This post details two Empires contending with each other in the Warcry campaign at the moment. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit.

There’s also some discussion of when a Kingdom needs to become an Empire, and a mysterious religious body that seems entwined in events.

The working title of the article was “Empires Of Pain”, and I’m still not sure which title is the better one. In the end, I made an instinctive choice.

Acknowledgment

The Idorian Empire and Lamaraine Imperium are derived from material published in I. C. E.’s “Raiders From The Frontier”, a campaign module for Space Master by A. Brooke Lindsay III, © 1989.

Use In Other Campaigns

Everything herein should be fully compatible with Traveller, and with most other sci-fi franchises. The abilities and distinguishing political structures of the two empires mean that they can also work in a superhero campaign, and maybe in horror, too (with a bit of work).

It should also be possible to reinterpret the content to achieve compatibility with a Fantasy campaign run with a rules system like D&D or Pathfinder. The Gene-splicing of the Idorians might be ‘magical infusions’ instead of technology. Similarly, the brain grafting of the Lamaraine sounds like something Illithid might be paid to do.

A bigger problem is confining them to a site that is large enough to support the necessary imperial infrastructure but not so large that the PCs bumbling into the middle are totally overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Forced to be subtle and stealthy, perhaps.

The Fumanor Scale

Fumanor was a game setting under active threat. That meant that there was always a fluid situation requiring command decisions on a regular basis – the closer you got to the borders, the more this was the case.

A rider who runs his mounts to near-death and then transfers to a fresh mount can travel about 8 times as fast as a determined traveler, all things being equal – or so I decided. That gave the initial Kingdom of Fumanor four layers:

• The Inner Kingdom, up to one day’s death-race away (8 days normal travel). This was reduced to 5 days normal travel to take advantage of natural defensive terrain (a choke-point in a ravine between two impassable mountains). In fact, it was surrounded in all other directions by impassable mountains.
• Outside the Inner Kingdom on its one ‘exposed’ side was The Major Kingdom, two days death race away (16 days normal travel). It was surrounded by a wall and regular fortifications that took a generation to erect, even with magical assistance. With the expansion of the Kingdom, these are now rarely threatened and many have fallen into disuse. Many think of the Major Kingdom as the “real” Kingdom, an attitude that leads to political turmoil.
• The Outer Kingdom, three days death race away (24 days normal travel). But there was no hard border; in some areas, a habitation could be 32 days from the capital, in others it might be only 28. This area is under constant threat from the creatures of the Wilderness.
• And beyond the Outer Kingdom lies the Wilderness, where men were the hunted, not the hunters. Three weeks’ travel through the wilderness brought you to the Elven Lands, a further week could take you to the Elven capital or the entrance to the Dwarven Mines; three weeks beyond those was the gateway to the Orcish Kingdom.

(It’s worth noting that the inner kingdom started as a Barony, but had the good fortune to survive a global cataclysm relatively whole about a century before play started. They have been expanding and civilizing the surrounding wilderness ever since). There’s more to both stories but it’s too long and complicated to go into right now).

The campaign was all about growing pains caused by the success of the PCs. They brought closer alliance with the Elves, forged an alliance with the Dwarves, the terms of which made them independent entities within the overall Kingdom. At a stroke, this doubled the area and resources of the Kingdom, but the new lands were simply too far away for effective management.

The solution was to split the kingdom into three administrative regions or “Kingdoms” (plus the Elves and Dwarves). The original capital would directly rule over the inner Kingdom and about half of the Major Kingdom. A new western capital would rule over the balance of the Western Major Kingdom and the western Outer Kingdom. A new Eastern capital would directly rule over the Eastern Reaches and be the diplomatic point of contact with the Elves and Dwarves. Each would have its own ruler, who would sweat fealty to the King in Fumanor.

Of course, the PCs then had to go and win a war with the Orcs (who attempted an massive invasion due to Drow manipulations). In the course of the war, Lolth recaptured the spiritual heartland of the Elves using the gates of Joraldon (which I have written about before, in The Ultimate Weapon: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 5) – but she lost her grip on her own ‘beloved’ Drow in the process.

The whole thing turned out to be a half-baked scheme to elevate her to the status of a true deity. Again, that’s a side-issue; what really matters is that the war was concluded by exposing Lolth’s deception to the Orcs, who hate being used for another’s benefit. So they agreed to peace terms that permitted them to take the place of the Elves, who had abrogated the treaty almost immediately. Individuals, however, still respected the treaty; not all of them became evil, just as it took time for Drow to step out of the shadows.

At a stroke, the Kingdom expanded more than 5-fold in area – most of it wild and untamed. And then the Orcs were invaded by The Golden Empire, with their armies of Undead and magic beyond anything the Kingdom could muster. So they did what they always did, and assembled an adventuring team to investigate – and if possible, solve – the problem. That’s the basic background to the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign.

The key point: The Kingdom had already grown to the point where efficient administration required it to distribute it’s administration. It would be a Kingdom for less than a generation; the only practical approach was for it to become an Empire. It had all the problems of an Empire but not the tools to solve them (Though, to be fair, it’s “Empire” was more of a Commonwealth than an Empire in the more traditional sense).

Applying the same logic to an interstellar political body is simply a matter of scale. Think of each significant resource or population center as a town; and consider the capital in terms of the time it takes supplies to reach the populace within. Major cities are always net importers of food and net exporters of skills and goods.

If the capital needs the full resources of every system within 1 day’s travel, forcing those systems to also be net importers of food, it not only needs a multi-system administration, but a defensive perimeter around those critical worlds, and then a broader swathe of systems that feed those inner systems, and an army / navy / space corps to protect all of the above, and put down any insurrection]. That’s a kingdom, in my book – an interstellar one.

Divide the speed of the fastest messenger service – we’re obviously talking FTL of some kind, here (see Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gamingfor more on that subject) – by the speed of the typical merchant / transport vessel.

You’ll usually get a ratio of three-to-five. These faster vessels are the equivalent of riding horses to death, what I described earlier as a death race; as soon as your basic kingdom grows that many times in distance from the capital, it needs to decentralize its administration and become an Empire (or equivalent sociopolitical structure).

So that’s the practical definition of an Empire that I use.

The basic Interstellar Kingdom is 1 central system plus a ring of systems feeding it, plus a ring of defensive systems. Call it 15 systems as a rough guide (refer to Anatomy of An Interstellar Empire, below). As soon as the Kingdom grows to around 60 systems, it needs to shift to an Imperial model.

In this diagram, there is one Capital, four inner systems (in yellow), and ten outer systems (in red). From those outer Kingdoms, another layer of 12 fringe systems have been colonized, almost doubling the size of the Kingdom; at this point, the Kingdom would be starting to display signs of growing pains, if you knew where to look.

This takes the preceding Kingdom and grows it a bit more. The 12 systems that were in the outer Kingdom have been joined by 12 more, and from those 24 systems, another 49 have been claimed, bringing the total to 88 systems. What’s more, another 20 systems have been reached and at least partially explored; at any tick of the clock, the Empire could grow to 108 systems.

It wasn’t a deliberate design feature, just a function of the geometry, but it’s worth observing the ratios of systems in each layer (which is why I separated the 24 and 49).

10 / 4 = 2.5
24 / 10 = approx 2.5
49 / 24 = approx 2

These ratios imply that the next layer, exploration of which has only just begun, will eventually contain between 2 and 2.5 times the 49 systems of the current outer layer (green), i.e. 98-124 systems. This is a fairly good approximation to use in other maps of provinces and the like; assuming that they are all roughly the same size, you’ll get two-to-two-point-five as many in a ring around the existing cluster. If they are larger, this number will go down; if smaller, it will go up.

This Empire is pretty close to minimum size. At the very least, half of the worlds in the “10” ring would need to become provincial capitals, or better yet, 10 of the worlds in the “24” ring.

What’s the difference? “10-ring” provincial capitals or sector capitals (or whatever you want to call them) would be ideal for administering the Empire as it is right now because they are roughly half-way from the Imperial Capital to the outer reaches.

The “24-ring” would result in looser direct Imperial control (not necessarily either bad or good in itself), but would be ideally placed to administrate the next ring of worlds, too.

Okay, so now we’re on the same page, definitions-wise; you don’t have to use my approach, but it’s important that you get a sense of scale in terms of what I mean when I describe an “Empire”, so that you can translate it back to a fantasy equivalent.

The Idorian Empire

This empire is situated in a globular cluster within the Galaxy. It’s inhabitants may or may not have been human, once; for certain, they can’t be described that way any more.

The homeworld

Idorians are very secretive as to the climate and location of their homeworld, even to the point of refusing to discuss the basis of their biology. There’s a lot of speculation from various sources that they come from a Swampy world and originally had webbed fingers to help them in swimming, but there’s nothing but a few vague hints that could all be misdirection.

Dominant Species

The Idor are the dominant species within the Idorian Empire. They have gray skin with a slight hint of blue, with individuals varying in both darkness of gray and intensity of blue shades. Their faces include flaps that grow from the cheeks to cover the nose and mouth and provide a natural protection against atmospheric contaminants. When angered or upset or simply claiming dominance, these flaps flare out, revealing the facial features.

They are tall, strong for their size, and incredibly resilient. Specifics beyond these general traits vary from occupation to occupation, as many lower castes are specially engineered to have greater capabilities and prowess relevant to that occupation.

Quite how that fits in with their religious orders, no-one knows.

Furthermore, it is likely that one in three carries an experimental genetic modification, granting them unusual capabilities even relative to others of their caste / occupation.

Slaves

When the Idorians discover a new species, they enslave it. At first, this isn’t as bad as it sounds; the Idorians tend to stick fairly close to the shadows and rule by locally-installed proxies, and they are lavish in their expenditure of resources to improve the local botanic, medical, technological and agricultural capabilities. In terms of protection from predating rivals or natural disasters, it can even be seen as a good deal by the locals.

Genetic analysis

Part of those medical advances are extremely detailed genetic analyses. These are not considered adequate until the genetic analysis of an individual tells the Idorians everything that there is to know about the individual through the various phases of its life (arbitrary divisions are used if there are no natural changes to which distinctions and specifications can be attached). The assumption is always that the individual will be raised in a healthy and secure environment, taking into account local conditions.

Social Assimilation

The analytic work can easily take decades if not generations. Quite often, to discover the significance of a particular sequence, the Idorians will need to analyze the genetic codes of other life-forms indigenous to the planet.

All during this phase of their conquest, the Idorians will be incorporating any worthwhile social practices into their own culture, while also firmly suggesting that the conquered species adopt more efficient approaches when those are clearly superior.

Gene Crafting

Things start to change when a genetic trait that is deemed desirable is identified. They identify the genetic coding that confers this trait, look for associated biological systems and subsystems, and work up a genetic ‘package’ to be applied to a select number of the ruling Idorian children hatched thereafter. These are carefully watched and their genetic inheritances and potentials mapped and analyzed; it is rare for these grafts to succeed the first time, or even then tenth time.

Early grafts are not intended to breed true; that is a separate problem to be tackled only once all the ‘bugs’ are out of the ‘system’. But that is the ultimate goal.

An example should make the problems in the process clearer.

Two additional eyes on prehensile stalks, generally facing behind the Idorian.

The eyes and the stalks are the easy part, copied whole from the slave species. It’s the supporting infrastructure that gets complicated.

Nictating membranes to protect from glare. Maybe taken from the donor species, maybe from a species of aquatic creatures.

Additional visual processing centers within the brain, which either has to grow as a result, or something else has to be sacrificed. Increasing the size of the brain can cause balance problems, or weakened skull density, or all manner of other problems. Musculature and bone might need to beefed up to support the additional mass of the head.

Some of these problems can be alleviated by reducing the functionality of the new eyes; they might not need to see color, for example. They might be able to get by with lower detail resolution. Perhaps they can be tuned to function in spectra to which the host organism, giving them better night vision or natural infrared-sensing capabilities.

Additional motor controls to permit conscious control of the eye stalks. They might be able to get these by modifying the genes from an insect, effectively adding the stalks as an extra limb. Or they might steal an idea from terrestrial cockroaches, who effectively have a single brain cell controlling each limb with no communications to, or direction from, the central nervous system (such as it is). An entire upgrade plan might be needed to incorporate refinements one at a time.

Then there’s the problem of reconciling the visual input between the different sets of eyes. Should the new eye stalks be able to trigger impulses and reflexes without conscious thought? Or should they be tools that have to be actively monitored by the consciousness? Is it better to dim or even block the main eyes when concentrating on the stalk view – that could simplify the brain re-engineering considerably!

Does the new visual sense increase the need to take mental shortcuts in processing visual information, leaving the species more susceptible to optical illusions? Does it promote ‘laziness’ that costs visual acuity in the primary sense? Do the additional brain capabilities cause an increase in psychoses or other mental aberrations? Is there an unexpected resonance between the new sense and some other biological function – do the eyes twitch when the host breathes in, for example? Do they become useless when the host is shivering?

The list of questions, and potential problems, just keeps growing.

It will sometimes transpire that a perceived advantage is not adjudged worth the attendant cost to the organism. in which event, it will simply be documented as an ‘unsatisfactory’ upgrade.

(I had another example that i was going to include – a venomous bite – but am short of time. So here’s a very quick summary:

Sacs to contain the venom, a biological function to produce the venom, personal immunity from the venom, secondary organ functions, voluntary vs involuntary release, and so on. But it isn’t as good an example as the one I presented in full.

The Slaughter

It’s when all the potentially-useful upgrades have either taken root in the Idorian population that the status of the conquered species takes a turn for the worse. The Idorians now consider themselves the ‘heirs’ of the conquered species, so they commit an act of mass genocide (aside from a few specimens preserved for research) and simply move in.

Eugenics can be a nasty business, can’t it?

Emotions and Emoting

It should be clear that the Idorian Empire’s primary species has an utterly ruthless streak. It would be easy to consider them unfeeling and emotionless, but this is incorrect; they simply think of their species as the pinnacle of creation – and should it not prove so, they simply upgrade themselves to eliminate any perceived deficiencies.

They are racists and fascists, but they are fiercely protective of their young and are capable of great gentleness. They generally treat conquered species part of the ‘family’ – but that doesn’t have quite the same meaning for them as it does for humans.

Other Personal traits

Idorians are not without their virtues. They have a stronger sense of honor than most humans, see charity as a responsibility as well as a virtue, could lecture Klingons on bravery, are generally highly intelligent, and are good conversationalists – if they are interested in the topic.

They think that incorporation of another species genetics into their own is a way of honoring that species, while the subsequent genocide is perceived as a mercy killing on a mass scale; the donor species is now clearly inferior to the (modified) Idor, and doomed to eventual extinction after generations of suffering.

Idorians take great pains during such acts to reduce suffering to an irreducible minimum and expend considerable effort to document and preserve the culture and history of the donor race. As they see it, having ‘inherited’ the resources, they have a responsibility to the new source of their genetics. And you can never tell when an element from a past culture will influence or inspire a new generation to advance the hybrid species.

The Lamaraine Imperium

The Lamaraines have a number of qualities that makes others perceive them favorably, but this respectability is a veneer that only exists to the extent that it is useful to the Imperium. They are strongly opposed to any form of racial prejudice, and – within their own particular social structure – are also strongly gender-neutral. In fact, anything that could stop an employee from willingly giving his all for his employer is considered barbaric and expressly forbidden.

Origins

A couple of thousand years ago, according to legend, a starship from some other great empire landed on a planet after an accidental space transit beyond the bounds of known space. Unable to return home, the crew formed a colony on the planet, which they named NewHome.

The survivors were just large enough in number to make the colony viable, from a perspective of genetic diversity. They cannibalized what was left of the ship that carried them to NewHome to give themselves a leg up as a colony, used fertility drugs to increase their birthrate, and sacrificed social mores and restrictions as necessary to maximize their gains.

In a generation, one colony had become twelve, that were starting to specialize economically by exploiting natural nearby resources. At the centenary of their arrival, twelve homesteads were a half-dozen towns with thousands of inhabitants. A century later, there were almost 58 million of them, and they had conquered the landmass on which their colonies stood.

100 years later, they were rediscovering the technology that had brought them hence, and they had conquered NewHome. Their numbers were now approaching 12 billion, and they were spread throughout the star system of NewHome. 500 years after their arrival and they had discovered pathways to other star systems and were an Interstellar Kingdom.

Stellar Geography

The Imperium occupies a ribbon loosely connected to a galactic arm. They are unsure whether that galactic arm is the one from whence they escaped, or if it contains the semi-mythical Home from which the dominant race derive. Some records were damaged or lost before the survivors learned how to read and preserve them, and some information was simply never documented within their databases because it was not considered necessary for their original mission.

Mysterious Purpose

What that original mission might have been is another fact that has been lost to history. There are all sorts of speculations, but nothing verifiable. It once must have been common knowledge, and as such no-one made a point of documenting it – until suddenly, the last person who knew it was gone.

There are hints – certain turns of phrase, such as references to ‘escaping’ the old culture, which is frequently demonized as repressive. But none of it is definitive. Heck, there are a dozen different names recorded for the ship that brought them to NewHome, and no-one knows which one is true.

Administrative Structure

The Imperium is ruled over by Mega-corporations, most of which once provided essential governance services on NewHome, but which have diversified by claiming and exploiting other star systems.

Each corporation, at its heart, is a family dynasty called a House ruled over by a Senior President. Within their own spheres of power, these Houses are virtually completely autonomous provided that they abide by the decreed law of the Imperial Praetor of NewHome (which is the head of another dynastic family).

The corporations rub shoulders at the imperial court on NewHome, often engaging in baroque and involuted games of dominance, spying on each other and stealing resources and intelligence – or trying to.

There are multiple tiers of management and staff within each corporation, and it’s not uncommon for workers desirous of promotion to move from one House to another – if they can physically relocate. The lowest tiers of worker are generally only paid enough on which to survive, but as workers are promoted in rank and responsibility, responsibilities and remuneration rise disproportionately. Senior executives may command the wealth of an entire star system that is nominally part of the House, for example.

Military Assets

The Imperium maintains a military that is nominally under the direct command of the Praetor, but which is provided – with trained crews – by individual Houses. Some specialize in one type of unit or asset, others are commonplace and built to common Imperial standards, if not to unified specifications.

These services are allocated to the corporations by Imperial Contract, which have a defined review date; should a house lose an Imperial Contract it is a serious blow to the prestige of the House which suffers the loss and a boost to the House that is awarded the new contract. In practical terms, this usually reflects a change in the status or capabilities of the House in question; decisions are relatively apolitical, but are also strongly influenced by public perceptions.

in practical terms, each House has its own militaries, which differ in strength and makeup of specialist units and Assets, but which is overseen by the Imperium as a whole.

Alien Relations

Almost a dozen sentient species have been discovered during the expansion of the Lamaraine Imperium. Under Imperium Law, these are automatically accorded full ‘human’ rights. However, before those rights can be accessed, their planet must accept being part of the Imperium, with it’s infrastructure, bureaucracy, political structures and social practices. If they do not accept membership, they are sealed into their solar systems and left to fend for themselves (although humanitarian aid may still flow in emergencies).

Should they accept the proposal, they receive full imperial benefits immediately. Work on any necessary infrastructure commences right away, at the expense of the House which has contacted the alien species. The locals cannot refuse these ‘gifts’ once they have opted into the Imperium.

When the lives of the aliens are as comparable to those of any other Imperial Citizen, the total cost is determined by the House (audited by the Imperium); the species must return to the House resources of comparable value, either in the service of its citizens or in material goods (including food).

Once that payment is made in full, the planet becomes part of the House that found it, or may establish it’s own House as it sees fit; the discovering House is entitled to a 5% share of any net profits earned by the new House or 10% if they are given responsibility for the new member planet, to defray maintenance costs.

In practice, this is many times that maintenance cost, by no accident whatsoever, ensuring that bringing a new species into the Imperium is a profitable exercise for the responsible House.

Senior Presidents

These are the heads of the ruling corporations and of the family Dynasties. Think socially-aware Robber Barons, or the CEOs of corporations in Cyberpunk.

Each bears a remarkable similarity in skills, attitudes, and personality traits to their parent, too much so for this to be accidental, but few bother to inquire further. The corporations make no secret of the cause, though they do not publicize it widely, either.

Firstborn Male Inheritance

The firstborn males are raised in the secure knowledge that they will, on their 18th birthday, inherit the corporation and become head of the Dynasty. This typically gives them an exaggerated sense of entitlement.

Life is generally pleasant for these unfortunates; they are frequently widely traveled, get to have adventures and a fair degree of independence, often have significant wealth in their own right, and it is not uncommon for alliances between Houses to be reflected by apprenticeships in the allied Houses’ service.

Every few months, the parents brain is stimulated to produce a ‘brain bud” containing skills, expertise, attitudes, and personality traits. These are grafted into the brains of the firstborn heir, where the engrams, RNA, etc, are incorporated into the brain, transferring skills and expertise from one generation to the next.

These are integrated with the existing experiences of the child, so each generation is like a more-modern revision of the existing Dynastic head. The heirs all know that something of them will survive the experience – and is sometimes even the source of the dominant personality traits – and have the general reckless confidence of youth to think that this will be the outcome in their individual case.

In the meantime, hedonistic tendencies are balanced by increasing responsibilities to the Corporation; they are generally viewed as extensions or representatives of the patriarch.

Later males

Everyone makes mistakes, and learns from them. Some mistakes are deliberately preserved as object lessons, often hard-learned, in the Heirs; but others are more shameful or unwanted. In particular, any weaknesses or vulnerabilities are not to be passed on; the goal is to make each generation incrementally better than the one before it. Early on, then, these are extracted via brain-bud and preserved in the mind of subsequent lesser heirs.

Upon reaching adulthood, these are expected to make their own way in the world; they are given a modest start (but more than most people get) and turned loose. However, they generally have the benefit of having accompanied either the patriarch or his elder brother on corporate assignments, may have been apprenticed to a member of the Corporate Board, have received a first-rate education, and are generally very well prepared for the inevitable.

They also frequently get to vicariously participate in the antics and adventures of the Heir. These shared experiences usually result in close bonds. It is not uncommon for an Heir to hire his brother as an Executive within the Corporation.

The reasons of this largess are to inhibit any thoughts of bringing about an ‘accident’ to the Heir in order to become the eldest (surviving) child. Between the price potentially incurred (the death of self) and the removal of incentive, there is little reason for disloyalty. “Better him than me” is often a mantra amongst these lesser male heirs.

Daughters

Daughters not only get educations as comprehensive as those of the males, they are often better educated in areas not directly relevant to Corporate Management. Sciences and arts are freely available, and they are encouraged to explore their own interests. Some families are happy for daughters to accompany Heirs on their escapades, while others shelter them a little more, or require them to go exploring life separately (with their sisters).

Daughters serve one additional vital function: insurance. The brain-bud process is not perfect, and sometimes things go wrong, something that often can’t be detected until the grafting is complete. Furthermore, even a successful bud does damage to the source brain. So both the existing Patriarch is aging, mentally, and the Heir may suddenly develop a serious psychosis or mental deficiency that renders him ineligible to inherit.

Other male heirs are either too young and inexperienced, by definition, or have been the recipient of brain buds of traits that are deliberately not to be conserved, making them ineligible for consideration. In such cases, the eldest daughter or daughters assume control of the company, overseen by their mother, and the Corporation becomes (briefly) a matriarchy.

Corporate matriarchies are feared throughout the Imperium. Their heads know that they are only in charge until their eldest male child becomes mature enough to take over, and they are furthermore being forced to carry out a job that they never wanted to perform. They can make only limited brain grafts to their children, who will automatically be disadvantaged as a result; the only hope they have for protecting those children from the depredations of other Houses is to force other Corporate executives to donate brain buds to their Heir.

In the meantime, they are automatically expected to be less capable, and to hand on a seriously diminished House; this gives them free reign to implement social change as they see fit with a total ruthlessness and lack of attention to profitability. They are responsible for a lot of the long-term reform and improvement within the Imperium, the radical progressives that counter the inherent conservatism of the brain-graft process.

And, because they are not expected to know the “unwritten rules”, they can sometimes use sheer ruthlessness and disregard of ‘established wisdom’ to create profit where none could be perceived.

When they reach adulthood, assuming that they have not been called upon to substitute for a defective male Heir, they not only get the same start in life as a younger son, they also get twice as much held in escrow as a dowry.

New Houses

Because new Houses are automatically the rulers of a new Corporation, which will only survive if other Houses invest in it, it must also be appreciated that it takes both a Male and a Female to found a House – and the female is usually the source of the ideas and inspiration that give the new corporation a ‘product’ or ‘service’ to sell.

Nine-tenths of New Houses fall in their first 5 years, and Ninety-nine in one hundred within two generations. To succeed, they have to offer something new, or better than anyone else, have to turn that into a profit, have to invest that profit wisely, and have to diversify enough to withstand any reverses of fortune – which jealous rivals will be actively trying to engineer.

A smart daughter is therefore at the heart of a new House, by definition. This immediately gives their birth House the first opportunity to invest in the new House, and to ally with it, benefiting both.

Political and Arranged Marriages

Anyone who claims these don’t happen is deluding themselves, but as a general rule they never work in the Imperium – and are strictly illegal, to boot. Daughters have the same rights and responsibilities as any other sentient, and coercion in choice of partner is an open-and-shut case. A great House can be felled by such a daughter simply going to the media and lodging a public complaint – if there’s evidence to back up the claim, of course.

The only safe option is to throw a male from the House you want to ally with into the company of a compatible daughter, repeatedly, and hope that something clicks.

Machine Rights

To be adjudged a sentient citizen with full rights, a machine intellect has to (1) prove that it is capable of learning and integrating new information into its world-view, and (2) prove that it has independence of thought. It’s not enough to pass some sort of Turing Test; it has to demonstrate a capacity for humanoid-type intellectual growth.

There is a Society For The Advancement Of Machine Rights operated by the Delphus-Vienna Family through the Yttrium Corporation who zealously police the ranks of those afforded Machine Rights; it is their philosophy that any false case harms the acceptance of Machine Rights in general, while any refusal to accept and acknowledge a genuine representative of the Machine Kind is an indictment of the entire Imperium.

Should some corporation own the hardware in which a Machine Person resides, the legal model is based on what happens with alien species – the corporate owners of that hardware have to immediately hand possession and title over to the Machine Person, but that Machine Person then owes the corporation the value of the hardware of of any services they were expected to provide. This has to be repaid before the Machine Person is truly free.

Agreements for upgrades on similar terms may be made; that’s a matter of negotiation. Some corporations are quite open about their support for Machine People in their service; others are sensitive to an independent Machine Person having access to their corporate secrets, and make it (relatively) quick and easy for the Machine Person to buy their full liberty.

Religion

The Imperium has a religion of sorts that dates back to the founding of NewHome, but many of its precepts are a patchwork of confused half-guesses. There’s something about an Omniscient Cosmos that would sound a lot like the principle of Karma, and a destiny that is to be shared by all sentients when they join with that Cosmic Omniscience.

Recent History

The two empires came into contact for the first time about 50 years ago. Both reacted cautiously. Diplomatic envoys. Gifts. Pretty speeches. Dancing Ghirurhs (8′ tall marsupials with three 10 inch claws on each hand).

Slowly, though, it became clear that there were irreconcilable philosophical differences between the two.

As things stand, neither the House (Jade-London) in direct contact with the Idorians nor the Empire have enough power to decisively overcome the other. The Empire is considerably stronger than House Jade-London on its own, but it almost certainly would not fight alone; there are any number of alliances that might be called on, and if the full might of the Imperium gets involved, the Empire is toast.

