The story so far…

This is the fourth in a set of mini-posts that I’m writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series.

Each post examines one of the specific image categories nominated in the first post of the series, dividing them up into strata of commonality.

So far, the series has looked at Objects, People, Monsters (and other encounters), and now it will turn its attention to vehicles. I’ve expanded this post more than most because it’s both useful to do so and the post will be published in the usual window for CM.

The goal is to define a set of policies, processes, and principles that use the game value of the result to define how and how hard it is worth searching for a particular image within each category / strata combination.

Vehicles

There are three, no four, attributes that combine to yield the Game Value of a vehicle.

Distinctiveness

The more unique the vehicle, the greater the imaginative leap required to visualize it from description alone. With some players, that doesn’t matter too much, but with others it can make all the difference in the world. Either way, it is something that they need to concentrate on in addition to playing, and that means that they can benefit from a graphic representation doing that part of ‘the work’ for them. Hence, the greater the distinctiveness of the vehicle, the greater the game value of an illustration.



Image by Jean photosstock from Pixabay, sky by Mike.
Try describing this vehicle in a couple of hundred words – whatever the impression your text creates will be inadequate next to the graphic visual image.

Plot Impact

The more important the vehicle is to the plot, including as a setting, the greater the Game Value because important pieces of roleplay will take place there. Making an RPG immersive is one of the greatest challenges faced by a GM, and illustrating a vehicle with significant plot impact punches above its weight in this area.

It doesn’t even matter too much if the vehicle itself has low plot impact, being nothing more than a place where things happen while characters travel from A to B. If significant events take place there, then it can be considered an important location, and that earns it the same plot impact as though the vehicle were plot-significant.



Both of the spacecraft images below would be suitable as either a base of operations for a group of PCs or as a vehicle for the regular use of a group of PCs, but they convey very different impressions and subtexts. The first image is by Thomas Budach, while the second image was shared by Thomas Budach, both through Pixabay. Images rotated and cropped by Mike.

Campaign Penetration

I struggled to find the best terminology for this aspect of a vehicle. Simply put, if it’s going to appear in multiple adventures, if it greatly expands the choices open to the PCs, if it functions as a mobile headquarters for a recurring character of any kind, then the vehicle achieves a higher level of campaign penetration than it’s relevance to any specific adventure or encounter, and that gives it greater game value than might meet the eye.

Metaphor, Metagame, and Implication

These three elements, even in combination, are not as significant as those described before them. That’s why I have grouped them together into this one banner headline rather than counting each separately.



Image by Eduardo Davad from Pixabay

Proposal One: Metaphor

Telling players that their characters have traveled from A to B is not as effective as telling them this while showing an image of the vehicle that conveyed them. The vehicle itself is a metaphor for the act of traveling. One picture is worth at least 500 words in this case, maybe more – even if absolutely nothing of interest is going to transpire on board and you intend to hand-wave the entirety of the passage.

Proposal Two: Metagame

A vehicle can contain a cultural context that holds significance beyond it’s simple existence. Think back to the first appearances of the other schools in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the Durmstrang Institute and the Beauxbatons Academy) – the first thing you see is their mode of transport (the carriage drawn by pegasi and the ship rising from the sea floor). Both of these begin the process of establishing these schools and their styles even before they are introduced by Dumbledore.

This is foreshadowing, which readers might not have realized is inherently metagaming – it’s the GM using his foreknowledge of the plot to hint at what is to come, and (in this case), manifesting it in an image. The image is therefore a critical piece of the plot, designed and intended to subtly prod the thoughts of the players in the “right” direction.

And that gives such images a level of game value beyond any that meets the eye.



This image places two representations of the same train from two different sources side-by-side. Which image you choose depends on the impression that you intend to convey. The mostly grayscale image was provided by Brigitte Werner, the color image is from blizniak, both from Pixabay, cropping and compositing by Mike.

Proposal Three: Implication

The players see an alien spaceship land. Even if the pilot is about to appear in its doorway and steal the spotlight, the first hint that the PCs will have as to the nature and intentions of the occupant is that spaceship. Depicting the ship lets the players process exactly what their characters are seeing, and that gives it a higher game value because it conveys implications about the contents.

The analysis below, as usual, is based around the first of the four attributes just discussed. That means that the primary source of nuance and differentiation within each resulting sub-category are the other ‘three’ attributes – Plot Impact, Campaign Penetration, and the three-legged Metaphor / Metagame / Implication bundle. Collectively, these comprise the Importance of the vehicle. Even the most common types of vehicle can have enough Importance to justify an extensive search; rising rarity simply elevates the “minimum importance”.

Mundane

Mundane vehicles are widely available in the campaign. Depending on the genre and time period, availability of images can range from the hard-to-find to the routine. For example, if you search for “1970s car”, you’ll be spoiled for choice; you will usually be better of with a more specific search – “1970s Ford”, “1970s sports car”, “1970s pickup”, and so on.

This fact provides the solution to the problem of the hard-to-find categories. For example, searching for “Carriage” brings up a lot of railroad images but not too many of the horse-drawn variety; to actually get results you are better off ditching the term “carriage” completely and substituting the specific type of carriage that you want, something that I’ve learned the hard way. Your starting point should therefore be the Wikipedia page dedicated to the type of vehicle desired – for example, this page for Carriages, and this page for Boats (hint: hover your mouse over each of the types to get a pop-up preview of the page, which generally includes a brief description).

Things become a little more problematic again when the vehicle is a type that doesn’t actually exist yet (and might never exist). For example, “Space Freighter”. Once again, adding “concept art” can find images that would otherwise be missed. In general, you are forced to apply functional descriptions as search terms because any other kind of specific yields few or no images at all.

Being well-read in the genre can make a huge difference. If you know that, for example, Space: 1999 contained exactly the right “look” for the vehicle you’re after, searching for “Space 1999 Vehicle Concept” will usually find you choices that are more useful because they have the right appearance for your intended purposes. Knowing many of the different sci-fi television shows, novels, authors, and artists can be a lifesaver. For example, do an image search for “Chris Foss Spaceships” – here, I’ll make it easy for you:

DuckDuckGo Image Search: Chris Foss Spaceships.

Foss is a quite famous sci-fi artist whose work features on a number of sci-fi novel covers; his style tends to be instantly recognizable.

Nevertheless, as a general rule of thumb, image searches for spacecraft and the tend to be either too broad, or too specific; there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. Be prepared to aggregate the best results from multiple searches in order to find enough choices.

Other additions to the list of search terms that can be useful are “Primitive”, “futuristic”, “Sci-fi”, “Scifi”, “Interplanetary”, “Interstellar”, “Intergalactic”, and so on, both singly and in combination. The sheer number of possible search terms that result can quickly become overwhelming; it’s almost unheard-of to search for all the possibilities. That means that a significant fraction of the possible terms never get searched for, and a significant number of the possible results will never get found. To combat this, I try to perform subsequent searches in alternating sequence – first to last, then last to first.

Further expanding the scope of potential results (and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before), the algorithms used by the different search engines are all different and frequently find different results. Learn to use them all; have one primary go-to (mine is DuckDuckGo because I find it more convenient, my fallback is Google (which used to be my #1 choice, but they have made it progressively more annoying and hard to use), after that Qwant, then Bing – except that sometimes I’ll scramble the order to avoid over-reliance on the same sources..

The devil’s in the inconsistent detail

Two of the biggest problems that you will face is technology that looks too dissimilar and technology that looks too similar.

Two alien races should have differing engineering philosophies, and that should translate into a distinctive appearance for their respective spacecraft (or sea-craft, for that matter). At the same time, the same physics will usually apply to both, and so there should be some consistency, too. And that can be a very difficult duality to achieve.

Star Wars doesn’t quite pull it off; their designs are too variegated for consistency. Star Trek does a better job – Vulcan, Romulan, Klingon and Federation ships all operate on similar physical principles, and so there’s a consistency of general design principles, but each race also has its own style. If a ship shows up in an episode that looks different, it will prove to operate on different physical principles, often with benefits and disadvantages that the rest don’t share.

For contrast, study the different ships of Babylon-5, in which the technologies and design priorities of each race are distinctly different and so each race’s ships are similarly distinctive (Earth ships look like they were designed by Chris Foss…). Each race’s design ethos also translates into many other design manifestations – from homes to diplomatic quarters to weapons to… well, you get the point.

Decide where your dividing line has to be and stick to it like glue; that is your only pathway through the complexities of inconsistent consistency and consistent inconsistency!

Game value of images can range from the trivial to the monumental, but even the trivial ones tend to still offer some reward to the GM who seeks them out.

Common

Common vehicles are less widespread but still easily obtained if you go to the right place. They are vehicles that most travelers would see regularly if not with great frequency. For example, while sailing the Mediterranean, it would not be all that surprising to see a Spanish Galleon in the appropriate era, or a Dutch Trader, but a Barque showing the colors of Turkey, or one of the Scandinavian countries? Much less likely.

Or, to take a D&D-relevant example, Carriages would be mundane, Royal Carriages would not – but there are enough nobles that you would probably see one every month if you were traveling regularly. Or carriages might even be ‘common’ and wagons ‘mundane’ in your game world.

The same search tips and techniques apply to common vehicles, as do the same problems.

Specific

Specific vehicles are where things often start to get sticky for the fantasy GM and easier for the sci-fi GM, because – as with all searches – the more specific you can be, the more targeted your search results. You may get fewer matches, but the average result will be a better match. But specific for the Fantasy GM means something that matches a specific style, and they can be very hard to match.

At one point, for the Pulp campaign, we needed to find an image of a longs hip being excavated. There were a number of viking long-ship images, but very few of them matched that specific criteria. What’s more, they were all photographed from above, we needed one that was at or above the eyeline of the observer. I ended up getting a ship from one image, the dragon-prow from another, some oars from a third, and some colorful shields in a row from a fourth, then compositing everything with a background image that was itself a composite of multiple images. This search was so specific that the full criteria approaches ‘unique’ status, but even discarding the additional requirements, there were so few matches that the general principle still holds.

Despite this, there is a ray of hope that gets bigger all the time. Artists keep creating images, and those images keep getting curated on the web. The pool of possible results is always growing. That doesn’t mean that obscure images will suddenly become commonplace – but it does mean that there is always hope that someone’s artistic product and your need will intersect!

Unique

Which brings me to the problem of unique vehicles. These are either something completely specific, like the Millennium Falcon, or Galactus’ spherical ship (from the Comics, not the movie), or the Battlestar Galactica (original or revised version). Or maybe Thor’s Chariot – which (surprisingly) has no unique name (the Norse named his goats, his hammer, his belt, his servants, his gloves, and his staff – but not the chariot drawn by those goats. Go figure).

Quite often in this category, though, ‘unique’ is a misnomer. You might need a ship with a particular figurehead or a specific name, for example, and have multiple other requirements, just as we did with the Viking ship; but we weren’t looking for a specific Viking ship, any ship that matched our needs would do.

Many of these are relatively simple editing jobs in Krita. It’s usually easy to paint out an existing ship name and replace it with a new one, for example.

What this adds up to is that the most unusual vehicle images are often less work than a highly specific one, because – ironically – you can compromise more regarding the image content when you know that you are going to be editing it anyway.

Another week of medical to-ing and fro-ing is in prospect, interfering with my ability to post. I’ll try to get the next mini-post, Locations, done for the usual posting time, but it may be delayed 24 hours or more.

This post has taken a lot longer than expected, delayed by medical testing that was like a black hole sucking in time. And there’s more of it to come, I’m afraid…

The story so far…

This is the third in a set of mini-posts that I’m writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series.

Each post will examine one of the specific image categories nominated in the first post of the series, dividing them up into strata of commonality.

The goal is to define a set of policies, processes, and principles that use the game value of the result to define how and how hard it is worth searching for a particular image within each category / strata combination.

Monsters and Encounters

‘Monsters’ have a commonality, in game terms, proportionate to the danger level they pose. In fact, in an RPG (regardless of genre), increasing rarity equals increasing deadliness.

There is even a level above the uppermost tier of commonality where you are dealing with named and discrete individuals, which are better treated as unique NPCs. In D&D that’s individuals like Beelzebub and Odin, Hercules and Tiamat.

Encounters are a little stranger, since monsters are already covered. Weather events are dealt with in the Effects category, NPCs are in the People category, environments are in locations – there’s not a lot left.

Or is there? There’s a lot of ground between the basic level of danger represented by the bottom tier of “Monsters” and nothing at all; in fact, in some genres, almost everything will fall into that category. Deer, birds, bees, sheep, cattle… So “Encounters” is being used as a label to reference “ordinary” animals (and plants), while “monsters” is being reserved for creatures that are the products of the collective human imagination.

Encounters

With that determined, I can look more closely at the commonality strata as they apply to these different categories.

Mundane Encounters

are

• the small creatures – birds, small lizards, rabbits, mice, and the like;
• small fish (did you know that properly-cared-for goldfish grow 1/2″ every year and can get to 14-16″ in length?); and
• insects.
• And most plants – grasses and bushes.

These creatures don’t add much Game Value in and of themselves. What they do is add a living, active, ingredient to the landscape in which they appear. If you need such an illustration, it should be judged as a Location image – at least under most circumstances.

There are a few exceptions to bear in mind. The first is where there is some additional plot relevance to the animal’s appearance. The second is where the animal is somehow out of place, which lends additional significance to the very fact that the animal is where it is.

For example, recently in the Zenith-3 campaign, I used a very picturesque Elk in the middle of ‘town’ to illustrate how small and decentralized the community in question really was. A second example is the (forthcoming) appearance of a toucan in flight in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, which (in combination with some other images) should suggest an environment teeming with life.

The examples show that there can be plot value in such images by virtue of the impressions that they suggest to the players, but outside of such purposes, they have very limited utility. If you can make valid use of an image of this type, they tend to be fairly easy to find, permitting you to select the image that adds the maximum value to the campaign.

Common Encounters

The contents of the Encounters category begin to diversify markedly in the Common sub-category.

• small creatures that are inherently dangerous – some frogs, snakes, and so on – and
• larger creatures that are not so dangerous – goats, sheep, deer, etc.

This also includes

• the smallest dinosaurs (up to, say, 1 foot in length);
• apes up to the monkeys,
• mid-sized fish – up to the size of trout, salmon, and barracudas;
• and any plants that are shorter than a person, including those smaller plants that can be considered exotic or dangerous (Venus fly traps, orchids, etc) – which complete the category.

These are a bit of a mixed bag in terms of Game Value – some can be quite high, others not so much. Aside from the dinosaurs, you should have no trouble finding what you need, so rarity is not a real consideration.

Let’s deal with the exception noted above. If you do an image search for “small dinosaur” you will be presented with a few options; opening the source page of one of the results should give you the scientific name of the species that has attracted your attention, and an image search for that specific variety of dinosaur will usually yield a better range of results from which to choose.

The impact of the creature on the plot should guide your decisions; if the creature is not significant, you can usually live without the illustration. Exceptions are the same as for the Mundane variety of encounters. As a general rule of thumb, and to state the obvious, the more dangerous the creature is, the more likely it is that the encounter will be significant to the plot.

Specific Encounters

• …start with the mid-sized hunters – eagles, hawks,
• jaguars and most of the big cats,
• wolves, wolverines, etc,
• all the way up to and including alligators and crocodiles;
• And the really big herbivores, including elks, moose, elephants, hippos, etc.
• Most dinosaurs also belong in this category, all the way up to multi-ton plant-eaters.
• The larger apes, excluding the really big ones (gorillas, orangutans) are also part of this category, as are
• fish up to the size of dolphins.
• and plants that are bigger than a person and shorter than a house. That includes virtually all the fruit trees, vines, etc.

Basically, anything that’s left that isn’t in the fourth subcategory, below.

As you can see from the listed contents, these creatures tend to be a lot more attention-getting and potentially quite dangerous (at least in most game systems). That makes them much harder to ignore, from the perspective of the players, and that translates into a high Game Value for an illustration (from the point of view of the GM).

In D&D, these are the sort of encounters that you use to let the PCs blow off a little steam without doing much to reduce the emotional intensity that has built up. Used in this way, the image has considerable Game Value.

I would be prepared to spend 5-10 minutes ferreting out an image for one of the encounters on that list. Maybe less for the fish, depending on the Story Value. Not that it should take that long, as most of these images will be broadly available. In fact, in many cases you may find yourself spoiled for choice.

Unique Encounters

Any animal that can’t be ignored, even if you are in a safe place.

• Raptors, T-Rexes, etc,
• Lions, Tigers,
• Gorillas, Bears, arguably Rhinos,
• Kangaroos and Cassowaries,
• Great Octopi and Giant Sea Squid,
• Whales, Sharks, etc.
• Plus trees taller than a house.

Everything said in the last section holds true for this category except for the last paragraph.

Some of these have loads of images to choose between, but there are some that are surprisingly hard to find. You will either strike gold very quickly or you will need to get creative. And that won’t be as easy as it sounds in some of these cases.

Monsters

Attitude counts for a lot in this category, as does sentience, because it allows creatures that have more tools at their disposal than they are endowed with by their nature..

Mundane Monsters

Anything small than a man in weight that is not intelligent.

While a few examples, like Blink Dogs, may have sufficient plot value to justify an image search, these will be rare exceptions. More often, the depiction in your monster sourcebook will be as good as anything you can find online.

Common Monsters

Anything up to man-sized that is intelligent, and anything that can be considered inherently magical that isn’t in one of the two higher tiers. Like Unicorns.

It’s far easier to find interesting images online for most creatures in this category, and that (coupled with obvious plot relevance) yields obvious Game Value that justifies a search.

These include some of the favorite choices of subject matter for many artists. Which brings me to a useful tip: adding the words “fantasy art” to your search term can open up whole new worlds of results for your inspection, as can adding the words “concept art”.

Specific Monsters

Anything man-sized or larger that isn’t in the fourth category, excludes anything that is not considered sentient. That’s all your Ogres and Trolls, Ents and Elves, and a great deal more, besides.

Unfortunately, these are less popular as image subjects, so the increase in Game Value is matched by a decrease in image availability. Accordingly, you will often be in for an extended search of 30 minutes or more before you find anything useful. Fortunately, those image search tips offered in the previous section are still valid.

Unique Monsters

Beholders, Dragons, Mind Flayers, and anything of similar cache. Like the top tier of Encounters, these are the creatures that can’t be ignored, even if you think you’re in a safe place with respect to them. That would also include your higher-type Demons and Devils, of course, and Djinn, and Greater Elementals.

These are all creatures that should be treated as top-level NPCs, but often aren’t, even by experienced GMs.

On top of that, anything special brewed up by the GM as a featured monster – like the menacing Halloween creature used as an illustration at the start of this mini-post – also goes into this sub-category, which suddenly seams almost bursting at the seams.

Some of the most popular subjects for fantasy art occupy this category, but that can be a mixed blessing; two artists can have different visions for the same subject that are wildly incompatible. This can completely undermine the verisimilitude that justifies the image search in the first place, if you aren’t careful!

Sometimes it can be more valuable to do the image search first and create the encounter second, drawing upon what you find for inspiration.

Next: Vehicles!

The story so far…

This is the third article in this series, and the second of a set of mini-posts that I’m going to be writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series.

Each post will examine one of the specific image categories nominated in the first post of the series, dividing them up into strata of commonality.

The goal is to define a set of policies, processes, and principles that use the game value of the result to define how and how hard it is worth searching for a particular image within each category / strata combination.

The first mini-post dealt with Objects. Today, the subject is NPCs.

People (NPCs)

Compared to the category of Objects, People are relatively straightforward.

Mundane

Mundane NPCs are your generic crowd scene, or representatives from such a scene. These can be divided into four subcategories:

• Crowds that say nothing more than “the location is crowded.”
• Crowds that are important because of the common activity being depicted.
• Groups that are important because of some collective common feature.
• Individuals with whom no significant interaction is expected.

The Location is crowded

The crowd are superfluous window dressing in such images; the importance is actually dependent on, and attached to, the location itself, and (if anything) the crowd is likely to be obscuring that, though they would impart a greater realism to the scene. Such images should be evaluated as depictions of the location, which will get dealt with in a later mini-post.

Depictions of activity

Shoppers in a bazaar or marketplace, for example. This category is a half-way house in which the activity of the crowd and the location tend to be of equal significance, but an image of rioters would also fit into this category with no location value being evidenced.

Such activity depictions tend to be plot-significant, so these images are immediately possessed of Game Value. Depending on the nature of the crowd, they may be either easy to come by or extremely hard to find. “Medieval rioters” would be quite difficult, for example, although you might succeed by thinking outside the box – a still of villagers from Frankenstein, for example, might fit the bill.

Common features of a group

The King’s Guards. The palace courtiers. The Riot squad. An invading army of orcs, or androids, or martians. An ordinary group of people all suddenly wearing the same badge, or mask, or whatever. A demon horde.

No way any of these would ever be relevant, is there? Quite often, it’s the mere fact that there are a group of them that is the most important fact to convey; the actual appearance of the group is secondary in such cases.

This can get tricky, because you might be able to find an image of a representative member of the group but not of an assembled group. That puts you in the position of displaying the individual as a representative member, or of editing the image to insert additional copies of the individual which are then manipulated to create diversity to the required level. I’ve worked it both ways, depending on the Game Value of the group, but in general, the first would be the most acceptable compromise if an actual group shot can’t be easily obtained.

Individuals of no plot importance

The final subcategory deals with another form of window dressing, the movie-set extra. These exist for no other reason than to add verisimilitude to a scene, but they can be useful in hiding inappropriate content from the viewer in a visually-arresting way. It’s just as much work to insert a small dragon into an image as it is to paint out an air conditioner, but the scene-plus-dragon is likely to be the better result.

I’ve also used this technique to cover street signs, fire hydrants, and to replace inappropriate (modern) vehicles with something more era-specific; the general term I use for the procedure is ‘time-shifting’.

For example, you can take a modern image (without too many people) of a British village’s historic town center and use a few bits of window-dressing to set the image in a medieval era. All you need to do is recognize the possibility of the altered image when viewing the source, and plan what you are going to need to correctly “dress” the scene.

Beyond such purposes, though, rent-a-crowds have very limited Game Value.

So there are some functions of appreciable Game Value for images of mundane (in plot terms) people, and some of negligible value. This makes your intent in choosing to display such an image (assuming that you can find or make one) critical. You need to have a specific purpose, and you then need to select images or image elements that achieve that specific purpose. Anything more that you might get out of the image is a bonus.

Clearly, some of these will be more easily-obtained than others. As a general rule of thumb, the greater the Game Value of the resulting image, the more difficult it will be to find the right image. This simple relationship means that you should search until you find something suitable if a search is warranted at all.

Ideally, you will find two or three images to choose between, but there is often a degree of luck associated in finding anything at all. Therefore, when undertaking such a search, I don’t take the first result, but continue until either I have enough such options, or the search extends beyond what I consider the Game Value in prep time – at which point I choose between whatever I have found. That might be one image, or a pair of images, or even more – if the plot value was high enough that I had continued the search after achieving that ideal result (it has happened).

Common

Common People, from the standpoint of Game Value, are NPCs who may be named, but whose identity as individuals is subsumed to some other factor. That factor may be a personality trait (“angry young man”) or a social trait (“fop”) or a profession (scientist) or whatever.

The interaction with one or more PCs gives these individual NPCs significant levels of Game Value, and this was one of the drivers of the high Game Value score in my initial insight into the subject (the chart shown in the first post of the series)..

Naming such individuals gives the option of addressing them by name, having them introduce themselves, etc – it makes interaction easier. But it is often unnecessary. The rule of thumb I employ derives from the anticipated interaction between the NPC and the PCs – if this is such that it would be reasonable for the NPC to offer their name, or if the PC is likely to be directed to speak to the individual by name, then I name them.

Searching for such images is usually a case of searching for depictions of the “other factor”, possibly with additional qualifiers. Having a broad vocabulary helps. When searching for “Brazilian Deckhand 1930s”, the actual image chosen after a recent search was found using just “Tropical Deckhand”.

Because you will expect to make multiple searches, you need to be decisive. Use any tools on offer (image size especially) to narrow your search down. Any ‘contenders’ should be opened in new tabs and keep going until you have five or six of them, then winnow down to the most satisfactory image.

What’s more, amortized effort is again a consideration – the same NPC may reappear multiple times in the campaign. It’s worth spending a little extra time on such image searches because there will be virtually no effort required for subsequent appearances.

In terms of availability, people are one of the most commonly photographed subjects. That tends to produce a lot of images for you to choose from. Specific restrictions bite into that ubiquity – some more than others. Some searches will yield a lot of results, some few, and it can be unpredictable. So budget your time expecting trouble and take advantage of it when random factors align in your favor.

Specific

This sub-category generally indicates the need for an image with multiple specifics, but not a real, named, individual. Luftwaffe Captain with a scar, Riverboat Gambler with cane, Monstrous Hulking Porter, Beautiful Blonde Concierge… you get the idea.

The one thing that members of this sub-category always have in common is that you expect there to be considerable interaction between this NPC and one or more PCs, either now or in the future. That in turn means that the character that the image is to depict will play an important role in the plot, and that it is all the more important for the players to be clear about the character that’s doing the talking..

All the advice in the previous section still applies. Both the Game Value of the image and the difficulty of finding a match have increased, but in proportion, so the same standards of results apply. The increased plot value / interaction level goes on top of that, so this is a search in which it is worth taking your time and being a little more exhaustive.

I’m going to reference this sidebar again in the final part of the series, but it’s an important search tip for right now: you will often get better results, faster, if you do your image search and then write your descriptions, etc.

In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, we set a high standard for such images in terms of the amount of personality conveyed by the image. Sometimes, those results are achieved by searching for the personality profile we want (and being less selective with respect to other character traits), but more often, we will search for some specific desired quality and cherry-pick the results that show the most personality regardless of the makeup of that personality – then we can pick between the population of the resulting short-list.

The image above could be any government or business figure. The emotional content is subject to interpretation, but the image itself displays a lot of personality; it has impact.

Unique

There are two types of Unique individual. The first is someone real, often doing something specific – Stalin making a speech, Lincoln tipping his hat, Churchill looking stoic, etc. These are no more difficult to find than Specific images, but have much higher Game Value by virtue of the baggage and reputation that they carry. This is even true of images of individuals that the players won’t necessarily recognize – for example, James Buchanan – at least until you provide a relevant biography.

The other type is of an individual whose specifications are sufficiently distinctive that the likelihood of a successful search plummets. As noted earlier, the Game Value of such an image tends to rise proportionately, which means that you can justify spending quite a bit of time and effort generating a custom image, which is quite likely the only way that this sort of image search can succeed.

In both cases, the Game Value is about as high as it can get. These are always important characters in the adventures in which they appear (otherwise there would be no point in such distinctive characters appearing).

Depicting important characters is therefore about as important as it can get.

To close out this mini-post, I thought that I would repeat an image first shared about a year ago, of Brother Simon, the Pacifist Dalek, which is an example of the second sub-type of unique character.

Next: Monsters and Encounters

The story so far…

This is the second article in this series, and the first of a set of mini-posts that I’m going to be writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz.

My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the mini-blitz.

Each post will examine one of the specific image categories nominated in the first post of the series, dividing them up into strata of commonality.

The goal is to define a set of policies, processes, and principles that use the game value of the result to define how and how hard it is worth searching for a particular image within each category / strata combination.

Objects

This first mini-post is likely to be one the larger ones of the series. It deals with objects – which is to say, things. This is a category full of nuance and shadings and exceptions, many of which will need explicit examination within.

Mundane

As a general rule, mundane objects are ubiquitous within the game environment and have virtually no Game Value. If you mention a lantern, the exact design doesn’t matter very much, and spending any time describing the details is counterproductive.

And if the exact design does matter, the mere fact that it mattered enough to search out an image instantly telegraphs that significance to the players, even if there is no reason for them to recognize it. If you wait until they do recognize the importance, they will already have formed a mental image of what the lantern looks like, so the image is at best superfluous, and at worst counterproductive again.

There are, however, a number of exceptions to this principle.

• Objects that are iconic to a culture that is different to that the PCs are used to can carry greater Story Value by symbolizing the whole ‘we aren’t in Kansas anymore’ message. The vase and other objects in the image above clearly illustrate this principle.
• If there is something else visually obvious about the object, it can carry greater Story Value by representing that the owner has unusual objects.
• Some objects are especially symbolic of culture, no matter how mundane they might be. Food is a great example.
• Some recurring objects can, by virtue of the repetition, have a greater Game Value. But these are usually a lot more specific than this category.
• Any Vehicle that does not have enough Plot Significance to warrant illustrating the interior is considered to be an object, and some of those will be ubiquitous enough to be a Mundane Object. You can quickly determine this to be the case when you don’t care what the ‘object’ looks like, just that it looks ‘good’ or ‘cool’.

Searching for such images is a lot easier with a touchstone term. The basic search term is the name of the type of object – “lantern”, to continue the example. A touchstone term defines a specific subcategory with a descriptive term. That term could be “oriental” or “Babylonian” or “gold” or, well, anything your can think of that will winnow through the chaff and get you the image you want.

Always remember what the search terms mean when you enter them in an image search – they are terms that appear on the web page where the image being displayed can be found. If you are very lucky, and depending on the subject of the search, that might be a description of the item. But it might not. “Babylonian Artifact Restored” might be an even more successful search term than “Babylonian Lantern”, even though it is more likely to throw up non-lantern results. You have to Design your search terms.

