Image by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay

The Unexpected Microcosm

A department store is a near perfect-simulation of, well, just about everything, really.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration – but much less so than most people realize.

This article will seek to simultaniously demonstrate the truth of the general statement and show readers how to use the microcosm of the Department Store in various ways through extrapolation to subdivide the problem of generating various larger structures and conceptual entities easier and more comprehensive.

The technique works by breaking the model – a hypothetical department store – down into essential functions, and then using each as a signpost or analogy to the equivalent functions of the objective, yielding a structural process that is far less likely to leave something important out.

If the structural object is planned or designed, this should be done before mapping takes place, because it yields a work order for everything that logically has to be there; in an unplanned target, a draft map should be done first and the various functions shoehorned into wherever they will fit, on some sort of logical sequence of priority / authority. Some of these will be obvious, others not; this process will naturally highlight any compromises that result, and hence, where the inefficiencies lie.

Individual geography, societal differentiation, and circumstances, all get taken into account through the simple process of choosing this priority sequence, so that you can start from exactly the same foundations and end with completely different outcomes that take these complex factors into consideration in a relatively simple way.

The end result is a planning tool that simplifies, and makes more robust, the creation of complex settings, whether they are intended for use in an adventure, a campaign, or a work of fiction, with an underlying internal logic that adds to their utility and believability.

The secret to the utility of the process is that we’re all familiar with the department store, and so can understand the way they work (even if we’ve never given the matter much thought). So this takes a complex problem and simplifies it enough that it becomes much easier to work with, creatively.

The Necessary Structure

It didn’t take much thought to divide the essential functioning of a department store into no less than twenty distinct components – enough that most won’t remember them.

That’s why the use of a department store as a mnemonic device is so useful – because the logical elements that comprise the collective umbrella description of “Department Store” can be derived from basic principles every time they are needed if you don’t have a list of them handy.

I happen to have such a list – that’s how I know there are twenty entries – so let’s look at each item and what function it serves within the Microcosm. I’ll have more to say about some of them in the examples a little later, but here’s an introductory set of descriptions.

1. Departments – The central purpose and concept of a department store is to offer products to sale within general categories of related products. The same logic holds true of supermarket aisles. Typically, there will be eight to twelve different departments in a single store but there can be more or less than this guideline. In some mega-stores, for example, there can be twenty or more; in some smaller stores, the categories might be broader and there will be fewer of them. What they all have in common is that revenues for each department or division are tracked independently (but with common procedures and processes).
2. Specials – These are frequently a sub-function of the individual departments, perhaps with an overall umbrella promotional principle dictated by the Publicity department (function 13 below). But the selection of products to be placed on special, the adjustment of stock levels to accommodate anticipated increases in demand, the creation and coordination of displays, and the placement of those displays, all add up to a specialist function within the operation of the department store. I’ll have more to say on this subject when I get to the second section of the article; suffice it to say that however complicated you may have thought it was, this is almost certainly more complicated than that!
3. Stocktaking – Every night or every week (perhaps every fortnight or month in a sleepy backwoods), someone has to count exactly how many widgets remain in stock on Aisle Three. I once had a casual temp job for minimum wage doing this – it’s not hard work but can be backbreaking. About 40 of us would descend on a single store and count the stock levels of every product on every shelf in a single night. One some jobs, there were pre-printed forms which told us how many of each item there should be, minimum, so that the store could determine how many replacements to order; on others they fed the stock counts into their own software to replace one form of human error with another. There aren’t as many such jobs, these days,, because most point-of-sale systems track the cumulative level of stocks taken off the shelves as they go; an automated subtraction does the rest. But, for all that it’s been automated, this remains a vital function – just imagine the chaos without it!
4. Receiving Docks – If you are ordering stock, you logically need some way for it to get into the department store, usually in bulk, and that’s a receiving dock. The presence of one also implies (for efficiency) a storage space where the bulk reserves can be uncrated as necessary to replenish stock on the floor. There can be variations on this pattern – the showroom concept in which only a demonstration sample is visible to the customer and the actual product is delivered to the customer from the storage area or even a central depot, for example – but the general principle of this being a necessary function for the operation of a department store remains.
5. Distribution – Product won’t get from the storeroom to the shelves on its own. I used to pump gas at my Uncle’s service station on a Sunday (giving him the only time off that he got), and one of the duties was restocking the refrigerators of soft drinks and ice-creams. On a hot day in high summer, this was a never-ending task – by the time you got to the end of it, it was time to start again. And sometimes there would be a run on a particular item for no obvious reason, necessitating doing it more frequently. There was also an iron-clad rule – no shelf should ever be empty, even if you ran out of whatever was supposed to be there, and you had to use your own experience and judgment to second-guess what to use to fill that shelf space. You also had to keep a sharp eye on product lines that weren’t moving at their usual pace and pass the information on.
6. Cleaners – Sweep the floors and sales increase. You also reduce the likelihood of workplace accidents (or worse yet, of customer accidents). Cleaning is a vital behind-the-scenes function.
7. Cashiers – In Australia, at least these are slowly phasing out, replaced by self-service options and a single security guard (who also mans a help desk). But the function itself remains essential.
8. Security – No store can survive without some sort of security – even if it’s nothing more than a locked door when the store is closed. Most have something more elaborate than this minimum.
9. Customer Finance – This isn’t about the store’s money, it’s about separating the customer from money that they don’t have on their person at the time. I’m just barely old enough to remember when the only option was lay-by, where an item was set aside until it was paid for (usually in multiple partial transactions, sometimes with a fee attached); then came credit cards, and now there are a plethora of financial instruments that can be used. But they are all the same, in principle. Some might not think this is an essential service, regarding it as an optional extra – but the fact is that (in general) a store that offers such a service will outperform one that doesn’t. Complicating the situation are the handling fees and charges that the store gets charged by financial institutions, which obviously detract from the additional profits that accrue, but this department doesn’t have to worry about such policy decisions; this function simply handles the interface with the customer – taking and tracking payments – that implements those decisions, and that’s true even if the cashiers can do it all.
10. Utilities – In general, only the largest stores will have a specific infrastructure to handle the utilities. That doesn’t matter. Light, heat, cooling, and water remain essential functions that the stores need to provide in order to maximize revenues. Cashiers may be able to resort to manual methods in the event of a blackout, but since the store would staff to operate at maximum efficiency under normal circumstances, such inefficient methods mean that cashiers could never come close to keeping up if there wasn’t an immediate drop-off in demand under such circumstances. This can also include unexpected items like a staff lunchroom, cafeteria or kitchens, washrooms, even a children’s playroom. I’d have called these Infrastructure, but that umbrella term would also include two other functions that are vital (11 and 12 below), and so could be confusing. If it exists to enable the other staff to do their jobs more efficiently, it generally comes under this heading.
11. Maintenance – A light-bulb needs replacing? A shelf needs repairs? A ceiling tile has come loose? A door has jammed? A pane of glass is broken? The floor is lifting? A cash register has malfunctioned? A fuse has blown, or some wiring has shorted out? The list of maintenance tasks just grows and grows.
12. Transitions – Elevators, escalators, aisles, and the implementation of store layout – these are all about transitions. Every customer needs to enter the store (at least they did until internet shopping came along), needs to be able to get to the products they want to buy, needs to be able to get to a cashier to make their purchase, and then needs to get out of the store again. Every member of staff needs to be able to enter the store in the mornings, get to the location of the work, and exit at the end of the day. All these customer and staff movements are Transitions. But there are additional complications in some stores – having the Hi-Fi department too close to the TVs can cause the two to compete for a sound footprint in the landscape, for example. Sales in some areas will go up with quieter surroundings. Some areas naturally pose noise problems – a complaints section, for example – and handling all these aspects of placement and mobility are represented by the Transitions function.
13. Publicity & Promotions – I’m not sure if it was Harrods or Seers who had the first bespoke Publicity function within their operation. It might even have been someone else whose name is now lost to the ages – but the days when a department store can get by with just the name of the store above the entrance are long gone. As a general rule of thumb, there’s a lot more to this function than most people imagine – ideas need to be dreamed up, plans need to be made, costs and success need to be tracked, and the whole then needs to feed back into the next promotion – and there’s no time to start the process over. Instead, you need to be tracking the current promotion, planning the next one, and dreaming up the one after that, all at the same time. And that’s just the promotions part of the activity. Promotions are a lot more effective if customers know about them – they actually drive people into the store – so publicity is also a natural element of this function. And that adds any other media relations activities to this function. In the very biggest chains, these may even be separate corporate divisions or subdivisions. The modern umbrella term is ‘Marketing’, but I think the more specific terminology is useful in this context.
14. Customer Relations – I’ve already mentioned customer complaints, but the process of keeping customers satisfied when things go wrong is an essential function, and one that you usually don’t want occurring in full view of other customers (who may not like what they hear). In theory, this could also be folded into the Publicity and Promotions or lower management functions, but there are practical problems with that approach; the first lends itself to trying to ‘spin’ your way out of problems so as to avoid negative publicity without actually addressing the problem (or to the perception that this is what you are doing), while in any dispute with the store, management is frequently perceived as ‘the enemy’, and there is a natural bias by management against the customer on the part of management when there’s a dispute that can be perceived if not actual. Neither is conducive to satisfactory resolution of the problem; it has been tried both ways, and it soon emerges that results are better for all concerned if there’s a separate complaints / customer relations process. So this naturally becomes a standalone function.
15. Design – There are two possible meanings to this function. First, the promotions & publicity department might come up with the idea for a promotion but have to hand it over to a bespoke design department to create and manufacture the promotional displays and advertising that implement the idea. Second, who decides which part of the store is electrical and which menswear, which one contains shoes and which saucepans Who decides how many aisles there should be, how long they should be, and what the store layout should be in general? There’s enough overlap that they can be considered a distinct function of the store, no matter who is carrying them out.
16. Administration & Accounting – The first part of this double-barrel creates and implements policies, procedures, and processes that enable the other functions to operate. The second tracks and documents cash flow, and reports same to those with a right to know, while watching for abnormal patterns. This function is a general umbrella for the back-room processes that make it possible for all the other functions to take place and be controlled.
17. Human Resources – Hiring, Firing, Payroll, and Working Conditions all fall under the Human Resources umbrella function. None of the functions can occur without people in back or in front of them, and Human Resources are supposed to provide and maintain those people.
18. Training – Life is full of change, and so are societies. Training not only gives the people sourced by Human Resources with the necessary skills and knowledge to perform their functions, they revise those skills and knowledges when changing circumstances dictate, and maintain those skill levels. The larger and stronger the administration function, the more bespoke and idiosyncratic the procedures and processes become and the greater the need for training to prepare people to follow those procedures and processes.
19. Lower Management – Lower Management makes day-to-day decisions regarding at least one of the previous functions, aimed at maintaining the smooth operation of that function. Each department and each function other than the first will typically have a manager in charge. There may also be an intermediate level of management because there are so many managers that result. If a department store is part of a chain, with some centralized functions, this becomes all the more certain.
20. Senior Management – Senior Management makes the longer-term decisions that administration, HR, Training, and Lower Management then have to implement and make work as best they can. “Reduce staff levels 10%” – “Raise prices 5%” – “Reduce costs” – “Increase management pay rates” – whatever. In theory, the goal of senior management is to maximize profits, knowing that sometimes you have to spend money to make more money, but there’s an inherent conflict of interest and scope for short-term greed to overwhelm the interests of long-term productivity.

Those are the essential functions that come to mind when I reflect on everything I know about the operations of a major department store. Depending on the size of the store and the era (in terms of retail operations), one person may carry out many of them, or only a part of one, or anything in between; that’s why the separation is by function, because this enables the model to scale from the one- or two-person operation all the way up to something with tens of thousands of employees.

The Essential traits

It’s the nature of people to be lazy unless they are motivated to be otherwise. It’s the nature of profitability to demand efficiency, maximizing productivity for a given level of effort and profit for a given level of productivity. Over the years, there has been a great deal of research into how to achieve the second and third in the face of the first. Some of the lessons have come from direct studies of retail operations, some have come from seemingly unrelated fields and found surprising interpretations in the retail sphere.

Supermarkets, Department Stores, and Casinos have all invested something between considerable sums and vast fortunes into these studies, after early success was encountered adapting the discoveries of psychologists. The history of this research is as fascinating as the lessons learned, and awareness of the principles enables you to choose whether or not to combat the impact of the sales techniques that stores use to try and manipulate your purchasing choices, maximizing your productivity when shopping and getting you more bang for your buck.

It’s also useful to recognize the influence that this field of collected study has had on the different essential functions because these principles can taint the extrapolation process; some need adaption, and some need to be wholly ignored.

Those that can be readily adapted are what I have termed the Essential Traits (for lack of a better term): Purpose, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Success. These essential traits have to be divorced from the twenty overarching functions described earlier because they require more abstract interpretation in terms of our model in order to extrapolate from our Microcosm to a specific target, and will guide that extrapolation process.

In Search Of Purpose

The purpose of a department store is obvious – to sell a wide variety of goods, at a profit. Every function is devoted to, and necessary to, achieving that purpose. Whatever structure we are going to model using our department store microcosm needs to have an equally simply-stated purpose which we will use to guide the translation from microcosm to modeled target.

These functions are sometimes tricky to find – a town that simply grew up because there’s a lot of traffic past a secure site, for example. Nuances matter a lot – you can end up with a very different population center if you nominate trade as your primary purpose as compared to, say, security or rest-stop. Context needs to be considered, too – if this location is in what a lot of GMs call the Wilds, you might get a very different answer to a location that is a day’s wagon-distance from the capital city.

The more unusual you make the purpose, the more unusual the resulting community, settlement, or structure. I like to have a list of 3 or 4 common ones and disperse examples of each type reasonably evenly – but there will be clumps – merchant towns along trade routes, mutual defense along borders (especially hostile ones), religious centers around important shrines, and the like. This enables different regions to have a slightly different ‘feel’ to them – one religion-oriented community is unsurprising, two in a row is unusual but not especially noteworthy, three in a row and you’re either near an important religious site or following the path of a popular pilgrimage to such a site – or in a particularly devout part of the world.

It’s important to note the usual human responses to such focus – the devout well be attracted to such communities, the secular will generally find somewhere else that’s more to their liking. What they can do about it is a question of the mobility afforded different social classes in the society of your game world – if they can’t move, they will become part of a secondary (and moderating) purpose within the ecology of the township; if they can, they will, which means that the religious community will grow more focused and the destination communities will grow more secular. The first diffuses extremes throughout the population; the second creates differentiation and differences of expression.

And, every now and then I’ll toss in an oddball – a town dedicated to cuisine, or wine festivals, or beer-halls. Just because I can.

You can anticipate future campaign needs, too. If you expect that the PCs will at some point come into possession of a potentially-valuable artwork, or an expensive-looking set of rare gems cut to form a set, having already established the Fine Arts ‘capital’ of the kingdom / known world or the gem-cutter’s guild headquarters – perhaps someplace relatively remote to the PCs and requiring an “interesting” journey – will enable you to steer the campaign while imbuing it with far more credibility than if such a location suddenly appears on the map the week after such an item or set of items is acquired.

In Search Of Effectiveness

I love this section because it gives me the chance to rabbit on about Formula 1 for a while!

There’s a huge difference between Effectiveness and Success. Success means winning, and that means designing and constructing the fastest car that isn’t clearly outside the rules. If there’s a gray area, you find a way to exploit it – but have a plan B in case the powers that govern the sport ban your too-clever-by-half idea. Making a faster car generally means that you will start the race from a better position, so there’s a compounding benefit. The problem is that you will usually have to overtake someone eventually, even if the only reason they are in front of you is because you’re emerging from a pit-stop – and, beyond a relatively low ceiling, making a car faster makes it more susceptible to the drag and ‘dirty air’ (aerodynamically disturbed air) coming off the car in front of you, making passing harder. This can completely ruin your race, so a faster car might not be fastest after all!

All things being more-or-less equal, you wouldn’t be held up by a slower car in this fashion for long because they would pit and get out of your way. But there is a reason why Formula 1 is sometimes described as ‘a moving game of chess’ – every team knows this, and has all manner of tactical options open to them. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the complexities of race strategy, and sometimes the best teams get it wrong.

Be that as it may, here’s the point: the faster car on paper may be the most effective in pure terms but if it is too compromised, it may not be the most successful. Another interpretation that fits would be that making a car faster used to mean making it lighter, which means making the parts more fragile, until you reach the point of being the fastest thing on four wheels – for half the race.

Effectiveness describes the extent to which the community being created satisfies their primary purpose regardless of the impacts on other general purposes that can be assumed, and how it achieves that. Let’s pick ‘Beer and Sausage Festival’ for our primary purpose, because why not? So, we’ll need a bunch of people who make their own sausages in the town, and a brewery or two, and a bunch of beer-halls, and some sort of annual festivities (if not more frequent booze-ups). None of that makes the town a satisfactory place to live, in fact it would be a ghost town if that was all there was. So the town is effective, but its success remains to be seen – the tourist trade is much smaller in medieval times (but might be larger – if more localized – in your campaign world).

In Search Of Efficiency

Efficiency is something else again – it’s usually considered to be output per unit of input or per cost unit. But we haven’t necessarily defined effectiveness as something we can measure – and that gives us a lot of creative license. But here’s a bottom-line: the money (or whatever the input is) has to come from somewhere, and it will flow for a reason. So either the operation achieves a minimum standard of efficiency, or the community is going broke, or they are being directly supported by someone or something for their own reasons. It could be the local ruler, or a thieves guild or all manner of things – some of them open and above-board, some hidden and covert.

At the border, it doesn’t matter how inefficient it might be, a community situated on the most defensible piece of real estate in the region is an asset not to be neglected.

Decide on the efficiency of the town or structure – and if the answer is not good, decide on who is propping it up (if anyone), and how, and why.

Again, the local environment needs to be taken into account. If the soil is poor and rocky, the efficiency will take an immediate hit – which doesn’t matter too much if the primary purpose is mining shale or slate or whatever. This probably meets the minimum standard for self-reliance; it just means that trade caravans will need to make their way to the community on a regular basis to keep it supplied with food, clothing, and many other such commodities. Those same caravans will probably buy whatever the locals are producing and take it away with them (an empty wagon returns no profit). Right away, the town begins to come to life.

Let’s say that it’s slate, and the bottom has fallen out of the slate market – no-one wants the stuff. Okay, the town has been through bad seasons before – everything will just get a bit more threadbare, is all.

Now let’s say this happened thirty years ago. Why is the town still there? What’s keeping it afloat, economically? What are the local up to?

In Search Of Success

Efficiency, scaled to Effectiveness, yields profit. Profit isn’t success either – unless that was the purpose, just like in our department store. Success is how good the target is at achieving everything else that it has to do.

To use Formula One as an analogy again: it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the fastest car but make slow pit-stops and can’t overtake, or use up tyres like a chew-toy and need to pit more often than anyone else – your overall success will be compromised.

In the case of out beer hall town, it’s how well the town does at keeping its citizens fed, clothed, content, secure, and able to pay tax revenue.

These four very similar-sounding traits define the central function of our microcosm as translated to the target, and provide guidance as to the analogues of the other functions and where those functions will sit on the priority ladder. They come close to telling us all we need to know.

So let’s start putting this theory into practice. If all goes according to plan, I will have five examples to show the breadth of capabilities of this technique.

Extrapolation One: A Town

Name: Cordain
Size: Bigger than a village, smaller than a city – maybe 2,000 inhabitants and 3,000 more living in the vicinity.
Location/Environment: Farmlands, situated at the crossing point of two major trade routes, and bisected by the river Thornton just prior to it’s merging with the Brandybuck. 500 years ago, this was all wilderness, and the village a fortified outpost; thanks to this place and others like it, the region has been tamed and civilized. Socially, a natural conservatism is regularly tested, challenged, and even tainted by infusions of new ideas from other regions, leading to a general live-and-let-live-but-don’t-tell-us-how-to-live attitude. An increase in the number of encounters with Goblins and the occasional sighting of Gnolls has the locals on edge.

• Purpose: Cordain could be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the ultimate purpose that best sums up the community is as a pin in a map, an anchor holding the greater Kingdom together as a unit. More than just a melting pot, this is the exemplar that represents the entire kingdom.
• Effectiveness: It takes time for information and new practices to reach Cordain, and more time for the locals to assimilate and react. That impacts the effectiveness of the community, especially in fast-moving situations. Because it is a melting pot, though, when it does assimilate and react, it does so fairly definitively.
• Efficiency: The town is quite economical at achieving it’s status as a cultural centerpoint or tent-pole, largely because there are functions that it doesn’t spend much on compared with both outer communities and larger cities. It passes these savings on to the community in the form of being as business-friendly as it can be, because it is a crossroads for all influences on the society and trade drives that status.
• Success: Cordain is highly efficient at the functions that other communities of comparable size and circumstances do well, and moderately successful at best at anything that doesn’t meet those restrictions.

1. Departments = Taverns with shelter for whole caravans are the heartbeat of the community function, supported by subsidized ale and wine. Supplies come from a competitive pair of local breweries, but the wine has to be imported. There is a vibrant marketplace and a freight exchange where bulk trading occurs. Several teamsters base themselves out of Cordain.
2. Specials = Most exotic products can be accessed from time to time, some seasonally. Similarly, specialists in most services pass through town from time to time and will often set out a temporary shingle before moving on. More common services that are not provided locally on a permanent basis are available on a regular basis. This includes a thriving black market for property stolen elsewhere. Those responsible protect the security of this trade very assiduously, so the local crime rate is extremely low.
3. Stocktaking = Before anything can be sold at the markets or at the freight exchange, it has to be ‘inspected’ – which means assessed in value for taxation purposes. It would otherwise be entirely too easy for cargoes to be bartered, bypassing the taxman entirely, and forcing up taxation requirements elsewhere in the culture. By spreading the taxation base more evenly, it actually lowers the tax rates overall.
4. Receiving Docks = Goods arrive from one of the four roads into town, or are ferried up- or down-river. The major docks and warehouses are located rather more centrally than is usually the case, but there are lesser examples close to the town entrances.
5. Distribution = Rumors and Gossip is rife within the community, to such an extent that many merchants add a 10% surcharge unless you can tell them some news that they haven’t heard.
6. Cleaners = Street Cleaners are a rare service in a medieval society, but with so many caravans passing through Cordain, a necessary one. Their primary purpose is the collection of animal waste which is on-sold to a fertilizer maker to defray the cost of the service.
7. Cashiers = The merchants of Cordain are renowned for driving hard bargains and knowing to a copper the current market values of goods from all over the Kingdom.
8. Security = The constabulary of Cordain are under-resourced and underfunded due to the low crime rate. The few who are employed by the crown are more familiar with crowd control but they do also provide protection for the tax collectors, for which service they receive 0.1% of all tax receipts conveyed to the capital by the protected tax collector. This is 80% of the remuneration provided to the constabulary, so the responsibility is taken quite seriously and enthusiastically. Cordain was once on the frontier, and had a substantial wall around the township, but it has fallen into dissaray as it is no longer needed, and parts of it have been robbed out for construction materials.
9. Customer Finance = There is a private bank that provides loans to merchants and caravaners. It acts more as a broker, on-selling these debts to spontaneous consortia based in the freight exchange, collecting a 20% service charge for doing so. This means that the bank rarely risks any of its own funds; only if insufficient backing can be found for a given venture are the banks owners liable if the debt is not properly redeemed. The more conservative the bank is with its money, the fewer people will qualify for risky loans, and the more secure investors will be in taking over that debt, so the bank’s owner has a vested interest in lending responsibly. The owner is also the biggest Fence in the Black Market, known by the nom-du-gurre “The Blackbird”.
10. Utilities = There is very little in the way of public utilities provided. by the town. There is a small expenditure on cleaners, as described earlier. By far the greatest utility provided are inspectors who ensure that the taverns and inns meet the minimum satisfactory standards needed to maintain the reputation of the town as a hub for trade and commerce. There is also a court with a permanent judge which primarily deals with civil concerns. Two wells provide clean drinking water – one in the Count’s Palace and one for everyone else to use.
11. Maintenance = The roads have to be maintained, and the Count’s residence and needs. To fund these maintenance duties he receives a flat fee plus a percentage of tax revenues from the Baron of Exwix, but is also required to collect taxation locally and see that it is forwarded to the Baron. A percentage of these tax revenues is forwarded to the capital for the King’s use.
12. Transitions = There are three categories of roads. the main thoroughfares, through which trade flows into and through Cordain; minor roads, which are used for local foot traffic, and which rarely extend beyond what remains of the city walls; and the alleyways that are used for the passage of menial workers and other low-society types, which never extend beyond those walls. There is no sewer system.
13. Publicity & Promotions = Town criers stalk the (better) streets, offering half a headline. For a silver coin, they will tell the rest of the story to anyone in earshot; for a gold coin, they will tell an individual or group privately. These in turn pay the merchants of the central market for news, and will frequent taverns to listen to public conversations to supplement these sources. It is traditional for a crier to visit one establishment a night (usually a different one each time, with a semi-regular schedule) to buy a round for all in the common room in exchange for news and gossip of interest.
14. Customer Relations = The Count sponsors and supports a Church and burial yard on the north side of town. On major festivals, he will attend in person to address the faithful (attendance is mandatory as this is when amendments to the civil and legal codes are usually announced). Off-duty members of his personal guard occasionally stalk the streets looking for trouble and carrying reports back to the Count’s Court. They will occasionally intervene in support of someone in distress, be they local or transient. Once a year, at the end of the Summer Harvest, the Count provides a Feast for the towns citizens (out-of-towners may pay a silver piece to attend). These measures are calculated to keep the locals happy and the Count popular and are largely successful.
15. Design = While there is no official building code, construction tends to be based upon the style that is currently contemporary. Buildings that are below satisfactory standards, or that possess a style that the Count dislikes, have a frequent habit of collapsing at night, resulting in an undefined and somewhat casual design standard that is enforced haphazardly. The count likes small stone structures of two or three stories with balconies; he regards these as ‘efficient’ and ‘tidy’.
16. Administration & Accounting = The Count’s chief administrator is named Provario and is regarded as a cruel and heartless man who the Count must constantly override to provide largess for the community. Provario is also the head of the Count’s personal guard, acting exclusively under his orders – which suggests that this reputation is not entirely fair. Nevertheless, if someone has to say ‘no’, it’s usually attributed to Provario.
17. Human Resources = Provario personally recruited Thaddeus, the head of the Count’s household staff, and provided Thaddeus with a limited budget for the recruitment of additional staff and servants. The Count chose Whitles, the head of the town watch (such as it is), on Provario’s recommendation, and Whitles recruits the rest of the watch as needed. Provario’s assistant, Jerest, is the accountant and head of the tax collectors, and has likewise recruited on behalf of the Court. Jerest also fills the positions of Judge and Bailiff as needed (so that there is – theoretically – a separation between those positions and the watch).
18. Training = There is a school on the west side for young gentlemen, an Academy on the south for young Ladies, and a Vocational College for the children of the lower classes on the East side. Attendance is mandatory for part of the year up to a certain age (15, 12, and 9 years of age, respectively), but the schools are not free; part of the costs are paid by the parents and part is a debt to the Count accrued by the students. The amounts of these fees vary as students grow older and the lessons more elaborate. The Vocational College offers a broad education in various fields of labor and acts as a feeder for apprentices to craftsmen. It also trains appropriate individuals to function as servants to the Count or other significant public figures. 70% of the sometimes meager earnings of these positions is assessed against the student’s accrued debts until the debt is repaid. Pay rises and promotions often coincide with this achievement, which is considered individually significant.
19. Lower Management = The count’s household staff number 12, not counting the senior individuals named and those recruits who work for them. They have virtually no authority. There is a mayor, appointed annually by the Count, whose function is to make day-to-day decisions necessary to the maintenance and good order of the town; some years this is a merchant, some years an innkeeper, and sometimes it has been the head of the watch or the Judge. On rare occasions, such as after the terrible floods of 46 years ago, it was a Master Builder, and at the time of the last Orcish Uprising, a Weapon-smith, but outside of such specific and particular needs, these are not even considered. It has never been a tax collector.
20. Senior Management = In addition to the individuals named earlier, there are 4 advisory positions available annually in the Count’s Court. These must be purchased from the Count at quite a stiff price; if oversubscribed, the prices are raised until enough contenders drop out of the running. The Count feels obligated to listen and even consider what the Court tells him, but not to follow their advice.

You can see how the functions of the department store parallel those of the village in this very D&D/Pathfinder example. The others will be presented in considerably less detail.

Extrapolation Two: A Fortress

Name: Dungilt
Size: Small, perhaps 500 residents (100 fighting men)
Location/Environment: built into the side of a mountain, with high walls and a moat. An outer wall protects a small farm, and farmers maintain herds of sheep and goats outside the outer wall. These supplement the regular food caravans from more central regions.

• Purpose: A shield against the Marauders of the Dwarven Wastelands.
• Effectiveness: Formidable defenses make Dungilt quite effective except against Dwarven Sappers. Tunnels are collapsed when they are found.
• Efficiency: Dungilt costs a lot to maintain and operate. It earns very little revenue to offset these costs.
• Success: Life on the frontier is very spartan. This shortage of comforts and luxuries limits Success beyond the primary function to a minimum.

1. Departments = The walls, 60′ thick at the base, progressively shrinking as they ascend.
2. Specials = Arrow slits and murder holes.
3. Stocktaking = Three great store-rooms hold perishables sufficient for a three-month siege. A mountain stream falls into the Fortress on the north side, collecting in a stone pool, before exiting through an artificial underground river.
4. Receiving Docks = A moat with two widely-separated drawbridges forcing attackers to split their forces – if only one is attacked, mounted defenders can ride out from the other to ravage the flanks and rear of the enemy.
5. Distribution = A series of dumbwaiters replenishes the supplies of archers positioned in the walls. There are three complete blacksmiths shops, stables for 50 warhorses, and five fletchers, connecting to the dumbwaiters via a series of warehouses linked by radial avenues. Elevated orbital alleys connect the sides for personnel in a series of concentric semi-circular rings that pass above these radial avenues, ascending in elevation as the inner walls are approached.
6. Cleaners = Sewerage is treated in two great stone vats before being carried away along the underground river. The vats contain long water-grasses and fish that transform the waste into an additional food source for the defenders.
7. Cashiers = There is room for between 40 and 120 archers (depending on whether 1, 2, or 3 share the same arrow-slits, aiming and firing in succession). Minimal skill is required for those near the top (height transforms missiles into a deadly hail) or the bottom (a wealth of targets, miss one and you will probably hit another). These reach their posts along the orbital elevated routes (another reason for these being at different heights above ground). There is room for a further 80 armed defenders along the radial avenues, half of them mounted.
8. Security = The watercourse presents the greatest points of vulnerability, especially in times of drought when the underground ‘river’ may not fill the stone tunnels used to drain the water from the fortress. Protecting from descent from above are razor-sharp crystalline blades embedded invisibly in the pool beneath the waterfall, while steel mesh confines a hatchery for dozens of deadly water-snakes that must be overcome by any force seeking to gain entrance from below.
9. Customer Finance = The stone used is native to the region, almost everything else has to be brought in from the outside. The purchases have to be subsidized, it costs money to transport the goods, and the shipments need to be protected while en route – all of which costs. So obviously beneficial is it to an attacker to cut the supply line to the Fortress that any missing or delayed shipment is considered potential early warning of an attack until proven otherwise.
10. Utilities = Large oil lanterns are arranged at regular intervals, sheltered from wind and rain by glass shields. The fortress and the outer wall are never completely dark, so that attackers cannot sneak up under cover of night. Kitchens and bakeries provide food to the inhabitants through large messes, and ale is carefully rationed. Accommodation is in barracks and small rooms for officer’s quarters.
11. Maintenance = Masons, stone-cutters, and an additional smithy all work to keep the city in tip-top shape.
12. Transitions = There are three fortified towns that are required to send defenders to Dungilt in rotation. Residents who are not fighting men are generally permanent. To prevent a general migration away due to the hardships of the outpost, residents are not subject to taxation. A number of very skilled craftsmen have used this to springboard themselves into very profitable careers in the central Kingdom.
13. Publicity & Promotions = The fortress of Dungilt has withstood a number of assaults over the years, creating something of a legend as a murderous place to try to conquer. Formal estimates are that defenders experience a force multiplication of between 7 to 1 and 10 to 1. It is most vulnerable to siege tactics, but this force multiplier means that s significant force is required, which is enough to alert Kingdom forces, which will rush to attack assailants from behind. This mandates a fast conquest before this force can relieve the siege, which doubles or even triples the force multiplication, so significantly more than 20-to-1 force is required – and that’s very hard to recruit and move in secrecy, which adds to the need for haste, making the task all the harder. Hence the legend that the fortress is unassailable.
14. Customer Relations = Dungilt is under the command of Viscount Massey, a grizzled veteran soldier of 30 years field experience, 12 of them as a general. This adds to the cachet and reputation of the post. The Viscount isn’t entirely selfless; in addition to his considerable wages and pension being untaxed, the estates he was granted when he was appointed to his title earn him income from a wine-making operation and an orchard, and mutton, goat-meat, goat’s milk and cheese, and wool in excess of the fortress’ needs are sold for additional income, all also untaxed. The effect is of giving him the assets of a large baronetcy, which he is investing in various holdings elsewhere, the foundations of a future mercantile empire. He intends to remain in his current post for another three years before retiring in favor of his son, who was made a General in the army four years ago.
15. Design = The next piece of the puzzle for Dungilt is the development of esprit de corps, through the creation of uniforms to be worn only at the Fortress, on the theory that this will motivate the defenders to make slightly greater efforts. Design for these uniforms is ongoing but the notion is being resisted by the King’s advisors because of the added costs involved.
16. Administration & Accounting = Since someone else is footing the bill, this is more about rationing supplies and ensuring that enough is constantly on hand to cope with any possible need – siege, blockage of caravan routes, etc.
17. Human Resources = The primary human resources are the soldiers rotated into the command regularly. Service in the fortress is normally a fixed year, with one-third of the force rotating out every four months. However, a number of variations take place, with some proving better suited to the demands than others. There are those who view service here as something to be endured, those who view it as a means to secure command rank, those who see it as a service to the Kingdom or it’s rulers, and those who simply enjoy the independence and solitude – or the tax exemption. As a general rule, those who do not want to be there are rotated out early in favor of those who want to be stationed there, on the assumption that if they don’t want to be there, they will not give their all. Soldiers who depart prematurely frequently find their careers negatively impacted – they will frequently be assigned to duty in other undesirable locations without the incentives and rewards of Dungilt, will be regarded as untrustworthy, will be denied part or all of their pensions (if they live long enough to earn one), and will have to work three times as hard for future promotions. But, for the most part, soldiers simply go there when ordered to do so and stay until they are relieved, with the command neither knowing nor caring who they are as individuals. Rather more attention is paid to the other essential roles – the cooks, bakers, farmers, clothiers, blacksmiths, and so on – because the fortress is deemed too vital to the security of the Kingdom for any chances to be taken. Recruitment is cautious and replacements for any vacant position sought promptly; commissions and entitlements are generous, as they need to be – this is a frontier posting which comes with considerable danger.
18. Training = Ongoing training is provided not only for the soldiers but the civilians, both in self-defense and self-reliance. It is expected and required that every man, woman, and child will play their role in achieving victory if needed, but it is recognized that a prepared and disciplined force is more likely to survive. Successful service in Dungilt is considered a mark of honor elsewhere in the Kingdom.
19. Lower Management = The command structure of the military units is supplemented with junior officers who liaise with the various professions, bringing problems to the attention of the Viscount and implementing his decisions.
20. Senior Management = The Viscount also has his own personal staff, servants, and advisors, and the latter in particular are the equivalent of Senior Management. The most senior position is currently held by Urubillit Markus, who is appointed directly by the King to monitor situations and the King’s interests; in theory, the Urubillit can even dismiss or overrule the Viscount, but any such crisis in the leadership would automatically place both on trial for their lives in the Royal Court, with the expectation that one of them (at least) will forfeit that privilege. It is popularly believed that the Golden Flame, the secret service of the Kingdom, maintains a hidden asset to monitor for collusion or incompetence on the part of either of these servants of the Crown. the presumption is that since their identity is unknown, this official cannot be bought, and thus protects the Kingdom against disloyalty by either or both. It is not known whether or not this belief is correct.