The result has been a lukewarm cold war in which both sides are attempting to boost their production enough to prevent the other from changing the status quo, accompanied by a number of limited (and deniable) skirmishes. If any of these take place at a flash-point, though, the war could heat up very quickly.

Acting as an anodyne to these petty grievances has been the Church Of The Omniscient Mind.

Church Of The Omniscient Mind aka The Order Of Tharsh

This is the principle religious body of the Imperium but no-one really knows what the faith is all about. Members of the Church are secretive and authoritarian, and are frequently recruited from the younger sons of the Great Houses.

Factions and Splinters

The Church has splintered into differing groups a number of times, leading to incessant interfaith conferences aimed at reconciling the differing beliefs. Ultimately, the Praetor can only publicly back one (and needs to have one to lead the official services within the Imperium, so he can’t stay neutral), which means that the incarnation that most closely publicly matches his personal beliefs is the one that will generally emerge on top.

Monks

Monks are the individuals with whom the general public has the greatest contact. These are frequently hooded, need not be human, and assume absolute authority over births, deaths, and associated rites. Almost every social function – marriage, maturation, etc – has a religious component performed by a monk.

Alien Faiths

One known tenet of the Church is that all true faiths contain at least a piece of the Truth, and none hold it all, for they are all the creations of flawed sentients. Even if such were personally guided by the Cosmic Omniscience, which several claim, the imperfection of the sentients perception of that guidance mars the work.

This doctrine has permitted the Church to assimilate the faiths of several of the alien species who have joined the Imperium.

When the Idorians and Imperium came into contact, it was determined that the Idorians had a more polytheistic nature, broken into multiple cults and sub-faiths. It was a natural reaction for the Church to host multiple interfaith exchanges between themselves and these cults, but it still surprised everyone when they announced that they had examined the precepts of the Yendai cult and found them to be fundamentally compatible with the Faith.

The inclusion of alien belief patterns is one reason why the faith is not really understood outside the Church itself. To which they would reply, “Understanding is not required; much is merely symbolic, anyway. Faith and Respect for those who believe is sufficient.”

Abbots

Monks can eventually be promoted either to Abbots or to Novitiates.

Abbots are still monks, but they get trained in bureaucracy, administration, and command, and in turn, train other Monks. They set policy locally and represent the Order Of Tharsh to the rest of the Galactic Arm. This path suits those of a practical or pious bent. Monks and Abbots swear oaths to remain celibate so that family connections have minimal influence over the church (it should ideally be none, but that’s recognized as impractical).

Novitiates

Novitiates are the lowest-ranking members of the Priesthood proper. As they advance in rank within the Faith, Priests are required to interface with the public. Senior Priests also set Church policy and doctrine. This path suits those of a more social or political personality. Priests are permitted to marry..

Higher Ranks

Clerics*, Bishops, Archbishops, Pious – these are the publicly known ranks of the Priesthood. What their responsibilities and powers are is not known publicly.

It is known that no-one not of Bishop rank can be assigned as spiritual advisor to the Praetor. But this role is usually confined to helping the Praetor make up his mind without influencing the substance of the decision. Whether or not this is another of those ‘hypothetical ideals’ is not known, but is generally assumed.

Other Precepts

Despite the monks best efforts to keep their philosophy internalized, a few specifics have leaked out. Some of these will be familiar to students of theology in our world, though often recast in slightly strange phrasings:

• Judge others not, for ye will be judged.
• Wealth placed in the service of Justice will reap Justice until it is corrupted.
• Wealth placed in the service of Honor starts wars.
• Peaceful prosperity is worth almost any secular price.
• What is sewn will be reaped. Often with interest.
• Corporate Irresponsibility is the only thing worse than Corporate Responsibility.
• All beings are motivated by Spirit. Some of them even know it.
• The sharper the blade, the deeper the casual cut. The same is true of tongues.
• A secret revealed is free for others to misuse.
• Truth in all things is preferred except when it is better to lie. There is no middle ground.

In general, most of the socially progressive beliefs and business practices of the Imperium have been incorporated into the faith-structure of the Church. The primary exception at this time centers around Machine People, which they are still considering.

The Church and its agents never refer to “souls”. They will refer to Spirit, which they consider the motivating force that drives all sentients, and to “taint” which perverts that force into destructive acts either against the self or others.

Politics and The Church

The Church attempts to steer as clear of all political narratives as possible; they dislike being forced to take sides, especially since there is no certainty that two Priests will reach the same conclusion and offer the same advice / interpretation.

They are, however, NOT meek and subservient. They are polite, and friendly, and pious, and as arrogant as hell. THEY know the operating system of the Multiverse and no-one else does, and they like it that way. They can go from diffident to forceful at the drop of a cassock; they are accustomed to ‘persuading’ arrogant House Patriarchs into abiding by their instructions. They only succeed in this because, most of the time, they don’t stick their noses in where they aren’t wanted.

The Hoods

The hoods worn by the monks tend to be a neutral middle gray (about 35% black for those familiar with that mode of description). They include wired shells underneath to distort the perceived shape of the habit so that the species of the wearer cannot be readily discerned. There are some things that are beyond this capacity, but they are always developing new tricks to this end – including holographic tentacles in place of hands.

Two-and-a-half creations

So there you have it. I guess it’s time to talk a little bit about the backstory. As discussed earlier, these are all inspired by someone else’s work, which I happily acknowledge. I read the part of the supplement that contains the adventure Cargo Macabre a month and a week before play, and a week later made some rough notes about how to dovetail the adventure with the ongoing quest within the campaign – enough that I would have been comfortable winging it the next day.

Specifically, i needed to involve some gentlemen of noble rank – the primary PCs daughters need husbands and their mother insists on this (and many other) preconditions. The PC has his own ideas, and there’s rarely room for both.

Which meant that I needed trouble sufficient to bring some representatives of the ruling house to the site of the trouble – and that demanded information about the culture. The basis of everything that you’ve read here was written in a single evening session the night before we actually started play – and the players are currently about half-way through the resulting adventure, which bears only minimal resemblance to the original.

What you have read here today takes those rough notes and the additional cultural details that appeared in the campaign and expands on them (including taking into account a few observations of the players during play). That expansion also consisted of a single evening session of writing.

A bit of a fill-in article this week (and maybe next week, too), so that I can put additional effort into a larger article on Economies in RPGs.

In the original version of this article, it was illustrated with a composite image created from three DALL-E (Ai-generated) images. Part of the reason for doing so was because I knew from past experience that actual photographs of the environment I wanted to display would be extremely hard to find, and part of it was to see if DALL-E could provide a more efficient solution.

Long story short: No, it couldn’t. To get something half-way passable required just as much manual editing as working with actual photographs would have done, maybe more. I had to composite three separate generated images to get something approaching the look and textures that I thought necessary, and the results were still only just good enough – after hours of editing work. The artificial results were too cartoonish in style, for one thing.

It’s not an experiment that I will be repeating any time in the near future.

Furthermore, some creators and backers of this site refuse to support any work that is or that features AI-generated content, because they want to back human creators. As a human creator myself, I can’t argue with their position – and so I am reposting the article without the offending AI-generated content. Which means, no featured image this time around.

Now, on with the post!

With the recent return of the Warcry campaign, I thought that I would describe a couple of the more interesting creations that have appeared in the campaign. One of these is part of the current adventure, another is part of the campaign’s history that is still remembered vividly by the players.

I’m framing this as part of the occasional “Pieces Of Creation” series, which contains material created for my own campaigns (or, in this case, re-created from memory). It’s been a while since I’ve done of those – the last one was The Artificial Mind: Z-3 Campaign Canon about eight months ago, and it came so close to not being done in time that I didn’t even include the series logo!

Acknowledgment
I am sure that the Land Of Green was based in part on material published elsewhere, and would happily acknowledge that intellectual debt, but I can’t locate the source. I do know that part of it also derived from expanded material that I prepared for the Living Land in my TORG campaign.

It is almost certain that the source was an I.C.E. module for Space Master, but I think I took a small part of one and blew it up in significance. But I’m not even sure of that, any more.

Use in other campaigns

While the material is obviously sci-fi oriented, and would work in most superheroic campaigns, it would not take much to adapt it to a fantasy setting. You might need to set The Land Of Green on an island instead of making it a whole planet, though.

I also have to add that the ‘explosive evolution’ theory is no longer in vogue. But with alien genetics involved, who knows?

The whole genetics / evolution question becomes more difficult in a fantasy setting; while it may be useful to the GM for analyzing just what is there for the PCs to find, it will be far more common to simply take the environment as found.

Plot problems are largely going to center around the issue of whether or not it’s acceptable to addict a PC against his will with little or not saving throw. I know that I’d be pissed if that happened to one of my PCs, no matter what the GM thought was realistic. Overcoming this problem entails doing one of two things:

1. Conferring some sort of temporary immunity or protection to the PCs, probably magical.
2. Making the addiction weaker, so that it’s both harder and less frequent that characters become addicted and easier to recover.

Or both, of course.

All right, without further ado:

The Land Of Green

An exploration ship has discovered a planet completely covered in plant life with virtually no animals, but a series of massive fossil deposits testify that animal life was once dominant on the planet. The ship is searching for resources that can be exploited as well as scientific discoveries; if these are significant enough, a specialist ship will be dispatched.

In time, the exploration ship may be able to determine the following:

Beginnings

Once, GRN-7244 was home to a rich biosphere, reaching a stage similar to the late Cretaceous / Jurassic eras here on earth – think dinosaurs, mega-fauna, birds, insects, etc. Then one plant developed a novel means of dispersing its seeds over a much wider area; it included a combination of mild psychotropic and euphoric compounds in the fruit wrapper that contained its seeds.

Animals that ate the fruit liked it, a lot, and wandered off in response to the fantasies created by these compounds, breaking even life-time mating bonds, and venturing into areas that would normally not have been considered safe had the creatures been in their right minds.

It mattered not a bit if the ‘host’ was killed and eaten in the process; this still provided the plant with the opportunity to spread into areas that might otherwise have been inaccessible.

Mega-fauna Appetites

Of course, the problem with mega-fauna is that they eat a lot of vegetation. Plants evolved many strategies to protect themselves from this; prolific spread or heavy fruit yields amongst them. Evolution cares not a whit for the survival of any individual representative of a species; it is always focused on the spread of the species overall.

The mega-fauna appetite becomes a much greater problem if your produce is perceived as an attractive part of the available diet. 80-ton creatures might be drawn to consume the fruit, but they were rarely discriminating, and would strip the plant of its foliage in a psychotropic daze. The very success of its strategy for increasing the range of its spread was placing the survival of the species under threat.

A New Strategy

When species are ‘stressed’ in the environmental / survival sense, there is far greater pressure for evolutionary change and diversity; when existence is comfortable, change can proceed at a more leisurely pace. In one of the threatened plants, genetic chance brought forth a concentration of the psychotropic compounds in the leaves and an ability to spread it like a scent through the air.

The plants became toxic; even being close to one could administer a lethal dose of toxin. At a greater distance, their presence caused breakdowns in the social structures and habits of any species that crossed the path of the plants. In effect, they turned from a spread-far-and-wide protective path into a survival-in-isolation strategy.

The Wave Of Death

These disruptions provided a new evolutionary pressure on the survival of the mega-herbivores, but before they could respond to it, species began to vanish, all cohesion lost. This was strictly a regional issue at first – how is a species to be propagated if its members lose interest in mating for a generation or two? Like a blight, these regions grew and grew; on an evolutionary scale, the net effect was a mass extinction without warning.

There were many domino effects in consequence; without their prey to nourish them, the super-predators were the next to feel the blowtorch, triggering a second wave of the mass extinction of the mega-fauna. Birds and larger insects soon followed. But many plant species have evolved to require the intervention of animals as part of their life-cycles; some of these also began to vanish.

All At Sea

Coastal waters became contaminated whenever rainfall washed some of the fruit from these plants downstream. When a plant fell, for whatever reason, that waterway carried the psychotropics all the way down to the sea. Larger species of marine life joined the wave of extinction save a few species at home in the deepest seas. Over time, the surface water and upper oceans all became contaminated and any species that did not derive nourishment directly from plankton, fell.

Green Explosion

With the decrease in competition, the plants carrying this compound flourished, but they were no longer alone; several others had taken the compound on board through contaminated water supplies. Those that learned to use it as did the originating source, as a toxic protection, also gained a significant evolutionary protection against the smaller surviving herbivore species.

As those species consumed the plants that were capable of sustaining them, it presented an opportunity for spread to those plant species not being eaten, so the non-toxic food supplies continued to dwindle, and the poisonous species spread far and wide, adapting to any environment that supported plant life.

Green Implosion & Revolution

Many plants require the existence of animal life to prosper; they revitalize soils, recycle plant material, convert oxygen into CO2, and provide many other vital links in the biosphere. Those links were now failing, one by one, and whole ecologies were once again under threat of total collapse. The result was a ‘Green Implosion’ in which less hardy plant species began to die out, creating still more capacity for those plants which were not so dependent on animal services to thrive.

The Green Implosion became a time of explosive growth in the number of subspecies of plant life due to the many empty micro-environmental niches that had been emptied, and the psychotropically-toxic plants took full advantage. They were now the undoubted dominant species of life on GRN-7244, and exploded in subspecies to fill those empty niches.

New Tricks

Where it was needful, some of the new species of toxic plant learned new tricks – like the trees whose spore-like seeds contained a surface covered in fine hairs bearing barbed hooks; once these would have made it easier for the seeds to latch onto the fur of small mammals or feathers, but now they learned to come to rest on the flowers of other plants, where they waited for the next strong gust of wind to resume their journey, in the process conveying pollen captured by these surfaces to parts unknown, assisting in the spread of both species.

It was a short step from such arrangements to symbiosis between the species; others joined in, until whole biosphere colonies were carried aloft in summer breezes. It wasn’t long before these began to supplant the remnants of the original psychotropic species, the latest victims in the ongoing ecological war for survival.

Other animal functions were mimicked by other species. One vine-like species learned to perambulate from one tree-limb to another in a semblance of locomotion, and some of those trees in turn evolved to use the vines as go-betweens in the reproductive process. When the trees began to reward the vines with nourishment, making those trees a ‘preferred’ species by the vines, symbiosis between the two was complete.

Some have even learned the art of respiration, thriving on oxygen and releasing carbon-dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Remnants Of The Old Guard

There were a few species of animal life who also employed toxins as defenses against predators or to hunt. Now, there were no more predators and little enough prey. In particular, a few species of snakes found that they no longer needed to produce their own venom (there was nothing to use it on) but that if they ingested plant mater from these bio-toxic plants, they could concentrate the dangerous compounds in their own (disused) venom sacs, keeping them safe and viable. Of course, they remained somewhat unpredictable immediately after feeding, so their spread has been slow. They are now the dominant form of animal life on the planet.

The Current Picture

The ecology and biosphere diversity is very similar to that of the earth – but for any animal role, there is a plant doing it instead. Virtually every plant on the planet contains psychotropic drugs in sufficient quantity to cause addiction with a single bite.

Low-level doses of these compounds float through the air all spring and summer, sufficient to cause hallucinations and an unquenchable desire to eat the fruit of the trees that are everywhere. Even a small dose is enough to cause delusions, such as the captain giving permission for crewmen to leave the vessel and harvest the fruit.

The water is similarly toxic except in the depths of winter. The greater the proximity of plant life to the edges of a watercourse, the more toxic it will be; the worst cases of contamination are enough to kill instantly, and to addict any not so killed.

Going outside of a sealed and controlled environment, even in a sealed spacesuit, simply allows the compounds to adhere like pollen to the external surfaces; if decontamination is insufficient on return to the sealed environment, crew may be affected. Merely touching an exposed object is enough to create mild audio and visual hallucinations.

Some of the colony spores may be hardy enough to survive exposure to vacuum, so visiting spacecraft may inadvertently be responsible for spreading the Green Revolution to other worlds and environments.

Snakes can be up to a meter across and forty meters in length. Their bite is instantly fatal, but they are less inclined to act in this way than terrestrial snakes, because they no longer perceive animal life as a food-source.

In-game

Warcry and companions arrived just as the explorer ship was preparing to test the atmosphere on lab animals. They had detected the low concentrations of euphorics and psychotropics in the air, and were concerned as to what the effects would be, so they were proceeding cautiously.

Accidents happen from time to time in even the best-run labs. Such an accident caused a number of crewmen to be exposed to the atmosphere before the results of the testing referred to were fully analyzed. One crewman made it all the way to the fruit before being recaptured.

Those exposed went through withdrawal, experiencing berserker rages in which they exhibited unusual strength and a singular need to consume the fruit of the trees near the ship. They broke free of their confinement and once again reached the fruit; several consumed some of it and died instantly, an expression of euphoria on their faces. In the process, several more members were exposed.

When the ability of the ship to return to space became threatened due to crew members becoming untrustworthy, the captain elected to depart the planet. Several crewmen mutinied, and were confined, creating a new puzzle – they were not known to have been exposed, how had it happened?

That was how the spore effect was discovered. When Warcry deduced that the ship’s exterior would have been covered in spores, the Captain decided that he had no choice but to list his vessel as the victim of a plague and carry out a self-destruct action. He could not risk carrying colonies of the Green to a new world.

Warcry, who had made a number of friends amongst the crew while they worked to discover the secrets of GRN-7244, decided that this was one world that the universe could do without, particularly when he discovered that some of the spores had burrowed into the atmospheric seals of the explorer ship and space suits. Luckily, his worked on a different principle.

Simply blowing it up would have been the easy option, but would have created an asteroid belt rich in valuable metals; someone sooner might have mined it and come across a viable colony spore. So his solution was even more drastic (and difficult to arrange) – he caused it to plunge into its star, reasoning that if any plant could survive that, everything else was already dead, they just didn’t know it yet.

Next Monday: two more creations for the Warcry Campaign, this time from the current adventure, ready to be copy-and-pasted into your sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero campaigns.

This post features a composite of three AI-generated images. If you disapprove of AI-generated content, you may prefer to view a version without the AI-Content. If so, just click on This Link: https://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/the-land-of-green-no-dall-e-version

Having searched for jungle images before, I knew that finding the right one would be problematic, so I turned to DALL-E. The images above were all close to what I wanted but not quite right, so I composited the three into one master image.

• The main source image is the most recognizable as a contributor; I separated it into creek & foreground and trees & midground. I copied-pasted-and-manipulated various bits to extend the latter beyond the original frame on both sides & above and the former beyond it to the left. I also separated the two, creating a gap between the two pieces.
• In the second (which is actually the first image that I generated), I extracted the tree because I liked it’s shape, and stretched it and tweaked the angle to create a framing element on the right-hand side. I then used the rest of the image, enlarged, as the background between the two parts from Image 1 – but, because of the nature of the canopy image extracted from the base image, this background actually forms a new midground plane in between the two main image sections.
• From image three, I liked the texture of the tree but not the shape, so I extracted the part of the tree above the foreground leaf and twisted and manipulated it to match up with the tree from Image 2. I also extracted the foreground leaf (bottom right), and – after adding texture to make it look more realistic and less cartoonish – used it to give the tree hybrid a sense of scale, pushing it back into the midground and making it seem a lot larger. You’ll see the final resulting image after a few preliminaries are taken care of.

A bit of a fill-in article this week (and maybe next week, too), so that I can put additional effort into a larger article on Economies in RPGs.

With the recent return of the Warcry campaign, I thought that I would describe a couple of the more interesting creations that have appeared in the campaign. One of these is part of the current adventure, another is part of the campaign’s history that is still remembered vividly by the players.

I’m framing this as part of the occasional “Pieces Of Creation” series, which contains material created for my own campaigns (or, in this case, re-created from memory). It’s been a while since I’ve done of those – the last one was The Artificial Mind: Z-3 Campaign Canon about eight months ago, and it came so close to not being done in time that I didn’t even include the series logo!

Acknowledgment
I am sure that the Land Of Green was based in part on material published elsewhere, and would happily acknowledge that intellectual debt, but I can’t locate the source. I do know that part of it also derived from expanded material that I prepared for the Living Land in my TORG campaign.

It is almost certain that the source was an I.C.E. module for Space Master, but I think I took a small part of one and blew it up in significance. But I’m not even sure of that, any more.

Use in other campaigns

While the material is obviously sci-fi oriented, and would work in most superheroic campaigns, it would not take much to adapt it to a fantasy setting. You might need to set The Land Of Green on an island instead of making it a whole planet, though.

I also have to add that the ‘explosive evolution’ theory is no longer in vogue. But with alien genetics involved, who knows?

The whole genetics / evolution question becomes more difficult in a fantasy setting; while it may be useful to the GM for analyzing just what is there for the PCs to find, it will be far more common to simply take the environment as found.

Plot problems are largely going to center around the issue of whether or not it’s acceptable to addict a PC against his will with little or not saving throw. I know that I’d be pissed if that happened to one of my PCs, no matter what the GM thought was realistic. Overcoming this problem entails doing one of two things:

1. Conferring some sort of temporary immunity or protection to the PCs, probably magical.
2. Making the addiction weaker, so that it’s both harder and less frequent that characters become addicted and easier to recover.

Or both, of course.

All right, without further ado:

The above doesn’t really do the finished image justice, so I’ve also uploaded the full-sized version. Click the image above to open it in a new tab.

The Land Of Green

An exploration ship has discovered a planet completely covered in plant life with virtually no animals, but a series of massive fossil deposits testify that animal life was once dominant on the planet. The ship is searching for resources that can be exploited as well as scientific discoveries; if these are significant enough, a specialist ship will be dispatched.

In time, the exploration ship may be able to determine the following:

Beginnings

Once, GRN-7244 was home to a rich biosphere, reaching a stage similar to the late Cretaceous / Jurassic eras here on earth – think dinosaurs, mega-fauna, birds, insects, etc. Then one plant developed a novel means of dispersing its seeds over a much wider area; it included a combination of mild psychotropic and euphoric compounds in the fruit wrapper that contained its seeds.

Animals that ate the fruit liked it, a lot, and wandered off in response to the fantasies created by these compounds, breaking even life-time mating bonds, and venturing into areas that would normally not have been considered safe had the creatures been in their right minds.

It mattered not a bit if the ‘host’ was killed and eaten in the process; this still provided the plant with the opportunity to spread into areas that might otherwise have been inaccessible.

Mega-fauna Appetites

Of course, the problem with mega-fauna is that they eat a lot of vegetation. Plants evolved many strategies to protect themselves from this; prolific spread or heavy fruit yields amongst them. Evolution cares not a whit for the survival of any individual representative of a species; it is always focused on the spread of the species overall.

The mega-fauna appetite becomes a much greater problem if your produce is perceived as an attractive part of the available diet. 80-ton creatures might be drawn to consume the fruit, but they were rarely discriminating, and would strip the plant of its foliage in a psychotropic daze. The very success of its strategy for increasing the range of its spread was placing the survival of the species under threat.

A New Strategy

When species are ‘stressed’ in the environmental / survival sense, there is far greater pressure for evolutionary change and diversity; when existence is comfortable, change can proceed at a more leisurely pace. In one of the threatened plants, genetic chance brought forth a concentration of the psychotropic compounds in the leaves and an ability to spread it like a scent through the air.

The plants became toxic; even being close to one could administer a lethal dose of toxin. At a greater distance, their presence caused breakdowns in the social structures and habits of any species that crossed the path of the plants. In effect, they turned from a spread-far-and-wide protective path into a survival-in-isolation strategy.

The Wave Of Death

These disruptions provided a new evolutionary pressure on the survival of the mega-herbivores, but before they could respond to it, species began to vanish, all cohesion lost. This was strictly a regional issue at first – how is a species to be propagated if its members lose interest in mating for a generation or two? Like a blight, these regions grew and grew; on an evolutionary scale, the net effect was a mass extinction without warning.

There were many domino effects in consequence; without their prey to nourish them, the super-predators were the next to feel the blowtorch, triggering a second wave of the mass extinction of the mega-fauna. Birds and larger insects soon followed. But many plant species have evolved to require the intervention of animals as part of their life-cycles; some of these also began to vanish.

All At Sea

Coastal waters became contaminated whenever rainfall washed some of the fruit from these plants downstream. When a plant fell, for whatever reason, that waterway carried the psychotropics all the way down to the sea. Larger species of marine life joined the wave of extinction save a few species at home in the deepest seas. Over time, the surface water and upper oceans all became contaminated and any species that did not derive nourishment directly from plankton, fell.

Green Explosion

With the decrease in competition, the plants carrying this compound flourished, but they were no longer alone; several others had taken the compound on board through contaminated water supplies. Those that learned to use it as did the originating source, as a toxic protection, also gained a significant evolutionary protection against the smaller surviving herbivore species.

As those species consumed the plants that were capable of sustaining them, it presented an opportunity for spread to those plant species not being eaten, so the non-toxic food supplies continued to dwindle, and the poisonous species spread far and wide, adapting to any environment that supported plant life.

Green Implosion & Revolution

Many plants require the existence of animal life to prosper; they revitalize soils, recycle plant material, convert oxygen into CO2, and provide many other vital links in the biosphere. Those links were now failing, one by one, and whole ecologies were once again under threat of total collapse. The result was a ‘Green Implosion’ in which less hardy plant species began to die out, creating still more capacity for those plants which were not so dependent on animal services to thrive.

The Green Implosion became a time of explosive growth in the number of subspecies of plant life due to the many empty micro-environmental niches that had been emptied, and the psychotropically-toxic plants took full advantage. They were now the undoubted dominant species of life on GRN-7244, and exploded in subspecies to fill those empty niches.

New Tricks

Where it was needful, some of the new species of toxic plant learned new tricks – like the trees whose spore-like seeds contained a surface covered in fine hairs bearing barbed hooks; once these would have made it easier for the seeds to latch onto the fur of small mammals or feathers, but now they learned to come to rest on the flowers of other plants, where they waited for the next strong gust of wind to resume their journey, in the process conveying pollen captured by these surfaces to parts unknown, assisting in the spread of both species.

It was a short step from such arrangements to symbiosis between the species; others joined in, until whole biosphere colonies were carried aloft in summer breezes. It wasn’t long before these began to supplant the remnants of the original psychotropic species, the latest victims in the ongoing ecological war for survival.

Other animal functions were mimicked by other species. One vine-like species learned to perambulate from one tree-limb to another in a semblance of locomotion, and some of those trees in turn evolved to use the vines as go-betweens in the reproductive process. When the trees began to reward the vines with nourishment, making those trees a ‘preferred’ species by the vines, symbiosis between the two was complete.

Some have even learned the art of respiration, thriving on oxygen and releasing carbon-dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Remnants Of The Old Guard

There were a few species of animal life who also employed toxins as defenses against predators or to hunt. Now, there were no more predators and little enough prey. In particular, a few species of snakes found that they no longer needed to produce their own venom (there was nothing to use it on) but that if they ingested plant mater from these bio-toxic plants, they could concentrate the dangerous compounds in their own (disused) venom sacs, keeping them safe and viable. Of course, they remained somewhat unpredictable immediately after feeding, so their spread has been slow. They are now the dominant form of animal life on the planet.

The Current Picture

The ecology and biosphere diversity is very similar to that of the earth – but for any animal role, there is a plant doing it instead. Virtually every plant on the planet contains psychotropic drugs in sufficient quantity to cause addiction with a single bite.

