walls Of Water

      4.8.7.11 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements
      4.8.7.12 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions

4.9 Exotic Modes Of Transport

    4.9.1 Flight
    4.9.2 Teleport
    4.9.3 Magic Gates & Portals
    4.9.4 Capacities

And, In future chapters (most of them much shorter):
  1. Land Transport
  2. Waterborne Transport
  3. Spoilage
  4. Key Personnel
  5. The Journey
  6. Arrival
  7. Journey’s End
  8. Adventures En Route

Image by Brigitte Werner (ArtTower) from Pixabay

4.8 Seagoing Vessels

The defining trait of ships is that anything other than sails or mechanical power is a secondary or backup form of motive energy. Seagoing vessels are an order of magnitude more complicated than river trade, but potentially an order of magnitude more profitable as well.

In many ways, deep-water sailing vessels are the nearest thing in Fantasy to Interstellar Trade in a Sci-Fi game, for exactly the same reasons: You are a long way from anywhere, so if you need something, you had better have taken it with you.

When you’re miles (or light years) – perhaps a dozen, perhaps hundreds – away from an established port, you can’t exactly nip on down to the corner store any time you feel like it.

That means that a lot of planning has to go into these expeditions; they have far more stringent personnel needs, and far more rigorous preparations that have to be made, or they might never leave port.

Those needs have been in the back of my mind throughout this project, and have had considerable influence over the Key Personnel chapter, for example.

Before I get into the broad mechanics of sea travel, though, I want to talk a little more about the logistics of these voyages.

    4.8.0 Logistics At Sea and In Space

    Over time, people will have learned from successful trading voyages and a few unsuccessful ones, too, I would imagine. They would have learned that there are certain risks involved which could lead to catastrophic failure, but that if you have this, and someone on the crew knows how to do that, there is at least a chance (if not a certainty) of staving off that disaster.

    Having the right resources and personnel is a form of insurance; not having them is something that you might get away with, time and again – but sooner or later, it would come back to bite you.

    If you could carry everything you might possibly need, there would be no problem, but you can’t. Some things are too big or too expensive to justify, given the relatively low risk that they will be needed. That alone makes for competing imperatives and interesting choices, but there is a third factor: every kilogram or pound of resources that you carry will occupy space that is therefore not available to be used to carry cargo, and its’ cargo that pays the bills.

    You would never carry a spare keel, for example – if the one you have happens to break in a storm, well that’s just tough luck, that vessel is probably headed for the bottom (unless you manage to limp into port somewhere or make landfall, and can then craft and install a replacement or repair – a singularly difficult and improbable task).

    You wouldn’t carry a replacement mainmast – if yours gets blown away, you have to make your way to land and again see about constructing or buying a replacement. But you might be able to save the one you already have just by cutting the ropes attaching your mainsails and letting them blow away – and storms happen often enough that it would be worth carrying one or perhaps even two spares.

    Anchors are essential, but large and heavy – they are probably a borderline spare. More likely, you would carry a smaller, lighter, emergency anchor with which to make do, temporarily.

    Ships need a certain level of crew, but people die at sea all the time (especially in a fantasy environment), so anyone who doesn’t carry spares has rocks in their head. But those people need food and water, and you have to carry that, too – so getting the numbers right is another vital decision. And carrying someone who can keep them healthy is definitely desirable. And someone who can prepare that food.

    In fact, it’s in the food-and-water department that the greatest differences between space trading and sea traders can be found – because those who travel the oceans are surrounded by water, and that water contains food, in the form of fish.

    The problem is that you can’t stop to fish – who knows what the winds will be like tomorrow? If the wind is even half reasonable, you have to take advantage of it while you can. And as for sea water, you can’t drink it.

    It’s possible, were the ship to be becalmed, that you could set the crew to fishing and purifying sea water, but you will never produce enough of either commodity in that way, and you’re often better off putting the crew to work rowing toward someplace where the winds are more likely to be useful and reliable.

    In space, it might be possible to find a source of potable water in the form of ice – it would need to be melted and filtered, but that’s a relatively easy operation. But there is no likelihood of food, so that side of things is worse.

    All of which means that navigation is vital – in both instances. And so it goes, on down the line.

      4.8.0.1 “But I don’t need to know this stuff, my PCs aren’t Space Traders…”

      Someone actually said this to me at one point. To anyone thinking that way, I would ask, Do your PCs ever need to buy anything not made locally? Do they ever need to use a service provided ‘on the side’ by traders? Do they ever interact with any NPCs who do trade, or who try to protect traders from pirates? Do you ever need to take trade patterns into consideration when assessing the viability of outposts and colonies?

      If the answer to any one of these questions is ever even just a little bit “yes,” then you need to have a grasp of the basics and of what a trader needs to know in order to be prosperous.

      You might not need to take every trade exchange into detailed consideration, but you need to know the basics, just so that you can do a reasonable job of integrating them into your campaign environments.

      Use sea trade, then, as an analogy to your situation when thinking about interstellar trade, and you will have everything you need to succeed at at least this minimal level.

      Okay, so where was I? Oh, yes….

      4.8.0.2 Using the analogy
      The principle is, then, that anything that can be encountered by a ship at sea will have some analogous encounter for a ship in space, and vice-versa. These encounters won’t just affect trading vessels, of course; any ship that journeys from Port A to Port B, for any reason, can have one.

      Let’s say the PCs have undertaken some task with a firm deadline, but one that they should be able to meet easily. That doesn’t suit the GM; he wants them to be under some time pressure so that when real problems arise later in the adventure, the PCs can’t make the lazy decisions, they will have to take a few risks. But how to delay them long enough to make time more critical?

      How to delay them? is therefore the question, and to answer it, the GM deploys this analogy and thinks of all the things that could delay a merchant ship going to sea.

           ▪ A paperwork snafu delays departure.

           ▪ While at sea, encounter a Beholder.

           ▪ Becalmed.

           ▪ Pirates.

           ▪ A military vessel hunting pirates who is suspicious of the PCs ship.

      First question: one delay, or several smaller ones? The GM decides to have an each-way bet: one longer delay, Becalmed, and several smaller ones that can be dropped in or left out as needed to achieve the total delay desired.

      Second question: How much delay does he want? Somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks, he decides. That’s not enough to make time a critical factor, but it is enough to make the timetable uncomfortably tight.

      Third through seventh questions: what are the equivalents of the maritime problems that he has listed?

           ▪ A paperwork snafu delays departure. Unchanged, really, it just needs a bit of fleshing out.

           ▪ Beholder. Some equivalent creature might reside in an Asteroid belt that the PCs have to traverse on their way out of the system. Give it powers useful to a space-going creature – beams from some of its eyes that are adept at locking onto and destroying incoming missiles; some sort of x-ray vision; something that penetrates hull armor; something that ablates or drains shields. Have it live on something in the engine compartment (details depend on game background); it uses it’s x-ray vision to search for it and its powers to go after it. Once driven off / defeated, the ship will need temporary repairs to be space-worthy. Or they can return to their departure point and get the repairs done properly – at the cost of even more time.

           ▪ Becalmed. A ship jumps into hyperspace just as the PCs are arriving, and it’s evident that it was not properly configured, causing it to misjump. If the game system uses jump gates, maybe this causes the gate to malfunction, and the PCs can’t go anywhere until it’s repaired. If the ships generate their own jumps, as in Travelor, maybe a misjump ‘curdles’ space making misjumps more likely even if the ship is properly configured. All the PCs can do is wait for space to ‘calm down’. Or maybe an Asteroid has impacted a nearby gas giant and kicked up a super-storm of gas-giant proportions, and it’s the radiation and electrical discharges that make FTL travel unsafe. Lots of options, pick an appropriate one.

           ▪ Pirates. Self-explanatory, but largely done to death. The focus should be on making this pirate encounter distinctive. Maybe they have heard rumors of an incredibly valuable shipment coming through and won’t believe the PCs when they say ‘it’s not us’? Rare, 20th century comic books perhaps, or something else equally attention-getting? I remember the outrage amongst my players when the original Kermit The Frog puppet was listed amongst some recovered stolen property… After the battle, the ship might need repairs. Again.

           ▪ A military vessel hunting pirates who is suspicious of the PCs ship. Again, fairly self-explanatory. They would insist on boarding, would search the ship and demand proof of purchase for anything and everything that might, or might conceal, cargo. Which might be especially problematic if the mission is to smuggle something somewhere.

      Each problem (other than “Becalmed”) might be resolved in 1 or 2 days with a successful check of the appropriate skill, or 2-3 days with an unsuccessful one. The PCs can be “Becalmed” for 4, 6, 9 days, that’s up to the GM. There should probably be some sort of instrument that would warn the crew it’s unsafe to jump, and someone should be monitoring this and reporting back to the captain on a regular basis. This is a chance to delve into how the world works, don’t waste it! That means that if the PCs succeed in every check, 4-8+6 = 10-14 days elapse; a failed check simply takes one of the subsequent encounters off the list.

      I would also rank the encounters in terms of game world / storytelling strength. As mentioned, Pirates are a bit of a cliche; so they would rank fairly low. The “Beholder” is a bit better, but stretches credibility a little thin. It’s next best. The Pirate hunter is pretty good, and might be encountered even in systems where there is little or no pirate activity. And the different FTL problems (“Becalmed”) are gold in terms of throwing the occasional spanner into the predictability that is often a feature of these games.

      That gives a good idea of which encounter to drop, if need be. Logically, the pirate hunter should be at the destination, not in the departure system – but if you change them to be hunting smugglers, that can work, too. So the sequence can be tweaked as well.

      I would be careful about putting the two weakest encounters after the “Becalmed” sequence, though; one weak encounter and one stronger one are a better mix in terms of sustaining interest and entertainment throughout.

      I have seen travel to a jump point, jump, arrive, and travel to destination hand-waved down to three minutes game time and a skill check; I’ve seen it take an hour or so, game time; and I’ve seen it occupy a full game session. This 1-2 week delay is closer to the latter.

      And, to state what should be obvious: No, you don’t do this every time. You save it for when it adds story value to the game – like shortening a deadline to the point of discomfort.

      4.8.0.3 A Word on Historical Accuracy

      Don’t expect more than a bit of lip service to this concept herein. Trying to compress the entire maritime history through to the end of the age of sail into a coherent and cohesive system requires massive generalization and more than a little romanticization, even before allowance gets made for any Fantasy element.

      Functionality and a superficial credibility were far higher priorities than accuracy or realism.

    4.8.1 Capacity

    Seagoing vessels tend to be fairly big, and that generally means that the size of a Trade Unit tends to be larger as well. As a general rule, 1/2, or 1, 2, or 4 tons (or tonnes) are probably the most practical sizes for this kind of cargo transportation. That increases the size of a Labor Unit as well, because there is more to be handled – loaded or unloaded – in a given time frame.

    All ships are NOT alike. There are huge variations in design and capacity. Some trade capacity for speed, the better to run away; others bulk up on defenses, the better to survive; and some aim for the maximum cargo.

    Not all ports are able to handle ships of every size. The larger the vessel, the deeper the water that it needs (as a general rule of thumb).

    So cargo capacities are specific to each ship design and limited by what the ports can handle on a trade route. Or, more properly said, cargo capacities are specific to each ship design and trade routes are restricted by the size of the ship.

    And don’t forget that supplies and operational reserves eat into the cargo capacity.

    Crew sizes are also generally proportional to the cargo capacity, because each increase represents an increase in the size of the ship.

    There are 14 sizes that are reasonably common. Below, in a table, I set these out and cross-reference them with the listed ‘optimum Trade Unit’ sizes to get total cargo capacity in conventional units. After that, there are some modifiers for different optimizations.

    But you should work backwards – select a vessel of appropriate size and type, reverse the adjustments to get cargo capacity, and then find that capacity listing in the column of your chosen Trade Unit size.

    Cargo Capacity
    (Trade Units)

    1/2 T = 1 TU

    1 T = 1 TU

    2 T = 1 TU

    4 T = 1 TU

    1

    1/2 T

    1 T

    2 T

    4 T

    2

    1 T

    2 T

    4 T

    8 T

    4

    2 T

    4 T

    8 T

    16 T

    5

    2.5 T

    5 T

    10 T

    20 T

    8

    4 T

    8 T

    16 T

    32 T

    10

    5 T

    10 T

    20 T

    40 T

    15

    7.5 T

    15 T

    30 T

    60 T

    20

    10 T

    20 T

    40 T

    60 T

    25

    12.5 T

    25 T

    50 T

    75 T

    35

    17.5 T

    35 T

    70 T

    (140 T)

    50

    25 T

    50 T

    100 T

    (200 T)

    60

    30 T

    60 T

    (120 T)

    (240 T)

    65

    32.5 T

    65 T

    (130 T)

    (260 T)

    75

    37.5 T

    75 T

    (150 T)

    (300 T)

    100

    50 T

    100 T

    (200 T)

    (400 T)

    Notes:
    () signifies vessels that did not exist in the historical periods commonly used as a basis for Fantasy games, even at a stretch – but that might exist in a Fantasy reality, nevertheless.

    Units:
         1 Tonne = 1000 kg = 1.102 short tons = 2205 lb
         1 short ton = 2000 lb = 907.2 kg = 0.9072 tonnes
         1 long ton = 2240 lb = 1.12 short tons = approx 1.016 tonnes = 1016 kg

    Long tons are used for the displacement (weight) of vessels.

    Cargo is supposed to be recorded in short tons, but this only generates confusion and opportunities for fraud (using long tons for cargo to reduce mooring fees and sound tolls [a toll for using the strait separating Denmark and Sweden that for 200 years generated up to 2/3 of Denmark’s state income], for example).

    It’s also useful to notice that, to two significant digits, the difference between tonnes and long tons is a rounding error.

    4.8.2 Ships As Monsters

    It can often be useful to use standard combat as an analogy for naval battles – hit points, armor class, etc. While not going fully down this path, there have been any number of tips of the hat to the idea in the content that follows.

    If you decide to commit to this more fully, just remember that – unlike monsters – (1) there is no flanking advantage; (2) ships will keep going – unlike monsters, they won’t stop on a dime – and collisions between ships can easily sink both; (3) it takes time to furl or open sails. How long depends on all sorts of factors, and is better left up to the GM;.and (4) ships tend to be big and heavy, and even though there isn’t a lot of friction to overcome, they are still going to be slow to get moving even when sails have been hoisted or engines engaged.

    4.8.3 Ship Specifications

      4.8.3.1 Physical Dimensions

      Ship sizes may include Small / Light*, Medium, Heavy / Large, and Over-sized.
           * These are also sometimes called “Pocket” ships
      Ship Sub-types may include Fast (optimized for speed at the expense of other attributes) and War (optimized for offensive capacity at the expense of other attributes)

      Length: typical length in feet, but every ship will be a little different

      Weight (empty):typical weight in long tons, but every ship will be a little different

      Masts (normally): 0, 1, 2, 3. 4+ was possible but rare, and assumed to be ‘fantasy’ in nature.

      4.8.3.2 Movement Parameters:

      Turning Circle: 1 Very Tight, 2 Tight, 3 Moderate, 4 Wide, 5 Very Wide, 6 Incredibly Wide.

      This is usually measured as a multiple of fudge* × length × speed / 4.

      The actual meaning of these turning circles depends on the map scale, wind conditions, and too many other factors to go into here. GMs should decide what they mean on the day and under the current in-game conditions – while noting that each is worse / wider than the one before. GMs aiming for realism should note that the extra speed from a wind at the stern actually permits a tighter turn, while any wind from square of the hull forward increases turning circle by 1 class to the worse.

      Any ship with <1/4 max crew also adds 1 to the turning circle.

      * Fudge is an adjustment that is consistent over a class of ship (usually) and is used to scale the turning circle designated by the GM to the scale of the ship. It’s what is commonly known as a ‘technical term’.

      Speed: 8 = Incredibly Fast, 7 = Very Fast, 6 = Fast, 5 = Medium, 4 = Slow, 3 = Very Slow, 2 = Incredibly Slow, 1 = 1/2 Slow, 0 = 1/10 Slow

           Incredibly Fast (8)= 2 × Very Fast (typically), available only to vessels with “Fast” in the descriptor
           Very Fast (7) = 3 × Medium (typically)
           Fast (6) = 2 × Medium (typically)
           Slow (4) = 1/2 Medium
           Very Slow (3) = 1/3 Medium
           Incredibly Slow (2) = 1/4 Medium
           1/4 Slow (1) = 1/8 Medium = 1/2 Incredibly Slow
           1/10 Slow (0) = 1/20 Medium – only when sailed/rowed into the wind (otherwise,s speed 0 in those conditions)

      4.8.3.3 Functionality:

      Draft:
      There are 5 categories of Draft value. All come with both benefits and liabilities in terms of what a particular vessel is capable of.

      In sci-fi terms, think of gravity wells as reefs, shoals, and distances to the coast – the stronger the local gravity well, the lower the “draft equivalent” that is needed. Having way-stations in orbit or on nearby planets / moons is the equivalent of deeper harbors, obviating the need to go into the deep, nasty, gravity well.

           1 Shallow (can use coastal waters, cross shoals & some reefs without danger)
           2 Near Shallow (can use coastal waters, cross most shoals & reefs without danger)
           3 Medium (can use coastal waters, cross deep shoals and reefs with little danger but shallow ones are a threat)
           4 Deep (can only use bays, cannot cross shoals or reefs without extreme risk)
           5 Very Deep (can only use ‘deep water’ bays at any time, needs high tide to use other bays, all shoals and reefs pose extreme risk)

      Crew:
      Crew numbers are specified as a range, minimum to maximum. Another significant value is 2x minimum. The numbers given are a base value that has to be adjusted for the number of officers and high-value passengers.

           Officers count as 3 crew but increase max crew by 1 each.

           Passengers in steerage / low-berths count as crew but NOT as minimum crew (Passengers who are in cold-sleep or something similar consume no rations and count only as dead weight, obviously).

           Passengers in high-berths count as officers but NOT as minimum crew.

      There is also a “virtual crew count” used for the consumption of rations. For this purpose, officers may count as 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 crewmen. That doesn’t mean that they eat five times as much – but they may eat five times as well. Nor is this necessarily consistent amongst the entire officer corps – the captain, first mate, and high-berth passengers will often have one value while other officers are 1/2 or 1 less.

      Crew Provisions

      As per 3.1.1.13 & 3.1.1.14, the minimum requirement in food and water totals 5.25 kg/person per day. When you do the math, you get to a value of 0.0402 long tons × crew, per week. This number includes increased mess and galley size, which is one reason why Officers count as more extra crew than just their numbers. It does NOT include crew quarters, locker space, etc.

      But it’s not that simple. When you’re crossing a desert, an arctic tundra, or out at sea, you can’t simply replace food that has spoiled – so you have to carry extra supplies just in case. How much in extra supplies is a function of paranoia and climate (things go bad more slowly in cold environments). I consider values of +10%, +25%, +33%, +50%, +75%, and +100%.

      But that’s feeding people the minimum they need to survive – one minimal meal a day. Unless you had no choice but to impose such a regimen, crews would revolt at the imposition of such a regimen. So you also need to decide how many meals a day, and of what relative size (where that essential minimum =100%). I consider values of +10%, +25%, +33%, +50%, +75%, +100%, +150%, +200%, and +250%.

      100%+250% means 350% total each day. How this gets broken up is irrelevant – there could be three light snacks and a feast, or one light snack and three solid meals, or whatever – so long as the grand total adds up to 350%.

      When you correlate all these factors, you get the following table:

      spoilage
      allowance

      +0%

      +10%

      +25%

      +35%

      +50%

      +75%

      +100%

      better
      than
      minimum

      +0%

      0.04

      0.044

      0.05

      0.054

      0.06

      0.07

      0.08

      +10%

      0.044

      0.049

      0.055

      0.06

      0.066

      0.077

      0.088

      +25%

      0.05

      0.055

      0.063

      0.068

      0.075

      0.088

      0.101

      +33%

      0.053

      0.059

      0.067

      0.072

      0.08

      0.094

      0.107

      +50%

      0.06

      0.066

      0.075

      0.081

      0.09

      0.106

      0.121

      +100%

      0.08

      0.088

      0.101

      0.109

      0.121

      0.141

      0.161

      +150%

      0.101

      0.111

      0.126

      0.136

      0.151

      0.176

      0.201

      +200%

      0.121

      0.133

      0.151

      0.163

      0.181

      0.211

      0.241

      +250%

      0.141

      0.155

      0.176

      0.19

      0.211

      0.246

      0.281

      For example: +35% spoilage allowance, +150% better than minimum, 16 crew: 0.136 × 16 per week = 2.176 long tons = 2.43712 short tons. If your ship has 50 long tons cargo capacity, you could carry provisions for those 16 and nothing else and have 20.5 weeks’ capacity. If you want to provision for a 6 week voyage, plus 2 weeks’ margin, it would reduce cargo capacity by 19.5 long tons. Note that for a journey of this short length, 35% spoilage is being really paranoid.

      Ships owners will always look to cut unprofitable corners. Six weeks is short enough that even if there was 80% spoilage of the food, the crew could make it all the way to their destination without starving to death, and go even further if rations were cut in response to the emergency. What’s more, the crew can progressively eat their way through that extra two week’s worth, so you can cut the ‘better than minimum’ to +50% and still be feeding the crew reasonably well. That reduces the requirement from 0.136 per crew per week to just 0.06. This returns (0.136 – 0.06) × 16 × 8 = 9.728 long tons of cargo capacity to the pursuit of making profits – nearly 20% of the 50-ton capacity.

      Cargo Capacity (short tons)
      The numbers given are base values that need to be adjusted as follows:

           -1 cargo / 6 crew (or part thereof) over 2x min

           -0.5 cargo / cannon

      At first glance, you might think that actual crew numbers should be used for these adjustments, but no, no, no – all crew and high-level officers have the capacity for personal baggage / comforts, and the highest ranking have even more of it. So use x3 for most crew & high-berth passengers and x5 for the cream – certainly that Captain, maybe the navigator, maybe the first mate, and maybe the doctor. Larger ships may further differentiate.

      So total up the ‘effective’ crew numbers. If the result is less than double the minimum, they have not intruded into the cargo capacity; if the result is more than double that, but less than the maximum, then cargo capacity is reduced as shown; and if the total is more than the maximum, the ship is effectively overloaded and has NO spare cargo capacity.

      If you cut rations, you cut the ‘effective crew’. I’ve made the assumption that we’re allocating 1016 kg / 5.25 kg per day × 3 = 580.6 meals per ton of capacity – and then applied a fudge factor to lift that to a neat 600, because a small overload will quickly disappear. Dividing that by 6 means that we’re effectively working in units of 100 meals – a nice, convenient number.

      Some crew may require more or less nourishment than others. A Halfling would count as 1½ crew, for example. A Giant may count as 10 or more! Don’t forget to take such things into account.

      Ships carry enough provisions for 2 × the minimum number of crew without intruding on the cargo space. But if your crew numbers exceed that quantity, you need to add extra provisions that won’t fit into the holds designated for the purpose.

      Total Food Reserves

      With the above information, you can quickly determine 2 × Min crew / 100 + the excess cargo calculated above to get a total provisions weight. Multiply the result by 100 meals in a long ton and divide by the number of crew determined previously (the count that factors in how well various people eat). The result is the number of days that the ship has provisions for – both food and water – if fully laden. This is often a useful number to know, to say the least, but because it varies according to so many factors, it’s not something that can be specified in advance – it needs to be recalculated for every trip, or sometimes for every leg of a trip.

      4.8.3.4 Combat

      Hit Dice / Hit Points:
           Potential HD = Class #

           Class 1-6 rafts = d2
           Class 1-6 Boats = d6
           Class 7-8 = -1 die, size to d8
           Class 9-20 = -2 die, size to d10
           Class 21-30 = -4 die, size to d12
           Class 31+ = -4 die, / 1.6 die, size to d20

           Reinforcement = – 2^(x-1) cargo where × is +1 defense & +1 HD.

           Actual HP = (Potential HP + Reinforcement) × Crew / Max Crew

      Again, a note: If you only have 1/2 the maximum crew, you only have 1/2 the capacity for taking damage. That’s because you have fewer crew to replace the injured or killed, and fewer crew to work as damage control parties.

      Damage
      It doesn’t matter how damage is inflicted – it could be a cannon, a whole bunch of cannon, a fireball spell, a laser cutter, a beam weapon, or a whole bunch of rowdies with axes. This combat analogue measures Ship HP on the human scale, so all these things to whatever damage they would normally do.

      Instead of rolling for each individual, if there are a lot of them, determine the roll required with all modifiers taken into account and translate that into a % successful.

      Next, we need to apply a fudge factor. Divide the number of attackers by 6 (counting cannons as 6 attackers, fireballs as the number of d6 in the fireball, and so on). Roll that many dice and add the result to the % successful, then roll it again re-rolling all sixes and subtract the result from the adjusted % successful.

      The more attackers there are, the less likely it is that there will be a significant variance. The ‘re-roll sixes’ is a deliberate abstraction to allow for the fact that sometimes a near miss is good enough.

      Multiply the net % successful by the number of attackers, broken down by size of damage die if necessary, to get the number that actually hit – and them multiply by the average damage result, no need to roll it unless you want to do so for dramatic effect.

      My Technique would be to actually roll the first wave of damage,. then apply average damage until the target vessel has less than 3 ‘salvos’ capacity remaining, then go back to rolling. This maximizes dramatic effect while minimizing inconvenience and inefficiency. Of course, if no PCs are involved, it’s average damage all the way – the ‘fudge factor’ provides enough randomness to seem realistically variable.

      Damage Distribution:
           (3d20+40)% of damage is applied to crew. The rest is applied to the ship.

      Crew Damage: Use half the indicated total damage to kill crew, based on average hit points etc. Apply the remainder as evenly as possible over the surviving crew (and note that this will reduce their average hit points for the next salvo).

      Ship damage includes sail damage that slows the ship but doesn’t actually sink it, offensive damage that reduces a target’s ability to attack back, defensive damage that reduces a ship’s ability to stay intact, and hull damage that reduces it’s ability to stay afloat. So you may need to further break it down.

      That breakdown depends on where the attackers were aiming which depends on what they were trying to accomplish. The attacker should nominate one of the four damage types indicated; this choice will persist until changed, and it takes 8 × minimum crew / surviving crew foregone attacks, round up, to make such a change (officers count as 3 as usual, due to their greater experience).

      Example: Minimum crew is 20, current surviving crew is 65; it takes 8 × 20 / 65 = 2.46, rounds up to 3, attacks foregone to change targets.

      The GM needs d6 in 4 different colors. One color represents sail damage, one offensive damage, one damages the targets’ defenses, and one hull damage. The GM needs 3 dice of the color that matches the chosen target of the attacker and 1 dice each of the other three, for a total of 6 dice (yes, there are ways of doing this will dice of only a single color – roll 1d6 three times and 3d6 once, recording the totals).

      Divide the damage done by the total of the six dice (rounding off to the nearest 1/2) and then for each type of damage, multiply the result by the total of that colored dice. Round results in the opposite direction to any rounding that too place following the division.

      Example: 1 red die (6), 1 green die (2), one black die (3), and 3 blue dice (10), total of 19. Damage done to the ship = 45. So, 45/19 = 2.368, which rounds to 2.5. Multiply the three dice total (10) by 2.5 to get 25 – that’s the number of dice of damage to whatever the attacker was targeting. Multiply the red die result (6) by 2.5 to get 15 – that’s the damage done to whatever the red die represented. The green die gives 5 points, the black die gives 7.5 – which gets rounded down to 7 because we rounded up to get to the 2.5.

      Damage Effects
      Divide the damage done to each area of effect (except hull damage) by 6, but record remainders as fractions of 6 – these can accumulate over multiple salvos / rounds.

      Sail / Speed damage: it takes 6 points to drop from the vessels top speed rating by 1, then 5 to drop by another one, then 4, and so on, until the vessel reaches 0 and is dead in the water.

      Defensive Damage: the result is the bonus that the attacker inflicting the damage will be at for their next attack. If the target vessel has enough excess crew to perform damage control, this will reduce by 1 on the attack after that, by another 1 on the attack after that, and so on. Damage control is limited to HALF the defensive damage done – the rest needs more time / resources than can be accommodated during battle. Furthermore, every -6 or part thereof has a 1 in 6 chance of becoming 1 worse during combat maneuvers.

      Offensive Damage: this reduces the number of dice of damage that the attacked vessel can inflict on their next attack by the indicated number. If they have sufficient excess crew to work damage control, this will reduce by 1 on the attack after that, then by 1 more, and so on. Offensive damage repairs are limited to HALF the inflicted offensive damage, the rest can’t be fixed on the fly. Furthermore, for every -6 or part thereof, there is a 1 in 6 chance of doing an additional d6 damage to one of the other areas of the ship (roll a d3 to choose).

      Hull Damage: The damage done comes off the ships hit points. If there are sufficient crew to work damage control, they can restore 1d6 points of hull damage in a combat round, and if they roll a six, they roll again and repair +6 points. Hull repairs are limited to HALF the inflicted damage, the rest can’t be repaired so easily. Furthermore, for every 6 points of hull damage done in a single attack after the first 6, there is a 1 in 6 chance of an extra d6 of hull damage resulting from combat maneuvers. Do enough hull damage to a target and it can literally tear itself apart, sending it to the bottom.

      Furthermore, ships that lose 1/2 their HP in hull damage are slowed one additional Speed, and another when they lose 1/2 of what’s left, and a third when they reach 0.

      Zero HP means that a ship is sinking. How long this takes is up to the GM but it’s usually measured in minutes for small ships and potentially hours for large ships. Or should that be seconds and minutes, respectively? The first is more historically accurate, the second ups the ante considerably. Ongoing Repairs / damage control may stem this. Each Ship-Class additional HP inflicted thereafter reduces this by 1 of the larger time units. So a class 9 vessel needs 9 additional HP of hull damage to hasten its’ sinking, a class 15 vessel needs 15, and so on.

      Cannon
      Cannon are divided into two classes for ‘ship vs ship’ battles: Light and Heavy.

      ‘Light’ means that each counts for only half the standard weight, but the cannonballs are lighter and smaller and do 1d6 per cannon per shot. Heavy means that each counts fully for the weight, the cannon have greater range, and they do d10 per cannon per shot.

      Remember that cannon are usually arranged in pairs, one to each side of the ship, so at most half can fire in a given round.

      An additional weight class, “Gargantuan”, is occasionally trotted out because they look really mean, but the cannon weigh twice as much as normal and only do d12, take twice as long to reload, and have no significant range advantage, so they actually have less effect than regular cannon.

      4.8.3.5 Data Sources

      A lot of research went into the above rules and the tables given below. Credit where it’s due:

      Sid Meier’s Pirates! (Video Game, various incarnations)

      ★ Link 1

      ★ Link 2

      ★ Link 3

      Wikipedia

      ★ Pinnace (ship’s boat)

      ★ Full-Rigged Pinnace

      ★ Sloop

      ★ Schooner

      ★ Lugger

      ★ Fluyt

      ★ East Indiaman

      ★ Brigantine

      ★ Brig

      ★ Frigate

      ★ Galleon

      ★ Clipper

      ★ Ship Of The Line

      ★ Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad

      ★ Ottoman ship Mahmudiye

      Other (was actually used for the previous post):

      ★ Gouth AI a raft of 8 logs

      4.8.3.6 Ship Specifications

      This was originally one big table. At the last minute, I’ve broken it into three similarly-sized tables so that the headings are never too far away, and I’ve repeated the heading at the end of the third table for good measure. When this gets edited into an e-book, they might get rejoined or split into two, depending on how they fit on the page.

      Class

      Class Name

      Len
      (ft)

      Wt
      (lt)

      Masts

      Turn

      Speed

      Draft

      Cargo Cap (st)

      Crew

      Cannon (Tot)

      7

      Pinnace*

      28-40

      100

      1

      1

      5

      Shallow

      20

      6-50

      8

      8

      Small Sloop

      45

      140

      1

      2

      5

      Shallow

      30

      8-55

      6

      9

      Medium Sloop

      50

      160

      1

      2

      6

      Near Shallow

      40

      10-65

      10

      10

      Large Sloop

      55

      180

      1

      2

      6

      Near Shallow

      50

      12-75

      12

      11

      Small Schooner

      60

      160

      2

      2

      6

      Medium

      40

      10-80

      12

      12

      Medium Schooner

      65

      180

      2

      2

      7

      Medium

      50

      11-90

      14

      13

      Large Schooner

      70

      220

      3

      2

      7

      Medium

      60

      14-100

      18

      (14)

      Over-sized Schooner

      75

      240

      4-6

      3

      6

      Medium

      70

      18-140

      22

      15

      Small Barque†

      45

      160

      1

      2

      5

      Medium

      60

      10-90

      12

      16

      Medium Barque†

      50

      180

      2-3

      2

      5

      Deep

      70

      12-100

      16

      17

      Large Barque†

      60

      200

      3

      4

      4

      Deep

      85

      16-120

      20

      18

      Small Cargo Fluyt

      50

      160

      2

      4

      3

      Shallow

      65

      10-60

      10

      19

      Medium Cargo Fluyt

      80

      200

      2

      4

      3

      Shallow

      100

      12-75

      12

      20

      Large Cargo Fluyt

      90

      250

      2

      4

      3

      Shallow

      140

      16-85

      14

      (21)

      Over-sized Cargo Fluyt

      100

      300

      3

      5

      2

      Near Shallow

      180

      20-100

      16

       

      Class

      Class Name

      Len
      (ft)

      Wt
      (lt)

      Masts

      Turn

      Speed

      Draft

      Cargo Cap (st)

      Crew

      Cannon (Tot)

      22

      Small Merchantman (East Indiaman)

      150

      185

      3

      5

      5

      Medium

      90

      12-90

      14

      23

      Typical Merchantman (East Indiaman)

      170

      210

      3

      5

      4

      Deep

      100

      16-100

      16

      24

      Large Merchantman (East Indiaman)

      175

      230

      3

      5

      3

      Deep

      120

      16-125

      20

      (25)

      Over-Sized Merchantman (East Indiaman)‡

      190

      260

      (4)

      5

      3

      Very Deep

      140

      20-140

      22

      26

      Small Brigantine†

      50

      50

      2

      4

      5

      Medium

      60

      12-110

      20

      27

      Medium Brigantine†

      110

      110

      2

      4

      5

      Medium

      65

      14-115

      22

      28

      Large Brigantine†

      250

      250

      2

      5

      4

      Medium

      70

      16-125

      24

      29

      Large Brigantine (Brig)†

      480

      480

      2

      5

      4

      Medium

      70

      16-125

      28

      30

      Light Frigate‡

      120

      800

      3

      6

      3

      Deep

      60

      12-140

      28

      31

      Fast Frigate‡

      150

      1000

      3

      7

      4

      Deep

      50

      20-160

      24

      32

      Frigate‡

      135

      1200

      3

      6

      4

      Deep

      90

      28-200

      32

      33

      Heavy Frigate‡

      140

      1500

      (4)

      5

      4-5

      Very Deep

      120

      32-200

      36

       

      Class

      Class Name

      Len
      (ft)

      Wt
      (lt)

      Masts

      Turn

      Speed

      Draft

      Cargo Cap (st)

      Crew

      Cannon (Tot)

      34

      Light Galleon

      100

      500

      4

      4

      3

      Medium

      70

      12-140

      20

      35

      Fast Galleon

      120

      1100

      4

      5

      4

      Deep

      80

      16-160

      24

      36

      Medium Galleon

      140

      1000

      5

      4

      3-4

      Deep

      120

      16-100

      20

      37

      Heavy Galleon

      145

      1600

      5

      3

      4

      Very Deep

      140

      16-200

      32

      38

      War Galleon

      150

      2000

      5

      3

      4

      Very Deep

      90

      16-200

      40

      (39)

      Over-sized Galleon

      165

      2500

      5

      3

      4-5

      Very Deep

      120

      24-250

      44

      (40)

      Extreme Clipper‡

      220

      825

      3

      5

      6

      Medium

      100

      20-140

      36

      41

      Standard Clipper‡

      180-250

      1080

      3-(4)

      5

      6

      Medium

      100

      20-140

      38

      42

      Large Clipper‡

      250-300

      1410

      3

      4

      6

      Medium

      120

      20-140

      44-60

      43

      (301-350)

      1600

      3-(4)

      4

      6

      Medium

      (125)

      30-160

      (50-70)

      44

      (351-400)

      2000

      (4)-(5)

      4

      6

      Medium

      (135)

      40-180

      (60-80)

      43

      Ship Of The Line (4th rate)‡

      150

      830

      3-(4)-(5)

      5

      5

      Very Deep

      110

      30-500

      50-60

      44

      Ship Of The Line (3rd rate)‡

      170

      1440

      3-(4)-(5)

      6

      5

      Very Deep

      115

      40-600

      62-74

      45

      Ship Of The Line (2nd rate)‡

      200

      2500

      3-(4)-(5)

      5

      6

      Very Deep

      120

      40-700

      90-98

      46

      Ship Of The Line (1st rate)‡

      250

      4300

      3-(4)-(5)

      5

      6

      Very Deep

      140

      40-800

      100-140

      (47)

      Imperial Ship Of The Line‡

      200

      5000

      3-(4)-(5)

      6

      6

      Very Deep

      160

      50-1050

      116-148

      (48)

      Other??

      GM’s Choice – see Exotic Crews, Below

      Class

      Class Name

      Len
      (ft)

      Wt
      (lt)

      Masts

      Turn

      Speed

      Draft

      Cargo Cap (st)

      Crew

      Cannon (Tot)

      * The term Pinnace was used for two entirely different but very similar vessels – the full-rigged Pinnace is the one used in the table as a vessel in it’s own right, while the Pinnace (Ship’s Boat) is only used in conjunction with a larger vessel (see ‡ below).

      † There are two different types of ship that have been referred to as “Barques”. I have based these numbers on the “Lugger” class of vessel. Similarly, a “Brig” is a related vessel class to the normal “Brigantine” but is larger and heavier. This sort of nonsense makes researching vessel classes and their characteristics a real nightmare…

      ‡ Includes a ship’s boat; for an Imperial Ship Of The Line, this is a (medium) Sloop, for anything else it is either a Pinnace or, for ships >2000 long tons, a small Sloop. Note that Galleons had nothing but rowboats for service in this capacity, usually 16-man.

      () denotes a configuration or vessel that did not exist in real life. For example, under “Masts”, you might see an entry 3-4-(5). This means that the real life versions had 3 or 4 masts but in a fantasy world, you might have 5.

      4.8.4 Some Thoughts About Cannon

      Maritime vessels place the GM in something of a quandary that these rules cannot avoid or evade looking at: Without cannon, an essential flavor of the swashbuckling expectations that come with these vessels is lost, causing dissatisfaction all round (no matter that it’s more ‘realistic’ and ‘historically accurate’).

      But let them in, and you also let in everything else that gunpowder and cannonballs can do, and that can be an even higher price to pay. Cannon can pulverize castle walls. Grapeshot can wipe out whole battalions with a single salvo – from a handful of the devices. And some bright spark PC will want to create muskets and flintlocks, either personally or by paying someone else to do it. And then, there’s the issue of bombs, and of other explosive substances like nitrocellulose – once you’ve opened the door, everything from det cord to white phosphorous can crawl through it.

      Some GMs are fine with all that, pointing out that in a world with Umpteen-d6 Fireballs and Meteor Swarms, a few cannon are really quite small potatoes, and that may be true – but again, some of the essential flavor is lost.

      Some draw the line and say “this works, anything further doesn’t” – but they will sooner or later be met with the eternal challenge of the small child, “Why not?” – and he’d better have a good answer at the ready.

      Others (including me, for a very long time), simply ban gunpowder and explosives outright. If you want a fusillade of cannon raking an enemy vessel, the equivalent in-game-world is an arcane spellcaster lobbing fireballs (etc) – you hire a bunch of them and they stand on the (lower) deck, casting through a ‘gunport’ (usually called something else, because you can’t use the word ‘gun’ before the gun exists). That’s just rubbing players noses in it.

      But some of the research linked to above suggested that there may be a way….

      4.8.4.1 Having Your Cannon And Your Flavor, Too

      Specifically, it was mentioned somewhere that what is called a Cannon on land, and what is called a Cannon on board a seagoing vessel, are two completely different things. The land-going version is much smaller and lighter and uses a much smaller and lighter cannonball. They also use much less explosive propellant to launch those cannonballs. As a result of all this, they had about half the range of their larger seagoing versions. The basic reason for these differences is two-fold.

      First, if your cannon is insufficiently-strongly anchored, a large part of your propellant force is simply going to launch it backwards, through your own troops.

      And second, by the time you include frame and cannon and ammunition and black powder and everything else, it becomes too much to transport overland except on the very best roads. And a cannon without portability / mobility is worse than useless, 90% of the time.

      Let us suppose, then, for the sake of argument, that Gunpowder works a little differently in the game world. In sufficient quantities, and ignited by sufficient heat, it will explode, right enough – but that requires either a mage or a fire elemental.

      That means that your shipboard cannon are still perfectly fine, because it has long been established in most fantasy canon that arcane spells can be placed in scrolls that anyone can use. Now, that might be going too far, but if that’s the case, then it’s certainly not out of the question to compromise and state that a non-mage can use such a scroll, but doesn’t have the training to be able to set off gunpowder with it. THAT requires a ‘gunnery’ expertise.

      This proposal doesn’t just permit the flavor of swashbuckling and pirates, it infuses them with the fantasy flavor that was supposedly being sacrificed!

      It’s when you consider the implications outside of sea battles that this pays off, big-time.

      4.8.4.2 Crippled Land-Cannon
      Use enough gunpowder to set off an explosion under the above concept, and you will blow any normal land cannon to pieces.

      There are ways around that – using Adamantine or something similar – but they increase the weight of the cannon to the equivalent of the too-big seagoing cannon anyway, and would cost an absolute fortune. There’s nothing that can be done to lighten the load because the cannon would no longer be strong enough to resist the explosive force within.

      Or, you might throw a bone, and let smaller cannon and smaller gunpowder loads function – at 1/4 the normal power. While the results may be effective against enemy troops, they won’t do squat against castle walls. And the cannon is too big and inconvenient to carry around just for an antipersonnel weapon. Magic gives you far more potent and far more portable options.

      4.8.4.3 Personal Firearms

      Blunderbusses and Flintlocks go away, too – they fire not with a bang, but with a fsst. No bullets flying, which means that your Fighters are still supreme up close and personal, and aren’t going to be cut down (short of magic) before getting into position to absolutely ruin somebody’s day. And untrained nobodies aren’t running around stealing spellcaster thunder, either. Again the Fantasy within the Fantasy Genre is protected.

      4.8.4.4 Bombs and other explosive devices

      Bombs remain possible – but they need someone lobbing a fireball into exactly the right place, or a fire elemental charging into that right place, to set the device off. A wick or fuse won’t cut it. Again, the fantasy element is preserved, even enhanced.

      4.8.4.5 Other explosive materials

      And as for the rest of the canonical realm of explosives? The changes to the way gunpowder works should tell any player worth his table-space that the laws of chemistry are different. This should be obvious, anyway – alchemy can do things, and potions work, neither of which are true outside of the fantasy genre.

      And that means that all the other panoply of explosive compounds and related materials that mankind has come up with, over the years, are also off the table. They simply won’t work. Soaking rags in nitric acid simply eats holes in the rags – it doesn’t create nitrocellulose.

      Or maybe they will work – but only on the Elemental Plane of Water, or something – and they still need a fire elemental to set them off. Given the environmental complications, that’s sure to be more trouble than it’s worth.

      So yes, you can have cannon on board ships, all you want, without sacrificing the important bits of the genre elsewhere. You are the GM, you decide the game physics, i.e. what will work and what won’t.

    4.8.5 Exotic Crews

    Section 3.1.1 gives you everything you need to be able to amend ship designs to create vessels built for non-human crews. In particular, the size factor and the proportions factor are your guide, but the specifics given in 3.1.1.10 will be just as useful.

    If you have a crew that are somewhat smaller than human average, there are two routes that you can go – either you keep the vessel more-or-less the same physical dimensions and increase the crew capacity, then tweak the other values accordingly, or you scale the vessel down to fit.

    If you have a crew that are somewhat larger, you have little choice but to scale the vessel up somewhat.

    In both cases, at least one fundamental will change in terms of the shape – the height. Humans build decks to be about 2m apart, plus double the thickness of the deck itself, probably 2 × 2.5cm more, for a total of 2.05m. (That’s 6′ 8.7″ in American, and decking that’s 1″ thick). That’s built to accommodate relatively tall individuals of the era, and a fairly normal range of heights today.

      4.8.5.1 Human Height Adjustments

      It’s hard for the modern mind to come to grips with how much smaller people were back then, mostly due to malnutrition over multiple years during youth. Even the nobility didn’t eat as well, in terms of nutrition, as most poor people today.

      The simplest way of adjusting modern height tables is simply to lop 6-12″ (15.24-30.48cm) off the indicated height – so 5’5″ becomes 4’5″ to 4’9″ (165cm becomes 134.52-149.76cm). Or, to simplify it, 65″ becomes 52-59″.

      But that doesn’t really get precise enough for most people. My method of calculation isn’t as neat or as simple, but it gives more specific results. It’s based on nothing more than having visited a number of houses that were more than a century old and built proportionately to the inhabitants. That last is an important point; nobility and gentry and wealth tended to build high and impressive ceilings, so they are still high and impressive in modern times, just a little less so.