Extrapolation Three: A Space Station

Next, let’s look beyond the fantasy genre to something unashamedly sci-fi in nature.

Name: Orbital Telescope Alpha Four (OTA-4)
Size: 80 personnel
Location/Environment: High Lunar Orbit

• Purpose: OTA-4 watches for interplanetary threats to the well-being of Earth, especially during it’s time in Lunar Night when resolution is at its greatest. Rogue comets and planetoids are considered existential threats to the continuation of life on Earth, either through impact, atmospheric disturbance from reentry, or biological contamination. OTA-1, and -2 exist to probe space in various ways and make new scientific discoveries; OTA-3 monitors the resource-gathering activities of space-dwelling humans to ensure fidelity and transparency in their business dealings, with their significant political ramifications; OTA-5 monitors the sun for disturbances; OTA-4 is the high guard. The theory on which it operates is that the sooner a threat is detected, the sooner action can be taken to remove or mitigate the threat.
• Effectiveness: A modular design that sees periodic upgrades to its capabilities makes OTA-4 quite effective. Normal procedure is for peak sunlight to be downtime, crew rotation, and maintenance; lunar ‘afternoon’ is used to prioritize targets for detailed scrutiny; lunar ‘dark’ is for observations, starting with the highest-priority targets and proceeding down the list (any targets not examined automatically move to the top of the list for the following night), and lunar ‘morning’ is for the compilation, documentation, analysis, and reporting of results. Anomalous and potentially threatening targets violate this routine and are automatically designated top-priority targets. All this makes OTA-4 very effective at its primary task.
• Efficiency: It also makes OTA-4 a very expensive operation. It could have been established in Earth Orbit for a fraction of the cost, but this would have compromised its effectiveness, and (because of orbital junk) its reliability, and both were considered mission priorities after the Apophis scare of 2038.
• Success: Crew efficiency is likewise a priority, and mandates that some level of crew comfort and convenience is considered essential. But the primary measure of success outside of its purpose has to be keeping those crew alive and in contact with the Earth.

1. Departments = There are several observational platforms that collectively comprise OTA-4. Each can be considered analogous to a different department within a department store.
2. Specials = Representatives from the different observational platforms are often brought together to form a multi-disciplinary focus group to examine specific bodies of interest or potential threat. When Comet Bapp-724 was discovered to be a single solid-body beneath its layers of ice and snow by exhibiting an unusually pronounced and regular change of direction through out-gassing, instead of a loose amalgam of smaller rocks and materials as is more typical, the problem was handed to such a group who used a combination of multiple instruments to show that the object contained a deep crater that was larger on the inside than outside, which was systematically filled with deposits of different boiling points as the comet receded from the inner solar system. When its orbit returned it to the inner system, rising temperatures created the typical cometary halo but could not initially penetrate the “cave”; eventually, heat carried by conduction from the now-exposed surface heated the inner pocket sufficiently to cause out-gassing with the shape of the mouth creating a ‘jet’ effect that was most pronounced when internal spin faced the mouth away from the sun, creating the false impression of intelligent course-correction. Each orbit thus accelerated the body and changed the orbit of Bapp-724, and could eventually see it escape the solar system entirely.
3. Stocktaking = Provisions, including air, have to be extremely closely monitored and rationed. Maximum recycling is necessary.
4. Receiving Docks = A specially-designed docking port connect supply ships directly to the storage tanks. Other cargoes are offloaded while the tanks are replenished.
5. Distribution = Strict schedules are set by the Mission Commander for all personnel – everything from showering to eating is regulated. Only in the event of a priority alert are these adjusted. This regularity has been known to have negative psychological impacts on the crew, so psychological buttressing is also built into the schedule – a specific amount of R&R each shift, a specific amount of time spent communicating with friends and family on earth, and so on. These schedules are complicated by the internal social structures enforced, such as recognition of Birthdays and Anniversaries of note. With each crewman having a typical contact circle of six, and 40 crewmen aboard, there is such a variation roughly every second day, giving some idea of the complexity of the task.
6. Cleaners = Refuse naturally accumulates onboard a space station; it’s considered unavoidable. This detritus of life can pose a threat to the continued functioning of the station, so there are weekly, monthly, and quarterly cleanup schedules that are executed by a shift of three.
7. Cashiers = Engineers who maintain the observatories.
8. Security = In the event of a significant threat being detected, there might not be enough time to organize a mission from Earth to deal with the problem. For use in extremis, the crew of OTA-4 are tasked with direct intervention, and are equipped for the task, with the authority to commandeer any needed resources that are available. This includes the delivery and emplacement of nuclear devices, which are under the command of a specific segment of the crew. Of only secondary importance to this duty is the need to do whatever is necessary to maintain the functioning of the station, under conditions that could range from space-psychosis to acts of terrorism. The Space Marines charged with carrying out these tasks are another specialized unit within the crew. It is rumored that they also have operational directives concerning first contacts should such occur, but this has never been confirmed.
9. Customer Finance = Part of the crew are positioned ground-side to handle the ongoing administration of the project. While under the NASA umbrella, these are generally autonomous to the agency’s other functions and exist as a separate project administration. The essential goal is to provide the space-side crew with everything they need to carry out their mission.
10. Utilities = Electrical energy provides light, heat, and air. The water distribution and waste recycling systems also require electricity. The final vital utility is communications capability. A dedicated segment of the crew maintain these distribution systems.
11. Maintenance = Very little onboard OTA-4 runs itself; it all requires human operation and intervention. Psychological and Social health are therefore necessary to keep the essential equipment known as “the crew” in peak operational condition.
12. Transitions = There was a time when airlocks were considered essential throughout a space station. But it was found during ISS operations that delays in patching micro-punctures escalated and compounded problems more than the added security was worth, and humans eventually wedged such airlocks permanently open to facilitate travel between compartments, so the question of transitions within the space station environment were reconsidered. The approach on OTA-4 is to have a compacted plastic seal positioned at each compartment entrance that can be used to create a temporary seal as necessary, but otherwise a more open-plan structure is employed.
13. Publicity & Promotions = While the crew of OTA-4 can take matters into their own hands if necessary, it’s strongly preferred that the need doesn’t arise. All that stands between the two scenarios is the hardworking communications crew of the station, who not only keep the channels open to the ground-side politicians, but also the multiplicity of data links that permit verification of observations, and the numerous other comm channels that keep the station running.
14. Customer Relations = Analysis requires extensive computational power and huge amounts of data storage.
15. Design = The science performed by the station may be largely established and settled, but the crew are always looking to refine techniques and improve their analyses, and that means overhauling and rewriting their computer code. A dedicated segment of the crew are perpetually designing and implementing refinements to the onboard software. Interestingly, the most significant developments have been in the direction of less sophisticated results – fast analysis that selects data blocks that are more likely to yield useful results when subjected to full study.
16. Administration & Accounting = Inevitably, disputes will arise between crew members, exacerbated by close living conditions. Other sources of friction are the variances in perspective between crew and ground-control. While most traditional admin tasks are handled ground-side, dispute resolution needs to work on the front lines, de-escelating situations before they get out of hand.
17. Human Resources = Scientists can be eccentric personalities and those at the cutting edge, even more so. Personality matrices have to be built around the eccentricities of the individuals, which puts considerable demand on the human resources department. Nor is the psychology of crew compliments even close to a settled science; matches are as often guided by instinct as by insight, and field surgery on relationships is an ongoing process. While most of the recruiting process occurs ground-side, the hands-on psychological adjustments need to be performed by a specialist amongst the crew and his or her assistant.
18. Training = Data, techniques, and knowledge in general, are all being generated ground-side at 10,000 times the rate of development aboard the station, but little of this is directly relevant to the activities aboard the station. Filtering out the extraneous and applying what remains to their unique situation, mission, and matrix of personalities is the function of the Process Refinement members of the crew and takes the form of ongoing training for all aboard (including themselves).
19. Lower Management = There’s a lot going on aboard OTA-4 at any given time, and overseeing all of it are the mission sub-commanders. In particular, they seek to avoid scheduling conflicts and policy problems. They are acutely aware of the differences between theory “on the ground” and the reality “in the sky”, and continually seek to refine “the book” to accommodate practicality.
20. Senior Management = Station Commander Delson Velasquez and Mission Commander Alphaes Hortens are the last word when it comes to authority aboard OTA-4, with the Mission Commander the nominal senior of the two.

Extrapolation Four: A Website

Because websites are designed to emulate the bricks-and-mortar shopping experience and processes, there is a natural resemblance between the two. That means that our department store analogy can cover any sort of online store or site – and, by extension, virtually any type of computer program.

I thought about using Campaign Mastery itself as the example – after all, you have the site itself right in front of you to compare with – but realized that an online casino would enable me to discuss aspects of the analogy that would be more of a stretch with Campaign Mastery.

The basis of this section won’t be any one specific casino site; instead, it will be an abstracted generic (and completely fictitious) site, based on a number of typical sites. The list of sites ranked by top10rankedonlinecasinos.com was used as reference for some points; if you’re ever looking for casino sites, that’s a good place to start.

Name: Not-A-Real-Casino.com
Size: n/a
Location/Environment: The World Wide Web / The Internet (these aren’t the same thing, the Web is just a subsection of the total Internet).

• Purpose: The purpose of any website is to enable a visitor to interact with data and programming stored on a web server. In the case of a Gambling site, the programs are slot machine simulations and other gambling games either against live opponents elsewhere on the web or simulated opponents. The owner of the website represents the House, earning money by facilitating these operations.
• Effectiveness: Not-A-Real-Casino is a moderately-effective website offering a variety of games – a half-dozen slots, and an online poker tournament. They also provide tutorials, a history of slot machines, and advice on responsible gambling. Visitors to the website can win weekly or monthly prizes by being the right visitor number in the given period.
• Efficiency: The cost of setting up a website is negligible. The cost of setting up an e-commerce website, i.e. one that deals with actual money, is slightly more, a large chunk of which goes on the software that’s necessary. The cost of setting up a gambling website is somewhat more again, because you have the cost of each piece of gambling software, but also the financial base to set up – enough money to pay out more winners than you can reasonably expect, because you never know when a bunch of someones will get lucky (you know you’ll make it all back and then some in the long run, but you need the liquidity to last that long). That means that early in their online life, most websites are compromised in efficiency; corners have to be cut. Over time, those corners are replaced with more sophisticated constructions. Not-A-Real-Casino has improved several of its pages but some of the less-popular pages still remain to be done. All told, there are about 12 people directly employed in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing the website.
• Success: Most websites do something more than their primary purpose – that could be a newsletter, or obtaining and installing new games, or generating ‘side’ content. Not-A-Real-Casino is no exception. Most of these additional functions are adequate but nothing better because they are always a lower priority than the core functions of the site.

1. Departments = Each page with fixed content on a website can be considered analogous to a different department within a department store. Campaign Mastery has about twenty of these, for example the “about us” page. In addition, each blog post has its own dedicated page. And there is a dynamically-generated front page that is the equivalent of the store windows. In fact, there are so many pages here that Campaign Mastery is probably the equivalent of a whole shopping mall! That’s one reason why “Not-A-Real-Casino” is a better illustration. This fictional website has two or three pages of legalese and admin information, a sign-up/sign-in page, a front page, and a page for each of the games they host, and there would be another 3 pages devoted to the ‘extras’ that the site uses to add legitimacy and search engine rankings. Now, several of these are actually symbolic of, or connected to, one of the other functions discussed below, so even this tally of 16 or so pages exaggerates the number of ‘departments’ considerably.
2. Specials = The front page of my fictional gambling site contains news and special offers designed to welcome visitors.
3. Stocktaking = This one’s a little trickier, but there would have to be a limit on the number of players that can be accommodated at the one time if all jackpots are to track in real time, based on the server speed and site demands. Rather than moving product to consumer, though, this is moving consumer to product (or redirecting them if necessary). This is especially true of the hosted poker games, where the number of simultaneous players would directly add to the time taken to resolve an individual hand. It’s a little different for Campaign Mastery,. where stocktaking would represent the analytics that tell me which posts were popular and how many visitors they got on a given day.
4. Receiving Docks = That makes it clear, in turn, that the equivalent of the receiving docks would be the menu system on the front page that directs the visitor to one of the other specific pages.
5. Distribution = This function matches available players to the vacancies determined by the “Stocktaking”, possibly with incentives to play less popular games. But that only makes sense if each game is hosted by its own server(s); if they are shared, there’s no point in trying to load-share.
6. Cleaners = You always need to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to comments. Over the last 11 years, posts at Campaign Mastery have received more than 1.25 Million spam comments. Anything even the slightest bit suspicious gets held for moderation (anything that’s positively identifiable gets sent directly to the trash) – but there have been times when there have been 1000 comments awaiting moderation in a single day. So various policies and practices and anti-spam measures have been put in place over the years to help “clean” the website. This would be the same for every website out there – even refusing comments is no safeguard as every website is required to have certain email addresses which get spammed. Not-A-Real-Casino.com is no different.
7. Cashiers = The part of Not-A-Real-Casino.com that takes money in and hands chips out (and vice-versa) is the equivalent of cashiers. Campaign Mastery does not employ paywalls or sell services/products directly, so we have no equivalent to point to.
8. Security = There have been at least a million attempts to hack Campaign Mastery over the years. I’m only aware of one success and that one was quickly ejected after tripping a site security “land-mine” laid down for that very purpose. And we’re not a site which has money that can be stolen. The day Campaign Mastery gets the equivalent of Cashiers is the day that our security would get a further upgrade (even though that wouldn’t be free) – so the presumption would be that the site revenue that resulted would come with an immediate overhead that had to be cleared on a regular basis. Never fear, it’s not likely to happen in the foreseeable future! But Not-A-Real-Casino.com does handle theoretical money, and would need all the extra security that can be made transparent to the customer.
9. Customer Finance = It might seem that the ‘Customer Finance’ department is a redundancy, given that the default payment modes over the internet are by credit card, supplemented by less-universal services like PayPal. But I have thought of that. Perhaps Not-A-Real-Casino.com gives new customers a bonus number of chips/spins – I get personal spam making such offers all the time. Perhaps the ‘exchange rate’ is different at certain times when the site has a ‘special offer’. The fiduciary elements of every such transaction are the equivalent of the department store’s “Customer Finance” department. There may also be more direct comparisons that are valid – the default currency of the site might be US Dollars, for example, necessitating currency conversions. So there’s plenty for this department to do.
10. Utilities = This starts transitioning from the website itself to the real world administration. Anything that’s needed in order for the site to function as intended goes under this heading – in Campaign Mastery’s case, there are hosting fees, domain registration fees, PHP and other back-end updates, and maintenance/updates of the various modules that extend the basic functionality of the web hosting software, plus updates to that hosting software itself. On top of that, I have to pay for an internet connection and electricity in order to administer the site. All these requirements grow even more substantial in the case of a commercial site; considerably so if they own their own electronic infrastructure.
11. Maintenance = That’s where the equivalent of the maintenance department comes in – keeping the infrastructure, the hardware, functional. Campaign Mastery uses a hosting company to take care of most of this for us, and they have proven very reliable. But we do have to share bandwidth and technician’s time and so on with all the other sites that are hosted by this company – and that might well be an unacceptable compromise on the part of a site like Not-A-Real-Casino.com.
12. Transitions = You might also think that this is redundant – but it isn’t. The front-page menu and links take you to a specific page, but where do you go when you want to leave that page? On Campaign Mastery, the menus are the same on every page, but that doesn’t have to be the case. If you click on the “Blogdex” link, you’ll get taken to a hard-coded sub-menu, for example. So navigation from a target page, i.e. moving from one department to another, is the equivalent of Transitions.
13. Publicity & Promotions = The implementation of specials has already been discussed; the publicity and promotions section decides what these promotions should be, and handles telling people about the site, buying ads elsewhere, for example.
14. Customer Relations = Every site needs a ‘contact us’ for handling complaints, offers, and feedback. That’s customer relations.
15. Design = Where a site is designed to impart information, like Campaign Mastery, the design should be deliberately minimalist so that it doesn’t get in the way of the information. When you’re selling something, glitz and glam become a lot more important. On top of that, someone needs to create those adverts that I mentioned in the previous ‘department’. And, finally, every website out there has certain priorities around speed of loading. I could, for example, set the front page of Campaign Mastery so that it displayed the most recent 50 posts, in full – and fifty more posts each time you clicked the ‘next’ at the bottom of the page. But the loading time would be unacceptable. There was a time when we only displayed the 5 most recent posts; at one point, I increased that to 12 and found loading times to be too great. Currently, the best compromise is 10 posts, or about 2-and-1/2 months worth per page. These are all design questions, and every website out there will have similar concerns.
16. Administration & Accounting = Admin is all about how you ring-lead this rodeo, which has a lot more moving parts than are evident on the surface. Fortunately, our web-hosting software comes with an appropriate content-management system or CMS. Accounting is not so important for a site like CM – I simply pay the bills when they are due. For a site like Not-A-Real-Casino.com, though, they have costs and expenses and income that needs to be rigorously tracked and may well have taxes that have to be paid and government reports to generate. They may have shareholders to keep informed. Like everything else, the Admin and Accounting demands ramp up immediately.
17. Human Resources = Sad to say, less can be automated than you might like to think when it comes to a website. Human review and intervention needs to occur regularly. That means people – either employees or the occasional hired gun. Johnn and I were fortunate that between us we could do everything necessary to set up Campaign Mastery; a previous venture that I was involved in needed to spend thousands on shopping cart software and a specialist programmer to install and customize it. And that was decades ago, it would probably run us to 5 figures these days – if we didn’t opt for a simpler, cheaper, product (which wasn’t an option back then, this was in the very early days of e-commerce). And people have to be recruited, and paid, and have various legal entitlements administered and provided. I can pretty much guarantee you that a gambling site has at least one staff member at least part-time.
18. Training = You don’t keep your people up-to-date and fit-for-purpose with training them. The more developed your procedures and policies are, the more any new hires will need to be trained in them (and older employees might need the occasional refresher, too.
19. Lower Management = Here, for the first time, we reach a point of possible conflation of departments. Day-to-day management and senior management of a website can be one and the same person wearing different hats. When you work for someone else, though, you are (at best) Lower Management; the person employing you is Senior Management.
20. Senior Management = See above.

And that’s all twenty of our divisions within the department store. I had some other examples planned, but didn’t think they would add much to what these four already show.

Practicalities

I doubt anyone can seriously argue that the results from all four examples are far more fully fleshed out than they would otherwise have been. Is there still work to do on all of them before they could be used in a campaign? Certainly – though up to 90% of the work can be considered done at this point, enabling you to focus on a few specifics.

But this comes at a price. This process is slower than simply pulling narrative out of a hat. That’s because speed is not the goal that this process is trying to satisfy; completeness and robustness would be more accurate. Each of these examples took one-to-two days to complete; that’s probably four times longer than a less comprehensive approach.

It follows that you shouldn’t employ this every time; save it for when it matters. If development is likely to take more than a day or two – for example, if you are developing a city or an important location of some other sort – then this can be extremely valuable. If you are having trouble getting started, or can’t visualize something in your mind, then it can be invaluable.

However, the more often you use the technique, the faster it will become. You would inevitably grow more adept at remembering the different departments (or re-imagining them) and then translating them into appropriate interpretations for whatever you are trying to simulate. This is a tool with certain advantages and benefits, and a certain cost in time and effort; add it to your toolbox and learn to use it when it’s the best tool for the job, because there will certainly be times when that is the case.

Image by Mick Nolan from Pixabay

A shorter article today (by CM standards), but one with a lot of impact to offer.

The head of the ruined statue lay on its side, half-buried in soil and vegetation. Three meters from crown to chin, the sculpture of which it was originally a part must have been enormous. The left side of the visage had melted like wax; what can do that to fine marble?

For some reason, the scenes at the end of The Fellowship Of The Ring (Movie Version) have repeatedly come to mind over the last few days.

It took me a while to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me, but I got there in the end: Monumental structures impacted by History are the best representations of the existence of that History.

Those monumental structures can be architectural, ornamental, geological, or practical.

• “Architectural” is a ruined building of some kind.
• “Ornamental” is usually a statue or sculpture of some kind, like the example with which I opened this article.
• “Geological” is the overt absence of something that should be there, like the back half of a hill, or a hollow which used to contain an organic (wood or clay) structure. Or it might be a structure carved out of the earth – ring-shaped mounds are archaeological indicators of ancient defenses and structures.
• “Practical” is whatever’s left of something with a purpose, often (but not always) a vehicle of some kind.

The gray cylinder rests precariously askew on the snowy ledge, 20-odd meters across and more than 200 long, half hidden by long-frozen palm trees. Ominous black holes are exposed at one end, and a metal wheel with multiple curved blades can vaguely be distinguished at the other, flanked by smooth bulges. In the middle, barely visible under the mass of obscuring ice, is some sort of hump.

The PCs have found a derelict submarine perched on a mountain ledge and covered in snow. This is clearly not an everyday occurrence and very loudly proclaims that something strange has happened quite a long time ago. It’s a scene whose backstory will vary considerably with the genre of the campaign – in some, it’s entirely possible that the PCs won’t recognize what the shape is (and the language used to describe the screw and sail reflect that possibility), but the players should recognize it fairly quickly. This would be an example of positive metagaming, contrasting player knowledge with character knowledge to generate curiosity, interest and excitement – the same curiosity, interest and excitement that the characters would be feeling, but from a different source.

Integration

It’s not enough to simply have such a feature appear in the landscape – that always makes the feature feel tacked on and superficial. To fully integrate it into the location, you need to show the impact of campaign history on it – which also integrates the campaign history into the landscape and the player experience.

In the statue example, it’s the ‘melting’ effect, perhaps the result of a miscast Stoneshape spell, or a target that was partially out of range. In the submarine example, the object’s placement and the growth of the environment around it (snow and ice) serves the purpose. Stones with rents and cracks that clearly result from axe and sword blades tell the story of a past combat of some kind, asking the question who was fighting whom?

This would also provide an opportunity to expand the cultural significance of a chosen character class. While a knowledge check might yield multiple possible answers to the question, or none, examining the depth of the marks, the length of the marks, the curvature of the blade, the strength of the material, and so on, could be enough for a Fighter to recognize the specific type of weapons and when they were manufactured in that particular style. Coupled with the results of the History check, this could be enough to narrow the battle down to a specific conflict.

(A lot of people, GMs included, don’t recognize that the shape and style of common weapons continually evolves, some coming into fashion and some going out of fashion. Always, these marks of distinction become more pronounced and decorative in times of peace and more practical and utilitarian in times of war. Often, there will be little or no practical difference between the variations; it’s just what’s popular.

Sometimes, a General will have a favorite combat maneuver, and will require the men under his command to drill in that maneuver regularly; while it may not confer any advantage on the battlefield of significance, this has a two-fold benefit to the army in question. One, it instills discipline and a level of professional skill; and Two, some bright spark will tweak the design of the weaponry to take advantage of the maneuver or make it more effective. If every army has its own signature style and equipment that is of equal tactical worth, there is no difference in terms of game mechanics, but all the difference in the world in terms of distinctiveness.

For the GM, it’s a crack in the uniform veneer of the rules into which flavor and uniqueness can naturally seep – and that can be worth its weight in gold.

Searching out reference material on the specifics can be arduous, but the GM has a huge advantage over the historian – he can make it up as he sees fit. In one set of strokes of the (possibly metaphoric) pen, the GM infuses depth and detail into his campaign, and welds it to flavor, and – if he does his job well – adds relevance, to boot.

Consistency

Consistency is important. If you find a Roman sword, you would expect any armor or coins or whatever that gets found nearby to also be Roman in character, and of a similar vintage. This should then influence encounters and treasure and decorative styles and anything else that you can think of. Always remember, too, that a battle usually requires two sets of combatants.

I love Gnolls in my campaigns because they tend to use a lot of cast-offs and ‘found’ armor and weapons. A Gnoll is a piece of living history, and if the Gnoll is local, so is that history! You can hide significant clues to puzzles and problems in plain sight, just waiting for someone sharp enough to ask the right question. Be warned, though – do this just once and as soon as the players cotton on, they will expect this to happen every time!

Often, GMs treat the history of their worlds and the history of the objects within it as being all of one piece. Player resources frequently encourage this by simply providing tables of weapons with their game effects. This encourages Roman-style architecture with Egyptian decorations and Greek Urns and all sorts of other hodge-podge mashups; and, because they don’t know any better, and because it’s the GM’s world, players simply accept this and move on.

That might be good enough to get by on, but it’s an opportunity missed – and, once missed, it will never come again.

Editing History

Note that you don’t have to label things “Greek” or “Roman” or whatever – you can simply look up the architecture and armament of a particular group or location, find a picture, and use it as inspiration to describe what the PCs see. Orcs in my Fumanor campaigns had architecture that was a blend of African grass huts and Cumbrian-style longhouses with thatched roofs for meeting halls. Their society owed more to the Vikings than to any other culture – but with their own distinct culture and mythology, assembled piece by piece, and often rooted in the natural advantages that the game rules conferred on them as a race. You can see some of that process unfolding in the Orcs and Elves series, here at Campaign Mastery.

In fact, it’s often better if you don’t use recognizable labels, because that can leave you exposed when you aren’t able to be consistent. The ancient Greeks stole the notion of sliding wooden bolts from the Egyptians via a Near East culture (which one is unknown) somewhere between 1100 and 1000 BC. A small hole permitted a key of the right length and shape to hook onto a metal eye in the bolt and draw it aside through the door. The match had to be reasonably exact in order to get the right leverage to slide open the bolt [Source: https://www.historicallocks.com, plus some imagination based on the sketches provided].

If the architecture that you have led the players to expect is Greek, and labeled as such, then they would reasonably expect the locks to be Greek as well. To make a key that matched, the party Thief would need to find some indication of the original lock (or to proceed by trial and error with educated guesses, starting with a long ‘blank’ key and progressively shortening it until he got the right length). While that might be very interesting, and shine a spotlight on the details of educated lock-picking (and on the Thief/Rogue), if you have in mind a more mechanical contrivance with gears and teeth and tumblers of some exotic nature, the inconsistency can be counter-productive because the lock is clearly more technologically advanced than the architecture leads you to expect. If you strip away the label, on the other hand, mechanical prowess becomes a signature trait of the race that built the place – a trait that then needs to be present consistently throughout it.

There’s more scope for creativity if you leave the labels off. But doing so places a greater premium on consistency – which is not a problem if the GM knows it, and does his prep and creation accordingly.

Makeover Implementations

It’s never to late to start down this path – except perhaps in the last adventure or two of a campaign! But doing so mid-stream is a big ask, simply because of all the baggage created by past adventures and inconsistencies. If you’re lucky enough to have operated with some sort of stylistic theme – “Arabian” or “Persian” or even “Medieval French” for example – then this becomes a lot more manageable, but until now, there’s been no-one holding consistency to account. There will be anomalies.

The big trick to making these anomalies work in a more rigorous regime is to embrace them. Add little touches to your campaign history (or assume that they are there if you don’t see them becoming relevant) to explain these little bubbles of inconsistency and move on – being sure to continue to emplace (quite deliberately) similar bubbles of inconsistency in the future. This takes a lot of the stress and even more of the work out of the project.

By way of example, let’s solve the problem of the Greek-style construction with the out-of-place lock. Unfortunately, the GM let slip the telltale word, “Greek” during his flavor text, and employed Greek terminology like “Amphora” elsewhere in his description at the time, so this is now an inconsistency that he will have to live with and incorporate into his campaign henceforth.

First of all, we need a mechanically-adept species or race – Elves fit this bill in some campaigns, Dwarves in others, and Gnomes in most of what remains. But all three have appeared in this campaign in the past with no hint of this attribute – which means that either they lost it (unlikely but possible but it would be noteworthy and wasn’t noted), or we need someone else. So let’s say that Halflings are whizzes at creating (and picking) locks – to protect their stores of ale and pantries, of course.

Next, we need a way for the halfling-made lock to get to the place where it was found – that is either a solitary traveler and a singular exchange of some kind, or regular trade between the two at least for a while. If there’s some event in the campaign background to cut the trade links at the right time, the latter is probably the better choice, because it starts integrating the solution into the campaign history; if not, the first is the default way out of the problem. But the fact that there was only one such lock found in the PCs previous explorations argues strongly in favor of the solitary traveler – the experience in-game would be inconsistent with regular trade as an answer.

So, we have a traveler, someone who set out to see the world, making his way from kingdom to kingdom, picking up a knickknack or two as he goes and trading them for passage, accommodation, and food when he needs something more substantial than a day or two’s labor. This is the element that’s been missing from the campaign history, which explains the inconsistency. It didn’t matter before, because you weren’t trying to use cultural content as a tool to enhance the campaign, but now you are.

Fuzziness Is Your Friend (if constrained)

It would probably help to flesh out this rather minimal description a bit, but keep it vague and imperfect – details have been lost – and give him lots of different names that (if translated) all mean roughly the same thing – “Wanderer”, “Vagabond”, “Explorer”, and so on. Too many GMs make their history too perfect – at least in terms of what the PCs know. Yes, the GM needs perfection of reference so that he can build the history into the campaign’s adventures, but the history as the PCs know it will not be as neat. It will contain omissions, errors, historical biases, occasional vagueness, and even outright propaganda. I like to make a copy of my campaign history, deliberately obscure anything that I want the PCs to discover in the course of the campaign, and then “fuzzy-up” the rest, .Overwriting what’s already there.

This is made easier by the fact that Overwrite Mode in the word processing software that I use respects existing paragraph marks – if I get to the end of an existing paragraph and keep typing, the end-of-paragraph marker doesn’t get over-written, the additional text is simply added to the end of the paragraph. NOT ALL SOFTWARE WORKS LIKE THIS, so caution is warranted as you explore the tools available to you. In general, you should abridge the history a fair bit, too, but I like to do that as a separate process, because that gives me three versions of the campaign history:

1. A specific and accurate “Reference Version” for the GM;
2. An inaccurate-and-abridged summary that represents “Common Knowledge” amongst the PCs;
3. An inaccurate but more detailed version that can be split up and given to specific players as it becomes relevant, if they are in a position to know it.

In some campaigns, such as Fumanor, I actually went one step further and provided intermediate versions from the perspectives of singular races and classes where relevant. Sometimes one race got one version of the story and the rest a completely different version, and no hints as to which one was more accurate (if either).

Oh, and in the inaccurate-but-unabridged version, it’s acceptable to have sections where “no-one knows” something – but in the abridged version, that hole should always be filled with wild (and possibly contradictory) speculation. Again, this is a great way to differentiate the races – “The Elves think X, Dwarves are sure of Y, but Mages think they are both wrong and the truth is Z”.

Anyway, getting back to the point: From now on, whenever you create a location in the campaign, you only have to ask yourself “has the Wanderer been here? Has he left his mark? What oddity might he have left behind, and has it survived?” – many times, the answer will be no. You should only say ‘yes’ if/when you have an interesting answer that enhances and embellishes the adventure, encounter, or location.

Again, by leaving things fuzzy, you give yourself room to get creative.

Campaign histories work best when they are teased, not handed out on a silver platter, and uncertainty should be part of the package. This engages curiosity and makes room for plot twists as (some) of the truth gets uncovered in the course of the campaign. These are powerful forces to have at your disposal as the campaign unfolds; once you get used to the degree to which they can enhance your adventures, you’ll never want to go back to life without them.

993… 994…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Time is running out!

Image byfrom Pixabay, brightened by Mike

The adventurers are moving over rugged grasslands punctuated here and there by the leaves of a wild melon. One of the PCs has been gathering these as they traveled to add a touch of flavor to the goat’s meat purchased in the last town, which has the flavor and consistency of stringy bark, in his opinion.

Although there are many plateaus and undulations in this region, the party has been careful to stay well clear of these and away from any potential danger of ambush.

The GM rolls the dice; the indicate that a random encounter is about to take place.

There are two common ways of thinking about what that encounter will comprise.