Low-level doses of these compounds float through the air all spring and summer, sufficient to cause hallucinations and an unquenchable desire to eat the fruit of the trees that are everywhere. Even a small dose is enough to cause delusions, such as the captain giving permission for crewmen to leave the vessel and harvest the fruit.

The water is similarly toxic except in the depths of winter. The greater the proximity of plant life to the edges of a watercourse, the more toxic it will be; the worst cases of contamination are enough to kill instantly, and to addict any not so killed.

Going outside of a sealed and controlled environment, even in a sealed spacesuit, simply allows the compounds to adhere like pollen to the external surfaces; if decontamination is insufficient on return to the sealed environment, crew may be affected. Merely touching an exposed object is enough to create mild audio and visual hallucinations.

Some of the colony spores may be hardy enough to survive exposure to vacuum, so visiting spacecraft may inadvertently be responsible for spreading the Green Revolution to other worlds and environments.

Snakes can be up to a meter across and forty meters in length. Their bite is instantly fatal, but they are less inclined to act in this way than terrestrial snakes, because they no longer perceive animal life as a food-source.

In-game

Warcry and companions arrived just as the explorer ship was preparing to test the atmosphere on lab animals. They had detected the low concentrations of euphorics and psychotropics in the air, and were concerned as to what the effects would be, so they were proceeding cautiously.

Accidents happen from time to time in even the best-run labs. Such an accident caused a number of crewmen to be exposed to the atmosphere before the results of the testing referred to were fully analyzed. One crewman made it all the way to the fruit before being recaptured.

Those exposed went through withdrawal, experiencing berserker rages in which they exhibited unusual strength and a singular need to consume the fruit of the trees near the ship. They broke free of their confinement and once again reached the fruit; several consumed some of it and died instantly, an expression of euphoria on their faces. In the process, several more members were exposed.

When the ability of the ship to return to space became threatened due to crew members becoming untrustworthy, the captain elected to depart the planet. Several crewmen mutinied, and were confined, creating a new puzzle – they were not known to have been exposed, how had it happened?

That was how the spore effect was discovered. When Warcry deduced that the ship’s exterior would have been covered in spores, the Captain decided that he had no choice but to list his vessel as the victim of a plague and carry out a self-destruct action. He could not risk carrying colonies of the Green to a new world.

Warcry, who had made a number of friends amongst the crew while they worked to discover the secrets of GRN-7244, decided that this was one world that the universe could do without, particularly when he discovered that some of the spores had burrowed into the atmospheric seals of the explorer ship and space suits. Luckily, his worked on a different principle.

Simply blowing it up would have been the easy option, but would have created an asteroid belt rich in valuable metals; someone sooner might have mined it and come across a viable colony spore. So his solution was even more drastic (and difficult to arrange) – he caused it to plunge into its star, reasoning that if any plant could survive that, everything else was already dead, they just didn’t know it yet.

I was going to present another pair of creations in this post, but have decided to save them for next week.

There are three facts about a character that can be considered definitive of what sort of person they are, diagnostic of what sort of mistakes they will make, and instrumental in defining what sorts of adventures will consume their attention.

These are not the whole sum of the substance of the character or his personality, but they are a lot of what is on open display to others; mastering these facts and their implications goes a long way to mastering the playing of the character.

That’s of equal importance to both players (for their PCs) and GMs (for NPCs, obviously).

These three things are:
 

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others?
    
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others?
    
3. What specific cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for?
    

Answers should be as succinct as possible; don’t try to make formal sentences, keep everything as compact and declarative as possible.

Every player should know this about their character without having to look it up. Every GM should know it about every NPC who appears in the game.

The answers to these questions are neither good nor bad, honorable or ignoble, in and of themselves; such judgments are applicable only to the deeds that are performed as a consequence of these key motivations.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the three, to better understand why they are so important.

What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others?

This speaks to what drives the character, what motivates them to get up in the morning, what they aspire to, and what qualities they seek to develop in themselves. But it also implies the opposite – what the character will oppose most strongly, what is anathema in their eyes, and the criteria by which they assess the value of others.

“Value” might not be quite the right term, depending on the answers – but it gets the point across.

For example, if the answer is “loyalty” then quite obviously “betrayal” and “treason” are the most heinous crimes imaginable. The results could describe anyone from a pious priest to a ruthless dictator, because qualifiers – loyalty to something – is not considered a valid answer; the correct answer is the general one.

If the answer is “progress” then “stagnation” is repugnant. But the answer applies equally to the progressive politician as to the fevered anarchist, or the Loki-style mischief-maker who simply likes to shake up the status quo.

This answer, on it’s own, is not definitive; it’s part of the definitive answer.

Which brings us to the second question.

What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others?

It’s the exclusion of the answer implied above that is most significant, because that means that this answer will illuminate aspects of the personality that the first question doesn’t touch on.

This is where the distinctions between Pious Priest and Ruthless Dictator, between Anarchist and Idealist are made.

It does require a little more thought than the first answer, because most people think of their characters in terms of what they support, not what they oppose; the first can imply multiple things to be opposed, but the second is more definitive.

The authoritarian might decry anarchy or independence; the zealot might oppose lax morality or corruption or secular priorities; the idealist might rail against greed or self-indulgence. For any given “approve of”, there are usually multiple alternatives of “oppose”, and each carries nuance.

Both this question and the preceding one are ‘big picture’ and ‘long-term’ in scope; they say nothing about the priorities of the character, about their immediate ambitions and objectives; which brings me to the third question.

What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for?

For there to be a cause, there has to be a movement (however small) that has goals that the character considers to be – at the very least – a step in the right direction. Quite often, they foresee a domino effect in which one key reform makes others, currently impossible, something that can be achieved.

This question is also relatively specific – choosing a general response tags the character as ‘a dreamer’ without practical goals or as a ‘drifter’, insufficiently motivated to do more than bob along the surface of life’s waves.

It concerns what aspect of (1) the character wants to prioritize, where he or she (or it) thinks they can make a difference. It can legitimately be about building personal wealth or prestige – in other words, gathering the tools and influence to make a difference.

The value to GMs

Aside from defining the aspects of the personality that will define a character’s actions in a readily-codified form that makes reactions and responses to circumstance relatively easy to determine, in the case of NPCs, there’s a lot of value in the GM understanding the answers of a player about their PC.

These define and codify desired campaign direction, sought-after plot threads, and the plot hooks that will capture a PCs attention every time.

They define where characters will be operating at cross purposes, and where conflict with authorities might lie, and who will oppose the meaningful actions of the PC. Some opposition is simply a matter of interpretation; there is always room for debate between those ‘of good conscience’. Characters have even been known to change their minds from time to time!

Enemies

But there is some opposition which the character will take personally, implacable enemies not because of who they are but because their agendas oppose those of the character. The individualist in an authoritarian society, or the legislator in a libertarian society who seeks to curb the excesses of robber barons.

If the same answer to (1) can be either positive or negative, there will be those who will see the negative and oppose it. And there will be those who will see the positive, and oppose that because they are threatened by it. Whether or not these antipathies actually materialize into bitter opposition depends on the answers each makes to (3).

Strange Bedfellows

The answers to (3) can also make room for allies of convenience. These strange bedfellow are headed for an eventual confrontation of colossal proportions, made all the more intense by the fact that in the short term, both want the same thing (undoubtedly for different reasons!)

Identity Examples

So important are these personality attributes that you can often identify a character by the answers they give.

Don’t believe me? As one final pitch for the importance and value of this descriptive tool, let’s try a handful (or so) of examples. Yo9u may differ with my interpretations of character in some cases, but I think that it will still be clear who I’m talking about!

Mystery Character #1

Who Am I?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others? – Personal Gratification / Liberty.
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – Theft of what assures (1)..
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – Proximity to, if not possession of, the one thing that he feels assures him of his independence from the great and powerful.

So, who am I? Answers at the end of the article – if you need them.

Mystery Character #2

Who am I, this time?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others? – Human Survival capability.
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – Intellect without conscience.
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – the safety of her family.

Who am I? Answers at the end of the article.

Mystery Character #3

This is a fun game!

Who am I, now?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others>? – their personal welfare.
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – intellectual inferiority in authority.
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – a way of getting back to Earth.

What’s your answer? The answer awaits, if you need it.

Mystery Character #4

Who Am I?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others? – Personal Honor
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – a lack of self-discipline.
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – the safety of others, especially those in his care.

Okay, that’s a little more difficult; it could potentially be almost any square-jawed idealistic hero. When that happens, review your answers, looking for something more definitive. But in this case, the only alternative serious alternatives come in question 2 – there’s a reason it was tagged as the most definitive question!

2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – a lack of professionalism.

I’m not sure that’s much of an improvement. I’ll make one last try:

2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – personal greed.

Nope. Maybe the character really is a cookie-cutter model. If I were to offer a different answer to (3), though, the identity should become clear:

3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – the recapture of the vessel on which he serves.

That’s a lot clearer, isn’t it? The problem was that the answer to question (3) was too broad, too general, not specific enough.

But, for this to work, we need to take the previous answer to (3) and recast it as an answer to (2):

2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – endangering others, especially innocents.

You can get confirmation of the answer in the usual place.

Mystery Character #5

Who Am I?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others? – Nobility.
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – disunity.
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – obtaining the Holy Grail

Go to the end of the article for the answer – if you need it. I don’t think you will.

Mystery Character #6

Who Am I?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others? – Justice.
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – Dishonor.
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – redistribution of wealth that has been extorted illegally from the poor

That should be fairly obvious to everyone, I would think, though the answer to (2) doesn’t feel quite right to me – but if you need help, you know where to look.

One more:

Mystery Character #7

Who Am I?

Answers:

1. What quality or attribute their character prizes above all others? – Corporate Welfare.
2. What quality or attribute other than the opposite of 1 the character loathes more than any others? – Disloyalty to the company. Sorry,.that won’t work, it’s the opposite of (1), which is forbidden. Okay, try: Valuing the individual over all else.
3. What cause (outside of 1 in general) will the character most willingly sacrifice for? – Getting a symbiote to the company’s bio-weapons research unit.

So, who am I? Answers at the end of the article – but I don’t think you’ll need them.

General Summary

(1) and (2) are descriptive of the type of person the character is. (3) is how that personality manifests, and hence is more definitive of specific identity.

Character Generation

There may be a temptation to use the answers for the generation of characters, especially by GMs who should exploit any game=-prep shortcut open to them.

Nevertheless, I do not recommend this approach. The reason is that without having defined the character already, you will tend to get cookie-cutter cardboard characters – remember the problems encountered in Example #4?

Once a personality has been derived by one of the many other methods offered in Campaign Mastery over the years (be warned, it’s a long list [presented here in sequence of likely relevance]) –

• Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep
   
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC
   
• The “Characterization Puzzle” series
   
• Breaking Through Writer’s Block Pt 3: Action and Personality Blocks
   
• The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity
   
• Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans
   
• What matters to your character: the value of the shameful secret
   
• Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation
   
• Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs
   
• Look beyond the box: a looser concept for NPCs
   
• The Envelope Is Ticking: Insanity In RPGs
   
• The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs
   
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Part 12: Relations
   
• The Flunkie Equation – quick and easy Hors d’Combat
   
• The “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series

– this can be a valuable tool for distilling that character down to the essentials that are likely to manifest in play, but doing the summary first is putting the cart ahead of the horse.

This tool can be useful as a means of crystallizing thoughts, however, or of testing the uniqueness and distinctiveness of a character. The fact that only one answer to each question can be definitive, and that you have only the three answers to be comprehensive, forces close attention to getting the answers right.

Answers to the Who Am I examples

Hopefully, by now, I’ve convinced you of the value and utility of these three questions as a tool for the definition of characters. So I’ll close this article with the list of answers to the examples:

1. Gollum
2. Sarah Conner (Terminator, Terminator II)
3. Dr Smith (Lost In Space – the TV series more than the movie remake)
4. Casey Rybeck (Under Siege)
5. King Arthur
6. Robin Hood
7. Burke (Aliens)

I was thinking about the perception of time and how that doesn’t match up with the mechanism of time-keeping in the standard initiative systems in games.

I mean, it’s certainly possible to design additional mechanics to take these variations into account, and reinvigorate a system that has become predictable.

More interesting AND more realistic at the same time? That certainly bears further investigation!

And so, here we are…

Physical measurement of Time

Let’s try to start this discussion with a level of objectivity, by looking at how we measure time.

To start with, let’s agree that there are three scales in use, and perhaps should be more.

There’s the Planetary scale, that have always been measured by observations of objective phenomena – everything from a day up falls into this category.

There’s the human scale, which is used for everyday events, actions, and perceptions – human reaction time at it’s best is about 1/4 of a second, but if we play on the safe side, we can say that anything from 1/10th of a second up to a day falls into this category (with the longer entries a little more vague and approximate in meaning and measurement).

There’s the atomic, which can only really be handled in a lab, often with expensive apparatus, but which we have bent to our wills to more precisely measure the human scale.

I would argue that there should also be the Cosmic, used to lop off seemingly-endless repetitions of zeros in measuring events like stellar lifetimes and galactic interactions and planetary histories. But this doesn’t seem to have caught on, at least not yet. Maybe when such phenomena are reported daily in the newspapers…

It’s entirely possible that when we start grouping clusters of related events together at the Cosmic Scale that we need to break it in two or even three different scales just to keep things comprehensible in relative terms. That’s beyond the remit of this very broad examination of what is ultimately, a side-issue – at best, a foundation..

We know how each of these scales relates to each other. We can convert one into another with relative aplomb. No-one would ever do so for practical purposes, but if we had to, we could estimate the lifetime of stars in terms of frequencies of light.

Make no mistake, each of these scales exists (or doesn’t yet exist) purely as a human convenience. Within them, various measurements are employed by humans, and have been for a very long time in most cases.

Seasons

Let us start with the seasons. These are obvious objective phenomena that recur every year, but whose start and end points are fuzzy, and ill-defined until you start getting into astronomical observation.

Then someone links the winter solstice with the season whose name it bears, and the summer solstice likewise, and you have ‘pinned down’ (with an artificial definition) two of the four fuzzy markers.

The relationship these markers have with the objective reality experienced on the ground is illustrated vividly by the fact that Groundhog Day persists, year-on-year.

Sidebar: An improvement? A perspective.

It might be possible, and even better from a human perspective, to define the start of a season as the first time in a cycle that one or more certain objective measurements being recorded. It might be the first night where the temperature dips below a certain level, or the first time snow falls, or whatever.

These would be functional and practical definitions that would correlate with the experiences of the growers of crops, making them useful, too.

But they completely lack the color of an event like Groundhog day, which transforms the passage of time into something to be celebrated – and we humans love any excuse for a good party.

Non-humans of more sober mind-set might well opt for the more practical approach described – something to keep in mind. In fact, since military success is often tied to the impact of the seasons, we could probably include those of a more martial mind-set on that list!

Months

Whew, I waffled on about seasons far longer than I intended! So let’s try and redress the balance a bit over the next few categories.

Months come in two varieties – there are Lunar Months, which are tied to an objective physical phenomenon, and there are calendar months, which are a convenient abstraction, dividing the year into 12 roughly equal units and the seasons into a beginning, middle, and end.

Sidebar notes

It’s perhaps worth observing in passing that it is the extreme circularity of the Lunar Orbit that makes Lunar Months sensible. Were the orbit more elongated, they would not be even close to the same length in more objective counts – some might last for 60 days, and some for 15. If orbital eccentricity on that scale were the case, I’m not sure the concept would even evolve.

Things would also grow more complicated if there were two visible moons up in the sky, because we now have three visible phenomena – the periods of each moon and the subdivisions provided by the relative frequency of their interactions.

I employed both of these in my very first fantasy campaign, in ways that are far too complicated to go into here. Suffice it to say that I ended up with 36 “Months” and ten “seasons” in a “calendar year”.

Days

Another obvious objective phenomenon is the rising and setting of the sun. Never mind that it happens at a different time every day, and that the period of daylight is also variable over the course of a year – daybreak-to-dusk plus the night is a reasonable definition to work from.

Sidebar: Starting each day at zero

Humans (these days) use an objectively-set artificial zero, sometimes called “Midnight”, as the boundary from one day to another. This is a very modern perspective that shouldn’t necessarily apply in a fantasy culture.

A lot of it comes from a fixed and precise notion of the length of human-scale time units, which are next on my to-examine list. Take that away and replace it with arbitrary or approximate measurements, like the length of a candle burning down, and incorporate the practicalities of rural life as the locally-dominant feature, and you can end up with a quite different answer, and one that can add functionality to fantasy campaigns:

Each day starts at zero, and is divided into 10, 12, or 16 arbitrary units of approximately equal span until dusk. Any leftover is a god-given time to relax, or to squeeze in one extra (unscheduled) chore. But what the gods may give in the warmer months, they steal back in the winter. At night, the same-sized arbitrary unit is used to approximate divisions, but there will usually be either more of them or less of them, depending on the season.

In the Zenith-3 campaign, on the current campaign date, at their new base of operations in Arkansas, dawn currently arrives at 6:01 AM and lasts 14 hours and 20 minutes.

As the height of summer approaches, dawn will come earlier, and the day will last longer. These two changes are not equal, but the differences are measured in a rate of change of seconds per day. Come winter, and the day will be down to around 10 hours (I haven’t looked it up, I’m just subtracting from 24).

So, if Dawn is zero each day, and we’re using divisions of 12, then each ‘division of labor’ is 1 hour and 21.75 minutes long – call it 80 minutes for convenience. This permits a farmer or laborer to divide his ‘day’ into functional units by which to estimate the progress of tasks and the scheduling of activity.

The night is 24-14h21m = 9h39m in length; divide this by 80m, and you get a night of 7.2375 ‘divisions’. Call it 7 1/4 for convenience. So, for night-time tasks, 2 divisions on and 5+ off is equitable for four – so long as the ‘2 divisions’ that are short (only 1 1/4 in length) are rotated around.

You can already see this having an impact on social and logistical patterns, on the ‘real world’ around the characters, and this is just the starting point. But it all stems from using arbitrary-but-meaningful units instead of absolute-and-measurable ones.

Avoid using the terms ‘hours’ and ‘minutes’ – reserve those for the real-world objective measurements, or you’ll eventually get yourself in a hopeless tangle. “Divisions” works for comprehension (and comes naturally with “subdivisions” for a smaller unit), but is fairly flavorless.

But once again, I’m getting off-track.

Portions Of A Day

Another fairly basic objectively-observable phenomenon is ‘noon’, when the sun is at it’s highest point in the sky. This, in fact, is where ‘midnight’ comes from, when the sun is at it’s (theoretical) ‘lowest point’.

Humans have found it convenient to abstract the daylight spans on either side of this non-arbitrary point into “morning’ and ‘afternoon’, and then to subdivide those (‘early morning’, ‘mid-afternoon’, and so on) – generally into subdivisions of three for no good reason that I can come up with without arbitrarily defining a day as 12 hours long, in which ‘into thirds’ becomes a natural subdivision.

In practical terms, no-one has the time to stand around watching the shadow of a stick (or equivalent), so “noon” becomes fuzzy, and the divisions equally so. I would suggest that this fuzziness is the reason these concepts can survive differing lengths of day – they are approximations of convenience.

Sidebar: More speculations, plus Dwarves

Again, those who want to make their cultures a little more alien, take note! Dwarves, with their underground lifestyles, might have an entirely different sense of ‘convenience’ in such matters – ‘start-shift, mid-shift, short-shift, and ‘end-shift’ (a division into four) might be more appropriate – with ‘short-shift’ called that because it’s interrupted by,. and begins with, a mid-shift meal.

Weeks & Fortnights

From whence does the concept a week come from? And a fortnight, whose bright idea was that?

I have always held the (uninformed) opinion that these started as subdivisions of a ‘month’ (one quarter and one-half, respectively) and then got codified into a fixed number of days because it permitted sufficient worship on the seventh day to retain religious indoctrination without compromising the productivity of the laborer too much – a compromise between religion and secular power, in other words, and so far back in history that the origins have been lost.

But that might be just my fanciful imagination.

Taking the ‘fancy’ and the implied criticism of theology out of it, what I am left with is that these are arbitrary subdivisions defined in terms of shorter time periods (days) that have proven useful in defining satisfactory levels of work-‘life’ balance.

Factor in recurring market days and the like and social patterns quickly shape themselves around these intervals. It’s debatable whether longer groupings (eight days a week, anyone?) with their more complex patterns, are too much for people to tolerate, or if this is simply a human artifice to marry these periods into some semblance of integration with the longer time-units.

Still more speculation

I have occasionally wondered why we humans don’t use a 360-day year, with recurring days that ‘aren’t counted’ as holidays spaced throughout in order to make up the ‘natural year’ of 365 days.

You can even add in an extra ‘non-counted day’ on leap years, except when the year ends in ’00’ but doesn’t end in ‘000’ to make this system every bit as accurate as the one we do use.

And the convenience! Months that are exactly 30 days long. Weeks that are either 5 or 10 days long. An exact number of weeks in every month.

Species of a more ‘precise’ or analytic bent might employ such a system, but I think it more likely to find favor amongst species that are even less mathematically-inclined than we are. Like Halflings. Something about the notion of sweeping those days of the calendar that don’t fit to one side and using them as an excuse for a feast resonates, for some reason.

Years, Decades, Centuries, Millennia

Until we get astronomy locked down to a reasonably high standard, ‘years’ are semi-arbitrarily defined by the rotation of the seasons. Decades, centuries, and millennia are simple base-10 groupings of years.

That’s an important point that anyone involved in computers in the early days should appreciate.

“10” in binary, =2 in ‘real-world’ (base-10) numbers.
“10” in octal (base 8) = 8 in base-10 numbers.
“10” in hexadecimal = 16 in base-10 numbers.

Computers ‘think’ in binary, but usually in groups that form ‘words’ of code. Octal has largely fallen out of fashion, replaced by hexadecimal codes, and these are still in use today. If you write in ‘machine language’, you are coding in hexadecimal.

The implication is that if a species uses base some-thing-other-than-10, these arbitrary compilations of years will represent different tallies.

Beyond years, these are simply units of convenience.

Seconds, Minutes, & Hours

We need to talk about the convenience of 12, and of 30, 60, and 90. I’ll try to keep it brief.

12 is evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 4. When it comes to measuring angles, though, 12 subdivisions of a circle yields units that are too large, and that quickly become inconvenient.

Logically, then, we extend by 5 to get 30 – the first number to be evenly divisible by the first 5 digits, and we get the sixth as a bonus.

So, why aren’t angles measured in degrees of 30ths of a circle?

My best guess – and I don’t know for certain – is that the resulting margins of error were too large to make the subdivisions useful. 1 thirtieth of a circle is 12 traditional degrees, and that’s a big enough interval that dwelling measured to that standard would be in constant danger of collapse. “Level, plus-or-minus six degrees?” Not going to work.

Navigation – if your course is correct to within a margin of six degrees to either side, over a distance of 100 miles, you could be as much as 10½ miles away from your intended destination – that’s MORE than 10%, and enough that you might completely miss your target.

So someone decided to double it, to sixty and then increase that six-fold to 360° because being accurate to within 1° is a heck of a lot better in everything from carpentry to home construction to navigation.

But the earlier unit of sixty remained for sub-subdivisions of degrees and of sub-sub-subdivisions – still known as minutes and seconds, respectively – and because these angular measurements predate accurate timekeeping, hours were subdivided the same way when clocks were invented.

The term ‘second’ was first used in the year 1000 by a Persian scholar named al-Biruni, basing the measurement on a fraction of the time between New Moons of certain specific weeks relative to the preceding Sunday.

That’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it until some better explanation comes along.

Minutes and seconds are, therefore, arbitrary divisions of a basic time unit (hours) that have been chosen because they can be subdivided evenly in many convenient ways – one half, one third, one quarter, one fifth, one tenth, one sixtieth.

Attempts to change units of angular measurement have been tried over the years – look up Gradians – and have foundered. Radians (there are pi of them in a circle) have survived because they are mathematically convenient in some contexts beyond the everyday.

Because the mathematical utility of these sub-divisions remains true, even if they are arbitrary, I would expect most civilizations to adopt them – but the precise interval of time represented with them will vary with the definition of an ‘hour’. I have posited at least one alien civilization in which the hours are divided into 100 minutes, however – even though I don’t think it would actually ever happen in real life.

Heartbeats

Okay, now we’re getting into intense territory. The human heartbeat varies in beats per minute quite considerably, depending on what we’re doing and on our emotional state. It also varies massively from individual to individual as does the variability. To some extent, this is due to physical training, but that’s far from the whole story.

It’s a documented fact that formula one drivers have a far lower resting heartbeat than most people would consider normal, and a far higher heartbeat when under stress, which they are able to sustain for longer periods than almost any other type of athlete (from 40 to 200+ bpm, for up to 2 hours). The same is also documented in other forms of motor-sports, though to a lesser extent perhaps.

Take away the sustained nature of this pattern, and you get Test Pilots and Astronauts, who can operate at absolute peak efficiency for minutes at a time. Lower the peak from there and you get other elite sportsmen and elite combat troops, and so on.

When our hearts are pounding, though, this remains the most important timekeeper, at least subjectively. Everything else fades into insignificance in comparison.

And that’s where I think subjective time comes into the picture, something I’ll discuss more fully a little further down the track.

(English?) Railroads

I’ve been informed that there was very little precision in timekeeping until national railroads began running, especially in England. Suddenly, it because vital for all the clocks in all the railway stations to read the same thing at the same time so that arrival and departure times could be precise. Anything less would soon lead to one train colliding with another, and even sooner lead to a horde of angry customers.

From that beginning, it spread – radio broadcasts and hours of labor and television and so on. The whole concept of being punctual was fuzzy prior to this – you arrived when you got there, and so long as you didn’t waste any time or get delayed en route, that was as punctual as it got.

Not sure of the relevance, but I’m throwing it in here, anyway.

Crystal Oscillations

Precision started mechanical, but became electronic, when electrical oscillations in particular types of pure crystals became precise radio wavelengths and the corresponding frequencies, and were then adapted into clocks.

Not that most such clocks and watches were very precise, at first. The vibrations seemed sensitive to all sorts of environmental variations that such digital clocks and watches were known to gain or lose time, all the time.

In a good one, that might be a minute or two a month; in a more typical one, that much per week; and in a bad one it could be that much in a day. The good ones therefore needed resetting every 6 months or so, the typical ones every couple of months or less, and the bad ones, weekly.

Precision did improve somewhat over the years, but became increasingly expensive. You can get digital watches now that are guaranteed to be accurate to within one second per century – but they cost thousands of dollars.

Sports and sporting prowess has remained one of the major drivers of precision in a relatively everyday setting. The time was when it was sufficient to measure lap times to within a tenth of a second – and then it became necessary to do so to the nearest hundredth in order to split competitors, and then to the nearest thousandth, and now to the nearest ten-thousandth.

You can see the same thing happening in other areas, too, like human sprint races, and swimming races. Those are eternally compromised by the need to actuate the timers with mechanical triggers, though, so there is a hard limit to the accuracy with which these things are measured, and the ‘dead heat’ still happens.

Beats Of Atomic Light

In physics, greater precision was needed. It came, first, in the same crystal technologies described earlier, and then in atomic clocks, and then in the counting of frequency ‘beats’ of particular wavelengths of particular atoms, under extremely controlled conditions, which is where the ultimate in precision stands now.

The current definition of one second is 9 192 631 770 vibrations of the ‘unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency’ of the Caesium-133 atom, measured in Hertz (i.e. cycles per second). Other atomic ‘vibrations’ have been defined as secondary ways of measuring the unit of time, some of them with greater stability and hence greater practicality, but the Caesium isotope is still the standard.

