This series is a concordance of Seasonal Summations for different locales around the world. That serves a number of different functions:

• it provides a climatic baseline from which any number of analogues, regardless of campaign genre, can be generated;
• it compares and contrasts different locations, enabling the reader (and the author) to start getting a grip on the really critical factors in terms of weather generation simulations;
• it acquaints the reader with backgrounds and histories on a heap of locations, each of which can be used as the inspiration for others if not used directly; and,
• it gives a list of the seasonal activities in each location, again providing a rich source of ideas that can be translated into any game genre.

But predominantly, it’s about the weather – and so far, it’s been all about Winter.

Part 1 began with Winter descriptions for McMurdo (Antarctica), Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Tahiti, and Cairo. It explored, completely as a side issue, the role that latitude plays in the weather.

Part 2 covered Winter in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Miami, New Orleans, and New York City. Or to put it another way, it examined the role of the Western Atlantic and – again as an aside – determined that it wasn’t the water temperature or gulf stream that mattered so much, it was the air above the water and the direction it moved in.

Part 3 began a trek westward across the USA, examining the relevance of longitude, and found that it was rather more important than generally thought – but only in terms of the proximity of masses of water, and the extent to which air currents can carry moisture from a water-source to land. So far, all the locations have been within 4° of latitude, but there have been some locations added to the list in Part 4. This tour started in Washington DC (following New York City in Part 2), and then traveled to Detroit, Chicago, and finally a city fairly close to midway across the US (and perhaps the most surprising one to date), Omaha, Nebraska.

This is the fourth post in the series, and the second half of that American Trek, and the focus this time is on Mountains and the Eastern Pacific. We’ll start in the deserts of Nevada for Las Vegas, then head to just east of the Rockies for Denver, Colorado. I’ll then cross them to find Spokane, Washington. My preliminary research into that location convinced me that I needed northern West-Coast representation, and (with some difficulty) chose Seattle, Washington for the purpose. That will be followed by San Francisco, wrapping up this section of the series.

Part 5 will look at the central and north-Western Pacific with a number of Asian cities chosen to be comprehensive from the many available, on the basis of everything I’ve learned so far working on this series. The current plan calls for Honolulu, Tokyo, Beijing, Bangkok, Shigatse (Tibet), and Kathmandu (Nepal). The only location missing is India, but that would be another deal like Brazil; India contains everything from Himalayas to sub-tropical or even semi-tropical Jungle, and just about anything else you can think of, in-between. A single entry would be inadequate, and anything else wouldn’t add anything you wouldn’t already get from the above. There remains a little uncertainty over Shanghai vs Beijing, and whether or not to include Hong Kong, simply because I think the weather there might be as unusual as the location.

Part 6 is going to deal with Southwestern Europe (plus a Canadian ringer): Montreal, Rome, Madrid, London, Glasgow, Berlin. The most notable omission in this section is Paris, and I’d love to sneak it in.

Part 7 wraps up Winter, dealing with Northern Europe and North-Eastern Eurasia (with an American ringer): Switzerland, Stockholm, Moscow, Siberia, Anchorage, and Reykjavik. All environments that can be characterized as Alpine, or colder.

Thereafter, parts 8-14 will handle Spring (same cities), parts 15-21, Summer, and parts 22-28, Autumn. Currently I’m averaging 13,000 words to a post, or about 2400 words to a city. My revised estimate for the whole series is 250,000 words. It’s my hope and expectation that because I don’t have to do histories etc for each city in parts 7-28, that they will be half as long and can be knocked out almost twice as fast. At the moment, it’s taking 1.7 working days, 4 days a week, per city; if I can get that down to a city a day or better for the latter parts of the series, the whole thing should be complete around December 12, fingers crossed!

But ideally, I’ll get done faster than that, as I have other plans for the last quarter of 2018! In fact, if I’m too far behind schedule when Winter is done, I’ll move on to other things and do a-season-a-year until 2021!

It’s good to have a plan….

This is a Serial Blog Post. That means that I will add to it for an hour or so four weekdays a week, and it will get finished when it’s finished. Come back regularly for an update, or comment on (and subscribe to) this post to never miss being advised of one!

PS: Another change being made from this post forward is that I’m moving this notification closer to the head of each post. Some readers weren’t noticing it. I have also made the decision to save a little formatting time by only posting updates when a city’s entry is finished as an encouragement to keep plowing on as quickly as I can. This posting, which constitutes an advisory notice of the changes, will be the only planned exception.

One more PS before I get started. Sometimes you can see things in a thumbnail that are really hard to spot otherwise. So it was with the source map that I’ve been using for my US Locations, presented below in three forms: Thumbnail Sized, Somewhat larger, and Somewhat larger with notation. Notice the very clear curving line that bisects the continent…

Okay, so maybe it’s old news to everyone else. But I had never noticed it before. Once you become aware of it, it’s easy to see, even in the unmarked map. I’m not even completely sure of the significance – but I thought it worth calling attention to.

17. Winter In Las Vegas

Las Vegas gives the impression of being one of the most unusual settlements in the continental US – no, make that “one of the most unusual settlements anywhere”, period. Most cities have some form of Urban Renewal program, even if it is one dictated by nothing more than economic opportunity. Equally, most cities have a historic restoration and renovation program aimed at rejuvenating and preserving the oldest, most iconic structures within the community’s boundaries. Only in Las Vegas is it deemed acceptable, even sensible, to demolish an iconic structure for which the first blush of fame is beginning to wear thin, in order to construct something even more palatial.

Should something ever happen to wipe out the human race while sparing our structures, it would not be at all unreasonable for alien archaeologists to declare Las Vegas humanity’s capital, based solely on the amazing construction of the Strip and its Casinos. And, from that misconception, a whole raft of even more inaccurate speculations would inevitably flow – “Rulers” viewed as “Gods on earth”, poker machines as devices of worship, and innumerable altars with arcane symbiology as altars, perhaps? Other places like St Petersburg and the Taj Mahal with equal but isolated splendor as the seats of Regional Rulers? Who knows?

This is not a town without history to share; it’s just that the history seems to take a remote second or even third place to the pursuit of gambling revenues.

Or does it? What’s the real story?

The History

A young Mexican scout named Rafael Rivera is credited as the first non-Native American to encounter the valley, in 1829, but it wasn’t named by Westerners until trader Antonio Armijo led a 60-man party along the Spanish Trail – a conflation of trade routes from Santa Fe, to Los Angeles, California – in 1829. The name means “The Meadows”, and it was named for abundant wild grasses and a desert spring that provided much-needed water to westward travelers.

In 1855, eleven years after John C Fremont helped popularize western migration and at the tail end of the California Gold Rush as production of the precious metal shifted from easy surface pickings to more difficult subterranean mining, members of the LDS Church built a fort in Las Vegas as the site was halfway between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. This fort was abandoned several years afterwards, but its remains are still visible, located just north of the Downtown region of the city (which lies East of the northern end of the Strip, something I had always wanted to know).

At the start of the 20th century, the population stood at just 25. In 1905, the city was formally founded when 110 acres (45 ha) of land in what would become the Downtown area, and which were located adjacent to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks, were auctioned. Five years later, the population was 800, and by 1930, it was 5,165.

1931 was a pivotal year for what was, then, the town of Las Vegas. Nevada legalized gambling, reduced residency requirements for divorce proceedings to only six weeks, and began the construction of Hoover Dam (completed in 1935). All three had a role to play in creating modern-day Las Vegas, but especially the first and last. Hoover Dam still powers the lights of Las Vegas.

There was an immediate impact; the influx of workers helped the region avoid economic calamity during the Great Depression. In 1941, what is now known as Nellis Air Force Base, and home to the aerobatic team known as the Thunderbirds, was established. By now, the population was more than 8,000.

Following the second world war, lavishly decorated hotels and casinos, providing big-name entertainment, became synonymous with Las Vegas and the population boomed. Nuclear Weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site (105km / 65 miles northwest of what still wasn’t a city in terms of residents, but which may have been after counting temporary visitors) began in 1951 and continued until 1963.

Casinos like the Flamingo, Dunes, Stardust, and Desert Inn made huge profits that were regularly skimmed away by their Organized Crime owners. The government knew some Nevada casinos had legitimate partners fronting for unlisted owners as early as the 1940s, but the May 1957 assassination attempt on New York crime boss Frank Costello blew the lid wide open. “Costello was rushed from the crime scene with nothing more than a severe scalp wound, but inside his sleek suit pocket, the responding officers found a ledger with the previous day’s gaming totals for the Tropicana casino. Even the FBI who had previously denied there was an organized crime group or Mafia had to admit this was a serious link to Nevada’s casinos from known crime families.” – Gambling Sites.com

The Nevada Gaming Control Board, to its credit, insisted that new owners for the Tropicana – which had been open for less than a month – be found. But that didn’t stop the flow of proceeds to known crime families. This was only the beginning of a long campaign aimed at cleaning up Casino ownership in Las Vegas.

In 1959, the iconic “Welcome To Las Vegas” sign was created and located 6.4km (4 miles) south of the actual city limits, a distinction that is ignored by both locals and tourists who refer to the entire Metro Area as “Las Vegas”. A year later, 64,405 people were calling the city home.

Caesars Palace was established in 1966, and it was the beginning of the end for private owners. Designed to be an opulent glitzy experience dedicated to catering to wealthy players, the focus was more upmarket than grassroots. The inauguration party included a feast served by scantily-clad waiters and waitresses who 50,000 glasses of champagne, 300 pounds of chunk crab, 3,500 pounds of filet mignon and enough caviar to fill dozens of bathtubs. More than $42 million in advance bookings had been made for the first months of operation, clearly signaling the way forwards.

When the owners were linked to organized crime figures in New York and New England by a Federal Organized Crime Task Force in 1969, they were forced to sell; the new owners gave the casino a Corporate ownership that led the way into a less seedy business culture. This was a wave of change that had been building for three years, when Howard Hughes moved into the penthouse suite of the Desert Inn and began negotiating for its purchase in 1966. Those negotiations took just four months, and Hughes went on to purchase several other Casinos and Clubs along the Strip such as the Silver Slipper and the Landmark Casino.

A further signpost to the changing times was the opening, also in 1969, of the International Hotel (now known as Westgate Las Vegas)- with 1512 rooms, the first of the Mega-resorts. The first two performers to appear in the International’s showroom were Barbara Streisand and Elvis Presley, and the shows were sold out for 30 days straight; by the time both performers had finished these performances, the ink between Big Entertainment and the Big Casinos had been indelibly forged.

In 1973, the first MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, with 2084 rooms, was opened to become one of the largest Hotels in the world (at the time), and the standard rooms within were up to four times the size of its rivals for that crown. But this was the high-water mark for the era.

By 1970, Las Vegas may have officially become a city, but for the first time in two decades, growth had fallen below 100% a decade. Over the next decade, it continued to slow, as the Strip became increasingly dilapidated (relatively speaking). By 1980, it was down to +30.9% over the preceding decade. The reason: the economy was dependent on the gaming industry, and that industry faced new competitors, both in the form of Off-the-Strip casinos and in cities like Reno. Las Vegas retained the lions share, but the clubs were no longer the dominant force they had been in the late 60s.

Casino owners began casting around for secondary income sources to revitalize the industry; the Circus Circus casino, for example, featured a video-game arcade and a big-top show. Parents found that they could leave their children in the circus area and play for hours in the Casino.

In the decade 1970-1980, existing properties were redeveloped, most notable the Golden Nugget casino in 1973-77, again targeting a wealthier clientele with the help of Frank Sinatra as headliner and promoter, and a few successful new ventures began, such as Binion’s Horseshoe Casino introducing the World Series Of Poker in 1970.

“Still, a single poker tournament couldn’t prop up all of the profits in the Downtown area, and most of the small casinos with lots of nickel slot machines and $2 blackjack like the Bird Cage, Mint, Nevada Club, and Pioneer, were closed by the end of the 1970s.

“Small clubs along Las Vegas Boulevard like the Jolly Trolley, Centerfold, and Orbit Inn also closed during the 1970s as players gravitated to larger properties that featured nearly free meals, $29 rooms and cheap dinner shows with entertainers like Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Diana Ross, Bob Newhart, Cher and Paul Anka.” – Gamblingsites.com.

But the glamour had faded, and the mob had been ousted, and the combination of an economy struggling to cope with the changes and Reagan-era conservatism put the city’s future in limbo.

“A lot of the ‘classic’ hotels [had become] rundown shadows of their former selves. A devastating fire in 1980 at the original MGM Grand killed more than 80 people, and just a few months later a fire at the Las Vegas Hilton killed eight more. In some ways these tragedies helped to further the transformation of the public’s view of the entire city. Las Vegas became tacky, desperate, and possibly unsafe.

“Even the showrooms… had become something of a joke. For entertainers, Vegas was where you played when your career was over, not when you were on top.” – History in Las Vegas

Las Vegas was moribund and uncool as a destination for the most part of two decades. It was Golden Nugget owner Steve Wynn who found the solution, raising $630 million (mostly through the sale of Junk Bonds) and building the first of the Modern Generation of Casino-Hotels, The Mirage. It opened in 1989, “fronted by five-story waterfalls, lagoons, and lush tropical foliage – not to mention a 50-foot volcano that dramatically erupted regularly! Wynn gave world-renowned illusionists Siegfried & Roy carte blanche (and more than $30 million) to create the most spellbinding show Las Vegas had ever seen, and he brought in world-class chefs to banish the idea that all you could eat in the town were all-you-can-eat spreads and $4.99 prime rib.”

The immediate success both financially and in terms of rejuvenating the city’s image brought about a new boom. A King-Arthur-themed hotel/casino, the Excalibur, became the world’s largest (at least for a while) when it opened in 1990.

In 1993, The Circus Circus redeveloped itself to incorporate a five-acre amusement park, Grand Slam Canyon.

The same year also saw them complete the Luxor Las Vegas, a modern interpretation of what Ancient Egypt might have looked like, followed in October of 1993. A crowd of 10,000 attended the opening. The pyramid (which cost $375 million to build) was, at the time of the opening, the tallest building on the strip. It contained 2,526 rooms and a 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) casino. The hotel’s pyramid is similar in size to the Red Pyramid and Bent Pyramid of Egypt. When the resort opened, it featured a “Nile River Tour” – a river ride that carried guests to different parts of the pyramid, passing by pieces of ancient artwork. The casino also featured “King Tut’s Tomb and Museum”, a duplicate of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, as found in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt, from which the complex derived its name.

Still in 1993, and in between these developments, a new MGM Grand was opened, also backed by a theme park, which ended the Excalibur’s claim to its record.

The year 1995 marked the opening of the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas’s downtown area. This canopied five-block area features 12.5 million LED lights and 550,000 watts of sound from dusk until midnight during shows held on the top of each hour. It also saw the Hard Rock Hotel open, a “Hard-Rock Cafe” styled Hotel-Casino.

1996 brought the French-Riviera-themed Monte Carlo and the Stratosphere Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, which features an 1149-foot tower. In 1997, the “New York – New York Hotel and Casino” lifted the bar still higher, designed to evoke with a single massive construction the 1940s skyline of the city for which it is named on an 18-acre site. The US Post Office “Forever Statue of Liberty Stamp”, which was intended to show the actual Statue of Liberty, inadvertently uses an image of the replica at the New York-New York due to an error by the stamp designers.

And then 1998-1999 blew all this construction out of the water with the completion of the Bellagio, the Mandalay Bay, the Venetian, and the Paris Casinos. Since then, the list of mega-complexes has only grown – the rebuilt Aladdin (which only lasted a couple of years before being completely redeveloped by Planet Hollywood), the Palms, the Wynn, the Palazzo, the Encore, the Aria Resort and Casino – the list goes on and on (and I’ve only taken it into 2009)! But, little by little, a new wave of maturity was taking over; the wacky, eye-catching themes were phased out (as much as one can when one’s hotel looks like a castle), and a more stable and secure generic sophistication took its place. The arenas of competition between the modern Hotel-Casinos are things like decadent nightclubs, celebrity chef-backed restaurants, fancy spas, and superstar shows.

And, in the middle of all that change, the public perception of the City was transformed, first by the original CSI (2000-2015), Las Vegas (2003-2008), reality shows like Pawn Stars (2009-present), American Restoration (a spin-off) (2010-2015, then continuing with a new cast and format), and movies such as Oceans Eleven (2001).

These days, and contrary to the impression held (and delivered) in the first few paragraphs, Las Vegas at last seems to be a city that’s entirely comfortable within its’ own “skin”.

The Demographics

The population breakdown of Las Vegas has been metamorphosing considerably since 1970. Back then, Blacks and African Americans totaled 11.2% of the population, Hispanics/Latinos, 4.6%, and Asians 0.7%; 87.6% of the population was White. In 2010, the Black figure was virtually the same (after a dip in 2000), the Hispanic figure was up to 31.5% (almost one in three), and Asians formed a significant minority at 5%. All this has come at the expense of the White representation, which is now only 62.1%. It follows that recruitment of the non-white demographic during the most recent expansions has been disproportionate.

In some ways, that’s not a huge surprise. The Moulin Rouge Hotel which opened in May, 1955, broke new ground as the first integrated hotel/casino within the US. For a while, it was even owned by the first African American woman to hold a Nevada Gaming License, and many of those who enjoyed and were employed by the hotel became activists and supporters of the cause. In 1960, under threat of a protest march against racial discrimination in the Las Vegas casinos down the Strip, a meeting was hurriedly arranged by the Governor between hotel owners, city and state officials, local black leaders, and then-NAACP president Dr James McMillan. The meeting was held on March 26 at the closed Moulin Rouge, and resulted in an agreement to desegregate all Strip Casinos.

The Hotel was closed in November 1955 and by December, it had declared bankruptcy. It has been partially demolished after a series of fire.

So there has been a relatively long history of integration within the city. When it declined, it would have become attractive as a relatively low-cost community, and when the resurgence occurred, the locals would have been first in line to take advantage of the resulting employment opportunities.

The Weather

Las Vegas is located in a basin of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by mountain ranges on all sides of more than 3000m (10,000 feet) elevation; much of the landscape is rocky and arid. Flash floods are possible, but have become less frequent and less damaging through improved drainage systems.

The climate is typical of the Mojave, but is slightly cooler in Winter thanks to the 2000-3000 feet of elevation. Officially a subtropical hot desert, it is characterized – according to climatologists – by long, very hot summers; warm transitional seasons; and short, mild to chilly winters. Las Vegas is among the sunniest, driest, and least humid locations in North America, with exceptionally low dew points and humidity that sometimes remains below 10%.

Las Vegas winters are short and generally very mild, with chilly (but rarely cold) daytime temperatures. Like all seasons, sunshine is abundant. Winter evenings are defined by clear skies and swift drops in temperature after sunset, with overnight lows sinking to 3.9°C (39°F) or less in most December and January nights. December is the year’s coolest month.

As with many other locations, the detail paints a slightly different picture. If Winter is defined as record highs below 100°F, it’s November to April (6 months). If it’s record highs below 90°F, November to February becomes winter, and we have a spring but no autumn. If it’s record highs below 80°F, we get the official 2-month December-January Winter.

It’s a similar story with the average of the highest temperatures recorded for the month, only the numbers are different:
<95°F: 7 months (October-April);
<80°F: 4 months (November-February);
<75°F: 3 months (December-February);
<70°F: 2 months (the official December-January winter).

The average daily highs across each month confuse the picture even more, suggesting a 2-month summer, 3-month autumn, 2-month winter, and 5-month spring.

I get exactly the same range of results when I study the average monthly lows, the mean minimum temperatures within each month, and even the record lows. It’s just as valid to say that Winter starts in October and runs through April as it is to say otherwise.

The notion of there being four seasons is a human creation based upon observations of a limited group of climates, and because they are used to trigger human behavior (“the planting season”, etc), we have been shoehorning the actual weather into that pattern as best we can, ever since. The definition of “winter”, in other words, depends on just where we draw the line between wintry conditions and non-wintry conditions. Sometimes, that line is clear, and sometimes it is not. Las Vegas is an example of the latter.

So I am going to go with the pattern that best fits the data that I can see, even though it contradicts the official description. Las Vegas has four seasons, starting in December: Not-Hot, Uncomfortable, Hot, and Less Unpleasant:

• Not-Hot: December-February
• Uncomfortable: March-April
• Hot: May-September
• Less Unpleasant: October-November.

The differences between one season and the next are merely a matter of degree; you only get substantial differentiation across the two most extreme seasons.

This, then, is the weather for the season I have defined as Not-Hot. To avoid confusion with any descriptive terminology that may be used, the “season” name will always be given in italics and “inverted commas”.

The record highs are fairly mild except at the end of the season, as the season drifts into “Uncomfortable”: Dec: 26°C (78°F), Jan: 25°C (77°F), and Feb: 31°C (87°F). It is worth noting that the February value is the same as the November, but that is not the case with the other values quoted below.

The usual daily maximum is more comfortable, even perhaps cool-to-pleasant: 13.7°C (56.6°F), 14.4°C (58°F), and 16.9°C (62.5°F) respectively.

Some days are hotter; at least once during each month, you can expect maximums of 19.4°C (66.9°F), 20.1°C (68.2°F), and 23.6°C (74.5°F), respectively, to be reached, and of course, some years are even hotter.

Of course, we’re talking about a desert environment, and everyone knows the nights are cool-to-cold in a desert. The usual daily minimums by month are 3.7°C (38.7°F), 4.1°C (39.4°F), and 6.3°C (43.4°F). Some nights each year are even colder; at least once in the month, you can expect a minimum of -2.9°C (26.8°F), -2.2°C (28°F), and -0.8°C (30.6°F), respectively, to be forecast. These are the ONLY three months of the year with such values below freezing point, and this is one of the unifying values around which the “not-hot” season has been defined.

Of course, some years produce extremes beyond these norms. The record lows are below zero from October through April, and in single digits centigrade in three more months. In “Not-Hot”, the records are -12°C (11°F), -13°C (8°F), and -9°C (16°F), respectively. Again, it’s worth noting that the record minimum for November is marginally cooler than that of February.

But don’t be fooled by these numbers. Freezing temperatures are recorded on an average of 16 nights each “Not-Hot”, but it is exceptionally rare for temperatures to fall to or below -4°C (25°F), or to remain below 7°C (45°F) for an entire day.

Rainfall is scarce, with an average of 4.2 in (110 mm) dispersed between roughly 26 to 27 total rainy days per year. Most of the annual falls occur during the “Not-Hot” months, but even the wettest month of the year (February) averages only four days of measurable rain.

The average number of “rainy” days is 3 in December, 3.1 in January, and 4 (as mentioned) in February. It’s worth noting that the figure for March is 2.9, only statistically different to that of December or January. In essence, one-in-ten, repeat, rising to one-in-seven, then falling back to one-in-ten. The rest of the year has notable fewer such days in a month save a “mini-wet” season in July-August.

The amounts that fall on these rare rainy days are small. The averages are 12.7mm (0.50”), 13.7mm (0.54”), and 19.3mm (0.76”), respectively. Dividing those by three (four in February) gives the true scale of the wet weather of 4-point-low-something to a-little-under-5 mm – which is a “light shower” in Sydney, the sort of event that does nothing to cool temperatures and only raises the relative humidity, leaving the day less comfortable after they pass than it was before.

Snow is even rarer. The mountains immediately surrounding the Las Vegas Valley accumulate snow every winter, but significant or sustained accumulation within the city is rare; the last time it occurred was on December 16, 2008, when the city received 9.1cm (3.6”).

Las Vegas records an average of 310 sunny days a year and bright sunshine during 86% of all daylight hours. December is the cloudiest month of the year, but that isn’t saying much since the average is still 78% of the possible sunshine. January isn’t much different at 79%, and February is 81%. It’s worth noting once more that November scores 80%. Every other month of the year records 85% or more.

When I started writing this, I expected the desert climate of Las Vegas to be simple and straightforward – so much so that I almost culled this city from the series. What I didn’t expect was a climate so complicated that it would challenge the very definition of the seasons.

I must also place a caveat to conclude this subsection: any analysis is only as robust as its data, and the climate data for Las Vegas available to me starts in 1961 and stops in 1990. Why the records don’t continue, I have no idea; clearly, we should now be approaching double the 29-year recorded baseline, which is to say, double the reliability of the statistics. But the numbers are what they are.

Attractions & Events Around Town

You might think that the city has no events beyond those mounted by the hotel-casinos, but that ignores the fact that people live here, the husbands and wives and children of those supported directly or indirectly by the star attractions, and they need to be kept happy, too.

December brings a number of season events, where “seasonal” can be sometimes defined as “taking advantage of the weather” instead of simply referring to the time of year.

• Beginning in late November and running through to early January is the Ethel M Chocolate ‘Light The Night’ Spectacular, in which The Mars chocolatier family hang thousands of lights on their desert plant’s garden and host special tours of their facility.
• The 26-mile Las Vegas Marathon takes place in the first week of December. Thousands participate in the all-day charity event which is full of parties and banquets for non-participants before, during, and after.
• Towards the middle of the month, Rodeo competitors gather from all over the world for the National Finals Rodeo, which lasts a week nine days ten days (it grew with every site I consulted).
• New Year’s Eve is always going to be over-the-top in a place like Vegas. At this time of year, the strip is packed with partying street crowds and top-draw entertainers seemingly on every street corner (and in-between as well).
• A more ‘organized’ alternative to the free-for-all along the Las Vegas strip is the Downtown event at the Fremont Street Arcade which features live bands and a synchronized fireworks display. Some people start here, drift onto the strip, and then drift back for the end-of-year countdown. Between both sets of events, an estimated 320,000 attendees partied at the start of 2018.

January is relatively quiet here as it is in many US cities.

• NCAA College Basketball starts in January and runs all the way through most of June.
• There is an annual parade on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, featuring floats, marching bands, and an awards ceremony to recognize those who have contributed to the dream of equality.
• The International Consumer Electronics Show grows in size every year (10% in 2017) and regularly tops 100,000 attendees (140,000 most recently, and organizers learned after the event of another 40,000 who attempted to participate but were discouraged by the Visa process; expect streamlined processes to be in place for 2019). Much of the boost is coming from international attendance, and that is fueling increased interest in international participation.

Things liven up in February.

• A number of events in February celebrate the African-American influence on the culture and entertainment of Las Vegas, notably the kickoff breakfast at Fitzgerald’s Hotel and Casino, the largest Black-owned hotel and casino in the United States, and the family cultural event held towards the end of February at Neonopolis. Collectively, these are known as “Black History Month”.
• The Super Bowl celebration (First Sunday in February, but it used to be mid-to-late January) at the Showboat Casino Hotel is famous for attracting the High Rollers and a crowd to watch the action on several wide-screen TVs plus a lavish free buffet.
• Early February marks the Chinese New Year, which is celebrated with events all over the city (and is an excuse for themed events at many of the big Hotel Casinos, to boot). The opportunity is also taken to celebrate Japanese, Tahitian, and Thai culture.
• The Tennis Channel Open, held through February and into March, takes place at the Darling Memorial Tennis Center. Although not as prestigious as the major tournaments, the guaranteed television coverage makes this an event growing in sponsor interest, and that pulls in the players, who in turn pull in the crowds.
• Sometime between mid-February and early March, the High Rollers Scooter Weekend celebrates Mod Rockers and the iconic Scooter associated with the movement in various Vegas locations. Because, like, they can.

These events only scratch the surface. Eventbrite lists an incredible 727 annual events in and around Las Vegas. That’s an average of more than one a day, each and every day of the week – and too many for me to process for this article, so I’ve simply linked to their 49-page list!

Primary Sources:

• Wikipedia’s Las Vegas page;
• Why did the California Gold Rush end after only several years? from Reddit AskHistorians;
• Las Vegas of the ’60s and ’70s by Gambling Sites .com;
• History in Las Vegas from Frommers.com;
• Greater Las Vegas Annual Events from the EventGuide network;
• Las Vegas events calendar from TimeOut;
• Eight Vegas events that draw massive crowds by Delen Goldberg for the Las Vegas Sun.

18. Winter In Denver, Colorado

Colorado contains some of the most scenic views to be found in the continental US. Unfortunately, relatively few of them are actually in Denver.

The Geography of the region is important: lots of open plains to the east, hills to the north and south, and the Rocky Mountains to the west. Latitude is some distance north of Las Vegas, which – if I were bound by a strict east-to-west progression – would normally require Denver to have appeared first on this list.

Fortunately, I’m free to vary the sequence to whatever makes the climates of the regions concerned most understandable and enlightening. Vegas was all about the desert; Denver (and Spokane, to follow) are all about the influence of the Rocky Mountains.

Denver is located in the South Platte River Valley, on the edge of the High Plains, with the foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains just 19km (12 miles) to the west.

The city is nicknamed the Mile High City because of its official elevation – exactly one mile (5280 feet / 1609.3 meters) above sea level at the benchmark location on the steps of the State Capital Building (the city has actual elevations of 5,130 to 5,690 feet, and some official websites use a different benchmark to list the elevation as 5278 feet).

In 2016, it was named the best place to live in the United States by US. News & World Report.

Since the 2010 United States Census, it has also been one of the fastest-growing major cities in the United States, with a growth rate of 15.48% over the preceding decade. The 10-county Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area had an estimated 2016 population of 2,853,077 residents.

The shape of the city is somewhat unusual: A slightly-irregular rectangular block, connected to another one off to the North-east and connected by a complicated northeast-southwest corridor:

This makes more sense when you realize that the urban area extends well beyond the city of Denver, mostly to the North, South, and East.

When I examined the various photos shown on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the city, the content reminded me a lot of Sydney. The only thing separating the two cities is that Sydney is on the coast, with sea from SSW to NNE, while Denver is land-locked on all sides.

It’s not just terrain (both cities have mountain ranges to the west) that is similar and not just altitude that is different (Sydney is more-or-less at Sea Level). The lifestyle, culture, and devotion to sports are all reminiscent of Sydney. In fact, everything from the trains to much of the architecture is strangely reminiscent of the Australian city while still being just a little different.

