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

I’ve written over 1,800 answers on Quora and for every one, I’ve read 40 or 50 answers (probably more) written by other people in response to a question by someone else again.

A surprisingly small amount of what I’ve read has been directly RPG-related.

That’s because most of the content that gets offered derives from my past upvotes and the classifications that Quora links them with.

I started off answering questions about music, pop culture, politics, science, technology, and maths, as well as RPGs, but a lot more people write on those other topics than write about RPGs, so they naturally came to dominate my feed. And on top of that, I’m less familiar with D&D 5e than I am with 3.x, so I tend to rule myself out of pontificating on 5e subjects, further shrinking what is already a niche subject.

And, on top of that, my best content will always show up here at Campaign Mastery; sometimes I can do an abbreviated version as an answer, sometime not. This accelerates that existing trend.

So, when a really good question comes along in my feed that is RPG-related and has a number of answers already, I don’t expect to be able to add much – at least, I hope that I am not able to do so, because that means that the existing answers are good enough that I can pick up some takeaway tips.

Last week, the question “How do I incorporate a theme into my TTRPG campaign despite the fact that players will be unpredictable? I play D&D 5E if that helps” came to my attention.

There were five answers which ranged from the ‘excellent’ on up. None of them were a waste of my reading time, and you can read them too, just by clicking on the ling above..

One of those answers was by a Quora user who I’d not encountered before, Erin Schram, and it was so inspirational that an article immediately came to mind – not to repeat what he had written, but to add to it, and all the other answers.

Themes should be like Gravity

As anyone who’s been reading my works for a while knows, I love a good analogy because they can reveal perspectives and permit analyses that otherwise could be missed. A good analogy abstracts the subject matter and presents it as an overview that tells truths that would otherwise be like hacking through jungle with a machete to unearth.

The inspiration in this case was just such an analogy, or perhaps, a general principle, so central to the question as to bear repeating at least twice to drum it in – so I have.

Explaining Themes

Erin’s answer points out that Theme can mean a number of different things. He then rejects those that merely define a style for a campaign or game system, and offers up “the word theme means recurring elements in the narrative that tighten the story. That way we could have a side quest that still feels on theme despite not directly involving the main plotline. The theme can also justify amusing plot twists.”

This is correct, but doesn’t go far enough. Themes should be more than narrative elements; they should also impact character design, relationships, plot, environments and locations. A theme is a conceptual element that defines a campaign; it is the difference between two campaigns run within the same style / sub-genre / rules system, the thing that sets them apart from each other in a coherent and cohesive way.

That last point is important; you don’t need to have a theme to separate two campaigns. Two different GMs can begin from the same starting point with the same campaign elements and setting and the two campaigns will be completely different. The same GM can even run two different campaigns with the same foundation elements and they will be different, though those differences will probably be relatively small.

The benefit of having themes is not that they make the difference, it’s that they codify the difference, permitting consistency and forging additional coherence by linking multiple adventures through the thematic content. This not only makes it easier to create distinctiveness in a campaign, it gives you a head-start on applying your creativity in general.

Exploring The Analogy

Gravity is a force that affects other bodies at a distance. In fact, Gravity affects anything and everything, even light, at a distance! It brings macroscopic structure to the universe by balancing or overcoming other forces such as electrostatic charge.

In a similar way, a theme should influence and inspire, but will rarely control content. A good theme is both as ubiquitous as gravity but also as capable of being overcome.

If you think of your campaign as it is at any given instant as a ball floating through a universe of possibilities, theme is a companion object exerting a gravitational attraction upon the campaign. Rather than running headlong into the companion object, a more interesting picture is almost inevitable.

Either:

• …the campaign will be dominant (greater gravitational force) and the theme will simply float around the edges of the campaign, coloring content from time to time like a lunar tide; while the campaign may be tugged this way and then that by the theme, which wants to travel in a different direction, these influences will cause only a minor perturbation in the course of the campaign. Or,
• …the theme will be dominant (greater gravitational force) and the campaign will float around the theme, returning to it regularly and exploring it from multiple angles and interpretations; the course of the campaign may deviate temporarily from the influence of the theme, but such deviations are only temporary. Or,
• …the pair will be relatively equal in force, and both will orbit around a mutual center of gravity. The directions of travel of both will ultimately be a compromise between both.

Except that the pseudo-gravity of the theme can do things that ordinary gravity can’t – they can wax and wane at command, for example, or change the influence that they are imparting to the campaign simply by reinterpreting the theme or its consequences. What’s more, themes can evolve in the course of a campaign; they often come in matched pairs, like Liberty and Responsibility, Individualism vs Collective Unity.

When this happens, neither is the true theme; the real theme being explored is the conflict between the two philosophies and the consequences of extremism in either direction.

I was reading something else just recently that drove this point home; another Quora answer about why Elric of Melnibone had not achieved adaptions and the fame of other fantasy works like Game Of Thrones and The Lord Of The Rings. The response suggested that the Law-vs-Chaos conflict that forms one axis of the typical D&D alignment space has been adjudged a mistake in recent times and is now being downplayed by the game in favor of the much simpler Good Vs Evil, or the morally more neutral Us vs Them.

While it might be true that this conflict is now being de-emphasized, the assertion only drove home the point that for most of its 40-plus years of history, my superhero campaign has explored this conflict and how it complicates simple answers of morality and gives rise to individual choice in determining answers to moral questions.

For example, one implication of Order is having well-developed plans, while the equivalent Chaos implication is being flexible and able to adapt to circumstances that change unexpectedly. Another set of implications are Government and Anarchy. And then there is Purpose vs Acceptance, and the list just goes on and on. On top of that, while it is true that Order vs Chaos impacts on and complicates Good vs Evil, it is equally true that Good and Evil impact and complicate Order and Chaos. A perfectly valid theme within this space would be an exploration of Doctrine vs Command Authority, for example.

Like Gravity, a theme can exert an influence over events without necessarily manifesting as a fall from a great height. Gravity continues to exert an influence even aboard a jet plane at 45,000 feet, after all.

The influence can manifest itself in different ways depending on what aspect of the campaign is being considered.

Plots

A theme creates conflict between groups or individuals, which create objectives and motivations. Or it can simply color these aspects of an existing conflict. A theme can lie at the heart of an individual adventure, or it can simply color and shape that adventure by providing context for some of the adventure content.

More commonly, a single adventure will have a specific theme of its own, perhaps deriving from a broader campaign theme, perhaps compounding or colliding with such a theme. I’ll cover that subject a little later.

Central Characters

Each of the central characters – including the PCs – should have, or should develop in the course of the campaign, a position with respect to the theme. This position, and its consequences for the character’s choices, can easily form the heart of adventures focusing on that central character; but most of the time, it will influence character choices, not control them. A theme can cause an enemy to manifest an unexpected virtue, or cause an ally to betray some cause in which he has hitherto believed in.

Even if the theme does nothing more than define (in whole or in part) a character’s background and the choices that have led that character to whatever position they currently hold within the campaign, that is a valid manifestation of the theme.

It is also possible for a central character – PC or NPC – to have their own individual theme, that influences behavior in the course of an adventure at any opportunity. This is part of their character that they carry around like a blanket or pair of gloves. Sometimes this manifests as a personal character arc – a character seeking redemption for some past misdeed, for example, or seeking to expiate a debt.

Locations/Environments

Except when shaped by sentient beings, it can sometimes be difficult to relate these to a theme, except in the most abstract form, or by using the theme as a metaphor for the location or environment. Only on rare occasions will a direct interpretation be possible.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check for the possibility!

Often overlooked, in particular, is the application of a theme to the way characters can be expected to react to a location or environment. This can be invoked simply by using intentionally-loaded emotive terms to describe the location, possibly supplemented with observed behavior of incidental characters.

A place of deep shadows, seemingly designed with the intent of permitting characters to furtively migrate from one to another, in which everyone always feels curious and calculating eyes upon them, will naturally trigger a response in behavior on the part of any PC entering such a location. It should influence (but not control) the nature of any encounters, especially unplanned incidental ones.

Once again, any given location or environment can have a theme that manifests only there. These become touchstones around which descriptions, encounters, and events are framed.

‘Tranquility’ is an easy one that’s often used for bucolic rural settings, for example. It gets more interesting when applied to a city park that is surrounded by violence, anger, and intolerance. But even without that, the intrusion of a force of violence into such a location creates an impression that colors the responses of those witnessing it.

Minor Encounters

Minor encounters rarely have their own theme, they simply aren’t important enough. Which means that when you assign them one, the encounters immediately become more interesting and memorable.

A consequence of doing so is that the players can no longer tell whether or not a casual encounter is a minor one or not. This forces them to pay closer attention, just in case – and even if it seems like it’s not significant, after the fact, my players know that I’m perfectly capable of dropping that same character into a future adventure in a more significant role.

A theme is far more dominant with a minor character. It will often be reflected in vocalizations, personalities, and clothing, for example.

Because these personal themes exert a stronger influence over such characters, they are less impacted by broader themes that may be in play. That can sometimes make them islands of stability or fonts of chaos in comparison to the events that surround them.

On final tip before I move on: GMs can often undervalue and under-utilize such minor encounters. To combat this, I try to think of such minor encounters as a conduit, building block, or tool that can be used by the PCs to solve whatever the problem is that currently confronts them. They are a resource in other words – one that may not be necessary, or that may play a pivotal role in advancing the campaign narrative.

Multiple themes

Nor is it necessary for a campaign to have only one theme. After all, you already have a plethora of more localized themes, as the preceding sections make clear. But this immediately creates complications for the GM – good ones, perhaps, but complications nevertheless.

Those problems come in the form of interception points, where two themes intersect. This sort of thing happens all the time, of course – if a campaign element has its own dedicated theme and the campaign has a theme, those two themes will intersect every time that particular character appears.

Opportunities

Churchill once said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” The way themes can interact, or be triggered, or shaped, by each other presents opportunities that can be exploited; this is often a design criteria in the selection of themes both overarching and specific, because they create a specific mode of intersection between the two that makes resulting events a self-evident logical progression. Not only do you get more plausibility, but you get parts of the plot that literally write themselves – a character or group, defined by their localized theme, react to the overarching theme in exactly the right way to create interesting stories / characters / locations / events.

Progression within themes

In most campaigns, there is also a progression in relative impact from campaign-level themes. Some will be present at full strength from the very beginning, others will be minor contributors to situations but grow to dominate the campaign by its very end. This naturally creates a campaign-level plot arc, the overall story of the campaign.

Complex Thematic Structures

More complex arrangements are also possible; if, for example, there is any chance that the campaign might be extended to continue beyond this primary story arc, you should build the seeds of “what comes next” into the campaign either from the beginning or from the midpoint of the first campaign, the point at which you can discern its ultimate shape in reality and not in plotting theory (the two are rarely the same).

Another example: it is possible to craft a theme that only applies at specific times or under specific circumstances, which therefore uses local themes and game developments as triggering circumstances, as tumbling dominoes, or as plot twist generators.

Themes as Prophecy

It’s even plausible to take the basic campaign elements as a set of descriptions of the initial state of the campaign and interpret every development that occurs through a matrix of interlocking themes in order to simulate, in broad strokes, the entire campaign. This is generally a waste of time, however, because the accumulated impacts of free will on the part of the players and their characters will cause the reality and the simulation to drift apart exactly at the point where a good simulation would be most useful.

That provides one final tip: plan for the campaign you want to run and revise those plans, over and over again, each time the players choose a different path. There should always be consequences that result from PC actions, anyway; at least the intersections between themes give some indication of what consequences the GM should play up and which ones he should seek to minimize.

No Self-contained Answers

Like most such techniques, themes cannot be the be-all and end-all of campaign construction. They are more akin to seeds that sprout through the campaign, flowering at times and wilting on others; they are tools to assist in the creation of adventure and plot elements, and sources of inspiration; but no tool can do it all.

Learning the limits of what can be done with themes is not easy; experience is the best teacher. Experiments and trial and error, perhaps conducted on a small scale, and then expanded, are the best approach.

As a primer to get you on your way, remember this: every personality trait, every characterization of an environment or location, every single-sentence plot summary that describes what you have planned before actual play – these can all be considered themes, or manifestations of themes, however temporary or limited in scope. So you are probably performing these experiments already, without even knowing it!

I was thinking about this month’s Blog Carnival subject (Gods Of The Multiverse), hosted by Gonz over at Codex Anathema, when I was struck by a thought that had never occurred to me before.

Deities, by their very nature, don’t belong in Dungeons and Dragons – or in most other RPGs, for that matter.

Before you can look for solutions, you need to identify a problem. In order to solve this problem, I need to explain why I think that’s the case.

Exceptional Characters

The PCs in almost every RPG are not supposed to be ordinary, they are supposed to be extraordinary. No matter what the situation is within the game, they are supposed to be able to cope with it and turn a difficulty into victory.

And, most of the time, they can do so – but all that changes as soon as Deities enter the picture. Beings of immense power that can literally rewrite reality with a snap of their fingers – what can even an exceptional mortal do about that?

AD&D solved this problem by handicapping Deities to the point where they were not much better than extraordinary mortals of high power. Shortchanging them as a concept is the only solution.

Later versions of the game restored some of the conceptual heft of Deities, but only barely enough – and the Deities & Demigods of 3.x managed to be incompatible with the rules contained in other official supplements, so it was hardly a perfect solution.

I have often accepted the principle of these rules structures while finding other ways of expressing the concept, limiting deities within my campaigns in other, less obvious and more subtle ways. I hinted at some of this in an early post at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs.

Bottom line: Deities, as promised on the lid, negate player agency, and the only solution is to handicap them.

Ordinary Characters

Not all games employ the Heroic Fantasy mode. Johnn used to run a Murder Hobos campaign, back when he was still contributing to Campaign Mastery, for example.

Deities are even more overwhelming in such a campaign, at least in pure form. But because the characters are more down-to-earth, the watered-down official version of the deities can be just as overwhelming and not quite as out-of-place.

Limiting Deities

In both cases, though, the more integral to the campaign world you can make the limitations of deification, the better, because it permits the deities that may occur in the campaign from time to time to be more pure conceptually. In other words, it lets deities be deities.

In general terms, that’s the solution to the problem, and it’s one that I’ve been putting into practice for many years. So the sort of limitations that I have been imposing on the very concept of Deities are exactly what we need to be talking about.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to offer up a series of ways of limiting Deities. I’ve used all of these at times, sometimes just in one specific campaign, sometimes in several – and all of them (usually) without explaining the very existence of these limitations to the players in advance of the campaign; to players (and to PCs), Deities are the shiny all-powerful beacons of mythic might that they purport to be. Only through play do the cracks in this facade become revealed.

1. Conceptual Limitations

Most Deities have what my players call a “portfolio” – some attribute that is their specific focus. Thor is the God Of Thunder, Neptune is god of the Seas, and so on. The question is always, how much power, knowledge, skill, and authority do they have outside this conceptual framework?

In a lot of my games, Deities have their special portfolio and all that goes with it, in which they are supreme (or close to it); each pantheon (and there may only be one pantheon in a campaign) then has a set of more general attributes which are at a lower standard than their specialty; and there may be a third tier at a lesser standard again that is generic and applies to all Deities unless otherwise specified.

Some of my games impose a fourth layer of attributes that are applicable to demigods; in other games, demigods and ‘true’ gods differ only in their origins.

I have occasionally defined a ‘flaw’ or ‘ignorance’ – the opposite of s specialty, this is an area in which the deity is no better than the average mortal.

But always, these are conceptual limitations, i.e. limitations that derive directly from the character concept.

2. Hostages to Belief

In a number of my campaigns, I have made Deities hostages to the belief in them. Sometimes this is simply because it is Belief that gives them their power; sometimes it is because true faith is the conduit by which Clerics and Priests are empowered; sometimes, it is something more exotic.

In my Fumanor campaign, Deities found that their natures, personalities, portfolios, and abilities were in part a direct product of the belief in them, and were in part a fundamental reflection of who they were in prior belief systems. Theology was codified because that created stability and predictability in their relations with each other, but they were often blindsided by human creativity.

In the Shards Of Divinity campaign, this was taken a lot further; the Deities were not only expressions of the belief in their natures, but were hostage to changes in those beliefs. This fact was weaponized by their enemies at one time, which led to the creation of Paladins to root out heresies and dispel them.

3. Power Supply

I’ve touched on this already, but the question of where the Gods get the power that they employ to work miracles (and bestow on mortal followers) is an almost ubiquitous limitation in my campaigns. Sometimes, this is inherent, and capped somehow; sometimes, it is external and limited in some other fashion.