Wikipedia’s article on ‘second’ (the SI standard unit) adds,

A set of atomic clocks around the world keep time by consensus by “voting’ on the correct time and steering the voting clocks to the consensus, which is called International Atomic Time.

Civil Time is defined to agree with the rotation of the Earth. The international standard for timekeeping is the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This time scale “ticks” the same atomic seconds as TAI, but inserts or omits leap seconds as necessary to correct for variables in the rate of rotation of the Earth.

Einstein

It seems likely that future standards will have to specify that the measurements be taken at a specific speed of motion relative to the observer (zero within tolerances) because Einstein complicated everything with his theory of General Relativity.

This showed that as the relative speed of motion increases, time is perceived to stretch, and that gravitational fields, by distorting the space and hence the distance through which a beam of light must pass, do likewise.

One of the first accepted ‘proofs’ of the theory was the solution to a problem in which the orbital period of Mercury was wrong in predicting when it would become visible from around the far side of the sun. This proved both the principle of Gravitational Lensing and solved a problem that had been vexing astronomers for some time.

But it also means that with motion, time stops being fixed and becomes flexible. At low speeds, the effect is trivial, even negligible – but even jet aircraft have been shown to exceed the minimum reasonable threshold for ‘trivial, even negligible’.

They did this by sticking an atomic clock on just such a jet; the clock that had been perfectly synchronized with another on the ground. They then flew the jet around the world and compared the two clocks, finding that they no longer agreed.

Precision timekeeping is needed for GPS to work, for one example, and this source of error would completely disrupt the service if it hadn’t been taken into account.

So speed of motion creates a hard limit to the accuracy of timekeeping, and it’s not just a perception of time that it is inherently variable.

Or is it? Before falling down that rabbit hole, lets switch to the second line of discussion – perceptions of time.

The Perception Of Time

I’ve occasionally gotten into arguments by suggesting that all time is perceived, and that we have no direct functional sense of time, and that seems like a good place to start.

We measure time using clocks and the like by observing changes over time. We have agreed that a specific such amount of mechanical change represents an hour, or a minute, or a second (to refer to the hands of a clock).

Other techniques involve electrical currents and the electrochemical reactions that produce them. But we don’t see these electrical impulses, vibrations, or the reactions that create them; we see a counter change when a threshold count is exceeded. That counter is the readout on a digital clock, it could be in the hours, minutes, or seconds position.

Inferred time

We can infer time based on a standard speed of movement or even one that changes consistently, such as the acceleration due to gravity over a fixed distance. but, just like the swinging of a pendulum, this relies on perception of a visual change in a system.

We might be able to infer time by the period that it takes certain chemical or physical reactions to proceed. This may be a fairly fuzzy choice, but water clocks use this principle.

Every external measurement of time gets perceived as such a change. That doesn’t mean that it’s not an objective standard; just that we have to perceive time indirectly by the changes that occur.

Internal perceptions

What about our internal perceptions of time? Well, there are inherently variable phenomena like heartbeats – and persistent stories of people who can control them sufficiently to use them as timepieces. I’ve never seen any of these claims proven empirically, though.

Beyond that and similar biochemical reactions of which we have no direct perception (since they occur at a cellular level), we have reaction times and a subjective sense of the passage of time, sometimes pegged to theoretical circadian rhythms.

I’m not arguing that these are inherently inaccurate or accurate to a certain standard; just that they are subjective, and rely on a perceived interval of time having passed.

Internal Alarm Clocks

Most of us have an internal alarm clock that wakes us up to whatever degree of reliability or unreliability. It might do so at the same time every day, or at the same condition of natural light, or at the first rooster-crow, or some combination.

There’s a psychological element to these ‘clocks in our heads’, too – if I set my (external) alarm clock and really need or want to wake up then, I will often awaken five or ten minutes before the actual alarm sounds. If I don’t feel such a burning need, or don’t synchronize my internal chronometer to the time shown on the alarm clock by setting the alarm, it doesn’t happen.

But there have been occasions when the power failed, killing the external clock – and the internal one still worked. Once, as a prank, the digital clock was reset while I slept – I still woke up at about the right time (ten minutes late, as I recall). And there have been a number of occasions when I have mis-set the alarm to PM instead of AM – but because I had perceived the applicable time as AM, I awoke at around the right time.

This isn’t just a matter of going to bed at the right time, or of awaking after a consistent period of sleep; it would be a lot more predictable were that the case. So far as I am concerned, this is an objectively-real if unreliable phenomenon – one that most people share to some extent, and with differing reliability levels.

But it’s still subjectively observed and interpreted, no matter how objectively real it may be.

Other biological functions

And the same is true of every other biological or biochemical or neurological or neurochemical process that I can think of. These are undeniably objectively real, but none of them are perceived directly, so they are all subject to subjective interpretation and the time intervals they ‘measure’ are subjective in length..

Two subjects

That means that there are two fascinating subjects to be analyzed in thinking about these phenomena and how to reflect them in game mechanics on behalf of the PCs and NPCs who may experience them.

There’s the phenomenon of time perception, also known as chronoperception, itself; and there’s the relationship, if any, between this and ‘objective time’, which would define things like the reliability and accuracy of the perceptions.

To me, the more I thought about it, the more inextricably-linked these became, because I couldn’t think about the perceived passage of time without referring to some external perception or objective time interval.

I could subjectively perceive that ‘morning’ has become ‘afternoon’ but those terms don’t have any meaning without the perception of external reality itself.

I could perceive that it’s been about an hour since I last checked the time – but to do so, I have to have noted the time an hour ago, and have a concept of ‘an hour’ against which my subjective interpretations are compared.

The subjective perception has no meaning without the objective reality, and so everything said on the subject relates to the relationship between the two – and that leads me back to the earlier point about our only ever perceiving time indirectly, and therefore subjectively.

So, let’s talk about different subjective interpretations of time, since that’s all we’ve got.

Past Time

When I think back over the years, some events seem more remote than others.

I’ve lived in two different places totaling more than thirty years in both – but that doesn’t ‘feel’ like half my lifetime. A third, tops. That could be interpreted as my feeling 90 years old (and I do, sometimes), so let me be clear – I mean that 30+ years feels more like 20-or-so at most.

I can still remember clearly, events from my childhood (just fewer of them) – but some events that are far more recent are also far more clouded in clarity and specificity.

There are two primary theories of time perception that could apply, according to Wikipedia:

The strength model of time memory. This posits a memory trace that persists over time, by which one might judge the age of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered occurred) from the strength of the trace. This conflicts with the fact that memories of recent events may fade more quickly than more distant memories.

The inference model suggests the time of an event is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known.

I think that both of these are probably correct to some degree, and the perception of recency lies in the first, while the ease of recall and perception of detail lies in the second. Thus, soldiers suffering from what used to called PTSD can experience flashbacks to events that seem contemporary and immediate and completely visceral (and will then act and react accordingly), while knowing and feeling that these are long-past events the rest of the time.

It also seems likely that the frequency of recollection makes recollection easier and hence the memory, more immediate. Time spent without a traumatic past event being triggered helps encrust that memory with distance, creating greater resistance to it being triggered in the future, even by stimuli that would have immediately induced a full flashback.

These mechanisms would also limit the impact of such traumatic re-visitations, so that a flashback might be a passing emotional flash and not a full reliving of the trauma – combat veterans from the Vietnam war have often said that a helicopter being heard or seen overhead or the snap of a twig often brings a flash of emotion deriving from their time of service. In some cases, these pass almost immediately, in others they last significantly longer and are far more intense and immediate because of it.

Science has determined that different ranges of duration are processed by different areas of the brain; to me, this directly relates to the storage, processing, and recall of memories.

Wikipedia (my primary reference source for this article, and not even consulted until I got to the modern definition of a second) lists a number of temporal illusions, or distortions in the perception of time.

I’ll touch on some of these as they become relevant. So far, the major ones to be applicable appear to be

• Time Telescoping, in which events are recalled as nearer or further back in time than they really occurred, referred to as Forward and Backward telescoping, respectively;
• Auditory stimuli may appear to last longer than visual stimuli, which suggests differences in how the brain handles those stimuli;
• and one that Wikipedia doesn’t mention, that different senses may cause stronger or weaker memory accesses than others. Scent is often a much stronger stimulus than sight or sound, for example, if one that has fewer significant events ‘tagged’ by it.

But we’re not really talking about memory here, other than perhaps indirectly. So let’s move on.

Slow Time

“Events seemed to unfold in slow motion”. I’ve heard and read that any number of times, both from sportsmen who were in the zone, or who were about to experience a traumatic event that they could see coming, and from those experiencing violence of some kind like soldiers and police officers.

To some extent, this is all about the brain going into hyper-drive due to adrenaline, focusing more of its resources into analyzing a situation perceived as survival-critical; it is often accompanied by a form of tunnel vision, as ‘irrelevancies’ are discarded or ignored.

In past articles about optical illusions, I’ve talked about the Gorilla paradox, in which a brain concentrating on one task (counting the number of passes of a basketball by one team) can fail to observe a guy in a gorilla suit wandering through the field of vision, waving at the person, and leaving. Magicians use it for misdirection, getting the audience to focus so intently on one thing that they don’t notice another.

Slow time gives the perceiver greater time to react, and to choose between different reaction options.

Endless Time

“A watched pot never boils” is another aphorism, and one that describes a different mental phenomenon – that, in response to boredom, a brain can either wander off (which cuts short the time perceived to pass) or can simply shut down and rest (which prolongs the perceived passage of time without any events to trigger a sense of Slow Time.

When I’m writing – be it an article or an adventure or whatever – and the words are flowing smoothly, they just continue to stream from thoughts into words on the page. Sometimes, it can be hard to keep up, because I can’t simply let misspellings and missed punctuation go, I have to correct those I perceive immediately.

If ever the words stop flowing, and I have to stop and think about what to say next, or if I’ve left anything out, or should this be moved there instead of appearing here. it’s easy to start writing in my head than on the page. I can rough-compose whole pages in my mind this way – and, if I’m lucky, remember them when I resume putting down actual words.

This can encourage that smooth flow, when it occurs, but it can also mean that a snap decision turns into five minutes of reverie with nothing to show for it.

Long Time

When you are focused on one thing, like writing, time outside of that focus can slow or stretch. I can compose words for what seems like a few minutes, only to find that a substantial portion of an hour has passed – or I can struggle through a difficult passage for what seems to be hours, only to discover that only a few minutes have passed.

Both of these are examples of different phenomena of Long Time – either the perceived duration of time interval lying outside the point of focus is longer than objective measurements, or the perceived duration of focus is stretched relative to objective measurements.

Intensity of focus vs distraction tends to shift perception from one to the other. Frustration of any sort pushes perception toward stretched duration of focus. There’s also a rebound effect, as perceived time shifts first one way and then the other. Intensity of concentration is a factor in both.

Subjective awareness of the passage of time is inherently sloppy, it seems. But that brings me to Vierordt’s Law: Shorter intervals tend to be overestimated while longer periods tend to be underestimated.

Clearly, there is a threshold in between these two perceptions, but I would contend that there is often a threshold outside the ‘longer periods’ range at which longer periods again become overestimated.

A really long movie, for example, can seem even longer than it was. Adding ten minutes to the running time can cause a movie to seem twenty or more minutes longer. Stimulation and boredom both play a part in this, as does exhaustion – you can’t stay at 11 for the whole movie, you need to occasionally dial things down and let people catch their breaths.

That was one of the key principles in my article on emotional pacing in RPGs (Part 1, and Part 2).

Heinlein

One of the key tenets of at least one of Robert A Heinlein’s stories lay in the perception of time by characters in the story, and was summarized as “the duration of an interval is proportional to the number of learning events experienced” – more or less.

Three of the temporal illusions referenced by Wikipedia apply to this:

• Time intervals associated with more changes may be perceived as longer than intervals with fewer changes;
• The perceived temporal length of a given task may shorten with greater motivation; and
• The perceived temporal length of a given task may increase when broken up or interrupted.

I’d actually broaden these to some extent, again by bringing the concept of focus.

Revised Temporal Perception propositions

A) When you are focused (higher motivation), interruptions and distractions are (1) more easily tuned out, but (2) have a disproportionate impact on the perception of duration when they are not.

B) When you are not focused so strongly, the perceived passage of time is more strongly measured by events that could be considered distractions and interruptions than on progress in the task at hand.

Music In The Background

Let’s say that I have music playing in the background while I write. This not only cues me to take regular breaks – I’ll come back to that in a moment – but it helps me monitor the passage of time, except when I’m intensely focused, when I simply tune it out and don’t hear it at all.

The more familiar the music is, the easier it is for that tuning-out to occur. What’s interesting is that the more easily I can tune out the music, the more successful I am at tuning out other forms of environmental distraction, including awareness of the passage of time.

I mentioned those periods of protracted reverie a little while back? They don’t derail the process of writing as frequently or for as long if there’s music playing. Note, not music videos or TV shows – it’s too easy to get distracted by the visual stimuli. I need to save that for the page, where I really need it.

Perceived Productivity

The other thing that plays into this perception is perceived productivity.

We often imply the length of a time interval by considering the achievements within that interval together with an impression of the ease and efficiency with which they occurred. That’s just human nature.

I can look at a graphic representation of the length of this article and guesstimate it as being significantly longer than average, about 7000 words so far maybe, and that since it has mostly flowed freely, I’ve been writing it for about 6 hours. So, reality check: as of THIS word, it’s 6,850 words (close enough) and I started writing it (aside from some headings and subheadings and the opening paragraph) at 10:30AM this morning, 6 1/2 hours ago.

Notice that I overestimated the work product slightly and underestimated the time interval slightly.

There is the perception that regular short breaks waste time. Testing has shown that this is not the case unless you are operating at the highest level – when the words are flowing freely, for example. Most of the time, though, I write at about half the pace indicated by those actual measurements, and taking regular breaks increases the productivity without increasing the perception of productivity.

And that skews those mental assessments. In fact, it can skew them dramatically. So, unless I’m in the zone, those prompts to take a short break at semi-regular intervals can more than make up for any time lost due to the distraction factor.

The other benefit is that it prompts me to save my work regularly – something that I haven’t done since I started. So let’s take care of that, right away!

Quick Time

There’s a very thin line between being in slow time and being so overwhelmed by events to which you have to pay attention that you are overwhelmed.

When that happens, the natural response, as I indicated earlier, is to develop tunnel vision. You can focus only on the enemy or task in front of you, and everything else gets shunted to one side.

Intelligence: Is More, Better?

Clearly, a high intelligence helps you have clarity, helps you analyze situations on the fly, and helps you develop and modify clear tactics to achieve your current objectives.

All of those sound like good things in terms of situational awareness and are easily thought of in terms of slow time.

But consider that high intelligence frequently means high awareness or perception (for exactly the same reasons) and that means that there are more things for you to keep track of, and more possibilities for each, and more possible responses on your part to things that they might do – so it would actually be a lot easier to suffer from a monomaniacal focus.. Arguably, high INT/PERC should help until suddenly it doesn’t – when it becomes a liability.

The Mechanics Of Temporal Mis-perception

At this point, you should have a pretty good handle on what we want to modify the game mechanics in order to simulate.

But it’s probably worth a nutshell review of Initiative systems before we go there, though.

In lots of game systems, initiative can be thought of as a numeric value that expresses who acts first. So it starts low (1st character to act) and rises to N (last character to act). These values are often determined by some sort of roll or draw, which may or may not be modified by a stat value or by some sort of character ranking like class level.

In the Hero games system, it’s a little more complicated than that, because characters get a different number of actions in a given 12-second turn, depending on their character’s speed. These are distributed unevenly across the 12-second span – everyone acts in segment 12, and any remaining actions are evenly distributed over the remaining 11 segments (each lasting one second).

One of the first changes I made to the standard Hero System was to rewrite the actions table to evenly distribute actions across all 12 segments, eliminating the “Segment-12-everyone-acts” because typical combat segments could last a couple of minutes while Segment 12 took over an hour. Even distribution eliminated that problem.

In the D&D 3.x system, initiative is a numeric value that indicates in relative terms when a character acts, counting down from the highest to the lowest. This system is so much faster than the Hero Games model that it has largely replaced the superhero subsystem in my campaigns. I’m still thinking about a “last character acts then everyone recovers” model. It’s slightly complicated by the capacity to hold actions until a trigger of some sort, but by and large it works extremely well.

Between them, these are representative of most of the initiative systems that are out there, so those are what I’ll be looking to modify.

Injecting Some Variability

The two types of systems can be treated as belonging to two classifications: High sooner, or Low sooner.

To inject some variability, we simply need each character, after they act, to roll a d6 and add it to their previous initiative value to get their next round value..

If you’re in slow time, that means that you have either rolled low (in a low-sooner model) or rolled high (in a high-sooner model). It’s as simple as that.

Variability Modifiers

Anything else that we want to factor in can largely be treated as a modifier to that die roll – with limits on how much it can change, so that you don’t waste a lot of time dealing with lots of modifiers.

In low-faster systems, anything that makes your perception of time better, that aids your comprehension, subtracts 1 from your die roll. That’s anything and everything – and not one each item, it’s one for anything at all.

In high-faster systems, you add 1 instead.

That includes things like a simplification of the tactical situation, being a lot more capable than the enemy, outnumbering the enemy, and so on.

More robust alternatives make it plus-or-minus 1 for each of the named factors – but you can’t get an initiative adjustment of less than 0, anything more than that simply goes to waste.

The point here isn’t to have a big adjustment in a given combat round, but a steady accumulation of them as different advantages add up.

The GM can also decide that a tactical situation has worsened – the enemy get reinforcements or whatever – and impose a modifier on everyone except selected characters as a one-time thing. This covers situations in which a character is flanked and has to try to focus in more than one direction, and so on. These assessments should take place, with immediate effect, after the last character acts in a round.

Tactical Focus Vs Tactical Myopia

Finally, we have the problem in which characters become overwhelmed, causing tunnel vision. Once this happens, the GM should impose a modifier based on the character’s intelligence score and use it to move the initiative value in the direction of ‘go slower’. If they ever reach the point of trying to take initiative points off a score of zero, these should be applied as a ‘go faster’ to everyone else – it’s all relative values.

Once tunnel vision occurs, the character fails to be aware of anyone else doing damage to them. All attacks against the character get the usual ‘surprise’ bonus or ‘from behind’ bonus, whichever is greater.

Trigger

So, how does this happen? In low=slower systems, i.e. high-sooner it’s easy – any modifier that would push the character’s initiative value below zero instead puts the character into this condition.

It’s a little bit trickier in a high-slower system; we need to establish a triggering threshold. As a general rule, 5 + low init + high init should be a reasonable threshold. If the status appears to be triggered too often, raise this by another 5.

Exit

Any change in condition that moves the character away from the threshold gives the character the chance to refocus – but note that the character is in a tunnel-vision state in which only the enemy right in front of them exists. In practical terms, that means that the enemy in question has to go down, or get flanked by an ally of the overloaded PC. The character can then take a round to clear their head and generate a new, unmodified, initiative score.

Finally, it would be extremely irresponsible of me not to offer up such a set of game mechanics house rules without considering the potential impacts.

Opening New Possibilities

Before I go there, though, I’d like to point out that this proposal offers more than just what you’ve seen on the face of it, a yin to the downside’s yang..

Feats To Manipulate Initiative.

This opens up a whole new class of combat feats – you could have feats that negate a certain category of negative modifiers, feats that let you impose a negative feat on an enemy, feats that let you add a positive modifier to an ally, feats that modify the die size, feats that force the other side to modify their dice size…

Classes That Manipulate Time

Similarly, you can have classes or class abilities that do some or all of these things. In fact, you could have an entire class or subclass built around the concept of combat-awareness, or of creating combat confusion in their enemies.

Spells/Magic items That Manipulate Temporal Perception

And, of course, there can be spells that temporarily, and magic items that permanently confer these effects on those who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them.

This analysis doesn’t quite answer all the possible questions. “Is a barbarian who is Raging more susceptible to Tunnel Vision”, for example. I like to leave some such issues open for individual GMs to resolve, because that enables them to make the concepts their own.

The Inevitable Question

Is it worth it?

That’s a difficult question to answer. Despite efforts to minimize it, there can be no doubt that these modifications will add some overheads to the system that determines who goes first – that, after all, is what it’s designed to do.

A Warning From The Past

No matter how straightforward it appears on the surface, any recurring modification to the mechanics has to be approached with an air of trepidation. If you don’t know why that should be the case, take a look at My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic, most especially, the first of those subjects. I assure you that it remains an object lesson to this day, not only to myself, but to everyone who played in the affected campaign. Okay, so that’s just one surviving player these days, but still…

An Act Of Balance

There are a lot of benefits promised for this set of house rules – and they would all serve to bind this modification more tightly to the campaign.

My personal opinion – well, I have several of them.

• There are very few combat systems that modify the mental state of the combatants, discounting the Sanity mechanics of Call Of Cthulhu. So this would immediately be a point of distinction for any campaign.
• I think there’s more than enough analysis offered to show that the results would be more realistic in ways that most game systems don’t even recognize.
• The game mechanics are designed to be as far from onerous as possible. Even so, without considering fringe benefits, it’s problematic whether or not they are worth implementing on blind faith and optimism – but they are worth trialing.
• Those fringe benefits are huge, but come with a downside to match. If the basic modifications have passed a successful trial period, that limitation goes away and the goal-posts move.

Ultimately, these leech a little of the abstractness from an initiative system and make it a little more simulationist. That could be seen as good, or bad, depending on your perspective; you need a balance between both for a system to be practical.

If you try them and like them, you may find it necessary to further abstract some other element of the combat system to compensate.

All I can do is provide food for thought and some guidance. The rest is up to you!

I’ve been fortunate enough to write a number of very well-regarded articles on how to run mysteries in RPGs.

There was

• The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs (even WOTC linked to this one),
• The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, which builds on the earlier article,
• Delving Deeper Into Mystery, which revisits and expands on techniques and plot structures for creating and resolving satisfactory Mystery adventures,
• Ask The GMs: Penetrating the veil of mystery deals with the fundamental issue of writer’s block when it comes to mystery plotlines, but also has some general advice and links to more.
• Boundaries Of The Fantastic, which has some good general advice and expands the principles of ‘The Butler Did It’ to more specifically cover Fantasy games;
• Taking everyman skills to the next level: The Absence of an Alibi takes apart a truism of mysteries that is often overlooked – if you are going to commit a crime, you are probably going to try to appear to have an alibi. That alibi is often the greatest point of weakness in the whole crime, and breaking it down can be tantamount to proof of guilt. Logically, that means that anyone who doesn’t have an alibi is the least likely to commit a premeditated crime, and the stronger a purported alibi, the more suspicious it should be.
• Of, perhaps, less immediate value will be
  Ghosts Of Blogs Past: An Air Of Mystery – Using an RPG to write mystery fiction.

Today (referring to when this article was first drafted), seemingly from nowhere, a stray thought suggested another, and that’s what today’s article is going to deliver.

Big Mysteries

I was reading something the other day about an extremely corrupt politician getting caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, and how he had brought his political party into disrepute, potentially costing them the next election or even more, and how some members of that party hated him even more than the members of the opposition did because they took what he had done so personally.

At the same time, this politician was refusing to lie down and go quietly, and the balance of voting was such that his party leadership didn’t really want him to go

And this morning, I thought to myself, it’s a good thing no-one killed him because there would be so many suspects that it might be almost impossible to get a guilty verdict.

We’re talking enemies and friends and victims and fruitcakes, all with good reason to want this joker six feet under. We could be dealing with a lone gunman or a massive conspiracy.

How would you go about investigating such a major case?

Means, Motive, And Opportunity

Detectives like to work from Motive because its the best way of identifying suspects and immediately points the investigation of those suspects in a direction that could lead to their quick exoneration through the other two factors. Starting with motive quickly narrows the focus of the investigation – at least, it does under normal circumstances.

With such a large suspect pool, that approach won’t work.

The only choice, then, is to focus on one of the other elements of guilt. The nature of the assault and the inferred means is probably as good a way of winnowing through the options as any, but this is far less precise than motive; there is always the possibility of someone acquiring the means through coincidence, accident, or opportunity, and none of those can be ruled out.

That means that you need to also approach the problem from the standpoint of opportunity, looking for where means and opportunity intersect.

Once you have a narrowed pool of suspects, you can look for corroborating evidence and circumstantial indicators that support the motive and how the suspect reacted to that motive, and so close in on the killer.

Be prepared for the fact that some people will never be convinced, one way or the other, by this evidence. It’s entirely possible that the case will never be solved to an evidentiary standard that would satisfy a court of law.

But the real value of such a sweeping mystery lies in the exposure and exposition of the background, and the level of nuance that can be imparted to the social and political fault lines it contains. This is a big-picture, broad-sweeping scenario, and it requires a commensurate effort in game prep.

That also makes it an ideal start-of-campaign adventure.

The Small Mystery

But that brought to mind a number of episodes of Columbo, and the way each shone a spotlight on a single small aspect of the world that he inhabited.

You start with the victim, and their interests and the social circles in which they moved as a result, including the immediate family with whom he was in contact; that is your initial suspect pool.

From this starting point, you seek to eliminate those suspects using one or more of the three elements. That means getting to know the social circle in question, what binds them together and what they do together, and the role that the deceased played in that society.

In some ways, this requires even more prep than the big mystery. Depiction of the society in question can’t be superficial, or the whole plot will ring hollow; so you need to do your research and understand that social circle clearly and in depth. Through exemplars and ‘guide characters’, often themselves suspects, you then need to communicate that research.

The fun comes when you contrast the game world with the real one within which you have conducted your research – how do those differences manifest in the activities of the social circle?

This makes the small mystery a doorway into the consequences of the (possibly) hidden history and assumptions that underpin the game world. A magnifying glass with a singularly useful focus, as it were.

The smaller mystery

Murder, is – pretty much by definition – an extremely intensely-focussed mystery. The consequences are so extreme that a substantial passion is required to justify the act, and often those strong feelings are one of the first clues as to the guilty party.

Take that passion away, take that crime away, and you are left with smaller passions and motives, and ‘smaller’ crimes. Fraud, theft, deception, embezzlement…

These mysteries are almost always about relationships – be it between people, between employer and employee, family members, or whatever – and about some form of betrayal of that relationship.

Even a seemingly random theft puts pressure on all the relationships of those affected as they come under suspicion of involvement; even if that suspicion proves unfounded, the consequences of that pressure will remain.

Value

The smaller mystery is ideal for taking an even smaller element of society and shining a spotlight on it. Instead of factories of type X or businesses of type Y, the focus is on this specific example and on the relationships of the individuals who comprise it.

For example, let’s say we’re talking about a payroll robbery. The first thing the GM needs to do is make it distinctive enough to attract the attention of the PCs (and, more importantly, the players).

“Two men, calling each other ‘H’ and ‘C’ respectively, wearing ski masks, robbed the payroll of Dwight Pemberton and Co. as it was being delivered to the personnel office. Despite the payroll consisting of more than 15,000 Lucarnos, the thieves only took 1, 424 Lucarnos – and ‘H’ handed back 68 sublucarnos in change.”

So L 1423.32 were stolen, when the thieves could have taken 15,000? And one even went to the effort of giving change to reach that exact amount? How bizarre – and right away, you have the audience hooked.