As a general rule, availability of these images is quite high, because – once again – you don’t particularly care (or shouldn’t) what the image result is, so long as it will look good. But even so, unless there is some specific Game Value that will be achieved, these images are not worth the time to pursue.

With one exception, in addition to those listed above: Immersion. This is always hard to achieve, but a succession of relevant images is one way of doing so. Such a sequence contains, collectively, greater game value. This is especially important when setting the stage for a mystery plotline.

Common

Common images are Mundane objects with one element of specificity about them. That specificity must have specific game value or it doesn’t count.

That usually means that you are looking to compile a consistent “look”, and (as explained earlier) that gives the image results a greater Game Value.

It also means that you are justified in making a quick search for images of the specific objects. You may not find everything you want, but a little creativity in your search will usually find most of your wish list.

The same exceptions listed above still apply, and now warrant something more than a cursory search. My personal standard is to try to find three choices for each image, enabling me to choose between them.

I also pay special attention to the background behind the object. There are three possible options:

• A plain background, which may be cut away digitally and replaced with a more relevant setting;
• A background that constitutes a reasonably relevant image already; or
• A background that constitutes an irrelevant image that will be difficult to redact and replace.

Clearly, the second option is the most efficient, the first is an acceptable outcome, and the third should only be considered if the proposed illustration has the highest possible Game Value, i.e. you consider it essential that you have something to show at that point. And that is especially rare when you’re still dealing with common objects.

Another way to look at these potential illustrations is as seasoning for your adventure. As with cooking, a little can go a long way, and it is very easy to use too much salt, pepper, or spice. Be selective and take the time to prioritize your desired results. The default option should still be not to add an illustration unless it carries extra Game Value.

In practical terms, the stricter requirements mean that only 10-40% of the images found under a “mundane” level search will still be relevant, possibly less. That’s another way of saying that it will take about 2½ times as long to do an adequate image search.

That in turn sets the threshold that you should apply – unless the object has at least 2½ times as much Game Value as some generic “flavor” object, it’s not worth the effort to search. That’s a threshold that only examples that are right on point can reasonably sustain. If the result isn’t at least some minimum shade of perfect, forget it; you’re better off without an illustration.

Specific

As the specifics of what you want increase, the difficulty of finding exactly what you want in an image search also increase, and it becomes increasingly practical as a solution (if you have the skill) to edit an image to get what you want.

The effect of the latter is to broaden the scope of a search that has become so narrow as to be difficult and time-consuming. The greatest probability is that it will still be so, even after that compromise.

In many (but not all) cases, the Game Value of the image as an illustration will also have increased, but has it increased enough to justify the time and effort involved?

Sometimes, the answer will be yes, and sometimes no.

The answer will be different from individual to individual, depending on how skilled they are at image editing and manipulation. But it will also, inevitably, be fuzzy in other ways.

You see, when an illustration is provided by the GM, the assumption is that the players will find it useful or even need it, but that’s something that will vary from player to player and from day-to-day. On one occasion, a given player might need the extra support to get a clear understanding of what’s happening in-game, and on a different occasion that same player might not.

It’s usually the best that you can do to play the odds, while allowing yourself a margin of safety.

Most of the time, you can ignore this and simply go with your gut; it’s when the effort required is close to the limits of what is acceptable that this assessment is most likely to be unreliable.

A “Specific” image is one in which most parameters of image content are fixed and unalterable, but the object is nevertheless sufficiently popular as an image subject that there is a reasonable likelihood of finding something that can be manipulated to be “close enough” for game purposes.

In the first post in this series, I discussed the cars that the PCs could choose between in my Zenith-3 campaign. One of those was a Sky Blue and Burgundy Sedan DeVille. The image that I found for this car was White and Burgundy. It had to be edited to provide the image that was ultimately used. In fact, about half of the cars on the list needed image alterations of this kind. Most of these changes took less than an hour, a couple took a full evening each. All told, the available prep time meant that this editing took a little less than two weeks.

The only reason they held enough Game Value to justify this was because we were in Covid Lockdown, and hence I had substantially more prep time than would normally be the case. In normal times, I might have edited the images representing the cars that the PCs chose after the fact, but not doing them all in advance.

There is also the possibility of ‘amortizing’ the effort over multiple adventures.

One of the ongoing ‘bits’ in the Zenith-3 campaign is the mysterious appearance on one character’s pillow each day that she is where she is expected to be of a set of perfectly-fresh gourmet muffins and an exotic, even magical, coffeepot. This always has two stalks, each of which dispenses a different beverage designed to ‘match’ the muffins.

Every time this coffeepot has appeared, it has been a different color. It took a while to isolate the coffeepot from its background the first time it appeared, but because I saved the file in Krita’s native format, it took only a handful of minutes to change its appearance the next time.

The image to the right is a compilation of the four colors that it has manifested so far in the campaign.

Oh yes, when the last cup of beverage has been drawn from within its depths and it is set down, it vanishes the first instant that no-one is looking. What’s more, the players have discovered that if they stay put in a strange place for long enough, the muffins and coffeepot will start showing up there – it just takes them a couple of days to find the PCs.

This involves a more sophisticated calculation – first use and ongoing use – because it can generally be assumed that ongoing use will require a lot less time than doing the initial image editing, while the recurrence increases the Game Value of the illustration.

Technically, because the examples are all supposed to be the “same” coffeepot, this would be a unique object; but because the images are different each time, it should be treated as four separate objects.

I use the same logic and technique when I have the TARDIS materialize in the Dr Who campaign – a different background each time, and I have three different “pre-faded” materialization to choose between. It takes very little time to marry a chosen background and a prepared Tardis Materializing (it usually takes a lot more time to find the right background, to be honest).

Because the baseline Game Value of these images is higher, anything on the exceptions list becomes a high priority.

Unique

Unique images have to match specifications so exact and so distinctive that the chance of finding one of them in an image search is essentially nil, and there is a near-certainty that a base image will have to be edited to get what you want.

Such images do not all have the same Game Value as illustrations, however. It depends on how central they are to the story. What can also be said is that even those of comparatively low Game Value – “Magic Sword,” for example – this value may be high enough to justify a search.

It’s usually a lot less work to find a suitable image and alter your description to fit, than to create a bespoke image. For that reason, it can be a good idea to do a lot of your image searches as you go.

There is a compromise approach that should also be borne in mind: curating a list of required images, with some sort of priority rating. That rating tells you how much effort to put into the image, taking everything discussed here into account. One-star might be “quick search, take anything remotely compatible”; two stars might mean “ten minutes search, accept only good images of a decent size”, and so on; that’s up to you.

As a general rule of thumb, I like to have two or three alternatives to pick from – sometimes more – as I may have said already. There are times when an image that is ‘good enough’ (or even ‘perfect’) pops out of the woodwork, and is accepted immediately, though.

Next: NPCs.

A False Start

Last week, I was discussing an image that I had composited for the pulp campaign with my co-GM.

I made an off-hand remark about how justified I felt about expending the time and effort on the image.

He agreed, positing that the greater the demands on the imagination of a scene, the more useful it was to relieve that load, enabling the players to focus on the game situation.

That sparked a thought that seemed like it would make a good post for Campaign Mastery, so here we are.

My initial reaction – the thought that I mentioned – was that there were two spikes in the utility of graphic depiction – one that focused on the specific but big-picture, and one that focused on isolating a specific from the innumerable possibilities that arose from a more generic subject matter.

The chart to the right describes this first impression, and it’s an insight all on its own that it would be worth exploring in a post.

Unfortunately, a second thought a moment after showed that it’s half-false and half-misleading. There was a critical factor that this alleged relationship was completely ignoring.

A Better Beginning

The missing factor: the potential importance to the plot of a clear representation. This could be said to multiply by the commonality of the subject to give a more reliable index to be charted against the game value of a graphic representation.

So, an image could be of something quite common (a low uniqueness) and even if very central to the plot, it would have a low game value. Or it could be of something quite unique, which means that even if not central to the plot, it has some game value – but if it is central to the plot, its value as an illustration achieves astronomical value.

And, I was all set to write today’s article on this subject – but the presence of one additional factor implied the possibility of more, so before I committed myself, I invested a bit more time in thinking about the subject, and sure enough….

The Final Attribute: Availability

…I found that there was an assumption buried within the analysis to date: that all images desired would be equally available. It took only a moment’s reflection thereafter to realize that this flawed assumption would completely invalidate any analysis that didn’t take it into account, and that there was no one-size fits all answer to accommodate the attribute of availability.

The more I thought about it, the more relevance seemed to attach to this question of availability. At first, I thought there were three types of impact, but further reflection suggested that two of the three were closely related.

Availability Manifestation 1 – The Likelihood Of Success

The first primary impact is on the likelihood that you will find an image matching whatever specifications you might have, or one that is at least close enough.

A secondary outcome would be an image that could be quickly and easily modified to transform it from unsuitable to ‘close enough’ – introducing a sub-variant factor to consideration, which also has to be taken into consideration. The easiest way of doing so is to expand the concept of quality of result to include the potential for modification to achieve suitability.

Availability Manifestation 2a – The Importance Of The Hunt

A problem that needs to be considered is that you can’t know the outcome of a given search until you actually undertake that search. While you can make educated guesses about the likelihood of success based on the specifics of the search, and your capacity to compromise, there are perpetual surprises of both the good and bad kind.

Going on an image hunt is not unlike rolling a skill check – all sorts of things can be reflected in the bottom line, but in the end, it all comes down to luck and the scope for the manifestation of that luck. You can never be completely sure of the outcome until you roll those dice.

‘Availability’ is a critical assessment that can never be perfect. That means that the greater you can refine your estimates of the likelihood of success before you start, and in the early phases of the search, the more accurately you can assess the likelihood of success – and whether or not it’s worth you continuing with the hunt, or should switch to an alternative approach.

Availability Manifestation 2b – The Value Of Image Generation

Not everyone is as adept at image generation as I am. That should surprise no-one. There are also artists out there who can generate works that leave me awestruck in the same time (or less) as it would take me to churn out something just barely adequate.

Also, to be completely honest, sometimes works seem to go a lot more smoothly and quickly than I expected before I started, and at other times, the simplest job seems to have unanticipated complications that add hour after hour to the project.

Again, we have a ‘best guess’ fuzziness attached to each project; you can’t predict in advance with complete precision where that project will fall.

What can be said is that if you honestly evaluate each project relative to an accurate perception of your skills, the actual difficulty and project time will fit more-or-less on a standard distribution, a dumbbell curve, centered on the ‘best educated guess’. In the long run, therefore, your estimates should average out if you are honest with yourself.

But it’s possible to bias the odds in your favor by choosing a base image that is more suited to being manipulated to meet your needs than one that needs a lot more work.

There are all sorts of skills involved, and you get better with all of them with practice – so the bar of what is achievable in a reasonable time-frame keeps rising, and the accuracy of your estimates improves constantly. This means that it doesn’t really matter how adept you are with a (digital) paintbrush; being unskilled simply means that you have more scope for improvement.

Generating an image yourself is always a compromise over finding the perfect image ready-made. Sometimes, that’s a compromise worth making; sometimes, it isn’t – and often, you can’t tell until you are neck-deep in the project.

That’s the point of the (ongoing Image Compositing for RPGs series – collected hints, tips, and tutorials to boost that learning curve into the stratosphere.

“Availability’ is not a simple linear measure of the chance of finding an image that can be modified to your needs; each possible answer also has to be evaluated with respect to the amount of work required, and the amount of prep-time available. It might be that a less-acceptable image with a lower overhead is going to be a better, more practical, choice than one that would yield a better result but would require three times as much work to complete.

Game Value vs Availability

It’s worth taking a moment to define exactly what the goal of the analysis was supposed to be. What I wanted was to develop a schema that identified the relative value attached to searching for, or manufacturing, an image. Such a schema would enable a master listing of priorities that would yield the maximum ‘bang for buck’ for image searches and define a threshold point at which the generation of images (if one could not be found) was worth the time it was likely to take.

I’m not entirely sure that this goal is still a viable one, given the complexities that have now been introduced – but any guideline is better than none. So it’s still worth making the effort. In order to yield a result from these efforts, though, I intend to simplify outrageously. I’m not looking for a definitive set of answers, at least not anymore. A process for making decisions, in which each of the considerations is taken into account, is going to be more universally useful.

Strata of Commonality

If you take another glance at the prototype chart reproduced above, you will notice that Commonality has been divided into four classifications. This still makes a great starting point, so let’s look at each of them.

Mundane

‘Mundane’ incorporates all sorts of everyday items. Most of these will have very limited game utility; what limited functionality they provide can also be achieved through more important images, at least most of the time.

In general, mundane objects should not be graphically represented. It is said that one picture is worth a thousand words – if you can’t see the need for at least 500 words being spent on the description, it’s just not worth searching for them, outside of some specific exceptions.

Vehicles are a special case, so don’t worry about them for the moment. We’re talking pots and pans and treasure chests and the like.

There is a huge contextual element here, however. Space suits may be mundane items in a sci-fi environment, but they would be exceptionally rare in a fantasy one – and, in a steampunk environment, would have a completely different look-and-feel. What’s more, even in a sci-fi campaign, the graphic depiction of a space-suit does so much to ‘sell’ the genre that they have a game value beyond the mere fact of their ubiquity.

Perhaps the greatest value of mundane objects is as ‘set dressing’ to enhance generated images of greater value. These can be transformative – take an image that could belong to any number of settings and toss in a mundane object of greater specificity, and you have suddenly nailed the scene to a far more specific setting.

Throw in an object that clearly doesn’t fit within that range instead, and you introduce a deliberate contradiction that serves as a visual metaphor for a far more complex situation – so much so that the results probably belong in the ‘unique’.range, below.

Common

There are two ways of interpreting ‘Common’. The first deals with generic backgrounds and setting illustrations – these can be useful as foundations of more specific images, or for the capture of genre / setting atmosphere. Or they can impart absolutely nothing of significance. But they tend to be easy to find, so the return on invested time can be relatively high.



Image by ELG21 from Pixabay

For example, a generic image of snow-topped mountains doesn’t add much specific information about a setting – but they carry a sense of grandeur, of sweeping epic scale, that even a thousand words might not be able to convey. Atmosphere alone can justify their use as an illustration.

The other is where the subject is so common that dropping the label is going to result in fifteen different interpretations in the minds of players. For example, “Innkeeper” – everyone will immediately have an image in their reminds as to what he (or she?) looks like, and everyone’s interpretation will be different.

Now, that might not matter – or it might be critical. It all depends on the role of this particular NPC within the adventure.

You can even take advantage of the multiplicity of impressions. For example, you tell the players that they are greeted by an innkeeper in a surly tone, then give each player a strip of paper and ask them to write a line describing what they imagine the innkeeper looking like – race, dress, features.

From that time forward, those descriptions are how each PC sees the NPC – until something happens to reshuffle the strips of paper.

But you don’t tel the players this – you simply incorporate visual elements that no-one else can see into the narrative as the scene proceeds. “He accepts your rebuke of his manners and tips his hat at you in apology.”

“His hat? I thought he wore a leather cap?”

“He does, with a broad rim and silver buckle”….

The players may not know What is going on, but will soon be in no doubt that something more than meets the eye (quite literally!) is transpiring!

Once again, the field can be subdivided, though into more distinct and nuanced classifications than just “generic” and “atmospheric”. I’ll have more to say about that when I get into specifics a little later in the article.

Specific

The more specific your search subject, the lower the likelihood of an exact match, and the more you either have to compromise or edit whatever you find to make it fit for purpose. In fact, the likelihood of any result is markedly lower.

That can be compensated for, to some extent, by making more exhaustive searches. You can also sometimes find results that won’t show up in Google Search results by trying a different search engine – I’ve noticed that they usually all give different overall results with a few images in common. My search priority these days is usually DuckDuckGo, Google, and Bing (in that order) and I’ve recently added a fourth string to my bow, Qwant.

After that, some of the big image repositories and clip art providers, like Pixabay sometimes have images that none of the search engines seem to find. I keep a large set of links to these for the purposes of searching out illustrations for Campaign Mastery, anyway. You might not have any equivalent justification, but don’t let that stop you. Avoid (as much as possible) sites that watermark their free images, though. I include Wikimedia in this category.

The deeper that your search has to proceed, though, the more you encroach upon the point of simply not finding what you are looking for. Being aware of this, I also open any images that could potentially be edited to give the desired result, preparing the ground for a potentially-necessary Plan B.

It is also important, when making such assessments, that the points made earlier are kept in mind – “is it actually worth the investment in time to edit this image into something with game value?” – the more time you spend in the search, the less time there is available for such editing; there comes a point where the answer to the italicized question becomes “no.”

Unique

This is really an extension and extrapolation of the trends identified in the last category; the only real change is that the Game Value increases massively by virtue of the “unique” label.

When it comes down to it, with very very few exceptions, “Unique” images follow one of two paths:

• You perform all searches with the expectation that whatever you find will require editing to convert potential game value into actual game value; or
• You choose the best image that you can find and modify the adventure to fit, not the other way around.

In terms of time, choice two is the obvious winner. So if I find an image that will “work” with this approach, that’s job done and move on to the next; if I don’t, then I’m looking at the ‘editable’ options that I have gathered in the course of the search. Pursue both options simultaniously, in other words.

Classification of Image Categories

Okay, let’s get down to brass tacks. I’ve divided image subjects into six categories. I’m then going to look at how each category intersects with the Strata of Commonality just discussed, permitting advice that is as specific as I can make it. The six categories are:

1. Objects
2. People (NPCs)
3. Monsters & Encounters
4. Vehicles
5. Locations
6. Events & Effects

There is some overlap – “Unique People” clearly overlaps with “Encounters”, for example, and “Objects” can include “Vehicles”. These overlaps were necessary to ensure comprehensive coverage.

Objects Vs Vehicles

If the PCs involvement / engagement with the vehicle is enough that it may require depiction of the interior, then the “Vehicle” category is the important one, with the “Object” treatment (exteriors only) a fallback position.

If there is not likely to be any Game Value in the interiors, then the Vehicle is an “Object”, and the advice attached to that category should be your guide.

Vehicles like motorcycles that don’t have an “interior” require a further exercise of mental gymnastics – pretend that the vehicle in question is actually one that has an interior and then assess the engagement as above.

People Vs Encounters

The “People” category has two non-exclusive objectives – implying the personality of the individual, and providing a common mental image to the players to aid in recognition of the NPC as an individual. If neither of those is the purpose of the image, it should be treated as an “Encounter”.

Encounters are more related to what the individual is doing in the image, which should match up with the plot purpose of the encounter. “Why is this encounter happening?” at a meta-plot level is the guiding principle.

I want to conclude this overview section with a comment about player agency. Giving players a choice is always a better choice than not, but it does make image searches more complicated. For example, in the Zenith-3 campaign, the plot had the players buying a couple of vehicles from amongst the options at a pair of used-car lots. What attributes the players chose to prioritize would dictate which options best matched; since I didn’t know this, I had to prepare for a large number of contingencies. I described the situation and the prep involved in How Good Is That Rust-bucket In The Showroom Window?

There were more than 200 vehicles in the spreadsheet that contained the results. After the players decided on their key parameters, from highest to lowest, I simply had to sort the results accordingly to determine which vehicles best matched. Then it was just a matter of playing around with the budgets to derive a set of choices. I could simplify this somewhat because these were to be bought from used-car lots that were no doubt trading in vehicles even as the PCs were searching – any option that yielded too many possible combinations or that didn’t look to be “fun” / interesting, I simply marked as “sold” while the PCs were looking around the lot.

Because I could perform “theoretical” sorts in advance, I could manifest a shortlist of the options that would represent the options to be put before the players. This ended up being a list of twelve vehicles; there were more, but another key metagame factor was whether or not I could find an appropriate or editable image of the vehicle.

For those who may be interested, the twelve second-hand cars offered to the PCs in post-Ragnarok 1986 were:

• 1983 Black Coupe DeVille Cabriolet d’Elegance
• 1982 Sky-Blue and Burgundy Sedan DeVille
• 1984 Black Escort LX 5-door Hatchback
• 1984 Beige Escort Series I Liftback Wagon
• 1984 Black Escort 3-door Hatchback
• 1984 Navy Blue Cadillac Sedan DeVille Automatic
• 1983 Lincoln Continental Mark VI Pucci Designer Edition – one of the two chosen
• 1984 Brown Chevrolet Cavalier Station Wagon
• 1983 Cherry Red Chevrolet Cavalier, badly faded
• 1982 Purple Buick Skylark Station Wagon – the second vehicle chosen, but it turned out to be a good-looking lemon
• 1983 Bright Red Chevrolet Cavalier – the vehicle chosen as a replacement for the Lemon above.

Each of these had their virtues from the PCs perspective. That meant that each had to be presented to the players when they were looking at their different purchase options – I had no idea which ones the players would eventually choose. To get two cars, I had to illustrate 12 (plus three interior views).

That’s a lot more work than shows in the ultimate results. Player Agency is the enemy of efficient prep – but that’s a necessary evil. The only real restrictions placed on the players choices were (1) that I could find / make a suitable illustration of the vehicle; and (2) that I wanted them to end up with two different makes and models so that I could compare and contrast the two, and so that the players choices had measurable impact on the game-play. Because if it makes no difference, it’s not really player agency, is it?

Where To From Here?

This article is now approaching an unmanageable length, given the available time. So I’ve decided to break the rest of it into smaller mini-posts, which I’ll deliver over the next week or so, a day or two apart. Each will examine one of the specific Image Categories listed above, breaking each down into the four levels of Commonality.

Yesterday, I was browsing around in an online digital music store when I came across an Album that I would most certainly have purchased much sooner if I had known that it existed.

This is one of the major problems that has beset the music industry over the last twenty or so years.

The Drake Of Sales

I’ve often suggested a sort of Drake Equation for marketing. The total number of sales is equal to:

0. The total number of people who will consider buying gaming products,
1. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who are interested in the genre of your product,
2. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who are interested in the type of product being offered some people don’t like PDFs for example, some people won’t buy anything else),
3. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not dislike the medium of your product,
4. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not turn away because they do not play the game system that your product is tied to,
5. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not bear a grudge or a dislike for the publisher of that game system,
6. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not have a personal dislike or animosity for someone involved in the product,
7. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who dislike the artistic or visual style of your product enough that they won’t buy it,
8. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who will not purchase your product because they have already bought something similar that fulfills their needs,
9. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who are not turned away by the price of your product (which can actually be a factor slightly larger than one if the price is cheap enough, but this is a factor relative to the perceived need for the product) ,
10. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who might by your product anyway because of the subject matter or the look of the product (yay! Another increase!),
11. Multiplied by the fraction who can or will purchase from the marketplace in which you are selling (some people may not buy online, others may not buy from Amazon or whatever),
12. Multiplied by the fraction who aren’t turned away by the reputation of someone involved,
13. Multiplied by the fraction who won’t acquire a copy illegally
14. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who actually learn of your product’s existence.

In essence, this litany of potential disasters defines the general potential customer base and then whittles away at it by defining aspects of a product that might turn away a potential purchaser. There are 14 factors listed to define that whittling; if each of them turns away a mere 10% of the potential customer pool, you will sell to only 22% of the potential marketplace.

That number isn’t all that realistic, though. Many of these factors will be closer to 99.9% than they are to 90%, some will be lower by a little and some by a lot, some may even be greater than one for reasons of reputation, or a polished look, and many of these factors impact on the perceived value-for-money of the product.

Applied Drake – Assassin’s Amulet

Take Assassin’s Amulet – the primary reason for publication was to present the map and build an adventure around it, i.e. to sell a module. Everything else that we included is all intended to broaden the appeal of the product to include people who may not be interested in the module per se, but who might like a new character class, and a bunch of articles on how it would fit into a society, and new magic items, and so on. For those who are primarily interested in a game module, AA is horribly overpriced; it’s the job of everything else to create the perception of value for money through the very basic tactic of actually increasing the value for money. We had decided to sell for $20, so we wanted the product to have an actual value in the $30-35 range. (I actually wanted us to sell for $15 a copy, plus a margin of a dollar or two to cover production and sales costs, but was overruled by my more experienced co-authors).

But always, the problem was that last factor. No-one can even contemplate buying you product if they don’t know that it exists. I estimate that we reached about 0.05% of the potential market at best with AA.

The Marketing Of Music

And that’s the problem faced by music distributors these days. The industry has systematically turned away every avenue for discovery of their product out of sheer greed.

Radio used to be the primary publicity tool; getting your band’s song on the air guaranteed sales the next day. Live performances and reputations were often the next most powerful mechanism – one hit made another more likely simply through name recognition. Magazine coverage (interviews, reviews), which didn’t actually permit readers to hear the song or album of course, were – at best – a relatively minor contributor, but one that could help get that all-important broadcast. Word-of-mouth was an even smaller contributor, but one that could domino unexpectedly into a hit from nowhere.

But the record companies decided that it was their content that let a radio station attract sponsors and advertisers, and that this was all good for the radio station, so that they should charge each time a song was played.

The record company executives had a point, but overlooked that each time a song was played, it wasn’t just free advertising for their product, it was subsidized advertising. And this was a good thing, because bribery and corruption and other such scandals were frequent occurrences.

Even while Radio was riding high, along came the Music-oriented TV shows. Always hungry for new content, these added a visual and entertainment dimension to the product, and sales went up. And then – in the US – came MTV, and the film clip (Australia had been there since the mid-70s but not 24/7).

Sales exploded, and everyone was making gobs of money. But then the record executives again bit the hand that was feeding them, and applied the same logic as they had earlier done regarding radio – “these clips are horribly expensive to make, but you get to show them for free. We think we should get paid for producing your on-air content.”

So MTV started winding back it’s 24/7 music, which was starting to suffer from generational issues anyway, and went for non-musical content and reality TV. And that sucked all the oxygen out of music sales. With video and radio gone, or at least heavily muted as advertising tools, all that were left were Live Gigs and magazines, and whatever trickle survived of the earlier marketing kings.

(You may be wondering where the RPG-relevance is in all this. Patience, I’ll get there – take a deep breath.)

Throughout all this, it is worth noticing that at no point did the end customer get any consideration at all; they were considered (at best) a necessary evil, a wallet delivery system, at least in their eyes. This is an important observation, because the next thing to happen was the rise of File Sharing.

If the record companies had been on the ball, this could have been a replacement marketing tool, one that was fully under their control. Flood the internet with (free) album previews, engage the customers through an online review mechanism, evolve that into social media (i.e. “free advertising”) – the losses due to piracy were large only because the marketplace had been shriveled by past marketing decisions and greed. If the internet were used to replace/supplement Video and Radio, regrowing the market to its former size, not only would the piracy problem be much smaller, but it could in fact be treated as marketing, simply by leveraging everything that an MP3 didn’t give you in order to sell CDs.

Instead, they considered those using file sharing as parasites who would kill the industry, and declared their own customer base to be enemies.

In time, a compromise was reached, through the advent of Apple Music and the iPod. These days, there is more music being produced than ever – its getting uploaded to YouTube and other such sites. Almost ALL the marketing save word of mouth (enhanced by social media) has disappeared, and those creating this music are left with the naked problem – no-one can buy your product if they don’t know that it exists.

The Marketing Of RPG Products

Last week, I found a product on DrivethruRPG that was now heavily discounted, but that I would surely have purchased (or at least seriously considered purchasing) at full price had I known of it sooner.

The rise of self-publishing has meant that there are more writers getting published than ever before – but only a few who get taken up by a major publisher will ever hope to make more than a hobbiest.

It’s damn hard to make a living out of writing. It used to be that only one in ten could do so; now, because there are more writers out there but no more success stories, it’s one on ten thousand, or less. Still, there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for the lucky few. But notice that this is exactly the same problem facing the music industry.

There’s a very good reason why “The End Of The Rainbow” is the category that Campaign Mastery uses as a metaphor for Inspiration. It means that I/we (depending on who is doing the writing) think that there are ideas for adventures, characters, and/or campaigns that can be generated or can derive from the content, that it has value as a generator of ideas beyond the direct utility of the content.

(Okay, here comes the real relevance!)

Selling The Adventure

It may astonish readers, but GMs face an existentially-similar problem every time they dangle a new adventure in front of the players. Nightmarish horror stories abound of players not “taking the bait”.

In the most extreme cases, players may then turn around and blame the GM for running a boring day’s play!

The GM has to get the players to “buy in” to the adventure, usually by means of an adventure hook that captures their attention and fires their imaginations.

This is a marketing problem, but few if any seek to employ marketing tools & techniques to solve it.

I have identified seven marketing ‘elements’ – it’s probably coming on too strong to call these ‘essentials’ or ‘principles’ – that have applicability to this, and to related GMing problems. It’s my intention in this article to describe them, explain them as much as necessary, and then to adapt them into RPG-relevance.

I want to make it clear that I am not a marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination, I am very much just a curious layman in these matters. For that reason, neither the list nor the treatments applied are comprehensive, and I am not going to pretend that they are.

This means that there are almost certainly relevant aspects of marketing that I didn’t think of, or wasn’t clever enough to interpret. This article, then, is very much a foundation for GMs to build on with their own experiences and expertise. This is a beginning, not an end.

Seven Elements Of Marketing, applied to RPGs

I’ve always been fascinated by marketing techniques, the art and science of creating the impulse to buy in a customer.