I always like to have Belief play a significant role – so if belief doesn’t hold deities hostage, it is not uncommon for belief to be the power supply. But at least once I decided that there was a completely distinct potency that was blocked by belief except within the scope of a portfolio. You might think that this means that deities would do their absolute best to fly under the radar and not be subject to the restrictions of Belief, but ‘unspecific deities’ were nigh-on powerless against deities within the scope of their portfolios, so it was generally considered to be a necessary evil. Nevertheless, there were a few beings who had the potential to be deities but chose not to subject themselves to that limitation.

Having deities powered by belief can create an interesting dynamic in which miracles for the faithful are needed (occasionally) to sustain belief, but to gain further power, the miracles have to be for, and be seen to benefit, the general public. At the same time, such miracles consume some of the power granted to the deity, so the results are a delicate three-way balancing act, with many different valid choices.

4. Mortal Hands

One of the most common restrictions is the Great And Powerful Oz – in which the gods have NO power against anyone but their own kind, but are able to empower mortals to be their hands, eyes, and ears.

The major variations that apply to this restriction revolve around omniscience, not omnipotence (which has already gone by the board). Are the Gods aware of everything their worshipers do and see? Are the aware only of what those worshipers choose to share? Are the gods omniscience but trapped by the multiple possible pathways of destiny? Or perhaps they are aware of everything in some fashion, but that awareness is cloaked in symbolism and allegory, with interpretation both necessary and difficult?

One idea that I’ve never used treats the Gods as the directors of a celestial intelligence agency, sending mortals (the PCs) into dangerous situations so that the Deity knows what is going on and can plan to resolve it. Of course, this puts the PCs into all sorts of dangerous situations – and once they have done their job, they have to get out all on their own….

5. Ancient Treaty/Unlocking a Door

Sometimes, Deities can have virtual omnipotence – but so do their enemies. To prevent the destruction of everything, there has been a treaty or agreement between those enemies that provides a functional restriction where none existed.

A variation on this theme gives the deities virtually unlimited power – but they have ancient enemies of similar power that have been ‘locked away’ somehow, and if the deities use too much of their power, they risk unlocking the door…

6. Cosmic Problems

Another popular choice amongst GMs who favor high fantasy is not to limit Deities very much if at all, but instead to redirect that might by giving the deities problems commensurate with that power.

A common variation is to have both deities and their enemies be equally matched, and so both sides need to resort to mortal proxies. This solution is sometimes dismissed because there is an impression that this sort of ‘proxy conflict’ needs to be imposed from an even greater force; this is actually not the case. What you need is someone at the same power level who is neutral to both sides, but who will ally with the enemies of whichever side breaks the rules. Since the addition of this third party would make either side unstoppable, neither would chance it – overtly, at least (There would undoubtedly be all sorts of stealthy under-the-table maneuvering going on!)

7. Public Relations Nightmares

Something that isn’t used as often as perhaps it should is reduction of effective power due to public opinion. You can be as omnipotent as you want, but if actually using that power overtly would cause a mass uprising against you – and potential ending of your power supply – then you are hamstrung.

Picture some divine enemies who dress themselves up as a seemingly-legitimate Faith, then willfully abuse their power (stopping just short of annihilating the mortals being deceived)… True deities might well find that they are all tarred with this brush and become forced into a low-profile existence, even though innocent. This would effectively give the clever enemies who orchestrated this PR Nightmare something close to free reign.

Deceptions of all sorts can be used in this way, effectively strangling the power that Deities can bring to bear.

8. Nonexistence

What if there were no Deities, just a bunch of Faiths who had access to Spiritual Power through the worship of congregations? If every “Divine Visitation” was a deception to further the belief in the figurehead?

Not even existing is the ultimate restriction!

9. Fragmented Divinity

This is a concept straight out of my Shards Of Divinity campaign. The story – which the PCs never learned fully while that campaign was underway – was that there was a Deity, singular, who created the universe. But he was lonely, so he attempted to create more of his kind, expecting that his seniority would keep his children in line while the resulting universe was populated with sentience and wonders.

Like all children, they chafed at the restrictions that he placed on them, and especially at the fault that he found in their creations when they sought to emulate him. Ultimately, they rebelled and tore him to pieces, shards of which were then scattered throughout reality.

When those shards encountered the fevered imaginations of mortals, they became Deities. Together, these Deities were able to expel the “Angry Ones” – the spoiled brats – from Reality, but lacked the power to destroy them; only their Father had sufficient might to achieve this.

The Deities that were so created believed fully the creation myths of the mortals, not knowing any better. They exiled the angry ones out of self-preservation, with no appreciation of the history involved. Nor did they realize that reassembling the Creator would lead to the complete destruction of his universe, which was sustained by them due to their existence as the remnants of the Creator. Of course, they also possessed all the human flaws that their mortal creators could think up.

Meanwhile, the creations of the Angry Ones were themselves a threat, and many of them the equal of anything that the Gods could create. Lacking the power to confront these enemies directly, they set about empowering mortals.

The ultimate goal of these enemies was to bring back their creators, and they worked diligently at this, to the point where success was imminent.

The PCs were supposed to discover that the Fey gained their powers of illusion from the largest fragment, which retained some ‘echoes’ of the thoughts and will of the Creator. These master manipulators had orchestrated the rise of one particular mortal and were shepherding him down the path that would leave him in possession of the Fey Shard, and able to use it to summon all the others and reconstruct the Creator, this being their ultimate and only defense against the Angry Ones.

The Fey thought that in so doing, they would be ascended and would supplant the Angry Ones as the children of the Creator. But the mortal they had caused to be born and who they were manipulating and protecting was a PC with a will of his own, and the intelligence to deduce what the Fey did not know themselves – that reassembling the creator would require the totality of the Creation to be sacrificed.

There were a couple of alternate outcomes that could result.

• The PC could fulfill the destiny carved out for him by the Fey, destroying them and him in the process;
• The PC could be subverted by the Angry Ones, elevating himself to primacy over them, supplanting the Creator that they had destroyed; and destroying everything else in creation;
• The PC could choose to gather, refocus, and re-scatter the Shards, sacrificing the Angry Ones to perpetuate magic throughout existence, and elevating himself to Primacy over a new generation of Deities.
• The PC could permit Magic to die throughout reality, erasing his own source of power, annihilating the Angry Ones, ending the existences of all beings who relied on Magic to survive, and let a Mundane World exist for eternity – and having to live with the knowledge of that choice throughout his remaining life.

Everyone involved was able to see the potential destiny of this PC, and were attempting to manipulate him toward the end that they favored while undoing the manipulations of their rivals and enemies, which was ultimately what the Campaign was all about.

10. The Snow Job

Deities in the Rings Of Time campaign were quite different. Essentially, they were flim-flam men with little actual power of their own, who ‘borrowed’ mortals of sufficient power to solve problems for them. The PCs, inheritors of a vast Dragon Hoard, whose betters had sacrificed themselves in capturing, found themselves to be the latest such trouble-shooters, and eventually ferreted out the truth. Once they had solved the immediate problem (a rogue faction of ‘Gods’), they were thanked and dumped back on the Prime Material Plane with virtually nothing to show for it while the “gods” went around taking credit for it.

They then set out to earn the rewards that they felt should belong to anyone doing the hard work of being a deity (themselves, in other words), thereby making themselves the enemies of the “gods”, who promptly recruited a new troubleshooter (the sister of one of the PCs) to deal with the upstarts.

These “gods” were not without power, but it was nowhere near what legend ascribed to them. They were more Micromanagers than Deities.

(It’s worth remembering that all this was cobbled together on the fly with ZERO prep in advance, using leftover and discarded ideas developed for the Fumanor campaign. As such, it’s surprising how coherent it all turned out to be).

The Difficulty With Deities

Most of these solutions have fundamental impacts on the truth of mythology and religion within a campaign. They may or may not have any impact at all on what is commonly believed by characters within a campaign, but the underlying reality usually gets changed – either a little, or a lot.

It therefore becomes important to have that impact integrated into your campaign in any other appropriate way; consistency is important.

These limitations will also impact greatly on the look and feel of clerical magic, on the potential for corruption and excess within organized religion, on the viability of non-belief, on the presence of multiple pantheons, on the ways Deities interact with mortals (if they do so at all), on the origins of Demons, Devils, and Undead, and on many other aspects of the campaign world.

Once you have settled on one or more limitations, you need to think through the implications in search of other ways in which these limitations will manifest within the campaign.

I especially want to call out the impact that these different solutions have on the truth, and on the perceived truth, of creation myths. These should be at the heart of the questions, “Who are the Gods?” and “Where does their power come from?” It’s no coincidence that the Shards Of Divinity example was all about the Creation Myths – both the true but incomplete ones of the Angry Ones creations, the true-but-even-less-complete ones of the Dragons who taught Mortals to use Magic, the partially-true-but-incomplete ones of the Fey, or the completely inaccurate ones told by the Faiths and the Deities that they had inadvertently created to be their centerpieces.

Where does the universe come from? Who are the gods, really? Where do they get their powers? And where does magic come from?

And, most importantly, How do you avoid the existence of Deities from treading on the toes of PC Agency in your campaign?

That last one is the real question; the others are signposts to the answer.

When I studied Chemistry in Secondary School (which, when I started, was known more commonly as “High School”), we started with the Dalton Model of Atomic Structure, of atoms as fundamental units of matter that could not be subdivided, and then moved on to the Thompson “Plum Pudding” model.

In essence, this describes a negatively-charged pudding with positively-charged raisins floating in it.

We then moved on to the Bohr “Solar Atom” structure, before being presented with a glimpse of the more complex world that was still being deciphered at the time.

This approach was chosen because it established that everything we were being taught was a generalization and an approximation, a tool that was useful for understanding the essentials of Atomic structure as it pertained to chemical reactions.

My first year university course in the subject basically trod the same ground, though it covered it a lot faster.

Even today, the “Solar Atom” provides a gentle introduction to the chemical world, even though we know better – we know that electrons are quantum energy fields that collapse into particles when observed, particles that occupy energy states that match the ‘electron shells’ or ‘orbits’ of the Bohr model (noting that my understanding of these things is way out of date, and that I have simplified outrageously), and that quantum theory explains why the innermost shell can only hold 2 electrons (at most), and so on – all assumptions that simply had to be taken for granted by the simpler model.

I’ve always found it useful to occasionally strip and coalesce phenomena into its simplest possible structure, even though that structure is impossibly oversimplified. It then becomes possible to introduce the complications of reality, one at a time, and gain a greater understanding of why they are, and how they interrelate.

The other day, I idly wondered, ‘why not do that for RPGs and see what can be learned?’ – and so, this article was born.

The Atomic RPG

What is the absolute simplest RPG model that you can think of?

Try this: one stat, for how effective a character is. You state what you want to try and do, and roll against this stat, and if you succeed in the roll, your character succeeds in his action.

This is the “monotomic hydrogen” of RPGs. The stat is the solitary proton, the electron is the die roll (a virtual thing that actually exists in all possible results until you actually roll a die and read off a result), and the description of intended action are the electron shells that contain the die roll and give it significance.

Combat mechanics

Let’s think about combat with this ultra-simple RPG. There are all sorts of models that could be used, but perhaps the simplest is the one from the Hero System: You have the average result as a threshold of success, and the difference in “ability” (attacker minus defender) increases or decreases that threshold. Roll under the net threshold, and you succeed.

Hold up – we need some way of tracking damage, don’t we? The simplest possible mechanism is a fixed unit of damage, but increased sophistication and chance would result from using a die roll – say a d6. If you get hit, you lose a d6 in temporary reduction to your one and only stat.

That immediately produces an interesting and rare dynamic in which an initial failure can cascade through subsequent rounds until it results in victory; it literally gets progressively easier to win a fight. But luck can only go so far; if there’s a big enough differential between the combatant’s ability scores, luck has to start going your way over two or three or even more rounds or you quickly become shish kabob.

The Helium RPG

Helium adds a second proton and a second electron, and needs to add some neutrons to hold it all together. I’m leery of pushing the analogy too far, but let’s push on and see how we go.

Instead of one stat, we now have two, and some form of differentiation in definitions. The most obvious one is to separate the character’s abilities into physical and mental prowess. This lets us track these independently

At this point, if you were to add both stats together, they would always have to total the same number, because we have no mechanism for variation. A character could be good physically, or good mentally, or some sort of compromise between the two.

So far, so good, but as soon as we do this, we need some guidelines for the GM to use in deciding which stat to use, and that’s our first Neutron.

We need to think about Smart vs Smart contests, and relegate our previous “combat” structure to Brawn vs Brawn contests. Each of these needs to be defined, and we have to think about the resulting damage and what it means. There has to be an analysis of Smart vs Brawn, and if that can ever happen, and what it means. Those complexities are the second Neutron – essential mechanics to hold the whole thing together and control the interactions.

The complexity of our model has suddenly shot way up.

Atomic Number Rising

The number of protons in an Atom defines its Atomic Number. this is a convenient indexing of elements, it doesn’t mean much more than that – at first glance.

But each positive charge in the nucleus needs to be balanced by a negative charge, and so we add more electrons, and have to start worrying about how they pack, and energy being pumped in to increase an electron’s ‘orbit’, which it then yields as a photon. And an interesting pattern begins to emerge.

The second electron shell can hold 8 electrons, and if we add those (one at a time) to match the increasing atomic number, we get the basic structures of Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, and Neon. The third shell can also hold eight electrons, and that gives us Sodium, Magnesium, Aluminium, Silicon, Phosphorous, Sulfur, Chlorine, and Argon.

Whoops – except that this third shell can actually hold 18 electrons, but there are configurations involving electrons in the fourth shell that are more stable. So the next two elements, Potassium and Calcium, both add their extras into that fourth layer. Once there’s a pair of electrons there, the next bunch of elements all add to the third layer again, until it gets up to 16. When we add one more after that, to take us to 17, one of the outermost 2 electrons finds its way into the third shell, so that the pattern runs 2/8/16/2, 2/8/18/1, 2/8/18/2, 2/8/18/3, and so on. Things continue on from there until we get to 2/8/18/8, Argon.

If you line the elements up in a table so that the number of vacant spots in the outermost shells line up, clear patterns of chemical properties begin to show up. In fact, this table structure was first noted from those patterns of properties, and later explained by electron configurations. So strong are these patterns that they were successfully used to predict then-unknown elements and their properties – chemists then went looking for, and found, these hitherto-unknown elements. The number of empty spots also matters – a lot – to the chemical reactions that these elements prefer to undergo.

When you align the elements according to these patterns of electron configurations and similarity of properties, the resulting table is something most of us will find familiar – the Periodic Table of the Elements.

The above depiction shows the elements up to Atomic Number 118, and all of them have been either found in nature or synthesized in an atomic laboratory. Wikipedia’s article (from which it derives) has an excellent description of the structure of the table, which I don’t think I can improve on:

The table is divided into four roughly rectangular areas called blocks. The rows of the table are called periods, and the columns are called groups. Elements from the same column group of the periodic table show similar chemical characteristics. Trends run through the periodic table, with nonmetallic character (keeping their own electrons) increasing from left to right across a period, and from down to up across a group, and metallic character (surrendering electrons to other atoms) increasing in the opposite direction. The underlying reason for these trends is electron configurations of atoms.

I would add that there are also trends down groups concerning melting points, boiling points, electrical conductivity, densities, and more.

The RPG Analogy

We can subdivide our two stats as much as we want. It’s common, for example, to subdivide the mental stat into two or three, one dealing with learned knowledge and the capacity to learn more, and the other either representing spirit, willpower & determination, or wisdom, or empathy; and it’s common for the ‘brawn’ stat to be subdivided into measures of strength, physical health and robustness, dexterity and/or agility and/or nimbleness, and possibly a third branch dealing with attractiveness. Some systems add still more stats.

If we accept the analogy that the simplest breakup (brawn and brain) corresponds to the innermost electron shell, then all these stats represent additional electrons in a new, outer layer. Most RPGs have six or seven such sub-stats.

This shows exactly why these additional stats are defined – they are all parameters whose values differentiate one simulated individual from another. They enable an individual to be better than average in one respect while being poorer in a counter-balancing other respect.

That’s a very pernicious concept; once it is accepted, any area in which it is not the case suddenly comes under sharp scrutiny.