From that beginning, you then need to sustain the interest. There are two methods of doing so: one is to pile improbability on unlikelihood, perpetuating the strange nature of the crime; this rarely works well, and needs to be handled expertly to succeed. It’s a pity, then, that this is often the first resort.

The alternative is to work hard at making the characters encountered interesting and compelling. This erects a framework around the mystery that holds it together when additional equally-bizarre information comes to light about the original crime.

Distinctive characterization, eccentricities, strong opinions, angels and demons and those who seem a mixture of both – those are what the GM should focus on when dealing with a Smaller Mystery (once the hook is in place, of course).

From the GM’s perspective, the benefit of the smallest mysteries is the way it takes the big picture and zooms in to show the impact on specific individuals. It’s one thing to say that “there has been a shift in the political winds, and the city has been quietly gearing up for war” – and quite another to actually make that political ‘reality’ come to life.

The Inflating Mystery

Finally, let’s turn our attention to a fourth class of mystery that we GMs can rarely do without. This category are mysteries that start small and grow to reveal themselves as but the tip of an enormous iceberg.

The prototypical example of this is the Watergate scandal. A break-in at the political headquarters of the opposition party as the country heads toward an election is undoubtedly news, but it’s not very important news. The editor assigns the story to a couple of relatively junior reporters because if that’s all their is to it, it’s not worth the time of anyone more seasoned. They write their story and that’s the end of it.

But wait, there’s an added human-interest dimension – it seems the would-be burgers were fairly inept, so a followup for a laugh or two seems worth the effort. And then there comes to light an additional political dimension when it is revealed that the apparent motivation was the planting of microphones in order to spy on that opposition.

And so it goes, revelation leading to denial leading to cover-up leading to investigation leading to hearings leading to recordings and supreme court hearings and the Senate at odds with the White House and – two years later, after the election itself is history – to the shock resignation of a President.

The story just kept getting bigger, better, and juicier, until the ultimate head was rolled because of it..And those junior reporters went from unknowns to two of the most prominent journalists on the planet – everyone (at the time) knew who Woodward and Burnstein were.

So much for the archetype. This sort of mystery starts small and grows, usually involving either a scandal, or a conspiracy, or both. They tend to have long fuses, taking a long time to explode, and that’s the GM’s first problem right there – games don’t have the playing time to take all that long, it’s usually necessary to compress such time spans.

Technique

One of the best approaches is for much of the early (slow) action to have happened off-camera, possibly completely unnoticed by the PCs. They then become one of the multitudes who get caught up in the plot as the mystery grows.

1. Someone [NPC] sees something they shouldn’t, at work. They think nothing of it, simply route it to where it was supposed to go in the first place.

2. That person starts having strange encounters with high-level personnel, stopping by to talk about, well nothing, really – but eventually getting around to asking about the something and how much of it the sacrificial lamb saw.

3. Accidents and strange events begin to occur around the sacrificial lamb, enough to scare them, The authorities discount any reports they may make, because a record of treatments for paranoid delusions has mysteriously appeared in the sacrificial lamb’s medical history.

4. The sacrificial lamb goes into hiding, and there’s a minor flurry of interest because of the accounts that had been earlier dismissed as paranoia.

5. Internal investigations reveal that someone had embezzled a non-trivial amount (but not enough to seriously damage the company). As the person who has vanished, suspicion naturally falls on the sacrificial lamb, whose reputation is now being completely trashed. Maybe they had better reason to flee than paranoid delusions, maybe that was just a cover story.

6. Someone tracks down the sacrificial lamb. There’s an attempt or two on their life. Some of the missing money is found where they were hiding out.

7. A friend of a friend of the sacrificial lamb asks the PCs for help. They are only moderately curious – until the friend of a friend is killed under suspicious circumstances

8+: And so on.

Analysis

Accidental discovery (1) leads to investigation (2) and an attempt to downplay the significance. When that doesn’t work because it’s clumsily done, (3) it leads to fear, and an initial attempt to damage the credibility of the discoverer while clumsy attempts are made to remove the discoverer. Things escalate in (4), leading to a more expert cover-up / distraction (5) and more serious attempts to silence the discoverer (6) and destroy any credibility they might have. There’s no smoke without fire, and (7) fills the room the PCs are in with (metaphoric) smoke, and bring about a new escalation in seriousness. This backstory can be told – with details – in only a few minutes, but there is clearly something rotten in the state of Denmark, as the saying goes.

More than simply exposing or examining some facet of the game society in which the PCs exist, this casts shadows (where there may have been none) and ultimately instigates change within that society. It can thrust the PCs into the spotlight of public awareness or provide more limited exposure as other people become the public face of the consequent investigation.

Another example of this is The Pelican Brief. But that’s a relatively slow build-up – in a movie, you can take that time. For a more suitable example for the pacing of a game version, there’s an episode of Scorpion that comes to mind, in which the ex-wife of their government handler is the sacrificial lamb in a plot fairly reminiscent of what I’ve described above (Season 1, episode 9, “Rogue Element”).

Mysteries, Big and Small

Because they can be difficult to do well, GMs sometimes avoid mystery plotlines. In doing so, they fail to see the value that can be added to a campaign using a mystery as a vehicle.

In the Star Trek: Next Generation episode, “Clues, {Season 4, Episode 14), the Enterprise crew awaken after an event that has a serious but trivial explanation. But clues begin to accumulate that all is not as it seems, creating a mystery – and, as Captain Picard later explains, human beings often find a mystery to be irresistible. We love to find, manufacture, or discover explanations for such events, be they big, small, or even trivial.

Your players are human beings, too – and just as susceptible to this allure. Harness it, and put it to work in the service of your campaigns – or, if you’re doing so already, use this article to sharpen your focus and improve your techniques.

The right mystery is out there, somewhere, waiting to illuminate some aspect or element of your campaign world while thrusting your players deep into immersion within your invented reality!

And now for something completely unrelated: A contest!

Evil Genius games are inviting the gaming community to participate in a contest relating to a planned reboot of Urban Arcana.

Participants are to pitch a magic setting for the Everyday Heroes core rules system, using 100 words* to explore “how magic exists in the modern world, the role of goodly races in society, and the state of monsters in this new world”.

*

The documents detailing the contest list a 200-word submission guideline. I’m not sure which one is correct, but 200 seems a lot better suited to the breadth of concept required than 100.

I can add that the 100-word limit comes from an early announcement, and the official web-page for the contest uses the 200-word limit.

So I would feel safe in advising you to do so, too.

UPDATE: I have been informed by Dave of Evil Genius that the initial limit was 100 but they decided to increase it before the contest began. So the 200-word limit is golden.

The winning pitch will be developed into a fully realized setting that will be included in the Everyday Arcana supplement, with the contest winner receiving full pay and credit for their contributions (my emphasis).

If you want to break into the ranks of the published gaming professionals, this could be your big break (but don’t expect to get rich off it alone, or even earn enough to give up your day job – it’s a starting point, not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow).

Don’t send your entries to me and Don’t post them as comments below – I’m not judging this contest / opportunity, I’m just telling you about it!

Submissions are open now, and will close on April 20th, 2023.

Everyday Heroes, the core

In February 2022, just over a year ago, at the conclusion of the main text of Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, I promoted the Kickstarter campaign for the core rules around which this contest is to be oriented. This should serve as a quick introduction to the context and system core. It’s your starting point, in other words, if you’ve never read the rules themselves.

And, of course, it has a link to that Kickstarter page, even though the project came to fruition long ago, which will deepen your knowledge of the core concepts embedded within.

Urban Arcana, the setting

The Urban Arcana setting is “a magical world set in modern times, complete with the origin of magic and the fate of elder races such as elves, dwarves, and halflings.

“Imagine a world where magic is real, and the impossible becomes possible. But how did this magic come into existence? Was it a gift from the gods, or the result of a long-forgotten experiment that went awry? Your proposal should delve into the origins of magic and how it has shaped the world we know today, as well as explore its effects on the modern world and its people.

“The elder races, with their centuries-old wisdom and knowledge, have their own story to tell. How have they adapted to a world that has changed beyond recognition, and what role do they play in the present day? Your proposal should explore the struggles and triumphs of these ancient beings and their relationship with the world they now live in.”

Even with 200 words, there’s barely enough space to posit a general concept. Submissions are going to have to be lean and efficient.

Semi-finals

Ten semi-finalists will be invited to write a 1,000-word proposal expanding on their pitch. The semi-finalists will be announced on May 5, 2023.

These 1,000 word submissions will be accepted from May 8th to June 9th, at midnight EST.

Semi-finalists will be paid for this submission.

Finalists

From the submitted semi-finalists, three finalists will be chosen. These will be announced on June 26th, 2023.

These will then be judged in a public vote, which will run from June 26th through to Midnight EST of July 14th.

Winner!

The winner will be announced on August 3rd, 2023. That winner will be hired by Evil Genius to transform their 1,000 word submission into a 50,000-word history of the magical world of Everyday Heroes.

Restrictions, Terms, and Conditions

Anyone who wants to enter should read Section 9 of Evil Genius Gaming’s Terms and Conditions page.

Most of it should be obvious, but it needs to be pointed out anyway.

Content

The intention is for this to be a serious reboot, with no constraints deriving from older versions. “We are looking for someone with an inspiration for what direction to take the world in. We don’t have many preconceptions other than the general notion of fantasy content in a modern setting.”

Your Rivals

So far, over 300 interested parties have made contact with Evil Genius. So there will be plenty of competition. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s bad if you get dispirited, decide that you have no chance of winning, and give up without even trying.

It’s good if this spurs you on, knowing that if you do get the nod as a semi-finalist, your creation will have earned serious credibility – and some of that glory will be reflected back onto you.

Campaign Mastery’s Advice on your best chance of success

Some of this is going to be mutually contradictory. Make of it what you will, this is strictly my personal opinions.

You have to impress whoever is judging the contest at Evil Genius Games. That means your entry has to be original, interesting, innovative, and easily-grasped – not necessarily in that order. It has to fit the overall core concepts of the Everyday Heroes system.

You also have to impress, and appeal to, and interest, the voting public. That means it has to be original, interesting, innovative, enticing, distinctive, and possessing of vision and scope, while still having traditional values and scope (and you thought the first part was hard!) – again, not necessarily in that order.

On top of that, you will need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with minimal wasted verbiage (which probably puts me out of the running, ha ha). Conveying color will be vital, but never at the expense of clarity – or even delaying that clarity.

Don’t waste a single word of your 200 words. Don’t waste a single word of your 1,000 words, if you get that far!

Very, very few will be able to tick all of those boxes. That means that most of the rival submissions won’t do so, either.

Finally, inconsistencies and logical holes can always be papered over – but only if you get the chance. Better by far to weed these out before anyone else gets to read word one of your concept. Not that you have a lot of words to waste on them to start with!

More Information

Evil Genius will make more details available for those that sign up to get info.

To do so, head for this web page and scroll down to the big red button. Or you can click on the image at the start of this announcement.

And yes, I have an idea for an entry of my own…

The best of luck to anyone who enters! Again, though:

Don’t send your entries to me and Don’t post them as comments below!

Most people – and I include many players and GMs in that grouping – have no idea how tiring it can be to run a game, and try to do it well.

For many years, I didn’t notice it, either; my reserves of stamina were sufficient that I could happily GM for 5 hrs, take a break, GM for another 4 1/2 hours, take another break, and be good to go for 5 hours more.

I can’t do that any more, and I recently realized that there was a point somewhere in between having that capacity and now when I might have been semi-capable of such longevity but should not try to exercise it.

There is also likely to be some truth in the statement that doing that sort of thing regularly helps you do that sort of thing regularly. It’s like any other form of exercise, right?

The GMing Crash

These days, in theory, we start play at around 1PM and wrap up at about 4:45, giving players time to pack and catch the 5:04 Bus. In practice, it’s often about 1:30, and the last minutes are a mad scramble with play overlapping with packing up until around 4:55. And there’s usually a five- or ten-minute break somewhere in the middle, sometimes two.

GMIng is an incredible adrenaline rush; you’re operating at the highest level you can manage, especially if you have a significant group of players.

• You’re keeping track of multiple conversational threads (including a couple only in your head),
• multiple story lines (at least one for each character),
• employing a laser-like focus on the immediate situation….
• ….in a fantastic and utterly non-existent reality that only fully exists in your mind,
• deciding how best to manifest that reality in the minds of your players (frequently using nothing but your voice and descriptive prowess)
• …and never losing sight of the big picture and the broader narrative.
• In complex campaign structures, you may be keeping track of half-a-dozen intertwining plot threads at the same time.
• You’re also keeping the identities, motivations, intentions, actions, and capabilities of as many as a dozen individuals in your head at the same time,
• ….and remaining aware of how those personalities interact with those plot lines, reacting to developments and pivoting the course of any or all of them on a dime.

Sounds impossible, right? It’s easier than it sounds, but that doesn’t make it easy. It’s like a sporting achievement for all that it’s intellectual in nature.

Good prep makes it easier. What ‘good prep’ means varies from campaign to campaign, and one of the things that we get better at with experience is intentionally designing that definition into the campaign so that it better fits our circumstances – initially, as those circumstances are, and later, as we expect them to be going forward.

“Sustainability” has a double-meaning when it comes to GMing.

As soon as play stops and the goodbye-see-you-next-time-hope-you-had-fun-today’s begin, the adrenaline begins to wear off. About half and hour after it’s all said and done, I absolutely crash; I feel like I’ve run a marathon, at least mentally. Those few hours feel like a full day’s work at the highest intensity possible, and they leave me utterly exhausted.

Collaboration

For the Adventurer’s Club campaign, I collaborate with the original creator of the campaign. We get together once or twice a week for about 10 hours in total; half that time is spent socializing, and about half is devoted to writing the next, or a future, adventure.

Currently, we are playing the 32nd adventure in the campaign (not counting a couple of last-minute off-the-cuff fill-ins), “The Hidden City”; Number 33. “Lucifer Rising” is almost in the can and ready to go (I have one illustration to finish); and Number 34, “The Kindness Of Strangers” is coming along nicely. Work on numbers 35 through 38 is at an early stage, and we have outlines for at least ten more beyond that.

Those collaborative sessions are as intense and busy with problem-solving (sometimes through a haze of mental myopia) as running a game.

Which only makes sense, when you think about it a bit – when planning and writing an adventure, you have almost all the things in your head that actually go into the running of that adventure, and all the alternative ways that things could go – and you are constantly trying to winnow things down to the best choices, even if the differences that result won’t be noticed until game sessions later.

Always, we try to be guided by five questions (in sequence of priority high to low):

1. What is best for the campaign?
2. What is best for the adventure?
3. What will be the most fun for the players?
4. What is the most campaign-appropriate?
5. What is the most genre-appropriate?

As a result, about an hour after he goes for the day, I experience a GMing Crash that is usually only a little less severe than the one caused by actually GMing for a like period of time.

Solo Prep

Solo prep, where you are doing it all on your own, is usually a lot less stressful and intense. You can stop whenever you want to, take breaks as necessary, and – if you’ve followed the advice offered in other articles here at Campaign Mastery- in particular,
 

• To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?,
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 3: Preparations,
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 7: Adventures, and, most important of all,
• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity (which lays out a process for prioritization)

– even if you only follow the advice in principle – then you know that you’ve hit the most important parts of the game prep and are going to be as ready as you can be.

Sustained effort is still exhausting, of course, but it takes a solid 10-14 hours of game prep to achieve the same levels of fatigue. You can get an awful lot done in that sort of time-frame!

In fact, my guideline for solo prep is 1 1/2 to 2 times the playing time usually produces a playable outcome if the work is prioritized correctly. Anything that can contribute to future adventures as well as the immediate one can either be counted on top of that basic game prep requirement, or can be amortized over the entire spread of adventures to which it is going to be relevant.

That means that if you are creating an NPC who will appear in four adventures, only 1/4 of the prep time involved should apply to this particular adventure. And if said NPC is not going to appear in this adventure at all, but is going to influence it, that counts, too.

But it’s usually too much work splitting hairs that way, taking time that can be put to better use – so I simply tack it on as extra to the normal and move on.

Game prep can be pleasurable, but it’s not often fun – and that encapsulates the intensity concerned, which in turn indexes the scale of the GM crash that follows.

Excessive Prep Needs

There are times when the time available is simply not enough, or – worse still – you underestimate the prep required (or lose yourself down one of the many creative rabbit-holes that can eat time faster than a black hole consumes a light lunch).

When this happens, you have only three options:

1. Work like a dog trying to achieve an acceptable prep standard in the time remaining, even if it costs you sleep or interferes with other activities;
2. Inform the players that prep is taking longer than expected, and the next game has to be deferred/canceled as a result;
3. Create or unpack a fill-in adventure that is deliberately designed to be low-prep (even if it means interrupting an ongoing adventure) to buy yourself more prep time. If you choose this option, turn your attention to the fill-in adventure immediately.

Options 1 and 2 are clearly extremes, Option 3 is a somewhere in-between.

Which one you choose depends on two factors: How often you play, and How late in the process you realize the situation you’re in.

How Often You Play

The more frequently you get together, the less important it is if – on rare occasions – you have to miss a session. Option 1 beckons, with Option 3 as a backup.

In fact, it’s possible to have a second campaign (even if it’s run under another GM) established as an on-going backup solution. This isn’t the sort of thing that happens by accident, but it is the sort of idea that good planning can produce – because you will probably need it at some point!

How Late In The Process

The closer you are to game day, the closer you are to the prep finish line – and that makes Option 2 more attractive, again with option 3 as a backup.

Confronted by these circumstances, you then have to make a second, harder, choice: you can either set the main adventure aside long enough to prep the fill-in to an absolute minimum standard, with the intent to run a lot of it ad-hoc (see the many articles listed under “GM Improv” on the Game Mastering page of the Blogdex and the section on Ad-hoc adventures on the Adventures page of the same resource – in both cases, it’s the last section of the page, so scroll to the bottom and work up).

Again, there are those who advocate having a fill-in adventure prepped and on standby; I have done so, myself. The problem is that it’s entirely too easy to go overboard when you do this, and before you know it, you have something that’s just as rich and complex as your regular adventures – and takes just as much time and effort to prep.

You can get around that by not developing more than a singe-paragraph outline of the fill-in adventure, leaving all other prep work for when you actually need the fill-in. This is a compromise, but it’s not a bad one. Equally, you can draw any other line in the creative and metaphoric sand that you want to use, the principle remains the same.

Enough Sleep?

I mentioned, in the context of option 2 of the ‘too much prep to do’ solutions, a key term: Sleep. I’ll have more to say about it in relation to avoiding the GMing Crash, but first I want to look at the question of how much a lack of sleep impacts on the GM Crash itself.

At an absolute minimum, I need about 5 1/2 hours sleep before I can GM. If I’m half-an-hour short of that, it brings the Crash forward about 15 minutes, and starts a “droop phase” about 15 minutes before that.

A “Droop Phase” is when you are starting to struggle with fatigue, impairing your decision-making, concentration, and reaction time. Just as the adventure is coming to a climax for the day is possibly the worst time for this to happen, exceeded only by the climax of the whole adventure, or the climax of the whole campaign.

A second half-hour short brings forward the Crash by 5-10 minutes and begins the Droop Phase 15 minutes earlier again.

It’s when sleep drops below that four-and-a-half hours that things really take a turn for the severe. In fact, in my experience, if you are going to get less than that, you are better off not going to bed at all – but I’m a night owl most of the time.

Every half-hour below 4½ hours sleep brings forward the GM Crash by about 15 minutes and the Droop phase by about 25 minutes.

Let’s count those up:

• 5½ hrs Sleep = Crash 30-60 mins after the game
• 5 hrs Sleep = Crash 15-45 mins after the game, droop for 15 mins before that
• 4½ hrs Sleep = Crash 5-35 mins after the game, droop for 30 mins before that
  — Note the risk of droop commencing during play
• 4 hrs Sleep = Crash between 10 mins before game end and 20 mins after, droop for 55 mins before that
• 3½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 25 mins before game end and 5 mins after, droop for 80 mins before that
• 3 hrs Sleep = Crash between 40 mins and 10 mins before game end, droop for 105 mins before that (1 hr 45 min).
  — Compromised performance for up to 1/2 the game session.
• 2½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 55 mins and 25 mins before game end, droop for 130 mins before that.
  — Compromised performance for more than 1/2 the game session.
• 2 hrs Sleep = Crash between 70 mins and 40 mins before game end, droop for 155 mins before that (2 hrs 35 min)
• 1½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 85 mins and 55 mins before game ends, droop for 180 mins before that.
  — Compromised performance for almost the entire game session.
• 1 hr Sleep = Crash between 100 mins and 70 mins before game ends, droop for 205 mins before that.
  — High probability of Compromised performance for the whole game session.
• ½ hr Sleep = Crash between 115 mins and 85 mins before game ends; droop for 230 mins before that.
  — Virtual certainty of Compromised performance for the whole game session.

No sleep at all is about as bad as getting that full 4½ hours sleep, but it makes the eventual Crash more severe, and typically requires an early night afterwards.

To some extent, a lack of sleep the night before can be ameliorated by getting ample sleep in the nights before that – typically, 3-4 nights worth, running. I haven’t factored this in because it can be quite variable. The other crash mitigation techniques offered below can also assist to at least some extent (but there are limits).

Sleep quality is another ignored factor here – suffice it to say that if your sleep quality is poor, for whatever reason, you need more of it to reach the same levels of restedness!

Note that this is all in terms of my personal experience, it may be better or worse for you, just as it used to be much better for me – before my sleep started to be compromised by bodily aches and pains, for example!
.

Why do I call it a Crash? What Happens?

When you Crash, your thinking becomes woolly (you might prefer the term fuzzy) in the extreme, your judgment is largely irrelevant because it’s hard to concentrate enough to actually make a decision, and if you relax for more than a moment, you are likely to drop off – it might be for minutes or for an hour or more. You will remain prone to nodding off for the rest of the evening.

None of this sleep can be considered quality sleep; you will awaken eventually, but will not experience much in the way of recuperation from your fatigue. It takes 1½-3 hrs of such dozing to recover – and that’s enough that it can disturb your usual sleep patterns. But a protracted doze will bring you back to the level of exhaustion that you should feel after being awake for as long as you were at the time you dropped off, or thereabouts.

Which means that you are then good for another 5 hours or more of activity, and will find it hard to actually go to sleep for a like time-span..

Playing through a Crash

Droop happens in spite of the stimulation provided by play, and so does a crash – to at least some extent. If you can actually restart play, or employ any of the amelioration processes below, you can usually reboot yourself enough to return to the GMing chair.

That does not mean that it won’t affect your GMing – it will. Your decision making will be poor, and if the action level ever pauses, even for a little while, you can still Crash to the point of dozing off, mid-game.

It’s a far from ideal situation.

Partial Solutions

There are no magic bullets. You’ve been working hard, and grow fatigued as a result, and that’s only natural.

But there are a few things that can lesson a crash in severity and even combat droop for hours – enough to present a facade of normality, even at the game table. These have been proven to work, at least in my case, even though some of them are a little counter-intuitive.

Exercise

Mild exercise – walking or jogging for a few minutes – can be enough to make the Crash a soft landing. One of the other reasons I call it a crash is because of the suddenness with which the fatigue strikes, and at least part of that is the adrenaline rush wearing off. This stimulates a more gentle downslope, such that your energy levels might be a little low for the rest of the evening, but you are otherwise fit to engage in other activities.

Stimulation

It’s not enough to turn on music or call up a movie or TV show that you want to watch; you need something dynamic which prompts an actual response from you. The music only works if you get up and dance.

Computer games are a better choice, because they are interactive. Conversation is a good choice for the same reason. In both cases, though, beware lulls in the action – the Crash is lurking and can strike given the least opportunity.

Napping

You can take the edge off a Crash with a 15-30 minute nap. This requires someplace totally devoid of stimulation (no conversations audible) and as comfortable as possible – and an alarm. Set it for 20 or 30 minutes. When you awaken, splash some cold water into your eyes and proceed with the measure below.

(Legal) Stimulants

Drink a cup of hot tea or coffee. Cold drinks don’t work as well. Make it black if you can, as milk becomes a soporific when heated.

If you must have milk, energy drinks like Red Bull and V are probably a slightly better option unless you can drink the resulting hot beverage very quickly.

The idea here is to create a quick rush of energy to cause a softer landing – just as with exercise.

Fatigue-minimization techniques

There are a number of other fatigue-minimization techniques listed as part of my article, Tourism in Sleepland: Sleep management for GMs & other creative people (be warned, it’s a long one). You may not be able to use some of them, but others can be of value in this situation – a hot/cold/hot shower, for example, need only take five or ten minutes. If you are going to play again, tell your players that you need to take a few minutes to perk yourself up.

To that general advice, I can add one thing more: discomfort is the enemy of fatigue, especially being cold. Being comfortable or warm is the enemy of alertness when you are fatigued. The trick is to ensure that any cooling or heating goes far enough.

Using these techniques, a GM Crash can be minimized or even seem to be avoided (I’m not confident that the avoidance is complete). They can be enough to enable you to carry on GMing – maybe not at your sparkling best, but close enough for everyone to be entertained. Or, they can be enough that you can carry on working for the rest of your normal day, or to permit you to relax and watch something of interest without falling asleep in the middle of it.

In other words, they can bring you back to something approaching a normal condition. I never thought that I’d need them for that, but if – like me – you do, you now have the tools to defeat the dreadful GMing Crash.

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact.

Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I never seem to remember how much work goes into one, by the same token – if they started showing up all the time, I might be less eager!

This time around, I have just such a product / campaign to tell you about (and I hope to have another in a month or so!)

There are a number of things that RPGs do poorly, despite many attempts through the years.

Two of these are moral systems and the integration of computer-interface time scales with real-world time. Close behind these two come the integration of technology with magic, and keeping pace with the last (perhaps a half-step ahead or behind) is the integration of different combat styles.

It follows that any serious attempt to better the high-water mark in any of these areas is going to be of interest to a great many players and GMs whether or not the game itself is something they might want to play.

Which brings me to Subversion by Fragging Unicorns Games.

Subversion

Subversion is a new RPG being delivered and enhanced by a Kickstarter fundraising program. As I write this, the campaign has 17 days to go, but by the time you read it, that is likely to be 16 days or less.

This is a fantasy game in a Cybertech environment. The setting is “Neo Babylon”, where the ruling populace are wealthy, powerful, technologically enlightened, corrupt, and self-serving (sounds fairly typical of a Cyberpunk setting, doesn’t it?)

Most characters in such environments are expected to be anarchists opposed to the status quo (which casts them in the role of the downtrodden). While they cooperate out of necessity, they are individualistic, competitive, and prone to go their own way at the drop of a hat somewhere clear across town.

Subversion, on the other hand, has ambitions to establish a different relationship between characters with an altogether more-interesting take on these two classic genres. So, let’s talk about those intractable problems for a moment, and how they shed light on potential interest in this RPG beyond the borders of its actual content.

Tech and Magic

PCs in Subversion are representatives of communities striving to survive and prosper in a world subject to rapid change from “powerful magic, pervasive technology, wondrous creatures and Babylonian Gods”.

All of these save the technology have, for millennia, defined power by proximity to these forces, but now corporations and the technology that empowers them are challenging the old world order.

Right away, that all ticks the “Tech v Magic” box, then.

Morality Systems

Each of the seven major species – Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Humans, Orcs, Yettin, and Harmaku (winged humanoids) – are envoys of a community of that species, with their own unique ability combination, “determined to protect and advance their communities while remaining true to their own ideals”, to paraphrase the blurb text.