It’s an interest that has helped me publicize Campaign Mastery, that has assisted in the development of Assassin’s Amulet, and that has enabled me to recognize when I am being subjected to marketing in television adverts, and in stores and supermarkets, however imperfectly. That gives me at least a chance of resisting the sales pressure, or giving in if that seems more appropriate – it gives me at least partial control over my spending. So there have been a number of real-world benefits to my education on the subject, however limited.

The resulting awareness has also spilled over into a number of articles here at CM that may be of interest, and that should be good starting points for anyone wanting to take this subject further.

• Directly relevant is Cause And Inflect: Marketing Your Way To A Better Game.
• Ask The GMs: Buzz and Background discusses marketing applied to RPGs in the section on “Buzz”.
• A Political insight for RPGs & Life Addresses the concept mostly in the introduction, but the ideas weave in and out of the content repeatedly, if at arm’s length.

Of course, I have written more directly about marketing a few times, too.

• In Ethics For Sale? – The Role Of Native Advertising discusses a then-new practice of advertisers sponsoring content that masquerades as news, and how product placement might invade RPGs. Advertising is directly linked to marketing, so this is clearly relevant.
• Finally, a two parter. Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – part 1 of 2 deals with how price impacts on the perception of an RPG, and discusses all the contributing factors that go into the production of an RPG product.
• Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – part 2 of 2 looks at the impact of the internet on expectations and, in particular, the different standards that are required of downloadable PDFs. It also runs through the contributing factors that affect the price of products in that format, while comparing and contrasting with the factors from the first part.

I’ve included these links here in the middle of the article because they serve to establish what credibility I can muster on the subject of marketing, and establishing that will help ‘sell’ the content that remains. So these contributions to the subject of marketing are, themselves, functioning as a marketing exercise – an effect that is at least somewhat mitigated by my making readers aware of the PR-intent of the exercise, but ‘complete disclosure’ demands no less.

So with this preamble having established both my bona-fides and enabled expectations to be reasonably settled, let’s get to the real meat of the article!

1. Product Differentiation

Fundamental to all marketing efforts is the identification of the distinguishing features of the particular product, and especially anything that differentiates it from any similar products on the market. It might be cheaper, or more efficient, or more effective, or any of a dozen other things.

These will then become the central focus of attempts to market the product.

For example, the Pepsi taste test invariably finds that more people choose a Pepsi over a Coke. Marketers quickly realized that one point of differentiation between the products is that Pepsi contains an extra teaspoon of sugar, making it sweeter, and that meant that while it would be more agreeable to drink without accompaniment, coke would be more palatable when consumed with foods, especially salty snacks. Pepsi devised the taste-test to present their product in the best light relative to their rival, based on the differences between their products.

If you have a new campaign to “market” to the players, you need to identify what distinguishes this campaign from all the others on offer, and from campaigns using similar or the same game system that may have been played in the past, or may even be going on concurrently.

Take Fumanor: One Faith as an example. The premise to the previous campaign, Fumanor: The Last Deity was that most Divine beings had been destroyed in a cataclysmic event a century earlier, forcing the survivors to unite into a single pantheon. This left gaps in the portfolios represented by the different deities; small ones could be papered over by expanding the ‘interests’ of the survivors, but there was one large gap that needed to be filled with a newcomer to their ranks. Thoth, the god of knowledge, had been destroyed by his attempt to acquire knowledge of the Gods’ enemies, but he had set in motion an elaborate plan to select and elevate his own replacement, one who would not have the same vulnerability that had been his own undoing. There was more to the story, of course, but that had been the central premise. A key part of the story was “marketing” the new pantheon to adherents of the old multiple-pantheon structure, in particular churches dedicated exclusively to one mythos, forging recognition of the new pantheon to their human worshipers. The One Faith campaign dealt with the attempts to unify the churches and social institutions behind the new banner, discovering secrets held by one institution that were to be shared only reluctantly.

2. Create a perceived need, then fill it

This is the bottom line for a significant level of advertising, especially the more successful campaigns. Creating a need takes many forms; it can be creating dissatisfaction with the existing products in the marketplace, or appealing to the senses, or environmental or social justice, or teasing the curiosity of the viewer. The most effective choice is always one that plays to the product differentiation, and there have been times when artificial ‘differences’ have been manufactured in order to support a planned advertising line.

An example of the latter that does not seem to have rebounded, post-COVID, is the souvenir tie-in with popular movies. There used to be one of these every month or two, but I don’t see them returning until the theater industry rebuilds further. The reason is that attendance numbers are still fragile, and the certainty of success of a blockbuster remains weakened or absent. These tie-ins represent significant investment on the part of the stores creating and selling the tie-in products, with significant lead-times required for the design and manufacture of the products; to be certain of success, it has to be clear at least a month or two in advance that a movie will be successful enough to make the tie-in profitable. The fact that these businesses are themselves operating with more fragile bottom lines means that there is less capacity for taking a risk, further undermining this promotional mechanism.

Most examples of this principle are more prosaic, and often formulaic. Show a kitchen counter that looks clean, superimpose some animated germs to imply that the appearance is deceptive, then show a cleaning product and an even cleaner kitchen counter that positively gleams, and the advertisement is pretty much complete; anything more is just a refinement on the basic package. This works by creating a sense of need – implying that most cleaning products will create the appearance of cleanliness but not the reality – and then satisfying that need on a visceral level by positioning the product as the solution.

Or, perhaps, the advert shows a group enjoying a meal or a picnic or whatever, then shows the product as being a key element of such a social occasion, and – hey presto – job done. Given the constraints that were placed on such social events through the early phases of the pandemic, I’m somewhat surprised that this advertising was not more prevalent as restrictions were relaxed; people would have been made more receptive by their inability to host such festivities during times of lockdowns and other restrictions, so creating a perception of need would have been relatively easy.

There are times when creating the perception of need is more difficult, or a particular attempt to do so is less successful. It’s by no means always as easy as the discussion above tends to suggest. It’s also easy to fail to make the leap from need to the particular product being advertised as the solution. And there have been past attempts where the story itself was simply not entertaining enough to hold viewer’s attention long enough for either or both of these to be established. So there are at least three ways such advertising can fail.

Targeting the advertising at a particular market segment can improve the odds of creating the sense of need. Connecting the solution to a point of product differentiation helps connect the product to the sense of it being the solution. Some newness about the product – either because it’s legitimately new, or because it can be packaged as “new and improved” – also helps, simply by implying that the existing range of products on offer don’t do the job of satisfying the need in an adequate way.

You can spend months studying this aspect of advertising, and the more that you understand it, the more aware you are of the attempts to manipulate your purchasing intent – create it, shift it from one product to another, capitalize on it. And that helps to insulate you from it, giving you greater control over your spending.

But this sort of awareness also helps when the shoe is on the other foot. It was a major discussion when planning the content for Assassin’s Amulet, for example; the intent was to include content that could be excerpted for stand-alone articles at Roleplaying Tips and here at Campaign Mastery to create “buzz” about the product and, yes, a sense of need/desire toward the product.

When attention turns to new campaigns, two scenarios suggest themselves.

The first is where the GM has the ultimate control, and the players simply participate in whatever he has brought to the table; this technique can be adapted to create enthusiasm toward the proposed campaign.

The second is where the players have a choice, and can choose not to participate in a particular campaign for whatever reason – from dislike of the game system that is proposed to disliking the premise of the specific campaign. The goal in ‘advertising’ the campaign is not just about generating enthusiasm, it’s about persuading players to participate in the first place.

In either case, the first step is to create a sense of need. Often, this can be achieved simply through the GM’s own enthusiasm for the campaign, but sometimes it can mean focusing on product differentiation: “We’ve been playing a lot of [genre x] lately, so I thought trying something from [genre y] might make a nice change of pace”. Or, if not straying too far from the usual genre, it can be an emphasis on product differentiation and what will make this campaign different from the last, and from the one before that, and so on.

These approaches generally bundle the satisfaction of created need with the creation of that need, but sometimes these still need to be handled separately.

Another powerful tool in this department can be the idea of a campaign of limited scope – a trial run, or an isolated adventure that may or may not progress to a full campaign if the players have fun.

An exciting name can be a big selling point, too, a name that intrigues or that implies promises with respect to content can create anticipation in the player’s minds – the absolutely critical key to such is making sure that you satisfy that sense of anticipation, even if the creation was due to sheer sloppiness on your part.

Key words can be critical in creating these expectations. “Post-apocalyptic” is one of these triggers, “deep space” is another. The phrase “adventure to adventure” or simply ‘adventures” (plural) can imply a more episodic approach.

Sometimes, a simple misunderstanding can create expectations that you nevertheless have to satisfy. I’ve described in the past how the original intent for the sequel campaign to the original Zenith-3 campaign were completely different to what the NPCs within the campaign had in mind, and how the current Zenith-3 Regency campaign had to change fundamentally to accommodate what the players expected (and were looking forward to).

It’s an imperfect science, then, but it can be a powerful one.

3. Know Your Target Market

There are resistances that you can’t simply overcome – I already know that proposing a Star Trek campaign will fall on deaf ears, because the players I have access to are simply not interested in such a campaign. To sell such a proposal, I would have to repackage it, perhaps as a Star Wars or Traveler -oriented campaign.

This is an example of knowing your target market, what they are willing to entertain, and what is a bridge too far.

In many respects, it can be easier for those engaged in more traditional marketing of products; they can target by gender, or by socioeconomic stratum, or even a specific segment of a market. Because they are dealing with mass-market advertising, they can afford to only succeed with a portion of that market and still have a successful marketing campaign. In fact, they would go into such a situation expecting to only succeed with a fraction of the available market, but weight of numbers works to their advantage.

A GM promoting a proposed campaign to his players has no such cover; practically by definition, he has to target specific individuals, and that’s a very different proposition.

Evolving social demographics are a perpetual challenge for the traditional marketer; the normal approach of determining which member of a household generally makes the purchasing decisions with respect to the category of products, and explicitly targeting them, begins to break down fairly comprehensively when society itself undergoes some form of metamorphosis. With families in Lockdown, the traditionally-identified purchaser of an item might no longer be valid, but that won’t be the case universally; you could view this as a fracturing of the market base, requiring greater focus on what the disparate sub-groups have in common, or you could back away from stereotypical advertising and take a more generic approach that tries to encompass both the new decision-makers and the old.

When the transformative influence ends, not everything will go back the way it used to be. As a result, the old approaches may no longer apply, and new patterns have to be adopted.

For example, there has been a big push, starting pre-Pandemic, for greater diversity and inclusion in advertising here in Australia. As the Pandemic arrived, and the accompanying restrictions and associated demographic changes in who had purchasing power and who did not, this push began showing dividends, mostly in the form of tokenistic inclusions (for which a number of advertisers were quite rightly called out). Then the Pandemic impacts took hold, and the entire campaign for inclusion was de-prioritized in advertising, in favor of making ads that appealed to a broader audience because the advertisers were less secure in knowing who their target audience was going to be. As we have emerged from Pandemic restrictions, not all the old social patterns have reverted, so advertising continues to be more broadly-oriented, but the push for diversity and inclusion has been subsumed into that broader pattern; with no fuss being made about it, greater diversity IS being shown. It’s not at all abnormal now for a family scene to be a family with same-gender parents, for example. Unless you are specifically looking for it, you would hardly notice. There’s also a subtly-greater emphasis on showing community spirit, or of being a good neighbor. It’s as though the big push has had the desired outcome, but with the key transformative moments being masked by the impact of the Pandemic on the advertising content, hidden from view under the banner of appealing to a more general audience.

The imminent end of an ongoing campaign and raising of the question, “what will we play next” is, in some ways, quite akin to a transformative social event. The strongest influences tend to be differentiating the next campaign from the current one, and appealing to as broad a base as possible.

I’m acutely aware of this, as my Zener Gate campaign is winding down and will conclude sometime in the current calendar year. The current plan, approved by the players, is to resume the Warcry campaign, perhaps best described as a superheroic science-fictional family soap opera space-opera. With time travel, but that’s often less of a focus than a more Doctor-Who-esque bouncing around from one interesting place to another, especially at the moment. That contrasts very strongly with the Zener Gate campaign, which is paramilitary and political with a central focus on time travel within the timeline of the Earth and associated solar system. There are heavy sci-fi elements to both, and both have time travel, but that’s where the similarities end.

In promoting this plan, three individuals had to be targeted: the first was the central focus of the campaign, the titular character, and his player; that was easy. The second was a player in the campaign from its previous incarnation who was not a part of the Zener Gate campaign; that wasn’t all that hard, either. The third was a player in the Zener Gate campaign who might or might not choose to join the renewed campaign, replacing a player whose passing brought the first version of the campaign to an end. He likes space opera, but not ‘cosmic’ level adventures; this would be both, so it could have gone either way. In the end, he chose to come on board, so we’ll see how it goes!

4. Create a sense of value-for-money regardless of the actual price

This is a tricky one and something that not all marketers actually acknowledge. It’s all about perception of price and product positioning within the market, and that can be a difficult thing to control.

Entire advertising campaigns have been draped around the positioning of a particular product as a ‘premium brand’ and worth the higher price being demanded for it. If your product costs twice as much as that of a serious competitor, you are at a serious sales disadvantage, especially when economic times are hard; this attempts to turn that liability into an asset.

The key is to find virtues that you can allege are manifested by the premium product that do not attach themselves to the competitor. “Longer-lasting”, “Mega-pack”, “Eco-friendly”, “Sustainably sourced”, and many other terms like these, are the weapons, as is the blunt declaration “Premium” – usually accompanied by the caveat, “at an affordable price”.

These are designed to create the impression that a product manifesting these virtues should cost a whole lot more than the ‘premium’ product being offered does, implying that it is both socially-responsible and a bargain. Despite the higher price.

The other end of the marketplace also has its own version of this necessity. The perception to be overcome is not that it is overpriced, but that it is so low-priced that quality has been compromised. One of the most common approaches is to supersize the product so that the net price is just a little less than the average mid-range competitor, making a huge virtue out of “value for money”, but there are more sophisticated tools as well. “Convenience” is one that comes and goes. Attempting to position the product as ‘closer to nature’ can sometimes work, and when it won’t (because the premium product already has that marketing space claimed), “purity” can be a substitute (it’s really hard to have both qualities at the same time).

Before we can translate all if this into the sphere of RPGs, we need to decide on the equivalence of the concept of cost.

Ultimately, this is an amalgam of three factors:

• Actual financial cost;
• Time;
• and Effort.

The last of these can be further divided, into

• Complexity, and
• Learning a new game system.

The resulting four attributes are the ‘cost’ of a proposed new campaign.

The financial cost can include everything from purchasing game-day food, to travel costs, to the purchase of roleplaying references and sources. The latter is generally a one-off up-front cost, the others are ongoing costs of participation.

The time cost can include not only the time spent participating, but the travel time, and even the cost of not doing something you otherwise would.

The complexity cost can relate to how complex character maintenance is, to the nature of the plotlines inherent in the proposed campaigns and the effort needed to keep them straight in the mind of the player, to any demands outside of the gaming table that are imposed on the player. Some of these can be one-time cost, dealt with during character construction; others are ongoing costs that have to be dealt with regularly or periodically.

Finally, there is always an inherent cost in effort required to learn a new game system, if one is involved, and this can be the deal-breaker in any proposal. This not only is a direct cost at the start, it can become an ongoing cost as well, and it acts as an amplifier to everything listed under complexity.

The GM needs to sell the proposition that an offered campaign will be worth these expenditures, and the inconvenience that they carry. Sometimes that’s easy – if a player already knows the game system, for example, and has already bought anything required for it, two of the costs are either diminished or completely obliterated, and that yields a far more favorable cost-benefits ratio. Playing a new game system that a player has always wanted to try out can be a completely different mitigating factor.

The suitability of the game system to the proposed campaign is a critical factor that falls within the scope of this heading. A game system that has been home-brewed to exclude the mechanical parts that the players don’t like, in the process distancing it from its primary reference genre, may be quite a different proposition to a ‘warts and all’ implementation of the game system.

5. Identify and utilize perceived product/producer strengths

Perceptions can often differ from reality. A manufacturer can have a reputation for high quality that can be ‘rubbed off’ onto a medium-quality product, for example. Some cleaning products are perceived to be more effective than others because they are perfumed with a scent that is associated with disinfectant or soap. Other scents are known to arouse hunger – the odor of freshly-baked bread, for example. Some institutions are regarded as more professional and trustworthy than others.

These are all assets that can be taken advantage of, even if they don’t actually contribute to a material point of product differentiation. A perceived benefit or advantage doesn’t actually have to be real or verifiable; it will still influence the interpretation and credibility of actual points of product differentiation to make them more effective. The same facts are true for everything from toothpaste to cough medicine, from bank loans to baked treats.

Applying these facts to an RPG requires a little self-assessment with no sugar-coating. Is there something you are known to be particularly good at? Is there something you are known to be relatively poor at? Then your proposition of a new campaign should emphasize the first and downplay the second.

I’m known for my intricate plotting, for rooting my campaigns in their backgrounds, and for an equitable sharing of the spotlight. I’m not so well known for being a military strategist. If I postulated an alternative-world-war-two campaign, it would never get off the ground on its own merits; not only would I not be seen to be playing to my strengths, I would be lauding my virtues in an area in which I’m known to be weak.

If, however, I were to pitch such a campaign with a co-GM or advisor of known militarily strategic expertise, and provide explicit details regarding the historical variations and their causes that implied a coherent and plausible background, I would have negated the liability (even turned it into an advantage) while playing from a position of strength. Suddenly, a concept so divergent from my personal strengths that it would be laughed out of the room sounds very intriguing, an option that none of my players would have considered credible.

I have told my players repeatedly that I expect the current Z-3 campaign to be my last superhero campaign; it still has at least 16 years of game-play before it reaches the planned crescendo, plans that are preliminary and not set in any form of concrete at this point, and yet there are already known plot loose ends that are not intended to get resolved in the current campaign simply because not everything ever gets tied up in a nice little bow. If I were to gather those plot threads together, I could conceivably formulate a third Z3 campaign. I don’t intend to do so, because I think it would be anticlimactic after the current campaign has run it’s epic course. Besides, I’ll be in my mid-70s at that point!

That potential is there because it adds to the credibility of the campaign I’m running right now, not because I ever expect to use them in a sequel.

But if I were ever to intimate that I had changed my mind, I would expect my current set of players to sign up immediately – not only do I have form within the genre, but such a campaign would clearly be playing to my strengths as a GM.

In the meantime, though, I can launch other, shorter, campaigns that play upon that same set of strengths, and expect to get sign-ups.

It’s important to note that any campaign I proposed would me chosen because it sounded like something I would have fun doing, and something that would enable me to entertain the participants; I’m not choosing a campaign based upon my strengths or weaknesses, I’m thinking about what assets I have to convince potential players that they would enjoy participating by virtue of those strengths. I could propose, for example, a Fantasy campaign set in an age when existence was soft and malleable, when even the Gods were finding their way. This would play to another known strength, the big concept, so I would expect player interest – but their first question would be about the game system. Or I could offer a game of political intrigue set on the fringes of a great galactic empire. By implication, that hearkens back to the ’embedded rich plotting’ advantage.

The goal is to sell the campaign that you want to run to the players. That means taking advantage of your known assets and neutralizing known weaknesses (or better yet, turning them into assets).

6. Products that earn the greatest profit should be placed at eye level, then down for the next two shelves. Products earning the least profit per sale should be at the floor or on the top shelf.

This is actually a maxim of shelf-arrangement employed by successful supermarkets, but it’s just marketing in a different environment.

You could paraphrase it as placing your most profitable commodities in a location where they require the least effort on the part of customers.

There are also corollary rules regarding which shelves go where. Again, the most profitable shelves should be near the checkout – once people have committed to a purchase, you want to translate that into an actual sale as quickly as possible.

Once again, to translate this into the RPG medium, we need to decide on what is going to be the equivalent of most profitable. The easiest solution is to pick things that we’ve already discussed, but the more useful approach would be to consider something that we’ve only lightly touched on – fun value.

The translation thus becomes, “whatever will generate the most fun for the players should be the option that comes most readily to hand.” Unlike the previous section, then, this is about the content of a proposed new campaign; it’s not about the adventures, per se, but about the context and framing mechanisms that will lead from one adventure to the next.

But this is still about marketing; you want the players to whom you propose the campaign to feel that something fun is right at their fingertips in the proposal. It’s about making the proposed campaign a salable product from the point of view of the players concerned, then getting out of the way. “You are a rogue AI hiding out in a computer system, forced to manifest as characters in various simulated realities until you find a way to escape this confinement” – this promises variety, and a bit of silliness, but with a serious undertone linking adventures together. Saturday Morning Cartoons meets The Great Escape in a Tron-inspired environment. I can see this appealing to two or three of my current players, were I to propose it.

Only I might know that the majority of those “computer games” are a cross between Star Trek and Star Wars – or different Fantasy milieu – or Sherlock Holmes mysteries set in the 24th century, or whatever. In effect, it would repackage these campaign concepts into a form that will appeal in a way that the straight concept might not. And that’s marketing, too.

7. Use anticipation to build excitement

It was well known that Walt Disney had experimented with waiting times to build anticipation for the rides at Disneyland by the time that I first visited there, just a few days after Space Mountain had first opened to the public. The fact is even referenced in Dream Park.

The outcome of these experiments was that it worked, up to a point; but that there was a cliff to the response, after which additional waiting time detracted from the entertainment value of the ride. Disney used portable fencing to define the length of the waiting line – if it was full up, patrons would go somewhere else for a while rather than mill around aimlessly while waiting for a slot to open up.

Get it right, and the anticipation would be converted into excitement when the patrons actually boarded the ride, enhancing their enjoyment of the experience. Disney’s designers worked hard at getting it right.

It’s also true that not all attractions were created equal. There was always a long line for Pirates Of The Caribbean; there was a long line for Space Mountain (because it was new); there was a shorter line for the Haunted Mansion, and a still shorter line for the Jungle Cruise, and so on.

This principle works for RPGs, too. Given a bit of lead time, anticipation can become excitement (if the quality of the ‘ride’ is not a let-down). Too much, and it can become a negative. Too little, and you don’t take full advantage of the ‘free extra enthusiasm’ that can be generated.

Every campaign, every ‘ride’ has a different optimum point, and it will vary from one participant to another when you’re dealing with such a small group. That makes this tricky for a GM to get right, but so useful when you do that you have to keep making your best guess as to the right answer.

There are a multitude of factors that come together to define the ‘right time’ in any specific case, which also makes it hard for me to offer much in the way of specific advice.

But it is possible to cheat, and that can be a safe workaround. To cheat, you propose the campaign and then release information packs until you reach the point of play commencing. Since you won’t have time to generate these once the countdown has started, it’s best to generate them in advance. There should be no more information packs than there are players participating is something that I’ve found to be a good rule of thumb. Releases should be at regular intervals, and there should be enough time for players to assimilate the material before the next one arrives.

One should contain the campaign background in a narrative form. One should deal with any house rules, or should provide the game rules if it’s a new game system. One should probably focus on the available character construction options. One should focus on important NPCs and organizations. One should focus on the most recent events, and the location where play is to commence. And that’s probably more than enough; unless you have 5 PCs, you will need to conflate some of these, or forego them in favor of in-game attention.

Other key decisions can play into things. Two of these decisions are: character construction in advance, or simultaniously, at the game table? and, Do you want to run a session zero that brings the PCs together? Or some other form of prequel adventure?

Broader Application

Seven elements of the totality that is marketing in the 21st century. Hopefully I have demonstrated the relevance to the concept of selling potential players on a proposed campaign.

But that’s just the beginning. Every time you introduce a new NPC, or location (dungeon?), or crisis, the same principles apply – you need to make these convincing (unless they aren’t supposed to be), and that means marketing.

You have a captive audience, who are practically begging to be convinced to buy in – but closing the deal is up to you. Marketing can provide many tools to help you do so.

Attitude and Intensity

We all have NPCs who are more driven than most, more obsessed or more sassy. This is never as easy as it sounds.

We all have to raise our voices a little just to be heard clearly from all parts of the gaming table.

Simply employing the “intense whisper” for the dialogue of such characters works well in movies and on TV, but is liable to be completely inaudible at the gaming table. And describing the speech pattern that way has all the impact of wet spaghetti.

So, how do you convey intensity or attitude at the gaming table?

For June’s blog carnival, I want to know about one of your PCs or NPCs who had or has attitude to burn, what they care so passionately about, and how you play this so that the (other) PCs are aware of it. “WHY” is usually an integral part of the story, too. Did you have to / ask to / want to change the character’s stats to reflect this situation?

The understanding is, of course, that these will then become a pool of characters and techniques that other GMs can call upon in their own games.

Campaign Mastery last hosted a year ago (anchor, roundup, and sequel).

Em’ridge

As my contribution to this discussion, let me tell you about a PC who appeared in the first D&D session that I ever ran.

First, a little context.

I had a whole suite of house rules developed as part of my first campaign. So much so that I decided that a playtest was warranted. On top of that, since this was my first ever campaign, I wanted to test the level of interest that the campaign background could sustain.

I wasn’t intending to measure myself against the standards of a novice GM; I knew that I would be competing for players with GMs who had been running the game for years, who were either part of the first wave of players when the game reached these shores, or those who were treading on their heels shortly thereafter. A number of the players who I hoped to attract were somewhere in between this elite group and those with the same level of experience as I possessed – about a year’s worth, as a player, at the time.

Design and Prep for the campaign had started around July or September of 1981, when I didn’t even have that much experience under my belt. I spent about 3 months on the background, the initial dungeon (which would be considered a mega-dungeon, these days), and on the house rules that needed to both convey and reflect the background.

For the playtest, only the first level of the dungeon was ready. Because of the standards that I wanted to test against, I invited six or seven of the “elite”-level players that I knew through the University Of NSW Science Fiction Society (who had introduced me to RPGs earlier that year).

Em’ridge was one of the characters created for this one-off game session / playtest. From memory, he was a fighter/mage, but I also have vague recollections of there being some Ranger in there somewhere as well. And that’s just about the last time that the character class of this PC will be mentioned in this write-up.

What’s In A Name?

Well, in this case, there’s an apostrophe.

Em’ridge’s player had constructed a simple table, that he shared with no-one. At the start of each game day, or after experiencing any one or more of a long list of ‘triggers’ (some of which would bias the results), the player would roll a d6.

1 or less = prickly, prone to anger
2 = sad, wistful, and reflective
3 = cautious and apprehensive, potential to panic, potential to overcompensate
4 = content, happy-go-lucky, “normal”
5 = joyful, exuberant, hyperactive
6+ = same as he was previously

This table made it easy for the player to run Em’ridge as a manic-depressive in a society that had never heard of the concept, never mind the term. No-one else knew about this table, not even me as a GM; if anyone asked about the die rolls, it was simply a generator of the character’s “mood” or an “air” that he had around him. The player, a 2nd or 3rd year psychology student, had reasoned that such individuals must have existed long before there was a diagnosis for the condition, so he had constructed this neat little simulator.

But he didn’t make a grand announcement of the character’s attitude; he reasoned that the character himself would have been unaware that he was mentally ‘different’ to anyone else.

The only clue that people had, initially, was that apostrophe, because whenever the player would refer to his character in the third person, or would introduce himself, the vowel that bridged the apostrophic gap in the name would correspond to the psychology then in effect:

1. EmARridge
2. EmERridge
3. EmIRridge
4. EmORridge
5. EmUHridge

This not only provided an indicator, a pattern that would have grown recognizable after further exposure, but it kept the mechanics from intruding into the roleplaying. In effect, he created a personality outline that he used to guide his “performance” of the character.

Personal Rituals

To accompany this behavior, the character had a number of personal rituals that the player had worked out. There was a generic one used at the start of each day’s play, and after every meal, that signaled a potential change in mood, a check that all the character’s weapons were where they were supposed to be, and ready for use.

Unless the character was in EmARridge mode, at the start of combat he would use a round to conduct this ritual ‘readiness check’, and that was the first big clue to the others of what was going on. If the character was in EmIRridge mode, he would do it twice, which came as a rude shock to the rest of the party, who were already up to their neck in the battle by the time Em’ridge entered the battle. It was also often misinterpreted by the other side, too.

There were others.

Every coin had to be untouched by corrosion, checked and polished individually each night; if one were flawed, he would pester one of the other PCs to exchange it for one in better condition.

When the character took off his armor, he lined up the pieces from large to small; if there wasn’t room to do so, he would stack them in that order. The character claimed that this structured process made it easier to put the armor on properly if necessary.

The character absolutely would not touch food that had anything white in it – if the soup-pot had a visible bone in the stew, it had better be gray or brown.

When the group went shopping for equipment, Em’ridge would draw up a list of all the items most commonly sought out on such expeditions, then ask a particular PC to be in charge of acquiring enough of that item for the entire party. This was “more efficient”. Since he always chose one of the lists that was likely to be harder to find to do himself, there was no grumbling.

When he counted, he used fingers and toes – and if he didn’t have enough of them, he got one of the other PCs to “provide” him with extras, simply by standing where Em’ridge could see them. The character wasn’t dumb – one extra set of fingers represented tens (ten, twenty, thirty, and so on); a second enabled him to count almost all the way up to four digits, and so on. Since several members of the party were both illiterate and innumerate, this was also accepted and assumed to be a technique that the character had devised for himself before his formal education and training began.

I don’t think the game went on long enough for anyone to decide if there were more; these were just the ones that got noticed.