Way The First

Consider the terrain and landscape and pick an encounter that takes advantage of it to make the encounter more difficult / interesting.

EG: Goblins have used an illusion to conceal a natural bowl and the PCs are now surrounded by goblin archers with altitude on their side. The grasslands will waver as though in heat haze for a moment and then the sides of the bowl – and the archers, 30′ high on its rim – will stand revealed.

Problem: Why wasn’t the illusion detected / penetrated? This won’t be a problem if there’s no-one in the party resistant to such, but any Elf in the party raises a problem (at least in editions through 3.x – I’m not sure about 4e and 5e). Is there some limitation to the usual Elvish ability to see through illusions that the rules don’t mention? Or to racial abilities in general? Can clerical magic, for example, inhibit such abilities with an appropriate spell? Or Arcane Magic? Or is there something about this particular location?

The chosen solution to this problem will add considerably to the distinctiveness of the campaign. For balance, the opposite should also be true – there should be spells or locations that imbue specific races with additional racial abilities that they don’t have elsewhere. Suddenly, geopolitics in this world takes on a whole new significance and flavor!

Way The Second

Think about how the environment can be transformed to add spice to an encounter of a type that the PCs were not expecting.

EG: The PC picking melons sets foot on a piece of terrain that isn’t there, a hole hidden beneath the grasses. He falls 10′ (not enough to seriously harm most PCs) and is immediately attacked by a hungry spider with its mate to his rear. The spiders think that he’s probably going to have the flavor and consistency of stringy bark, but beggars can’t be choosers….

Meanwhile, the other PCs have noticed that the PC has vanished, but none of them saw where he went. They can hear him, though – BOY, can they hear him!

Way The Third

What is the story? Can it spawn an encounter? If not, do you have another little mini-story that can materialize unexpectedly?

EG 1: The PCs are on a quest to recover a legendary treasure. It’s of low monetary value and has no magical qualities but has high sentimental and patriotic significance. It has long been thought lost, but the memoir of its last guardian has just been discovered and provides a strong hint as to the location of the treasure. Whoever recovers it will be lionized and gain entree into the upper echelons of society, opening many doors to many opportunities.

No doubt some of the logical implications will be part of the main adventure. But this is a time to think through the logic again for anything you may have missed. The two most obvious implications are rivals on the quest and enemies who don’t want to see the item recovered. The main plotline will reveal (eventually) that the memoir is a fake and the treasure isn’t there, it’s a deception by a political rival looking to undermine popular support for the King. But the PCs are expected to discover a new clue to the real location of the treasure that will enable them to recover it and expose the plotting of the political rival.

Are there any other enemies of the Kingdom that might add their two cents’ worth? Are there any other adventuring bands who might also be on their way to recover the treasure? How might they have gotten ahead of the PCs?

To me that suggests an encounter: A rival band of adventurers have also been tipped off by a friend in the Kingdom’s circle of advisors. They have burned a one-shot teleport spell they recovered in the form of a magic item to get ahead of the PCs – which means that they were the first to encounter a band of Half-Giant Orcs who have been recruited by another neighboring Nation, one with which the PCs Kingdom is supposedly on good terms, but which fears that the Kingdom is growing too dominant in their relations. The Half-Giant Orcs are being well-paid to interfere in anyone’s attempt to recover the treasure. The neighbor knew about the treasure because they have a highly-placed spy in the Royal Court.

This not only adds nuance and richness to the politics of the Kingdom, it adds a new layer to the adventure, and throws in fair warning to the players that the GM is thinking outside the racial ‘box’ of the official rules. It also places a bit more treasure in the path of the PCs, compensating for the fact that the main reward of the adventure is not of significant monetary worth. In fact, it ticks an awful lot of boxes for the GM – so many that he really should have this as a pre-planned encounter en route.

Well, if that’s a pre-planned encounter that’s supposed to happen somewhere else, and there are no boxes that the GM can think of that they haven’t ticked already, perhaps a mini-story that just happens to intersect with the PCs path en route?

EG 2: A shepherd has been having trouble with a Harpy stealing his lambs of late. Many more have gone missing than can be accounted for in dietary needs alone. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but wants it stopped. As the PCs top a rise, they see (in the distance) the harpy carrying off another lamb as the shepherd tries to keep the rest of the flock together and his dogs attempt to attack the thief. The shepherd tells them (when they reach his location) that this is the 13th lamb stolen in 6 days. A single lamb should sustain a Harpy Nest for a week, he doesn’t understand it.

What he doesn’t know is that the Harpy is a Necromancer who intends to use the lambs’ blood in an evil ritual tomorrow night to enhance her powers, enabling her to raise and merge many Undead into a larger, more resilient and more dangerous form, a sort of Undead Flesh Golem.

The difference between this and a straightforward encounter is that the narrative behind the encounter is more important than the encounter itself, at least initially – the PCs see something in the distance, too far away for them to do anything about it, and then meet the farmer, who presents the plot hook. What’s more, by delaying the party, this eliminates the need for the pre-scripted rivals encounter to expend a teleport to get ahead of the PCs, which means that it can be set aside for use with a second band of rivals should another random encounter be indicated.

Of course, it might be that the story needs have all been catered for – that certainly seems to be the case at this point in my example! That brings me to…

The Zeroth Solution

The dice indicate an encounter, but there are times when the planned pacing is already chock-full, and adding another encounter into the mix will only get in the way. With every random encounter, the GM should always think about whether that encounter will help or hinder the pacing and unfolding of the plot, or if it will be too distracting. The less frequently you get to play, the more important such considerations become – there’s a lot more room to maneuver if you play weekly than if you get together bi-monthly, for example.

When there’s no room for an encounter right now, I invoke the “zeroth solution.” That’s an encounter that’s a time bomb – it won’t manifest until the time is right. If I can’t think of one that I haven’t used recently, then I’ll make it a plot development in a character’s background – they will return from the current adventure to find that things are not the same as when they left. Sometimes, these will be a change for the better, more often they will be for the worse. A third version of this encounter is a noteworthy location.

Let’s have an example of all three sub-varieties

EG 1: A pack of blink hounds stumbles across the PCs trail and begins stalking them. They will hunt the PCs for no more than three days, and will not follow the PCs into a dwelling or dungeon, though they will linger around the entrance in case their prey comes back out. They are looking for one of the members of the ‘herd’ to become separated from the rest, or for the herd to let their defenses down, eg a watchman who falls asleep.

EG 2: A PCs sister weds an unscrupulous character against the wishes of her family. What she hasn’t told them is that this is the price of his not turning over evidence of some past deed on the part of her father which, though legal, looks off-color, and would do his reputation serious harm. When the PC returns, the family will add this mess to his stack of things to do that require his immediate attention. Since that stack will now require him to be in three places at once, the only way he can make it all happen is by offloading some of his responsibilities to the other PCs. This encounter indicates that the Saga Of The Noble Scepter (or whatever it’s being called) will be followed by an unplanned change-of-pace adventure – one that wasn’t even on the horizon a moment ago.

EG 3: The PCs come upon a hill, one side of which seems to have been scooped away by some vast hand. A spring at the top of the hill cascades down the rocky side in a musical tinkle, landing on the side of a small pool, surrounded by shading trees. This place seems unnaturally peaceful; somehow, you can tell that this is the one place in all the world where there has never been an act of violence of any sort. On one of the tree-limbs, a sparrow and a hawk stand side-by-side, regarding you with unconcerned eyes. A rabbit pokes its head of a hole nearby to examine you with nothing more than curiosity while a fox emerges from the undergrowth to drink from the pool. This would be the perfect place for the PCs to camp and rejuvenate their spirits.

Every hour spent in this place adds a year to the lifespan of each PC, to a maximum of +25 years and does d3 healing. Once a character is fully healed, each hour adds +1 HP up to the maximum possible from the character’s hit dice. These extra HP will fade at the rate of 1 per hour once the characters leave the vicinity.

Any act of violence will be the equivalent of leaving the location, and will destroy the natural magic of this wonder of creation.

The place is also a trap for the unwary – every hour adds +1 to the difficulty of a WILL saving throw (or equivalent) to leave, it’s so comfortable and peaceful. If any party member fails, they will refuse to leave yet, for what seems like a good reason (to them, at least), and will resist any attempts to force them. Note that coming to blows will qualify as an “act of violence”. Even if a party member succeeds in one given check, that gives them no particular benefits at the next such check. Either the PCs split up, leaving some of the party at the pool, or they end the “magic,” or each party member has to succeed at the same time in order to leave.

Note that such rolls are not made every hour – they are only made when the time comes to leave according to the PCs established routines or other decision made by them.

A lot of narrative- and story-oriented GMs look upon random encounters as an inconvenience. The best will view them as an opportunity to flesh out a part of their game world or explore some aspect of it that hasn’t come to light. The very best will see it as a means of further world-building because they already have external forces lined up that will propel the PCs toward adventures that put all the established unique aspects of the game world on display.

Outside Fantasy

Game systems can be divided up into two main categories – those with random encounters and those without.

In the first category, we have virtually all Fantasy RPGs from D&D through to Tunnels & Trolls and Rolemaster. I’ve never seen a Fantasy game that didn’t have some ‘wandering monster in the wilderness’ mechanism. The same has to be said of every game system that is based upon a Fantasy-genre system – that’s D&D-esque game systems like Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, and Gamma World, and Pathfinder variants (only one so far, Starfinder).

Perhaps in an effort to distance themselves from the TSR/D&D model, random encounters are absent from almost every other game system, at least in terms of embedding them within the game mechanics. That doesn’t mean that casual encounters don’t and won’t take place, but these are more related to the logical potentials of each location and whether or not such encounters will add to or detract from the adventure at hand. If a superhero in Champions performs an act of public derring-do, nearby members of the press and fan-club members and members of the public in general will be attracted to the location. If the act is not so public, potential encounters are the people who could logically be at the location in question, from security guards to office staff working late.

Just because there is no die-rolling mechanism for invoking such encounters doesn’t mean that they won’t take place; it just gives the GM more control over their occurrence while placing more of the responsibility on his shoulders. In every other way, everything stated above still applies, including the four approaches.

Choices

With so many options, a systematic approach to choosing between them becomes critical.

I tend to adopt the following sequence under most circumstances:

1. The Third Way
2. The Zeroth Solution
3. The First Way
4. The Second Way

You could summarize this as “Story, Delayed-Bang/Background, Environment, Creative Capacity”. if nothing comes to mind in a given category, or is contraindicated, I’ll move on to the next category. Once the first three are exhausted, it indicates that no encounter is possible under the current circumstances, so if you really want/need an encounter, the only solution is to change those circumstances in some way.

A Fifth Answer?

In my superhero campaign, at the moment, I’m actually employing what could be considered a fifth approach, or at least approaching one.

I’ve created a list of possible encounters – little more than a placeholder – and whenever nothing interesting has been happening for a while in my adventure planning, I’ll spice things up by picking an item off the list that seems to match up with the local environment.

I can’t go into too much detail as we’re months away from actually playing through these, but they all fit under the “Third Way / Zeroth Solution” umbrellas so far (and the clock won’t even start on those months until the current Lockdown conditions come to an end – which quite possibly means a 2022 start).

Parting Wisdom

How you think about encounters pervades the atmosphere of your RPGs. Some approaches are better than others; the best choices will rarely happen by accident. All too often, one approach becomes habitual, even if it is no longer the best answer; take a moment to review how YOU handle random encounters, and your games will be the better for it.

I should end this article by pointing the reader to another of my articles on the subject – actually, a series of articles:

• Creating ecology-based random encounters: The Philosophy of meanderings

• Creating ecology-based random encounters: This Eats That

• Creating ecology-based random encounters: Encounters with meaning

And always remember, the object is to create fun at the game table for everyone!

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay, background color & mirroring by Mike

The article that I intended to publish today didn’t just go pear-shaped on me, it went prickly-pear shaped.

Nothing was salvageable.

That’s Okay – I have this series as a backup for that very contingency.

So, today, I present another 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 (none?) of them will be anywhere near the length of the usual post here at Campaign Mastery.

How would you play a pacifist in D&D? What race, class, and background?

What is your most interesting monster you’ve created for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign? – I could link to the answer, but it’s just a set of links back to posts here at Campaign Mastery, so let’s cut out the middleman:

• The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti
• The Flói Af Loft & Ryk Bolti (continued)
• The Flói Af Loft & Ryk Bolti (conclusion)

Under what circumstances (if any) would you consider it time for a 6th edition of Dungeons & Dragons? – An interesting question and answer given that we’re now in August 2021, about 3 years later – and I still haven’t seen any hints that a 2024 “Sixth Ed” is on the way. 5e took about 3 years from playtest startup to publication, so time is running out – but when this was written, Covid wasn’t even a word. Has Covid killed 6e? Like you, I can only speculate…

How should I roleplay a (Alseides) nymph in DnD? – my answer to this is a collection of links to relevant articles here at Campaign Mastery. If you want to look at the only other answer to the question (to which my answer refers), when the link opens to my answer, click on the question, or scroll to the bottom of the answer.

As a DM in Dungeons and Dragons, how do you deal with players who constantly find ways of wrecking all of your planning with ludicrous actions no sane character would take?

What exactly are “tabletop RPG adventures”? Does it involve computers? – Any experienced tabletop RPG player will probably have the same initial reaction to this question as I did – a wince and perhaps a small eye-roll. But I decided to take the question seriously (even if I thought that it was probably trolling for attention). Instead of focusing on the second part of the question, I made the first my center of attention, which makes most of this answer a response to offer to those outside the hobby when they ask what it is that you do.

Is it wrong to listen to rap music if I love God? So many people talk about the Illuminati and symbolism. There’s even a rapper that I love who has one eye covered on his album cover. Should I avoid these types of artists? – the specifics of this question and answer might not have an obvious RPG relevance, but the broader issue that it raises is definitely relevant. I have had one really good player bail from a campaign because it had magic in it and their religious sect was extremely rigid in considering magic to be satanic – I wrote about that, and the broader issues raised, in Moral Qualms on the Richter scale – the need for cooperative subject limits, which sparked considerable debate at the time.

What’s your favorite little or unknown tabletop game? – my answer is about a Time Travel game.

What is the lore of Arcane Magic in your D&D setting? – my answer is more about campaign concepts that I haven’t yet run. So if you’re looking for campaign ideas…

As a role-player, does your main character have a favorite weapon? Explain in detail what is special about this weapon and how your character feels about this weapon. – my answer takes me back to an early AD&D campaign in which I was a player. There’s an interesting character concept there for anyone who’s looking for one (works with any class – as proof of which, i reused the character concept in a Roman World campaign some years later, different rules system being playtested, in which the character was a half-Orc Scout – you’ll understand the significance of that after reading the answer!).

Were polearms ever used as individual weapons, or is this an invention of Dungeons & Dragons? – my answer to this question is barely adequate, but there are some quite informative other responses to the question that are worth taking the time to read.

In your country are traditional, pencil and paper, role playing games still popular? Or is it all over now because of video games?

As a D&D DM, what are some more unique and intriguing weapons you have presented your party with during a campaign? – My answer to this question is something I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned here at Campaign Mastery. On top of that, there are 18 other answers to mine for ideas!

In D&D, how did/would you deal with different dialects of languages (such as Common, Draconic, or Elvish) in your campaign? – this answer just scratches the surface of a very complicated subject, the evolution of languages (in general, not relating to any specific language). It’s a subject that I continue to learn about but still can’t say that I have significant expertise to draw upon – just more than some and less than others.

As a D&D player, what weaponry or magic have you seen in a movie that made you stop and take notice in a good way? – this answer feels completely inadequate to me when I look at it today, something that I regret.

How do you deal with travels in a one-shot tabletop roleplaying game? – another almost inadequate answer that does little more than point the reader at someone else’s response, but which does actually answer the question. I must have been under time pressure at that point or I would have elaborated somewhat.

Should a character make a clearly unwise choice to continue the GM’s story?

Do you prefer RPGs to have action combat or turn based? Why? – before answering the question, I vent about people who assume that all RPGs are computer games – a perpetual social media bugbear of mine.

Is it worth paying a Dungeon Master for a session? – this answer feels somewhat dated given the explosion in online TTRPGs as a result of Covid-19. There’s certainly a lot more that could be said on the subject of “Professional GMs” – but I don’t think my answer would change. And this is after people (both through CM and elsewhere) have suggested that I do just that – GM Online, for a fee. Some out there might not even know that it’s a thing!

If you were an RPG character, what character trope would fit you best? – another barely-adequate answer, though it does at least justify the choice.

As a DM/GM how do you deal with combat in the context of high hit points (a Dwarf probably shouldn’t be able to survive 20 stabs/slashes)?

Is radio something that most sentient races would use at some point and if so why are we not awash in radio broadcasts from around our Galaxy? – this answer bottom lines an article here at campaign mastery without linking to it. The article is A Game Of Drakes and Detectives: Where’s ET? – it’s worth reading if you haven’t already done so.

Are Google’s “free to use” images actually free? – for anyone who wants to show their work in public, this is a really important question that most of us pay a LOT of attention to, on a regular basis. If you NEVER intend to let anyone outside your circle of players / friends see what you’ve been up to, go hog-wild. But be aware that it’s a one-way road; once you make a copyright image central to a campaign or an adventure, that campaign or adventure is forever barred from public view; so if there’s a chance that you might EVER change your mind, swim between the copyright-legal flags. or at least to the gray zone that this answer offers you.

Is the 80’s hysteria over devil worship still a problem for the tabletop RPG industry? – this question got me quite fired up. But every time I get upset thinking about the absolute nonsense that was the 80s RPG Hysteria (and some of the outright biased journalism that went with it, I remember that three of my regular players weren’t even into the hobby then, and another had been away from RPGs for years – but has now been back “in” for longer than he was “away”. Out of a sample of 6, that’s fairly significant in terms of the longer-term impact of the Hysteria.

Can anybody answer a legal question regarding the SRD for DnD 5e? Some class branches and certain features are in the player handbook but not SRD. Are these, therefore, not usable under the SRD’s license? – I hesitated before answering this question in hopes that someone more knowledgeable would provide an adequate answer. When none appeared after giving what felt like adequate time, and assuming that the SRD-PHB relationship was the same for 5e as it had been for 3.x, I weighed in with this answer which I still consider barely-adequate, though the person asking the question found it to be exactly what he was looking for, judging from his reply. Someone did offer a better answer than mine, though – you can read it at Mike Prinke’s Answer.

Can a person’s taste in music be used to determine his/her personality? – actually, the question that I answered was Psychologically is there any connection between the type of music people listen to and their personality? but two (or more) similar questions were conflated.

In D&D 5e should a DM allow the use of Polymorph or Druid’s Wild Shape to change into a dinosaur? Do you stick with RAW or does it break immersion too much? – the comments are worth reading too (especially the first one if you’re a 5e GM, especially the second one if you’re not).

What is the best board game table?

What obscure movie did you watch a lot as a child, but no one else you know has even heard of it? – my answer is a numeric analysis of how far technology has come in recent years. And still manages to be relevant to the question. I’m not sure it’s as relevant to RPGs, but in terms of providing look-and-feel for the early days of the internet, it’s priceless – and that is something that’s relevant here.

How can you become a better role player?

In Dungeons and Dragons, how would military units be structured? – for some reason this question seemed to resonate with Quora contributors, resulting in more than 100 answers (of which, mine is just one). So if you don’t like my answer, or don’t think it’s relevant to an army in your campaign world, check out the others. But set aside a fair chunk of time.

In D&D, how do you give your players motivation to go adventuring?

…which brings me up to mid-April of 2019, in terms of Quora contributions.

LOTS more to come. My usage dropped for most of the rest of the year, only to rise dramatically through 2020, and as for 2021. For almost two months now, I’ve been in Lockdown (along with half of Australia), and that’s led me to spend a lot more time on Quora – sometimes commenting on other answers, sometimes answering questions.

You can get some idea of how productive I’ve been in that space by the fact that when I published the first in this series, I had answered over 1200 questions in about three years – and the total is now over 1400, just a few months later!

Not all of these are PG-relevant – some have been about music, some about politics, some about Covid-19, and some about life in general. To date, I’ve written more than 1400 answers! If just 20% of those are relevant to readers here, that’s 280 answers – and at 40-or-so-a-time, that means at least 5 more of these posts are to come!

Speaking of….

991… 992…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. only EIGHT to go until the big occasion!

This visual combines girl-1970399.png by JL G from Pixabay with computer-2930704, image by ItNeverEnds from Pixabay.

Back in the mid-90s, when I was preparing the campaign background for my rebooted superhero campaign, I had to think about cyberware – not the relatively reliable and semi-routine stuff that you would find in a Cyberpunk campaign, but the stuff that you would have before all the bugs were worked out.

I wasn’t interested in the cyberware itself, but on what it would do to people when the implantation process went wrong, and the ways that it could go wrong.

Now, as it happens, very few of the adventures that I’ve run in the 20-odd years since the campaign reboot started have actually involved cyberware, and the few that have done so have involved far more advanced cyberware than I had in mind when doing this background material, because the players had chosen to take the campaign somewhere that I had never intended it to go (to be honest, though, I now have trouble seeing any other way that it could go, the new location has become so central to the ongoing mythos of the campaign)!

But, in the months before Covid Lockdowns began to interrupt, a sub-campaign started containing some of the essential plot threads of the campaign that occur back in the originally-intended setting. And that means that the prep-work done almost a quarter if a century is suddenly becoming relevant again.

So I got out my campaign background, and took a look at the material I had prepared. Now, of course, things have advanced tremendously since this stuff was written. We now know more about the problems involved with artificial implants, we’ve solved some of them and are getting closer to reaching this point in real life. The original ideas, I have found, stand up fairly well; but there’s room for improvement and refinement.

Since I’m never afraid to do my campaign development in full view of Campaign Mastery readers (especially if I can get an article out of it!), that’s what’s on the menu for today. The material offered within this article can be used with almost any Sci-Fi or superhero campaign.

The article is going to be divided into three or maybe four parts. The first is this introduction. After that, in section two, I have a few slang terms in use amongst the cybered-up community and those who interact with them. Section three is mostly a recap of the cyberware faults from my original campaign background, tweaked and updated just a little. Finally, if there’s room, I have a few thoughts regarding the legal impact of cyberware implants.

Let’s go…

Cyberware Terminology

Most of the following terminology is street slang, but – like “Google” or “Xerox” – is slowly becoming part of the official language of the Cyberware industry and those that become involved in it.

• C-Grade – describes Commercial-Grade cyberware. Generally reliable, generally secure, generally NOT cutting-edge. Freakz with exclusively C-Grade enhancements are sometimes described as “Mallows” (short for Marshmallows).
• Chipped – a Freak with exclusively brain-enhancement chips.
• Chipnoia – a Meatchop who is scared of cybernetic enhancement, usually unreasonably in the eyes of a Freak.
• Cybertank – a vehicle operated by a living brain connected to cybernetic controls.
• Dataviz – virtual data displays relayed directly to the brain, including any form of sensory enhancement.
• Edgy – a Freak with enhanced or pre-programmed reflexes.
• Freak, Freakz, Freaked – someone who is cyber-enhanced, several such someones, and the act of getting cyber-enhancments installed. The full term is CyberFreak, but common usage has abbreviated it.
• Greased – Cyber-enhancements are expensive, and the better they are, the more expensive they are. Someone who can either afford to Freak due to personal wealth, or who has obtained a contract (usually requiring use of the new implants, potentially illegal) that will pay for the surgery.
• InLine – The cybernetic equivalent of online. Because it literally connects the brain directly to the internet, it is considered a more direct and intimate connection than traditional connection methods. Note that most of the hardware required remains external to the human at this time.
• Jacked – Having the implanted connections required to go InLine. The process of going InLine is sometimes called Jacking.
• Lone Wolf, Wolf-pack – Most Freakz congregate into gangs with strict hierarchies, rules, and command structures. Most such gangs have mutual respect and relations with each other. When an individual violates the gang strictures sufficiently to be expelled, he is described as a Lone Wolf. When a gang violates its arrangements with another gang, they are referred to as a Wolf-pack. Both terms indicate that the named is not to be trusted lightly. See also Samurai.
• Meat – Biological parts that are replaced or augmented with cybernetic mechanisms.
• Meatchop – An uncybered human.
• M-Grade – Military-grade cybernetics. Less reliable, more powerful, and frequently incorporating classified technology and/or weapons.
• Painted – Fitted with subdermal LEDs that provide camouflage or other cosmetic or visual styling.
• Parity Hole – A malfunction in cyberware is sometimes described as ‘Going Down a Parity Hole’.
• Protochipper – someone who uses prototype cyberware. Unreliable, dangerous, but very cutting edge. Often, Protochippers are addicted to upgrading to the latest tech.
• Racker – Someone who develops original cybertech and installs it in their own bodies.
• Samurai – Some Freakz who go outside the gang structure for personal reasons but who can still be trusted and/or respected by the gang are referred to as Samurai.
• Shadow – Freak with stealth enhancements.
• Slicer – A surgeon or surgical assistant who installs cyberware (technically, someone who does so illegally, but street slang usually doesn’t differentiate between legal and illegal enhancements).
• Streetware – the black market in (illegal / stolen) cyberware.
• X-Grade- Experimental Cyberware. Extremely unreliable and dangerous.

When Cyberware Goes Bad

The advent of cyberware has introduced new diseases and ailments that only afflict those who have been enhanced. In some cases, they are the result of poor designs or poor installations, in others they are normal diseases with new traits because of the enhancement of the sufferer.

Many of these terms have also emerged from street language, and hence they have an informality that is unusual in describing medical conditions.

{Some of these are old, the rest are new].

• ChipRage Syndrome – This is believed to result from a malfunction of the neural implants used to control cyberware or from substandard implants or even botched implantation. These failures trigger a unceasing fight-or-flight response that spikes adrenalin production while flooding the brain with endorphins in a process very similar to a massive dose of PCP. The result is a berserker rage that usually ends in the death of both the sufferer and of several bystanders.
• Cyber Necrosis – Cyber Necrosis is a form of decay of organic tissue that has not been replaced with artificial components. Believed to be related to an excessive and uncontrolled immune reaction which causes the adjacent tissues to become inflamed and then rot in a manner similar to gangrene. Immunosupressants can halt the process but not reverse the damage; the alternative is further organ replacement. In acute cases, it affects the brain, causing aphasia and other brain damage which often proves lethal.
• Digitiphobia – This illness is a form of Paranoia which initially presents as one or more uncontrolled phobias not previously manifest within the victim’s personality. It is thought to be caused by faulty signaling within neural implants which activate the incorrect synaptic patterns, which in turn cause the brain to route its signals incorrectly, confusing conscious and subconscious thoughts. In acute cases, this condition can coincide with ChipRage Syndrome.
• Fantasyland – this is the result of rogue signals being received by the brain by way of cyberware. Since the brain can’t distinguish real from false, it begins to construct an alternate perception of reality that accommodates the false sensory feedback. The victim therefore becomes delusional. Most victims are fully capable of functioning in the wider community, though they may exhibit unusual reactions to certain trigger experiences. The sensory channels affected are a critical differentiator; minimal impact to the community results from the senses of taste, smell, touch, temperature, balance, time, etc; somewhat greater impact is experienced with auditory delusions; and the greatest impact stems from visual stimuli.
• Jackslash – Jackslash results from the overloading of nerve and synaptic pathways which damage the overloaded cells over time, reducing the effectiveness of the entire nervous system. The disease resembles a degenerative nervous disorder such as a malignant brain tumor in symptomology, including potential personality changes. A frequent side effect is the over-stimulation of one or more neurological pleasure centers, which transits to excruciating and unending pain when the synapse degeneration becomes pronounced, by which time the Freak is addicted. The name derives from the lurid description offered by the first reported case, who stated “it feels like Jack the F—– Ripper was slashing my nerves length-ways”. It should be noted that this disease is a non-fatal overdose of the pleasure centers involved; even when patients are given near-fatal doses of painkillers, they require ever-increasing levels of stimulation of the degenerating structures or they will suffer acute withdrawal symptoms which can include depression and suicidal ideation but may also resemble ChipRage syndrome.
• Snap Jackslash – An acute form of Jackslash which can progress from asymptomatic to severe pain in less than 24 hours.
• Identity Transection – Because the intensity of data transfer direct to the brain can be experienced far more sharply and strongly than ‘real’ stimulus, some people come to think of themselves as cybernetic organisms with some organic dependencies. This particular psychosis is known as Identity Transection. Little is yet known of the condition and there is no standardized treatment.
• Reality Corruption – This is the result of corruption of the data stream being fed to the brain to augment a particular sensory channel. Opinion is divided as to whether this should be considered a specific form of Fantasyland or is a condition in its own right. The case for the former is fairly self-evident; the principle case for the latter position rests on the psychological impact that attends a case, to wit: since the victim has enhanced perceptions within the sense affected, they are more likely to treat the corrupt information as accurate, and psychotic breaks in which the individual comes to believe that their cyberware is permitting them to see past or through a deception imposed on the rest of the world, are frequent. This in turn fuels paranoia and conspiracy delusions, which causes aberrant decision-making. Another point of contention is the question of inevitability – are all sufferers of Reality Corruption somewhere on an inevitable progression, or can the disease arrest at particular stages even without professional intervention due to the absence of other conditions such as paranoic tendencies?
• Remote Confusion – Dependence on GPS systems for navigational orientation can enhance an individual’s mobility, particularly if enhanced with low-intensity altitude/depth instrumentation to provide a 3-dimensional awareness of their environment. However, there are sometimes glitches in such systems as any user of early onboard-navigation systems can attest. Such navigational corruption in a cybered individual is known as Remote Confusion. Since such sensory inputs usually replace more conventional senses, making the victim dependent on the unreliable information, this can have profound effects on behavior, and can trigger other psychoses and neuroses. One recorded case of Remote Confusion thought that she was trapped in a bank vault, triggering an underlying claustrophobia that caused her to destroy the gas station that was present at her actual location.
• Rogue Hackware – It has to be assumed that any hardware which connects to the outside world (i.e. is not ‘air-gapped’) is now or will become hackable. There have already been demonstrated cases of insulin pumps and pacemakers being hackable. When a remote operator seizes control of a Freak’s implants, those implants are described as Rogue Hackware.
• Synapse Reversion – This is a form of phantom limb syndrome in which an organ that has been replaced or enhanced fails to respond to instruction because the ‘phantom limb’ does so in its stead. It is a physical manifestation of a dissociative state in which the identity of the victim becomes confused, leading them to think of the cybernetic implants as a separate being occupying the same physical form as the personality. Such secondary identities are often ‘free’ to act on behavioral impulses that the primary personality would not countenance and would suppress. This can cause a mailman to become a terrorist, transform a meek schoolteacher into a rapist, and so on, and as such is considered an extremely serious mental illness.
• The Twitch – When individuals with some underlying mental illness (including other forms of cybernetic dysfunction) employ a cybernetic connection to control machinery remotely, the mental illness can manifest in mishandling of the machinery or the misbehavior of such machinery. Such ‘mishandling’ may be nothing more than a slight recurring twitch, it may cause the machinery to reach for objects an inch or two to the left of where the operator thinks they are, or they may replicate full-blown spasming. Quite often, this condition is only triggered when specific actions or operations are initiated.
• Trigger – This occurs when individuals have supplemented their knowledge with chip-based information resources such as encyclopedias, mathematics co-processors, etc, when the data indices pointing to specific records contain errors. Sufferers are unable to separate the incorrect data from reality and therefore act on bad data whenever that particular subject is ‘triggered’. For example, all British Politicians may be identified as Maggie Thatcher, associated with Thatcher’s policies, and cause the victim to respond to encounters with such according to the victim’s attitudes toward Thatcherism.

This list of conditions only scratches the surface. It goes too far to suggest that every implanted individual suffers from some form of psychological or physical impairment, but the number of such individuals without some accompanying dysfunction are a very small minority.

There is a growing perception in some parts of the wider community that it will be necessary for the broader population to be enhanced in some fashion in order for them to be competitive in the social and economic arenas. The medical reality is the primary counter to that argument, but proponents point out that as design and construction of cyberware improves, such medical conditions will become increasingly rare and less of an inhibiting factor; they may delay ‘the inevitable’ but not prevent it.

Others react with horror to the notion of removing perfectly functional organs and limbs, or the implanting of unnecessary technological enhancements within the body, and the stage is set for some level of confrontation as this becomes a more acute social divide.

This question is complicated by the rise of cyber-religious movements, who consider the exhilaration of being able to surpass the purely human to be a religious experience. Some feel that the replacement of frail organic components brings them closer to God and blame all human failings on the organic elements of their bodies, for example. Other religious movements suggest that God is an emergent property of interfaced neural networks. Neither view is especially mainstream, but there are passionate adherents of both, and each has its own radical fringes. Some of the cybergangs espouse such beliefs and use them as a point of collective identity, for example the 49th Street Church Of The Elevated Chip-Set in Los Angeles.

Cyberware and the Law

Issues of diminished responsibility already create contention in many court cases across the world. When cybernetic implants reach the point of potentially impacting on the personality of the individual, such complications will only become more frequent and more acute, and it seems inevitable that at some point a defendant will claim that they were not guilty of a criminal charge because their cyberware could have been hacked.

There are two ways for this problem to go: either such claims get designated an affirmative defense, which forces the defendant to prove that their cyberware was exploited, or they are not, in which case it becomes part of the prosecutorial burden to prove that either such hacking did not take place, or that if it did, that it could not account for the alleged criminal actions.

It’s very rare that laws are made in anticipation of a problem. It’s far more common for existing laws to be shoehorned into a new application for which they were never intended to apply. Laws are responsive to changing conditions, in other words, and there may be a significant lag before the law actually catches up with the reality.

As a general principle, it is faster to regulate something (however inadequately) than it is to make it illegal, i.e. ban it completely.

The story of the MP3 is a case in point – attempts to ban it outright failed; even though short-term victories blocked or shut down this sharing service or that, there were five more ready to step into their place. What killed the file-sharing services was the advent of a legal alternative which brought the sale and transfer of MP3s (and other digital media) under an existing legal and trade umbrella. In particular, the prices being charged were smaller than the costs associated with using a ‘free’ service that could land you a massive fine or jail time, and the cost of the inconvenience of not being able to find what you are looking for.