Art from Subversion, brightened slightly by Mike. Click the image to back the Kickstarter.

The game is focused on community, direct action, revolution, hope for the future, and commonality of interest, all being confronted by “runaway technology, unchecked power, and dangerous secrets”.Differing social values and the relationships between them are buried beneath the surface but essential driving forces to the game dynamic, especially the confrontation between capitalism and nationalism.

The PCs are cast as heroes who need to collaborate with the envoys of the other races or be plouwed under. Diversity and relationships are critical to success.

This takes issues of moral standards out of the province of the individual and places them where they truly belong, elements of the society from which the individuals derive. Each individual has to then interpret the imperatives of their communal behavioral standards into a personal ethos by which to live, and hopefully, prosper – just as it is in real life.

When PCs act in accordance with their defined values, for good or ill, they are rewarded; when they oppose these values (for convenience, to help a friend, or another reason), they are confronted with consequences and may even have to make amends.

The Communities that each PC represents are partially created by the GM and partly by the player; giving joint ownership of the results to both; this encourages both to create a community that is interesting and one that the player wants to represent and exemplify. The more creative the player, the more deeply this relationship can extend; we’re talking a package deal in which the player has at least some creative control not only over the individual but the background that drives and defines them.

This is the element that is predominantly missing in most Cyberpunk campaign concepts, directly responsible for the ‘collection of misfit anarchists’ philosophy common to the genre, so right away, this RPG promises to be something profoundly different.

Even more significantly, it presents a template for other campaigns to follow to achieve the same result. This directly opposes the conceptual core of “Murder Hobos” without forcing draconian restraints on the characters. It can be argued that this is exactly what D&D and Pathfinder have been missing all their many years!

Combat Styles

Subversive is built around what the authors are describing as a “unique paradigm system” that “lets players build tons of customization into their characters, not just in how well PCs can fight”. Paradigms are “like mini-classes that you can dip into as much or as little as you like.”

The rules system is described as “medium complexity” but “easy to learn”. It’s primary mechanical philosophies orient around two principles: “Make storytelling easy and fun” and “make character advancement meaningful and worthwhile”.

At the core of the mechanics is the skill test, which is a dice mechanic unlike those of any other RPG I’ve seen. It’s sort of half-way between the Hero System and my own Sixes system, with heavy admixtures of the basic mechanics common to RPGs from the early days of D&D forward.

With each Community and Species being so individually distinctive, their philosophy and approach to battle will inevitably be equally distinctive. The diversity of challenges that can confront the PCs is such that no one solution to such problems will be universal; tactics will need to evolve to become optimized, and that can only happen if the combat styles mesh in terms of game mechanics.

This is not stated outright in the materials reviewed, but even the promise of doing so through the mechanics incorporated makes this product of interest to anyone who runs any other genre-mutable campaign or environment – and they are all of that nature to at least some extent.

D&D / Pathfinder, for example, blends the martial and the magical and sometimes the spiritual. Superhero games blend all of these in even more diverse combinations. Horror games like Call Of Cthulhu blend the spiritual with technological forms of combat (and reserve the traditional martial as a last-ditch option). I could go on, but you get the point.

Computer Time

Even less explicitly addressed is this issue. And yet, there are nuggets of information that imply the presence of this issue within the mechanics, and it is – to at least some extent – inherently a part of any cyberpunk system.

So the game makes no promises, but if the mechanics are not broken in this respect, there is the implication of a solution. For some GMs and genres, this alone might be worth the price of admission!

That all sounds quite promising, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The setting

I’ve already mentioned this but it’s worth pulling in some other descriptive text from the campaign page to expand on the point.

The core of the setting is the city of “Neo Babylon”, and a map of the city is provided along with, presumably, other setting details – organizations, businesses, and the like. That would hold a certain value in some campaigns all on its own.

But there’s more: “The story of Subversion is set against the rival powers that are currently fighting for control, wealth, and power in Neo Babylon. The old masters, the Ukkim council, hoard magic like secrets and their old money and old magic still has preeminence. But the explosion of cybertech has meant that the power gap between the magical haves and have-nots is closing. Corporations, guilds, and even organized crime lords are now every bit as threatening … as the Arcanist mages.”

The richness and diversity of the stories and campaigns that could be told from this starting point are simply breathtaking. Anything from…

• …a superhero campaign (modeled, perhaps, more closely upon the Legion Of Superheros, where each character is an exemplar of a particular species, with the abilities that make that species unique are that character’s ‘powers’)…
• …to a Cthulhu-esque plot in which the ruling overlords summon something they shouldn’t in a bid to regain lost dominance…
• …or a more general steampunk interpretation…
• …perhaps even a pulp / sci-fi riff in which the PCs have to uncover the hidden past that not even those old masters know as clearly as they think…
• …or maybe a “Pirates Of The Caribbean” -inspired riff of corporate commercialization vs the freedom to be an individual.

That’s a lot of diversity. And, of course, they can all blend and run together, nuancing some common thread (the PCs).

One of the stretch goals of the campaign is a separate map of the city. That’s a $60,000 target (presumably USD) – it comes after extra artwork (the primary motive for the Kickstarter campaign), two adventure PDFs, and a fiction anthology. The only one that I would question is the last – I think the separate map might be a more attractive goal than the fiction add-on, myself.

Campaign Status

The campaign was 200% funded in 4 hrs, 32 minutes (and 34 seconds). It’s currently sitting at AUD $66,253, which is about $44,850 USD.

Which means that the two adventure PDFs are already funded and the campaign is almost half-way to the fiction anthology add-on. It seems very likely to me that the campaign will achieve that $60,000 level and may even reach the stretch goal beyond it – a third adventure at $75000. I’m not quite so sure that the top tier bonus, a GMs screen at $100K, will be reached.

That still makes this an eminently successful fundraising campaign.

Other Opinions

There’s often not a lot of interest on Kickstarter pages once you get past the Risks section (and that tends to be fairly boilerplate). This time, it’s different – there are excerpts from playtesting feedback and reviews that make for very interesting reading.

I have no doubt that these are at least partially responsible for the success described above. I wanted to include a couple of excerpts from these quotes in this review.

• “The rules were intuitive and easy to understand.”
• “The dice mechanic is honestly one of the coolest I’ve seen in a while.”
• “Every time I climb to a higher rooftop to shout the praises of this setting it just affords [me] a better view of everything it has to offer.”
• “The game’s focus on community makes it stand out … and intertwines perfectly with the … mechanics and themes in a way I’ve never seen before.”
• “I … often find myself at odds with the mercenary and criminal elements that are common in the [cyberpunk] setting. Subversion is a breath of fresh air with its focus on community building, humanistic character creation, and central theme of fighting against oppression and corruption.”

One other comment referred to the values-infusion brought to their approach by Fragging Unicorns Games, but I thought I’d close this article by giving them a chance to speak for themselves in the form of one or two more quote from the Kickstarter page:

“FUG (Fragging Unicorns Games) is trying to make the world a better place, one game at a time.

“We want to be decent people. We don’t want to step on people on our way up. We want to see things and do things differently.

“We’ve gathered diverse, inclusive, and good-hearted people to be the best there is at being cool. To everyone. For everyone.”

But it does make me feel old to realize that they are all about half my age….

So, there you have it

There are a lot of reasons to back this Kickstarter, in fact to kick it up to a next level of funding, and not a lot of good reasons not to.

To join what is already a sizable crowd, click on this link, or on any of the illustrations that adorn this article.

And tell ’em that Mike sent you!

In any game with Deities or Religions (and that’s almost all RPGs), the questions that dog real religions need to have answers that are plausible, whether we as real people believe them or not. The more interventionist the Deities are, the more this needs to be true, because there is greater capacity for the priests and spokesmen to interrogate the deity in question directly.

One of those central questions is ‘Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?’ The stock answer is a platitude about ‘God’s Plan’ that (to me) always seems to evade the question and is never satisfactory to those receiving it.

This was a problem that was considered very carefully in crafting Cyrene, the deity and her mythos in Assassin’s Amulet (see The Creation Of A Deity: The Origins Of Cyrene and Cyrene Revealed: an excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet – the first is the backstory of the creation and the second an edited excerpt of the content from the game supplement itself).

Today’s post is going to offer a number of better answers for you to put into the mouths of priests and deities in your game world for use when tragedies strike people who don’t deserve such misfortune.

Some Caveats and Important Contextual Notes

I’m NOT trying to convert anyone, here. If you have faith, that’ wonderful for you. If you don’t believe in higher powers, that’s fine, too – but it only makes it more imperative that you have reasonably convincing answers to put into the mouths of your NPCs when this (and similar issues) arise, for the sake of plausibility if nothing else.

The problem with presenting this sort of list is that it directly challenges GMs to answer the question of why these answers are not sufficient for them in real life – and those can be uncomfortable questions to answer. I have my own answers to those questions, but I’m not here to force them on anyone else.

Again, I’m not trying to create controversy, here. This is strictly an intellectual exercise regarding one philosophical aspect of the simulated unreality in which our games take place, nothing more.

So, without further ado, let’s talk a little turkey…

1. Toughen Them Up

It is often said that mothers, and those who suffer from some sort of ongoing medical problem causing pain, have a higher pain threshold. Certainly, most military organizations seem to operate on the belief that pain experienced in a controlled environment (basic training) makes soldiers more resilient under combat conditions, when the lives of the soldier, and the other members of his unit, stand in the balance. That principle – toughen ‘them’ up, either directly or indirectly, so that they become fit to be ‘soldiers of [God]’, can be used to explain why bad things happen to good people.

Consider the logic: if bad things happened to bad people, it can be perceived as simple justice, and no-one save those who fall into the category of ‘bad people’ can be expected to learn a thing. These are not going to be inclined to be ‘good soldiers’, no matter how many object lessons they experience.

The preferred recruit is always going to be a ‘good person’ (from the perspective of the recruiting sergeant). Therefore, these people should suffer more, not less, to equip them to fight and survive.

But a deity who is seen to be unjust and a persecutor will find it hard to attract recruits – so the optimum balance is achieved by distributing pain and ill-fortune as evenhandedly as possible. It’s just that there’s an ulterior motive for the suffering of the worthy and spiritual.

2. Egalitarian Worship

If all men are created equal, and all are treated equally by the god(s), with no room for fear nor favor, it encourages people to see others as their equals. No favored sons permitted. Gods can’t spare their followers, because the faith of those followers will then become a crutch, a way of avoiding punishment, a way for the unworthy to swell the ranks of the worthy. One bad apple can contaminate the whole bunch.

This goes far beyond ‘you get what you deserve’ or ‘as ye sew, so shall ye reap’. It elevates thinking of yourself or your group as ‘special’ or ‘chosen’ to one of the ultimate sins, in the eyes of the deity.

The flip side of this particular coin is that this is a particularly heartless philosophy, one devoid of empathy. You can either embrace that, or you can compensate for it with greater empathy in other ways.

For example, the price of a Healing Deity making a cure available for every ailment might be for everyone to suffer equally, no matter how much the deity might wish it did not have to be so – ‘no pain, no gain’.

There is a deep-set implication of some sort of ‘cosmic balance’ that is served by this egalitarian approach; the nature of that balance should be the subject of deeper thought by the GM.

3. Balance Of Good And Evil

Speaking of deeper balances, let’s talk about elementary account-keeping. In order to spend, you have to have money – that’s fairly basic. Even if you borrow money, you have to repay that debt, usually with interest, making things more expensive in the long run.

In order to bestow suffering on those who do not worship a deity, that deity might need to build up their ‘bank balance’ by forcing the faithful to suffer. Of course, having a greater bank of suffering built up than you inflict upon the non-faithful would be cruel; so this world-view only works if the deity ‘spends’ every cent they accrue.

Bad things happen to good people so that bad people can be made to suffer.

Or, contrariwise, it might be that bad things happen to good people to accrue the capital for good things to be done to good people. It’s just another interpretation of the same basic philosophy.

In most campaigns, it is the faith of the followers that is the fundamental ‘power unit’ of what the deity does. This proposal suggests that it is not their faith that matters, it is the suffering inflicted on the faithful – the matter of their faith simply determines to whom the resulting ‘credit’ will accrue.

I, personally, find this to be a very bleak and dystopian concept, and hence one that would suit a very bleak and dystopian game world.

4. A Harsh Education

‘Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind’. In many game environments, Gods are limited, not omnipotent, even within their pantheistic role. Gods inflict pain on worshipers because painful things will happen anyway, and the caring Deity wants to equip their followers to survive in a hostile and harsh reality.

This philosophy works particularly well if there are one or more groups of antipathetic non-Deities – Devils, Demons, etc – who are outside the control of the Gods, and who inflict suffering for their own perverted pleasure / gain. It can even be seen as immunizing the faithful against the far worse suffering that the faithful may encounter, because the Gods can’t protect people against everything all the time.

There’s a lot of resemblance between this philosophy and that of justification number one, above. This is also a very paternal / maternal concept, reflective of the ‘strict parent’.

5. An Appreciation Of Contrast

This is, perhaps, the answer that most accords with my own personal philosophy – without the occasional bad time, you have no appreciation of how good the ‘good times’ actually are, in fact you are more inclined to take them for granted.

No-one who has not suffered from some chronic medical problem fully appreciates the occasional pain-free day, or so it seems to those who do so suffer. Certainly, those subject to chronic disease are far more appreciative of ‘good days’ when they happen to occur.

Gods can inflict suffering just so that the faithful can properly appreciate a lack of suffering. After all, it may be beyond the power of a Deity to bestow a life that is any better than a lack of suffering.

This plays into the attitude of many horror stories about wishes like The Monkey’s Paw – the concept that life is a zero-sum game and that one person’s reward has to be built upon the suffering of one or more others. There is only so much ‘wealth’ in the world, this theory runs – whether that ‘wealth’ is good fortune, or prosperity, or health, or whatever – and anyone being gifted such wealth requires it to be withdrawn from someone else. Over the whole of a society, the best that a deity may be able to do is provide a lack of suffering – most of the time.

‘Into each day of sunshine, a little rain must fall; into each deluge, there will be a break in the weather, an eye in the storm’.

In a metaphysical sense, suffering could be said to occur because someone, somewhere, is depriving others of their fair share of good fortune. Greed can be satisfied only by the suffering of others. It follows that greed for more than one’s fair share of those good things listed earlier will eventually be harshly punished. But, until that happens, a lot of other people will suffer through the actions of satisfying that persons greed and ambition.

6. A Test Of Faith

It’s easy to be faithful when that faith is never put to the test. Gods may inflict pain on their worshipers to test their faith, seeking to identify the elite, who can then be rewarded either in this life or the next. This concept is endemic within the Christian faith, where only the ‘worthy’ will be welcomed into heaven. It reeks of elitism.

But there can be many subtle variations. Perhaps the elite are to be singled out to perform in the direct service of a deity in the protection of the general populace from a worse fate – this is an ‘officer candidate school’ equivalent of the ‘basic training’ concept offered as justification number 1. The testing is to see who can be trusted with the power and authority that the Deity grants to the elite in his service – and the freedom and independence that power and authority bestow.

Heaven is for sheep, in this worldview – anyone can earn their way into it. It’s enduring the suffering without losing faith that is the pathway to real rewards.

No-one who subscribes to this philosophical approach can do so fully without having read Robert Heinlein’s “Job: A Comedy Of Justice” (link is to Amazon, available in Hardcover, Paperback, and Audio CD – the printed versions are reasonably priced, I will get a small commission if you purchase).

Job is the story of God persecuting a worshiper to prove to Satan how strong that worshiper’s faith is. This persecution takes the form of shifting the worshiper from his native world to others at random intervals while throwing the promises of rewards at him and then snatching them away. Enduring a shipwreck, an earthquake, and a series of world-changes Alex and Margrethe work their way from Mexico back to Kansas as dishwasher and waitress.

Whenever they manage to make some stake, an inconveniently timed change into a new alternate reality throws them off their stride (once, the money they earned is left behind in another reality; in another case, the paper money earned in a Mexico which is an empire becomes worthless in another Mexico which is a republic). These repeated misfortunes, clearly effected by some malevolent entity, make the hero identify with the Biblical Job.

The protagonist, Alex, attributes these misfortunes to Satan, while Margrethe attributes them to Loki (she is a pagan by Alex’s philosophy). As they near their destination they are separated by the Rapture – Margrethe worships Odin, and pagans do not go to Heaven. Finding that the reward for his faith (eternity as promised in the Book of Revelation) is worthless without her, Alex journeys through timeless space in search of his lost lady, taking him to Hell and beyond.

— Summary partially excerpted from this Wikipedia page. I can’t go into much more detail without spoiling the book for anyone who hasn’t read it.

If you are one of those unfortunates who haven’t read ‘Job’, it is definitely worth your time. Be warned, Christians may find it challenging.

7. The Chess Player

Moving on, we have a variation on the omniscient omnipotent “not a sparrow falls” / “God’s plan” concept, in which the Deity is a master manipulator who is steering humanity (or part thereof, or equivalent) toward some end that only he / she can perceive – but which is so worthwhile that any short-term pain inflicted is amply justified.

Problems with predestination can be avoided by having some other agency actively working to oppose this idyllic future, causing the Deity in question to continually revise his plans and strategies.

I’ve used this basic concept (usually in the form of a Pantheon vs Something Else) a number of times.

My superhero campaign contains a deliberate progression at a metaphysical level – from us vs them, to good vs evil, to order vs chaos, to cooperative world-building vs the forces of anarchic destruction and nihilism in the guise of ‘freedom’.

Each such conflict eventually ends in a cataclysmic confrontation between metaphysical exemplars of the philosophy in question that destroy almost everything, but which leave a residuum that grows and evolves into a reborn reality, shepherded into existence by the next generation of metaphysical entities.

The Zenith-3 campaign is currently building toward the next such confrontation – in fact, the Apocalypse is the underlying tapestry of the current campaign.

One reason for using it so often is that you don’t need to create a fully fleshed-out grand strategy – you can do most of it on the run, as opportunistic moves and half-baked tactics cause responses and reactions. This convenience can save you a lot of world-building time, which can then be devoted to other campaign needs.

8. Dominance Games

One of my persistent criticisms of Deities as Stat Blocks is the potential for non-Deities (read: the PCs) to challenge and even overcome / overthrow the Deities, something that is inherently embodied in the concept of restricting Deific power levels to a mere set of numbers.

Naturally, I’ve examined the opposite choice, in which Deific ‘turnover’ is accepted, and Gods view mortals as potential rivals and heirs even though said deities are inherently dependent upon the mortals. This, in fact, was the central conceptual spine of my Rings Of Time campaign.

This asserts that the Gods (1) use mortals to do their dirty work, because they are always less than myth and legend would have it, and (2) inflict suffering on the populations subject to them (whether they worship the deity or not) as a means of establishing, reinforcing, and cementing their dominance over those potential rivals.

If you choose to go down this path, a central concept of the Theology that results needs to be the reasons why the Deity is dependent on their mortal followers. There are endless possible answers, and variations on those answers, to explore.

For example, one that I have never utilized is that Mortals give the Gods a Moral Foundation; without mortal worshipers and the object lessons that the Deity gets to experience through them, they become Evil (Devils) or Anarchic (Demons), they lose their way as it were.

Whatever the ties are that bind the two together, these love-hate-fear relationships are central to the resulting mythos.

One of my earliest posts here at Campaign Mastery was A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs. This is exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind.

9. An Illusion Of Simplicity

Finally, we have the possibility that – at least superficially – one or more of the above appear to be true, but that appearance is the result of oversimplifying an even more complex reality.

This is “there are more things under heaven than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” writ large and made manifest.

The usual approach to this possibility that I recommend is to pick one of the others (the over-simplification) and use that to define restrictions on behavior – then, once the players are familiar with it, and with its implications, carve out an exception, a case where what has to be done doesn’t fit the model.

No theology in a game should ever hold all the answers; the fringes of understanding should always contain dark corners and unexpected departures for future discovery and exploration.

I’d like to close this section of the article with a (relevant) quote from Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

— quotation provided by brainyquote.com.

There may well be other answers to the question; but these nine are all better than that wormy old proverb, in terms of credibility and plausibility (it is worth pointing out that some of them can be simplified into that proverb, however).

Having Priests articulate one of these arguments in response to the question, or offer it as comfort to those suffering loss, and believe it wholeheartedly, puts their faith (fictitious though it is) onto a firm characterization footing.

Of course, each of these, if taken as the official position of a theology, will impact the practices and beliefs of that theology in other areas. That sort of extrapolation is not possible in an article of this scope, and rests too strongly on other aspects of the game worlds offered by the GM.

In other words, you will need to explore the ramifications for your game world on your own. But at least this is a starting point.

Oh, and don’t ignore the possibilities raised by the converse question: “Why do Good Things happen to Bad People?” These can be equally illuminating, and a good Theology should be able to answer both!

Application

The articles that I linked to earlier offer a demonstration and example of how to go about such extrapolations. We were very careful to make Cyrene a deity with rich characterization, with both positive and negative aspects, and with some aspects that could go either way depending on the individual’s circumstances.

In general, the impact of a particular philosophy or theology will come down to (a) offering appeasement, (b) seeking protection, (c) giving thanksgiving, or (d) requesting intervention (one way or another), and each of the possible answers listed earlier will manifest in all four of these.

In addition, there will be (e) some races / classes / professions that are thought to be protected by their relationship to the answer, (f) some that will be considered threatened, (g) some that may be considered offensive, and some that are considered (h) friends, (i) allies, (j) enemies, or (k) interested observers / subjects of observation.

The complexities of Theology

By the time you have entries under each of those headings for the chosen justification of suffering promoted by a specific deity / priesthood / clerical order, you will have developed a diverse, rich and compelling set of interpretations and roles for the deity, just as we did for Cyrene. You can easily determine, on the fly and as necessary, how any given group or profession will relate to the deity in question and vice-versa.

Once you have done two such interpretations for the same deity (favored by different priesthoods / sects / orders / groups) or for a different deity, you can start exploring and defining the complex ways that they can interact and interrelate. Heck, even a broad conceptual description of those others is enough to get you started.

That’s all we had for the other deities in Cyrene’s pantheon. The relationship of that conceptual thumbnail with the one deity who had been fleshed out was enough to start fleshing out the others. Each deity subjected to the process then forms a building block to further define others.

The bigger picture that results

This simple process can turn a bland list of deities into a genuine pantheon with its own internally consistent and original Theology. Even if the perceptions are erroneous, and all this merely projections onto the Deities by over-inventive mortals, you achieve an ever-tighter integration between that Theology and the game world, the environment in which adventures take place, making it more unique, more interesting, and more complete.

The justification of suffering is a toolkit for the enrichment of your game in all sorts of ways. It’s never a wasted exercise.

It’s happened to all of us – we receive some paperwork that is important, do whatever we have to do with it, and then put it away for the next time we need it. And then, when the time comes, can’t remember exactly where it is – or it isn’t where we thought it was.

It’s not just true of paperwork, either – my personal history is replete of examples of putting something away ‘somewhere safe’ and needing to search for it when it once again became needed.

There are analogous situations in other contexts, too. An office worker files a document somewhere. Someone else, at a later time, needs to find it – that might be a temp, a manager, a replacement, or a thief.

In The Hero System

In writing the Adventurer’s Club adventure currently in progress, an in-game situation of this type has been anticipated, and so we turned our attention to the rules to see how the game mechanics handled the situation.

And quickly ran into a brick wall.

There was no ‘search’ skill.

We agreed that if the object of the search was out in the open, a simple perception roll would suffice, perhaps with a negative modifier for haste or obscurity – we’re used to such situations and can handle them without batting eyelids.

In time, we discovered “Concealment”, which is described in the game mechanics as representing “a character’s ability to hide things and find things others have hidden – important papers, weapons, jewels, artifacts, drugs, and so forth”.

But this implies a deliberate act of concealment – which is not the case in those examples proffered earlier. Nevertheless, it’s the closest thing that we could find anywhere in the game system.

There is also a list of Sight Perception Modifiers in the rulebook, and the following notes:

“Like Skill Rolls, PER Rolls are subject to modifiers. Some of these modifiers are the same as those for Skills, others are different or specific to PER rolls based on a given Sense.

Skill Modifiers

“As a general rule, GMs can apply the following types of Skill Modifiers to PER Rolls (see p45) for details:

• modifiers for Routine, Easy, Difficult, and so on;
• taking extra time; and
• excellent or poor conditions.

“Other such modifiers apply as the GM sees fit.

Range Modifier

“Attempts to perceive things at a distance are subject to the Range Modifier. See page 373.”

All these seem reasonably relevant to the question.

The broader question, in context:

This sort of question comes up in RPGs all the time, regardless of the game system that you are using – usually as a result of a PC doing something that the game mechanics didn’t anticipate.

It’s relatively rare for such problems to come up when you can take your time to consider a solution. As such, this is an unusual opportunity to examine House Rules and the processes of crafting them.

While this specific question might not be relevant to the game system your campaign employs, it’s a near-certainty that, sooner or later, some other gap in the rules will open up beneath your GMing feet – so this is a chance to think about the processes involved and set some basic rules to make life just a little bit easier when it happens.

Past Examinations Of The Subject

As you would expect of such a broad topic, this is hardly the first time that it’s come up here at Campaign Mastery. The following articles seem especially pertinent (excerpts from the Blogdex Metagame page, plus some extras tagged as relating to “House Rules”):

• Ask The GMs: Going Beyond The Rules – How do you extrapolate from existing rules to cover new situations?
• The House Always Wins: Examining the Concept of House Rules – I look at the basics of House Rules – and in particular why campaigns have them. Along the way I introduce readers to some of the many controversies relating to the subject that have raged amongst gamers for as long as I’ve been involved in the hobby. I have some fun with some of my players in the comments.
• Precision Vs Holistic Skill Interpretation – Skills can either be interpreted as strictly and explicitly defined within the mechanics, or can be viewed as incorporating anything related to the skill’s application that isn’t explicitly covered by a separate skill, which I refer to as the Holistic approach. The examples offered make a strong case for the latter.
• The Personal Computer analogy and some Truths about House Rules – I realized that constructing a campaign was analogous to constructing a Personal Computer, that the analogy revealed some valuable insights into the relationships between different bodies of rules, and that there were some especially notable points to be made in this context about House Rules and importing rules from other game systems.
• The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules – The speed of events in the computer world mandate that rules be codified and violations detected, and acted upon, automatically. Yet, human behavior does not readily boil down to neat straight lines, and that opens the door to rules being enforced when they shouldn’t, or not being applied when they should. Human Error is an inherent part of the system. I use these thoughts to re-examine the question of how much dominion the GM should have over the rules and update a previous article, Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs, which examined these issues from a genre-and-campaign perspective.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) – This article lists (and offers as a freebie download) the house rules that my co-GM and I have developed for our Pulp campaign, the first in a series of four on the subject. I then discuss the meanings and implications of some of the rules, and the broader principle from which they were derived (which apply to every campaign.
• “I Can Do That” – Everyman Skills For Pulp – After (briefly) explaining the skills system within Hero Games’ Champions Fifth Edition, I look at the everyman skills that we give the PCs (and NPCs) in our Pulp Campaign, provide some additional rules relating to their use, then expand on the concept of Everyman Skills to adapt the principle to other game systems, like D&D/Pathfinder.
• Phase 1: Inspiration from the ‘New Beginnings’ series – I list and analyze 23 sources of inspiration, and discuss what to do with the ideas that they generate. Along the way, House Rules Theory and Campaign Ideas get discussed.
• Phase 4: Development from the ‘New Beginning’ series – Detailed examination of the process of Campaign Development is made, touching on Campaign Plotting, Research techniques, Societies and Cultures, Races, Rules Conflicts, House Rules Theory, Rule Importation, Plot Organization, Campaign Structure, and Plot Sequence. This constructs the major ‘bones’ of the campaign skeleton.
• Phase 6: Mindset & Underpinnings from the ‘New Beginnings’ series studies completing the structural elements of a new campaign. Specific attention is placed on the Campaign Philosophy, Campaign Themes, Magic, House Rules Theory, Races and Classes, with a key example from the Shards Of Divinity campaign.
• Phase 9: Completion from the ‘New Beginnings’ series – is mostly about dotting i’s and crossing t’s and a few other tasks that were put off, at least temporarily, earlier in the series. In particular, the categories of Campaign Structure, Adventure Format & Structure, House Rules Theory, PCs, Races, Archetypes & Classes, Campaign Background, and how Players will integrate with the campaign are considered.
• The Prohibition Disjunction: When Rules Go Bad looks at the integration of House Rules and Official Mechanics, amongst other aspects of Rules Failures.
• A Role To Play – this article is all about roleplaying and inhabiting a character. One section discusses how game mechanics can inhibit this and how that problem can be turned into a characterization asset with a little House Rules judo.
• Combining Abilities: Teamwork and Synergy between RPG Characters (updated) – most game systems try very hard to ignore the complicated question of multiple characters cooperating to solve a problem, even though they are the sort of problems that crop up in actual game-play all the time. I bite the bullet, posing 5 specific problems and multiple possible game mechanics solutions to uncover solutions that will work.
• A Wealth Of Stylistic Factors – giving each campaign its own style takes time and effort, and that’s what this article is all about. One of the contributing factors is House Rules, and in the relevant section, the article looks at that contribution and how to choose House Rules that will lend themselves to the style that you want to achieve.
• To Roll Or Not To Roll, pt 1 and To Roll Or Not To Roll, pt 2 – there are times when it can be more useful to the GM and his game to have a PC not roll for something. This two-part article (originally conceived as one big one) looks at the why, when, how, and the implications. If it looks familiar, it’s because it was only published a couple of months ago.