Species, Archetype, and Class

The second and third items in the heading are different words for essentially the same concept, but just so that we’re all on the same page, let’s toss out some broad definitions:

Species –

Genetic traits and abilities, even in a world that doesn’t understand genetics. Fundamental properties deriving from what a being is, not what they have studied / learned.

Archetype –

A profession or occupational description and the suite of standard capabilities that are assumed to come with it, in the most general sense. Often employed in discussions of the most general manner to describe the traits common to all who are exemplars of the archetype.

Class –

Some game systems codify archetypes into specific character classes. Pretty much everything said of archetypes can be applied to character classes and vice-versa.

With that out of the way, let’s fit them into our atomic model. Conceptually, this can be done in several different ways, but given that specific expertises and abilities are defined by these choices as ways of simulating the overarching characteristic, that makes them most analogous to ‘just another stat’ in our model.

For example, a species of “Elf” will carry with it certain assumptions that distinguish it from all other species. Those assumptions – the ‘species profile’ – will find expression through the game mechanics as abilities and traits unique to an “Elf”. The same is true of a character class, such as “Wizard”, or an archetype such as “Muscle-man” (more often referred to by the generic term “Brick”).

The Skills Story

Right now, the knowledge stat (or whatever is serving in that capacity) defines the character’s capabilities in every sphere of knowledge. His strength stat (or whatever is serving in that respect) defines the character’s capabilities in every type of physical act, save those in which some other stat (Acrobatics, Dexterity, or whatever) is a more accurate choice. Normally, anything involving speed of reflexes, speed of motion, or finesse of motion, comes under that umbrella rather than raw strength, for example, and so on.

As soon as you differentiate statistics into multiple parameters, this becomes not only hypocritical but counterproductive. That’s because the purpose of our simulation has shifted – rather than being an abstract representation, we are now engaged in attempting to simulate a more rounded individual in the form of the designated parameters of the game system.

The obvious solution is to implement some sort of skills system in which no individual can possibly know it all. But this brings in a whole new group of assumptions about how the mechanics will work, and at this point we have minimal guidance on which to base solutions.

Fortunately, that minimal guidance is directly relevant and easily analogous. We defined an attack as the value of an offensive characteristic plus an average roll less the defensive characteristic of the target, because that was the simplest way of integrating all those elements. All we need to do is determine some analogous values and a basic set of game mechanics pops out the other side.

A skill use is the value of that skill plus an average roll less the difficulty of the task being attempted.

But this represents a further refinement again of the purpose of the game mechanics – we have just shifted from attempting to simulate a rounded individual through designated character parameters, to attempting to simulate a rounded but flawed and incomplete individual through designated character parameters.

Attack Rolls & Defensive Capability

Individuals don’t remain static. They get better at some things with training and education, they get better at most things with practice and experience, and they get worse at many things as they age and become more infirm – but might also get worse as their physical condition changes.

That’s inherent in the very concept of Skills. And it forces a reappraisal of some of the things that we had thought settled. In particular, our combat mechanics.

Attack Rolls

It no longer seems reasonable that a character’s attack roll remains static throughout his or her lifetime. If you can improve skills through education and training, you can improve other parameters. In particular, attack rolls and the character’s defensive capability.

Attack Rolls, first. If we uncouple these from direct relationship with the value of a stat, we can treat different weapons, or classes of weapons, as skills, and we can increase or decrease these independently of the root parameter measurement. It’s not just how strong you are, anymore; now it’s about how well you use that Strength.

That means that your attack roll can and should start considerably depreciated, and increase with time and expertise to become considerably better than the raw stat alone.

Defensive Capability

Next, defensive capability. Should that keep pace with the improving attack capability? This is not quite as simple a question as it first appears; the PCs are supposed to be exceptional individuals, and a player has invested some degree of effort in creating one of them. That always argues yes, in fact it argues that defensive capability should slowly outstrip the offensive ability.

But if you do that, the PCs will find it harder to succeed against anyone even a little bit better than they are, which makes adventures more fraught.

What’s more, because there will be multiple attempted attacks in any combat, any small imbalance will be geometrically magnified.

Single Attacks vs Maneuver Chains

And that brings in yet another consideration: does an attack roll represent a single blow (which will make combats last a long time) or is there some sort of time compression involved, with each attack representing an entire string of maneuvers?

Balancing these disparate considerations is most easily accomplished by divorcing the capacity for absorbing damage from being directly tied to the representative parameters. Assuming that time compression is mandated for playability reasons, we need to apply whatever the compression factor is to the capacity to absorb damage, either by deflecting it with defensive capabilities or by creating a semi-independent measure of this parameter – hit points.

The Hero system uses the “one action, one roll, deductions from damage done, no time compression” approach. D&D uses the “one roll, one string of actions, with time compression” approach, and compensates by increasing hit points with each progression in overall capability. Instead of deducting damage from most attacks, it also applies compression to the value of an individual hit point so that damage represents a cumulative impact of one or more successful blows, and applies a generous layer of abstraction.

It should now be noted that while we have an allowance for adverse or beneficial circumstances in our skill use, there is no such allowance in the combat mechanism. It’s easy enough to implement one, simply by applying a modifier to the attack roll.

Weapon Differentiation

But that opens the door to a new concept: weapon differentiation. Not all weapons are alike – some may strike more easily but more slowly; others my strike more heavily but compromise one or both of these parameters. These considerations can easily be addressed now that we have abstracted damage capacity, because that lets us abstract the damage done, as well. In fact, we can inflate or compress scales of hit points as desired to land us in a sweet spot in terms of weapon differentiation.

The latter is far easier to balance, but the actual choice doesn’t matter too much in this broad analysis.

What is more important is that a choice – weapon employed – brings with it a set of specifics within the game mechanics. Depending on the degree of abstraction in the game mechanics, there may be only one or two of these, or there may be a half-a-dozen or more.

Again, the specifics are just values that are held by the variables that go into character description within the game mechanics; so these are “protons’ within our RPG ‘solar atom’ just like anything else, and the mechanics that interpret the values are the corresponding neutrons, while the mechanism of actually collapsing a set of theoretical interpretations into a specific value are analogous to electrons in our model.

Radioactivity

Before I get onto the subject of applying these theoretical concepts to practical purposes, there’s one more analogy that emerges as an extension to this model.

When an atomic nucleus grows too large, it becomes unstable, prone to shedding parts of itself as particles and – in the process – becoming some simpler element. We describe this property as ‘radioactivity’. Continue to add to the atomic mass and cataclysmic failure becomes not only possible but an eventual inevitability.

As a child, too smart perhaps for my own good, I formulated the proposition that since Iron was the end-point of all nuclear processes (an oversimplification), it could be suggested that every atom higher on the periodic table could be considered radioactive; it was just that the isotopes and elements that we consider ‘stable’ within this range have such lengthy decay rates that we don’t notice the decay.

I have no idea of the relationship between this premise and reality, and don’t care (for the purposes of this discussion); the point is that the same thing happens if rules systems become too complex. Arguably, my Zenith-3 rules lie some distance above the critical threshold, but by focusing attention on one subsystem at a time, the whole is just barely manageable. So it’s not the equivalent of Plutonium, or anything higher on the atomic table – but it might be Lead, or Mercury, or (my personal choice), Gold.

Why is all this important?

Aside from codifying the relationship between these elements of game mechanics as applied to actual play, there’s a symbolic relevance that should not be neglected.

The nucleus – the ‘proton elements’ and the ‘neutron infrastructure’ that supports them in matched pairs – define individual characters within a game system. The ‘electrons’ – again paired with the protons – represent the capacity of those character-defining elements to interact with anything else, and in particular, to interact with other characters.

This is the precise relationship of atomic structure within the chemical elements with the chemical reactions that make up the natural world. So this model – though it proved insufficient in chemistry – informs us as to some general principles in game design that are easily overlooked, and those have practical application.

Matched Pairs

You have to consider the characteristics that describe a character, including things like species and character class, as inseparably bound to a set of mechanics that interpret the traits of the specific values those characteristics can contain.

Because it’s our tendency to collect those interpretations and then sort and separate them into collective properties – putting all the weapons into a single table, for example – this truth can sometimes get obscured.

This obfuscation means that people think they can change one part of the game mechanics without impacting on characters and character balance. The reality shows that it is impossible to make such a change without fundamentally affecting actual characters, for good or ill. Those effects can be subtle, or grossly overt.

Similarly, you can’t change a characteristic without altering both the supporting game mechanics AND the way those mechanics interact with other characters and/or the reality external to the character.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen game mechanics proposals that looked fine on paper, but that failed abysmally when put into actual practice. Some of these mistakes were mine – see, for example, My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety and Magic – some belonged to others.

If you understand the relationship between these game design components, you can at least know where to start to look for unwanted consequences, and have at least a shot at understanding why the game mechanics of which you were so proud have collapsed into a screaming heap – and what to do about it.

The Door To Options

But that’s not the only, or even the most powerful application of this analogy, useful though it is; even more significant is this – it gathers under the one umbrella, all the ways in which characters can interact with anything external to them (including die rolls for things like understanding of the game world).

While, at first glance, it might seem that all these potential interactions are viable, the reality is that some combinations need to be forced into combination; they aren’t ‘natural’. Other combinations are more relevant, and describe some aspect of the game reality that you might find useful.

These can be obvious – STR vs STR, for example, or an Attack Role vs DEX to attempt to hit a character performing some acrobatic maneuver – or more subtle.

“He’s trying to grab me by the shoulders? I want to twist so that he gets a handful of cloak, enabling me to simply divest myself of it and roll to one side, but I want it to look accidental so that he doesn’t actively resist.”

You could simulate that as a DEX (motion) vs STR (grip), but that would be fairly obvious. If you want a motion to look accidental, it might be more appropriate to use CHAR (the perception of the character and their actions by others) vs STR (grip). You might decide not to go this way; but at least you will have considered the available alternatives, including those that might not have occurred to you otherwise.

This can be a way of taking the spotlight from one of the combat monsters and momentarily shifting it to a character that normally wouldn’t get such attention, simply by specifying that this is the avenue of advancing the plot that is preferred from a plot perspective.

Comprehension is the bonus

Ultimately, this analogy captures aspects of game design and function, calling attention to inobvious parts of the system, and giving the GM a greater range of options and a deeper understanding of the game system being used. That potentially makes you a better GM – not instantly, but the potential is there, if you work on it. This is a road map to such enlightenment, not a set of Cliff’s Notes.

And don’t forget how the functional purpose of the game mechanics changed as the contents became more complex. That gives you a tool for the analysis of new game systems that you might encounter ‘in the wild’.

You can’t ask a lot more of an abstract representation than all that!

Shane Warne was one of the greatest cricketers since the game began. His specialty was Leg Spin, which involves using your fingers during the delivery process to get the ball to spin so that it curves through the air, and when it bounces off the pitch, it ‘turns’ to one side or the other – frequently in the direction that it was not curving – or dips and speeds up or rises and slows down. Like a baseball pitcher’s slow ball, the objective is to make the ball be somewhere that the batsman doesn’t expect it to be.

It is a measure of his genius that it was said that “Some sportsmen have a purple patch every now and then of twelve to eighteen months, if they are lucky. Warnie’s lasted 18 years.”

Warne passed away recently of a heart attack, at the age of 52. A private memorial for family and selected friends was held a couple of days ago, a state funeral will take place within the next week and is going to be broadcast nation-wide on a commercial network advertising-free – which shows the level of esteem in which he was held; we don’t even do that for the former leaders of the entire country! (As will inevitably happen eventually, when Queen Elizabeth II ultimately passes away, we might accord her a memorial on a similar scale, though of course, she will not be buried here).

Last night, a tribute show was broadcast, and it reminded me of some of the underlying concepts from the Legacies Setting that never saw the light of day. These were intended to form part of the content for the eventual second installment of that series.

The concepts are sufficiently meritorious, I think, that they deserve to be shared. Since it now seems unlikely that this will ever happen in Legacies 2, this is the most appropriate space for that sharing.

1. Every Life leaves a Legacy

Every living being makes a mark upon the world through their interaction with sentience. It doesn’t matter if you are a beloved pet or most learned instructor in some exotic art, prey to be hunted or a hunter of prey; nor does it matter how sentient you are, only that you interact in some manner with a being that is sentient.

The marks we leave are a compound of our every shared experience as perceived both publicly and privately. That sharing can be indirect – the person may have written a poem or song, or an educational or spiritual text, and it matters not how well established the mark they made already is, by the sharing of that work (however misunderstood it might be) with a new generation, the mark of the author is refreshed and deepened.

Doers of great deeds leave especially deep and strong marks, etched in the difference to history that they have made, even if their names were not known at the time. In some instances, it can be that anonymity elevates such contributions from the specific to an overarching generality.

One of the most special people that I have ever met was my uncle Stan; the son of Polish immigrants who I believe came to Australia around the time of WWII and settled unobtrusively in the small country town in which I grew up, he was taken from us quite suddenly and at a very early age. It seemed half the town wanted to speak at his funeral, and he was one of the only people I have ever encountered about whom everyone had a positive story and there were no negative stories whatsoever. Although the family had chosen to anglicize his surname to make it easier for his children to learn to spell, they themselves chose to revert to the original spelling to commemorate him; and that in itself is sufficiently rare to speak volumes of the man. Generous, kind, warm, helpful, loving, intelligent, supportive – name an accolade, and he owned it. He left his mark upon the world, though few from beyond that small country town would even have known his name. I was honored to be one of his pallbearers.

It was at this funeral that I first began having the thoughts that would crystallize into the concept of Legacies, the mark on the world that we leave behind, many years before I would even hear of RPGs.

2. The Hole We Leave Behind

When our personal stories come to an end, the accumulated deeds and thoughts of our lives form a hollow space in the fabric of society, a hole that we leave behind. Although the shape of this hole may change through the years, although its size and depth may vary, we all leave our marks in the form of the impact that we have on the lives of others, for good or ill, and regardless of intentions, however imperfect we may be. The accumulation of those marks, both those still growing and those now fixed, create the strands of history.

These are most noticeable when an individual encounters or creates extraordinary circumstances. The singular and defining events that transpire at such times are what fill our history books, and confer a kind of immortality.

One such thread that remains poignant to me, and which also contributed to this concept, is the tale of the unknown soldier whose remains were used to mislead the Germans ahead of D-Day. While he would have undoubtedly had left a personal mark on the lives of the family and friends who knew him, his death and the role that it permitted him to play in history enabled him to make a deeper impression upon the world. It doesn’t matter to what extent the deception was successful, or to what extent it saved lives during the landings; even if this trickery played no role in the outcome whatsoever, his story has entered the popular zeitgeist, and that alone is a mark made upon society.

Sometimes, the most significant impact we make upon the world is with our passing. Archduke Franz Ferdinand will forever be remembered as the catalyst that triggered the first World War of the 20th century, and that has forever overshadowed any other contribution that he made to the society around him, for it forever altered the lives of millions. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that had there not been a First World War, we would never had a second.

Even when the mark made stems from our lives, and not the ending of those lives, we are sometimes not the architects of our personal legacies; circumstances occasionally creates singular events in which the course of history can turn on the choices of individuals, sometimes extraordinary, and sometimes not.

Into the hole that we leave behind get placed the interpretations and commemorations of others, the reflections of and upon the deeds and communicated thoughts that we created in life. Over time, as perceptions change, so may the perceptions and interpretation of that legacy. Few ever consider themselves as the villains of a story, however dark and evil the deeds we commit.

Some legacies can be said to cast a shadow, making the person an pivot-point in the lives of others for long after they have ceased to add to that legacy. Take Winston Churchill – although certainly not perfect as a person, he rose to the occasion during the Second World War to leave an indelible mark upon history. He has served as an inspiration to others long after his passing, and even today, the ability of the President Zelenskyy of Ukraine to invoke that memory speaks to the enduring quality of his Legacy.

3. The Worlds That We Create

These things should also be true of the worlds that we create with our imaginations. Every circumstance, every event, every object, all have connections to Legacies both widely known and completely forgotten. Sometimes, caught up the heat of the moment, this gets forgotten; at other times, it is foremost in our minds.

That’s the way it is in the real world, too. Sometimes, you can be so busy living life that you lose sight over the unfolding of events and decisions that have led you to your current circumstance and how you are reacting to it. Everything that we know how to do, everything that anyone ever taught us, all make a contribution to the way that we react and behave, even at such times; the Legacies of others may be overlooked, but remain as profound as ever.

One of the fundamental principles of the Legacies Setting was to make the contributions of the past more impactful, immediate, and noticeable within the campaign world than is usually the case, by giving them greater manifestation within the objects, locations, histories, and circumstances that presented to PCs to create the ingredients of their adventures and to NPCs to create the elements of their lives.