If we accept these premises, then we might be able to get some idea of how the law will respond to these challenges by examining a few situations that can be considered analogous. No such analogy will be perfect, but at least we will have a starting point.

The unwitting cyberterrorist

Let’s assume that you have a computing device of some sort (a safe assumption since you need one to read this article), that it gets hacked, and is then used as part of a Denial-Of-Service attack or other cybercrime. To what extent are you legally culpable

My initial position was not at all, you’re a victim, just a means to the ends of those who actually initiated the attack. That perspective was quickly undermined by a Quora contributor who demonstrated that it was not so simple.

Kira Dark pointed out the legal requirement of due diligence

“If your computer gets hacked cause it was made intentionally insecure then the owner of the computer that got hacked to commit a crime is actually responsible. They are also charged as an accessory.

“If your computer is hacked and used in a crime by a 3rd party and you resist the authorities from finding who that third again there are charges that apply. Resisting under the point of ‘I didn’t do it’ is a different matter but if the authorities already have and demonstrate evidence that you got hacked and then your system was used in the commission of a crime and you make them get a warrant they can use this as evidence of obstruction charges.”

Only if your computer meets reasonable security standards – is only as hackable as anyone else’s, as Kira put it – are you not responsible.

What’s more,

“If the authorities can prove you actually had an honest chance at stopping or preventing the crime for example sat there and watched them do it when you could have actually taken action to stop it or prevent it without harm to yourself, you’re screwed, there are charges for that.”

Kira closed her answer by opening another can of worms: the liability of a manufacturer who creates cyberware implants that are inadequately protected against cybernetic intrusion. Consider this to be like releasing a model of car with inadequate brakes. If it’s the result of a design or manufacturing error, civil redress would be available to anyone harmed as a result, and the driver would be culpable only to the extent that they may have been disobeying the law. If it’s a situation that the manufacturer could not have anticipated, their liability is limited (but the experience will need to be incorporated into newer models). But if you did it deliberately, in order to make the vehicle cheaper, then you are going to be in a lot of trouble.

Of course, that particular analogy would – should – never happen in real life; government inspection should have discovered the defect in the braking system long before the vehicles went on sale. And that suggests that there would be, or would need to be, some regulatory agency charged with making sure that the cybernetic implants were ‘reasonably’ safe for their intended usage, and ‘reasonably’ resistant to attempts to abuse or compromise the technology.

Reflecting on that point resulted in the addition to my street lexicon of ‘C-Grade’, “M-Grade’, and ‘X-Grade’.

If the hacking of cyberware ever becomes a ‘thing’, incorporation of defensive software which gets regular updates would become, of necessity, a part of life with such implants, just as they are with mobile phones.

The hijacker

Lets say that you are out for a drive and stop to pick up a hitch-hiker who pulls a gun and forces you to participate in a crime. To what extent are you liable for the acts that you have facilitated and to what extent should you resist in order to protect yourself?

The key to this situation is the presence of coercion through the direct threat. Unless it can be shown that you were a willing participant or a co-conspirator (making the threat a sham), you would generally not be held responsible at all; you would be considered a victim.

But it’s not hard to imagine ways for this to get more complicated. What if the vehicle was inadequately maintained, and that the demands placed upon it at the hijacker’s instructions caused your vehicle to kill or injure a bystander? This could be construed as contributing to the outcome through negligence, and a degree of the blame would have to be shared.

It seems likely, in such a case, that a plea arrangement would be offered – the hijacker arguably poses a greater public risk, and making the case against him airtight would be a priority.

Things get murkier again if the hijacker escaped. In that case, the vehicle’s operator has little to offer in exchange for clemency, and is likely to have the book thrown at him.

Another permutation is revealed by the question, ‘What if the driver is not the owner?’

Any contributory negligence is the responsibility of the owner, not the driver – potentially mitigated if the driver knew of the problem and chose to use the vehicle anyway. But the issue of the legal culpability of the driver becomes a lot more problematic in this circumstance.

The Hostages

This notion comes from NCIS Los Angeles. Someone in a high-security position is forced to commit crimes when their family is taken hostage. (In the episode, there’s a plot twist when it is discovered that the ‘victim’ was a co-conspirator in planning the crime).

A threat to another can mitigate or negate culpability – it’s coercion again. But all those caveats about due diligence still seem relevant.

The messed-up

Finally, we need to consider the existing defense of diminished responsibility. Everything I know about this has come from American TV and is, therefore, suspect. It’s probably not too far off in broad, but the specifics have to be considered doubtful, and those are what I want to examine.

It’s not relevant in every case, that depends on the alleged crime. And it’s generally a discriminator of severity of guilt and punishment, not usually acquittal.

From Wikipedia:

“The defense [of diminished responsibility] is to be contrasted with insanity which is a complete but affirmative defense. In most jurisdictions a defendant would be acquitted on the grounds of insanity if the defendant established to the satisfaction of the jury that he suffered from such a mental disease or defect that he was unable to appreciate the consequences of his actions or did not know what he was doing was wrong.”

The successful use of an Insanity Defense results in acquittal – that’s what Wikipedia meant by ‘a complete defense’. Some jurisdictions have added the verdict “Guilty but insane” as a permitted outcome of the trial process.

One of the major differences between the two is that ‘diminished responsibility’ is not an affirmative defense, it’s up to the prosecution to prove that the alleged criminal was capable of knowing right from wrong and that what he was allegedly doing fell into the latter category. Insanity, on the other hand, is an affirmative defense, and the burden of proof is on the defense team.

In Scottish law, Wikipedia observes, a form of diminished responsibility can mitigate the severity of punishment.

Here in Australia, as Wikipedia notes,

…”diminished responsibility exists as a statutory partial defense in most Australian jurisdictions. The defense is only available in cases of murder and serves to reduce the offense to manslaughter.

It’s always been a contentious defense here, because a criminal sentence serves three different purposes at the same time – punishing the guilty, rehabilitation, and protection of the community. Diminished Responsibility weakens the guilt of the offender to some degree ranging from none to total, and reduces the need for rehabilitation in like degree, but exacerbates the danger to the public that is imposed in returning the offender to the community. At the same time, there is a general approval for those who suffer from mental illness or handicap to enjoy as normal a life as possible, especially if their condition can be regulated medically. The result is messy, to say the least, and far from settled.

My personal take on the issue is that the priority has to be public health and safety, followed by the health and safety of the individual, but that they are entitled to live as fully within the community as is possible provided that those priorities are satisfied, and any claim of diminished responsibility or insanity has to be assessed within those constraints. It might be an appropriate sentence for medication and counseling to be made mandatory for a period of time, or it might be necessary that regardless of mental state some form of incarceration under specialist care is necessary – each case is different.

Quite often, on TV shows like Law And Order, the defense will put onto the witness stand experts in psychology if they are planning to mount an insanity defense, but since testimony can be bought or biased, the prosecution demands the right to have the alleged criminal interviewed by their own experts. The judge has to rule on such requests, the defense has little or no say (they can attempt to persuade the judge to say ‘no’ but that’s often not as helpful to their client’s position as agreeing to the request). I have no idea how realistic this all is as a scenario, but it at least seems plausible (As an aside, I’ve often thought it a shame that the Jury, through the judge, can’t call independent experts to guide them through conflicting expert testimony).

Be that as it may, there’s clearly a lot of parallels between all this and the potential criminal liability of those with cyber-implants, insofar as those implants can induce an aberrant or abnormal state of mind. It’s no coincidence that so many of the cyber-diseases described in the previous section fall under this general umbrella.

ALL the factors discussed in this section are amplified – criminal responsibility, diminished responsibility, insanity, and the threat to public safety.

It’s hard to see a situation in which all jurisdictions throughout the world approach the issues raised in anything approaching a consistent manner. In some places, the potential defense will be considered a mitigating factor and investigation of the potential relevance to any case is likely to be put on the shoulders of the prosecution (or the ‘crown’, depending on where we’re talking about); in other places, the potential risk to the public will be given greater weight, and the cyber aspects of a case will either be ignored or made an affirmative defense.

It seems likely to me that the first will more frequently be the case in blue states, while the latter will be more common in red states – but the latter are also more passionate about individualism, self-protection, and weapons ownership, all of which argue in mitigation of this tendency and may even overrule it.

Legal turmoil is the most likely outcome, and a haphazard progress in updating legal codes to reflect the changes in technology.

So what else is new?

The only certainty is that this will, sooner or later, become an issue. There are too many potential benefits from the technology for it to be suppressed – everything from chips to overcome diseases like Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s to smart limbs that are more life-like, to enhancements that overcome disabilities, to enhancements for the sake of being better at one’s job.

The progression to enhancements for their own sake seems inevitable, even though society as a whole would oppose such artificial aids, I think.

This is a social and legal issue that’s just over the horizon. Research into brain-machine interfaces is going on right now. We aren’t there yet – but devices like the cochlear implant and insulin pump show that the questions raised are imminent. This is Science Fiction on the verge of becoming reality, a process that won’t be complete overnight – it may take 40 years, it’s unlikely to take less than twenty – but it is coming.

Image by Thomas Wolter from Pixabay

Many of my campaigns either do not feature “dungeons” or employ transformative conceptualizations to justify their existence within the campaign world, because – to be frank – they don’t make a lot of sense, otherwise.

But there can be other structural concepts that don’t obey all the technical principles of the generic ‘dungeon,’ in other campaigns, that could be considered such if you squint just a little.

These often have singular origins that set them apart from the generic ‘dungeon’.

But sometimes, you just have to hand-wave away the logical flaws in the idea and embrace the concept.

That does not mean, however, that your dungeon designs should not be rational. On the contrary, it places even greater weight on the internal logic of each representative example.

This month’s blog carnival, hosted by Plastic Polyhedra, is all about dungeon design, and for the reasons listed above, I was initially hesitant about participating, feeling that I wouldn’t be true to the spirit of the topic – but then I changed my mind, because what I had to offer was an alternative perspective that others might find useful.

And that’s what Campaign Mastery is here for.

Of necessity, this will be a fairly high-level review of the process that I use to create dungeons, when they are appropriate to the game world and the ambitions of the players (obviously, if the PCs aren’t interested in Dungeons, it’s a waste of time creating them).

1. Core Concept

The place to start is always by defining a core concept for this particular dungeon. This central idea will be used to guide subsequent decisions, it provides a focus for all aspects of the design. This is especially important if you have many dungeons in your campaign because there is an ever-present risk of them blurring into each other; you need all the help to can get in making them distinctive.

I’m going to include an example as the process unfolds. In this case, my dungeon Core Concept is ‘defiled temple’. I want this to be a haven for enhanced Undead – especially Skeletons.

2. Constructor – Who and How?

Who built/created the dungeon and how? This is another of those formative questions, or should be. Every subsequent decision should at least consider these answers, if not be actively guided by them.

The heretic Azelfar, now a servant of the Dark God Telvas, returned to the temple of Belaal that banished him a decade prior. With the powers lent him by Telvas, he summoned an Undead Horde to besiege the Temple, eventually killing or driving out the faithful. Claiming the Temple as his own, Azelfar used a wish spell to invert the pyramid-shaped temple; Undead workers completed the transformation before burying the entrances beneath a mound of earth.

— When I started writing this article, I had the basic premise, but not the names or deities concerned.

3. Intermediate History?

Sometimes, this isn’t necessary, but adding in some additional layers of history can greatly enhance a dungeon. Just be careful not to stray too far from the core concept.

Knights of Errich challenged Azelfar, and brought the heretic low, but at great cost to their noble order. Carrying their wounded from the field, they returned to their Citadel, carrying with them some unknown malady that gradually wiped them out to a man. At the same time it slowly emerged that the evil curse on the Befouled Temple had not been fully lifted; creatures of dark nature continued to be sighted in the vicinity. The trade route from Carvelus to Isignerry, which once had swarmed with traffic between these growing communities, slowly choked to nothing, because of the darkness that lay across it. Over time, the exact location of the Befouled Temple was lost, as were the specifics of the trade route over the mountain pass. And so the evil was free to brood, and grow.

— This contains a lot useful information. In particular it raises the possibility that Azelfar survived, deceiving the Knights of Errich. It implies that there are two sources for maps to the dungeon that can be found – the one employed by the Knights (which means braving their ruined Citadel and the disease that may still slumber there, a mini-dungeon of sorts), or a map of the old trade route. The first would probably be more useful, the second is probably more accessible. And it suggests that there may be more denizens than simply Undead in residence – but whatever now calls the Temple home would need to be comfortable in an Undead-heavy environment. Finally, it provides a source of wealth – all those lost trade caravans – which has (presumably) accumulated in the ruined Temple.

4. Recent History

You may not need this if you’ve created an Intermediate history. This is all about motivations – why is it important now that the dungeon be found and cleared? Has it been newly-discovered or does the threat that it poses suddenly seem greater than it was? If greed is to be the PC motivation, why now? Possible motivating discoveries might include the discovery that some long-lost treasure may have ended up there, or the opening of a new (or re-opening of an old) trade route, or some sort of imminent threat that is blamed on the dungeon’s presence. Does someone else decide that the time is right to clear the dungeon, and hire the PCs to do the dirty work? Another old favorite is the notion of workmen disturbing something that was better left undisturbed.

Where it’s not about motivations, this needs to connect the Dungeon to the PCs – how do they know about it? How do they learn where it is located? This frames the prologue and the journey to the dungeon (which may not be without its challenges – anything that doesn’t like living with Undead but doesn’t like being hunted down by man is likely to find security by hanging around the general vicinity).

There are lots of options here.

— This raises the stakes considerably. It becomes obvious what the Heretic who created the dungeon was after, and the plot of this Telvas-worshipper may well succeed without intervention. So this not only makes the campaign mythology relevant, it better-defines the dungeon.

5. Internal Structure

Now that we know what we’re talking about, it’s time to settle some of the fundamental parameters of our dungeon – how big is it? How many levels? Are areas isolated, or is the place more like an underground house? An area may be a level, or it may be a cluster of rooms or spaces. Unless it’s truly massive, a single room shouldn’t be an area (though I did this once for the sheer variety).

I tend to stick to the mantra, ‘a purpose to every area, and to every area, a purpose’. These purposes should derive from the central concept and the history created in earlier steps of the creative process.

I’m not particularly interested in how one gets from one area to another at this point in time. That will come later, when the areas get broken down into specific rooms.

We have two design imperatives to guide us – the original design of a functional, reasonably self-supporting, Temple, and what was done to it subsequently, after it became structurally inverted.

6. Look and Feel

In general terms, ‘Look’ is the cosmetics of the dungeon. What sounds permeate the place? What smells? What are the common distinctive features – the walls, the ceiling? Where does light come from, and what is its quality?

These are important building blocks to the final dungeon.

‘Feel’ is equally important, but far more nebulous and hard to pin down; the terminology is just too broad and general. Take “creepy” – are all manifestations of “creepy” the same? if so, how do you distinguish one from another; and if not, what are the differences? Fortunately, there are all sorts of metaphors that we can apply to grope toward such distinctions – “something always lurking in the shadows” is different from “something is watching you – and hating you” is different from “there’s always something lurking behind you until you turn around” is different from “it makes your flesh crawl”. “Insidious Creepy” is not the same thing as “Brutal Creepy”. Appending each narrative passage with the hint of a scene of unwarranted violence being committed by one or more of the PCs creates the impression of something violent trying to worm its way into their thoughts, a variation on the techniques offered in “The Envelope Is Ticking – Insanity in RPGs“.

The walls are pastel shades of yellow that have faded to bone-white; shades of pale orange and gold that have decayed into pale dirty gray-green, all pockmarked with molds of green and brown and bright, angry red. Many have been defaced with crude, rude, or unholy symbols, splashed on with red paint, black paint, or blood. Creepers descend along every column, erupting from the tiled ceiling and weakening those tiles; many have fallen to the floor and smashed, with enough force to inflict serious harm on anyone they strike. The floors are plastered stone, green and slick with mold and the skeletal remains of small animals. Doors are inset into the walls near the ceilings; in some cases, rough ramps lead up to them, in others, the doorway arches have been roughly broken through. Any furniture that wasn’t mounted to the ceiling – which is most of it – and any other loose material has fallen to the floor, creating layers of detritus. And everywhere is the tinkle of falling water, and the thick smell of rot and decay. Brass fittings still hold long-extinguished candles, now pointed to the ground.

— This builds on the notion that the Belaal was a sun god, represented by the mostly-white pastel tones. Some of the information contained in this high-level summary can be reserved for the description of specific rooms, such as the stuff about doorways (which, I have to admit, was the first thing that I thought of). Most of it is concerned with conveying the impact of the inversion, and the impression that it was virtually instantaneous – down suddenly became up – and the implied violence of that transformation.

The ‘water’ sounds require further explanation. Turn any plumbing fixture upside down – sink, water-closet, whatever – and water will fall from it until the supply has been exhausted. On top of that, what hot air there is will rise, carrying evaporated water vapor with it, which will condense on the walls and pipes (which are presumed to be cooler than the surrounding atmosphere). The result would be perpetual drips and running small streams of water. The dampness would encourage mold and rot, so this notion feeds into other areas of the description.

7. Significant Occupant Ecologies/Societies

I’ve preempted this discussion a bit in my example, but it’s time to get more specific. I try not to think of specific inhabitants at this point in time (even if I have already done so); instead, I focus on ecologies and societies, as implied by the heading. I might have a “Minotaur kingdom”, for example specified as one of my areas; that tells me that the apex predators in that region are Minotaurs. What do they feed on? What wildlife have they domesticated? I try to keep this broad, if I can, but “plant – leaf-eaters – meat-eaters – apex” is a fair start.

Threat Ranking

Once I have that list, I rank them in sequence of the logical progression of danger to the PCs. This will be the foundation of my placement within the different areas and the way I structure the flow of encounters within the dungeon. This is also when I think about the relationships between the different groups – in Fumanor, you had to go through a goblin society and a Minotaur society (which preyed upon the Goblins) with Troglodyte slaves (who were preparing to revolt and reclaim their former “lands”) before you could get to the Dwarven society. And below them, Shadow Dragons hunted Giant Spiders, which led to the Drow City that the PCs were actually hunting for. All in the former Dwarven mine-shafts of Mount Ayer. Was this a dungeon? Technically not – but thematically, yes.

It’s at this point that the time required begins to impact on what I can demonstrate in this example. Fortunately, skeletons don’t require too much in the way of ecology and have minimal society; they are more automatons. But I do need to think about the nature of the enhancements and the implication that not all of them are human skeletons.

Finally, we have the population of critters living in the wild around the dungeon. These would live on the traditional small herbivores like squirrels and rabbits, but would avoid the dungeon itself. Any of them that are intelligent may be able to offer valuable intel to the PCs if captured – a Troll requesting a parley might be interesting, but I’ve already tapped the “troll dispenser” for skeletons. Once again, I’d go through the books. I have in mind that the region would now be very overgrown with lots of old-growth forest – it’s had hundreds of years, so the undergrowth should be quite dense.

8. Amenities: Air, Water, and Sewerage

There are four things that most creatures require to survive – food, air, water, and some way of disposing of their sewerage. Food has already been covered under the ‘ecology’ heading, so that leaves the other three.

Air circulation is always a hazard below ground, and needs some solution – in general, each campaign should have its own bespoke solution to the problem (even if that solution is to ignore it).

Water is even more necessary than food – humans can live a week without food, perhaps longer, but a lack of drinkable water kills us off in three days. Fortunately, there are natural supplies of water than can be incorporated into dungeon design quite easily – but you must remember that each society that needs water to sustain life will need access to that source, or will need some other source.

The more answers you can think up to these two environmental requirements, the more practical dungeons become in a campaign. While players can ignore the question just as easily as the GM can, it always strains the credibility and suspension of disbelief; whereas, providing a specific solution ‘scratches that itch’ and lets players relax into their roles that little bit more.

Getting rid of sewerage is not something most GMs think about, but it’s not only a source of disease, it’s a source of nutrients for many plants and insects, and an important part of any ecology. On top of that, some waste, when exposed to water, becomes extremely corrosive – bat guano is notorious for this, but it isn’t the only example. All these effects impact on the dungeon. For example, in the Shards Of Divinity campaign, there were a number of scarab-like beetle species that liked shadowy places in the undergrowth and efficiently recycled natural waste. Some of these never went underground, some never emerged into the light, for example the Ivory Beetle. Snakes and Birds fed on these beetles (so there were a lot more of them), and higher organisms fed on the snakes and birds.

Skeletons don’t have any such needs or problems. I’ve already covered the water angle, anyway, but in the upper level, rainwater will penetrate any holes in the roof (which used to be the floor) and pool. The were-rat tunnels provide ventilation on the second level. Below that level, however, there are greater problems. Azelfar would have solved this problem while alive, though his solution may have fallen into decay since his apparent death.

Clearly, more thought is needed on this subject than I have time to devote to it in this example. So I’ll leave it there – something I would not do if I were doing this for real.

9. Space Allocation

Take the ecologies/societies from 7 and locate them in the areas from step 5, if you haven’t already done so, in order from strongest to weakest, on the premise that the strongest would have first choice of digs, followed by the second, and so on. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in the deepest part of the dungeon, it means that they are where they will enjoy the most satisfied life. That might be next to an underground river, or close to a tunnel or passage to the surface, or near a deposit of ore, or close to a food supply. The specifics will vary from ecology to ecology.

Once they are emplaced somewhere, the immediate thing to do (before moving on to the next ecology / society) is to think about how they would modify the area. What changes would they make? What would they ruin, and what would they improve? What resources might they need, and how would they go about obtaining them? This is the foundation of defining the occupants role in an economy, and it can give social groups surprising depth.

I’ve already covered most of this in earlier steps, so I can pretty much skate right past it, now.

10. The Dungeon Narrative

Edging closer to a completed design, the next thing to do is think about how the dungeon will play out as a plotline. I find that if I think of each dungeon as telling a story, I can make it a lot more interesting and interconnected for the players. As well as an overall general narrative summary, I will consider six specific aspects of the story.

A: Approach

What’ s the story of the journey to the dungeon? What do I want the characters to be running short of (if anything) and how can I arrange that? BA Felton, in a famous Knights Of The Dinner Table, had the players trek through a jungle populated with apes that threw stones with pin-point precision, and I can’t think of a better example. Sometimes, many low-level encounters are better than one big one! The problem with such is that they can be tedious – something to work hard on avoiding. And that’s where thinking of the journey as a story can be helpful – use the tedious encounters as content and more interesting encounters as punctuation.

B: Interior Style

This isn’t about the narrative look-and-feel of the dungeon (we’ve already covered that), this is about the style of narrative that you will use within the dungeon. Short, snappy sentences will make the characters jumpier. Long, drawn out descriptions with lots of ells and sibilants and a gentle cadence will rock them to sleep. There are other tricks that can be employed, but you get the idea.

Most GMs and authors go for the big narrative hit, trying to create the atmosphere in one move – and there are times when that is the best approach – but it’s often better to set the stage with that initial hit and then build on that beginning repeatedly and regularly. I know one GM whose game room is fitted with a remote-control dimmer; he combines a hushed voice and gradual dimming of the lights to enhance the mood until suddenly the action starts (when it’s back to full brightness).

C: Variations

Are there any areas that will require particular variations on this style? It’s a very small nuance with little impact from one particular statement, but repetition and cumulative impact can be significant. For example, if you want to create uncertainty, end each block of narrative with a question, however rhetorical; if you want to create certainty, end with a statement (even when that statement is really a question in disguise – telling a PC that they are contemplating the choice of two paths, for example.)

D: Setbacks & Triumphs

While you can’t predict the action or the outcome of any encounter, you can think about the overall flow of the narrative and what the setbacks and triumphs will be. There should be some pre-planned small victories along the way, and some difficulties to overcome. This becomes especially relevant when there are two or more paths from A to B – any intelligent species will secure the least-defensible with traps if they can’t render it impassable or invisible, so as to direct enemies along the most-defensible route, which is where they will concentrate their forces.

E: Loot

Most loot is irrelevant in specifics, but there’s usually one or two items that are extremely important to the narrative.

In the example, that’s the Rod Of Piety needed to chain Telvas once more. Where is it hidden? What does it look like?

Is there any loot that is specifically to be emplaced to enable a subsequent part of the dungeon – with a submerged dungeon, some method of water-breathing should be made available (however difficult it may be to obtain). You may need multiple options, of varying usefulness.

F: Climax

The final piece of the narrative puzzle to think about in advance is the climax – what’s going to be the big finish of the dungeon adventure? And what do you need to do to make sure it happens?

Telvas awakens and begins to appear on the big throne. The PC cleric gets his hands on the Rod of Piety and discovers that it requires a life to be sacrificed if a mortal is to bind Telvas once again. He prepares to make The Ultimate Sacrifice (TM) when Azelfar reforms (again) and makes one last attempt to wrest the rod away – just as the Rod is activated. Azfelar’s life is whisked away and used to once again bind the dark Deity that unnaturally extended it in the fist place. Thus, Telvas is hoist upon his own petard, and all his scheming has come to naught. Happy ending.

11. In The Afterwards

While this could be part of the preceding step, I think it’s important enough to be out on its own, here. What are the long-term ramifications (if any) for the campaign? Where does the road go from here? What makes this dungeon part of a campaign, beyond the recurrence of player characters? Where does this dungeon fit into the bigger picture?

>My example obviously has a somewhat disquieting aftertaste. The PCs only just succeeded because there was no strong Priesthood here. 500 years from now, if they remove the Rod, who knows where it will be when the critical moment comes? Only if the Priesthood of Belaal is restored and the Rod entrusted to a worthy and reliable high priest will the world be safe – but this time, the kings and queens of the realm, and its military commanders, need to be made aware of why the Temple is important, so that they can protect and sustain it.

12. Enfleshing

The final step is to stop with these design thoughts and get down to work on the specifics, fleshing out each area and each location, each encounter and challenge, and each reward – putting meat on the bones, in other words. The first sub-step is always to put those bones in structural order, of course. This is where you draw your maps (or label someone else’s map), and so on.

You’ve made all the broad decisions; now all you need do is incorporate those decisions into the specifics.

Go Forth and Play!

That’s how I design a dungeon. Now you can do it that way, too.

Oh, what the heck – one more quick (partial) example to drive the point home. A dragon’s lair, methinks – areas include the play area, sleeping area, bathing area, the larder, the scrying pool, front gate security, perhaps a workshop…

989… 990…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. just ten to go, the countdown has begun!

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

There are times when you need to change things up, and give yourself a break from the routine.

There can be lots of reasons for this need, so its something that most GMs encounter sooner or later.

I have known one GM who took this as a sign that his campaign was played out, and junked it completely – whether his players were still enjoying it, or not. In a span of two years, he had six campaigns, and was losing players who were tired of their games being scrapped without notice.

I was reflecting on that the other day and came up with a novel solution. Well, actually, “novel” is probably too strong a word…

The Theory

The idea was that if you got to flex your creative muscles a bit with something that you wouldn’t usually run, but placed it in your ongoing campaign, then you might succeed in staving off the “this is getting to feel too much like work” reaction that is fueling your state of the Blahs.

Stimulation – that’s the ticket.

A lot of people respond well to the generation of a new plot idea using free association – that’s where you find a source of inspiration and simply work with the first idea that comes into your head.

I’ve tried that, and find that it’s a bit too random.

What’s needed is to restrain and direct that unbridled creativity.

The Mechanics

So let’s get the meat of the proposition – the mechanics – and then I can talk about how and why it works.

I’ve done up a quick infographic to encapsulate the process.

You’ll need a sheet of paper, a pencil or pen, and a d6.

Start by numbering lines at the top of the page from one to six.

1. On the first line, list a difficult enemy type – that is, some sort of enemy that the PC or PCs to be targeted will have difficulty dealing with.
2. On the second line, list an evocative location, somewhere that is going to be inherently interesting as a place.
3. On the third line, list an unusual challenge – something a little difficult to handle but that doesn’t come up very often.
4. On the fourth line, list an NPC profession that’s appropriate to your campaign setting.
5. Line five should contain a one or two-word description of a type of relationship.
6. The last line should list a type of valuable that’s appropriate to the campaign setting and that you don’t mind the PCs getting their hands on.

Sounds easy enough so far, right?

Next up, on the following six lines, list the letters A through F. After each, write the “out description” that applies to that code:

• A. Enemy:
• B. Where:
• C: Challenge
• D: Ally / Victim:
• E: Plot
• Plot Device

Now for the tricky part: In the middle of the infographic, there’s a table.

1. For A, roll a d6. If you get 1 or 2, whatever you wrote next to ‘2’ in the first step goes into slot ‘A’. A 3 or 4 and its whatever you wrote next to ‘3’. A five or six, and it’s whatever you wrote next to ‘4’.
2. Roll again. Column B shows 1-2 = 3, 3-4 = 4, and 5-6 = 6. You can’t use the same answer twice, so roll again if the indicated choice has already been used – but draw a line connecting A and B indicating that you can swap the two answers if you have to.
3. Roll again for Column C: 1-2 = 2, 3-4 = 5, and 5-6 = 6. Again, you can’t repeat an answer already selected, so you may have to roll again – but take note of any permitted swaps.
4. You know the drill by now. Column D has results 1-2 = 1, 3-4 = 3, and 5-6 = 5.
5. Column E: 1-2=2, 3-4=3, 5-6=5.
6. Column F: 1-2=1, 3-4=4, 5-6=6.

At the end of this process, all six of your original answers should have been reallocated into the six ‘slots’ listed in the middle of your page, and now mean something completely different.

The Plot Seed

You now know six things about the plotline, so it’s time to make sense of it. If you can’t find a meaningful interpretation, no matter how abstract, use free association to revise the category content; if you still can’t get anywhere, use any swap that’s permitted, and try again.

The key to this arrangement is the unpredictability, but it’s only semi-random unpredictability; it’s been constrained by the process to give reasonable new combinations.

Scope

You can use this process to create an encounter for a single PC who otherwise has nothing to do for a while, or to create a mini-adventure / encounter for the whole party, or even to create something more substantial for everyone. But it’s important to decide on the scope before you start, because it could potentially impact on question one – an opponent who is difficult for one specific character might pose no challenge at all for the whole party.

An example

That’s really all there is to it. But that’s not enough for a Campaign Mastery article, so let’s add in an example. I give readers my word that I had no idea how these would come out…

Campaign: Superhero

1. Hacker Cartel
2. Haunted House
3. Dance-off
4. Auto Mechanic
5. Rival
6. Motorcycle

Rolls:

• 4 so A=3
• 1 so B=3 so re-roll; 4 so B=4, and B can swap with A.
• 1 so C=2.
• 6 so D=5.
• All three possible options for E (2, 3, and 5) are already taken, so randomly choose one of two unallocated answers (1 or 6) and note that you can swap with A, C, or D. I rolled low, so E=1.
• 6 so F=6.

Put all this together, and you get:

A. Enemy: Dance-Off
B. Where: Auto Mechanic
C. Challenge: Haunted House
D. Ally / Victim: Rival
E. Plot: Hacker Cartel
F: Plot Device: Motorcycle
     A and B can swap.
     E can swap with A, C, or D.

A & B make more sense if exchanged.
C & E make more sense if exchanged.

So, the final listing is:
A. Enemy: Auto Mechanic
B. Where: Dance-Off
C. Challenge: Hacker Cartel
D. Ally / Victim: Rival
E. Plot: Haunted House
F: Plot Device: Motorcycle

Now to use creativity to turn these into a coherent plotline. An Auto Mechanic defeats a PC’s Rival at a Dance-off and claims the prize – a motorcycle with a cybernetic control link built in. The Rival attacks the Auto Mechanic, who flees into a house with a reputation for being haunted. The Rival, a superstitious type, contacts the PC and blackmails him into going into the Haunted House with him to claim his prize with photos of the PC from junior high school. In reality, the house uses holograms and hidden mechanical devices to seem Haunted (like Disney’s Haunted Mansion) so that a Hacker Cartel can do their thing without unwanted attention.

I don’t care what anyone says, no plotline so unlikely is likely to be exactly like their regular campaign. This reads like it came out of a Saturday Morning cartoon – a somewhat light-heated romp that will suddenly turn serious when the Hacker Cartel is revealed.

The rival immediately reminds me of a recurring character in the original series of MacGyver, a guy whose greed continually got him in over his head, but who was basically a good guy, named Jack Dalton. Wikipedia describes the character, played by Bruce McGill, as “MacGyver’s comical best friend. He is a soldier of fortune/bush pilot who periodically gets everyone into a heap of trouble with various get rich quick schemes out of which only MacGyver can rescue them. His left eye twitches when he’s lying. Dalton often attempts to romance the women he is introduced to.”

So I have my featured NPC, and the outline of a Romp centering around the character, and a hook into a PC’s past, with potentially serious consequences when the plot accidentally brings the PC and his NPC ally to the attention of a Hacker Cartel.

Presumably, given the superhero genre, the PC is just such a hero. What might the Cartel do when he busts them? Letting all his old enemies out of prison comes to mind. Erasing all his positive press. Erasing his identity would be hard, he’s such a well-known figure, but starting rumors about secret nefarious activities and letting the press go hog wild sounds good. Emptying his bank accounts is a given, but he probably doesn’t have any in his Superhero ID’s name; but if the designated target has a Publicly-known identity…

A second example

Let’s do a fantasy campaign example.

Campaign: D&D

1. Criosphinx
2. Temple of a Dark God
3. Lock Of Twisted Souls
4. Money-changer
5. Romance
6. Treasure Map

Rolls:

• 1 so A=2
• 3 so B=4
• 2 so C=2; re-roll needed: 3 so C=5, and can swap with A;
• 3 so D=3.
• 6 so E=5.
• 2 so F=1.

Put all this together, and you get:

A. Enemy: Temple Of A Dark God
B. Where: Money-changer’s
C. Challenge: Romance
D. Ally / Victim: Lock Of Twisted Souls
E. Plot: Hacker Romance
F: Plot Device: Criosphinx
     A and C can swap.

Looking over the results, I don’t think the prospects for a reasonable plotline are enhanced by swapping A and C, so let’s leave everything the way it is and get to work.