There are others, but they are more peripheral to the subject. In particular, some of the articles tagged “Philosophy” may be useful (there are only 150 of them – 151, counting this one.

A Reflection Of Expertise

First, I want to propose a way of handling the “searching an office” situation, so that I can exclude it from the more general question.

Proposed House Rule: If an object or document is filed or placed in a relevant location by someone who has a skill that is relevant to the placement of that object or document, a different character can use that same skill to locate the object or document. The skill of the original individual, divided by 5 and -2, is used as a modifier to the subsequent roll. This rule explicitly excludes anything deliberately hidden, including placement of sensitive documents into a safe.

If a secretary files a document in a filing cabinet, for example, their bureaucracy skill (or whatever the equivalent is in your game system) relates directly to the logic that defines the placement of that document. The better they are at their job, the more sensible and rational their filing system will be, and the more easily someone else will find it to locate the document using that same skill.

The same should also apply to someone with different lenses for a telescope (except that we’re talking about their Astronomy skill), and so on.

It’s up to the GM to decide whether or not a particular skill is relevant to the placement of the subject of the search.

I can’t help but remember passing exchanges from M*A*S*H about Radar’s filing system – I wish I could remember which episode so that I could quote from it more directly than simply name-dropping the series. It made perfect sense to Radar but no-one else could follow it. There was also a scene in which Frank Burns found out which cabinet contained Radar’s Bugle.

In such a case, bureaucracy would not help, in fact it would continually lead one astray. Radar clearly was not using that skill to place his files, he instead had a system of his own in which he had expertise.

If the character searching doesn’t have the right skill, this rule doesn’t apply, and this becomes a more general search.

Lost and (hopefully) Found

When something is not where we expect it to be, it’s a sure bet that the placement did not follow any replicable logic and did not utilize a skill to determine where such logic would place the item.

When this happens to me, there is a definite pattern to the resulting search.

• First, I search all the places that the item might reasonably have been put, in sequence of decreasing likelihood.
• Second, I search all the places that I put things the last time I remember having the item, even if unlikely.
• Third, I search all the places that I can think of that are plausible but unlikely.
• Fourth, I search all the places that contain similar items to the one that’s been misplaced.
• Fifth, I look at all the places where I routinely sit and do things.
• Sixth, I repeat search 1, but casting a wider net, and also searching nearby.
• Seventh, I start a systematic and thorough search by geographic area.

For example, let’s apply that sequence to searching for a set of keys:

1. I check the peg where I keep my keys, and the floor underneath. I check the draws and bags in the vicinity where the keys might have landed had they fallen. I check the bags that I use when shopping. I check the pockets of everything that I’ve worn in the last few days. I’ll also walk the ground between the bus stop and my front door – just in case.
2. The last time I went out shopping, what did I buy? Where did I put those purchases? Might I have put the keys down somewhere nearby – on top of the refrigerator, for example? Might I have dropped them without noticing when using them to unlock the gate or the front door?
3. If I bought groceries, I would have organized the shopping in the game room (because it has a large clear area that I can sit down at). Might the keys be on that table, or on the floor nearby I usually keep my mobile phone in the same pocket as the keys when I go out – where is the phone now? Are the keys nearby? Are the keys in the bathroom somewhere? etc.
4. I have a hook where I keep a spare set of keys. This takes most of the panic out of the loss (which is why I keep the spare set). Could I have put the original with the spares? Not likely, but I’ll check, anyway More to the point, there are a couple of places where I will hide other keys that I am looking after for someone else – could my keys have ended up there, somehow? There are places where I used to put my keys before I put up the hook – could muscle memory have put them there?
5. Next I will search my work area – especially looking behind the laptop, under the bag I use to gather rubbish, and so on, on the premise that I have simply put them down somewhere.
6. Back to search one – this time I’ll not only double check the pockets, I’ll double-check that I haven’t missed a pocket, and I’ll look to see if they could have been left in a pocket and then fallen out. I’ll look to see if they might have fallen out of one pocket and into another (it’s happened!) And I’ll look beneath the hook again, but this time I’ll get my eyes down to floor level, and so on.
7. If I haven’t found them by now, the odds are that they are lost – at least for now. I’ll start a systematic search, though, starting at the front door and proceeding through the unit – after taking a break to calm myself and get my breath back.

In other words, likely places, then plausible places, then possible places, then everywhere..

The process is the same if I’m looking for a document (my lease? a power bill?), a book, a grocery item, a screwdriver, a CD or DVD…

Translating the Search Concept

In order to translate this process into game mechanics, the first principle is to use the existing mechanics as much as possible – don’t reinvent the wheel. That means that searching for a lost or misplaced object or document has to be based on “Concealment”, which needs to be expanded to cover items that are placed with no intention of concealment.

That means that there is no concealment roll to hide the object in question; that should be replaced with a modifier, or with a series of them, and the only roll will be a ‘concealment’ roll to find the search object.

It’s worth remembering that we have excluded from these rules anything that has been deliberately concealed, or that is in plain sight.

I have compiled a list of 8 modifiers that reflect different attributes of a search object within the context of the environment being searched. There may be others, but these will do for now.

0. Scope

Before listing the modifiers and assigning values to them, though, it’s a good idea to establish some scope. I have the notion that every 2 by which the roll fails ticks off another of the search location levels – so if you succeed, then what you are looking for is in the first place you look according to the logical schema described earlier.

If you fail by 1 or 2, then it’s not in the first group of places, but it is in the second. If you fail by 3 or 4, then it’s not in location groups 1 or 2, but it is in three, and so on. With six categories, that means that a result of failure by 10 is perfectly acceptable, and it will actually require failure by 12 (or the GM having determined that what the PCs are looking for is not there) for the search object not to be found – eventually.

The lowest actual roll you can make on 3d6 is a 3. The default value of the concealment skill is 9+(STAT/5), and the average value of INT – the stat in question – is 10. So that means 11/-, maybe 12 or 13 or less. Call it 12 or less on average. Rolling a three gives a fail by 10, which works.

But the average roll on 3d6 is 10.5 – a failure by 1.5. We want that to fall in the middle of the ‘failure’ range, about -5.

With 8 modifiers, most of them should have an average value of -1. But some of them will have positive modifiers – so a better choice would be +1 and -2 (giving the same average).

1. Size

This is a completely subjective assessment by the GM – an unusually thick folder might be large in comparison to everything else in a filing system, or it might be small in comparison to a building of large files. A flash drive is likely to be small.

Large enough to be relatively obvious: +1
Typical: +0
Small: -2

2. Obviousness vs Difficulty

How much does the object stand out? One particular baseball in a box of them doesn’t stand out very well. One particular piece of paper will be obvious if you can identify it as the target with a glance, and not if you have to read each of large stack of papers to find the one that you want.

Folded into this are all questions of environmental difficulty. Searching for an object buried in silt and underwater to a depth that you can’t see except with a torch, is obviously difficult. Trying to read something written in red ink when the illumination is also red is difficult. Trying to search calmly and efficiently while people are shooting at you is difficult.

Object is easy to find: +1
Object is not hard to find: +0
Object is hard to find: -2

3. Distinctiveness & Contrast

Again, let’s say we’re talking about a folder. If it has red stripes around the edges, and is the only folder that has this feature. Okay, maybe that’s covered under “Obviousness”. So let’s go with something slightly more subtle: this is the only folder stamped “top secret”. Or maybe the document inside is the only one signed in purple ink. It doesn’t matter what the point of distinctiveness is, what matters is that the object can be identified, at a glance, as the object of the search.

It might be the only set of blueprints. It might be the only papers with a green cover sheet, like my lease. If a book, it might be distinctively sized, or have a distinctive cover.

Let’s say that I’m looking in my DVD collection for a particular James Bond movie. Several of the movies in that series have matching covers in terms of color and font – that lets me go to the group right away. It might take a stranger a little longer, but you only have to see Thunderball and Dr No and Goldfinger all in a set and you’ve narrowed the scope of the search drastically.

Object is distinctive: +1
Object blends in: -2
Otherwise: +0

4. Luck

I’ve written about Luck in the Hero System before. See, for example,

Chances Are: Lessons in Probability.

Assuming that he has rolled some luck points, a character can use them to his advantage in conducting a search.

One level: +1
Two levels: +3
Three levels: +5

5. Logic & System vs Haste

I don’t quite know what it says about me that I have a defined system for searching for something that I have misplaced. But having such a system is clearly beneficial than blindly searching in random locations.

If the character can articulate a sensible search strategy, that should be worth a bonus – but such a search may well take longer, because you are taking more care. So it’s more thorough, but that comes at a cost.

The more time pressure the searcher is under, the more that should impact their chances of finding what they are looking for. There have been times when I’ve been searching for something in haste, and picked up and set aside the object of my search because in my haste, I didn’t recognize it as what I was looking for.

This is one of those rare modifiers in which both a positive and a negative can apply.

Articulated system or logic to the search: +2

Panicked Search (1/16th normal time): -5
Searching Frantically (1/8 normal time): -4
Searching in great haste (1/4 normal time): -3
Searching in haste (1/2 normal time): -2
Taking extra time: +1
Taking a lot of extra time: +2
Leisurely / Casual search: +3

Update#1 28 Feb 2023

My co-GM for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, for which all this work was done, spotted something that I missed.

Quiet Search (Enemies down the hall): up one rank on the time applicable
Silent Search (Enemies in the next room or closer): up two ranks on the time applicable

6. Mess vs Order (environment)

If you’re searching an area that is nice and neat (and assuming that you don’t make a mess in the process), it can make it a lot easier to find something. If you’re searching through a mess, there is going to be a loss of time from moving irrelevant stuff aside, if nothing else.

Size of the object being searched also makes a big difference here, for obvious reasons.

Large object, tidy environment: +1
Small object, tidy environment: +1
Large Object, messy environment: +0
Small Object, messy environment: -2

7. Numbers

Many hands make light work. But some searches are so large as to require many hands.

The GM is entitled to set a minimum number of searchers required to complete the search in a reasonable time frame (4 hours, say – but that is also up to the GM and the circumstances). If the searchers can’t reach that minimum number, the ‘reasonable time frame’ blows out proportionately, but there is no additional penalty.

For every 50% over the base requirement or part thereof, there is a +1 modifier.

8. Panic / Emotional Upset

Finally, the state of mind of the searcher is clearly a relevant factor. If you’re calm and controlled, there can be a lack urgency about the search, but being able to assess what you find rationally soon more than makes up for that. On the other hand, if you are emotionally overwrought, crying your eyes out or shouting at the heavens, or in a blind panic or state of extreme fear, that represents a significant hurdle to hinder success.

If you’re vulnerable to emotional distress, this will only get worse as you proceed with the search without finding your target. If that is likely to be the case, or there are hints that the player is growing frustrated at the lack of success, use the overall average to determine the modifier.

Calm state throughout search: +1
Emotional Upset: -2

These eight parameters cover most of the contingencies that I could imagine encountering. One of the things that gives me confidence in that statement is that there were originally only 5 entries on my list, and the others came to me as I wrote and thought more deeply about the subject.

To use the search metaphor, I found the obvious things and then the inobvious ones!

A small sidebar

What’s interesting is that most of these will also apply to attempts to use a Search Engine – the only difference is that the search engine has presented you with a number of places to look for what you want, probably within a long list of things that you don’t. If you’re lucky, or if your Google-fu is strong, it might be high up in the results; or, if your search term is not as good as your think, it might be buried a long way down, or missing altogether.

Other Game Systems

It doesn’t really matter which game system you are playing – it either has rules for searching, or it needs rules for searching!

If you need such a subsystem, the above can be adapted in various ways without great difficulty. So use what I’ve written here as a template, and create a set of rules that integrate into your existing game mechanics.

If your game system already has a system mechanic for this purpose, it might be that the modifiers offered cover something that your system didn’t anticipate, or simply offer a perspective that you had not previously considered.

Above all, I want to emphasize that the context of the search is all-important – the physical context (environment), the degree of resemblance between target and non-target, and the emotional context.

In conclusion, I hope that readers have found something they were looking for from this article!

Sorry – I couldn’t resist…

Update#2 28 Feb 2023

I also converted the article into a two-page set of House Rules for the campaign that may be of use to others.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November.

That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that my co-GM and I had been working on.

More directly, though, it’s inspired by the technique employed in last Saturday’s successful reboot of the Warcry campaign. This reboot adventure had to accomplish a lot, some of it easy but a lot of it quite difficult:

1. Dust off and reintroduce the campaign, which hadn’t been played since 2012 (see Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff for the reason for the inactivity).
2. Introduce two new PCs and connect them with the protagonist PC
3. Write out two old PCs with a heroic sendoff
4. Apply a layer of fuzziness to all background material deriving from the backstories of those old PCs
5. Apply a second layer of fuzziness to many established building blocks of the game universe
6. Update that game universe to make it consistent with what had been uncovered in the Zenith-3 campaign
7. Expand on the game universe and it’s meta-dynamics
8. Ensure that all PCs, both old and new, were critical to the outcome
9. Challenge all PCs according to their abilities
10. Have the adventure be consistent with the established, fairly freewheeling, style of the campaign
11. Make it fun for all three players.

All that in a single afternoon’s play.

My solution was to have the protagonist experiencing multiple time tracks, one in which the universe was facing an existential threat, and one where that threat had been resolved, but with an unstable solution. Once the protagonist became aware of the threat and it’s scale and scope, his goal was to identify a more stable solution, establishing the time-line with the new PCs as the new “reality”, replacing the one which contained the old PCs – and have this enterprise suddenly seemed doomed to failure until those old PCs (once again) pulled a rabbit out of their (metaphoric) hats, achieving victory through their self-sacrifice.

Writing this adventure required a new structure, one not entirely dissimilar to that described in the earlier posts, but also required a new adventure format to make it practical. And, in the course of that writing, I discovered that the format used when writing an adventure could – in at least some cases – be just as profound in its effects on the adventure content as the structure.

Today’s article explores what I learned, extrapolates on the resulting techniques, and adds a quartet of applications that use this format as a tool.

The Basic Structure

I want to start this discussion with the simplest possible model and add refinements and complications from that starting point, rather than plunging headlong into the harder stuff.

The basic structure is this:

Two columns, and multiple rows. Each cell contains enough game prep material to advance the plotline or plotlines, and then comes to an end. Each column represents a single plot thread.

This enables the GM to balance the attention and spotlight focus between the two plotlines. Events in column 2 can be occurring simultaneous with those in column 1, or sequentially, or with an overlap, or even with a gap, though the latter should be rare and consist of hand-waving delays and travel between significant plot points..

This was the exact format that I used for the Warcry adventure, which was unusual in that the protagonist was experiencing both columns’ action sequentially, even though they were occurring in distinctly different places and circumstances.

Flow

In writing this adventure, I found myself compelled to pay far closer attention to the transitions and flow between the two plot sequences. I could rough-draft each plotline in full, but needed to tweak the resulting outlines significantly.

For example, in plot thread one, there was a substantial amount of exposition to get through – time in which the protagonist was the only PC with a player present. My first draft had this as a fairly monolithic block of prepared text, but it became instantly apparent that this would not fly; I needed to continually intercut away from that monolithic block of text to action focusing on the other PCs present, and that action had to be plot-significant, too.

I started with a relatively trivial encounter that was designed to let the new PCs show off some of what they could do. But, once enough of the exposition had been presented, that encounter was usurped by an illustration of what the exposition was describing. The threat went from something being discussed to front-and-center and in-your-face.

This not only made the action more dramatic, it lent weight and substance to the dry recitation of prepared dialogue.

Participants

Structuring the adventure in this way made a relatively trivial task – that of making sure that every participating character had something to be doing at any given point (even if that were simply waiting around or roleplaying) by subdividing the progress even more than would be the case in a normal act / chapter / scene structure.

While that was relatively trivial in this case, I could immediately see that in other campaigns, this could be a significant advantage. In the Zenith-3 campaign, for example, there are occasions when all four PCs and two central NPCs have plotlines of their own running, and these frequently intersect. On top of that, while it doesn’t happen frequently, there can be interactions with another 20 or 30 NPCs – some recurring, some occasional, and some transient. There’s little more inconvenient than discovering in the heat of play that an NPC was simply hand-waved out of existence in between significant contributions; it’s corrosive on a sense of realism. What they are doing might never actually be shown “on camera” within the adventure, but having some sort of checklist that shows them doing something means that you’re prepared if a PC goes looking for them, or simply asks what they have been up to.

Mismatched Participant Numbers

Of course, there is absolutely no need to have a column for each character. The basic model already divides the plot by plot thread, and intertwines those plot threads – not by participating PC. Naturally, you can have combinations and groups of PCs within a single plot thread – it doesn’t have to be single-character plots.

It doesn’t take a lot of rumination to see that the participation rosters don’t have to be fixed, either. One character can start of participating in plot thread one, then get distracted by plot thread two, while someone from plot thread two may or may not take their place in plot thread one.

The subdivision of events into relatively small slices means that all you really need to do is make sure that each significant character is name-checked in each row to make sure that the spotlight is being shared reasonably evenly.

Content

That is also dependent on the amount of content that you place in each cell. Based on both my experience with the Warcry adventure, with similar structures in the Zenith-3 campaign, and the recent adventure structuring in the Adventurer’s Club, I would aim for 2-4 cells per ‘page’. That usually translates to 1-3 paragraphs per cell.

It’s necessary to convert conversation into ‘paragraphs’ because you need to allow for replies by the PC(s). The assumption I make is that they will be roughly as long-winded as the NPCs with their canned dialogue – sometimes more, sometimes less, but that’s a good starting point. I can then tweak that estimate based on the loquaciousness of the player – PC combination and the situation.

Characters / Players who are outside their comfort zone, in particular, will either respond by padding their vocal contributions or by becoming more curt.

Be aware, too, of how quickly things will proceed if the player chooses to “roll-play” instead of “role-playing” – if the players are any good (mine are) this will usually indicate either unfamiliarity with the game mechanics or a subject / situation in which their PC has greater expertise than the player does.

For example, one PC in the Zenith-3 campaign has been taking painting lessons, starting with still-lifes and progressing to live models. I know more than enough on the topic to improv detailed dialogue and narrative regarding any given image or subject, but the player of the PC in question is not only relatively unfamiliar with it, he has no particular interest in the subject. As a result, he frequently resorts to roll-playing and relies on me to ‘translate’ the results into something that both sounds as competent as the character is, but that also makes sense to him as a player.

Another PC in that campaign has been getting into woodcarving, under the tutelage of a master craftsman. I know relatively little about the subject, but the player knows even less. But I’m good at pretending to knowledge that I don’t have (see The Expert In Everything), so with a bit of research and prep, I can make the player feel like he is successfully simulating the expertise that his character is acquiring.

Below is a screen capture of the Warcry adventure (shrunken sufficiently to show an entire page). Although black borders were used in the original, I’ve rendered these in red to make them more visible.



There are a number of points to highlight in this representation.

• First, row one has one large paragraph in column 1 and two medium paragraphs in column 2.
• Row two has an even larger paragraph in column 1 and a medium paragraph in column 2. This indicates that the initial focus of the adventure is plot thread 1, labeled Reality 1, which is appropriate because it starts from the point of what was prior to the rebooting.
• The third row has a single line plus a small paragraph in column one and a paragraph of similar size in column 2. The equality is significant.
• The fourth and final row on this page has a medium paragraph in column 1 and a paragraph of similar size plus a smaller one in column 2, reflecting a shift in focus as the significance of the new reality starts to become apparent.
• To avoid cells that span two pages, additional empty lines have been added to the bottom of column 2, row 4.

The narrative flow within the resulting page looks like this:



You deal fully with the contents of a cell and then move on to the cell alongside it. When you get to the end of the row, you return attention to the next cell of column 1. It therefore doesn’t matter how many columns you have, i.e. how many plot threads you are tying together.

It is also worth noting that overall, the spotlight is shared roughly equally between the two plot threads, as signified by the amount of text in each column.

Complications

As soon as you start wanting to check for balanced participation, and making sure that you don’t have the one character in two places at once, and that a given cell has been given its final narrative ‘polish’, and any number of other such considerations, you start complicating the structure.

Fortunately, it’s not all that hard to tweak the text formatting to take a lot of the sting out of these activities.

One technique to consider is highlighting any character names each time they appear – which makes it easy to scan a row and pick out anyone who’s missing, or who is appearing when they shouldn’t.

A refinement would be to use a different highlight color for significant NPCs (I consider any NPC who might participate in a conversation with a PC to be ‘significant’ in that scene, whether they do or not).

You could go even further and color-code enemies, allies, and neutrals differently, or to recognize some other significant affiliation. But it doesn’t take too much of this to create so much color that the text visually ‘drowns’ in it, and the benefits of such highlighting are lost.



It’s often useful to create a little space to one side of the columns, like the example above. You can then use a diagonal slash in red to check off one requirement, and a diagonal slash the other way to check off another. You can add a tick or a circle in black or blue to indicate that there is a relevant illustration / map / diagram NEEDED – or that one has been sourced and prepared.

Yes, you could use a separate column for each of these purposes, but that would then require headings so that you knew what each one represented, and the results quickly become counterproductive. A single cell which can be used in several different ways is not only easier to use in and of itself, but also forces a minimalist approach to the whole checklist question. While that can be constraining, it’s usually beneficial in the long run.

Switches & Segues

You don’t have to work very long on a structure of this kind to realize that how you switch from one plot thread – one narrative – to another is a whole new challenge. In general, these segues should become shorter – go into detail at first to establish the principle and who is where and doing what, and then assume that players will remember this the next time you turn your attention back to them.

But there is another kind of switch that’s worth highlighting: specific characters can migrate from one plot thread to another. Focusing attention on them makes them a natural vehicle for the segue that helps to keep them fresh, dynamic and interesting.

For example, contemplate the following:

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 4
A	B	C	D
A+B		C	D
B	A		C+D
	D+A	A+C	B

 

If A, B, C, and D are four different PCs, this illustrates how plot threads can be left dangling while players are being distracted by developments in another plot thread. If you end up with the same total number of occupied cells in all columns, the focus is roughly equally distributed between the four. Notice, also, the bottom row of the example, which uses A as a bridge between plot threads 2 and 3. This generally means on the next row (or the one after at the latest), A should not appear at all, so as to ensure equitable distribution of the spotlight.

This shows just how complex a narrative structure you can weave using a table to contain and structure that narrative.

A Variant Structure

It’s also possible to encode a plot structure with one character per column. This enables an additional column to be used to encode a reference to a particular plotline or plot development (I’ve illustrated this sort of thing any number of times here at Campaign Mastery, see the plot thread that occupies the last 1/3 of The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure, for example.

This can encompass all the problems described below in the “Four Or More Threads” section if you have more than 3 PCs to track, so it’s a lot more complicated in many ways, but it can still be a useful planning tool.

Three Threads

That’s getting a little ahead of ourselves; if it weren’t for the possibility of there being only 2 or 3 feature characters to track, I would not have mentioned the variant structure until later in the article.

So let’s take a step back and look at the somewhat simpler structure that is a Three-plot-thread braiding:

The basic structure of the three-ply braid looks, somewhat predictably, like this:

– three central columns (one for each plot thread) and two small ones on either side of the page for tracking whatever it is that you feel the need to track.

Within this basic structure, you have all the options and tools previously described available to you, plus a few that I have yet to get to.

Why Use A Three-Thread Model?

Let’s say that you have one significant plot thread, and two smaller ones that between them are equal to the significant plot thread. That would be one valid reason for using a three-thread model.

Presumably, one of those then leads into the main plot, which brings all the PCs together on the one problem – which may constitute a fourth plot thread.

There are other possible reasons, but they are all variations on this theme. For example, I once ran an adventure sequence in which one PC was driving the action while the others were kept hopping dealing with the fallout of those actions.

If you have six PCs, you can group them into two trios or three pairs – so having the three plot-thread model up your sleeve gives you a lot of flexibility.

But the best answer – and it’s still a variation on the same theme – is that you can dedicate one of the threads to the Villain and his actions / reactions to events. These never get related to the players, they show up as events in the first two plot threads if and when the developments get noticed. What they do is ensure that the Villain and his plot is developing and evolving in response to the PCs and their activities. It’s a planning tool of significant benefit.

Empty Cells

Further refinements are possible by leaving some cells empty. This only works with more than two plot threads, but enables you to sequence those plot threads as desired – this was a key point in the design of “Lucifer Rising”, the plot discussed in the article on plot structure.

A Second Variant

Let’s start with me name-dropping the Kree-Skrull War from the Avengers comic. For those who were comic readers of the time, this was the most epic plotline that had ever appeared in comic form, eclipsing earlier examples from the Fantastic Four (for example, the Inhumans plotline) and DC’s annual team-ups between the Justice League and Justice Society.

The three-thread structure facilitates the planning and construction of such epic plotlines by treating the events befalling one faction as a plot thread. In plot thread one, the supreme command of faction one might initiate a military confrontation with faction two as a distraction from a more subtle plot. A subsequent entry in faction two’s narrative then describes the outcome of the confrontation, while an entry in faction three’s plot sequence (the PCs) makes them aware of the confrontation and hints at it’s true purpose. There would then be a further entry for faction one detailing the success or failure or progress of the true plot.

This technique works whether faction one are Drow and faction 2 elves, or orcs and humans, or whatever the participants are to be. If necessary, coalesce factions into alliances to reduce the number of plot ‘threads’ to three, or at most, four.