      Modern

      Medieval Nobles & Wealthy

      Fantasy Professionals

      Fantasy Poor

      cm

      cm

      cm

      cm

      3

      0

      91.4

      2

      4

      71.1

      2

      9

      83.8

      2

      7.5

      80

      3

      1

      94

      2

      6

      71.1

      2

      10

      86.4

      2

      8.5

      82.6

      3

      2

      96.5

      2

      7.5

      76.2

      2

      11

      88.9

      2

      9.25

      84.5

      3

      3

      99.1

      2

      9

      80

      3

      0

      91.4

      2

      10.5

      87.6

      3

      4

      101.6

      2

      10.5

      83.8

      3

      1

      94

      2

      11.25

      89.5

      3

      4.5

      102.9

      2

      11.25

      89.5

      3

      1.5

      95.3

      3

      0

      91.4

      3

      5

      104.1

      3

      0

      87.6

      3

      2

      96.5

      3

      0.75

      93.3

      3

      6

      106.7

      3

      1.75

      91.4

      3

      3

      99.1

      3

      1.5

      95.3

      3

      7

      109.2

      3

      3.5

      95.9

      3

      4

      101.6

      3

      2.5

      97.8

      3

      8

      111.8

      3

      5.5

      100.3

      3

      5

      104.1

      3

      3.25

      99.7

      3

      9

      114.3

      3

      7

      105.4

      3

      6

      106.7

      3

      4.25

      102.2

      3

      10

      116.8

      3

      8.75

      109.2

      3

      7

      109.2

      3

      5

      104.1

      3

      11

      119.4

      3

      10.5

      113.7

      3

      7.75

      111.1

      3

      6

      106.7

      4

      0

      121.9

      4

      1

      118.1

      3

      8.75

      113.7

      3

      7

      109.2

      4

      1

      124.5

      4

      2

      124.5

      3

      9.5

      115.6

      3

      8

      111.8

      4

      2

      127

      4

      3

      127

      3

      11

      119.4

      3

      8.75

      113.7

      4

      3

      129.5

      4

      4

      129.5

      4

      0

      121.9

      3

      9.5

      115.6

      4

      4

      132.1

      4

      5

      132.1

      4

      1.5

      125.7

      3

      10.75

      118.7

      4

      5

      134.6

      4

      6

      134.6

      4

      2.5

      128.3

      4

      0

      121.9

      4

      6

      137.2

      4

      7

      137.2

      4

      4

      132.1

      4

      1

      124.5

      4

      7

      139.7

      4

      8

      139.7

      4

      5

      134.6

      4

      2

      127

      4

      8

      142.2

      4

      9

      142.2

      4

      6

      137.2

      4

      3

      129.5

      4

      9

      144.8

      4

      10

      144.8

      4

      7

      139.7

      4

      4

      132.1

      4

      10

      147.3

      4

      11

      147.3

      4

      8.25

      142.9

      4

      5.25

      135.3

      4

      11

      149.9

      5

      0

      149.9

      4

      9.5

      146.1

      4

      6.5

      138.4

      5

      0

      152.4

      5

      0.75

      152.4

      4

      10.5

      148.6

      4

      7.5

      141

      5

      1

      154.9

      5

      1.5

      154.3

      4

      11.5

      151.1

      4

      8

      142.2

      5

      2

      157.5

      5

      2.25

      156.2

      5

      0

      152.4

      4

      8.75

      144.1

      5

      3

      160

      5

      3.5

      158.1

      5

      0.5

      153.7

      4

      9.5

      146.1

      5

      4

      162.6

      5

      4

      161.3

      5

      1

      154.9

      4

      10

      147.3

      5

      5

      165.1

      5

      4.5

      162.6

      5

      1.75

      156.8

      4

      10.5

      148.6

      5

      6

      167.6

      5

      5

      163.8

      5

      2.5

      158.8

      4

      11

      149.9

      5

      7

      170.2

      5

      5.75

      165.1

      5

      3.5

      161.3

      4

      11.35

      150.7

      5

      8

      172.7

      5

      6.5

      167

      5

      4

      162.6

      5

      0.5

      153.7

      5

      9

      175.3

      5

      7.25

      168.9

      5

      4.5

      163.8

      5

      1

      154.9

      5

      10

      177.8

      5

      8

      170.8

      5

      5

      165.1

      5

      1.75

      156.8

      5

      11

      180.3

      4

      11

      172.7

      5

      5.5

      166.4

      5

      2.5

      158.8

      6

      0

      182.9

      5

      10.5

      149.9

      5

      6

      167.6

      5

      3

      160

      6

      1

      185.4

      5

      11.75

      179.1

      5

      7

      170.2

      5

      4

      162.6

      6

      2

      188

      6

      0.5

      182.2

      5

      8

      172.7

      5

      4.75

      164.5

      6

      3

      190.5

      6

      1.75

      184.2

      5

      8.5

      174

      5

      5.25

      165.7

      6

      4

      193

      6

      2

      187.3

      5

      9.25

      175.9

      5

      6

      167.6

      6

      5

      195.6

      6

      2.5

      188

      5

      10

      177.8

      5

      6.75

      169.5

      6

      6

      198.1

      6

      3

      189.2

      5

      11

      180.3

      5

      7

      170.2

      6

      7

      200.7

      6

      3.5

      190.5

      6

      0

      182.9

      5

      7.75

      172.1

      6

      8

      203.2

      6

      4

      191.8

      6

      0.5

      184.2

      5

      8.5

      174

      6

      9

      205.7

      6

      4.5

      193

      6

      1.5

      186.7

      5

      9.5

      176.5

      6

      10

      208.3

      6

      5

      194.3

      6

      2.5

      189.2

      5

      10

      177.8

      6

      11

      210.8

      6

      5.5

      195.6

      6

      3.25

      191.1

      5

      11

      180.3

      7

      0

      213.4

      6

      6

      196.9

      6

      4

      193

      6

      0

      182.9

      I realize it can be hard to see exactly what’s going on – the human mind doesn’t do well at assessing columns of numbers without analytic tools being employed. One such tool is graphical analysis, and so here’s one (with a couple of minor mistakes) that I prepared earlier:

      This not only factors in nutritional effects, it incorporates nutritional requirements (higher for those with height) and social attitudes (it also takes into account that we’re operating in a heroic environment, in which people are bigger and better; for ‘real world’ numbers, lop another 4.5 inches off). Because of these additional factors, the ratios change a number of times as heights increase.

      So, with a comparative yardstick, let’s begin.

      4.8.5.2 Non-human Height

      First, cargo capacity depends on two factors – volume and buoyancy. Volume is length × width × depth × shape factor. If the shape and proportions of the vessel are unchanged (at least for the moment), then the shape factors will cancel out, and everything will be adjusted proportional to the Height of the non-human species, proportionate to a 6′ modern human – i.e. a 5’10.5″ human (70.5″, 149.9 cm but I would use 150 for convenience).

      EG: Let’s do a Halfling-scale merchantman. Length is usually 175 feet, Wt 230 long tons, cargo capacity 120 short tons, crew of 16-125, 20 cannon. 3 Masts, Turn 5, Speed 3, Draft Deep.

      Halflings are about 3′ tall, so we need to reduce the height of our vessel to 91.4/150 = 0.60933 = 60.933% of normal. But our stats don’t mention height, or width for that matter; only the product of those – volume, and even that is implied only by assuming that the density of cargo and wood are the same.

      If we’re going to reduce things proportionately, we need to multiply those values by the cube of our ratio – once for length, once for width, and once for depth.

           ★ 175 ft long × 0.60933 = 106.633 ft.

           ★ 230 long tons × 0.60933^3 = 230 × 0.2262376 = 52.034648 long tons.

           ★ Cargo capacity = 120 × 0.60933&3 = 120 × 0.2262376 = 27.1485 short tons.

      # Cannon is a function of length, and has to be an even number.

      # of Masts is also a function of length, but rounds down to any whole number, and has a minimum of 1. But you can round up if the answer is reasonably close to a whole number.

           ★ Canon: 20 × 0.60933 = 12.1866, rounds down to 12.

           ★ Masts: 3 × 0.60933 = 1.82799; close enough, call it 2.

      4.8.5.3 Non-human Proportions

      The crew have to be able to work. If the shoulder width relative to the height is the same as human, there’s no problem – but if the crew are slender, or broad-shouldered, that will affect both the horizontal dimensions of the vessel.

      Halflings are often compared to human children, and children grow vertically a LOT more than they do horizontally.

      8 year old boys average 50-52 inches in height (127-132 cm)*; our Halflings are 91.4cm tall max. Too much, let’s try lopping off the years one at a time.

           * Determined by asking Google for the “proportions of an 8-year-old boy”.

      7 year old boys range from 45-53 inches in height (114-135 cm). Still too tall.

      6 year old boys run from 43-50 inches with an average of 46 inches (117 cm). Still too big.

      5-year-olds are typically 110-115 cm tall (3′ 9″) – still too big.

      4-year-olds typically range from 37.5 and 43 inches – getting close but not quite there yet!

      At 3 years old, the average human male height is 37.5 inches, about an inch-and-a-half too tall.

      BUT WAIT: Those are all for children exposed to modern nutrition. We need to boost our 36-inch height to get a correct comparison!

           ★ 36 × 183 / 150 = 43.92 = 44 inches (3′ 8″ or 118.8cm).

      Bang! Right away we’re back with 6-year-old boys.

      Chest sizes for a 6-year-old are 23-24″ and waists are around 21″ – but we’re talking Halflings, so let’s set the latter to 25″.

           ★ 23.5 × 72 (adult height) / 46 (3-year-old height) = 36.78″.

           ★ 25 × 72 / 46 = 39.13″

      Human Adult shoulders are an average of 18″ but anything from 15.8 to 20.9 is normal.

           ★ 39.13 / 18 = × 2.174 – so our Halflings are more than twice the size of a scaled human.

      We need to apply that factor to length and breadth, and the square of it (4.726276) to anything ‘three-dimensional”: Or we can reduce the maximum number of crew by this number to make room for them. That seems the more sensible answer, so:

           ★ Max Crew = 125 / 2.174 = 57.5 – round up to 58.

      4.8.5.4 Crew Strength

      It might be that the ship Needs fewer crew, anyway. To find out, we need to scale the average human Lift by our original Halfling Factor and compare it to the average Halfling Lift value. We can absorb up to a × 2.174 ratio; beyond that, we either make the ship bigger (to take maximum advantage of the crew strength) or we have to again cut crew numbers. The danger of the latter is that we can’t let the number drop below the minimum of 16 indicated for operating this class of vessel.

           ★ Average Human Strength = 10, giving lift (maximum load) of 2 × 100 lb = 200 lb.

           ★ Average Halfling Strength = 8, giving lift (maximum load) of 2 × 80 lb = 160 lb.

           ★ 200 / 160 = × 1.25.

      That’s no problem; in fact, it’s reasonable to reduce the minimum number of crew by this factor.

           ★ 16 / 1.25 = 12.8, round up to 13.

           ★ Total crew: 13-58.

      4.8.5.5 Handling and other parameters

      Masts, Weight, Length, Cargo, Crew. That sequence is important.

      Using the ship tables, we need to find the vessel that most accurately matches our modified vessel, in that sequence. That in turn will give us speed, turn, and draft.

      In this case, our needs are 2 masts, 52 long tons, 107 feet, 27 tons cargo, and 13-58 crew. Obviously, we’re going to be looking on the first table, and probably toward the top. Or are we?

      Looking for a Masts match, I find:

           Small Schooner = Masts 2.
           Medium Schooner = Masts 2.
           Medium Barque = Masts 2.
           Small Cargo Fluyt = Masts 2.
           Medium Cargo Fluyt = Masts 2.
           Small Brigantine = Masts 2.
           Medium Brigantine = Masts 2.
           Large Brigantine = Masts 2.

      So that’s my short list.

      Vessel Weight of 52 eliminates most of these. I’m left with:

           Small Schooner 160 lt
           Small Barque 160 lt
           Small Fluyt 160 lt
           Small Brigantine 50 lt

      I need search no further; it’s clear that the Halfling Merchantman will most closely resemble the Small Brigantine, in fact it’s not even close. Our length is twice that of the normal small Brigantine, so we’re going to be half as wide – and that shape is better at cutting through water, so we can add one to the Speed. All of which gives us:

           ★ Turn 4, Speed 6. Medium Draft

      …compared to our staring values of Turn 5, Speed 4, Deep Draft. So the Halfling vessel is a little more maneuverable, a lot faster, and can operate in shallower waters.

    4.8.6 Mixed Crews

    There are multiple ways of handling this, but the best one is to ask, “who was this vessel designed for?”

    If it’s a Frost Giant ship being crewed by humans, scale it up for frost giants. Next, look at the most common crew, or the closest to Frost Giants in size and strength (if you need to break ties). Work the numbers based on the abilities of that race relative to Frost Giants.

    Then look at anyone not already accounted for. If they are larger / stronger than the reference race, they count as multiple ‘people’ for the purposes of crew requirements. If smaller, they count as a fraction of a crew for that purpose.

Which brings me to the end of this post, and the beginning of the next, which should finally bring this chapter of “Trade In Fantasy” to a close.

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Campaign Workflow For GMs Pt 2


Running a campaign is a lot easier if there’s a clear process that maximizes opportunities for success and avoids the worst traps and pitfalls.

Campaign Mastery has again been recognized as one of the top 20 blogs devoted to the subject of RPGs. Given the caliber of the opposition, I consider this to be a significant compliment. Many thanks to FeedSpot for the acknowledgment and support! (Click the link to see where your other RPG blogs landed, or to look for new ones that may be of interest).

Inspiration

Today’s article was inspired by an article at EnWorld by Charles Dunwoody – a shout-out to him – entitled “Joyful GMing: RPG Success Strategies”. I adapted it into a flowchart to which I made a number of modifications, which you can read about in part 1of this two-part article.

The first part looked at the creation of a campaign, steps 1 through 5. Today, the focus is on running an ongoing campaign, and steps 6 through 10. To the side, I have repeated my modified flowchart, and – as you can see – step 6 has actually been subdivided into 5 sub-steps.

6. Adventure Creation

The central concept surrounding the sub-division of the original Step 6 is “Sandboxing In Time”. As the term itself makes clear, this is related to Sandboxing a campaign, but applies the concept to adventure creation and prep by breaking the process up into smaller steps. You’ll see what the advantages of this approach are in just a little while.

In traditional approaches, steps 6a through 6e are done in between sessions for the specific next adventure. Because the GM doesn’t know (or care) where the PCs will go and what they will get involved with in the course of that adventure and especially in its aftermath, he focuses all his attention on the immediate consequences of those decisions, only investing prep time in the very next adventure.

It assumes that the GM entrenches within each adventure several adventure seeds, far more than the PCs will actually have time to fully resolve in the next adventure; instead, they can either pick one or two, or even pick up on one or two that were left lingering in previous adventures.

It’s often a good idea simply to replace any plot threads seen through to a conclusion in the last adventure, so that the ‘pool’ of potential areas of focus remains constant in size, once the maximum desired pool-size is achieved – the pool doesn’t have to start fully-stocked.

For example:

    Adventure #1 – four plot threads, two of which get resolved (player’s choice).
    Adventure #2 – 4-2=2; + four plot threads = pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
    Adventure #3 – 6-2=4, +2 new plot threads= pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
    Adventure #4 – 6-2=4, +2 new plot threads= pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
    Adventure #5 – 6-2=4, +2 new plot threads= pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
    …And so on.

It can make life a lot easier for the GM if the ending of each adventure includes a mandatory statement of intent by the players on what they intend to focus on next time, but that rules out their choosing one of the new plot threads, which in turn permits them to be seeded somewhere other than the beginning of the day’s play.

That in turn gives the GM more flexibility in how he or she weaves them into the ongoing plotline and gives a less ritualized and more organic feeling to the whole campaign.

The biggest flaw to this approach is that no two adventures are alike in the scale of the prep required to bring them into a playable state. Some will be quick and easy, while others will by slow and convoluted; the process makes no allowance for this variation.

Getting around this problem isn’t all that difficult – you simply specify a fixed amount of time to be invested in prep on a regular basis that is sufficient to complete one of those slow-and-complicated development jobs, and – if the next adventure requires less – investing the remaining prep time in developing elements for future adventures, in effect investing that extra time in ‘getting ahead of the curve’, permitting the next ‘slow and complex’ prep to extend over multiple prep-sessions.

But this has an assumption (a big one) and carries a new flaw. The assumption is that you have correctly determined how much prep will be needed for the slowest / most difficult adventures and allowed enough time, OR have employed some corner-cutting within the process to cope with incomplete prep on game day.

You can assist that corner-cutting by a process of prioritizing what prep is needed most urgently to get the adventure under construction as close to ‘ready to play’ as you can get it within the available prep time. I like to also factor in how long the prep will take, and to differentiate between multiple standards of prep-and-polish – from ‘quick-and-dirty’ through to ‘extensive and polished’.

Links:

Prep Prioritization as a concept was first discussed in depth in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity, and was the core subject of Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving Part 2 of 3: Prioritization and To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?.

It would be remiss of me not to prominantly point to Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep before going any further.

The benefits of deliberately not doing certain kinds of prep get discussed thoroughly in Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs, while the impact of trying to do too much prep is the focus of Overcoming The GM Crash.

Two parts of the Basics For Beginners series, Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 7: Adventures and Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 3: Preparations take a lot of advice from my other articles and expand on it, including on this subject.

Finally, Dominoes and Daisy Chains: Writing Adventures has a lot of useful advice on all aspects of writing adventures, with links to relevant articles for further reading.

The flaw that this introduces is that you are actually violating the principle of sandboxing the campaign by working on material that may never be utilized, simply because if it is needed, it will take longer to prep than the time available.

Overcoming that flaw requires a more sophisticated approach to game prep than the ‘do everything for next session in between sessions’ approach, and organizing it demands a breakdown of the type that the flowchart proposes.

I’ll deal with those bigger-picture approaches in a set of sidebars at the end of step 6, but let’s start by looking at each step of the subdivided process and what it entails.

6a. Adventure Outline

An adventure outline is a summary of the central idea. It’s your answer to the question, “what’s the adventure about?”

It has to be short and succinct. A single line is preferable, or 2-3 sentences at most. Sometimes, that isn’t quite enough, but it’s a good standard to aim for. You can facilitate the avoidance of railroading within adventures by focusing your adventure outlines on what one or more NPCs are doing, rather than working from the point-of-view of the PCs.

As such, it shouldn’t have anything about how the PCs get involved, and should have little or nothing about how the adventure is to be resolved. That’s often harder than it seems, because the PCs should always be the focus and heart of the campaign. You achieve it by ensuring that whatever the NPCs are doing, it will have an impact on the lives of one or more PCs – in other words, the job of these outlines is to summarize how you are going to get the PCs into trouble and not how they are going to get back out of it.

6b. Adventure Draft

An adventure draft takes your one-or-two line summary of the adventure and breaks it down into major plot sequences, each of which is then summarized in one or two lines. In other words, they turn the idea into the outline of a story.

In theory, that’s all they contain. In practice, it’s never quite so simple – who the NPCs are, motivations for actions, ideas for locations and snatches of key dialogue and narrative always seem to get attached, and if you aren’t careful, you find yourself writing the whole adventure without having done the summary of the whole story first.

Now, some writers love that – the challenge of it, the discovery as you write of who the (NPC) characters are and what will happen next. Again, there is a very organic feeling to the result. But it’s also really easy to write yourself into a corner or a blind alley, and it’s then twice as hard to backtrack and choose a different path. The most sensible and logical path forward is the easiest and most natural to write, and that’s what got you into that mess to start with.

As a general principle, leave that sort of thing to the novelists; you need a more pragmatic, disciplined, and workmanlike approach. The best answer that I’ve found is a simple rule: Don’t connect ANY dots except in the draft outline, where you have that general breakdown of the action.

This, in turn, is best achieved through document structure, believe it or not.

    Adventure outline.

    Act 1 summary
    Act 2 summary

         (space for more acts to be summarized)

    Act 1 snippets / content

         (space for more details to be added)

    Act 2 snippets / content

         (space for more details to be added)

    Act X snippets / content

         (space for more details to be added)

The above is a generic and general demonstration, stripped of specifics. So far, 2 acts have been summarized, but there’s more to do before what you have is a story. In the course of summarizing them, some bits and pieces of these two acts have come to mind, and rather than trying to remember what they are, you’ve done the equivalent of jotting them down, with lots of white space in between. There has also been an idea recorded for content that hasn’t yet been tied to a specific act – this is usually something like the personality of the antagonist; you need to summarize it early so that it can be consistent with their actions in acts 1 and 2, but it hasn’t actually been revealed to the PCs yet. In fact, it might never be overtly spelt out except in the GM’s notes – letting the players form their own opinions (right or wrong) about the NPC’s persona.

Critically, no attempt to actually join the dots and spell out the full sequence of events in the acts is permitted until as many Acts as you need to resolve the story are outlined.

Once all the acts are summarized, you can then proceed to the next stage, breaking each down into specific plot sequences. You can then drop those snippets into place and connect those dots because you have a summary of the big picture to guide you and keep you out of those blind alleyways and corners.

There will be – well, there should be – lots of empty space in the document, even after you’ve broken the story down into plot sequences. Remember, at this point you don’t know what the outcome of those plot sequences is going to be; unless you’ve noted a specific description (or part of one), you have no specifics of locations, and so on. Instead you have a list of things that need to be created before the scenes can be completed.

The ultimate goal of this stage of the creation process is to have an end result that lets you completely improv the adventure while remaining consistent with the big picture. The level of detail needed to achieve this will vary from one GM to another, so each individual will need to set their own standards through a bit of trial and error.

There is also a significant difference between being able to completely improv around the general shape and being comfortable doing so. The first is the minimum standard to aim for, the second is the desired standard, but you don’t need to get there – yet.

6c. Supplemental Creation

From top to bottom, start to finish, fill the descriptive and narrative gaps, write up the NPCs to the extent that you need to (but no more), and so on. For example:

    Location: Martian Domes

      These are constructed of dozens of layers of gossamer silk exuded by martian worker-units, to which a stiffening agent has been added. In the primitive past, hundreds of layers were needed for strength, but the discovery of the stiffening agent permitted a construction boom. When the martians were forced into stasis because of the thinning atmosphere, dust and sand began to accumulate in the lee of the prevailing winds, so the domes appear more tear-drop shaped on planetary ordinance surveys. A relatively thin crust has slowly formed over the more exposed parts. The domes are variable in size according to function – worker-units and soldier-units are accommodated in the largest domes, 100-150 meters across, science, medical, engineering and colony management in intermediate domes 60-100 meters in size, and leader-units resided in the smallest domes, 30-60 meters in diameter. Several of the domes have collapsed over the centuries and filled with dust that has slowly fused into solid rock, but many remain intact. Archaeological testing will show that the domes were constructed at least 8,000 years ago, around the same time that humans started building pyramids.

      Implications: organic feel to the technology, arachnoids, machines with multiple legs suitable for crossing difficult and dry terrain. Flat pads on the feet to cross sand. Hive-mind? Hierarchical society.

This description is generic enough that it can be the springboard for any specific dome’s description while supplying enough detail that other specifics can be detailed as needed.

What’s missing are numbers – how many of each dome? And, just possibly, an intermediate group that are more advanced than just workers – scientists and engineers and medical personnel.

Note in particular the ‘implications’ section, which plants the seeds for other things that might need to be described, producing a more even consistency of concept.

Next point: Quite often, one description will imply another, saving you the trouble of at least some of the detailed work.

Example:

    Site Manager’s Office

      The site manager’s office is spartan and pristine, at least on the surface. A bookshelf against one wall holds volumes on the design and construction of the site and its facilities, but these are organized in what appears a haphazard and unstructured manner. In reality, whenever one is consulted, it is returned to the top shelf, with others moving down to make room; over time, the references most frequently needed will congregate to that top shelf, while those needed less frequently get pushed down onto the lower shelves. Despite their having no purpose in a near-airless environment, rose-colored silk curtains hang in front of the windows, which (of course) cannot be opened. An artist’s depiction of the completed facility as it was originally envisaged hangs on the wall, capturing the design ethos of the facility in graphic form; it is far more structured and even than the reality visible beyond the curtains. The desk is large and constructed of a white plastic or ceramic material created with a combination of native martian materials and some admixtures brought from Earth. The chair is large, soft, and luxurious, with built-in leg and back massaging, designed for long periods of sitting. The only concession to individual flair is a perspex cube on the desk which contains an autographed baseball, it’s stitching slightly torn. Although the writing is faded and hard to read, it appears to have been signed by “Bub Ruth”.

      Implications: Hard-nosed, pragmatic, organized to an extent beyond the obvious. Spartan but with dramatic touches and flourishes where they will be most noticeable by visitors.

After the description of his or her office, the site manager themselves needs very little description – it’s all spelt out or implied, already. Size, weight, race, gender, name – there’s no real hint about any of them, implying that these are secondary to the personality and the professional occupation.

The more two-birds-with-one-stone that you can incorporate like this, the less work you actually have to do in prep, and the more easily you can be consistent. Note that this description has two thrusts – practicality and the way the person is perceived by others. The latter could simply be vanity, but the first argues that it’s more deliberate and related to job function. There are further hints in the description of the office that the office-holder is organized and competent at their job, and a take-charge type who could be trusted to get the job done.

And yet, this isn’t quite enough to improv everything about the NPC – some things require further thought. Anything and everything related to their personality and their work performance are well-covered, but there isn’t enough there to tell us much about how their personal quarters are arranged or decorated. They could be along similarly spartan lines, or that might be a space in which the character can metaphorically let their hair down and relax. Which approach to take should be derived from their function in the story – are they to be hard-nosed and no-nonsense, or do they need a little softening to make them more rounded individuals?

6d. Revise / Polish Adventure

A lot of people skimp on this step, and there’s rarely a good justification for doing so. The technique and structures that I have described already are designed to keep the need for this step to a minimum, but that only makes failure to perform it all the more inexcusable.

What’s involved is fairly straightforward: Now that the supplemental creations are done, go back over the descriptions of events to transpire in the settings and the dialogue to be delivered and make sure that they are consistent with the descriptions of locations and NPC personalities.

Because the creation is holistic, with plot sequences inspiring content creation, most of the narratives will be fairly consistent with what’s already in place, but a quick once-over to be sure will usually reveal some areas that would benefit from the greater clarity of concept that you now have.

6e. Adventure Prep

If you feel the need to generate maps and diagrams and illustrations and photographic reference and anything else, this is when that happens. But that additional gloss is more often unnecessary than those of us who practice producing it regularly would like to think; it’s usually a secondary activity to the reality of Adventure Prep.

This stage is really about double-checking that the I’s have been dotted, the T’s crossed, and no unreasonable assumptions made; it’s a reminder of the content of the adventure (skim it only) and how it all fits into the bigger picture, and it’s about making sure that you are as ready to run the adventure as you possibly can be.

It’s also about making sure that all necessary resources are in the one spot so that nothing essential can be left behind (if you have to go somewhere else to game). The number of times I’ve seen someone forget to bring something they had spent hours preparing…. Okay, for any given GM running a game every weekend, it might only happen once a year, and often it’s not the end of the world (depending on what has been left behind), but still…!

6 Sidebar: Just-In-Time Adventure Creation

It’s a little more work in the campaign setting up process, but every time you start a new campaign, this bears thinking about.

Let’s say you have the breakdown of process that I have described above. And, when setting up the campaign, you generate 5 adventure outlines for adventures #1 to #5; and then you do rough drafts for adventures #1 to #4; and then you do all the supplemental creation for adventures #1 to #3; and then you do you final polish for adventures #1 and #2.

 

The results can be labeled ‘just in time adventure creation’, but it’s not necessarily obvious what’s happening unless you see it in a diagram – so I’ve done one.

What you end up with is a situation in which adventure #1, after some final prep, is ready to run.

Adventure #2 needs only that final prep to be ready to run.

Adventure #3 needs only to have final polish and prep to be ready to run.

Adventure #4 needs NPCs and Locations and narrative to be fleshed out, as well as final polish and prep, and

Adventure #5 needs everything except the generation of the final idea.

After running adventure #1, look at the breakdown of what happens if the GM carries out the same tasks listed above for the next adventure that needs that work to be done:
 
 
 
 
 
 

  • He generates one adventure outline (for adventure #6);
  • He turns one adventure outline into a rough draft (adventure #5);
  • He does descriptions, NPCs, etc for one adventure that’s already in rough draft form (adventure #4);
  • He polishes one adventure whose NPCs etc have already been done (adventure #3);
  • He then does final prep and revision of the next adventure to be played (adventure #2),
  • Leaving it ready to run, and everything else further up the pipeline one step closer to being ready to run.

In other words, he does no more between-sessions prep than usual once the campaign is underway, but has multiple adventures in progress.

Why is this such a big advantage? The answer is, flexibility.

If the GM has underestimated how long it will take to create NPCs etc for an adventure, he can spend the extra time by cutting out adventure first draft and maybe adventure outline, and has four game sessions to get caught back up.

Every adventure is still ready to run just in time; every adventure can be given final tweaks to accommodate decisions made by player agency; he has sacrificed a little extra time getting the campaign ready, buying himself insurance for a future occasion when he gets caught short of sufficient prep time for whatever reason. Real life gets in the way? No problem. Something takes longer than expected? No problem. An idea simply doesn’t work and needs to be scrapped or heavily revised? No problem.

Flexibility. When the time comes that you need it – and it happens to all of us – it’s priceless.

If you don’t have it, your only solution is to improv something with little guidance for how it will fit in and no regard for the bigger picture. With this arrangement, you always have some work done on the next adventure, so you always have the big picture perspective and something that’s at least semi-playable up your sleeve.

The key is in that final polish stage, now incorporating anything that you didn’t foresee in the way of player priorities or decisions, and making sure that the adventure as run always builds out from whatever the players have decided they want to do next session.

But there’s a secondary advantage as well: it makes foreshadowing a breeze. Hints and background events can be seeded into adventures with the deliberate intention of having them pay off in a specified adventure “not long from now”. This is something that the basic flowchart does really poorly, so that’s definitely something to contemplate.

6 Sidebar: A grander Vision

There are two other variations that are worth considering. The first is to develop adventure outlines for the whole campaign, or for the next six months of it at least. This essentially employs the same “general summary” technique used to turn adventure outlines into broad stories for the whole campaign or a significant slice of it.

If you have a look at the posts that I made here about planning what was at the time my next Dr Who campaign (it’s now ongoing) – links below – you can see an example of this process. I also used a similar approach to the Zener Gate campaign.

My superhero campaign goes a bit further – it has a long list of plot threads that are fully outlined, essentially mini-campaigns of 5 or 6 (or less, or more) adventures and employs a concordance to schedule “the next part” of each of these plot threads into specific adventures.

You still have complete flexibility to modify things, bring them forward, delay them, even abandon them altogether. Your adventures are still completely responsive to player input. But you get the sense of a much bigger campaign because there are multiple things happening all the time – and sometimes these can interact in interesting ways.

6 Sidebar: More epic adventures

Under this heading, i want to actually talk a little bit about the current adventure in the Doctor Who campaign because it shows flexibility being applied within the process described, and not just because of it.

I outlined the adventure in several acts, each representing a day’s play. The first act integrated the basic plotline with the character’s stated intentions and priorities so that events emerged naturally from his attempting to achieve those goals. A crashed spaceship on Skaro, the Dalek home-world, needed rescuing.

Act II was all about getting what the ship needed in order for that rescue to take place. It delivered the broader, more campaign-level developments that justified the story’s inclusion in the campaign.

Act III dealt with the actual rescue / escape and introduced a new villain, one who was ultimately responsible for the ship needing to be rescued in the first place.

This villain then blackmails the doctor into doing his dirty work in Act IV, which was mostly deep background material, but which included a first attempt at said dirty work.

Had the player not flubbed a major roll, damaging his lungs in a toxic atmosphere, breaking an arm and smashing his spacesuit, Act V would have completed the adventure, taking down an established villain and completing most of said villain’s backstory. This was the game session played this weekend just past.

Instead, he landed himself in hospital for a period of time while various parts of his anatomy were repaired and the session was about campaign backstory and planning how to complete the mission more successfully on a second attempt, which will comprise Act VI.

The function of the story within the campaign is to push the Daleks and Time Lords into the Time War. In fact, once the new villain showed his hand, it became clear that every possible choice by the PC led, eventually, to such a war; only the interval between cause and effect would vary.

But the heart of the campaign’s overall story isn’t about how the Time War began, it’s about the 8th Doctor becoming the 9th, a version of himself dedicated to fighting the Time War. Almost every adventure has seen a small step in that direction result from the titular PC being himself in the situations the adventures orchestrated. Its central tenet is that putting the character into the situations that comprised the campaign made this transition inevitable, whether the character recognized the slippery slope that he was on or not.

The new Act V was another step in that direction, as the character employs painfully-acquired skills in tactics and military planning to solve the immediate problem of completing the mission without stuffing it up a second time. But here’s the key point of relevance so far as this article is concerned: until the character blew what should have been a reasonably easy roll in Act IV, the Act V just played did not exist. It was completely written and researched in the two weeks between the Act IV and Act V game sessions and inserted into the adventure as a consequence of that failure.

It broadened the campaign canon in several areas, most notably in the history of the robotic dog companion of earlier Doctor Who and the history of an organization from those earlier days, a history that explained the situations depicted in later seasons of the TV show when both that robotic companion and the organization would reappear within the canon, integrating the campaign even more solidly with the established series canon from both before and after the supposed events of the campaign, and continued the overall story of the campaign – and none of it could have been planned in advance, because the character should have been able to make that roll – but didn’t.

In terms of the process outlined above, the entire adventure was developed to fit into the overall plotline of the campaign; it was ready to run without the inclusion of the new Act V. The only activity between game sessions that was anticipated was the final polish / prep, which is all about revising the adventure to incorporate the latest in-game developments surrounding the PC. Because of the failed roll, the new Act V became logically necessary, but it wasn’t simply shoehorned in – it was used to further the overall story contained within the campaign, as explained above, making both the adventure and the campaign better for its inclusion.

There are GMs who only run adventures-as-written, without adapting and evolving those adventures as play proceeds, just as there are those who insist on Rules-As-Written. They tend to be inexperienced, but that’s not a defining trait. The better you are at the art of GMing, the more you can integrate in-play events with the unplayed-as-yet parts of the adventure.

This anecdote shows, by example, how extensive the revision phase of the process described in the flowchart can be.

Admittedly, it’s a relatively extreme example – the only thing that would have been more extreme would have been the complete junking and replacement of the planned Act V (which became Act VI); that wasn’t necessary in this case. I wasn’t originally going to even mention it – this entire section wasn’t in my outline of the article – but, as I wrote the preceding sections, an impression seemed to be conveyed that the final stage was little more than a quick skim through the adventure to fix significant elements in the mind of the GM.

Most of the time, there’s not a lot more than that involved; but the system has the capacity to permit more substantial revisions when they are warranted, and this section is intended to highlight that.

7. Run Adventure

How long is an adventure? I’ve run D&D sessions in which the entire day’s play was consumed by a single room in a 5-room dungeon. The relationship between adventure breakup into acts and playing time is loose and slippery. As a general rule, I’ll try end end each act on a cliffhanger or a moment of decision or commitment, and I’ll try to drop a lesser cliffhanger part way through the adventure.

Because I have it to hand, let’s look at text length vs playing time from the current Dr Who adventure:

  • Adventure Outline: 260 words
  • Additional Background reference: 731 words
  • Act I: 4524 words
  • Act II: 4025 words
  • Act III: 3179 words, 1 critical diagram
  • Act IV: 4566 words (a lot of prepared dialogue)
  • Act V: (newly inserted) 3615 words, and ran a half-hour short
  • Act VI (was act V): 90 words (outline only) plus 1613 words that can be re-used from Act IV.

If I posit that the critical diagram showing the tactical progression of the escape from Skaro is worth the metaphoric ‘thousand words’, Act III contains 4179 words. If I extrapolate a full session’s play for Act V (3.5 hrs vs 3 hrs), that rises to 4217.5 words.

The average over the acts that have actually been played is therefore 4302.3 words. As a general rule, 4200-4500 words gets a solid day’s play.

As soon as you introduce a combat situation, the planning gets messier. As a general rule, most combat sequences get allocated 10 minutes plus 5 minutes per protagonist (PC or NPC ally) or significant antagonist. This gives one ‘qauntized unit’ of combat.

  • Simple battles = 1 unit.
  • Moderately-complicated battles = 2 units.
  • Complicated battles = 3-4 units.
  • Extremely complicated battles = 5+ units.

If the battle needs to be spread over multiple sessions, add one unit per extra game session to each session’s play to represent setting up and documenting positions and statuses.

Let’s take an example most readers won’t know: the Grand Finale of the first Zenith-3 campaign involved 5 acts, three of them battles of increasing complexity and difficulty, plus an aftermath of about 1/4 of a game session. There were 5 protagonist characters, +3 in the first, and +1 in the second; and each battle was with a single enemy. There was also about 2000 words worth of roleplay in between each battle. Acts I and II were set-up and totaled about 4700 words from memory (and ran slightly overlong).

Let’s work the math:

    Act I + Act II: 4700 words
    Act III: 2000 words + Battle #1:

      One Battle Unit = 10 + 5 x (5+3) + 5 = 15 + 40 = 55 minutes
      Complexity Level: Complicated = 3-4 units
           = 55 minutes x 3-4 = 165 – 220 minutes
      At the lower end of this scale, so use 165 minutes.

    Act IV: 2000 words + Battle #2:

      One Battle Unit = 10 + 5 x (5+1) + 5 = 15+ 30 = 45 minutes
      Complexity level: Complicated = 3-4 unites
           = 45 x 3-4 = 135 – 180 minutes
      At the upper end of the scale, so use 180 minutes

    Act V: 2000 words + Battle #3:

      One Battle Unit = 10 + 5 x 5 + 5 = 15 + 25 = 40 minutes
      Complexity Level Extreme = 5+ units
           = 5 x 40 = 200 minutes or more

    Aftermath (also part of Act V, effectively): 25% of the game session.

    If I arbitrarily set the average length of a game session to 4250 words, except for Act V which I knew would run a little long, so 4750 words, I can calculate backwards to determine how many words each battle unit represented:

    Act III Battle #1: 4250-2000=2250; 3 units, so each = 750 words; 750 / 55 = 13.6364 words per combat minute in a unit.

    Act IV Battle #2: 4250-2000=2250; 4 units, so each = 562.5 words; 562.5 / 45 = 12.5 words per combat minute in a unit.

    Act V Battle #3: 4750 – 25% x 4250 = 4750 – 1062.5 = 3687.5; -2000 words = 1687.5 words; 5 units, so each is 337.5 words; 337.5 / 40 = 8.4375 words per combat minute in a unit, less if more than 5 units.

I wasn’t expecting a consistent value across all three battles; they were intended to be bigger stakes and increasingly frenetic. And Battle #3 was deliberately simplified to fit the available time – without that, the words per combat minute would have been closer to 10. It was the stakes that were bigger, not the combat complexity per se.

If I put those numbers onto a chart, I get the above. The red line is a straight line between the high value at 3 and the low at 5 simplified and shows just how consistent this is as a method of guesstimating how many words equivalent a combat is going to represent in a day’s play.

Extrapolating back, I get 2 = 16 words per combat minute and 1 = 17.5 words per combat minute. In other words, the less climactic / complicated the combat, the more room there is for the insertion of roleplay into the battle narrative. As things become insanely complicated, the need to clarify the tactical situation becomes all-consuming.

The other piece of wisdom that can be gleaned from the chart is some idea of the margin of error. The straight red line fits 3 of the 4 points almost perfectly, but it cuts the 4 mark at about 12 words per combat minute, while the actual value was closer to 12.5 – so 100 x 0.5 / 12 = &PlusMinus;4.17%. Call it &PlusMinus;5%, because there’s no indication that this is an extreme case.

It’s only a rule of thumb, but it’s a good one to have around.

8. End Campaign?

How do you decide that a campaign has reached it’s end? Well, if there’s an overarching story that connects the whole campaign together, that’s fairly obvious. If the campaign is more open-ended, it can be a more difficult question.

I can see 6 – no, 7 – reasons for a campaign to end in addition to Plot Completion (which I will include in the list for the sake of being complete):

  • Plot Completion – the story is over. You might tell another story with the same characters in a sequel campaign.
  • TPK – everybody dies. This doesn’t have to spell the end of a campaign if the GM/players don’t want it to; there are ways around it. New characters taking up where the old ones left off, some form of resurrection, some combination of the two, a sliding doors moment that rewrites history, whatever. Another option is to pivot to a new-character sequel campaign in which the world is living with the consequences of the previous PCs failure. So sometimes this ends a campaign and sometimes it doesn’t.
  • Player Interest – the GM should always be on the lookout for the subtle signs of waning player interest, bearing in mind that everyone will experience this to a different degree and will express it to a different degree. If the signs are clear, though, maybe it’s time to wrap up the campaign and do something fresh.
  • Player Departure – when a player leaves the campaign, that can be the end of things – it doesn’t matter why they have gone. If you know that the situation is only temporary, putting the campaign on hold for a while and doing something else might be a viable alternative. Several of my campaigns did not survive the death of one of the key players. Some of them did. One was put on hold for more than a decade. It happens.
  • Character Limits – Some game systems limit how far the characters can advance. Those limits may or may not be sufficient to fully encompass the planned plotline of the campaign. Personally, I never let such limits constrain my campaigns – if they have to go into “epic levels” to get the story told, so be it. Other GMs feel very differently about the question.
  • GM Interest – when prep becomes a millstone around your neck and you keep finding reasons to not do the things that you know you should, when the campaign becomes a grind, the GM has lost enough interest in running it that he is better off either putting it on hold while he recharges his batteries or shutting it down altogether. It can be said that you should always leave the audience – the players, in this case – wanting more. I disagree, I think you should always leave them satisfied.
  • Internal baggage – sometimes campaigns grow so convoluted and complicated that internal baggage starts making plots harder to come up with. Again, when it becomes a grind, putting it on hold or shutting it down are viable options that have to be considered.
  • Repetitiveness – when you’ve run out of original plot ideas and things start to feel repetitive, the campaign has run its course. Note that this can occur if PCs develop faster than the GM intended – when there are no credible threats left to challenge the PCs, and they win every fight without breaking a sweat, something has to change – and retiring the campaign is one option under the heading of ‘something’.

If the campaign is ending, you can let it quietly retire, or you can activate a planned ‘big finish’ of some sort. My co-GM and I already know how the Adventurer’s Club campaign will end, even if we don’t know when we will pull that trigger – and even if one of the other campaign-ending reasons forces our hand.

If the campaign is ending, then it’s back to ‘square one’ and the development of a new campaign. If not, it’s move on to step 9.

9. Revise Campaign

Too many GMs don’t do this, but after every adventure, the GM should revise his campaign plans, first to incorporate the direction in which the players want the campaign to travel in (and to avoid the directions in which they don’t want to go), and second because the characters will have evolved in the course of the last adventure and the GM should take that evolution into account, going forward.

This can take quite a bit of time and effort; the earlier it happens that the characters diverge from their anticipated path through the campaign, and the larger the campaign, the more significant the effort that is required.

Most of the time, it’s a lot more straightforward – so much so that GMs don’t see how critical it is. NEVER skimp on this step unless performing it would require shutting down the campaign for a period of time because the job is SO large.

When that is the case – for example, in my Zenith-3 (superhero) campaign – campaign revisions have to happen at the adventure outline stage. This complicates the adventures, but they tend to run for multiple game sessions – the current adventure has been running for a year of actual play (and been shut down for a year following my move).

That means that the overall campaign plan has to be robust enough to survive changes in direction and PC plans / goals / ambitions unscathed, while still letting those plans / goals be significant within the scope of individual adventures – and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds. Plot Trains are inevitable in this situation unless you actively work to derail them – one of the limitations of the big sprawling campaign plan.

But either way, the campaign plan needs to be revisited and revised to accommodate the consequences of player agency. Whether it happens as a standalone step in the campaigning process (Step 9 as show) or gets folded into a more localized set of events / developments, it still has to happen.

10. Evolve Characters

The GM often doesn’t get to see how the key characters of the campaign – the PCs – are evolving until after it has happened, and there’s at least one game session lag between that evolution and the GM’s capacity to incorporate the evolution into the campaign; the evolved characters simply show up ready for play in an adventure that was written and prepped without knowing what they had become.

Inevitably, this makes the characters more capable and competent than the GM had anticipated, sometimes markedly so. The adventure as written will almost always seem easier than expected.

There are a number of potential solutions to this problem.

  • Ignore it / live with it – my preferred option most of the time.
  • Require player foreshadowing of evolution – I’ll discuss this below, it’s too complicated to put in a bullet-point.
  • Anticipate character evolution and make the adventures harder to compensate for it – this is hard to get right, but very satisfying when you do. Beware of over-estimating how far the characters will evolve.
  • Tweaking adventures on-the-fly to incorporate the evolution in the characters – sometimes, you have no choice but to do this, because the character evolution is adventure-wrecking; sometimes, you can get away with paying lip service to the changes at times and mostly going with the first answer offered in this list. If character evolution makes the planned adventure a walk in the park, it’s not always a good idea to prevent that. That’s answer #1 in its purest form.
Require foreshadowing of character evolution

In my Fumanor campaigns, whenever a character gained a level, I always required them to tell me what they intended their next character level to be.

Players were free to change their minds as the campaign played out – sometimes, a planned diversification down a character evolution side-path would be delayed or brought forward because the player felt that the change would better prepare the character for what they foresaw happening in the campaign.

This let me add little scenes here and there into an adventure showing the character trying to master certain skills or abilities that would lead to the planned evolution.

It gets a little more complicated when you don’t have the limitations of condensing evolution into a simple headline using character classes, but the general principle still works – foreshadowing what skills or abilities the player intends for the character to improve next is still possible.

When you are writing adventures, it can sometimes become obvious that characters are going to be pushed out of their comfort zone, and players may elect to evolve their characters in response to that eventuality – or they can decide that staying true to the character concept / personality requires them to accept that such situations will remain outside of their comfort zone. This also lets you anticipate and foreshadow such evolution.

So long as the decision is not binding until the character actually gets to evolve – i.e. gains a level or gets a certain amount of banked experience to spend – this can add greatly to the verisimilitude of the campaign.

My personal preference, when possible within the overall campaign plan, is to both foreshadow the next step in a character’s evolution AND let their last evolutionary development play some significant role in the next adventure, even if it’s only one small scene or a difference in the narrative that takes it into account without making a huge difference to the story.

These let the players sense that their character’s in-game experiences are being shaped by their evolutionary choices and implies that the campaign is evolving in response to their actions – in other words, they are a public demonstration of player agency, implying that other player choices are also having an impact, even if it’s not always obvious.

The rewards for making this little bit of extra effort are far in excess of the costs incurred in terms of GM time and prep.

Again, this all plays into the business of revising and polishing adventures; it’s another element within step 6e. Quite often, the only significant changes or additions to an adventure are a direct consequence or expression of character evolution.

The other thing that needs to be highlighted under this heading is that NPCs should evolve, too – either to further their goals / plans, or in response to in-game events that show a weakness or vulnerability or even an opportunity. Where PC evolution gets publicly displayed (a character exhibits a new ability), when an enemy gets to hear about this, they should revise both their own plans and their own future evolution to take it into account.

Back To 6a

I consider these post-adventure steps to be a permanent attachment to the act of running an adventure. When they are complete, the GM has them to employ as context within the campaign for their game prep – so it’s back to step 6a and the development of the next adventure.

Final advice

Prep requirements always expand to fill the available time plus 20% – or more. That’s just a reality that GMs have to get used to.

Ideally, prep can be spread out so that some of it gets done in advance. A number of scenes / adventures in the Zenith-3 campaign exist for no other reason than to introduce an NPC who will be a building-block for future adventures, or who will trigger the development of such building blocks.

The metagame benefit of doing so is that the character creation gets separated out from that NPCs campaign-significant appearance, making both that bit less work-intensive. On top of that, the GM gets to see what works and what doesn’t, and can fine-tune the character to make them more effective when it matters.

Campaign Activities: A sidebar

I have a little time up my sleeve, so I’m going to invest some of it in a sidebar at this point. Campaign events, from a meta-perspective, can be categorized as:

  • Introducing new campaign elements – people, places, things
  • Developing existing campaign elements and contexts
  • Introducing new narrative threads / subplots
  • Advancing existing narrative threads / subplots
  • Interactions between existing and/or new narrative threads / subplots
  • Concluding existing narrative threads / subplots

Six categories, in all. If a chart is drawn up showing the life of a complex campaign over time, the % of game content that each of these represents provides an interesting set of patterns over the lifetime of the campaign:

The image is a little hard to read, you can click on it to see a larger version in a new tab (so that you can switch back and forth between it and the text).