A Criosphinx flies into the central marketplace and pays to have the town’s criers spread word of an employment opportunity for a team skilled at covert investigation. Prospective applicants should meet the Sphinx at a nominated Tavern.

How the PCs proceed is up to them. They can challenge the Gynosphinx to a riddle game, and one more victory will secure their release; the Sphinx is willing to help them escape if they will seek to release her and put a stop to whatever the Dark Priests are up to. If not, she will challenge them individually in order to secure her own release, and leave them to their own devices.

Where the adventure goes from this point is up to the players. The lock can be defeated by feeding it bursts of positive energy of sufficient magnitude that it mistakes them for new victims, but they will have to consult a very learned sage to get that info. And as for what the Dark Temple are up to, I have no idea – maybe they’re trying to summon some nameless horror from another plane, that’s my usual fallback!

As you can see, this time the technique has yielded a quite serviceable adventure with no trace of the lightheartedness of the first. On the contrary, this starts off moderately seriously and only grows more intense as it proceeds. It definitely plays games with a few stereotypes, but at it’s heart, it’s a story of love (the sphinxes) and hate (the Dark Priests) – and, just maybe, the lengths to which one will go in the name of the first, and how much one is willing to sacrifice to stop the second. Deep, emotional themes, and what sounds like a great adventure – but, once again, one that’s been seemingly manufactured from thin air.

Changing it up

Now that you’ve got a handle on the basic principle, it’s time to talk about changing it up. Any tool will grow blunt with repeated use, and after a while you have to either resharpen it or replace the blade (or the handle, or whatever – you can only stretch the metaphor so far!)

The way you do that is to change one or both of the top or bottom of the infographic. Ask different questions, or assign different meanings to the answers.

Why does it work?

By asking questions, the first section directs your free association to come up with specific types of idea. The table then allocates these answers to questions that can fundamentally match a basic type – who, what, where, why and how. The idea is to spark your creativity while channeling it toward creating an adventure that is just a bit different to what you would have come up with on your own.

It’s a simple tool to add to your kit – you never know when you’ll find what you’re doing to be a bit of a grind, or that you need a quick fill-in adventure because your prep is taking too long.

988… 989…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Eleven to go!

Free Stock photos by Vecteezy, image by aukideezy

An Earworm is one of those songs that you can’t get out of your head. Often, the only cure is to expose yourself to “just enough” of another earworm!

For the last two months, I’ve been afflicted with a case of the far less-known Dreaded Plotworm.

This is when a plot idea that doesn’t quite fit what you had planned won’t let go, won’t be dismissed, but demands that you work it out.

It’s usually some idea that sounds really cool or interesting, and that holds some plausibility in campaign terms, but which isn’t completely compatible with the foreshadowing from the past, or the pacing of the current, or the plans for the future.

Despite not fitting, the attractiveness means that the idea won’t let go, it keeps coming to mind and distracting you.

The only way to get a Plotworm out of your head is to work it out, but therein lies the danger.

The first threat

Plotworms undermine your sense of the campaign’s history, because of this demand to ‘make them fit’. Past history and plans and assumptions get thrown out as necessary, turning the plotworm into a missed opportunity. “If character A had only said B instead of C, E (the plotworm) would fit” becomes “So character A says B, and that leads to E, which leads to F” – and because you are concentrating so hard on this hypothetical alternate reality, it’s not only easy to lose your grasp on what actually happened, it weakens your grasp on the reality of events even if you avoid this total dislocation.

A succession of plotworms can riddle your campaign with holes like wormholes through an apple.

The second threat

Having weakened your grasp of the reality of the campaign, Plotworms then offer up a more dire threat in the form of confirmation bias. When doing further planning for the campaign, the attractiveness of the idea can infiltrate your plans, undermining what you have in mind for the future.

This affects some GMs more than others, because the extent to which GMs plan out their future campaign beats I’m a planner, for the most part, unless I make an active effort not to be. Others are more instinctive, or only plan a session or two ahead, asking “Given everything that’s happened so far, what’s the most interesting thing that can happen this week?”

Unfortunately, this only leaves the latter more vulnerable to the first threat of the Plotworm.

The third threat

The third impact of a Plotworm is the least dangerous, in some respects, and the most dangerous in others. They are distracting, and (unlike an earworm) they can linger for ages. That’s like only being able to give your campaign 90, 80, 70% of the attention that you would normally devote to it.

Just about every GM will be able to relate to what that means, we’ve all been there on occasions when (for other reasons) we haven’t been able to lavish as much attention to our games as we would like. At best, the games simply don’t sparkle as much as usual, and everything feels rushed and half-baked; at worst, it can feel like you’re drowning in a sea of unpreparedness.

I’ve even known some GMs who – on such occasions – toss their usual campaign aside for a while in favor of some B-grade lighthearted alternate, or even abandoned it completely.

So plotworms can have a serious effect.

Mitigating Plotworms

If you can’t get rid of a plotworm until you’ve worked it out, the only option is to try and minimize the impact that it has. This is often more easily said than done.

There are three strategies that can be employed effectively. The first is to try and integrate what you have to do into the plotworm, enabling a brief return to 100% focus (or close to it); the second is to distract yourself with the immediate task; and the last is to compensate for the distraction by eating into whatever unallocated time you may have.

A fourth option is to try and dismiss the plotworm ASAP in hopes of mitigating the damage, and it’s common to attempt this solution for a while, with a hard deadline before switching to one of the other mitigation strategies.

A GM I know once proposed that you simply “not think about” the plotworm. This just doesn’t work at all. It’s like trying to think about ‘large desert animals with a prominent hump’ without thinking about Camels.

Plotworm Prep Integration

This involves manipulating the Plotworm. If, for example, the prep work that is required for your next game is a character, then start by thinking about how that character might become involved in the Plotworm (even if the conclusion is that they can’t or wouldn’t); this enables you to focus in on the character and get the prep done, despite the nagging and distracting presence of the plotworm.

Distraction

Focus your attention on something quick that can’t possibly have any relevance to the plotworm. It might be a strategy game, or a game of sodoku, or even a game of pick-up patience. Whatever it is, as soon as it has your full attention, switch to the necessary prep. The distraction acts as a short-term plotworm displacement, enabling you to get some of what you need to do done. As soon as you relax your focus, though, don’t be surprised if the plotworm returns.

More Time

This is bowing to the inevitable, or at least, it feels that way. If you’re lightly distracted by the plotworm (90% capacity), you need to allow about 10% more time to your prep. If the plotworm is a moderate distraction (80% focus), it’s about 25% extra. If you’re seriously distracted, up to double the normal prep time may be required, but 50% will usually suffice.

This requirement is so severe that it’s often not a viable option – but even a partial implementation yields dividends in terms of getting more done to a higher standard.

Eliminating the plotworm

The single best way to get a plotworm out of your head is to invest time and effort into another idea that is equally as “cool” / interesting – but you generally can’t come up with those on the spur of the moment. The best opportunity for doing so is to keep a list of unsolved plot problems and a game-time deadline for when they need to be solved. Posing questions of this nature and looking for a cool / interesting solution (even if it isn’t one that you ultimately use) is your best prospect for slaying the plotworm by starving it of creative appeal.

The more common solution is to work through the plotworm, solving the creative challenge of integrating it into the campaign.

Speed Of Solution

Some plotworms are easily overcome; a few minutes of idle speculation is enough to scratch the itch. Most are more pernicious, their lifespan being defined by the scale of the plot problems they pose.

If you solve these problems quickly and easily, then what you have is an idea that you can choose to use or not; it might be just what you need!

If the idea poses a greater challenge, the plotworm can hang around for quite a while, and the idea is less likely to be of any value to you when you’re done with it; it’s far more of a monkey that you have to get off your back.

Depth Of Solution

Every idea also has a threshold of integration – a different target level of ‘solved’ that is enough to satisfy the nagging back-of-the-head sensation that this is a good idea that you can’t just ignore.

Some plotworms need only superficial examination to put them in their place – there may simply be too much water under the bridge for them to be viable.

Others appear to be potential solutions to problems that actually do need to be solved, or possibly better answers to a plot problem you’ve already solved – who is that masked villain that you dropped into the plot a couple of game sessions ago? You knew who you intended it to be at the time, but maybe it’s not too late to make it someone else completely…

Such plotworms need ‘solving’ to a far greater depth, which requires more time and attention, and may even require the keeping of written notes.

Scale Of Solution

It will obviously take a lot more time and attention to satisfy an idea for a campaign-sized subplot than it will to solve an idea for a specific single adventure. Similarly, it will take more effort to craft an adventure that can be inserted into the plot than it will to create a single encounter.

But there’s a secondary factor that needs to be taken into account in any such structure: an individual GM’s predilections. One may be more adept at coming up with encounters, another more skilled at crafting broad plot arcs, another more capable at crafting adventures – and they will usually adopt (consciously or otherwise) a campaign structure that plays to their strengths.

GMs can sometimes get themselves into trouble by assuming that they will have such facility at their disposal, leaving them vulnerable to the occasional failure of their natural gifts. But that’s a discussion for some other day.

I make no bones about being more adept at plot arcs than individual adventures; and more adept at adventures than I am at individual encounters. I’m a naturally big-picture person. This tends to give my campaigns an epic, sweeping quality even when that’s not my intention. That simply means that I have to invest disproportionate time and effort on the small scale in order to achieve results that live up to the grand visions that they are supposed to be a part of.

That simply means that a campaign-scale plot worm won’t take as much effort (in general) for me to resolve as an adventure-scale plotworm. It also means that I am more likely to come up with plotworms of that scale.

The implication is that each GM has a ‘weak spot’ – a point on the large-to-minute scale where the ideas are exactly the ‘right size’ to cause maximum difficulty and inconvenience. For me, that point is cool ideas for characters – these have to be scaled out to see how they impact on the campaign, long-term, perhaps requiring the insertion of additional unplanned adventures, and have to be scaled inwards to see how individual encounters will be affected.

All plotworms are not alike. Some ideas are potentially more useful than others, and some are definitely more difficult to resolve than others. The cost-benefit relationship in each particular case can be clear or very unclear, and it’s often worth indulging the plotworm until you can resolve at least that question.

After-plotworm Rehab

So, you’ve been afflicted with a plotworm and have finally resolved it. That plotworm is now either part of your future plans for the campaign or it has been set aside (maybe you can make use of it elsewhere). I’m at this stage, right now, having resolved the plotworm that’s been buzzing around in the back of my head for the last two months or so.

It is, perhaps, worth taking a moment to note that if the campaign in question – my Doctor Who – had been able to keep to its intended schedule that it would be too late to actually use the plotworm by the time the problems of doing so were solved. Time and patience can be the ultimate solution to any plotworm – but as solutions go, it’s by far the least desirable and efficient.

The next step has to be dispelling any confusion that has resulted from the plotworm. Treat the situation as if you had been away from the campaign for as long as the plotworm was active, and do whatever you would normally do to reacquaint yourself with the current picture, the big big picture, the relationship between the two, and where you intend to go from here.

If the plotworm occupied your thoughts for a day or less, the odds are that no rehab will be necessary; it was a cool idea but one that wouldn’t work out, and you’ve moved on.

If the plotworm occupied a week or so, you may need to read over any notes regarding the last session, any notes regarding past encounters that were relevant to the plotworm, and refresh your memory in terms of immediate and long-term plans. Spend a week doing that (if you can), but spend at least a day on it.

If the plotworm occupied more than a week, then the potential for long-term damage to your ‘sense of campaign’ goes way up, but the repairs don’t scale accordingly. In most cases, the same a’-week-if-you-can-but-at-least-a-day recipe is usually enough. Make room in your schedule for a second day in case you need it, though.

Graveyard Of Plotworms

Whenever you have a cool idea that just won’t work, write the basics of it down somewhere. You never know when you’ll need a cool idea!

Amongst the ideas lurking around in my graveyard at the moment are:

• Drow Civil War ‘progressives’ vs ‘conservatives’
• Crime gang who use chameleon-tech to change their faces after every robbery
• Hacking someone’s cyber implants

….and many more. If ever I find myself stuck for ideas, the graveyard is where I go. I maintain a similar graveyard for article ideas for Campaign Mastery.

Of course, it won’t have escaped the attention of my readers that I haven’t actually described the plotworm that I’ve been wrestling with. That’s because I still don’t know whether or not the idea can be used – because it interconnects several elements within the campaign, there are multiple opportunities to make it relevant, and I need to go through them all to see where – if anywhere – this cool idea can fit.

987… 988…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Twelve to go!

Grit: The Devilry is in the Detail. Image by Peter H from Pixabay, cropped, resized, and selectively sharpened by Mike

Today’s post comes courtesy of an ear-worm. I recently played Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and the theme from the John Wayne movie “true Grit” stuck in my head (not for the first time). Not at the time, mind, but afterwards, when it was triggered by writing about gritty reality in a Quora post and mentioning it in last week’s blog.

That got me thinking about “Grit” in the environmental sense, which led me to “Grit” in narrative, which I then generalized into today’s topic.

Four Levels Of Grit

I generalize “grit” in my thinking and writing into four categories or standards. Exceptions may always exist and be called out, but this is what I “bake” into my narrative.

Gleaming

Super-pristine; I use this quite sparingly. Antiseptic authoritarian sci-fi societies are generally gleaming; hi-tech office buildings are often gleaming; the homes of the rich and powerful are often gleaming; super-villain lairs are sometimes gleaming; and (very occasionally), a Wizard’s Tower (cleaned by magic) will be Gleaming. It takes constant attention to detail and a prioritization of attention to appearances over actually living in a space.

Tidy

Tidy is clean but with a little disorganization here and there. A clean home with a child’s toy left out on the carpet; a clean kitchen but with dirty dishes awaiting washing; and so on. This is a lived-in space, it’s neat but functional.

Messy

I’m the first to admit that this is my usual state of living; I like things neat and tidy but don’t have the physical capacity to keep them that way, and little by little, detritus accumulates. I prioritize whatever cleaning I think needs doing the most, two or three times a week. So some things are a little dirty, there’s dust in the corners, there’s some slight staining of the walls, there are books and things everywhere, and so on. The things that I use all the time for whatever my current project is are close to hand, and I usually have multiple projects on the go at the same time – but, to an outsider, anything not needed for whatever project I am working on at the immediate moment is ‘clutter’.

One of the things that made Star Wars stand out, when it was first showing, was that it was a ‘lived in’ science fiction environment; prior to that, the standard was ‘pristine’.

Dystopian

Dystopia usually means that you don’t try to clean up, at best you just attempt (unsuccessfully) try to hide the mess. There’s dirt on the floors, and the walls. Things are constantly breaking down due to neglect, age, or overuse, and what isn’t broken down is being held together with scotch tape and baling wire. There’s rubbish on the streets and no attempt to clean it up – though there may be attempts to sweep it aside into alleyways. Gotham City in the first (modern) Batman movie, and in the Nolan Batman trilogy, and Blade Runner – these are all dystopian levels of grit. The streets and homes of the poor quarter in medieval cities are generally dystopian, too.

One standard for each environment, location, or region

I carefully choose one standard for each environment, location, or region. This is the overall standard, and while it will be taken into consideration in initial descriptions and first impressions (which I try to always communicate to the players), but which is rarely mentioned otherwise.

Dwell on the exceptions, not the rule

Grit should be applied sparingly – a little can go a long way. Go back to the original Star Wars trilogy and pay attention to the visual state of the interiors of the Millennium Falcon – while there are some messy elements here and there, appropriate for a Messy (Lived-in) setting, they are just enough to offset the cleanliness and polish of the rest of the set. You see the same thing on the Death Star in the first movie, and the scenes in the cloud city of The Empire Strikes Back. Contrast these with the scenes in Mos Eisley (first movie), Dantooine (second movie) and the court of Jabba The Hut (third movie) – in these places, the standard is Dystopian, and once that is established, only the exceptions need to be mentioned aside from the occasional reminder.

Contrast and Nuance

Some genres are better served by down or up-shifting your standards. This is achieved by using the basic standard with occasional elements from a neighboring standard. Both the neighboring standard to apply and the narrative to be affected are dictated by the degree and direction of shift. This can create nuance with a half-step or four-color blended simplification with a whole-step adjustment. There are other genres and campaigns that may be better served by broadening the standard to create nuance that is focused on that standard. These principles are demonstrated in the following set of diagrams:

Click the image to open a larger version in a new tab. Refer to the text below for explanations and interpretations.

The first diagram shows a 1/2 step downwards, and what effect that has.

• If the standard is ‘Gleaming’ then only the most extreme examples will actually mention the standard. More common examples will use a little of the language normally used to describe a ‘tidy’ environment. Some of that language will also make its way into the best of the Messy environments, while some of the merely ‘messy’ will be used in describing more dystopian scenes.
• If the standard is “Tidy” then ‘gleaming’ language is reserved for the most pristine of environments, but some ‘gleaming clean’ elements are used in describing the best tidy scenes. Tidy environments are not singled out except in such cases; the language is reserved for additions to the best ‘Messy’ environments. Similarly, the merely messy will be highlighted in the best Dystopian environments.

…and so on.

I’m limiting my analysis to a couple of examples so that more of them can be seen at the same time for comparison purposes. In particular, I want readers to compare the second diagram and its effects to the first.

• Only the best of the best Gleaming environments get singled out; the rest of the time, gleaming details are picked out in describing tidy scenes.
• Similarly, Tidy details are emphasized in Messy settings.
• Only the most extreme Dystopian environments are not ‘rescued’ somewhat by emphasizing the merely messy.

The net effect is that everything is brighter, cleaner, and more colorful. This suits Pulp, High Fantasy, Space Opera, and Superheros amongst other genres and sub-genres.

I couldn’t fit an up-step example while retaining clarity in the diagram, but you should be able to imagine the effects of one using these diagrams. As a general rule, an upward step makes more room for, and use of, the gritty and messy. Whereas the downward steps often damn with faint praise, the upward steps condemn either mildly or quite denigratingly.

That’s because I needed room to demonstrate an alternative approach that can sometimes be useful – expanding one particular classification (the standard). I use this technique in a lot of my Fantasy games – more on that in a moment. First, let’s look at the specific effects:

• “Tidy” language is used to diminish the least of the “gleaming”, taking just a little of the polish off.
• It is also used to dress up the least Messy environments.
• As a result, the ‘standard’ applies to almost 1/3 of the entire gamut. Gleaming and Dystopian extremes are reduced to make room for this expansion.
• the least ‘Messy’ environments have ‘Tidy’ elements emphasized, but the best Dystopian settings have ‘merely messy details emphasized, so there is no overall diminution of the scope of that standard.

In Fumanor, in middle- and upper-class human territory, I expanded the Tidy in my narratives; in the poorer areas, I expanded the Messy; in the Elven Forests and Drow Tunnels, I expanded the Gleaming; in Orcish, Trollish, and Ogrish (etc) territories, the Dystopian was expanded; while the Dwarven areas used a half-step upwards, as did Dungeons. These were subtle distinctions but they gave each environment a slightly different atmosphere.

An example: in human kingdoms, blood might spill or stain, or splatter in the most extreme cases; in Elven lands, it would never spatter, it would fountain, or – at worst – drip. In the Wilds, it would spray and splatter, raining down on everything nearby, accompanied (when appropriate) but little bits of bone or brain or flesh.

Use Mechanics to reflect your choice

I use the standard that applies to a particular area as a guideline to how to interpret the Game Mechanics in those areas. In Dystopias, details and imperfections are emphasized; in Messes, details alone get the treatment; in Tidy environments, the emphasis is on outcomes and generalities; in a Gleaming environment, hyperbole is added to the Tidy, and everything is a little larger than life. These effects are always compromised with the campaign style, and the inherent style of the game system (which was hopefully chosen to suit the desired campaign). Again, on their own, they do little, but the impact stacks with other small touches like narrative emphasis to create distinctiveness from one setting to another.

Applying Grit to Places

The balance of this article is going to put a little flesh on the bones. In making the article as explanatory as possible, I had to use generic terms like “locations”, “environments”, “settings” and “elements” within one of the other terms. In these sections, I’m going to try and get a bit more specific.

Places are ubiquitous – everything that happens takes place somewhere – so this is a fundamentally important case.

• In a Gleaming environment, a general impression is conveyed and then broken down into specifics that reinforce that impression.
• In a Tidy environment, a functional or purposeful impression is conveyed and then supplemented specifics, especially any that are Gleaming or Messy.
• In a Messy environment, specifics come first and build toward a general impression that is summarized. The more messy the environment, the more details precede the general impression. Exceptions may then be mentioned, either pockets of order/purpose in the chaos (tidy) or specific details of wear-and-tear and disorder.
• In a Dystopian environment, a very abstract general impression is applied – be very Noir about it – then specific details are used to emphasize the general impression and translate it from the abstract into the grittiest reality. You want your players to ‘smell the stink’.

Only when commencing a scene in a particular location would the chosen standard of Grit get represented in the form of the overall impression; from that point onward, the standard isn’t mentioned, only exceptions. Make these work for you; don’t apply them capriciously. For example, in a messy environment, the greatest order will be found in the spot where the owner was last working (and the greatest mess not far removed from it). If the general impression is one of chaos and confusion, a desk that is pristinely organized tends to stand out.

I once had a friend, Dylan, who lived in the most Dystopian Grit you can imagine. He was unable to go past the written word – whether that was a newspaper rescued from the garbage or a book that had caught his eye. His home was literally stacked waist-high with books (chest-high in places) throughout – so much so that at one point his foundations shifted. There was just enough empty space for the front door to open; you then had to climb over stacks of first editions to go down the main corridor and into one of the other rooms. His bed had no frame; that had been tossed out to make room for stacks of books upon which his mattress rested. At the same time, he was one of the most generous people that I’ve ever known, the sort of person who would simply show up at your door with a meal or a book that you had expressed interest in, and expect nothing in return. He knew everything that he had in his collection of more than 10.000 books and roughly where it was located – not because he had a system, but because his retention of the written word matched his voracity. He had read every word in his collection. And yet, there was a vague structure – magazines in one place (and not too many of those), newspapers in another, non-fiction here, biographies there, science fiction hither and fantasy yon and general fiction elsewhere; first editions near the top of each stack, reprints and duplicates at the bottom. Every six months, he would clear out half a room, carefully deciding what to toss and what to retain until its contents occupied one half of its previous volume – what he did with what he chose not to keep, I don’t know, but at least some of it was given to friends, and some to the local library. I suspect that most went to landfill!

Applying Grit to Objects

Objects are specific elements within a setting or location. That means that they can either reflect the standard of that location, or they can be out of place, or be somewhere in-between.

• Gleaming objects are as new. Even if constructed by a hobbiest or prototyper, they will be precise in structure, layout, and assembly. Shiny things will be polished, non-shiny things will be brushed, and nary a blemish will be seen.
• Tidy objects might be Gleaming with some signs of wear or use, or they might be a little more haphazard than that. They will be organized and purposeful.
• Messy objects are still fully functional but with considerable signs of wear-and-tear. There will be marks and scratches and the like.
• Dystopian objects may still function somewhat, but they are almost played out from hard usage. Expect rust spots and stains, gouges and nicks.

Applying Grit to Vehicles

Vehicles are both objects and locations. It is useful to remember the following maxim: If the outside is important, the vehicle is an object and important only in terms of its interaction with that environment (and vice-versa); if the outside is not important, the vehicle is the location for some scene or dialogue.

• Gleaming Vehicles – emphasize the newness of the leather (the smell), and of the controls – they will snap into position, make satisfying clicks, be taut and responsive. Brakes might squeal a bit. Everything works – manufacturing defects excepted.
• Tidy Vehicles are clean and almost everything works, but there are some small signs of wear. There’s no snap to the switches, there’s a little play or non-responsiveness to the knobs, there are wear marks on the seats and a stain or two on the carpets.
• Messy vehicles have seen extended or heavy duty. Some of the gauges will have failed or be unreliable, sometimes in predictable ways (“Fill up when the gauge is 1/3 full, you have less then 5 miles fuel at that point”). Some controls will be unresponsive, or make excessive demands on an allied system – the windscreen washer might drain the battery faster than the alternator recharges it, for example. It will often be dirtier in its interior, but not decrepit.
• Dystopian vehicles are either on the verge of total collapse or have already died in most respects. They may still provide basic functionality but even those will be unreliable – engines that are hard to state, brakes that are prone to failure, electrical systems that constantly fail. Gauges will be dead or completely deceptive. Watch Top Gear’s “cheap car challenges” and take the worst failures and you’ll get the idea.

Applying Grit to Weapons

Weapons are ubiquitous to many game genres. As a general rule, weapons that are still functional will be at least one category more pristine than the general environment, while weapons that are not should be treated as objects and shifted down a half step or even a full step. That’s because weapons that are poorly maintained can be dangerous to use, or can fail unexpectedly.

A truism in most of my fantasy campaigns is that magical weapons (including cursed blades) do not decay or rust. But I have been known to vary that formula – the hilt might not be as protected as the blade, for example, and may be in desperately poor condition. Or the weapon may be stained with a patina of surface rust.

Some explosives tend to become less stable with time. if you want to make a player sweat a little, tell him that the explosives he’s just found have been sweating, or that the grass around the landmine he’s just stepped on are yellowish and decayed.

But firearms are the most interesting and unpredictable weapons when it comes to grit. Heavily-used weapons can have worn parts that make them unreliable, but at the same time, a weapon wouldn’t be heavily used if it weren’t reliable. Dirt and grit can make some weapons explode when you pull the trigger, while others can be absolutely filthy – and shoot perfectly, at least once!

Treat the barrel and mechanics as something separate to the hilt – a professional who has used his weapon extensively is likely to have a worn hilt or stock but pristine mechanics. A careless hunter might have the same wear on his hilt or stock, but a barrel that smells of cordite (or whatever gunpowder the weapon uses), signaling that it hasn’t been cleaned since it was last used. A barrel or mechanism with a rust spot or lots of scratches and marks is a clear danger sign.

The other thing to bear in mind is that ammunition also decays and becomes unpredictable – some might have a tendency to go off more easily (a problem if it’s not in the firing chamber at the time), others won’t go off even if tossed into a fire. And that’s without any other source of unreliability being factored in!

Applying Grit to Clothing

There are aspects of a character’s appearance that they can’t control, and aspects over which they – or, more properly, their social and economic status – have significant control. ‘Grit’ generally signifies dirt poor or a laborer who has been hard at work.

• Gleaming – polished buttons, perfect fit, coordinated materials and patterns that combine to present an overall ‘image’. Try to distill that ‘image’ down to a single word if you can.
• Tidy – good fit, buttons may be slightly tarnished if metal, some wear or staining, less reliable fashion sense, and less coordination. Specific details may point to a profession (but can be unreliable).
• Messy – clothes that have been chosen for comfort, not appearance. May or may not be color-coordinated. NOT rags.
• Dystopian – Rags, rips, holes. Virtually no color coordination. Clothes that project neither comfort nor appearance. Frequently smelly and unclean. Look out for small insects and the like making themselves at home – fleas, lice, etc.

Applying Grit to People

The Grit Standard is an influence over personality choices. This can manifest in many ways – saltier language, a more ornery attitude, being less (or more) pretentious, putting on airs, arrogance (justified or not), professionalism, casual displays of expertise, a work ethic – there are dozens of possibilities and nigh-infinite number of permutations.

You can get particular mileage in terms of characterization by considering the combination of personality grit and clothing grit. These can reinforce each other, can nuance one another, can compliment each other to produce a more coherent characterization, or can contradict each other for dramatic effect.

Favorites include the homeless tramp who’s an undercover cop, the brilliant (but mad) scientist in messy clothes, the sloppy detective in pristine fashion (often a successful writer of mystery fiction), the receptionist who’s mad at the world, and the farmer who chops wood more vigorously when he has an audience. Basically, any time I can play with assumptions and judgments, I’ll at least think about doing so. Most of the time, the best interests of the encounter or adventure will overrule such temptations, but every now and then I can let myself go. The high priest who puts a neophyte in his chair to hear all the petty complaints and supplicants while he dresses like a neophyte and stirs out to find out what the real people really think – or just goes fishing.

Applying Grit to Politics

This talks about the gap between ideals and reality. The more grit, the greater the ideals have been, and have to be, compromised, and the more moral murkiness is floating around. Consider the congressman who accepts financial backing from (say) a mining interest in his election campaign, who then protects them from an environmental inquiry, because they employ a lot of his constituents who would suffer if they went out of business – how corrupt is he, really? How pristine?

As a GM who loves to present my players with moral conundrums and choices, such characters – whether allied to the players, opposed to them, or agnostic with respect to them – immediately make the situation more interesting. “How can something be good for the nation if it’s bad for Georgia?” – I’m not sure where the line comes from, but it exemplifies the sort of thinking that Grit in Politics implies.

Applying Grit to Journeys

There may be times when it’s not the destination that matters as much as the transition from one place to another. This is especially the case when both are well-known to the characters, or when the destination is uninteresting. Grit manifests in inconvenient minutia, while a lack of grit is more abstract. Other way of looking at it is that a Gleaming journey is all about the big picture – the culture and history of the eventual destination, and discussion of what will happen when the characters get there in general (and optimistic) terms; Dystopian discussions focus on the problems that will have to be overcome while focusing on the inconveniences of travel. Another interpretation that works is that the more Dystopian the Grit level, the more NPCs with baggage get involved in the journey.

One encounter in my old super-spies campaign that I never got the chance to use (it never fitted the situation) was a paparazzi who mistook a spy (trying to keep a low profile) as a celebrity.

Applying Grit to Combat

I’ve actually covered this to some extent with the initial example about how a wound, or more specifically, the blood from a wound, would be described in different settings because of the different Grit Standards emplaced in those settings. In a gritty setting, the crunch of stones underfoot (implying a slightly-uncertain footing) and every bruise and nick and the physiological reaction to same are important to the flavor of the combat; in a Gleaming setting, anything that isn’t lethal is ‘just a flesh wound’, and you should focus your narrative not on those but on the ringing sound of blade striking blade, the staccato rhythm of thrust and pivot and counter-thrust and leap and swing.

In Summary

The level of grit in a location is an important parameter that should inform every choice made in terms of the activities and the peoples that perform them at that location. It doesn’t dictate or control those choices, but it should influence what your narrative focuses on, and what the context is. Contributions resulting from the applied Grit Standard can be subtle or overt, but they accumulate (when used properly) to making each location and its inhabitants feel distinctive and interesting.

Using these techniques, you can separate Realism from Plausibility, permitting you to manipulate one for effect without interfering with the other, and giving you greater control over the style of your game. So, now that you have them, what are you going to do with them?.

Virus image by Tomislav Jakupec from Pixabay, Image rotated by Mike

Whew, finished at last! Six hrs overdue, but it’s more than twice the usual length, so hopefully that can be forgiven!

Is it too easy to cure disease in RPGs? I analyzed that question from various angles last week and came to the conclusion that the answer was arguably ‘yes’ – and also arguably ‘no’ – but that the advantages of making ‘Cure Disease’ hard to do were too significant to ignore.

I also described a system of rating diseases on a 1-5 star scale, and that’s fairly relevant to this second part of the article, so I’ll quote an edited highlights:

I once played in a game in which the GM rated all diseases on a one-to-five scale. Double the rating and subtract one and you got the required spell level of a spell designed to deal with that specific illness. I’ve shamelessly appropriated the concept for my own use, expanding it in the process, as you will find out later in the article.

• Specific One Star Diseases are curable with a specific 1st-level spell. This healing will be available in most towns and villages.
• Specific Two Star Diseases are curable with a specific 3rd-level spell. A survival rate of one in three per character level gives distance to a cure of a day or two’s travel in a country with the population of medieval France.
• Specific Three Star Diseases are curable with a specific 5th-level spell. One in three survival gives a distance of 1-2 weeks to a cure in a country with the population of Medieval France.
• Specific Four Star Diseases are curable with a specific 7th-level spell. The 1-in-3 rate means there’s one place in the equivalent of Medieval Europe to find a cure.
• Specific Five Star Diseases are curable with a specific 9th-level spell. Finding such a cure will mean searching several Planes of existence.

For this system to work, “Heal” and “Mass Heal” need to be weakened significantly or eliminated completely. No decision has been made yet on the best alternative.

So that’s where we’re at.

Weakening “Heal”?

So what might weakening heal look like? Well, let’s start by putting another interpretive spin on that five-star ratings system:

• One Star = common diseases
• Two Stars = uncommon diseases
• Three Stars = severe diseases
• Four Stars = deadly diseases
• Five Stars = disastrous diseases

So, let’s try the following on for size:
“Heal can cure any common or uncommon disease. It can also heal severe disease from any one general category of diseases, but this capacity must be specified when the spell is taken at the start of the day and choice may be restricted by deity.”

So this one spell can replace a whole bunch of 1st-level spells and a whole bunch of 3rd-level spells, and a select (and possibly restricted) group of 5th-level spells. That seems reasonable for a 6th level spell.

Of course, for this to work, we need to specify some general categories of disease. But I actually view that as a side-benefit of some rules for simulating a disease.

Simulating A Disease

This is the heart of today’s subject, so far as I’m concerned; last week’s article described how important disease was (or should be) to most RPGs, but D&D in particular, this article is all about populating Pandora’s Box.

NPC Susceptibility

Who cares? NPCs will come down with things at the speed of plot. Want a plague? Here you go. Want disease to be holidaying in his summer palace? Not a problem.

Still want some rules? Okay:

Chance of catching (%) = (20 × stars) — 10 + (Age / 5), round down.

Specific Diseases may have modifiers to that chance. Some of these modifiers are age-specific because the diseases are known as ‘childhood diseases’ or ‘geriatric diseases’; the applicability of these modifiers is up to the GM.

Non-humans should have their ages converted to human physiological equivalents.

Is that better? Arguably, the last two paragraphs are the most important, in my opinion. At this point, something I used as the foundation of another article should also be brought to mind: If you have an X% chance of something happening, and 100 opportunities for that chance to manifest, you may as well say that in X cases out of that 100, it happens.