One of the principal sources of inspiration for this comes from the collected DVD extras of the multi-DVD editions of the Lord Of The Rings. First, the One Ring itself can be viewed as a character within the story, one as fully-realized in its own way as any other. Manipulative, deceptive, determined, sometimes malevolent, sometimes seductive, you can’t buy into the story without accepting it as a character in its own right.

But more than that – the heritage of each race is displayed in their architecture, tools, weapons, and armors, and in their characters, characteristics, and preconceptions. The histories of each race are palpable influences over their “modern” representatives and their interactions.

One thread within the epic tale that is barely touched upon in the various commentaries is that what sets the Nine Walkers apart from the others who appear in the tale is their ability to rise above these histories and legacies.

• The friendship between Gimli and Legolas is displayed in the movies, but announced more profoundly in the original books, and forms one example.
• Gandalf The Grey becomes Gandalf The White, in the process ascending beyond what he was, both in powers and limitations.
• Boromir rises above the narrow perspective of his legacy at the last, though it almost destroys him first.
• Aragorn rises above his own experiences to become the King – he doesn’t just accept the titles and privileges, he accepts and feels the responsibilities and cares that we would hope were felt by our leaders, and that changes him, taking him beyond what he was.
• And, of course, the coming of age of the Hobbits is the one aspect of all this that was discussed; one of my abiding criticisms of the movies is that the tales of Merry and Pippin are short-changed in the adaptions, especially the ultimate demonstrations of how much they have grown from their experiences in the Scouring Of The Shire. Still, that means that however much I might enjoy the adaptions, the books themselves have something more to offer, and can’t simply be set aside.

The third significant source of inspiration was the fundamental concept of Legacy Items, in which the past ownership of the item was essential knowledge. They encapsulated the perspective that the most significant participants in the campaign were the Legacy Items themselves, with their owners a necessary adjunct to that story. This is largely the reverse of the traditional relationship – but as the owner grew in power, so the Legacy Item was able to tap into more and more of its own innate power, and so the two advanced side-by-side.

A lot of the early development work that went into The Legacies Setting post-Assassin’s Amulet was geared toward taking this principals and finding ways to reflect them in all aspects of the game universe. Today’s article is intended to share a lot of the notes, thoughts, and concepts with readers.

4. Every weapon has a history

Every weapon has a past, and some of that past matters. It may have been used in a famous battle, or had a past owner of note, or it might have never been tested in battle. When it is so tested, it may find itself unequal to the challenge, or it may come to revel in the blood of enemies – or simply to revel in blood. Past owners may have been flamboyant, or driven by ego, or may have preferred to stay in the shadows.

And, although not sentient, the traits of past owners always leave a mark, in imprint upon the weapon. It can be said that each and every weapon of significance has a personality, in part innate, bestowed upon it by its creator, and in part learned from the styles of its past owners.

When an experienced weapon first comes into the possession of a new owner, it will seek to lead him down a pathway familiar to it. The new owner can resist these urges and prompts, and seek to turn the weapon down a new path; or can identify them and unlock a mundane advantage from them, a small but useful benefit beyond the simple articulation of embedded magics.

Sometimes, the weapon’s preferred approach will compliment the style of the new owner, and sometimes, the two will conflict. In the case of the former, a synergistic bonus may arise, and the owner will quickly realize that this particular weapon “feels right” — for him. Where the approaches are too different, the weapon may feel opposed to the owner, seeking to betray him, producing an ‘anti-synergistic” penalty.

No matter how identical they may appear from a strict retelling of specifications as given in the dungeon master’s guide (or equivalent), no two weapons are ever completely identical.

Unlocking those points of distinctiveness, understanding and harnessing them, can steer a character down paths not contemplated, or advance a character in a journey already underway, or lead to the emergence of temptations and personality traits that the owner resists – or indulges.

A lot of inspiration for this section came from the description of the Elvish swords found in The Hobbit. If you keep that in mind while reading the game mechanics and creation process below, you can almost see Tolkien’s fingerprints running through it.

In game terms, the GM should select 1-2 personality traits to be embodied within the weapon’s ‘approach’ or ‘style’. It may be that a particular enemy type or enemy style are embedded within these traits, eg “Jealous of Elves”, “Hatred Of Salamanders”.

From those traits, he should select 1-2 skills within the system to receive a synergy bonus or penalty of plus-or-minus-1 (other rolls may also be considered, eg +1 FORT save).

If a synergy bonus is in play, it also applies to either attack rolls or damage rolls, not both, and the GM should choose which. Similarly, a synergy penalty should apply to the other of these options.

For every +2 magical bonus in the weapon, or part thereof, the number of personality traits should increase by 1, as should the rolls that will benefit or suffer.

The GM should then craft a brief backstory – past owners / encounters / battles – which give rise to all these personality traits save one, which is deemed to have come from its creator.

Finally, the GM should devise a pathway for the discovery of this backstory – some of it may be easy to find, some of it incredibly difficult, some will lead into potential adventures, some will be suited to the occasional spot of downtime. At least one part should only be discernible by paying attention to when the GM imposes a synergy bonus or penalty.

The same applies to armor and shields; they all have history. These items in particular tend to be customized to reflect the first owner’s identity and interests, which means that a visual clue is far more likely to be the starting point to tracing the history of the item.

Wands and miscellaneous magic items have to be treated a little differently, as they don’t offer the same sort of traceable clues. So these items tend to focus more on the intent of the creator at the time of creation – the purpose of the item – than on the owners.

Each mage should have a specialty, a particular sphere of magic in which they are more interested or gifted. This can either be a type of magic, a unifying concept that ties several spells together, a particular environment, an ally (for whom the item was crafted) or enemy… you get the idea.

Spells that match this unifying category (or that are cast in an appropriate environment or setting) gain +1 on any targeting or saving roll or, if there is no such roll, +1 per die on any effect or damage roll, or, if there isn’t either of these, +1 to the duration in whatever numeric units are used. If nothing else is appropriate, the mage gets +1 to attempt to avoid being counterspelled.

For each such synergy, there should be an opposing vulnerability. This need not be a diametric opposite, it can be something completely different. The mage might have an affinity for water and ice magic, for example, but a vulnerability to kittens and other felines.

Magic items crafted by these mages receive a similar +1 when appropriate. Some magic items will contain some sort of visual clue as to the nature of this synergy bonus, others will not. If there is no such visual clue, the only way to discern the synergies is by communing with the item through deep meditation. At least an hour is required per magical plus or special ability contained withing the item.

It is common for religious items to confer a synergy bonus on the wielder and a synergy penalty on all others within range of an effect of the item. The wielders of such items can choose to double the penalty and apply it to themselves instead (so if the synergy and penalty are exact opposites, the net effect is a synergy penalty). Doing so permits the synergy bonus that would normally be granted to the wielder to be conferred on another character within 60′ of the wielder.

Synergy bonuses and penalties can stack, and can stack with any other form of bonus or penalty. That means that if you can gather a set of items, they might confer a synergy bonus of +3, +4, or even +5. However, these benefits must be spread as evenly as possible amongst the different applications or benefits, which keeps them from being overwhelming to the game system. +1 to hit, +1 to damage, and -1 to saves is hardly as big a deal as a modifier of three to any one of these items. The GM is free to modify this rule as he sees fit to construct synergistic collections.

One common choice might be to create a set of items that actually confer a synergistic penalty per item until the entire set is reunited. Throw in some sort of breadcrumbs to lead from one item to the next, and you have a sweeping adventure.

5. Manifesting History

It might be going too far to suggest that you should be able to write history from the place names alone, provided only that you could establish a chronological sequence for the bestowing of those names – but certainly under such conditions, place names should signpost important developments in history.

Too often, we approach the naming of places without a plan, and with no regard for how history will have influenced those names. And that’s a shame, because there’s a win-win to be had here – not only does using history make it easier (and a lot less work) to craft good names, but there’s a payoff in verisimilitude.

It should be no different in a campaign based on the Legacies framework.

Place names come down to

• Commemorations of Notable People
• Commemorations of Notable Events
• Commemorations of Impressions
• Sources of local Pride
• Commemorations of Value
• Commemorations of Past/Native Language
• Commemorations of Identification
• Impositions by Invaders
• Attempts to rewrite History
• Wit and half-wits
• Other

Commemorations of Notable People –

Important people get things named after them. Usually when they do something spectacular, or die. But a lot of things also get named after the first people to discover them, or the first to fully explore them.

Commemorations of Notable Events –

If something significant happened somewhere, a place will often be named or renamed to make a record of the event. The more significant the event was to the locals (or those with the authority to change the name if that isn’t the locals), the more likely it is to be so documented.

Commemorations of Impressions –

Lots of places get named for the way they look, or the way some singular individual thinks they could look. The latter can also reflect a lot of wishful thinking. Strangely, such names often seem to have the opposite effect – name somewhere Paradise Gardens and you’re asking for trouble….

Sources of local Pride –

It’s probably going too far to name a town after the local sporting club, but this sort of thing does happen all the time. It doesn’t matter what it is – the world’s biggest catfish, the best apples in the world, etc (in the eyes of the locals).

Commemorations of Value –

If there is a local commodity of particular value, expect that name to show up in a number of manifestations within the local names. Often with a fair dab of poetic license.

Commemorations of Past / Native Language –

A lot of the place names in Australia derive from the Indigenous Australian names for those places. We’re so used to them, we hardly notice anymore, until it gets pointed out to us. There are probably some places in England that retain names derived from the names bestowed by the Romans – not many, but a few!

Commemorations of Identification –

When communities are formed, they will often virtue-signal that they want to be like somewhere that already exists, or that there are a lot of residents who formerly hailed from someplace else, by taking on some variation of the name. There are a whole host of American towns that are named after British towns and cities, for example.

Impositions by Invaders –

Conquerors and invaders regularly rewrite languages and rename places and objects. If the period of conquest lasts long enough, the changes can outlive the conquest. Nowhere is this lesson more forcefully represented than in the place-names of England.

Attempts to rewrite History –

This is a somewhat contentious one, but places can be named to glorify those who failed to achieve something that was locally supported, in essence, treating the loser as the winner in order to pretend that they won instead of losing. I’ll say no more, lest I offend someone.

Wit and half-wits –

There are always a few who are too clever by half, or not half as clever as they think they are. And sometimes, a name intended as a joke can get taken seriously for whatever reason (no sense of humor, perhaps?) – and so you end up with places bearing extremely unlikely names. Quite often, these names don’t last very long, but there always seems to be another one.

Sometimes, names acquire a second, more humorous, meaning, because the language changes or evolves.

Other –

And sometimes, names just occur to people out of thin air. Sometimes, these are the results of too much imagination, and sometimes too little.

Do a rough outline of your world’s history in chronological sequence. Rate each event on a scale from 1-10, where a ‘1’ is almost trivial, while a ’10’ is earth-shattering. That’s how many places should be named for something associated with that event. How many places are named for famous Generals?

Next, add these together one at a time, from most recent to most remote. If the most recent event was rated a three and the event before that was rated a 7, then the most recent event would be numbered 3 and the one before that would be numbered 10 (because 3+7=10), and so on.

Go over your map and make a list of the places to be named using a simple coordinate system. If the item is not a specific point, pick a specific point that includes the location and make a note of what it is – region, river, mountain range, whatever. Work out a rough estimate for when the place was last named or renamed. It makes life easier if you do this in a spreadsheet or in some other document that can be sorted. When the list is complete, sort according to the date named.

You can either start with the most recent place-name and work backwards, or the oldest and work forwards. But all you have to do is pick one of the name sources and use your history to correlate historical events with names deriving from those events, or individuals, or whatever.

Each scale of map introduces new locations to be named. There will be some carryover from a larger-scale map, so always start big and work to small.

Easy.

6. Societal Legacies

Social legacies tend to be a bit more subtle and harder to trace. These come under three headings, generally:

• Social Reforms
• Social Evolutions
• The founding of Organizations.

Social Reforms –

For every right and privilege that is enjoyed by anyone but the Clergy and the Nobility, there had to be a time when those rights and privileges did not exist. Even such things as the codification of civility, and the formalities that accompany the most elevated of meals, had to be introduced from somewhere or by someone, and those individuals and their contributions to society tend to be remembered. Sir Walter Raleigh, for example.

Sometimes these formalities start out as personal practices instituted in a particular time and place and never intended to become general to a whole population. But one of two things can happen to spread the practices and embed them within a broader society: Either someone encounters them and adopts them, and they spread because they have some inherent social value or symbolism; or someone sees a way to take advantage of these customs for their own benefit, or for the benefit of a cause they believe in, and so they construct deliberate campaigns to insert them into common practice.

It must also be admitted that oftentimes, social reforms meet heavy opposition, and this too can be a valid legacy.

Social Evolution –

Most changes in society don’t happen because of a Reformer, though; most are simply a matter of something being popular for a while, and then not. The more you look into such things, however, the more you discover connections to more serious and potent sections of history.

During WWI, many women took up work that had previously been the province of men, because the men were off fighting the war. When the men came back, they were forced to relinquish those positions, but many had grown to enjoy the independence and prosperity; the result was a record number of new businesses being founded. This independence of spirit and sense of optimism also found expression in new social activities, which quickly evolved a specific style and dress-code. The ‘flappers’ of the twenties remain icons of the time, even recognizable today. The Great Depression ended the fun and games and destroyed this giddy optimism, and ‘flappers’ went out of style.

So the story of one particular dance craze touches on a Global War, Economic Depression, Employment, Emancipation, and Equal Rights – and that’s just a superficial examination of the story. This isn’t the sum total of the important stories of the day – but it touches on a lot of them.

Some people leave a mark on Society, sometimes deserved and sometimes not. Martin Luther King earned his mark on Society with the optimism of his vision and the earnestness with which he pursued it. For some, his message fell on deaf ears; but others embraced the vision, to a greater or lesser extent. His idealism was not enough to remake the world, but it provided the beginnings of a blueprint for harmonious relations between disparate populations that remains as valid today as it was back then. When he was killed, King became a martyr to the cause of equality, and his legacy reverberates even today.

Other people become the centerpiece of such visions seemingly by accident. JFK was certainly not perfect, and definitely not the best President the US had ever seen; he made many mistakes, and may well have been defeated at reelection because of them. Still, his approach to the Space Program encapsulated a vision of hope for the future to many, no matter how cynical and practically political his motivations may have been. National Prestige and the Global leadership role of the US demanded that the US engage in, and win, the space race; Kennedy had demanded a confrontation on ground that the Americans had a chance to win on, manned flight to the moon. Most other possible achievements in space conceded an advantage to the Russians that made success unlikely. And yet, even knowing all that, the Kennedy aura remains, right up until the moment of his death in Dallas, Texas. Many feel that the optimism with which they saw the future died alongside him, only to be slowly and incrementally rebuilt over many decades, if at all. Kennedy has become larger than life as a result, and his place in history secured; he remains inspirational, not because of who and what he actually was, but because of who and what the myth makes him out to be.

Individuals sometimes evolve Society, but more often, Society evolves around them, captures them in a whirlwind of change for which they are (at most) only partially responsible, and elevates the individual, reshaping them into a perceived figurehead for the cause. This means that sometimes, the cause can be set back or even ended by exposing the feet of clay of the figurehead, but it doesn’t always work.

I have seen documentaries on the Art Nouveaux movement in design, and the Bauhaus movement in design, that shed new light on the great social and political movements of the day.

Not every social era evolves its own artistic style or movement in this way, but when they do, those artistic styles and movements can be a touchstone that ties seemingly coincidental events and concepts together with indestructible bonds that create a sense of inevitability.

The Founding Of Organizations –

In general, though, the most accessible Legacy of an individual is an organization that outlives them and continues to speak for, and work toward, the causes espoused by the individual. These can be anything from private clubs to merchants’ guilds. The modern-day political parties all started off with one individual at their nexus, frequently their first leader.

Every organization that exists within a campaign should have a history, however brief, establishing when and by whom they were founded, where, and why. These never exist in isolation; they should always be related back to the patterns of the society of the time, which gives context to the original organization.

Organizations, Social Changes, Reforms – these are all Legacies left by others, and the impact of those social Legacies should be noticed from time to time within the campaign.

7. Political Legacies

Noble families tend to be better than most at keeping track of the Legacies of the past individual members of those families, but everyone who gets involved in politics leaves some sort of a mark in history, no matter how small. This is true for those born into politics (that’s those Noble Families again) to those who serve and advise them, to those who defend them and conquer for them, and to those who seek to influence them. Elected Politicians and unelected political figures, all make a difference.