This chart breaks a campaign into 4 divisions – Early, Mid-campaign, Late, and End. Each of the first three is subdivided into three smaller periods the same size as End, to get 10 equal spacings and End is subdivided into two. In reality, there is virtually no chance that a campaign’s phases would be of the same duration, but the regularity helps with interpretation.

  • At the start of the campaign, it’s divided 50-50 between introducing characters and introducing plotlines.
  • 1/3 of the way through the early campaign, and these have shrunk to make room for advancing some of those existing plot threads and 5% in resolving early plot threads. This is necessary to give players a sense of accomplishment, of making progress.
  • 2/3 of the way through the early campaign and 5% of the total is now devoted to developing existing campaign elements, while resolving plot threads is up to a little more than 10%. These take equal chunks out of the new campaign elements introductions and new plot threads – advancing existing plot threads remains consistent at about 15%.
  • At the end of the early campaign, as it transitions to mid-campaign, plot resolutions remains about the same, developing existing characters and related campaign elements is up to about 10%, advancing existing plot threads is up to about 20%, and introducing new elements and plotlines continues to fall steadily to make room.
  • 1/3 of the way through the mid-campaign, and a key characteristic of the mid-campaign is now a noteworthy component: interactions between plot threads. Advancing existing plot threads has again grown in significance, and plot resolutions have also grown. Steady falls in both new campaign elements and new plotlines continue in order to make room for these changes.
  • 2/3 of the way through the mid-campaign is actually the half-way mark of the whole. Plotline resolutions and advancing existing plotlines have both grown as a share of the content while interactions and developing existing characters have remained about the same. The same steady reduction in new plots and campaign elements continues, now down to 20% each.
  • As the campaign transitions from mid-campaign to late campaign, there are dramatic changes. Advancing plotlines grows again, and interactions between plot threads triple; there is actually a reduction in resolutions as a result, in addition to the steady drop in new content introduction. For the first time, advancing existing plotlines is SUBSTANTIALLY higher than new campaign content. This is a key feature of the late campaign.
  • 1/3 of the way through the late campaign, and only 10% of the campaign is new character elements, and the same for new plotlines; advancing existing plotlines is now more than both of these combined. Developing existing campaign elements grows, and so does resolution of plotlines. In fact, more plotlines get resolved than get introduced.
  • 2/3 of the way through the late campaign, and everything starts to come together in terms of narrative, resulting in a massive spike in plotline interactions. Character evolution becomes extremely important because that’s the trigger for subsequent plot developments. The big picture is starting to resolve itself into something definite. There’s neither an increase nor decrease in the emphasis placed on advancing plot threads outside of these interactions, and there’s another big drop in plot resolutions. Things begin to stack up on the PCs, in other words.
  • The conclusion of the late campaign is the beginning of the End. Plot interactions collapse, because things have come together. Character evolution both results from the previous interactions and drives the next phase of the campaign. New campaign elements are almost non-existent, but there are a few new plotlines still being introduced – mostly in the form of short adventures of no campaign significance in between the more campaign-oriented material.
  • Half-way through the End, there’s one final burst of thread interactions and the development of existing campaign elements. Advancing plotlines all but collapses because there are so few plotlines left outside of the main campaign plotline. Almost everything else has been resolved at this point, there’s only the Big Finish to come (and anything leading up to it).
  • The End of the End is the end of the Campaign. There’s a little bit of interaction as all the existing plot threads coalesce into one plotline, there’s one or two isolated adventures to give that a little time in which to happen, there’s a tiny bit of plot advancement, and it all leads into the Big Finish. There’s also allowance made in the “New Plot threads” for an epilogue or even a prologue to a sequel campaign, building on anything not resolved. And, if you add up all the “New Narrative Threads”, 50 + 40 + 35 + 30 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 240; and the Resolutions add up to 5 + 12 + 12 + 18 + 22 + 20 + 25 + 10 + 20 + 45 + 85 = 394, it becomes apparent that the two aren’t to scale; there’s a significance factor in play. if resolutions are twice as important as new plotlines at the moment the latter are introduced to the campaign, 240 – (394 / 2) = 240 – 197 = 43, or roughly 18% of the campaign. If resolutions are even more important, this percentage only goes up. And those numbers assume that plot resolution is in the PCs’ favor – which might not be the case. Sometimes, a victory is simply stopping an explosion for long enough that it becomes somebody else’s problem.

Okay, where was I? Oh, yes.

The ideal of introducing everything before it becomes plot-significant can’t always be met. There will always need to be some measure of compromise and corner-cutting when it comes to prep. The goal is never for prep to be complete and comprehensive – fine detail takes a lot of time for often minimal gains – its to have the next adventure be ready to run effectively. If there’s time up your sleeve once that’s accomplished, you can spend it on incorporating fine details and nice-to-have adventure elements.

I try always to be aware of the best places to cut corners – juggling maximum gain in prep time for minimal impact on the adventure. This comes back to planning and scheduling campaign prep and the art of knowing what’s possible in the available time and what’s not – while keeping things loose enough that you can occasionally indulge yourself.

The campaign flowchart, and the process that it depicts, is an ideal, a guideline, something to be varied at need. This is especially true when it comes to adventure creation.

The closer to game play that you can leave the creation of an adventure, the better that adventure will be in terms of fitting into the existing and established continuity and context of the campaign – but the further from that point it takes place, the better an adventure will be in fitting into the overall campaign plotline and context. Both are necessary and desirable – and mutually contradictory.

There’s a saying in Computer Programming: “You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it functional. Pick two.” Of course, that’s an oversimplification; these points define a three-dimensional solution space in which any point is a valid one to aim for. But it gets non-IT people thinking along the right lines, deciding what needs to get compromised and what can’t be – and identifying the costs associated with those specifications. If one function requested is going to be 70% of the development effort and associated expense, you have to at least think about whether or not that’s an essential, or just a ‘nice to have’ – is there some practical workaround that lets you do without it, slashing the development time and expense in the process?

This is a similar situation, the right answer is to compromise both just a little. But breaking the adventure development process up into discrete steps means that the compromise point can be adjusted within different phases of that process, maximizing bang-for-buck in terms of the development time invested by the GM.

There is no one right answer, there are innumerable wrong answers and even more poor ones. A campaign process that flows activities lets you ask the right questions and make the most effective plans for the utilization of your prep time. That reality is the best that you can realistically hope for, and its not to be sneezed at.

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Campaign Workflow For GMs Pt 1


Starting and Running a campaign is a lot easier if there’s a clearly understood process that maximizes the opportunities for success and avoids the largest traps and pitfalls.

Image by beate bachmann (spirit111) from Pixabay

As usual, I worked on the next part of Trade In Fantasy until it became clear that it wasn’t quite going to be ready in time, then shifted gears. This article was originally intended to be the next time-out entry in the sequence, but it’s been preempted by the need to have something ready to publish in short order. In fact, it’s likely that I will have so much to say on the subject of today’s post that I will split it in two.

Inspiration

Today’s article was inspired by an article at EnWorld by Charles Dunwoody – a shout-out to him – entitled “Joyful GMing: RPG Success Strategies”. Overall, it seemed a solid enough article, if a little on the shallow end at times – but then, most blogs are, compared to the standards set for Campaign Mastery.

At it’s heart is a process for successful GMing which Charles polished and slip-streamed into a very simple workflow.

As I read the article, my first thought was that it really needed a flowchart to pull it all together, so I started to sketch one out, finding as I did so that I had something to say about each of the stages. The flowchart that you can see on the right was the result.

It’s nice, neat, and simple, and at the time, that was the full intention of this article – to supplement Charles’ article with my own advice.

But, as I started contemplating what that advice would be, part of it was that ‘this step really should be subdivided this way’ or ‘there’s something that’s been left out, here’. I found myself thinking, in the end, that the process may have been over-simplified, that there was room for some solid advice that would not fit the simpler structure.

Revision

So my first step was to revise the process and the flowchart by the inversion of steps 1 and 2 and the addition of steps 2a and 5a. Steps 9 and 10 followed, and then step 6 got subdivided into 5 sub-steps in a third wave of revisions. And, by now – as you can see to the left, the result didn’t look very much like the process described by Charles at all.

Make no mistake though – his original is still at the conceptual heart of things. I’ve just added a few things and complicated some others.

This flowchart is your road map to today’s article, your table of contents if you will. You don’t really need it to read and use the content, but it helps put the process into context.

I’m also going to do my best not to repeat Charles’ advice; his article is still relevant and it might even be useful to read it before continuing. So here’s that link again (opens in a new tab).

0. Start

Some people struggle with this step. A lack of confidence saps their willingness to accept the responsibility and workload. I can sympathize with that; there have been times when I was caught in a time-crunch by the real world and didn’t think I could spare the time / effort / creativity to run another campaign – and even had to put existing campaigns on hold, for a while.

But there’s a big difference between not having enough time and not having enough ability.

No GM starts with the complete skill-set that they need to run a successful campaign. It’s like a degree in computer science – from the moment the still-wet ink gets deposited on the page, your skills start to atrophy, and the world around you starts to evolve to date what you know. You can combat the first by actively using everything that’s relevant from what you’ve learned (and occasionally casting a refresher glance over the rest); to combat the second, you need to self-educate. Regularly and frequently, even constantly.

GMing is a little more forgiving, but when you are starting out, there will be mountains to climb. Fortunately, there are many sherpas out there to guide you, and none of the mountains is as forbidding as they seem.

It does help if your players have a similar level of experience to your own – they will be more forgiving of any lapses if they can’t do any better. It can also be helpful in the long run if your players are more experienced than you are – for a while, they may ride roughshod over your efforts (and that can be fun for them), but you will learn more quickly be being thrown in the deep end.

The biggest danger comes from having players with significantly less experience than you have – because they will be looking to you for guidance, and things can devolve into the blind leading the blind. Nevertheless, that is going to happen from time to time – and, when it does, your duty is clear: throw them in the deep end, but be prepared to guide them out if absolutely necessary. This sharpens their learning curve, just as experienced players do yours – but that only accelerates them getting ‘up to speed’. The one essential is for them to know that the GM has their back.

Of course, the time will come when you need to start loosening the apron-strings and letting the players sink or swim on their own. How much to pull back, and when, are as much a part of your campaign planning as anything else – or should be.

One technique that’s especially useful is to supplement the PCs with an NPC member of the team. This lets you speak to the players through that NPC, offering suggestions, demonstrating the right way to role-play, and so on. Don’t play this NPC as-written, at least at first; it’s a mouthpiece for you to use to get the PCs out of trouble, or headed in the right direction when they grow lost or confused. As the players become more experienced, you will naturally start adopting a harder line in terms of the character-as-written because the players will be less reliant on the outside input and advice. If you want to (there’s no real need), you can even mark ‘graduation day’ by killing off the NPC, symbolically telling the players “‘you’re on your own, now”.

One trap that I have seen multiple new (potential) GMs fall into is judging themselves by the standards set by more experienced GMs. I’ve lost track of the number of times someone has reached out to me to say “I thought I was ready to GM but I don’t understand half of the advice that you offer on Campaign Mastery” – I rarely write these articles for beginners; they are aimed at experienced GMs and poke into all sorts of nooks and crannies within the art. Some of the resulting advice will be useful to a particular GM, and some of it won’t be. My advice is always, bookmark anything that doesn’t make sense and come back to it a year or so later; eventually, your skills will grow to the point where you can make an informed and educated decision about the usefulness of what’s offered. Until then, if you don’t understand it, ignore it.

The same practice should be applied by beginner GMs to every experienced GM they encounter. Those experienced GMs will be able to do things that you can’t, and will do things that you might not – before you can take any lessons from them, you need to understand not only what they are doing, and how they are doing it, but why they are doing it. Only then can you judge whether or not it’s a practice that you should attempt to emulate. Don’t expect to run before you can crawl – design your campaigns and adventures with your own limitations in mind, while carefully pushing yourself to improve, and that’s all that anyone can ask or expect of you.

One final piece of advice before I move on – it’s okay to compromise on ideals and standards of GMing if you have to. Don’t expect to have all the answers, and do expect to have to diverge from your prepared plans when the players do something unexpected or expose a shortcoming in those plans. If you don’t have time to do everything that you would ideally like to do, have a plan B and execute it. If that compromises your prep, so be it. GM over-commitment is a mistake that we all make from time to time. It’s more important, most times, to deliver something playable than to dot every i and cross every t.

1. Campaign Concept

The campaign concept is the central idea at the heart of the campaign, painted in the broadest possible strokes. It focuses on what will make this campaign different from the one run by Joe Bloggs down the street. It’s the conceptual cornerstone that should inspire everything else.

As GMs grow in experience, they will often invert the sequence of Charles’ original steps 1 and 2 – they will have an idea for a campaign and then choose a game system that seems to suit it. Beginners tend to do it in the sequence he describes, in which they have a rules system and devise a campaign to fit into it.

The reason for the change is that the rules system inherently constrains the campaign concepts. If those constraints simply reinforce the intentions of the campaign, they are an advantage, not a liability; but when that isn’t the case, an alternative game system may be a better fit.

My first Fumanor campaign was designed and intended to be an AD&D campaign. The players persuaded me to make it a 2nd Ed campaign, but the differences between system and expectations grew until they became intolerable. So I converted it to Rolemaster, trying to put a little more grit into the mechanics. That didn’t work very well, and didn’t last very long. Finally, we adopted D&D 3.0 (and later, 3.5) and never looked back; it had the right balance between rules crunch and fantasy, between PCs and capabilities, at least for my taste. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

2. Choose Rules / 2a. House Rules

No rules system adapts perfectly to suit a campaign concept. There is, in modern times, a movement to running games with RAW – “Rules As Written”. I come from the old school, where if a rule didn’t work for any reason, changing it was not only acceptable but best practice.

I’m not going to dig into that particular debate; suffice it to say that both approaches have their benefits and their drawbacks. Instead, let’s talk about bad house rules for a minute.

Just because you can change something, doesn’t mean that you should. Yes, a revised rule might better implement your vision of the campaign, but that alone isn’t always enough to justify changing it; the rest fall into the category of other consequences. Before you can change a rule, you need to understand why the rule is as it appears, and why it will be advantageous to change it, and whether or not there are alternatives to consider, and what the ramifications and consequences outside of the purpose of the change are going to be. Only then can you determine whether or not the price is worth paying.

In the bad old days, GMs rarely made such detailed assessments. “I want X” was justification enough – and, as a result, some truly appalling rules were foisted onto players and campaigns.

Sometimes, even doing all that analysis isn’t enough – see the Woes Of Piety & Magic article published way back when under the heading of Greatest GMing Mistakes. In the case of the Piety system, the intentions were both noble and respectable, and the implementation seemed like a good idea at the time. Suffice it to say that it bogged everything down, it broke game balance, and it didn’t achieve it’s intended goals.

Not all house rules are like that. Most fall into two categories: rules that cover areas that the RAW overlooked, and rules that change the way the RAW function within the campaign context. The first are always easier to justify than the latter, but both have their place.

I remain perfectly happy to change the rules if I deem the change necessary. I’m just a little more cautious about what changes I make. They exist to better fit the game system to the campaign, and to patch holes in the RAW.

3. Campaign Overview

A campaign overview is a brief synopsis of what is going to make the campaign different / unique. It’s a hook, a broad breakdown of the how the central concepts of the campaign will be introduced to the players and how they will make a difference to the story of the campaign. It’s the bait with which you lure potential players into playing it.

In effect, it is a summary of what you expect to occur within the campaign, in general terms.

Every house rule that doesn’t simply patch a hole or problem within the game mechanics needs to be highlighted in the campaign overview – there needs to be an element of the campaign that does nothing but bring the central tenets of the campaign to the players’ attention and show how they will impact the overall story.

A lot of GMs skip the campaign overview stage, and that’s never a good idea. Even where you expect the campaign to be responsive to player choices and demands, you need an overview to place what the players want to do into context, and to restrict players choices where they do not fit the campaign concept.

There are two basic approaches to campaign overviews: the PC-driven and the Existential.

In a PC-driven overview, the GM is committing to arranging in-campaign circumstances that will force or require the PCs to achieve certain things, which will mitigate or undo those circumstances. This forces them to earn their player agency, starting with small amounts at the beginning of the campaign and ending with near-total agency at the end. This type of structure works very well when PCs present at the table with goals or motivations spelt out, as for example in a superhero campaign. All the GM has to do is find a way to conflate each PC’s goals with the bigger campaign picture.

My superhero campaign is a PC-driven one; there are multiple plot threads running concurrently. At least one, and often several, for each PC, at least one for some significant NPCs that will affect the PCs, at least one that will reshape / is reshaping the campaign world, at least one for a major organization, and even a couple that revolve around enemies of the group. Not all of these advance at once; everything is geared at building to a crescendo – in 10-15 years. My Dr Who campaign is another example.

In an Existential campaign, the PCs don’t even get mentioned in the campaign overview; instead, it’s all about the world around them and how it is going to change (unless, perhaps, something is done to stop this from happening). These events provide context and boundaries for whatever the players want to do; there is no expectation that the PCs will solve all the world’s problems, only that they will seek to survive and advance themselves in the face of whatever challenges get thrown in their way.

The Adventurer’s Club campaign is an existential one. We know how we have reshaped world history, we know how we have reshaped the world history that is yet to unfold, and we know how that will affect the parent and titular name of the organization to which the PCs belong. Those things all happen in the background, occasionally providing flavor and context, but generally not playing a pivotal role in the adventures themselves, which tend to be more standalone affairs.

Both approaches work; the key difference lies in what the GM expects from PCs in the campaign, and hence what they expect from players. This has to be spelt out in no uncertain terms as part of the initial briefing for potential players.

4. Attract Players

There are three ways of grouping potential players – open, closed, and a hybrid of the two.

The Open approach means that there are lots of potential players out there and you only have to make the existence of the forthcoming campaign known to attract some of them. Advertising a campaign on a University noticeboard or a Facebook group, for example, or at a games store.

The Closed approach means that you already have contact with a group of players and are trying to devise a campaign that will appeal to them.

The Hybrid approach means that there are one or two specific pre-selected players that you want to satisfy / attract, but that you are openly advertising for others to adventure alongside them.

There are significant ramifications to the different options. The closed and hybrid approach mean that if your campaign concept doesn’t appeal, you have to set it aside and start over. The friends with whom I game have no interest in a Star Trek -based RPG for example, and only one of them is really into Doctor Who. But I could count on at least two of them and maybe three or all four if I came up with a Babylon-5 based campaign. The structure and content of the campaign are dictated by the preferences of the players.

An open campaign, on the other hand, operates on the “Build It And They Will Come” principle. Your proposed campaign might only appeal to 1 in 1000 gamers, but you only need 3-5 of them – so if there are 3-5,000 players who learn of it’s proposed existence, all will be well. The more popular your campaign concept is, i.e. the broader its appeal, the more easily you will attract players – and the more of them you may have to turn away for lack of space.

When do you propose playing? The majority of my games happen on a Saturday because that’s when people are neither working nor studying. I used to belong to another group that gathered on Friday Nights and the occasional long weekend. I know of two groups – one meeting on a Friday and one on a Tuesday – because that’s when the players are available. I used to run regular but occasional games on Sundays as supplementary to the Saturday game sessions.

With a closed or hybrid model, you are already constrained in terms of when, but you probably already know what those restrictions are. Players joining up will have to be available at times that suit. With the open and hybrid models, any restriction of time also restricts the compatibility of possible players and campaign. Pick an unpopular day and time because it suits you and you may find that you attract no player interest.

Picking a popular time can also be problematic, as potential players are more likely to already have a game to go to!

Ultimately, attracting players is an exercise in Marketing. That means that there are a number of stages to the process, and you need a plan for each of them. These are: Awareness, Appeal, T’s & Cs, and Responsiveness.

Awareness: Before someone can consider becoming a player in the proposed campaign, they need to know that it exists. The more places you advertise its existence, the broader the potential pool of players – but the better you focus you advertising presence, the less effort you will waste on those who will never be interested. For about $5 a week, I can sponsor a radio show on local community radio; this produces advertising that will reach thousands upon thousands of listeners – but most of them won’t be gamers. Placing an advert on a noticeboard at my local library will only be seen by a few hundred people, but there will be a slightly higher response rate because there’s already a gaming group that meets there regularly. Placing an advert on a noticeboard at the local games store may also only be seen by a few hundred people a week – but they will all be gamers, and they will all know other gamers.

Appeal: Once a gamer knows that the campaign exists, the next thing that has to happen is that it has to appeal to them. That means describing it in an accurate but appealing way and in a way that can be comprehended in a very short space of time. People don’t have time to, and won’t, read an entire paragraph. You’re lucky if you can get them to read a full sentence and not a sound bite. My best advice: think like a spammer. Yeah, you heard me right. Construct a clickbait headline that will attract people strongly enough that they will then read a slightly longer descriptive passage of the proposed campaign. I would also direct your attention to the Secrets Of Stylish Narrative series, which is all about compressing text to make it shorter and more comprehensible while not skimping on the flavor. And practice – lots of practice.

T’s & C’s: I don’t know if this term has gone as viral in advertising elsewhere as it has here in Australia. It stands for “Terms and Conditions” – but only takes half as long to say, and is generally something that people can figure out from context even if they’ve never heard it before. In terms of your advertising for players, it means specifying where and when play is proposed, and what level of flexibility there is. There may be other restrictions like “No Power Gamers”, or “University students / graduates preferred”. Finally, a content guideline is probably appropriate – “G” or “NRC” or “Mature Concepts” or even “Occasionally Explicit Language Tolerated”. The goal is to avoid wasting your time and the time of a prospective player.

Responsiveness: Finally, a call to action – while making that action as easy as possible for the prospective player to complete. You don’t have to go as far as “Scan this QR Code to phone the GM” – but the easier it is to respond, the better. But there is a downside – this information is going to be open to the public, and that means open to potential abuse. I don’t know that you need to go as far as a burner phone, but using a disposable email address might prevent a LOT of grief.

5. Character Generation

So you’ve attracted a group of players who are willing to at least give the campaign a go. If you’re exceedingly lucky, you may even have a standby list to back them up. You’ve gathered them together for the purposes of character generation. Which means they need a more extensive campaign briefing in order to make good choices for their characters. I’m a big believer in collaborative concept selection – for example, when generating characters for the Zenith-3 campaign, I specified six or seven broad categories of PC archetype – the equivalent of character classes & race – and let the players choose in sequence of them signing up for the campaign. That didn’t prohibit two of them choosing the same thing, but it encouraged them to pick a slot that hadn’t been filled on the team – and, since there were more slots than players, they collectively decided what parts of the campaign they were going to find more challenging.

There are two different approaches to character generation – all together, or individually / piecemeal. “All together” means everyone at the same time and the same place. “Individually / piecemeal” means one-on-one sessions with the GM. The second is more realistic in that the PCs will have no knowledge of each other; the first ensures that there are no secrets between the PCs.

Under certain circumstances, there is also a lot to commend in adopting a hybrid approach – a trusted, pre-selected, player who knows both the game system and your campaign style can be a lifesaver if the other players don’t know the rules, acting as an assistant GM. But you need to be able to trust them implicitly because they will be generating their PC separately from the others.

The other big advantage of the “all together” approach is that it turns the character generation process into a social occasion. You should play into this, especially if there are players that don’t know each other already.

The GM needs to be on-hand during character generation to answer questions. And, if you are taking the “all together” approach, they should also observe the emerging group dynamic closely. What are the rough spots? Who gets along immediately? How are these personal dynamics likely to affect the way the PCs interact in-game? Are there any red flags that suggest someone may not last as a player in the campaign? Or any black flags that suggest you might need to actually expel someone from the group?

It’s far too early at this point to make any such decisions, but it’s never too early to start watching out for potential unpleasant surprises.

5a. Player Commitment

Another subject that requires thought in advance of the first session – even if that’s only for the purposes of character generation – is an answer to the question “What are you asking the players to commit to?” and the related question, “What are you committing to?”

I ask new players to commit to playing 2-3 sessions before pulling out if they don’t enjoy it, and to give me at least one session’s notice that they will be doing so. At the same time, only a fool doesn’t recognize that circumstances can change, and novices may not have any idea of what sort of time commitments they are actually signing up for. If you expect players to do something in between game sessions, that needs to be spelt out, as well. I commit to giving players a little latitude to modify or tweak their characters for the first few game sessions. I require all players to be friendly toward each other and myself, and to telephone (preferably a day in advance) if for some reason they can’t attend – and commit to making allowances for genuine emergencies and general ill-health.

Some groups have an expectation that they will go together to buy lunch / dinner; others have social contracts like ‘phones off during play’. Some groups demand that people take it in turns to buy drinks or snacks for the group, or that everyone will pitch in to help clean up afterwards.

I know at least one group that permits no-one but the GM to crack open a rulebook other than the player’s book at the game table during play and another that won’t even permit that much.

The variety if social contract that can be found in an RPG group are incredible. As a general rule of thumb, these things are only problems if they aren’t clearly communicated to the participants. That communication is your responsibility, as is the leading of any discussion of what the social contract terms should be within the group.

And with that, I’m about half-way through, and right out of time. To be continued….

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Trade In Fantasy Ch. 4: Modes Of Transport, Pt 3


This entry is part 11 in the series Trade In Fantasy

Today’s post focuses on Rafts and small boats like Kayaks and Canoes. The defining trait of such vessels is that while they can have sails, their primary motive power derives from the use of oars or paddles.

It’s taken quite a bit longer than I intended, due to a fundamental truism of publishing, at least to Campaign Mastery: Tables Take Time – and this post needed 9,877 lines of hand-coded HTML tables, completely on top of the effort needed to generate the content of those tables.

Even now, I’m more than a little concerned that Table 3 has too many columns and may need to be split in two – a task that there is not enough time to complete prior to deadline. But we’ll see how we go – if you’re reading these words, then all is well; if I’ve had to rewrite them, you’ll be reading about that, instead!

Table Of Contents: In part one of this chapter:

Chapter 4: Modes Of Transport

4.0 A Word about Routes

    4.0.1 Baseline Model
    4.0.2 Relative Sizes
    4.0.3 Competitors
    4.0.4 Terrain I
    4.0.5 Terrain II
    4.0.6 Multi-paths and Choke Points

      4.0.6.1 Sidebar: Projection Of Military Force

    4.0.7 Mode Of Transport

4.1 Backpack / Litters / Shanks Pony

    4.1.1 Capacity
    4.1.2 Personalities / Roleplay

4.2 Horseback

    4.2.1 Capacity
    4.2.2 Requirements
    4.2.3 Personalities / Roleplay

4.3 Mule Train

    4.3.1 Capacity
    4.3.2 Requirements
    4.3.3 Personalities / Roleplay

4.4 Wagons

    4.4.1 Capacity
    4.4.2 Requirements
    4.4.3 Other Exceptions – Animal Size

      4.4.3.1 Sidebar: Road Trains

    4.4.4 Fodder / Food & Water Needs

      4.4.4.1 People
      4.4.4.2 Horses
      4.4.4.3 Mules
      4.4.4.4 Oxen / Cattle
      4.4.4.5 Elephants
      4.4.4.6 Other

    4.4.5 Personalities / Roleplay

In Part 2:

4.5 River Boats & Barges

    4.5.0 A Splice Of Maritime History

      4.5.0.1 Dugouts & Canoes
      4.5.0.2 Rafts
      4.5.0.3 Boats
      4.5.0.4 Poled Rafts & Barges
      4.5.0.5 Oars
      4.5.0.6 Land-based motive power
      4.5.0.7 Sail
      4.5.0.8 Better Sails
      4.5.0.9 Trading Ships
      4.5.0.10 Warships & Pirates
      4.5.0.11 Beyond the age of sail
      4.5.0.12 Riverboats
      4.5.0.13 Sources

    4.5.1 Riverboat Capacity
    4.5.2 Favorable Winds

      4.5.2.1 The Beaufort Wind Scale

    4.5.3 Favorable Currents
    4.5.4 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements
    4.5.5 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions
    4.5.6 Extreme Weather Events
    4.5.7 The Tempest Scale
    4.5.8 Vessel Rating
    4.5.9 Weather Cataclysms

In today’s post:

4.6 Rafts

    4.6.1 Rowing Time & Exhaustion
    4.6.2 The basics of vector sums

      4.6.2.1 An Example
      4.6.2.2 A better example
      4.6.2.3 With Maths
      4.6.2.4 Simplified Vector Sums
      4.6.2.5 Multi-hour Vector Sums

    4.6.3 Raft Design & Operation

      4.6.3.1 Buoyancy
      4.6.3.2 Raft Calculation Process
      4.6.3.3 Why all this matters
      4.6.3.4 Category 1 Raft Table
      4.6.3.5 Category 2 Raft Table
      4.6.3.6 Category 3 Raft Table
      4.6.3.7 Category 4 Raft Tables
      4.6.3.8 Category 5 Raft Tables
      4.6.3.9 Category 6 Raft Tables

    4.6.4 Overloaded Rafts
    4.6.5 Raft Breakup
    4.6.6 Construction Time
    4.6.7 A final word on Overloading Capacities

4.7 Canoes etc

    4.7.1 Proportions
    4.7.2 Frontal Dimension
    4.7.3 Base Speed

And next:

4.8 Seagoing Vessels

    4.8.1 Capacity
    4.8.2 Favorable Winds
    4.8.3 Favorable Currents
    4.8.4 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements
    4.8.5 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions
    4.8.6 Extreme Weather Events
    4.8.7 Vessel Rating
    4.8.8 Weather Cataclysms

4.9 Exotic Modes Of Transport

    4.9.1 Flight
    4.9.2 Teleport
    4.9.3 Magic Gates & Portals
    4.9.4 Capacities

In future chapters:
  1. Land Transport
  2. Waterborne Transport
  3. Spoilage
  4. Key Personnel
  5. The Journey
  6. Arrival
  7. Journey’s End
  8. Adventures En Route

The main Image is based on China Raft by Emma from Pixabay with additions made using copy, paste, blend, etc to aid the composition.

4.6 Rafts

So far as this system is concerned, vessels come in three main types – rafts,. canoes & rowboats, and ships. Further, canoes and the like can be treated as a special sub-type of Raft, enabling a common set of rules for the definition of their traits and characteristics.
.
For this reason, Canoes and any other form of vessel whose primary motive power comes from oars or poles, are considered a sub-variety of rafts, though I have separated them out into a small section of their own.

I have to stress that these are not the pleasure-rafts that many people grew up with. These are rafts designed and assembled to be able to handle sea travel. They have to be sturdier, heavier, and better built than the home craft created by lashing a few branches together. There will be some overlap but it won’t be as great as you might think.

It should also be pointed out that a raft of 10 square meters or more is enormous! In modern times, we’re used to thinking of large life rafts of this size that can hold anywhere from fifty to a couple of hundred people while they await rescue; the larger end of this range of rafts are of comparable size, but made of timber, not inflated plastic. That makes a pretty huge difference. So much so that it’s fair to expect the upper end of these craft to only exist in a fantasy world.

    4.6.1 Rowing Time & Exhaustion

    Crews can row for 2 hrs maximum before resting for at least 1 hour.

    If need be, a tired crew can continue for another hour, but will only achieve 3/4 of their normal speed. This hour also has to then be added on to their recovery time, which increases to two hours.

    A further hour at 1/2 speed then becomes possible, but this ads 2 more hours to the recovery time.

    An exhausted crew can manage one last hour at 1/4 speed, at the price of needing +2 more hours recovery.

    It can be helpful to visualize this in terms of distance covered, rather than speed:

    I’m sorry that the diagram is hard to read, it was a lot harder to fit everything in than I thought it was going to be.

    Two hours rowing and 1 of rest is clearly the most efficient unless you have a second crew to take over the rowing while the first one rests.

    But, if 3 hrs rowing will carry you to a destination, it’s worth keeping on, even though the crew will need additional rest at the end of it.

    Two hours rowing, 1 of rest, and another hour of rowing get you 12x in distance (where x is 1/4 of your best speed). So there are only two circumstances where you might contemplate a fourth straight hour of rowing – where you are attempting to outrun some threat (an enemy, a hurricane, whatever), or where the additional total distance (13x compared to 12x) was enough to get to a destination.

    Only the first of those scenarios justifies a fifth hour of rowing – and even then, the distance covered by a 2 row, 1 rest, 2 row pattern is actually greater. It’s that hour of rest that is the critical deciding factor – if the menace is so imminent that you don’t think you can afford that delay, then pushing on beyond the point of exhaustion if necessary, is the only option.

    4.6.2 The basics of vector sums

    There are three factors that control the movement of vessels: currents, rowing, and wind.

    If you have no sails, wind is 1/4 effect. If you have no rowers, but rely on sails for motive power, wind has 4x effect.

    To chart the actual motion of a vessel, you need to convert these into the same units and then perform a vector sum operation.

    A vector is “speed in a specific direction”. To perform a vector sum, you simply mark out a straight line in the indicated direction that is of a length that corresponds to the speed on whatever scale you’re using. And that makes it sound much more complicated than it really is.

    But we complicate matters by then remembering that most of the time, we want to proceed in a specific direction, not simply track what direction we are actually traveling.

    To make life simpler, I recommend using “X” as the units – which is a distance per hour equal to 1/4 of your best speed. So if your best speed is 4 mph, you would use mph as your unit scale; if your best speed was 6 mph, you would use units of 1.5 mph.

      4.6.2.1 An example

      Currents in this part of the world flows 30 degrees to the east of due north at a speed of 6 knots. Winds are currently averaging 14 knots from 20 degrees south of east. Your vessel’s best speed is 4.6 mph.

      For a first take, let’s assume we head due west at full speed for an hour.

           1. 6 knots = 6.90467 mph.
           2. 14 knots = 16.1109 mph.
           3. Units = 1/4 of 4.6 = 1.15 mph.
           4. Current = 6.90467 / 1.15 = 6.004 units.
           5. Wind (no sails) = 16.1109 / 4 / 1.15 = 3.502 units.
           6. Hourly vector sum:
           6.1 Currents, 6 units 30°E of N
           6.2 Winds, 3.5 units 20°N of W
           Net effect: almost exactly Due North
           6.3 Rowing: 4 units due West
           6.4 Vector Sum: 33.7°W of North at 7.6 units

      6.1 – 6.4 are illustrated below. Each step starts where the last one ends.

      4.6.2.2 A better example

      The above is all well and good if you actually wanted to travel roughly 35 degrees West of North.

      If, as seems more likely, you actually wanted to head due west, the conclusion from the first example is that it isn’t possible – rowing due south would result in a measurable drift north and very little westerly progress.

      So, a second example: Same currents, but winds are now 22 knots 20°South of West, and instead of calculating where we would end up by rowing due west, let’s actually try and head due west.

           1. 6 knots = 6.90467 mph.
           2. 22 knots = 25.3171 mph.
           3. Units = 1/4 of 4.6 = 1.15 mph.
           4. Current = 6.90467 / 1.15 = 6.004 units.
           5. Wind (no sails) = 25.3171 / 4 / 1.15 = 4.22 units.
           6. Hourly vector sum:
           6.1 Currents, 6 units 30°E of N
           6.2 Winds, 3.5 units 20°S of W
           Net effect: Drift Movement is mostly North with a slight Westerly element.

      From this point, the two examples differ in procedure as well as details.

      6.3 From the endpoint of 6.2, drop a southerly line. Since our initial travel is 4 units an hour, draw a circle 4 units in radius. Anywhere on (or in) that circle is reachable with 4 units of rowing. Note that the circle must cut the original line to the west for “Due West” to be a valid outcome. In this example, that is true, but by so little that it’s easy to see why a slight shift in the wind vector was enough to prevent it.
      This redefines the objective – we want the vector that cancels out the Northern tendency as efficiently as possible (so that unused movement can be added to the resulting westward drift). That’s what the circle defines for us – at the point where it crosses the east-west line.

      6.4 Draw a line from the endpoint of 6.2 through the point where the circle crosses the East-West line. That is the vector direction (we already know the length, 4 units, by definition). I measure that as 27.5° degrees West of South.

      The net effect is that the combination of currents and winds move us 1 unit west, and the rowers – after overcoming the tendency to drift north – add another 2 units of motion in that direction. So this particular arrangement is a net 75% efficient.

      4.6.2.3 With Maths

      It’s possible to use trigonometry to take each of these vectors apart into a North-South component and an East-West component. We know the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle each makes with its starting point and either the angle or 90° minus the angle. Naturally, this is a lot more precise, and if people want or need to go to that much trouble to be precise, more power to them.

      4.6.2.4 Simplified Vector Sums

      Except in extraordinary circumstances, though, that’s wasted effort chasing unnecessary precision. Heck, even the examples I’ve given above are overkill, only relevant for explaining the technique to someone who has never seen it before.

      Do you really think that despite the craft being in motion, with a component of that motion not coming from the elements, that the current it experiences won’t change in the course of an hour? That the winds won’t change direction, or intensity, or – more likely – both? That the wave-tossed craft permits a precise course to be set?

      Every value used is an estimated average over the course of the hour. And the ‘estimated’ part restricts the level of precision. In real life, then, this is closer to what I would do:

      Vector Directions are about right, and so are quantities. That gets me to the endpoint of 6.2 in 2 calculations and 2 strokes of the pencil – usually with a ruler, but sometimes I won’t even bother with that.

      I don’t need the whole circle, either – just the arc, which I can get using the ruler – set the 0 measurement on the 6.2 endpoint and rotate it until the 4 crosses the east-west line. Mark that point and estimate the angle – using the ruler as a temporary north-south line or east-west line. By eye, even without that, I can say that the line is something close to 30 degrees west of south – and the 2.5° difference to the real error is small enough to be swallowed by the other sources of error.

      4.6.2.5 Multi-hour Vector Sums

      That simplicity is needed because most of the time, one hour won’t be enough to get you where you want to go, as noted earlier. Below are four diagrams, each covering 5 hours of time in different ways, and comparing the net results of each.

      The first is obviously the most effective – Five hours continuous rowing, spread amongst two crews (so that each has time to rest while the other rows).

      Hour 1: as per Example 2 above. Rowers make some gains to the west but spend most of their efforts combating drift.

      Hour 2: Current slightly more northerly and noticeably weaker. Winds weaker and more westerly. Rowers gain even more to the west, but still spend most of their efforts opposing the drift.

      Hour 3: Current slightly stronger and more northerly. Winds due West. Rowers spend the entirety of their efforts opposing the current’s northward push, with less than complete success. The only westward movement is from the wind.

      Hour 4 Current weaker but more westerly; winds much weaker, but more Northerly. Rowing is the same as Hour 3, and is almost enough to maintain an overall westerly heading.

      Hour 5: Current weaker and more westerly, Winds much stronger and more Northerly. Rowers efforts now have to oppose both wind and current, and don’t even come close to complete success.

      The chart below the vector sums is what you get when you plot each hour’s end-point. In total, the 5 hours of continuous rowing carried the craft 14.25 units westward (desirable) and 2 units north (undesired). Still, being within only 3 miles (2 units) of the desired destination isn’t bad – wind changes and weaker currents near the coast should permit that to be overcome.

      The second figure adjusts the first insofar as it shows the effects of a single crew doing all that rowing, until – at the end of the five hours – they have reached the point of total exhaustion.

      Hours 1 and 2 are unchanged.

      Hour 3, the rowers only manage three units of movement, and finish considerably more North of the comparative position.

      Hour 4 only amplifies the drift to the north,, but they do manage some progress.

      Hour 5, and they are really helpless to battle the conditions. In fact they make so little headway that they might have been better off using that hour to rest – it would not have been enough to restore them to full effectiveness, but it would have reduced the need by an hour,.

      But, when you measure it out, the crew manage the exact same 14.25 units west – at the price of being pushed 8.5 units north of due west. As usual, if that’s where they really wanted to go, the Navigator is a genius – and if not, he’s close to worthless, or so it might seem to the unhappy crew.

      Which brings me to the third figure, below. Instead of forcing the crew to keep rowing, this lets the craft drift while they rest in Hour 3. In Hour 4, they just about master the conditions, halting the northward drift, but in Hour 5 the combination gangs up on them. If, In hour 6, the currents shift to due west or close to it – a bigger shift than has been seen so far – or simply weaken to the point of near insignificance (more likely), the crew would probably be able to hold their losses in a third continuous hour of rowing; they wouldn’t get much further to the west, but they would get maybe a unit more, while not losing anything more to the north.

      Again, when you measure it out, you end up with a total westward movement of 14.25 units – something that I doubt people would believe if the diagrams weren’t right there in front of them.

      The total northward drift is only 5.6 units – if a unit is 1.5 miles, that’s about 8 1/2 miles in total. I’ve left the “8.5 unit” mark from the previous example to give visual reference for the gains – about 1/3 of the losses are wiped out, and the crew may be tired but they are nowhere near exhausted. Should conditions then change into something more favorable, they could easily regain those 5.6 units in an hour or two.

      To round out this section, there is one more scenario worth considering – the one where whoever’s doing the navigating is too clever by half and decides that if a slight drift north is inevitable, they should aim to push south of their destination while they are able.

      The figure above shows the results. In total, the crew manage to move about 0.6 units south – but that’s still enough to wipe out twice that much in northward drift. The craft will end the 5 hours about 1.25 miles north of their intended destination.

      But what this really illustrates is how you don’t need a lot of precision in your vector sums. Note that this would have negligible impact under either of the other scenarios – resting or one crew working to exhaustion – and that it sacrifices quite a lot of Westerly movement in the process. If the craft was 14.25 units east of port, they will still be 3.35 units out to sea at the end of the five hours. With the first crew only half-way through their second stint at the oars, if conditions are favorable, they might get there in another hour – but if they aren’t much different, the change in final-hour movement will be negligible; they will end up in something close to the same position as the basic two-crew 5-hour continuous rowing result, they’ll just have sweated through an extra hour of hard work for no good reason.

    4.6.3 Raft Design & Operation

    Rafts are either square or (effectively) rectangular (outriggers don’t count). They have a maximum length to width of 8:5 and a minimum width of 1 foot. If they fall outside those dimensions, they have to be considered a canoe-type vessel.

    Generally, the squarer they are, the more stable, and the greater the surface area relative to the length of the sides. However, even square rafts are unstable if too small.

    Adding length makes the craft stable front-to-back at some speed – the longer the craft, the lower this speed tends to be. However, if they are too narrow, they remain prone to roll fro one side to the other, sometimes at the slightest provocation. Some sports take advantage of this fact to create single-person craft that are more maneuverable. At that stable speed, even the sideways roll tends to be reduced, so they are only ‘somewhat unstable’ or ‘slightly unstable’.

    Increase the size of a square design sufficiently, and it becomes stable in both directions once again. There comes a point at which a new factor becomes increasingly important – the interval between wave crests and troughs. These create, corner to corner or front to back or side-to-side stress that tries to tear the raft apart – which one depends on the angle of motion relative to the direction of the waves, and the line of stress will be at right angles to the direction of the waves relative to the raft.

    There are construction techniques that increase the strength of rafts, such as using whole logs for the entire length of the raft. The downside is that as these gain resilience, they also gain weight, and the latter faster than the former (because weight is based n volume and the structural resilience on the cross-sectional area). The rules below will assume that a raft has always been designed in the optimum manner.

    Crew that aren’t rowing, provisions, tools, and salvaged cargo occupy the central space. Cargo etc is handled by weight, with the average crewman assigned a nominal weight of 200 lb – so 1 ton of ‘extras’ reduces a raft’s capacity by (1 short ton / 200 lb) crew carried.

    It may be possible to rig a small sail on a raft, handling this is left to the GM to improv. No raft will ever be faster than Incredibly Slow.

    Above the largest size indicated, the weight of load required to hold a raft together is enough to overcome its buoyancy and it will sink, unless magic is somehow used to prevent this – I leave such variations in the capable hands of the individual GM and their creativity.

      4.6.3.1 Buoyancy

      Which means that I had better explain buoyancy before I go much further.

      Buoyancy is not quite as simple a subject as people think. To explain it more fully, especially with reference to the different configurations of raft permitted under the rules above, I’ve out together the diagram below (I didn’t really want to, but judged it to be necessary).

      Water and sky derive from Message In A Bottle from Pixabay.

      In the diagram above, we first have a raft consisting of a single row of logs – this is the basic design that most people will immediately think of when hearing the term “raft”. The critical design factor is always the strength with which those logs are held in line – try picking up a number of pencils at the same time, and they will naturally bunch up; viewed end-on, the natural shape is round. That’s what the logs in a raft try to do, too; so they tend to be weaker side-to-side than front-to-back IF single logs / beams run the entire length of the raft.

      Typically the buoyancy of wood is only a little more than the force of gravity trying to pull them down. But there is a second buoyancy factor – the resistance to being submerged. This is (essentially) additional buoyancy that only comes into effect when a log is actually submerged. So the raft rides the waves with the upper surface not far above the waterline – and waves will regularly break over that waterline, and the sides of a raft, especially at sea.

      Adding a second row of logs doesn’t increase the native buoyancy by much because it also increases the weight. But it does reinforce the strength, and it does increase the secondary buoyancy because the weight forces the bottom row of logs under the surface. As a result, the raft rides a little higher, and is a lot stronger.

      The buoyancy can be further increased by hollowing out some or all of the logs, even though this compromises their strength somewhat. This not only reduces the weight but increases the buoyancy and resistance, to the point where the upper row of logs may be completely above the waterline.

      Adding a third row increases the weight again, but also increases buoyancy, resistance, and strength. As a result, far greater loads can be supported.

      One might think that adding a fourth row would also bring about an improvement, but there are a number of complications – not least of which is that you will now have up-down stresses also trying to tear the raft apart, and reinforcement to prevent this essentially takes you back to the two-log situation, even if the logs are hollowed, or worse. There’s a limit to how far you can go.

      Overcoming that limit involves using beams and caulking to seal gaps and removing the logs from the center of the raft – at which point it ceases to be a raft and becomes a ship.

      4.6.3.2 Raft Calculation Process

      In the course of developing the tables given below, a structured process of raft specification emerged. I wasn’t going to bother sharing this, just the results, but then realized that GMs would need to understand the basis for the different restrictions and limitations placed on rafts.

      1. Area in sq feet

      This is the key characteristic specified by the person creating the raft.

      2. Area in sq meters.

      Divide by 10.764 to get area in square meters.

      3. (area sq m) ^ 0.5 = minimum rowers per side to achieve full speed.

      4. (area sq ft) ^ 0.5 / 3 = minimum width (‘).

      5. Creator specifies actual width of this raft.

      6. (area sq ft) / min width = length (‘)

      7. length / 2 and round down = maximum rowers on each side.

      It’s possible for this to be higher than the maximum possible number of people on board (= area /2, see [18] below). This indicates insufficient buoyancy to carry the indicated number of rowers.

      This requires a design adjustment – either increasing the buoyancy through [8] below, or reducing the number of pairs of rowers, or both.