It’s worth mentioning that marathon gaming sessions were the order of the day in that era, at least in these parts. We convened at 10AM, spent 10 minutes or so making small talk, spent another ten minutes while I briefed them on the most significant things they needed to know about the game background, another 90 minutes on character creation, and after a ten-minute break, were ready to start play. We broke for half-an-hour’s lunch at about 1:30, and for dinner at about 7 PM; and the game session came to an end at 2AM, because twenty minutes later was when the last train left the local station. That’s a 16-hour stint, less interruptions and meal-breaks. So there was a fair amount of opportunity for such personal foibles to show itself.

The true obsession

But all this was just underpinning for the character’s true fascination: an obsession with fire.

Each night, when the PCs were setting up camp, he insisted on being the one who set and lit the campfire. He would gather chunks of wood, branches of various sizes, twigs and other small flammables, would carefully arrange them in a stack, lovingly stroking each piece before emplacing it, would carefully anoint selected pieces of timber with lamp-oil before carefully setting them in their pre-ordained place, all while murmuring his appreciation of the sacrifice they were about to make.

Once the fire was lit, he could sit and stare into it for hours. If someone got his attention – plonking a serving of roast meat in front of him, for example – he would extremely poetically call their attention to some aspect or attribute of the flame. I can’t recall exactly what was said, so many years later, but in general terms he might point at the way the fire rose up like a wave only to die back, tethered as it was to the burning wood.

If someone was foolish enough to mention fire to him during the day’s travels, he could extemporize poetically about the flames he had seen on another occasion, and what made them memorable (to him); he would talk the ears off of anyone in the vicinity. All delivered in a natural voice but with reverent tones.

The Cleric (and the only character who was not multi-classed, because the latter was encouraged under the house rules) suggested that perhaps he worshiped a fire god. Unfortunately for him, Em’ridge happened to overhear the comment (I had him roll) and he came back with the proposal that fire was the one thing that the gods could not fully control, that it was always trying to escape and run rampant, and only extreme care prevented this from taking place – or something like that.

The List Of Proverbs

The player must have been intending to make this his character’s theme all along, because he had prepared a list of proverbs and sayings about, or related to, fire (many of which the player had created himself), and potential meanings for them as metaphors.

I don’t remember many of them, these days, either, but one went something like “Weather is the fire in which all must burn” when it started to rain, and another said “You cannot divide the flame, only the fuel; it is an inevitable consequence with a mind of its own.”

This gave the character many ways to work fire into any conversation, and many more ways to use it as a referent in a discussion of any other topic. But the player was careful not to go too heavy with this; it was just a reminder of the character’s obsessive fascination with fire.

The End Result

There was once acute manifestation of the character’s quirk – staring into the flames, barely blinking, using them to meditate. Other manifestations were small and fleeting, for the most part, and the character’s other unique aspects supplemented what could have been a one-trick pony to give it richness and complexity. Everything was designed by the player to convey the maximum amount of in-game and meta-game information with a minimal share of the spotlight, without being so overwhelming that the character couldn’t have a normal conversation about ordinary events when it was warranted.

Most importantly, the player never simply came out and said “my character is manically-depressive with an obsession for fire”; instead he employed the old writer’s maxim, “Show, don’t tell”. He created a pattern of behavior and let that do the talking for him; the results were more organic, and more natural, and both of those traits made the character’s obsession clear with no need to shout it from the rooftops.

Besides being a perfectly satisfactory playtest, it was a masterclass in applied characterization, something of value to all of us – player and GM alike.

So that’s my contribution. Now, can anyone else add to the conversation? Pingbacks seem wonky and unreliable these days, so make sure to drop a line and a link to your contributions in the comments space below. At the end of the month of June, I’ll aggregate and review the contributions.

This was intended to be part of a single, self-contained article – but the more I look at it, the more inevitable it seems that what did happen, would happen. Make sure you’ve read Part 1 before continuing!

I intend to dive straight in and pick up exactly where I left off, but first, there’s a bit of housekeeping.

Whenever you incorporate a table of contents, which I did in part 1, you give the impression that the planned content is set in stone, and to the extent that the planned sequence of topics is logical, this is true.

Behind the scenes, until that table is published, things are less fixed. They move around because the flow of narrative is smoother, or because the content of a section provides a better lead into the next topic than expected, or simply to better space out the illustrations dotted here and there to space out the blocks of text. So long as you also update the table of contents, no-one will ever know.

Except when you have to ‘fess up, because occasionally mistakes get made, and something that was intended to be in one place accidentally doesn’t get moved when it’s parent section in the hierarchy does.

This happens in adventure writing all the time, too, and that’s directly relevant to the RPG-related content of this post.

There was meant to be a subsection to the discussion of books on cosmology and astrophysics that got left out, for whatever reason. So, to start with, I have to take a slight side-step and plug that void.

Planetary Types

The State Of Cosmological Texts (cont)

The Price of Reference Books

In (the previous section), I made the point that any book on Cosmology or Astrophysics that’s more than 5 years old is likely to be so out of date, such has been the rate of progress in the field, that it is as likely to be misleading or counter-productive, and recommended choosing the textbooks and reference books that are being used in university classrooms right now. This practice won’t get you right up to date – it takes time to produce and publish these books – but it will get you past the worst of the out-of-date material.

There is an inherent problem with that approach, and it’s something that I meant to address before moving on.

Textbooks tend to be expensive at the best of times, and the more current they are, the more this is true. There are two solutions to this that are worth considering.

The first is that bulk-purchase discounts from university bookstores are often a way to get significant discounts, especially at the start of first semesters. Some such stores will sell online, even if you aren’t a student at the faculty in question. Other such bookstores will impose a premium for non-students or even refuse to sell to them outright, but with so many institutions out there, you should be able to find one that gives you access to the marketplace.

I would look, at least initially, at institutions that provide remote-distance degrees, then at institutions located near to you, and then at the largest national or international institutions.

The alternative is to look for bargains. The hard way to do this is repeated searches across multiple bookseller sites for the books that you specifically want – and don’t ignore eBay, especially at the conclusion of a year of study; there will always be students looking to sell their old textbooks to finance the purchase of those that they need for their next year of study, or who have changed majors and no longer need the old books. Institution Noticeboards, especially if they are online, can be a prime source of private sales.

But there is another approach, one that may require a little more flexibility on book choices but that can pay off significantly, and that’s using a bargain comparison site. At least one has a section dedicated to Astrophysics & Space Science books that would be a great place to start. Find a book whose title sounds promising, open it in a new tab, and by clicking on the “more” at the end of the description, you will get a publication date. There are other controls, such as price, that can help focus the selection.

Options like Humble Bundle, which mostly sell bundles of e-books and PDFs, can also be an extremely cost-effective solution – but you are taking a bigger risk concerning the publication date.

Getting up-to-date in this area doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank.

Dr Who: Venturi Station

About 18 months ago, I published Vortex Of War: A Dr Who campaign construction diary, in which I described both the process of creating my current Dr Who campaign in detail, and the results of that process. There was a lot of focus on campaign structure, and pacing. Adventure number six was named Venturi Station and it was inspired by parts of the cover text from a Star Frontiers module, “Bugs In The System”, though it used virtually none of the interior content.

The adventure was outlined in broad strokes in a large 244 word paragraph, which is partially quoted below (I can’t quote the whole thing because it contains spoilers that I don’t want my player to read).

A gas giant named Venturi contains huge clouds of petrochemicals that are being mined for pharmaceuticals by an orbiting siphon, which concentrates the clouds, extracts the good stuff (discarding the rest) and then transporting the concentrate (at subzero temperatures) as a frozen sludge to an orbiting collection station, once every hour (when the collection station is directly overhead). [Unusual] electromagnetic disturbances in the atmosphere [have been taking place], and the collector [has been damaged] several times, forcing the collection station to send down repair crews. The last such repair crew were killed until there were only two left, before evacuating back to the collection station. [One of the survivors] is being held in the sick bay of the collection station because his bio-readings are all over the place, in fact he should be dead based on those readings. The commander of the station is preparing to send a second repair crew when the Doctor arrives.

Anything in [square brackets] has replaced a lengthier part of the outline to protect secrets.

I though it important to give this redacted summary, however, because it highlights how and in what ways these initial outlines evolve when they expand into a full adventure.

The Needs Of Story

The first step in any such expansion is always to decide how you are going to proceed. In this case, there were multiple elements to the adventure outline that needed to be juggled:

• What did I need the characters to know and how was I going to put that information in front of the player?
• How many NPCs did I logically need, who were they, how would they interact both with each other, and with the PC, and how was I going to introduce them?
• Speaking of interactions, what were the characters to actually do? I didn’t want this to be a pure gab-fest, there needed to be some scope for interaction with the plotline.
• What is the purpose of the plotline, in terms of the campaign, and what do I need it to contain in order to achieve that?

The last one is the easiest to answer. In the previous adventure (which was re-titled at the last minute to “The Eternal Upgrade”), the Master, the Doctor, and Quasima the Azurite, had defeated a plot by the Cybermen aimed at achieving galactic domination. They had dealt with this plot by rewriting galactic history, changes that were much more far-reaching than followers of Who might expect. Only the three participants would be aware of the changes, to everyone else continuity would be seamless. So the purpose of this adventure was to bookend that event and to rub the players nose in the changes, making them feel a bit more real.

A secondary purpose was to continue to evolve the personality and capabilities of the companion, Quasima, who has been growing more confident and capable in recent adventures.

The second question has quite a high variability – a space mining operation could be anything from a small city (most of whom would be cookie-cutter background) to a handful or two of characters. In some measure, it depends on exactly when in Who continuity the adventure is to take place, and the technological level associated with that time period.

The first question was a really critical one; the process of the mining operation needed to be detailed and to at least sound plausible, and that meant that the gas giant itself, Venturi, needed to solidly conceptualized – hence the research that I reported in part one.

The third item produced the first major decision of the writing – I would move the arrival of the PC and his companion closer to the start of events. This would create opportunities for action and activity and exposition and interaction. Everything else would come from the plot needs and breaking up the information on the gas giant and the mining operation, which made that the key to unlocking the structure.

Dr Who: Defining Venturi

Clue number 1 is the name, Venturi. That is (broadly speaking) another word for wind, so winds had to be a prominent feature of the gas giant. I wanted this particular gas giant to be an outlier, so that the Doctor would know of it – and would expect there to be no such mining operation there. That ticks off the campaign-level requirement, the need to make the changes to history apparent and tangible.

I knew that I wanted it to be larger than most gas giants by a considerable margin. I wanted to define the chemistry in terms of climatic cycles. Liquid chemistry and a swirling wind-flow from deeper in the planet outwards, with complex carbon-chain building-block molecules forming on the liquid surface and floating on and through the liquid until they were carried upwards, where interaction with high-energy sunlight caused them to form still more complex compounds. And for some reason, I very firmly wanted it to be a bright blue color. Beyond those foundations, though, I didn’t have a clue.

The first thing I had to do was discard a prejudice – because Jupiter is larger than Neptune or Uranus, the size specification oriented me towards Jupiter-like chemistries. I spent quite a bit of time trying the different Jupiter options before concluding that none of them would work.

That meant a Neptunian chemistry, but that left me with a size problem; while there were large Neptunes, none of them approached the size that I wanted for Venturi. I was going to have to devise a new variant on the planet types already discovered or theorized with any level of acceptance.

An important clue came with a decision as to how the massive size was to be demonstrated to the player in-game – I decided that this super-planet had managed to capture a small Jupiter-sized gas giant of it’s own. Typical satellite-to-primary ratios being on the order of 10-to-1 or more, that meant that the size of Venturi would have to be ten times that of the small-Jupiter “moon”.

Where there can be one, there can be two, maybe more. That raised the possibility that super-Neptune had absorbed a ‘wrapper’ of Jovian chemistry, forming an upper atmosphere. The next problem to overcome was the restriction upon the size of Jupiters – past a certain point, they don’t get any bigger, gravity being enough to compress them down to roughly the same physical size.

I solved that partially by making the liquid a less-compressible one than most hydrocarbons – I didn’t go into what made it that way, just that it was so. By definition, that meant that it would occupy a larger volume than was indicated by mass, and have a lower density, while at the same time, lowering the overall mass of the planet and hence the gravitational attraction. As a result, gravity would flatten the layer of “ex-Jupiter” Hydrogen, Helium, and Methane somewhat, but not as much as would normally be the case. That made the planet potentially somewhat larger, but it was only a partial solution.

It was when I posited an interaction between the orbiting mini-Jupiter and Venturi that everything seemed to start coming together. This enabled “Hot Jupiter” effects with each high tide, creating a ‘hot spot” in the atmosphere of Venturi. That in turn would cause Venturi to “puff” out, increasing its diameter into a slightly egg-shaped cross-section.

Gases ionized into plasma would stream away from the Hot Spot, recombining into various simple compounds as they cooled; the resulting ring-like structures would not be stable, they would be torn apart by the winds and form streaks and ribbons that would be propelled toward the opposite side of the planet. At some point during the process, they could encounter the more complex hydrocarbons being flung upward by the convection currents above the liquid ‘ocean’, enabling still more-complex chemistries.

Such a system would be incredibly unlikely, but I only needed there to be one of them. What I wanted was an unforgettable world, and that was always going to require it to be something rare.

There were a few additional details that would be worked out along the way, but that was the central concept of Venturi – a gas giant with unique climatic conditions.

Further Research

I set out to do further research into the relevant carbon-compound chemistry that would let me attach names to some of the compounds, but ran out of time. Besides, it has been my experience that calling a spade a spade – describing, in this case, an improbable but plausible planet and then labeling it rare or even unique – enhances the credibility of your creation at least as much as additional detail, if not more.

Instead, I had to turn my attention to the mining process and the technology employed by the station. This involved

• Some way to ‘capture’ the hydrocarbons being mined;
• Some way to discard all the ‘unwanted’ compounds into the atmosphere of Venturi except monatomic hydrogen (especially Deuterium);
• Using the gas flow of the unwanted compounds to refrigerate the purified atmospheric distillate, taking it from a gaseous state to a liquid, and compressing it somewhat;
• Recombining the liquid with the Deuterium set aside earlier in the process;
• Transshipping this liquid to the main station, where it could be separated and further refined into a number of especially desirable compounds, Deuterium, and some waste.
• Use the Deuterium to employ fusion as one arm of a redundant power supply for the station. Use any Hydrogen contaminant to power transshipment of the processed liquids (see below) to a collection point.

From there, some further refrigeration taking advantage of the periodic eclypses of the star by the “lunar” gas giant – which would be a regular and recurring event – could super-chill the purified liquids, permitting it to be stored in cryogenic tanks that could be shipped to a collection point.

This was a complex enough process that it was plausible; it separated processing into two distinct locations (needed for plot purposes); and it avoided getting mired in the organic chemistry that I did not have enough time to research.

The process is refined enough that it was clear this would not be the first time the station personnel’s species had done this, but the uniqueness of the planet being mined would pose fresh engineering challenges, and present an opportunity for some small innovations to boost efficiency (if they work). Technologically, this is a static snapshot of a dynamically-evolving concept – and that’s very hard to achieve.

Some additional research into the weather within gas giants was necessary to get some idea of the conditions of the collector part of the station.

Plot outline

With these details decided, I could construct a bullet-point outline of the plot. Something like:

• Doctor arrives, recognizes location as a human space station.
• Gas Giant. BIG Gas Giant.
• Vertical Zero-G shaft.
• Captured by [NPC1]. First hint of troubles aboard.
• Interrogation by Captain. Repair Mission underway. Introduce additional NPCs.
• Repair Crew emergency, Rescue Plan.

….and so on.

A Cast Of Characters: Integrating Introductions

I wanted the crew of the Mining Station to be a very disparate bunch, but all competent and all contributing equally toward the success of the mining operation. There needed to be something to bring together such a motley crew and bind them into a collective whole.

I decided that having them all be co-owners of a business venture would provide the binding factor that I needed, but having equal shares in what was obviously a significant investment didn’t seem entirely realistic. Instead, I had one organizer putting up the seed capital, a few large investors providing funding, and a select crew recruited to fill various operational roles, with loyalty purchased with shares in the profits.

That bound the time to somewhere in the relatively early part of human galactic expansion, a period marked by a certain rustic sci-fi look to the equipment, a dinginess that carried loads of atmosphere, a certain look-and-feel and a limited level of technology that fitted the notion that this was a more advanced prototype of something that humanity had been doing for a while.

I could add a sense of urgency and unwillingness to simply walk away when things started to go wrong by specifying that the resulting corporation had entered into contracts that had not anticipated the difficulties encountered, which were pushing them toward a default which would bring the entire corporate house of cards crashing down.

By the time I had finished outlining the essential tasks needed to set up such an operation, I had a crew of 12. I added an AI and a primitive automaton that would help tie the whole story into whovian continuity for the player (but not for the character) and make interaction with the historical records a roleplaying function and not a die-rolling one – always a preferable outcome if you can arrange it – and which added to the sci-fi sensibility of the whole adventure.

These were arranged into a series of logical encounters and distributed through the early parts of the adventure outline in the same fashion as the example offered a little earlier.

Just-In-Time Infodumps vs. Background Teasers

In particular, I realized that between the societal and corporate background, the physics and chemistry of the planetary system, the nature of the station and its technology, and the problems that needed to be solved and associated mysteries, I had a LOT of information to impart to the player. There are three basic approaches to achieving this:

• A massive pre-game infodump;
• A massive in-game infodump;
• A series of Just-In-Time Infodumps.

The first has the advantage of generating a permanent document that can be referred to whenever necessary. But it’s an extra task to generate such a document, it can create a disconnect between the contents and the adventure, you either give away more than you want to or leave the document inherently incomplete, and it removes the presentation of information as a means to add interest to an in-game event. That’s a lot of downsides, and it’s not even the full list – read A Helping Handout and Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question. The first article is mostly about generating and using handouts and making them fit for purpose; the latter deals more with problems, focusing on “How long should a handout be?”

Of course, you could simply read the handout to the player(s) before play begins, probably boring the socks off them and definitely magnifying the risks of miscommunication exponentially. Worse still, you can interrupt play long enough to do so – that’s option number two on the list. See My Biggest Mistakes: Information Overload in the Zenith-3 Campaign for some notion of how badly this can backfire.

With both the first options carrying potential or inevitable problems embedded within their very natures, my preferred go-to is always the third answer, except on those rare occasions when it doesn’t work for some reason.

It’s best achieved by breaking the information to be imparted into small lumps, and ensuring that these are delivered immediately before they become necessary for player decision-making. That will leave a few sections that need to be presented at some other point in the adventure (because the critical sections need them to provide context) or that can be casually imparted because it’s logical for the information to be accessible at that particular moment.

Keeping each of these blocks tightly integrated and cohesive helps; don’t try and write them as one cohesive narrative block that you then subdivide. It’s often easier to simply outline them in note form until you have the subdivision worked out, then write them into more fulsome text passages in isolation. You can even do them out of order if that helps make them more isolated and discrete.

Spacing The Pacing

The final thing that I do is to run a weather eye over the content that results and assessing the pacing of the results. It may be necessary to add in some filler to spread things apart a little and let the recipients digest what they’ve just been told. This need will usually vary from one player to another and often from one topic to another.

A lot will depend on how much you can pack into NPC exposition (with accompanying interactions), and how much has to be delivered ex-cathedra. Being able to use visuals (however crude) can also pay a big dividend.

That reminds me of an encounter in my Zenith-3 campaign that’s somewhat relevant and a lot of fun to contemplate.

PC tracks down an NPC who was a good guy, but who has exiled himself since. PC plies the NPC with questions about a certain Temporal and Cosmic phenomenon, which the NPC is quite happy to explain, with animated holographic diagrams to make the difficult bits easier to fathom. The PC, who is not a genius nor an expert of the caliber of the NPC, is barely able to keep up, but just barely manages to do so.

NPC then explains his self-confinement – the knowledge that he possesses is inherently too dangerous to be let loose out in the real world. NPC makes clear that he has done terrible things, villainous things, to confine this knowledge, as the lesser of two evils. And now that the PC possesses this knowledge, he, too, can never be permitted to leave. PC duly escapes, with the NPC and former good guy hot on his heels…

Adventure Content

Below is what you get when you spin all of these elements together, transform into narrative, and sprinkle with a bit of characterization and roleplay – the actual adventure as it has been played to date, presented verbatim.

Format

Each section has a title that consists of a number, and a bullet-point summary. The numbers mark logical divisions between parts of the story and hence logical break points for the end of play. So “1”, “1.2”, “1.3”, and “1.4” are all closely connected and play should not break them up (“1.1” is assumed to be incorporated into “1”). If I needed to shuffle things around or drop in a scene, you might sometimes get a “2.2a” or whatever.

Numbers in brackets (0601) instruct me to show a picture of that name at that point in the narrative. Text in (brackets) are pacing instructions to me as GM.

A double asterisk like this ** gives additional GM instructions, especially regarding branch points such as the success or failure of a skill check.

Words bracketed by a pair of =equals signs= indicate emphasis – this was written in a far less sophisticated text editor than Campaign Mastery content, it doesn’t support bold or italic text, so I use this to remind myself of points to emphasize.

That lets me use italics to drop in the occasional comment or side-note directed to the reader. This is material that is not part of the original adventure.

Adventure Content (played so far)

0. Retro / Status

Last time, the Doctor and the Master collaborated to reweave the strands of history broken by the Cybermen. After three days of mindless tedium reporting on the events to the High Council, he was more than ready to escape – anywhere would have to be better than this! Accordingly, rather than show up for a fourth day of repeating the same answers, you and Quasima ‘liberated’ your Tardis and made a tun for it. As you feared and expected, the Master has completely vanished, and no trace can be found of him; he has dug a deep hole somewhere in which to hide.

Perhaps the biggest change engineered during this rewriting was the instigation of a war between Daleks and Cybermen in order to frustrate both enemy races. There were a number of such changes, some the Doctor knew about and some inserted by the Master as surprises. The Domino effects of the consequences mean that the universe will be new and unpredictable for the Doctor as he travels.

In the course of the shattering of time and it’s restructuring at the hands of the two miscreant Gallifreyans, a number of things about time travel that the Doctor thought fixed, solid, and reliable turned out to be none of these things. Fixed points in time, for example, cannot change, but the paths both to and from them =are= mutable, and they =can= be excised from continuity completely. He has also learned more about the Black and White guardians than he thinks is known by any other Time Lord.

And, finally, he learned that everything that he has experienced lately has been induced by the Master in order to ensure that the coalition between them was one of the remaining Fixed Points in time, circumscribing the options of both of them until that outcome became an inevitability – everything from the Oans to the Submarine Captain who thought he had glimpsed the future, from the Pacifist Poet Dalek to the Davros booby trap targeting him specifically.

What was more, the Master had liberally sprinkled the doctor’s timeline with challenges and surprises as a parting gift (and a distraction from his own activities). Since the =fact= of these is fixed, but the =content= of them is not, all that can be definitively said of the Doctor’s past, and his future, is that there is now and =always has been= more than one individual acting to steer troubles and ‘interesting times’ in his direction; to date, he’s been ‘blaming’ it all on his Tardis, but now a second hand has been revealed to muddy the waters.

When you put all this together, the universe is a new and revitalized place for the Doctor to explore, with guaranteed twists and turns that he won’t see coming. For this reason, his itch to explore it has been rejuvenated, making those three days of endless debriefing all the more tortuous.

Even Gallifray itself, and its inhabitants, have been subtly changed as a result of this intervention – much as they might think of themselves as the masters of Time, the reality is that in this instance, Time has mastered them. But the only people to notice this are The Master, Quasima, and the Doctor; everyone else in the Universe has reacted, according to their natures, to whatever stimulus has confronted them in the moment, ensuring an internally-consistent timeline that holds surprises only for the three of them who retained their knowledge of the prior course of history. To everyone else, the world is now how they have always perceived it, even if it was different up until three days ago (on the trio’s personal timelines).

As the Tardis dematerializes, it occurs to the doctor that the entire accidental recruiting of an Azurite would have been one of the items ‘scripted’ into reality by the Master to ensure that the building blocks of reality could be manipulated to undo the Cybercontroller’s master plan. With the great rewrite now behind them, who knows what the future holds on that front, too?

** ensure that XP has been given, and spent.

1. Arrival

The Tardis materializes in a space station docking bay near an instrument panel (0600a). The docking bay currently contains two ‘bugs’ (0601), a small craft designed for local space travel, with space for two more. Gravity feels about 2/3 earth normal and seems artificial in nature. There is a span of almost a thousand years in human history that used this basic technology, so where and when you are remains somewhat uncertain. Of course, you could consult the Tardis’ data systems, but where’s the fun in that?

1.2 location

The docking bay is open at one end and reveals a deep space view that must be reasonably close to the galactic core based on the number of bright stars and the obvious blue-shifting showing that they are accelerating toward this location. There is a source of reflected light of considerable intensity but it’s below the bottom of the portal.

Significant panels are dedicated to impressive greenery; clearly for oxygen recycling, the redundancy of their frequency is a commendable design feature.

The door out of the docking bay is a very innovative six-bladed design with each blade twisting and extending in two halves which then interlock like an aircraft plug door so that it doesn’t matter which side pressure fails on, the integrity of the door is secured (0601a)

This leads to a tube that connects the main spindle of what is clearly a space station of some kind (0601b). The tube contains transparent panels above, below, and to the sides. It’s slightly disorienting because the artificial gravity system only operates at full effectiveness in the opaque parts of the resulting corridor; in the middle of the transparent panels, gravity is only about 1/3 normal and makes you feel like you are both leaning away from the center of the panel, and not, both at the same time.

But the view is nevertheless captivating, revealing a vivid blue gas giant with strange bursts of otherworldly color that erupt in a flash of light that streaks across the surface of the clouds in a direction completely distinct from the line of rotation of the planet (0602).

To your utter astonishment, another gas giant begins to rise behind the first, a mere fraction of it’s size. It’s VERY rare for a gas giant to be large enough to have another such planet as one of it’s satellites, even if the second is at the small end of the size scale, in fact, you’ve never heard of it before. This place should be famous, on all the galactic tourist charts, but the station clearly has nowhere near enough capacity to service a tourism industry.
(pause for reply)

1.3 activity

This brings up the rather obvious question of just what this station is designed to do. The configuration suggests several possibilities. What can be said is that there are very limited signs of activity on board at the moment; whatever it’s purpose, it doesn’t seem to be doing it right now.

1.4 encounter

Past the view-port=passage, there’s another door that leads to an intersection point. What’s remarkable is that the intersection is between the horizontal passage that you have been following and a vertical shaft, which is ringed by trees and a small garden. (0602a). Above and below the intersection, this connects with another tube, running the length of the spine of the station, connecting multiple levels. Normally under zero-gravity, it’s easy to float from one level to another, but there are handrails for use if the station is under acceleration. About half of the station lies upward of the level where the docking port was located, so you can go either up or down.

With most human designs, up is more likely to lead to the command and control sections, down is more likely to lead to the functional parts of the station. Which way do you want to go?
(decision)

*** It doesn’t matter which way he chooses, the scene will still proceed.

As you approach another level, a door into another intersection point dilates and a human exits into the tube, spotting you immediately (0603). “What the– okay, just hold it right there,” he says, pointing some sort of electrical tool toward you. Behind him, you can see some sort of automated greenhouse, which he has probably just been repairing (0603a).

With his other hand, he slaps a panel on the tube wall, activating an intercom. “Captain Quaid, this is Engineer Simpson. I may have an explanation for recent events. I have just discovered two stowaways, one human and one not. Perhaps they have been sabotaging the operation.”

“Bring them to the command deck immediately,” comes the reply. “Aye, sir”, acknowledges the engineer.

Quasima, more confident in his abilities these days, asks the doctor telepathically, “Do you want me to stun him?”
(Pause for reply)

2. Accusation

Captain Quaid (0604) demands that the intruders explain their presence. Just as the Doctor is about to reply, Quasima ‘speaks’ up telepathically.

This emphasizes two points worth noting. First, that these sections are no longer than necessary. There’s virtually nothing to this section – two sentences, and play moves immediately to section 2.2. Second, using images to depict characters means that there’s no need for descriptions.

2.2 Azurite Deception

“You are in error, Captain. We are not the cause of your problems, in fact we are here to investigate and help, if we can.”

2.3 Business Manager

“Did the company send you?” asks another man, who the captain introduces as Business Manager Lanning (0605).

“I’m sure they would have done, had they known we were available”, Quasima replies. “It just so happened that we were in the vicinity.”

2.4 Suspicion

“We detected no vessels approaching,” says a woman, her primary focus of attention the status display panels in front of her (0606)

A male voice, bathed in surprise, erupts from one of the panels at her workstation. “Did someone say we had stowaways?”, to which the woman replies, “Stay focused, Repair Team One. Leave the heavy lifting to the Captain.” “Confirmed, Lorraine” comes the reply.

Glancing at the instruments reveals that the station currently has a four-man repair team currently in the missing bug somewhere outside the station.

“Do you have an answer to the question, gentlemen?”

“Our craft translates directly from location to location, Captain Quaid. We were literally not there for your systems to detect,” replies Quasima.

The captain, clearly unused to telepathic communications and accustomed to accepting his own thoughts without question, swallows this improbability whole.