Most RPG campaigns view the great events of history as pivoting around larger-than-life individuals, because that implies the promise that when they advance far enough, the PCs will be counted amongst those individuals.

That’s fair enough, but it marks a distinct difference to the observed reality of the world around us, where individual political legacies are mostly feathers accumulating on one side of the scale until sufficient to overcome the resistance of the weight on the other. In other words, they are mostly collective accumulations of small changes that eventually form a significant force to achieve something.

Unfortunately, most GMs don’t recognize the inherent discontinuity in these world-views, and place their societies-driven-by-heroes-and-villains in worlds that have no room for heroes-and-villains. If that is done deliberately, it sets the stage for confrontations between the individual and the faceless masses of the status quo that can act to reaffirm that original perception of history. Social and political inertia become the ultimate enemy with which the individual must contest.

If it’s done carelessly, political elements within the campaign can feel ‘tacked on’ and superficial, and even contradictory, without the reasons for these reactions being recognized (let alone understood); at best, something just doesn’t feel ‘right’. Done correctly, they can be the bedrock and foundation of the campaign.

One of the earliest and most central elements to the Fumanor series of Campaigns was that the political infrastructure of society had a specific place within it for Adventurers, be they PCs or NPCs. This affirmed both the concept of Individuals as driving social forces, and the slower backdrop of collective wills forming a second layer within the society, and defined a relationship between the two.

Such questions can be, should be, the philosophical underpinnings of a campaign.

When creating a campaign, list the three most significant political problems in need of a solution within the game world.

Give each of the leading politicians a stance on these issues, one that makes sense given whatever is already known about them.

Who are the figureheads of the causes? Who are their opposite numbers on the other side of the debate? Where does public opinion lie? What are the consequences of doing nothing? What are the consequences should one side or the other win? What are the consequences that the advocates expect should one side or the other win (often not the same thing at all!)?

Sometimes, these debates and conflicts will form part of the campaign backdrop, a splash of color and nothing more; at other times, they may be a motivator for someone more significant within the campaign; and on rare occasions, the debate may be the central factor in an adventure, forcing the PCs to decide what side of the debate they are on.

8. Economic Legacies

Every business has a history – refer “Organizations”, above. I’m talking about something related to that, but that hasn’t really been covered explicitly.

Every mine has a history, every orchard, every granary – and every trade agreement. At the global campaign scale, these are usually trivial and irrelevant; but at the local scale, they can be all-consuming, or merely significant, factors.

Who has heard the concept of the Company Town before? When there is one major employer, or one industry that dominates the local landscape, the people tend to support that employer or industry over others. The company / industry becomes the central binding focus of everyone in the town, because even if they don’t get their income directly from the company / industry, they will get their money from people who do.

Who has recognized that the same principle holds true in RPGs like D&D? A mining town that exists purely to mine silver, or copper, or slate, or shale, or marble, or whatever, will place the ongoing interests of that source of wealth at the heart of their community interests. It doesn’t matter if the mine is owned by some nobleman or other who doesn’t give two hoots for the workers; what income and sustenance they receive is still directly bound to the productivity of the mine.

The history of the town is the history of the mine; the two are completely intertwined and interconnected. And the history of the residents, collectively, is also part of the history of both the town and the mine. The town, therefore, can be viewed as the collective legacy of past generations.

This is the level of Economic Legacy that most PCs will usually have to deal with, because it creates motivations for adventures.

Something is interfering with the workings of the mine? Send in some PCs.

The mine has petered out, so the locals have taken up banditry to get the gold they need to buy stolen ore from another mine? Send in some PCs!

The PCs are just passing through when word gets out that falling production means that the owners are imposing still more draconian living conditions in order to cut their expenses? You’ve already sent the PCs into the middle of this powder keg, they just don’t know that they are at ground zero – yet!!

But there’s another order of Economic Legacy that most GMs ignore: Trade between nations or regions.

For each of the economic units for which you are looking at trade, list their three biggest exports, who they go to, and – on a scale of 1-10 – what the annual revenue generated by each export is.

When you’ve finished, draw up a very crude map of these economic units and place a dice or markers totaling a value of (say) 40 in each of them.

Simulate a year’s trade by increasing the money in the exporter and decreasing the money in the people they are exporting to – this simulates the buying of that commodity.

Repeat two or three times more.

In an ideal world, imports should balance exports, so everyone stays at the starting money you gave them. In the real world, this is never the case – there is always some inequity. Money will begin pooling somewhere, and someone else will begin running short.

In those places running short, the standard of living takes a hit, and causes a readjustment of the price charged for their exports, but there’s a limit to that – said limit being the point at which someone else will sell to the importer the product that they want at a better price than the current suppliers want to charge.

So make those adjustments to values, and simulate another two years of trade.

The concluding balances give you some indication of the relative prosperity and levels of economic distress within the regions or nations of your game world. This is a simple Economic Generator. What’s more, you have just simulated the last 50 or so years of trade between each.

These trade factors indicate who can dominate who, who is dependent on whom, and who each nation is most likely to resent. These aren’t the only factors dictating relations between these economic units, but they are a start. Factor in relative military strength and you are just about there.

These relations will have an influence over every adventure, over the attitudes of every NPC, and even the relationships between PCs. Powerful juju, then.

All of thee economic transactions exist because some individual made the arrangements for them to happen – made offers, accepted offers, haggled over prices, etc. These figures are no less famous than generals – within their particular sphere of interests.

And now realize that in many RPGs, the participants in international trade behave like Mafia Dons (but are more careful not to get caught)…

9. Every Dungeon Is A Tombstone

This is the one part of the Legacies structure that most GMs will recognize. Every Dungeon should have a history – who created it, and why, and when – and the identity of the creator and circumstances of creation should influence the construction and contents of the dungeon.

There are a couple of milestones that GMs should keep in mind – the discovery of Steel being the most significant amongst them. Key discoveries/inventions in architecture are others – when the Lintel was invented, for example. Your PCs should be able to read the architecture of a dungeon and be able to guesstimate an approximate age of construction.

Now, that’s a lot of research work – the first time you do it. But once you have done it, it takes only moments to apply it on subsequent occasions.

10. Every Hole Has A Depth

I’ve made this point a couple of times already, but its time to look at it squarely. Some Legacies are local in nature, the person being basically unknown beyond a specific local region. Others are known internationally, and there are all sorts of scales in between.

The more widely-known an individual, the deeper the hole that they leave behind, and the longer the shadow that the hole casts upon the world. The more fields in which an individual is well known, the larger the hole.

All this is a metaphor, of course, a way of applying dimension to a persons reputation post-life. Reputations derive not only from public deeds, but from private ones that become publicly known afterwards, and the enduring impacts that a person had. Reputations often morph and change over time, as ‘less-relevant’ or side-issue facts get forgotten. Most reputations shrink in relevance over time, anyway.

But the holes left behind when a person dies can be more significant than the direct impacts of the living on any given issue, if the person in question was significant enough or influential enough with respect to the issue or some associated tangent to it.

At least one essay that I have seen describes the titans of the past as the mythological giants of the society. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill are all globally recognized as Giants in our modern society; in the metaphor that I am using of holes with depth and shadow, they have left very deep holes into which many people have deposited interpretations of their significance, and which cast long shadows, which are capable of shifting narratives and perspectives on issues even today.

Every campaign world should have its Giants, too – people whose reputations have grown beyond their personal control, who have become larger than life, and who have died either before or after that has occurred. Who are the Giants of your campaign world? How large a hole has their passing created, and how long a shadow do they cast in the modern or near-future setting of your campaign era?

11. Big Shoes: Filling A Void

It doesn’t always happen, but often someone will step forward and attempt to fill a void, replacing a lost champion of a cause with themselves or someone else. Often, these attempts fail, because the successful replacement to fill a void has to be able to capture the public imagination to the extent that the hole is deep, but someone trying earnestly will often score enough brownie points to at least be partially successful.

Many of these attempts go astray because they require the candidate attempting to fill the void to subordinate his personal opinions, philosophies, and preferences to the documented opinions, philosophies, and preferences of the person in whose shadow they intend to dwell, and that can be a very hard thing to sustain. And if their sincerity is ever seriously questioned, the whole reputation can unravel.

On very rare occasions, the replacement manages to carry an issue further than the original ever could, and can become larger than the hole he was seeking to fill. Once that has happened, the individual has more scope to be themselves so long as they don’t directly contradict the interpreted morality and principles of the original void.

GMs have to ask themselves, who has left the greatest voids in their campaign worlds? Who is trying to fill that void, however poorly, and how is that going, and how is it likely to go in the future?

12. The Times Always Elevate The Ordinary

Even in the presence of those who seem to have been always destined to be Giants, Ordinary people find themselves elevated by extraordinary times into positions of unexpected prominence. Tales of ordinary people doing exceptional things in dire circumstances become legends. The fact that nothing in their lives prepared them for such roles makes those legends all the more significant, because they have further to climb in order to achieve.

Such stories tend to get spread far and wide because they give people heart in difficult times, and morale is a powerful determinant of outcomes. A weak force can be outnumbered significantly, but if morale is high, and the more numerous forces have more typical morale (or worse), the weaker force can still emerge victorious.

A key factor in such tales that often gets overlooked is that it is much harder to raise the morale of a large force than it is to do so for a smaller one. Asymmetric forces are a breeding ground for such legends.

Who are the Ordinary Heroes of your campaign world, and where did their legends unfold?

13. A World Of Interlocking Legacies

The history of a game world should not be about the events that transpired, it should be about the characters and personalities who made those events occur. The world should be full of references and signposts to the legends of the past. Every time a group of PCs go somewhere for the first time, the GM should be able to insert a small factoid about the place and its role in history. “Birthplace of the Lion of El Tridad, who held off an entire tribe of Wild Orcs single-handed until relief arrived.” — “Scene of the final victory over the forces of the Black Viceroy.” — “Famous for its melons, first planted by the man who would become mayor for 112 years.”

Such little factoids bring the campaign history to life, and unify that history with the landscape.

Some legacies cast long shadows, and that includes the remnants of the evils of the past – places of vile ritual, of abject villainy, of fell creatures and foul magics. Every dungeon to be cleansed should have a context within the history, and these facts should have practical value to those who seek to expunge such legacies.

Every magic item should touch on or tell a story, or several, and those stories should being manifest benefits and penalties that connect the current owner with the legends of the past.

The result is an epic quality that cannot be achieved through shortcuts. The amazing thing is that creating that epic quality doesn’t have to involve that much extra work, if any; on the contrary, it can actually be less work in some respects.

Let the legends live on!

WARNING —

This turned into a very long post of more than 12,500 words – that’s three times my usual length.

Get yourself a drink and a snack before you start!

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?

It’s a simple enough question, isn’t it? And so easy to resolve – all it takes is a wristwatch or stopwatch – anything with a seconds counter, really!

Things get a little more interesting when you aren’t given the chance to take a deep breath first, because you could be at any point in your breathing cycle from having just taken a breath to having just exhaled. If we accept the premise that most ordinary breaths won’t be as deep as a deliberate intake, then we can map the results against the take-a-deep-breath standard, on the basis of the volume of oxygen in the lungs.

I’m not trying to suggest that these are proportionate to the real events; the typical human, at rest, breathes 12 to 20 times a minute, each breath being 3-5 seconds in length. We can easily exceed that simply by talking; an automatic mechanism prolongs the use of a breath, so you don’t need to breathe as often.

I don’t know about you, but I can hold my breath for a lot longer than the 2-3 breaths suggested by the diagram. So don’t read into it things that aren’t there. In fact, the average person can hold their breath for 30 seconds and some for a great deal longer. The general upper limit is around the two minute mark, but that’s with training and excellent health. The world record would take some beating, though – Aleix Segura Vendrell of Barcelona, Spain managed a proven 24 minutes and 3 seconds in February 2016!

But the diagram does incorporate a number of fiddly little technical details. When we take a deep breath, it doesn’t take that much longer than an ordinary breath; most of the added oxygen (relative to a normal breath) gets used up fairly quickly; and we have nowhere near exhausted the available oxygen when we can’t hold our breath any longer. That’s because the breathing reflex is actually a response to the partial pressure of Carbon Dioxide, which effectively poisons the breath that’s remaining.

Healthline.com list the following as the effects of holding your breath:

• 0:00 to 0:30. You might feel relaxed as you close your eyes and tune out the world around you.
• 0:30 to 2:00. You’ll start to feel uncomfortable pain in your lungs. The most common misconception about holding your breath is that you’re running out of air – you’re not. Learning to slow your breathing and increase intake during inhalation is part of this. But holding your breath is difficult and dangerous because carbon dioxide (CO2) is building up in your blood from not exhaling.
• 2:00 to 3:00. Your stomach starts to rapidly convulse and contract. This is because your diaphragm is trying to force you to take a breath.
• 3:00 to 5:00. You’ll begin to feel lightheaded. As CO2‚‚ builds to higher and higher levels, it pushes the oxygen out of your bloodstream and reduces the amount of oxygenated blood traveling to your brain.
• 5:00 to 6:00. Your body will start to shake as your muscles begin to uncontrollably contract. This is when holding your breath can become dangerous.
• 6:00 and longer. You’ll black out. Your brain badly needs oxygen, so it knocks you unconscious so your automatic breathing mechanisms will kick back in. If you’re underwater, you’ll probably inhale water into your lungs, which is life threatening.

But wait – those are normal people. Athletes are different, and fall into two groups: endurance athletes and burst athletes (I couldn’t find an official term, so I made one up).

When working hard, a burst athlete will breathe about 45 times a minute, while endurance athletes will only breathe 30 times a minute. Untrained humans naturally fall into the burst athlete category; it takes practice and training to do better. That training slows the consumption of oxygen early in the process to extend the breath’s duration later on by lowering the relative CO2 levels.

So, even with all that complication, it’s still a fairly simple question that is fairly simple to answer. Here’s a far more difficult one: How long can a character hold his breath?

There are multiple possible answers to contemplate.

Some options

I’ve broken those options down into Eight general categories. Magic Items, Magic in general, Metagaming a solution, Single Saves, Compound Saves, Stat Derivatives, Character Stat choices, and initial character status. Each of these represents a consideration that any solution to the question will need to have taken into account, even if it is eventually decided that it’s not part of the solution. To a certain extent, this review is to establish design parameters for the mechanics.

I’m also mindful that, like the Lifestyle rules a few weeks ago, the results have to accommodate a large variety of game systems, with different tolerances for realism. At the very least, D&D, Hero System, and Zenith-3 rules will need to be accommodated.

1. The Tray of Many Rings

There are some magic items in just about every game system that supports such things that makes the question moot, at least for some, and possibly for the whole party if enough of these items have been accumulated by the PCs. In most campaigns, by the time characters reach high levels, it’s not even an issue unless extraordinary measures are taken.

Whenever I encounter a broad question like the one under discussion today, and where magic items can solve the problem, I always have nightmarish visions of a PC (the keeper of the loot) whipping out a jeweler’s tray with fifty or so rings on it, consulting the tags, and lifting such a ring out of the tray for each PC.

Of course, there’s usually a limit to how many magic items of a given type a character can wield at any given time, so this might restrict the characters in other ways – but they can always take off the ring when they no longer need it and replace it with their usual choice, so really, it’s not much of a restriction – most of the time.

If the question doesn’t matter to you, you might continue reading out of intellectual curiosity, or to prepare yourself for one of those rare occasions when magic items can’t solve a particular dilemma that the characters face, but in general, magic can completely override the relevance of the question.

One solution is to make sure that the party never have enough such items to equip everyone; this preserves at least a minimal level of suspense about the situation.

Actually, it doesn’t matter if this is a solution to the problem if the PCs don’t think it is. Contemplate this – a long series of submerged passageways, far lengthier than the PCs can swim before running out of air. No problem, they break out their magic trinkets as above. Half-way down the passageways, they encounter some kind of anti-magic field that knocks out their magic items, however temporarily. (To be especially mean, portcullis might also drop on both sides, making the danger even more dramatically real). Suddenly, the problem seems very relevant to the players, life-or-death even! But even better, there’s a ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ factor – one such trap implies that there could be more. And that means that their h-so-clever magic item solution can no longer be relied on.

If magic items solve the problem, and the GM prefers to keep the counter for a more appropriate time, the answer is, indefinitely.