As of 2006, Denver had over 200 parks, from small mini-parks all over the city to the giant 314 acres (127 ha) City Park – more than 1.25 square kilometers, almost have a square mile. Starting in 1911, Denver began acquiring land for mountain parks, and now have approximately 14,000 acres (57 km2) of mountain parks under management. Denver also has 29 recreation centers providing places and programming for the recreation of residents and visitors.

In 1970, Denver was selected to host the 1976 Winter Olympics to coincide with Colorado’s centennial celebration, but in November 1972, Colorado voters struck down ballot initiatives allocating public funds to pay for the high costs of the games, which were subsequently moved to Innsbruck, Austria. The notoriety of becoming the only city ever to decline to host an Olympiad after being selected has made subsequent bids difficult. The opposition was based largely on environmental issues and was led by State Representative Richard Lamm, who was subsequently elected to three terms (1975-87) as Colorado governor.

Denver has also been known historically as the Queen City of the Plains and the Queen City of the West, because of its important role in the agricultural industry of the region.

The City and County of Denver has defined 78 official neighborhoods that are used for planning and administration. These “neighborhoods” should not be confused with cities or suburbs, which may be separate entities within the metro area.

“The character of the neighborhoods varies significantly from one to another and includes everything from large skyscrapers to houses from the late 19th century to modern, suburban-style developments. Generally, the neighborhoods closest to the city center are denser, older and contain more brick building material. Many neighborhoods away from the city center were developed after World War II, and are built with more modern materials and style. Some of the neighborhoods even farther from the city center, or recently redeveloped parcels anywhere in the city, have either very suburban characteristics or are new urbanist developments that attempt to recreate the feel of older neighborhoods. Most neighborhoods contain parks or other features that are the focal point of the neighborhood.” – Wikipedia

Demographics

The minority populations of Denver have risen sharply since the 1940s. Black residents (as of 2010) account for 10.2% of the population (down from a peak in 1990 of 12.8%), Asians and Asian Americans 3.4% (up from 0.2% in 1940), and Hispanic/Latino residents have gone from 0 to 31.8% of the population. White residents have gone from 97.3% to 68.9%, and that includes 16.7% who are White Hispanics, which the earlier 31.8% does not. If these two groups are conflated, the total is more than 50% of the population.

Overall there were 102.1 males for every 100 females, but in 2015 for the category of never-married ages 25 to 34, there were 121.4 males for every 100 females – a skewed gender representation that have caused some to nickname the city “Menver”.

Climate

Denver is officially the owner of a semi-arid continental climate. But the climatic environment is a very complex one, as the climate-type map of Colorado below shows.

According to the Colorado Climate Center of Colorado State University,

“The climate of local areas is profoundly affected by differences in elevation, and to a lesser degree, by the orientation of mountain ranges and valleys with respect to general air movements. Wide variations occur within short distances. The difference (35°F) in annual mean temperature between Pikes Peak and Las Animas, 90 miles to the southeast, is about the same as that between southern Florida and Iceland. The annual snowfall at Wolf Creek Pass (elevation 10,850 feet) in the southern mountains is averages nearly 400 inches and sometimes exceeds 600 inches while at Manassa in the San Luis Valley just east of Wolf Creek Pass annual snowfall is barely 40 inches. Statewide average annual precipitation is 17 inches but ranges from only 7 inches in the middle of the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado to over 60 inches in a few mountain locations.”

Wikipedia states that Denver has four distinct seasons, a finding that is backed up by the meteorological record. “It receives a modest amount of precipitation spread throughout the year,” the site adds, and this is the key to defining the seasons.

Temperature records define Summer as June to August, and Winter as potentially September to May. However, the rainfall record defines a two-month Autumn (September-October) and three-month Spring (March, April, and May). By the process of elimination, that restricts winter to the four months from November to February. However, the temperature profile of November matches that of March so closely that it has to be considered part of the transitional season, so that we end up with a year of three equal-length seasons.

But it’s worth noting that weather that other locations would call “Winter” begin months prior to and follow for months after, this season. March, for example, has the heaviest snowfalls of the year – even though this analysis doesn’t even consider it Winter!

Due to its inland location on the High Plains, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Denver is subject to sudden changes in weather, and the diurnal temperature variation (the difference between day and nighttime temperatures) is unusually large throughout the year. Based on 30-year averages for December, January, and February, the Weather Channel in 2014 ranked Denver as the 18th coldest major US City.

There is a popular perception that Denver enjoys 300 days of sunshine a year (putting that “modest” rainfall into perspective), but this is somewhat inaccurate. Denver officially has an average of 115 clear days, 130 partly cloudy days, and 120 cloudy days each year.

Winters consist of periods of snow and very low temperatures alternating with periods of warmer weather due to the warming effect of the Chinook winds from the west, which have been observed in other locations to raise the winter temperature (often from below -20°C (-4°F) to as high as 10-20°C (50-68°F) for a few hours before temperatures plummet back to their base levels. [Loma, Montana, holds the record – from -48 to +9°C (-54 to +49°F), while Spearfish, South Dakota (in the Black Hills) holds the record for the world’s fastest recorded rise in temperature. Wikipedia describe the story very clearly (emphasis mine):

“On 22 January 1943, at about 7:30 AM MST, the temperature … was -4°F (-20°C). The Chinook kicked in, and two minutes later, the temperature was 45°F (7°C). The 49°F (27°C) rise set a world record, yet to be exceeded. By 9:00 AM, the temperature had risen to 54°F (12°C). Suddenly, the Chinook died down and the temperature tumbled back to -4°F (-20 °C). The 58°F (32°C) drop took only 27 minutes.”

That’s a brutal two-and-a-half-hour roller-coaster ride. Clearly, you can’t understand the weather of Denver without at least some understanding of the phenomenon. Fortunately, one diagram tells you almost everything you need to know for these purposes – the one below:

Snow is, at first, driven as flurries by the wind and then becomes “moist and heavy” and in an incredibly short time may disappear entirely. They can occur at any time of day or night. Without the Chinook, it is believed by the US Dept of Agriculture that without them, the livestock ranges of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas would have to be abandoned in the winter as the stock would not be able to secure sufficient nourishment, and would freeze to death too often for the herds to be viable. A report held by the Departments National Agricultural Library and available online as a PDF states,

“Aside from its temperature, the Chinook bears an important relation to the amount of snow remaining on the ground in the mountains and on the plains at the time of the spring thaws. If the Chinook has been absent, or infrequent in occurrence, the accumulated snow, especially on the plains, is likely to be great. The conditions are then ripe for high spring floods. If frequent visitations of the Chinook have occurred, much of the snow on the plains will have either disappeared through evaporation or been converted into a hardened mass of snow and ice. As ice it remains a long time unmelted in the ravines and affords an abundant supply of water for the creeks and rivers during the succeeding spring and early summer. In either event the danger from floods from this source is practically eliminated. It might appear at first thought that these hot winds, which so suddenly denude the plains of snow, would themselves cause floods. Such is not generally the case. These winds are intensely dry, having lost their moisture on the other side of the Divide. Accordingly, they reach the eastern slope bereft of their original dampness, but possessing a manifold capacity for absorbing moisture from any source available. The melting snow supplies this source, and so rapidly does the evaporation follow that floods caused by the Chinook alone are practically unknown.”

How strongly is Denver affected? Daytime highs at this time of year can exceed 16°C (60°F) but also often fall to 0°C (32°F) during periods of cold weather, and can even fail to rise above -18°C (0°F) on occasion. On the coldest nights, lows can easily fall to -23°C (-10°F) or less.

The usual peak daytime temperatures in Winter are Dec 6°C (42.8°F), Jan 6.7°C (44°F), and Feb 7.9°C (46.2°F). In November and March, these climb to 11-12°C (52-54°F), noticeably warmer. However, temperatures will regularly exceed Dec 18.3°C (64.9°F), Jan 18.2°C (64.7°F), and Feb 19.2°C (66.5°F) in the course of the season, and the record highs are Dec 26°C (79°F), Jan 24°C (76°F), and Feb 27°C (80°F) – t-shirt weather, which you wouldn’t expect to last very long!

But these values are inherently contaminated by the Chinook phenomenon. The extent of that contamination will vary; it would be 100% in terms of the record highs, and a small percentage in terms of the “usual” temperatures depending on the frequency these winds are experienced.

Unfortunately, that seems to be a value that’s hard to get data on; the University Of Colorado website that I’ve quoted already simply states that they occur “Occasionally”. Digging into the causes, it seems you need a high-pressure system and a low-pressure system to be, respectively, in just the right places in order to create one. Alberta, Canada, experiences them on one day in three, but only one-third of those are sufficient to have full effect, but it is known from other sources that they decrease in frequency as you head south. A report by the USGS finally provides some specificity; Approximately 29.75% of the time the wind is from somewhere in the range the NNW to SW; 17% of the time, it comes from the SSW. That’s slightly better than one in three, and it suggests that the Alberta numbers are applicable.

So Chinooks of noticeable impact can be presumed to occur once every week and a half, on average, or about three times a month, plus the occasional extra. So the percentage of days on which Chinooks occur and contaminate the readings would be about 12%.

Which means that the usual temperatures are usually about 12% of the 16°C (28°F) cooler than indicated above – that’s -2°C (-3.4°F).

In terms of the average highest temperature of the month – which I describe as “regularly exceed” – these would almost certainly be Chinook occurrences, and provide an indication as to the usual degree of impact that they have (while the records show how big an impact they can have.

The minimum temperatures tell quite a different story. The usual minimum, according to the records, is Dec -8.3°C (17.1°F), Jan -8.1°C (17.4°F), and Feb -7.3°C (18.9°F), however the same “Chinook correction” needs to be applied [-2°C (-3.4°F)].

Some nights, the temperature can fall to Dec -20.3°C (-4.5°F), Jan -19°C (-3°F), and Feb -18.5°C (-1.3°F), respectively. These would obviously be values free from the Chinook effect, as would the record lows: Dec -32°C (-25°F), Jan -34°C (-29°F), and Feb -32°C (-25°F), respectively. It is worth noting that both November and March average below-freezing temperatures, and the record lows for only two months of the year (at the height of summer) are above freezing.

Rainfall. Just how “modest” is it, with that recurring term “arid” in the climatic description? In December, the average from 4.1 rainy days is 8.9mm (0.35”); in January, 4.1 rainy days yielding 10.4mm (0.41”), and in February, 5.3 rainy days produces 9.4mm (0.37”) – but taking the shortness of the month into account raises those numbers to 5.7 days, 10.1mm, and 0.4”, enough to state that February is not noticeably drier than January. All other months of the year (3 exceptions) average more than an inch of rain in the month, and of those exceptions, two get close to an inch and the last – November – receives 0.61”, almost double that of the following month.

The average fall per rainy day is noteworthy – somewhere around the 2.5mm mark – which is not very heavy. My part of Sydney is reasonably typical of the city, and averages 81.33mm a month over the equivalent season. That’s more than three inches – which exceeds Denver’s fall in even it’s wettest month.

The reason, of course, is that the atmospheric humidity is locked up in the form of snow.

The Colorado Climate Center describes the counterbalance to the Chinook, the arctic air masses descending from the North, as follows:

“Storms moving from the north usually carry little moisture. The frequency of such storms increases during the fall and winter months, and decreases rapidly in the spring. The accompanying outbreaks of polar air are responsible for the sudden drops in temperature often experienced in the plains sections of the State. Occasionally these outbreaks are attended by strong northerly winds which come in contact with moist air from the south; the interaction of these air masses can cause a heavy fall of snow and the most severe of all weather conditions of the high plains, the blizzard.”

Were it not for the Gulf of Mexico, in other words, the Midwestern US would be as dry and arid as central Australia.

Snowfall is common throughout the late fall, winter and early spring, averaging 53.5 inches (136 cm) for 1981-2010. The typical season for snowfall is October 17 to April 27, though snow has been recorded as early as Sept 4 and as late as June 3rd.

I have already mentioned that the heaviest falls of the year occur, according to the records, in March, even though this is outside “Winter”. Suddenly, this makes sense; it is then that the confluence of cold temperatures and southern moist air combine most intensely.

There are just short of 5 snowy days in November (one in six), and just short of 6 (one in 5) in March (and just over 4 in April, for that matter, about 1 in 7 if the “April 27″ date is considered the end of the month for the purpose. These produce, respectively, Nov 22.1cm (8.7”), Mar 27.2cm (10.7”), and Apr 17.3cm (6.8”) of snow. Use these values as comparisons.

December has slightly more snowy days than November (5.3, still about one in six), and usually receives 21.6cm (8.5”), so snowfalls are slightly lighter in the Christmas month. January brings a decline in both: five snowy days (still about 1 in six) and 17.8cm (7.0”). If you do the math, you find that the average fall is again lighter – about 1.2” vs 1.6”. February has 5.3 snowy days (but, since the month is shorter, that’s about 1.06 days in 5), producing 14.5cm (5.7”) – so falls grow more frequent but lighter as the month draws to a close.

Relative Humidity is moderately high all year round, but is highest in late Autumn, throughout Winter, and in early Spring. With the exception of March and April, this period averages better than 55% (and a high in December of 56.6%), so there is very little variation.

Late Autumn and Early Winter is the cloudiest time of year. November receives only 65% of the possible sunshine, and December 67%. In January and February, these numbers are 72% and 70%, respectively. Interestingly, there is only a slight drop in March, which I will analyze in the Spring section of the series when I get to it.

Snow is not the only Winter phenomenon of concern. Wikipedia reports that in a study looking at hail events in areas with a population of at least 50,000, Denver was found to be ranked 10th most prone to hail storms in the continental United States. In fact, Denver has received three of the top 10 costliest hailstorms in United States history which occurred on July 11, 1990; July 20, 2009; and May 8, 2017 respectively.

Tornadoes are rare but one struck 4.4 miles south of downtown Denver on June 15, 1988. The suburbs to the east of Denver and the city’s northeastern extension can see a few tornadoes (usually of the weaker Landspout variety, of which I had never heard before) each spring and summer, especially during June.

Winter Activities

Because of its proximity to the mountains and generally sunny weather, Denver has gained a reputation as being a very active, outdoor-oriented city. Many Denver residents spend the weekends in the mountains; skiing in the winter and hiking, climbing, kayaking, and camping in the summer.

This proximity is both its blessing and its curse; most visitors barely “scratch the surface before disappearing to Aspen, Vail, or Breckenridge”. In an attempt to capture some of the tourist dollars literally fleeing their city, Denver is especially active at creating and promoting events all year around, which would make it a fun place to live.

You don’t have to look into the subject very hard before discovering that hosting a winter Olympics, and how to pay for it, remain extremely important questions to Denverites. Expect the question to be a perennial subject of conversation at this time of year.

Because of the location, I am going to completely ignore the obvious; there will be ice skating rinks, and mountain ski resorts are only an hour, or less, away. Otherwise, this list would be extraordinarily lengthy and full of redundancies.

It’s also worth noting that some may consider both March and April to be Winter, and certainly, winter activities are possible into mid-spring that simply can’t happen elsewhere.

Denver and the surrounding cities are home to a large number of local and national breweries, and hosts many nationally-recognized museums. At the time of writing, these were hosting no less than nine special exhibitions – eleven, if you count “A Passion for the Contemporary Art of Ballet” (3-dimensional wall art created directly from posed Colorado Ballet Dancers, available for public viewing one night only) and “Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” (a reinterpretation of the twelve bronze animal heads representing the traditional Chinese zodiac that once adorned the famed fountain-clock of the Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing). Many of these museums have free days or free entrances one day a week, some for Colorado residents only.

It also has active pop, jazz, jam, folk, and classical music scenes. Of particular note is Denver’s importance in the folk scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Well-known folk artists such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and John Denver lived in Denver at various points during this time and performed at local clubs.

One phenomenon experiencing a resurgence in Denver of late is the Speakeasy, a “hidden” bar. To get to one, you have to sneak through a refrigerator door; to reach another, a picture frame; and a third is accessed through a sneaker shop (and also known as a “sneakeasy”). But there are many more popping up around the city.

Another year-round attraction is Solutions Escapology, which hosts five different escape rooms and a cheese-oriented restaurant. These essentially challenge you to figure out an escape route before your time is up, typically an hour.

There are several day trips, tours, and excursions that are popular at this time of year.

• Red Rocks & Golden – it’s past the height of the tourist season for this natural wonder but that can be an advantage; the site is open all year. Particularly for the more active, the Trading Post Loop Hiking Trail is a 1.4-mile trip through the spectacular rock formations, valleys, and a natural meadow. Golden is a nearby town which features shopping, restaurants, and attractions all with an old-west theme for lovers of the cowboy genre.
• Denver Botanic Gardens & Chatfield – the Gardens boast of one of the ‘most compelling tropical plant displays in the country’ and that things are still blooming. Quite obviously, that means a climate-controlled break from the ever-present cold. Tours last about an hour. Afterwards, most people head for the Gardens’ Chatfield location which deals with the local ecology and features nature trails, a wildlife observation area, display gardens, educational exhibits, a historical farm, a 19th century one-room schoolhouse, working beehives and picnic areas. From late November (they get an early start) through to January 5th, the Gardens mount their “Blossoms Of Light” display, an interactive light-show built around a huge array of sound-reactive LEDs.
• Central City & Black Hawk – Denver was originally settled as a gold-mining community, and for me, that’s the big attraction of this one-two punch. There are mine tours, mining museums and several places offering instruction in the fine art of in-stream gold panning where a half billion dollars of the coveted, shiny metal was once found. Others may be drawn to the more than 30 casinos in these two towns located 55km (34 miles) west of Denver. In 2009, stake limits were raised to $100, in a bid to attract higher-rollers. The towns are also known for having some of the best-preserved Victorian architecture in the West.
• Rocky Mountain National Park – Even in Australia we’ve heard of this legendary preserve, just an hour out. Some of the most picturesque scenes of the season are to be found here, accessible only with snowshoe-hikes or cross-country skiing. Hiking trails can be open at any time of year, thanks to the effects of the Chinook; visitors should check with Park Rangers for information on what’s accessible and how to choose the right trail for your experience and stamina.
• Anyone from the US, dig around for some loose change. If you see a small “D” stamped on one of your coins, it was produced by the Denver branch of the US Mint, who manufacture 50 million coins a day. I was seven or eight years old when I toured the Australian Mint, and I can still remember some of what I saw as though it were yesterday; anyone who’s had a similar experience is sure to want to pass it on to the next generation or simply relive it. And if you haven’t, there is the fascination of doing something new. So expect tours through the Mint to be popular all year round.
• Free tours through the Colorado State Capital Building take place from 10AM to 3PM five days a week.
• The Denver Story Trek is billed as an interactive exploration of the stories behind the city’s landscapes and landmarks. And it’s free.
• The Great Divide Brewery in downtown Denver specializes in Craft Beers and has free tours.
• Littleton Museum focuses on Colorado’s pioneering days. Located on 39 acres, the museum consists of two living history farms (one from the 1860s and one from the 1890s), with a working farm, a blacksmith shop and more than 40,000 historically Colorado artifacts.
• Coors Brewery is the largest in the world. Free tours show the brewing process from start to finish and ends with free samples for those over 21.
• Dinosaur Ridge features Jurassic fossils discovered in 1877, and Cretaceous dinosaur footprints. Tours are self-guided but guidebooks are available.
• Celestial Seasonings is a company I hadn’t heard of before (unlike Coors). They are the largest specialty tea manufacturer in North America. Tours show how they blend, package, and ship their products, takes you through a gallery of original artwork from their tea boxes, and gives out free samples of every variety they make. All for nix.
• The National Center for Atmospheric Research will educate the tourist about Global Warming – but if that holds little attraction (many don’t believe in it, it has to be admitted), there are other displays to hold your attention and make this free attraction worthwhile. View a hailstone the size of a softball, watch a miniature tornado get created right in front of you, and get a look up close at how lightning is created. These are phenomena that affect us all to some extent, and where better to come to grips with them?
• On the first Friday of every month, the First Friday Tour explores Denver’s artistic communities through all seven of the art districts (six more than many other cities can boast)! Galleries, studios, and exhibitions stay open late for “a mind-expanding night of art, food, drink and fun.” It’s worth noting that the two “extra events” not counted in the “museums and galleries” notes above are (were) both parts of this Tour.
• The Royal Gorge Route is a unique train service that is around 2 to 2.5 hours and offers breakfast, lunch, or dinner on its route by the Arkansas River. With a fully equipped bar, you can enjoy the scenery of Colorado by sitting on a train with a beer in your hand. In the Holiday season, they also have a Santa Express Train (early bookings essential). Tickets can be pricey at $44-plus a head. This is just one of at least seven different scenic train rides through different parts of Colorado.

There are several noteworthy events during the winter Season. While many cities start their “winter seasons” on Thanksgiving Day, Denver (and Colorado in general) date their season from December first, perhaps because Thanksgiving doesn’t signal a season change in weather as strongly as in other places.

• One of the first events of the Winter is the Denver Parade Of Lights, which “snakes through downtown from the Civic Center to Skyline Park and back again on a two mile route”. Floats, Marching Bands and more, “all taking place after dark under the magic of twinkling lights” – other cities have parades, but this is the first night-time one in the US to come to my attention and it may very well be unique for that reason.
• The Denver Zoo is open all year, of course, but in Winter they cover all 70 acres with lights including a number of animated animal sculptures and provide nightly activities across the park.
• Starting in mid-December and continuing through to March, “Our Gang” have hosted ice racing at Georgetown, 45 minutes out of the city, for the last 42 years. 2018 is the first year that they have been forced to cancel the season due to insufficiency of the ice cover when it became clear that they weren’t going to get the ice they needed. Kudos to them for a safety-first prioritization, Commiserations for missing the racing. Entry is free.
• December 16 2018 was the date of this year’s benefit for “One Warm Coat”, which provides free warm coats to anyone who needs one, the “Ugly Sweater Run”, a 3.1-mile fun run through downtown Denver, ending at the finish line with “fake snow, warm hot chocolate, and a Kahlua cocktail”. Participation is $45 a head, but the cause is worthy and the participants enthusiastic.
• Late in December or early in January, the city of Dillon, 1hr 45m from Denver, is one of a handful of locations to construct an Ice Castle. These are “kind of like being inside a glacier or a Narnia-type scene where you have towers and tunnels and archways and everything’s frozen.” The story of how they were invented is engaging, you can read it (and see some stunning photos) at 303Magazine.com in an article by Marissa Kozma, one of their travel and lifestyle writers. The first public Ice Castle went up in 2010 and they have been growing in popularity as a winter attraction ever since. Cities “all over North America” have requested them, and in 2018, they were in Midway, Utah, Stillwater, Minnesota, Lincoln, New Hampshire, Winnipeg, Manitoba and Edmonton, Alberta in addition to Dillon, Colorado. They remain open 6 days a week both day and night (usually 4PM to 8/9/10 PM) until they melt, typically six to eight weeks after construction, but one year in Utah, “it was so abnormally warm, the castle closed after only three days.” Tickets start at $15.95 for pre-booked admission. There is a link in the article to the official website if you want more details.
• New Year’s Eve: The best place to view Denver’s fireworks and mini-parade, which features magicians, costumed performers, balloon artists, and other family-friendly attractions, is the 16th street Mall in downtown Denver.

January, as in most locations, is relatively quiet – if you exclude all those non-seasonal things-to-do listed earlier!

• The National Western Stock Show & Rodeo took place from Jan 6 to Jan 21 in 2018, and has been a tradition since 1906. The most attention-grabbing part of the show is perhaps the Kick-off Parade, when ranchers on horseback march long-horned cattle through downtown Denver.
• From Jan 11 to 14, the Denver International Sportsmen’s Expo brought together hundreds of vendors to display the latest in outdoors gear.
• March 15th saw the “Martin Luther King Marade” (NOT a typo), described as ” the largest parade and rally of its kind in the country.” The concept appears to be that you are expected to join the parade as a participant. The memorial parade begins at City Park and then marchers continue to Civic Center Park, with the final stop at the Colorado State Capitol Building.
• I mentioned the Red Rocks Amphitheater earlier. On January 26, they held a special event, “Icelantic Winter on the Rocks”. This is a naturally-formed rock formation that is acoustically-perfect (and surrounding park) and used as a unique venue for live music.
• January 26-27 this year was the Winter Brew Fest, which celebrates the beer-brewing history of Colorado by drawing together all the major brewers and microbreweries in one place so you can taste all their wares. Tickets are limited to give the festival an intimate ambiance, so booking ahead is essential.

February gets even busier.

• On the first of the month, “Ales, Apps, & Barrels of Fun” took place at the Marsico Campus of the Children’s Museum Of Denver, but it was an adults-only event for those aged 21 and over. Taste beers from local breweries, snack on light bites, and best of all, enjoy an evening of play (starts 7PM) in “world-class exhibits”: Build and launch rockets, see who can make the biggest bubble, race to the top of Altitude and so much more. The thought of using alcohol to impair adults back to childhood levels of physical activity appeals to me for some reason, and some of these sound like fun even for the teetotaler!
• If the Broncos don’t make the Superbowl, some residents like to distract themselves from the game at the “Run 5K on Super Bowl Day” fun-run from Washington Park, with prizes for the best fan ‘gear’. Advance registration required, $35.
• The Fire & Ice Festival in the appropriately named “Loveland” is a pre-Valentine’s special event that features on-site ice sculpture by day and the lighting of fire sculptures by night, plus live music, booze, and a nightly fireworks display, Feb 9th to Feb 11th. Entrance was free in 2018.
• Denver Restaurant Week runs from February 23 to March 4th. Hundreds of the top restaurants and eateries in the city offer multi-course dinners at three different price points to suit everyone from the casual diner to the discerning gourmet seeking something exceptional.
• The Colorado Garden and Home Show nestles alongside Restaurant week on the 2018 Calendar, running from Feb 24 to March 3. This is regarded as the region’s most prestigious show of its type.
• February closes out with yet another charity fun-run, this one the very descriptively-named “Run In Your Undies”. The distance is a “mile-ish” and the cause is a cure for neurofibromatosis. This is more about the party before and after and less about athleticism; participants warm up before (and after) with (presumably alcoholic) drinks. Starts at the Denver Civic Center.< ./li>

Sports are popular all year in Denver. It is one of only 13 US Cities with teams in four different national sporting leagues. Local teams are the Colorado Avalanche (Ice Hockey), Denver Nuggets (NBA Basketball), Colorado Mammoths (National Lacrosse League), Denver Outlaws (Major League Lacrosse), Glendale Raptors (Major League Rugby), University of Denver Hockey (More Ice Hockey), Colorado Rockies (Major League Baseball), Colorado Rapids (Soccer) and (of course), the Denver Broncos (NFL). And that excludes College Sports teams, amateur teams, and unofficial groups, like the Ice Racers listed earlier. And, as usual, sports teams imply sports fans, which imply sports events.

Sources

Primary Sources not linked to within the article:

• Wikipedia’s Denver page;
• Wikipedia’s Colorado page;
• Wikipedia’s Rocky Mountains page;
• Wikipedia’s High Plains page;
• Winter Fun & Outdoor Activities by www.Denver.org aka “Visit Denver”;
• New Year, New Adventures by www.Denver.org aka “Visit Denver”;
• Denver Events This Weekend by www.Denver.org aka “Visit Denver”;
• Free Winter Activities by www.Denver.org aka “Visit Denver”;
• First Friday Art Walks by www.Denver.org aka “Visit Denver”;
• Top 5 Reasons To Visit Denver This Winter by www.Denver.org aka “Visit Denver”;
• Snowpak’s Things To Do In Denver During Winter;
• 11 Free Things To Do In Denver In the Winter, by Diana Rowe “Traveling Grandmom”, for TravelingMom.com;
• 35+ Winter Date Ideas To Keep You From Hibernating by Ashley Adams for 303Magazine.com;
• The Ice Castles Are Back In Colorado This Winter – Here’s What You’ll See by Marissa Kozma for 303Magazine.com;
• Everything You Absolutely Must Do In Denver This Winter by Molly Martin for thrillist.com.

19. Winter In Spokane, Washington

The “Lilac City” looks so simple on a state-scaled map. A small city (about 209,000 people, 101st largest in the US) in what would be the exact center of Spokane County if it were a perfect rectangle (instead of having a ‘bite’ taken out of it to the northwest. And at first glance, the Wikipedia article detailing the city supports that.

The reality is in the second paragraph, hidden behind the seemingly-innocuous passage, “…and the economic and cultural center of the Spokane Metropolitan Area, the Greater Spokane Area, and the Inland Northwest.”

It’s only when you bring up google maps, zoom down to the individual street level, and start panning around, that the reality of what this means begins to strike home.

Spokane is a set Russian Dolls, with the “official” city nothing more than the innermost layer. The metropolitan area effectively protrudes Northward to encompass Country Homes, Southward to include Glenrose, and Eastward to incorporate Spokane Valley, and further east from there into Idaho and a north-south strip of adjacent urban areas that comprise Post Falls, Coeur d’Alene, Dalton Gardens, and Hayden. What’s more, Rathdrum, Idaho, is just outside this corridor but close enough that it can probably be considered an outer suburb in any practical sense.

Some of these (and more besides) fall into the Spokane Metropolitan Area, which is a full three counties in size. The more is places like Cheney (11,534 people), Liberty Lake (8,906 people) and Airway Heights (6,639 people).

Adjacent to this in Idaho is the Coeur d’Alene Statistical Area, which comprises of the townships named above including Rathdrum, and which also happens to be Kootenai County.

And it should be noted that all this is a simplification of the human geography of the region.

But, when you take away all these artificial divisions away and simply look at the roads, all of the above form one extended metropolis as shown on the second map of the montage. Put them all together and you get the third largest urban area in the Pacific Northwest, bettered only by Seattle and Portland.

The history of the place is not uncommon for these parts: a trading post, connected to everywhere else when the Railroad came through and brought settlers, the discovery of gold and silver, and an economy based on primary production (mining, timber, agriculture) until the 1980s.