“Very well, gentlemen, I will take your explanation at face value, at least for now. Nevertheless, it would be prudent to take precautions – you could still be pirates running a glib line on me.” Touching a control on a glowing disk on a pedestal in front of him, angled so as to face him, (0607), he announces, “Bilson and Torch to the command deck immediately. Draw sidearms from the vault en route.”

2.5 Where and When

Doctor, you have the feeling that Quasima has taken matters as far as he could; proceeding would require knowledge and expertise of galactic history that his species doesn’t possess. It’s time for you to take over the conversation and the place to start might be establishing where and when you are, and what’s going on here.
(roleplay)

3. Venturi

Captain: “The gas giant below is named Venturi for the strange winds that create the molecular excitation that produces the dramatic bursts of color on the surface.”

3.2 Venturi Station

Business Manager: “Logically, therefore, this station is named Venturi Station. It exists to mine huge atmospheric clouds of petrochemicals which are the basis of pharmaceuticals.”

3.3 A puzzlement

Doctor, this information allows you to refine and place the contemporary time-frame as the latter days of the Human Alliance, which overlapped with the rise of the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire – sometime in the late 31st or the 32nd century (human dating) or possibly the early 33rd. The Human Alliance was, historically, a group of human colonies that rose to control the Galactic Arm in spite of numerous conflicts with the Daleks. The primary distinction between the Alliance and the Empire that succeeded it was equality and peaceful relations with non-humans, starting with the Silurians and Zygons. The other major distinction was that Earth was not at the epicenter of the Empire.

But that brings up a minor mystery: Neither of these cultures should have anywhere near enough experience with aliens not to blink twice at a creature as unlikely as Quasima – every other alien they knew of was either an enemy or in the thrall of an enemy.
(roleplay)

3.4 Solution

“You have been seriously misinformed, Doctor,” replies the captain in a puzzled tone. “There are more than 130 species represented in our Confederation, and the Zygons were amongst the first, several hundred years ago.”

Abruptly, Doctor, you realize what has happened – when the Master triggered war between Cybermen and the Daleks, he wasn’t just handicapping the Cybermen, he was supplying a serious check on Dalek expansion. That would have delayed the Dalek expansion, giving many of races they had wiped out in his original history more time to expand and strengthen, which in turn further delayed Dalek expansion, giving still more time to those more distant from Skaro.

Several would have become space-fairing races during that interval. Which in turn means that several human colonies would never have happened, as other species got to them first.

The domino effect of that one change has transformed the Human Alliance from an intrinsically human political alliance to a multicultural multi-species assemblage, and that infusion of new blood would have transformed the Alliance of the 32nd century from a time of decadence to a far more politically vibrant time.

The captain continues “This crew is somewhat unusual, Doctor, in that everyone visually appears to be Human. They aren’t, but there are no obvious non-humans represented, purely by chance.”

3.5 A Catalog of strange events

Curiosity satisfied on that front, the conversation returns to the current situation. A strange storm built up, proceeding against the prevailing winds of Venturi, until it enveloped the collection mechanism suspended 1000km beneath the station. That was two weeks ago. Immediately after the storm dissipated, an intense wind damaged the collector mechanism.

It was repaired easily enough, but the same thing has happened four more times since. There were no recorded examples of such atmospheric disruptions prior to the establishment of the mining station. If it were a new technology, they might suspect that their designs had overlooked something, but it’s not; gas giant mining has been a practice for centuries.

Oh, there have been a few refinements to the process over the years; Venturi Station uses a preliminary refinement process to discard the compounds they have no interest in, and concentrate the remainder, allowing for more efficient transfer up to the primary extraction mechanism at the base of the station. But nothing that could explain these atmospheric phenomena.

Early suspicions were that their efforts were being sabotaged by a pro-human terrorist group, the “Sons Of Earth”, but no link to the group could be found amongst the crew, and no-one could think of a way for a lone crewman to commit sabotage so often. So they have been forced to return to the theory of natural phenomena.

3.6 Collector Malfunctions

The most recent such collector malfunction was a few hours ago, and there is a four-man repair crew now approaching the damaged collector to do a job that should be needed once every five years or so, for the fourth time in a fortnight.

So, what’s your opinion? What’s going on here?
(reply)

As you answer the captain, two crewmen arrive (0608). The Captain turns to them and orders, “These people heard we were in trouble and have come to see if they can help. I want you two to watch them like hawks, but don’t get in their way. If they find anything you think I should know, report back to me. Don’t let them take anything apart without my authorization, but other than that, anything goes – I’m giving them temporary top-level access. Understood?”

He then makes introductions. “Doctor, these are technicians Bilson and Torch. They normally keep the non-industrial tech running around here, and help out with the industrial side of things from time to time, so they know this place better than just about anyone else, so they can take you wherever you want to go and show you anything you want to see.”
(reply)

The pair are eyeing Quasima with openly fascinated expressions.
(roleplay)

4. Repair Crew

The repair crew dock with the collector while Bilson and Torch give you a quick rundown on how the station operates.

• Triple-redundant power supplies – electromagnetic induction, solar panels, and a fusion generator at the bottom of the spindle. Any one of them can power the station, any two of them can power the industrial processes. There are also battery backups good for 72 hours.
• Loops sweep through the clouds of gas while an electrical current runs through the loops. This traps compounds which can be polarized electrically or magnetized in a surface field stretching across the face of the field like a dust particle on a soap bubble, while leaving others, like Methane and Ammonia, behind.
• Physical screening then removes any material with too low a molecular weight to be of value, returning it to the clouds. Tritium is also accumulated to power the fusion reactor.
• Cryogenic compression is then applied to condense the material from its initial slush-like state into something that’s a solid at the atmospheric pressures within the Gas Giant.
• That pressure is is slowly reduced to a level of 1.2 standard atmospheres. This causes some substances to sublimate directly into gas, and permits others to melt out of the solid and be drawn off. This pre-processing splits the chemicals up into six different categories of compound. Three of those categories are deemed worthless, so they are raised to boiling boiled and expelled. Only the three categories of interest are then re-compressed, granulated, packed into cryogenic storage containers, and shipped up the tether to the station itself via magnetic induction.
• Various physical and chemical processes are then used in a station processing facility dedicated to handling that category of compound to separate the constituents and refine the resulting chemical compounds. There is a separate processing facility and a separate process for each of the three classes of organic compound.
• At full production, 100 tons of atmosphere can be processed daily, yielding 3-5 tons of distillates. When compressed, these become a cylinder 10m x 1m wrapped in steel. External motors are added and the cylinders launched into a stable parking orbit at the L2 point between the Gas Giants. Cargo vessels are supposed to call to collect these once a month.
• There are twelve crew aboard the station, normally, thirteen if you count Dr Cord’s Synth, fourteen if you also include Duncan, the AI that translates higher-order instructions into specifics and relays those commands to the relevant subsystems on board.

At the same time, the routine conversation of the Work crew can be heard over a number of hidden loudspeakers; the repairs seem to be going well, so far. The damage described suggests that great force was encountered, multiplied several-fold by a focal point. This breached the outer walls of the collector, shearing lines, severing wiring, shattering a number of pressure vessels, and so on; some of the parts are repairable, some have been reduced to scrap, and some have been lost within the atmosphere of Venturi. It’s like someone hit an alarm clock with a baseball bat. They estimate that it will be at least 10 work-shifts of repairs before the collector is operational again.

Business Manager Lanning looks like he is going to be physically sick at hearing this assessment. He reminds Captain Quaid that the first transport vessel is due to arrive in sixteen days, and if there isn’t a lot more to show for the effort, this facility will be declared bankrupt less than a week later. Is it possible to prioritize the A-Prime process flow, that’s the most valuable, and would at least buy them time to get the whole facility operational again?

The Captain seems to regard this as a reasonable proposition, but wants the repair crew’s assessment; they are the ones with eyeballs on the damage. Lorraine passes the request for an evaluation of the strategy on to the repair crew.

It’s becoming clear how the station operates. Lanning acts as an accountant and advisor to the Captain, who makes the big decisions while maintaining an overview of the situation and environment. Lorraine acts as the interface between the repair mission and the captain, monitors the health of the personnel, and has operational command to implement the Captain’s orders. In many ways, it’s an evolution of the practices he has observed aboard a 20th century submarine.

It should be noticed that this section conveys most of the essential information about the Gas Giant, Venturi, but leaves off some details for later exposition.

4.2 Environmental Anomaly

A beeping sound accompanied by a flashing light commences at the captain’s control hub. Pressing a control, he silences the alarm, and warns Lorraine, “Duncan is detecting a sudden rise in electrical activity nearby, another storm may be on the way. Get the repair crew out of there, ASAP.!”
(reaction)

Lorraine immediately begins warning the repair crew, who start returning to the bug. This is obviously not happening as fast as she would like; after her third reminder to ‘hurry’ to the repair crew, they reply “we’re going as fast as is safe, Lorraine. Remember, it’s 140°C, 8 atmospheres of pressure, and winds of 600 km/h on a calm day down here!”

4.3 Death Below?

Suddenly, all Lorraine’s instruments go haywire, multiple alarms sound, and the life-signs monitors for three of the repair crew go dark. The fourth remains lit up. “Morgan here, Lorraine. Everything’s electrified, must be 1000 Amps or more. The others were all in contact with a metallic surface, their instrument packs are fried and they aren’t moving. I’m about to contact the surface too, I can’t stop myself…”

“Hang tight, Morgan, if you can hear me. Help is on the way!”

Captain Quaid states, “Even with hotshot pilot Vanders at the controls, it will still take the best part of an hour to get there, Doctor. If their environment suits have been compromised, the repair crew will be long dead by then. The blue alien who accompanies you said that your vessel can transit directly from one place to another – can you get to them faster?”
(roleplay)

Quasima can pilot the Tardis, but with 4 people to rescue, the Doctor will need four physical bodies (including his own) to retrieve them. Bilson and Torch make two, the Doctor makes three, he will need one more.

Before he knows what is happening, Simpson is volunteered to be the fourth rescuer.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that while each of the NPCs has been given a specific personality, I don’t come out and announce that profile. Nevertheless, a number of subtle cues have been deliberately buried in the narrative – the example in this case is “Simpson is volunteered” implying a hesitation. It doesn’t announce that he’s a coward, it just demonstrates that he’s not especially brave.

This didn’t seem to affect him when he was first confronting the PC and his NPC companion, which implies that confronting a couple of potentially armed and dangerous saboteurs was less dangerous than the planet below. The combination of the two passages adds nuance to the character while implying that the situation is more dangerous than it might initially appear.

4.4 Rescue

It’s going to be impossible to tell which of the repair crew are alive but unconscious and which if any are dead, without opening their suits, which would kill them instantly. The only solution is to retrieve all four and take them to the station infirmary for examination. (0609)

Bilson points out that it’s not going to be that simple. Everyone, including the rescuers, will need to wear space suits rated to withstand the enormous atmospheric pressures (0610, ignore the background). These weigh almost 2500kg apiece, and while they have muscle-amplification technology, those are just enough to enable someone to maneuver in the difficult environment. It will take all four of them to retrieve the repair party one member at a time.
(response)

Quasima suggests (if the Dr doesn’t think of it) the gravitic compensators that he intended to use on the Fracture Of Harmony created by the Oans (0611) – if the Dr has four of them, the four rescuers should be able to handle one victim apiece, simultaniously..

(roleplay the rescue. There is no sign of the bug that transported the repair crew to the collector.)

5. Infirmary

Dr Kord and his Synth are standing by when you re-materialize in the infirmary (0612). A ‘Synth’ is a synthetic person, somewhere between an android and a robot, treated as as the latter. Although the doctor has never met any, they are an artificial replacement for the Ood, which a future incarnation will liberate from servitude. Equipped with a very limited AI that does not approach modern standards of sentience, they make good personal assistants, servants, and skilled labor; Dr Kord is a leading researcher in the biomechanical design and construction of better Synths. The Doctor doesn’t know why they went out of style, but suspects that the forthcoming Cybermen War may sour the Human Alliance on artificial pseudo-life.

The station infirmary consists of a central hub connected to the main spindle, with four small ER-style compartments radiating off the hub. These are more brightly lit than most of the station, probably a good thing when it comes to making life-or-death medical decisions (0613). A fifth compartment contains a dispensary, and a sixth, a small surgical bay. If all four members of the repair crew have survived, it will be at capacity. You don’t think that it’s been designed to cope with anything major; small industrial accidents and routine medical needs, but not much more.

Each of the rescuers is carried to one of the infirmary beds, and the gravitic compensators deactivated. The beds abruptly groan under the sudden load. Bilson, Torch, and Simpson begin removing the components of the spacesuits while Dr Kord does likewise to the patient carried in by the Doctor.

Kord pauses for a moment to look at you. “Doctor, eh? Of Medicine?”
(reply, assume in the negative)

“Then would you please get yourself out of the way while I attempt to save this man.”
(response).

Sadly, it soon becomes clear that crewmen Leader and Chapp have not survived. Although their suits are insulated against the normal electrical currents to which they might be exposed, nothing short of not being there at the time could protect one against discharges of the power observed at the collector.

By the time this has been established, Captain Quaid has arrived. Upon being informed of the repair crew’s condition, he turns toward a blank wall. “Access Duncan, authorization Quaid Alpha Two Four.”

A face forms from a myriad of data displays (0614). “Duncan Accessed. Voice-print confirmed. Hello again, Captain Quaid; what can I do for you today?”

“Observed facts: Electrical phenomenon on planet Venturi causing electrification of the collector mechanism. Four crewmen in appropriate pressure suits are exposed. Two survive, injured; two do not. Analyze and theorize.”

“Working on it, Captain.

“1% of all lightning strikes on earth exceed 200,000 Amps and 1% of those achieve the ‘worst case maximum’ of more than 350kA. Lightning on Jupiter is up to 1000 times more intense than this – the 1% of 1% value will be in excess of 200MegaAmps, or 94% of the typical annual power output of the largest nuclear reactor in US as of 2022.

“Venturi is a super-Jupiter that comes close to being a hot Jupiter. Some of its cloud layers reach temperatures of 2400 degrees centigrade, ripping molecules apart into plasma, which constantly stream toward the night side of the planet, where they recombine into new molecules and compounds. But outside these two extremes are bands of greater stability through which these raw atoms stream, energizing local weather patterns; consequently, lightning on Venturi is as much as 1000 times more intense even than a standard Jupiter. 200 BILLION Amps.

“Fortunately, while intense, the bolts didn’t strike the workers directly, they just electrified the metallic surfaces; and, since like charges repel, this is a self-limiting phenomenon. At most, 0.02% of the electrical potential of the lightning strikes would have found it’s way into contact with the crew, or about 40 Million Amps. Their suits would have dissipated a lot of this, surrounding parts of the station, even more; and the duration would have measured in fractions of a second, perhaps even milliseconds. Actual exposure would have been 200-2000Amps.

“The duration becomes important; 200 Amps for a second is more than enough to disrupt human neural activity, triggering heart attacks and electrocution; 200 Amps for a millisecond would rarely be fatal, but 2000Amps for that length of time would be just as lethal.

“All of which explains why two of the four could survive, and two not. But there is a wide scope between the state of being healthy (for a human) and being dead, and the rescued crew currently occupy different positions on this spectrum.”

Doctor, you find this analysis fairly compelling. There have been a number of unverified logical leaps along the way, and some unproven speculation, but both are justified by the fact that the resulting prediction matches and explains the observed outcome.

Another small infodump from the additional research.

“Supplemental Query, Duncan. Positing the assumptions and observations which yield the observed outcome, is it possible for some form of additional protection to be added to such pressure suits sufficient to leave a future incident survivable to a degree defined as an acceptable risk by standard regulations and the Venturi Corporation’s established Charter?”

“Working. An additional layer of electrical insulation should be applied to the external surfaces of all metallic elements of the suit. Additional metallic suit elements should be designed and incorporated that will flash into vapor upon encountering 500Amps of electrical current through the suit; these should consist of a platinum-osmium compound that will carry away some of the excess charge as static electricity. Survivability would be 99 and four 9s percent, provided that the theoretical exposure would not exceed that assumed for this event.”

“Thank you, Duncan. Return to Sleep. All right, Simpson, you heard the AI! Get to work – the sooner we can safeguard against a repetition of this outcome, the sooner I can send another repair crew down there. Don’t cut corners, you’ll be leading that crew. The systems down there may have fared no better than our people in the wake of that electrical discharge, and ensuring that we remain operational is your responsibility.”

“Understood, Captain,” replies the engineer.

5.2 The Impossible

Meanwhile, Kord and his “nurse” have been hooking up all sorts of diagnostic sensors medical equipment to the two survivors. The Captain’s inquiry of the AI, Duncan, gave him time to take his readings and perform a diagnosis of their conditions.

“Report, Doctor,” orders the Captain, then realizes that this could be confusing, and adds “This one,” (pointing at Kord), “Not that one!”

Kord replies, “Morgan is going to be all right, but needs to be monitored for at least 24 hours. I conjecture that she took less of a hit than the others, and maybe Zygons are more resistant to electrical effects. I’ll induce regression if I have to, but at the moment don’t think it will be necessary. Our visitors and their strange blue box craft undoubtedly saved her life.

“Jafyrd is in far worse condition. From his readouts, it’s a miracle that he survived – in fact, half of them indicate that he didn’t and all we have here is a still-warm corpse. But several of the readouts make no sense at all. His heart-rate is 220 beats per minute, his internal temperature is an unsurvivable 120°C, his synapses are lit up like a Christmas tree, and it looks like he has somehow internalized the electrical current into his nerve sheaths. Under those conditions, his heart should not be beating at all, and he should not be able to breathe. He has third-degree burns to 70% of his body, and that could well kill him in the end; it should have already melted his lungs, but maybe he got lucky and didn’t inhale the super-heated gasses. His tissues appear to have been suffused in methane, at levels more than toxic enough to have killed him by now. He’s not dead, but he should be, and I can’t explain why he’s not. It’s doubtful he’ll ever regain consciousness.”

“Is he in pain, Doctor? If so, given that prognosis, you may need to invoke the Catastrophic Mortality provisions and grant him a peaceful death.”

“With that much synaptic activity, he should be unable to distinguish pain from any other sensation, so while it might come to that, I see no urgent need. If you’ll all get out of here, I need to examine him far more closely, and review his recorded Last Wishes.”

Notice that I’ve trickled in a little information about the society of this era – formally-recorded Last Wishes (perhaps only for those in dangerous occupations) and ‘Catastrophic Mortality provisions’ within the law that protect individuals from extreme pain in situations without reasonable medical hope, with implied restrictions on the application of that law.

“Very well, Doctor Kord. Keep me advised.”

“Of course, Captain.”

5.3 Meet The Pilot

With everyone except the medical personnel and their patients turfed out of the infirmary, Bilson and Torch have rejoined the Doctor. “If Jafyrd has a chance, it’s because of you, Doctor. And it sounds like you’ve definitely saved Morgan. That won’t be forgotten, and it earns you a large helping of goodwill. So, where do you want to go now, and what do you want to see?”

Before you can reply, Torch suggests, “Tell you what – you’ve met everyone aboard except one, the chief Pilot for Venturi Station, Vanders. He’s either going to be eating or playing his damned flight sim games in his quarters – why don’t we start there, and offer to join him for lunch?”
(response)

Venturi Station Pilot Vanders is indeed in his quarters, with the lights out, playing some sort of dogfight-in-space simulation game (0615). “Doctor, Eh? Touchy about the qualification, are we? “Cause that’s the only reason I know to insist on using the a alone as a name. It doesn’t even have to be the title that someone’s insisting on. I once knew a girl who insisted on being referred to as Princess, even though she wasn’t one. Turns out she was trying to hide the fact that she’d had plastic surgery, and was still self-conscious about the way she used to look and the nicknames others had used for her because of it.”
(reply)

Garrulous and opinionated, you conclude, with the cockiness that tends to accompany piloting duties; they grow so confident in their own abilities if they are any good that they tend to think that their judgment supersedes most of the social rules that are there for other, lesser, people.

Bilson and Torch have no trouble persuading Vanders to join them for lunch, but you get the impression that you are at least half the interest. Strangers must be few and far between in an isolated environment like this, and a highly-strung pilot type The commissary is another dark and gloomy environment with most of the light focused on another wall of plants, this one featuring a design in flowers. (0616)

Noticing your attention, Bilson comments, “Green things are supposed to help keep us in the right head-space.”

Food is dispensed in the form of colored cubes from vending machines. The crew simply wave an arm over a receptor on the machine and the price is deducted from their earnings through a small implant. Of course, neither you nor (obviously) Quasima have such implants. Not that this matters to Quasima, because he “eats” electricity and other radiations directly.

“Doctor, if you wish sustenance, I could attempt to reprogram the device,” offers Quasima.
(reply)

Torch has realized the problem, and made his way to an intercom. “Torch to Captain Quaid, a minor problem Captain. We’re in the commissary, and our guests don’t have implanted credit chips, so they can’t order anything.”

“Well, that won’t do,” replies the Captain. “They’re working to help us, and that means they are earning credits. I guess they’ll have to go on the corporate account – we have a small number of external credit chips to use as expense accounts when VIPs visit. I think Lorraine is just about to head down to the commissary for lunch, I’ll have her deliver the necessary. Good catch, Torch. Lanning, we had better assign them some quarters while we’re at it.” A distant reply can be heard, “Deck 3, berths 3 and 4?” “Fine,” replies the Captain. “I guess we’re going to be neighbors, Doctor. When you’ve finished lunch, come backup to Ops and we’ll discuss next moves. I suspect that you’ll want to look over logs and old sensor readings, and I’ll have to instruct you on how to access them through Duncan.”
(reply)

A few minutes later, you are the proud holder of an expense account with the Venturi Corporation. Lorraine tells you not to worry about overusing it, the Captain drained it of all but the credits earned so far and a small bonus for field sign-up and for using your personal craft to rescue four station personnel.
(reply)

Most of the cubes are labeled with traditional earth dishes, Doctor; you’ve had almost all of them before. Some you liked, and some you didn’t. What are you ordering?
(reply)

When your cubes arrive, you are astonished to discover that not only do they seem to provide adequate nutrition (according to the very detailed label), but they have the flavor of what they purport to be, and somehow also provide the sensation of consuming what they purport to be.

Vanders seems to have been expecting your reaction; he explains “It’s something new, Doctor. Memory RNA encapsulated in a gel that sublimates in the mouth and travels to the cortex via the nasal system – replays the memory of eating something, if you’ve ever had it before, or inserts the memory if it’s not already there. It was supposed to be a way of giving people quick skill-sets, but it never worked very well in that capacity. Sure makes lunchtime more enjoyable though, and the company is cleaning up.

That’s what we’re doing out here – gathering the raw materials to meet the rising demand. If we succeed, we’ll all become very rich; if we don’t, we’ll all become very poor. This station is a big investment for all of us.”
(reply)

The final pieces of the background to the situation get delivered in this sequence. So it’s time to get the action underway.

5.4 Dr Investigates

Captain Quaid ‘introduces’ the Doctor to Duncan and shows him how to access the various documentation. Having decided that you aren’t a threat, he returns Bilson to his regular duties as assistant to the engineer, Simpson, but leaves Torch with you as a liaison.

(roleplay until the Dr decides he doesn’t know what he’s looking for, so he’s not going to be sure if he’s found it or not. But he does get the chance to familiarize himself with the station layout and the technology it uses).

Also a drop point for extra info about the Venturi system if I think it’s necessary, and it gives the character a chance at a die roll that he’s almost certain to succeed at, which reinforces the ‘you don’t know what you are looking for yet, so you don’t find it’ message.

5.6 The Vanishing

While he’s doing so, the Captain and Lorraine discuss the rostering of a second repair crew. Simpson, Bilson, Vanders, and the Synth, at least until Morgan is fit enough to resume duties. They seem uncertain as to whether two two-man teams working separate shifts are safer and more productive than a single four-man shift working a single shift; the loss of Jafyrd, Leader, and Chapp have clearly created a resources deficit.

You are contemplating whether or not there is anything to gain from volunteering either yourself and/or Quasima, permitting two teams of three, when the discussion is interrupted by a voice from the intercom.

“Captain, it’s Morgan.”

“Morgan – what are you doing out of bed? Kord wants you to rest for at least 24 hours, that was quite a jolt you took.”

“I have to know, first, Captain – Did the others make it?”

“I can understand that, Morgan. Kord probably won’t like my telling you, but I’d want to know, too. I’m afraid Leader and Chapp didn’t survive, and it seems only a matter of time until Jafyrd checks out, too.”

“Where is he, Captain?”

“What do you mean, ‘Where is he?’ – he’s in the Infirmary Pod right next to yours.”

“Not any more, Captain – I’m all alone in here….”

It’s worth noting that the adventure was somewhat restructured on-the-fly to turn this into the cliffhanger even though sections 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9 still remain.

Fantasy Usage: General Principles

Let’s talk about Fantasy application of the many hints and tips and lessons offered up in this two-part series. You may have researched the Fall Of Rome and want to implement an Orcish version of the invasion of the Goths, for example. Exactly the same principles apply.

Or perhaps you have compiled an entirely new vision of Elvish Society that you want the players to discover, the first time that they travel into Elvish territory. Same thing – you have research, but need to translate it into plot sequences that reveal the differences, without any of them seeming forced, and without colossal Infodumps.

The basic approach of doing research and integrating the results apply, no matter what the genre of game. Fantasy campaigns may let you stretch a point of logic just a little farther, and so be just a little easier than an SF campaign, but the basics remain the same.

Fantasy Usage: Many Planes of Cosmological Grit

But that’s all bonus. What I want to dangle in front of you is a new way of perceiving the elemental planes. Ignore the basic problem of extreme gravity, and you can use the various forms of gas giant as foundations for the elemental planes of air (Jupiters), water (Neptunes), Earth (Rocky planets), and fire (Hot Jupiters). You can use a lot of artistic license and metaphor, but the basic concepts survive translation, and yield conceptual descriptions of the planes and what happens within them that are quite different.

Wrap-up: Where No Writer Has Gone Before

I’m going to close this article out with a few facts that have come from research for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that might also be useful to Fantasy GMs. These will be presented as a series of bald-faced facts.

Naismith’s Law is used to plan hiking expeditions, and states that a healthy adult can cover 5km of level ground per hour, and you should add 1 hour for every 600m of uphill hiking (10 min for 100m), twice this for exceptionally steep sections (20 min for 100m). Some sources suggest half this for steep downhill sections, so 5 min for 100m. Note that these are ground distances, not elevation changes. A right-angled triangle with elevation change for one vertical side, and map distance on the horizontal side of the right angle, and the basic formula of c^2 = a^2 + b^2 gives you the actual distance to be covered.

Experienced Hikers should rest for 5 min every hour, minimum. Most take those breaks and an additional 5 minutes before every difficult or ascending section.

Horse speed in mountains = 7 mph and up to 16mph on stretches of smooth ground.

Normal horse Gaits: Walk. 4.3 mph (7 kph) ; Trot. 8.1 mph (13 kph) ; Canter. 10-17 mph (16-27 kph) ; Gallop. 25-30 mph (40-48 kph), all on firm level ground.

Most horses will want a 5 minute break before and after each difficult or long ascent but those accustomed to the terrain, at the mountain speeds given above, should otherwise be fine ridden non-stop provided they can rest for at least 8 hours overnight and are well-fed and watered.

In jungle settings where a path has to be cleared, expect a maximum speed of 2.2 mph.

10m of standard rope weighs about 3 kg, most people should carry at least 5kg of rope. Especially strong party members should carry more.

Rope weighs 3 to 5 times as much wet as it does dry.

It is often more practical to abandon wet rope than to carry it and attempt to dry it out.

Vines have 1/3 the strength of rope but do not increase in weight when wet. They lose half this strength if they dry out. 10-20m of vine can be very handy but should be replaced every second day, minimum, depending on availability.

Each male will eat at least 1kg of food per day. Foraging/Hunting may be possible but will take up time.

Each female will eat at least 0.7kg of food per day. Foraging/Hunting may be possible but will take up time.

The food limits given are the minimums for survival. Twice as much or more is needed for good health – but this gets very heavy, very quickly.

Each person requires 1 liter (1 kg) of water per hour of exertion, in jungle heat = 11kg per day plus the weight of containers.

Water is the chief limiting factor – it’s indispensable and heavy.

Progress can be defined in terms of the water load being carried – very slow (75-100% load), slow (50-75% load), half normal speed (25-50% load), normal maximum speed (which may be only 2.2 mph as stated above) at <25% load.

The only thing worse that having too much water is running out of water. As soon as you hit the final speed rating, it’s time to try and replenish your water supplies – which drops you back into a slower pace due to the heavier load.

Horses can carry 720kg max load. They require 14kg of dry food per day, they will naturally supplement this with forage. They have a greater tolerance for lush greenery than mules but can develop colic if they overindulge. They can only go two days without water but can go almost a month without food. Every 2 1/2 days without food enables them to carry 1 extra day’s water.

Mules can carry about 320 kg max load. They need 6 kg / day of dry fodder and 18 kg per day of water. Eating food that is too lush and green makes them sick with something called laminitis which can be lethal. They have a much higher tolerance for low feed levels than horses, and can work for up to 2 weeks on virtually no feed. Their digestive processes actually grow more efficient under such conditions to better utilize the available feed.

When fully laden, anything over 7 1/2 miles a day is good going. As the load drops, this will improve – until you refill the load with more water.

Horses are less desirable than mules because they carry half as much and have higher dietary needs, so they can’t travel as far on a given weight of supplies.