GMs should always scrutinize the fine print that comes with descriptions of such magic items. There have been occasions when players have been known to (gasp) cheat. But there are also some creative solutions that might be employed – summoning an Air Elemental to create a moving air pocket around the PCs, for example.

So, what are the effects of an anti-magic field on a life-form that is innately magical?

It’s always worthwhile if you can find the time to scour the rulebooks for paths around the problems that you intend to pose. Being able to anticipate possible solutions that the PCs might use lets you plan in advance what the outcome will be. You won’t usually be able to cover everything, but the better you know the players and their PCs, the more accurately you will be able to predict what they might do.

2. Other Magics

Magic Items typically solve such problems at an individual level0 Magic Spells, on the other hand, can solve them for a whole party. Of course, anti-magic fields that temporarily negate spells can certainly go some distance to making the question relevant again even in the face of a determined spellcaster. So can other techniques, such as temporal manipulation effects that make spells run out sooner.

Whenever a PC uses a spell to overcome some obstacle for the entire party, GMs should at least glance at the fine print on the spell. Again, learning to anticipate PC solutions to the basic problem at least gives you a head-start on any rulings that you might have to make.

As a general rule, though, magic can solve most problems if the practitioner is skilled enough, and there are times when that’s fine – the whole question might be nothing more than a way to give a mage PC some spotlight time! You’ll need to decide such things – that’s what the ‘pay’ you for, you’re the GM!

Which reminds me of a variant elemental plane that I once submerged the PCs in. It had a high level of dissolved copper sulphate which turned the water bright blue, and limited visibility even more than usual. It also made the water a splendid conductor of electricity, which was the primary attack mode of the inhabitant creatures…

3. Metagaming a solution: The Speed Of Plot

A character succumbing to a breath weapon is one thing, drowning on the way to the battle is quite something else. There are few more ignoble ways for a Hero to perish. It may be realistic for a character to drown, but there are times when realism does the GM no favors – it’s fun if the hazard can be overcome, it’s no fun if it can’t.

Being unable to access part of the adventure simply because they aren’t able to reach it is also no fun for those unable to participate.

There is, therefore, some justification for threatening characters while making sure that there is some means of getting through or around the obstacle. The alternative is to force the party to divide and have plotline in readiness for those left behind, to operate in parallel with the adventuring of those who have gone ahead.

Either solution is an example of Metagaming a solution to the challenge. The outcome proceeds “at the speed of plot”.

Whatever the mechanics of our solution to the broader question, they have to take this potential into account, presenting the GM with the options that he needs to be able to go in any direction desired. The bark has to be potentially worse than the bite – but at the same time, the bite has to have enough teeth that the bark is taken seriously. That’s a delicate balancing act to pull off.

It might even be that we need two subtly different sets of mechanics, a harsh option and a soft option. That’s never my preferred approach, but at the very least, we should be alert to the possibility as we proceed.

3a. But What About Player Agency?

There’s also a counter-argument that has merit – that player agency is violated when the GM leads the players by the nose in this way, that while the GM would have the responsibility of making the players aware of the inherent risks in proceeding, once they have done so, they should be ready to face the consequences of that choice.

It’s a position that I support, at least some of the time. As I said, it’s one thing to fall to a breath weapon, and another to drown on the way into the dungeon.

One solution to this aspect of the problem is to mandate that an ‘active threat’ of some kind presents itself as characters approach the critical point of the challenge. But that’s entirely too predictable and not all that acceptable. A better solution might be to provide life-sustaining but debilitating air pockets (stale air) – enough to sustain life, but not enough to maintain full capabilities, at least for a while.

Debilitation

But that raises another issue to be considered – simply being exposed to conditions that warrant engaging any proposed mechanics must trigger some sort of temporary debilitation. Pulling yourself from the water, you lung burning as you gasp for air, your muscles feeling like lumps of lead as a result of the effort involved – no-one should expect to be at their best in dealing with whatever is waiting for the PCs. The mechanics need to generate this debilitation, specify the way that it manifests, and also provide a recovery mechanism.

That recovery mechanism will need to be fairly sophisticated and flexible, capable of dealing with everything from active conflict through to less-stressful activities through to lying there like a fish gasping for air but doing nothing more. Te system needs to determine how and when a minimum level of restrictions are mandated, and ho those mandates are lifted.

4. Single Saves

There’s always a lot of justification in terms of playability for a single roll to determine results, even if that represents a compromising of reality. But there can also be an inflexibility to this approach, and it might be a compromise too far.

5. Compound Saves

There is also something to be said for requiring multiple saves, with rising penalties or difficulty levels. This builds tension and excitement – so long as the rolls don’t happen too frequently, which would create tedium and additional work.

But this in turn opens up a new can of worms – how should those difficulty numbers increase? In a linear fashion? Geometrically? Exponentially? Fibonacci Sequence? And at what intervals – fixed, variable, or one of those other sequences?

6. Stat Derivatives

For that matter, as already identified, the fundamental basis of the mechanics needs to be determined – should they be determined, in whole or in part, by characteristics, or some derivative of them, with no rolls at all? This trades agency – the capacity to fail or excel – for mechanical simplicity.

7. Will or Strength or Con?

There’s the question of what characteristics are fundamental – the heading identifies three that could plausibly relate to the situation. And the question of debilitation also comes into play here – is the debilitation impact to be separate from the increase in difficulty targets or can the one set of numbers cover everything?

8. Initial Status

Finally, the system should take into account the character’s initial state – someone who has been engaged in combat or doing something else strenuous should not have the same capacity as if they were alert and rested.

Not simple at all.

The most realistic approach would probably be to have a stat-based buffer, perhaps modified with a saving throw of some sort, followed by a series of Will Rolls as the character resists the natural urge to breathe, and then a series of Con Rolls to resist the involuntary burning need to breathe for just a little longer.

It would also be necessary to distinguish between resting characters and characters who are working hard, or engaging in combat while operating within these mechanics. Any sort of activity should consume some of the character’s capacity, so that such activities reduce the duration of a character’s capabilities. It’s one thing to simply hold your breath for a while, and quite another to hold your breath AND run or swim, AND fight a battle. Any such effects should be on top of any environmental considerations the GM considers appropriate – it’s much harder to swing a weapon underwater, for example, to the point of virtual ineffectiveness; thrusting is better, but not by very much, and having anything in your hands or any sort of load can severely compromise your mobility and ability to swim.

It’s not difficult to come up with such a system – whether or not it’s realistic enough in its determinations is another question, but any system can be tweaked; so a perfect answer isn’t necessary, just something to serve as a guideline.

A realistic system

I had an unfair advantage when considering that list – I already had the rudiments of a system in mind, without having yet done the hard work of actually attaching numbers to the general principles. But the preceding section was still a valuable check to ensure that nothing had been overlooked. It’s a system with eight elements: Time Measurement, Buffer Time, Progressive Difficulty, Will Checks, Con Checks for more will checks, Initial Character State, Debilitation State and consequences, and putting the whole thing together to yield definitive answers to the question.

1. Measuring Time

Forget anything so rigid as minutes and seconds. This system is going to measure time in Events. An event is any action, any locomotion, using any ability.

If you do something that inflicts damage, it’s one action per dice of damage or per five points if there are no dice rolled. If you take damage, it’s one action for every 5 points inflicted before any defenses are taken into account (that matters in the Hero system).

Moving however far you can swim, or anything more than staying in the same hex, is an action. And staying still in the same hex under adverse conditions – like having to hold your breath – counts as an action. Pausing for a second to listen or look at something? That’s an action. Trying to grab something or pick something up, you’d better believe that that’s an action…

The mechanics will give you plenty of them, so don’t be afraid to chew them up.

This completely decouples time from the rest of the system mechanics – except that the normal limits of how much you can do in any period of time within your game system remain.

In the Zenith-3 system, for example:

• you can attack, use a skill, or use an active power;
• you can actively defend yourself;
• or you can move (or use a movement power)

– but you can only do two of those in a given round. You can use any passive powers you might have at any time. And using two different active powers counts as your two choices.

You can also pay additional Endurance and take various penalties to attempt additional actions beyond the two.

The point is that the more active you are, the faster you will burn through your allocation of events.

It’s just possible that someone might wonder why taking damage burns through event points. In response, I would say: Have you ever contemplated how hard it would be to keep holding your breath while getting punched in the belly? Or suffering a serious burn or cut?

2. Buffer Time

You get so many events before you have to start making rolls. This is a critically important number. You get 5 points for every turn or round that begins before you run out of event capacity, and you get a certain number based on your constitution.

How many depends on the game system.

• For D&D/Pathfinder, you get your FORT save. It doesn’t matter if this is on 3d6 or on d20.
• For the Hero System, you get your CON save, plus two for every point by which that save exceeds 11. This is rolled on 3d6, but is calculated as 11+(CON/5), round up.
• For the Zenith-3 System, you get one-fifth of your CON save, plus 10, plus one for every ten by which your CON save exceeds zero (or part thereof). This is a d% save ranging from -100 to +250 – with an average of -11 because the mathematics were perverse and wouldn’t give a neat answer.

Any other game system will have some equivalent to one of these, so just use them as a guideline.

So, for example, if you are a pulp hero with a CON of 22, your save is 11+(22/5), round up, or 16 or less. That gives you 16+10=26 events, plus 5 each time you get to start a new action round before using up all of those 26-plus.

Note that this is not attempting to be a full parity conversion from one system to another, just a ballpark figure.

3. Progressive Difficulty

Every 5 Events that you count off adds one to your progressive difficulty. This is a cumulative penalty applied to all saves and rolls that you make. In D&D / Pathfinder, the penalty is -1 per difficulty point; in the Hero system, it is also -1; and in the Zenith-3 system it is -10.

These penalties appear quite low, but they will NEVER go down until you can both breathe normally AND undergo a complete recovery afterwards, so they can add up.

They apply to every roll that you make, effective immediately they are incurred.

4. Will Checks For More time

When your time (in the form of available events) runs out, you reach the point where you want to take a breath but can use your willpower to resist this urge.

• The difficulty of this check in D&D / Pathfinder is 10+Penalty.
• In the Hero system, it is your usual saving roll-penalty.
• In the Zenith-3 system, it is your usual saving roll-(5 × difficulty). Other standard difficulty modifiers also apply.

If you succeed, you add 5 more actions to your event capacity, plus one quarter of the number determined in step 2, LESS the cumulative penalty. Each turn or action started before these run out also adds FOUR to this total.

Eventually, you will have to roll again. If you succeed, the same thing happens but now each round only adds THREE to the total. Then two, then one, and then – finally – none.

5. Con Checks For More Will Checks

When you fail one of these Will checks, you enter a more dangerous stage in which your will has faltered just long enough to inhale some water.

The difficulty modifier immediately worsens by 1/2 of the amount by which you failed the will save plus 5.

You have to immediately make a CON save (FORT save in D&D / Pathfinder) with this new difficulty modifier.

If you SUCCEED, the difficulty modifier goes up by 1, and you get an additional series of will saves for more time, and immediately lose 10% of your remaining hit points or BODY.

The additional will saves are calculated as:

• In D&D / Pathfinder the difficulty is (20-Save)+Penalty.
• In the Hero system, it is your usual saving roll +10 -penalty.
• In the Zenith-3 system, it is your usual saving roll + 30 – (5 × difficulty). Other standard difficulty modifiers also apply as usual.

Eventually, you will fail (or the penalties will grow to a total that makes success impossible). That will put you back into the situation of making another CON save for more Will checks, as above.

If you FAIL one of these CON / FORT checks, all hope is not lost. The difficulty modifier goes up by the amount by which you failed, you immediately lose half your remaining hit points or BODY or 10 points, whichever is worse, and you get an additional series of will saves for more time.

With the second CON / FORT check, if you succeed, the HP loss is unchanged at 10% loss. With every odd-numbered CON / FORT check, that loss increases by 10%. So with the third, it’s 20% of what’s left, and the same with the fourth; with the fifth and sixth, it’s 30%; with the seventh and eighth, it’s 40%; and thereafter, it’s 50% or 10 points, whichever is worse, the same as if you had failed.

With each successive CON / FORT check after the first, the initial starting point for the WILL saves improves by 10 – but the penalties are quite likely to have increased by more than that, so the effective starting point gets progressively lower.

Let’s say you start with 100 HP, for an example. The first CON check succeeds and drops you to 90HP. The second one succeeds and drops you to 81HP. The third one succeeds and costs you 20% of 81, or 16 HP, leaving you with 65. You fail the fourth, costing you 32 HP, and leaving you with 33. You fail the fifth, costing you 16 HP, and leaving you with 17. You fail at the sixth, and lose 10, leaving you with 7 HP. You fail at the seventh, and you are out of HP, unconscious, and drowning. The increase in difficulty penalties makes this quite a likely scenario.

Let’s say you start with 200 HP, as a comparison. The first CON check succeeds and drops you to 180HP. The second one succeeds and drops you to 162HP. The third one succeeds and costs you 20% of 162, or 32 HP, leaving you with 130. You fail the fourth, costing you 65 HP, and leaving you with 65. You fail the fifth, costing you 32 HP, and leaving you with 33. You fail at the sixth, and lose 16, leaving you with 17 HP. You fail at the seventh, lose 10 HP leaving 7. You fail at the eighth and are out of HP, unconscious, and drowning.

Doubling the initial HP bought you one whole extra set of Will rolls.

Again, for a comparison, let’s consider 50 hp. The first CON check succeeds and drops you to 45 HP. The second one also succeeds and takes another 4 HP, leaving 41. The third one is probably more problematic, because this is likely to be a lower-level character, but let’s say that it succeeds, too, just because that’s what happened in the previous examples; you will lose 20% of the remaining 41 HP, or 8 HP, leaving you with 33. You fail the fourth, losing half of that 33, which is 16 HP. That leaves you with 17 HP. You fail the fifth, dropping that 17 to 7 HP. You then fail the sixth, and are out of HP, unconscious and drowning. So halving the initial HP (but changing nothing else) costs you a single set of Will Rolls.

If, however, we presume that the character’s save is considerably lower, and more quickly overcome by penalties, it is far more likely that they would fail that 3rd roll, and so lose half the 41 HP, dropping your total to 21. Fail the 4th, and you’re down to 11 HP. Fail the 5th, and you’re down to 1 HP. Fail the sixth, and once again you’re out of HP, unconscious and drowning. So the impact cuts it finer, but you still last just as long as you otherwise would have done – so long as nothing is nibbling on your toes or otherwise causing distress!

6. Initial State

That shows that the system is responsive to initial conditions, but the impact is largely one of making you more vulnerable as initial HP drop.

So, to initial state: the ratio of HP lost vs the fully-healed total, rounded to the nearest 10%, is the fraction of initial actions that are considered consumed, which brings the first check on that much more quickly. This same fixed ratio is applied to each subsequent set of actions permitted by a Will Roll. Always round in the character’s favor.

If the character has no opportunity to take a deep breath, the GM should secretly roll a d10 for how far they are through their normal breath cycle, and apply the result in 10% increments. In practical terms, this simply multiplies one percentage by another. Technically, since we want to know how long the character will last, we need to subtract this roll from 100 before multiplying.

Let’s say that a character who normally has 200 HP has been in combat and is down to just 142 HP when they take a deep breath and go swimming. 142/200 is 71% but that gets rounded to 80%. If you normally would get, say, 24 events before your first Will roll, that drops to 80% of 24. which equals 19. How quickly those get used up depends on what the character is doing – it could be 19 actions, it could be just one. Most likely, the character will use 2-3 per turn, and would normally get 5 back.

That’s right, if a character never does anything except swim, they can effectively hold their breath indefinitely – all they have to do is be sure not to use any more than 5 event points per turn / round.

Of course, engaging in combat changes that usage markedly. Move, plus defend, plus take 3 dice of damage, plus an attack or two doing 1 dice each (2 Events each, one for the Attack Roll and one for the damage) – that’s 9 event points each round. Throw in looking for additional combatants and assessing the state of the battlefield – something that’s normally taken for granted – and you’re up to 10. You’ll still get quite a few rounds of combat in.

Unless, of course, a Mage drops a fireball into the situation, for an additional 6 dice (3 if you make your save). That’s an extra action for the save, and an extra 3 for the damage if you succeed, or six if you don’t. That 10 rockets up for a round to 14-to-17. Is the damage inflicted on the enemy worth the loss of breath? Finishing the combat more quickly is definitely worthwhile…

Things start to become different in this whole situation when the initial condition is factored in. Characters normally get 5 additional event points at the start of each turn or round – but if the character is down to 80% HP when they go swimming, not only do they only get 19 Events instead of 24 (in the case of our example), but each round they only get 80% of the 5 additional events – four.