During the first half of the 20th century, Spokane seemed to be simply marking time. Slow growth was followed by stagnation was followed by slow growth. The initial decline, in 1910, was largely due to a slowing economy, not helped by the Great Fires of 1889 and 1910.

A saga of flames

All right, there’s a historical can of worms that I tried hard not to open, without success.

1889

[On] August 4, 1889, … a fire, now known as The Great Fire (not to be confused with the Great Fire of 1910, which happened nearby), began just after 6:00 PM. and destroyed the city’s downtown commercial district.

Due to technical problems with a pump station, there was no water pressure in the city when the fire started.

In a desperate bid to starve the fire, firefighters began razing buildings with dynamite. Eventually the winds and the fire died down; 32 blocks of Spokane’s downtown core had been destroyed and one person killed. – Wikipedia

A construction boom naturally followed as Downtown was rebuilt, though not without more than their fair share of setbacks: between 1889 and 1896 alone, all six bridges over the Spokane River were destroyed by floods before their completion.

Nevertheless, the city boomed until the 1910s, as the city became an important rail hub.

1910

The Great Fire of 1910 is also commonly referred to as the Big Blowup, the Big Burn, or the Devil’s Broom fire. It was a wildfire in the western United States that burned about three million acres (4,700 sq mi; 12,100 km2) in two days, August 20-21, killing 87 people, mostly firefighters, and established the profession as public heroes. The cause of the fire has never been officially determined, but the story given below is all-but universally accepted.

Abundant Autumn and Winter rainfall in 1909-1910 promoted a dense undergrowth in the forested regions of the affected states. The Spring and Summer that followed were extremely dry and summer hot enough to be described as “like no other”. The drought produced forests teeming with dry fuel. Individual spot-fires were lit by hot cinders flung from locomotives, sparks, lightning, and back-burning fire crews, and by mid-August, there were 1,000 to 3,000 fires burning across Idaho, Montana, Washington, and British Columbia.

These fires exploded into rolling waves of flame as the sap in the Western White Pine forests that blanketed Idaho boiled and created

“a cloud of highly-flammable gas that blanketed hundreds of square miles, which spontaneously detonated dozens of times, each time sending tongues of flame thousands of feet into the sky” – Wikipedia

…which created the heat conditions to generate a new release of hydrocarbon gas, a self-perpetuating cycle that destroyed everything it touched.

Smoke from the fire was said to have been seen as far east as Watertown, New York, and as far south as Denver, Colorado. It was reported that at night, five hundred miles (800 km) out into the Pacific Ocean, ships could not navigate by the stars because the sky was cloudy with smoke. – Wikipedia

And then the fire became the inferno that earned it the rather graphic appellations given earlier. On August 20, a cold front blew and brought hurricane-force winds, whipping these hundreds or thousands of small fires into one or two huge conflagrations. The resulting fire was impossible to fight; there were too few men, too little supplies, and not enough expertise or technology. It ultimately collapsed when another cold front swept in, carrying steady rain.

Even today, with the full gamut of national resources and expertise, experience tells me that firefighters would struggle to cope with such a perfect storm of conditions. So much of this story is reminiscent of regular events here in Australia, such as the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983, the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, and the Black Christmas bushfires of 2001-2002.

But it was time of industrial economic change, and that was the real killer; everything else was only a temporary setback. Control of mines and resources became increasingly dominated by national corporations rather than local people and organizations, which diverted capital away from the local economy of the city (and to the economies in which those corporations were based). This decreased growth and investment opportunities in Spokane, which made the city less attractive to investors and further slowed growth.

With mining in decline, agriculture and logging becoming the dominant forces in the local economy. The population explosion and the building of homes, railroads, and mines in northern Idaho and southern British Columbia fueled the logging industry in particular.

Although Spokane’s resources were overshadowed in importance by the vast timbered areas on the coastal regions west of the Cascades, and the local industry was handicapped by monopolistic rail freight rates and stiff competition, it nevertheless rode the boom to become a noted leader in the manufacture of doors, window sashes, blinds, and other planing mill products. – Wikipedia

The railroad industry was already killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, so far as Spokane was concerned. Rail freight rates were so much higher in Spokane than those in coastal seaport cities such as Seattle and Portland that Minneapolis merchants could ship goods first to Seattle and then back to Spokane for less than shipping directly to Spokane, even though the rail line to Seattle ran through Spokane on the way to the coast.

This situation could not last; freight rates eventually fell to more rational levels, but by then the local logging economy was limping – not moribund, but not really growing, either. As the logging interests consolidated, this economic stagnation became entrenched within the local industry.

During this time of stagnation, unrest was prevalent among the area’s unemployed, who were victimized by “job sharks”, which charged a fee for signing up workers in the logging camps. Job sharks and employment agencies were known to cheat itinerant workers, sometimes paying bribes to periodically fire entire work crews, thus generating repetitive fees for themselves.

Crime spiked in the 1890s and 1900s, with eruptions of violent activity involving unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or “Wobblies” as they were often known, whose free speech fights had begun to garner national attention. – Wikipedia

The unethical practices of recruiters gave the IWW a legitimate grievance that turned Spokane into a flash-point of industrial unrest. Union members from many western states came to Spokane to participate in what was a deliberate publicity stunt, a fight over Free Speech and local ordinances on Soapboxing that was symbolic of the broader conflict between Workers and Profits that continues to evolve to this day.

When your city economy rests on three pillars and two of them are on shaky ground, you had better hope for good things from the third. It can be argued that agricultural success kept Spokane alive.

Initially, the region was thought to be unsuitable for wheat production due to the hilly terrain; there was a common belief that wheat could not be cultivated on the tops of the hills. When wheat was first planted in the region in the late 1850s, it was discovered that this was false, and the region became a breadbasket.

Inland Empire farmers exported wheat, livestock, and other agriproducts to ports such New York, Liverpool, and Tokyo. These days, the region south of Spokane is one of the largest wheat producing regions in the United States. A large share of that production is exported to Far East markets. The agricultural economy has also diversified, supporting many vineyards and microbreweries.

But it wasn’t enough at the time to sustain growth; the 1920 census showed a population increase of just 35 over the preceding decade. Since this is far less than the natural growth of the then population, it shows that thousands were, in fact, leaving the city.

In the 20s and 30s, to generate any sort of growth, those attempting to boost the city were forced to market it as a quiet, comfortable place suitable for raising a family rather than as a dynamic community bursting with opportunity. A brief improvement in the city’s fortunes occurred during WWII, when the cheap electricity available in the area from the many local dams stimulated local aluminum production, a material much in demand for aircraft. Post-war, this demand waned, proving this boost to have been a temporary lifeline.

In the early 1960s, an organization naming itself Spokane Unlimited sought to revitalize downtown Spokane and lift the city out of this malaise. They successfully hosted the first environmentally-themed World’s Fair in 1974, in the process sweeping away a century of railroad infrastructure and reinventing the urban core. The actual site of “Expo ’74” became the 100-acre Riverfront Park after the event.

This kick-started the city, which experienced a boom through the late 1970s and early 1980s, interrupted only by a nationwide recession in 1981 in which Silver, Timber, and Agricultural Product prices dropped. This triggered a period of slow decline which lasted into the 1990s and exacerbated by the loss of many blue-collar jobs in the manufacturing sector. Eventually, though, the diversification made possible by the reinvention of the city in the 60s and 70s enabled it to escape this downward slide and begin to transition to a service-oriented economy, a process that continues to this day.

Along the way, Spokane has seen the emergence of a number of features unique to the city, a unified patchwork of styles that sets it apart when taken as an aggregate. An example is the extensive network of skywalks that interconnect a number of buildings in the downtown area, a concept that remains somewhat controversial to this day – see, for example, this discussion on the metrospokane website.

I’d like to have provided a map to illustrate just what is meant by the term “extensive”, but I couldn’t find one that wasn’t copyright-restricted, so you’ll have to settle to a link to an 8-years-out-of-date map at Experience Spokane (Zoom in to see the skywalk network, which is a silvery-gray in color. Look for the yellow buildings and City Hall, which is a middle-gray).

Other Architectural & Cultural Features

Spokane neighborhoods contain a patchwork of architectural styles that give them a distinct identity and illustrate the changes [that have taken place in the course of] the city’s history. – Wikipedia

Most of Spokane’s notable buildings and landmarks are in the Riverside neighborhood and the downtown commercial district, where many of the buildings were rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1889 in what is known as the “Romanesque Revival” style. The principle architect of this reconstruction was a self-taught designer named Kirtland Kelsey Cutter, who got his start designing “Chalet Hohenstein” for himself and other residences for his family, all while supporting himself working as a bank teller.

The next great wave of construction/reconstruction was in the 1960s and 70s and was in the Modernist style.

As a general rule, you can observe the history of the prosperity of the city by noting which styles are well-represented in the patchwork; renewal occurs when the economy booms.

An early affluent Spokane neighborhood, the Browne’s Addition neighborhood, contains the largest variety of residential architecture in the city. Residences are lavish and personalized, featuring many architecture styles that were popular and trendy in the Pacific Northwest from the late 19th century to 1930.

Much of Spokane’s parkland was acquired prior to WWI, and in 1907 the board of Park Commissioners retained influential landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, to draw up a plan for those Parks, establishing the city as a leader amongst western cities in the development of a citywide system of parks, an approach that is commonplace in modern times.

Spokane is also known as the birthplace of the movement that eventually led to Father’s Day being established as a National Holiday in the USA.

Topography notes

The lowest elevation in the city of Spokane is the northernmost point of the Spokane River that lies within the city limits, in Riverside State Park: 490m (1,608 feet). The highest elevation is on the northeast side, near Beacon Hill and the North Hill Reservoir,: 790m (2,591 feet). That’s a difference of 300m (983 feet), which is not an inconsiderable range and reflects the city’s location in the western fringes of the Rocky Mountains.

Of course, it’s not that simple. The city lies on a steppe plain west of the Selkirk Mountains, the sharply-rising foothills of the Rockies. Ecologically, the city is situated at the transition point between two different neighboring ecologies; to the east lie the Columbia Basin and the coniferous forests of the Rockies; to the south are prairies and rolling hills.

Demographics

Spokane has been criticized and sometimes derided for its lack of diversity and mono-cultural society, but recent decades have brought about an increase in diversity that renders the stereotype out-of-date.

Spokane and its metro area in general, particularly northern Idaho, has been stigmatized in the popular consciousness by a number of hate groups that were set up in and around Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Low ethnic diversity made the region a destination for some seeking to escape more cosmopolitan cities for a locale with a relatively homogeneous, white population, a trend that accelerated with the arrival of retired engineer Richard Butler from California to (eventually) establish the white supremacist church better known by the name of its political arm, the Aryan Nations, who were responsible fro several hate crimes and terror plots during the 1980s and 90s. The group became defunct in 2000 when the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a civil suit against them, winning a $6.3 million dollar settlement that eventually bankrupted the organization and caused the closure of their compound.

Another significant act of hate was the attempted bombing of Spokane’s Martin Luther King Day Parade by Kevin Harpham of Addy, Washington in 2011.

The Southern Poverty Law Center currently lists three hate groups in the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene metro areas, in the categories of anti-Muslim, Holocaust denial, and general hate.

But even as the Aryan Nation were at their zenith in terms of “political activity,” their grounds for choosing this location were being undermined by a new cosmopolitanism. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a substantial wave of immigration from countries in the former Soviet State (especially Russians and Ukrainians), who now form a comparatively large demographic in Spokane and Spokane County.

There is also a strong Latino demographic. And among the fastest-growing smaller demographics in Spokane is the Pacific Islander ethnic group, which is estimated to be the third largest minority group in the county.

Spokane was once home to a sizable Asian community, mostly Japanese, centered in a district called Chinatown from the early days of the city until 1974, even though that was both a misnomer and culturally insensitive to a degree that would not be tolerable in modern times. As in many western railway towns, the Asian community started off as an encampment for migrant laborers working on the railroads. This Asian community thrived until the 1940s, after which its population decreased and became integrated and dispersed, losing its Asian character; urban blight and the preparations leading up to Expo ’74 led to the demolition of “Chinatown”.

Perhaps nothing speaks to the transformation undergone by the city in the 21st century more strongly than the gay and lesbian Spokane Pride Parade, held each June, and the Spokane Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, held every November, which features contemporary, independent films of interest to the LGBT community. The acceptance of these events as part of the cultural landscape demonstrates clearly how much things have changed since the 1990s when diversity was a much-maligned dirty word.

Climate: The big picture

Spokane has been a rules-breaker since the days of the IWW, more than a century ago – sometimes in good ways, and sometimes in bad. Although nicknamed the Lilac City from a flowering shrub that has flourished since being introduced in the early 20th century, after the history conveyed above, I feel it is equally deserving of the name “The Teflon City” – in the same sense that John Gotti used to be known as the “Teflon Don”. No matter how bad things got for them, none of the undoubted misfortune experienced seems to have stuck to them. Other cities, faced with the challenges dealt Spokane, could have collapsed; instead, the city simply languished in the doldrums until someone found another avenue to good times.

It’s somehow fitting that the climate of the city is also a noted rules-breaker. Officially, it’s a humid continental climate, which is considered a rare climatic type because of its elevation and significant winter precipitation requirements. Spokane, however, is adjacent to, and sometimes classified as part of, a region with a warm-Summer Mediterranean Climate, because the average temperature for the coldest month is just over -3°C (26.6°F). In truth, and in keeping with the modern diversity underpinning the city, it shares some features of both, revealing just how arbitrary the lines between different climatic types really is at times, and how complex real weather can be – for all that there are obvious patterns and correlations within the phenomena.

As you might expect from so large an extended city, there’s a wealth of data that’s applicable to some extent. Wikipedia’s page on Spokane provides complete records for Spokane International Airport, Supplemented by partial records from 1953-1983 at Riverside Park, and by partial records from Felts Field Airport, close to the border with Idaho. There are substantial differences between these records.

But Post Falls, for example, has weather that is only similar to the records for the three Spokane sources. And I suspect that the weather would only grow more diverse if I went looking for other data points. Still similar, but the devil’s in the detail, as has been shown a number of times.

Rather than bury both myself and the reader in confusing details, I’m going to simply summarize the differences and then treat the international airport as “THE weather” of Spokane.

Riverside: Hotter in late summer, cooler or the same the rest of the year, warmer at night in Winter and Spring, significantly cooler in Autumn. Marginally wetter all year round, and receives a LOT less snow.

Felts Field: Record temps, both high and low, are 6°F (or more) hotter all year round, both days and nights. Normal temps are all 4°F hotter. Some months are slightly wetter, and some slightly drier, but any pattern is obscure; as a general rule, the amounts are only 0.3” or so in the course of a month.

Post Falls, Idaho: officially a “dry-summer continental climate”. Remember that, and that Spokane has officially either a “humid continental climate” or a “warm-Summer Mediterranean Climate” (depending on who you ask), both of which sound like they would be rather more moist than that of Post Falls. In fact, Post Falls experiences considerably more rainfall than the Spokane reference – in fact, up to 2 1/2 inches more, depending on the month. Some months, Post Falls gets double the rainfall of it’s western neighbor. Your immediate suspicion might be that Post Falls receives less snow, but once again, this is not born out by the records, where up to six inches more can fall in January and lesser increases at other times. What’s more, Post Falls only has three months with snow-less records; Spokane has four and very nearly six or seven.

No, what’s going on here is the other side of the Chinook Wind phenomenon – all that moisture and precipitation has to go somewhere. You could say (inaccurately) that Denver is in Post Falls’ “Chinook Shadow”. If you corrected the places referred to, you could even make that a reasonably accurate statement, because the principle is correct.

What this shows is how sharply the Chinook “precipitation dump” effect falls off. The distance between the two is only 25 miles; it takes less than half an hour to drive from one to the other via the I-90, but there are both pronounced similarities and profound differences between their respective climates.

“Proximity to elevation”, relative to the prevailing winds over water-sources, is thus revealed as a critical factor when it comes to the climate actually experienced by a region.

Spokane’s location, between the Cascades Range to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east and north, protects it from weather patterns experienced in other parts of the Pacific Northwest. The Cascade Mountains form a barrier to the eastward flow of moist and relatively mild air from the Pacific Ocean in winter and cool air in summer.

Climate: Specifics Analysis

There is no pronounced dividing line between the primary seasons and the transition seasons. The changes tend to be more gradual between a high-point and a low-point. The two primary seasons are quite distinct, but there beginnings and endings are a little fuzzier. Nevertheless, there are four distinct seasons experienced in Spokane.

Winter, at first glance, is normally December through February, but it regularly starts early and can occasionally linger into March. The months that bookend each year are the clear “heart” of the winter season. It is as correct to describe Winter as two months long as it is to consider it to be three or even four months in duration; it’s all about where you draw the classification “dividing line”.

I am going to consider winter as commencing in November because of a marked similarity between snowfall levels in February and those of November; if one is designated “Winter”, the other should be too, according to this observed pattern. In effect, Winter has stolen an Autumn month, making for a sharper transition between the hot and cold seasons, a pattern that is reflective of the actual situation revealed by the climatic data. It is this accuracy of impression that I consider the decisive argument.

So the seasons of Spokane, for the purposes of this series, are:

• Winter: November, December, January, and February;
• Spring: March, April, and May;
• Summer: June, July, and August;
• Autumn: September and October.

So, to analysis of the Winter records, starting as usual with the daily temperature highs: Winter tends to arrive suddenly. There is a 10°C (17°C) difference between the record highs of October and November respectively. This is the biggest month-on-month change in the course of the year, though the March-April change is almost as great. The hottest temperatures on record are Nov 21°C (70°F), Dec 16°C (60°F), Jan 17°C (62°F), and February 17°C (63°F).

The typical highs of each day in these months are far cooler. Nov 5.3°C (41.6°F), Dec 0.1°C (32.2°F), Jan 1.3°C (34.4°F), and Feb 4.2°C (39.6°F). However, not all days are this extreme; temperatures of Nov 13.4°C (56.2°F), Dec 8.3°C (46.9°F), Jan 8.6°C (47.4°F), and Feb 11°C (51.8°F) occur at least once each month.

The overwhelming impression created by these numbers is one of an extreme symmetry to the season. The temperatures plunge until they reach bottom, then rise again. All else is “passing noise” in the pattern. It will be interesting to see if that pattern also occurs in the daily minimums.

Most nights (presumably) are below freezing, sometimes by quite some margin. Typical daily minimums are Nov -1.2°C (29.8°F), Dec -5.3°C (22.5°F), Jan -4.1°C (24.7°F), and Feb -3.1°C (26.4°F). But at least once in a season, those minimums are exceeded (in the wrong direction): Nov -10.9°C (12.3°F), Dec -16.1°C (3°F), Jan -15.9°C (3.3°F), and Feb -12.9°C (8.7°F), respectively, and minimums are below zero regularly in Autumn and Spring, as well.

With chilly minimums such a recurring feature of the climate, it’s no surprise that the record minimums are extremely frosty. Nov -25°C (-13°F), Dec -32°C (-25°F), Jan -34°C (-30°F), and Feb -31°C (-24°F).

Despite this impression, the Rockies shield Spokane from some of the coldest air masses traveling southward from Canada. It could, in other words, be much colder. This also suggests that wind speeds, and hence windchill effects, are also relatively moderate – compared to what they could be.

Temperatures of less than -23°C (-10°F) are rare, and typically only 3.5 days a year average below -18°C (0°F).

As a season, winter is the wettest month. Because of the rain shadow effect of the Cascades, the Spokane area has 420mm (16.5”) average annual precipitation, less than half of that of the (unprotected) Seattle. However, there is a second annual peak in late Spring which is important to the agriculture of the region, and which can produce heavy fire loads in a summer that is already hot and dry. Within the season, November and December are the wettest months, both receiving 58.4mm (2.3”) on 13.7 and 13.2 rainy days, respectively. This also shows that individual falls are slightly heavier later in the year. In January, the average falls to 45.5mm (1.79”) over 13.4 rainy days, so this trend doesn’t last. February receives 33.8mm (1.33”) over 10.4 rainy days, but it is the shortest month of the year; if it were a more typical length, these numbers would be 36.5mm (1.44”) and 11.2 days. If you compare these, you find that not only are the falls decreasing in frequency but they are also becoming lighter.

The defining visual image of Spokane’s winter climate, though, is snow. While rare, at least one incident of snowfall in October and another in May, of virtually-identical intensity, have taken place; snow is a regular feature of the months in between. The peak occurs in December, and would trend toward the 3rd-4th week of that month, i.e. Christmas. Residents of Spokane don’t have to dream of a White Christmas and probably wouldn’t consider it anything to look forward to.

It is worth bearing in mind that snowfalls happen with roughly half the frequency of rainfall while considering the actual averages: November, 4.9 snow days yield 18.8cm (7.4”); December, 9.8 days produce 37.1cm (14.6”) of cover; January, 9 snow days generate 29cm (11.4”) of snow; and in February, the typical experience is 5 snow days and 17.3cm (6.8”). Falls generally persist into mid-Spring, decreasing in frequency and severity.

While late Summer and early autumn see relatively clear skies, the frequency of cloud cover rockets as Winter approaches. In November, only 26% of the possible sunlight actually reaches the city, in December that falls to only 22%, and in January the average is 28%. In February, this rises to 41% – 4 clear days for every 6 cloudy ones – and throughout Spring this slowly increases. But clouds are a recurring fact of life in all but the hottest months, and winter is when they are most ever-present.

Winter Events

The appeal of covered walkways between major buildings becomes far more understandable after considering these weather patterns. In fact, the reader could be forgiven for a suspicion that the regular rainfalls, however light, might put something of a damper on the social scene; Spokane was ranked as having the 4th ‘most depressing’ Winter in the US, after all. Spokane even struggles to promote any specific local activity themed around Christmas.

Outside of Winter there’s plenty going on, and there are a few events that occur regularly despite the season.

There’s an active Arts subculture concentrated in three districts. Like Denver, Spokane has First Friday art walks. Twice a year, these build to a crescendo – the first Friday each of October and February – which attract large crowds to the art districts within Davenport, the Garland Business District, and East Sprague. The first of these also has the highest concentration of art galleries and is also home to many of the main venues for the Performing Arts.

“The Knitting Factory is a concert house that serves as a setting for many mainstream touring musicians and acts.

“The Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, restored to its original 1931 Art Deco state after years of being derelict is home to the Spokane Symphony Orchestra.

“The Metropolitan Performing Arts Center was restored in 1988 and renamed the Bing Crosby Theater in 2006 to honor the former Spokanite.

Touring stand-up comedians are hosted by the Spokane Comedy Club.

Theater is provided by Spokane’s only resident professional company, The Modern Theater, though there are also the Spokane Civic Theatre and several other amateur community theaters and smaller groups.

The INB Performing Arts Center is often host to large traveling exhibitions, shows, and tours.” – Wikipedia

Spokane is considered somewhat deficient in terms of grassroots-level musical venues, though there are a number of higher-level venues and groups, such as the Spokane Symphony Orchestra (mentioned above), which presents a full season of classical music each year, and the Spokane Jazz Orchestra, which does likewise for their genre.

Similarly, there are a range of museums catering to everything from art to local history to science and technology.

But in terms of big local events, the schedule favors the warmer months, which are home to everything from the annual Lilac Bloomsday Run to the Spokane Hoopfest (a 3-on-3 basketball tournament) to Pig Out In The Park, an annual six-day food and entertainment festival which features free concerts featuring local, regional, and national recording artists in Riverfront Park.

What major events do occur in the Winter Season are indoors in nature. November brings the Spokane Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (mentioned earlier), while the Spokane International Film Festival (a small, juried festival that features documentaries and shorts from around the world) is a February event.

There is an annual Renaissance Faire but no indication of what time of year it calls home.

There are five ski resorts in the region and this is their peak season (for obvious reasons).

The INB Performing Arts Center hosts the WCE Best of Broadway at the end of each year.

The Spokane Symphony’s concert season continues through the winter. You can also stop by the Historic Davenport Hotel which has an annual Christmas Trees display and sells raffle tickets to win the decorated trees, with funds going to support the Symphony. The display and raffle are about a week long and are a genuine seasonal highlight.

And the last week of February is the time of year for the Inlander Restaurant Week – just like Denver, the best restaurants create three-course fixed-price menus for this celebratory period. The Menus are generally made public in early February to give patrons the chance to plan their gastronomic tours.

Primary Sources

• Wikipedia’s Spokane, Washington page;
• Spokane Winter by Visit Spokane .com.

20. Winter In Seattle, Washington

Any time that you use a real-world location with which you have no personal experience for any purpose – be it literary, factual, or in an RPG – you are forced to confront the difference between what you think you know and what you really do know about that location. This is something that I’ve had to do repeatedly in the course of this series, and Seattle is no exception.

My awareness of the place is that it’s on the West Coast of the USA, up in the extreme north of the contiguous continental states, and beyond that there is a confused melange of unreliable impressions more accurately ascribable to the New England region, such as “Whale Hunting” and “snow”. And there’s a vague association with Soundgarden. Or maybe it’s a different band.

Of course, you may be able to get away with such vagueness if your audience – your players, in the case of an RPG, or my readers, in the case of this blog – know no better than you. For example, most North Americans would have known very little about Sydney, so a GM setting an adventure in my city would be able to get away without a great deal of research and the players probably wouldn’t notice.

Given that most of my readers are North American, and predominantly from the US, that won’t work in this case – if I screw up, or do a half-arsed job, someone’s sure to spot it. The only solution is to do the very best research job that I can, because your credibility suffers massively from even a single case of getting it wrong through inadequacy of research. If you can spot that I’m talking through my hat in an area about which you know better, you are that much less-inclined to trust my work on a place about which you know nothing.

Worse still, most RPG players are sponges for factual information. When I use, say, Rome in an adventure, I can never be sure in advance of what my players might know about the place. So I have to maintain the most scrupulous standards that I can manage just to achieve a reasonable suspension of disbelief.

And that means that thee unreliable gestalt of vague and uncertain impressions needs to be shown the door unless they can be validated through factual research.

In a way, that’s what this entire series is about – on the local scale, it’s about the weather experienced by different specific locations that have been selected to be representative of various climates and geographic locations; on the regional scale, it’s about using local climatic data as a template for similar locations, knowing that there will be some inherent level of inaccuracy in doing so; and on the broadest scale, it’s about my understanding of the weather, confronting the numerous errors and patches of nebulous vagueness in my knowledge on the subject, and passing the resulting factual foundation on to you, my readers, for your own use.

Seattle was chosen because my research indicated that there was a uniqueness to San Francisco that made it unrepresentative of the West Coast as a whole, and because I was already reporting on Spokane, Washington, a location that is specifically described in various sources as being sheltered from the climatic influences to which Seattle is subject. To get the complete picture, then, you needed both Spokane and Seattle.

Okay, so the first thing you notice about Seattle is that for a coastal city, it seems to be an awfully long way inland. This is one case in which appearances are highly deceptive, and the error can be summed up in a single two-word name: Puget Sound.

Puget Sound

A ‘sound’ (in geographic terminology) is a “sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord; or a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land” (though those are also known as a strait).

Which sounds all nice and precise; the reality is a heck of a lot messier. There’s no consistency to the use of the term, which was often assigned long before the definition was cobbled together.

In the case of Puget Sound, the term is applied to a complex network of estuaries, marine waterways, and basins with three connections (one major and two minor) to the Pacific Ocean. The name was first assigned to the waters of the region south of the Tacoma Narrows by George Vancouver in 1792, and was later extended to include the waters north of the Narrows as well.

In 2009, an attempt to clean up the terminology by the United States Board on Geographic Names led to Puget Sound, plus the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia (both of which form part of the international border between the US and Canada), being defined as the “Salish Sea” – but sometimes the terms “Puget Sound” and “Puget Sound and adjacent waters” are used to refer not only to the Puget Sound referred to as part of the Salish Sea but also waters to the north, such as Bellingham Bay and those in the region of the San Juan Islands.

Nine rivers feed into the Sound, however ill-defined it might be, and it forms a major channel to the Pacific. The most practical definition is based on that fact; the waters of the sound are a blend of fresh water and the salt waters of the Pacific. The marine population is a mixture of salt-water life, fresh-water species, and some unique adaptions that exclusively prefer the lower salinity of the Sound.

There are 15 prominent islands within the sound’s one hundred mile length & ten mile width, and six cities are located on its coastline – Seattle, Tacoma, Washington, Olympia, Everett, and Bremerton.

Even before looking at the data and analyses of various sources, I can see from the map of the Sound included in the Photographic Montage that Puget Sound will have a complex relationship with the climate of Seattle. If the wind is from exactly the right direction, it will carry cold, moist, air from the northern Pacific SSE to strike Seattle with minimal interference; but if the source is just a few degrees more from the north, the wind will flow across the icy landmass of western Canada, resulting in a drier and even colder airflow. A few degrees more to the west, and Vancouver Island and/or the expanse of the Olympic Peninsula to the west will provide at least some shield against the winds, a situation that remains in effect through almost 45 degrees of arc. The location map at the start of the montage adds to the story, clearly showing a channel of relatively low ground from the west to the south-west; while these winds would be warmer, there is not a lot of terrain impact to leech the water content out of the air before it gets to Seattle. Everywhere else you look, there is high ground; winds from those points of the compass would incur Chinook effects to at least some extent, making them drier and providing less rainfall for the City.

From this alone, I would expect the weather to be quite literally as fickle as the winds. From the currently-prevailing wind and the season, you would have a reasonable chance to predict the general weather pattern, and from a particular state of the weather and general knowledge of the season, you could probably make a fair stab at guessing the wind direction.

It should be noted that these last two paragraphs are entirely semi-educated guesswork on my part – bold predictions to be validated by examining the actual climatic information, which happens a little later in the article.

A (very brief) History of Seattle

The Seattle area was inhabited by native Americans for at least 4000 years before the first permanent European settlers, now known as the Denny Party, arrived from Illinois via Portland on the Schooner Exact in 1851.