In this case, that means that if there’s a 1-star disease going around, the chance of under 5s catching it will be 10% unless there’s a specific modifier, rising by 1% for every 5 years of age:

     0-4: 10% of this age group will have it.
     5-9: 11% of this age group will have it.
     10-14: 12% of this age group will have it.
     15-19: 13% of this age group will have it.
     20-24: 14% of this age group will have it.
          …and so on, up to
     95-99: 29% of this age group will have it.
     100-104: 30% of this age group will have it.
          …and up from there.

Or you could take the average age of a community – let’s say 30 – and simply get a general “16% of the population are ill”.

For comparison, let’s look at a 4-star illness, no special modifiers:

Chance of catching (%) = (20×4) — 10 + (Age / 5), round down, i.e. 70% plus age modifier.

     0-4: 70% of this age group will have it.
     5-9: 71% of this age group will have it.
     10-14: 72% of this age group will have it.
     15-19: 73% of this age group will have it.
     20-24: 74% of this age group will have it.
          …and so on, up to
     95-99: 89% of this age group will have it.
     100-104: 90% of this age group will have it.
          …and up from there.

Average age method: 76% of the populace are sick.

PC Susceptibility

But this is where the rubber really meets the road. A PC encounters an NPC with the disease – what’s the PC’s chance of coming down with this dreaded lurgy? (Actually, for various technical reasons, the game mechanics that came to me actually work better as a resistance).

Base Resistance

Base resistance is 5 × CON minus Age.

For non-humans, convert their age to a physiological human equivalent if they are even susceptible to this particular illness.

Specific Disease Modifiers

Subtract 10 times the Star Rating of the disease.

Wounded Modifiers

     If the character has been wounded in the last week, add 5.
     If the character has been wounded in the last 24 hrs, add 10.
     If the character has been wounded in the last 6 hrs, add 15.
     If the character has been wounded in the last 3 hrs, add 20.
     If the character’s wounds were not healed within 30 minutes, add 10.

(These all represent the likelihood that the character’s immune system is fighting off an infection).

Age Modifiers

This represents modifiers from a specific disease toward a specific age group. For this purpose, age groups are

     Infants
     Children
     Young Adults
     Adults
     Senior Adults
     Elderly Citizens

Where a GM chooses to put his boundaries is up to him or her. I would probably use:

     Infants: 0-2 yrs
     Children: 2-13 yrs
     Young Adults: 13-20 yrs
     Adults: 20-40 yrs
     Senior Adults: 40-60 yrs
     Elderly Citizens: 60ys+

— but I would vary those numbers based on the genre of the campaign, using very different numbers in a Cyberpunk world, for example, simply because the state of the medical art would have extended both the human lifespan and the fitness of individuals at later ages. I might also toss in another category, “Teens”.

So, some rules:

• For every +5% in one age bracket, two others must have a -5% risk.
• If one age bracket has more than a +10% risk, it’s neighboring age brackets must have at least +5%.
• If one age bracket has more than a -10% risk, it’s neighboring age brackets must have at least -5% unless it has a +5% from the preceding rule and no other age modifier from this section.
• No age bracket can have more than a -80% risk and no age bracket can have more than a +60% risk.

That means that resistance based on age is broad-based, while susceptibility is narrow, and that there is at least a nod towards curve smoothing. It also places some hard limits on how big a modifier is permitted.

EG: Let’s create an Infants/Childhood Disease. We need to reserve the Young Adults category for the minimum +5% risk described above. That means that we have three age brackets to load up with resistance.

Let’s take all three to the maximum of -80%, for a total of -240%; but only half that much ‘comes across’, so -120%; and splitting that evenly between the two vulnerable age brackets gives the +60% maximum permitted.

But the rules given above state that the Young Adult category has to have either a +5 (from the childhood side) or a -5 (from the adult side), with ties broken in favor of the +5. The only place we can get it from are the two +60s, so one drops to +55.

The results:
     Infants +60%
     Children +55%
     Young Adults +5%
     Adults -80%
     Senior Adults -80%
     Elderly Citizens -80%

The power of these adjustments is really only appreciated when you factor in the standard age modifiers given earlier.

Note that these modifiers apply to both PCs and NPCs.

Other Modifiers

Finally, a catch-all category to cover things like climbing through sewers, rolling in mud, wrestling with plague-carrying Giant Rats, and whatever. The GM can add up to +30% additional resistance or -50% weakened resistance for other circumstances as he sees fit.

Total these up and you get any character’s resistance to any given disease. I recommend doing the base resistance calculations in advance, and doing the age modifiers when you specify a disease in-game.

A General Rule

Which brings me to a general rule that was strongly implied by last week’s post:

Diseases of more than 2 stars should never appear in a game by accident, or capriciously. “Realism” alone is not enough justification for their presence. ONLY use them when they will add significant impact to a story.

Disease Descriptions

So, each GM should describe the common diseases in their campaign for themselves. The first thing to think about is a standard format, so that’s the next thing. I’ll be adding additional rules as they become relevant to an entry within the standard format.

0. The Text Block

Obviously the place to start is with a text block because (at the very least) that will contain the name. So we may as well put all the other text here, too.

• Name – I would stick to common names except in a high-tech society. Note however that non-human cultures may well have their own names for illnesses to which they (or their domesticated creatures) are susceptible, which should also be listed here.
• Appearance / Symptoms – what does the disease do? Go for the most common first, and assume that every case will have all the symptoms; anything else is far too complicated for RPG usage.
• Effect – if you need to include a game mechanics effect, this is where it goes. That includes age modifiers.
• Game Impact – this is a concluding text block that deals with how the society in general views the disease. In most cases, this can be left blank.

After that, we get down to some statistics, that should be used as a guideline by the GM to the handling of the illness.

1. Incubation Period (0-5)

This is how long after your exposed that you get sick.

Suggested Values:
     0: 1 day
     1: 2 days
     2: d4+2 days
     3: d8+6 days
     4: d12+9 days
     5: 2d10+8 days or more

2. Infectiousness Period (1-6)

How long after you get sick are you dangerous to be around?

Suggested Values:
     1: 1 day or less
     2: 2 days
     3: d4+2 days
     4: d8+6 days
     5: d12+9 days
     6: d12+3 months or more

3. Infectiousness Risk (1-5)

If you encounter someone in the Infectiousness Period, how likely is it that you will pass the disease on?

Suggested Values:
     1: 10%
     2: 20%
     3: 30%
     4: 45%
     5: 55%

4. Lethality (0-5)

How likely is the illness to kill you?

Suggested Values:
     0: 5%
     1: 10%
     2: 15%
     3: 30%
     4: 60%
     5: 80%

These assume that you have to roll once to survive or die. If you want a daily or even an hourly check, they should be much lower.

How much lower? Well, that gets complicated.

Because you stop rolling to survive if you die, we first need to convert our number into a decimal, and then subtract it from one. From now on, let’s call that X.

Next, we need the Yth root of X. Let’s call that Z.

We then need to convert that back into a chance of dying by subtracting the result from 1, and then converting that back to a percentage.

If our initial number was 60%, and we wanted four checks for three days, that gives us a Y of 12 and an X of 0.4.

That gives a Z of 0.92648487247906914467417516897626 (my calculator is exuberant with the decimal places).

Subtract from 1 and then multiply by 100 and we get a death chance per roll of 7.3515127520930855325824831023735. I would use 7.35 as near enough, round down, and let the 0.35 remainders add up until they got to a whole percentage point.

     1st check:7.35 =7% and 0.35 carried forward.
     2nd check: 7.35 + 0.35 = 7.7 = 7% and 0.35 carried forward.
     3rd check: 7.35 + 0.7 = 8.05 = 8% and 0.05 carried forward.
     4th check: 7.35 + 0.05 = 7.4 = 7% and 0.4 carried forward.
     5th check: 7.35 + 0.4 = 7.75 = 7% and 0.75 carried forward.
     6th check: 7.35 + 0.75 = 8.1 = 8% and 0.1 carried forward.
     7th check: 7.35 + 0.1 = 7.45 = 7% and 0.45 carried forward.
     8th check: 7.35 + 0.45 = 7.8 = 7% and 0.8 carried forward.
     9th check: 7.35 + 0.8 = 8.15 = 8% and 0.15 carried forward.
     10th check: 7.35 + 0.15 = 7.5 = 7% and 0.5 carried forward.
     11th check: 7.35 + 0.5 = 7.85 = 7% and 0.85 carried forward.
     12th check: 7.35 + 0.85 = 8.2 = 8% and that’s the last check.

If you go to all the trouble, you can work out that this all comes to

     1 – 100 × [ ( 0.93 ^ 7 ) × ( 0.92 ^ 5 ) ] = 60.343% net chance of death.

My, but that’s a lot of palaver. You could save some of it by rounding to 0.3 or 0.4, I suppose, and it wouldn’t make a huge amount of difference but would be a lot easier to calculate.

A quick-and-dirty shortcut
But, in fact, I would use a highly inaccurate quick-and-dirty calculation: Square Root of (Original X minus Y) plus Y/100.

If the number of checks is too high, halve them.

     60-12=48. Square root of 48 is 6.9. Add 0.12 to get 7.02. Then ignore the 0.02. (If it had been 0.1 or something like that, I’d have tracked it).

Twelve checks at 7% gives 58.1% total risk. I’m not bothered by the missing 1.9%, are you?

Let’s do another one: Hourly checks, 1½ days, net exposure of 30%.

1½ × 24 = 36 checks. There isn’t enough room in 30% to subtract 36, so we halve the number of checks and make them two-hourly instead.

     30-18=12; Square root of 12 is 3.46; add 0.18 to get 3.64. Ignore the 0.04, use 3.6.

     1st Check: 3.6 = 3% and 0.6 carried forward.
     2nd Check: 3.6 + 0.6 = 4.2 = 4% and 0.2 carried forward.
     3rd Check: 3.6 + 0.2 = 3.8 = 3% and 0.8 carried forward.
     4th check: 3.6 + 0.8 = 4.4 = 4% and 0.4 carried forward.
     5th check: 3.6 + 0.4 = 4%.

With nothing carried forward, this then becomes a 3, 4, 3, 4, 4 pattern that repeats until we get to the required 18 checks:

     3 4 3 4 4 3 4 3 4 4 3 4 3 4 4 3 4 3

If you work backwards from those results, you get

     1 – 100 × [ ( 0.97 ^ 8 ) × ( 0.96 ^ 10) ] = 47.894% net chance of death.

That’s a fair bit higher than the target 30% – in fact, it’s past half-way to the next value of 60% – but so what? I said this was quick and dirty, not accurate.

5. Recovery Period (0-5)

Once you start to experience the symptoms, how long is it until you start to feel better? This is relative to the infectiousness period.

     0: +25% after the infectious period
     1: +3 days after the infectious period
     2: +1 day after the infectious period
     3: when the infectious period ends
     4: d4 days before the infectious period ends
     5: 1/2 way through the infectious period

Observe that the lower this is set, the less dangerous the disease is because you may be feeling better but can still spread the illness. It’s also possible with the right settings to pass completely through the recovery period before you become infectious!

6. Recovery Chance (0-5)

Some symptoms may be marked as persistent, indicating that there’s a risk that they will persist in the long term. It’s assumed that any symptom not so marked will pass when the infectious period passes.

This is the chance per month of recovering from those symptoms. As usual, the higher the rating, the worse the disease.

     0: 8% each month
     1: 6% each month
     2: 4% each month
     3: 2% each month
     4: 1% each month
     5: 0% each month

7. Disease Star Rating (1-5)

Last, but not least, the star rating, which sums up how bad this particular illness really is.

I suggest using actual stars if you can manage it: ★★★★★

This post is displayed using web-browser language (HTML, technically “HyperText Markup Language”) as is everything else that you will see on the web, so I did the ones above by typing &-star-f-semicolon five times. If you’re producing your disease reference using a word processor, look for a symbols library or font.

Creating a Disease

Okay, so now that we know what’s in a text block, let’s look at how to crunch those statistics.

The General Case

Multiply the star rating by 4.5, and round up. Divide the results amongst the 6 other categories.

If you do the math, that gives you the following:

     1-star: 5 disease construction points
     2-star: 9 disease construction points
     3-star: 14 disease construction points
     4-star: 18 disease construction points
     5-star: 23 disease construction points

This means that you can have diseases that are very infectious or very lethal or any other variation that best describes them (note that this is why some of the categories offer a ‘0’ rating and others don’t). The alternative would have complicated the “multiply by 4.5”.

Specific Strains

With the current concern over the rising spread of the Delta variant of Covid-19, the concept of specific strains is front-and-center for a lot of people. Most of the time, you can use the generic signature of a disease, but every case is just a little different.

1. Roll 1d8 per star and total the results.
2. Average the results with the general case build points, round up.
3. Subtract the general case build points.

The result is the over-or-under relative to the generic version of the disease. If you came up with 4 points under, for example (that’s a result of -4) then this specific strain is, overall, milder. So you start by allocating those -4 points to different categories. You can’t take any category below it’s minimum.

You can also take the opportunity to tweak the profile – once you’ve allocated the specific strain points, you can increase any single category by 1 step while reducing another by a step. Once only, note!

An example: a 4-star disease has 18 build points for it’s generic version. These have been allocated:

     Incubation Period (0-5): 3
     Infectiousness Period (1-6): 4
     Infectiousness Risk (1-5): 3
     Lethality (0-5): 1
     Recovery Period (0-5): 2
     Recovery Chance (0-5): 5

Rolling 4d8 gives me a total of 20. Average with 18 to get 19. So this specific variant is one point nastier than the base.

I’m going to add the extra point to the Recovery Period. I’m also going to use my one-time-per-specific-variant deal to take one point off Infectiousness Period and further increase the Recovery Period. So this specific variant looks like this:

     Incubation Period (0-5): 3
     Infectiousness Period (1-6): 3
     Infectiousness Risk (1-5): 3
     Lethality (0-5): 1
     Recovery Period (0-5): 4
     Recovery Chance (0-5): 5

So you can’t infect others for quite as long, but the symptoms will stay with you for longer. This is actually a milder but more persistent strain.

Other Species

Generic Profiles for humans are fine, but don’t expect the illness to progress in the same way for Elves or Dwarves or anyone else that’s susceptible. Add 1d6 to the build points per star and subtract 1d6 to the build points per star.

Here’s the trick: it’s up to the GM to decide which dice are added and which subtracted. This lets him deliberately tune the disease to the plot, one way or the other, or simply let it be a random input.

Specific Diseases Considered

I was never going to have time to do full stat blocks for a whole bunch of diseases, and that wasn’t the point anyway – why provide the mechanics for a GM to make his own decisions and then usurp that authority?

What I have done is list every disease that I could think of off the top of my head (excluding Covid and Bird-Flu and the other new kids on the block). I am sure that this list is not exhaustive!

Some of these will be the result of metabolic failures, others will be caused by infectious agents or other harmful substances. I deliberately haven’t listed symptoms, like indigestion, as diseases in their own right.

As a general thing, these have been loosely grouped into families, not in any scientific way, and with one or two curve-balls thrown in. As a general rule, I’ve tried to go from low-star to high-star members within each family, and the final member is always a generic category – which feeds back in to the modifications to Heal that I proposed earlier.

For example, at one point, the list runs

8. Influenza
9. Scarlet Fever
10. Yellow Fever
11. Black Death
12. The Fevers

but “Malaria” (which arguably should be in this family) has actually been put into a group with “Bites and Venom” as it’s head. Why? Because direct infection from another person is unlikely in that case but assumed to be possible in the list above.

I’ve tried to jot down a few words to serve as the basis of a text block for each disease, but my primary goal was to indicate how many stars I thought it should have, and why.

1. Cold ★

Colds are actually multiple similar illnesses caused by completely different viruses. That’s why it’s so hard to come up with a cure. They also mutate extremely quickly. In effect, you would need five or ore different vaccines to be developed every year. Not that they aren’t searching for a magic bullet!

Almost all colds cause your nose to run. This gets onto hands and from there onto other surfaces and then gets picked up by someone else. I’ve seen unverified suggestions that they can survive for months on a surface. So they are easily spread and hard to kill. The phlegm can cause sore throats, laryngitis, upset stomachs, sinus headaches, watery eyes, and will usually irritate at least part of the nose. The virus will usually cause some difficulty in breathing due to phlegm in the lungs. The cold can cause either a dry cough or a wet cough (the latter being an attempt by the body to ‘cough up’ phlegm. Muscle and joint aches are also possible.

Treatments are usually aimed at controlling symptoms and have become far more effective over the last 25 years or so. This is still a fertile area for home remedies.

2. Heatstroke ★★

Not a disease that you can catch from someone else, this comes from dehydration and being out in the sun too much. Had it once, don’t care to repeat the experience. Symptoms include delirium, dizziness, blurred vision, and headache. Sometimes you can be susceptible. for no apparent reason even if you usually aren’t. There have been suggestions that other illnesses that can lead to dehydration such as influenza can make you more susceptible. Treatment is simple: get into the shade and drink plenty of fluids until you feel better.

Heatstroke can kill in severe cases or when treatment isn’t available. In even a semi-dangerous environment, though, making mistakes of judgment is probably the leading cause of fatalities. “Look at the nice kitty with such long and sharp teeth, let me just get my toothpaste, it’s here in my pack somewhere….”

3. Cold Sores ★

Cold sores are a little more serious than Acne, which I decided not to list. They are an infection on the lips, that are spread by lip-to-lip contact. If touched, it’s possible to transfer the agent (Virus? bacteria, I think?) to other parts of the body, where the consequences can be more serious. They like moist environments so this is especially true of open wounds. They seem to be more common in colder weather, hence the name, but that might be an old wives tale.

4. Ulcers ★★

Ulcers are sores, often in the lining of the stomach. They cause pain, under certain conditions – certain foods can trigger them. They are associated with stress and worry. If not treated, they can bleed, and this can eventually be fatal. But the pain and malnutrition that result from avoiding the pain are more likely to do a sufferer in.

5. Measles ★★

Measles used to kill children regularly. Then we developed a vaccine. Since the rise of the Antivax movement, measles deaths are again rising. Measles are characterized by a rash on the skin and may be accompanied with a fever. Thankfully, most people can only catch them once.

6. Leprosy ★★★

Leprosy is relatively noninfectious but disfiguring and can last for a long time. It’s a bit like a measles that won’t go away and that leaves severe scarring in survivors. It can kill, but this is relatively rare.

7. The Poxes ★★★★

A catch-all for other types of diseases that cause a rash. The most notorious member of the family is smallpox. These are generally assumed to be fairly lethal and fairly infectious.

8. Influenza ★★

People die of influenza every year, despite it being little more than an irritant in most cases. This is one of the most common diseases that people should encounter. It generally produces weakness and a lack of energy. The body’s attempts to make itself as unhospitable an environment as possible produce a fever, and that fever can get out of hand in severe cases, causing death. There are often no outward signs that someone has the flu, and that’s a major component of its infectiousness and risk profile.

There are four major strains of flu, and the flu vaccine is good for two of them. Immunity lasts 1-3 years. Each year, the most common / most dangerous varieties currently in circulation are identified and used to create the specific vaccine combination for that year. This suppresses the strains against which it is targeted, creating an open meal-ticket for the ones that are not the following year. So a flu shot one year will provide very limited protection the following year. Because the virus mutates fairly readily, the vaccines have to be custom-built every year, and there is only time and money enough to get two done, combined, and distributed.

There were early attempts to downplay Covid-19 as no worse than the flu. I prefer to think that Covid-19 shows just how bad the flu can get. Reference the epidemic of 1918.

9. Scarlet Fever ★★★

I know the name, and believe that it can cause infertility. I know very little about it beyond that.

10. Yellow Fever ★★★★

Yellow Fever is spread by mosquitoes but that wasn’t known for a long time. This accounts for this being a disease restricted to tropical climates. The building of the Panama Canal was fraught because of Yellow Fever. It’s more commonly fatal than any of the fevers listed thus far. I am not sure whether or not surviving it creates immunity or for how long it lasts.

11. Black Death ★★★★★

Elder statesman and patriarch of the Fever family. Highly dangerous. It was believed that you can catch it from another human, but I’m not sure that’s been scientifically verified; what is known is that it can be carried by the fleas that infest vermin and small animals, and be transmitted to humans by a bite. Quite often, when such animals die, the fleas jump off in search of a new host. They bite and make themselves at home, and pass on the disease as their housewarming party. The Black Death is rare but deadly; the last major outbreak is believed to have killed off one sixth of the population of Europe. Has the Black Death ever run rampant through Asia or Africa? I don’t know.

12. The Fevers ★★★★★

As a general rule, individual fevers can be survivable if you can keep the Fever symptom controlled. There are environments in which that’s tough, and there are some members of the fever family that are worse than others, so the general rule can only go so far.

13. Cancers ★★

I tend to think of Cancer as a disease that only really starts when we started using medicine to extend and improve human life. I now know that to be only partially true. Most cancers start off posing minimal direct threat of death but they can and will spread to other organs. Each time one does, add another star. They kill by interfering with key biological processes within the organ affected, which eventually shuts down (effectively) as more and more of it becomes cancerous, and by the accumulated systemic strain of coping with these messed up processes. Some cancers are more common than others, and there are a host of environmental triggers that were poorly recognized at first.

What truth there is in the above statement is enough to show that in a society in which Heal is the ‘routine’ treatment for serious illness, Cancer would escalate as a cause of death, because the effect would be the same as what we have achieved with technology – people live longer, and remain in better health for longer, until some systemic breakdown takes place.

Treatments tend to be invasive, the goal being to destroy or excise ALL the defective tissue. If surgery isn’t a thing in your society, you will be in big trouble. If it is available, you will still be in trouble.

The star rating is based on the relative availability of appropriate magical treatment using Heal. In a nutshell, under the proposed modifications to that spell, find one early enough and Heal will cure it. Once overt symptoms start showing up (usually when it grows to a three-star disease), it’s almost too late for Heal to be effective; the window would be very narrow, because it’s now on the verge of becoming a 4-star disease against which Heal isn’t enough – a Miracle might do the job, though.

Some people can survive for quite a long time with Cancer. Others seem to be taken within weeks or months. There are a huge number of variables and variations and no-one can predict the course of an individual case, only identify what has happened after the fact – though general predictions are usually safe if enough margin is allowed.

14. Blisters ★

I don’t know anyone who’s never had a blister. Repeated rubbing on the skin can cause them. Touching something too hot can cause them. Either way, some of the skin cells break down and release their contents into a bubble that causes the skin to swell. This is a nutrient-rich soup that can easily become infected. Avoiding that is as simple as preventing the blister from bursting; in just a day or two, the fluid will get absorbed back into the body and the swelling will subside as new skin begins to grow over the injury.

Even if a blister does become infected, it takes bad luck and neglect for it to become life-threatening. It’s a greater risk for the limb in question to become necrotic, i.e. start to die; in extreme cases, this secondary infection can pose a risk of death, but the limb is usually amputated before that can happen. Even that is an unlikely outcome, though.

15. Boils ★★

Boils are big, nasty sores, often (always?) full of pus, which are dead white blood cells, which are caused by an attempt to fight off an invading organism. Lance and clean the boil, and prevent a fresh infection from taking hold, and they can be quite survivable – but that prescription is often not available in a more primitive society. They can be quite sensitive, and there always seems to be some routine activity that triggers pain, whether that be sitting, or riding, or whatever.

It’s pretty rare for someone to catch boils from another sufferer; I have the impression that the causative agent is routinely present on human skin but rarely manages to find a way into a more vulnerable location. If correct, that would raise the “pretty rare” to “almost impossible”.

If the infection spreads to the body, it can cause a fever and more serious problems that are potentially fatal.

16. Chilblains ★

Damage to the blood vessels in the extremities (usually the feet) causing blood to leak, creating sensitivity, redness, swelling, and possible blisters. They most commonly occur when susceptible. individuals (especially women and children) are exposed to cold and humidity. Treatment is preventative, involving the wearing of gloves and warm footwear.

17. Scurvy ★★★

This is a Vitamin C deficiency, a fact that has been forgotten and rediscovered numerous times through history. Early symptoms of deficiency include weakness, feeling tired and sore arms and legs. Without treatment, decreased red blood cells, gum disease, changes to hair, and bleeding from the skin may occur. As scurvy worsens there can be poor wound healing, personality changes, and finally death from infection or bleeding. It takes at least a month of little to no vitamin C in the diet before symptoms occur. It was a limiting factor in long-distance sea travel, often killing large numbers of people; in the age of Sail, it was routinely assumed that half of the crew would be lost to the disease on any major trip.

The condition goes away with the reintroduction of Vitamin C into the diet.

18. Malnutrition ★★★

Malnutrition is the family name for a range of illnesses that result from a diet that is inadequate in one or more essential nutrients. The resulting conditions can be very complicated and difficult to diagnose. Malnutrition can kill quickly, especially in children, but is more frequently a slow and tortuous death. The good news is that this gives time to correct the problem..The treatment is simple – a good diet with the essential food groups represented. For most of history, though, that has been easier to say than come by.

19. Diabetes ★

Diabetes comes in two varieties, Type-I and Type-II, but they both mean that the body doesn’t process blood sugar properly. Type-I starts at birth and needs the blood sugar to be regulated with insulin; prior to the discovery of this medication, it could easily result in comas and death. Type-II results later in life and is more easily regulated. By itself, Type-II is rarely fatal, but the list of potential complications can seem never-ending, including loss of peripheral vision, amputation of limbs due to necrosis, slowed healing, and increased risk of heart failure.

20. Tonsillitis ★★

The tonsils are the body’s first line of defense against ingested or inhaled pathogens, but for a long time were considered to be of secondary importance as a protection. Because of this function, they can become inflamed or enlarged, and it was common practice from 50BC until the 1970s to surgically remove them when this happened in case they blocked the airway. It is still the second most-commonly performed outpatient surgery in the US for children. In somewhere between 1 in 2360 and 1 in 56000 cases, patients can die from complications, but the procedure is one of the safest surgical interventions. There is a level of controversy about the efficacy of the treatment in modern times; in essence, it is removing a bodily organ because it is doing its job. Medications to mitigate the swelling are now the preferred first-resort treatment of many surgeons.

21. Appendicitis ★★★★

The appendix used to be considered a vestigial organ that performed no useful function in the body, but that view has been challenged by modern research, which suggests that it may be a reservoir of useful gut bacteria, assists in the proper removal of waste material from the digestive system, and plays a role in training the immune system to recognize and respond to pathogens entering the body through the digestive system. Because these contributions to health were not recognized (and still are unconfirmed), it was routine practice to remove the appendix when Appendicitis occurred. Approximately 7.5% of people have appendicitis at some point in their lives.

This is inflammation of the appendix caused by an infection. It normally presents initially as poorly localized gut pain and may induce mild fevers, nausea, vomiting, digestive upsets of various kinds, decreased appetite, and abdominal bleeding. As the inflammation grows worse, the pain & sensitivity localizes on the right hand side of the stomach area and especially in McBurney’s point – however, it should be noted that 40% of cases do not experience typical symptoms. It used to be (relatively) routine to remove the appendix when it became inflamed because if it burst, it could and frequently did induce peritonitis (inflammation / infection of the abdominal wall), followed by shock, and, if untreated, death.

Studies in 2013 found that the Appendix had been lost to human anatomy and to have re-evolved at least six times, and possibly as many as 38 times. 32 separate evolutionary modifications to the organ have been identified genetically. Since the body has had ample opportunity to abandon a vestigial leftover, and it keeps coming back, the only explanation was that the organ had an unappreciated function or benefit to the overall organism. A more recent study produced different numbers but reconfirmed the fundamental principle. As a result, there has been significant effort expended in trying to find a non-surgical treatment for non-critical cases using intravenous antibiotics, with some success.

22. Peritonitis ★★★★★

I mentioned this illness above. Symptoms may include severe pain, swelling of the abdomen, fever, or weight loss. One part or the entire abdomen may be tender. Complications can include shock and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Causes include perforation of the intestinal tract, pancreatitis, pelvic inflammatory disease, stomach ulcer, cirrhosis, or a ruptured appendix. Without treatment death may occur within 48 hours.

Without modern medicine, there is very little that can be done. Even now, if treatment is not sought promptly, it may be too late to prevent death. As a result, desperate measures may be undertaken with little hope of success in less advanced cultures.

23. Infections ★★★★★

The infection family sounds fairly mild and moderate at first glance – but that’s a perspective distorted by modern medicine. During the civil war, less than 200 years ago, any sort of cut or nick could become infected with lethal consequences. There were so many presenting with such wounds (or more serious ones) that physicians had little choice but to amputate such limbs on first suspicion of infection. If they didn’t proceed quickly enough, they might remove a foot only to have to re-amputate below the knee, then above the knee, then at the thigh – with increased risk to the patient at each step of the process. That’s how bad infections can be.

24. Malaria ★★★

I tossed up between making Malaria a three or four-star disease, and even now I’m not sure I made the right call. Like Yellow Fever, malaria is a tropical disease carried by mosquitoes. Symptoms that typically include fever, tiredness, vomiting, and headaches. In severe cases, it can cause yellow skin, seizures, coma, or death. Symptoms usually begin ten to fifteen days after being bitten by an infected mosquito. If not properly treated, people may have recurrences of the disease months later – and no treatment was known until 1640, and even then, it would have been incredibly rare in Europe (the bark of a tree from South America). In those who have recently survived an infection, reinfection usually causes milder symptoms. This partial resistance disappears over months to years if the person has no continuing exposure to malaria.

References to the unique periodic fevers of malaria are found throughout history. Hippocrates described periodic fevers, and the Roman, Columella, associated the disease with insects from swamps. Malaria may have contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire; it was so pervasive in Rome that it was known as the “Roman fever”.

25. Frostbite ★

Frostbite is a skin injury that occurs when exposed to extreme low temperatures, causing the freezing of the skin or other tissues, most commonly affecting the fingers, toes, nose, ears, cheeks and chin areas. The initial symptom is typically numbness. This may be followed by clumsiness with a white or bluish color to the skin. Swelling or blistering may occur following treatment. Frostbite is rarely directly fatal; instead, the dead tissue necrotizes and becomes infected when warmed, and it is this secondary infection that can kill. The treatments most commonly depicted in media involve rapid warming of potentially affected tissues, and/or rubbing of same; in reality, both are contra-indicated. A gentle warming is more common. In a world without antibiotics, this may not be an option. Fortunately, such a process accompanied by a low-level healing is probably enough.

Things become more serious if untreated. There are estimates that 40% of mountaineers experience frostbite every year; fortunately, they routinely utilize protective garments and the resulting injuries are slight.

Frostbite, like burns, is classified into four different grades, called degrees. First degree frostbite is superficial surface skin damage that is usually not permanent. Early on, the primary symptom is loss of feeling in the skin. In the affected areas, the skin is numb, and possibly swollen, with a reddened border. In the weeks after the injury, the skin’s surface may slough off, leaving pinkish scar tissue.

Second degree frostbite causes the skin to develop blisters quickly, and the skin’s surface hardens. In the weeks after injury, this hardened, blistered skin dries, blackens, and peels. Lasting cold sensitivity and numbness can develop.

Third degree frostbite occurs when the layers of tissue below the skin freeze. Symptoms include blood blisters and “blue-gray discoloration of the skin”. In the weeks afterwards, pain persists and a blackened crust (eschar) develops. There can be long-term ulceration (skin cracking and subdermal infection) and damage to bone structures.

Fourth degree is the most serious. Structures below the skin like muscles, tendon, and bone become frozen, and cell membranes can rupture from the cold, effectively killing the affected parts of the body. Early symptoms include a colorless appearance of the skin, a hard texture, and painless rewarming – the latter is a key warning sign. Later, the skin becomes black and mummified. The amount of permanent damage can a one month or more to determine. Autoamputation can occur after two months. If secondary infection occurs, it can kill before that takes place, so forcible amputation of digits or whole limbs may be necessary. Frostbite can be said to “creep” from the digits up the limbs, a progressively worsening condition.

Add one star for each degree of frostbite after the first, and one more if two or more limbs are affected at the same time.

26. Bites & Venom ★★★★★

Frostbite, is – of course – the Bite Of Winter. The cold is often pictured as a beast stalking the poor and infirm. Frostbite injuries often look like some savage animal has chewed away part of the affected digit or limb, especially in third and fourth degree cases. So it seems natural that in a less advanced society, Frostbite will be considered part of the family of Bites and Venoms.

It’s a fact that most media amplifies the dangers of the latter, in particular in terms of the speed with which they can kill something the size of a human. Where minutes are the common depiction, the reality can be hours or even days. Much depends on the quantity of venom delivered; the most dangerous creatures have sufficient reservoirs to inflict multiple bites, each potentially lethal in time. Other creatures have but one shot at a lethal outcome and are then relatively safe until more is excreted into the sacs which store the compounds.

Creature attitude is another significant factor. Some creatures will bite/sting you if they feel they must in order to protect themselves, but they would prefer to simply be elsewhere; others are naturally fearful of anything the size of a human, and – if not directly threatened – will usually put on a show and then depart. They will attack if cornered or startled, however. And then there are some creatures that are just plain ornery, as they might have said in the wild west. The Australian Brown snake is one such, at least by reputation – but at least they won’t chase after you if they try and bite. Cobras and the Australian Black Snake are more of the fearful kind, less prone to attack, but the Black is bad-tempered and will chase after you if it misses the first time or try to back away. Rattlesnakes seem to be somewhere in between – capable of lashing out if really threatened, but if they aren’t sure, they seem to have to work themselves up to it.

I will never forget the M*A*S*H episode in which a patient presents with a mystery malady that none of the medics can solve – until they postulate that a snake bit him in his sleeping back and then wriggled out, satisfied with its’ days work. Examination of the patient didn’t find the bite marks due to his other injuries, and of course, he was comatose and couldn’t answer questions. Heck, if there’s one thing that regular blood tests and flu vaccinations have taught me, it’s that if the tooth is sharp enough and small enough, you might not even feel the bite – if asleep.

Of course, venoms and poisons have a great variety of effects to consider. In addition to the neurotoxins, you have venoms that inhibit breathing, venoms that cause fevers, venoms that cause necrosis, and no doubt many more besides. Get creative!