      8. 5.5 m^2 – 8 m^2 – double row of logs needed. 8.1- 16 m^2 – triple row needed. Above 4 m^2, these are usually hollowed out and the ends sealed to create a buoyancy chamber. Multiply the indicated # of rows by 0.75 if logs are hollowed to get a timber multiplier (value of 1 if not specified).

      Hollow Logs reduce the weight of the craft. Additional Rows of logs effectively reduce the effective weight for the purposes of [17] as well.

      9. If you have the less than the minimum # of rowers, base speed is 0 and you are at the mercy of the currents. If you have the exact minimum #, actual speed is 10% base speed. If you have the maximum # of rowers indicated then you achieve 100% of base speed. If you have something in between, use

           100 x (rowers – min) / (max – min)

      to get the % of base speed this particular raft is capable of. Don’t worry about being too precise, there are too many fudge factors under GM control for this to be anything more than a guideline.

      10. ( [7]-[3] ) x 5 = extra base speed from additional rowers (%).

      11. width (‘) x 2 + 0.1 and round up = minimum number of logs in a row.

      It’s usually more convenient & realistic to round up to the next even number, but sometimes I’ll increase the # of logs to a multiple of 3 (for 3′, 6′, 9′, and 12′ widths). The higher this number, the smaller the diameter of the trees used. This sets the maximum diameter of those trees to 0.5 m (1’ 7.7″) which is quite a big tree.

      12. [5] x 5 = base speed lost to water resistance (-%). x0.87 if logs are hollowed, x 1.414 for two rows of logs, x 1.732 for three rows of logs

      13. width (‘) / number of logs in a row = average diameter of logs used (‘)

      Big trees are heavier than smaller ones but have more buoyancy. If you want that level of realism, you can decide the actual average diameter of the trees used and multiply both weight and capacity by the ratio of (actual / calculated); I’ve simply used the calculated value 99% of the time.

      14. Area (sq ft) x log width x [8] = volume of wood in cubic feet.

      14a. / 31.315 = volume of wood in cubic meters.

      Area is the net of two axes of the theoretical wooden ‘cube’. Log Width x [8] gives the third axis, depth, so this is as simple as this calculation can be made.

      15. Multiply [14a] x 550 = Wt (kg).

      Raft weights are calculated using estimated volumes and an assumed density of 550kg/m^3, which is the generally accepted value when it comes to the flotation of raw wood. It is assumed that whole logs were used in the construction. Larger rafts (classes 5 & 6) are assumed to have hollowed cores, reducing the weight 25%. Rafts in classes 4 & 5 assume a double row of tree trunks, class 6, a triple row.

      Technically, in multi-row designs, the top row is not hollowed so that it can provide greater support and structural integrity, but I have decided that accuracy in this respect is more trouble than it’s worth. I mention it so that you can adjust the results if you disagree.

      16. Although it isn’t actually used in the raft system, comparison to sea vessels needs this weight in long tons. So / 1016 to get this if you need it.

      17. Solid Logs: (log [Wt (kg)] / 0.30103 [ / (Rows of Logs) ^ 0.5] x 5 = base speed loss to weight (-%)

      17a. Hollow Logs: 0.7071 x Solid Log Value (-%)

      All sorts of factors cancel out in this calculation or it would be a lot more complicated.

      It’s normal to calculate this two ways – the craft with nothing but rowers (maximum possible speed, shown above) and the value with full weight of passengers / cargo included. The latter is the loss at maximum safe load; when an actual load is determined, it will almost always be something either higher or lower. But this gives a useful guideline.

      Steps 18-20 determine the absolute maximum number of people that can be safely aboard the craft and converts that into a maximum safe cargo weight (assuming no passengers).

      18. Area (sq ft) * (rows of logs^0.5) / 2 (/ 0.75 if hollow logs) = people aboard (safe limit).

      People lying down require about 6 sqr ft of area. People sitting up, knees drawn up a little, need 2 sqr ft. People huddled together need 1 sqr ft each. People standing up and squashed together as closely as possible need 0.75 sq ft each. The system uses 2 sqr ft / person to calculate loads because most people are sitting up when they row, but you can squeeze more onto a raft, overloading it.

      19. [18] – (2 x [7]) = passenger space.

      20. 200 x [19] = cargo space (kg).

      The system uses an average weight of 200 kg per person, representing both the individual, the additional weight of water in wet clothing, arms, equipment, etc. I thought about using a smaller value but found that the system works better when using something close to a ‘worst case’ value.

      Note that passengers occupy, and count as, cargo space. [19] is not ‘in addition to’ them, it includes them.

      You can squeeze extra people on board a raft in complete safety – if everybody sheds enough weight. It might mean that there isn’t enough room for everyone to sit down at once.

      21. [19] / 907.2 to get cargo space in short tons, if needed, or / 1000 to get it in tonnes – whatever makes conversion to trade units most convenient.

      22. Raft base speed is based on 3 mph* = 4.828 km/h* = 264 ft/min* = 4.4 ft/sec = 80.47* m/m = 1.34 m/sec. The values marked with an asterisk are the ones most commonly used for practical purposes.

      4.6.3.3 Why all this matters:

      Nonhumans. Halflings, Ogres, Dwarves, Elves, you name it. Anything that doesn’t fit standard human silhouettes, size, weights, etc

      For actual ships, I’ve got a relatively simple solution, it can even cater for mixed-race crews. But for some reason, it just doesn’t work properly for rafts.

      That means that GMs are going to have to fudge the adjustments that are necessary for themselves. Earlier chapters have given you all the specifications about the races that you need, and enabled you to customize them to your world. Now you get to put that work to good use.

      4.6.3.4 Category 1 Raft Table

      Category #

      1

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 1

      Area m^2

      0.5017

      0.65

      0.65

      0.65

      0.799

      Area sq ft

      5.4

      7

      7

      7

      8.6

      Width ft

      2‘

      1‘

      1.75‘

      2.64’

      4‘

      Length ft

      2.7‘

      7‘

      4‘

      2.65’

      4.3‘

      Min Rowers

      0.22

      0.806

      0.806

      0.806

      0.894

      Max Rowers

      1

      1 †

      2

      1 †

      2

      1

      2

      Logs / Row

      5

      4

      4

      5

      5

      6

      8

      Factor

      1

      1

      0.75

      1

      0.75

      1

      1

      Row Depth ft

      0.4‘

      1 / 4‘

      1 / 4‘

      0.35‘

      0.35’

      0.4417‘

      0.25‘

      Volume cu ft

      2.16 cu ft

      1.75 cu ft

      1.31 cu ft

      2.45 cu ft

      1.84 cu ft

      3.092 cu ft

      4.3 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      0.069 m^3

      0.05 m^3

      0.0375 m^3

      0.07 m^3

      0.06 m^3

      0.08756 m^3

      0.122 m^3

      Wt kg

      37.95 kg

      27.5 kg

      20.625 kg

      38.5 kg

      33 kg

      48.16 kg

      67.1 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.0375 lt

      0.027 lt

      0.02 lt

      0.038 lt

      0.0325 lt

      0.0474 lt

      0.066 lt

      Max Pass

      0.7

      1.5

      0.67

      1.5

      0.67

      1.5

      0.3

      Max Cargo kg

      140 kg

      300 kg

      134 kg

      300 kg

      134 kg

      300 kg

      60 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      0.15 tons

      0.33 tons

      0.15 tons

      0.33 tons

      0.15 tons

      0.33 tons

      0.07 tons

      Max Cargo T

      0.14 Tonnes

      0.3 Tonnes

      0.134 Tonnes

      0.3 Tonnes

      0.134 Tonnes

      0.3 Tonnes

      0.06 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +7.8%

      +1.94%

      +11.94%

      +1.94%

      +11.94%

      +1.94%

      +11.06%

      Spd Width

      -10%

      -5%

      -4.35%

      -8.75%

      -7.61%

      -13.2%

      -20%

      Spd Weight

      -26.2% – -37.4%

      -23.9% – -41.8%

      -15.4% – -25.7%

      -26.3% – -42%

      -17.8% – -26.1%

      -27.9% – -42.2%

      -30.3% – -34.9%

      100+Tot Mod

      71.6% – 60.4%

      73.04% – 55.14%

      92.18% – 81.89%

      66.89% – 51.18%

      86.53% – 76.23%

      60.84% – 46.54%

      60.76% – 56.16%

      Max Spd

      x264

      189 ft/min

      192.8 ft/min

      234.4 ft/min

      176.6 ft/min

      228.4 ft/min

      160.6 ft/min

      160.4 ft/min

      / 3.281

      57.62 m/min

      58.78 m/min

      74.19 m/min

      53.83 m/min

      69.63 m/min

      48.96 m/min

      48.89 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.148 mph

      2.191 mph

      2.766 mph

      2.007 mph

      2.596 mph

      1.825 mph

      1.823 mph

      x1.609

      3.457 km/h

      3.526 km/h

      4.451 km/h

      3.229 km/h

      4.178 km/h

      2.937 km/h

      2.933 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      159.5 ft/min

      145.6 ft/min

      216.2 ft/min

      135.1 ft/min

      206.5 ft/min

      122.9 ft/min

      148.3 ft/min

      / 3.281

      48.6 m/min

      44.37 m/min

      65.9 m/min

      41.19 m/min

      62.95 m/min

      37.45 m/min

      45.19 m/min

      / 26.82

      1.812 mph

      1.654 mph

      2.457 mph

      1.536 mph

      2.347 mph

      1.396 mph

      1.685 mph

      x1.609

      2.916 km/h

      2.662 km/h

      3.954 km/h

      2.471 km/h

      3.777 km/h

      2.247 km/h

      2.711 km/h

      † Craft could have more rowers by length but does not have sufficient buoyancy to hold them.
       

      4.6.3.5 Category 2 Raft Table

      Category #

      2

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 2

      Area m^2

      0.8

      1.115

      1.115

      1.115

      1.115

      1.5

      1.5

      Area sq ft

      8.6

      12

      12

      12

      12

      16.15

      16.15

      Width ft

      2′

      2′

      2.5′

      3′

      3.46′

      2.5’

      3′

      Length ft

      4.3′

      6′

      4.8′

      4′

      3.47′

      6.46 ’

      5.38’

      Min Rowers

      0.894

      1.056

      1.056

      1.056

      1.056

      1.225

      1.225

      Max Rowers

      2

      3

      2

      2

      1

      3

      2

      Logs / Row

      6

      6

      6

      6

      8

      8

      8

      Factor

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      Row Depth ft

      1/3′

      1/3′

      0.417′

      0.5′

      0.4325′

      5/16′

      3/8′

      Volume cu ft

      2.87 cu ft

      4 cu ft

      5.004 cu ft

      6 cu ft

      5.19 cu ft

      5.05 cu ft

      6.05 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      0.08 m^3

      0.11327 m^3

      0.1417 m^3

      0.17 m^3

      0.147 m^3

      0.143 m^3

      0.1713 m^3

      Wt kg

      44 kg

      62.3 kg

      77.94 kg

      93.5 kg

      80.85 kg

      78.65 kg

      94.2 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.043 lt

      0.06 lt

      0.0767 lt

      0.092 lt

      0.796 lt

      0.0774 lt

      0.093 lt

      Max Pass

      0.3

      0

      2

      2

      4

      2.08

      4.08

      Max Cargo kg

      60 kg

      0

      400 kg

      400 kg

      800 kg

      416 kg

      816 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      0.07 tons

      0

      0.44 tons

      0.44 tons

      0.88 tons

      0.46 tons

      0.9 tons

      Max Cargo T

      0.06 Tonnes

      0

      0.4 Tonnes

      0.4 Tonnes

      0.8 Tonnes

      0.416 Tonnes

      0.816 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +11.06%

      +19.44%

      +9.44%

      +9.44%

      -0.57%

      +17.75%

      +7.75%

      Spd Width

      -10%

      -10%

      -12.5%

      -15%

      -17.3%

      -12.5%

      -15%

      Spd Wt

      -10.7% – -30%

      -29.8%

      -31.4% – -44.5%

      -32.7% – -44.7%

      -31.7% – -48.9%

      -31.5% – -48.9%

      -32.8% – -49.2%

      100+Tot Mod

      90.36% – 71.06%

      79.64

      65.54% – 52.44%

      61.74% – 49.74%

      50.43% – 33.23%

      73.75% – 60.45%

      59.95% – 43.55%

      Max Spd

      x264

      238.6 ft/min

      210.2 ft/min

      173 ft/min

      163 ft/min

      133.1 ft/min

      194.7 ft/min

      158.3 ft/min

      / 3.281

      72.71 m/min

      64.09 m/min

      52.74 m/min

      49.68 m/min

      40.58 m/min

      59.35 m/min

      48.24 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.711 mph

      2.389 mph

      1.966 mph

      1.852 mph

      1.513 mph

      2.213 mph

      1.799 mph

      x1.609

      4.363 km/h

      3.845 km/h

      3.164 km/h

      2.981 km/h

      2.435 km/h

      3.561 km/h

      2.894 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      187.6 ft/min

      210.2 ft/min

      138.4 ft/min

      131.3 ft/min

      87.7 ft/min

      159.6 ft/min

      115 ft/min

      / 3.281

      57.18 m/min

      64.09 m/min

      42.2 m/min

      40.03 m/min

      26.74 m/min

      48.64 m/min

      35.04 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.132 mph

      2.389 mph

      1.573 mph

      1.492 mph

      0.997 mph

      1.814 mph

      1.307 mph

      x1.609

      3.431 km/h

      3.845 km/h

      2.532 km/h

      2.401 km/h

      1.604 km/h

      2.919 km/h

      2.103 km/h

      4.6.3.6 Category 3 Raft Table

      Category #

      3

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 3

      Area m^2

      1.5

      2.508

      2.508

      2.508

      2.508

      2.508

      3.5

      3.5

      Area sq ft

      16.15

      27

      27

      27

      27

      27

      37.7

      37.7

      Width ft

      2 ‘

      1.75 ‘

      2 ‘

      3 ‘

      4.5 ‘

      5 ‘

      4 ’

      6.14 ‘

      Length ft

      8.075 ‘

      15.43 ‘

      13.5 ‘

      9 ‘

      6 ‘

      5.4 ‘

      9.425 ’

      6.14 ‘

      Min Rowers

      1.225

      1.584

      1.584

      1.584

      1.584

      1.584

      1.871

      1.871

      Max Rowers

      4

      6 †

      6

      4

      3

      2

      4

      3

      Logs / Row

      6

      4

      6

      8

      10

      12

      10

      15

      Factor

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      0.75

      1

      Row Depth ft

      1/3 ‘

      0.4375 ‘

      1/3 ‘

      0.375 ‘

      0.45 ‘

      0.417 ‘

      0.4 ‘

      0.409 ‘

      Volume cu ft

      5.38 cu ft

      11.81 cu ft

      9 cu ft

      10.125 cu ft

      12.15 cu ft

      11.3 cu ft

      11.08 cu ft

      15.42 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      0.1523 m^3

      0.3345 m^3

      0.255 m^3

      0.2867 m^3

      0.344 m^3

      0.32 m^3

      0.354 m^3

      0.492 m^3

      Wt kg

      83.77 kg

      184 kg

      140.25 kg

      157.7 kg

      189.2 kg

      176 kg

      194.7 kg

      270.8 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.082 lt

      0.18 lt

      0.14 lt

      0.155 lt

      0.186 lt

      0.173 lt

      0.192 lt

      0.267 lt

      Max Pass

      0.07

      1.5

      1.5

      5.5

      7.5

      9.5

      17.13

      12.85

      Max Cargo kg

      14 kg

      300 kg

      300 kg

      1100 kg

      1500 kg

      1900 kg

      3426 kg

      2570 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      0.02 tons

      0.33 tons

      0.33 tons

      1.21 tons

      1.65 tons

      2.09 tons

      3.78 tons

      2.83 tons

      Max Cargo T

      0.014 Tonnes

      0.3 Tonnes

      0.3 Tonnes

      1.1 Tonnes

      1.5 Tonnes

      1.9 Tonnes

      3.426 Tonnes

      2.57 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +27.75%

      +44.16%

      +44.16%

      +24.16%

      +14.16%

      +4.16%

      +21.29%

      +11.29%

      Spd Width

      -10%

      -8.75%

      -10%

      -15%

      -22.5%

      -25%

      -17.4%

      -30.7%

      Spd Wt

      -31.9% – -33.1%

      -37.6% – -44.6%

      -35.7% – -43.9%

      -36.5% – -51.5%

      -37.8% – -53.6%

      -37.3% – -55.1%

      -26.9% – -41.8%

      -40.4% – -57.4%

      100+Tot Mod

      85.85% – 84.65%

      97.81% – 90.81%

      98.46% – 90.26%

      72.66% – 57.66%

      53.86% – 38.06%

      41.86% – 24.06%

      76.99% – 62.09%

      40.18% – 23.18%

      Max Spd

      x264

      226.6 ft/min

      258.2 ft/min

      259.9 ft/min

      191.8 ft/min

      142.2 ft/min

      110.5 ft/min

      203.3 ft/min

      106.1 ft/min

      / 3.281

      69.08 m/min

      78.71 m/min

      79.23 m/min

      58.47 m/min

      43.34 m/min

      33.68 m/min

      61.95 m/min

      32.34 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.576 mph

      2.934 mph

      2.954 mph

      2.18 mph

      1.616 mph

      1.256 mph

      2.31 mph

      1.206 mph

      x1.609

      4.145 km/h

      4.722 km/h

      4.754 km/h

      3.508 km/h

      2.6 km/h

      2.021 km/h

      3.717 km/h

      1.94 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      223.5 ft/min

      239.7 ft/min

      238.3 ft/min

      152.2 ft/min

      100.5 ft/min

      63.5 ft/min

      163.9 ft/min

      61.2 ft/min

      / 3.281

      68.12 m/min

      73.07 m/min

      72.63 m/min

      46.4 m/min

      30.63 m/min

      19.36 m/min

      49.96 m/min

      18.66 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.54 mph

      2.724 mph

      2.708 mph

      1.73 mph

      1.142 mph

      0.722 mph

      1.863 mph

      0.696 mph

      x1.609

      4.087 km/h

      4.384 km/h

      4.358 km/h

      2.784 km/h

      1.838 km/h

      1.162 km/h

      2.998 km/h

      1.12 km/h

      † Craft could have more rowers by length but does not have sufficient buoyancy to hold them.

      4.6.3.7 Category 4 Raft Tables

      Category #

      4a

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 4 table 1

      Area m^2

      3.5

      3.5

      3.5

      4.645

      4.645

      Area sq ft

      37.7

      37.7

      37.7

      50

      50

      Width ft

      2.05 ‘

      3 ‘

      4 ‘

      2.36 ‘

      4 ’

      Length ft

      18.4 ‘

      12.23 ‘

      9.425 ‘

      21.19 ‘

      12.5 ‘

      Min Rowers

      1.871

      1.871

      1.871

      2.16

      2.16

      Max Rowers

      9

      6

      4

      10

      6

      Logs / Row

      6

      8

      10

      7

      10

      Factor

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      Row Depth ft

      0.3417 ‘

      0.375 ‘

      0.4 ‘

      0.337 ‘

      0.4 ‘

      Volume cu ft

      12.882 cu ft

      14.138 cu ft

      15.08 cu ft

      16.85 cu ft

      20 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      0.411 m^3

      0.451 m^3

      0.482 m^3

      0.538 m^3

      0.639 m^3

      Wt kg

      226.05 kg

      248.05 kg

      265.1 kg

      295.9 kg

      351.3 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.2225 lt

      0.244 lt

      0.261 lt

      0.29 lt

      0.35 lt

      Max Pass

      7.13

      6.85

      10.85

      5

      13

      Max Cargo kg

      1426 kg

      1370 kg

      2170 kg

      1000 kg

      2600 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      1.57 tons

      1.51 tons

      2.39 tons

      1.1 tons

      2.87 tons

      Max Cargo T

      1.426 Tonnes

      1.37 Tonnes

      2.17 Tonnes

      1 Tonne

      2.6 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +71.29%

      +41.29%

      +21.29%

      +78.4%

      +38.4%

      Spd Width

      -8.92%

      -15%

      -20%

      -11.8%

      -20%

      Spd Wt

      -27.7% – -37.8%

      -39.8% – -53.3%

      -40.3% – -56.2%

      -41% – -51.7%

      -42.3% – -57.6%

      100+Tot Mod

      134.67% – 124.57%

      86.49% – 72.99%

      60.99% – 45.09%

      125.6% – 114.9%

      76.1% – 114.9%

      Max Spd

      x264

      355.5 ft/min

      228.3 ft/min

      161 ft/min

      331.6 ft/min

      200.9 ft/min

      / 3.281

      108.37 m/min

      69.6 m/min

      49.08 m/min

      101.07 m/min

      61.24 m/min

      / 26.82

      4.04 mph

      2.595 mph

      1.83 mph

      3.768 mph

      2.283 mph

      x1.609

      6.502 km/h

      4.176 km/h

      2.945 km/h

      6.064 km/h

      3.674 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      328.9 ft/min

      192.7 ft/min

      119 ft/min

      303.8 ft/min

      160.5 ft/min

      / 3.281

      100.24 m/min

      58.74 m/min

      36.28 m/min

      92.46 m/min

      48.93 m/min

      / 26.82

      3.737 mph

      2.19 mph

      1.353 mph

      3.447 mph

      1.824 mph

      x1.609

      6.014 km/h

      3.524 km/h

      2.177 km/h

      5.547 km/h

      2.935 km/h

      ‡ Reducing the number of rowers would slow the craft but add 400kg cargo capacity per pair of rowers eliminated.

      Category #

      4b

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 4 table 2

      Area m^2

      4.645

      4.645

      5.5

      5.5

      5.5

      Area sq ft

      50

      50

      59.2

      59.2

      59.2

      Width ft

      6 ‘

      7 ‘

      3 ‘

      4 ‘

      5.92 ‘

      Length ft

      8.33 ‘

      7.143 ‘

      19.73 ‘

      14.8 ‘

      10 ‘

      Min Rowers

      2.16

      2.16

      2.345

      2.345

      2.345

      Max Rowers

      4

      3

      9

      7

      5

      Logs / Row

      15

      16

      9

      10

      12

      Factor

      1

      1

      1

      1

      1

      Row Depth ft

      0.4 ‘

      0.438 ‘

      1/3 ‘

      0.4 ‘

      0.493 ‘

      Volume cu ft

      20 cu ft

      21.9 cu ft

      19.73 cu ft

      23.68 cu ft

      29.12 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      0.639 m^3

      0.7 m^3

      0.63 m^3

      0.756 m^3

      0.93 m^3

      Wt kg

      351.3 kg

      384.6 kg

      346.5 kg

      415.8 kg

      511.5 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.35 lt

      0.38 lt

      0.341 lt

      0.41 lt

      0.5 lt

      Max Pass

      17

      19

      11.6

      15.6

      19.6

      Max Cargo kg

      3400 kg

      3800 kg

      2320 kg

      3120 kg

      3920 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      3.75 tons

      4.19 tons

      2.56 tons

      3.44 tons

      4.321 tons

      Max Cargo T

      3.4 Tonnes

      3.8 Tonnes

      2.32 Tonnes

      3.12 Tonnes

      3.92 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +18.4%

      +8.4%

      +66.55%

      +46.55%

      +26.55%

      Spd Width

      -30%

      -35%

      -15%

      -20%

      -29.6%

      Spd Wt

      -42.3% – -59.4%

      -42.9% – -60.2%

      -42.2% – -56.9%

      -43.5% – -58.9%

      -45% – -60.6%

      100+Tot Mod

      46.1% – 29%

      30.5% – 13.2%

      109.35% – 94.65%

      83.05% – 67.65%

      51.95% – 36.35%

      Max Spd

      x264

      121.7 ft/min

      80.5 ft/min

      288.7 ft/min

      219.3 ft/min

      137.1 ft/min

      / 3.281

      37.1 m/min

      24.54 m/min

      87.99 m/min

      66.83 m/min

      41.8 m/min

      / 26.82

      1.8383 mph

      0.915 mph

      3.281 mph

      2.492 mph

      1.559 mph

      x1.609

      2.226 km/h

      1.473 km/h

      5.279 km/h

      4.01 km/h

      2.508 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      76.6 ft/min

      34.8 ft/min

      249.9 ft/min

      178.6 ft/min

      96 ft/min

      / 3.281

      23.34 m/min

      10.62 m/min

      76.16 m/min

      54.44 m/min

      29.25 m/min

      / 26.82

      0.87 mph

      0.396 mph

      2.84 mph

      2.03 mph

      1.091 mph

      x1.609

      1.4 km/h

      0.638 km/h

      4.57 km/h

      3.266 km/h

      1.755 km/h

      4.6.3.8 Category 5 Raft Tables

      Category #

      5a

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 5 table 1

      Area m^2

      5.5 m^2

      5.5 m^2

      7.43 m^2

      7.43 m^2

      7.43 m^2

      Area sq ft

      59.2

      59.2

      80

      80

      80

      Width ft

      2.565 ‘

      3.37 ‘

      3 ‘

      4.5 ‘

      6 ‘

      Length ft

      23.08 ‘

      17.57 ‘

      26.7 ‘

      17.78 ‘

      13.33 ‘

      Min Rowers

      2.345

      2.345

      2.726

      2.726

      2.726

      Max Rowers

      11

      8

      13

      8

      6

      Logs / Row

      8

      8

      8

      10

      15

      Factor

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      Row Depth ft

      0.293 ‘

      0.421 ‘

      0.375 ‘

      0.45 ‘

      0.4 ‘

      Volume cu ft

      26.02 cu ft

      37.385 cu ft

      45 cu ft

      54 cu ft

      48 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      0.8309 m^3

      1.194 m^3

      1.437 m^3

      1.725 m^3

      1.533 m^3

      Wt kg

      457 kg

      656.7 kg

      790.35 kg

      948.75 kg

      843 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.45 lt

      0.646 lt

      0.778 lt

      0.934 lt

      0.83 lt

      Max Pass

      56.93

      62.93

      80.67

      90.67

      94.67

      Max Cargo kg

      11 386 kg

      12 586 kg

      16 134 kg

      18 134 kg

      18 934 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      12.55 tons

      13.87 tons

      17.78 tons

      19.99 tons

      20.87 tons

      Max Cargo T

      11.386 Tonnes

      12.586 Tonnes

      16.134 Tonnes

      18.134 Tonnes

      18.934 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +86.55%

      +56.55%

      +102.74%

      +52.74%

      +32.74%

      Spd Width

      -15.78%

      -20.73%

      -18.46%

      -27.68%

      -36.91%

      Spd Wt

      -22.1% – -33.8%

      -23.4% – -34.2%

      -24.1% – -35.1%

      -24.7% – -35.5%

      -24.3% – -35.7%

      100+Tot Mod

      148.67% – 136.97%

      112.42% – 101.62%

      160.18% – 149.18%

      100.36% – 89.56%

      71.53% – 60.13%

      Max Spd

      x264

      392.5 ft/min

      296.8 ft/min

      422.9 ft/min

      265 ft/min

      188.8 ft/min

      / 3.281

      119.63 m/min

      90.45 m/min

      128.9 m/min

      80.76 m/min

      57.56 m/min

      / 26.82

      4.46 mph

      3.373 mph

      4.805 mph

      3.011 mph

      2.146 mph

      x1.609

      7.178 km/h

      5.428 km/h

      7.733 km/h

      4.845 km/h

      3.453 km/h

      Fully
      Loaded Spd

      x264

      361.6 ft/min

      268.3 ft/min

      393.8 ft/min

      236.4 ft/min

      158.7 ft/min

      / 3.281

      110.22 m/min

      81.77 m/min

      120.05 m/min

      72.07 m/min

      48.39 m/min

      / 26.82

      4.109 mph

      3.049 mph

      4.475 mph

      2.687 mph

      1.804 mph

      x1.609

      6.613 km/h

      4.906 km/h

      7.702 km/h

      4.324 km/h

      2.903 km/h

      Category #

      5b

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 5 table 2

      Area m^2

      7.43 m^2

      7.43 m^2

      7.43 m^2

      9.5 m^2

      9.5 m^2

      9.5 m^2

      Area sq ft

      80

      80

      80

      102.26

      102.26

      102.26

      Width ft

      7.5 ‘

      8 ‘

      8.9 ‘

      3.37 ‘

      5.8 ‘

      10.11 ’

      Length ft

      10.67 ‘

      10 ‘

      8.97 ‘

      30.34 ‘

      17.63 ‘

      10.15 ’

      Min Rowers

      2.726

      2.726

      2.726

      3.082

      3.082

      3.082

      Max Rowers

      5

      5

      4

      15

      8

      5

      Logs / Row

      16

      18

      20

      8

      12

      25

      Factor

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x1.5

      Row Depth ft

      0.469 ‘

      0.444 ‘

      0.445 ‘

      0.421 ‘

      0.483 ‘

      0.4044 ‘

      Volume cu ft

      56.28 cu ft

      53.28 cu ft

      53.4 cu ft

      64.575 cu ft

      74.085 cu ft

      62.03 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      1.797 m^3

      1.7 m^3

      1.705 m^3

      2.062 m^3

      2.366 m^3

      1.981 m^3

      Wt kg

      988.5 kg

      935 kg

      937.75 kg

      1134 kg

      1301.3 kg

      1089.55 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      0.973 lt

      0.92 lt

      0.923 lt

      1.116 lt

      1.281 lt

      1.0724 lt

      Max Pass

      96.67

      96.67

      98.67

      100.35

      120.35

      126.35

      Max Cargo kg

      19 334 kg

      19 334 kg

      19 734 kg

      20 070 kg

      24 070 kg

      25 270 kg

      Max
      Cargo t (/907.2)

      21.31 tons

      21.31 tons

      21.75 tons

      22.12 tons

      26.53 tons

      27.85 tons

      Max Cargo T

      19.334 Tonnes

      19.334 Tonnes

      19.734 Tonnes

      20.07 Tonnes

      24.07 Tonnes

      25.27 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +22.74%

      +22.72%

      +12.74%

      +149.18%

      +49.18%

      +19.18%

      Spd Width

      -46.14%

      -49.21%

      -54.75%

      -20.73%

      -35.68%

      -62.18%

      Spd Wt

      -24.9% – -35.8%

      -24.7% – -35.8%

      -24.7% – -35.8%

      -25.4% – -35.9%

      -259.9% – -36.6%

      -25.2% – -26.7%

      100+Tot Mod

      51.7% – 40.8%

      48.81% – 37.71%

      33.29% – 22.18%

      203.05% – 192.5%

      87.6% – 76.9%

      31.79% – 20.29%

      Max Spd

      x264

      136.5 ft/min

      128.9 ft/min

      87.9 ft/min

      536.1 ft/min

      231.3 ft/min

      83.9 ft/min

      / 3.281

      41.6 m/min

      39.28 m/min

      26.79 m/min

      163.39 m/min

      70.49 m/min

      25.58 m/min

      / 26.82

      1.551 mph

      1.464 mph

      0.999 mph

      6.092 mph

      2.628 mph

      0.954 mph

      x1.609

      2.496 km/h

      2.357 km/h

      1.607 km/h

      9.803 km/h

      4.229 km/h

      1.535 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      107.7 ft/min

      99.6 ft/min

      58.6 ft/min

      508.3 ft/min

      203 ft/min

      53.6 ft/min

      / 3.281

      32.83 m/min

      30.35 m/min

      17.86 m/min

      154.94 m/min

      61.88 m/min

      16.33 m/min

      / 26.82

      1.224 mph

      1.131 mph

      0.666 mph

      5.777 mph

      2.307 mph

      0.609 mph

      x1.609

      1.97 km/h

      1.821 km/h

      1.071 km/h

      9.296 km/h

      3.713 km/h

      0.98 km/h

      4.6.3.9 Category 6 Raft Tables

      Category #

      6a

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 6 table 1

      Area m^2

      9.5 m^2

      9.5 m^2

      11.15 m^2

      11.15 m^2

      11.15 m^2

      11.15 m^2

      Area sq ft

      102.26

      102.26

      120

      120

      120

      120

      Width ft

      3.37 ‘

      4.4 ‘

      3.65 ‘

      5 ‘

      6 ‘

      8 ‘

      Length ft

      30.34 ‘

      23.24 ‘

      32.876 ‘

      24 ‘

      20 ‘

      15 ‘

      Min Rowers

      3.082

      3.082

      3.34

      3.34

      3.34

      3.34

      Max Rowers

      15

      11

      4

      15

      8

      7

      Logs / Row

      8

      10

      10

      12

      15

      20

      Factor

      x1.5

      x1.5

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      Row Depth ft

      0.42125

      0.44

      0.365

      0.417

      0.4

      0.4

      Volume cu ft

      64.616 cu ft

      67.49 cu ft

      98.55 cu ft

      112.59 cu ft

      108 cu ft

      108 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      2.063 m^3

      2.06 m^3

      3.147 m^3

      3.6 m^3

      3.45 m^3

      3.45 m^3

      Wt kg

      1134.9 kg

      1132.67 kg

      1730.88 kg

      1977.5 kg

      1896.85 kg

      1896.85 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      1.117 lt

      1.148 lt

      1.704 lt

      1.946 lt

      1.867 lt

      1.867 lt

      Max Pass

      106.35

      114.35

      232

      210

      224

      226

      Max Cargo kg

      21 270 kg

      22 870 kg

      46 400 kg

      42 000 kg

      44 800 kg

      45 200 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      23.45 tons

      25.21 tons

      51.15 tons

      46.3 tons

      49.38 tons

      49.82 tons

      Max Cargo T

      21.27 Tonnes

      22.87 Tonnes

      46.4 Tonnes

      42 Tonnes

      44.8 Tonnes

      45.2 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +119.18%

      +79.18%

      +6.6%

      +116.6%

      +46.6%

      +36.6%

      Spd Width

      -51.92%

      -44.46%

      -29.06%

      -56.27%

      -41.09%

      -38.44%

      Spd Wt

      -14.8% – -54.5%

      -13.1% – -54.9%

      -7.6% – -58.8%

      -14.8% – -58.2%

      -11.4% – -58.6%

      -10.6% – -58.6%

      100+Tot Mod

      152.46% – 112.76%

      121.62% – 79.82%

      69.94% – 18.74%

      145.53% – 102.13%

      94.11% – 46.91%

      87.56% – 39.56%

      Max Spd

      x264

      402.5 ft/min

      321.1 ft/min

      184.6 ft/min

      384.2 ft/min

      248.5 ft/min

      231.2 ft/min

      / 3.281

      122.68 m/min

      97.87 m/min

      56.28 m/min

      117.11 m/min

      75.73 m/min

      70.46 m/min

      / 26.82

      4.574 mph

      3.649 mph

      2.098 mph

      4.366 mph

      2.823 mph

      2.627 mph

      x1.609

      7.361 km/h

      5.872 km/h

      3.377 km/h

      7.026 km/h

      4.544 km/h

      4.227 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      297.7 ft/min

      210.7 ft/min

      49.5 ft/min

      269.6 ft/min

      123.8 ft/min

      104.4 ft/min

      / 3.281

      90.74 m/min

      64.23 m/min

      15.08 m/min

      82.18 m/min

      37.75 m/min

      31.83 m/min

      / 26.82

      3.383 mph

      2.395 mph

      0.562 mph

      3.064 mph

      1.407 mph

      1.187 mph

      x1.609

      5.444 km/h

      3.854 km/h

      0.905 km/h

      4.931 km/h

      2.265 km/h

      1.91 km/h

      Category #

      6b

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 6 table 2

      Area m^2

      11.15 m^2

      12.08 m^2

      12.08 m^2

      13.47 m^2

      13.47 m^2

      13.47 m^2

      Area sq ft

      120

      130

      130

      145

      145

      145

      Width ft

      10 ‘

      6.5 ‘

      10 ‘

      4.02 ‘

      5 ‘

      8 ‘

      Length ft

      12 ‘

      20 ‘

      13 ‘

      36.07 ‘

      29 ‘

      18.125 ‘

      Min Rowers

      3.34

      3.476

      3.476

      3.67

      3.67

      3.67

      Max Rowers

      6

      10

      6

      18

      14

      9

      Logs / Row

      24

      15

      25

      10

      15

      20

      Factor

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      Row Depth

      0.417

      0.433

      0.4

      0.402

      1/3

      0.4

      Volume cu ft

      112.59 cu ft

      126.65 cu ft

      117 cu ft

      131.2 cu ft

      108.75 cu ft

      130.5 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      3.595 m^3

      4.045 m^3

      3.736 m^3

      4.188 m^3

      3.473 m^3

      4.167 m^3

      Wt kg

      1977.5 kg

      2224.5 kg

      2054.9 kg

      2203.5 kg

      1910 kg

      2292 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      1.95 lt

      2.19 lt

      2.023 lt

      2.267 lt

      1.88 lt

      2.256 lt

      Max Pass

      228

      240

      248

      254

      262

      272

      Max Cargo kg

      45 600 kg

      48 000 kg

      49 600 kg

      50 800 kg

      52 400 kg

      54 400 kg

      Max
      Cargo t (/907.2)

      50.26 tons

      52.91 tons

      54.67 tons

      56 tons

      57.76 tons

      59.96 tons

      Max Cargo T

      45.6 Tonnes

      48 Tonnes

      49.6 Tonnes

      50.8 Tonnes

      52.4 Tonnes

      54.4 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +26.6%

      +65.24%

      +25.24%

      +143.3%

      +103.3%

      +53.3%

      Spd Width

      -35.59%

      -47.82%

      -37.04%

      -67.73%

      -59.73%

      -47.89%

      Spd Wt

      -9.8% – -58.7%

      -12.6% – -58.9%

      -9.8% – -59.1%

      -15.8% – -59.3%

      -14.4% – -59.4%

      -12% – -59.6%

      100+Tot Mod

      81.21% – 32.31%

      104.82% – 58.52%

      78.4% – 29.1%

      159.77% – 116.27%

      129.17% – 84.17%

      93.41% – 45.81%

      Max
      Spd

      x264

      214.4 ft/min

      276.7 ft/min

      207 ft/min

      421.8 ft/min

      341 ft/min

      246.6 ft/min

      / 3.281

      65.35 m/min

      84.35 m/min

      63.09 m/min

      128.57 m/min

      103.94 m/min

      75.17 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.436 mph

      3.145 mph

      2.352 mph

      4.7963 mph

      3.875 mph

      2.802 mph

      x1.609

      3.921 km/h

      5.061 km/h

      3.785 km/h

      7.714 km/h

      6.236 km/h

      4.51 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      85.3 ft/min

      154.5 ft/min

      76.8 ft/min

      307 ft/min

      222.2 ft/min

      120.9 ft/min

      / 3.281

      26 m/min

      47.09 m/min

      23.42 m/min

      93.56 m/min

      67.73 m/min

      36.86 m/min

      / 26.82

      0.969 mph

      1.756 mph

      0.873 mph

      3.488 mph

      2.525 mph

      1.374 mph

      x1.609

      1.56 km/h

      2.825 km/h

      1.405 km/h

      5.614 km/h

      4.064 km/h

      2.212 km/h

      Category #

      6c

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 6 table 3

      Area m^2

      13.47 m^2

      13.47 m^2

      14.86 m^2

      14.86 m^2

      14.86 m^2

      14.86 m^2

      Area sq ft

      145

      145

      160

      160

      160

      160

      Width ft

      10 ‘

      12 ‘

      4.3 ‘

      5 ‘

      8 ‘

      10 ‘

      L ft

      14.5 ‘

      12.083 ‘

      37.21 ‘

      32 ‘

      20 ‘

      16 ‘

      Min Rowers

      3.67

      3.67

      3.855

      3.855

      3.855

      3.855

      Max Rowers

      7

      6

      18

      16

      10

      8

      Logs / Row

      24

      25

      12

      12

      20

      25

      Factor

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      Row Depth

      0.417

      0.48

      0.358

      0.417

      0.4

      0.4

      Volume cu ft

      136.05 cu ft

      156.6 cu ft

      128.88 cu ft

      150.12 cu ft

      144 cu ft

      144 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      4.344 m^3

      5.001 m^3

      4.116 m^3

      4.794 m^3

      4.6 m^3

      4.6 m^3

      Wt kg

      2389 kg

      2750.44 kg

      2263.68 kg

      2636.6 kg

      2529.1 kg

      2529.1 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      2.352 lt

      2.707 lt

      2.228 lt

      2.6 lt

      2.489 lt

      2.489 lt

      Max Pass

      276

      278

      284

      288

      300

      304

      Max Cargo kg

      55 200 kg

      55 600 kg

      56 800 kg

      57 600 kg

      60 000 kg

      60 800 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      60.85 tons

      61.29 tons

      62.61 tons

      63.49 tons

      66.14 tons

      67.02 tons

      Max Cargo T

      55.2 Tonnes

      55.6 Tonnes

      56.8 Tonnes

      57.6 Tonnes

      60 Tonnes

      60.8 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +33.3%

      +23.3%

      +141.45%

      +121.45%

      +61.45%

      +41.45%

      Spd Width

      -42.24%

      -39.1%

      -71.15%

      -67.08%

      -53.03%

      -47.43%

      Spd Wt

      -10.6% – -59.7%

      -9.8% – -59.7%

      -15.8% – -59.9%

      -15.2% – -59.9%

      -12.6% – -60.2%

      -11.4% – -60.2%

      100+Tot Mod

      80.46% – 31.36%

      74.4% – 24.5%

      154.5% – 110.4%

      139.17% – 94.47%

      95.82% – 48.22%

      82.62% – 33.82%

      Max Spd

      x264

      212.4 ft/min

      196.4 ft/min

      407.9 ft/min

      367.4 ft/min

      253 ft/min

      218.1 ft/min

      / 3.281

      64.75 m/min

      50.87 m/min

      124.33 m/min

      111.99 m/min

      77.11 m/min

      66.48 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.414 mph

      2.232 mph

      4.635 mph

      4.175 mph

      2.875 mph

      2.479 mph

      x1.609

      3.885 km/h

      3.592 km/h

      7.459 km/h

      6.719 km/h

      4.626 km/h

      3.989 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      82.8 ft/min

      64.7 ft/min

      291.5 ft/min

      249.4 ft/min

      127.3 ft/min

      80.3 ft/min

      / 3.281

      25.24 m/min

      19.72 m/min

      88.84 m/min

      76.02 m/min

      38.8 m/min

      27.21 m/min

      / 26.82

      0.941 mph

      0.735 mph

      3.312 mph

      2.834 mph

      1.447 mph

      1.015 mph

      x1.609

      1.514 km/h

      1.183 km/h

      5.33 km/h

      4.561 km/h

      2.328 km/h

      1.633 km/h

      Category #

      6d

      Name

      Raft / Canoe 6 table 4

      Area m^2

      14.86 m^2

      16 m^2

      16 m^2

      16 m^2

      16 m^2

      16 m^2

      Area sq ft

      160

      172.22

      172.22

      172.22

      172.22

      172.22

      Width ft

      12.5 ‘

      4.4 ‘

      5 ‘

      8 ‘

      12 ‘

      13.12 ‘

      Length ft

      12.8 ‘

      39.14 ‘

      24.6 ‘

      21.5275 ‘

      14.35 ‘

      13.1265 ‘

      Min Rowers

      3.855

      4

      4

      4

      4

      4

      Max Rowers

      6

      6

      18

      16

      10

      8

      Logs / Row

      30

      15

      15

      20

      36

      40

      Factor

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      x2.25

      Row Depth

      0.417

      0.293

      1/3

      0.4

      1/3

      0.328

      Volume cu ft

      150.12 cu ft

      113.54 cu ft

      129.17 cu ft

      155 cu ft

      129.17 cu ft

      127.1 cu ft

      Volume m^3 (/31.315)

      4.794 m^3

      3.626 m^3

      4.125 m^3

      4.95 m^3

      4.125 m^3

      4.06 m^3

      Wt kg

      2636.6 kg

      1994.1 kg

      2268.6 kg

      2722.3 kg

      2268.6 kg

      2232.3 kg

      Wt lt (/1016)

      2.6 lt

      1.963 lt

      2.233 lt

      2.68 lt

      2.233 lt

      2.2 lt

      Max Pass

      308

      332.44

      308.44

      312.44

      324.44

      328.44

      Max Cargo kg

      61 600 kg

      66 488 kg

      61 688 kg

      62 488 kg

      64 888 kg

      65 688 kg

      Max Cargo t (/907.2)

      67.9 tons

      73.29 tons

      68 tons

      68.88 tons

      71.53 tons

      72.41 tons

      Max Cargo T

      61.6 Tonnes

      66.488 Tonnes

      61.688 Tonnes

      62.488 Tonnes

      64.888 Tonnes

      65.688 Tonnes

      Spd Rowers

      +21.45%

      +20%

      +140%

      +120%

      +60%

      +40%

      Spd Width

      -41.08%

      -42.62%

      -73.82%

      -69.6%

      -55.02%

      -49.21%

      Spd Wt

      -9.8% – -60.3%

      -9.8% – -60.7%

      -15.8% – -60.3%

      -15.2% – -60.4%

      -12.6% – -60.6%

      -11.4% – -60.7%

      100+Tot Mod

      70.57% – 20.07%

      67.58% – 16.68%

      150.38% – 105.88%

      135.2% – 90%

      92.38% – 44.38%

      79.39% – 30.09%

      Max Spd

      x264

      186.3 ft/min

      178.4 ft/min

      397 ft/min

      356.9 ft/min

      243.9 ft/min

      209.6 ft/min

      / 3.281

      56.79 m/min

      54.38 m/min

      121.01 m/min

      108.8 m/min

      74.34 m/min

      63.89 m/min

      / 26.82

      2.117 mph

      2.027 mph

      4.511 mph

      4.056 mph

      2.771 mph

      2.382 mph

      x1.609

      3.407 km/h

      3.263 km/h

      7.26 km/h

      6.527 km/h

      4.46 km/h

      3.833 km/h

      Fully Loaded Spd

      x264

      53 ft/min

      44 ft/min

      279.5 ft/min

      237.6 ft/min

      117.2 ft/min

      79.4 ft/min

      / 3.281

      16.15 m/min

      13.42 m/min

      85.2 m/min

      72.42 m/min

      35.71 m/min

      24.21 m/min

      / 26.82

      0.602 mph

      0.5 mph

      3.176 mph

      2.7 mph

      1.331 mph

      0.903 mph

      x1.609

      0.969 km/h

      0.805 km/h

      5.112 km/h

      4.345 km/h

      2.143 km/h

      1.453 km/h

    4.6.4 Overloaded Rafts

      (Actual Weight – Craft Weight – [19]) ^ 0.5 / 3 = % chance per hour of capsize.

    1 in 3 capsizes are total, 2 in 3 are partial. For partial, roll d% / 2 to get the percentage of people / goods that end up in the water.

      [8] x 1.25, round down = % chance of raft breakup in a partial capsize.
      [8] x 2.5, round down = % chance of raft breakup in a total capsize.