In the following year, the settlement was moved to the eastern shore of Elliott Bay from it’s initial location at Alki Point and renamed “Seattle” after Chief Si’ahl of the local Duwamish and Suquamish tribes.

The first major industry was logging, but by the late 19th century it had become a commercial and ship-building center, serving as the gateway to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush.

In 1907, the company that would eventually become UPS was founded in Seattle.

During World War I, a shipbuilding boom took over the city, and the retrenchment of the workforce after the war led to the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which was the first General Strike in the USA. Seattle was mildly prosperous in the 1920s but was particularly hard hit in the Great Depression, experiencing some of the country’s harshest labor strife in that era. Violence during the Maritime Strike of 1934 cost Seattle much of its maritime traffic, which was rerouted to the Port of Los Angeles.

Quite obviously, job-creation programs focus on where the need is greatest, and so Seattle became one of the largest beneficiaries of the New Deal. The residents were subsidized to build roads, parks, dams, schools, railroads, bridges, docks, and even historical and archival record sites and buildings, but this was not enough to stave off the challenge posed by Los Angeles. Seattle’s eastern farm land faded in importance due to the growth of farming in Oregon and the Midwest, forcing people into town, further boosting the unemployment rate.

World War II saved the city, as prosperity returned, centered on Boeing Aircraft. Post-war, this prosperity again dipped, but Boeing grew in strength to dominate the commercial airliner market, and this dip was short-lived. The city became established as a center for aircraft manufacturing, and future prosperity seemed assured.

The city hosted the 1962 World’s Fair, also known as the Century 21 Exposition, which included construction of what has become the most iconic visual icon of the city, the Space Needle, an observation tower. During the World’s Fair, nearly 20,000 people a day used its elevators.

The aircraft boom ground to an unexpected and savage halt in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a victim of the oil crises, loss of Government contracts, and costs and delays associated with the Boeing 747. Many people left the area to look for work elsewhere. So savage was the downturn that two local real estate agents erected a billboard which read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle Turn out the lights.”

Boeing recovered, of course; and the 747 proved to have been worth all the angst in the long-term; it is now regarded as the most successful commercial aircraft design of all time. While the manufacturing plants remain an integral employer in the region, the corporate headquarters of Boeing were relocated to Chicago in 2001.

But, by then, the city had developed alternative economic pillars. In the 1980s, Microsoft established themselves in the region, and was followed in 1994 by Amazon. Innovative technological startups in the software, biotechnology, and internet fields have sustained the city in slower times since 1990 and led to the occasional economic boom.

The biggest such boom ran from 1990 to 2000, and saw the city grow by 50,000 residents and saw Seattle’s real estate become the most expensive in the US. In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst; many of the Seattle companies had been built on real technologies and not only survived but remained relatively strong, but the explosive growth in the field was over.

In July 2013, Seattle was the fastest-growing major city in the US, remained in the top five for the next 2 years, and then again topped the list in 2016.

Beginning in 2010, and for the next five years, Seattle gained an average of 14,511 residents per year, with the growth strongly skewed toward the center of the city. Unemployment dropped from roughly 9 percent to 3.6 percent. And then another boom started.

This most recent boom is directly attributable to Amazon, which moved its corporate headquarters from north Beacon Hill to South Lake Union (both in Seattle), which involved a historically-epic construction boom which resulted in the completion of almost 10,000 apartments in Seattle in 2017, more than in any previous year and nearly twice as many as were built in 2016.

Nevertheless, the city is now “bursting at the seams”, with over 45,000 households spending more than half their income on housing and at least 2,800 people homeless, and with the country’s sixth-worst rush hour traffic.

Today, Seattle is a major gateway for trade with Asia, and the fourth-largest port in terms of container handling. Because of the indirect impact from imports, Seattle is likely to be one of the cities most strongly impacted by the proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum.

Seattle’s musical history is an enviable one; from 1918 to 1951, nearly two dozen jazz nightclubs existed on Jackson Street, connecting what is now the Chinatown/International district to the CBD. This jazz scene nurtured the early careers of Ray Charles and Quincy Jones to name just two. Seattle’s next claim to musical fame was as the birthplace of Jimi Hendrix, but from 1951 to the 1990s, it was a relatively lean time for the city. Then Grunge and alt-rock exploded into mainstream awareness – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and the Foo Fighters are all native to the city.

To me, the pattern of that musical legacy is reflective of Seattle as a whole. It plods along, drifting from year to year without making waves – and then emerges from the mists of history to shake the economic foundations of the nation for a while, only to again fall quiet for long enough to be forgotten sufficiently for the “next big thing” to emerge from the region to widespread astonishment. Conditions now seem right for it to again fade from the forefront of cultural and social awareness – for a while.

The Physical Reality

Seattle is farther north than Canadian cities such as Toronto, Ottowa, and Montreal, and lies at roughly the same latitude as Salzburg, Austria. It is further North than Hobart is South, a fact that might surprise many, the consequence of there not being very much of significance between the continental Antarctic landmass and the almost 44°S latitude of Tasmania’s South-East Cape.

Geographically, the city encompasses several noteworthy hills; in fact, like Rome, the city is sometimes said to lie on Seven hills (one of which has been removed by man). The Kitsap and the Olympic peninsulas along with the Olympic mountains lie to the west of Puget Sound, while the Cascade Range and Lake Sammamish lie to the east of Lake Washington.

Much of the immediate region has been extensively landscaped by a number of “mega-projects”. For example, an area north of the central business district contained a steep hill (“Denny Hill”) that was removed to create what is now known as the “Denny Regrade”. This (and other regrades) moved a combined total of more than 35 million cubic yards of earth (almost 27 million cubic meters). Creating Harbor Island involved 7 million cubic yards, while the Ballard Locks project moved 1.6 million, twice that of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel. Straightening the Duwamish River and filling its tide-flats was the largest single project, at nearly 22 million cubic yards.

Seattle is in a major earthquake zone. On February 28, 2001, the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake did significant architectural damage, especially in the reclaimed land of the Pioneer Square area, but caused only one fatality. Other strong quakes occurred in 1700 (estimated magnitude 9), 1872 (7.3 or 7.4), 1949 (7.1), and 1965 (6.5), which killed three people directly and one more by heart failure.

Climate

“Seattle’s climate is classified as oceanic or temperate marine, with cool, wet winters and mild, relatively dry summers.

“Temperature extremes are moderated by the adjacent Puget Sound, … Pacific Ocean, and Lake Washington. Thus extreme heat waves are rare in the Seattle area, as are very cold temperatures.

“The Seattle area is the most cloudy region of the United States, due in part to frequent storms and lows moving in from the adjacent Pacific Ocean.” – Wikipedia

Despite having a reputation for frequent rain, Seattle receives less precipitation than many other US. cities, but does have many more rainy days when a very light drizzle falls for many days.

In an average year, according to Wikipedia’s sources, 150 days in a typical year receive at least 0.25mm (0.01 inches), more than nearly all US cities east of the Rockies, and it’s cloudy 201 days of the year and partly cloudy on 93 more.

Official weather and climatic data is collected at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, located about 19 km (12 mi) south of downtown in the city of SeaTac, which is at a higher elevation, and records more cloudy days and fewer partly cloudy days per year – something to bear in mind when assessing climatic records..

Hot temperature extremes are enhanced by dry, compressed wind from the west slopes of the Cascades, while cold temperatures are generated mainly from the Fraser Valley in British Columbia – which jibes fairly well with what I predicted earlier in the discussion of the region.

You can get a better feel for the variability of the region in terms of climate from the fact that Sequim, 64km from downtown Seattle, has a climate more like that of Los Angeles, roughly 1200 miles to the South, than to the far closer city.

The temperature records clearly show that Summer runs from May to September. November is more like February than it is like October, and March is not all that different from November, at least in terms of temperatures, while April is very reminiscent (statistically) of October.

In practical terms, there’s a 5-month summer (May-Sept), a 5-month winter (Nov-March), and two transitional seasons measured in mere weeks (October and April).

The record highs for the winter season are Nov 23°C (74°F), Dec 19°C (66°F), Jan 19°C (67°F), Feb 21°C (70°F), and March 26°C (78°F).

The more usual winter highs are Nov 10.5°C (50.9°F), Dec 7.6°C (45.7°F), Jan 8.4°C (47.2°F), Feb 9.9°C (49.9°F), and March 12.1°C (53.7°F). At least once in these respective months, however, the temperature will normally climb to Nov 15.9°C (60.7°F), Dec 13.3°C (55.9°F), Jan 13.6°C (56.4°F), Feb 15.7°C (60.3°F), and March 18.9°C (66°F), or more.

Comparing the differences between these values and those of other cities I’ve looked at gives the impression that Seattle is slightly more variable in daily temperature than the usual. That certainly fits with the expectations I raised based on the geography of Puget Sound relative to Seattle.

Typical daily minimums for this time of year are Nov 4.4°C (40°F), Dec 2°C (35.6°F), Jan 2.7°C (36.9°F), Feb 2.7°C (36.9°F), and March 4.1°C (39.3°F). However, it is normal for temperatures to fall, at least once in each respective month, to Nov -1.8°C (28.7°F), Dec -4.4°C (24°F), Jan -3.7°C (25.4°F), Feb -3.4°C (25.9°F), and March -0.4°C (31.3°F). It does sometimes get colder than that; the record lows are Nov -14°C (6°F), Dec -14°C (6°F), Jan -18°C (0°F), Feb -17°C (1°F), and March -12°C (11°F).

These numbers suggest that winter tends to arrive slightly more precipitously than it ends. They also suggest that the winter chills are more consistent for Seattle than for other cities, the occasional icy blast notwithstanding.

28 times in a typical year, the temperatures will drop below freezing. Twice in such a year, temperatures will not rise above the freezing point. It is extremely rare for temperatures to fall below -7°C (20°F), again supporting the impression of more consistent winter lows.

The average window for freezing temperatures is November 16 through March 10, allowing a growing season of 250 days.

Seattle experiences its heaviest rainfall during the period from the start of November to the end of January – roughly half its annual rainfall occurs in these three months. In late fall and early winter, atmospheric rivers (also known as “Pineapple Express” systems), strong frontal systems, and Pacific low pressure systems are common. Many Pineapple Express events follow or occur simultaneously with major arctic troughs in the northwestern United States, often leading to major snow-melt flooding with warm, tropical rains falling on frozen or snow-laden ground. The series of charts below summarize what’s involved in a “Pineapple Express” – from the North of Australia all the way to the North of America by way of Hawaii.

It’s worth noting that the source event (“1” on the first chart) occurs most frequently in our late spring and summer, which corresponds to the American late autumn and winter.

In November, Seattle averages more rainfall than any other US. city of more than 250,000 people; it also ranks highly in winter precipitation. It is simultaneously one of the rainiest major US cities (as measured by the number of days with precipitation) and one of the driest (as measured by the total rainfall, especially during the June-September period (which I have defined as mid-to-late summer).

During El Niño years, little precipitation falls in the Puget Sound area even by the typical standards. Since the region’s water comes from mountain snow packs during the dry summer months, El Niño winters can not only produce substandard skiing but can result in water rationing and a shortage of hydroelectric power the following summer.

Thunderstorms are rare; on average, only seven days a year include a report of thunder. New York City has an average more than 3.5 times this, Kansas City an average more than 7 times that of Seattle, and Fort Myers in Florida, an average more than 13 times this frequency (roughly 2 per week over a year). Most of Seattle’s thunderstorms are relatively mild, a characteristic of the Puget Sound Convergence Zone.

In this Zone, air arriving from the north meets air flowing in from the south. Both streams of air originate over the Pacific Ocean; airflow is split by the Olympic Mountains to Seattle’s west, then reunited to the east. When the air currents meet, they are forced upward, resulting in convection. Thunderstorms caused by this can occur north and south of town, but Seattle itself rarely receives more than occasional thunder and small hail showers.

The Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm in December 2006 is an exception that brought heavy rain and winds gusting up to 111 km/h (69 mph). This event was not caused by the Puget Sound Convergence Zone and was widespread across the Pacific Northwest at the time.

Occasionally, Seattle will experience a more dramatic weather event, usually associated with a “Pineapple Express”. Wikipedia describes one (edited for consistency):

One such event occurred on December 2-4, 2007, when sustained hurricane-force winds and widespread heavy rainfall associated with a strong Pineapple Express event occurred in the greater Puget Sound area and the western parts of Washington and Oregon. Precipitation totals exceeded 350mm (13.8 inches) in some areas with winds topping out at 209 km/h (130 mph) along coastal Oregon. It became the second wettest event in Seattle history when a little over 130 mm (5.1 in) of rain fell on Seattle in a 24-hour period. Lack of adaptation* to the heavy rain contributed to five deaths and widespread flooding and damage.

* I presume they mean “preparation for the heavy rain”.

The average rainfall in Seattle through the winter months is Nov 166.9mm (6.57 inches) over 18.4 days; Dec 135.9mm (5.35 inches) over 17.6 days; Jan 141.5mm (5.57 inches) over 18.2 days; Feb 88.9mm (3.5 inches) over 14.7 days; and March 94.5mm (3.72 inches) over 16.9 days.

Seattle typically receives some snowfall in a year but heavy snow is rare. Average annual snowfall, as measured at SeaTac Airport, is 17.3cm (6.8 inches). Only fifteen falls in a single calendar day of 15cm (6 inches) or more have been recorded since 1948, and only once since February 17, 1990. Much of the city received less snow than was measured at the airport and the southern regions of the city, with Olympia and Chehalis receiving 36-46 cm (14 to 18 inches).

Another moderate snow event occurred from December 12-25, 2008, when over one foot of snow fell and stuck on much of the roads over the two week period because temperatures remained below 0°C (32°F). This caused considerable problems, because these events are so rare that Seattle is not equipped for snow clearance.

The largest documented snowstorm occurred from January 5-9, 1880, with snow drifting to 6 feet (1.8 m) in places by the end of the snow event. But that was almost 140 years ago, long before official records were kept. The heaviest fall officially recorded was 20 inches on January 31, 1950. That month was particularly severe for snow, receiving a total of 57.2 inches (including that single-day fall).

Snowfalls are generally far more moderate, month on month. The averages are Nov 3 cm (1.2 inches) over 0.3 days; Dec 4.3 cm (1.7 inches) over 1.6 days; Jan 3.6 cm (1.4 inches) over 1.3 days; Feb 4.3 cm (1.7 inches) over 0.9 days; and March 2 cm (0.8 inches) over 0.5 days. These are the only months of the year with recorded snowfalls.

The sunshine hours through winter make for grim reading. November has clear skies only 26% of the possible hours on average; December, 20%; January, 25%; February 38%; and March 48%. Even at the height of summer, the sunshine received is only 65% – which is around the LOW mark in some other cities I’ve looked at.

Winter Events

There are a number of local attractions within the Seattle region, operating year-round.

• The Pacific Science Center has a tropical butterfly house, planetarium, hundreds of hands-on science exhibits, two IMAX theaters (night-time only) and one of the world’s largest Laser Dome theaters (ditto). They also have periodic special events.
• The Museum Of Pop Culture (“MoPOP”) sounds like a great place to spend a day. Exhibits are designed to be experienced, not just viewed, and cover everything from Star Trek to Jim Henson by way of David Bowie.
• A multi-course feast, generous libations, and a show that’s part circus and part dinner theater featuring international cirque, comedy and cabaret artists, is the menu for a three-hour evening at Teatro ZinZanni.
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center is at the core of the world’s largest center of private philanthropy, designed to inspire, educate, and empower others to make a difference in the world as well as communicating, through interactive exhibits, the projects of the Gates Foundation.
• Pinball is big in Seattle right now. There’s an annual mid-year Pinball and Arcade Show (11 years and counting) and the world’s largest weekly pinball tournament at Fremont’s Add-a-Ball.
• They might be dying out elsewhere, but record shops are a big thing in Seattle. Bop Street in Ballard carries over half a million LPs and Easy Street in West Seattle is also a center for the resurgent audio medium.
• “Wings Over Washington” is an immersive Virtual Reality aerial tour of some of the most scenic locations in the state. This appears to run all year round. Each “flight” takes about 15 minutes.
• The Seattle Children’s Museum is located in the Seattle Center Armory and features interactive exhibits aimed at “Kids of all ages”.
• The 5th Avenue Theater has produced and presented live musical theater since 1926.
• Seattle regularly holds conventions of various sorts aimed at popular culture, both mainstream and fringe. Anglicon 2017 (Dec 8-10) was a Dr Who convention; Rustycon 35 (Jan 12-14) was a science-fiction/fantasy convention; and the Emerald City Comic Con 2018 (March 1-4) was about comics and pop culture in general, to name just three. There’s another for paranormal investigators (the Port Gamble Ghost Conference), and one for small publishers and… look, there are lots of them, okay?
• The first Thursday of every month, three museums offer free entrance to their regular exhibits: the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the U.W.; the Museum of History & Industry at South Lake Union; and the Seattle Art Museum downtown, which also permits entrance to any special exhibition for half price on these Free Thursdays.

November

But these only scratch the surface. Seattle is one of those places where there is always something going on. The following are selected highlights of the November events calendar (trust me, I left dozens more off the list):

• The month starts back in mid-October with the Earshot Jazz Festival which concludes after almost 3 weeks and more than 50 live concerts on November 4th (2018). Timing in other years will probably vary.
• Seattle Restaurant Week runs for eight days at the start of November (and again in April) – except Fridays and Saturdays. 165 restaurants in the Seattle area offer three-course meals at discounted prices. All participants offer Dinners, some also offer discounted Lunches.
• On a November date to be confirmed (it was Nov 4 in 2017), the Day Of The Dead Festival includes a procession of Aztec dancers, performances by singers and folk dancers, the dedication of an altar, face painting, and Mexican snacks for sale.
• Not to be confused with the Emerald City Comic Con, the Jet City Comic Show at the Tacoma Convention Center brings in an extra dose of comics and pop culture.
• At about the same time, “America’s Largest Antique & Collectible Show”, a quarterly event, brings 400 vendors selling everything from furniture to slot machines and memorabilia. Note that this is a traveling “show” that has made over 220 appearances over the last 32 years in different locations, mostly in the northwest, but some as far south as Reno, Nevada.
• The Seattle Winter Ciderfest occurs early in the month. Tasting the “Fall and winter ciders from the Northwest’s best producers” plus local beer, wine, soda, and vendors representing ski resorts, spas, and music festivals come together for one evening. Ages 21+ only.
• The Veterans Day Parade and Observance (Nov 10, 2018) in Auburn, 26 miles south of the Seattle CBD, is one of the largest in America, with veterans’ units, military vehicles, motorcycles, 25 marching bands, and floats, plus related events. Note that it’s actually scheduled for the day BEFORE Veterans Day.
• Also on Nov 10 is the Tacoma Beer Festival, featuring “150 Halloween-themed and seasonal craft beers from 34 breweries”, plus food for sale. Ages 21+, costumes welcome.
• And starting at the same time, but extending an extra day, is Northwest Chocolate Festival brings 80 purveyors of chocolate delights to satisfy the most ardent chocoholic.
• Veterans Day is one of the Free Entrance Days at all National Parks and Washington State Parks. There are more than 140 of the latter to choose from.
• Sometime during the month (no date has yet been confirmed), the Seattle International Auto Show will display 400 of the latest cars and trucks.
• Starting in late November and running through to the New Year’s Eve celebrations at the Space Needle is the Seattle Center’s Winterfest. Activities that are designed to be free or highly affordable, fun, and uplifting, take place over five weeks in a variety of venues – everything from ice carving, live performances, ice rinks, Dickensian carolers, a comedy show, a dance party, student showcases, and the Winter Train & Village, a turn-of-the-(19th)-century village and train.
• The day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas Ship Festival gets underway, and continues until December 23. The Spirit Of Seattle is decorated with twinkly lights and sails to 65 different waterfronts in Puget Sound while an on-board choir serenades passengers and shore-dwellers. This has been a regional tradition since 1949. The Red Tricycle web-page on the Festival has some great photos but they are copyright Argosy Cruises, so you’ll have to go there to look at them (the one about half-way down the page is my favorite).
• Starting in mid-November, Swanson’s Nursery (a prime source of Christmas Trees) transforms into a “Winter Wonderland” in what it called the Reindeer Festival. The display, which includes a model train village and Santa’s Reindeer, remains open to the public until Christmas Eve.
• From around Thanksgiving (in 2017 it was from Nov 21) until Jan 1, Seattle showcases its annual Gingerbread Village. Seattle takes this very seriously; architectural firms, master builders, and Sheraton Seattle culinary teams create a “meticulously planned candy wonderland”. The 2017 exhibit recreated elements of Seattle’s past and imagined future in candy form, “from skyscrapers to underground tunnels”. This is more installation art than the domestic treat that may have initially come to mind.
• From a month before Christmas through until the end of the year, the Bellevue Botanical Garden offers the “Garden d’Lights”, in which more than half-a-million sparkling lights are formed into “whimsical shapes of plants, flowers, birds, animals, and cascading waterfalls” within the Garden’s scenic surrounds.
• Not to be outdone, the Woodland Park Zoo presents, from Thanksgiving+1 day through to Jan 1, their annual “WildLights” exhibit, which uses 500,000 LEDs to create luminous animal-themed designs and put the zoo’s nocturnal animals in a new light. Other attractions are an indoor snowball fight, real reindeer, carolers, and a holiday beer garden.
• And, at the same time, the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma (34 miles from Downtown Seattle) creates hammerhead sharks, sea turtles, carnivorous plants and their insect prey, a 30-foot-wide underwater landscape, a polar bear family, and a giant Pacific octopus from lights.
• And yet another light-themed event that starts at the same time, but runs until mid-January, is the Lantern Light Festival, a 2000-year-old Chinese tradition in which lanterns of various shapes, sizes, and colors are set aglow. The chinese-dragon lantern is quite spectacular (I’d like to have included the image but it appears to be copyright, so click on the link to see it).
• The Seattle Marathon and Half-marathon will be held on November 25th in 2018. More than 15,000 people participate.
• Late in November through to early in December there is a Victorian Country Christmas market with 500 booths with vendors in Victorian costumes selling art, jewelry, decorations, clothing, and toys.

You see what I mean?

December

Not only do several of the above continue for various lengths into December, but there are even more events on the Christmas Month’s schedule. Below is an even more restricted set of highlights:

• The Leavenworth Christmas Lighting Festival (aka the Leavenworth Festhalle) commences Dec 1 and continues every weekend through to the last Sunday before Christmas Eve, transforming the Bavarian town into a village of holiday-themed lights, and featuring live music, street performances, roasted chestnuts, a traditional Gluhwein Tent selling hot spiced wine and cider, and more. Admission is free. While Leavenworth is almost 135 miles from Seattle, this is nevertheless a popular place to visit, reachable by train, bus, or car. Most of the trip takes place within the Wenatchee National Forest, ensuring plenty of alpine scenery.
• Also starting the festive season with an exotic splash is Jule Fest, a Scandinavian Christmas bazaar of arts and crafts, folk dancing, Vikings, a Christmas tree lighting, Lucia bride, bonfire, and Santa Claus.
• The Seattle Art Museum runs different public tours throughout the year. Regular involvement by an eccentric? opinionated local art community – visual artists, dancers, curators, critics, and more – mean that these are constantly changing, and the Museum is a place to explore repeatedly through the year. But the highlight of the year is the annual SAM Lights display, a free illuminated event in the associated Olympic Sculpture Park (which is usually only open during daylight hours) that includes hands-on public art-making, music, hot drinks and sweet snacks, and of course, the light display. In 2017, this event was Dec 14, a Thursday, suggesting that the date is fixed.
• Speaking of the local arts community, Nov 30 and Dec 1-2 sees the Seattle Sampling Artists’ Studio Tour – 24 artists at 8 studios who make clothing, jewelry, glass, ceramics, prints, and more offering their wares for public purchase.
• Dec 9 is the scheduled date for the Jingle Bell Run (5k, or 1 mile distances) and the kid’s run (1 km). Participants are encouraged to wear a costume or Christmas bells, walkers are welcome, but there is a fee for dogs.
• New Year’s Eve is spectacular at the Space Needle, which is transformed into a fireworks platform that has to be seen to be believed. The city closes the streets in front of the Space Needle so there is ample room to find an unobstructed view.

January

Things quieten down – a little – in January. I only count 42 events currently scheduled for January 2019. Of course, that’s a long way away, leaving plenty of time for more event to be announced…

• The Resolution Run 5K and Polar Bear Dive is a 5K fun-run on January 1 and includes an optional dip in the cold waters of Lake Washington, awards, snacks, and a beer garden at Magnuson Park.
• And, just a mile north of those who want to work up a sweat first, the annual Polar Bear Plunge attracts 1000+ people a year to wade into Lake Washington, and even more to watch them do it. Costumes are encouraged.
• In Tacoma, and starting Dec 31, there is a 2-day Model Train Festival.
• The provocatively-named Worst Day Of The Year Run is a 5K/10K winter run with a costume contest, indoor finish line party and a beer garden. The 2019 version will be the fifth event in what is rapidly becoming established as an annual tradition. The run’s menacing name derives from the sister event that inspired it, the Worst Day Of The Year Ride, a cycling event that started in 2000 in Portland. The ride, in turn, was named in honor of Oregon’s coldest and wettest day in history: February 8th. In 1933 on that date, Ukiah, Oregon enjoyed balmy temperatures of -54 degrees, and in 1966, the coastal range was all but swimming after 26′ of rain in just 4 days.
• Once the Christmas Lighting Festival at Leavenworth has run its course for the year, the township takes a couple of weeks to reinvent itself for the Bavarian Icefest. A one-weekend-a-year event which transforms the town with snow sculptures, a snowmobile sled-pull, live ice carving, and other cold-oriented activities.
• And, two weeks after that (are you sensing a theme, here?) they host the Timbrrr! Winter Music Festival which throws skiing, snowboarding, a hot-toddy garden, wine tastings, and festival-branded flannel shirts together with numerous local and national acts of styles ranging from indie rock to hip-hop.
• Martin Luther King day (Jan 21 in 2019) is another free entrance day to state and national parks. There is also a workshop at Garfield High School followed by a rally, a two-mile march, and a second rally to celebrate the day, amongst more conventional commemorations.

February

The tranquility is not a function of the colder weather; come February, and the schedule has regrown to November-level event levels, despite the shortness of the month. The list below has been ruthlessly pruned:

• This entire month is designated “Seattle Museum Month” in which a huge diversity of museums in the Seattle area put on special exhibitions and drop their prices to half the usual admission fee. Everything from the Museum Of Flight to the Pacific Science Museum to the Museum of Pop Culture take part.
• Early February will showcase the Seattle Boat Show, which promises 1000 boats and watercraft on display plus 200 boating seminars. Attendees can also visit boats in the water at Bell Harbor Marina & South Lake Union. It’s possible that the event opening will be brought forwards into January.
• America’s Largest Antique & Collectible Show is back.
• The official start of Spring has become, over the last 25+ years, the traditional time for the annual Northwest Flower & Garden Festival, attracting gardening enthusiasts from all over the Northwest of the USA. Tickets also grant access to a vintage garden market, educational seminars, a gourmet marketplace of craft food and beverages and more. The Festival runs from Feb 7-11, plus an opening-night party to support the Washington Park Arboretum.
• Of course, Valentine’s Day events abound. Options include everything from Symphony Concerts to Burlesque Shows (more than one of each!)
• New Orleans might be around 2500 miles away as the crow flies, but the ‘any excuse for a party’ mentality won’t let anything so trivial as that get in the way. The Mardi Gras Masquerade Party Cruise includes “Creole and New Orleans inspired appetizers and desserts,” a masquerade mask, beads, a drink ticket, and three hours of scenic views of Lake Union and Lake Washington. For age 21+, of course.
• Any city that celebrates the Lantern Lights Festival (see November, above) is likely to make a big deal about the Chinese New Year. So it is no surprise that one of the biggest annual parties in Seattle is the Lunar New Year in Chinatown. Of course, the date varies from year to year, but is generally in mid-to-late-February. In fact, the region celebrates the event twice in 2019 – once on the 11th and again on the 24th.
• Later in the month, the Seattle Food and Wine Experience is a three-day festival of gastronomy with an emphasis on local produce. Multiple local gastropubs and taverns, winemakers, and brewers come together to produce a succession of themed culinary delights at a series of locations.
• And, at about the same time, the annual Wintergrass Festival is underway at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue. As you might suspect from the name, this is a Winter Bluegrass festival, which this year ran for 4 days.

March

March is when the social calendar starts to get busy. There are more events that either have taken or will take place in the course of this month than there were in November, by a considerable margin.