27. Arthritis ★

Arthritis isn’t something that you can catch from someone else. It’s an inflammation of the joints, often accompanied by swelling. It can be extremely uncomfortable, and there’s no know cure, but it’s not lethal.

28. Gout ★

Gout is a type of Arthritis caused by consistently elevated levels of Uric Acid in the blood, and characterized by recurrent attacks of a red, tender, hot, and swollen joint. Pain typically comes on rapidly, reaching maximum intensity in less than 12 hours. The joint at the base of the big toe is affected in about half of cases. It can cause Kidney Stones or even more severe forms of Kidney Damage. At high levels, uric acid crystallizes and the crystals deposit in joints, tendons, and surrounding tissues, resulting in an attack of gout. Those who regularly drink beer or sugar-sweetened beverages, or who eat foods that are high in purines such as liver, shellfish, or anchovies, or are overweight, are most susceptible. to Gout. Perhaps the most famous sufferer was Henry VIII. Because of their rich diets, royalty was far more prone to suffering from gout than common folk, and for that reason, it was nicknamed “The Disease Of Kings”. Many attacks seem to take place at night.

While there are modern treatments, there was nothing effective against Gout for most of human history. While agonizing during an attack, and potentially mentally unbalancing over time, it is not directly fatal.

29. Lost Limbs ★

A lost limb whose stump has been properly cared for poses no direct threat to the health of the victim. What danger exists is the result of secondary infection. It should be noted that poorly-fitted prosthetics can cause blistering and infection in the same way that a shoe of the wrong size can do, opening the door to such infections. Improper cleaning of stumps can also provide a vector for infection.

30. Lost Organs ★ or ★★★ or ★★★★★

Lost organs are a lot more serious, especially in a world in which chemical / physical replacements aren’t possible. For one thing, the victim loses the function of the organ, and that alone can be fatal. For another, infection can easily result. At the low end, we have tonsillectomies and appendectomies, the loss of an eye or an ear, and the amputations of fingers and toes; in the middle, we have kidney damage and lung loss (they get downgraded in severity to this level because we have two of them) and the amputation of limbs; and the surgical repair of more critical organs; and at the extreme end, we have critical organs whose functioning is essential to the perpetuation of life. Livers, Hearts, Brains, and so on. Lose one of those, and you’re in trouble.

But in a world with magic, there may be other ways to sustain life. Losses in the first group are one-star; losses in the second are three stars; losses in the third, or the loss of both organs from the second (both kidneys, both lungs) are five-star events.

31. Allergies ★ to ★★★★

A family with no lesser members. There are literally thousands of things that you can be allergic to, and some people think that everyone has at least one of them (whether they know it or not, and however mild it may be). Once aniphylaxis is understood, and epipens invented, allergies are only lethal some of the time, even if they are of the more acute varieties. I have a serious allergy. Both my brothers have allergies, one mild and one more severe. Allergies are common.

Before the technology existed to treat allergic reactions, the risks entailed in accidental discovery were far higher. It could be honestly said that if an allergy didn’t kill you in childhood, you were reasonably safe from them – provided that you avoided the things you had survived in that early period of life. The ratings above presume, however, that you failed to do so – chowing down on clam chowder when you shouldn’t.

“What doesn’t kill you tells you what to avoid in future,” my brother once said.

32. Toothache ★

It’s fairly rare for a toothache to be fatal. Nevertheless, you can spark quite an intense debate by asking two GMs if a Healing Potion can repair damaged teeth or simply inhibit further decay for a time. I know at least one PC who used to gargle a CLW potion daily on the off-chance that it helped.

As is not unusual, the real dangers to life stem from secondary infections.

33. Headaches ★

There are lots of possible causes of headaches when you get down to specifics, but in the general sense, they are all about blood flow within the brain. It’s always struck me as a little strange that you can have headaches and yet the brain has no pain sensors, a fact exploited routinely during neurosurgery. To me, that suggests that there is at least this one case in which “it’s all in your head” might have a more literal, and accurate interpretation – that your brain receives news flashes of something wrong in the surrounding tissues and ‘interprets’ these as pain within the head.

Depending on the cause, headaches can be lethal, but that usually marks the headache as a symptom, not an event in its own right. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell the two apart; all you know is that your head hurts. The usual response (absent some obvious potential cause) is therefore to provide some form of painkiller and see if the problem goes away on its own; if it doesn’t, people start looking for an underlying cause.

This entry refers to those specific cases in which time will do away with the headache. It may recur if it’s the result of a head wound, and there is some evidence that PTSD (or whatever the modern terminology is) can cause recurring headaches even without a past physical trauma.

34. Migraines ★★★

Migraines aren’t just intense headaches; those are the most ubiquitous symptom, that’s all. Typically, episodes affect one side of the head, are pulsating in nature, and last from a few hours to three days. Other symptoms can include nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light, sound, or smell. The pain is generally made worse by physical activity, although regular exercise may have prophylactic effects. Up to one-third of people affected experience ‘aura’ – typically a short period of visual disturbance that signals that the headache will soon occur Occasionally, aura can occur with little or no headache following, but not everyone has this symptom.

The causes are still not understood; the more research is done, the more complex the phenomenon seems to become, and it’s near certain that there are dozens of possible causes all being lumped together under a single umbrella term. It is known that cranial nerves and blood flow are involved, and that some medications are effective in some cases. Hormones are thought involved in some cases, as are stress and hormonal stress response.

Treatment usually consists of trialing one chemical after another until one is found that ‘clicks’. I first developed them at the age of 19 or 20, and went through 13 different medications until finding one that relieved the pain. During an episode, the pain would frequently bring me to tears and I was close to screaming on a number of occasions. Picture someone hitting your head with a hammer in the same spot over and over again, as hard as they could, while someone else kept stabbing at your forehead repeatedly, for 12-14 hours at a time – that’s what it felt like! Over time, I became aware of a sort of ‘tension’ in my head that preceded an episode, and learned that promptly taking the medication would in my case prevent the episode sometimes. At first, this happened perhaps one time in three; over time, that rose to nine times in ten. This year marks fifteen or sixteen years since my last episode – and a good thing, too, because that medication is no longer on the market; instead, it’s been bundled with caffeine to form what is supposedly a ‘more effective’ formulation, but one that exacerbated a sense of drunkenness on the few occasions when I had to use it. (One side benefit: a number of doctors and specialists have noted a high pain threshold. I put that down to having experienced migraines in my past).

Migraines aren’t usually lethal, but they have been known to drive victims to suicide. They can have a significant negative effect on employment and career prospects, which can contribute to depressed states of mind. The worst thing is that it can be physically painful to hear any noise louder than a whisper – making it extremely difficult for some people to seek help while at their lowest ebb. They can talk plenty when it no longer matters, though.

35. Epilepsy ★★★★★

Still in the general category of ‘things wrong with your head’, we come to Epilepsy – a group of neurological disorders characterized by recurrent seizures, episodes that can vary from brief and nearly undetectable periods to long periods of vigorous shaking and jerking due to abnormal electrical activity in the brain. These episodes can result in physical injuries, either directly (broken bones for example) or through causing accidents. In epilepsy, seizures have a tendency to recur and have no immediate recognizable underlying cause. It is known that brain injuries (including strokes) can sometimes cause the condition in someone who did not previously experience it. Seizures are controllable with medication in about 70% of cases. Not all cases of epilepsy are lifelong, and many people improve to the point that treatment is no longer needed.

The oldest medical records show that epilepsy has been affecting people at least since the beginning of recorded history. Throughout ancient history, the disease was thought to be a spiritual condition. In most cultures, persons with epilepsy have been stigmatized, shunned, or even imprisoned. As late as in the second half of the 20th century, in Tanzania and other parts of Africa epilepsy was associated with possession by evil spirits, witchcraft, or poisoning and was believed by many to be contagious. Before 1971 in the United Kingdom, epilepsy was considered grounds for the annulment of marriage. The stigma results in some people with epilepsy denying that they have ever had seizures.

People with epilepsy are at an increased risk of death. This increase is between 1.6 and 4.1 fold greater than that of the general population, and most pronounced in the elderly. Mortality is often related to the underlying cause of the seizures, status epilepticus, suicide, trauma, or Sudden Unexpected Death in EPilepsy (SUDEP) syndrome – the latter being a fancy label for a “we don’t know” from the medical community. It gets applied in cases of sudden, unexpected, non-traumatic, and non-drowning death of a person with epilepsy, without a toxicological or anatomical cause of death that can be detected during a postmortem examination. In other words, we’ve ruled out everything that we can think of.

36. Dementia ★★★

Another disease for which I struggled to allocate a correct star rating. Dementia is a cognitive disorder in which progressive impairments to memory, thinking, and behavior, occur. These negatively impact a person’s ability to function and carry out everyday activities. Aside from memory impairment and a disruption in thought patterns, the most common symptoms include emotional problems, difficulties with language, and decreased motivation. It’s common to think of Dementia as “profound confusion interspersed with moments of lucidity”. This is not an entirely accurate clinical picture but it’s good enough for game purposes. Many of the problems that arise with dementia patients relate to uncertainty as to the level of impairment from day-to-day, moment-to-moment. Someone can be completely clear and lucid one day, and enveloped in a mental fog the next; that fog can lift for seconds, minutes, or hours, seemingly at random. As such, it is very hard to consider any decision taken to have been made in a lucid state; there is an inherent tendency to treat the individual as though they were at their worst all the time, even when knowing better. Dementia is considered primarily a disease of the elderly.

Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are now considered to be subtypes of Dementia.

There is no cure, and – in science – little prospect of one, at least in the near future. The condition can be managed somewhat and progression slowed, and that’s about it.

Dementia can be fatal when a sufferer forgets that they need to eat, and so does not, or other extreme manifestations of the illness.

39. Muscle Strains & Tears ★

A strain is an acute or chronic soft tissue injury that occurs to a muscle, tendon, or both. The equivalent injury to a ligament is a sprain. The muscle or tendon overstretches and partially tears under more physical stress than it can withstand, often from a sudden increase in duration, intensity, or frequency of an activity. Strains most commonly occur in the foot, leg, or back.

Muscle strains are generally not directly fatal and are temporary in nature. However, they can cause a permanent weakness that allows repeated and progressive injury to the muscle or tendon. Typically, once a muscle strain occurs, it is more likely that the muscle in question will experience a future strain with less provocation and greater severity. It is possible to minimize this progression but it usually takes considerably longer and substantially greater effort than simply recovering to the prior state of fitness. It has been shown that ‘warming up’ (i.e. an intermediate level of activity in preparation for exertion) greatly diminishes the risk of a muscle strain.

40. Back Strain ★

Back strain is the injury occurring to muscles or tendons in which those tendons and muscles that support the spine are twisted or pulled. Chronic back strain occurs because of the sustained trauma and wearing out of the back muscles. Acute back strain can occur following a single instance of over stressing of back muscles, as in lifting a heavy object. Chronic back strain is more common than the acute type.

Spinal problems involving trapped nerves can force the back muscles to attempt to provide the entirety of the support normally deriving from the spine; this effectively results in a chronic back strain with the potential for acute manifestations. It is as though the back is taken to the limits of its capacity by the normal everyday tasks involved, making it more susceptible. to acute strains when called upon to perform some additional task. It is normal for such injuries to be only somewhat predictable, and to be chaotic in the mathematical sense, i.e. sensitive to very small changes in input conditions that make the impact of any given task unpredictable. Over time, sufferers tend to learn the warning signs that they are approaching their limits and find ways to avoid exceeding them. The longer that they can go without triggering an acute episode, the greater their capacity for short-term bursts of activity as core strength grows in excess of the daily requirements. Life is thus a balancing act of managing the potential for Acute injuries while performing the necessary tasks for daily life.

Back strains are not directly fatal, though they can leave sufferers crippled, slow-moving, and unable to exert themselves.

41. Cardiac Problems ★★★★★

The ultimate muscular problem lies in the ultimate muscle, the heart. Anything that goes wrong with this organ is potentially fatal. There are a wide range of possible injuries and failures possible – everything from heart valve failures to cross-chamber leaks to blocked arteries to muscle strains after extreme exertion to electrical or rhythmic problems. Small problems have a tendency to progressively become larger and more life-threatening; for example, a stroke may disrupt the electrical signals that regulate the heartbeat, causing part of the muscle to die, permanently reducing the heart’s capacity to pump blood and leaving it more susceptible. to blockages that it could previously have endured (probably with discomfort).

42. Blindness ★

I’ve talked elsewhere about the loss of eyes, so this refers to the situation where the eyes are present but just don’t work properly any more. Astigmatism, Cataracts, Retinal damage, Optic Nerve damage, or even damage to the brain can be responsible. There is a technical difference between legally blind and completely sightless that may be relevant in some circumstances. Blindness is not usually directly fatal, though the cause of the blindness may be lethal. Death is more commonly the result of some form of increased helplessness because of the blindness, though the human capacity to cope with this disability (especially with the support of a trained seeing-eye dog and modern technology) is remarkable.

43. Deafness ★

Pretty much as per Blindness; we’re talking about a different sense, is all.

44. Polio ★★★★

This was an afterthought, and probably should not have been so. Polio is an infectious disease caused by the polio-virus. In about 0.5 percent of cases, it moves from the gut to affect the central nervous system and there is muscle weakness resulting in a flaccid paralysis. This can occur over a few hours to a few days. The weakness most often involves the legs, but may less commonly involve the muscles of the head, neck and diaphragm. Many people fully recover. In those with muscle weakness, about 2 to 5 percent of children and 15 to 30 percent of adults die. Up to 70 percent of those infected have no symptoms. Another 25 percent of people have minor symptoms such as fever and a sore throat, and up to 5 percent have headache, neck stiffness and pains in the arms and legs. These people are usually back to normal within one or two weeks. Years after recovery, post-polio syndrome may occur, with a slow development of muscle weakness similar to that which the person had during the initial infection.

Those who are infected may spread the disease for up to six weeks even if no symptoms are present. In cases of spinal polio, if the affected nerve cells are completely destroyed, paralysis will be permanent; cells that are not destroyed, but lose function temporarily, may recover within four to six weeks after onset. Half the patients with spinal polio recover fully; one-quarter recover with mild disability, and the remaining quarter are left with severe disability. Spinal Polio is rarely fatal.

Without respiratory support, consequences of poliomyelitis with respiratory involvement include suffocation or pneumonia from aspiration of secretions. Overall, 5 to 10 percent of patients with paralytic polio die due to the paralysis of muscles used for breathing, up to 30 per cent in the case of adults.

45. Taboo Diseases ★★★★★

I looked hard for a nice euphemism to describe these diseases! Most of them are controllable or curable using modern antibiotics, though resistant strains are an increasing global concern. Probably the worst of the Taboo Diseases is Syphilis, which can literally rot the brain of sufferers. In any pre-20th century environment, most of these STDs can kill.

Of concern is the fact that some of these diseases can be spread by means other than promiscuity, even though this is relatively rare. Even abstinence is not a complete protection.

In most cases, it will be inappropriate to designate specific Healing spells for this type of disease; they are better left as a disease family, even though most members of that family have nothing other than the common means of transmission in common.

Disgustingly Healthy vs the Cough And Wheeze

The end at last! I started by asking the question, “Is healing too accessible in D&D” (and in other RPGs). The answer is clearly a “Yes, some of the time, and in some campaigns”. If you have good reason to want everyone in your campaign to be a Captain America knockoff, then widespread Healing is probably your best shot at achieving that. But be sure you can live without all the things that you are giving up.

If the words “Grim” or “Gritty” or “Realistic” are to be commonplace in the way you think about your environments, even if you don’t choose those terms all the time so as to avoid overuse, then the answer is a yes. Prepare your list of diseases. Add some more of your own creation. Add some that only affect Elves or Dwarves or whatever. Add a few that started off that way but have now jumped species. Think about the social impacts of the diseases in your campaign, and the economic consequences of both the diseases and whatever level of healing ubiquity you consider appropriate.

There is nothing wrong with either choice. Blind choices, on the other hand, are problematic at worst and sources of vulnerability at best. So think carefully about the Disgustingly Healthy, the Cough, and the Wheeze.

985… 986…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Fourteen to go!

Image by Gerhard G. from Pixabay, shadow added by Mike

A Post In Two Parts

This is a post in two parts. The first is the traditional blog carnival roundup; the carnival has now moved on to a new host. Turnout for July was disappointing, though, so that wouldn’t be enough to reward readers for taking the trouble to check in.

So I was already contemplating backing it up with something additional – the second part. And when I thought of a post that could dovetail with the subject of the carnival being rounded up, one last shot as it were, I couldn’t resist.

And then, as is my usual practice, I started to plan out the content, and discovered that there was an awful lot that had to be incorporated. In fact, there were no less than 86 entries (including the one above) in my heading/subheading list.

That’s a lot – so many that I’m not especially confident of getting everything done before deadline. And, if I don’t, this will then become a post in two parts in the more traditional sense, as well! I already know the perfect ‘split’ point… but let’s hope I avoid needing it. In that spirit, let’s get started…

Blog Carnival Roundup

Counting this one, there were 6 posts offered in response to my challenge – and one attempt that didn’t seem to make it in time – and five of the six were by me, here at Campaign Mastery.

They were (starting with the welcome outlier):

Plastic Polyhedra – On Loot and Lifestyle – Tom writes about the conversion of static piles of loot (boring) into wealth that can be used to trigger or incite adventures or simply act as a vehicle to deliver adventures to the party. Lots of ideas here for the taking, especially in a Fantasy Campaign (but not irrelevant to a modern one, just replace ‘loot’ with the word ‘paycheck’).

Campaign Mastery – A Wealth Of Characters – After the kickoff post for the blog carnival, I offer another technique of creating NPCs on the fly after dismissing the concept of an accumulated library of old NPCs.

Campaign Mastery – The Power Of Blur – I detail how I use ‘blur’ in image compositing, and then use the technique as a metaphor for avoiding the trap of providing ‘A Wealth of Specifics’ instead of generalizing to the impressions that a character has. Which led me to the Basketball Gorilla optical Illusion, which I then applied to PCs in an RPG. And as a bonus, you get a floral Dalek!

Campaign Mastery – A Wealth Of Suspects and the lessons they teach – A new RPG Campaign Structure for implementing self-contained Agatha-Christie-style adventures leads into an example of constructing adventures from the middle out. I then abstract the process into some general principles.

Campaign Mastery – A Wealth Of Stylistic Factors – How do you give each campaign its own unique style? After defining ‘a style’ in RPG terms, and listing the many contributing factors that coalesce to create one, I offer four examples of how to customize D&D for (a) High Fantasy, (b) Science Fiction, (c) a Mystery-oriented campaign (in two distinct varieties), and (d) a Politics-oriented campaign, before wrapping up with some final advice on how to use an established Style to your advantage..

Campaign Mastery – A Wealth Of Ailments – The article below, a final celebration of the diversity of the topic!

The blog carnival has now moved on to Of Dice And Dragons and the subject of The Gamer’s Notebook. Best of luck, Scot!

A Wealth Of Ailments

An episode of M*A*S*H inspired this post – I forget which, but it dealt with the limitations of Doctors and healers in general. And that happened to connect with a Quora group dealing with D&D in my head, and well, here we are. I started with a question, inspired by those sources, and that’s the right place for you to start, too.

Is Curing too easy in D&D?

Even though this article is clearly going to be D&D-oriented, many RPGs will face similar issues and questions. In an effort to avoid answering the question for just a little longer, let’s briefly consider that.

• Cyberpunk – How long does it take to recover from receiving a new implant? Is it like being fitted a modern prosthetic which needs to be followed with months of physical therapy? Because tying a PC down for that long seems undesirable – but any short-cutting of the process opens the door to a suitably-revised version of the question.
• Superheroes – when you have only a limited number of players, as was the case when my early superhero campaign was underway (for many years, it had only two players), anything that takes one out for a significant length of in-game time is undesirable. So I came up with the idea of a “Regen Tank” (retconned to be a nanotechnology), stolen directly from various sci-fi sources. And ever since, I’ve had to struggle with the equivalent question of just how effective or ineffective it was.
• In general, you don’t want PCs sidelined when their players are present and willing. Having a PC whose player is absent come down with some Dreaded Lurgy, on the other hand, can be a great way of justifying the absence or effective absence of their characters, enabling the game to go on.
• Contrariwise, some game systems try hard for gritty realism, and an appropriate simulation of sicknesses is part of that grit. But the general principle conflicts with that – so they have this question at their heart, too.

All of which demonstrates that this topic is bigger and more significant than the intellectual exercise that it seemed initially. So, let’s give it some serious consideration.

The Argument for Wound Cures

Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about the ubiquity of “Cure Wound” spells and potions. Nicks and wounds are a natural consequence of fantasy adventuring, and the absence of healing for such would have a stultifying effect. I looked into this specific issue indirectly in my series “All Wounds Are Not Alike” which considered the impact of a number of variations on standard Healing. But there are secondary considerations arising from that question – common access to quick healing means that infections are going to be a lot less common, for example, and that means that limbs will need amputating less frequently, and that means that prosthetics will have less impetus to improve and will be comparatively primitive.

No, this article is asking whether or not healing for sicknesses and illnesses beyond the normal scope of Cure Wound spells is too easy and too effective.

Lesser Specific Spells

I once played in a game in which the GM rated all diseases on a one-to-five scale. Double the rating and subtract one and you got the spell level of any spell designed to deal with that specific illness. I’ve shamelessly appropriated the concept for my own use, as you will find out later in the article.

Let’s unpack that a little.

One-star diseases

2 × 1 – 1 = 1 – so curable with a 1st level spell, i.e. by a 1st level cleric.

Two-star diseases

2 × 2 – 1 = 3 – so curable with a 3rd level spell, which requires a cleric of 5th level.

What’s the survival rate of adventurers in your world?

If it’s 90% (unlikely) then there will be 0.9×0.9×0.9×0.9 = 0.6561 clerics of that level for every 1st-level cleric out there.

I once calculated, using the treasure progressions in the 3.x DMG that the rate should be about 14%. 0.14 × 0.14 × 0.14 × 0.14 = 0.00038416 5th level clerics for every 1st level – or 2603 1st level clerics to get one 5th level cleric.

One-in-three tends to be a fairly happy medium. That gives 81 first level clerics for every fifth level cleric.

If one-in-250 people are clerics – enough that anywhere with that population or more will have at least one 1st level cleric – those survival rates give population levels for a fifth level cleric as 381, and 650,750, and 20,250 respectively.

It doesn’t matter how you get to those targets – five villages of 2000 and twenty hamlets of 513 people each is enough to contain a 5th level cleric, if your target is 20,250. With an average separation of maybe 25 miles, maybe 30 miles, that’s a circular region of around 100-115 miles diameter (25 localities, sqr root, over pi, times 25 or 30, times 2 to get diameter).

Why those separations? Because that’s roughly how far you can travel in a day on foot. Double that if traveling by horse, multiply it by three for a forced march, quadruple it if you are changing mounts regularly, and multiply it by 5 if you are traveling in a wagon pulled by at least four horses (reduced by 1 for every 500 lbs of freight being carried).

So the ‘happy medium’ means that a cure for a two-star disease is only a day or two away.

Three-Star Diseases

2 × 3 – 1 = 5 – so curable with a 5th level spell, which requires a cleric of 9th level.

Again working on the ‘happy medium’ numbers, that gives 3^4 5th level clerics for every 9th level cleric – that’s 81 to one (again) and 81×81 = 6,561 1st level clerics for every 9th level cleric.

If one-in-250 people are clerics – enough that anywhere with that population or more will have at least one 1st level cleric – those survival rates give population levels for a ninth level cleric as 1,640,250. There might be a dozen of them in a country the size of medieval France. Weeks of travel are indicated in order to get to one.

Four-Star Diseases

2 × 4 – 1 = 7, so curable with a 7th level spell, which needs a caster of 13th level.

Once again, there will be one of these for every 81 ninth level clerics, or 6,561 fifth level clerics, or 531,441 first level clerics at our ‘happy medium’ survival rate.

At our 1-in-250 clerical population rate, that’s one 14th level cleric for every 132,860,250 people. That’s close enough to the population of medieval western Europe. And that means months of travel to reach one.

Five-Star Diseases

2 × 5 – 1 = 9, so curable with a 9th level spell (which used to be as high as clerical spells went, once upon a time), so a 17th-level cleric.

With our standard assumptions, there’s basically a 1-in-81 chance that there will be one in the equivalent of Medieval Western Europe. That’s 1.2345679%. If the average lifespan of such is 80 years, that means that for each one that comes along, you have to wait another 6400 years for the next. Good luck with that.

The only solution is to look outside the prime material plane. If the population of each plane of existence is about 1/6th the “Western Europe” total – a fairly conservative estimate – then there will be one cleric capable of handling 5-star diseases every 13.5 planes. You could search for years or even decades without finding that one. (Of course, there will be one that you know about: the God who looks after healing).

These results are so relatable that the assumptions get a big tick, in my book.

The Medium-high-level Elephant In The Room

Sticking in the middle of this nice, orderly progression is the 6th level spell, Heal, which restores ten hit points (irrelevant) per level (okay, that’s more significant) and all diseases and mental conditions (oops).

For the progression to work, “Heal” and “Mass Heal” have to be watered down or neutered.

How ubiquitous, given our assumptions, would clerics be that can cast an unmodified Heal? We’re talking about an 11th level cleric. So there would be one for every 9 ninth level clerics. With an estimate of a dozen of the latter in a country like medieval France, we’re about at the point where there will be one Priest of the required ability in most major nations, probably in the capital city. He probably isn’t the head of the church – there’s too much admin and bureaucracy and politics involved in such positions to attract such a pious figure – but expect him to be the priest who looks after that head, and/or the head of state.

“I’ll Just Pop Down To The Temple”

It was long before encountering the 5-star system that these infamous words were first uttered in one of my campaigns. Because it was convenient at the time, and in that particular campaign, I let it slide and ignored the bigger issue. But I’ve seen (and occasionally played) in campaigns in which 6th level was the entry-level requirement for a priest in a major city or holy site. Usually, paradoxically, in campaigns with a far lower survival rate than the one-in-three-per-level “happy medium” used above.

And without watering “Heal” down, that makes Healing too common in my book, unless you’re prepared to spend quite a lot of time working out the implications for society, social order, economics, politics (etc) of such ubiquity.

To me, the results of the 5-star system sound about right. Trivial ailments get cured locally, sparing untold misery and boosting productivity significantly; more serious conditions have to be lived with, but can be cured if someone with sufficient wealth bankrolls your treatment; and still more serious conditions? The wealthy and elite may be spared them, but ordinary folk, not so much.

Others may feel that the 5-star interpretation offered makes healing too hard to access, while agreeing that the one-in-every-pot approach goes too far. It’s easy to choose a different set of assumptions and get a completely different answer. The indicated level of ubiquity for “Heal” may seem about right to them.

Are Diseases Too Weak in D&D?

Perhaps we should turn the problem on its head for a different perspective.

I like to think that the ubiquity of weak Healing was a factor in the creation of the magical diseases listed in the DMG.

Have you ever tried to use one of these? My experience is that they are too weak and too easily cured.

Of course, there’s good reason for this – being laid out by a disease isn’t heroic, and isn’t thrilling. It’s a different story for NPCs, runs the argument – it should be “one rule for the masses, and one rule for us”.

.There’s some merit in that perspective. PCs are generally considered exceptional specimens in most campaigns – that was one of the paradigm shifts that occurred between AD&D and third edition. Why shouldn’t they be spared the mundane worries of disease?

Tell you what, let’s set PCs aside for a moment and ask the question again, restricting applicability to NPCs – “Are diseases too weak in D&D?”

That comes down to campaign and style, but as a general rule, in my own experience, they aren’t so much too weak as too absent – until the GM notices, and then generally overcompensates..

Most campaigns seem to end toward the Utopian, with a bucolic village living in a golden age under threat from a dungeon-based nightmare of some kind.

The more experienced the GM, the more gritty and realistic the campaigns become (except when they deliberately take a lighter tone, so as to be able to focus on other game elements like politics). My Fumanor campaign’s world had its problems, but outside of those issues, citizens generally lived fairly well. Most had enough to eat, and could afford reasonable clothing. My Shards campaign was more Dickensian in approach, with such idyllic lives available only to the wealthy and connected – and to achieve that, I had to restrict the availability and effectiveness of Healing..

If Curing Is Hard, what is gained?

Aside from the health of the general citizenry taking a turn for the worse, that is. There are two different forms of this question, though – because we still have the open issue of whether or not different rules should apply for PCs. Perhaps, in the course of listing the impacts of ‘hard cures’, we can find an answer to that, as well, and get some idea of what those different rules (if any) should be.

Home Cures & ‘Popular Wisdom’

Where there’s sickness and a lack of expertise, home remedies and popular wisdom will provide ‘solutions’. As a general rule, these will either target symptoms, or will provide temporary relief, or will focus on whatever the common folk think is the cause of the illness – which rarely bears any resemblance to a scientific reality.

Of course, a strict scientific reality might have no relevance to a D&D campaign – that’s something else the DM has to think about. As a general rule, though, they have to be internally logical, and most GMs don’t have the time to invest in creating something that is both internally sound and not rooted in modern understanding of what was happening.

This means, of course, that players will understand the world far better than their characters are supposed to, and that can be a recurring problem for the GM. Taking that headache away is one of the major justifications for making that creative effort (the campaign immediately becoming more memorable and distinctive are two others).

Getting back to the point, home cures and ‘popular wisdom’ offer a pathway for the GM to explain (through an NPC) some of the underlying realities of the campaign (if accurate) or, at least, what the people of the game world think they are!

Cheap ‘Cures’ and other Snake Oil

If healing is plentiful, there’s no need for these, and con men will turn to other deceptions. And a source of color becomes much thinner on the ground.

Having an NPC taken in isn’t all that much fun, but it lets the PCs be ‘holier than thou’ or compassionate. Any example of the former is a natural invitation to the GM to teach the arrogant character a lesson. That kind of goes away if PCs are not (broadly speaking) as vulnerable to disease as the general public, because it removes any impetus on the part of the PC to buy.

Faith Healing and other Quackery

A more extreme example of the lengths that people will go to, in search of a cure. While exposing a PC to this level of shenanigans can be moderately entertaining, and a way to relieve the character of ready cash, it’s somehow unsatisfying unless part of a deliberate plot arc in which the PC discovers that he’s been hoodwinked and the Quacks get what’s coming to them in some form. Outside of that circumstance, it’s generally better if some NPC falls into the clutches of Faith Healers.

The reason is because the GM creates the faith and tenets of the Faith Healers, he is imposing those beliefs on the character. Even if the player is willing to take them on board, because they are someone else’s ideas, the player can struggle to integrate them into his character’s world-view; the whole thing can seem tacked-on and superficial. Results are often better if you get the player to design the Faith Healer and the nonsense that he represents, subject to GM approval – but that then raises the question of how skilled the player would be at doing so. Some of my players would struggle with such an assignment, I think, and I’ve got pretty good players.

This consequence actually argues (weakly) in favor of different rules for the two populations.

A Question of Medicine

If there’s less illness, or it’s easily cured, there’s a LOT less impetus for Medicine to develop. On top of that, consider how big the churches were as part of the social lives of Medieval Europe even without the ability to cure common ailments. If you grant them that capacity, how much stronger would their hold on the citizens become?

I’ve used this premise in the past to justify a general prejudice against those “doubters and askers of impertinent questions”, mages, which I have always considered the “natural philosophers” of their realities. These are the people who try to understand the world; they might not be able to deny the metaphysical influence of the Gods, but they want to understand the “how” and “why”. And both undermine strict faith, and can contradict it, and the churches generally don’t like that.

In our own world, church bans against post mortem examinations held back anatomical knowledge for centuries, and that is the essential precursor of modern medicine.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that you can either have clerical healing or a knowledge of Medicine.

Of course, that makes books on anatomy rare, valuable – and forbidden. Great heat-soaks for excess player cash!

Hospitals & Other Institutions

If there are fewer sick, there is less need for somewhere to care for the sick. When was ‘the hospital’ invented? Well, hospitals in the modern sense were preceded by Sanitariums where sunlight (and sometimes salt water bathing) and rest were the most advanced cure on offer, coupled with treatments and primitive medicines that were generally just home remedies, when you got right down to it.

If healing is widespread but restricted in efficacy, as per the five-star system described, such institutions would still exist, but far more of their patients would be those with serious illnesses that could not be readily cured.

In the 18th century, people with serious illnesses (and especially those with mental complaints) were frequently exiled to such places and forgotten. Much the same happened prior to that time, though such care was rarer and more expensive, and hence more restricted; there were cases of people being walled up in a room of their home rather than letting them be seen in public, and often it was implied in conversation that the person had died – that being considered less shameful than that they had come down with this horrible disease, a punishment from God no doubt.

Earlier forms such institutional care were of greater variety; the fountain at Lourdes comes to mind, for example. Pilgrimages were sometimes organized to convey the ill to such curative locations. If you were lucky enough to attend a boarding institutions and recovered from whatever brought you there, it was not uncommon for you to be employed for the care of other sufferers; the concept of immunity was well understood even if the mechanics were not.

It takes very little imagination to translate these into fantasy-world equivalents, and you soon end up with a ‘golden age’ that has a rotten heart festering below the surface.

The Hidden Victims

There are thus three classes of hidden victim: those who have been institutionalized, those who have simply been locked away, and the families of those who have to live with them. These are traumatic episodes, and they have a significant impact on not only the primary sufferer but on those who surround them.

On an episode of Who Do You Think You Are that I caught up with a couple of days ago, an elderly relative of the subject was quoted as having said that they had never had any sense of paternal love or affection, or words to that effect. That’s the sort of impact that we’re talking about.

Plagues & Pandemics

I’ve actually discussed this point before, in Disease and Despair – the healing-resistant nightmare. An underlying assumption of that article was that healing was relatively widespread – certainly more than on the 1 in 3 model offered earlier.

It might be hard to have the proper perspective on this entire question because the world is currently suffering through a once-in-a-century pandemic – events that are near-certain to accelerate in frequency for a number of reasons.