Being suitably equipped and refilling only to 60% or so when supplies drop below that will carry you a lot further, a lot faster, than waiting until supplies drop to near-zero and then refilling to capacity. But the latter gives more margin of safety.

Have fun!

One of the essential skills that has to be in every GM’s toolkit is the ability to interleave research into subjects that they, and their players, know nothing about into the stories that they craft for their campaigns.

Way back in September 2014, I produced an abbreviated list of subjects that a GM arguably had to at least seem to be expert in, as part of The Expert In Everything?.

In 2016, I followed up with Lightning Research: Maximum Answers in Minimum Time, in which I describe the research techniques that I employ in order to be able to pull off that sleight-of-hand.

It’s not something that comes up every weekend, and quite often it’s fairly superficial, but recently I’ve had a couple of more intense such sessions.

I can’t really talk about one of them, because the adventure in question is still unfinished, and is months away from actually being played (in the Adventurer’s Club campaign), and I can’t talk about the second, because it would give too much away about the Adventurer’s Club adventure that’s only just started, but the third example is from the Doctor Who campaign, which lives rather closer to the margins. The relevant part of that adventure was played yesterday (as I write this), and written almost completely in the 48 hours prior, so it’s the most fresh example of the three, to boot.

What’s more, the research in question is inherently interesting (at least in my opinion), and that made choosing this topic an easy decision.

But on top of all that, a chance discovery (on my part) of a couple of tangentially-relevant stories provides an extra bonus that cemented the choice.

Here’s what I’ve mapped out for this article, a table of contents if you will.

1. A Golden Period
2. Planetary Types
   1. Classification Structure
   2. Terrestrial Planets
      • Carbon Planet
      • Coreless Planet
      • Desert Planet
      • Dwarf Planet
      • Ice Planet
      • Iron Planet
      • Lava Planet
      • Ocean World
      • Super-Earth
      • Mega-Earth
      • Sub-Earth
      • Ultra-short period planets
   3. Gaseous Planets
      • Controversy: When Is A Brown Dwarf Not A Brown Dwarf?
      • Gas Giant
      • Hot Jupiter
      • Super-Jupiter
      • Super-Puff
      • Eccentric Jupiter
      • Puffy Planets
      • Helium Planet
      • Gas dwarf (aka Mini-Jupiter)
      • Ice Giants
      • Mini-Ice Giant (aka Mini-Neptune)
      • Hot Neptune
      • Super-Neptune
      • Ultra-Hot Neptune
   4. Selected Other Types Of Planet
   • Blanet
   • Cthonian Planet
   • Circumbinary Planet
   • Circumtriple Planet
   • Disrupted Planet
   • Double Planet
   • Ecumenopolis
   • Mesoplanet
   • Eyeball Planet
   • Pulsar Planet
   • Sub-brown Dwarf
   • Sub-Neptune
   • Toroidal Planet
   • Ultra-short Period Planet (USP)
   • Superhabitable Planet
3. Unusual Exoplanets List
4. Nearby Habitable Systems
5. List Of Named Exoplanets
6. The State Of Cosmological Texts
7. Controversy: Universal Expansion

 
That’s as far as I got in this article, so in part 2, there will be:

8. Dr Who: Venturi Station
   1. The Needs Of Story
   2. Dr Who: Defining Venturi
   3. Further Research
   4. Plot outline
   5. A Cast Of Characters: Integrating Introductions
   6. Just-In-Time Infodumps vs. Background Teasers
   7. Spacing The Pacing
   8. Adventure Content
9. Fantasy: Many Planes of Cosmological Grit

So this is, on the face of it, going to be an absolutely huge article. But by being brief, I have hopes that it can be completed and published on schedule.

Misplaced hopes, as it turns out – though I got a huge amount done, it wasn’t complete, as you can see from the above.

A Golden Period

We are living in a golden age in terms of advancing our cosmological knowledge. Never before have we learned so much about the universe we inhabit in such a short period of time.

The first exoplanet was detected in 1988, but that one (Gamma Cephei Ab) wasn’t confirmed until 2002. Just four years after that first detection, in 1992, exoplanets were confirmed around PSR B 1257+12 (which is a mouthful! This is a millisecond pulsar located in the constellation Virgo, believe it or not! And just three years after that, the first confirmed exoplanet around a normal star was found, 51 Pegasi b, currently named Dimidium.

As of 1 May, 2022 (just two weeks ago), there have been 5017 confirmed exoplanets discovered in 3,694 planetary systems, 822 of which have more than one planet. On top of that, there are 6587 detections from three mission still awaiting confirmation.

That’s absolutely massive – potentially, 11,600 exoplanets in 30 years, or an average of about 387 a year. More than one a day, on average!! Even if we assume that none of those unconfirmed contenders turn out to be real (something that I doubt), that’s still more than 167 a year, or about one every 2 days, 4 hours.

Arguably, though, it’s not the fact of their existence that is the headline news these days, it’s what has been determined about their natures, something we have been getting better at, and that will take a quantum leap forward once the Webb Space Telescope becomes fully operational, any day now.

Any science-fiction property – be it a game, campaign, adventure, novel, short story, TV series, or a movie – that predates 1992 and even hints at something to do with space is at a near-certainty of being out out-of-date, and that risk remains significant even if it was first played/published/broadcast just yesterday.

This presents both a huge demand on GMs as well as a huge opportunity. To make your game or game product cutting edge, all it needs to be is up to date with respect to the general classification and frequency of occurrence of exoplanet types, or to contain some good reasons for having differing answers. That’s the opportunity. The responsibility comes with avoiding the loss of credibility that comes from not being up-to-date.

Talk about a risk-vs-reward ratio…

So, this article will look to lay some foundations for a GM to at least pretend to know more than he does on the subject.

Much of it will be mercilessly cribbed from Wikipedia, which is an excellent resource for these known-fact information compilations, and which is kept relentlessly up-to-date by enthusiastic planet-watchers and astronomy buffs.

Planetary Types

Classification Structure

Planets are, these days, generally divided into three main types, sometimes dubbed “Rocky”, “Gaseous”, and “Unusual”. Astronomers generally use “Terrestrial” for the first and “Other” for the last, but – for the most part – these definitions are too broad for usage these days.

Terrestrial Planets

These are planets composed mostly of silicates, rocks, and metals. The four innermost planets of our solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) all qualify.

There are several sub-types. Because this information wasn’t actually needed for my Dr Who adventure, I did very little research on them, in fact I’ve had to supplement my research for this article.

• Carbon Planet – a (theoretical) type of planet that contains more carbon than oxygen. Some possible examples have been found but their nature has not been confirmed.
• Coreless Planet – A coreless planet is a theoretical type that has no metallic core (and hence, no magnetic field). They are likely to be found in cooler regions (cosmically speaking) and further from the star.
• Desert Planet – a theoretical type of planet with a surface similar to Earth’s hot deserts. Studies suggest that Desert Planets have a broader habitable zone than ocean planets.
• Dwarf Planet – Probably the most famous non-Earthlike category, thanks to the controversy over the reclassification of Pluto. a Dwarf Planet is clearly a world (defined as possessing sufficient gravity to force it into a spherical shape) in solar orbit. The controversy stemmed from a later exclusion of Dwarf Planets from the list of Planets – while, ironically, retaining the term in the category title. It’s currently estimated that there are from 5 to 120 such bodies in our solar system, including Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Orcus, and Salacia). And the observant will note that there are already more than 5 names on that list!
• Ice Planet – These planets have a surface of frozen volatiles such as water, ammonia, and methane. They may possess liquid oceans beneath an ice layer. In our solar system, the only known examples are planet-sized moons like Ganymede and Titan, but it is estimated that they will be common worlds in the Milky Way.
• Iron Planet – If a Coreless Planet is one without an earth-like metallic core, Iron Planets are the opposite, planets that have little or nothing but planetary cores. Mercury is the largest example in our solar system, but it is expected that there will be larger versions commonly in existence because Iron is one of the most abundant substances in the universe.
• Lava Planet – Terrestrial planets with a surface mostly or entirely covered by molten lava. There are several developmental paths that could lead to such planets – newborn planets, planets who have recently undergone a collision event, or a planet that orbits very close to the surface of its star. There have been possible Lava Planets found in at least three solar systems, but there are no examples in our solar system.
• Ocean World – planets containing a substantial amount of water either as a surface hydrosphere or subsurface ocean. There are no prizes for guessing that the Earth is the most famous example. The term is sometimes used to refer to hypothetical planetary bodies with oceans of liquid other than water – ammonia (Titan) or Hydrocarbons (Titan again!). Theoretical studies by NASA have recently (2020) found that exoplanets with oceans are going to be far more common than was previously expected. Since water is a high-probability foundation for the development of life, this suggests that life may also be more common than was thought likely even after the confirmed discovery of exoplanets.
• Super-Earth – A super-earth is a terrestrial ocean exoplanet with a mass of 5-10 earths. The term, which is not intended to carry implications regarding surface conditions, was coined to fill the gap between earth-like Ocean Worlds and Mega-earths. The term “gas dwarf” is sometimes used to describe planets at the upper end of the size scale, though Mini-Neptune is more commonly employed. There is some controversy over whether or not such planets should be considered Terrestrial or Gas Giants; they bridge the gap between those classifications.
• Mega-Earth – The term is not yet routinely accepted; it was used to describe Kepler-10c when that world was first discovered to be a Neptune-mass planet with a density considerably greater than that of Earth. Further study showed Kepler-10c to be a typical volatile-rich planet weighing just under 1/2 of the initial mass estimate, so the term no longer applied to that exoplanet, but it is believed that such worlds remain theoretically possible.
• Sub-Earth – These are terrestrial planets that are considerably smaller than Earth, and include Mercury and Mars, even though the former is also considered to be an Iron Planet. One of the earliest exoplanets confirmed is a sub-Earth around the millisecond Pulsar PSR B1257+12. The smallest example found to date, despite these being the most difficult exoplanets to detect, is WD 1145+017 b which has a radius just 15% of Earths, making it somewhat smaller than Pluto.
• Ultra-short period planets – These are planets with orbital periods (years) of less than one earth day, and only seem to occur around stars of less than about 1.25 solar masses. While all the known examples are Hot Jupiters (see below), it’s theoretically possible for a ‘rocky’ world to posses this characteristic as well. Of course, such would be at temperatures sufficient to melt or even boil almost every substance known, so the appellation “rocky” might be something of a misnomer in such cases!

As you can see, the definitions and classifications of terrestrial exoplanets are still evolving and while there are some areas of consensus, there are also some areas of disagreement; at this time, you could not say that there was a rigorous classification system. Right now, we are still discovering just what is possible within this category. This is one of the bleeding edges of Astronomy.

Gaseous Planets

Things are a little more settled with the Gaseous Planets. These are largely oriented into “Families” based on the commonly known exemplars within our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.

I’ve been a little more fulsome (and eschewed the bullet-point format for this part of the discussion because this was the focus of my research for the Dr Who adventure.

But, before we get there, there was an unexpected area of controversy that shows that this sub-field is also still evolving, and that I found fascinating, which deserves presentation in a sidebar.

Controversy: When Is A Brown Dwarf Not A Brown Dwarf?

A few years ago, it was all so clear-cut. A Brown Dwarf was a star that was hot enough to fuse Deuterium, at least for a while, but not ordinary Hydrogen, which happened nicely and neatly at a mass of 13 Jupiters. Therefore, anything larger than that was a Brown Dwarf, and anything smaller was a Gas Giant, a Hot Jupiter.

And then we found a few exoplanets whose density was too low to permit such fusion but which were well over the “13Mj” (Jupiter Mass) limit, and a few Brown Dwarfs were found that clearly did or had supported fusion that were only 10Mj in size.

And then a few stellar bodies / rogue planets were found that were Brown Dwarfs in every respect but underwent no fusion, presumably because chance had given them insufficient Deuterium, just to completely demolish this rosy little picture.

The dividing line / criteria for distinguishing one class of extrasolar object from the other is now the subject of “hot” debate. The official dividing line is still the mass of 13 Jupiters, but this is more often ignored than it is followed. Extra-solar planets as large as 60 Mj are now on the record – and it is worth noting that the upper limit of Brown Dwarf sizes are 60-90 Mj.

Officially, an extrasolar body that orbits a star and does not show Deuterium Fusion is considered a planet, even above the 13Mj ‘limit”. Infrared and X-Ray observations are thus considered definitive, and this is likely where the consensus will land, in my opinion.

Currently, there are two different methods of differentiation, one based on formation and the other on the physics of the interior; these can yield contradictory results in which one method classifies an object as a star (brown dwarf) while the other does not.

But I find it both amusing and fascinating that an entire planetary definition has come and gone without my noticing!



Image
provided by flflflflfl from Pixabay

Gas Giant

Gas Giants are planets composed mainly of Hydrogen and Helium. Jupiter is the definitive example within the solar system. Saturn is often considered a second example, but some prefer to classify it into a separate class of giant planet due to a larger Helium content.

The visible ‘surface’ of Gas Giants consists of an outer layer of compressed hydrogen and helium surrounding a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen, with a rocky core at the interior. Within the layer of compressed gasses are visible clouds mainly composed of water and ammonia.

“Metallic” hydrogen is a state of matter in which hydrogen becomes electrically conductive due to extreme pressure. A Jovian core is at such a high temperature and pressure (20,000°K) that its physical and chemical properties are not yet fully understood.

Theoretically, gas giants can be divided into five separate sub-sub-classes according to their atmospheric attributes, which produce distinctive appearances. These features are (I) Ammonia Clouds, (II) Water Clouds, (III) Cloudless, (IV) Alkali-metal clouds, and (V) Silicate clouds.

Interestingly, cold Hydrogen-rich planets more massive than Jupiter but less than about 1.6 Mj will be larger in volume than Jupiter, but above this limit, gravity actually causes the planet to shrink back toward the size of Jupiter. Even Brown Dwarfs are very close to the typical Jupiter in size.

Heat from the interior carried upward by local storms is a major driver of weather on gas giants, predominantly thunderstorms, and much if not all of the heat escaping the interior follows this mechanism, which is thought to be very similar to the mechanism that creates storms on Earth. The heat flows develop into small eddies and vortices within the clouds, causing them to form ‘curls’.

The Great Red Spot is a high-pressure anticyclone system in which winds swirl at between 430 and 680 kilometers an hour. It has been observed to swallow smaller storms whole. Exposure to UV radiation creates brown organic compounds, which are then sucked into the upper atmosphere; it is hypothesized that these get stuck in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, creating it’s red color. It is expected that such phenomena will be frequent occurrences in extrasolar planets of this size.

Condensation of helium creates a Helium Rain on gas giants, but the different masses of Jupiter and Saturn cause them to have different climatic mechanisms associated with this phenomenon. Some astronomers distinguish the two planetary types according to the Helium behavior; In ‘typical size’ gas giants, this distinction is largely ignored, but it remains relevant when considering much larger examples. The surface temperature of Saturn is about 900°C.

Hot Jupiter

When a Jupiter-class planet is very close to its primary, it has a very short orbital period (‘a year’) and becomes super-heated. We’re talking about “years” of less than 10 days, for the most part (one has been found with a year of 111 Earth days, and one has been found with year of just 1.3 earth days!)..

These exoplanets are the easiest to detect using the radial-velocity method because they induce relatively large ‘wobbles’ in the parent star’s motion.

The term ‘Hot Jupiter’ is an informal designation that is almost universally employed.

Although there is great diversity amongst the Hot Jupiters that have been discovered to date, there is a long list of common attributes.

They must have a mass of somewhere between 0.36 and 11.6 Jupiter masses, for example.

They have very circular orbits with low eccentricities; there are competing theories as to why.

Some collide with (and are absorbed into) their parent stars, otherwise they would be even more common.

Many have unusually low densities. They tend to be much larger than their mass warrants, and it’s not clear exactly why; several explanations have been posited but none proven to be the dominant mechanism.

The closeness to the Primary causes most to be tidally locked, with one side always facing the parent star. This is thought to create extreme and exotic atmospheric conditions. The day-night temperature differential is estimated to be about 500°C.

They are more commonly found around F- and G- type stars and are less common around K-type stars. Hot Jupiters around red dwarfs are extremely rare. In general, their prevalence decreases exponentially with absolute stellar magnitude.

More than half of the Hot Jupiters studied have orbits that are misaligned with the axis of rotation of their parent stars, and a significant fraction have completely retrograde orbits. There are many proposed explanations for this.

Even when taking surface heating from the proximate star into account, many Hot Jupiters have a larger planetary radius than expected; this may be caused by interactions between the atmospheric winds and the planets’ magnetosphere creating an electric current through the planet that heats it up. The hotter the planet, the greater the ionization of the atmosphere, which in turn leads to a greater magnitude of magnetosphere interaction and hence a larger current being generated, leading to greater heating and expansion of the planetary atmosphere. This theory matches evidence relating to observed correlations between inflated radii and planetary temperatures.

Super-Jupiter

A Super-Jupiter is an exoplanet that is considerably more massive than the planet Jupiter. By 2011, there were 180 confirmed Super-Jupiters, some hot and some cold. Up to about 80 Jupiter masses, their size remains very similar to that of our local Jupiter. Beyond that, they become so massive that fusion can initiate, turning what might have been a planet into a brown dwarf.

That means that their surface gravity and density are proportional to their mass. CoRoT-3b has a mass of around 22 Mj and is predicted to have an average density greater than that of Osmium, the densest natural element under standard conditions. It’s surface gravity will be over 50 times that of Earth.

Super-Puff

Super-puffs have a mass comparable to that of the Earth (up to a few times Me) but a radius larger than that of Neptune. This gives them a very low density. They are cooler and less massive than low-density Hot Jupiters.

One hypothesis is that they have continuous outflows of dust to the top of their atmosphere, so that the true surface is much smaller than the apparent surface. Gliese 3470 b is considered a possible example of this mechanism.

Another possibility is that some super-puffs are smaller planets with large ring systems which are being mistaken for planetary surfaces. HP 41378 f is considered an example. See also “Puffy Planet,” below.

Ultra-hot Jupiter

Ultra-hot Jupiters are Hot Jupiters with a daytime temperature in excess of 2200°K. At such temperatures, most molecules dissociate into their constituent atoms and stream away from the hot side to the night side (tidally locked, remember) where they recombine into molecules again. Logically, there must be a reciprocal flow from cold side to hot, completing a closed cycle, but what this could be remains to be determined.

The most extreme example is TOI-1431b, which was found to have an orbital period of just 2-and-a-half days; it’s day-side temperature is 2427°C, hotter than 40% of the stars in the Milky Way, and even it’s night-side temperature is 2300°C.

Eccentric Jupiter

An Eccentric Jupiter is a gassy exoplanet that orbits its star in an eccentric orbit, which carries it both close to its primary and some distance away. HD 96167 has a comet-like orbit that carries it out from roughly the equivalent of the orbit of Mercury to the equivalent of the center of the Asteroid belt (in terms of orbit size).

Together with the discovery of Hot Jupiters, Eccentric Jupiters required a complete reexamination of theories of solar system formation as the existing theories did not adequately explain the phenomena.



Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay

Puffy Planets

Puffy Planets are less-extreme Super-puffs; they have a large radius and low density. They are sometimes called “Hot Saturns” due to their density being similar to that of the ringed planet.

They orbit close to their parent star, and the intense heat from solar radiation absorption plus internally-generated heat inflates the atmosphere.

Six have been confirmed so far, and it is suspected that some Hot Jupiters will be reclassified as Puffy Planets upon further examination.

Most puffy planets will be at or below Jupiter mass because anything greater would generate enough gravity to counter Puffing, and keeping them at roughly the same size as Jupiter.

Hot Jupiters wit masses less than that of Jupiter and temperatures in excess of 1800°K are so inflated and puffed out that they are on unstable evolutionary paths that will eventually cause their atmospheres to evaporate and become lost to the planet.

Helium Planet

A Helium Planet is one with a helium-dominated atmosphere, which contrasts with “ordinary” gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. We don’t have an example of a Helium Planet in our solar system, but there have been some attempts to shift the boundary of “helium-dominated” to cause Saturn to fall into this classification.

Two formation mechanisms have been posited that would lead to Helium Planets – remnants of White Dwarf stars and Hydrogen evaporation from standard Jupiter-like gas giants.

Helium stars would have a white or gray color.

It is expected that a distinguishing feature of the chemistry of Helium Planets that would separate them from regular Jupiter and Jupiter-family exoplanets would be evidence of carbon monoxide and dioxide in the atmosphere, resulting from a loss of the hydrogen that would normally bond with the carbon to form methane.

Gliese 436 b is a possible Helium planet and does exhibit this chemical signature.

Gas dwarf (aka Mini-Jupiter)

Wikipedia lists a planetary type by this name but doesn’t have, and appears never to have had, a page on the subject, or a mention anywhere else of the planetary type. That means that I can only theorize, with at least a 50-50 chance of being totally wrong.

So, speculating (but not wildly), the existence of Mini-Neptunes (see below) could suggest the existence of similar Gas Dwarf planets that have a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere. These would need to be sufficiently distant from their parent star that they would not outgas sufficient Hydrogen to change the nature of the planet to a dwarf Helium Planet; their small size would suggest that they would have trouble holding on to an atmosphere in any event, so it’s entirely possible that if the hydrogen were to go, so would the helium, leaving only the heavier compounds of a Mini-Neptune (and a much smaller planet).

This also means that they would be sufficiently distant that significant Puffing would not take place, resulting in a cool, sub-Jovian planet in both mass and size.

That’s all semi-educated guesswork. It’s just as likely that someone created the category by mistake – but at least it sounds logical.

Ice Giants

The original meaning of the term Gas Giant included Uranus and Neptune, but these days the significant differences in their chemistries have placed them in a separate class, Ice Giants. These are giant planets comprised mainly of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur.

In astrophysics and planetary science, the term “ices” refers to chemical compounds that are volatile, i.e. have freezing points above about 100°K.

Ice Giants lack a significant solid surface, they are primarily composed of liquids and gasses. The principles of their formation is problematic because the building blocks that would have gone into Gas Giants such as Jupiter would have been close to solar escape velocities, and more likely to have been thrown out of the solar system or into cometary orbits than to have accreted into the planets that we see today.

Either there were a lot more of these than solar system formation theory suggests, or the formative principle is different; proposals based around pebble accretion or gravitational disk instabilities have been proposed that might plug this theoretical gap. Many Ice-giant candidates have been observed amongst the exoplanets discovered, suggesting that they are relatively common in the Milky Way, and therefore that the mechanism must be fairly ubiquitous.

The gaseous outer layers of Ice Giants have several similarities to those of Gas Giants. These include long-lived equatorial winds of high speed, polar vortices, large-scale circulation patterns, and complex chemical processes driven by ultraviolet radiation from above and mixing of layers in the lower atmosphere. Their chemical compositions promote different processes to those of the Jupiter family.

Because they receive far less sunlight than the Jovian family, internal heating becomes far more relevant to the atmospheric weather of Ice Giants. There are still no complete models explaining how the observed atmospheres of ice giants function. This is a hot subject of research in planetary physics as exoplanetary properties are not yet understood, even in general theory.

The largest visible feature on Neptune is the Great Dark Spot, which forms and then dissipates every few years. It is similar in size to the Great Red Spot, which has persisted for centuries.

Of all giant planets of the solar system, Neptune emits the most internal heat per unit of absorbed sunlight (an approximate ratio of 2.6). Saturn has the next highest (ratio of 1.8); Uranus emits the least, at a ratio of about 0.26, which is so extremely different that it is attention-getting. The suspicion is that the extreme axial tilt of the planet, 98°, is relevant to this observation. That axial tilt also creates seasonal patterns unique within the solar system.

The internal heat of Uranus is very low; it is the coldest planet in the solar system, with a temperature in the upper atmosphere of -224°C. The deepest parts of the mantle are so hot and under so much pressure that methane decomposes into elemental carbon. One potential result is that the mantle will experience a rain of liquid diamonds. Higher up, sunlight causes methane to form compounds like Acetylene and Diacetylene, and this can potentially support organic chemistry of great complexity in the regions that bound the diamond nucleation zone and the upper atmosphere, potentially supportive of life.

Because of their large sizes and low thermal conductivities, planetary interior pressures range up to several hundred GPa (Giga-Pascals) and temperatures of several thousand Kelvins.

The compressibility of water in ice-giant models could be off by as much as 1/3, according to an announcement in Match 2012. The consequences of this are still reverberating through the relevant planetary science studies.

The magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune are both unusually displaced and tilted. Their strengths are intermediate between Gas Giants and those of terrestrial planets, 50 and 25 times those of the Earth, respectively. Despite these greater field strengths, the equatorial field strengths are only 75 and 45 percent of that of the Earth, indicating that the sources are relatively deeper than the field strength itself indicates, compared to Earth. The magnetic fields are believed to originate in an ionized convecting fluid-ice mantle deep within the planets.

Mini-Ice Giant (aka Mini-Neptune)

A gas dwarf is a gas planet with a rocky core that has accumulated a thick envelope of volatiles but which is less massive than Neptune but which has a radius of 1.7 and 3.9 earth radii. They are divided into a three-tier classification regime based on the metallicity of short-period exoplanets (in astronomy and astrophysics, a “Metal” is any substance that is neither Hydrogen nor Helium.

Studies of such planets are loosely-based on what we have learned about Uranus and Neptune. Without a thick atmosphere, they would be classified as ocean planets instead. The 1.7 Earth-radius lower limit is a little fuzzy; the dividing line is considered to be somewhere between 1.6 and 2.0 Earth radii. Any planets with a larger radius that have been observed had significant levels of Hydrogen and/or Helium, as did any planet more massive than approximately 6 earth-masses. Beyond this observation, they appear to have a diversity of compositions that are poorly explained by simple models using a single mass-radius relationship.

It is this diversity of composition that explains the “fuzziness” mentioned in association with the lower limit; depending on the composition, the dividing line can be as low as 1 Earth-radius to as high as 20 earth-radii.

Neptune-like planets are considerably rarer than sub-Neptunes despite being only slightly bigger. This “radius cliff” separates sub-Neptunes from Neptunes, with a dividing line of 3 earth-radii. The divide is thought to be a function of planetary formation; the atmospheres of planets smaller in radius than the limit struggle to achieve the pressures required to force Hydrogen into the magma ocean, which limits radius growth. Only once the magma ocean becomes Hydrogen saturated can radius growth continue, and that can only occur with planets larger than the critical boundary.

Hot Neptune

As might be expected from the description / definition of a Hot Jupiter, a Hot Neptune is a Neptunian giant planet that orbits close to it’s star, typically in an orbit of less than 1 AU (closer to it’s star than the orbit of the Earth around our star). The first Hot Neptune to be found was Gliese 436 b, in 2007; it is located about 33 light years from our solar system.

Recent observations have revealed a significantly larger population of Hot Neptunes than was previously expected. In part, this can be explained by these planets being easier to detect, for the same reasons as Hot Jupiters, but this is not enough to account for the discrepancy. One notable example is Kepler-56 b, which has a mass somewhat larger than Neptune’s and orbits its star at a radius of just 0.1 AU, closer than Mercury orbits the Sun.

Super-Neptune

A super-Neptune is a giant planet of Neptunian character which is more massive than the planet Neptune. These are generally described as being approximately 5-7 times the size of Earth and with masses of 20-80 Earths. Exceeding this limit generally requires the planet to have sufficient Hydrogen and/or Helium to qualify it as a gas giant, even under the revised nomenclature. Planets falling within this mass range might also be referred to as a Sub-Saturn, indicating that the additional mass contains more Hydrogen-Helium than is normal for a planet within the Neptunian class. However, “sub-Saturn” is not an official designation, while “Super-Neptune” is.

There have been relatively few planets of this kind to be discovered. The mass gap between Neptune-like and Jupiter-like planets is thought to occur because of “Runaway accretion” occurring for planets of larger than 20 earth-masses; once the threshold is crossed, it becomes so much easier for them to acquire additional mass that they rapidly grow into planets the size of Jupiter or larger, much of it Hydrogen / Helium, which pushes the planet out of this category and into the Super-Jupiter category.

Ultra-Hot Neptune

So far, only one Ultra-Hot Neptune has been confirmed; LTT 9779 b has an orbital period (year) of 19 hours and an atmospheric temperature in excess of 1700°C. It is so close to its star that its atmosphere should have evaporated into space, so its existence requires an unusual explanation.

There is a possible second example awaiting confirmation orbiting Vega. It is believed to be slightly more massive than Neptune, orbiting Vega every 2.43 days, and – due to the highly energetic star – has a temperature of 2500°C, which will make it the second-hottest planet on record if it is confirmed.



Image by Chil Vera from Pixabay

Selected Other Types Of Planet

There are a number of other planetary types whose names caught my attention. If they subsequently proved interesting enough, I’ve kept them on the list below; if not, they’ve been redacted.