• One of the big events of the year is the Emerald City Comic Con; in 2017, more than 91,000 fans attended, along with hundreds of guests from television, movies, and comics. The 2018 version was from March 1-4. Next year, it will be mid-month. Helping it grow each year is the inclusion of add-on side-events open to the general public as opposed to being restricted to registered attendees.
• There’s a Sewing and Stitchery Expo for the same four days.
• One of those side events is the Night of Board Gaming for Good on Top of the World which, for $69, includes a buffet dinner, two $10 vouchers for the game store, and all of the games you can play, with views from the top floor of Columbia Tower, all to support charity.
• March 2-4 is the Polar Science Weekend at the Pacific Science Center.
• Carnival for a Cause on March 3 includes two drink tickets, appetizers, and dancing at a number of locations hosted by 1927 events and is a Masquerade cocktail party.
• Also on March 3 are several celebrations of the Indian festival of Holi, when colored powder flies. Younger Children (age 12- at one, age 15- at the other) are free at two of the events, another is adults 21+ only.
• The Seattle Bike Show is March 3-4, and entry is free for children 12 and younger. Tickets also give access to the Golf and Travel Show and the Outdoor Gear and Adventure Expo, both at the same location at the same time.
• In a sort of prelude to St Patrick’s Day, the Shamrock Wine & Beer Walk on March 10 includes 10 tastes from Washington wineries & breweries in the shops at Country Village in Bothell. Wear some green, and bring a glass. Age 21+, ID required.
• The Seattle Kennel Dog Show on March 10-11 attracts 11,000 spectators and 2,000 dogs.
• St Patrick’s day commences the previous afternoon (because it can) with the Landing Of St. Patrick at 5:30PM (at South Lake Union) and the Green Stripe Laying starting at 7PM which marks the parade route along 4th Avenue. Both are free events.
• St Patrick’s day proper starts officially at 12:20 PM with the raising of the Irish Flag at a ceremony in front of the King County Administration Building. The Mayor of Seattle and various parade dignitaries will be in attendance and the Irish and American national anthems will be played. The Parade itself begins approximately 10 minutes later and features Irish bands, pipers, dancers, and 2,000 marchers. Several other events also mark the day, some of which are listed separately below.
• The St Patrick’s Day Dash is a 5K fun-run (wear green or a costume), and then head for the giant beer garden if your over 21. The Leprechaun Lap is a 1K dash for kids aged 10 and younger.
• There are two other fun runs on the day. The Kirkland Shamrock Run (5km) and kids’ race ends with a party at the Wilde Rover, and welcomes walkers. The St Paddy’s Day Run in Tacoma is a morning 5K, 10K, half-marathon, and kid’s 1K run.
• The St Paddy’s Day Cruise includes one free drink, an appetizer and dessert buffet, food for sale, and three hours of scenic views of Lake Union and Lake Washington. Ages 21+.
• The State’s oldest and largest Coin Show is at the annual convention of the Pacific Northwest Numismatic Association, March 16-18.
• At the same time, the Quilters Anonymous Annual Quilt Show takes place at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds in Monroe, in the greater city’s north-eastern fringes.
• March 17-18 is the Spring Book Sale by Friends Of The Seattle Public Library and features 100,000 titles starting at $1.
• You might expect everyone to be tired out, but no – the day after St Patrick’s Day sees yet another run, the Mercer Island Half Marathon, which also includes a 10K run, a 5K run/walk, and a half-mile Kids dash.
• Billed as the world’s largest comedy/variety festival, the Moisture Festival has 40 shows at Hale’s Palladium, Broadway Performance Hall, and Teatro ZinZanni at 3 & 7:30 pm. for all ages; plus burlesque and late-night shows for age 18+.
• On March 23, Boots, Barrels and Brews tickets include six beer or wine-tasting tickets, appetizers, a live country band, and line-dancing lessons. Age 21+.
• Starting on the same day, the 3-day Victorian Heritage Festival has a Friday evening pub crawl, a Saturday Victorian fashion show and Victorian Ball, and weekend teas plus weekend tours of historic buildings in Port Townsend.
• Easter comes early to Seattle this year; while the big day is of course April 1, events start on March 23 and continue daily.
• Norwescon is a literary sci-fi and fantasy convention starting March 29 and running through April 1. Two hundred panelists, vendors, events, and 24-hour game-playing. It describes itself as The Pacific Northwest’s Premier Science-Fiction and Fantasy Convention, and is one of the largest regional conventions of its type in the US. The 2018 edition will be the 41st. Attendance numbers haven’t been provided for a few years but in 2013, approx 3200 attended.
• The day after Norwescon starts, it is joined by Sakura-Con, an Anime festival and rival. Traditionally held over Easter weekend, is the largest anime convention in the Northwest and is the 8th largest North American anime convention as of 2017. Last year, 25,000 attended. 2018 is the 21st anniversary of the original event.

My best guess is that the listings above represents at most a tenth of the total events hosted by Seattle and Region over that five month period. Typical of the items that didn’t make the cut are the Seattle Scotch & Beer Fest and the Grilled Cheese Festival. If you want to experience the jaw-dropping totality, consult the events12 links below.

It strikes me, as I complete this essay on the city, that Grunge Music is the perfect metaphor for the City that birthed it. Rarely receiving enough rain to do more than spread the grit around, and full of dark and gloomy looks, it nevertheless captures the vitality and life of a city in which any excuse is good enough for a gathering. They even have a Mussel festival and a Hairstyle Show, two more March events that didn’t make the cut – but, between them, they represent the sense of fun and activity that seeps out of the list of events above!

Primary Sources:

• Wikipedia’s Seattle page;
• Wikipedia’s Puget Sound page;
• Clipper Vacations Magazine’s web page, 25 Things To Do In Seattle This Winter by Katie Schlossberg;
• The Seattle Center’s web page for Winterfest 2017;
• The Seattle Art Musuem’s home page and SAM Lights web page;
• The home page of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center;
• The home page of the Emerald City Comic Con;
• The Best Festivals in Seattle: Winter 2017/2018 by Elaina Friedman, Kim Selling and Joule Zelman for The Stranger;
• Events 12 Seattle’s pages for
  • November,
  • December,
  • January,
  • February, and
  • March.
• Worst Day Of The Year Run’s Facebook page.

21. Winter In San Francisco

Forty-one or forty-two years ago, my family (including a Grandmother and an Aunt) embarked on a three-week tour of the US. This was the trip that resulted in the loss of luggage at Las Vegas, mentioned in the entry detailing the Nevada city. From there, we traveled to San Francisco.

It’s a city that holds mixed memories for me, as a result. I was impressed by the public transport system – one ticket lasted all day, no matter how many times one alighted and rejoined the cable cars – but there wasn’t a whole lot of interest to the young teenager that I was at the time.

It was bitterly cold (in comparison with Las Vegas, bearing in mind that the clothing I was wearing was quite inappropriate for the climate), and spending money was in relatively short supply (I think some of that had been lost in the missing luggage). So we didn’t do much and didn’t go very far. One round trip on the cable-cars, one trip – it might not even have been a round-trip – on the BART, which was new and ran completely under the Bay, one trip to Lombard St, and the Mirin Headlands (to see the Golden Gate Bridge).

But we did pick up in Chinatown what still abides in my memory as the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn – stonewashed denim, pre-softened – and an orange-colored Hawaii-print sloppy joe that I still remember fondly, and that was possibly the softest shirt that I’ve ever owned.

Still, at the time, San Francisco was a disappointment. If I were ever to return, I think I would find a lot more to be of interest. Because there is a lot there to be interested in.

The Location

Let’s start with something astonishing. While almost everyone has heard of both Los Angeles and San Francisco, altogether too many people couldn’t tell you which one was more Northerly of the two. I once saw a survey of Americans that said that this was true of 60% of the US population (excluding Californians) – it was in the late 80s, I think – and that 25% of respondents thought that the two cities were less than 100 miles apart.

San Francisco is about 40% of the way down the California coast. Los Angeles is roughly 80% of the way down that coast. There’s a difference of about 610 km (380 miles), and that’s more than enough to make a significant climatic difference between the locations.

Which is a distinction that most people are aware of, but they never seem to think about the geographic implications.

San Francisco is the 13th-largest city in the US in terms of population and the fifth most densely-populated US County (the two terms are virtually interchangeable).

The History

San Francisco was founded as a Spanish colony on June 29, 1776 (if the founders has any sense of future history, they might have waited another 5 days…)

In 1821, the area became part of Mexico during the Mexican War Of Independence. California was then claimed on behalf of the US by Commodore John D. Sloat on July 7, 1846, during the Mexican-American War, and what was to be renamed San Francisco was claimed by Captain John B. Montgomery two days later. On January 30, the name change took effect, and Mexico officially ceded the territory to the US at the conclusion of the conflict in 1848.

Despite being an attractive location for a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography, numbering only 1,000 residents. That, however, was about to change…

Gold Rush of 1849 and the Barbary Coast

On January 24 of 1848, gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California (58 km [36 miles] northeast of Sacramento, which is itself 142 km [88 miles] northeast of San Francisco).

Sutter had plans for an agricultural empire and attempted to suppress the discovery because he feared his plans would be disrupted if it became known, but rumors soon started to spread and were confirmed in March by San Francisco newspaper publisher Samuel Brannon. Brannon quickly set up a store to sell prospecting supplies and then strode through the streets of the city holding aloft a vial of gold, shouting about the discovery.

It took five months for the story to be picked up by a major East Coast newspaper, the New York Herald, who published the discovery on August 19th. These days, people have the erroneous impression that the news spread like wildfire, not realizing that the coasts were not linked by telegraph until 1861 and by rail until 1869. The tyranny of distance was very real in those days. While the section “Distance From News” in my 2017 article The Influence Of Distance Part 3: Far (The first half) dealt with remote communities being separated from the news of the political and social centers, the problem cuts both ways, and those centers are just as separated from events in remote corners.

Almost four months later, in December, President James Polk confirmed the discovery in an address to Congress, telling them – and the world – “The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.”

It was this confirmation, and the news of it, that really ignited Gold Fever in the rest of the world. By then, California had been living with the discovery for almost ten months.

When the residents of San Francisco learned of the discovery, courtesy of the opportunistic Samuel Brannon, the then-tiny settlement became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses. It was only when waves of immigrants began arriving – the earliest as a result of the New York Herald story – that the population began to swell. By then, Sutter had (as he feared) been ruined; his workers had abandoned their employment in search of gold, and squatters had taken over his land, stealing his crops and rustling his cattle.

The boom began in earnest in 1949, hence the popular nickname for the opportunistic prospectors, “49ers”.

Throughout the year, people around the United States (mostly men) borrowed money, mortgaged their property, or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. They abandoned wives and children, families and deserted responsibilities.

The first waves came by ship, and were also known as Argonauts; from the East Coast, a sailing voyage around the tip of South America would take five to eight months, and the alternative was to sail to the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama, take canoes and mules for a week through the jungle, and then on the Pacific side, wait for a ship sailing for San Francisco. There was also a route across Mexico starting at Veracruz. But many gold-seekers – now estimated to be half – took the overland route across the continental United States, particularly along the California Trail, and these are the ones that are best remembered in modern times.

Each of these routes carried deadly risks, but I could not find any reliable estimates of how many perished en route. It may have been as little as 1%, or as many as 1 in six. Hundreds are known to have died en route, but the toll may have been much higher.

“The people who went to California by the the tens of thousands were greenhorns — city folks. They didn’t have a callus on their hand, had never fired a rifle, had never followed a plow, had never rode a horse, didn’t know up from down in terms of the wilderness world, the frontier life. And they weren’t interested in it.” – JS Holliday, author of “The World Rushed In”, quoted by Genealogy Trails.

The first groups to arrive were from Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), Mexico, Chile, Peru and even China. Immigrants from these regions were arriving even before the East Coast knew there was anything to get excited about.

The gold rush brought rapid growth to San Francisco, as eager fortune-hunters from all over the world rushed to the region. By December 1849, the population of the city was 25,000. California boomed equally; estimated at this time to be 100,000 (non-natives only), up from 20,000 a year earlier, and around 800 in March 1848. By the mid 1850s, it would be 300,000, or one in 90 US Citizens. By 1852, more than 25,000 immigrants from China alone had arrived in America.

The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Approximately 500 ships were abandoned, some of which were then used as storehouses, saloons, and hotels, but many were left to rot and some were sunk to establish title to the underwater lot.

To provide for the needs of the ’49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses. Most of these were operated by those who had come early and learned the brutal reality – even with gold abundant (a relative term), 9 prospectors in 10 found nothing. Many got out of the melee and began to open businesses catering to newly arrived prospectors.

“In fact, some of America’s greatest industrialists got their start in the Gold Rush.

“Phillp Armour, who would later found a meatpacking empire in Chicago, made a fortune operating the sluices that controlled the flow of water into the rivers being mined.

“Before John Studebaker built one of America’s great automobile fortunes, he manufactured wheelbarrows for Gold Rush miners.

“And two entrepreneurial bankers named Henry Wells and William Fargo moved west to open an office in San Francisco, an enterprise that soon grew to become one of America’s premier banking institutions.

“One of the biggest mercantile success stories was that of Levi Strauss. A German-born tailor, Strauss arrived in San Francisco in 1850 with plans to open a store selling canvas tarps and wagon coverings to the miners. After hearing that sturdy work pants – ones that could withstand the punishing 16-hour days regularly put in by miners – were more in demand, he shifted gears, opening a store in downtown San Francisco that would eventually become a manufacturing empire, producing Levi’s denim jeans.”

“Most of the men who flocked to northern California arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. Once there, they needed to buy food, goods and supplies, which San Francisco’s merchants were all too willing to provide – for a cost. Stuck in a remote region, far from home, many prospectors coughed up most of their hard-earned money for the most basic supplies. At the height of the boom in 1849, prospectors could expect prices sure to cause sticker shock: A single egg could cost the equivalent of $25 in today’s money, coffee went for more than $100 per pound and replacing a pair of worn out boots could set you back more than $2,500.” – History.com

Labor was in such short supply, and hence commanded such high wages, that it was routine for laundry to be shipped to Hawaii for washing – for those who could afford to have laundry done at all.

California was granted statehood in 1850. Silver finds, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth.

The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, prostitution and violence.

“As the amount of available gold began to dwindle, miners increasingly fought one another for profits and anti-immigrant tensions soared. The government got into the action too. In 1850 California’s legislature passed a Foreign Miner’s tax, which levied a monthly fee of $20 on non-citizens, the equivalent of more than $500 in today’s money. That bill was eventually repealed, but was replaced with another in 1852 that expressly singled out Chinese miners, charging them $2 ($80 today) a month. Violence against foreign miners increased as well, and beatings, rapes and even murders became commonplace. However no ethnic group suffered more than California’s Native Americans. Before the Gold Rush, its native population numbered roughly 300,000. Within 20 years, more than 100,000 would be dead. Most died from disease or mining-related accidents, but more than 4,000 were murdered by enraged miners.” – History.com

San Francisco was not spared. Fortune hunters streamed through the city, and lawlessness was rife; the Barbary Coast section of the town became notorious as a haven for criminals, prostitution, and gambling.

By 1851, surface gold had largely disappeared, though fortune-seekers continued to arrive. Striking it rich had always been difficult and dangerous, requiring as much good luck as skill, perseverance, and a near-obsessive work ethic. The average daily take for independent miners working with pick and shovel had been declining sharply from what it had been in 1848. As gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor.

In that year, the San Francisco harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships, and by 1870 the entire Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land; buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations for new structures are dug.

Gold Mining peaked in 1852, though it would continue throughout the decade.

The Gold Rush would have had an even more profound impact on the population of California, including San Francisco, had not a great number of those seeking wealth departed for the Alaskan Goldfields starting in 1896.

As the funnel through which the riches of the goldfields poured, San Francisco prospered throughout the Gold Rush.

“Development of the Port of San Francisco and the establishment in 1869 of overland access to the eastern US. rail system via the newly completed Pacific Railroad (the construction of which the city only reluctantly helped support) helped make the Bay Area a center for trade. Catering to the needs and tastes of the growing population, Levi Strauss opened a dry goods business and Domingo Ghirardelli began manufacturing chocolate. Immigrant laborers made the city a polyglot culture, with Chinese Railroad Workers, drawn to “Old Gold Mountain”, creating the city’s Chinatown quarter. – Wikipedia

It’s not entirely untrue to say that this boom was the making of the city. Through the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, a sea of Victorian houses began to take shape, and civic leaders campaigned for a spacious public park which eventually was realized as Golden Gate Park. San Franciscans built schools, churches, theaters, and all the other infrastructure of civic life, while the Presidio developed into arguably the most important American military installation on the Pacific coast.

By 1890, San Francisco’s population was approaching 300,000, and the city was the 8th largest in the US. By the close of the century, San Francisco had established a unique character as possessing a flamboyant style, stately hotels, ostentatious mansions, and a thriving arts scene. The city acquired the nickname “The Paris Of The West”.

Plague

But the new century was not to be kind to the burgeoning metropolis. The first continental North American plague epidemic struck the city in 1900.

A ship from Hong Kong in 1899 had two cases of Bubonic plague on board. Because of this, although no passengers were ill when the ship reached San Francisco, it was to be quarantined on Angel Island. When the boat was searched, 11 stowaways were found – the next day two were missing. Their bodies were later found in the Bay, and autopsy showed they contained plague bacilli.

It is believed that rats from the ship escaped into the city, and were the source of the outbreak in Chinatown 9 months later. Health authorities immediately recognized the danger posed by the situation, but for more than two years, would be obstructed by Henry Gage, the Governor of California, who denied there was a problem. Gage was motivated by the wish to keep the reputations of San Francisco and California clean and to prevent the loss of revenue from trade stopped by quarantine. The failure to act quickly is believed by many to have allowed the disease to establish itself among local animal populations.

“Anti-Chinese feeling ran strong in the city then, and the first step taken was to quarantine Chinatown. The Chinese objected, and so did the business community. Not because they wanted to protect the rights of the Chinese, but it was bad for business to have people thinking there was plague in their city or state.

“The quarantine was lifted and health officials began to run house-to-house inspections of Chinatown. People resisted, hiding their dead and locking their doors. But two more plague victims turned up.

“The city Board of Health officially announced that plague was present in the city. The governor refused to believe it or to do anything to help in the anti-plague effort.

“The Surgeon General got permission from President McKinley to pass anti-plague regulations. Others still denied the existence of plague, although more and more states in the country were stopping trade with California.

“Commissions and boards formed, fought with the governor, and were disbanded, underfunded, and reformed. Meanwhile, more plague cases were found.” – PBS

City leaders were not above taking advantage of the situation when opportunities presented themselves. In the mistaken belief that interred remains were one source of the disease (for which there was little evidence), burials were banned within the city. Cemeteries were moved to the undeveloped area just south of the city limit, now the town of Colma, California, releasing extremely valuable land within the city limits. (In 1912 (with legal fights extending until 1942), the last remaining cemeteries in the city were evicted to Colma, where the dead now outnumber the living by more than a thousand to one). Less than a handful of exceptions were granted.

Federal authorities slowly built up incontrovertible proof of the problem, and this undermined Gage’s credibility to such an extent that despite the city being in the grip of machine politics, he lost the 1902 Gubernatorial election. His replacement quietly implemented medical solutions and by 1904 the epidemic was stopped with 119 dead of 121 identified cases.

The Great Fire of 1906

“At 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, a major earthquake struck San Francisco and northern California. As buildings collapsed from the shaking, ruptured gas lines ignited fires that spread across the city and burned out of control for several days. With water mains out of service, the Presidio Artillery Corps attempted to contain the inferno by dynamiting blocks of buildings to create firebreaks.

“More than three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the earthquake/fire combination, including almost the entirety of the downtown city center. Official estimates at the time put the death toll at 498, but modern estimates place the true number in the thousands.

“More than half of the city’s population of 400,000 was left homeless. Refugees created a diaspora, settling temporarily in makeshift tent villages in Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, on the beaches, and elsewhere. Many fled permanently to the East Bay.” – Wikipedia

Reconstruction

“Rebuilding was rapid and performed on a grand scale. Rejecting calls to completely remake the street grid, San Franciscans opted for speed. Amadeo Giannini’s Bank of Italy, later to become Bank of America, provided loans for many of those whose livelihoods had been devastated.

“The earthquake hastened development of western neighborhoods that survived the fire, including Pacific Heights, where many of the city’s wealthy rebuilt their homes. In turn, the destroyed mansions of Nob Hill became grand hotels. City Hall was reopened in 1915.” – Wikipedia

The area destroyed included the Chinatown district. While reconstruction was underway, a second outbreak of Bubonic Plague occurred, this time spread generally over the city, including cases across the bay in Oakland. It seems likely that plague-carrying rats had spread out unchecked following the fire, searching for food.

This time, the official response was rapid and decisive. Between 1907 and 1911, $2 million was spent on killing as many rats as possible in the city – more than $50 million in modern currency.

In 1907, Mayor EE Schmitz was found guilty of extortion and the office of mayor declared vacant. Schmitz had been president of the Musician’s Union and was chosen by political powerbroker Abe Ruef to run for mayor as a front for the Union Labor Party in 1901. Ruef constructed an effective political machine to win and retain power. Schmitz is considered to have been less corrupt than the Mayors who had preceded him, but he was little more than a puppet in the hands of his friend and master, Ruef, who wrote most of the mayor’s official papers and ran the city from behind the mayoral chair. Ruef was also sentenced to 14 years imprisonment and served a little more than four-and-a-half years of his sentence before being released, though he was not permitted to resume his legal practice. Before entering prison, he had been worth over $1 million, when he died in 1936, he was bankrupt.

Dr. Edward R. Taylor, Dean of Hastings College, agreed to step in as interim mayor and was given power to appoint new supervisors to replace those who had resigned, and most of the recovery from the Earthquake occurred on his watch.

Much of the city’s most important infrastructure dates to this period. In particular, the creation of abundant and stable water supplies would permit the sustained growth and development that created the city as it now stands.

The speed with which San Francisco was rebuilt was astonishing, and established a baseline of expectations internationally that was not shattered until New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

A mere nine years after the almost-complete destruction of the city, it was able to host the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Officially, this was to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, but unofficially its purpose was to showcase the city that had been completely-rebuilt less than a decade after being wiped out by an Earthquake.

Depression? What Depression?

Fourteen years later, San Francisco was a financial capital, with a reputation for stability that was only enhanced by the 1929 stock market crash, when not a single San Francisco-based bank failed.

“…at the height of the Great Depression that San Francisco undertook two great civil engineering projects, simultaneously constructing the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, completing them in 1936 and 1937, respectively.

“It was in this period that the island of Alcatraz, a former military stockade, began its service as a federal maximum security prison, housing notorious inmates such as Al Capone, and Robert Franklin Stroud, The Birdman of Alcatraz.” – Wikipedia

While the rest of the country recovered, San Francisco forged ahead, hosting a World’s Fair in 1939-40, the Golden Gate International Exposition, creating an artificial island named “Treasure Island” to house it; several of the structures are now Heritage Listed.

War and Peace

During World War II, it was a major embarkation point for service members deploying to the Pacific Theater, and the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard became a major hub of military activity. This triggered a fresh boom for the city, as the explosion of jobs drew many people, especially African Americans from the South, to the area. After the end of the war, many military personnel returning from service abroad, and civilians who had originally come to work, decided to become permanent residents.

In 1945 it became the birthplace of the United Nations, and in 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco officially ended the war with Japan.

Contraction and The Summer Of Love

“Urban planning projects in the 1950s and 1960s involved widespread destruction and redevelopment of west-side neighborhoods and the construction of new freeways, of which only a series of short segments were built before being halted by citizen-led opposition.

“The onset of containerization made San Francisco’s small piers obsolete, and cargo activity moved to the larger Port of Oakland. The city began to lose industrial jobs and turned to tourism as the most important segment of its economy.

“The suburbs experienced rapid growth, and San Francisco underwent significant demographic change, as large segments of the white population left the city, supplanted by an increasing wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America. From 1950 to 1980, the city lost over 10 percent of its population.” – Wikipedia

Over this period, San Francisco became a magnet for America’s counterculture. Beat Generation writers fueled the San Francisco Renaissance and centered on the North Beach neighborhood in the 1950s.

Hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, reaching a peak with the 1967 Summer of Love. This was a golden year or so; it didn’t last. A year later, George Harrison visited, expecting to find a socially progressive, liberated, and spiritually awakened center; he left, disillusioned. Pattie Boyd described the occasion:

“We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible – full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains. Everybody looked stoned – even mothers and babies – and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop for fear of being trampled.” – The Beatles Bible.

The “Gay Mecca”

The gay population of San Francisco was given a boost during World War II, when the US Military began to actively seek out and dishonorably discharge homosexuals from the armed services. From 1941 to 1945, more than 9000 were discharged, many processed out in San Francisco.

Over the next 15 years, the city acquired a “gay tolerant” or even “gay friendly” undercurrent to its reputation as a radical left-wing center. While the hippies were attracting all the attention, a new wave of lesbians and gays with more radical attitudes also flocked to the city.

These new residents often lived communally, buying decrepit Victorians in the Haight and fixing them up. When drugs and violence began to become a serious problem in the Haight, many lesbians and gays simply moved “over the hill” to the Castro District (frequently referenced simply as “The Castro”) replacing Irish-Americans who had moved to the more affluent and culturally homogeneous suburbs.

In the 70s, The Castro emerged as an urban gay village and the city became a focal point of the Gay Rights movement and its opposition. San Francisco was home to the first lesbian-rights organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis (1955); the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States, José Sarria (1961); the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, Harvey Milk (1977); the first openly lesbian judge appointed in the US, Mary C. Morgan (1981); and the first transgender police commissioner, Theresa Sparks (2004).

The assassination of Milk, along with that of Mayor George Moscone, in 1978 focused national attention on the LGBT community of San Francisco and further galvanized that community. Following the Summer Of Love a decade earlier, this cemented the city in the popular zeitgeist as a center of liberal activism in the United States.

“Manhattanization”, redevelopment, and social problems

“[The] Bank of America completed 555 California Street in 1969 and the Transamerica Pyramid was completed in 1972, igniting a wave of “Manhattanization” that lasted until the late 1980s, a period of extensive high-rise development downtown.

“The 1980s also saw a dramatic increase in the number of homeless people in the city, an issue that remains today, despite many attempts to address it.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused destruction and loss of life throughout the Bay Area. In San Francisco, the quake severely damaged structures in the Marina and South of Market districts and precipitated the demolition of the damaged Embarcadero Freeway and much of the damaged Central Freeway, allowing the city to reclaim The Embarcadero as its historic downtown waterfront and revitalizing the Hayes Valley neighborhood.” – Wikipedia

Dot-Coms and Technology

In the late 1990s, startup companies from the dot-com boom reinvigorated the economy.

“Large numbers of entrepreneurs and computer application developers moved into the city, followed by marketing, design, and sales professionals, changing the social landscape as once-poorer neighborhoods became increasingly gentrified.

“Demand for new housing and office space ignited a second wave of high-rise development, this time in the South of Market district. By 2000, the city’s population reached new highs, surpassing the previous record set in 1950.

“When the bubble burst in 2001, many of these companies folded and their employees were laid off [but] high technology and entrepreneurship remain mainstays of the San Francisco economy; By the [middle of the decade], the social media boom had begun, with San Francisco becoming a popular location for tech offices and a popular place to live for people employed in Silicon Valley companies such as Apple and Google.

“By 2013, San Francisco, with thanks from the Web 2.0 boom, had fully recovered from the late 2000s recession and [was] experiencing a real estate and population boom. The computer industry [was] moving north from Silicon Valley. Availability of vacant rental units became scarce and the prices for vacant units increased dramatically, and as of 2015 is reported to be the highest in the nation.” – Wikipedia

During the recession, the area South Of Market, which had been the bustling heart of the dot-com industry, went from being crowded with few vacancies to a virtual wasteland of empty offices and for-rent signs. Although still expensive by US Urban Standards, residential demand and rents eased considerably. The availability of cheap property was undoubtedly a factor in luring the Web 2.0 resurgence to the city, which attracted white-collar workers, recent University graduates, and young adults from all over the world, leading to a rise in residential demand and renewed rise in rents.

The city’s history of equal rights movements continued with the 2011 election of Edwin Lee as the first Chinese-American mayor in a major US City. Mayor Lee has proven to be a strong proponent of tenant’s rights as well as being business-friendly toward the tech community.

To ease residential demand, the city relaxed building height restrictions and zoning codes to construct residential condominiums though the GFC (also known as the Economic Downturn of 2008) halted some of this construction.

As you might expect from a city with “young attitudes,” San Francisco is a leader in the adoption of renewable energy. In April 2016, the city passed a law requiring all new buildings below 10 stories in height to have solar panels on the rooftop, the first major US city to do so, again reasserting the city’s claim to being one of the most progressive in the nation.

Geography Of San Francisco

The bulk of the mainland city forms a “seven-by-seven-mile square”, though it’s total area (including water) is nearly 232 square miles. San Francisco is known for it’s hilly terrain, the tallest of which is Mount Davidson (283m [928 feet] in altitude), one of several districts and neighborhoods named for the hill upon which they are situated.

The city has grown significantly beyond the natural geography; entire neighborhoods are located on areas of landfill. Unfortunately, such land tends to be unstable in earthquakes…

The Fault Lines

The San Andreas and Hayward Faults both lie close to the city, though neither pass directly through the city. Both have been responsible for earthquake activity in the region. The larger earthquakes in 1906 and 1989 were caused by the San Andreas.

Los Angeles may be the oft-proposed site of “The Big One” (and in fact experienced a magnitude 5.6 ‘quake just offshore this morning [April 6]), but San Francisco is arguably more likely to experience a major seismic event, though this risk is taken in a more matter-of-fact manner.

You often get the impression that while LA residents know it might happen, they don’t really think that it ever will, while San Franciscans have experienced something that was as close as you would care to come to the real thing.

In response to their past, San Francisco has repeatedly improved the building codes and have constructed an auxiliary water supply. Many of the building code improvements also required retrofitting older buildings.

This played a significant role in the outcome of the 2013 Mythbusters test of whether or not standing in a doorway yielded the greatest chance of survival in a major earthquake. They constructed an earthquake shake-table that measured 13 feet by 11 feet, and then constructed a traditional masonry house on the earthquake simulation platform, and found that the doorway was indeed the safest location in a high-magnitude earthquake. They then constructed a timber-frame home on the platform according to the most up-to-date San Francisco building code and re-ran the test, finding that hiding under the table was now safer than the doorway by far. Their conclusion was that because older buildings of the masonry type were increasingly rare in San Francisco, and reasoning that other earthquake-prone zones would have implemented similar protections, on balance, the myth should be considered busted because it was not universally true – while noting that other locations which also suffered from earthquake risk may not have been as proactive in mandating retrofits.

(It must also be said that areas with low earthquake risk may not have any resistance at all specifically incorporated within their construction standards; that significantly increased the destruction caused by the Newcastle Earthquake here in Australia in 1989, which killed 13 and injured more than 160 despite being a (relatively) mild 5.6 on the Richter scale. Despite geoscientists knowing better, prior to this, Australia was immune from Earthquakes – at least in the popular zeitgeist.)