The net impact on societies of Plagues and Pandemics can’t be over- or under-estimated. The one certainty is that there will be such effects, even if it is only through the loss of a particular individual, who then needs to be replaced by someone with more or less competence (but almost-certainly less experience) and with an entirely different style. They may also have a completely different private agenda, and/or a completely different set of allies and enemies.

Ripple effects alone could completely transform a Kingdom. The departed individual was either going to be more or less reactionary in preference and policy proposals than the throne actually implements; the vast likelihood (because that’s the way these things usually work) is that the replacement will fall on the other side of the scale. The Kingdom can thus go from enlightened and benevolent to strict and authoritarian, or vice versa, in extremely short order.

And that’s without the social impact of so many deaths, or the economic impact if one group is harder hit than the average, or the psychological impact of the fear that is likely to arise.

As I said, perspective is hard to come by when you’re in the middle of a pandemic. Study the Black Plague or the Influenza of 1918, or read Demon Lord Of Karanda, the third volume of the Mallorean, by David Eddings, or Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, both which feature plagues / epidemics (links are to Amazon, I get a small commission if you buy).

Lost Limbs & Simple Replacements

I’ve touched on this already. So this heading serves as a simple reminder.

Disease as a Punishment

I’ve hinted at this already, too. Diseases were often viewed as punishments by the gods, or the work of devils and demons in the event that the sufferer was known to be pious.

Either a whole new set of rules gets applied because of the Divine origins, or Disease as a punishment is off the table if healing is widespread. And a significant tool of the forces of Darkness gets substantially weakened.

Torture

On the darker side, ubiquitous healing – even of the potion / Cure Light Wounds variety – can be used to enhance torture as an interrogation technique. Just anoint the wounds with a little of the potion to prevent death during questioning without diminishing the pain being inflicted and it becomes much harder to go too far.

Disease as a Weapon

While on the subject of darker thoughts: it was rare but not unheard of to use catapults to fling the bodies of those who had died of disease into enemy strongholds and castles during a siege in hopes of infecting those inside. It’s certainly quite a ruthless practice. Thankfully it loses effectiveness if healing is widespread, (depending on how virulent the disease is, of course).

The Magical Diseases

If healing is widespread, you are far more reliant on the Magical Diseases. And not only do I think they are not up to the job, there’s nowhere near enough variety amongst them.

They are also too knife-edge – nothing or plague, there’s no in-between. That’s because the natural diseases that should occupy that in-between spot are susceptible to Healing if that’s commonplace.

Too many GMs consider these from the perspective of a low-level character, which is when they can be quite foreboding – but that requires an encounter which is far beyond the capabilities of the PCs at the time. By the time you are of a high enough level to cope with a Night Hag, your susceptibility is markedly reduced, perhaps even non-existent.

Something that I’ve done on occasion in my campaigns is make these diseases immune to Clerical Healing – but susceptible to the Laying On Of Hands of a Paladin of a particular level.

Bottom line: if Healing is widespread, you are justified in making these diseases a LOT nastier. If it’s not, you are justified in making them a BIT nastier. If you adopt the ‘clerical resistance,’ you can leave them be because the treatment is far harder to come across and restricted in supply – and you can vary that supply by different settings of Paladin Level.

The Quest For A Cure

A major plotline gets taken off the table if Healing is too widely accessible – the quest for a cure. The victim on whose behalf you quest need not be a PC, though that adds impetus if it is. This can not only be a plotline in its own right, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it can be a driver of sub-plots. Another book by David Eddings, The Diamond Throne, is all about The Quest For A Cure (regardless of what it might say or suggest on the back cover – worst Blurb ever, at least on my copy!) – the link is to a compiled anthology of all three volumes in the Elenium, of which The Diamond Throne is only the first. My favorite is the last part, because of the political shenanigans, but don’t let that bias you!

PC Vulnerability

So the only arguments in favor of a different set of rules for PCs come down to Cure Wounds and a weak contribution that can be handled with a special case.

The more widespread healing is, the weaker any arguments in favor of the PCs being exceptional in this regard. Even the proposed distribution in the star-rating system discussion is enough to leave those arguments undented, whereas with the “6th level spell that can cure anything”, Heal, treatment is so easily accessed that almost ANY disease is nothing more than an inconvenience.

And that’s the Break Point between the two halves that I had in mind. While I have enough time left to make a start on the next sections, I don’t think I have anywhere near enough time to finish. So, next week, Take Two And Call Me Again will cover:

• Simple disease simulation rules
• How to create / document a disease, and
• Provide a quick review of about 45 diseases that I thought of off the top of my head, before wrapping up.

Hmm – that will make this Blog Carnival six weeks long, which I think (though I might be wrong) is a record….

984… 985…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Fourteen to go (not counting next week’s post)!

It’s easy to imagine this as the casting of a spell. It’s not; it’s burning steel wool being swung on a string of some kind. But it sure looks impressive.
Image by Faizal Sugi from Pixabay

I saw a question on Quora the other day asking how you could give an RPG a particular style. I thought about giving an answer, but the more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became.

No campaign is imbued with its own unique style right from the get-go. It takes time, and a continuous evolution, and consistency for that to develop. But you can give it a good starting point.

Because of where this question was asked, the foundation that the request was eliciting was D&D. I immediately thought of four different styles that any answer would have to accommodate in order to be generic.

Each of these further expanded the vague notions that came to mind in terms of an answer. It soon became clear that there were a wealth of considerations.

So those four styles became my test cases. The styles are High Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery, and Political.

It soon became clear that any adequate answer to the question would take far more room, and be far longer than was reasonable in that forum and the time available. That meant that it was tailor-made for a venue in which I could be as expansive as necessary – like Campaign Mastery. My course was sealed when I realized that it would dovetail nicely with this month’s Blog Carnival, due to end in just a few days.

Before I get to how each of these can be implemented, let’s run through all the factors that have to come together to form a campaign style.

There’s a lot to get through, so let’s get to work…

What Is Style in an RPG?

‘Style’ is a focus or orientation within an adventure or a campaign. Encounters are too fleeting to have much of a style of their own, though they can make a contribution to the adventure or campaign style.

That’s a very practical definition; I don’t want to get caught up in theoretical discussions. Most people will know what is meant by the term (especially given the test cases described) without needing much explanation, if any.

Another way to answer the question would be to specify a sub-genre to which the campaign or adventure will (mostly) adhere. In a science-fiction campaign, that might be dystopia or cyberpunk or star trek or space fantasy or any of a number of others. In fantasy, we have swords-and-sorcery, high fantasy, the test cases listed earlier, and more.

Style is broader than a campaign theme – a theme is an idea or concept that will be explored in the course of the campaign, possibly from many different perspectives. Style provides a context and background to a theme, a space in which to explore that theme. For example, “Responsibility” is a perfectly valid theme, but it’s not a style. A “political campaign” is a style, indicating that the adventures and motivations will center around the politics of the game world – and “Responsibility” would be a completely acceptable theme within that style.

Most game settings come with ready-made styles that are inherent (if, perhaps, not obvious) to that setting – choices of adventure that explore something interesting about the setting. That’s how you can get styles that are defined as “John’s Dragonlance” or “Paul’s Eberron” or “Jimmy’s Star Wars” or whatever. That’s a succinct way of saying “X’s campaign definitely has its own style, but I don’t know how to sum it up in words, so I’ll just label it and move on.”

Make no mistake, even if you don’t expressly pursue a particular style, one will emerge naturally through the symbiosis of adventures, GM style and technique, and players. It will be a wild beast, unpredictable at times, uncertain all the time, but distinct to that particular campaign. It may even be able to trace its ancestry to antecedent campaigns. While it can be fun to let a campaign find its own voice in this way, it does mean more work for the GM as they have to remain open to greater flexibility in PC choices. What a calculated and deliberate style confers is focus and direction, which excludes a great many alternatives that the GM doesn’t have to consider in prep.

With a working understanding of what the topic of the day is all about, let’s plunge into the different elements that contribute to a campaign’s style, and that may have to be altered to infuse a campaign with a particular style. I’ve numbered these entries just to bind them together.

1. Game System

The game system has a big impact on the campaign styles to which the system lends itself. D&D, Rolemaster, Empire Of The Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls, and Elfquest are all fantasy game systems, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Each has its differences (and they can be profound) – and those distinctions both confer a certain stylistic envelope to all campaigns that run under that game system and comprise a stylistic fingerprint that ‘comes with the territory’.

To a certain extent, a directed style choice means one of two things: forcing a game system beyond its normal limits, or restricting attention to a limited portion of the natural envelope so as to focus on it.

An example of the first is attempting to run a science fiction -styled campaign using D&D. It certainly can be done, and it remains a fantasy campaign – it just has some odd undercurrents. To some extent, D&D is a ‘monster bash’ game system, so a Horror D&D pushes the boundaries – but Ravensloft is another of those very popular campaign settings because it does just that.

A political campaign, on the other hand, is completely within the natural envelope of the game system – in fact, of virtually every game system, simply because politics is such an inherent feature of human society. I can easily imagine a perfectly “Diplomacy” campaign set in the world of Star Trek, exploring the political structures of both members and non-members of the United Federation Of Planets, negotiating treaties, avoiding wars (or starting them), and so on. I can also imagine a “Diplomatic” campaign set in the Star Wars universe – the Empire trying to keep its subject worlds from revolting while they track down the rebels, or the Rebels trying to woo subject worlds into supporting their cause, openly if possible, covertly if not. Those two campaigns have superficial similarities in some respects, but I’m sure everyone would agree that they would be quite different campaigns despite those similarities.

You can run a Super-spies campaign using the James Bond game-system, the Babylon-5 game system, Pathfinder, or the Hero game system – and each would be distinctly different for all that they have in common.

That’s because each game system comes with its own baggage – assumptions and choices that may be buried so deeply within the game concepts that you can never fully extricate them, and you could even argue that without them, the game system itself is inherently changed. For example, picture a D&D campaign in which there is no magic. None. Nada. Zip. And no creatures that overtly rely on magic to make them viable – no Dragons, no Deities, no Devils or Demons. Is such a campaign truly still D&D? I can see people arguing yes or no over this for hours with no consensus emerging – because the key question is only inferred and never directly addressed by the question as posed: To what extent is the ubiquity of magic a fundamental part of the D&D tapestry?

Every game system has an envelope describing adventures that are a ‘natural fit’ with those underlying assumptions and excluding adventures that are not, and also contributes to the style of any campaign run using that game system by virtue of those underlying assumptions.

2. Genre and Sub-genre

But that’s not the be-all and end-all of the question. Identifying a key genre or sub-genre within that envelope also contributes to the style of the campaign. This is where the different game settings come in – each also has an envelope or context in which certain adventures just work and certain adventures have to be altered in scope, context, or premise in order to sit comfortably.

Imagine an adventure set in some Hobbiton-like rural environment with lots of Hobbits at its center. That fits very naturally into core D&D, but assumes all sorts of overtones if the game setting is Ravensloft.

I’ve already discussed most of the content that belongs under this subheading in the previous section – necessarily, because it was also relevant to the game system question – so I don’t have much more to add, except to say this: just as there are certain adventures that are a comfortable fit within a given game system, so there are certain genres and sub-genres that fit comfortably within that game system. So much so that quite often, you are well served by choosing your preferred Genre and, perhaps, Sub-genre, and letting those choices guide your selection of game system.

3. Style-supporting House Rules

The only way to really push beyond the boundaries of a given game system is to institute House Rules to expand the scope of the core system. Most of the famous D&D game settings do this. Forgotten Realms and Eberron are not interchangeable. Even when the game system is explicitly enabled for a particular Genre – “Pulp Hero” within the “Hero System”, for example – House Rules may be necessary to fully embrace the Genre that you want as your campaign foundation.

One of the things that distinguishes my many D&D campaigns is that each has its own game setting and set of House Rules that expand the boundaries of what is natural under the combination – while excluding things that aren’t. I won’t go into buckets of detail, there isn’t room; I’ll just say that without those house rules adding oomph to the campaign style, they would feel very ‘vanilla’. A large part of the campaigns is often set aside for discovering the cultural and social implications of the House Rules, of exploring the uniqueness that each set brings to the campaign environment..

Supporting a Genre, a Sub-genre, or a Style within those, is one of the best justifications for a House Rule. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only alternative valid justification, the correction of broken rules, should never manifest a new House Rule that is not (at the very least) mindful of the Stylistic impact of the change. There may be six possible fixes to any broken rule; Style should be your guide to choosing between them. This may result in choosing a solution other than the most efficient in an absolute sense, but the added contribution to style may justify it.

4. Style Of Characters

In a game world without magic, certain character archetypes need either re-imagining or complete rejection. It might be a different story if magic were to suddenly stop working (the implication being that it can start again), but – in general – validity in character choice is dictated by Game System, Genre, Sub-Genre (if applicable), and intended Style. In this context, Style may be thought of as a lens of colored glass – altering some choices and making others all but invisible.

If the intended style is Political, a Barbarian character won’t fit very well – not without a little cosmetic surgery to the class concept, at least. Rogues, Mages, and Clerics are a more natural fit. Fighters, less so – they may be right on the edge of suitability.

It follows that the GM should give the players at least a vague idea of the intended style of a campaign before character generation takes place, and that the players should be guided in their choices by that information. It further follows that the GM should reject some characters as unsuitable for this campaign at this time if they don’t fit the style – or should at least discuss how the character will fit into the planned style before accepting an outlier.

But style is a two-way street; part of the style of a campaign comes from the choices of the PCs, and that derives from the options available to the PCs, and that derives in turn from the original design of the PCs. If ‘desired style’ is used as a design criterion for those PCs in the first place, the characters themselves become natural amplifiers of Style, pushing the campaign in the desired general direction.

If the GM decides to take an alternative vision for the PCs, asking the players to generate “Every-men” who will find themselves in extraordinary situations and have to rise to the occasion – in other words, requiring design choices to be based upon an intended campaign Theme – then the results will be a modifier to the campaign style, not an Amplifier. The differences can be both subtle and profound.

I could, at this point, launch into a related topic – the stylistic contributions of the players in play – but I’m trying to follow a logical progression here, so I’ll save that for later.

5. Style Of Plotlines

To start with, I should make it clear that I’m distinguishing between plotlines and adventures because the one plotline – a plot arc – can be woven through multiple adventures. Plotlines are ‘big picture’, in other words, while ‘adventures’ are parts of the big picture, expressed in playable form.

If you want to run a political campaign, you had better have adventures that deal with the politics of the game setting. All the shaping of Style in earlier sections comes down to making room for focus on a particular type of adventure – so not having plotlines that generate those kinds of adventures is rather pointless.

That said, if you follow the advice elsewhere in this article, your style will often be able to support the occasional digression or diversion from the core style, in order to keep the adventures fresh and interesting, and will be the richer for it. At least half your plotlines should directly reflect the chosen style, though, and no other style should be more than half of what’s left. This gives you scope for the occasional Romantic Interlude or Action Plotline or whatever. And if you can give these an overtone that hearkens back to the core Style, these become explorations of the fringes of that Style, and perfectly valid within the campaign structure.

A brief review of my Zenith-3 campaign might be relevant at this point, something I’ve never done from this particular perspective. It’s divided into phases.

• In Phase 1, campaign elements were introduced and campaign themes hinted at. Most adventures existed only to put the right chess pieces on the ‘board’ for later use. Individual adventures will be resolved but most plot arcs will persist.
• In Phase 2 (where the campaign is now), more campaign elements are being introduced and prior campaign elements – NPCs, situations, plotlines, plot arcs – are starting to interact. Again, the campaign themes are only being hinted at. Individual adventures will be resolved but most plot arcs will persist.
• In Phase 3, a few campaign elements will be introduced having been foreshadowed in Phases 1 and 2, and existing plotlines will continue to develop and unfold. Some plotlines that initially appeared unrelated will coalesce into more complicated situations. A few plotlines that existed only to introduce or manipulate early campaign elements will be resolved. Adventures will continue to be resolved on an individual basis but most plot arcs will persist. Campaign themes may be hinted at in specific adventures. Consequences of past adventures will have secondary effects.
• In Phase 4, several campaign plot arcs will coalesce or be resolved. Consequences of past adventures will have secondary effects. A few campaign elements will be introduced but this will be a relatively minor part of the phase content. Those few will be highly significant, however. Around half the existing plotlines will continue to develop and unfold. Most adventures will either explore ideas tangential to the main themes or will foreshadow the main themes. Consequences of past adventures will have secondary and tertiary effects. There will be some increase in the stakes of individual adventures.
• In Phase 5, most of the remaining plot arcs will interact or coalesce or be resolved, forming one primary plot arc with lots of complications and a number of side issues that threaten to worsen those complications. Most of those complications will derive from past adventures, directly or indirectly. Adventures will increase markedly in stakes. A few campaign elements will be introduced but this will be a relatively minor part of the phase content. Those few will be highly significant. A number of plot twists and revelations are planned.
• In Phase 6, the major plotline will be resolved, the game world will be utterly transformed, the stakes will be as high as they get. Everything will relate to the one plotline and to the campaign themes.
• In Phases 7-9, handful of individual adventures will explore the early consequences of whatever happens in Phase 6, and bring to a conclusion the plotlines of the surviving PCs (if any). This deals with the aftermath in different regions of the game universe.

So the campaign starts by more or less ignoring the campaign theme and consists of a number of different adventure styles. As it progresses, though, there is increasing alignment with those dominant themes and increasing consistency of style – though the campaign themes are broad enough that a number of variations and fringe issues can and will be exploited.

6. Style Of Adventures

Again, I’ve addressed this fairly solidly in the previous section – because that was necessary to fully explore it. It’s important to note that your adventure styles can’t be monotonous; even if your primary style is Political in nature, you will still need the occasional variation. As the campaign works its way to a conclusion, however, everything should focus in on the central style and theme.

7. Style Of Encounters

Every encounter adds to the style of the adventure, obviously. But they cumulatively add to the style of the campaign, too. Some encounters are all about talking, others about combat, and still others are about applying skill. In some encounters, the PCs give information or direction, in others, they receive information and encounter circumstances that circumscribe their options either immediately or for some time to come. Some encounters create opportunities, others eliminate choices. All of these variations and distinctions (and more) combine to reflect the style of the campaign.

Again drawing upon the Zenith-3 campaign for examples, a few situations have to be resolved with combat, but in far more cases, the PCs are levers in search of a fulcrum that will permit them to change a situation without conflict; in this way, they can deal with social movements and enemies that are far too potent for direct confrontation. At the same time, they are frail and usually damaged human beings, and the work they do leaves scars and wounds on their personal lives. Sometimes, there is tragedy and heartbreak; sometimes, life-and-death choices need to be made; and sometimes, they can relax and enjoy life, however momentarily, even in the darkest of situations. The most trivial of decisions can have repercussions many orders of magnitude greater, given time. Personal connections are one source of those fulcrums – so, ultimately, the campaign is roleplay oriented, and puzzle-solving oriented, more than it is a combat-fest.

That means that most encounters don’t involve combat, they involve talking and comprehension of ideas, and expressions of ideas, and give-and-take negotiations – and even those that do involve combat are usually resolved in one or more of these other interaction modes.

The current stage of the campaign broadens their campaign world and reveals it to be a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. But it also introduces them to resources that they can use to solve later problems. All of that happens in the form of encounters and discoveries. The pretext (at a metagame level) is that they are searching for a new base of operations from which to operate a sub-campaign – one in which they have different identities and a different leadership structure. The pretext is quite literally a vehicle for delivering various unrelated encounters – that, at a future point in time, will become very relevant to the campaign.

8. Style Of Challenges

Again, I’ve touched on this in the preceding section. A Challenge is a problem that needs to be resolved without combat or talking – it might be using a character’s skills or abilities to accomplish something or it might be making a decision or figuring out something. Some of these can be resolved with dice rolling, but many of them come down to difficult decisions.

9. Style Of Narrative

I’ve discussed the power of narrative many times. Your ultimate goal with narrative is to impart information, and the secondary purpose is usually to impart a sense of realism or believability to the environment and world. But an important tertiary function of good narrative is to impart a sense of atmosphere, and that contributes to the overall style of the campaign and the adventure. So important is this tertiary function that I’ve done an entire series on the subject – The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative – so I don’t have to say very much about it here!

10. Style Of Imagery

Imagery comes in two forms, so far as I’m concerned (in an RPG context): Theater of the mind and something you actually show the players. The first derives its stylistic flourishes from the nuances of descriptive language that you’ve imparted – stylish narrative again – and the second? It can either add to that impression or detract from it, depending on what images you choose.

Learning to manipulate the images that you find that aren’t quite right can extend your reach considerably. For example, of late, I’ve become reasonably adept at converting autumn images into high summer. That involves color manipulation, and textural manipulation. and masking off protected areas, and the addition of realistic foliage – well, reasonably realistic foliage! To be honest, 2/3 of the images are just “good enough”, but the remaining 1/3 are things to be proud of! (I’m unsure of the copyright availability of the base images, so I can’t risk sharing any of them with my readers, I’m afraid).

You can even play games with the imagery subtext and choose styles that give clues to the players – I did that a while back with a scene supposedly obtained from a security camera that the PCs hacked in an emergency.

11. Style Of In-game Outcomes

How you describe outcomes is also important; you need to phrase these in terms of the overall style of campaign. In a political campaign, the political impact of an event or action needs to be front and center. Equally important, because it feeds that narrative, is how you assess the outcomes.

It can be equally important to leave out or subvert outcome descriptions that are both obvious and that detract from that style. “You persuade him to back down, but have offended many religious onlookers who may actively start to undermine or bypass your authority in the future” – the result of a successful roll to do something that solves the PCs short-term problem but didn’t pay enough attention to the longer-term ramifications. The shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line!

12. Style Of Rewards

This is something that probably wouldn’t occur to many, but the rewards that you impart to the PCs can contribute to the style of the campaign in surprising ways, because they expand the options available to the players or the capability of the PCs to employ a particular solution to a problem. Your rewards for solving a political problem should not make the character more effective at combat unless the political problem was a deviation from a combat-style campaign. The reward should, instead, be political in nature – “X admits that he owes you a favor and asks what he can do to clear the debt”.

13. Style Of Contributions

I struggled to give this section a proper title. I’m not really happy with “contributions” but it will suffice.

Players and their approaches to problems will have an ongoing impact on campaign style. Where those influences are simpatico with the intended style, they can act to further define and refine your vision, evolving it toward a unique variation on the main style. Where there is a conflict, you can fight it (reducing the overall fun of the campaign) or go with it (and take it as a hint that your players might not be fully onboard with the style targets that you’ve set, and perhaps should dilute them a bit more).

High Fantasy Campaign

So, let’s take a look at the four styles of campaign, from a D&D perspective. High Fantasy is relatively easy, so it makes a nice soft entry point into this part of the article.

High Fantasy is all about exploring the fantastic, and is often bombastic in nature. It’s the “space opera” of Fantasy. I love it because it gets to explore all the conceptual mechanics behind the game world, and those are great fun to create. Others may not like it as much because the adventures tend toward being a bit ‘cosmic’, though I always try to keep the campaign’s feet on the ground by exploring the ramifications for ordinary people. Gods and Mythic figures stalk this sort of campaign, and some critters are just too mundane to be the focus of attention – at least without some dressing up.

1. Game System – D&D
2. Genre and Sub-Genre – High Fantasy
3. House Rules – Exotic places and Races. Maybe a specialist character class or two.
4. Characters – Intelligent characters are favored. Characters with an obligation or desire to protect / preserve / maintain the multiverse are favored.
5. Plotlines – Something awful is happening to the multiverse. PCs have to become aware of it, identify it, discover who’s responsible and why, and do something about it.
6. Adventures – Initially, fairly mundane with hints at something bigger going on. Side effects of the something awful. Exploration beyond the Material World in search of the cause. Probably one or two raids on possible culprits. Discovery of the true enemy. Confrontation. Consequences.
7. Encounters – Most of what the PCs encounter will be beyond direct confrontation; they will need to be targeted carefully and need non-combat resolution. More encounters with potential allies than is usual, some reluctant.
8. Challenges – intellectual and aimed at the Players and their understanding of the game world, for the most part.
9. Narrative – The dryer and more sciency the subject, the more poetic should be your approach. Save the non-flowery stuff for PC interactions with the exotic, when clarity is more important. Beware of pomposity. Above all, use “nitty-gritty” language as sparingly as possible.
10. Imagery – Explosions and rays make everything better. Look for the fantastic. If necessary, create it. Beware of pomposity, but be grandiose.
11. Outcomes – Every adventure should result in the PCs knowing more about the structure and nature of the game world (and/or its inhabitants) than they did. Much of this knowledge will be ‘forbidden’ so an early adventure needs to give them unreliable access to such knowledge, perhaps at a price.
12. Rewards – see above. Resources for information gathering. Resources for exploring beyond the Material. Favors, obligations, alliances – the more unlikely, the better.

That’s a reasonable prescription for a generic High Fantasy campaign, and shows how every level of the campaign contributes to the totality of the style.

Science Fiction Campaign

This is much harder. What we’re talking about here is providing reasonable, plausible, pseudo-science explanations for everything that’s fantastic, making the fantastic mundane – while keeping it awesome and amazing..

1. Game System – D&D
2. Genre and Sub-Genre – Middle-Fantasy Pseudo-science
3. House Rules – Answer the hard questions. Explore the conceptual ramifications. Rewrite rules as necessary to reflect them. For example, applying inverse-square laws to magical effects.
4. Characters – Intelligent characters are favored. Characters with a down-to-earth attitude can be useful foils.
5. Plotlines – The quest for answers, for an understanding the underlying game physics and how to manipulate the environment to your advantage. How this understanding is to be achieved defines the road-map of the overall campaign, the ultimate application of it in defense of it’s achievements defines the campaign conclusion.
6. Adventures – Early adventures should emphasize the apparently fantastic nature of the world and create a sense of dissatisfaction at the illogic of the explanations. Opportunities to acquire new perspectives and worldviews should follow. By mid-campaign, the PCs should be amongst the foremost experts in the nature of reality, with a clear path of discovery and exploration to follow. Ask and answer “Why” repeatedly.
7. Encounters – These will fall into three groups: those with information to teach the PCs, those who seek to protect their dogma, and those who don’t care (and are therefore ‘grunts’ of various levels of ability, some of them well-educated in what – to the PCs – should be trivialities.
8. Challenges – Intellectual and imaginative.
9. Narrative – you can use the florid modes of expression when describing effects but otherwise should focus on the ordinary and matter-of-fact delivery of narrative.
10. Imagery – use of traditional fantasy imagery will be fine, much of the time. And look for illustrations in junior science books – things like falling apples.
11. Outcomes – like High Fantasy, every adventure should result in the PCs knowing more about the structure and nature of the game world (and/or its inhabitants) than they did. Much more of this campaign structure should focus on those who want to prevent the PCs gaining knowledge that is (or “should be”) forbidden. This is a story of social revolution, and all sorts of otherwise quite agreeable people will oppose it.
12. Rewards – allies, resources, understanding. Even wealth is a resource in this context (and presumably a very expendable one).

Mystery Campaign

Fantasy mysteries are even harder than fantasy sci-fi, for the same reasons that sci-fi mysteries are hard. I discussed Asimov’s basic principles in The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs and his technique in Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs. The same principles can be adapted to a Fantasy mystery – but it’s twice as hard, because cause-and-effect can be uncoupled by the Fantastic. That means that a lot of your technique will need to derive from the science-fiction version of fantasy discussed in the previous section.

It gets harder still when you realize that, for your entire campaign to be mystery-oriented, you only have two choices of model: the police procedural, in which a new mystery is introduced and resolved in each adventure, and the serial police procedural (like ’24’) in which a single mystery can be large enough to comprise the entirety of the campaign. And it’s really hard to keep big mysteries interesting, and really hard to keep small mysteries interesting and not trivial. The first is actually the easier problem to solve – you simply need to keep raising the stakes, but at no point can you let the situation grow too frustrating for the players – progress must always be visible, or they might just give up.

1. Game System – D&D
2. Genre and Sub-Genre – Mystery
3. House Rules – Tools and resources for examination of locations in detail
4. Characters – Intelligent characters are favored, but some bulldogs are often useful. Specialist characters who can bring different areas of knowledge to a situation can be useful, but will probably require expansion of the Knowledges subsystem.
5. Plotlines – If you go with the one-big-mystery approach, that is your plotline, and everything else needs to dance around it. If you go with the Sherlock Holmes / Police Procedural approach, your plotline is likely to involve the personal and professional lives of your characters, and take the form of subplots entwined within the mystery of the week.
6. Adventures – In the one-big-mystery approach, there have to be multiple layers which can be penetrated one at a time. Each adventure’s yield is a clue or a lead to be followed up in a subsequent adventure. In the procedural approach, adventures are self-contained mysteries that have to be solved and the personal / professional lives of the investigators.
7. Encounters – Encounters can be grouped into two types: encounters that advance the plot towards a solution, and encounters that don’t. A percentage of the latter will be encounters that hinder the solution of the plot, but most of them will relate to other aspects of the campaign.
8. Challenges – Intellectual.
9. Narrative – Lean towards the detailed and matter-of-fact. The first can be quite difficult to achieve with compressed narrative, so you will need to find ways of delivering detailed information without creating a blur of details. You will also need to bear in mind that the players are not their characters.
10. Imagery – You can find lots of images that reflect theories of what may have happened, but everything else will be harder to come by. Resorting to on-the-fly sketches and the like can add an air of authenticity, though, so think about getting some “paper” printed up that looks like old stock, and experiment.
11. Outcomes – In the one-big-mystery approach, adventure outcomes should emphasize progress toward a solution (or a reversal in same). In the procedural model, outcomes should emphasize the resolution of the mystery of the week, perhaps by doing what Colombo episodes did at the start of the show – revealing the who and how of the crime by showing it. An element of Agatha Christie may also be useful as a framing device, having the PCs gather for a dinner party at which the final solution is to be revealed.
12. Rewards – There should be some scope for the characters getting better at solving mysteries and getting involved in bigger mysteries as a result. But at least part of the rewards should focus on resourcefulness outside of the mystery-solving arena for those occasions when confrontations are necessary. Much will depend on whether or not the PCs number some “bulldogs” amongst their compliment.

Political Campaign

As a long-time fan of The West Wing, I couldn’t resist considering a political campaign – in fact, this was one of the first styles that came to mind.

Any political campaign has a couple of ground rules that have to be followed:

• Everyone has an agenda that is justified in their own mind.
• Agendas conflict.
• Factions. And minorities. All of which have agendas. Say no more.
• Unstable balances of power. Shifting alliances. Back-room deals.
• Allies, some of whom can’t be trusted, all of which will have their own agendas.
• Enemies, some of whom can be trusted if a situation is in their best interest, and some of whom can’t. And by now you know what I’m going to say about Agendas.
• Power. Who has it, who wants it, and what they are willing to do to get it.
• The role of the PCs in all of this needs to be clearly defined.

To some extent, Adventures in a political campaign can be defined as “What’s the worst possible thing that could happen now?”. To some extent, consequences of past acts and decisions and compromises coming home to roost.

And whenever anything happens, every faction and individual needs to try to find an opportunity to benefit themselves or their agenda. Even if that makes solving the problem harder for the PCs.

That last is a LOT of work; a system will be needed to reduce it to a manageable routine. I have the preliminary glimmerings of one, but it’s way too difficult to do generically. The general principles are based on a flowchart, isolating specific factions, minorities, and vested interests who are either directly affected or who can make an obvious move to further their self-interests, based on spheres of authority. Political Spectra also factor in. But it isn’t something that’s anywhere near ready to present to the world; I’ll have to leave it percolating in the back of my mind for a while, yet. Possibly for quite a while.

It might even be that a better approach, in the meantime, would be to pick a faction to “be a problem” and work backwards from that to the event that creates the opportunity.

1. Game System – D&D
2. Genre and Sub-Genre – Political Games
3. House Rules – See preliminary discussion above
4. Characters – Social and intellectual characters preferred.
5. Plotlines – Kings don’t generally get elected, so re-election is out. That tends to leave either one big political crisis that has to be resolved, or serial adventures and problems of the week. The latter are SO much easier that the preliminary discussion largely assumes that this is the GM’s choice. But if you want to go for the one-big-crisis, most of the advice offered for one-big-mystery campaigns applies.
6. Adventures – So, problem-of-the-week. The name of the game is political survival, no matter what the world throws at you.
7. Encounters – Lots of talking. Some deduction. Some subterfuge. An emphasis on society and politics. It would be well to know what you’re talking about, and to maintain political neutrality. That may mean modeling your politics on a country other than that of yourself and your players, if anyone has trouble being neutral. Or you can pick some faction that everyone agrees with and let them be the ‘good guys’.
8. Challenges – Power games. Watch The West Wing, you’ll see what I mean.
9. Narrative – The Fantastic doesn’t go over very well in Political campaigns. Matter-of-fact is the better choice.
10. Imagery – Character design and costume design forums are likely to be your best resources. Start with Pinterest and find some relevant boards.
11. Outcomes – You probably need some sort of scoreboard. Maybe something based around a deck of cards so that the power and influence of multiple factions can be represented. The deck probably won’t be good for much else afterwards, though.
12. Rewards – Your faction gains in authority or influence, overcomes a problem, advances their agenda, or stems the blood-loss from a threat to their authority and influence. Perhaps you might gain an ally or an intelligence asset. Most other forms of reward are irrelevant frippery, but titles can be good sources of color if not over-used.

Final Advice

So there you have it – four campaigns, each distinctly – well, arguably – D&D, but each distinctly different. Putting style into your campaigns is so easy that it’s going to happen anyway, and you can’t dictate exactly what the ultimate style of any given campaign will be – you can define a starting point and play towards a central style, but at least part of the equation is out of your control.

Accept that, learn to use it to your advantage, and remember that your goal is to entertain first and foremost.

There are a wealth of stylistic factors that contribute to a campaign’s specific style. So many, in fact, that the occasional deviation from that style is quite tolerable. Use the ones that you don’t need to vary in an adventure or an encounter to ‘make room’ for those you do, and you can have the best of all worlds.

Reminder: Time is running out to contribute to this month’s Blog Carnival! Soon, it will migrate elsewhere!

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I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Sixteen to go!