    4.6.5 Raft Breakup

    If the capsize result indicates that the raft has broken up, here’s the procedure:

      Roll d20 x 5. If you roll high, this is the % of the raft that survives the breakup ‘intact’. If you roll low, this is the % of the raft that is lost. If you roll close to the middle, choose as above; a second raft consisting of (result-10) per cent of the original also survives.

    When assessing / describing the results, which are (essentially) one or two rafts with different configurations, think about the construction of the raft, as shown below:

    Notches are basically cuts into the timbers , no more than half-way through and preferably less. Because logs tend to narrow at one end, the direction the narrow ends point alternates from end to end; this makes it more difficult to get the notches to line up, but this is critical to the structure of a raft.

    Into the notch is placed a crossbeam – usually a 1/4 or 1/3 ‘wedge’ from another tree. This should fit pretty perfectly as a result of matching the angle of the wedges removed from the main structure.

    Note that these are at right angles to the main logs of the raft. This matters.

    Nails are then used to secure the crossbeam to each of the logs. Note that these nails are at right angles to both the main logs and the crossbeams, i.e. up and down. The more nearly true this is, the stronger the construction – but the reality is that they will almost always be at a slight angle, one way or another.

    This design means that no matter which direction a force impacting the raft is coming from, there is something that is resisting it and distributing that force across the whole structure.

    Water and sky derive from Message In A Bottle from Pixabay.

    This side-view should not only make this a little clearer, but also shows how multiple rows of logs are joined and how the structural strength is compromised by hollowing out the lower logs – but it has to be done.

    Notice how the notches are staggered so that no two nails should ever meet head-on, which would introduce additional points of weakness.

    Damage by natural forces is going to proceed from the outside inwards. First, a crossbeam will come loose; second, one or two logs held by the crossbeam will break away; third, what’s left may break into two pieces.

    People and cargo can easily be lost overboard, and that can be a good thing because two smaller rafts do not have the same capacity as a single larger one. However, it can also be catastrophic because the sides that initially break free? That’s where your rowers are, and your oars. You might be able to replace the first, but the second severely compromises your situation.

    Crews should build these rafts like their lives depended on them – because they very well might.

    4.6.6 Construction Time

    Construction time is determined simply by working out how long each part of the task takes. For example:

    • Find a suitable tree
    • Saw down the base
    • Saw off the unwanted crown
    • Saw off any large limbs flush with the trunk
    • Trim any smaller limbs
    • Hollow the log if you are going to
    • Carve any notches being very careful with measurements

    Repeat for each log needed. Construct the crossbeams from an additional log. (You might think that if you’re using 90-degree wedges, you will get 4 of them per trunk. You won’t; you will get three and some leftover wood, because you need to be on the better side of the inevitable margin of error).

    • Assemble the raft.
    • Launch the raft.
    • Stock the raft.
    • Mount the raft.
    • Navigate, Row the raft.

    The diameter of the logs is obviously a critical question in terms of the first group of tasks – especially since the larger the tree-trunk, the larger any branches will be, relatively speaking.

    Divide 550 x the (average) diameter of the tree trunk by the lift capability of the characters doing the work to get the base time for carrying each of the tasks. Then halve the result as the result is the number of half-hours it takes.

    If the wood is denser than the average used, it will be stronger and heavier – so apply a fudge factor to allow for this (and don’t forget the impact on the raft specifications).

    Some tree types will have bigger, stronger limbs than others – compare oak trees and pine trees for example. So you need another fudge factor for that.

    Having the right tools makes a huge difference. If using ‘adequate’ replacements, double the work; if using ‘inadequate make-dos’ multiply it five-fold.

    Hollowing out a tree trunk is a LOT of work. And external holes into the hollow have to be plugged, probably with a mixture of sawdust and wood sap. The usual method is to start at the thick end, set it alight while repeatedly moistening the parts that you don’t want to burn, and – as soon as it chars – digging out the part that’s burning to create a hollow. Set a fire within the hollow, and repeat – again and again. Then plug the end, possibly with a sawn-off tree cross-section.

    Even under the best of circumstances, with the right tools, this takes the base time per foot of length to be hollowed.

    Some tree saps are more volatile / flammable than others. This can speed the work but make it more dangerous and frustrating – Australian gum trees, for example, can explode when burned. So apply a relevant fudge factor for the tree type.

    Beyond these guidelines, use your own best judgment. But note that a lot will depend on the scarcity of suitable timber. Emphasis on the word “suitable” – the trunk has to be considerably taller than the intended length of the raft. If not, the raft will have to be shorter.

    It’s also worth noting that rafts are so inefficient as a means of cargo transport that only being marooned and having no other choice makes it viable. That’s a factor that’s been at the back of my mind throughout this section, and it should be in the back of your mind whenever rafts are discussed in-game, too.

    But there are times when a raft is the best possible solution. When the knights need to transport both themselves and their horses to the scene of a confrontation in Edding’s “Tamuli” series, the only practical solution is for the Knights to ride on board ships with the horses on rafts that are either pushed or towed by the ships – the stories give the impression of pushing, but towing makes more sense. From memory, this action starts in book 2, The Shining Ones, and concludes in book 3, the hidden city, but don’t quote me on that!

    Ultimately, it’s not up to the GM to decide when the PCs will take a raft to sea – it’s a choice that the PCs have to make. While he may be able to predict it as a possibility, there may be other solutions to the needs of the moment. The goal of this section of the series is to give the GM the tools that are needed to accommodate the choices made by the PCs.

    4.6.7 A final word on Overloading Capacities

    Done properly, this is a reasonable risk to take. Done improperly, it’s not.

    Overloads in the form of consumables are – as a general rule – worth the risk, because those consumables will disappear over time, mitigating the risk – and avoiding the risk of running out of food (or, more importantly, potable water).

    However, there are limits to this sort of thing, and the players and GM will need to be very wary of those limits.

    How long it is going to take the characters to get somewhere where they can do better for themselves is a critical question. The Vector Sum rules are presented very early in this discussion, and in considerable detail, for a reason.

    I should also emphasize that threats are magnified several-fold if you are stuck on a raft. Think about a shark or two – one need only nudge the raft until it capsizes, even if it isn’t damaged, for lunch to end up in the water. A single shark can be as menacing as a while school of them would be in a ship, and then some.

    Rafts may not be anyone’s first choice of seagoing vessel – but they are sometimes the necessary choice.

    4.7 Canoes etc

    Canoes and small boats are basically rafts which trade dimensional constraints (inherent in the basic hull shape) for additional speed. They are often at the smaller end of the raft scale because they are essentially either a single hollowed out log or a wooden or metal frame with some material – leather or cloth – stretched over the frame and treated to make it waterproof.

    The latter are a lot more delicate work to construct, while the former are simpler, requiring less expertise, but involving more manual labor.

    4.7.1 Proportions

    All small boats have the proportions of either 1-to-x or 1.5 to X, where X is always at least twice the base of the ratio.

    So 1:2 is valid. So are 1:3, 1:4, 1:5, and so on, even up to 1:12 or 1:14 – which violates the basic dimension restrictions for rafts. Some rowboats use 1.5 as the base of the ratio, 1.5:3 is obviously the same as 1:2, but 1.5:4 or 1.5:5 are also legitimate. And again, you can go all the way up to something like 1.5:16 or more.

    4.7.2 Frontal Dimension

    Boats usually taper to a point at the front, just like ships, making this a non-existent dimension in reality, but for the purposes of construction and calculation, the width at the front is assumed to be the same as the width of the boat at it’s widest point, and the area is assumed to be that of the resulting rectangle.

    Unlike rafts, however, the frontal dimension can be as small as 1′.

    Each rower or oarsman is assumed to occupy a space, sitting down, of 1′ x 2′. That means that the narrowest vessels in this category only support rowers in a single line, and not pairs of rowers.

    However, if the craft is 2′ or more wide, 2 rowers can operate side-by side – and you can actually have extremely wide vessels with up to three oarsmen on each side per 2′ of length.

    Because of the narrowing of the hulls, the front 2′ of hull are not permitted to have rowers, however.

    Examples of the combinations that are possible when all these restrictions are taken into account are shown below.

    Figure 1 illustrates the point made about shape – the system assumes that the three shapes are equivalent, and then offsets the error with a higher base speed for shapes 2 and 3. What matters are the dimensions of width and length.

    Figure 2 shows a 1;:5 ratio boat with 1′ width. Because of the (invisible) tapering of the hull, there is no room for a rower in the front 2′. That leaves 3′ of room for rowers – but since each occupies 1′ x 2′ of space, there can be just one rower. That leaves 1′ of space at the back that could be used for cargo or for one person standing up. The one rower could either use a small oar that they moved from side to side with each stroke, or two oars that they employed simultaneously.

    Figure 2a shows a 6:1 ratio boat with 1′ of width, showing that this creates enough room for a second rower.

    Figure 3 keeps the same ratio of width to length, but doubles the width to 2′ – enough for rowers to operate in pairs side-by-side. This means that 8 rowers can be operating, or 4 rowers with 4 resting at any given time.

    Figure 4 doubles the width of the craft without increasing it’s length. Now, you can have 16 rowers – or 8 rowers with 8 resting – or 8 rowers and 4 passengers (the raft configuration). There are multiple possible 8-rowers-and-8-resting configurations, as well, but they all amount to the same thing in within the game mechanics.

    Not shown (there wasn’t enough room) is a 1.5′ x 10′ ratio – basically, Figure 3 with an extra half-rower’s width. This requires the rowers to be staggered, but leaves room next to each rower for a small amount of possessions or cargo.

    There are other possibilities as well – Figure 3 with 4 rowers and cargo / passengers in positions 3, 4, 7, and 8, or with someone manning a tiller at the back with a passenger / cargo beside them.

    4.7.3 Base Speed

    Just calculate the speed of the vessel as though it were a raft, using the correct number of rowers (and remember that on a raft, these are all configured in pairs).

    Then adjust the base speed from 3 mph as follows:

      Base Speed = 1/2 x ([Length / Width] – 1)

    The raft system then spits out correct answers for these small boats, taking into effect everything that matters..

    It’s that simple.

Thuings I didn’t get to do / finish:

(1) An example in the raft generator, worked step-by-step. That will have to wait until I edit all this into an e-book.

(2) A spreadsheet that does it all for you. What, you thought I calculated all those table entries manually? No chance! But it needs some tidying up before it’s ready for anyone else to use. Depending on how quickly the rest of the next part flows (and it’s part-done already), I may or may not get time to finish it for a bonus freebie. If I can, I will – I would rather do it while it’s still fresh in my head.

Next time, the seriously maritime: Ships of many shapes and sizes, plus exotic modes of transport, to wrap up this chapter of Trade In Fantasy.

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The Best Of 2015 Part 3


Listing the best posts offered at Campaign Mastery in the last third of 2015.

The next part of the Trade In Fantasy series is so close to completion that I pushed on with it until it became clear that it would fall a few hours to the wrong side of the publishing deadline – and that even a quick ‘filler’ post might not be ready in time. But I’m a strong believer in trying to publish something every week, so – even if it’s a little late – here goes….

The Very Best Of 2015 Pt 3: Sept-Dec

The 10/10 list
  • The Secret Arsenal Of Accents – I have five secret weapons to help me import accents from other languages into the speaker’s pronunciation of English. This article not only looks at all five, it digs deeper into them than I had ever done previously.
  • What Empowers A Curse and other dangerous questions – usually, if an article doesn’t reach a conclusion, it gets an automatic ratings deduction, but not this time. Curses in D&D (and many other RPGs) are weak, wimpy, and too-easily lifted. This article suggests ways of making them far more troublesome – and ways of moderating the results if they seem to go too far.
  • The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity – a technique for focusing free association by giving it direction. I use this technique regularly.
  • Getting Into Character pt 1: NPCs – Techniques for wearing an NPCs personality like a cloak, taking it off and putting it on as necessary, with minimal delays. This is even more challenging when the GM has to represent multiple characters at the same time or in short succession – such as when two of them have a conversation.
  • Getting Into Character Pt 2: PCs – Making a PC the focus of an adventure requires getting inside the head of that PC to forge connections between plot content and focal character. This article offers a technique for digging even more deeply than many players go.
  • The Conundrum Of Coincidence – Coincidences are the hardest thing for a GM to incorporate with plausibility and believability in their campaigns – but if this force of accident doesn’t exist, the absence can be even more corrosive to plausibility and suspension of disbelief. This post examines the problem and offers solutions.
  • A Stack Of Surprises: Blog Carnival November 2015 – Campaign Mastery hosted the December 2015 Blog Carnival, nominating “Surprise” as the subject. This is the anchor post, and looks at the question of whether or not Surprise is an absolute, or can surprise modifiers stack, how long does surprise last, and other relevant questions.
  • The Portals To Celestial Morphology series – four posts on the subject of gates and portals between worlds. The first of the four analyzes six defining parameters – between them, 4000 combinations are possible. The rest of the series offers twenty unique ideas for such portals, some of them with multiple sub-types.
  • Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question – how much handout is too much? Can misinformation be included? Should it be incorporated? Can handouts backfire? And how do some of these answers change as the campaign progresses?
  • Lessons from the Literary Process – there’s a huge difference between how the public perceives a writer’s lifestyle and the reality. I employ thoughts offered in a 13-part series on writing to correct the perceptions – and then apply the material to the writing of content for an RPG.
  • Blog Carnival: The Unexpected Reality – Inspired by another GM’s entry into the Blog Carnival, I take a look at Rules as Plot Delivery Systems – and Plots as Rules Delivery Systems.
  • Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – two busses on the same route leave a set interval apart. So why do they always seem to end up nose-to-tail at the end of their route? And why is the answer important for GMs to understand?
  • A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration – there’s what amounts to an interview with myself (only rates an 8/10) and 183 answers to the question, If you could give just one piece of advice to another GM, without knowing anything about their campaigns, rule systems, or players, what would it be?
  • Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again – A sequel to the Challenge of Writing Adventures for RPGs (listed below) that looks at character skills and the assumptions that social conditioning make in game systems regarding them, in general, and the concept of transferable skills specifically.
  • I see with my little mind’s eye: The power of Visualization – You have to be able to imagine what you are going to describe. This is even more difficult and complicated than it sounds. Fortunately for anyone who struggles with that (and we all do, sometimes), this post is here to help.
The 9/10 List
  • Tales From The Front Line: Critical Absences – an unresolved question – Some groups handle player absences by having the character controlled by another player, or the group of players collectively, or by the GM, this article isn’t about handling those situations, but takes a hard look at a related question: if a PCs player is absent, should that character be permitted to experience critical successes or failures? This only rates a 9/10 because it doesn’t come to a firm conclusion, leaving decisions to individual GMs after its from-all-angles examination of the subject.
  • The Challenge Of Writing Adventures for RPGs – Every GM feels under-appreciated from time to time, thinking “If only they realized how much effort went into that…” – this filler article isn’t about that, not directly. Instead, it looks at the many difficulties GMs have to overcome every time they write an adventure, and briefly canvasses possible solutions.
  • The Breakdown of Intersecting Prophecies – Having tossed the plot train aspects of Prophecies overboard in The Perils Of Prophecy: Avoiding the Plot Locomotive, this article looks at ways that the GM can use prophecies to benefit and strengthen a campaign.
  • Ask The GMs: Parting is such a frayed plot thread – how should characters be written out of a campaign when a player departs?
  • To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget? – A discussion about Hollywood movie budgets combines with the thought that “Time Is Money” to suggest that every GM has an optimum ‘sweet spot’, with time enough to do everything that needs to be done but not enough for self-indulgence. With advice for the GM on how to find their own personal “sweet spot” and some extra help for beginners.
  • Yrisa’s Nightmare and other goodies – while this is mostly a review, there are sections of relevance even though the product being reviewed has now been out for ten years! Subject like whether or not to use previews & teasers to excite players about the next adventure, inspiration from maps, and using art to dress up your adventures, are as relevant today as they ever were.
  • Ask The GMs: The GMs Help Network – where can GMs posit questions / content to get answers / feedback from other GMs? I fear this post may have dated somewhat, which is why I’ve bumped it down to the 9/10 list.
  • Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables – how much are goodies really worth? How big is $100 million? Current Value -> Value Then -> Currency Conversion Then gives a different answer than Current Value -> Currency Conversion Now -> Value Then – so which way is right? How common are large gemstones? What are collectible coins worth? And Art? And Real Estate? And is there some common system that can be used to approximate common answers to these questions?
  • Pieces of Creation: Mortus – The Pieces Of Creation series offers material created for my campaigns for other GMs to adapt / use. I love villains whose very concept challenges fundamental assumptions made by players (and by society in general). Mortus and his philosophy do just that. Mortus takes “The End Justifies The Means” and “Being Cruel To Be Kind” and applies the principles to medical research – and then amplifies it all to 11. He’s polite, urbane, civil, patient, warm, and an absolute monster.
The Honorable Mentions: The 8/10 list
  • What is An Adventure? – examines the differences in meaning that attach to various synonyms employed for “an adventure” in an attempt to extrapolate a more concrete and functional definition. It’s actually a more important and profound question than it seems on the surface, and something that a lot of GMs struggle with.
  • Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade – Lon Than is a villain, Kalika is an alternate form of Kali, and the Prison of Jade is a magical mind-control effect. Lon Than explores the moral ambiguity of “War for the prevention of War”. Even if none of those appeal, there’s a lot of research on Jade included that might be useful.

The next post in this series will look at 2016 – well, part of 2016, anyway!

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A Guest Post: The Making of the Glumdark Book


I’ve added some additional art for this post beyond what was originally intended – the covers of the standard edition and the deluxe limited edition with black page edges and debossing on the cover. Collaging and shadows by Mike.

Introduction by Mike

Today, in support of a new RPG product, The Glumdark, I have a guest post by the author, Christopher Drellow.

Glumdark is a massive, fully illustrated, painstakingly constructed resource for Game Masters and players of dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying games. Recommended for the likes of Mörk Borg but totally system agnostic and compatible with D&D,Pathfinder, or any other TTRPG.

It includes Over 2,596 items and ideas to enhance your campaign, Original fiction detailing the grim reality of the Glumdark universe, a two-page map to geographically kick-start your campaign, and 55 system-agnostic tables covering everything from Bleak and Unique Quests, Clever and Deadly Traps, Surprising and Evocative Locations, Awful and Original Loot, Wild and Withering Weather, Totally Ridiculous Magical Items, Demigods, Animals, Events, Monsters, Occupations, Insanities, and much much more.

Glumdark is 140 pages, plus as needed to incorporate stretch goals. The Pledge levels are: PDF version US$10, Hardcover US$30, Deluxe Hardcover $45. Prices are subject to last-minute tweaking, of course, and there are also add-ons to consider.

NB: The cover art has been updated since the above image was assembled.

It’s at this point that I have to interrupt this introduction to tell a tale.

This post was originally intended to get published back in August 2024. But the Kickstarter campaign got put on hold when a significant backer expressed interest in supporting the product. And, of course, that meant that promotional activities in support of that fundraiser also got put on hold.

So I scheduled the post for six months down the track and sat back to let events eventuate. The author of today’s article was intending to get back in touch when a revised schedule was determined – this was simply putting publication off into the never-never until it could be finalized.

It was when I noticed that the six months was only a month away from falling due that I decided it was time to reach out and re-establish contact. But there was a problem: My ISP deletes emails after about 3 months. I no longer had contact details for Christopher.

So, I followed the link given below, expecting to be taken to the old fundraising campaign page from which I hoped to be able to extract a contact address.

I was completely surprised to discover that the Kickstarter campaign had been completed on February 22, and far more successfully than anyone was expecting (I’ll get back to that in a moment). It was immediately obvious that the pressures and distractions of the negotiations and delays and the subsequent plan revisions and fundraising campaign had distracted Christopher to the point where he had completely forgotten about this article and the promise to get back in touch when he knew what was happening.

It wasn’t the first time something like that has happened, and it probably won’t be the last. No grudges, it happens. Locating the contact information I was looking for, I reached out and we started considering what to do about this post – the decision reached should be obvious at this point.

A successful campaign

The target was a modest USD$40,000. The project raised $151,865 in pledges.

The target was so low because the creative elements of the book were complete; the funds were for production and the inclusion of add-ons. That’s always a recipe for success, only the scale varies, unless you’re really unlucky.

All ten stretch goals were achieved, and the combined total looks very impressive.

But here’s the critical thing readers have to know before this interruption comes to an end: IT’S NOT TOO LATE to back the project. For a limited time – they aren’t sure how long – late pledges are being accepted as though the campaign was still live.

So, if you find yourself intrigued by today’s guest article, run – don’t walk – to the links provided and take a closer look at whether or not this is something that you can afford. Don’t delay – the creators aren’t sure how long the late-pledge option will remain open. It’s been more than three weeks already!

You can back Glumdark – or just take a closer look – at https://glumdark.com/book, or by clicking the image above.

Okay, with the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get on with the show!

The Making of the Glumdark Book

A Guest Post by Christopher Drellow

The Glumdark Book is heavily influenced by Medieval bookmaking, but it didn’t start out that way.

When I designed the first layouts for the book, I borrowed the design language from the Mörk Borg universe as developed by Johan Nohr and adopted by many others. It’s a neat aesthetic, and there are two good reasons it’s so often utilized in compatible content for Mörk Borg:

  1. It feels cohesive.
  2. It is dope.

A layout found in Mörk Borg, which is terrific.

 

My first attempt at a Mörk Borg style layout, which is derivative and bad.

Because Glumdark is heavily influenced by the world of Mörk Borg, and because many of the players who use Glumdark come from that world, I designed the first spreads in this style. But I quickly found that it felt like wearing another guy’s shirt on a date. It didn’t feel like I was being myself.

MB design is what one might refer to as poster-style. Each page of the book would have been an entirely different composition, and one of my goals in making this book was to learn about making books. I’m a believer in learning the rules before you break them, and I wanted to learn how to make a grid (and then break it).

I found some Masterclass-type courses on book design, and read a book or five about basic typography and layout. And then I got to work on the grid.

The Grid

I developed a fluid, flexible grid which allowed me to work in single, double and triple columns while also combining column widths when I wanted the page to be more or less symmetrical. Here are some of the basic vertical forms which emerge from the grid:

Single and double column pages.

 

Asymmetric and triple column pages.

 

Different asymmetry, different triple column widths.

Using The grid

Of course, once the grid is established, you want to go about breaking it in various ways. This is a bit like holding down the beat with the rhythm section of a band and then playing polyrhythms on top. Visual consistency is maintained, but play becomes possible:

Negative space forms a cross, which the illustrator forms into mine shafts.

 

Text alignment forms the fundamental shapes of a house, which the illustrator expands upon.

The examples above are included to illustrate the union between the two primary layout constraints of the book. That is, working within the established grid, and then carving out space within that framework which promotes the creativity of our illustrator. Working in this direction is a little backwards, and I’ll discuss how I arrived at that workflow in the next section.

In the first image above, the chambers of a mine were imagined in the negative space between the text. In the second, the text became an under-girding for the house.

Early Book Design

What I really wanted to sample, borrow, and steal from, was the design language of medieval Europe when the first printed books were being mass produced.

This requires a couple of caveats.

First, that the notion of ?mass? production was obviously on a different scale than we think of now. The first print run of the Gutenberg Bible was under 200 copies.

Second, that I’m speaking of book printing as it arose in the west. Wood block printing came about in China in the 9th century with metal set printing following in the 14th century, about a hundred years before the Gutenberg Bible. I sought early examples of western (as opposed to eastern) bookmaking mostly because what we think of as fantasy roleplaying generally exists in a sort of alternate history medieval era. Dragons, knights, you get it.

Researching The History of Bookmaking

In any case, I stumbled into the world of early bookmaking rather naively. I walked into the San Francisco Public Library and asked about ?very old books.? I was immediately directed upstairs and given the name of a librarian who was profoundly well suited to my ignorant quest. She patiently listened to my rambling about seeking layout and design techniques from early bookmaking and had me sit down while she searched the stacks for a ceaseless train of absolutely perfect reference material. I took many, many pictures. But I also learned very quickly which eras were useful, and which were not.

I took a lot of photos for reference, a habit which I fanatically encourage.

Mike here, interrupting for just long enough to tell you that you can examine this image in it’s full 1420 × 1065 glory by clicking on this link or on the “thumbnail” above (3 Mb)…

A Sea-change in layout design

You can always very clearly tell when publications were made after the 1700s. In the following century, with the rise of advertising, printed publications began to adopt giant mastheads and hero text. Giant blocky fonts begin to appear. Everything starts to look like a Wanted poster from a western film.

What I discovered almost immediately is that pages which inspired most came a couple centuries before this. The era just after the invention (in Europe) of movable type coincides with a fascinating development in design language and technology. Previous to the printing press was the era hand-written manuscripts, which look, unerringly, like this:

But it seemed to me that upon receiving access to the technology of movable type, bookmakers began experiment immediately:

Notice the playing with the layout.

The design of early books

This play with type design became foundational to the book. But the thing that influenced me the most in this very first visit was a small aside in a book on early bookmaking practices. The era where books were filled with fantastic woodcuts would not come along for quite a while. What preceded it was an era where books were printed with large empty spaces on the pages. The publisher would denote what was meant to go in that area. You, then, as the first owner of this book, would find an illustrator to illustrate your own copy. Thus, each book was a family heirloom and a work of art in its own right.

Beyond that, having the illustrations drawn after the book had been typeset was this reversal of expectations that fascinated me. In the modern era, you’re likely to receive images and place them in text, designing the text to work around those images. Mörk Borg-style books take this to an extreme degree, treating both art and text as artistic elements to shift and play on the page.

Delayed Impact

When I read about this, it made no impact on me. But as I was sitting at home later looking at all of the images I’d gathered, I realized that that one anecdote was in fact the key to the project. I contacted Vil, an artist who we had commissioned several times previously for work on the Glumdark website. And I asked him to meet with me over Zoom, something we’d never done before. He kindly agreed to hear me out and I gave him the pitch: I’ll design the layouts and then provide them as canvases to be drawn upon. Rather than setting my text around his illustrations, he could use each spread as his canvas once the text had been placed. To my great (and ongoing) delight, he eagerly agreed.

Now that I had a grid, a direction, and an illustrator, I was ready to begin stealing from the past.

Stealing From the Past

The flourishes in the designs were more directly stolen from books made hundreds of years ago. Both because it was fun and because they belong to a design language which felt appropriate to the content.

Early manuscripts contained colorful illustrations which danced through and around the margins, here replicated by a grim alchemist and his red-roughed assistant.

 

Rather than illustrations, hand-cut block prints made for meaningful iconography. Here represented by our own hand-cut dice icons.

 

A rather brazen theft of roughly bordered illustration with Latin title.

 

This narrowing of text to a point is seen very frequently of texts of the era. Also, brazenly stolen for our own nefarious purposes.

And on & on?

Research is a compelling phase of any worthwhile project. It invigorates, deepens and steers early design decisions. My research in early bookmaking ultimately took me to the explore public libraries in San Francisco, New York, and Eastern Europe. I toured old castles for inspiration and wandered around museums of ancient weaponry and artifacts. I bought a heap of books on type design and medieval calligraphy and book design. And I combined that with the vast set of online resources available to any aspiring designer. I wound up just deeply grateful for the unending wellspring of creativity that we have access to. And I’m hoping at least a bit of that gratitude comes across in the final product.

About The Author:

Christopher Drellow (CTRO, CY_OPS, TABLEMÖNGER, Glumdark) is a writer, artist and programmer living in Brooklyn, New York. Christopher has built an uncomfortable number of fabrication projects involving skulls, but he draws and writes about them too.

 

Postscript/Addendum by Mike

I have to say that I quite enjoyed reading the above for the first time, and if you did too, then you should definitely at least think about backing the Glumdark. Here’s that link again, https://glumdark.com/book, or click on the image below (extracted from the image at the start of the article).

There is also a Facebook page (may not be official): Glumdark

Applied Inspiration; Spellbooks

But this wouldn’t be Campaign Mastery without throwing a little extra content your way.

Too many modern players seem to think that spell books are like exercise books, you write a spell down on the page and employ a little magical Ju-ju and you’re done. But books back then weren’t done like that; a closer analogy would be the preparation of an old-style illuminated manuscript (by hand, of course).

Most of the text would simply get written in, just like the exercise book, but there would be more. Lavish drop capitals, illustrations, working notes, related side-comments ? and that’s if the spellcaster is an absolute stick in the mud. Anyone with even a hint of looseness might add a doodle, or some ribald poetry, or a shopping list, or conceptual notes regarding a possible spell variation or even a recipe for soup ? why not, the real writing is magical and won’t be damaged by the additions ? and the rest of the book is just paper / parchment, so why not use it for notes, treating it the way most students treat their high school textbooks?

Plus, they would be likely to throw in the occasional trap for the unwary, just in case the spellbook gets stolen (which reminds me of the time when a Gnoll forced a PC Wizard to throw his spellbooks on the camp bonfire. The player assumed that because they contained magical writing, the spellbooks wouldn’t burn…)

Anyway, beyond all that, GMs should want their players to think about the page of text looking like an illustrated manuscript, and the amount of work that is implied. Text should be in some flowing script (fewer words to the page, more white space). Even if everything is monochrome, it should take one or more hours to inscribe a spell ? and employing that magical Ju-ju takes only as long as it takes to cast the spell, effectively seconds in most cases. What is the spellcaster doing, the rest of the time?

I look at the layouts and examples that Christopher has so lavishly provided in his post, and that’s what comes to mind. A useful reminder to incorporate a little genre-related flavor into your game mechanics whenever the opportunity presents itself!

One more idea from Mike – Applied Inspiration: Tomes Of Skill

Oh, all right, one more tidbit that occurred to me.

Why not give out, as loot, a reference book that confers +2 on a specific skill subject provided that the book is consulted for at least (difficulty/4) hours? And that gives a +1 on related subjects within the scope of the primary function? [EG: “Tome Of Elvish History” might also give +1 to answer questions about Orcs and Dwarves because Elves have had extensive… dealings… with both].

Make it heavy enough and large enough to be inconvenient, so that no-one will be tempted to carry more than one or two around with them, but not so big as to be unwieldy or impractical. Ten inches x 6 inches x 2 inches and 25 lb should be about right.

But if you want to make sure of it, have the books grow heavier by 5 or 10 lb each if another is within 10′ of it, per book after the first. Why? It’s magical, dude. So a set of ten would make each one weigh 75 or 125 lbs. It won’t take much of a library to completely consume a character’s carrying capacity at that rate. The big trick is to balance the benefit with the inconvenience.

But Bags Of Holding and Portable Holes and the like would still present a problem. But wait one – what if the books were self-updating, linked to a privileged position of Omniscience?

Stick one of those in a Bag / Hole, and the book, the bag / hole, and everything else within goes Kerblooey! I forget what damage the rules suggest, but I’d be inclined to make it 1 HP per pound of contents, +1d6 for the book and 2d6 for the container. What, you had 5,000GP stashed away in there? Gold is very heavy….

What would such a book be worth? 500 GP? 1,000? More?

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The Best Of 2015 Part 2


Listing the best posts offered at Campaign Mastery in the second third of 2015.

What do you do when you discover that the table of data that was to be the centerpiece of a post is too wide to display in the space available? Well, you have two options – either make it available as a download, or restructure it. The first isn’t a lot of work, the second requires a huge effort. So nine times out of ten, you’d pick the ‘download’ option.

But for the table that’s the centerpiece of the next installment of Trade In Fantasy, that’s not an option, because the idea is for the whole thing to aggregate into a publishable e-book at the end.

The only option is to take the harder road. It was already dicey whether or not it would be ready to post by deadline (tonight) – this simply sealed the deal. But that’s why you’re looking at another filler post.

But it’s actually fairly appropriate that this post is looking back and reflecting. A year ago this week, I signed the lease and moved into my current address – hasn’t time flown?

Long-time readers will remember the stress and angst that this climaxed – it’s not right to suggest that it was all over (it wasn’t), but this was when things started to improve, one year ago.

And, for the most part, it’s been steady progress for that year. There have been a few setbacks, but for the most part things have been steadily improving – and, where a setback has demanded more assertive action, it’s either in progress or being organized.

It may not have been a great year (those only come along every now and then). but it’s been a year of progress toward a future great year, and that has its own satisfactions.

This is also the earliest possible theoretical date for the completion of the Trade In Fantasy series – a schedule that was never considered realistic, I have to admit, though I had hoped to be deeper into it than I am. But that’s the price of not compromising (any more than I have to) the quality of the work. At the end of the day, i want this to be a resource that can be referenced again and again, and that takes either a big writing team (there’s just me) or taking the time.

Most GMs will never need the 22-step process that I just wrote up for defining the characteristics of rafts, and when they do, one of the off-the-shelf solutions included with the process will be quite good enough for them nine times out of ten – but to tweak the designs to allow for non-human races, it was necessary to describe it in full, so that’s what I’ve done – something to look forward to when Trade In Fantasy Chapter 4 part 3 is finally ready!

But, first —

Something else that’s worth mentioning is that when I updated Campaign Mastery to https – yes, it is secure aside from two social media links that continually raise unwarranted red flags for visitors – a lot of links got zapped. The automated process was supposed to convert them all, automatically – but it didn’t. A number of illustrations also got zapped at the same time – the images are still there, but the link to them that displays them in the post got removed.

As I discover these, I’ve been doing my best to reconnect / repair the damage. Of course, this extra effort contributes to the amount of work involved in doing one of these posts – another reason why I’ve broken 2015 into three parts.

Of course, to discover these missing links, I have to actually re-read each of the posts from back then, which also takes time. I skim when I can, but usually have to be more thorough. I’d have to at least skim the articles anyway, to rate them. Just a quick glimpse behind the scenes for readers!

The Very Best Of 2015 Pt 2: May-August

The 10/10 list
  • The Further Thoughts On Pacing series – I follow up the 2014 Emotional Pacing in RPGs 2-part series with a 4-parter looking at pauses and breaks of all sorts and the impact they have. Disney are famous for creating and using anticipation to enhance their attractions; this covers the RPG equivalent.
  • The Plunging Into Game Physics series – looks in depth at what a Game Physics is, why it’s important, how to create one, and how to use it for various purposes – as a plot generator, for example.
  • A Vague Beginning – An old article that I had underfoot about the basic conceptualization of a new campaign. Not at all superfluous despite the similarity in subject matter to the New Beginnings series because this puts the conceptual groundwork together in a single space (instead of breaking it up into a large series), providing an overview that leads to concrete and directly useful results.
  • A Helping Handout – Phil Veccione of Gnome Stew wrote an article about making handouts more valuable to players so that they looked them over for more than a 3-second glance. Hungry of Ravenous Roleplaying reviewed and linked to that post. I saw that review and was led to the article – and found that Phil had only covered 4 of the 13 applications for Handouts that I observed. So this expands on that original source to cover the field, especially the other 9 purposes.
  • The Cinematic Combat series – What is a cinematic combat style and how do you achieve it? An article that I resisted doing until I could find a way to abstract my methods into something more universally applicable. Part 1 deals with attacks and the basic whys and wherefores, part 2 with Damage, and part 3 with the absence of traditional mechanics. Game system purists should not read the series, it’s full of house rules and the principles to be enshrined in house rules, which will only upset them.
  • Traditional Interpretations and Rituals Of Culture – explores the Gaming relevance of a thought of mine: ‘Traditions become empty when the meaning behind them is forgotten. We don’t teach enough relevance to create reverence’. How to generate and utilize traditions and customs within a campaign setting.
  • The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 1: A 2-part guest article – part 1 deals with acquiring and designing vehicles for various purposes within an RPG.
  • The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 2: A 2-part guest article – part 2 covers the in-game use and abuse of vehicles in RPGs.
The 9/10 List
  • Taking advantage of the sensory heirarchy – The only reason this isn’t 10/10 is because some of the links have undoubtedly gone south over the last 10 years. The relative importance of the senses and how each can be manipulated by the GM, with a focus on Oratory / Public Speaking.
  • Overprotective Tendencies: Handling Player Risk Aversion – As players grow attached to their characters, they can start playing it safe and over-planning. This offers six solutions to the problem – some of which may be even worse than the original issue – but this post is more about putting the problem on a GM’s radar than any set solution.
  • Imperfect Imbalance – Personal Injury Law in RPGs – This post plugs a gap in my coverage of creating fundamental campaign concepts and translating them into game impact at the level of mundane day-to-day life by looking at the question through, of all things, personal injury law.
  • A target of inefficiency: from Dystopian trends to Utopia – Why is aging infrastructure a problem, how does this join with other similar trends to push toward a dystopian future, and how can a utopian alternative emerge from these circumstances? I’m really proud of both the insight and foresight of this article – for example, “Concentration of wealth has left media control in a relatively small number of hands. While the degree of influence of the modern media barons is a hotly-disputed subject, the potential remains for Kingmakers to control our economic destiny.” But I couldn’t rate this as a 10/10 – it’s only applicable to modern / futuristic campaigns, and takes too long to get to the RPG-relevance.

    Nevertheless, it seems so prescient regarding the situations we face right now that I have to call attention to it. While my utopian solution may not work (it’s good enough for an RPG, I make no claims or promises beyond that), the mere fact that any sort of solution can be plausibly discussed is a cause for optimism – one that’s sorely needed right now.

  • The Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) series – 12 parts published so far, with three more still to be done, this series focuses on advice for beginning GMs, and those who need to get back to basics. While some parts were easier to write than I expected, most were a lot harder because I really did aim to provide practical advice for first-time GMs (most of Campaign Mastery focuses on the experienced GM and helping them advance to the next level; it’s not a blueprint for doing so, more a series of paths for individual development – what will work best for one will not be the best focus for another). For the record, the three remaining sections are “Surprises”, “Mistakes”, and “Laughs”.
The Honorable Mentions: The 8/10 list
  • Fogs, Clouds and Confusion: A Battlemap technique – How to shroud a battlemap in mist, rain, snow, fog, etc. One comment described the technique as overkill, but that’s for the individual GM to decide – and the decision can change with the circumstances. A filler post, but still worthwhile.
  • Ask The GMs: On Big Dungeons – Another GM asks for help in making a big Dungeon something manageable in terms of the playing experience. The answer looks at subdividing the dungeon into smaller independant sequences and understanding why the thing is so big in the first place.
  • The Power Of The Question-mark in RPG Plotting – A short filler article discussing how to use question marks to implant variable content within an adventure. Good stuff but fairly limited in scope.
  • Tales from the front line: The Initiative Conflict – I break down the initiative system from D&D 3.x and explain my preferred interpretation, analyze why one of my players hated it, and describe the way that I accommodated his interpretation without letting it wreck the campaign(s). The first in a (very) occasional series analyzing conflicting points of view at the gaming table from the perspective of actual “battlefield” experience.

Still more to come!

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A Recipe For (Small) Disasters: Cooking in RPGs


So your character has a cooking skill. What dishes can he prepare? What will be inedible? What does that mean? Adaptable all systems.

It was surprisingly hard to find a good illustration to go with this article. I didn’t want meat to dominate, I did want a variety of ingredients to be visible, and I insisted that there should be evidence of some sort of process having been followed. The cake above ticks all of those boxes. Image by Marina Pacurar from Pixabay.

We’ve all grown up with the concept of a recipe being utterly reliable. If you do the same thing every time, you will get the same result, every time.

Most of us take this completely for granted, never realizing how miraculous it is that any recipe works at all, never mind being as safe as houses.

If ever a recipe doesn’t produce the intended result, either the recipe is wrong, or we haven’t followed it properly.

As a result, if we think of it at all, we have extreme difficulty adjusting our thought processes to a world where this is not the case.

And yet, for most of human history, it wasn’t so.

Measurement Failure

I have a small collection of cookbooks, one of which is Barbara Lowery’s 1977 work, “Quick & Easy Cookbook”, which I picked up cheaply from a garage sale – I won’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of either book nor author.

It offers information right up front that you simply don’t find in most cookbooks about the standard weights and measures used in different countries.

In Australia, 1 standard cup is 250 millilitres. Same in New Zealand. But in the US, 1 standard cup is 237 ml, and in Canada, 227. So if you’re trying to follow a US recipe and put a 250 ml cup of liquid into your recipe, that’s 5.485% too much liquid.

1 standard tablespoon is 20 ml – in Australia. In New Zealand, it’s 15 ml; in the US, it’s 14.8 ml; and in Canada, it’s 14.2.

1 standard teaspoon is 5 ml in Australia and New Zealand, 4.9 ml in America, and 4.74 ml in Canada.

Heaven only knows what these measures are in other parts of the world. Yet, very seldom do recipes state what part of the world they have used standard measurements from.

How on earth can any recipe be expected to work with more than 1-in-20 variations in what amount a standard “cup”” is?

Ingredient Variations

A recipe might call for three oranges. But there are innumerable types of Oranges, and they are not the same. Not only will the variety most readily available locally probably be different in different places, but there can be a huge size variation from one variety to another.

There will also be size variations depending on where you are with respect to the growing season. Here in Australia, the Mandarin season is past; what few Mandarins are now on offer come, generally, from the US, and most of them are very small even compared to the same variety (when it’s available) from a local source.

The same is true of all sorts of fruit and tomatoes and pumpkins, and the list goes on and on.

But these things also change over time. I’m old enough to remember when Mangoes were a rare and expensive treat – but they became popular here, and so lots of people started growing them. In several different varieties. So they are now commonplace in the summer months. Heck, I remember Kiwifruit coming to Australia for the first time, and when Lychees were rare and unusual.

I have seen passionfruit the size of large oranges (about three inches in diameter, compared to a more typical 1 1/4 inches in diameter). I have seen grapefruit that are smaller than that – and some that were three times that size. The typical size is probably about 8-10″ in diameter – but you have to allow for seasonal variation and different varieties.

Tomatoes four or five inches across are not uncommon at certain times of year. Right now, most are a bit less than 2″ across, and some are only 75% of that size.

So, when a recipe calls for three pears – what exactly do they mean, if they don’t say, specifically?

Organic Variation

But it gets worse. All organic products have a natural variation in size – these days, everything gets sorted and sold according to size, so that you get ‘medium eggs’ and ‘large eggs’ and so on (you don’t often see small eggs here, for some reason).

No matter what variety of organic matter you’re talking about – chickens or steaks or cherries – there will be a natural variation in size.

These details are rarely even hinted at in recipes – though, to be fair, I have seen some that specified large eggs. Most of the time, they simply don’t say.

Ingredient Lifespan

Herbs and spices lose strength and flavor with astonishing speed.

From my notes for a future installment of the Value Of Material Things series:

    Most of these lose 1/2 their freshness and flavor every 6-12 months (with the lower end more common). It’s possible that some methods of preservation – boiling the herbs in oil to extract the flavor into the oil for example – might evade this reality. Some will also work well in a vinegar solution – mint, for example.

    A suspension of spice in honey might also work.

    But such heroic methods notwithstanding, the rule of thumb remains 1/2 flavor every 6 months.

BUT… every spice is a little different.

The best resource that I’ve found on the subject is the EATBYDATE site – here’s a link to their spices page.

So, if a recipe calls for 4 cloves of Garlic or 10g of Turmeric – the actual strength, the amount of active ingredient, is never going to be the same. how can a recipe possibly be reliable?

And that’s with the best modern preservative techniques. Take a step back to an older time when it took months, not days or weeks, to import spices from some far-off exotic land, and uncertainty only grows – exponentially.

Which means the exact same recipe from, say, 1918, could have entirely different measurements of key ingredients to the same recipe published last week – simply because those ingredients are now fresher and more concentrated, so you don’t need as much of them.

Which suddenly reminds of reading somewhere that eggs were about 20% smaller in the 19th century and the start of the 20th than what was common in the 1970s through to today. Along with most other forms of fruit and veg.

In a nutshell, we have better fertilizers and better farm management.

Scaling Failures

If I hadn’t seen this happen on Masterchef with my own two eyes on multiple occasions, I wouldn’t have credited it – but people have real problems scaling their recipes up.

If you know you need 1 lb of butter for 1 cake, and you are baking 50, that’s a fairly simple calculation. If a typical serving has 2 lb of steak, and you’re preparing 30 servings, you might think that 60 lb of steak would be enough.

It won’t be. It’s hard to be completely consistent in size, and that makes it hard to be consistent in weight – and that means that you will end up a few serves short from 60 lb. On top of that, there will be different amounts that have to be trimmed, and the need for testing along the way, and reserves to cover for any accidents – you might get away with another 5%, but an extra 10% is probably safer.

Thermal Reliability

Look up any source or site about how to cook and it won’t be long before you’re talking about temperatures. The Lowery cookbook has a table which lists the old-style descriptive labels and their equivalents in °C and °F – a “Cool” Oven is 100°C or 200°F, for example. The temperatures rise by a steady 25°C for a while, then go up by 10, and then 20 for a while, and then 10 again. So there is no discernible pattern beyond each being hotter than the one before.

Just before that list, it states, “Oven temperatures vary according to make; therefore the table … gives only a general guide to temperatures of Electric Ovens. If using a gas oven … decrease the given temperature by 10°C (25°F).”

Back then, as now, oven temperatures are set by turning a dial to the desired temperature – but how accurate are those dials and the temperature that they induce within the oven? Hence, the advice about ovens being different from one manufacturer to another. 200°C dial-indicated might be 185, or 210.

These days, though, the dials are often not pre-set – instead, you are setting the thresholds at which the actual temperature will be held – at least on the better models of oven. And (until opening this book, I’d never heard of the need to decrease gas oven temperatures by 10 degrees – which I guess means that those have become more reliable, too.

Also in modern times, we have fan-forced ovens, which are generally (effectively) a lot hotter than the indicated temperatures – you need less heat for the same result.

    Wood…

    But let’s look back a little. I’ve never cooked anything serious in a wood-fired oven, but have talked with others who have, and they have a number of peculiar things to report. First, most of them don’t have any sort of thermometer – you have to know what the general temperature is from the way the things being cooked respond.

    Second, temperatures will spike when a log is well ablaze, moderate but stay fairly consistent when you have glowing embers, and be quite variable any other time. Knowing when to add fuel to the fire, and how much, was as much a part of cooking in the olden days as measuring ingredients was in the 20th century.

    Third, almost all ovens and stoves will have a unique ‘personality’ of their own – parts that are hotter, parts that are cooler (if you’ve ever noticed, you get the same thing happening in Refrigerators – some shelves will be cooler than others).

    I don’t know if the same is true of coal-burning stoves – but I expect it might be.

So temperatures are at best an unreliable setting – at least with modern equipment, they are consistent.

Or are they? Many electrical components change over time – and the elements of ovens are no different. Gas is more consistent, unless one or more nozzles gets blocked – which can happen. So,while you won’t notice any difference between this year and last year, when the interval clocks up to 10 or 25 years, you might.

    The Cooking Process

    Let’s talk about the cooking process for a minute, because it’s relevant. The temperature at which you set your oven is determined by how quickly the heat gets from the exterior of whatever is being cooked to its interior. Raise the temperature, and the outside will cook a lot more quickly (being exposed directly to the greater heat), while the temperatures in the interior will rise more slowly because the heat has to work it’s way through from the outside.