The Coming “Big One”
The first image in the “earthquake montage” depicts the San Andreas fault. I have added markers for Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

“A study published in 2006 in the journal Nature found that the San Andreas fault has reached a sufficient stress level for an earthquake of magnitude greater than 7.0 on the moment magnitude scale to occur. This study also found that the risk of a large earthquake may be increasing more rapidly than scientists had previously believed. Moreover, the risk is currently concentrated on the southern section of the fault, i.e. the region around Los Angeles, because massive earthquakes have occurred relatively recently on the central (1857) and northern (1906) segments of the fault, while the southern section has not seen any similar rupture for at least 300 years.

“Nevertheless, in the 11 years since that publication there has not been a substantial quake in the Los Angeles area… – Wikipedia

Studies by the USGS have assigned varying predictions for the next big one. One assigned a 7% probability that a magnitude 8.0 or bigger will occur somewhere along the San Andreas fault. But this is nothing new; for as long as I can remember, there have been warnings that the next “Big One” was due or overdue.

So why hasn’t it happened if it’s overdue?

A lot of people don’t understand probability when applied to infrequent events. If a study determines that a major event occurs once every hundred years, on average, that doesn’t mean that you can expect one to strike each century like the hour hand on a clock. It means that the long-term average period between events is roughly 100 years – and that assumes that the underlying conditions don’t change.

There could be a 200-year interval between any two events – and then 70 years, 90 years, 50 years, 70 years, 110 years, and 80 years. That yields a perfect 100-year average over a 600-year span. The longer the span, the greater the scope for variability in any given interval.

As a rule of thumb, when an event – seismic or weather or whatever – is officially designated a once-a-century event, what it means is that the scientist in question would be surprised if there were less than 50 years or so before the next one, and not surprised if there weren’t another for 150 years, all things being equal, and assuming no errors in the assessment methodology.

Image by MW Toews, based in concept on a figure by Jeremy Kemp via Wikipedia commons, license CC-BY-2.5.

A “once a century” event is simply one in which the peak probability of the next event is at the peak of the probability distribution.

Which means that, by definition, half the time the interval between events will be longer than a century, possibly even several hundred years. That’s not impossible, just unlikely – just as it’s unlikely but not impossible that the same event will be repeated next year.

The “Big One” is inevitably coming. But when it will occur, and how big it will be, is a lot harder to predict.

Readers interested in more specifics about the likelihood of an occurrence in the near future are directed to this page at Wikipedia. My conclusion: it could happen by 2050, but is more likely to happen after that date.

Looking back at the San Francisco region, it’s clear from the statistics that the likelihood of a major earthquake is relatively low, despite the two? three? four? that have taken place already in the last 120 years or so. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just that it isn’t likely to.

The 1906 earthquake was estimated to be magnitude 7.8. There was another of magnitude 5.7 in 1957, and a third in 1989 (magnitude 6.9 and actually in the Santa Cruz area), and a fourth in 2004 (magnitude 6.0 and actually in Parkfield). The 1989 quake caused fatalities and property damage in San Francisco, the 2004 quake did not (but was felt over a wide area of California, including San Francisco).

You can see why it’s hard to even decide how many there have been.

In the near future, at least, the threat posed by the weaker Hayward Fault Zone is probably of greater significance to San Francisco. This is a group of six fault lines running through the San Francisco area, roughly parallel to the San Andreas fault. In general, they have been responsible for relatively mild earthquakes over the last century, but that may be changing.

“Many seismologists believe that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which occurred on the San Andreas fault, reduced the stress on many faults in the Bay Area including the Hayward fault, creating an “earthquake shadow,” a quiescent period following a major earthquake.

“It also appears likely that this quiet period in the earthquake shadow is ending, as projected by the rate of plate motion and the stress state of other faults in the region.” – Wikipedia

Prior to the 1906 earthquake, there had been 4 significant earthquakes (magnitude 5.2 or more) in the system, the worst of which may have been as great as magnitude 7.0, and caused 30 deaths in 1868. Significantly, the area of the 1868 quake had not been significantly urbanized at the time, but has been since. If the 1868 earthquake were to occur today, the estimates are that the damage bill would top 165 billion US dollars and more than 5 million people would be directly affected.

For the thirty years following 2014, the estimated likelihood of a magnitude 6.7+ earthquake in the Hayward Fault Zone is 14.3%, compared to a 6.4% likelihood of an event of the same magnitude within the same period on the southern San Andreas fault. Another (2012) USGS estimate increases the risk to 31%, while a third (2015) raises the risk level to 72%, with the chances of a magnitude 7 or greater being 50%, and a 20% chance of magnitude 7.5-to-8.

This risk is beginning to affect San Francisco society.

“The progressively more severe reports and estimates of event probability and consequences have awakened a broad interest in training people for emergency response. It is becoming widely understood that professional fire fighting, police, and medical services will be overwhelmed by a major event and that neighbors will have to assist each other as best they can.” – Wikipedia

It is expected that the area response organization would be modeled on the 1950s civil defense structure, but as yet, nothing has been done. And it’s been 3-4 years. I smell politics getting involved, but that’s just my opinion.

The remainder of the images in the “Earthquake Montage” show damage from the 1906 Earthquake.

Climate In Winter

The climate of San Francisco is officially the “Warm-Summer Mediterranean Climate of the California Coast, but the sharp topography, high hills, and marine surroundings on three sides create a number of quite pronounced micro-climatic variations on this foundation.

The hills in the center of the city cause as much as a 20% variance in rainfall between different parts of the city, and also protect neighborhoods directly to their east from the foggy and sometimes very cold and windy conditions experienced in the Sunset District; for those who live on the eastern side of the city, San Francisco is sunnier, with an average of 260 clear days, and only 105 cloudy days per year.

That means that the specific location of the weather monitoring is something that needs to be taken into account. The official observation station is currently at the United States Mint building (opened in 1854 to serve the gold mines of the California Gold Rush). The current facility at the corner of 5th and mission streets was opened in 1937.

Location of the US Mint Branch within San Francisco. Click on the thumbnail to view a much larger version or for a copy of the large map without the mint location marked. Original map, based on OpenStreetMap project data, by Droll, license CC BY-SA 2.0.

That puts it on the eastern side of Lone Mountain, a 421′ peak. There are lower hills to the north (Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, Presidio Hill) and much taller peaks to the south such as Mt Sutro and Mt Davidson. That suggests that the location is going to be partially affected by the phenomena described earlier, making it a good compromise location. So BOTH the general micro-climate effects listed earlier have to be applied to this basis – areas west will be cloudier and rainier, areas east clearer and drier – but as much as areas to the near south-southeast.

I found this topographic map to be extremely useful in analyzing the information and this topographic map useful for interpreting the results.

Rising hot air in California’s interior valleys during summer creates a low-pressure zone that draws moist sea air from the North Pacific High through the Golden Gate, creating the characteristic cool winds and fogs for which the city is infamous. This phenomenon is weakest in late summer and early autumn; because of this, the warmest month is usually September, and October is usually warmer than July, especially in the daytime.

This makes picking out the start and end points of some of the seasons especially difficult. Fortunately, winter is not one of them, clearly running from December through February. High Summer, on the other hand, appears to be split up by a two-month “false autumn” early in that season that will make that time of year more complicated, and the real autumn seems quite truncated as a result.

It’s as though the seasons ran:

• Spring (3 months, March to May);
• Early Summer (June);
• Early Autumn (2 months, July and August);
• Late Summer (2 months, September and October);
• Late Autumn (November);
• Winter (3 months, December to February).

I will probably treat the entire 5-month span from June to October as “Summer” and Autumn as a single month in duration. But that’s a decision for another day.

Record highs for the Winter months are Dec 24°C (76°F), Jan 26°C (79°F), and Feb 27°C (81°F), respectively. With the record high for the preceding month being 30°C (86°F), it is clear that the change of seasons is quite rapid.

It doesn’t normally get anywhere near that high; the mean of the highest temperatures each month is roughly 5°C (11°F) lower than these record highs. Specifically, the records to 2010 show values of Dec 19.1°C (66.4°F), Jan 19.6°C (67.3°F), and Feb 22.5°C (72.5°F).

More likely temperatures each day are 5-7°C (9-12°F) cooler again, specifically Dec 13.9°C (57.1°F), Jan 13.8°C (56.9°F), and Feb 15.7°C (60.2°F), respectively.

The three winter months are the only ones in which the record low temperature of the day is below freezing: Dec -3°C (27°F), Jan -2°C (29°F), and Feb -1°C (31°F). Given that San Francisco is only about 3 degrees of latitude, the differences between the Eastern and Western seaboards could not be more pronounced.

Of course, these are – by definition – exceptionally cold. Averaging the minimum recorded temperatures gives a better idea of how cold (at worst) it’s likely to get: Dec 4.5°C (40.1°F), Jan 4.6°C (40.3°F), and Feb 5.4°C (41.8°F).

Most days, it won’t even get that cold, but it will get close; there isn’t a lot of difference (about 3°C (6°F) between the averages of the minimum temperature of each month and the average minimum temperature each month: Dec 7.8°C (46.1°F), Jan 7.6°C (45.7°F), and Feb 8.6°C (47.5°F).

Winter doesn’t so much end as taper off. The temperature differences between March and April are very similar to those between February and March.

The same can’t be said of the rainfall pattern. Autumn through Winter and into Spring is the rainy period for the city, while the summer and “early” autumn are relatively dry.

December brings, on average, 115.8mm (4.56 inches) of rain on 11.6 rainy days, or slightly more than 1 day in three and an average fall of 10mm (0.39 inches).

January is statistically a fraction drier at 114.3mm (4.5 inches) with a slightly greater frequency of falls (11.7 rainy days). When you break that down to daily values, the difference is minuscule, and easily swallowed by daily variations; I doubt it would even be noticeable “on the ground”.

The same is not true of February, which experiences 113.3mm (4.46 inches) over 11.1 rainy days, despite initial appearances. Correcting for the length of the month shows that the frequency of rainfall goes up slightly, and the average fall is up almost 7%, enough to say that at least one fall would be significantly heavier.

I do get the impression that frequent light drizzles are more common than full-on rainy days, but have only the above statistics to back that up.

However, Wikipedia warns (through NOAA data) that the variation in precipitation from year to year is high. Above average rain years are often associated with warm El Niño conditions in the Pacific while dry years often occur in cold water La Niña periods. In 2013 – a “La Niña” year – a record low 142mm (5.59 inches) of rainfall was recorded in downtown San Francisco over the year, less than 24% of the average.

Snow is very rare, with only 10 measurable falls since 1852, most recently in 1976 when up to 5 inches (130 mm) fell on Twin Peaks.

Cloud cover is frequent over autumn and the winter months. The yearly average excluding those months is 72.125% of the available sunshine; compare that with 57% (November), 54% (December), 61% (January) and 69% (February). Only the latter comes close.

One final word on the subject by WhiteDahlia, a contributor to Trip Advisor Australia’s forum in response to a question about San Francisco’s weather in Winter:

“Historical averages for January in SF are a Google search away. But historical averages are just that and rarely do we have an ‘average’ year.” – WhiteDahlia

So take the information and analysis provided above as a foundation, but not as gospel!

Things to do in a San Francisco Winter

“Tourism is one of the city’s largest private-sector industries, accounting for more than one out of seven jobs in the city. The city’s frequent portrayal in music, film, and popular culture has made the city and its landmarks recognizable worldwide. It attracts the fifth-highest number of foreign tourists of any city in the United States and is one of the top-20 destination cities worldwide by international visitor spending. More than 25 million visitors arrived in San Francisco in 2016.” – Wikipedia

My abiding impression of San Francisco is that it’s a great place for adults to visit, but of limited interest to kids, as I said in introducing the city.

A number of things deserve mention as places to see, but you will find most all of them in the notes attached to the photo montage, so I have restricted myself to listing a few that weren’t.

Year-round:

• The most-visited museum in San Francisco is the California Academy of Sciences, which contains a planetarium, an aquarium, a four-story living rainforest, and a natural history museum with, amongst other things, the fossilized skeleton of a T-Rex. Let’s be honest – you could probably spend several days exploring everything this place has to offer.
• San Francisco has several theaters offering live performances during the colder months, in what is simply known as the Theater District.
• City Bus Tours – there are several of these that vary in price and duration. Almost all of them show the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, and Fisherman’s Wharf; some include 19 stops. One tour lets you set your own pace, another includes a visit to Alcatraz, and a third is an evening tour – which is excellent for seeing the downtown lights (refer December Events, below).
• These days, one of the city’s most popular attractions is a tour through Alcatraz, the Federal Prison that once held the nation’s worst criminals. Tickets tend to sell out quickly. Tours operate seven days a week, and in the evenings from Thursday to Monday. Dress in warm clothing for the 20-minute Ferry ride to and from the Island.
• The Exploratorium is a science museum which emphasizes the buzzword of 21st century displays – interactivity. Five large galleries explore sound and vision, the structure of living things, weather, mechanics, and human behavior, respectively.
• San Francisco holds almost 50 different film festivals each year, each with a different theme, genre, or culture. Winter festivals include the American Indian Film Fest, the Transgender Film Fest, Save the Waves, Noir City, the SF Indie Fest, and the Mostly British Film Festival. You can examine a full list of the festivals at this website.
• Whale Watching tours take place all year round. From December to May, the focus is on Gray, Sperm, and Killer Whale migrations. Sightings occasionally include dolphins, leatherback turtles, and sea lions.
• The Napa valley and Sonoma County, both located close to San Francisco, produce some of the best wines in the America. You can head for the source to explore for yourself or attend one of the regular wine-tastings. Wine is popular in this part of the country.
• Just across the road from the California Academy of Sciences is the de Young Art Museum, which contains more than 25,000 works from all over the world. Permanent exhibits include pieces from pre-Columbian to 20th century America, and artwork from sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, and Indonesia. Tickets also grant admission to another fine art museum, the Legion of Honor.
• San Francisco has a world-famous Zoo. Visit it anytime, but there are special events in later December for Kids, known as the “Zoo Lights”.
• The Children’s Creativity Museum is “known for its state-of-the-art, hands-on exhibits that explore art and technology” – which makes it like any number of other children’s museums, though the inclusion of art as a focus is a point of distinction. Interactive exhibits include an animator’s studio, music production lab, digital workshop, studio z, and more.
• Cooking classes are a popular pastime in San Francisco, especially at this time of year, and supply has evolved to meet the demand. Three that have been recommended by others are the San Francisco Cooking School, Tante Marie’s, and the Cheese School of San Francisco.
• I don’t know of anywhere that has an active foodie scene that doesn’t have an active coffee scene to compliment it, and San Francisco is no exception. Lots of high-end coffee shops can be found in different corners of the city.

November/December:

San Franciscans date Winter as starting on Thanksgiving (or thereabouts), so there is some “bleed” of seasonal activities into November. That said, Winter is the “quiet time” for tourism – which, if you can tolerate the weather, provides considerable advantages in terms of queue lengths and availability of tickets (with a few exceptions noted).

• San Francisco has several different tree-lighting ceremonies to attend. A number of them also incorporate refreshments and live entertainment. Amongst the most popular choices are Pier 39, (From Noon, Sunday Nov 19 in 2017, and the tree is re-lit nightly at 6PM throughout the season), Union Square, (6PM, Friday Nov 24 in 2017), Ghirardelli Square (from 7PM, Friday Nov 24 in 2017, this is more adult-oriented than many of the other events), 555 California (6PM-9PM, Wed Nov 29 in 2017), The Ritz-Carlton (5:30 PM to 7:30PM, Thursday, Nov 30 in 2017), Westfield Mall (6PM to 8PM, Thursday Nov 30 in 2017), Rainbow World Tree Of Hope at City Hall (5:30PM to 8PM , Wed, Dec 4 in 2017), and The Presidio (5PM to 6:45PM, Friday, Dec 8, in 2017 – and take a flashlight for the guided lantern-walk). On top of that, many buildings and structures sprout decorations, and some residential neighborhoods also maintain a tradition of richly decorative displays at this time of year.
• Every year, starting in mid-November and running until Mid-January (sometimes longer if the show is popular that year), Cirque du Soleil brings their latest masterpiece to the San Francisco public.
• From mid-November until mid-December, weekends bring the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, a slightly-romanticized recreation of Charles Dickens’ London, complete with period-appropriate shopping, dining, and entertainments.
• In mid-December (it took place on Dec 15 in 2017), from 6PM to 8PM, Fisherman’s Wharf hosts the oldest and largest holiday boat parade, with more than 60 colorfully illuminated boats sailing along the coastline.
• Like most cities, San Francisco has a fireworks display at midnight on New Year’s Eve. There are also dozens of public parties to attend, NYE cruises, and concerts.
• For the last 5 years, Illuminate SF have held a Festival Of Light on Thursday nights through December. This celebrates the city’s many light-art installations with a series of three specially-guided tour.

January:

• The first week of January is San Francisco Art Week. There are two contemporary art fairs that comprise this event.
• Each year, at some point in January, droves of Sea Lions take up a temporary residence at the K-dock of Pier 39, “camping out” for a while. This convergence of man-made urban environment and nature is a popular event and attraction for locals as well as visitors.
• The San Francisco area’s biggest comedy festival occurs for a week early in January. It’s well-known for innovation and creativity within the comedic community, nation-wide, including workshops, presentations, kids events, podcasts, improv shows, and more, at locations all over the city.
• The last week (or so) of January is given over to the San Francisco Restaurant Week, which actually lasts ten days. I don’t have too many details of what this specifically comprises, but suspect that it’s something similar to the events of other cities – see, for example, the Denver, Spokane, and Seattle entries above.

February:

• San Francisco’s Chinatown is legendary, and that means that the city really kicks out all the stops when it comes to celebrating Chinese New Year with close to a month of events, the highlight of which is the annual parade with colorful dragons, lion dancers, drums, and lanterns through the downtown streets. Other related events include a flower market fair, basketball jamboree, Miss Chinatown pageant, street fair, and a 5K-10K run.
• The annual Chronicle Wine Competition gives visitors the opportunity to sample more than 800 award-winning wines. The competition selects the best American Wines from (usually) more than 5000 entrants.
• The San Francisco Giants start the baseball season early with the “Giants Fan Fest” every February. This event gives fans the chance to meet the players, get their autographs, pick up new merchandise, and play catch on the field. Traditionally, this event is one of the accepted signals that Winter is ending.
• Of course, any city that celebrated the “Summer of Love” can be expected to have a host of Valentine’s-Day related activities.
• The Noise Pop Festival in late February is a Music Festival with a focus on indie music.

Primary Sources:

• Wikipedia’s San Francisco page;
• Wikipedia’s History Of San Francisco page;
• Wikipedia’s page on the California Gold Rush;
• Wikipedia’s page on the San Andreas Fault;
• Wikipedia’s page on the Summer Of Love;
• The Gold Rush of 1849 by History.com;
• 8 Things You May Not Know About the California Gold Rush by Barbara Maranzani for History.com
• Bubonic plague hits San Francisco 1900-1909 by PBS.org;
• George Harrison visits Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco from The Beatles Bible
• San Francisco Tree Lighting & Holiday Events 2017 from SF Tourism Tips
• Things to Do in San Francisco in the Winter from SF Tourism Tips
• 10+ Things to Do in San Francisco in Winter 2018 – January & February Activities & More by Casey Makovich for the Go Card San Francisco Travel Blog.
• Things To Do in San Francisco in the Winter by Andi Fisher for her blog, “Misadventures with Andi”.
• Everything to Do in San Francisco This Winter (Including All the Holiday Cheer You Can Handle) by Allison McCarthy for PureWow, a women’s lifestyle online magazine.

That concludes part 4 of this series. I’m going to take a week or two off from it in order to finish up another massive post because the unwritten parts of it are starting to become vague in my memory and I want to try and finish it before it’s too late.

While I’m doing so, expect “regular” Thursday posts to resume. Besides, a change is as good as a Holiday, as they say.

When this series does resume, it’s off to the Central Pacific and Asia for Winter in Honolulu, Bangkok, Tokyo, Beijing, Tibet, and Nepal (I can feel the snow piling up from here…)

A month or two back, I perceived the plot need in my superhero campaign to have one of the PCs appear on the celebrity edition of a game show.

The complication: Licensing of formats

The problem was that Game Shows are licensed for big money and the owners are very protective of their rights. While it was possible that – even if they came to know about it, something that would not necessarily ever happen – they would not mind one of their shows being adapted for RPG purposes, I didn’t feel like taking the chance (you can read a great overview of the situation in general at Deal or no deal: copyright protection in television formats by Leonard Glickman for Lexology).

Besides that, the game setting argued in favor of doing something new – I’ll get into that in a little bit. So, after concentrating on the problem for a while, I came up with my own original game-show format. And because other GMs may also want to incorporate a game-show into their RPGs, I am presenting it here.

The License

The game-show format and key elements thereof, as described in this blog post and its sequel, are ©2018 Mike Bourke. Licensing is free for any RPG-related purpose. Licensing for any other purpose (but especially for use in an actual televised game show) are negotiable, contact me through the website.

A Terminology Note: “Participants” vs “Players”

You normally term those taking part in a game, “Players”, but that term has a specific meaning already in an RPG. In an attempt to avoid confusion, I have attempted to use the terms “Participants” and “Contestants” to describe those characters taking part in the game-show throughout this article.

The Key Elements

The game show format that I created for my game features seven elements that, to the best of my knowledge, are original and unique.

Differentiated Scoring

Trivia-knowledge questions are ranked in terms of difficulty from 1 to 10 and that ranking is the score that is awarded for correctly answering the question. It is also the score that is lost for failing to provide a correct answer.

Deflection

Contestants in later rounds have the option of sacrificing a small part of their points score to “deflect” a question they do not feel confident of answering to a competitor, who must then answer the question or suffer the consequences of failing to do so.

Inter-participant interactions

This encourages interactions between competitors as a feature of the game. A key strategic element is the competitor “selling” themselves to their rivals, whether that is as someone who is trustworthy, or someone who is not to be messed with.

Participant Knockout

Contestants who run out of points are eliminated from the game.

Audience Directions

In some game segments, the audience determines which competitor will be presented with a given question. A key strategic element is the competitor establishing a rapport with the audience.

Audience Answers which may be false

In some game segments, the audience offers answers to the question which may or may not be accurate, depending on whether the audience members selected support or dislike the competitor who is attempting to answer the question.

Combination of pre-recorded and live game-show segments

Early stages of the game show are pre-recorded with a slight delay to broadcast. Later segments are broadcast live. This permits real-time interaction between the viewing audience and the ongoing game.

The Setting

The RPG campaign is set in the year 2056, in a world in which the British Empire has become the dominant political force over more than half the world. Individual nations have Kings (or equivalent, including Presidents and Prime Ministers) who are subordinate to the Emperor or Empress. Imperial Decree and Common Law form a foundation to the legal and social systems of all nations; in all areas in which no decree overrides the prerogatives of the national ruler, each nation is free to impose its own laws and governmental structures. Politics is broadly modeled on that of Britain, with local variations – political parties, free elections, a civil service, a peerage nominated by the crown or elected independently who serve as a reality check to the legislation of the primarily-elected lower house, and so on.

The key point here is the date, with all the technological baggage that it carries. While it’s not impossible for a game show to remain popular for 38 years, it doesn’t happen very often. How many game shows currently air with original episodes that were also on the air in 1980? There are a couple – some of whom had popular runs, faded away, and have been rejuvenated after a long hiatus – but it’s fair to say that almost all currently-successful game shows started far more recently.

That meant that either nostalgia would be a major part of the game show (if I were to appropriate an existing format) or that it would be a new show that was not currently on the air, and which would therefore require original and novel features.

Commentaries on the Key Elements

Having made the decision to go with an original game-show format, it was then necessary to devise one. I started by reviewing all the game shows currently airing in Australia and asking how my game show would differentiate itself from them. What would make it different enough to stand out?

Differentiated Scoring

The first thing that I noticed was that in almost every show out there, correct answers scored the same number of points, regardless of the difficulty of the question. The only exception was a show called “Pointless” which tests obscure knowledge; the goal in which is to give an answer which is both correct and which none of 100 people surveyed in advance had given. “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” also differentiates between difficulties of question but only in an attempt to sequence them in order of increasing difficulty as the prize money earned by a correct answer increases.

Deflection

Every game show that I looked at either permitted people to confer or asked questions to individual competitors. “Family Feud” permits rival teams an attempt to “steal” the points earned by their opposition if that opposition fail to give all the correct responses to a general question that had earlier been provided by a public survey.

The exact opposite of the person who was asked the question having to answer it is for them to have someone else answer it. It was that thought that led to the eponymous element of the new game-show that I was devising, Deflection.

Inter-participant interactions

That gave the concept, as a development tool, of attempting to find a way to do the exact opposite of what most or all game shows that I had seen did. Most game shows have the host / quiz-master interacting with each competitor or competitor group, but limited or no interaction between rivals. Doing the opposite of that – encouraging interactions, even baiting participants into interacting, brought a social element to the game show which permitted roleplaying. I took this as a signal that I was on the right track!

Audience Directions

The audience applauds. Contestants may be drawn from the studio audience. The only game show of which I am aware where there was any sort of interaction between a contestant and the audience was a show that was popular in Australia a while back called “Deal Or No Deal“. Specifically, I was not aware of any game show in which the determination of which contestant was asked a particular question was determined by the audience members voting in the space between one question being asked and the next. In more modern times, this could be done over the internet if the show was being broadcast live to air; otherwise, it would need to be done by the studio audience, who could indicate their choice by viewing the question being shown on an overhead screen (where contestants couldn’t see it) and a bank of colored buttons in the armrests of their chairs. The host would then be signaled the majority tally of who the audience wanted to answer the question.

This opened up important new avenues of interaction within the game-show, and new strategic and tactical considerations. Being perceived as the underdog, or simply being popular, could lead to the audience sending easy answers to one participant; being disliked by the audience could lead to difficult ones. Since the studio audience would serve as surrogate representatives of the broader viewing audience, this would create a sense of engagement between the audience and the show, an interactivity that I thought would greatly add to its popularity. In a more technologically-adept era, and with a live broadcast of those segments of the show affected, that engagement could be made more direct and immediate, a notion that I derived from the system of voting used by the Eurovision Song Contest.

Audience Answers which may be false

That, in turn, opened up the possibility of audience members voting on answers which would then be given to the contestants during the segments (see below) when the questions were especially difficult. Once again, this could be in the form of a multiple choice presented to a studio audience or some kind of official twitter-like feed from a broader audience pool once the technology permitted. One or two of the individual responses would be chosen at random and presented to the studio contestant.

This idea added a further dimension to the interactivity between the audience and the game show, and between the audience and the game show contestant.

Combination of pre-recorded and live game-show segments

Given the obvious advantages in terms of audience engagement and participation, I couldn’t see why – in the mooted 2056 era – the show would not be broadcast live. And then I had some second thoughts – there were obvious segments in which the foundations for each contest were laid, before audiences had the opportunity to get to know all the participants, when it would be patently unfair for that audience to be making game-changing decisions. I therefore decided that part of the show would be pre-recorded (with minimal delay and no interaction outside the studio audience), and the rest presented live. A further factor influencing this decision was the thought that this would increase the pressure on the contestants, making for a more vicariously-thrilling outcome.

Besides – once again – that sort of thing simply wasn’t being done, and so it marked another point of difference between Deflection and everything else out there.

Number Of Participants

In an ordinary show, with regular contestants, I would expect four players to be normal. For plot reasons, I wanted this to be a celebrity edition, which entailed an extra round, more questions, and more participants. After some thought, and bearing in mind that the number of potential interactions increased exponentially with each additional contestant, I settled on six.

Anticipated show length

That should give a show of 25 minutes (leaving room for adverts) for the regular show and 45-48 minutes (leaving room for adverts) for a celebrity version. That would translate to one and one-and-a-half hours broadcast time, respectively. I took my cue for those lengths from the Australian version of Family Feud, which is typically a fast-paced half hour but which has celebrity versions that are sometimes a slightly more languid hour in length.

The Segments

The regular game would have three segments, separated by ad breaks. The celebrity edition has a fourth segment.

Introductions Segment

In the introductions segment, contestants are asked questions – first, one each in succession, and then semi-randomly – the sequence is random except that no player gets two questions in a row, and the points score available to each player has to total the same at the end of the round if they answer all questions correctly.

Before each contestant is given their first question, they are introduced to the audience. All contestants start with a points score of 20. Questions asked in this round are

• 60% very easy (difficulty 1-3 out of ten) and
• 40% moderately easy (difficulty 4-5 out of ten).

Players are not permitted to deflect these easy questions, which exist to establish a baseline score, i.e. a set of starting conditions.

The host regularly comments on the state of the score, especially when the leader-board changes or might change dramatically.

Celebrity-only Segment (in two parts)

The celebrity round-2 introduces both studio-audience directed questions and deflections. It costs a contestant 1 point to deflect a question to the player coming last other than themselves, and three points to deflect one to the current leader other than themselves. Tactically, this gives whoever is coming last the chance to build up their score. However, no contestant can be asked two questions in a row – if you have just answered a question (right or wrong), you are immune from having the next question Deflected to you.

Complicating this is the audience attitude toward the contestant. Celebrity contestants can include publicly-elected or -appointed officials, artists, musicians, actors, models, you name it. All they need is some sort of name recognition.

The producers go out of their way to match contestants with rivals or with individuals with whom they (are believed to) have a public disagreement or relationship of some kind, or some controversial opinion with which another contestant is likely to disagree. In each part of this two-part segment, the host will raise the issue as a question is directed at a contestant and discuss it with them. Celebrities appearing on the show know this and usually prepare accordingly.

One reason for prerecording the early segments, including this one, is so that the reactions of the other celebrities can be monitored and appropriate footage inserted, and so that these interviews can be edited for length and language.