• Blanet – A blanet is a hypothetical exoplanet class that orbit black holes. They are basically planets like any other, i.e. they have enough mass to be rounded by their own gravity but not enough to start fusion reactions. In 2019, a team of astronomers and exoplanetologists showed that there is a safe zone around a supermassive black hole that could harbor potentially thousands of blanets in stable orbits. What is more, the accretion disks that form around black holes would force matter into this safe zone and so foster planet-building processes, so this is considered to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, a natural trait of such Black Holes. The term is a portmanteau of “BLAck hole” and “plaNET”.
• Cthonian Planet – Cthonian planets are a hypothetical class of celestial objects resulting from the stripping away of an gas giant’s atmosphere and outer layers through hydrodynamic escape. Such stripping is most likely to occur as a result of stellar proximity. The remaining rocky or metallic-core planet(oid) would resemble a terrestrial planet in many respects but significantly differ in others. If the core material of a gas giant (or even a brown dwarf) has an appropriate composition, it can stay compressed for billions of years despite the loss of the atmosphere that contained enough mass to perform the compression. HD 209458 b is an example of a gas giant in the process of becoming a Cthonian Planet, a process that will take many billions of years. Similarly, Gliese 436b has already lost 10% of its atmosphere. CoRoT-7b is the first exoplanet that might be fully transformed into a Cthonian Planet, but other researchers dispute this classification. TOI 849 b, a planet more massive than Neptune and located very close to its host star was found in the Neptunian Desert (a region of space virtually devoid of planets), may also be Cthonian.
• Circumbinary Planet – A planet that orbits two stars instead of one; the stars are usually in a binary star system. At one point, these were considered impossible, as the presence of the binary star would both disrupt planetary formation and ‘suck up’ all the building material needed for such formation; but several examples have been discovered, disproving this belief. The discovery has shed fresh light on some aspects of planetary systems such as orbital dynamics and axial tilt precession. It has also been noted that there is a general absence of such planets around shorter-period binary systems, suggesting that the old theory might not be completely inaccurate after all.
• Circumtriple Planet – A celestial mass that orbits three stars in a trinary system at the same time. Star System GW Ori contains a huge accretion disk of dust and gas located about 1300 light-years from earth; astronomers have observed a gap in the cloud and hypothesized that a planet has swept that region clear. There are other gravitational oddities about the star system that could be explained by the presence of a planetary body of Jupiter size. The body itself has not been observed. If it exists, it will be an extremely rare phenomenon in the universe, potentially the rarest type of planet in the known universe, and quite likely the only example within the Milky Way.
• Disrupted Planet – A planetary body disrupted or destroyed by nearby or passing astronomical body or object; the study of the process is known as Necroplanetology. For a long time, it was thought that the Asteroid Belt of our solar system was a Disrupted planet (some science-fiction suggested that it had contained an advanced civilization which had destroyed itself and its planet, which would – ironically – mean that it no longer met the criteria for this designation). This theoretical origin of the Asteroid Belt may have inspired the origin story of Superman as a refugee from the destroyed planet of Krypton. It is no longer thought that the Asteroid Belt was ever a solid singular body; it is rather thought that the gravitational attraction of Jupiter disrupted the planetary formation process.
• Double Planet – The typical ratio of masses between a planet and a satellite is around 10,000 to 1. In extremely rare cases, a satellite may be massive enough that both it and the planet it orbits with both revolve around a point external to both planetary bodies. The Earth-Luna double is one such example; both actually orbit about a point of balanced mutual attraction. Pluto and Charon were proposed to be an even better example, but this proposal failed when Pluto was controversially struck off the list of planets. This resulted in the definition being amended to state that one of the planetary bodies in question must be a bonafide planet before a system could qualify as a double-planet. Later revelations about the origins of the moon have only made the probability of double-planets forming even more rare than it was already thought to be; in conjunction with arguments about the significance of Luna to the development and evolution of life on Earth, and of sentience, some have suggested the absence of a moon of significant mass relative to an earth-like planet may constitute a choke-point in the formation of life-bearing worlds.
• Ecumenopolis – The name given to describe a (hypothetical) planet-wide city. Term coined in 1967, but the concept originated in Asimov’s Foundation series, and was initially proposed by American religious leader Thomas Lake Harris.(1823-1906). Lake also depicted interstellar empires and “ancient astronauts” in his writings, making him a lost grandfather of Science Fiction.
• Mesoplanet – Speaking of Asimov, this term is another of his contributions to science. Mesoplanets are planetary mass objects smaller than Mercury but larger than Ceres. Asimov observed that there was a considerable gap between the smallest object considered an undoubted major planet (Mercury) and the largest object undoubtedly considered a minor object (Ceres) and proposed the term to describe objects fitting into that size gap. At the time, only one planetary object, Pluto, fell into the category, and rather than declare it arbitrarily one or the other, he suggested placing it into this new subcategory (“Meso” means “middle” in Greek). Other objects have since been discovered that would be included are Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, probably Sedna, and possibly Orcus. Astronomers generally describe these as “Dwarf Planets” these days; other, smaller, bodies have been proposed by astronomers disagree about their potential dwarf planet status.
• Eyeball Planet – A hypothetical model describing tidally-locked planets induces spatial features which come to resemble an eyeball. The concept is that the planet will be hottest at the perpetual ‘noon’ and cool somewhat at positions removed from this point, producing ring-shaped zones in which some materials liquefy and others do not. The theoretical model thus posits a series of concentric rings as surface features of some such planets. It further calculates two viable types, a ‘hot’ eyeball and a ‘cool’ eyeball, depending on he chemistry of the liquid and whether or not it forms on the near-solar side or the far side. Kepler-1652b is potentially an eyeball planet, and the TRAPPIST-1 system may contain several such planets.
• Pulsar Planet – Pulsar planets are discovered through the influence of the planet’s gravity on pulsar, inducing a wobble that impacts on the precision of the timing of the pulses produced by the Neutron Star. The discovery was unexpected; such stellar objects have previously gone supernova and it was thought that any planetary bodies orbiting such stars would have been destroyed in the explosion. In 1991, it was announced that a planet had been detected around PSR 1829-10, but this was later retracted – just before the first real pulsar planets were announced. Two astronomers announced the discovery of a multi-planet system around PSR 1257+12, and these became the first two extrasolar planets confirmed to exist. There was some initial doubt about the discovery because of the prior retraction and because of questions about how pulsars could have planets; however, the planets proved to be real and cosmology had to adapt to incorporate their existence. Two additional smaller planets were later added to the system using the same technique, but one has since been retracted. The oldest known planet is currently a Circumbinary Pulsar Planet, 12.6 billion years old. It is believed to have been a planet orbiting the pulsar’s companion star before becoming a Circumbinary planet. In 2006, a Magnetar, 13000 light years from earth, was found to have a circumstellar disk, thought to have formed from metal-rich debris (NB. the astronomical definition of ‘metal’) left over from the supernova about 100,000 years ago. The disk appears to be quite similar to those around sun-like stars, suggesting that planetary formation may be possible even around Pulsars, and that Pulsar Planets may be far more common than previously suspected. It may be that these have unique properties in common due to their origins, which would elevate the term “Pulsar Planet” into the main types of planetary bodies.
• Sub-brown Dwarf – Just when you thought the Planet-Brown Dwarf controversy was complicated enough… These are astronomical objects formed in the same manner as stars and brown dwarfs (through the collapse of a dust cloud) but of planetary mass, and therefore below the limiting mass of the fusion of deuterium. Some astronomers call these free-floating planets, some call them planetary-mass brown dwarfs or Y spectral class brown dwarfs, and some label them rogue planets.
• Sub-Neptune – Again, a definition that seemed settled until now – the term has also been applied to planets with a smaller radius than Neptune but a larger mass, or to a planet with smaller mass or larger radius, like a super-puff. Both meanings can also be used in the same publication. Consistency seems lacking but consensus will eventually resolve this confusing situation… it is to be hoped.
• Toroidal Planet – A hypothetical exoplanet with a torroidal or doughnut shape. While there is no rigorous theoretical understanding as to how one could form in nature, the shape itself is potentially quasi-stable. It is considered extremely improbable that any naturally-occurring Toroidal Planet will ever be discovered, and should one be found, it will immediately become classified as one of, if not the, rarest object in the universe. But so many exoplanets are now thought to exist that if there is a formation mechanism that has been overlooked so far, no matter how improbable, it remains possible that such a planet exists – somewhere.
• Ultra-short Period Planet (USP) – Exoplanets with orbital periods (years) of less than one earth-day are designated USPs. Few exceed two earth radii in size. About one in 200 sun-like (G-type) stars has an USP, and most of them have an earth-like composition (70% rock 30% iron). K2-229b has a higher density, suggesting a more massive iron core, while WASP-47e and 55 Cnc e have a lower density and a corresponding composition of more pure rock, or a rocky-iron body surrounded by a layer of water or other volatile substance. The main difference between these planets and Hot Jupiters is that USPs almost always have longer-period planetary companions, while Hot Jupiters are rarely found with other planets within a factor of 2-3 in orbital period.
• Superhabitable Planet – The Drake Formula, which I wrote about in A Game Of Drakes and Detectives: Where’s ET?, often seems to assume that because life was known to have evolved on Earth, Earth and its solar system must reflect the optimum chances for the development of life. In 2014, Rene Heller and John Armstrong introduced the concept a Superhabitable planet, a hypothetical exoplanet or exomoon that may be even better-suited to the emergence and evolution of life. Critical of the existing conceptual models as unjustifiably anthropocentric and geocentric, they proposed to establish a profile for exoplanets based on planetary and stellar features; analyzing the measurable properties of a planet which offered the greatest potential likelihood of life, they identified eight characteristics and concluded that existing search methodologies had ignored the most likely targets for success. 24 planets matching the Superhabitable profile have been identified but – so far – only two have been confirmed: Kepler-69c and Kepler-1126b. One of the unconfirmed, KOI 5715.01, is regarded as potentially the best match to the profile.


Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Unusual Exoplanets List

Wikipedia also maintains a couple of lists that are worth keeping an eye on, and occasionally exploring. This first of these is a list of exoplanet extremes.

This list is full of one jaw-drop after another.

Nearby Habitable Systems

Next up, we have a list of the Habitable Systems closest to Earth – (but refer to the discussion of Superhabitable Planet above for relevant discussion).

List Of Named Exoplanets

It would be nice if this list explained why these particular exoplanets were considered worthy of being named, given that so many have now been found that these have clearly been singled out. But this List Of Named Exoplanets is what it is.

The State Of Cosmological Texts

There have been so many changes in the last couple of years that if you have an astronomy or cosmology text that is more than 5 years old, it’s almost certainly out-of-date, and even hot-off-the-presses publications run the risk of being significantly outdated in some areas. That doesn’t make older reference works useless – well, not completely – but it does mean that they might well mislead more than educate. At best, they are a starting point. I’d offer up a recommendation or two, but they would almost certainly date very poorly.

If this subject is relevant to your games, the advice is therefore to seek out the most recent book written for your academic level in this subject. This is going to be an evolving landscape – cutting-edge right now might be a year out of date, and might get supplanted as “most recent” six weeks from now – good luck if you happen to be reading this in late June, not so much, if not.

That advice also presumes that all such works are going to be equal. We all know better than that, don’t we?

You might use reviews to assess this factor, but there are complications. The newer a book is, the less likely it is that it will have a lot of reviews – that’s number one. And you can’t assume that all reviews are created equal, that’s number two. Unfortunately, that’s where you are going to have to use your own best judgment. But I have a suggestion for you to consider. And it comes from, of all places, learning the art of musical composition.

You see, I couldn’t decide between the For Dummies book on the subject and the Complete Idiot’s guide. So, feeling extravagant at the time, I bought both. And what I learned was that the combination was better than either book on its own. What one explained in a way that left me confused, the other explained clearly. Often, one would provide the foundation concepts and the other would expand on that material.

I would, therefore, select a university which has an Astronomy or Cosmology course and which lists study materials online and select the first-year textbook their course demands; and then look for an alternative pitched just a little down from that, in hopes that it would fill in any foundational blanks in the more advanced book. (Actually, because I already know a little on the subject, I might go for a second-year text and a supplementary first-year text, but you get the general idea).

Controversy: Universal Expansion

How fast is the universe expanding?

Well, my answer has always been a slightly vexed “no-one knows”, because the further away we look, the further back in time our information is. So we can only ever know how fast it was expanding, and one datum is not enough to extrapolate a current value.

But I thought that this one known datum was at least fairly solidly known – at least until I read this answer on Quora:
Krister Sundelin’s answer to “Why is there a crisis in cosmology?”

In a nutshell, we now have several different methods of calculating the Hubble Constant (the rate of expansion of the universe), which have been refined and made more reliable and accurate over the years – and the three methods don’t agree.

It’s possible that the solution to this problem lies in the logical fallacy I espoused above, but it’s equally possible that it doesn’t – I would need to do a lot more research to try and answer that question.

It’s worth noting that the answer given is months old at this point, and that brings in the pace of cosmological discovery that I mentioned earlier. I made an attempt to do that further research, or at least to see if the discrepancy had been resolved since; what I learned was that it has, if anything, deepened. There is now evidence that the rate of expansion is not constant, but is a variable that has changed over time – and that the rate of expansion is accelerating in a non-linear way.

If my complaint was the sole factor at play, it might explain a constant change, but not a non-linear one. What’s more, while a consensus has been reached that this is (or was) taking place, no adequate explanation has been found as to why.

If you’re as intrigued as I was, aside from the link given above, I would suggest reading
Ian Kimber’s answer to “What is the Hubble Constant controversy, and how would it change the way we understand the cosmos?”

and

Anders Rehnberg’s answer to “Why is there not a unanimous way to calculate the Hubble Constant?”

Finally, it may be worthwhile looking at the most directly relevant Wikipedia page, on Hubble’s Law

Okay, so here we are, about 2/3 of the way through the article (which is already more than ten times the usual length) and I’m right out of time. So I’ll pick this up with a shorter “Part 2” article next week, which might also give me the time to explain why this can all be relevant to D&D….

While introducing the players to the characters for the chase mechanics playtest a couple of weeks ago, I found myself ruminating on (of all things) the Charisma stat and what it represented.

You might think that this is a simple question – but it’s not, as readers will see by the end of this article.

This is a stat that is so devoid of functional value that I once almost removed it completely from a D&D campaign as far more trouble than it was worth, and some of the reasons why seem like a good place to start.

The Problem With Charisma 1: The Conflict with Player Agency

Charisma is ultimately all about using game mechanics to define, describe, simulate, and manipulate in-game interpersonal relationships. When it’s a PC using such abilities on an NPC, there’s no problem, and when it’s an NPC influencing another NPC, there’s no problem. But as soon as the target is a PC, regardless of whether it’s being done by an NPC or another PC, the owner of the target PC loses some control over his character, and with it, some measure of player agency.

This can be a small problem or a very large one, depending on a number of factors, but it’s always a problem of some scale. The scale can sometimes be minimized by using Charisma / Interpersonal mechanics to dictate the character’s state of mind but leaving the expression of that state of mind to the owner, and that’s a practice that I would recommend regardless of what game mechanics might recommend, except in cases of mental / magical domination

The Problem With Charisma 2: Contradictory social standards

The most overt characteristic associated with Charisma is physical attractiveness – Beauty and Grace. But as soon as you learn a little social history, you suddenly find yourself mired in some very deep waters even with this seemingly most innocuous of interpretations.

Consider a character with Charisma 18. We interpret that as describing an individual of great physical beauty.

Go back in time 200 years, and you will find that the very definition of “Great Physical Beauty” has changed somewhat. Does that mean that our CHAR 18 character only has CHAR 14? The standards of Beauty during the French Revolution were very different to those of the Roman Empire, which were different to those of the ancient Greeks. Even in modern times, Beauty can vary from one culture to another with some small overlap.

Body weight, hair styles and cleanliness, beards or no beards, even the clothing that is socially acceptable (and how much it reveals or hides) all combine to make standards sufficiently different as to be comparing apples and oranges.

Does that mean that our CHAR 18 character would only be CHAR 16 to an Elf and CHAR 6 to a Dwarf? What about the beauty standards of Goblins and Orcs?

Ultimately, what these issues raise is the problem that CHAR has a “soft” definition (at best), with no foundation in objective reality. Other stats also suffer from this problem, but not to the same extent – CON, for example, can be considered “the indexing of a character’s physical Resilience to a predefined universal scale”. CON 18 means the same thing whether you’re a Halfling or a Bugbear.

In many ways, this was actually easier to deal with back in the AD&D era, because CHAR was implicitly defined as being from the perspective of in-game contemporary human society, by giving other races an explicit adjustment to their CHAR to bring their local cultural interpretation into line with the “absolute” Human scale.

Back in that D&D game in which I contemplated abandoning the stat, the premise was that the appearance of physical health was the foundation of Beauty in a medieval society, in combination with the airs, graces, and absence of effects of hard labor that derived from social status. Since the former was already covered by CON, and the latter wasn’t actually defined anywhere, this interpretation left CHAR rather unsupported.

In that same game, Orcs were gifted with a natural regenerative ability that left physical health largely something that could be assumed, but they had a relatively short lifespan on average, so their standards of attractiveness were oriented around a youthful appearance in spite of advancing years.

With the Halflings, it was being well-fed that was the defining trait of Beauty, and hence of CHAR. The Elves held grace of motion and expression to be Beauty, and so on.

Food for thought, isn’t it?

But physical beauty is only a small fraction of what I now perceive as the constituents of CHAR, and that’s where this model collapses.

The Problem With Charisma 3: The problem with time

Vanity and a youth-oriented society mean that Beauty is now seen as an attribute of youth. The number-one sales pitch for beauty products is that it will restore a youthful appearance or hide (or somehow undo) the effects of aging.

So long as CHAR was defined in terms of comeliness, that meant that time – and aging – would inevitably have eroded CHAR.

This complication only became more complex when other aspects of CHAR were acknowledged.

For the purposes of illustration, this diagram simplifies CHAR into 4 elements:

• Beauty – attractiveness in all its forms
• Skill – things the character has learned to do like Command
• Class – Social Class. Except in the case of nobility, this tends to drop off as a character ages after ‘retirement’. This plots Child, Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Senility as the five major stages of a long life.
• Nature – a catchall for the bonuses due to character class, race, and the perception of same by the general public.

The top four panels of the diagram rates each of these factors out of 10, because we all know how to do that, with age increasing across the bottom of the diagram. The larger panel on the left simply adds these four factors together. The larger panel on the right weights the different contributions to emphasize appearance and social rank. Note that 1+1+1+1 = 1½+½+1½+½, so the totals are directly comparable.

That, of course, is not the only way the contributions can be weighted, and one can spend innumerable hours down the rabbit hole of playing around with the weightings to see what happens. You could, for example, decide that the contribution of Beauty is equal to everything else put together, and that social class is half of the rest.

The Problem With Charisma 4: The problem with definitions

Working definitions are all well and good, but the more closely you scrutinize everything that Charisma is used for, the more those temporary structures start to fall apart. The diagram hints at this, too, in that it could easily be decided that it was comparing apples and pomegranates.

But this is just a symptom of a problem identified earlier: that there is no conclusive definition of what Charisma is and what it covers.

Which brings me back to the thoughts sparked during the playtest. It wasn’t that these thoughts were anything particularly ground-breaking or profound; it was more that they suddenly crystallized, having been floating around in the back of my head for quite a while..

The Anatomy Of Charisma

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Let’s smash the box that’s labeled “Charisma” (or any equivalent) and see all the things that are rattling around inside. Maybe that way a definition can be reached.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 1: Beauty

To start with, let’s dispose of the bleeding obvious, something that is referenced by just about every description of Charisma going, regardless of genre. Charisma represents the physical attractiveness of the character, the extent to which can be objectified by those who are so inclined.

There are still innumerable terms that can be applied to describe a high level of Beauty – “Cute”, “Pretty”, “Gorgeous” – and there will be others that are more poorly defined, such as “eyes that you can melt in”, or “perfect listener”.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 2: Physique

Also implicit in the concept of Beauty can be the concept of physique. Lean, Strong, Lithe, and more. Again, this is an association with youth, health, and vigor, but you can have these qualities without being exceptional in those respects, you just have to work a little harder at it.

A poor physique would naturally detract from other aspects of Charisma, while a healthy or powerful physique would enhance those aspects. So this is definitely part of the story, and one that is often overlooked or subsumed into “Beauty” when it shouldn’t be.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 3: Magnetism

Some people don’t need attractiveness to be attractive (though it helps); they have a natural charisma that not even they can explain, but it draws people to them like moths to a flame. They don’t have to be known to those attracted, so it’s not fame, or wealth, or power, or any of the other ‘aphrodisiac qualities’; it’s best described, therefore, as sheer animal magnetism, but that is a label, not a definition, so bear that limitation in mind.

Most game systems don’t go this far when defining Charisma. This, and everything else that follows, gets left out, and that’s important to note.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 4: Presence

Related to, but not necessarily the same as, the preceding item is a character’s Presence. Characters with this often find themselves propelled into performing or politics (sometimes both). In fantasy campaigns, the Church would be another obvious career path.

Presence makes an individual seem larger than life, someone to listened to. That doesn’t make them more convincing, or anything like that; it simply means that they can hold an audience enthralled.

In extreme cases, the location of an individual with Presence within a room can be sensed without looking, simply by extrapolating subconsciously from the directions that almost everyone else is looking.

Some people can simulate or emulate having this quality through learning to be great orators. Others can take a moderate level of Presence and elevate it.

I have often read that Adolf Hitler had a kind of magnetism, but further explanation of what was meant by that clearly suggests that it was actually a high Presence. Even today, 80+ years later, and not knowing a single word of the language, when watching one of his recorded speeches you get a sense of it; how much more powerful it must have been without those barriers.

Churchill was a great speech-maker and an above-average orator, but his speeches could not conjure the overwhelming passion that Hitler could. The difference in quality of the two (setting aside all historic and political differences) is that Churchill had less Presence. That’s all right, he had plenty of other qualities on his side!

The Anatomy Of Charisma 5: Seductiveness

I view seductiveness as a form of hypnotism in which the target of the seduction becomes more and more enthralled in the prospect of some form of romantic association with the seducer. It’s the art of bending every thought that starts to stray from that singular objective back until all roads lead to dalliance.

It can be learned, but the results of doing so can be mechanical and performed by rote; some people have the quality naturally. They may not be the prettiest people (though adding Beauty to the mix can be a knockout blow), but they do more with whatever they’ve got.

If you’ve never been the subject of a seduction, it induces a kind of mental fog in which everything and anything else other than the potential romantic interlude fades almost into insignificance; you can still see it, but it just doesn’t seem to matter as much as it should. It forms a bubble around the participants that can be as strong as armor plate or as delicate as a film of soap, depending on who is attempting to penetrate it and their relationship with those within.

When the bubble is pierced, the subject shakes their head and tries to clear their thoughts, discovering that considerable time has passed while they were enthralled. If the seduction is permitted to run its course, it must be renewed when next the two encounter each other or it will simply become a wild fling in the mind of the subject, something to remember with pleasure; but if it is renewed, it can bind the target in chains of passion for days, weeks, months, or years. When mutual, it can be the foundation of a love that lasts a lifetime, but there is something just a little cynical in the concept of seduction as an expression of romantic attraction – but that’s a side issue.

So long as players and GM think of seduction as a form of Slow Hypnotism, they can handle roleplaying appropriately fairly easily.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 6: Manners

Etiquette is mostly reserved for highly formal occasions, these days. Society encourages the forthright expression of thoughts over the form of presentation of those thoughts – quite rightly, in my opinion – but I never forget the purpose of formalized modes of expression.

Etiquette is a set of rules designed to grease social and formal interactions, aimed at maintaining the functionality of that interaction regardless of the opinions, feelings, and any ill-will between attendees.

We naturally soak up the basics of etiquette as children. Listen when other people are speaking and don’t interrupt, for example, how to use a knife and fork, and so on. Until about a century ago, perhaps less, there was formal instruction in etiquette within schools, and there have been specialist schools in the subject for even longer and even more recently than that. I don’t recall where and when, but sometime in the last 30 years the headmistress of such a school was interviewed, prior to educating the participants in a reality show of some kind.

Even today, when you meet the Queen Of England (and, presumably, other royal families and monarchs), they have someone who explains the etiquette that is to apply at that meeting – do this, don’t do that, etc.

If Charisma is to incorporate one’s social class in some respect, then high skill in Manners and Etiquette are clear contributors to Charisma because these subjects are inextricably entwined with nobility and the upper class. This is especially true in fantasy games, with societies untainted by modern egalitarianism.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 7: Persuasiveness

Interpersonal skills come in three basic varieties – intellectual, forcible, and passionate. In the latter, you are attempting to directly engage the emotions of the listener in order to get them to do something – vote for you, or whatever. The first is an INT-based form of persuasiveness rooted in facts and logic; the second is about threats and an induced fear of the speaker, and is all about intimidation, and is arguably rooted in some demonstrated capacity to make good on those threats. This includes all argument by authority.

The last one, however, is clearly positively influenced by many other aspects of Charisma, to the point where natural Persuasiveness is itself a quality that would have to contribute to Charisma itself.

Characters who could naturally talk a law-abiding citizen into a criminal act arguably have a high level of Charisma regardless of their appearance. Any extension or other application of that ability must also mean the same thing, and so we end up at the point where Persuasiveness itself must be considered an element of Charisma.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 8: Sincerity

Palpable Sincerity (whether genuine or falsified) is close kin to Persuasiveness. Giving the sense that you sincerely believe in something that you have said makes your argument all the more persuasive if your judgment is respected by the listener, either in broad or in the specific case of the individual.

“I have always found their judgment to be sound” plus a Sincere expression of some belief equals a compelling argument for the person making the statement to accept that belief.

There was a time when Science and Scientists were regarded in this way; in fact, it is only within the current Pandemic and the debate over Climate Change that this has not been the case in recent times. This is because Science, demonstrably, works.

Prior to Science holding that authority, it was held by Religious bodies. The transition occurred when science challenged religious doctrine and science won. It didn’t happen overnight, it was a relatively gradual shift, and one that is still far from resolved in the minds of many.

An air of Sincerity is still respected and persuasive, and that makes Sincerity another element of Charisma.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 9: Leadership

What is a natural leader? Well, aside from having to make right choices at least some of the time in a tactical sense, a natural leader inspires others to follow.

This question has been given a strong airing of late due to the Invasion of Ukraine, and the inspirational performance of President Zelenskyy, compared to other politicians; who you are comparing him with depends on where you are from, to some extent.

It’s arguably a touchy subject, so I’m not going to go too deeply into it (or we will be here all day). Instead, I will simply state the obvious – the appearances, behavior, and actions of President Zelenskyy have been described as expressing a natural gift for Leadership that he didn’t even know he possessed until he needed it. Can anyone reasonably deny that those televised appearances showed this Leadership to be Charismatic?

This demonstrates with a real-wold scenario that Leadership is an inalienable element of Charisma.

Some people can give an order, and there will be a natural inclination to follow that order. Captain America had this quality (in the comics, less so in the movies). Superman (prior to the recent DC-Universe revisions) once had natural leadership in a similar way, and (again in the comics more than the movies) Batman found that he had it too, much to his surprise.

That ability to inspire others is Leadership, and it is clearly a contributor to Charisma.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 10: Authority

I’ve referenced this already, under the heading of Sincerity, but having the weight of Authority on your side is not quite the same thing. An amalgam of demonstrated expertise and recognition of that expertise, or of the bestowing of authority upon an individual based on the perception of expertise, brings Authority to an individual.

Religious men and women are perceived as knowing the mind and will of God more clearly than lay people; if religion matters to you, those individuals speak not only as themselves, but with the authority of their church behind them. I once posited the question of how much more authority must such people have in a Fantasy world in which the gods are Demonstrably real?

But that would simply reinforce Belief, and it is actually Belief that gives Authority its power to sway and direct. And that’s true of the Authority of Scientists, too; if people believe in the power of science, then they will accord Scientists with the authority to make definitive statements about something that is happening, or that is going to happen.

The modern problem is that people started believing in the scientists instead of the scientific process; the first permits absolute pronouncements that then become treated as gospel, the second implicitly accepts that the pronouncements are simply the results of the best model available right now, but that evidence to the contrary causing a reassessment is always possible. To those who imbued the scientist with Authority and not the process, this looks like flip-flopping and betrayal.

Extended for too long, there can also be “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” syndrome, where pronouncements are automatically disbelieved or received cynically – and sometimes, they should be – but most of the time, the scientist is not trying to deceive, they are simply explaining the foundations of the science (particularly the scientific method) badly.

(I think that it says something about my perspective on this that “Scientific Method” is a foundation skill in my superhero campaign. Without it, you can learn and recite facts by rote, but you can’t evaluate evidence that contradicts the ‘authority’ of what you’ve learned, or understand the implications of anything new.)

Be that as it may, it is also possible to show that political authority is exactly the same (except in dictatorships, perhaps). “Leaders” get elected by convincing the public that they have the expertise to run the country / state / whatever, effectively, and can solve the problems that are currently manifesting. That belief results in the people vesting that “Leader” (who may have no Leadership whatsoever) with the Authority to speak on their behalf, to tell them what to do, and to make decisions for them.

All authority springs from Belief. This is an external boost to the Charisma of the Authority that results from the Belief.

But some people naturally seem to be able to speak with a Voice Of Authority, to seem like they are more across any given subject than anyone else (even if they are not). This kind of Authority is a direct attribute of Charisma.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 11: Nobility

Nobility, in this sense, is not directly related to social class, though it is a general expectation that members of the uppermost social class will posses Nobility. It’s more of a sense that the individual has respectable social values that will direct their behavior.

In a one-faith community, the pronouncements of religious doctrine tend to over-ride personal Nobility most of the time when the two do not accord; in any plurality, where an individual must speak to adherents of many faiths, there is more scope for (and demand for) a personal Nobility that suggests that the person will do “the right thing” no matter what religious doctrine may state, and any leader who permits dogma to override what is generally considered “the right thing to do” tends to get pilloried.