☆ Round 1: 19 Events available, 10 used; 9 remain. Penalties -2.

☆ Round 2: 9 Events available, plus 4, = 13. 10 used, 3 remain. 10+10=20, so penalties are -4.

☆ Round 3: 3 Events available, plus 4, = 7. 10 to be used but the character doesn’t have that many left. The Will Roll itself will use one Event, so the character can only get through 6 of their desired 10. Twenty already used +6 makes the penalty -5.

Based on the initial value of number of events, this probably drops the character to a nine or less chance on 3d6 or d20 for that will roll.

If they succeed, they would normally get 5 more actions to your event capacity, plus one quarter of the number determined in step 2, LESS the cumulative penalty. Each turn or action started before these run out will add four to this total. But they aren’t fully fit.

So, Apply the 80%: 80%x5=4 more Events, plus one quarter of 19 (which already takes the 80% into account) = 5, minus 5. 4+5-5= plus 4 Events; and each round they will now get 80% of 4, which rounds back to four.

☆ Round 6, continued: 0 events available, +4, =4. completing the full slate of actions uses all four – the character will have to start Round 7 by making another Will Roll. 26+4=30, so the penalty is now -6.

☆ Round 7: 0 events available, +4 = 4. The character wants to use 10. 3 used in combat and one for the Will Roll is not enough to worsen the penalty. That Will Roll is now effectively 8 or less on 3d6 or d20 (depending on your game system). Either way, that’s difficult but doable.

Success gives 4 more events, plus 5, minus 6. 4+5-6=3, and each round they get 80% of 3 event points, which rounds back to 3.

☆ Round 7 continued. 0 events remain +3 = 3. The character gets to use two more Event points and must again make a Will Save. 30+4+3 events = 37 used in total, so the penalty is now -7, which makes the Will Save a 7 or less. Getting progressively worse.

Success gives 4 more events, plus 5, minus 7: 4+5-7=2.

☆ Round 7 continued. 0 events remain +2 = 2. The character gets to use just one more Event point before they have to again make a Will Save. 37+2=39, so on the verge of a -8 but not quite there yet. The Will Save remains a 7 or less.

The character has had a good run of luck with these saves – but sooner or later, that luck will run out. They have, so far, succeeded on one roll at 9 or less, one at 8 or less, and one at 7 or less. Now they have to make a fourth – but even if they succeed, they will only get enough Event points to make a fifth (at 6 or less), and not to actually do anything.

The overall chance on d20s is easy to calculate: 9 × 8 × 7 × 7 / 20 × 20 × 20 × 20 = 3528 / 160,000 = 2.205% chance of making the 4th save; × 6/20 = 0.6615% chance of the fifth. It’s practically certain that one of these rolls will fail.

The chances on 3d6 are harder to calculate, because they aren’t linear. For the 9 or less roll, 1+2+3+4+5+6+5 +1+2+3+4+5+6 +1+2+3+4+5 + 1+2+3+4 + 1+2+3 + 1+2 chances out of 216 = 6×1 +6×2 +5×3 +4×4 +3×5 +2×6 +5 = 6+12+16+15+12+5 = 66; out of 216, that’s 30.555%.

For the 8 or less: 1+2+3+4+5+6 +1+2+3+4+5 +1+2+3+4 + 1+2+3 + 1+2 + 1 = 6×1 +5×2 +4×3 +3×4 +2×5 +6 = 6+10+12+12+10+6 = 56 / 216 = 25.926%.

For the 7 or less rolls, it’s 1+2+3+4+5 +1+2+3+4 +1+2+3 + 1+2 + 1 = 5×1 +4×2 +3×3 +2×4 +5 = 5+8+9+8+5 = 35 / 216 = 16.203%.

For a 6 or less roll, it’s 1+2+3+4 +1+2+3 +1+2 + 1 = 4×1 +3×2 +2×3 +4 = 4+6+6+4 = 20/216 = 9.26%.

Putting those together: 30.555% × 25.926% × 16.203% × 16.203% = 0.208% chance of making the 4th save, x9.26% = 0.019% of the 5th.

Once in about 5263 attempts, you would expect that series of rolls to come off. But even if you make the 5th, that only demands a 6th and then a 7th and an 8th immediately, still without letting the character actually do anything else in between. In essence, they have entered a “roll until you fail” loop. All that a success on the 5th roll gets you is an additional -1 penalty.

Any fair GM encountering this situation will let the character fail automatically and keep the better penalty number of -7, in my opinion. But some players are stubborn and will insist on trying for the 5th save, anyway.

The penalty modifier immediately changes. If the character rolled a fairly average 10, they fail the 4th roll by 3, so the change is -1+5=+4. But this is very variable – if they had rolled an equally-average 11, they would have failed by 4, so the change would be +3. Either result is equally likely, and that one difference in the penalty value makes a big difference. But let’s be generous in our assumptions, and give the character the +4. That means that instead of a -7, they are now looking at a -3 in penalties.

Now we’re in the province of the CON saves – at minus 3. Maybe a 13 or less, overall? They have a pretty good chance of success, the first time around.

If they DO succeed, they lose 10% of whatever hit points they had left after all those rounds of combat, which might not be very many, and the difficulty modifier improves by another 1 to -2, and they get another set of Will Saves, which means that they get another 19 Event points, and each round, they will again get 4 additional Event points.

☆ Round 7 continued. 19 Events remain. The character gets to finish his turn using six of those event points, and leaving 13. 6 events used = -1 additional penalty, which returns to -3. Each round they start, they would normally get 3 Event Points, but they only get 80% of that, which is 2.4 – and that, happily for them, rounds in their favor back to 3.

☆ Round 8: 13 Events remaining, +4 = 17 to use. 10 used, leaves 7. 16 Events used worsens the penalty by 3 from the initial -2 to -5.

☆ Round 9: 7 Events remaining, +4 = 11 to use. The character uses 10 of them. 10 more Events used =26, which worsens the penalty from the initial -2 by -5, to -7 in total.

☆ Round 10: 0 Events remaining, +4 = 4 to use. The character uses 3 and is forced to make another Will Save to try and get some more. 29 events used is still a -5 adjustment to the penalty, which remains a -7.

The successful CON roll didn’t buy much time, did it? There’s still a reasonable chance that the character will make this Will save, but there’s a better chance that they will fail. It took four sets of Will Saves for things to get this difficult last time.

The character fails. So it’s time to make a second CON check. The character fails this roll, too, and starts to drown.



Things would get a lot worse for the character if their initial condition was worse. At 50% or below, some of those roundings would stop being in their favor – four would become 3, and 2 would become 1. Instead of 19, they might only have 12 Events, and fewer each round to boot. In effect, there is a geometric progress of difficulty with HP loss.

In reality, this very much represents a worst case for the character. The penalty applies to their attack rolls, for example, and if they miss, they don’t inflict damage, which therefore only costs them one Event Point for the attempt. It also affects damage inflicted in the case of most melee weaponry (water resists movement far more than air) – and that might also be enough to negate that Event point (do no damage, take no pain). So the potential is there for a character to last much longer in underwater combat.

7. Debilitation State

Whatever the final penalty is when the character drags themselves from the water (STR check, that’s another Event!) becomes their debilitation state. Each round, they have to make a CON / FORT save at the current penalty level. If they succeed, they improve that penalty by 1. The penalty continues to apply to all attacks and damage in the meantime.

The GM should assess the debilitation state and estimate any other impacts (END used, for example) that are relevant.

If the character actually failed one or more Will Checks, and was therefore forced to make a CON / FORT check, they have swallowed water (or whatever the noxious substance is). The CON check sequence tracks the worsening physical condition that results but doesn’t take the actual effects of the whatever into account.

Each CON / FORT roll that the character fails should be noted by the GM. They add half the number of rounds or turns spent in the hazardous environment and 2 for every CON check that was failed while in the Hazardous environment, and compare the results to the characters CON. If the total exceeds the CON then the character has swallowed enough of the hazardous substance that it could potentially be lethal – they are coughing up water. (Of course, if their HP dropped to zero, they drowned).

NONE of the HP lost to the hazardous environment are actual; they will return in proportion to the recovery from the debilitated state. This doesn’t include damage inflicted by an enemy, obviously.

8. How Long is A Piece Of String?

I found that example in the last section to be very beneficial. If I were to consider tweaks to the mechanics, I would reduce the initial number of Events conferred, increase the number of Events gained each round by a little, and maybe add a reduction in the initial number of Events conferred by a successful CON save – but overall, the system did everything required of it.

• An initial buffer before the character gets into trouble;
• Escalating trouble once it starts;
• Responsive to initial conditions and physical and mental capabilities
• Increasing difficulty in accomplishing tasks
• A recovery system for afterwards;
• A flavor that can create excitement and drama;
• Mechanics that are unlikely to kill a character outright or force a split in the party.
• Note that by the simple mechanism of roping characters together in a chain, even if one succumbs and the stronger characters have to make a STR check to pull them through, even low-stat characters should be Okay – after a while.

The objective, after all, was never to kill the party or any of its members; it’s to pose a challenge and reflect an environment in which characters are at a severe and increasing disadvantage compared to those who can live there.

But that’s still a lot of fart-arsing around. We really need something that’s faster, and simpler, and more abstract. Perhaps modeled on the system given above, but faster, simpler, and cleaner. And it’s because I knew this was coming before I wrote word one of the mechanics above that I didn’t go back and apply those tweaks!

An abstract system

I’m structuring this in a very similar way to the system given above. In fact, I’ll be using copy-and-paste to get the initial draft of the mechanics (so don’t be surprised if parts of it sound familiar).

1. Measuring Time

Using Events as a timekeeping system is an important innovation that should be retained, because it ties the answer to the overall question with the activity levels of the character. Be very active, and you’ll burn through your allocation quickly; conserve your air, and you will last for quite a while. You may not get as much done in any given round, but the long term will be more than comparable.

2. Buffer Time

This also remains almost unchanged in this more abstract system:

• For D&D/Pathfinder, you get your FORT save. It doesn’t matter if this is on 3d6 or on d20.
• For the Hero System, you get your CON save, plus two for every point by which that save exceeds 11.
• For the Zenith-3 System, you get one-fifth of your CON save, plus 5, plus one for every ten by which your CON save exceeds zero (or part thereof).

I thought about reducing this allocation, as suggested in the concluding analysis of the realistic system, but these results are so straightforward that it wasn’t worth the effort.

Every turn that you start with unused Events adds 6 Events to the total, until you have to make a CON check for more time; then it’s +5 each turn, followed by +4, +3, +2, and +1.

This is slightly more generous than the realistic system.

3. Progressive Difficulty

This is also unchanged – every 5 Events that you count off adds one to your progressive difficulty modifier. This confers a -1 to every roll or save in D&D, Pathfinder, and the Hero system, and -10 in the Zenith-3 system.

4. A Will Check

This is where things start to change. Instead of a succession of Will Checks, I want to replace them all with a single roll in which the amount by which you succeed or fail translates into an equivalent number of successful will saves.

• Make a Will Roll (with difficulty modifier) and determine the amount by which you succeed, if you succeed at all.
• Compare that value with the list below to determine the number of “successful rolls” that result:
  

  Succeed by 0 = 1 success
  Succeed by 1 = 1 success
  Succeed by 2 = 2 successes
  Succeed by 3 = 2 successes
  Succeed by 4 = 3 successes
  Succeed by 5 = 3 successes
  Succeed by 6 = 3 successes
  Succeed by 7 = 4 successes
  Succeed by 8 = 4 successes
  Succeed by 9 = 4 successes
  Succeed by 10 = 4 successes
  Succeed by 11 = 5 successes
  Succeed by 12 = 5 successes
  Succeed by 13 = 5 successes
  Succeed by 14 = 5 successes
  Succeed by 15 = 6 successes
  Succeed by 16 = 6 successes
  Succeed by 17 = 6 successes
  Succeed by 18 = 7 successes
  Succeed by 19 = 8 successes
  Succeed by 20 = 9 successes

  <./li>

• Each ‘success’ grants additional successful Will Saves before a CON check is needed equal to Base Number + Current Difficulty Modifier, with a minimum of 1.
• Each new turn continues to add Events to his capacity as usual.

Example: A character needs 8 or more to succeed on d20 (D&D). He rolls a 14, succeeding by 6. This is considered the equivalent of succeeding three times in a row. Each time his available number of Events runs out, he gets his base number, less the current difficulty modifier, additional Actions, with a minimum of 1 additional success.

Example: A character needs 15 or less to succeed on 3d6 (Hero system). He rolls a 4, succeeding by 11. This is considered the equivalent of succeeding at five Will checks in a row, less the current modifier, with a minimum of 1 successful Will Roll.

Each ‘success’ adds 6 more actions to your event capacity, plus one quarter of the base number, less the cumulative penalty.

5. A Con / Fort Check

The CON checks described in the realistic system had significant effects on the character even if they succeeded, so there should be minimal changes to this section.

The difficulty modifier immediately worsens by 1/2 the number of Will Saves that were indicated above, minus 1, with a minimum worsening of 1.

If you succeed, the difficulty modifier remains unchanged and you get an additional set of Will saves determined as above, using the worsened difficulty modifier. You also immediately lose 10% of your remaining Hit Points, or 10, whichever is greater. This “10% loss” increases by 10% with every odd-numbered Con / Fort check.

If you fail, the difficulty modifier increases by the amount that you failed, and you immediately lose half your remaining hit points or less (or equivalent), or 20 points (whichever is worse). If you still have Hit Points remaining, you then get to make a Will Save as above for more events.

6. Initial State

This is handled in the same way as in the realistic system:

The ratio of HP lost vs the fully-healed total, rounded to the nearest 10%, is the fraction of initial actions that are considered “pre-consumed”, which brings the first check on that much more quickly. This same fixed ratio is applied to each subsequent set of actions permitted by a Will Roll. Always round in the character’s favor.

If the character has no opportunity to take a deep breath, the GM should secretly roll a d10 for how far they are through their normal breath cycle, and apply the result in 10% increments. In practical terms, this simply multiplies one percentage by another. Technically, since we want to know how long the character will last, we need to subtract this roll from 100 before multiplying.

Debilitation

These rules are also unchanged from the Realistic System:

Whatever the final penalty is when the character drags themselves from the water (STR check, that’s another Event!) becomes their debilitation state. Each round, they have to make a CON / FORT save at the current penalty level. If they succeed, they improve that penalty by 1. The penalty continues to apply to all attacks and damage in the meantime.

The GM should assess the debilitation state and estimate any other impacts (END used, for example) that are relevant.

If the character actually failed one or more Will Checks, and was therefore forced to make a CON / FORT check, they have swallowed water (or whatever the noxious substance is). The CON check sequence tracks the worsening physical condition that results but doesn’t take the actual effects of the whatever into account.

Each CON / FORT roll that the character fails should be noted by the GM. They add half the number of rounds or turns spent in the hazardous environment and 2 for every CON check that was failed while in the Hazardous environment, and compare the results to the characters CON. If the total exceeds the CON then the character has swallowed enough of the hazardous substance that it could potentially be lethal – they are coughing up water. (Of course, if their HP dropped to zero, they drowned).

NONE of the HP lost to the hazardous environment are actual; they will return in proportion to the recovery from the debilitated state. This doesn’t include damage inflicted by an enemy, obviously.

8. How Long is A Piece Of String?

This system works almost exactly as the “realistic” system except that it’s been streamlined.

That’s more like it! But it’s too soon to call this a definitive answer. You see, asking the question also means that you need to think about the circumstances under which you might need an answer, and that leads to the consequences of failure / running out of breath.

The Need To Breathe

I was only able to come up with five reasons (and a catch-all) why you might need to hold your breath, each with its own consequences. I’ve listed these from solid to liquid to gas. to a lack of gas.

Buried Alive

At first glance, you might think that this category doesn’t belong. The problem when buried alive is often that you can’t expand your lungs enough to take a breath due to the weight pressing on your body, after all – certainly, that’s the problem when you are buried in sand, gravel, or loose earth.

But, if by chance, you find yourself in a hollow after an avalanche or mine collapse, this might not be a problem; the difficulty then is that there is limited air to consume. Slow, shallow breaths, and minimal activity, are the primary survival techniques in this situation, but the inexperienced will tend to hold their breath for as long as they can, then gasp for a bit, then hold their breath again. If people could limit themselves to a single exhalation and gasp of air, this might work – but no-one can.