The mix of questions in this round is:

• 20% very easy (difficulty 1-3 out of ten),
• 40% moderately easy (difficulty 4-5 out of ten), and
• 40% moderately difficult (6-7 out of ten).

It is normal for one or two contestants to end up in points trouble by the end of this round, while a third takes a strong lead.

Deflection Segment

This is round two in the regular game and round three in the celebrity edition. This is the first live segment of the show.

This round is played the same way as the previous one, but the mix of questions is harder, and a randomly-chosen answer from a member of the audience is given before the contestant chooses whether or not to deflect. They are given only a second or two to make this decision.

This is the round in which the game becomes very tactical, and it may be preferable for a contestant to deflect an answer they know to a rival who they think doesn’t. It’s normal for whoever is leading at the start of the round not to be by it’s end, and this can be when contestants get knocked out (i.e. have their score reduced to zero).

The mix of questions in this round is:

• 10% very easy (difficulty 1-3 out of ten),
• 30% moderately easy (difficulty 4-5 out of ten),
• 30% moderately difficult (6-7 out of ten), and
• 30% difficult (8-9 out of ten).

In addition, it’s traditional for the round to contain 1-3 difficulty-ten questions in the latter half as forewarning of what’s to come.

Double-Deflection Segment

This is the final round of the game show. At the start of the round, each contestant in the celebrity edition announces which charity or cause they are playing to raise money for, while the contestants in the regular game are asked what they will do with the money if they win. In addition, there are hot-line numbers set up for the celebrity edition which permit the viewing public to contribute to the celebrity cause.

Questions are, basically, whatever’s left to be asked, and can include trick questions.

In this round, Deflection costs are doubled, correct answers score double points, and incorrect answers cost double points. Questions can be Deflected twice and two answers are chosen at random from the audience. These can be the same, or different. Contestants also get twice as long to think about their answers. Contestants still can’t be asked two questions in a row but a second question in sequence can be deflected to a given contestant.

Because of the points available, any Contestant still in the game can still win, or crash out. It’s normal for very tactical play to occur, and for there to be several changes of the lead.

In this round, Contestants are not told how many points a question is worth until after they have attempted to answer it, adding yet another tactical layer to the mix.

Prize-money

At the end of the game show, contestants earn a fixed amount for every point in their final score, with the winner getting +50% for every point they scored. The remainder of a fixed prize pool is then divided equally amongst all the contestants.

Celebrity editions generally have a much larger prize pool.

I won’t quote the exact numbers from the example game here because they would be misleading, taking into account another 38 years of inflation. To give readers some idea of how big an impact that has, I worked back from 1980 US dollars to modern currency. It’s roughly 5-fold.

While the host explains all of this, and gives the amounts won, a giant-sized novelty check is produced off-stage and presented to the winner at the end of the show.

Celebrity-specific procedures

Another of the tactics that the show uses to keep itself interesting is not to tell the players who they are up against until filming starts, even to the point of getting additional celebrities into the studio audience as red herrings and deliberately casting celebrities with “histories”.

Tactics

Contestants are encouraged to “talk their way around the question”, even if they know the answer.

It’s quite common for players to use this time to try and charm the audience, or paint themselves as the bad guy or girl if they are confident of their abilities and want to put the other contestants off. Sometimes, this is all bluff.

There are other tactics: snappy answers to get more questions in, or taking your time to get less, trying to prune the field, being friendly or ruthless, attempting to send other players down the garden path by offering a red herring in your dialogue, trying to charm the audience, singling out the weakest player or the strongest…

Rumors

It’s rumored that the quiz cards have multiple questions on them, and the producers are reputed to manipulate the difficulty to make for a more interesting game. That wasn’t the case in the version that I ran (too much work), but you may choose otherwise if that’s important to your
plot.

Host

The host should have a current affairs background and be used to interviewing people who don’t want to give answers to difficult questions.

The host and quiz-master of the in-2056 version is Stuart DeBrassie, who also hosts the most-watched public affairs program in the Empire [‘IBC Tonight’]. Stuart uses his knowledge to quickly get to the heart of who players are.

“Stuart” was deliberately modeled on David Frost, who had that sort of reputation as an interviewer – able and willing to ask the hard questions and skilled at getting an actual answer. There was also some touch of Andrew Denton (who has developed a similar reputation in Australia) in the way I played the character and wrote the ‘script’.

When you use this Game-show format in your RPGs, you will need to create a host of your own, possibly based on mine. The host is responsible for a lot of the interaction and tone of the show; the tone that I was striving for was a touch on the serious side, but someone who was strong enough to keep control over potentially heated tempers. You might want a more folksy, lighter touch, or a more charming host, or a fire-starter like Jerry Springer, or someone with stronger social credentials like Oprah Winfrey.

Whoever you choose as the model upon which your host is based will have a profound impact on the tone of the game-show.

Participants

The next thing that you’ll need are participants – six for the celebrity edition, four for the regular.

The Celebrities that I chose for the 2056-based game were:

• Recently-disgraced politician Marcel Thurman Greene, who “allegedly” contracted with the Circus Of Crime to assassinate Shock Jock and thorn in his side, Howard Eskin. The PCs failed to get sufficient proof of his involvement when they took down the Circus (in their 3rd adventure), so he is on the reelection trail;
• NOPD Chief Of Police Oscar Raven;
• Sir Alice Cooper, semi-retired shock rocker, actor, golfing celebrity, restaurateur, and vintage automobile restorer/customizer, 107 years old and still going strong, knighted for his social services in combating celebrity alcoholism;
• “Princess”, a somewhat prissy fashion model and Cooper’s great-granddaughter;
• Mosul Panesar, Sikh and Comedian, who pokes fun at tradition-for-the-sake-of-tradition and racial bias; and
• Alison Cash, an all-too-serious and opinionated (but very popular) actress with whom Mosul has had several public disagreements about whether or not his comedy is inappropriate, and who has publicly criticized Cooper for being unwilling to mix entertainment and politics, i.e. to utilize the stage given him by his fame.

Of these, everyone except “Sir Alice” is completely fictional.

You will almost certainly want different participants; these were not chosen at random. More on that, shortly. It’s very important that you have a clear idea of who these people are, their experiences and expertise levels, their personalities, and – preferably – to have some way of distinguishing between them when delivering dialogue between them.

It should also be noted that there’s an extra! The “corrupt politician” was never intended to survive through the entire game-show as a Contestant, and in fact I incorporated an “extra question” to make sure that his score would have the right value at the right time to enable his “exit” to follow my script. His appearance was the entire point of the plot sequence (in campaign terms), everything else was an added bonus.

Gathering Questions

I gathered my questions, first, by looking up trivia quizzes through Google, and second, with an old fashioned web-crawl through Wikipedia, plus one or two items that I already knew. My goal was to have five questions for each difficulty rating (1 to 10); achieving that required subsequent rephrasing some questions to contain multiple choice answers or hints. I still needed to gather about 60 questions to get the required target.

Participant- specific questions

I also scratched a few because I wasn’t confident of the answers supplied, and made sure that there was one question targeting a known expertise of each contestant.

In an non-celebrity game, these would be based on pre-game questionnaires.

Rating Questions

This was mostly done by ‘feel’ and by how difficult they would be for the average person in the game setting to answer. I took into account how recent the events were, whether or not they were likely to be taught in school, and how specific the required information was.

Allocation to segments

Before allocating the questions to segments, I sorted them by difficulty and then randomized the sequence within each difficulty score.

Randomizing the Sequence

Once questions were allocated into a particular segment of the game show, I randomized them within that segment. However, to space out the interval between the various dialogue segments, I was quite willing to “override” that randomness when necessary.

Planning Interactions & Personality Conflicts

You don’t get an interesting “show” by accident. Normally, I was have assigned each character a “character arc” within the broader context of the story, but this time around, I did something a little different, planning a “narrative arc” for each of the points of conflict instead, and using that as my guideline to the “in-game-show” situation.

I also had a couple of plot developments that I wanted to deliberately insert. The first was the corrupt politician, present because he had been an outspoken critic of the PC group, and was the spearhead of a political movement that I wanted the PCs to become aware of; the second was to cement the relationship between traditional law-enforcement and the PCs; the third was to make the PCs aware of how much their fame had grown in the course of the campaign (you can never hint at that too strongly or too often); and, lastly, I wanted to plant the philosophical issue of celebrities influencing opinions, rightly or wrongly, and the “baggage” that comes with fame.

With those in mind, take another quick look over the contestants listed above, and the reasons for their inclusion should be fairly clear.

In Part 2

In the second half of this article, I will talk about how I wrote the “script” for the show, how I kept it dynamically-responsive to what the PC did, how I extended the narrative to include the other Players, and will wrap up by sharing the excerpts from the actual adventure.

I get asked questions all the time. Those coming at me through twitter I usually answer extremely briefly; if the 280-character limit (was 140) is not enough, I will either add more replies or set the question aside for answering here, if there is likely to be sufficient interest in the question. Those I get asked in person, I answer as best I can within the limits of the time I have available. And I average about 1 answer a month on Quora.

Never heard of it? It’s a site where some people ask questions and other people – who feel they have the expertise to provide a useful response – answer them. Some of my answers have been about Australia, some about Politics, some about Cricket, some about other topics – and yes, some have been RPG-related.

Until now, none of the answers have been suitable for expansion here. On Saturday, that changed.

The Question was, How do I create a good combat system for a tabletop RPG?

Below is the full text of my reply. You can confirm that (and read the other answers to the question, which are also worthwhile) at How do I create a good combat system for a tabletop RPG?

Combat systems are the crunch of RPGs, the most intensive interaction between players and game mechanics. Before you start, you need to understand the fundamentals of time-and-motion optimization.

If the average combat between 4 PCs and 4 equally-matched NPCs requires 6 rounds of battle, a single extra step taking 10 seconds (which seems quick and easy in isolation) for each adds 6x8x10 = 480 seconds or 8 extra minutes. If that time-span is 20 seconds, that’s 16 minutes game time lost per combat. If there are 12 rounds of combat in those typical battles, that’s 16 and 32 minutes of extra time per combat.

If it takes five extra seconds to perform an operation – the difference between addition and subtraction – and you have to do that for 10 rounds, 8 characters, 4 times in day’s play, that’s 5x10x8x4=1600 seconds=26-plus minutes of extra game time, lost. Plus, it makes it slower to evaluate your different tactical options, and that can add anything from 5 to 25 seconds on top of that five. Two or three such operations, and you can easily lose three, four, or even five hours of game-play.

The next thing you need to get your head around is the relationship between simulation and abstraction. Clearly, a combat system that takes account of everything that can possibly affect the outcome is going to be so slow that it’s unplayable. That means that you are going to need just enough realism that it feels like all possible combat modifiers are taken into account (i.e. feels ‘realistic’), but abstract enough that it’s playable.

Thirdly, the system needs to contain mechanisms by which the participants can influence the basic operation of the system – ways to implement tactics, ways to differentiate one character from another, different styles of combat, and so on – and these cannot add to the combat-time overhead. Accommodating these ‘differentials’ usually requires further simplification and abstraction of the combat simulation.

All of these principles wrap around your core combat mechanics, and don’t leave a lot of room for complexity in those mechanics. Which is why most systems come down to a chance of hitting, an amount of damage inflicted on a successful hit, and a total capacity for absorbing successful hits, and circumstantial/tactical modifiers to one, or at most two, of these. The details vary from system to system, but those are the core principles. There simply isn’t enough room for much more in the timing. Hero games splits damage into two varieties, and adds an Endurance variable that restricts medium-term capacities for combat – but uses a mechanism that requires only a single roll to calculate both damage results.

Finally, all combat systems have to pass the sensible test. In other words, they have to feel like they respond to common sense. Put on better armor and you become harder to hit to the point of taking damage. Put on more restrictive armor (which might be the same thing) and it becomes harder for you to hit others and inflict harm with that ‘hit’.

If you want to create a new combat system, start by understanding the ones that are already out there. Throw in an understanding of how card games work. Toss in an understanding of probability. Then follow the process outlined above. And think of the results as just your first draft, because I can guarantee that they will need revision after some real-world play-testing!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that answer, and I stand by it. But there’s a lot of meat in there that could be better-served with some fleshing-out and annotation.

Time-And-Motion Optimization

Back in 2014 (it doesn’t seem like four years ago), I wrote a full article on the subject, but that was focused more on House Rules and the inevitable inefficiencies that come as a price tag. I had in mind things like incorporating extra classes of modifiers, or hit location mechanics, or different types of damage, or a more Rolemaster approach to weapons and the other rules tweaks that every GM seems to come up with. This is a new application of the principles, and that’s why I went into some detail in the above answer – nearly 1/3 of it relates to the subject.

Another way to phrase this aspect of the answer is to ask a distinct and related sub-question: how fast should combat take to complete?

At it’s absolutely most basic level, a single die roll that takes into account every relevant factor could resolve the battle, and the rest is GM narrative. I think this goes too far, but there may be times when it’s the right solution.

A better solution is a single die roll that then leads into a formalized and structured narrative interaction between players and GM. This essentially uses the die roll and some assessment of the “quality” of the resulting success or failure as a guide to the outcome while saying nothing about the path taken:

In this example, the characters have rolled a 16 on a d20 but don’t know what they needed to succeed because they don’t know what modifiers the GM has placed on the roll. The GM initially has the battle advantage swing this way and that before events turn decidedly against the PCs, ending in a sudden decisive twist that produces the successful outcome they earned through their die roll. They can attempt whatever they want to attempt but will have little success until the final moments of the struggle.

Along the way, the GM might dole out damage and changing tactical circumstances as the combat evolves, based on what the players attempt and what the enemy does in response. But the ultimate question, “is a 16 good enough?” is not resolved until the end of the battle.

This sort of approach permits the GM to make combat dramatic and visceral – if he’s good at that sort of thing – but can leave the players ignorant of specifics that would affect their tactical decisions, and leaves no place for in-combat strokes of genius on their part.

For that reason, a lot of players wouldn’t like it. They want to know everything about their character’s condition, they want to be able to judge for themselves how effective or ineffective a particular tactic or weapon is, and so on.

And so we end up back at the basic RPG combat system, in which round by round numeric consequences of combat are described and any narrative is something the GM has to shoehorn in, sideways.

Simulation Vs Abstraction

I’ve touched on this subject many times in many articles, but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed the subject directly – see, for example, the series on Cinematic Combat from 2015.

There’s a difference between realism and verisimilitude that many people confuse. Verisimilitude is all about the suspension of disbelief, of logical consequences deriving from improbable or even impossible assumptions, of making the game – and that includes the combat – feel as though it was real, despite the presence of all sorts of strange phenomena like Sorcery and Monsters and what-have-you. Realism means that there is no disbelief to suspend, and nothing so out of the ordinary is possible. It takes the fantasy out of the equation, replacing imagination with simulation. Verisimilitude is to be encouraged at all times; Realism may be a vector to achieving Verisimilitude, but at least as often, it gets in the way.

Simulation attempts to load up on specific details. In theory, with a well-designed combat system, these details are epicly good, because they carry inherent verisimilitude. But they do so at the expense of practicality. I have seen (home-brew) game systems in which it took 12 minutes to resolve each attempted attack in a combat. Everything you can think of was taken into account, from the capabilities of weapon-type-X against armor-type-Y, to the relative heights of the two combatants, to skill levels with a shield, to…. well you get the point. This might work well in a computer RPG because the computer can crunch this type of math faster than you can blink.

In any other sort of game, there isn’t enough abstraction; it takes too long, can be too confusing, and intrudes game mechanics so severely into the gaming process that any gains in verisimilitude are often lost. You might know that the outcome is believably accurate, but you don’t feel it, viscerally.

Every RPG, every combat system, has it’s own point of compromise between simulation and abstraction. If that was all there was to it, you could pick the point that seems most desirable to you, and all would be well.

But this feeds directly back into the question of Time-and-motion Optimization, as was implied by that home-brew system I mentioned. You can’t accurately simulate every aspect of the real world in a practical combat system; you need to abstract and compromise the realism in order to achieve both a dynamic, thrilling, visceral contest, and a sense of verisimilitude.

There are good abstractions that are easy to understand and work with, and there are poorer abstractions that are extremely complicated when you dig deeply into what seems to be a very straightforward mechanic. An example of the latter that I analyzed extensively is D&D 5e’s “Advantage” mechanic – you can read my analysis in this article.

Controls

There are always rules for things like facing, and initiative, and surprise, and movement, and cover, and flanking. These are all variables that the characters engaged in combat can manipulate in an attempt to Control the outcome. No rules system can ever cover everything, or you end up back at the Simulation end of the scale.

For example, in D&D (any variety), you might have a player state “I am attacking to draw his shield out of position. I don’t care about hitting him – yet – I want to spend a round or two defending myself and getting him into a vulnerable position.” How do you adjudicate this? Unless there is a specific maneuver listed amongst the controls that describes this, you’re in trouble.

Before you can create and implement such a Control, you would need to really understand the abstractions that are built into the D&D system. One of those abstractions is that each attempt to “hit” is actually many attempts to strike a blow against the enemy, and your chances of success at inflicting harm incorporate any skill you might have in getting a character’s shield “out of position”. Ultimately, you could craft an explicit maneuver that would work – storing up your success margins above what you need to hit over multiple rounds in order to achieve a more effective blow when you do strike, for example – but you need to understand the abstractions and foundation assumptions of the game system first.

I’ve seen a number of house rules and attempts to create combat systems where the designer lost track of the abstractions, or never understood them in the first place, and as a result, their home-brewed rules came with gaping, exploitable, system deficiencies.

You need Controls, or the characters will have no capacity to treat the combat as though it were real – breaking verisimilitude – but you can’t cover everything. D&D 5e’s “Advantage” is an attempt to umbrella everything into a single abstraction, and – to a certain extent – it works well.

The Sensible Test

The Space Gamer, and more recently, Pyramid – both by Steve Jackson Games – used to feature a page called Murphy’s Rules, which mocked (in a comedic way) rules that failed the Sensible Test. Many of these have been collected into a PDF (US$ 7.99). For example, in AD&D, a fighter specializing in Darts can do more damage in a round than one specializing in Broadsword…

Every game designer has, at one time or another, written a rule that fails the Sensible Test. If they are lucky, it’s only in exceptional circumstances, and a minor tweak can set things aright. More often, this comes about because the left hand either didn’t know or forgot what the right hand had already done.

If it comes to that, the limits of abstraction frequently pose challenges to the Sensible Test.

Take the D&D 3.x stacking limits, for example. That game system had a quite sensible mechanic designed to simplify the abstractions question, only different modifiers stack. If you had two modifiers of the same type, you simply used the biggest one and ignored the lesser. There were one or two minor exceptions.

What did various supplement publishers do? To make their products more appealing, they came up with their own “categories” of modifier. You could get one magic item from one book, a class ability from another, and add them to something from the core rules, and end up with three STACKABLE bonuses for something that was never meant to stack in the first place! If those were just +1 or +2, that would be bad enough, but some of them were +4, +5, or even more.

I once constructed a character in this way, as a test to ascertain the seriousness of the problem, and ended with a 1st-level character who had +40 to stealth. No, I no longer have the details.

What to do? Well, you could restrict the publishers that were considered canonical in your game. Or, you could rule that unless it’s explicitly differentiated in the core rule-books, all these modifiers were considered the same type under a different name, restricting the scope of the problem.

But, at the same time, there were logical challenges to the concept of stacking limits. “You mean that because of my Cloak, I can wear hobnailed boots instead of my Boots Of Elvenkind and there’s no change to my Stealth roll?” kind of challenges. The concept itself fails the Sensible Test.

You could solve that whilst retaining the spirit of the rule. Many GMs did. The simplest solution was: total all your applicable bonuses except the single largest one. Each time those other bonuses equal the largest one, in aggregate, or part thereof, it increases the benefit of that largest one by one. So +2 and +2 and +3 gives you +5, not +7. And +4, +5, +4 gives you +7, not +13. It meant that characters still got a benefit from wearing multiple items that contributed the same bonus, but those benefits were curtailed to some extent.

Understanding The Game System You Are Using

You can do a lot worse, either as a player or as a GM, than taking the time to analyze and understand the combat system of the game you are using, even if you have no desire to create a new game system. Identifying the abstractions, and understanding the implications, comprehending the mechanics, being aware of the line between Abstraction and Simulation that the rules adhere to and why – these all make you better equipped to deal with failures of the Sensible Test when they occur, and increase your capacity to arbitrate the inevitable situations that aren’t in the book.

We all encounter those situations. Quite often, they result when an unusual combination of rules comes into effect; the better the play-testing that’s been done, the more the obvious such mechanics “holes” have been identified and corrected. But RPGs deal with environments and situations that are so complex, it’s impossible to have test every possible combination; there will always be tar babies and other monsters lurking in the shadowy recesses of the rule-books.

It’s part of your responsibility to hunt these down and whack them on the head before they become a problem, if you can.

Looking at the photographs of the “March For Our Lives”/”Never Again” rallies, you can’t help but feel that an entire generation, who have grown up under the shadow of gun violence in schools since Colombine (April 20, 1999), have run out of patience and been energized.

Calls for compromise, like those of Mark Rubio, who suggested “understanding of the other side,” are clearly going to fall on deaf ears; they essentially reiterate the policy compromises of the entire post-Colombine era that the students and organizers of the rallies consider failures, and with which they have exhausted their patience.

I saw one sound-byte in which it was claimed that at the coming Midterm elections, 1 million millennials would have the vote, and at the next Presidential Election, the number would be 20 million. Clearly, if the protests become a social movement that endures until then and which then transforms the protesting millennials into a unified voting bloc, this will bring about a wave of change that no political party can ignore.

That’s a major problem for the Republican Party, who are strongly linked to the NRA, who the students view as the enemy, willing to sacrifice the students lives in defense of the principles they espouse. The Democrats should have a far easier job of wooing these voters, as what attempts at gun control have taken place over the last 40 years or more have almost exclusively been from their side of the political fence.

Whether you agree with the position of the students or not (I do, but I’m Australian, and we have gun control laws that work), it’s hard to argue that this is a defining event for this generation, of the sort that hasn’t really been seen since the Vietnam War, or the Second World War before it. I tend to put the Civil Rights movements of the 60s, Prohibition, and the Unionization/Worker’s Rights movements of the early 20th century, into the same category.

These defining events don’t come along in every generation, but when they do, they tend to be, well, defining, whether you are pro- or anti-; they force those of that generation to choose a side, disregarding past loyalties and familial traditions, and from that stance, like dominoes falling, other stances and positions will flow, crystallizing around this seed principle.

There’s an obvious connection to the “youth vote” discussion that leads off A Political insight for RPGs & Life but, aside from this movement representing a clear and obvious inversion of a political trend of the last few decades (diminishing youth politicization), that article doesn’t really contribute very much insight into the current situation, never mind offering an RPG-related insight.

I’m not entirely sure why, but when I was thinking about this situation, I found myself making an unexpected connection to a couple of past articles here at Campaign Mastery –

• Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool
• Ergonomics and the Non-human (about Elvish Ergonomics)
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves (a sequel to the Elves article).

Specifically, I started thinking about Elves and lifespans and maturation rates and coming-of-age events and Generation Landmark events, and one thing led to another…

Proportionate Age Scaling

Most people, when they think about the longer lifespans of Elves, Dwarves, and other forms of long-lived characters, do one of two things: expand their life-stages proportionately, as shown on the diagram above, or simply add lots of extra years to the adult part of the range.

Few go so far as considering what that does to the demographics of the community. The first implies as much as 80 years of increasing senility in roughly 20% of the population, but that’s rarely shown; what do the elves do with their elderly when they start getting a bit dotty? The second implies that children are relatively rare, simply because more of the population would be adult.

When you get results like this, that don’t fit the norm of what’s established in most games, the temptation is to throw out the entire concept. This is wasteful and neglects a great opportunity.

Challenge your assumptions and preconceptions

What if “senility” in a long-lived species was different to that of Humans? Take Elves – two possibilities leap immediately to mind: Senility = obsessiveness, and Senility = coalescence with nature.

Senility=Obsessiveness

This is probably the more dangerous choice, because you can never tell what subject the obsessive will fixate upon. If it’s pottery, or ancient history, there’s no problem. If it’s arcane research, there will be trouble. If it’s religion or politics, you have a powder-keg.

Coalescence With Nature

Under this concept, aging elves grow ever more tired and lethargic. Eventually, they move so little that moss begins to grow on them, and they start to put down roots. If undisturbed, they sprout branches and become as trees.

There’s a lot that you could do with either concept. But why stop there? Why not redefine adolescent behavior, while you’re at it?

Redefined Aging

Once you’ve gone that far, it seems silly to cling to the concept of races who have different lifespans experiencing the same aging landmarks. Perhaps Elves mature emotionally and physically at quite different rates, remaining skittish and obsessed with fancy poetry and other fanciful impracticalities until some coming-of-age event occurs – if it ever does – at which point they metamorphose, emotionally, into a serious individual, more like Elrond, in the process transitioning from gregariousness to insularity and even xenophobia. Most PC elves under this model should be modeled on someone like Lelldorin from the Belgariad by David Eddings (or, if you want to stick with examples from The Lord Of The Rings, like Pippin and Merry).

Generational Landmarks of the long-lived

If you live a long time, perhaps even remaining “stuck” in a stage of development until transition to the next is triggered by involvement in some external circumstance, the great likelihood is that this will be a generational landmark event of some kind.

Elves, for example, could be happy-go-lucky wastrels indulging their most pretentious artistic tendencies, until some external threat or personal tragedy – the death of one’s parents, for example – caused the elf to set aside such childish pursuits, recasting their capacity for passion into a near-obsession with serious subjects. Mature Elves smile only for effect, under this model. Think of Latins, taken to the extreme.

This means that while there would be a few individuals who would make the transition due to personal circumstances, in the majority of cases an entire generation would mature simultaneously. If PCs – and NPCs – were used to dealing with the more happy-go-lucky elves resulting from a generation of peace, they might underestimate the Elves.

If part of a campaign is a quest by the PCs to “awaken the Elves”, this could become central to that campaign. But even without that option, there is RPG value to the proposition.

Consider the Vietnam war – in general, there were three possible reactions to it: You could oppose it, fleeing the draft if necessary; you could support it, and go willingly to fight; or you could be caught in the middle, perhaps opposing the conflict even while supporting a relative who was in service. No matter what the Generational Landmark event is, there will be at least two reactions, often splitting along generational fault-lines, and the resulting core values will define commonalities shared with a number of others who shared the experience. Of course, when you look more closely, you would find any number of individual variations within that overall generalization.

The Principle

The principle is to decide what traits you want the race to have and define a rational aging progression accordingly. Fit landmarks to the aging process that accord with the aging progression you have defined, and you end up redefining the race in question. Make the right choices, and there might not even be any superficial difference, while the race is entirely different “under the skin”.

Let’s take Dwarves, for an example. In childhood, they might have an overwhelming spiritual bond with the earth, looking upon the process of what other races consider mere “mining” as shaping the earth. Think of the reverential attitude of Gimli to the caverns beneath Aglarond – “When the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! Then Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light flows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-colored floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from the dark pools covered with clear glass” – and apply that passion to the race in general. As yet, though, the young Dwarves cannot do anything with this bond.

When a dwarf enters adolescence, he abruptly loses this connection to the Earth, and – in effect – he spends this entire phase of his life in a state of Addiction Withdrawal, leaving them hot-tempered and on the verge of a loss of self-control at all times.

As they begin to physically mature, becoming adults, they discover that this sense has not been lost, after all; instead, it has become focused into a number of specific channels, each of which provides one of the iconic abilities of the race. With each ability so regained, the bond is renewed and spiritual tranquility returns.

Have you ever talked with an addiction survivor? The experience marks the personality forever after. They tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic and willing to help those who want to be helped, or who they consider friends. Leo McGarry’s story about the Friend and the Hole from the West Wing episode Noel is not atypical: “This guy’s walkin’ down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you! Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole; can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me. Can ya help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, ‘Are ya stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

They also tend to have a fierce protectiveness toward those that they are helping, or who have helped them.

Of course, there are individual variations. Another prevailing trait tends to be a tolerance of those who backslide, a patience that says, “Start Again. Today, and every day, is the first day of the rest of your life.” That part of the ex-addict character would not translate into the Dwarfish character, because the bond has been restored.

Instead, the focus would be on the shared experience that every Dwarf has experienced. This would be something akin to the bond between members of the military. These bonds could be easily misinterpreted as xenophobia to those looking in from the outside, because they would be a shared experience that only other Dwarves understand.

There would also be a sense of having survived the worst possible pain and distress it was possible to know. It is a known fact that mothers have a higher pain threshold than non-mothers, simply because of the experience of childbirth; this would be akin to that, in spades.

Of course, this life journey is something intensely personal to the Dwarf; other Dwarves might understand it, but non-Dwarves certainly would not, and so Dwarves don’t share any information about it.

Under this (example) model of Dwarfishness, you can assume that there would be some few rare cases where the bond was never restored, but the Dwarf learned to live with lesser substitutes. Hotheaded, perpetually angry and resentful at the universe, given to other forms of self-gratification, and lacking the restored bond with the Earth that keeps them spiritually centered, these would make fearsome enemies. Think serial killers and sociopaths who are nevertheless sheltered and protected by the rest of the race, who could not fail to be sympathetic to their plight.

The short-lived

Another problem that GMs often have is in making sense of the short-lived races. There was a time when Orcs were described as living only 15 years or so, for example. Even if you assume that they grow and mature faster than humans, this lifespan is so short that social and technical progress would be almost impossible. Which sounds like a fine justification of the Orcish nature as described in various source materials, but it is simply too extreme; Orcs are rarely described as being sufficiently primitive for this description to stand up. More to the point, they would never live long enough to become formidable threats to PCs!

What is needed is some sort of experience dump, a running start to the “maturity” and physical prowess of the Orc. But, since it’s entirely likely that anything of the sort will go too far in the other direction, we need this process to somehow exaggerate the worst social and personal attributes of the Orcish character.