    It’s the exact opposite with a microwave oven, where the heat is greatest in the interior, and least around the outside – but it is possible (I know first-hand) to misconfigure a microwave so that the outside cooks while the inside is still frozen. It’s a black art, sometimes!

    Some recipes call for turning ovens up or down after so much cooking time – and that’s the reason: avoiding the outside being overcooked while the inside is underdone.

    IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING, you can tweak cooking times by varying the temperature in the oven – somewhat.

    Most people blindly follow the recipe.

Time

Until mechanically-‘reliable’ temperature controls came around, cooking times were a broad approximation. Skewers were used to test whether or not cakes were baked in the center and probably still are, to be honest. An experienced cook could also tell how much a protein had broken down from the resistance to such testing; the ordinary cook had to rely on external indications like “the crust is a golden brown”.

It’s perhaps a good thing that such flexibility was achieved because reliable timers weren’t around for a long while. There were (literally) hourglasses and the like, but reliable timepieces were expensive even after their development in the 1500s.

Navigation was a spur that helped improve timekeeping, and the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 was a major step forward – but they cost the equivalent of several months wages for the average worker, so they were not something the ordinary person could afford.

The factory manufacturing of precision parts in the mid-19th century, 200 years later, was what made timekeeping affordable and reasonably reliable. A major spur to the manufacturing of accurate timepieces was the rise of the railways; every station needed an accurate clock to synchronize timetables. This created enough demand from 1840 on to industrialize the creation of clocks, and that opened up the domestic markets.

Cuckoo clocks actually led the way, appearing in homes from the 1700s – at first, just those of the wealthy, and then slowly spreading down the economic span. I can see a number of influences prompting this rise – factory and shift workers who needed to start at certain times; the railroads, and the need for intending passengers to be at the station before the train was due; and the popularization of radio, and of specific programming that became a fixture of daily life.

Cooking is nowhere on that list, really. Temperatures weren’t reliable and consistent enough for cooking times to standardize, even within the one recipe, until the 1930s and 40s.

There’s No Substitute For…

With so much vagueness about every aspect of the cooking process – ingredients, quantities, temperatures, and times – I think I’ve proven my initial point: it’s a miracle that any recipe ever worked!

The earliest known recipe was recorded on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, for me-e puhadi, a lamb stew, somewhere around 1730BCE. But they are more a list of ingredients, without cooking instructions or measurements. In fact, the oldest written recipes that we would regard as such by modern standards were for beer.

    … Experience

    The cook had to make the difference, compensating and adjusting for all the variables to produce something edible on a reasonably reliable basis. To enable them to do that, most had little more than their experience as a cook, plus some basic training passed down through the generations.

    Every failure and every success have the potential to teach something. The smarter the cook, the more likely it is that they learn from these experiences, but there’s no mechanism in most games to simulate that; instead, it is normally used to justify improvements in a skill level that are acquired through some other mechanism.

    … Genius Instinct

    Most systems add a stat-based value to whatever learned expertise a character has in a skill, and in cooking, this allows for instinctively moving beyond experience and applying expertise generally and indirectly to the task(s) at hand.

    In part, this is abstracting specific lessons into general principles and then applying them deliberately, but most of it is doing so subconsciously – and some of it is sheer natural talent.

    Put all these elements together and you can sum it up as a Genius instinct – if there’s enough of it.

    … Personal Flair

    On top of that, every cook develops their own style over time, a personal flair if you will. It’s really hard to describe exactly what that means, but fortunately, I have a source that I can fall back on – a passage from Pawn Of Prophecy, the first novel in David Eddings’ series The Belgariad:

           The center of the kitchen and everything that happened there was Aunt Pol. She seemed somehow to be able to be everywhere at once. The finishing touch that plumped a goose in its roasting pan or deftly shaped a rising loaf or garnished a ham fresh from the oven was always hers. Though there were several others who worked in the kitchen, no loaf, stew, soup, roast, or vegetable ever went out that had not been touched at least once by Aunt Pol. She knew by smell, taste, or some higher instinct what each dish required, and she seasoned them all by pinch or trace or a negligent-seeming shake from earthenware spice pots. It was as if there was a kind of magic about her, a knowledge and power beyond that of ordinary people.

    Personal Flair is an ability to stamp your own signature on a dish, a personal style that goes beyond simply making something flavorsome to make this particular version undeniably and recognizably your own.

    This, too, is something that genius can extend beyond dishes that the cook already knows into general principles that can be applied to new products and ingredients.

So your character knows how to cook…

Congratulations!

So what does that mean, exactly?

Any interpretation of skill has to address all three of these elements, plus the fundamentals of edibility and reliability. I have such an interpretation to offer, based on a bricklaying model.

The diagrams above depict the significance of each point of skill and applied stat bonus, using the d20 / D&D / Pathfinder scale.

The yellow bricks are edibility, and they are the foundation. Fail in a roll badly enough, and this is the last line of defense for the cook; run out of these, and you are left with an undigestable mess.

The row above the yellow bricks is reliability, or – if you prefer – reproducability. Run out of these and what results will be a happy accident that may never be repeatable.

Above those foundations are the expertises. These may be a particular style of cooking (“Italian”, “French”), a particular type of dish (“Desserts”, “Soups”), a particular specific dish, enabling many variations and ingredient substitutions (“Pasta”, “Baked Dinner”, “Cake”), or Personal Flair, which gives you none of these, but which can substitute for any of them at need.

So, here’s how it works: Each rank adds a brick. You can’t add a brick unless the layer below it fully supports it.

  • So rank+skill 1 gives you an edibility brick. rank+skill 2 gives you a second edibility brick. Rank+skill 3 gives you your first reliability brick. Each brick that is added is shown with an asterisk.
  • 4 is a third edibility brick, 5 a second reliability brick, and 6 lets you choose one of the four areas of expertise – a cuisine in general, a broadly defined type of dish, a specific dish, or a touch of personal flair. The pyramid is now 3 layers and 6 bricks.
  • But, we have run out of room, so brick 7 is another edibility, which permits brick 8 to be another reliability, and then brick 9 can be another area of expertise. And that creates a space for Brick 10 to be a third expertise.
  • Bricks 11 and 12 are edibility and reliability, 13, 14, and 15 are areas of expertise.
  • Starting with 16, something new gets added to the process – each point of rank+stat adds a bonus brick in the next available space in addition to the normal brick lay. These are shown with an up arrowhead and colored purple to make them stand out, but they are of the same type as the rest of the bricks in that row. So 16 is an edibility brick and the extra is a reliability brick. 17 is another expertise, and the bonus for 17 is also an expertise. 18 gives still another expertise and a bonus expertise, taking the total to 10. The cook also has 5 reliability and 6 edibility at this point. That fills the 6-row pyramid.
  • Which means that the next time around, we again add an edibility and a bonus reliability at 19. Bricks 20 and 21, and their bonuses, are all expertise bricks. Brick 22 is an expertise and completes the 7th row of the pyramid, so the bonus has to be an edibility brick.
  • 23 lays a reliability brick and a bonus expertise brick. 24 gives two more expertise bricks.
  • At 25, we get to start adding a second extra – these are indicated by a circle and are colored red. All three of these bricks are additional expertise bricks, and complete the 8th row of the pyramid.
  • For 26 (not shown), you would lay a normal edibility brick, a bonus reliability brick, and a second bonus expertise brick. 27 is three more expertise bricks, and so is 28, completing the 9-row pyramid. The cook now would have edibility 9, reliability 8, and expertise 30 (divided up into its four functions). And so on.

Standard practice is to roll a d20 and add the ranks and stat modifier to get a total, which has to exceed a target difficulty level. Difficulty levels have a base of 10, so if rank+skill are 11 less than the DC, the PC has a 50-50 chance of success because the die roll has to make up that 11-point deficit.

Skill Checks

Let us say, for the sake of example, that the character has Ranks+Skill equal to 15, which is to say, they are pretty good cooks, and that there is a DC of 20. He makes a skill check and rolls – well, let’s look at the outcome for various rolls, going from high to low.

  • Rolls a 20: 20+15=35, which is 15 more than the DC. Success. Whatever the character is cooking, he gets to list it as a “signature dish” and thereafter can add his Personal Flair to his rolls as an additional bonus when making that specific dish.
  • Rolls 15-19: Success. (15-19)+15=30-34, which is (10-14) more than the DC. It might not quite be a signature dish, but it’s appetizing – even delicious – and distinctly the work of this character.
  • Rolls 6-14: Success. (6-14)+15=21-29, which is (1-9) more than the DC. Success. It’s an appetizing dish to a decreasing degree. At the lower end (roll of 6-9, say), those eating the dish start to wash it down, they have had enough of it.
  • Roll of 5: 5+15=20, which is the exact number required. Success. It’s edible and distinctly yours. But few will be back for seconds.
  • Roll of 4: 4+15=19, one short of success. Oh dear.
    • If the character has an appropriate expertise, that is enough to salvage this dish as something edible.
    • If not, then the first bricks to go are the reliability bricks. Since with this roll, the character only needs one of them, and has 5, he again salvages it.
  • Rolls 2-3: 2+15=17, so 2 or 3 short of success. More reliability lost but the character has enough.
  • Rolls a 1. Oh dear, oh dear. Not only is the roll 4 short of success, but the character can’t use reliability to get out of this mess; he has to use edibility. But he has 6 of those, so there will still be 2 left; the results are unpalatable but edible.

That seems pretty good. Now let’s look at a character with rank+skill=10, with the same DC.

  • Roll of 20. 20+10=30, ten more than the target of 20, so it succeeds, and it’s a natural 20, so it’s now a Signature Dish. Next time, he can add his Personal Flair as a bonus, increasing his likelihood of success.
  • Roll of 10-19: (10-19)+10=20-29, exactly what is needed or more, so these are all successes to varying degrees. On 10-13, characters eating it will need to wash it down to finish eating the dish, though.
  • Roll of 9: 9+10=19, one less than needed.
    • If the dish belongs to an area of expertise, the character can use that to salvage the dish. It will be edible but not all that tasty.
    • If not, then the character has to use one of his 3 points of reliability to salvage something edible.
  • Roll of 7-8: (7-8)+10=17, two or three less than needed. Salvageable, Edible.
  • Roll of 6: 6+10=16, four short of what’s needed.
    • If the dish belongs to an area of expertise, the character can use that plus his three points of reliability to salvage the dish – barely.
    • If not, then the character has to use a point of edibility, of which he only has 4. This is definitely not up to his or her usual standards.
  • Roll of 4-5: (4-5)+10=14-15, five or six short of what’s needed.
    • A point of expertise leaves four or five, respectively, to be found. Three of those come from reliability. One or two, respectively, have to come from edibility – but that still leaves some, so the character manages to salvage the situation, by the thinnest of margins.
    • Without that, two or three points have to come from edibility, respectively – but that still leaves 1, so again, the situation gets salvaged.
  • Roll of 3: 3 +10 = 13, seven short of the target.
    • A point of expertise leaves six to find, three from reliability and three from edibility, leaving an edibility of 1. Salvageable – just barely.
    • Without that, the dish is down to zero edibility. No-one can eat it.
  • Roll of 2, eight short of the target – not even a point of expertise can salvage this mess. It’s completely inedible.
  • Roll of 1, nine short of the target and a natural 1: Not only can the character not use his three reliability to cushion the blow, not only is this a definitely inedible disaster at -5 edibility (or -4 with an expertise), the dish is so bad that the character loses that expertise if it applies. His confidence is wounded if not shattered so far as that area of expertise is concerned.

So, how realistic is this target of DC 20?

Circumstantial Modifiers

Again on the d20 scale employed by both D&D and Pathfinder:

    Base DC: 10
    DC+10 Extremely Difficult / Complicated Dish
    DC+5 Difficult / Complicated Dish (included above)
    DC+5 Exotic Ingredients
    DC+5 Unusual Equipment
    DC+5 Unfamiliar Style or Cuisine
    DC+5 Shortage of time
    DC+5 Other adverse circumstances
    Maximum DC: 50

Turns out, it’s not all that unusual. There are many different ways of getting that as a DC. Cooking an unusual ingredient in someone else’s kitchen is enough.

Adjusting For The Hero System

The Hero System uses 3d6. Characters have to make a roll of ranks+9+stat/5, round up, or less, to succeed. Difficulty provides a negative modifier to this total.

Stats average 10. So ranks+11. Maximum “normal” is 25, so ranks+14.

Instead of +5 DC, the GM should apply -3 modifier (-6 for an extremely difficult or complicated dish). The base “DC” is zero, so that gives a maximum modifier of -18.

The “critical success” / signature dish result occurs on Snake Eyes (1,1,1) if the character has a success. Snake Eyes are not an automatic success in this system, but they are usually good enough.

The “critical failure” result happens on box cars (6, 6, 6). If the character is expert enough, and the modifier isn’t too great, the dish might still be salvageable.

Adjusting For Traveller

Traveller, from memory, uses 2d6. Characters have to roll ranks+stat or less to succeed. Stats range from 1 to 6. Difficulty provides a negative modifier to the target.

Base Difficulty = 0; Use -2 for each +5 DC. Maximum modifier is -12.

“Snake Eyes” is a pair of ones, “box cars” a pair of sixes. 25 ranks is a hell of a lot in this system. FOUR ranks is a lot. Multiply Skill+Ranks by 2.5 (round up) to get the equivalent score for the purposes of edibility, reliability, and expertises. However, skills tend to be a lot broader in Traveller, so it takes TWO expertise points to add something to the character’s ability.

EG: 4 ranks, Skill 4 = 8; 8 x 2.5 = 16+4=20; character has 7 edibility, 6 reliability, and 12 / 2 = 6 expertise points.

Having a cookbook or equivalent would offer some sort of a bonus, helping to offset the penalty.

Adjusting for Mike’s Superhero System

Modifiers range from +150 to -150, with +75 being the standard modifier for an “easy task”. So base “DC” of 75, worst-case is 225 worse than this.

Modifier = 75 – [(DC-10) x 225 / 40] = 75 – 5.625 (DC – 10).

Skill rolls are derived from stats and other skills and can then be improved. They start at -100 (minimum) and range up to +150. The minimum needed to use as a professional career is -12 (that’s just how the math worked out). Hobbyists and amateurs can have lower scores than this, but generally -20 is the (reasonable) floor and many characters have skills in the 30s or 40s.

(Skill + 100) x 2 / 25 = # ‘bricks’. So 35 would 270/25 = 54/5 = 11 (always round in the character’s favor).

Rolls are on a d%. Roll must be less than or equal to Skill + Modifiers. 01 is a critical success, 00 is a critical failure. But for signature dish / edibility points, I think dividing the margin of success + 50 by 5; any result better than 19 is a signature dish, any result worse than a 1 is a penalty.

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The Best Of 2015 Part 1


Listing the best posts offered at Campaign Mastery in the first third of 2015.

Oh my, was it really ten whole years ago? The original intent of this series was to compile a list of the best articles at Campaign Mastery roughly 2 years after the date, but that interval has slipped, and slipped, and slipped again.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing; quite a number of readers have come along since then, and these posts deserve to be brought to their attention.

As always, this is a personal judgement, and readers may disagree with the choices made.

I need to also explain why this is appearing now, even with the above context. When the time came to write a post for today, I realized that there was not going to be enough time to do a proper job on the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series, so I looked around for something that I thought I could finished in the time available.

And I found part III of the “fuzzy plastic memories” mini-series – which I published a while back, somehow without saving the article. So, I started writing the second half of it again. This consumed 2/3 of the available time before I went checking for a link and had my own fuzzy memory jolted.

So, it was officially scramble time. What’s below is the result.

The Very Best Of Jan-April 2015

The 10/10 list
  • The Final Twist: Dec 2014 Blog Carnival Roundup – Summarizing and linking to the Offerings of the December 2014 Blog Carnival. The subject was “With A Twist” and it covered Surprise Mechanics, Plot Twist Theory, Surprises & The Unexpected, Tricks & Trickery, Chance, and relevant Game Aids – plus a heap of plot twist examples.
  • The One Player Is Enough series – A 4-part series looking at one-on-one or “solo” gaming in depth. A full table of contents at the start of Part 1. I won’t link to each part individually in this list, just to the whole series.
  • The New Beginnings series – Ten substantial parts plus an introduction about designing and prepping a new campaign, with lots of solid advice along the way. It’s those occasional nuggets of wisdom / experience that elevate this series above a 9/10. I won’t link to each part individually in this list, just to the whole series.
  • The End Of The Adventure – Ponders the emotional tone of the end of an adventure. Includes a detailed list of 19 options that work and 12 options that don’t – that’s 31 variations on how to end an adventure analyzed! This one seems to have flown under the radar for many readers, but I think it’s worth checking out.
  • Ask-The-GMs: The ‘Some Arcane Assembly Required’ Series – A three- four-part ATGMs that focuses on Customizing Spell Components. Part 1 “The Sales Pitch” looks at “Why Use Spell Components At All?” and some rules infrastructure that’s relevant. Part 2, “Sourcing Parts” considers principles for generating custom spell components to occupy the categories identified in the original question and part 1. Part 3, “Tab A into Slot B”, and Part 4, “Cut At The Dotted Line”, offer example custom spell components from the rarer end of the scale and discuss how spell components can become game rewards in their own right. It’s the examples that have elevated this set above a 9 out of 10, to be honest.
  • Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists – Another goodie that flew under the radar, this is a technique for creating and running mysteries in RPGs using Metagaming, in the process demonstrating that there is more to that than “plot trains”.
  • Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game – Showcases a technique for inserting ‘stealth narrative’ into various aspects of the RPG process, so that you don’t have to spend a lot of additional narrative describing them. This offers some substantial benefits for the GM who masters this (admittedly tricky) technique.
  • Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation – Yet another under-the-radar post, this starts with four simple questions to be asked about an NPC and uses ripple effects to then define their characterization far more richly than most more complicated techniques, even while making it easier for the GM to play that character..
  • Disease and Despair – the healing-resistant nightmare – Posits the questions, first, what would the social impacts be of widespread availability of low-level healing magic, and second, what would the impact be of the rise of a disease that resisted such treatment. You want an apocalyptic Fantasy campaign? This is one sure way to create one.
The 9/10 List
  • Random Encounter Tables – my old-school way – Examines the theory of random encounter tables, why and when and how to use them, and a step-by-step process for constructing region- and season-specific tables. The article concludes by looking at a way of modernizing the technique and integrating the encounters into a plotline, and that last part is probably the best content in the article.
  • The Gradated Diminishing Of Reality – Travel in FRPG – Examines the perennial question, “How much travel do you roleplay”. A short but useful article, aimed principally at Fantasy Gaming but applicable to a wider audiance, I now realize.
  • Stride The Earth in 7-league boots: Travel (and Maps) in FRPG Pt 2 – A sequel to the article above which digs into scaling of maps and how it relates to the question posed in the first article.
The Honorable Mentions: The 8/10 list

Definitely more to come…

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‘No One Can Foil My Evil Plan’


“I attack him while he’s distracted.”

That’s not an appropriate response to an antagonist Monologing, but it happened once.

There came a time when a new player, unfamiliar with the genre, joined the Adventurer’s Club campaign. At one point, in an adventure, the villain began to Monologue – and that was this player’s response.

This is a bad idea for several reasons, and that’s a great place to start.

Time Out Post Logo

This is a composite of three images. The base image is monkey-236861.jpg by Fuzz, extended by me (turning Speak-No-Evil into a villain in a post about Oratory and Monologues, how could I resist?); the microphone is from microphone-2710067.png by Alexa; and the speech bubbles were extracted from doodle-7326367.png by pencil parker (and modified by me), all from Pixabay.

This is the fifth of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series.

I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.

Seven Reasons Not To Interrupt

First, monologues often reveal more about the villain’s planning and preparation than the players (and hence the PCs) already know, so they are of value.

Second, they provide a pause in the combat for both sides (but especially the PCs) to refresh themselves, take stock, and conspire / plan.

Both of those constitute giving the PCs an advantage they don’t currently have, and lead directly to reason three: Never interrupt an enemy when he’s making a mistake.

And, fourth, the rules of the Pulp (and superhero) genres are, Villains Get To Monologue. Heroes get to make stirring speeches.

Which leads to reason five: Villains are invulnerable while Monologing.

Six, Monologing is often when the GM gets to chew up the scenery and show off how clever they have been. Not letting them do so can p*** them off to no good effect.

Seven, confrontations leading to monologues are frequently, but not always the climax of an adventure. When they are not the climax, they advance the plot.

That’s seven good reasons NOT to do what the player proposed, all well understood by most players of this or any other genre. Needless to say, the other players stomped all over the proposed course of action and the player in question beat a hasty retreat in the face of the dreaded GM response, “Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

There Is A Hole In Your Rules

Nevertheless, technically – according to the Hero System rules – there is no reason not to take advantage of a villain putting his puffed-up ego on display in this way. The game mechanics do not enforce nor reinforce the genre in this respect. So it got me thinking about Monologues and whether something could be done to remedy this situation.

Broader Applicability

I laid down some initial thoughts (on a single sheet of paper) and later showed them to my Co-GM for input and discussion. He pointed out some holes and shortcomings in my initial thoughts – hopefully, this post resolves those – but, during the discussion, I realized that the rules (when they were functional) would have broader applicability.

Any genre or sub-genre that engages in melodrama – and that’s most of them at least some of the time – can produce a situation which is at least analogous to a monologue.

  • Goldfinger trying to convince the representatives of various crime syndicates to back his plan to ‘seize’ Fort Knox – that should count.
  • Count Dracula being an extremely urbane host – that should count.
  • Any leader making a speech that tells the flunkies more than just what he/she wants them to do, should count.
  • Any of those heroic stirring speeches – “It’s always darkest before the dawn” – should count.
  • Gandalf putting Grima Wormtongue into his place – that should count.
  • Gandalf trying to persuade Saruman to give up his bend into evil after the sacking of Isengard – you’ld better believe that should count!
  • One more from Tolkien: Any number of speeches by Bilbo in the Hobbit – to Dwarves, to Smaug – they should count, too.

What’s more, the definition of a monologue should expand sufficiently to encompass all of these. That carries it way beyond the narrow scope of the Pulp and Superheroic genres.

What This Post Is Not

I’m not presenting full game mechanics here, for a number of reasons.

First, Hero Games limits the length of such posts to 4 pages. The mechanics involved here would run to several times that limit.

Second, the space would be better utilized in describing how the mechanics work so that they can be adapted to other game systems as desired by GMs.

Third, time is limited and this approach is one that will fit within the available time-frame.

Fourth, the single-page outline referred to in the post survived the relocation of a year ago; the supplementary notes are still hidden away – somewhere. And for some reason, the final spreadsheet referred to in the text got overwritten by an older, incomplete backup – and I don’t have time right now to put humpty-dumpty back together again.

So don’t expect a solution on a platter – more the outline of a solution. What you do with it is then up to you.

History

Greek tragedies used monologing extensively, often breaking the ‘fourth wall’ to enable the character to reveal his thoughts, feelings, and motivations to the audience. Shakespeare also used monologues, and especially villainous monologues, in several of his plays.

A monologue is not necessarily bad writing, therefore. It only becomes that when it’s not a natural outgrowth of the scene – that’s when it feels ‘tacked on’, and that’s the bad writing, it’s not necessarily the monologue itself. Though, if you are capable of making so fundamental a mistake, the odds that the monologue is worthwhile also take a nosedive.

Purposes Of Monologing

Every monologue should have a clear set of purposes behind it, and these have to be understood by the GM and by the owner of any PC taking part. ‘Purposes?’ I hear someone ask – yes, there are three of them: The Character’s Purpose, The Plot Purpose, and The Metagame Purpose.

    The Character’s Purpose

    A character’s reason for monologing, in general terms, is to change the emotional state or intellectual assessment of the listener(s), or both. But that general expression is not useful in defining the parameters of the monologue; an explicit and specific reason needs to be defined which fits that general summary.

    Let’s look at a few examples:

      ▪ A villain monologing may be playing for time, or trying to recruit one or more of the listeners, or trying to intimidate opposition.

      ▪ A politician monologing, i.e. delivering a political speech, is trying to increase the favorable perception of himself while diminishing that of any rivals for office.

      ▪ A hero making a rousing speech is trying to engender hope in the face of rising despair.

      ▪ A character trying to calm an angry mob is trying to calm them so that they will disperse. This requires sympathy for any real or perceived grievances – the latter is important because even if the grievance is just a misunderstanding, the feelings it has aroused are quite genuine.

      ▪ A muckraker or firebrand may be trying to incite a crowd into action; depending on the action being called for, this may transform them into a mob.

    The Plot Purpose

    The monologue has to advance the plot, either by virtue of it’s presence within the game or it’s content. It cannot be meaning-free.

    It’s not just there to pad out playing time, in other words. It has to tell those hearing it something they didn’t already know of significance – be it what the villain is really doing, or why, or expressing an unexpected aspect of his (or her) personality.

    If it’s a hero trying to rouse support, there has to be a clear bifurcation of consequences depending on whether they succeed or fail.

    If it’s a villain, he has to measurably improve his chances of success (even if it’s only a small lift from zero), or at least to reasonably expect such an improvement (many villains are delusional in this respect).

    A direct consequence of this purpose is an expression of the personality of the individual performing the monologue. This need not be a revelation, it can be a refinement or a reiteration, but the monologue needs to shine a light on the personality; if it doesn’t, it’s a generic speech and not something specific to this particular character.

    That means that whoever is delivering the monologue needs to find the “voice” of the character and deliver the monologue in character.

    That’s less of a problem if you can prep and polish a speech in advance; it’s not fair to expect players to match that quality of polish when they are improving. That’s an issue for the game mechanics – they need to capture the flavor of a character delivering a monologue in character even if the player isn’t, can’t, or does a relatively poor job of it.

    The Metagame Purpose

    Lastly, there needs to be a Metagame Purpose or Function for the Monologue. In the case of the GM delivering an NPCs monologue, that’s usually to impart information. In the case of a player delivering a PC monologue, it’s to change the course of the adventure – i.e. that’s the player’s purpose as well as that of the character.

    The monologue needs to actually contain such information – it needs to be seeded into it. In the case of a GM, there needs to be some factual foundation (even if it’s only in the mind of the speaker); in the case of a Player, he needs to provide a reason for the listeners to change how they feel about the situation, whatever it might be.

      Example:
      1 .Verifiably Factual statement
      2. Contrast with Opposition position
      3. Logical interpretation: “You’re being played for fools.”
      4. Call t o action: “If I were you, I’d be mad as heck about it. I’d write his office and phone his office and make sure he knew I wasn’t going to stand for it. I sure as shooting wouldn’t vote for him.”

    In fact, it will make life a lot simpler if these are identified and defined before word one of the monologue is ever written.

Benefit Of Monologing

This is where things started to get a little controversial. It was my notion that (a) the monologuer derive an advantage from monologing, and (b) that the audience gain an advantage by not interrupting the monologue. But that brings in questions of how large an advantage and whether or not the two should cancel each other out, or be different in some way, and how the existing game mechanics were going to integrate with this new House Rule.

The Benefit Of The Monologuer

I had already decided that there should be a non-linear time scale to the length of the monologue (I’ll go into that below). Each step down that length should add either to the effect and/or to the chance of the effect occurring. One of the two should increase regularly by small amounts and the other less regularly and possibly by larger amounts, and possibly by different amounts each time.

    The Foundation Mechanic

    After trying variations in my head for a couple of minutes, I decided that the foundation of the game mechanic should be the Presence Attack. In essence, under our variation of this game system, characters make an opposed charisma check (or they can substitute an appropriate skill check). If the character making the attack wins, they get to roll a number of d6 based on the difference between the two rolls against a target stat selected by the GM as appropriate to the nature of the attack and the desired effect that the speech-maker wants to have.

      ▪ If they want passion to overcome clinical thought, that’s vs INT.

      ▪ If they want passion to overcome good common sense, that’s vs WILL (called EGO in the base rules).

      ▪ If they want to be liked or loved, that’s vs CHA (or PRES in the Hero system).

      ▪ If they want to overcome despair, that’s INT again.

      ▪ If they want to overcome exhaustion, that’s WILL (EGO)again.

      ▪ If they simply want to rouse up the troops to a fighting peak, that’s CHA (PRES) again.

    There were any number of modifiers that added or subtracted dice, sometimes adding to the chance of success by the active aggressor (we kept it simple and made all modifiers to their score, so that the target was always simply as defined) by the stats of the target.

    For multiple targets, you averaged their stat values and made a single roll to succeed – but there were modifiers for crowd size (the chance of success goes down but the number of dice you get if you do succeed goes up). You then make ONE roll against the entire audience that you are addressing.

    Sufficiently-confident or desperate characters could also trade chances of success for extra dice.

    The indicated number of dice were then rolled if the Presence Attack succeeded to determine how big an effect it had.

      ▪ <1 x the target stat – low / minimal effect.

      ▪ 1 x the target stat – substantial effect but very short duration.

      ▪ 3 x the target stat – substantial effect, somewhat longer duration.

      ▪ 5 x the target stat – more profound effect & moderate duration OR substantial effect, long duration

      ▪ 7 x the target stat – profound effect, substantial duration

      ▪ 10 x the target stat – profound effect, roll again; if second roll is 3 x the target stat or better, effect may be semi-permanent.

    A semi-permanent effect lasts until there is an active attempt to undo the change in attitude – and the results of the smaller of the two totals, indexed against a scale, provide an additional penalty to such attempts. The affected individual has become a convert.

    If the crowd was large enough, there was a translation method that yielded multiple results (some people were more convinced than others). These were always applied to targets with low target stat to high. What changed was the proportions of each result. The number of dice divided by the target score was down the left-hand side of the table and the rolled result divided by the target across the top; each cell gave a calculation for the proportion of the audience affected to each extent. As you went down a column, the minimum result rose but the maximum result fell; as you go across a row, both increase, but the maximum increases more.

    If you have 18 dice and the average target is 6 (low) then the minimum that you can roll is 3x the target. If you have 20 dice and the average target is 10 (normal average) then the minimum you can roll is 2x the target and the maximum is 12x the target, with the average result being 7 x the target – you will end up with converts, the only question is how many.

    A key goal of the sub-system redesign was to avoid treading on player agency. The change had to be something the character would find plausible under the circumstances. Implausibility was a big negative on the die pool size, halving or even quartering it before other adjustments were made.

    The table was generated using a spreadsheet and the actual results that were being represented, but not every outcome was modeled, making the results simpler to determine. You simply multiplied the indicated % by the unallocated crowd size, rounding down, and proceeding from most effected until you ended up with the number most marginally affected.

    That lends itself to more dice (i.e. more effect) being a less-frequent increase than chance of success, so that’s the option that was chosen.

The Benefit Of Listening

It was decided that this should be different in kind to the effect of the presence attack. Pre-planned and coordinated actions, tactical positioning to advantage those actions, bonuses to the success of those actions, and even the ability to ‘stockpile’ some of the advantage for later use within the adventure would be layered based on the duration of the monologue.

Bonuses would be awarded if the targets had some means of communicating with each other despite crowd noise (if any) and without the monologuer being able to overhear – that could be anything from hand signals to a full telepathic link.

If anything happened to interrupt the monologue, neither side would get the full advantage that they were aiming for or entitled to. That gave a solid reason not to do so – but the monologing character would lose less of his advantage than whoever interrupted him. This balanced realism with the genre-effect that we were looking for..

Duration Of A Monologue

It was decided that a genuine monologue had to last for at least a minute. Shorter speeches would be deemed ‘partial monologues’ and attract penalties relative to a full monologue. Longer speeches would attract benefits relative to the minimum, as described above.

    -4   1-2 seconds *
    -3   1/2 turn or 6 seconds **
    -2   1 turn, 10 or 12 seconds **
    -1   1/4 minute
    0   1/2 minute
    1   1 minute
    2   2 minutes
    3   5 minutes
    4   10 minutes
    5   15 minutes
    6   20 minutes
    7   30 minutes
    8   45 minutes
    9   1 hour
    10   1 1/2 hrs
    11   2 hrs
    12   2 1/2 hrs
    13   3 hrs
    14   4 hrs
    15   5 hrs+

    * or one sentence, whichever is less.
    ** whichever is shorter.

But what’s to stop characters performing a filibuster – i.e. saying any fool thing that comes into their head to pad out the clock? That brings me to the subject of the monologue’s content.

Content Of A Monologue

The content of a monologue is critical. After all, the monologuer isn’t just flapping his lips to feel the breeze, he has a purpose – at least, he’s supposed to have one – and every word has to be directed toward achieving that purpose, with only a limited amount of temporary diversion or digression permitted. And for that purpose to be achieved, whoever’s hearing it has to understand what is being said – they may agree or disagree, but they have to understand it (if they disagree, they may not understand why you are saying something so ‘obviously’ false).

When the audience stop understanding, they stop paying attention. When the audience is no longer listening, the monologue is over.

    Relevance

    A monologue can’t consist of just anything. It has to be relevant (or connected to relevance fairly quickly) – the number next to the duration is the number of off-topic words permitted before you connect back to the topic; fail, and the monologue ends and is counted as the current time, round down to the next shortest duration. The longer your speech, the more room there is for latitude.

    The limits of repetition

    The monologue can never repeat itself. That doesn’t mean that a catch-phrase, or statement of theme, or call to action can’t be repeated – but it has to get there by a different route each time. If the monologue becomes repetitive, people stop listening – which means that the monologue ends and the duration is again rounded down to the next shortest duration.

    Each hour of speech permits limited repetition – repeating something from the first half of the hour just passed – to drive the point home, but we’re talking about nothing more than 1 minute of the 60 minutes.

    The Target Audience

    The monologue can’t go over the audience’s heads.

    Divide the average intelligence of the audience by 7.5 – rounded down, that’s the number of sentences they can understand at a time. (Yes, I know that’s a cynical evaluation, and the reality is probably division be 5 or 6).

    Multiply the result (with decimal place) by 3 – that’s the number of consecutive words you can use before they get lost. (The real average is more like 2.75). Don’t count single-character words like ‘a’, or ‘I’, and don’t count ‘and’ or ‘the’ while you’re about it. Numbers count twice, four times if they are a fraction, five times if there’s a decimal place. Subtract 8 from the word-count if you can point at an image explaining or illustrating what you’re talking about (4 if it’s a graph).

    Multiply the result (with decimal place) by 2.5 – that’s the number of consecutive syllables you can use before employing a word that the audience understands.

    Exceed any of these limits, and the audience is gone, lost and confused and dismissive. And you will be forever at a -8 (d20 scale) / -40 (d% scale) when talking to them again.

    Making this practical

    No-one seriously sits around counting words and syllables (except in real life, where there are people who do just that!). The GM has to put himself into the shoes of the average audience member and decide on that basis when the limits are exceeded. If the monologue is by an NPC, he has to do this at the same time as actually delivering the monologue (or parts thereof).

    The GM would have to determine how the crowd reacts to the monologue anyway; all this does is give some guidance when it comes to certain limitations.

    Allow For Mood

    Mood can also be a factor. If the audience is in a relaxed, composed mood and ready for some deep and stimulating thinking, you can get away with more, perhaps even 2-3 times as much. Some will think they understand what you’re getting at, most will be wrong – but some will be right, and others will figure it out as you go along, especially if you populate your speech with examples the audience can understand.

    If the mood is angry and rebellious, you have less safety margin than usual – maybe half as much. A mob has no patience for gentle placation or explanation; they need to be directed, not coddled. As soon as you lose even a fraction of them, there is a chance that a member of that fraction will issue a call to action (no matter how ridiculous) – and have those who may be wavering join in. “He’s working for them – ” (even if ‘He’ isn’t) – “Stone the polecat!” “Stone Him” – “Traitor” – and the mob turns violently against the monologuer trying to calm things down.

Analyzing A Heard / Witnessed Monologue

Any audience can be divided up into five sub-groups:

  • The intractably opposed
  • The strongly opposed
  • The neutral / undecided
  • The supportive / agreeable
  • The intractably supportive

A ‘friendly’ audience has at least 60% in the top two categories and no less than 20% in the undecided camp.

An ‘unfriendly’ audience has at least 50% in the bottom three categories.

A ‘hostile’ audience has more than 50% in the bottom two categories.

Anything else is some shade of a ‘normal’ audience.

It gets progressively harder to change someone’s mind, the further they are from the middle. The intractably supportive will still be supportive even if you completely mess up your monologue (read, “your speech”) to them – unless your failure is epicly catastrophic (it can happen)!

Similarly, the intractably opposed are unlikely to become any shade of supportive in one motion. The best you can usually hope for is sewing doubt and uncertainty, shifting them to the second or third category – though an epic rabble-rouse can sometimes go beyond this limit.

The monologuer should (but won’t always) have reasonable expectations. That’s a matter of their personality and any mental quirks or demons they may have on their shoulders.

What’s more common is to shift the non-intractable one step in a given direction (depending on the monologuer’s success or failure). Any such shift will often be temporary – hearing from the other side can be enough to restore the former status quo in those originally neutral, opposed, or hostile.

One thing that can help ‘fix’ a change in place is a call to action, a demand that ‘something be done and here is the best something’. That’s why most speeches and monologues end with such a call – which is what makes them different from a soliloquy.

If the audience don’t like that suggested course of action, or have misunderstood the message, they can take matters into their own hands. Many speakers have roused a crowd only to lose control of them and have them turn into a mob. Few get a second chance, because the intractables will always feel “if you aren’t with us, you’re agin’ us” – and one of them may direct the unleashed hostility of the crowd in the speaker’s direction as a result.

It follows that understanding the message content of a monologue is critical, and each of these sub-groups are likely to have a different reaction. There will be:

  1. Those who are ideologically and implacably opposed to the view you are presenting;
  2. Those who are hopelessly confused by what you are saying and retreat to simplistic (mis-)understandings;
  3. Those who think they understand and agree that something should be done, but think your proposed solution one that goes too far;
  4. Those who think they understand and agree with you and your solution;
  5. Those who become intractably convinced by what they understand to be the problem but don’t think your solution doesn’t go far enough;
  6. And those who really do understand what you’ve said and what you propose should be done about it. Some percentage of these will think your solution goes too far, a like percentage will think it doesn’t go far enough, and the rest – sometimes the minority, sometimes the majority, depending on how polarizing the issue is – will back your play.

Once you have achieved a shift in the thinking of a band of the audience, you can attempt to move that into a ‘camp’ appropriate to your purposes instead of shifting them a second band. Such a change will not apply universally; generally, all six of the above groups will be represented; what you are changing is the proportions, and trying to steer the most vocal majority into line with your proposal.

Initial position matters a great deal – each entry on the original ‘bands’ of attitude (the list that includes the ‘implacables’) will bias the members of that group one way or another. The implacably opposed, even if you manage to convince them of a problem, are likely to disagree with your proposed solution. Pushing them further – into neutrality – is harder, and less likely to happen – but makes them much easier to ‘push’ into supporting your desired course of action.

All this means that an analysis of the audience’s reaction to an attempted monologue is both critical and complicated.

    The Realistic Way

    1. The multiple of effect relative to target (discussed in ‘The Foundation Mechanic) can be equated to a number of Action Points. A simple 1:1 is probably best, but that’s up to the GM implementing a monologue sub-system to their game’s mechanics. I also like to add 1 to this for a success and subtract 1 for a failure. If you have them within your mechanics, plus-or-minus three for critical successes / failures would not be unreasonable.

    The more action points, the larger the costs that can be made, and the more precisely the mechanics can be targeted – but the more complicated everything becomes.

    2. The GM divides up the audience, allocating proportions to each faction as percentages of the whole.

    3. One faction at a time, the GM determines the breakup after the monologue, again allocating percentages of the faction to each of the six groups and deciding what the ‘general default’ position is based on the faction’s original leanings and anything else that he deems relevant.

    4. It costs a certain number of action points to shift Implacables one step (if you use my suggestions in (1) then 3 is a reasonable price). Shifting them a second space uses two, each space thereafter costs 1. Or you can use 1 point to shift each sub-factions response 1 step up or down the second table. The GM decides this, not the monologuer, even if the monologue was by a PC, because this is all about NPC reactions – and it’s too much work to do if PCs are the targets, just leave their response to player agency (challenge their choice if it doesn’t seem realistic, though).

    5. Once (4) is taken into account, tally up the percentages of each faction that are in each of the six response categories. Multiply by the Faction percentage to get the contribution to the overall response.

    6. Repeat for the other 4 Factions.

    7. Total the percentages for each response. That gives the overall initial reaction of the audience.

    8. Roll a d% against each total. If you succeed, at least one member of that group is vocal enough to try and convince those around him.

    9. Taking the results of (8) into account, estimate the ‘buzz’ in the room and which direction the audience will ultimately ‘gel’ into, overall.

    10. Describe the results to the players – without using numbers. Terms like “a small group” or “the majority” are just fine.

    A simpler solution

    Use gut feel and the overall plot to simply decide 7, 8, and 9, taking into account the starting position of the audience. Then go directly to step 10.

    Why make life more complicated than it has to be?

Policy Announcements & Political Speeches

It should be obvious from the above that this system also works as a means of determining the responses to policy announcements and political speeches. Even Trumpian rallies fit the model.

It’s impossible to argue that Political speeches of any kind don’t have a lot in common with villainous monologues and heroic speeches, anyway!

Political Debates

Debates would have to work a little differently. Regardless of the subject matter, though, it’s all about shifting attitudes, and that’s what this sub-system is good at simulating.

Start by giving each participant a Joker or a chit.

For each debate topic, each debater makes a roll. If there is an implicit bias in the question toward one of them, give them a bonus – the bigger the bias, the bigger the bonus. Whoever gets the best total (or greatest margin of success, depending on your game mechanics) wins the point.

If you want, you can treat opening statements and closing statements as individual debate topics. My personal inclination would be, respectively, 1/2-a-topic and a full topic, but that’s up to the GM.

At any point (but usually when they think they are losing a point), a participant can play their joker / chit to represent doing something wildly unexpected that’s worth +5 to their roll (+25 if using a d%).

At the end of the debate, the GM should rank each topic from least important to most important (low to high). Each candidate will have won some points along the way; multiply the ranking of the question by 1 to get the number of points overall that they win.

Total the results for each candidate and then divide by 2 (to take into account an unwillingness to change on the part of most people). If there is more than two participants, increase this by 0.5 for each additional candidate.

Whoever’s total is the highest can be declared the winner of the debate; the difference between the two reflects the percentage of hearts and minds shifted (but the exact ratio is up to the GM).

The above mechanic works whether or not the debate is a traditional one, with the issues addressed and people getting a right of reply, or Trump-style tactics of intimidation. Note that debates never change the implacables on either side; it’s the rest, and especially the undecideds, that both sides are playing for.

One final point: the GM should always take individual personalities and reputations into account when deciding what bonuses / penalties are appropriate. For example, if a debater has a reputation for a certain policy position and his answer seems to contradict that track record, the other debater(s) are quite likely to highlight this inconsistency. This amounts to an additional penalty that the first debater has to overcome with a good die roll.

Interviews and Media Appearances

These work just like debates – except that the other side rolls a flat 10, every time. Some questions will be hostile or difficult (a negative modifier), others will be softballs (a positive modifier). Each question is a ‘debate topic’.

The GM can choose to weight the value of any hostile / difficult questions x2 and any softballs x 1/2, because the former can actually change opinions while the latter are less likely to do so.

Restrictions During A Monologue

During any monologue, the primary focus of the person delivering the monologue has to be delivering that monologue – reading the room, deciding when a point is getting traction and should be pushed, and when it’s not and should be cut short, and so on. At the same time, the audience’s primary focus (including any PCs) has to be listening to the monologue and evaluating it.

It’s a very fuzzy line to draw, but the GM has to determine if any proposed action would disrupt one or both of these focuses. Doing so ends the monologue prematurely, which is not a good thing.

Whatever the benefits of seeing out the monologue were supposed to be, the monologuer who was interrupted gets them +50% while the interrupters not only lose the benefits they would have gotten, if possible the GM should apply them as penalties.

But, if it’s the monologuer who crosses the line, these penalties are reversed.

It can also be an angry third party who is responsible – well, I presume that they are angry about something. Throwing an egg, or a piece of fruit, or a grenade; firing a gun; charging the stage – any of these, and anything similar, precipitates an early end to the monologue and lumps one side with the benefits and the other side with the penalties described – depending on who the interrupter was seen as more closely related to in positions on subjects.

An eco-warrior staging a protest at a rally by a moderate supporter of ecological issues because the eco-warrior doesn’t think the politician is going far enough is usually bad news for that politician – a lose-lose proposition, no matter what the outcome.

That can put PCs in the interesting position of actively doing something to permit a monologue to continue, even if they oppose it or disagree with it. And doing so with minimum disruption, maybe even without coming to the attention of the monologuer (if they are in disguise).

Every proposed action should come with a warning from the GM if it risks going too far. Unless it’s by an NPC, in which case the GM knows whether or not it’s ‘going too far’ and should advise the PCs of the likely consequences.

Actions During A Monologue

Almost anything else, in terms of actions within a monologue, is fair game. Some actions can even be thought of as benefiting the monologue – a TV screen displaying some past egregious action on the part of an enemy, or showing them saying something that can be misinterpreted, or even interpreted correctly! Or conjuring a mystic smoke vision that is the equivalent. Or just about anything else you can think of.

As usual, though, there’s a caveat – whoever is making the monologue has to appear to remain focused on what he is saying and who he is saying it to. He can’t afford to look distracted or uncertain, not for a moment. Stalling for time while waiting for something to happen is the hardest part of a monologue. So much so that it is often better to forego the ‘stunt’ and get on with the monologue – it may be less effective, but it has far less of a risk of falling flat.

Preparatory Actions During A Monologue

Things that are absolutely permitted, even encouraged, are for players to think about what they want their characters to do when the monologue ends. The sheer drama of bolts of energy raining down on the monologuer just as he has announced his inevitable superiority to all challengers is hard to top.

Maneuvering to be in position to perform such actions is usually fine as well – so long as it’s done slowly and quietly and a little at a time. Looking like you’re trying to find a better vantage point to see the monologuer is especially unlikely to trigger any problems.

Coordinating actions for the end of the monologue can be an entirely different issue. If the PCs have some means of private communications, that’s one thing, let the players plot and plan all they want, while you keep up the simulated patter from the ‘stage’ or it’s equivalent. Players should not interrupt the monologue for any reason, even to ask a question about layout or where things are positioned – they should make assumptions, indicate to the GM without interrupting him what those assumptions are, and let him correct any errors in the same way (see ‘Interrupting the flow’ below).

If they have no such capability, require players to write down any assumptions they are going to make about what other characters (including the monologuer) are going to do at the end of the monologue and then write down their action (in general terms) without consultation with anyone else.

The better the players know each other’s characters, the more likely they are to get this second-guessing right. The less familiar they are with each other, the greater the comedy of errors that is likely to ensue. Both are entirely reasonable, given the basic assumptions that underpin those disparate outcomes.