That means that there are no real immediate consequences for taking a breath – either you can, or you can’t (but try anyway) – but there may be dire long-term consequences. The CO2 content of fresh air varies between 0.036% and 0.041%. With every intake of breath in an enclosed space, some Oxygen is breathed in and some CO2 exhaled. Up to about 1%, increased concentrations of CO2 make the lungs feel stuffy and cause rapid, shallow breathing in an attempt to obtain sufficient oxygen. It often also causes drowsiness. In concentrations of 1-3%, hearing is reduced, the heart begins to race, blood pressure rises, and mild narcosis results. From 3-5%, shortness of breath, dizziness, confusion and headaches result. Around 8%, Sight becomes dimmed, the victim starts sweating uncontrollably and experiencing muscle tremors and spasms, and eventually loses consciousness. And somewhere between 7 and 10%, individuals can suffocate even if there is sufficient breathable oxygen. The technical name for CO2 ‘poisoning’ is Hypercapnia.



Rather than use this breath-holding game mechanic for such situations, it is often more useful to consider how long normal activity levels can be sustained in a given concentration of CO2.

⋄ Up to 1%, people can survive for a lifetime at full productivity.

⋄ From 1% to 2.5%, productivity is over 1 month, and any side-effects (mild respiratory stimulation) temporary.


⋄ From 2.5% to 3%, productivity is still >1 month, but the impact on respiration is more pronounced.

⋄ From 3% to 3.5%, productivity is >1 week, and there is moderate respiratory stimulation. Some side effects of exposure may persist after exposure.

⋄ From 3.5% to 4%, productivity is > 1 week and not only is there moderate respiratory stimulation when resting, there is an exaggerated respiratory response to exercise. Mild lethargy is common.

⋄ From 4% to 4.5%, productivity declines to >8 hours, and a flushed appearance to the skin becomes noticeable, otherwise as above.

⋄ From 4.5% to 5%, productivity declines to >4 hours and the respiratory stimulation is pronounced, as though you were working hard even when resting. Capacity for exertion begins to be impacted. Lethargy becomes more serious.
.
⋄ From 5% to 5.5%, productivity declines to >1 hour, otherwise as above.

⋄ From 5.5% to 6%, productivity declines to >30 minutes and cognitive abilities begin to be impaired in addition to the effects listed above. Some individuals appear to be drunken. Some people experience recurring headaches and periods of confusion afterwards.

⋄ From 6% to 6.5%, productivity declines to >15 minutes and cognitive impairment becomes more pronounced. Permanent after-effects become more common, signifying permanent brain injury. Otherwise as above.

⋄ From 6.5% to 7%, productivity declines to >6 minutes. Panic, Convulsions, and Hyperventilation may result, limiting ‘productivity’. Unconsciousness may occur.

⋄ From 7% up, unconsciousness will result in less than three minutes. Individuals may experience Panic, Convulsions, and/or Hyperventilation. Once unconscious, death will follow in minutes.



With this array of consequences in hand, all we need to know is how quickly C02 rises with breathing. Obviously, this will depend on exertion levels amongst other factors (temperature, food, pressure), which makes it harder to be definitive.

As a general rule, the amount of CO2 produced is roughly equal to the amount of O2 consumed. It may be up to 30% below this number, but the usual practice in computing survival times to take the worst case, not the best case.

24 cubic feet of oxygen an hour will become CO2 through normal respiration. This can double in periods of high stress or activity.

If you have a volume of 500 cubic feet of air at 1 atmosphere, that’s 24 to 48 / 500 = 4.8% to 9.6% per hour – but this is a fairly blunt time measure. Let’s use 1/5 of this, an interval of 12 minutes – giving 1-2% of the available oxygen consumed.

CO2 levels effectively start at 0. Air is 21% oxygen, so we need to multiply the accumulating CO2 % by 0.21 to get the overall percentage of C02 for use in the consequences listed above.

▸ 0 hours, 100% of the available O2, 0% CO2.
▸ 12 minutes, 1%-2% O2 consumed, CO2 1×0.21 – 2×0.21 = 0.21 – 0.42%.
▸ 24 minutes, 2%-4% O2 consumed, CO2 2×0.21 – 4×0.21 = 0.42 – 0.84%.
▸ 36 minutes, 3%-6% O2 consumed, CO2 3×0.21 – 6×0.21 = 0.63% – 1.26%.
▸ 48 minutes, 4%-8% O2 consumed, CO2 4×0.21 – 8×0.21 = 0.84% – 1.68%.
▸ 1 hour, 5%-10% O2 consumed, CO2 5×0.21 – 10×0.21 = 1.05% – 2.1%.
▸ 1 hour 12 minutes, 6%-12% O2 consumed, CO2 6×0.21 – 12×0.21 = 1.26% – 2.52%.
▸ 1 hour 24 minutes, 7%-14% O2 consumed, CO2 7×0.21 – 14×0.21 = 1.47% – 2.94%.
▸ 1 hour 36 minutes, 8%-16% O2 consumed, CO2 8×0.21 – 16×0.21 = 1.68% – 3.36%.
▸ 1 hour 48 minutes, 9%-18% O2 consumed, CO2 9×0.21 – 18×0.21 = 1.89% – 3.78%.
▸ 2 hours, 10%-20% O2 consumed, CO2 10×0.21 – 20×0.21 = 2.1% – 4.2%.
… and so on.

Of course, this is for just one character breathing the air. If there are four of them, multiply the C02 percentage by four…

▸ 1 hour 36 minutes, 32%-64% O2 consumed, CO2 32×0.21 – 64×0.21 = 1.68×4 – 2×1.68×4 = 6.72% – 13.44%. With 7% being the lethal threshold (effectively). that says that resting in such a space, four characters could survive for 1 hr 36 minutes awaiting rescue; if they take matters into their own hands, they have about half that long (48 minutes) to open an air passage.



The final consideration is how realistic that 500 cubic feet is. That’s a space of 10′ x 10′ x 5′ – which is fairly small. Ten times this much would not be surprising – and that means 10 times the survival times. For four characters, that would be 16 hours at rest, or eight hours of exertion.

The good news is that all this is a simple multiplication by a factor relative to the base assumption. It’s not too difficult to put together a table for each specific occasion that you need one.

Compound exertion levels – some characters resting, some characters exerting themselves – are not much more difficult:

NR + NE×2 = multiple of resting time for one character.

EG: 3 characters resting, one character exerting themselves = 3+2=5 x resting rate for one character.



CO2 is heavier than air, and can concentrate into pockets if released from volcanic processes; so long as the head is above the “pool” of CO2, you would not even notice. It is possible to go from trivial levels to lethal levels in a single step. Of course, smaller animals are more susceptible, and carrion-eaters such as vultures are drawn to the bodies and also succumb. Children have been killed by CO2 exposure in the vicinity of Mount Nyiragongo in the Congo.

Clearly, the situations where you can’t take a breath at all are more dire than the alternatives within this category, but the alternative is no picnic!

Under fluid

As soon as you mention “holding your breath”, most people immediately think of underwater travel. In fact, drowning is so significant in this context that I’ve given it a section of its own.

But what of fluids that aren’t water?

This is surprisingly simple – simply multiply the effort by the square root of the viscosity of the liquid and divide the results of such effort by the square root of the viscosity.

Which means that all you need to know is the viscosity.

This table gives you most of what you will ever need, but it doesn’t list water so we have no referent. Wikipedia to the rescue; according to this list, water is the standard, with a Viscosity of 1.0016 at 1 atmosphere and 20°C (room temperature). I suspect that the units were originally defined to give water a value of exactly one, but more accurate measurements later ‘tweaked’ that value. Never mind, 1 is close enough for our purposes. And a couple of entries above, we find Methanol with a viscosity of 0.553 – and the big table lists Methanol (under Alcohol) with a value of 0.56. So far as I’m concerned, that’s a match – and that means that we can just read Viscosity values straight off the table.

So, for example, Coconut Oil is listed as having a Viscosity of 30. That means a factor of √30 = 5.48. Which means that it takes 5.48 times as much effort to do something, like swim, and if your normal swim is 30′, you would only travel about 5½ feet.

If you need to determine a stat, like effective STR, the easiest thing to do is to subtract √Viscosity from the stat, then add 1 for water. In coconut oil, that means that a character with STR 18 would only have an effective STR of 13. If a character has a 12+ chance of hitting (D&D), add √Viscosity to get an adjusted chance – and then factor in the difference in STR bonuses. 12+5.5-1=16.5 — call it 16+ — and then adjust for effective STR, and you end up with 19+.

Drowning For Beginners

It can take as little as 1/2 a cup of fluid entering the lungs for a person to start to drown. The exact amount varies with age, weight, and respiratory health. A rough guide is 1 milliliter per kilogram of weight – that’s 0.092 US standard teaspoons per pound.

Children can then drown in as little as 20 seconds, an adult in 40 – or it can take considerably longer.

Drowning is divided into six stages: (i) struggle to keep the airway clear of the water, (ii) initial submersion and breath-holding, (iii) aspiration of water, (iv) unconsciousness, (v) cardio-respiratory arrest and (vi) death – inability to revive. Under the circumstances we’re asking the question, (i), (ii) and (iii) have already happened.

For several seconds after inhaling water, the drowning victim is in a state of fight or flight as they struggle to breathe. Then the airways close in a reflex action to prevent more water from getting into the lungs. They start to hold their breath involuntarily, no matter how little air they have left in their lungs. This continues until the person is unconscious.

Breathing then stops and the heart slows; a person in this state can still be revived. The longer it persists, the worse their chances of a good outcome, though. This condition can last for several minutes.

Eventually, the body enters hypoxic convulsion. This can look like a seizure. Without oxygen, the person’s body appears to turn blue and may jerk around erratically. There is still a slim chance of revival with modern technology, but the odds are now grim.

The brain, heart, and lungs reach a state beyond where they can be revived. This final stage of drowning is called cerebral hypoxia, followed by clinical death.

Four to Six minutes ‘breathing water’ will result in brain damage and eventually, death by drowning.

What’s more, a person can drown on dry land hours after inhaling water in what is known as Secondary Drowning, especially if they have inhaled salt water; the body keeps diverting water to the lungs to dilute the salt, and the victim ends up drowning in the fluid.

Gas Attacks

While there are some gasses that prevent you from extracting oxygen from the air, most of the time you aren’t worried about that so much as other effects from breathing a noxious vapor. Most game systems will have specified effects for specific gasses, and the subject is too broad to really go into in any depth.

There are a few exceptions to this: Carbon Dioxide (already covered) and gasses that like to explode, for a start. The latter are bad news at the best of times, but inhaling the exploding vapors makes a bad situation immeasurably worse. That’s what happens if you happen to fail your CON / FORT check at exactly the wrong time – bearing in mind that each die of damage from the explosion brings your next CON / FORT check that much closer AND adds to the accumulated penalty that makes the check that much harder to pass.

I want to specifically call out an effect of gas that often gets overlooked – vision difficulties as a result of ocular irritation from the gas. This can easily lead a character to stumble or trip on an unseen obstacle, and that can cause a loss of sense of direction that can trap a character long enough to cause an inhaling of fumes.

And that brings me to the last of the exceptions – smoke. This is another complex subject; rather than trying to unpack it here, I think it better to give you some further reading on the subject. Below are links to a number of web-pages of relevance, together with a quote or two from each page or a description of the content of relevance.

• New York State Department of Health, Exposure to Smoke from Fires – “Inhaling smoke for a short time can cause immediate (acute) effects. Smoke is irritating to the eyes, nose, and throat, and its odor may be nauseating. Studies have shown that some people exposed to heavy smoke have temporary changes in lung function, which makes breathing more difficult.” – A good general introduction and overview.
• Michigan State University, Smoke inhalation is the most common cause of death in house fires – “…once oxygen levels drop to half the normal amount, movement toward exits becomes difficult or impossible…” – lists the physical effects of declining oxygen levels.
• WebMD, Smoke Inhalation – “A fire can produce compounds that do damage by interfering with your body’s oxygen use at a cellular level. Carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and hydrogen sulfide are all examples of chemicals produced in fires that interfere with the use of oxygen by the cell.” – goes into greater detail on the effects of smoke inhalation, and how they are treated in modern times.
• Linkedin Pulse, Fire smoke inhalation is dangerous and the number one cause of death in house fires! – “Once you start to inhale the smoke, you are not getting enough oxygen to live. Depending on the density and heat of the smoke, it may take 2 to 10 minutes to pass out or die.” – goes into the time limits that apply to smoke exposure and also the impact on pets and animals.

Bad Air

Coal mines, amongst others, tend to have pockets of ‘bad air’ – often Carbon Monoxide or Methane. Small birds were often used as early warning signs of ‘Bad Air’.

Some gasses are lighter than air, and accumulate in hollows in the ceilings. Others are heavier than air and accumulate in depressions. Either can be lethal.

This article from Howden details the most dangerous gases in Mining – Firedamp, Black Damp, White Damp, Afterdamp, and Stinkdamp.

And this article from the US Forest Service about the dangers of exploring abandoned mines might also be of interest.

Finally, lest you be under the impression that it’s only Coal Mines that have problems with bad air, there’s this article from Western Australia: about Limestone Caves and foul air!

High Altitude / Vacuum

Holding your breath isn’t so much the problem at high altitude as the fact that there isn’t enough air to breathe! Of course, the ultimate expression of this lies in being blown out an airlock into space – and therein lies a tale.

Some sources say that you shouldn’t hold your breath under such circumstances; others that you should. The first doesn’t provide a lot of scope for player agency, however, so in most of my games, Holding Your Breath is the way to go.

Exotica

Finally, there are exotic and strange possibilities. A room full of radioactive dust, for example. These are so varied in their possibilities that they are well beyond the scope of this article, which is already long enough at almost 12000 words and counting!

Master, Have Mercy…

These dangers bring back into focus the discarded ‘speed of plot’ solution and player agency be damned – at least some of the time.

How is a GM to decide? Well, here’s what I think about when making such decisions:

What outcomes are acceptable?

Are you willing to let a PC die on the sword of verisimilitude? Is this supposed to be a difficulty or challenge to be overcome, is it supposed to force the party to divide, is it a steering mechanism, or is it supposed to be a hazard that can kill, possibly in conjunction with a combat encounter?

Temporary Impairment, not death?

If the mechanics indicate one or more deaths are likely, that’s not necessarily a refusal. Sometimes, you can restore player agency and soft-pedal the consequences just enough for characters to survive with a temporary impairment instead of death.

But I always remember the old woman in The Poseidon Adventure, who sacrificed herself to get everyone else through.

If the death will to be noble and heroic, and there are no campaign-adverse impacts, it is not necessary to show mercy. If both of these are not true, then I apply a set of maxims –

• No encounter is as important as the adventure;
• No adventure is as important as player agency;
• No player choice is as important as the broader plotline;
• No plotline is as important as the campaign as a whole;
• No campaign is as important as everyone having fun.

and quickly reach the conclusion that it’s more important to make the events dramatic and exciting and fun than to be a Killer GM.

As a general rule of thumb, I won’t kill a PC unless the player has them do something completely idiotic after ignoring multiple hints and warnings.

But there are all sorts of shades of gray in between, and one of those is taking a character to the point of death without actually killing them – so long as that won’t make them helpless for the rest of the adventure.

Descriptions and Narrative

So, drama and excitement. Those have to stem from gameplay and descriptions and other narrative.

Asking a player for his character’s stats automatically implies that your narrative is custom-tailored to the combination of that character and that circumstance. But it’s even better when that narrative is tailored to the individual character.

As a side-point – I once had a character experience a near-death situation purely so that he could experience a flashback to a situation that the player never knew of, and that the character had been encouraged to ‘forget’. So a mercy approach may be just as essential to the overall plotline as letting characters feel the full impact of their decisions.

A player should not know – building tension

It’s absolutely critical that if you intend to be merciful, that you don’t let the player know. The only way to build tension is to keep them in suspense, and it’s the release of tension that is exhilarating.

Escape Clauses and other Trap-doors

If I can think of a plausible one, I’ll use an escape clause instead of temporary impairment. This lets me go all-out toward killing the character if that’s what’s appropriate (it usually is), secure in the knowledge that at the last possible second, I’ll throw them a surprise lifeline.

How Long Can A Character Hold His Breath? The answer is a whole lot more complicated than it first appears.

There is no one answer – but this article at least gives you a suite of tools to use in deciding what answer best suits your needs at any particular time.