Four-or-more Threads

Which brings me to the four-or-more structure.

If you use landscape orientation and a relatively small font, you might conceivably be able to manage four primary columns, but experience tells me that this is going to be touch-and-go.

For perspective on that, here are three views of the front page of the Zenith-3 adventure, The Tangled Web – the first one shows the two-column orientation used for this traditionally-formatted adventure.

The second shows a mock-up of a four-column version: I should mention that I tried formatting (for real) this way and found that because a page was larger than would show on my screen at full-width, I was having to scroll up and down frequently.

Note that the text seems denser, but you actually fit slightly less on a page. Of course, the title graphic could be reduced in size to a single column – gaining almost half a page:

This means that I could not hold the front page up to show the players (helping to set the tone for the adventure) – in fact, the subtitle is all but invisible at this size. And, because we’ve increased the text content about 50%, the already annoying ‘scroll up and down’ problem will be 50% worse, too.

As a rule of thumb, then, four columns and content don’t mix very well, even in landscape mode.

Practical Limitations Of Structure

That requires a modification to the structure of the format. Instead of content going directly into the columns, it needs to be moved, and maybe even formatted in a two-column mode just like my 2-column version of A Tangled Web. This is then linked to the planning section (where information is kept in the four-column / four-thread format) by a simple sequential code.

Unfortunately, my example is going to require a little additional explanation because I made an assumption that I probably shouldn’t have: that the adventure started with an all-four-threads scene and then split into two threads, each of which then bifurcated into four – and that the first three cells are all on page one of the document and this is page two..

That’s why the first entry is numbered four in the example below; it’s probably a more realistic example but also more confusing – but I don’t have time to redo it.



In the top section, we have the scene number and space to write in the PCs who are part of the scene. There is also the usual space for ticks and crosses to signify that work is required / done.

This enables the top section to be used as a planning tool just as was the case with the earlier versions.

The index number then points to the content section. Note that with 11 rows of content, there would only be room for a line or two. Anything more and you have to move scenes 12-15 to the next page – and that can be extremely inconvenient.

Conclusion: it can be done – but it might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Coming Together

Let’s go back to our three-column model. How do you represent it when two plot threads converge into a single situation? This can be expected to happen when the PCs start coming together for the main plot of the adventure, after all, so it’s likely to happen regularly.

The example above demonstrates how to handle this – it’s a simple matter of selecting the cells that have come together and merging the cells. Most software will be able to handle this process. What’s more, if you do this before creating rows below the merge, some software preserves the new structure when additional rows are added (some software doesn’t, though!).

Splitting Apart

Similarly, having a plot thread bifurcate into two separate sets of activities or lines of investigation is achieved by merging the cells prior to the bifurcation:

Seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it?

Non-Plotting Applications

If this were nothing more than a way of arranging the text contents that make up your game prep, it would be a curiosity, something to file away for use on the occasional rare occasion, nothing more.

But there’s a lot more that can be done with this approach. I’ve already mentioned the two factions and a force of PCs caught in the middle (using the three column structure) – but there are so many useful things to do with the basic two-column mode that it will shine as a planning and background construction tool on a frequent basis.

I have four – well, three-and-a-half – such applications to throw into your toolkit.

1: A Tale Of Governments

Almost every government can be described as a contest between two factions – it doesn’t matter if there are democratic processes or if we’re talking alliances in a noble court or merchants / guilds vs authority.

That means that you can use the two-column model to construct a political history, working backwards, and mentioning only events that were politically significant.

Nor do the membership of any given faction have to remain consistent – you can have affiliations and alliances that shift and change in response to political intrigue, just as the Republican Party are both the modern day party and the party of Lincoln, and which freed the slaves, while the Democrats have gone from the party of business (slave-owners) interests to the more progressive of the two parties.

Even the form of government can have changed (and frequently will have done so). Before America was the USA, it was the British Colonies – and a monarchy. Every culture has its revolutions – bloodless at times, bloody more often.

2: Family Legacies

Unless your species has extremely unusual biology, your sentient species will normally have a maternal line and a paternal line. That means that the simple two-column model can be used to track backwards, one story / anecdote at a time, compiling an ancestry with family legends.

Each row can either represent an individual (in which case I suggest color coding for generations) or a generation.

Of course, with every step into the past, the chances of error or distortion increase – but this is better handled as a chance of accuracy or a degree of accuracy, because you can simply divide it by a fixed ratio.

I recommend multiplication by 0.8 for individuals and 0.6 for generations in isolation. But I would probably add 5% for individuals or generations that were personally known by the character compiling this family archive.

• Siblings: 100%. Maybe 95%.
• Parents: 65%. Aunts & Uncles, ditto – unless the person has never met them, yielding 60% accuracy..
• Grandparents: 60% of 65% = 39%. So more than half of what you think you know about them is wrong. If you’ve met them, +5% to get 44%.
• Great Grandparents: 60% of 39% is 23.4%. And this is the generation when meeting these ancestors starts to become problematic.
• Great-Great-Grandparents 60% of 23.4% is 14.04%. 17 facts in 20 are distorted at best.
• Great-Great-Great-Grandparents: 60% of 14.04 = 8.424%. There might be a single grain of truth in there somewhere.

….and so on. But this also works tracing forwards – Descendants of the siblings of your grandparents are as well-known as going back two more generations (because there’s a 2-generation gap) – so that’s 14.04%, possibly +5% if you once met your distant cousins.

Of course, you can play around with these numbers as you see fit; this is a starting point.

I have to admit that I like the generational model because it basically means that there’s one family myth or significant figure in each generation, yielding a manageable history – but that’s up to you, and some cultures will be more tightly-knit.



This collage contains an American Football (Simanek, CC0), Mohammed Shami warming up to bowl against England at Edgbaston, in 2018 (Aidan Sammons, CC BY 2.0), an excerpt from a night view of the Sydney Cricket Ground as it often appears during the Big Bash, half of the games of which are night-time (Mathew F, CC BY 2.0), a Mercedes AMG which was the car to beat in the 2023 Bathurst 12-hour race – but this example is from a couple of years ago (jason goulding from Muswellbrook, Australia, CC BY 2.0, and Australian batsman Steve Smith hooking a shot (www.davidmolloyphotography.com, CC BY 2.0), all via Wikimedia Commons. There was also a couple of bicycle races and some swimming, and basketball, and more. Summer in Australia is VERY sports-heavy!

3: Sporting Seasons

Today, according to the morning news, is the day of the Superbowl.

At the same time, there is a cricket test-match and one-day international series underway in India, as the Australian Team attempt to wrestle the subcontinent into sporting submission.

And we’ve just had something called the Big Bash, and the Bathurst 12-hour.

Before that, there was a (cricket) test series against South Africa – so there’s been a lot of sport happening lately.

That got me thinking about sporting seasons and how they could always be characterized, no matter what the sport, into a clash between two rivals; there may have been others at the start of the season, but by the end, it always comes down to two rivals.

That always reminds me of the scene in Major League in which Coach Brown says, “I figure it’s gonna take xx more wins to reach the playoffs” – I forget the exact number.

That entire movie is the story of one turbulent season in the life of the Cleveland Indians Major League Baseball team. Which means that – with the benefit of hindsight – an entire season leading up to the grand finale can be written as two simultaneous narratives, one focusing on each of the rivals.

Should it be desirable, you can even work toward a predetermined outcome by telling the story of one team’s season (with their rival-of-the-week being the other narrative thread). This enables you to compile the story one week (game time) at a time until the season reaches its climax.

That also reminds me of the M*A*S*H episode Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, in which Frank wins big by listening to a late-night broadcast of the games and placing bets with the rest of the camp personnel before the games are rebroadcast at a more “Civilized” hour. There was also another episode in which Charles gambles on baseball, convinced that Klinger is an expert, but I couldn’t track down the name of that one ( looked until I ran out of time).

Trying to write this sort of narrative without some organizing structure is a good way to lose track of pertinent details and have the ‘story’ stall if momentum is ever lost.

4: Grand Final Clashes

Just as obviously, a narrative form of a clash between two rivals can be done on a smaller scale, play by play (or the equivalent). To achieve a credible result, there is a minimum standard of knowledge required regarding the sport, I think. The actual process should be fairly obvious by now.

Not A Perfect Solution

Having spent most of this article singing the praises of the table as a tool, it’s time to come crashing back to earth with a dash of reality. Tables are not a perfect solution, mostly because of the software that is used to create them.

Word Processing Software Limitations

These days, the most common tool is a Word Processor. I have Word, but it takes forever to load, so I try to avoid it, instead using LibreOffice for my more complex tasks. I used to use OpenOffice, but it’s high memory demands made it unsuitable for the laptop that is my front-line computer these days (it has barely enough RAM to get by).

All of these implement tables in slightly different ways, and all have their own quirks, which it is necessary to master. For example, for some reason, LibreOffice puts its Table icon-ribbon at the bottom of the screen, where I never remember to look for it; this forces me to scramble around, looking for the controls to do what I want to do, at least until I again rediscover the table ribbon.

Interface & Formatting Inconveniences

Another of the frequent headaches lies in the reversion of text formatting, in whole or in part, when you copy and paste into a new cell with some Word Processors. Others preserve most of the formatting (tabs seem to be a particularly difficult problem in this respect). Again, every implementation has its own idiosyncrasies that have to be mastered.

A Simple Web-page editor?

A simple alternative that may be of use is to use a web-page editor. I still keep a copy of Frontpage Express around from my Win-98 days because it makes it so much easier to lay out a complex table structure. I then sometimes import the saved html into LibreOffice for final tweaks, but know enough html that I do a lot of it directly in my plain-text editor.

There were some things that Netscape’s equivalent to Frontpage did better, but tables weren’t one of them (from memory). When I was first learning, I quite often bounced the one html document from one editor to the other and back.

These days, though, you need to know CSS to make this solution work. I know just enough to get myself into trouble in this department, I’m afraid. If you’re in the same boat, the Word Processors are probably a better bet.

There are things that you can do with a hacksaw that simply can’t be done with a hand saw. The tools that we use can have a significant impact on what we can do with the words that comprise our raw material. While they are not the arbiter or restrictor of plot structures, they can facilitate or hinder.

In particular, some plot structures are far more accessible through the magic of tables in a Word Processor or WYSIWYG HTML editor (WYSIWYG = “What You See Is What You Get”) – the links near the bottom of the page may be of use in choosing your tools for working with tables if you don’t have one already, or don’t like the one you have).

In fact, there are some things that are extremely difficult or annoying to attempt in any other way. And that makes the table-based approach something that every GM should know about.

I was reading something on Quora the other day that offered a fairly convincing argument that most people wouldn’t recognize real randomness if it bit them on the toe (in less colorful language).

Now, most GMs are not ‘most people’; we work with randomness all the time. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the majority would be just as vulnerable to the common misperception of randomness, and that understanding the difference between perception and reality could be a valuable tool.

Fake Randomness

When most people think of a random distribution of results, they actually think of an even distribution, or a scatter-plot. And, at first blush, that makes sense; each of the possible results of a d20 has an equal likelihood of occurring, and so (over many results) you would expect the number of times any given result comes up to equalize.

The problem is that most people seriously underestimate the number of results that you need in order for that to happen. For example, let’s take a string of five results: 4 – 7 – 8 – 10 – 16. Even probability means that this is just as likely to occur as another valid set of results: 10 – 10 – 10 – 10 – 10. Yet, if you were to show those strings to someone, they would have little hesitation in describing the first as random and the second as decidedly not random.

It’s a known fact that humans absolutely suck at seeing and recognizing randomness. In fact, our brains are hardwired to spot and recognize meaningful patterns taking as many shortcuts as possible in the process to speed it up. Being able to spot the tiger stalking you behind the greenery from a minimal number of glimpses holds an obvious survival benefit.

These shortcuts are what is responsible for the phenomenon of optical illusions. This is one of those subjects that I find absolutely fascinating, so I’ve dealt with it a number of times here at Campaign Mastery:

• Art-Spiration, for the Nov 2022 Blog Carnival;
• The Glow Around The Corner;
• The Power Of Blur, for the June 2021 Blog Carnival;
• A Sharp Lookout: How Much Can You Adventure?; and
• Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see?

Oh, and while I’m at it, I should probably also mention that this isn’t my first article on the subject of randomness:

• Into Each Chaos, A Little Order Must Fall;
• Pieces Of Ordinary Randomness;
• Randomness In RPGs;
• Principles of Randomness; and finally,
• The Sixes System, which has randomness and probability at the heart of the game mechanics.

So the survival strategies built into us by countless generations of kill-or-be-killed are directly at war with the ability to distinguish the absence of pattern, to such an extent that the mind will try and invent a pattern when none exists.

This reality is responsible for all sorts of things, from Optical Illusions to Eyewitness Contamination to Social interaction during Jury deliberations to Conspiracy Theories and, perhaps, to an even broader application to paranoia itself.

The Truth About Randomness

In reality, then, true randomness doesn’t look anything like an even distribution. So what does it look like, then? And what light can be shed on the number of rolls that you need before a reasonable level of uniformity of result (as perceived and defined by a layman) can be observed?

These are far more complicated questions than it might first appear, so they will take some time to answer.

Distribution Of Results

To provide a real-world analysis, I rolled and documented 448 d20s. The graph analyses the results.

Why 448? Well, it’s more than 400, and 400 divided by 20 is 20; my instincts were that having the average tally of any given result be so high would be enough to show just how uniform the occurrence of any given result would be.

At the top, you can see the actual distribution of results – 16 times, I got a 1, 13 times I got a 20, and so on. A whopping 36 times, I rolled a 16! Surely, that means that the rolls weren’t truly random? That’s one result with a little over half the expected tally, and another with almost double it!

Well, when you calculate the average result, you get 10.4 – which is a smidgen below the theoretical average of 10.5. So maybe we need to look a little more deeply into these results.

Some Analysis

There were 448 rolls, so even distribution would be 22.4 occurrences of each result. What has actually been observed ranges from the low of 13 to the high of 36. Those are differences of -9.4 and +13.6, or -42% to +60.714%. So what can be said is that 448 rolls yielded an average of 22.4±61% occurrences per result.

What’s more, it’s reasonable to expect that this margin of error would probably halve each time you doubled the number of rolls. So, at 996 rolls, we have a probable error margin of ±30.05%. Let’s round those to 1000 and ±30%, for convenience.

Double again, and we get 2000 rolls and ±15%. Again yields 4000 rolls and ±7.5%. and, once again to get 8000 rolls and ±3.75% – finally a margin of error that is smaller than the range of the results (5% vs 3.75%).

UPDATE

A comment to a repost of this article on another site has pointed out that the ‘reasonable to assume’ is actually incorrect. To halve the error margin actually requires four times as many tests, to reduce it to a quarter requires sixteen times, and so on.

Which means that to get a probable error margin of ±30% requires roughly 2000 rolls, to get that down to ±15% requires 8000 rolls, ±7.5% needs 32,000 rolls, and ±3.75% needs 128,000 rolls.

I don’t think this makes any material difference to the remainder of the article, but bear it in mind. Individual results are far more smeared all over the map, more chaotic, than I thought they were.

Huge thanks to Andrew for passing on the feedback. Much appreciated!

More Graphical Analysis

However, die rolls are notoriously non-linear in their probabilities, which I’m at pains to point out in my analysis of the mechanics of the Sixes System. The normal pattern when it comes to a standard distribution is a core of very flat probability, in which variations are commonly observed, surrounded by a region on the curve in which the number of results rises or falls at a steep angle, surrounded by a plateau of very low probability results.

My standby tool for evaluating such large numbers of die rolls is Anydice, but when I went there, I found that this many dice went beyond it’s accepted limits. Instead, I had to drop the number of dice to 112 – so it’s not going to be directly relevant. But the principles will still be the same.



Base curves plotted with Anydice, refer link above.

If you’re talking about 448 die rolls, the central pyramid is only going to be narrower. At the same time, there are so many results with virtually zero chance individually that one or two anomalous results would not be surprising.

But this is all misleading, because we’re talking about 448 individual rolls, not one roll that compounds 448 dice. It is this difference that explains, and causes, the erroneous interpretation of randomness; on any individual roll, the chance of any given result – from one to twenty – is 5%.

The chance of two of them is 5% of 5%, or 0.25%. The chance of three is 5% of 0.25%, or 0.0125%. The chance of 4 is 0.000625%.

448 individual rolls is 224 pairs of rolls, so applying these percentages, we get:

• 448 rolls at 5% = 22.4 ones, 22.4 20s, and so on.
• 224 rolls at 0.25% = 0.56 pairs of 1s, 0.56 pairs of 20s, and so on.
• 112 rolls at 0.0125% = 0.014 triplets of 1’s, 0.014 triples of 2’s, etc.
• 56 rolls at 0.000625% = 0.00035 strings of 4 ones, strings of four 20s, etc.

Hmm – I’m not sure this adds much to the conversation.

Maybe it’s the whole concept of aggregating die rolls that’s leading us astray. So let’s contemplate a way of thinking about the sequences of results, translating them into some sort of graphical display.

Sequential Results

Clearly, mapping each actual result onto a single space on a grid is going to be fairly useless. What’s needed is some way of consolidating individual results into shorter strings of results.

The method that I decided to use, after some thought, was to roll d20s and map them onto a single row of a horizontal grid until a result came up that matched a result that had already been rolled; since this would not fit on the existing row (that space was already occupied), it would force the shift to a new row. I further broke them up into four sets of results to make the graph more convenient.

With a set number of rows to fill, the decision was to keep rolling until a result came up that ‘fell off the bottom’, signaling the end of the run. That, of course, explains the reason for the odd number (448) rolls.


Length Of Result Sequences

I also thought it important to analyze the theoretical length of the resulting strings – I didn’t want them to be too short, or too long. Because it made the math easier, I did this theory as a chance out of 400.

• Length 1: 1 in chance in 20 = 20 / 400 (by definition).
• Length 2: 19 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 2 results = 38 / 400; subtotal 58.
• Length 3: 18 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 3 results = 54 / 400; subtotal 112.
• Length 4: 17 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 4 results = 68 / 400; subtotal 180.
• Length 5: 16 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 5 results = 80 / 400; subtotal 260.
• Length 6: 15 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 6 results = 90 / 400; subtotal 350.
• Length 7: 14 attempts at 1 chance in 20 of matching 7 results = 98 / 400; subtotal 448.

So the average length of a string will be 6-7. Which means, out of 20, that about 2/3 of each row will be empty space. That seems like it will be enough.



True Randomness

This is the result, prettied up a bit, and right away you can see that true randomness is lumpy, coming in clumps. There are huge voids, like the one just below the right-hand top corner, and a smaller one just above the center. There are long strings of sequential results 2, 3, 4, and even 5 long. And there are a number of vertical bars that indicate the same number recurring time after time.

Below is an animated graphic showing a random walk with 25000 steps. It shows the same clumps and voids as my d20 results, and for exactly the same reason: randomness is not uniform in results, only in the likelihood of results (and sometimes not even then).. .

The misinterpretation has been responsible for a number of superstitions and fallacies that remain commonplace today.

The fallacy that a result is ‘due’, for example. If you are flipping a coin, the coin has no magic memory that makes a given result more or less likely – it doesn’t matter if you have just gotten 5 heads in a row, there is still a 50-50 chance of getting a head with your next coin-flip.

The fallacy that a past observed trend resulting from true randomness will persist, or be reversed, gives rise to the superstition that some numbers are more or less likely to result. To take an example from the die rolls that I have tracked in preparing this article, the number of results of “16” doesn’t mean that I’ll keep rolling a disproportionately high or a disproportionately low number of 16s in the near future.

In exactly the same way, the relative lack of twenties doesn’t mean that I will roll extra 20s to make up the shortfall anytime soon; it might happen, and will probably happen eventually, but it could be in 20 rolls or 2000.

No surprise – non-random digit distributions

The distinction between perceived randomness and true randomness might have surprised some. It might even have surprised me, but as soon as I saw it, my mind connected it to another phenomenon: non-random digit distribution.

If you invent a supposedly random series of multi-digit numbers, there will be a preponderance of threes and sevens in the digits. People tend to avoid even numbers, fives, nines, and zeros when inventing numbers because they perceive these as ‘less random’ than they should be.

This is one of the obvious consequences of the difference between true randomness and perceived randomness.

Note that you have to exclude leading digits in such analyses, because of Benford’s Law.

Benford’s Law

The leading numbers of any long series of numbers is going to be disproportionately low. This makes total sense when you think about it for a minute.

• In the numbers 1 to 20, eleven of the results will start with a 1, and two of them with a 2.
• In the numbers 1 to 200, one hundred and eleven results will start with a 1, and twelve with a 2.
• In the numbers 1900 to 2023, all but 24 of the numbers will start with a 1, and the rest will start with a 2. This is a completely not-random distribution.

Benford’s law, “also known as the Newcomb-Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small.” –Wikipedia

While it’s obvious why Benford’s Law applies to some data sets, in others it is simply an observed fact that resists simple explanations. To test for randomness of digit distribution, you therefore have to exclude the leading digits.

No surprise – chits

Random sequences are a different thing to a set of random numbers or random die rolls.

For example, consider what happens if you are drawing chits numbered from one to twenty without replacing them. The sequence of results will be random, but each draw is not an independent variable, because you cannot draw a result that has already been observed. Every result (assuming you continue until all the chits have been drawn) will occur, but the sequence will be random.

This actually sheds light on both true randomness and perceived randomness.

Public Domain Image supplied by Wikimedia Commons.

The Perceived Randomness Significance

When people think of what they perceive to be random distribution, the result is not unlike drawing chits from a bag for each coordinate on a chart. The accompanying illustration is a 200×200 grid containing 20,000 dark points (out of 40000) – so an even distribution of black and white. This is a plot of noise, basically, but it’s still what most people perceive as randomness.

If you keep adding dark pixels at random, sooner or later, all the white will be gone. Drawing chits from a bag instead of using a random number generator simply cuts out any intervening span by ensuring that you are selecting from the current population of white pixels only.

The True Randomness Significance

Below is another random walk pattern that was generated using pseudo-random numbers. At each step, the black could move into any of the nine cells surrounding it (which includes back the way it came, or staying where it was). After 2,000,000 steps through the 40,000×40,000 grid, the process was halted and the current state captured in the image which was then cropped.



Purpy Pupple, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I chose this image because it clearly shows the clumps and voids of true randomness. Which is ironic, because it’s not actually true randomness being displayed – results are constrained to be right next to the current pixel. This is not the same constraint as occurs when drawing chits from a bag, but the effect is similar, in that each point of white is simply a coordinate that hasn’t been ‘explored’ yet. Once again, if you continue generating steps, and exclude those results that take the ‘point’ out of the 40,000 pixel square space, the entire space will eventually become filled with black.

What’s more important – randomness or the Perception of Randomness?

All this leads to the inevitable question, which one – perceived randomness or true randomness – should a GM aim to use in his games?

After careful consideration, I don’t think there is any one right answer to this question; depending on the circumstances, either could be correct.

Repeat Exclusions

If what you want to do is to generate a sequence of some kind, but no choice is to be repeated, the chit-draw approach is the best choice. For example, if the intent is to determine the sequence in which the PCs interact with the individuals listed as patrons in a bar, this is the better approach.

True Randomness

Only if you don’t intend to have all possible outcomes occur should you consider alternatives. If the intent is simply to flag a course of action or plot, or to present a limited number of the possible outcomes, a die roll is the better approach.

For example, if you are generating a list of ‘serial numbers’, rolling d10s for each digit (rolling multiple dice and reading them left to right) achieves the randomness that should be there – though it may be necessary to insert a leading digit generated with a smaller die or even a fixed set of leading digits.

…with overrides

The basic technique of rolling for digits (or whatever) will serve many but not all needs. For example, if you want to generate a simulated fraudulent sequence or list of sequences, you might roll a d6 as well as a d10 for each trailing digit – on a 1, you override whatever is showing on the d10 make the digit a 3, on a 2, you override the d10 to add a 7, on anything else you ignore the d6.

If the results look too obvious, you could replace the d6 with a d8 or even a d12.

Perceived Randomness

If, however, a list is to be presented to the players, it may be more useful to aim for Perceived Randomness and not true randomness. Perceived randomness, for example, will feel ‘fairer’ than the real thing (even though it probably isn’t).

It all comes down to the keyword, ‘Perceived’. If perceptions of the results are important, then willfully making choices to create the sense of randomness is too important to leave to the chance of true randomness – better to do something that will ‘feel’ right.

A good example is weather – if you were to create a random weather generator, then it would be very easy to set it up to be true random, but this would be quite unrealistic. Seasonal variations or modifiers should apply, obviously, and so should yesterday’s weather. But it would be better to create such a table or subsystem and then use it only as a guide so that you can ensure that the weather ‘feels’ random, even if it is not.

Randomness is a lot more complicated than most people realize, but an awareness of the differences between reality and perception can be a valuable asset, and manipulation of game or plot variables to create the desired impression can be a useful tool.

One Final Example: An Adventure

Let’s contemplate a mystery adventure that takes these thoughts into account. First, decide what the mystery is, and what the solution to the mystery is going to be. Next, list a series of clues that will lead the PCs to the point where they have everything they need to solve the case. Then, create a mini-adventure whose reward is one of these clues.

Some of the clues can nullify or reveal lies that are initially presented to the PCs – remember the axiom that every suspect / witness in a mystery should leave something important out or lie about something, and if the latter, they should have a strong motivation for the deceit.

Throw in a concluding mini-adventure in which the PCs deduce the identity and motive of the criminal and act on that knowledge, and you have a complete plotline. Oh, and the criminal should do their best to look both innocent and to steer suspicion on someone else, throwing out at least one red herring, as should anyone else with a prejudice or a penchant to indulge in conspiracy theories.

Here’s the thing: you could present these clue-reward mini-adventures in sequence, or in true randomness, but the better choice would be to harness the perception of randomness so that one clue can logically lead to the next.

Let’s work some numbers:

Confrontation & Resolution: 30-60 minutes.
Post-resolution / wrap-up: 15 minutes.
Mini-adventures:

Number of clues: 4.
Number of lies / distortions to be revealed as clues: 6.
Number of red herrings: 2
Number of clues to the nature of the red herrings: 2
Total number of mini-adventures: 14.
Average length of mini-adventures: 15 minutes each.

Subtotal of mini-adventures: 210 minutes = 3 hr 30 min.
Initial mystery: 30 minutes.
Preface / introduction / preliminaries: 20 minutes
Total time: 30-60 + 15 + 3 hrs 30 + 20 = 4 hrs 35 to 5 hrs 5 min.

All told, a quite reasonable adventure. If you were to increase the length of the mini-adventures (15 minutes average is a little on the short side) to 20 minutes (average), you would add an additional hour and ten minutes to the total. Which means that adding a further 10 minutes to each to bring the average up to 30 minutes each would take the estimated playing time for the adventure to 8 hrs 5 min to 8 hrs 35 min – a big day’s play, or two (more moderate) game sessions.
This is probably a better target length, simply because there’s quite a lot to happen in each!

Of course, knowing the average length allows you to design these ‘to order’ – setbacks, complications, character interactions, and so on.

You could run those 14 mini-adventures in a random sequence, or simply list the focal point and leave it up to the PCs which one to pursue next. But it would make more sense to map out two or three different sequences of arranging the mini-adventures that is a combination of logic and perceived randomness.

Randomness can be your friend, if you’re willing to work with it.
Why? Because the ‘clumping’ of true randomness can feel forced and not random at all.