Advanced Technique: Feeding Rope / Engaging In The Monologue

There are some clear benefits for the listening side of any monologue, but some speakers are canny and will try to avoid making the obvious mistakes of revealing their whole plot. They will show just enough of the cards in their hand to reassure any followers who may be wavering or uncertain, while keeping one or two firmly tucked up their sleeves. As a player I know once used to say regularly, “The alignment doesn’t read ‘Chaotic Stupid’.”

Some antagonists may choose to goad the monologuer on, in hopes of getting them to say too much, carried away by a wave of enthusiasm. This technique can be especially useful of the majority of the audience are disposed to be friendly to the monologuer, because the antagonist has little or nothing to lose – they can be seen by the audience to “lose” the debate with the monologuer while opening a doorway into a minefield for them to traipse through.

There is something of an art form to this technique – you need to challenge the monologuer strongly enough that they are forced to respond, but with an argument or challenge light enough that they can easily do so. They can’t be left in a position of being able to ignore the challenge, and the bias of the general audience means that no matter how good the line of challenge is, it won’t make much of a dent in the monologuer’s support.

The weaker that original support level, the more the monologuer’s line of argument can be challenged on its merits, and the more there is to gain from doing so. They are far less likely, when addressing a neutral or antagonistic audience, to be goaded into going too far (unless they have known self-control issues or other psychological quirks that can be preyed upon).

One thing should be clear – this technique falls apart if there are more than one challenger. “They have to gang up on me” is too easy an out for the monologuer, and completely overpowers the objective of leading them on. Therefore, should they wish to utilize this technique, PCs have to select one of their number to be their representative in challenging the monologuer. This will often be the character with the best Oratory skill (if there is any such thing in the game mechanics). Failing that, it becomes a heated debate as to which one makes for the best choice: Highest INT, Highest WIS, or Highest CHA (or their equivalents).

I think that it should come down to the grounds of the intended challenge(s) – challenging logic is INT, challenging practicality is WIS, and challenging personality is CHA.

The challenged monologuer should make a roll against the chosen stat or grounds, with the duration of the monologue thus far as a penalty. It’s a lot easier to prod someone into a misstep after they’ve hit their stride and gotten used to talking to the audience – they start to relax, and that’s when they become most vulnerable to this technique. Of course, if the PCs wait too long, the monologue might end and they will have missed their chance.

It might be that the best Orator amongst the PCs should focus not on what is being delivered in the monologue, but on the way it’s being delivered, with a view to identifying the perfect moment for someone else to interject; that’s up to the players and the strategy that they want to adopt.

“But I’m No Good At Public Speaking…”

Speaking of Oratory, there can be a big difference between the polished capabilities of a PC and those of the character’s player. In theory, it can also swing in the other direction, but I’ve never played with someone who was an accomplished public speaker – an actor or radio announcer, for example.

The GM has to make all appropriate allowances for this when a PC is making a speech, or egging a monologuer on. He also has to work hard on his own abilities in this respect, including polishing monologues until they gleam to the exact standard appropriate to the monologuer. That can be really hard to do if the GM has to roll on the spot for the effectiveness of the monologue; it’s frankly a lot easier for the GM to make his rolls in advance and write accordingly.

Not every word in a monologue has to be delivered. Actually delivering a multi-hour monologue? Boring!! This can come to the GM’s rescue, however; he can describe the subject matter of a section of the speech, how convincingly it is delivered, and how it is received, in far less time than actually delivering the speech – and with far less prep. Sprinkling in some key phrases from the speech is usually enough – especially any call to action, because the events that follow should derive from the reaction(s) to that call.

Interrupting The Flow with side-comments / side-chatter

Most of the time when I’m GMing, I have no problem with side-chatter and side-comments, jokes and puns and nuggets of information known by one of the players but not necessarily by his or her character. In fact, there are times when I rely on some of that to wallpaper over rough spots in the plot, or give me a break from exposition, or just to let a player engage more fully with the plotline in moments that don’t have his character doing very much.

There are limits to this tolerance, and my players seem to be especially bad at picking up those signals from my part of the table. Here’s a hint, guys: if I’m not engaging in the banter, or laughing along with the rest of you, it might be time to refocus! But never mind that – we manage to muddle through without me displaying signs of impatience – too often.

My tolerance goes way down when an NPC is speaking. If there’s a conversation going on, that’s a different story to some extent, but if the NPC is monologing, judge your need for a witticism very carefully, and be even more wary of side-discussions and side-stories and content criticisms. IBreak the mood or train of though of a monologue and I may rule that you said something In Character even if you didn’t mean to – with the full consequences outlined above for premature interruption. What’s more, if the character is not in a position to have access to any information used by the player, I may also rule that whatever they interrupted with is NOT what the player said, but is some cultural misinterpretation or misunderstanding thereof.

A lesser penalty is simply to forbid the players from performing any action suggested by someone their character can’t interact with, no matter how much it might make sense. One or two occasions of that – with appropriate explanations for the ruling afterwards – and they will usually get the hint. There may be other occasions when communications is not so constrained, and suggestions can flow thick and fast – that sort of collaboration is a whole different story, and your explanations should make that clear.

I’m generally fairly careful to make the players aware that someone is Monologing. It may be employing metagaming, but actually stating “He then begins to Monologue” is probably the best answer – so long as players know what that implies.

And that’s what this post is all about really. Game mechanics are all well and good – and sometimes useful – but its the immersion – in the game, in the plot, in the scene, in the characters, and in the moment – that is most important. The mechanics described in this post should be considered guidelines for integrating and simulating that immersion with the natural reality of cause-and-effect within the genre of game being played, a means to an end, and not an end in and of themselves.

The latter lends itself to the promotion of roll-playing over role-playing, and that’s something I resist at every opportunity.

Ultimately, the threat of developing game mechanics for Oratory and Monologing is probably as effective a weapon as actually doing so, at least most of the time; that’s another reason why I haven’t given too many game-mechanics details in this post. That’s something for GMs to keep in mind when assessing whether or not they need to take this issue one step further, and actually impose such house rules.

And that’s food for thought for everyone, both in this specific instance, and in general broader principle.

Further Reading

There are a lot of resources out there to help GMs (and players) prepare a monologue / speech. I’ve cherry-picked a number that at least looked promising, below. I’ve tried to group them so that those on a similar topic are close together, but the field is so broad that this won’t always have been possible.

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Trade In Fantasy Ch. 4: Modes Of Transport, Pt 2


This entry is part 10 in the series Trade In Fantasy

Rivers provide a natural alternative to roads and overland travel, if the river happens to go where you want it to. That’s more likely than it might initially seem, because rivers provide natural resources and defenses that make them natural locations for settlements, with transportation of cargo a bonus on top of those advantages.

While it fits the general subject matter of travel, this doesn’t really fit the subject of today’s post – but it was too good to leave out, and the relevant images that I did find were not as evocative. So here it resides. Image by Sean Wareing from Pixabay

Table Of Contents: In part one of this chapter:

Chapter 4: Modes Of Transport

4.0 A Word about Routes

    4.0.1 Baseline Model
    4.0.2 Relative Sizes
    4.0.3 Competitors
    4.0.4 Terrain I
    4.0.5 Terrain II
    4.0.6 Multi-paths and Choke Points

      4.0.6.1 Sidebar: Projection Of Military Force

    4.0.7 Mode Of Transport

4.1 Backpack / Litters / Shanks Pony

    4.1.1 Capacity
    4.1.2 Personalities / Roleplay

4.2 Horseback

    4.2.1 Capacity
    4.2.2 Requirements
    4.2.3 Personalities / Roleplay

4.3 Mule Train

    4.3.1 Capacity
    4.3.2 Requirements
    4.3.3 Personalities / Roleplay

4.4 Wagons

    4.4.1 Capacity
    4.4.2 Requirements
    4.4.3 Other Exceptions – Animal Size

      4.4.3.1 Sidebar: Road Trains

    4.4.4 Fodder / Food & Water Needs

      4.4.4.1 People
      4.4.4.2 Horses
      4.4.4.3 Mules
      4.4.4.4 Oxen / Cattle
      4.4.4.5 Elephants
      4.4.4.6 Other

    4.4.5 Personalities / Roleplay

In today’s post:

4.5 River Boats & Barges

    4.5.0 A Splice Of Maritime History

      4.5.0.1 Dugouts & Canoes
      4.5.0.2 Rafts
      4.5.0.3 Boats
      4.5.0.4 Poled Rafts & Barges
      4.5.0.5 Oars
      4.5.0.6 Land-based motive power
      4.5.0.7 Sail
      4.5.0.8 Better Sails
      4.5.0.9 Trading Ships
      4.5.0.10 Warships & Pirates
      4.5.0.11 Beyond the age of sail
      4.5.0.12 Riverboats
      4.5.0.13 Sources

    4.5.1 Riverboat Capacity
    4.5.2 Favorable Winds

      4.5.2.1 The Beafort Wind Scale

    4.5.3 Favorable Currents
    4.5.4 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements
    4.5.5 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions
    4.5.6 Extreme Weather Events
    4.5.7 The Tempest Scale
    4.5.8 Vessel Rating
    4.5.9 Weather Cataclysms

And, in future installments:

4.6 Seagoing Vessels

    4.6.1 Capacity
    4.6.2 Favorable Winds
    4.6.3 Favorable Currents
    4.6.4 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements
    4.6.5 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions
    4.6.6 Extreme Weather Events
    4.6.7 Vessel Rating
    4.6.8 Weather Cataclysms

4.7 Exotic Modes Of Transport

    4.7.1 Flight
    4.7.2 Teleport
    4.7.3 Magic Gates & Portals
    4.7.4 Capacities

.8 Loading & Unloading

In future chapters:
  1. Land Transport
  2. Waterborne Transport
  3. Spoilage
  4. Key Personnel
  5. The Journey
  6. Arrival
  7. Journey’s End
  8. Adventures En Route
4.5 River Boats & Barges

If I were to use the term “River boat”, depending on where you are from, one of two images probably come to mind; Either a paddle-wheel steamer, like this one:

…or, perhaps, one of the canal-going houseboats of Europe, which could house whole families but are these days more synonymous with a mobile retirement lifestyle:

…which are often open-sided these days and used for tourism. But there are other classes of river-going vessel and some are explicitly devoted to trade and cargo-carrying, and those are easily overlooked. Perhaps a little historical context to start…

    4.5.0 A Splice Of Maritime History

    Boats pre-date writing and were actually built by Homo Erectus about 800,000 years ago, or so it is believed. Their simple vessels then enabled them to spread out to other parts of the world.

    The earliest known depiction of a maritime vessel of any kind is on a rock carving in Azerbaijan dating to 10,000 BC and showed a boat carrying about 20 men.

      4.5.0.1 Dugouts & Canoes

      The Pesse Canoe is the oldest known and confirmed vessel. Discovered in the Netherlands, it dates back to 8200-7600 BC. It’s three feet long and made from the hollowed out trunk of a single Pinus Sylverstris tree.

      Image from Drents Museum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

      In time, people learned how to construct a wooden frame and stretch animal hides (or later, canvas) over it, which were coated in sap or fat to seal any gaps. Better materials for that job soon followed.

      4.5.0.2 Rafts

      The first method of using multiple pieces of timber in the one vessel was almost certainly a raft;

      A simple raft – in this case, with an unexpected passenger. Image by Ronald Plett from Pixabay

      A 7,000 year-old raft made of reeds has been found in Kuwait and is the earliest known example. However, the workmanship displayed is such that this was clearly not the first – it’s just the one that happened to have survived. Some have even suggested that the raft predates the dugout canoe, but what archaeological evidence there is argues otherwise.

      4.5.0.3 Boats

      There were any number of solutions to the problem of keeping the water out of vessels made of cut timbers, none of them completely adequate on their own, but eventually they were combined to create what we would recognize as a true boat.

      Of course, metal tools were needed to create the planks in the first place, so we’re talking after 3000 BC here. This also made possible the construction of masts, and therefore, of sails. So I’ll have to backtrack a little to talk about motivating power.

      This example is relatively simple and shows the construction more clearly than most. Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

      A more sophisticated boat that is – to my eye – slightly reminiscent of the Dragon Longboats of the vikings. Image by Uwe Jelting from Pixabay

      Early boats had a limit of about 400 tons, fully laden. Trips that took just days when winds were favorable become sagas of weeks and months when they weren’t. This had two effects that have persisted for centuries: First, sailors became very superstitious, adopting a ‘take no chances’ approach to the subject; and second, they became acutely interested in meteorology, because winds are an aspect of weather, and there are patterns both daily, periodic, seasonal, and annual – and they spelt the difference between a successful voyage and one where the crew arrived destitute and starving.

      Adding fuel to the first was the spread of disease – even back then, people knew that not being around other people who were sick made it less likely that you would get sick – but on a boat for weeks on end, there was no place to hide. On top of which, there were some maladies to which boatmen seemed especially vulnerable like Rickets and Scurvy. It was not until the causes of these diseases were understood that they ceased being a source of ongoing fear aboard. And if the only defense you have is rooted in superstition, then you had better be superstitious!

      4.5.0.4 Poled Rafts & Barges

      Rafts with some sidewalls created a barge, but they needed some form of locomotion to get them where they were going. In place of paddles (which probably came along not long after the original canoes), a long stick was used to push the floating assemble of vessel and cargo along – a technique still in use today in some parts of the world.

      Image by DEGAN Gabin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

      Barges rarely have their own source of motive power. They are pulled by another vessel, or (if used as a ferry) by ropes or chains attached to the shore, or by land-based motive power (see below). It is only in the industrial age when power sources improved massively that this has ceased to be the universal case – and even now, the old definition still holds true in most locations.

      What has changed is that the barges used to be towed by tug boats and are now more frequently pushed by “pusher boats” (not a terribly imaginative name).

      However, some river barges did have sails, especially when ship’s sails were not as well developed. Most river merchant barges in England in the 18th century had a mast, for example. They could carry 20-40 tons of cargo – an important reference value for us, going forward.

      4.5.0.5 Oars

      Oars meant that the work of moving the vessel could be spread amongst many, enabling greater speed and more reliable performance. This led, in time, from the humble rowboat to the Syracusia, the floating palace of Hieron, King of Syracuse, designed by Archimedes and alleged to have been the largest transport ship in history in ancient times. These days we have only estimates as to its dimensions, but it had a garden, a palace, and a temple, all on the main deck. It housed 200 soldiers as well as the court and the slaves to make it go, and everything those imply. The Syracusia could carry a cargo of some 1600 to 1800 tons and a capacity of 1,942 passengers, according to one Historian. She was reportedly too big for any port in Sicily, and thus only sailed once from Syracuse in Sicily to Alexandria in the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, whereupon she was given as a present to Ptolemy III Euergetes.

      This image is an exaggerated depiction of the vessel, a hand-colored copperplate engraving from Robert von Spalart’s “Historical Picture of the Costumes of the Principal People of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages,” Metz, 1810. Copyright on this image has expired, so it is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

      If you look closely, the author has added masts and furled sails to his depiction of the Syracusia, but those were actually not thought to exist on the real vessel.

      4.5.0.6 Land-based motive power

      Where the terrain was amenable, it was possible to have one or more teams of horses pulling a barge along the river. Coordination of multiple teams was always a problem with this approach. The advantage was that the river was carrying the cargo, so it actually took relatively little motive power to get the vessel moving, regardless of the load it happened to carry.

      Some places and cultures even went so far as to make roads along the river bank (carefully removing any trees between the two) in order to facilitate this mode of transport.

      4.5.0.7 Sail

      Sails, when they appeared, were something of a game-changer. Early sails could only go with the wind, at best quartering it; if the wind wasn’t blowing in anything approximating the right direction, the sails had to be furled and the oars broken out.

      There is ample evidence to show that the Ancient Egyptians had sailing boats used for river travel – there are relief carvings showing the transport of obelisks for Temple Entrances along the Nile. These had (and needed) oars as well as a single square sail, and were about 100m long (328 feet).

      After about 500 years of using them for River travel, Egyptian boats were good enough to venture out into the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

      No maritime history is complete without at least mentioning the Phoenicians. From 1550 to about 300 BC, Phoenicians from the Canaan civilization (yes, the one referenced in the “Settlers Of” board-games) were making boats known as Galleys. The primary motive power was oars; most had multiple sails for gaining added speed, arranged in rows. They were used for trade, warfare, exploration, and piracy, and remained in use until the 19th century, though they were at their height in 16th-18th centuries.

      A Monoreme has one group of rowers; a Bireme, two; and triremes have three banks of oarsmen. Most galleys are Biremes, though the Greeks and Romans had a few triremes.

      In 1571, during the Lepanto war, hundreds of rowing ships and about 400 galleys were used, marking it as the largest naval war recorded in history.

      Almost 600 years earlier, from 1000 AD, Vikings used Long Boats for raiding, trade, war, and migration. These were rowed by 60-70 men and also carried a large Mainsail for when the winds were favorable. This made them quicker and larger but narrower than the Galleons and other ships of the time. It made them especially suitable for river travel as they did not have a huge draft.

      A lovely rendering of a Junk in a modern harbor. Image by Victoria from Pixabay

      And, about 100 years later, the Chinese started to build boats that we would now recognize as Junks, as warships and cargo vessels. They were much advanced over the European ships that – like these Junks – added rudders and watertight compartments to their designs, even though the Chinese were hundreds of years earlier in adding these innovations. The largest of these Junks measured 150m in length (nearly 500 feet) and had 9 masts.

      4.5.0.8 Better Sails

      People can be extremely clever, and eventually a way was found to configure sails so that vessels could sail directly into the wind.

      That meant no more need for oars, and smaller crews, and more space for cargo. Thus began the Age Of Sail.

      This example seems to be using its extra capacity to carry more people, though – and that was a legitimate purpose. Whole armies could travel under sail – all you needed was enough vessels.

      4.5.0.9 Trading Ships

      Ships could grow bigger, faster, and stronger, and trading ships took to the open seas. More on that sort of thing in the next post of the series!

      The largest vessels of the age of sail (16th-18th centuries) were, perhaps, the Galleons of Spain and Portugal. It’s when you start reading up on them that a term crops up that I have avoided using thus far: displacement. In essence, this is the weight of the vessel and cargo, which equals the amount of water that has to be pushed out of the way for the vessel to float; every vessel has a maximum displacement, and there is usually a lower figure that constitutes a maximum safe displacement.

      Load enough cargo onto a vessel and the sides will sink so much that water starts coming in over the sides. At that point, the vessel starts sinking. Adding to that are waves, which are generally fairly gentle on rivers, moderate on lakes (even in the stormiest of seas), but can be truly epic out at sea. And making this problem worse is the fact that most ships that don’t have flat bottoms tend to sail at an inclined angle because of the wind, so the water is a lot closer on one side than the other – and so are the waves. The amount of sail you raise increases both your speed and this angle, relative to the force of the wind – so it’s not a simple thing at all.

      4.5.0.10 Warships & Pirates

      Inevitably – and possibly even before trading vessels – boats were used for battle. These days, it’s considered normal for there to be specialized designs for our warships, but in the age of sail, vessels were far more multi-function. Ships routinely carried cannon and men; the major difference between a warship and a trading vessel was how many of these were traded away for cargo capacity.

      Once you have armed ships, and other vessels carrying valuable cargoes, the rise of piracy seems all but inevitable. These days, that adds to the romance of the era, but in the day, piracy was a scourge – especially once politics entered the picture.

      4.5.0.11 Beyond the age of sail

      We’re now entering waters that are less relevant to the subject at hand, so I’ll make this fairly brief. Steam power and then diesel power signaled the end of the age of sail, liberating vessels from dependence on the wind. Steel hulls made vessels stronger, and the combination plus better designs made them faster. Modern cargo ships can be awesome sights to behold and their capacities are stupendous. The current designs sacrifice gains is speed from the technological improvements of the modern age for size and capacity. Of course, this only makes for a bigger problem when something goes wrong – remember the ship stuck in the Suez Canal, or the problems caused by the Exxon Valdez?

      4.5.0.12 Riverboats

      With the historical context sorted, it becomes clear that there are three primary factors that determine how much a vessel can carry, and how fast it can travel when at its maximum safe loading:

           1. Motive power & sophistication
           2. Hull material and construction technique
           3. Size and shape

      Each advance in one of these areas increases the capacity, and/or speed, of the vessel. Quite often, an advance pushes the boundaries to the point where one of the other areas becomes the limiting factor.

      Riverboats are usually less sturdy than ships built for the open seas, as they don not have to withstand the high winds or large waves. There is also a perception that they tend to be slower, but this is only true when sea-going vessels are operating at their best possible speed, or in the modern era, where capacity is the number one design criterion.

      Critically, the design of a riverboat is restricted by the width and depth of the river they are designed to travel, as well as by the height above the water of any bridges that span the river. Mississippi Paddle-wheelers could operate in water less than 2 meters deep (6.56 feet).

      A riverboat can be considered a narrow barge for the purposes of defining cargo capacity. If a barge can carry 20-40 tons and a riverboat is the same length but only 1/5th the width, a rough rule of thumb would be that the riverboat could carry 4-8 tons of cargo.

      The reality is not so encouraging because riverboats don’t have a square shape. They are more going to approximate one of the shapes below:

      The diagram above looks very complicated, but it isn’t really. Let’s take them one silhouette at a time.

      The top one has a distance from bow to widest point of the vessel of a and a length down the middle to a line connecting both widest points of b. Half the width is obviously e. It equates the size of the craft with an area formed by four triangles, a-b-e. This is exactly 1/2 of the area of a rectangle 2e-2b, by definition – and that rectangle is what we used earlier to get an estimate of 4-8 tons of cargo, earlier

      The reality is overlaid and shaded – the hull curves outside the a line. And the stern is closer to the mid-line than the simple method given above, by a distance, d. I have seen suggestions that the two stern triangles should be (b- 1/2 d) by e as a means of correcting the estimate. I’m not having it – I contend that the extra area at the stern closely balances the lost area at the sides, close enough for gaming purposes, anyway.

      The second diagram shows an even more complicated approach. It only takes one glance to say that the shape more accurately reflects that of a real boat.

      It divides the length of the boat into three pieces – b, c, and f. Instead of measuring to the broadest point, it measures to a point some undetermined distance forwards of that, at which point, the boat has a width of 2g. It then extends two lines parallel to the mid-line of the boat from those points until they again intersect with the hull, giving the width of g; this defines the length of c. While I’ve shown it to be roughly the same as b, the reality is that it could be more, or it could be less. Anyway, this defines a square, c-by-2g. On each side there are a couple of triangles (h=e-g)-by-(1/2 c), 4 of them in total, two each side of the boat. And then we are left with the stern – you could use the total length and subtract b and c to get f, or you could pretend that f is b again as I did in the first diagram. The problem is that the compensatory mechanism isn’t there any more. So now we really do need to shorten the length by some fraction of d – but what fraction? There are too many variables. This model looks more accurate, but it actually has a boat-load more fudge factors built into it. As a means of estimating the cargo capacity, it is worthless.

      I should also fess up to having made a deliberate error in the diagrams – the mid-point of the port side (the bottom side as you view these diagrams) is just a little closer to the bow than the one on the other side. As a result, this boat would have a tendency to turn – my instinct says to the right, but I’m not sure of that. This sort of manufacturing defect is all too common when you’re talking about manual labor and craftsmen without modern conveniences.

      4.5.0.13 Sources

      I cherry-picked a lot of different sources in compiling the above, extremely abbreviated though it is.

           ▪ Google
                □ especially extracts from When Were Boats Invented | Marine Insight.com, and
                □ the entry for “Ship” | Encyclopedia Brittanica

           ▪ The Complete History Of Boats | Newswires

           ▪ Rioverboats | Wikipedia

           ▪ Early History | Everything About Boats.org*

           ▪ The History Of The Barge and Why It’s Still A Crucial Part Of The Supply Chain | OpenTug

           ▪ The History Of Barges | Archway Marine Lighting

           ▪ Barge | Wikipedia

           ▪ An Insider’s Guide to the History of Barges | European Waterways

           ▪ Asian maritime & trade chronology to 1700 CE | Maritime Asia

           ▪ Publisher’s Summary, A Maritime History of East Asia ed. by Masashi Haneda and Mihoko Oka | Kyoto University Press

           ▪ Maritime History Of Ancient China | China Underground, and, finally,

           ▪ Naval History Of China | Wikipedia

      * NB: one of the security certificates at Everything About Boats.org expired 40-odd days ago, so my Antivirus and browser both chucked a fit over visiting this web-page. Hopefully the issue gets resolved soon.

    4.5.1 Riverboat Capacity

    If you have defined a trade unit as the cumulative carrying capacity of X people of a specific average strength – which we have – then it’s easy to get a total weight for one. Divide the capacity of the vessel – determined above to be 2-4 tons – by this to get an exact number of trade units.

    But we don’t care about exact numbers very much – we want something sloppy and simple.

    What’s more, if river transport is the key to the operation set up by the PCs (or by an NPC), then that approach is putting the cart before the horse – it’s very much simpler to define the boat as having a particular cargo capacity in Trade Units and worry about the manpower situation and loading / unloading later on.

    Abstracting vessels in this way makes everything a lot simpler.

    My suggested values:

      Rafts: Sm 0.25, Me 0.333, Lg 0.5 TU.
      Canoes: Sm 0.125, Me 0.25, Lg 0.333 TU.
      Small Boats: VSm 0.333, Typ 0.5, Lg 0.75 TU.
      Medium Boats: VSm 0.5, Typ 0.75-1.25, Lg 1.25-2 TU
      Large Boats: VSm 0.75-1, Typ 1-1.75, Lg 1.75-2.5 TU
      Barges: Sm 2, Me 4, Lg 6-8, VLg 8-12 TU

    You can also multiply those numbers by any of the following factors to get a smaller unit of measurement if that’s more convenient: 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 20, or 24.

    Those last couple are pretty extreme. I think 6 or 12 would be the most useful.

    Factor of 6:

      Rafts: Sm 1.5, Me 2, Lg 3 TU.
      Canoes: Sm 0.75, Me 1.5, Lg 2 TU.
      Small Boats: VSm 2, Typ 3, Lg 4.5 TU.
      Medium Boats: VSm 3, Typ 4.5-7.5, Lg 7.5-12 TU
      Large Boats: VSm 4.5-6, Typ 6-10.5, Lg 10.5-15 TU
      Barges: Sm 12, Me 24, Lg 36-42, VLg 42-72 TU

    Factor of 12:

      Rafts: Sm 3, Me 4, Lg 6 TU.
      Canoes: Sm 1.5, Me 3, Lg 4 TU.
      Small Boats: VSm 4, Typ 6, Lg 9 TU.
      Medium Boats: VSm 6, Typ 9-15, Lg 15-24 TU
      Large Boats: VSm 9-12, Typ 12-21, Lg 21-30 TU
      Barges: Sm 24, Me 48, Lg 72-84, VLg 84-144 TU

    Remember: You control the design and parameters of the vessel. You can define its capacity as whatever is convenient to you, and the definition of a Trade Unit that you are going to use derives from that. Try to stick to simple fractions, though!

    Complicating everything is the fact that our measurements are in tons (presumably short tons) while everything else in this work is measured in kg, except when it’s in lb..

    1 short ton = 2000 lb = 907.2 kg.

    So, 2-4 tons = 1814.4 – 3624.8 kg.

    If the higher number is 24 trade units (factor of 12, Medium Boat, upper end of the scale), each TU would weigh 151.03333333 kg – close enough that I would call it 150 kg.

    Or, using lb, it’s 8000 lb total = 24 TU, then 1 TU = 333.333 lb. Which is highly inconvenient – I would round it to 325 lb.

    Double to get lift equivalent, look up the highest capacity in the maximum encumbrance bracket on the STR table, and this defines a TU as 1 character of STR 23.5. Or 2 of STR 18.5. or 3 of STR 15.5. Or 4 of STR 13.5. Or 5 of STR 12, which is by far the most reasonable average STR that’s been mentioned, assuming that loading and unloading freight is a job that attracts somewhat stronger-than-average types.

    You can see how everything starts to fall into place very quickly – in the space of a couple of paragraphs, we’ve defined a large vessel, a Cargo Unit / Trade Unit (by weight), and a Labor Unit (5 men of STR 12).

    4.5.2 Favorable Winds

    How fast can a riverboat powered by wind, go? Well, ignoring currents for the moment, and looking only at how good favorable winds are, let’s stick a top value of 30 knots (empty) – simply because that’s the speed of a strong wind.

      1 knot is 1.15 mph

    (actually, it’s slightly more, but that’s close enough).

    So 30 knots is 34.5 mph, or 55.56 kph.

    If the wind isn’t strong enough, the vessel goes nowhere. The wind needed to get a vessel underway and sustain it despite friction / resistance from the ocean is the area of sail divided by the mass of the vessel, including cargo.

    Too complicated!!

    Let’s instead define a standard size of sail that’s equivalent to the size of the boat, which is defined as a certain number of trade units.

      Maximum Speed at full sail = 34.5 mph (or one of the other units as is convenient) × Weight of boat / (Weight of boat + Cargo).

    So, we need to know how much a boat weighs. Or whatever sort of vessel we’re using.

    This sort of information is incredibly hard to track down, I know from past experience. So let’s cheat and simply assign some numbers.

    A large riverboat weighs as much as two large pick-up trucks. There, done. Call it about 5 tons, or 10,000 pounds.

    So, our formula now becomes:

      Maximum Speed at full sail = Base Speed × 10,000 / (10,000 + Cargo).

    Still not the most useful of formulas. Let’s rearrange it a little to see if that helps:

      Maximum Speed at full sail × (10,000 + cargo in lb) = 34.5 mph (or one of the other units as is convenient) × 10,000 = 345,000.

    But wait, it gets even more convenient: Simply divide both the 10,000 and 345,000 by the weight assigned to one Trade Unit (650 lb in the example), and round appropriately to get a bespoke formula specific to your choices:

      Maximum Speed at full sail × (15.25 + cargo in TU) = 530.

    This is starting to get somewhere. Now, that’s at a full 24 “Sails” – so multiplying the speed by the actual amount of sail available and dividing by 24 takes another factor into account. That “530” is an idealized situation, after all. The reality might be that this vessel can only provide 20 sails out of an ideal 24.

      Maximum Speed at full sail × (15.25 + cargo in TU) = 530 × Sails / 24.

    530 × 20 / 24 = 441.67. Less convenient than I would have hoped, but you can’t have everything.

    Next, let’s consider how “perfectly ideal” the wind direction is. Consider a compass, as shown to the right:

    As you can see, it’s a simple trigonometry calculation to derive the effective wind speed from the actual wind speed and direction.

    Too Complicated!

    So let’s simplify: we know that any wind direction other than perfect is going to reduce the effective wind speed to something less than the actual wind speed, yes? So let’s define Effective wind speed as a fraction – in tenths, maybe – of Ideal wind speed.

    100% (perfect) drops off to 90%, then 80%, 70%, 60% and so on, all the way down past 10% to 0% at 90° to perfect wind direction.

    All we have to do is incorporate that into our personalized formula:

      Maximum Speed at full sail × (15.25 + cargo in TU) = 5.3 × %Wind × Sails / 24.

    What’s good about this formula is that it lets you trade off one factor for another. You can see how much faster the vessel will be if you drop 50% of the cargo – or add an extra 50% onto the top.

    Or you can set a desired speed, make a reasonable assumption about the wind, and determine how much cargo you can carry.

    Which brings in another factor to consider (this one’s helpful): Statistics. We don’t want to have to waste time as GMs rolling for weather when the PCs aren’t even going to be there to experience it. Instead, define climate as typical averages, and assume that no matter what happens, over time, the average experience will trend toward that typical average.

    The typical average for summer is 70% favorable winds, and only a 10% chance of zero favorability? The average wind speed is 20 knots? We want to carry 5 TUs of cargo? Our vessel only carries 18 sails out of a possible 24? What is our average speed?

    Let’s plug those numbers into our formula:

      Average Speed at full sail × (15.25 + 5) = 5.3 × 70 × 18 / 24
      = S × (20.25) = 278.25
      S = 13.74 mph. In an 8-hour day, that’s about 110 miles.

    What about that 10% chance? That simply means that there’s a 90% chance of some progress, with the minimum defined as being 10% of whatever speed we can usually expect.

      10% of an 8-hour day is 48 minutes. On a typical day, we’ll make average speed for 7 hrs 12 minutes. At worst, we might have to slowly limp along and wait for the wind to change for 2×48 minutes = 1 hr 36 minutes. But if our normal speed is 13.74 @ 70%, then our speed at 10% is 1.96 mph – so even in this worst case, we will make 3.1 miles progress in that 1 hr 36 minutes, and about 88 miles in the rest of the day – so even in the worst case, we get 91 miles traveled.

      Things aren’t quite as rosy if we look at a bigger picture. 10% of a 3-month season is about 12.2 days. So, conceivably, we might experience those worst-case conditions for up to 12.2 days.

      The average is going to be less – a lot less. There are 6 × 6 × 6 possible results on a 3d6 roll; define each season as that many rolls of 3d6. The results will range from 3 to 18, a range of 16. The bottom 10% is 1.6 – so we want only 3-4.6. Everything else is fine and covered by the 70% average.

      It’s really hard to get a 4.6 on dice that only roll integers. But, using a 3d6 graph, like the one below, we can get estimate it.

      The above shows a quick graph showing “at least” results for 3d6. I’ve drawn a red bar at more-or-less where 4.6 is and noted where it crossed the curve. A Horizontal line from that point shows the % chance, or in this case, of time that the average event duration is going to be. Eight of those adds up to about 25%, so 25/8 = 3.125. But that’s an average – while there might be an event up to twice this long, there would need to be multiple much shorter events to get the average back down.

      If there are 9 other events:

      9 × X + 6.25 = 10 × 3.125 = 31.25
      X = (31.25 – 6.25) / 9 = 25 / 9 = 2.78 days.

    If there are 19 other events:

      19 × X + 6.25 = 20 × 3.125 = 62.5
      X = (62.5 – 6.25) / 19 = 56.25 / 19 = 2.96 days.

    If there are 121 other events, i.e. the double-length happens once a season, but at least part of every day in that season is worst possible conditions:

      121 × X + 6.25 = 122 × 3.125 = 381.25
      X = (381.25 – 6.25) / 121 = 375 / 121 = 3.1 days.

    Here’s the trend: the smaller the incidence of double-length periods, the closer to the 3.125 days the rest of the time has to be to get the average to work out. The deviation from that average just gets smaller and smaller.

    So, if your market is 100 miles away, once a season it might take you a week; most of the time, it will take 1-4 days. And, with the 10% figure still in mind, 9 times out of 10 it will be the one-day number.

      The practical upshot: Use the 1-day time with a 10% chance of it taking longer. Use 3d6-3 to determine how much longer, dividing the result by 4 to get the number of additional days.

    Of course, if your chance of worst-case results is 1 in 122, or 1 in 365, or 1 in 3650 – or 1 in 5 – you will get different answers. This shows how I derived that simple statement, to be used only when it matters, so that you can make your own settings and determine the results.

      4.5.2.1 The Beafort Wind Scale

      I was going to link to the US National Weather Service’s page on the subject, but given recent events there, I don’t think I can rely on it. Nor was the Australian equivalent much more helpful. So, instead, here’s a link to the Royal Meteorological Society‘s page on the subject of Wind Scale.

      In a nutshell:

           0 Calm = <1 km/h = <1 mph = <1 knots.
           Probable wave ht = 0 even at sea.

           1 Light Air = 1-5 km/h = 1-3 mph = 1-3 knots;
           Probable wave ht = 0.1 m at sea.

           2 Light Breeze = 6-11 km/h = 4-7 mph = 4-6 knots;
           Probable wave ht 0.2 m, max 0.3m.

           3 Gentle Breeze = 12-19 km/h = 8-12 mph = 7-10 knots;
           Wave ht 0.6m, max 1.0m.

           4 Moderate Breeze = 20-28 km/h = 13-18 mph = 11-16 knots;
           Wave ht 1 m, max 1.5 m.

           5 Fresh Breeze = 29-38 km/h = 19-24 mph = 17-21 knots;
           Wave ht 2m to 2.5 m. Crested wavelets on inland waters.

           6 Strong Breeze = 38-49 km/h = 25-31 mph = 22-27 knots;
           Wave Ht 3m to 4m. Incidence of large waves increasing.

           7 Near Gale = 50-61 km/h = 32-38 mph = 28-33 knots;
           Wave ht 4m to 5.5m. Foam blown in streaks across the sea.
           Vessels should seek shelter.

           8 Gale = 62-74 km/h = 39-46 mph = 34-40 knots;
           Wave ht 5.5m to 7.5m. Wave crests begin to break apart into Spindrifts.
            Be prepared to cut sails loose if they cannot be lowered quickly enough.

           9 Strong Gale = 75-88 km/h = 47-54 mph = 41-47 knots.
           Wave ht 7m to 10m. Wave crests topple over, spray affects visibility.
           Risk of masts being torn free if ship is under sail.
           Do not attempt to quarter or sail against the wind.

           10 Storm = 89-102 km/h = 55-63 mph = 48-55 knots.
           Wave ht 9m to 12.5m. Sea surface is largely white.
           Uproots trees, may blow down masts & rigging even if sails are furled.
           Structural damage is likely and extensive.
           Seldom experienced inland.

           11 Violent Storm = 103-117 km/h = 64-72 mph = 56-63 knots.
           Wave ht 11.5m to 16m. Rarely experienced even at sea.
           Accompanied by widespread damage.
           Medium-sized ships become completely lost to view behind waves.
           Seas are covered in white foam and visibility is seriously impaired.
           Masts and rigging almost certain to be lost.
           Decks likely to buckle. Keels may break. Ships may be torn apart.

           12 Hurricane = 118+ km/h = 73+ mph = 64+ knots.
           Wave hts 14m+. May generate tsunami-like waves.
           Virtually zero visibility, there’s too much water in the air.
           Almost everyone knows what Hurricanes are capable of.

      Tornadoes: The enhanced Fujita Scale lists the following:
           65-85 mph = EF0 (light damage)
           86-110 mph = EF1 (moderate damage)
           111-135 mph = EF2 (considerable damage)
           136-165 mph = EF3 (severe damage)
           166-200 mph = EF 4 (devastating damage)
           >200 mph = EF5 (incredible damage)

      It’s worth comparing those speeds with the Beafort Scale for wind speeds – EF0 essentially starts part-way through B11.

      This Wikipedia Page also describes the sort of damage that accompanies each level on the EF scale. The information has limited relevance to vessels, however, given that buildings are essentially attached as solidly to the ground as possible, and therefore are liable to be torn apart; that’s not true of a boat, which is likely to be lifted into the air (perhaps to some considerable height). Note that the damage to “large vehicles” described assumes vehicles constructed of steel; for wooden vessels, such damage would occur one category sooner.

    4.5.3 Favorable Currents

    Wind isn’t the only thing that moves boats – there are also currents in the water. These are typically a fairly languid pace, because unless they are specifically designed for it (and not for carrying cargo), boats and barges can’t cope with raging river currents.

    The average speed of a river current, Google informs me, is 3-4 mph (5-6 kph). The actual value depends on the river’s size, gradient, water volume, and conditions. In a flood situation, a fast-running river can achieve speeds of 15 mph.

    The fastest water flow in a river is typically in the middle of the channel and around the outside of bends.

    Unless you’re talking about some sort of river ferry, the situation is simple: the current is either for or against you, because you want to head either upstream or down. So it either adds to the effective windspeed (going downstream) or subtracts from it (going upstream).

    In comparison to the wind speed, it’s a relatively minor variable, but something to be aware of, nevertheless.

    One important thing to remember is that what helps you coming, hinders you going – if currents were all the same speed, all the time, it would be, overall, a non-factor across a round trip.

    But that’s not the case. Tides raise water levels, and that changes river size and (effectively) deepens channels, and those factors make currents run faster if the tide is going out and slower when it is coming in. Get your timing right, and the river gives you a little added boost to your efficiency; get it wrong, and it will fight you.

    As a very rough rule of thumb, tides occur 1 day + 50 minutes apart. Over a 7-day period, that 50-minute ‘drift’ totals almost 6 hours; over a 30-day period, it’s 25 hours. Over a year, about 12.674 days – or 12 days, 16 hours, and some minutes. But there are variations according to time of year and local geography and many other factors. In fact, calculating tides used to be so difficult that a calculating machine was developed exclusively for the purpose. You can get a lot more information on the subject at this Wikipedia Page..

    4.5.4 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Oarsmen Requirements

    The one thing you can be sure of about the weather is that there will be times when it seems dead-set against you.

    When that happens, you have two choices: drop anchors and (effectively) moor yourself to the bottom, or fight back – with oars.

    The right place to start is obviously by thinking about the use of oars in a completely becalmed situation, and then to extend that to cover situations where one or both of these natural forces is opposing you.

    So I’m going to do it the other way around, because I can.

    Whatever speed the oarsmen can generate under ideal conditions has to be enough to counter the effective wind speed (allowing for the current) that is trying to push you in some other direction.

    Obviously, if the sails are up, that gets a lot harder – multiply the wind speed by the square root of the Sail Number +1 before applying the effects of the current.

      If you have 15 “sails” up, that’s 4 × the wind speed for the purposes of determining rowing speed.

    Clearly, if the effective wind speed is more than your oarsmen can generate, you’ll go backwards. This is so unnatural in any sort of marine vessel that helmsmen have been known to turn their tillers and rudders the wrong way – go hunting for footage of someone trying unsuccessfully to reverse with a trailer and you’ll get some idea of how confused they can get. You can literally tell someone to turn left and they will turn right. Either comedy or disaster soon follows.

    The problem with currents is that they flow whether the sails are up or not. On a river, that’s not too bad, because they are (generally) predictable to at least some extent; at sea it can be disastrous.

      So, to get the rowing speed of the vessel, total it’s weight and that of any cargo on board, and divide by the total carrying capacity of the oarsmen, then multiply by 84%, and multiply all that by the typical rowing speed over distance of 14 km/h.

    If the oar design is more primitive than the best modern oars, reduce that 84%. Even the most primitive oars can manage 25-30% efficiency, though. For simplicity, I would use 24%, because that gives a nice, round 60% loss of efficiency – so all I have to do is estimate where on that 60% scale the current state of the art is.

    Another factor that has to be taken into account is vessel size, because that impacts oar size and therefore the difficulty of manhandling the oar. Large vessels may have three or four people manning each oar, they are so long and heavy. If you have only 3 people when you should have 4, that’s going to reduce your efficiency to 75% of what it otherwise would be.

      Let’s take the vessel we described earlier – 15.25 Trade Units, plus 5 TUs in cargo, for a total of 20.25, with one TU being defined as 650 lb.

      If the average STR of the oarsmen is 12, that’s a lift value each of 130 lb, or a carry capacity of 65lb. So 10 oarsmen is enough to get 1 TU up to full speed. Which means we need 10 × 20.25 = 202.5 oarsmen.

      We have only 60 oarsmen, let’s say. That’s 60 / 202.5 × 84% (at best) × 14 = 3.484 km/h = 2.165 mph = 1.88 knots.

      With the sails furled, any current faster than this can’t be overcome. If the current is assisting, on the other hand, it adds to this speed, and the oarsmen are as much assisting in steering the vessel as they are propelling it.

      And that’s with the full 84% efficiency (reduced for the shortage of crew). If it was only 64%, the speeds would be 60 / 202.5 × 64% × 14 = 2.655 km/h = 1.65 mph = 1.4336 knots.

      The long and the short of it is that 60 oarsmen aren’t really enough for a vessel of this size.

    4.5.5 Unfavorable Winds / Currents – Sail Solutions

    The invention of the lateen or latin-rig sail – a triangular sail mounted at an angle and in a fore-and-after direction – permits a vessel to tack or zig-zag around an overall direction upwind.

    In practice, the closest you can sail toward the wind source is 45 degrees.

    This creates the zig-zag with 90 degree turns (approximately), each of which requires the lateen to be reset.

    The technicalities of how the Lateen achieves this motion aren’t all that important. What matters is this: if you don’t have a lateen sail, you aren’t sailing closer then broad-side to the wind; your vessel simply isn’t configured to do it.

    Obviously, if you have such a sail, things become possible that weren’t before.

    The most efficient lateen is effectively only 2 or 3 sails worth; most are only 1 “sail”. So speed is obviously going to be compromised.

      Let’s look at the example from earlier – 20 sails out of 24 possible, 15.25 TU in vessel weight and 5 TU in cargo. Let’s say that the remaining “4 sails” are dedicated Lateen sails – so, when the wind is in slightly the wrong direction (up to 45 degrees from perfect), they can make for at least some of the losses. 4/24 or 1/6th of the total, in fact.

      But, when there’s nothing else for it, let’s drop those mainsails and see how these 4 Lateen sails manage.

      Average Speed at full sail × (15.25 + 5) = 5.3 × 70 × 4 / 24
      = S × (20.25) = 61.83
      S = 3.0535 mph.

      To that, let’s add 1.65 mph for 60 oarsmen, or a total of 4.7 mph. This is at a 45-degree angle to the direction we want to travel, so we need to multiply by sin (45) to get the actual amount of travel in the direction we really want to go – this is × 0.7071. So, all told, progress without a current is 3.32337 mph.

      If the current is in our favor (3-4 mph) then that’s 3.5 × 0.7071 = another 2.47485 to our speed at the 45-degree headings, for a total of 7.175 mph – which translates to 5.07 mph in our desired direction of travel despite the winds.

      If the current is not in our favor, then that 2.47485 difference gets taken off our speed, slowing it to 2.22515 mph in a straight line – or 1.57 mph in the direction we want to travel.

    Rivers seldom run in a straight line. We turn one way and the wind becomes our enemy, we turn the other and we’re best buddies.

    Here’s a realistic river that I threw together. Our vessel starts off getting 94% of the benefit of its mainsails, which rises briefly to 100% as we curve to the left before dropping back to 94%. As we start to curve to the right, it again goes up to 100% before dropping back, first again to 94%, and then to just 64%. As the river continues to curve to the right in the loop, the mainsails continue to drop in efficiency until, just past the half-way mark, they drop to 0%. I’ve changed the river from white to yellow at that point.

    Furl the mainsails and raise the Lateen; unship the oars, and pay close attention to the currents. While the river is yellow, we can continue directly down it’s course, but it isn’t long before we exceed the 135° mark and the river goes from orange to red. From that point until we enter the bend left, we’re fighting the wind.

    Once into that bend, we can again sail directly using the Lateen, until finally, we can raise our Mainsails once again.

    The overall measure of the wind angle is shown as 79°R – so, effectively, our Mainsails work at an average of 19% or not at all.

    Do we have to subject every journey to this kind of detailed analysis? Of course not. What matters is the vector sum – so long as it’s within 135° of the wind direction, we’re traveling in the right direction. For 1/3 of that, we’re using the lateen and sailing direct – slower, but still progress.