Nobility is perhaps more akin to Etiquette – a system for making moral judgments and acting on them. But because the spirit of Nobility automatically makes the individual more attractive as a leader and more persuasive, those who posses it have a higher Charisma than those who do not (even if they are, in all other respects, equal).

The Anatomy Of Charisma 12: Pivot of Inspiration

The ability to inspire others is closely related to several of the attributes described already. Some people can take the seemingly impossible and make it seem possible, inspiring others to go beyond the limits that they thought restricted them. Such people tend to be social pivots, around whom events swirl, drifting this way and that, rudderless.

There can be a lot of debate about why people respond to Pivots Of Inspiration the way that they do. Some of the arguments and analyses can be fairly convoluted, to say the least. I don’t think any of that matters, in this context; instead, it suffices to say that some people can inspire others to attempt things that they thought impossible. When those attempts fail, we rarely hear about it; when they succeed, they become the stuff of legend.

The ability to inspire others, to make events move in a particular direction, is clearly an often under-appreciated aspect of Charisma.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 13: Shared Confidence

This isn’t about the ability to seem confident yourself, we’ve already covered that; this is the ability to make others feel confident, which is clearly related to the Inspiration attribute discussed above.

This is where Winston Churchill shined, during the second world war, and especially the Blitz and the Battle Of Britain. It’s also an area where President Zelenskyy scorers highly, which has led to many comparisons between the two Leaders.

There is a dark side to this aspect of Charisma – it is all too easy for a Charismatic person to inspire Confidence in others, who then inspire greater Confidence in the original source, creating a self-amplifying feedback loop that convinces people that it will all work out the way they expect in the end, no matter how unrealistic those expectations have become.

This is where the Charisma of cult leaders comes into the picture, because the ability to inspire confidence is also the ability to persuade others to drink the Kool-Aid, or to otherwise engage in fanatical behavior.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 14: Repository of Trust

Getting others to trust you is another item that has been touched on already. In this case, however, I’m not talking about using expertise or the opinions of others to persuade people to grant that trust; I’m talking about something more fundamental. Some people are naturally convincing; successful con men rank high in this regard, for example. Others are naturally unconvincing – they could tell you water was wet, and you would want to check for yourself the next time it rained.

Being able to inspire trust in others is also clearly related to the last two attributes of Charisma, further cementing all three in place.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 15: Self-confidence

Closely connected to the ability to inspire confidence is others is the power of being confident in yourself, regardless of the obstacles to be overcome. In cases where events fail to follow the script, this self-confidence is usually reclassified as a form of personal delusion; but when they do work out, against all odds, they imbue an individual with a Charismatic attraction that cannot be denied.

It is my contention that this charisma is a mere amplification of a quality that already exists, that derives directly from an individual’s self-confidence. If you are confident in yourself, that on it’s own enhances your charismatic attraction to others through the power of Sincerity.

The Anatomy Of Charisma 16: Self-control

Finally, there is something charismatic about someone who is always calm and measured even when everything around them is going to hell in a hand-basket. Where this self-control comes from is unimportant; what matters is that the self-control that results is itself a contributing element to a high charisma score.

Charisma as a weapon

It can often be helpful to think of Charisma as a weapon that operates in the domain of interpersonal relations. It can be even more helpful to use this concept as the foundation for a definition of Charisma, which is the fundamental problem at hand in this article.

“Charisma is the stat that describes how good you are at influencing people to change their minds and do what you want them to do instead of what they want to do.”

That’s not a bad working definition.

Charisma as a defense

The question then arises, what is the defense against such attacks in the interpersonal space.

A lot of my games have equated Wisdom with Willpower – so much so that I have, on a number of occasions, re-branded the Wisdom stat accordingly. But I now think that I was wrong, and that Charisma is a better expression of a characters determination – because that, too, can be charismatic.

And that makes sense of all sorts of other attributes that are often derived or implied by Charisma, like Bravery.

So that general working definition needs one final amendment – “Charisma is the stat that describes how good you are at influencing people to do what you want them to do instead of what they want to do, and how effectively you can resist being influenced by the Charisma of others attempting to change your mind, and your drive and determination in general.”

Roll- vs Role-playing

It’s very easy for interpersonal skill use to devolve into Roll-playing, where one or both sides simply roll dice to determine an outcome. This is largely because that is less-threatening to player agency; combat damage is an accepted aspect of the game that can override player’s choices and wishes.

If an enemy manages to snare you in a lariat or net, players accept that their choices of action have been constrained by the enemy. There are all sorts of other examples, too. Roll-playing places interpersonal skill use by someone else – PC or NPC into the same context, rendering it acceptable.

This solves some of the problems associated with such skill use, but at the cost of role-playing, which is what the game is supposed to be all about. However, this is a problem that is relatively easy to solve; the GM simply has to allow a bonus for those who roleplay their character’s attempts to invoke the interpersonal skill.

GM: “You like the looks of that goblet, eh? That will be 15 sestari, my friend. A bargain, I assure you.”

Player: “Fifteen? I wish to buy something to drink out of, not add a new wing to your mansion! I will pay three.”

GM: “You wound me, noble sir. Look at the exquisite workmanship, the beauty of the firegems. Surely one would not expect to purchase such a work of art for less than ten sestari!”

Player: “It’s pretty enough, but hardly a national treasure or relic of a past age. Five.”

GM: “It has been a hard time for me, lately. To feed my family, I regret that I have to dispose of many objects at lower prices than they deserve. Let us compromise and agree upon…” Make a bargaining roll at +2. If you win, his offer will be Six, if you lose, his offer will be eight. Or you can accept an offer of 7 without rolling.

Player: “Seven sounds pretty fair. I’ll accept that offer, and throw in a half-sestari for goodwill toward his family – if he really has one.”

This exchange shows how Roleplaying can be used to supplement Roll-playing, even to the point where there is an option not to roll at all. If (as sometimes happens), on the other hand, the player had ignored the lead offered by the GM to start roleplaying:

GM: “You like the looks of that goblet, eh? That will be 15 sestari, my friend. A bargain, I assure you.”

Player: “I offer him three, and made my bargaining roll by six.”

GM: “Okay, I’m going to drop your margin of success to four for not even attempting to roleplay. [Rolls] He beats his bargaining skill by five, which is one more than your total. So he wins but doesn’t get it all his own way; you end up paying 12, and are convinced that this is 2 more than it’s actual worth to most people.”

Carrot and stick. Works a lot better than either of those choices on their own.

Notice, too, in the first example, that the GM responded to a reasonable attempt at roleplaying on the part of the player by making the seller’s counter-offer less than he would otherwise have done if the value was actually 10. By roleplaying a brief exchange (regardless of how well or how badly), the GM let the player have a win and buy the item at a bargain price.

In the second version, the player’s choice to go straight to die rolls sped things up, but took some of the fun out; and cost the player the opportunity to go for a bargain.

The Problem With Charisma 5: The dump-stat

And so we come to the ultimate problem, the one that I hinted at during the introduction to the article – when Charisma is considered just a reflection of attractiveness, it’s easy to make it a dump stat, a place to park a low stat score.

If you define a high charisma as being exceptional in one of the defining attributes, and moderate in most of the rest, it provides a realistic characterization. You can even permit exceptionally good results in a second attribute, or a third, for every aspect of Charisma in which the character is deficient. This makes Charisma a powerful tool for character definition.

But if you point out that a low CHAR score means being deficient in most or all of these applications, players will suddenly be a lot more hesitant to make it a dump stat.

How many attributes should be substandard for a given score? That’s up to you. There are many possibilities, including the potential for one of them to be ‘abysmal’ in exchange for one being ‘average’. Or two being abysmal for “above average”.

As a general rule of thumb, though, I would define a standard ‘mix’ that derives from each possible score – that’s not too much work – and a set of equivalences that let one be raised at the expense of another.

“And what are you good at, you silver-tongued devil?” becomes a perfectly valid answer to the problem of making Charisma as important as all the other stats. Do this, or something like it, and it will never be an automatic first choice for a dump stat again.

It took so much longer to plan out the article that I intended to publsh today, and it contains so many sections that I hasd grave doubts that I could finish it in time.

Rather than risk having nothing to post in what is already shaping up to be a very busy week, I decided to present another episode of this ongoing (occasional) series.

As usual, it contains links to 40 or so of my RPG-related answers on Quora.

Some of these will be little more than a paragraph, some may be more substantial, but few will be anywhere near the length of the usual post here at Campaign Mastery.

When we left off in Part 2 of this series, I was up to mid-April 2019…

How do I play an evil DnD character that pretends to be good?

What do you find is the most fun D&D Class to play?

Were decades of earlier centuries as distinguishable from each other, like, for example, the 70s, 80s or the 90s of the 20th century?

What would air warfare look like in DnD?

What book marks the beginning of the urban fantasy genre?

When running an AD&D game, what do you do to really make your players sweat?

(This post was used as the foundation for an article here at Campaign Mastery, Occupying a PCs Shadow).

In Dungeons and Dragons, how would the horde forces be structured?

In D&D, what did you think about the Lost Laboratory of Kwalish Module?

What, in your experience, is the most important element of running a tabletop RPG game?

What are your favorite “collaborative” board games? Why?

As a DM, what do you avoid in your games?

What table should I get if I want it to be good for tabletop games but still usable as a normal table?

Is it a general truism that it’s a bad idea to invite a spouse or SO to join an established D&D group? Do you have any stories where it did or didn’t work out?

Dungeons & Dragons Players and Dungeon Masters: What was the most fiendish puzzle or trap you have come across in your games and how did you play out the situation?

As a DM what pop culture references have you added to your campaign?

As a DM, how did you manage and build encounters for a large party?

As a DM, how do you run random encounters for your party while they are traveling?

Do you use any visuals for encounters in D&D or do you go with “theater of the mind?” Can visuals be too intricate and subtract from the role play experience?

What are ways someone can incorporate technology in the gaming experience for Dungeons and Dragons? Such as using text to deliver private messages to players.

(There’s something poignant about this question after the 2020 restrictions on play due to the Covid-19 pandemic, even if technology has moved so far in the time since it was written that it might be as dated as the dodo).

How did Dungeons and Dragons became such a phenomenon?

What action did your character take, during a D&D game, that shocked the DM?

In D&D 5e, to what extent do you consider Acrobatics and Athletics to be interchangeable?

What are the most popular tabletop roleplaying games aside from Dungeons and Dragons?

What are the pros and cons of each edition of D&D?

What’s the most common mistake players make when constructing player-characters for dungeons and dragons or any role-playing game?

If camera accessibility was as prevalent throughout history as it is today, what are some moments that would have gone the most viral?

What is the difference between Drama and Melodrama as a genre, in regards to fictional storytelling?

I’m about to publish two more ebooks, what should I do differently this time that I might not have thought about a few years ago?

How do blogs get away with using copyrighted images?

D&D 5th Edition: What happens if you cast the ‘Detect Thoughts’ spell on a person while they are sleeping? Is it up to the DM to decide what happens?

D&D 5th Edition: Can I cast reaction spells like Shield or Counterspell when I’m in the middle of casting a spell with a long casting time and don’t stop casting it? Counterspell has only Somatic components. What about casting shield?

How do you approach creating an adventure for a roleplaying game?

D&D: How do you make convincing NPC’s if you’re not great at multiple voices?

What’s the hardest bug you’ve debugged?

People who play Dungeons and Dragons, what is the stupidest thing that happened because you rolled a 20?

When your Dungeons and Dragons campaign has less than three players is it a good idea for the Dungeon Master to provide some helpful DM NPC party members to fill out the group?

As a DM, how to avoid unconscious metagaming when dealing with a high AC character?

The Earth is transformed into a free-for-all battle arena. Everyone gets gifted with superpowers and only 1 000 000 people may survive. What’s your power and what’s your strategy?

In D&D, when the DM presents the Party with one path that leads to gold and a different path that leads to honor and protection of the weak, which do you find the most rewarding to pursue?

The last time I posted one of these collections, I had been posting on Quora for a bit over three years, and was up to about 1400 answers in total. So now, it’s three years after that, and the total is now somewhere between 1800 and 1900 answers – and closer to the higher number, it’s been at 1.8K for a while now! So there will be several more of these occuring from time to time – but I’ll keep those in my back pocket for times when the Dreaded Deadline Doom begins to loom.

Chase mechanics are some of the hardest things in an RPG to get right – so much so that a lot don’t even try (and sometimes go to considerable lengths to hide the fact). So I was very interested when Evil Genius Games offered me the chance to review the chase mechanics from their upcoming release, “Everyday Heroes”, especially since these were specifically designed to recreate the chase scenes from the modern remake of Casino Royale.

To facilitate this, Evil Genius provided a PDF excerpt from their rules and a partial mini-adventure that featured the chase mechanics.

A poor beginning

To start with, the chase rules were supposed to be self-contained, and clearly weren’t – in fact, the first substantive paragraph of the rules section consists of the sentence “Individual participants roll initiative to determine turn order as normal. (emphasis mine).

It soon became clear that the game mechanics were built around a modern-day interpretation of D&D 5e, and that without experience in that game session (and a copy of the rules) GMs could quickly flounder.

Fortunately, one of my players had such expertise, and I had at least participated in the playtesting, so I had a clear understanding of what ‘advantage’ meant, for example. But I wish all that was spelled out in the introduction, if nowhere else.

It did not help that the mechanics demand the tracking of three separate variables – Escape and Capture points, and a time limit known only to the GM. This is at least one more than necessary, and maybe two.

One two many players

The first sequence is supposed to be one player against the GM, who is running the bad guy. Problem: I had two players present. This was solved by giving one player the villain to run, and the other, the hero (If I had a player sitting around doing nothing while another engaged in a chase sequence within an RPG, I would at least consider doing the same thing).

Mechanical Flaws

Each player then copied down a copy of the characters, and I read the chase rules aloud. The ‘two stats and time limit’ came in for immediate criticism – at least half of it from me, it must be admitted.

The ‘two stats’ were immediately junked and replaced with a simplified mechanic, called Chase Points for lack of need for anything better. This was a simple number that initially reflected how many moves ahead one side was of the other. If the villain (trying to escape) swung the total X in his favor, he would escape; if the hero (trying to catch the villain) swung the total by X in his favor, he would make the capture, initiating combat.

The initial set-up from the mini adventure stated that the hero had just spotted the villain climbing over a fence into a construction lot. Count 1 for the hero to spot the villain, count a second 1 for the hero to move to beside the fence, and count a third 1 for the hero to climb the fence – it would take an abstracted three moves for the hero to get to where the villain already was, so I set the initial chase points at 3. The reason this matters is because it measures how long the villain has to do something before the hero catches up with where the villain started doing whatever it was.

As per the set-up narrative, three was also the X selected – so if the villain got the chase number up to 6, he would escape, and if the hero got it down to 0, the villain would not.

The Chase

The player operating the villain spent a round looking around for a construction shed on the construction site where he might find tools and a second round heading for it. Gaining entry, he spotted a screwdriver (what he was looking for) and a couple of sticks of dynamite – without fuses, which were obviously stored separately for safety (he had rolled a nat 20, but there were limits to how generous I was going to be, but this was a Bond chase, after all; it wouldn’t be complete without something going ‘Boom’).

He decided to spend an extra turn ferreting out the fuses. This was long enough that the hero had spotted the villain, reached the fence but looked for a gate instead of climbing over, giving him time to keep half-an-eye on the villain’s activities. Spotting him going into the shed, and noticing warning signs of explosives, he climbed aboard a bulldozer in the construction site, raising the blade to provide some shielding against a possible explosion, and drove straight at the shed. That’s a total of four moves, so he got his mechanical mount headed in the right direction just as the villain emerged from the hut.

Note that if the chase rules were being run exactly as written, it would all be over by now – the time limit suggested was three turns… This was clearly nowhere near enough. In the end, 12 turns were consumed, and by the 10th on, it was clear that it was approaching a climax. 15 would have been too long; twelve proved just about right for an epic bond-style chase.

The chase played out from there, involving an industrial crane (intended, from the source material) used as a bridge to a multistory car park across the street (improvised), a semi full of mattresses for the hero to jump onto, and a school-bus blown up to provide enough cover for the villain to escape.

But, by now, the flaws and benefits of the game mechanics were clear to us all; the rest of the chase was for fun, and to make sure that we hadn’t missed anything.

Verdict

The player operating the villain thinks a lot more quickly than the one who was operating the hero, by both players’ admissions. That meant that by the time the hero-player had come up with a counter-move, the villain-player had been gifted enough time to plan his next move. Only the character edge built into the hero character gave the hero-player a chance to keep up.

If participants are equally quick on their mental feet, and the chase scene is not too complex, and the GM brings the right flamboyant attitude to the table, the mechanics could work very well – with the modifications described earlier.

Unfortunately, this is often not the case. The result is that the slower player begins to grow frustrated, the quicker player begins to grow bored, and the GM starts to struggle to keep the action flowing, and the game, interesting.

In addition, some GMs are not good at extemporizing and improvising, and there’s a LOT of that needed with this system.

IF you have the right ingredients, then this system can be fast-paced, high-energy, action, with minimal scope for mechanics to get in the way – exactly what you want for a chase sequence. But that will only be true of a few groups out there.

The News Gets Worse

Like most game mechanics for chases, the rules would clearly struggle to cope with anything more complex than simple one-on-one.

Many on One

One car is being driven by a baddie, and the chasing car is full of PCs, only one of whom can operate the vehicle at a time. Despite being one-vehcile-vs-one-vehicle, the PCs can clearly take multiple actions at effectively the same time. Or it could be aircraft, or jet-skis, or starships. I’ve never yet found a set of chase mechanics that handle this extremely common situation well.

Then change it up, and put each of the pursuers in their own, independent, vehicle, and everything gets more complicated.

To give the efforts of Evil Genius their due, simply adding the number of enemies in excess of one to the target X would probably handle these problems as well as any other rules that I’ve seen, if not better.

So it might be, starting from, say 2, that the villain needs +3 to escape, while the heroes need -8 to capture (in the first instance) and vice-versa in the second. This creates more room for the side with multiple participants to cause problems for the escaping villain, or to overcome problems that the villain creates for the chasing pack, without letting the combat last too long or come to a conclusion too quickly.

One on Many – one is enough

Many targets, one pursuer, but any one of the targets will be enough. Maybe the PC just needs to grab someone to tell him what the hooting alarms and flashing lights mean in the villain’s lair (he knows it’s probably not good). But they are panicking and running everywhere in response to those same alarms…

The PC is now operating in a target-rich environment, and he only needs one of those targets to pay off. This scene would be run fairly easily using the modified chase rules. Now, the fact that there are multiple characters on one side of the chase works to the benefit of the pursuer.

If I were running this sequence in an adventure, I would set things up so that if the PC stops, he can grab one of the panicked flunkies in a single round, and start interrogating him the round after, regardless of die rolls, or the PC can head for a particular position and attempt to grab a flunkie in passing (which would be far less likely to succeed). In fact, as time ticked away, it would become that much harder to succeed, as the flunkies escape, one by one.

To be honest, I would probably run these events ‘at the speed of plot’ – if I wanted the PC to know what the alarms meant, then after a round or two, I would throw a flunkie his way; if not, then after a round or two attempting to overrule me with a great die roll, the flunkies are all elsewhere and unavailable for interviews. The player will have to use his character’s own expertise to work out why the alarm is going off.

Who the character is, makes a big difference. A technology-oriented character might ‘get’ the answer right away, possibly even without a roll; a character less adept in technology might have to make a roll, even though most warnings are fairly explicit (if sometimes cryptic to a non-specialist). “Coolant contamination” might mean everything to a nuclear engineer, but most laymen will have no idea why it’s bad; all they know is that the alarms and reactions tell them that it is bad.



I couldn’t find what I wanted, so I made my own.

One on Many – all are needed

In this variation, it’s one vs many again, but all of the many have to be caught.

Our hero accidentally knocks over the drum containing the radioactive Gummy Bunnies, who immediately bounce their way in all directions, looking for a path to freedom (these examples are indicative and not to be taken all that seriously). The chase is to capture all the escapees before it is too late and one (or more) escape into the city beyond.

Again, this can be handled with some simple additional rules – that’s the good news. Set an overall target for all the Gummy Bunnies – any that aren’t caught before the hero’s advantage reaches Y are out and loose, and free to mutate into something nastier.

To determine Y, use a Fibonacci Sequence. Let’s be generous and let the chaser grab one of the bunnies right away – that means that the first number will be a 0. If the hero can spot his next target at the same time (reasonable under the circumstances), then the second number would be one more.

A Fibonacci sequence works by adding together the two previous numbers to get the next number in the sequence. They turn up in all sorts of odd places in nature.

We want as many entries as there are Bunnies – let’s say eight of them.

0 and 1 are the first two. 0+1=1 is the third. 1+1=2 is the fourth. 1+2=3 is the fourth. 2+3=5 is the fifth. 3+5=8 is the sixth. 5+8=13 is the seventh. and 8+13=21 is the eighth. It looks a lot clearer without the verbiage: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.

So 22 is our Y – or 20, if we want to make it harder for the PC.

Round 0 – he catches one.
Round 1 – he catches a second. If he makes a good enough roll, he might also capture the third. If he doesn’t, the bunnies get one step further ahead of him.
Round 2 – he’s supposed to be looking around for the fourth target, but he might be spending the turn capturing the third.
Round 3 – in the worst case scenario, he’s now looking around for the fourth, and can attempt to capture it in round 4. In the best case scenario, he’s captured the third and is starting to look for the fourth.
…and so on.

If the PC does something to improve his success, like throwing down some of the rabbit’s food to attract them, or finding a way to capture two at once early on (when they are all close together), he can get ahead of the curve and will make the target; if he makes a mistake (a bad roll to catch one), then one or more might escape.

Many on Many – the ultimate nightmare

Five PCs vs 5 Villains resulting in 5 simultaneous chases. It doesn’t matter what mechanics you use for this, it’s going to be a nightmare.

This is where those simplifications made to the Evil Genius rules really pay off. One number per chase for a total of 4 – that’s a lot better than a total of 8 to track. Run turns of each chase consecutively, sharing the spotlight around. Be alert for collateral ‘damage’ from one chase sequence impacting another chase, either to the for the better or the worse (that sort of thing helps unify and tie the whole thing together). If the villains look like giving the PCs the slip, the PCs can always exchange targets (a well-known trope and tactic). Do it right (using some kind of counter to track the four chase numbers) and the results would be a gripping game session.

The Ultimate Verdict

So the chase mechanics provided by Evil Genius are (1) not perfect, but (2) flexible and adaptable enough to be better than anything else in situations where there really isn’t anything adequate — IF you have the players to take advantage of the system’s strengths.

The larger the group, the less impact one player being a slower thinker than the rest will have, because focusing attention elsewhere gives them longer to make a decision. If it’s a recognized problem, you can always designate one or more players as being able to offer ‘suggestions’ to the slower player. There have been past games in which a successful skill roll earned this as an advantage – the better the roll, the more people were allowed to make suggestions (usually, a limit of one suggestion per contributor).

Yes, this is metagaming – but I don’t consider all metagaming to be bad, as I have pointed out many times before.

Would I buy a copy of the game system (when it’s available? This is the real bottom-line question. As always, it would depend in part on the price, and it would depend in part on whether or not I had a copy of the D&D 5e rules already, because what has been offered is not self-contained.

Assuming that the 5e rules are not a question – which would be the case for a lot of people out there – then the answer becomes a more solid “maybe”. At maybe US$20 – very likely, because the genre is one of value to me. At half that, then yes, even if the genre was not so beneficial. At more than that? At more than double the $20, I would start to hesitate – a lot. I would be very unsure whether or not I would get my money’s worth at that sort of price point.

Others might disagree, and that’s fine – what value one gets out of any given game product is an individual thing. But at the very least, it’s worth putting onto your radar.

Update 27 April, 2022

A reply from Evil Genius

Chris Ramsley was kind enough to send me a response, reproduced below in full.

Dear Editor,

Thanks for taking the time to try this system out! It looks like you’ve highlighted a lot of the things we wanted to do with this system; mainly the flexibility of the concept.

I think a lot of the trouble you’ve run into has more to do with the presentation of the demo than the system itself. It’s really only meant to be “played” exactly as written. Your inclination to start improvising and giving players more agency is, I think, the correct way to handle a chase scene in a real game session. It’s just that the demo is saying “play out this chase exactly as in the movie so you can see how the dice get rolled,” while I think what you’d like is a taste of the full system.

I’d like to send you the full playtest rules as well as the playtest scenarios we gave to playtesters to try out chases – one for foot chases and one for vehicle chases. These should allow for the real flexibility you’re looking for that the demo just doesn’t provide.

Here are a few more specific notes:

A poor beginning.

A playtest version of the rest of the system is necessary to play the demo and should have been sent along with it. The basics of 5e should be enough to understand it, so I think you were okay on that front with a player that knew those rules, but the playtest material will include everything you need this time around.

The demo is also set up so that player choice is very limited. It’s not a real session of an RPG, but rather a quick little thing to play through to see how the rules function. It’s presented so that you can get a taste of each of the major mechanics and see how they play out. It’s very clear in your article that you didn’t play it out as written, and as a tiny demo, it has no guidance for what to do if you go “off script.” The full chase rules, on the other hand, heavily encourage creativity, so I think you’ll enjoy them a lot more.

One two many players.

The example is a simple demo that recreates the movie chase, meant to be playable even if you don’t have a big group to play it with. I think having two players play Bond and the villain is a great idea though. The full rules will allow you to run with more player characters, which is more fun because some rules only apply to players and not NPCs.

Mechanical Flaws.

Tracking one score for each side is ultimately a lot less to keep track of than something like combat, where everyone is tracking hit points for instance. The two numbers could theoretically be combined into one, but the chase system also works for multiple different groups, not just two. You could have two teams each trying to catch a third, five different people in a race, or any other weird combination you can imagine, without having to modify the system in any way.

The points represent a narrative force, and not an actual distance, which can vary throughout the chase, so there’s no need to choose a starting number; everyone just starts at 0. Actions are then played out in a highly abstracted way. Chases are meant to be extremely fast paced, much like a chase in a movie is. Running a chase for 12 rounds is going to be boring no matter what, which is why the round limit is set to 3 in the demo. You can choose any round limit you like in the full rules, but a regular chase will be 3 or 4 rounds, and even a very long chase probably won’t be more than 6 or 7.

Each round begins with a complication, which it seems like you didn’t use; or at least used only sparingly. These are key to making the chase work. They provide context for the chase and inform player action, and give a way for players to score points or give points to the enemy. The full rules have a lot to say about them and include a lot of advice for the GM.

Verdict.

Being able to plan ahead very well shouldn’t matter very much in a chase. Ultimately whatever your plan is, you’re making an opposed roll against one of your opponents, or in some rare cases against the scenario. If you can come up with a way to use a skill you’re good at against a skill they’re bad at, that’s going to be helpful, but the way you’ve described the way your demo chase went suggests you played it very differently from how the system works, so I think getting the full write-up that explain everything more carefully should help a lot.

The news gets worse.

The system is designed to allow for any number of participants and functions well with vehicles. It looks like you’ve done a lot of math here, and I’m glad to tell you it’s much easier to run these kinds of chases than all that.

I think if you take a look at the playtest material and see how they play out in a “real” game, you’ll get a better feel for how it all works. There are examples of a few different kinds of chases, and all of them are made for a group of players, not just one Bond.

Sincerely,

Chris “Goober” Ramsley.
Co-designer of Everyday Heroes™
Evil Genius Productions LLC

Mike’s Response

Hi Chris,

Call me Mike!

You’re absolutely right about the inclination to go full-game rather than follow-your-nose. How the system responds to player agency is a critical element, and where a number of past game systems have fallen down. You touch on this point a number of times in your response. It definitely sounds like the full rules are a lot closer to what I was hoping for!

Regarding coalesced tracks, I get your point about needing to be able to handle several different independent factions. But I tend to think 2-party chases will be more common, and anything else an exception. And coalescing the tracking means that there are only two tracks needed with 3-4 factions.

I specifically want to mention that reducing everything to die rolls (even opposed rolls) as suggested makes game-play super-boring. It’s no wonder that chases are over so quickly if that’s the approach. Whereas, despite taking time to discuss the mechanics and our impressions, our chase lasted about 12 rounds and despite the problems described, was fun. And that’s the number one target for any game mechanics ticked.

Finally, since it has come up, the standard structure of a round that evolved in the course of the test ran as follows:

1. Decide whether or not a complication is needed to liven things up or throw a spanner in the works – in other words, these were treated as plot twists within the case.
2. If so, announce it.
3. Player attempting to escape announces what he wants to do next.
4. GM evaluates proposal. Is it too big for a single turn? What die rolls might be needed to achieve what the player wants to do? etc.
5. Player makes the rolls required, GM evaluates results, describes the action and effects.
6. Player attempting to capture announces what he wants to do next, given what the prey has just done.
7. GM evaluates proposal. Is it too big for a single turn? What die rolls might be needed to achieve what the player wants to do? etc.
8. Player makes the rolls required, GM evaluates results, describes the action and effects.
9. GM determines whether the pursued has extended his lead, or the pursuer has closed the gap, or the status has remained quo.
10. Count another turn complete and Repeat.

Mike