    So, what’s the shortcut? Draw a line between start point and end point. Measure the greatest distance in the direction of the wind to that line. 2/3 of that we’re zigzagging, which increases the length 1 / 0.7071 = about 40%. The rest of it, we’re at our slower speed. Combine those and you get 1.4 × 2/3 + 1/3 = 126% of the distance at lateen speed plus oars plus current. The rest of it, we’re under mainsail – for roughly the same distance. So, if our mainsail speed is X and our Lateen speed is Y, we get a combined speed of 1/2 X + (1/2 Y / 1.26). If you know the ratios of sail to lateen – 20/24 and 4/24 in relative terms in our example – then we have 20 / 2 + (1/2 × 4 / 1.26) out of 24 = 10 + 0.79 = 10.79 out of 24.

    Add to that the current, always in our favor, and the oars contribution × 1/2 / 1.26, and we get our net speed. And it will work out to 19% of our mainsail speed.

    The overall direction of travel relative to the wind and the actual length of the journey are all we actually need.

    But we don’t even need that – because we have already determined that 70% of the trip will have favorable winds. It’s right there at the start of the definition of the journey. So 30% of it is at lateen speeds plus oars and current, and 70% is at mainsail plus current.

    And if that doesn’t match up to what you have on the map, you have to remember that geographic features get distorted by speed. In effect, slower sections are larger and longer than fast sections by the ratio of the two – 20/4 = x5 in the case of our example. So the upwind slog is effectively 5 × the size shown in length.

    4.5.6 Extreme Weather Events

    If the weather seems out to get you when it’s just fighting you, what do you call it when it goes to war with you? This makes simply fighting the wind seem like playing with an aggressive kitten in comparison.

    I’ve already discussed the Beafort and Fajita scales and what the wind can do. Some areas are more prone to this sort of event than others, as Florida residents know all too well. But it’s not just the equatorial regions, as the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald makes clear (the Gordon Lightfoot song doesn’t get everything right but it’s close enough to make the point).

    Extreme weather events can happen anywhere, any time – they are just more predictably likely at some places and times.

    So, what are the odds?

    A once-in-five years event will happen once in 1825 times. Such an event with no warning is probable twice as rare – once in 3650 times.

    That’s 0.0274%. Or, to phrase it more usefully – you need to make a daily d% check and get an 01 to have a 2.74% chance of it happening.

    Maybe there’s 5 such events, all different. Then you would expect one of the five to happen, on average, every year. But some (bad) years, there will be two of them, and some years, there will be none.

    And some years, the event will be (comparatively) mild, while others, it will be relatively severe.

    Sounds like we’re in need of a statistical approach.

    So a 1 in 5-years event means that you expect one every 5 years, i.e. that there’s a 20% chance each year. If there is a 1 in 4 chance of greater severity and a 1/4 chance of an extremely mild version of the event, that means that there’s a 5% of a weak event, a 10% chance of a typical event, and a 5% chance of a severe event, each year. Call these outcomes A-, A, and A+ and a 0 for no event.

    If there’s a second 1-in-5 event that can occur completely independently of the first one (and those are comparatively rare), then no matter what the outcome of the A check, we get the same chances of a B event.

    5%: A-.
         ▪ 5% × 5% = 0.25% A- and B- in the one year.
         ▪ 5% × 10% = 0.5% A- and B in the one year.
         ▪ 5% × 5% = 0.25% A- and B+ in the one year.
         ▪ 5% – 0.25% -0.25% -0.5% = 4%: A-, no B.
    10%: A
         ▪ 10% × 5% = 0.5% A and B- in the one year.
         ▪ 10% × 10% = 1% A and B in the one year.
         ▪ 10% × 5% = 0.5% A and B+ in the one year.
         ▪ 10% – 0.5% -0.5% – 1% = 8%: A, no B.
    5%: A+.
         ▪ 5% × 5% = 0.25% A+ and B- in the one year.
         ▪ 5% × 10% = 0.5% A+ and B in the one year.
         ▪ 5% × 5% = 0.25% A+ and B+ in the one year.
         565% – 0.25% -0.25% -0.5% = 4%: A+, no B.
    80%: No A.
         ▪ 80% × 5% = 4%: B-.
         ▪ 80% × 10% = 8%: B
         ▪ 80% × 5% = 4% B+.
         ▪ 80% -4% -4% -8% = 64% neither A nor B.

    But if I generate 5 random d400 numbers, and divide by 4, each time there is a 64% chance of nothing happening – that might be only 10.73741824%, but it’s a non-trivial chance.

    Generate a sixth. 6.87% chance of nothing.
    Generate a seventh. 4.4% chance of nothing.
    Generate an eight. 2.8% chance of nothing.
    Generate a ninth. 1.8% chance of nothing.

    In fact, we have to extend the run to 14 years before there’s a less than 0.25% chance of nothing happening. That makes it near-certainty that something will happen in that time-period.

    We can use the same principle to add a third event to the possibilities, and then a fourth and fifth. But each time, we make the smallest chance only 5% of the previous smallest chance – so we have to increase the size of the roll 20-fold. From d400 to d8,000 to d160,000 to d3,200,000. And the number of entries in the resulting table would be 16 × 4^3 = 1024 entries.

    The last one – of nothing happening – will remain by far the biggest. We used 16% out of 80% for the cases with just two events; with a third event, the chance will drop to 80% of 64% = 51.2%; with a fourth, 80% × 51.2 = 40.96%; and with a fifth, 80% × 40.96% = 32.768%.

    There’s 100 × 0.32^5 = 0.37779% chance of nothing happening in a given 5-year time-span.

    Every time there’s an A event, be it A-, A, or A+, there is a 4% chance that it’s a once-in-25-years event instead (100/25=4). And a 0.8% chance of a one-in-125 event. And a 0.16% chance of a 1-in-625-years event.

    Having tossed all these numbers around like confetti, it’s time to bottom-line it: Events like this will happen at the speed of plot. If it suits the GM’s plans for something to happen, it will – and unless that’s the case, it won’t.

    4.5.7 The Tempest Scale

    Let’s say something does happen. How severe is it going to be?

      Divide the B scale number from 1 to 11 by 2.5. Add 1 for each F number. Then square each number

            B0 = 0^2 = 0.
            B1 = 0.4^2 = 0.16.
            B2 = 0.8^2 = 0.64.
            B3 = 1.2^2 = 1.44.
            B4 = 1.6^2 = 2.56.
            B5 = 2^2 = 4.
            B6 = 2.4^2 = 5.76.
            B7 = 2.8^2 = 7.84.
            B8 = 3.2^2 = 10.24.
            B9 = 3.6^2 = 12.96.
            B10 = 4^2 = 16.
            B11 = 4.4^2 = 19.36.
            F1 = 5.4^2 = 29.16.
            F2 = 6.4^2 = 40.96.
            F3 = 7.4^2 = 54.76.
            F4 = 8.4^2 = 70.56
            F5 = 9.4^2 = 88.36.

    4.5.8 Vessel Rating

    Every vessel receives a rating for their capacity to withstand storm and wind damage. The rating depends on the vessels (1) resilience, (2) construction methods, (3) materials, (4) magic, (5) captaincy, (6) Maintenance history, and (7) karma, which can add to or subtract from the other factors. When confronting a potential disaster, the GM rates each factor except karma out of 5, and Karma out of plus-or-minus five.

    The highest score (or one of them if there’s a tie) and the lowest score (or one of them, again) then get reduced by 1, representing age and wear-and-tear since the last time the vessel was checked.

    For every score of 2 or better after the first, he adds +1 to the total.
    For every score of 3 or better after the first, he adds +2 to the total.
    For every score of 4 or better after the first, he adds +3 to the total.
    For every score of 5 after the first, he adds +4 to the total.

    That’s six opportunities to record a 5, so 4 opportunities for +4, giving a maximum of (5×5) + (4×4) +4 = 25+16+4=45.

    The total score is divided by 2 and rounded down.

    Karma is then applied, so the maximum score is 27.

    This is subtracted from the Tempest scale to get the % chance of the worst outcome associated with that weather phenomenon taking place (a total of <0 = no chance of that happening and the vessel will survive the event just fine).

    If it doesn’t, this is also 10 more than the % chance of the next worst happening, and so on, until you get to B7 unless condition or maintenance history are 3 or less. If one of those is the case, go to B6; if both, to B5.

    And at this point, I should remind readers of one of the earliest notes made with reference to riverboats and barges: “Riverboats are usually less sturdy than ships built for the open seas”.

    4.5.9 Weather Cataclysms

    How much damage will experiencing a weather cataclysm cause?

    The answer is the damage chance + the total of the basic six ratings + a d20 roll. The bonuses for multiple high scores remain.

    Half of this total, or 20 points maximum, is minor incidental damage – 1 point for each item. Ropes, rigging, hatch covers, etc.

    Half of what’s left, or 20 points maximum, is more significant damage – 2 points for each item. Anchor chains snapped, cannon lost overboard, fires on board, crew lost, etc.

    Half of what remains, or 24 points maximum, is non-fatal structural damage. Missing prows, broken decks, lost masts, and such are worth 3 points per item.

    Whatever remains is potentially fatal structural damage. Holes in the sides, fires in the powder magazine (if there is one), cracks in the keel (2 cracks = 1 actual break), missing officers, etc are worth 5 points each – partial damage mean that an officer isn’t lost overboard, but is badly injured. Two breaks in the keel and it’s lost and the ship will break in two. It’s likely to be taking on water and may even have overturned if it isn’t a barge.

    Of course, wind isn’t the only potential disaster to befall a vessel – but, with the possible exception of river pirates and the odd pleiosaur, everything else is more likely to afflict a seagoing vessel.

And that brings this part of this chapter to a close. It’s covered quite a lot of territory, and that means that the next post should be relatively small, as I turn my attention to the deep waters… But first, it’s time for another Time Out!

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The Potential Benefits Of A Session Minus-One


Cover art by Jason Stewart. Click the cover to buy a copy.

I was recently offered the opportunity to review a copy of Mythwoven, a new RPG supplement by Sphynx Tale Games, by the Author Brett Moore. His description sounded intriguing: a collaborative worldbuilding game designed to enhance session 0 and immerse players in the game world’s lore.

From the additional details that his email disclosed, I got the impression that it gave players greater input into the worldbuilding in the course of Session 0 than is usually the case, which I found intriguing.

And so, here we are…

As always, this review is predicated on the questions of ?”Would I use this?”? and “?How would I use it?”?. Other people may have different ideas and standards ? and that’s fine. But there’s an inherent bias in all reviews ? and this at least gets the perspective that biases this review out in the open, so that readers can take it into account. I should add that I have received no incentives or financial benefit from this review beyond the sample copy.

The Purpose Of A Session Zero

The purpose of a Session Zero, in my book, is to introduce the characters to the game world and the way it is actually going to operate in play. Characters in a session 0 are not set in stone; players are free to tweak elements of what they have created that don’t work as well as expected or intended, and the GM is able to make suggestions to better integrate them into the world.

Specific world-building content that impacts one or more PCs will be highlighted but not necessarily disclosed in detail in a session zero, giving the GM the chance to refine his ideas after exposing them to the ‘real world’ of actual play. In particular, he can get some idea of what sort of adventures the players want to get involved in, and tailor the planned campaign accordingly.

It’s important to separate overall design, concrete campaign elements, overarching campaign theme, and specific plans for implementation; these are all different parts of campaign design, and some of them should be essentially complete before a session 0 is even contemplated.

Overall Design relates to optional rules, mythology, and the fundamental flavor of the world; it is sometimes described as ‘the campaign setting’ because any number of different campaigns can be set against this backdrop.

Concrete Campaign Elements are things like what races there are (at least initially), how they are impacted by the overall design, what the major cities are, where most of the plot ‘action’ is to take place, and so on. The principle of sandboxing is also important: it means that only vague generalities need be in place until an adventure extends into contact with one of these elements.

The Overarching Campaign Themes are the broader overall story that the GM wants to set against the backdrop. It does NOT include how that theme will generate specific plotlines affecting one or more PCs; it’s more about how the previous two elements will evolve in the course of the campaign.

Specific Plans For Implementation deal with what adventures the PCs will have, how they will change over the course of the campaign in response to the Overarching Campaign Themes, how the PCs are going to interact with and change the game world – and how the Game World is going to try to force the PCs to change. It necessarily incorporates character-level creations – the ultimate Villain of the background (Sauron, if you will) might have little or nothing to do with the lives of the PCs, who have an entirely different enemy to overcome. The Villain of the campaign, in other words, doesn’t have to have anything to do with the Villain of the Background.

Click the image to buy a copy.

The Purpose Of Mythwoven

Mythwoven provides an opportunity and a process for the players to collaborate with the GM in developing the ‘sets’ that will be used as backdrops to Act I of the campaign (and possibly beyond). The players learn (in abbreviated thumbnail form) the things they need to know about the Overall Design, the Concrete Campaign Elements (in at least general terms) and the Overarching Campaign Themes and how those will impact PCs at least in the early part of the campaign.

There are all sorts of benefits to this – in particular, it’s a process of evolving a local setting that integrates the PCs and their immediate ambitions more integrally. This gives a slice of ownership of the setting to the players and makes them likely to be more interested in the campaign. It also gives players the opportunity to design characters that fit into the local world.

There is a ‘getting-to-know-you’ phase at the beginning of any romance. You want the players to have a romantic entanglement with your campaign and the world in which it is set; Mythwoven permits the players to contribute to the design of that campaign and its setting, so that it will be more attractive to them when they embark on the ‘getting to know you’ phase, and that – ultimately – is it’s true purpose.

A Session Minus-1, then

What it isn’t is a process for a Session 0 – more for a session “minus-one” that precedes the actual session 0, designing (some) of the key specifics of the Fourth Element Set of Campaign Design – the initial home base around which adventures will revolve.

Necessarily Sandboxed

This approach not only encourages sandboxing, it actively demands it. At some point, it is virtually certain the the adventuring ‘world’ will move beyond the initial seeds set up through Mythwoven, or that the outside world will impose itself upon that locality, or both. Mythwoven has little to say about that; it sets the initial stages of the campaign in a setting that is vibrant and ‘real’, with a history and a touchable foundation.

Mythwoven: The Digital / Physical Reality

Okay, so that’s a general overview of Mythwoven and how it will fit into the campaign creation process. There are lots of specific details about that integration that I haven’t covered, that will be discussed more specifically later in the review.

    The Layout

    Mythwoven is 29 pages, full color, including front and back covers. The last three pages are process elements that need to be printed and cut out, and possibly pasted on cardboard in between those two steps.

    Most of the text is in two columns and just about readable when a digital full page is displayed. My review copy totals 18.3 Mb.

    The front cover doesn’t really show itself off to best advantage when reduced to a Campaign-Mastery-Fitting 556 pixels wide. So, to the side, you can see an enlargement of the bottom right corner, giving a clearer idea of the detail provided.

    Art

    There’s a lot of spot art throughout, all by Jason Stewart. This is strongly fantasy / medieval in nature, even though – as the back cover text describes – the process of Mythwoven can be applied to many different genres, under the direction of the GM in his setting of the initial parameters.

    It’s quite passably well-executed (I’ve seen a lot worse), but also has a slightly generic feeling to it that I think was probably inevitable, given the nature of the product. Still, one or two depictions of other genres would not have gone astray; there is a sense of paying only lip service to the applicability to other genres that I don’t think is entirely warranted and the art contributes to that impression.

    Hopefully, this usage doesn’t count as “Distribution!” Click the image to buy a copy.

    I also don’t think that this impression is entirely warranted – but it’s hard to shake. (There’s half-a-page of white space on page 24 – maybe something could be dropped in there, in a future edition).

    The pages in the review copy are all splashed with an overlay that reads “Media Sample Not For Distribution”, and this mars the art that I can display for readers to look at. For the most part, I’ve ignored the problem and left it to readers to take it into account.

    Next to this text is a thumbnail of Page 1 which illustrates the effect – chosen because it doesn’t give away any of the ‘trade secrets’ of the process; for those you will have to actually buy the product.

    Make no mistake, the art is very well executed.

    Art by Jason Stewart. Click the image to buy a copy.

    An excerpt from the above at 100% scale.

    Some of it could even be labeled ‘iconic’ – which, regular readers will know, is a big thing with me (see my recent post, Looking At A Bigger Picture, part 1 and part 2).

    To the right of this text there is a full-sized rendering of part of the village scene above. The architecture, the fortifications that are clearly around the settlement, and the castle on a lofty peak in the distance, all have a definite cohesion.

    Content

    The GM sets out some guiding principles and initial elements. A deck of cards is broken up into three sub-decks: the four Aces, the number cards plus a Joker, and the remaining face cards and second joker. Each player (and possibly the GM, especially in games without a lot of players) then takes it in turns to develop the setting using these cards as prompts.

    The initial phase is dealt with using the four aces. These establish “crucial aspects” of the settlement / community / space station / castle / city / whatever. Each of the four presents the player with a choice between two options, specified in the product.

    A ‘turn’ consists of three stages:

    1. Draw a card and act on it according to the instructions. This might involve adding elements to the community or making decisions that can alter its circumstances and direction. Decisions are to be made without consensus or discussion, the only exception to this being the four aces, which are specifically collaborative and necessarily consensus-oriented – in a very specific way.
    2. Vote on an unresolved issue. Three votes for either of the alternatives (and there are only two for any issue) and the decision is made by the town; you get to outline the decision, how it’s implemented, and what the outcome / consequences are.
    3. Take an Action (singular) – you have a choice of three alternatives:
      • Create introduces a new element to the settlement – it could be a location, group, event, whatever. You don’t get to specify any details – those get added later.
      • Detail adds information about something that has been previously created by yourself or someone else.
      • Choice raises a question to be voted on by the “community”. You get to set the question and outline (broadly) two alternatives. Others then cast votes in their turns in stage 2 of their turns.

    Once all four aces are dealt with, the process moves on to the number cards. These are less fundamentally definitive than the aces but still significant. These happen in a random sequence, so you never know what is going to shape a given community next.

    At some point in the number cards, someone will draw the first Joker. This is an instruction to the GM, not to the player; the GM then reveals “The Twist”, some discovery or event that introduces a significant change that disrupts established assumptions (there is an option for the GM to cede creative authority over The Twist to the player who drew the joker). This is the GM’s opportunity to introduce one or more of the overarching themes of the campaign, shaping the setting into one that is appropriately manifests that theme. Twists can be ad-hoc or carefully pre-planned – and the GM can change his mind at the last minute. If the GM doesn’t cede control of the twist to the player, the player draws another card when the GM is done revealing the twist, and progress resumes under the new set of circumstances. If the player was given control, after announcing the twist, he or she completes their turn as normal and play continues.

    When you run out of numbered cards, players start using the face cards. These are geared towards resolving some of the issues raised while exacerbating or developing others, and as such, tend to be a bit more severe than the numbered cards.

    At some point in the picture cards, the second Joker will appear, which ends the construction of the settlement. There is a mechanism for resolution of plot points and conflicts, but ultimately this will leave some plot threads hanging, and some decisions still undecided.

    Flaws

    The process seems well-developed, and the interpretations available for each of the cards sufficiently diverse as to create a number of different events. Some flexibility or creative interpretation of the instructions given is permitted (and necessary, if the process is to be applied to a non-fantasy genre) though a lot of the events should broadly apply anywhere.

    There is an example offered (but not spelt out in full) to help give a handle on the process, and there is at least one grammatical error that seems to have escaped the attention of all three editors – “Amidst this eerie backdrop, the faint echoes impending war” – there should be an “of” before impending.

    There is a slight predictability to the content that comes from all the numbered cards being used. I have two solutions for this:

    1. Instead of using all the numbered cards, the GM should shuffle them and then remove four, eight, or twelve of them from the ‘deck’. Since no-one knows what’s not in the deck anymore, what predictability there is gets strongly eroded.
    2. Each player has the option, once per ‘game’, of not drawing a card, but instead choosing a numbered card that has previously been played and returning it to some random position within the deck of unplayed numbered cards. Lightning can then strike twice (in general terms). This option is only available until play moves into the face-cards stage. It means that the predictability of something having already happened once, and therefore is not going to happen again, vanishes. The card that is chosen is secret – no-one else knows until that card again sees the light of day during play. The GM may exercise an option to shuffle the deck after a card is returned, so that the player who replaced it in the deck has no idea when it will come out.

    The original map of Dunkland provided within Mythwoven.

    While on the subject of flaws, something that did nag at me a bit (though it’s relatively trivial) – the example makes a point of mentioning “patches of wild forest”. To me, that implies that these patches are surrounded by less dense timber (though the trees could mostly have been removed for farming). But the map provided offers no indication of where those patches – or the less densely-wooded area around them – might be, as you can see. (I did my best to clean up the overlay, so that I could produce the map that follows).

    The map on the right, below, is what I would have presented if I were the GM of the example offered. I’ve added a couple of extra mountains for two reasons: (1) just having them in the corners made the whole thing look too symmetric and artificial, and (2) it explains the northern part of the road and the way it deviates to one side. Around the mountain peaks are (presumably) lesser mountains, with scattered trees and a few thicker clumps – I’ve shown three but more could be added. These obscured the text, so I’ve copied that to the lower part of the circle.

    My edited map of Dunkland.

    It’s a small set of changes. Clearly, there are going to be streams and/or a river that feed into the lake, and a river that drains it; the first are presumably somewhere to the north of Dunkland, and the second either south or East – with the latter sounding more asymmetric and therefore more ‘natural’.

    The same thing happens with numbers. If a list of numbers has too many fives and too many even numbers, it looks and feels ‘faked’ – but, paradoxically, when people make a fake list of numbers, they will overcompensate and include too many 1’s, 3’s, 9’s, and especially, 7’s, and not enough 0’s, 5’s, and even numbers. And it will look more believable to the lay eye!

    In the digits 1 to 100, there will be:

    • 10, 20,30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 = 9+2 = 11 zeros;
    • 1, 10-19, an extra for 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, and 91, and 100 = 1+10+1+8+1 = 21 ones;
    • 2, 20-29 and an extra in 22, 12, 32, 42, 52, 62, 72, 82, and 92 = 1+10+1+8 = 20 twos;
    • 20 threes, 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, 7’s, 8’s, and 9’s.
    • 11 + 21 + 8 x 20 = 192 digits.
    • about 5.73% will be zeros; 10.94% will be 1’s; and the remaining 83.33% will be evenly divided between the other eight digits, about 10.42% each.

    For numbers 1 to 1000:

    • There will be 192 zeros;
    • 301 ones;
    • and each of the other digits will appear 300 times.
    • That’s a total of 192 + 301 + 300 x 8 = 493 + 2400 = 2893 digits.
    • 6.637% will be zeros. 10.404% will be 1’s. The other 8 digits will appear a combined 82.959% of the time, or 10.37% each.
    • Notice that the percentage of zeros went up, the percentage of everything else went down, but 1’s didn’t go down as much – and there will be roughly 63 ones for every 100 zeros.

    You can look up the digits in 1 to 10,000 or 100,000 if you like. The identified trends will continue.

    There will be some natural variation. You can’t say definitively that a series of numbers has been ‘cooked’ unless they show a repeated pattern. As a rough rule of thumb, if there are supposed to be 192 zeros, anything more than 1.5 times this (or 288), or less than 0.5 times it (96) would be suspicious, and so on.

    Availability & Price

    Mythwoven was released on January 7 in both print and digital formats. You can buy Mythwoven from DriveThru RPG for AU $16.02 (PDF) or AU $32.05 (Softcover), with an option in the latter case for an additional free digital copy.

    There is a SWADE edition specifically for Savage Worlds, same prices, at this link.

    You can get a card deck with the various options in place for AU $1.60 (PDF) or AU $15.95 (embossed playing cards), again with the option of a free copy of the digital version, from this link – but you will need the supplement to use them.

    I suspect that these prices are US$10, US$20, US$1, and US$9.90 or something along those lines. Drivethru will automatically display the prices in your local currency if you’ve told them where you live.

    Limitations

    There are some limitations imposed by the process. Complex designs may not render down sufficiently to be readily grasped within the scope provided; there’s very little room for historical backstory; and some players may have trouble coming up with ideas. There are solutions to all of these problems, which I will go into below.

    A bigger problem is that campaign creation and world-building can take weeks or months, and not all of it can be carried out until the ‘session minus 1’ is complete. That is also manageable, but does require some advance planning by the GM.

    There is no way to build the elements of a character background into the mix unless you have already decided what sort of character you want to play – and doing so without the information provided and developed in the course of the Mythwoven process defeats the purpose, at least to some extent. Again, there’s a solution to this problem outlined below.

    None of these problems are really addressed within Mythwoven itself, and therefore, no solutions are offered, and that’s a bigger limitation. Other problems and potential limitations are addressed and resolved.

    All content on Campaign Mastery is copyrighted, with a free license for gamers to use or adapt it for any gaming purpose so long as authorship is respected. So I’d like yo officially extend an invitation to Brett and Sphynx Tale Games to adapt any of the content in this review for use in any future second edition of the product- no charge, but acknowledgment of the contribution would be great!

    Okay, so there are a few problems. Let’s deal with them them…

The Necessity of a Physical Copy

There are two ways of implementing a Mythwoven session: either the participant draws a card, and announces what it is, and the GM then looks it up and explains the meaning to the participant, or there is a physical copy of the book that gets passed around so that participants can look up the results for themselves.

I don’t much like the first option. It sounds slow, because it’s always faster to read something for yourself than it is to read it out loud (and not by a small margin).

There are times when digital copies are just as good as physical ones. This sourcebook is not one of them – not unless you intend to print and bind it yourself.

The Timing Of The Sessions

The GM should prepare 90-95% of the big-picture stuff in advance of prep for a session minus-1. And then ruthlessly sandbox 90-95% of that content because it won’t be relevant to session minus-1.

The trick is knowing which 5% will be relevant. Make your best guess – and if a player’s creation introduces another 5% to the mix, you’ll be ready to step in, though your pre-campaign work may have to evolve a little to incorporate other acts of player creativity.

For example, the GM may write up Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Halflings as part of his big-picture, with each being nuanced to make them just a little different from the stock-race versions in the rulebooks. He might anticipate that Humans and Elves will be part of the session minus-1 mix, and specifically rule out Gnomes and Half-breeds, but when a player adds a group of Halflings to the racial mix, they are not part of the 5% that he anticipated. Until it gets back to his turn, he has to live with whatever the players in between might specify about the Halflings (but if the GM is lucky, they will focus their details on other creations).

When it gets to his turn, he can throw a key detail about the Halflings that he wants to be in this campaign into the mix, establishing that part of the campaign concept. Simply repeating some basic fact about them from the source material is a wasted opportunity, because all that is implied simply by using the term, “Halflings” – so use the opportunity to flag one of the important differences between your Halflings and the standard ones.

It will be extremely advantageous for the GM to have boiled and compressed his concepts down into single-sentence summations that are ready for use in this way. That’s not an easy thing to do, so it, too, is best done in advance.

If many / most of the other differences are logical consequences of the major change, it’s reasonable to expect any other player contributions that are inspired by this change to dovetail with the broader concept, even though the players at this point don’t know fully what it is.

(For the record: Another 20-25% of the background will then be relevant to a real Session zero and the PCs that are generated prior to that session – and NO PCs should be generated prior to session minus-1. Conceptualized, maybe – with the caveat that these concepts will have to change if they conflict with the setting as it ends up being.

The rest can be introduced a little at a time as specific adventures bring the ‘facts’ to the PCs attention. I figure that by the time the PCs get to somewhere between levels 6 and 11, all should be known to them, so that the second half / three quarters of the campaign can deal with the major thematic elements and the overarching plot. There’s some latitude, so consider these guidelines, not rules to be followed religiously).

Next, the GM will need time to refine his background in light of the session minus-one results, and then distribute the selected 20-25% to the players so that they can make decisions about character construction, leading into a genuine session zero. Depending on the game system, it may be possible to generate the characters and have the session zero on the same playing day – that’s for the GM to decide.

The more work that has been in advance, the more likely it is that parts of it will need some revision or expansion – and the easier that revision / expansion will be. it might sound self-contradictory, but it’s true. But it does take time, and the scheduling of that session zero (or session one if there is to be no Session Zero) has to accommodate that.

As a rule of thumb, one ‘missed’ game session should provide enough time; in extreme cases, or when the GM is going to be unusually busy with the real world, this can be stretched to two missed sessions – but no further! If you are playing once a week (in theory), that gives 2-3 weeks to make the necessary changes and distribute them to players. If you play once a month, that’s 2-3 months, and I would try very hard to confine it to the first of those numbers.

If your ideas are too vague, your session minus one has jumped the gun and you won’t be fully prepped for a session zero in time, and probably perpetually behind from that point on. It takes 5-10 times as long to be creative as it does to simply edit and tweak material already created. Maybe more. So remember that, or it will come around to bite you – frequently.

Integrating a historical Backstory

If the GM decides that this is important, the best solution is to add a couple of actions to his turn, and an action to the turns of each of the other players.

In addition to everything else he gets to do in his turn, the GM gets to announce some event from the history of the game world or the location. No details, no outcomes, just the fact of the event. These should be events that have an impact far beyond the local region, but that will still be relevant, locally. It’s Major Backstory.

On their turns, each player then extends the story without bringing the event to a resolution. Again, no details outside of that one ‘plot development’.

When play again returns to the GM, he or she can either announce a resolution of the historical event or decide that it’s even more epic / sweeping and simply add to the story, in which case it continues developing until the GM again faces this choice.

Electring to enlarge an event in this way sacrificest the development of one other event, so it shouldn’t be done lightly.

At the end of the session, these stories have to be set in a logical chronological sequence and expanded into more substantial narratives.

Art by Jason Stewart. Click the image to buy a copy.

The GM can also choose to forego introducing a new piece of backstory, in which case the option to do so passes to the next player to act. The GM does not have any right of veto over this contribution, though he can twist the event massively in his contribution to the narrative; nor does he have the option of bringing it to a conclusiom, that’s now in the hands of the player who instigated it.

Suggestions For Slow Creators

Some of my players have trouble being spontaneously creative; they need a minute or two to think of something or whatever they create is going to be half-baked – and I have former players who were even worse. I also have some players who are really good at spontaneous creativity, and some who are great at throwing ideas out but lousy at examining those ideas for nuance, ramifications, and consequences.

I imagine that the above statement is true to at least some extent of almost every gaming group out there.

Mythwoven makes no allowances for this; it assumes that everyone is going to achieve a minimum standard of spontaneous creativity, and that assumption is a thorn in the side of the process. I have three suggestions that can alleviate the problems.

    1. The discussion phase

    Every time the ‘game play’ returns to whichever player went first, the game is halted for a set period of time – between 1 and 3 minutes – specifically to discuss possible concepts and ramifications. Not only will this help to spark ideas when players next get a turn, it gives the GM the chance to expound on any logic or confluences with other parts of his background prep.

    Alternatively, this might happen each time play gets back to the GM.

    The GM should also have the option to extend the discussion for another couple of minutes if the table’s creative juices are really flowing – and he needs to take careful notes of the ideas thrown out and generally accepted at the table.

    2. Sneak Peeks with a second copy

    I didn’t notice it actually saying so anywhere in the supplement, but there is a clear implication of the cards for each phase being stacked in single piles. There would be an advantage to actually dealing them out, face-down, to the participants, in advance.

    When it gets to the turn of the player before you in the turn sequence, you are permitted to look at the top card in your stack and to look up its meaning in a copy of the rules. That copy should circulate from one player to the next as a signal that it’s time to prep for your turn.

    This would be made far more convenient with a second copy – which is why the hardcopy plus digital bonus copy is such an attractive option to me. The GM uses the digital copy to manage and administrate the process, while the physical copy does the rounds of the table.

    Players might have to hold onto the physical copy until they have actually fulfilled whatever creative act is required by their cards and then pass it along.

    This offers one more advantage that’s worth bearing in mind – it obviates the need to read the card’s directions aloud. So long as the player obeys the instructions given (and the GM has his copy to ensure that happens), he need only announce his response to the instructions given, at least 99% of the time – on rare occasions, he may need help in interpreting those instructions, though they seemed pretty clear to me when reading through them.

    3. Genre-relevant Resources

    The third suggestion is to have a small stack of genre-relevant resources – sourcebooks – for players to thumb through looking for inspiration or the specific detail that will nail an act of creation. This – at least partially – solves the “silly names” / in-jokes problem that Mythwoven itself points out.

    Need a name for an NPC? Don’t call him “Bob” (which happens all the time at my table with one particular player) – flick through something which contains inspiration for appropriate names and pick something.

    Want to flesh out a fortress but are having trouble ‘seeing’ it in your minds’ eye? A quick browse through some relevant material and extract something that seems pertinent. Others can build upon that seed, so even if the basic concept can be traced back to its source, the final implementation will almost certainly be more original.

Between them, those three suggestions should accommodate just about every level of creativity.

Something like Mythwoven relies on the fluid and rapid exchange of ideas and leading suggestions; as a process, it can fall apart if it’s too stop-and-start. These suggestions should alleviate that.

The significance of the final Joker, and an alternative

The appearance of the final joker – it’s SOMEWHERE amongst the face cards – signals the end of ‘yesterday’ and the arrival of ‘now’ in the act of creation. Whatever face cards have not yet been played do not get to be played. This makes the makeup of the face-cards phase impossible to predict.

That’s all well and good if the position of the joker is in the second half of the face-cards somewhere. It doesn’t work so well if it can appear prematurely.

As an alternative, GMs might be able to declare that the Joker means that this round is the final one, not this turn. Instead of playing / interpreting a card, the player who drew the joker then gets to perform two actions instead of one, and play proceeds until it gets back to the first player to act.

I would suggest that this rule only be implemented if there are more unplayed cards than there are participants in the ‘game’. This preserves some of that unpredictability of the Joker without the abruptness of development ending that it can cause.

Keeping Some Cards Close To Your Chest – Editing the GM’s Concepts

The key to managing your concepts list and boiling the session minus-1 details down to the absolute bare minimum is a short series of simple questions:

    Q1. Do the players really need to know about this before they can generate characters?
         — if no, summarize it in a single sentence and leave it out.
         — if yes, continue.

    Q2. Is the answer conditional, i.e. only a yes for a character of specific race and/or class and/or background?
         — if yes, summarize the main concept(s) into single sentences & leave them out until a choice triggers their inclusion.
         — if no, continue.

    Q3. Does the information relate specifically to the main campaign plot arc? If so, do you really need it to be known before that arc begins?
         — if no to the second half, summarize it in a single sentence and leave it out.
         — if yes to the second half, continue.

Anything that makes it this far needs to be known by Session zero. Now to prune even more for a session minus one.

    Q4. Is the information intended to be definitive of the campaign, overall?
         — if yes, summarize it in a single sentence and include it.
         — if no, continue.

    Q5. Is the information definitive of the initial adventuring location regardless of where that might be?
         — if yes, summarize it in a single sentence and include it.
         — if no, summarize it in a single sentence and leave it out.

That’s really all there is to it.

Let’s take an example concept and break it down and see how the key parts fall through that filter:

    “Demons walk the earth, committing good deeds despite their inherent natures in a desperate bid to earn forgiveness for past transgressions, after the destruction of Hades and the Abyss in a final conflict. There are those who oppose these wannabe reformed characters because they can’t let go of their entrenched ideologies. Earth is now the arena where these conflicts play out.”

While it would be possible to include that whole blurb as the definitive information for session minus-1, it’s a little bit lengthy and there’s a lot going on. So let’s break it down:

    1. There was an Armageddon and both Abyss and Hades were destroyed.
    2. Those who survived now wander the earth, divided into three camps.
    3. Some seek forgiveness and rehabilitation. They will aid the inhabitants and create adventurers to oppose those in 4 and 5.
    4. Some cannot let go of the ideologies of Anarchy and Might Makes Right. They continue to fight for The Abyss under the flag of this former Demon Prince or that, oppose those in 3 and 5, and threaten the inhabitants. They will empower monsters.
    5. Some cannot let go of the ideologies of Hate. They continue to fight for Hades in the name of this former Arch-Devil or that, oppose those in 3 and 4, and threaten the inhabitants. They will empower Undead and the corrupt, creating hidden monsters within the general population of civilization.
    6. Implied by 3: All adventurers have a ‘guardian spirit’ that grants them powers and abilities beyond those of the normal population.
    7. Implied by 4: While some creatures are inherently dangerous, selected individuals amongst them are heightened and given additional powers beyond those normal to their kind.
    8. Implied by 5: Some corrupt individuals will have a ‘guardian spirit’ that drives them to commit foul deeds and rewards them with abilities beyond those of the normal population.
    9. Implied by 3: Characters have only had access to class levels since 2 began. it’s possible this is the first generation of classed characters and they don’t know what makes them different.
    10. Implied in general: The overall campaign arc describes the course of the three-sided conflict. It may or may not resolve it.

It’s possible to further break down 3, 4, and 5:

    3. Some seek forgiveness and rehabilitation.
         3a. They will aid civilized inhabitants of the world.
         3b. They create and empower adventurers.
         3c. Adventurers oppose 4 and 5 and those that they empower.

    4. Some (Demons) cannot let go of the Ideologies of Anarchy and Might Makes Right.
         4a. They empower selected individuals within the monster population.
         4b. These attempt to destroy civilization by force.
         4c. They fight under the banner of a specific (former) Demon Prince.
         4d. They despise and oppose both 3 and 5.

    5. Some (Devils) cannot let go of the ideology of Hate.
         5a. They empower Undead and selected individuals within civilized population.
         5b. These attempt to destroy civilization by corruption and subversion.
         5c. They fight under the banner of a specific (former) Arch-devil.
         5d. They hate and oppose both 3 and 4.

Right away, I can see three possible pathways through this campaign.

Route 1 starts with the PCs dealing with 5. If 9 is the case, then they are also discovering the backstory and their own natures and capabilities. They then face menaces from 4, which leads into the overall three-way conflict (or two-way with the PCs caught in the middle).

Route 2 starts with the PCs dealing with 4. If 9 is the case then they are also discovering the backstory and their own natures and capabilities. Just when they think they are secure, they have to deal with 5. This leads eventually into the general war between 4 and 5 with 3 opposing both.

Route 3 starts with the PCs discovering that they are different (9) while dealing with ordinary monsters and threats and maybe some low-level Undead. The threats posed begin to escalate due to 4 and the backstory gets pieced together. They acquire allies from 5 only to discover that they are being manipulated into fighting 4 on 5’s behalf. They have to deal with both 4 and 5 because neither can be permitted to win.

I don’t much like Route 1. It under-powers 5 simply because that makes achievement by the PCs possible.

Route 2 is better; there is a clear progression and escalation. But 5 seems overly confrontational and not nearly subversive enough.

Route 3 would be my choice. It starts off with the focus on the PCs and is otherwise a fairly traditional D&D campaign. As the PCs start to learn what makes this setting unique and original, and has done so from the very beginning, there is an escalation as 4’s minions pose greater and greater threats. In response, 5 does what 5 does best, and with the aid of 3 (or vice-versa), the PCs hold off the initial threats. But they need to learn why 4a have become so dangerous, leading to an intelligence / scouting mission behind “enemy lines” which begins to reveal the truth – and that 5 has been consolidating its power and authority while using 3 and 4 to keep each other occupied and out of the way. Big finish is the ousting of 5 – at least for now.

On that basis, let’s run these 21 precepts through our filters. To avoid confusion, when I’m referring to one of the precepts from this point on, I’ll put it in brackets.

    Q1. Do the players really need to know about this before they can generate characters?
         (1) no. (2) no. (3), (3a), (3b), (3c) – no. (4), (4a), (4b), (4c), (4d) – no. (5), (5a) (5b), (5c), (5d) – no. (6) – perhaps yes. (7), (8) – no. (9) yes. (10), no. Right away, we’re down to two items.

    Q2. Is the answer conditional, i.e. only a yes for a character of specific race and/or class and/or background?
         (6) no, (9) no.

    Q3. Does the information relate specifically to the main campaign plot arc? If so, do you really need it to be known before that arc begins?
         (6) yes and no, respectively. (9) no, so the second question doesn’t even apply. (6) is archived, (9) remains.

    Q4. Is the information intended to be definitive of the campaign, overall?
         Arguably, (9) yes.

    Q5. Is the information definitive of the initial adventuring location regardless of where that might be?
         Arguably, (9) no – not until session zero, when the PCs emerge as superior to the common townspeople in terms of being able to do things.

Wait, that was our last campaign precept? Where does that leave us?

Obviously, we’ve missed a precept or two! try these for size:

    11. Pre-campaign, there are no characters with character levels or level abilities.
    12. Characters will have to figure out in-game what their level abilities are, how best to use them, and why they are different from normal people.
    13. The community where the campaign begins is in the fringes of civilization, with Monster threats on all sides. Orcs, Bugbears, etc, specifics unknown.
    14. A community of Elves lies somewhere to the North.
    15. A community of Dwarves lives in mountains to the West.
    16. Between this community and 15 are hills where Halflings abide.
    17. To the East lies the Kingdom of which this is an outpost.
    18. To get to any of these places, you have to run the gauntlet of 13. This is a besieged outpost.
    19. Nevertheless, there is trade and the occasional contact with 14, 15, 16, and 17.
    20. News of the world outside the locality is sporadic, often vague, and usually months out of date.

Now, we’re talking! These are all about the population where the game begins, and deliberately implants potential for Elves, Halfling, Dwarf and Human PCs, as well as the seeds that will sprout into the campaign. Arguably, (12) is what the whole campaign is about, with (1) through (10) being backstory and ramifications. I would probably bundle (14), (15), and (16) into a single item. (12) doesn’t make sense without (11), so I would package them together, too. (13) and (18) also marry up, as do (19) and (20).

I end up with:

    (11)+(12);
    (14)+(15)+(16);
    (17)
    (13)+(18);
    (19)+(20).

There are additional ideas that haven’t even gotten a mention. Dungeons, for example, might be lairs for (4) and (5), protected by monsters when the owners aren’t around. That can be discovered in-game and tease at the broader picture, but it wouldn’t make the cut into session minus 1, and maybe not even session 0.

Making room for characters

I’ve already covered this to some extent in discussing the implanting of ‘seeds’ that open the door to various PC races. Seeds can also be contributed by players to ‘make room’ in the setting for the foundations of a specific class – “a mighty wizard builds a tower in the town” is a legitimate act of Creation. Others get to add their 2-cents worth and eventually the focus will move on to other items – but this means that there is the potential for a Wizard PC to be apprenticed to this ‘mighty wizard’. Without that, the player has to create both Wizard and character and the DM to integrate the wizard into the location, just to permit the player to have the class he has chosen.

For this reason, the GM gets to specify certain races and / or classes that are off-limits; it may not mean that there are none of them in the game world, but it probably does.

Did someone say, “Session Minus Two”?

As I was reading Mythwoven, the thought of a sequel product that made initial PC creation collaborative kept recurring to me. Obviously, it would proceed a little differently – each player would start by defining some initial trait of the PC that they were going to play, and there would have to be a limited option for a player to veto something someone else had ‘imposed’ on their character as one of the options within their turn.

Aces – define race, class, social class, and a key personality trait. If any of these are vetoed by the owning player, they have to replace the factoid with something else immediately.

Numbered cards: Ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, and sixes: player generates a stat value and places it somewhere on a set of six lists. A veto means that the player demands a re-roll – because this is a significant investment by them, the re-roll is on 1 extra dice, keep the best 3. When all six have one entry per PC, this phase ends and an auction phase begins. The lists are reordered high to low and labeled by stat in the usual sequence. Each player has a budget of so many construction points which they use to bid for ownership of that stat value for their character. Unused construction points can then be used to ‘buff’ one or more of the resulting stats, before any racial modifiers are applied.

Sevens, Eights, Nines, and Tens: deal with character backstory and personality and special possessions. When the numbered cards phase ends, social class for a PC can be used to buff one item one plus and acquire additional (normal) equipment and cash.

Face cards: these deal with circumstances surrounding the character just prior to and as play begins.

Vetoes: Each player should have ten chits. Each veto costs them one of these. With 4 aces, 6 stats, up to 4 details from other numbered cards, and 5+ details from face cards, that’s 19 specifics – so almost half of the character comes from group input / group ideas. The player gets to reject things that don’t fit the character concept that emerges to ensure that it is coherent and something they want to play.

The Limitations Of The Sandbox

There’s one specific type of campaign structure in which I don’t see Mythwoven working all that well without some additional creative input from the GM, and that’s one where the campaign opens with one or more PCs en route to what will be their initial base of operations – something like an apprenticeship scheme for adventurers. I employed this very structure in Fumanor: The Last Deity, because it phases campaign background into smaller bites. It also let me add PCs to the mix a few at a time, as the party naturally grew – it started with two, added a third, fourth, and a fifth (an NPC) – and then took one of the five away as he was transformed (naturally) into a draconic state. But the players had been developing their characters to mesh into a five-part team – and suddenly they were bereft of their ranger / scout, in the middle of nowhere, a long way from any help. By the time they had returned, they had found ways to cope with the loss and continued as a foursome, but it made the beginning a greater (and different) challenge to what they were expecting. They also had the option to replace that fifth member if they found they really couldn’t cope.

To make it work, this has to develop not the location where the adventures begins, but that eventual home base. Make that change, and Mythwoven fits right in.

Similarly, I’m not sure how well it would have fitted into my Dr Who campaigns, which are inherently about traveling from place to place while a broader story shapes individual episodic adventures; the initial settings for those were always carefully chosen to establish the foundations of the campaign while avoiding campaign elements that I wanted to save for inclusion in later adventures. So it’s not going to be a universal tool that I reach for, each and every time.

Take the two Zenith-3 campaigns – in the first one, several adventures were driven by the need to find and establish a suitable home base, in the second, one was provided for them as is and they had to adjust to it and to its requirements of them, and in the sub-campaign that’s been running lately, it’s once again been all about the journey to the approximate site of their new home base and then finding something they wanted to adapt into becoming that home base – and the compromises and activities needed to make it work. One of the key characteristics was selecting the size and type of community around it, with many options offered for them to contemplate. I have the feeling that using Mythwoven to create that base would have made my job easier (I wouldn’t have had to come up with all those alternatives) but would have both sucked a lot of credibility out of the plotline and had a sense of railroading the players to the destination they had chosen, at the same time. Restoring the first and avoiding the second would mean incorporating a lot of possibilities that I knew were not what the players had decided on – and would have led to frustration. Again, Mythwoven would not have been the right answer.

But other times, and other campaigns? Absolutely yes.

Summing Up

So that’s Mythwoven. The heart of what you are paying for is the process, the conflict heighten / resolution mechanism, and the integrated card interpretations. I’ve summarized parts of the first (but left out key details), and only mentioned the other two without getting into specifics. If you want more, you’ll have to buy a copy.

I think it’s a clever idea with definite potential to be useful. There may be future iterations that are more campaign-specific, with the overall one providing a template; that’s up to the publishers / author. I recommend you buy either the hardcopy with free digital bonus copy or the digital copy and then print a hardcopy and bind / collate it. I’ve offered a few tweaks and suggestions that I think improve it’s utility, identified a few limitations and (potential) flaws, and found ways around them.

It’s definitely worth the consideration of every GM out there.

I want to end this review with an invitation to Brett, the author, to comment on the various findings of this review and the contributions / suggestions that I have offered, in the comments below. I hope that he finds them to be enhancements that are worth considering into the future.

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