There are any number of possibilities to consider, but most of them center on the concept of resentment and the loss of a pleasant childhood, and that doesn’t fit the Orcish character. Once they are eliminated, there aren’t too many contenders. One that would fit would be the use of pain – torture – as a conduit for the life experience of the parents and teachers. Stockholm syndrome then makes the new generation ready and willing to inflict pain on others. Generational Sociopathy (or perhaps, Psychopathy), does a lot of the work of turning Orcs into monsters.

It’s entirely possible that without this practice, Orcs would live longer – 25 to 35 years – but would be single-HD creatures and slow learners. Without the resilience that their prowess and ruthlessness imparts, the race would come under serious threat from their equally-nasty neighbors like Bugbears.

This isn’t the only model, by any means, but it is one that works.

Put a little more thought into the impact of different lifespans on the races of your campaign; it’s a shortcut into a more unified vision of what makes those races tick.

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame.

The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters.

While it contained a lot of solid advice, I was immediately struck by a few differences between his approach and my own that I thought worth describing.

The Need

My first step is always to ask why I need an improv encounter in the first place. The answer is usually obvious, but mentally putting my finger on it helps define the solutions to grittier questions still to come.

Possible Needs include Pacing, Handicapping the PCs, Assisting the PCs, Steering the plot, Responding to plot drift, and Stalling.

• Pacing – if the game is heading into a major encounter which we won’t have time to resolve before the end of play for the day, but there’s a significant amount of game time left, it’s better to throw an unrelated minor encounter into the mix than to finish early or compromise the intensity of the main encounter.
• Pacing two – sometimes, there’s a need to fill a significant amount of in-game time with something. If I know that’s going to be the case in advance, I’ll build something into the adventure, but sometimes it’s down to how the players have chosen to have their characters react to the stimuli I’ve put in front of them, and I’ll need something to plug the gap.
• Handicapping the PCs – Players are sometimes too clever for the GM’s own good, cutting through the layers of fog that were supposed to keep them entertained to advance directly to “go”. Sometimes, that doesn’t make any big-picture difference, and they can be rewarded for their insights, but sometimes it was the layers of fog that were supposed to be significant – if the whole adventure was to serve as a soft entrance for an NPC whose significance would become apparent later in the campaign, for example. When that happens, you need to insert some fresh circumstances that will permit the “missing” building blocks to become relevant.
• Handicapping the PCs two – and sometimes the PCs are simply more effective in lead-up encounters than you expected them to be, and you need to throw a spanner into the works to avoid an anticlimax. You can either boost the effectiveness of the NPC concerned (sacrificing consistency for the sake of game-play) or you can use a side-encounter to make things temporarily more difficult.
• Assisting the PCs – when the players misinterpret the clues and hair off down a rabbit hole that puts the ‘big picture’ at risk, you sometimes need to parachute some clarification into the campaign before it’s too late. But such things should never be handed out on a silver platter, or they won’t be valued; so make them earn what you desperately want to give them.
• Assisting the PCs two – sometimes, though, you can underestimate the effectiveness of the enemy, a problem revealed in the lead-up encounters. This is the other side of the coin to “handicapping the PCs two”, and you are faced with the same two choices – providing some unexpected (and strictly temporary) assistance or being inconsistent.
• Steering the plot – sometimes the players don’t need to misinterpret the clues to go off on a tangent. When a flaw in their logic threatens to end in frustration and/or disaster for the campaign, corrective action needs to be taken (the rest of the time, let them learn the hard way, you ain’t their mama!)
• Responding to plot drift – some GMs have trouble sticking to a plot as it’s been written. Sometimes, especially in a commercially-available adventure, there’s a hole in the plot you can drive a Mack truck through – but patching it nudges the adventure to one side and the whole thing threatens to collapse like a house of cards. When that happens, it’s time to throw a new mastermind into the mix who can be revealed to have been providing misinformation left, right, and center, permitting the GM to snatch coherence from the jaws of anarchy. Another form of plot drift occurs when the players are stumped or simply not engaged; one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to change what you’ve planned in an attempt to capture their attention or supply increased drama; instead, use the plot the players don’t care about as background to something else that is made more dramatic or difficult as a result, and some of the attention gained by this side-plot will rub off on the plotline the players aren’t engaged with.
• Stalling – the least respectable of all the motives, but realistically, it happens that the GM simply needs more time to get the next “serious” part of the adventure ready. When that happens, you have three choices: run something half-baked, call off the day’s play, or Stall with a self-contained little plotline or encounter.

The Metaplot

Johnn’s first step is to determine what he describes as the GM’s Agenda, a notion that he credits to Dungeon World.

“I ask myself, what do I want to accomplish with this encounter? What’s my gameplay goal here?”

I consider this no less important than he does, but by making this my second question, I avoid excessive meta-gaming and plot trains. I am steered by the identified Need in the direction that I need the encounter to go at a metagame level.

But, having done most of the heavy lifting in terms of conceptualizing the encounter already, I find that I can spare the time and creative energy to be a bit more adroit in considering this question.

Most GMs in this situation use the encounter as a lever to move the players/PCs directly in the direction the GM wants them to move. This risks robbing the players of their free wills and direct control over their characters, producing the plot trains referred to a moment ago. I prefer to remove the directness by a step or two. One step means that the expected response to the encounter by the players will move them in the direction I want, but it is a change by their choice and not something forced down their throats. Two steps means that the expected response will trigger some NPC to move in a particular direction in reaction, and the counter-reaction from the PCs is in the desired direction.

The farther removed from direct cause-and-effect, the more scope there is for the players to make their own choices, or to feel that the choices they are forced by circumstances to make are their own. In effect, the direction that the GM wants the adventure to move in becomes a natural response to the in-game circumstances and not something that the GM is imposing.

The Entwinings

Having identified what the improv encounter is to achieve at a metaplot level, it’s time to contemplate exactly how this meta-function is to be achieved. What is the Being to be encountered (choosing my terminology to be as broadly-inclusive as possible) supposed to do? How will they translate the abstract ambition of the encounter into an in-game reality?

There are four aspects of the question that need to be contemplated, and the end result should be a checklist of attributes that the encounter needs to posses, either in terms of its capabilities, in terms of its actions, in terms of the responses that the PCs can be expected to make in reaction to those actions, and/or in terms of the changed context of everything else that’s going on in the adventure as a result of the presence and involvement of the encounter. These are: the encounter as an agent of metaplot; the encounter as a rudder; the big picture impact; and the small-picture impact. Between them, this set of specifications provides a blueprint for the encounter.

• The Encounter as an agent of metaplot – this generally means that the encounter is to be a stimulus of some kind. This consideration translates the known fact of what the metagame impact is required to be into a defined stimulus that will – at least in theory – achieve that effect.
• The Encounter as a rudder – this generally means that the encounter is to furnish information or corrective logic or an alteration in prioritization to the PCs. This generally is achieved by utilizing the current circumstances that the players (PCs) have incorrectly processed to achieve something that the PCs don’t want or don’t like. In the process of preventing or undoing that “something”, the Players and PCs will obtain the information that the GM wants them to have.
• Big-Picture Impact – some encounters can’t be confined in their impact to the scope of a single adventure. This is especially the case when the encounter furnishes either the PCs or their enemies with additional resources. Big-Picture impacts come in two varieties – desirable and undesirable. The encounter has to be defined in terms of achieving the desirable and avoiding the undesired.
• Small-Picture Impact – more often than not, though, big-picture impacts won’t be a significant problem. Instead, the issue will be with small-picture impacts – essentially, the encounter makes unplanned and ad-hoc changes to the current adventure, and you need to pay special attention to the ramifications that result. More than once, I’ve solved an immediate problem with an ad-hoc encounter that completely derailed the adventure, which needed to be reworked completely as a result – something that’s a LOT harder to do if part of the adventure has already been played.

The Agent

Once you’ve defined the parameters that the encounter needs to tick off from your checklist, and have a fair idea of how to control the inevitable side effects, it’s time to start hunting
around for someone or something that will meet the requirements. There are ten sources to contemplate, and I try to be fairly strict about considering them in sequence – and, of course, I stop as soon as I find an encounter choice that fits the circumstances. Johnn’s article identifies just four of these sources, and lists them in a very different sequence – with the same principle of stopping as soon as you have a “match” to your requirements. The ten are, in sequence, “From The Now”, “From The Past”, “From the Future”, “Targets Of Opportunity”, “PC Agendas”, “An Old Favorite”, “Encounter Reserves”, “A New One-Off”, “A New Recurring Element”, and “Random Generators”.

1. From the Now

Johnn gives the impression that his first resort is to mine the existing adventure for the encounter needed. It’s the first place that I look, but I am super-critical of any possible choices, because this is one of the most likely sources that will trip you up. The whole adventure can collapse if you discover (too late) that you have killed off an essential piece of the plot puzzle in an ad-hoc encounter. The benefits that Johnn articulates as deriving from choosing an encounter source from the game pieces already floating around the current adventure are all valid, but the price can be too darned high for my money.

2. From The Past

Johnn covers this source under the heading “Sandbox Encounters”, but I cast a wider net. Any NPC who has appeared in the past of the campaign and who doesn’t have a predefined role in the bigger picture of the campaign is fair game, in my book. The farther removed their last encounter was from the “now”, the more scope there is for updating their circumstances and capabilities to erase any red flags and tick any boxes that the character, as previously encountered, doesn’t match. What’s more, even dead characters can be an advantage; having the spirit of an enemy defeated by the PCs in the past return with an updated playbook, with a limited window before they are forced back to the grave, either in pursuit of revenge or in pursuit of some hair-brained quest to make their return more permanent, inherently limits the long-term damage that the campaign can experience from the encounter.

3. From The Future

If there’s no-one who has already appeared that fits the bill, I look at the characters I have planned to appear in the future – can any of them make an early appearance, even heavily-disguised? The answer is usually no, not without putting future plans at risk, but even the occasional “yes” pays big dividends in the long run in internal cohesiveness.

4. Targets Of Opportunity

I always have a list of past encounters that didn’t go as planned, or didn’t get used because the PCs zigged instead of zagging. Stripping them of their contextual links to the adventures they were supposed to be part of and reinventing them as standalone drop-ins is always desirable, but not always possible. A lot of them represent subplot threads that consequently didn’t manifest in the campaign, and those tend to be the easiest to adapt to standalone purposes. The need for a drop-in encounter can sometimes be viewed as an opportunity, in other words!

5. PC Agendas

When one or more of the PCs tell me they want to work on achieving something – whether that’s getting a magic item enchanted, buying a puppy, buttering up a politician, or acquiring a specific skill – I always devise a simple plot arc that achieves the result, or at least shows the PC working on achieving it, justifying marking the goal as achieved. Sometimes these need antagonists, sometimes they don’t need them but can support one (even one coming out of nowhere), and sometimes they aren’t important enough to justify any serious complications.

In the first case, It is possible to employ the antagonist as the encounter; in the second, it’s possible to add an antagonist to serve as the encounter. In the third case, you simply have to shrug your shoulders and move on. However, with N PCs, each of whom have personal goals, plus at least one team goal, the odds are good that at least one will fall into one of the first two categories.

What is less common is for such a potential encounter to satisfy the checklist of requirements, so it’s ultimately uncommon but not impossible for this to serve as the source for a drop-in encounter.

What is far more common is that the process of considering and rejecting the use of a potential encounter from this source for this specific purpose helps inspire ideas for the PC agendas and better define the plot mini-arcs in question, making them both more substantial and better defined when they do appear, so this option is rarely wasted effort.

6. Encounter Reserves

Johnn describes this idea as “Back Pocket Encounters”:

“Another trick I have involves creating 2-5 drag & drop encounters and keeping them in reserve. These encounters have minimal dependencies so I can drop them into most emergency situations. I often use these for stalling, but I try to integrate plot and GM Agenda as much as possible on-the-fly. I try to have a couple combat encounters and a couple roleplay encounters ready before each session. And I review these encounters every few sessions to account for character progression and relevance.

This is usually how I handle “wandering monster” encounters in D&D. If you come up with a list of half-a-dozen or so drop-in encounters, and a wandering monster is indicated, simply take the next one off the top of the list.

Sometimes, when it seems relevant, I will tag these as “Night Only” or “Day Only” or “In Furbash Only” or whatever, skipping over them if that defined requirement isn’t met. But for the most part, I try to make these as generally-valid as possible.

But I take these a step further than Johnn in that this approach permits interaction between these isolated drop-in encounters that connect them into a slightly larger narrative – a subplot that can, in fact, spread over multiple adventures, providing trans-adventure continuity that really ramps up the sense of cohesion within the campaign.

In addition to reviewing them periodically, I specifically review and replenish the list as part of my pre-adventure game prep.

For example, I might come up with the following:

1. An old hobgoblin, gasping for breath, half-insane from fear, stumbles into the PCs camp, gasps “The Terrax… all is lost….” and then dies. Three young Hobgoblins show up and attack the corpse to make sure it’s dead. If the PCs engage them, it will be discovered that they have twice the CON, +10 STR and DEX, and twice the HD that they should have (and attack bonuses & HP to match). They will commit suicide rather than permit themselves to be captured.
2. A lightning strike ignites a fire that threatens the PCs.
3. The PCs discover the mutilated body of a brass dragon.
4. One of the PCs will spot a gleam inside the hollow of a dead tree (or similar hiding place). Examining it more closely will reveal it to be a cache of stolen loot. Amongst items of minimal value is a fancy silver case with the legend “Terrax Enhanmus” on the lid. The lock of the case has been brutally forced, and the contents are missing.
5. A wild boar crosses the party’s path. It has a festering wound in its hindquarters from a poor-quality arrow.
6. The night sky will be filled with strange lights that you can see even through closed eyes, without explanation, and with no indication of where the display originates.
7. The PCs will encounter a hunting party of five “Enhanced” Hobgoblins (refer above). Three of them, The Hunters, will be riding Bugbears as mounts; the other two will be mounted on [undetermined, but something with a faster ground movement than Bugbears]. The latter sweep ahead of the Hunters on each flank and make noise to attract the attention of enemies. Those enemies will either flee the scouts, straight into the trap of the waiting Hunters, or they will pursue the Scouts and be led by them back to the trap. If a Hobgoblin rider is killed, the “mount” will come to its senses (remembering nothing) and either switch sides or flee; until then, they are willing servants.
8. The PCs come to a village from which all the children have been stolen by a Hobgoblin Raiding Party. The PCs can track the raiders back to their lair, where they see a strange altar and a totemic representation (a pole? or something else?) which incorporates a silver charm which exudes strong necromantic magic and darkest evil. There is a cage containing the children. Bloodstains on the altar reveals their intended fate. Thirty Enhanced Hobgoblins and forty Un-enhanced Hobgoblins are worshiping the “Terrax” while their “mounts” watch impassively. Another cage contains “wild” mounts. If the Terrax is destroyed, the Hobgoblins will lose all enhancement and their “mounts” will come to their senses. If the PCs watch until nightfall and moon-rise, they will see one of the children sacrificed, witness one of the Un-enhanced Hobgoblins become Enhanced and a “wild mount” become docile. The priests conducting the ceremony will be exhausted afterwards and need to rest for an hour before they can do it again.

It doesn’t matter how long a gap there is between one episode of this plotline and the next; they are not isolated but compartmentalized. Of course, it would be trivial to enlarge upon it – where did the “Terrax” come from, and are there more than one of them? How did the Hobgoblins work out how to use it? Is this a means of raising a small elite army for some grander plan? Or a distraction? Or a trial run?

7. An Old Favorite

Every GM has some old favorite
encounters they can dust off. Sometimes these are campaign-specific, with a magic that can never be recaptured; sometimes, they are a gift that just keeps on giving. More to the point, some of these will also be “old favorites” of the players. Dusting one off is always an option worth considering for a drop-in encounter. I have just three words to add – to some, they will speak volumes, to others they will be near-meaningless: “Red Gurdy Pickens“.

8. A New One-off

If I reach this point, I have conducted a comprehensive review of every NPC or antagonistic creature planned for the campaign (past, present, and future) and found nothing that ticks all the boxes. That means that it’s time to think about constructing something new, which will then add to the list of possibilities for future encounters. My first preference is to create a new one-off because that limits the campaign damage that can result, but some ideas are too good to be condemned to this fate.

9. A New Recurring Element

Which brings me to the notion of a new recurring element that I can pull out of a drawer whenever I need it. These are more problematic simply because the potential is for them to make an appearance in future even if they aren’t strictly necessary; if I can mitigate this problem through some character mechanism, I will create a recurring campaign element without further hesitation. But the idea needs to be good enough to sustain multiple appearances, and there needs to be such a mitigating mechanism before this is acceptable, adding to the list of requirements. If both are not accommodated then, no matter how good the character might be to play, I need a way to write them out – permanently if necessary.

10. Random Generators

I never use Random Generators except to give myself an idea when I’m completely at a loss for one. If I get this far through the list, I will use a random generator to construct such an idea and then pay particularly close attention to the reasons why the results are unsuitable if they are, better equipping me to start over. It very rarely happens – once in 30-odd years, in fact – but this is my last-resort.

In

With the who sorted, and what they are to do, both at an in-game and at a metagame level, there are only a couple of specific decisions that need attention. The first is “In” – i.e. how you are to bring the NPC “in” to the campaign. Closely related to this question are the sub-considerations of “Where” and “When” this introduction will take place.

Out

Once the “In” is known, it’s time to think about the “Out”, i.e. the resolution of the drop-in encounter.

Middle

Connecting the “In” to the “Out” is, quite obviously, the Middle. This is how the encounter is to be conducted to bring about the desired “Out”, which is why I consider that, first.

Legacy

Finally, I spare a thought for any legacy that might be left from the encounter. The best drop-ins will have a legacy, their status as ad-hoc drop-ins notwithstanding. A lot of the effort that I go to in this process is designed to ensure that such legacies are as beneficial to the campaign as I can manage.

Drop-in encounters are more than a filler; they are a tool and a resource, and should be taken as seriously as any other game element. Prepping some in advance is a great way of avoiding the need to do so at the game table while everyone is waiting. When you need one, take a break for a minute or five to consider your options, that’s only reasonable; but at the end of that time, you should be ready to proceed. Do it properly, and the players need never know the ugly truth of your need for an unplanned drop-in.

Obscure Knowledge can be a great source of uniqueness in an RPG Campaign, but it needs to be handled with care.

No-one enjoys being lectured to, and the more obscure the subject, the less likely it is to be of obvious interest to those receiving it.

There are ways around the difficulties and problems, and that’s the subject of today’s article.

The Value Of Obscure Knowledge

Basing some element of your campaign on a piece of obscure knowledge generates uniqueness because it is extremely unlikely that anyone else will have used that same information in the same way.

It must be remembered, however, that Obscurity is a relative term; all participants in RPGs are exposed routinely to facts from history and nature that are obscure by mainstream standards. When I use the term in the context of this article, you should interpret it as “obscure for an RPG player/GM”, but that’s a bit of a mouthful.

For example, you may have come across a little-known Lithuanian fairy tale regarding a race of miniature people, and have decided to “rebuild” the Fey based on this obscure source, just to make them different (No, I don’t know of any such story – this is an example invented out of whole cloth).

Most GMs love to read books on such unlikely subjects for the inspiration they can derive from them.

But this uniqueness comes at a price.

Which Comes First, the Knowledge Or The Relevance?

One of the problems that you have to consider is that Obscurity is relative – and by using something as a foundation-stone within your campaign, you are increasing the value of that information to those within the campaign, and hence reducing its obscurity from a PC’s point-of-view. That in turn increases the likelihood that a PC will know the information, even if his player does not.

The difficulty that this creates is that the player needs to know the information if his character has it, but the player has no reason to be interested in the subject. If you give the information to the player without making its importance clear to the player, it is likely to be forgotten by the time he is in a position to attach relevance to the material; but if you provide the relevance in advance, you diminish the interest level in the material.

This catch-22 makes obscure knowledge an unusually difficult proposition for the GM.

Focusing On Obscure Knowledge

The simplest pathway through this difficulty is to ensure that the character is not aware of the information until it becomes relevant, and even then, to position it as the solution to a mystery.

Curiosity forms an initial relevance which is sufficient to sustain interest until the true relevance of the information can be established.

The technique is to present the race or species that you are revising in the form of an encounter, either directly experienced by the PCs or indirectly experienced in the form of behavior that is substantially different to that which the player would expect from the source material to which they have access. This creates the mystery.

It is not enough to merely present such a mystery, however; you also need to ensure that understanding the solution is important to the players for some reason beyond intellectual curiosity. This generally involves wrapping a plotline of some sort around the mystery.

There is a constant struggle between what the PCs can be expected to know already and what the GM wants them to have to find out, because it is usually not enough to simply place the solution in the (metaphoric) hands of an NPC for eventual delivery to the players. As a general rule of thumb, it’s a lot easier to make PCs interested in a subject than it is to make the players -interested in that subject (counterbalancing this to some extent is the equally-general rule of thumb that players become more intensely interested in a subject if they are interested at all).

The trick, as is always the case, lies in getting the players to engage with the situation and not to merely pretend to it for the sake of ‘playing their characters’.

Avoiding The Lecture

A key element to achieving that is always to avoid “the lecture” in which answers are presented to the players by an NPC on a silver platter. Instead, you need to construct some route to the solution that the PCs can follow for themselves, then emplace sufficient barriers and challenges around that route that the players feel that they have earned the answers. By presenting the information that you, as GM, always wanted the PCs to have, in the form of a reward, and having the players view it that way, you generate the interest on the part of the players that you need.

There is a secondary challenge for the GM in terms of avoiding the lecture, something that even experienced GMs may not realize. I’ve been caught by it a time or two, myself. That challenge is Demonstrable Immediate Relevance.

It’s all well and good to have a logical connection between the source of inspiration and the interpretation that has been applied to the creature, race, (or whatever) that you are modifying to you unique design, but if the players cannot see that connection immediately they come into possession of the information and cannot make immediate use of it, the connection is too tenuous to sustain both verisimilitude and interest. It’s not enough to simply explain how and why the creature, race, (or whatever) is different, the information has to be immediately useful to the players, and that usually entails making it immediately beneficial to their PCs.

Coherence: The Final Challenge

Another problem that I have seen occur all-too-often is that the GM will introduce some explanation for a point of uniqueness without performing sufficient analysis of the ramifications of the explanation – in other words, not looking at the consequences of whatever produced the uniqueness they have imparted.

It’s really difficult and time-consuming to be completely comprehensive in this, so much so that it is completely impractical. Not only would every line of every official rule-book and source-book need to be scrutinized for possible implications, but virtually every word of the unofficial source material created by the GM. So some level of compromise is necessary.

The objective should not be perfection, because that is impractical and virtually impossible to achieve; instead, it should be Coherence, which is an entirely different thing. Coherence is having identified and analyzed sufficient of the major consequences that the GM can handle anything else on-the-fly simply by remaining aware of the point of distinctiveness that they have introduced. It is a state of prep that is “good enough” and no more, and hence is a lot more practical to achieve.

Different GMs will achieve that state with differing degrees of effort. Individuals will also place their requirements at different standards – some being more comfortable with ad-libbing may require less prep, while others need to think things through more carefully over a longer period of time. This is a subjective standard, not an objective one.

Furthermore, having multiple vectors for uniqueness escalates the difficulty involved exponentially. We all have different capacities, and need to work within those personal limitations.

The Price Of Uniqueness

The paradigm seems so simple at first: Find some piece of (relevant) obscure information and incorporate that into the campaign in such a way that one or more key ingredients are transformed into a unique variation on the core idea.

The reality, as this article makes clear, is not so straightforward. The benefits and rewards of the effort involved remain undimmed, but the practicalities of implementation are such that it is a lot more work than it may at first appear.

It follows that little-or-no effort should be expended on campaign elements that will not yield a benefit to the campaign that is proportionate. If Drow are to be a minor-at-best element within your campaign, don’t waste time customizing them; expend that effort on something that will be relevant more frequently and more substantially.

If, like every GM I know (including me), you are only human and have only limited capacities, it is necessary to pick and choose those elements that are both within your capabilities and that will give you the most creative ‘bang’ for your buck.

There is very little that can be left to chance. And that includes the pathways by which salient details of the game world get into the players’ hands. Information dissemination needs to be carefully pre-planned so that you not only avoid any plot trains, but also avoid making the uniqueness of the campaign setting hostage to the whims of the players. You can’t force them down any particular path, but you can ensure that any path they care to choose leads through a particular font of (relevant) knowledge.

It’s not always easy, but it’s always rewarding – if you can pull it off. Just don’t expect it to happen by accident.

A short post this week, cobbled together at the last minute when the article I was going to write fell apart on me, and at the same time, I contracted a massive head cold that’s impairing me mentally. It happens.

And yes, I have hidden a ninja in the image to the left. Subtle, but it can be found – if you look hard enough for it.

You don’t have to be an aficionado of martial arts movies to realize that they have a tempo like nothing else. Move-move-move in lightning succession – then pause. Move-move-pause, move-pause, move-move-move. Pause. The more spectacular the move, the sooner the inevitable pause.

Quite often, the pause is used for characters to dialogue, making up for the fact that they don’t do so while performing these actions. Immediately, that reminds me of many RPGs, in which players and GMs often have difficulty changing gears from combat mechanics to roleplaying.

There’s one major exception to this dialogue rule: the Ninja. The pauses are still there, but nothing is said. But more than that, until the characters being attacked find the enemy, quite often the action isn’t even depicted (though sound effects may represent the fact that something is happening), only the results are actually shown (and that often after a dramatic pause) – and that is what the pauses are for.

There are lessons for GMs to be taken from this approach, and a handy technique or two to think about incorporating into your game-play.

The Mystique of the Ninja

Quite often, what isn’t shown can be more powerful and fascinating than what is. There is a caveat: the underlying logic must ring true by the end of the encounter. If the GM hasn’t had time for everything to be explained/demonstrated such that the underlying logic is revealed to the players, no matter what the game mechanics may say, the encounter is not finished.

Mystery is a powerful motivator with the capability of intriguing. This poses a sometime-difficult challenge for the GM; maintaining verisimilitude is a lot easier if you explain everything. It can be easy to get into the habit of doing so, because it also appeals to every GM’s human vanity – it’s tempting to show how clever we have been.

And whole plotlines can be derailed by players misunderstanding what is going on. Fortunately, I’ve already addressed that problem in Refloating The Shipwreck: When Players Make A Mistake.

It’s not There until they See it

The first lesson in technique is this: until the PCs know what it causing something to happen, all they should be shown, all that should be described, are the effects that are taking place and what they can see.

The problem is the need to reconcile different perception capabilities with this principle. Every game system has such a mechanic, and it poses some genuine problems for GMs for all that it’s an obvious necessity. How do you have them make a perception check without alerting the players that there is something there to perceive?

There are almost as many solutions to this as there are GMs, some better than others. I’ve tried most of them at one time or another – everything from getting rolls in advance to making them in secret myself – but there’s a simpler answer: simply rank the PCs in terms of their scores in this skill/attribute/whatever-it-is-in-your-game-system. Add the lowest to the difficulty or modifier that applies for the circumstances and then have the Ninja make a stealth check. Then have this stealth wear off, one modifier at a time, revealing a fraction of whatever there is to perceive.

Not following me? Okay, let’s work an example (using game mechanics that don’t exactly match those of any game system of which I’m aware):

Five PCs with Perception [Spot] Scores from high to low:
PC A: 20
PC B: 17
PC C: 15
PC D: 11
PC E: 8

It’s dark, and the “ninja” is in dark clothing and using weapons that don’t make much noise. The GM rules or determines that the circumstances are worth +5. The Ninja has a skill of 16, so that gives him a base of 16+5=21, plus whatever he rolls on d20, against a target of 8 (from PC E) plus 10 (standard) = 18. The roll is a 8, giving a total of 29 against the target of 18. Success!

So the “ninja” gets to perform one action without being seen at all, only the effect is “visible” and described to the PCs. They then get to react. Then the “Ninja” (could be any creature or character that attacks by stealth) gets to act again. I take the lowest perception score off the target and add the next highest one, then compare it against the existing roll of 29: 18-8+11=21. Another success! So the ninja acts again without being detected, but – because we’re using the second character’s perception, the first character gets the vaguest of passing hints.

Again, the PCs mostly get to react to effect without knowing the cause. And then it’s the Ninja’s turn again. Adjust the target: 21-11+15=25. The total rolled is still 29, so that’s another success. We’re now using the third character’s perception, so the characters with the two highest perception will get to see something this time around, but still not enough to identify what it is that’s attacking them. But the difference is now less than the bonuses provided by circumstances and equipment. Let’s say that the PCs action was to light the area up, somehow, negating part of the bonus the GM gave the Ninja, dropping his total rolled to 26.

So, with just a couple of hints, the PCs again react to the effect without knowing the cause. Once again, it’s then the Ninja’s turn to act. Adjusting the target gets us to 27, which is now more than the Ninja’s current success total of 26. So this time, when he acts, the PCs get to see what’s been happening all along.

Note that we got to this point with the 4th character’s Perception value, so only the three characters with the highest Perception values will clearly see the Ninja at all times. The 4th character can see the Ninja when the Ninja acts, but has at best a vague notion of where the Ninja is, the rest of the time; and the 5th character can’t keep track of the Ninja at all.

Why is this (or something similar, adjusted to your game’s mechanics) better? It preserves the essentials – the stealth of the Ninja, the perceptiveness of the characters, the situational modifiers, and an element of randomness. And then it’s all interpretation.

If you really wanted to, you could make it an opposed die roll instead of using the “average result of 10” as the standard difficulty. So why not do it?

The more dice you add to a situation, the more the result will tend to crowd the medium ground. When you graph this, you get a “Bell Curve”, one that steepens with additional dice. With only two dice, the shape is that of a triangle.

But the probability is distorted from the flat line of the single die, that’s indisputable. Which is acceptable if that’s the way the game system is designed, but not otherwise. And even then, the problem of distortion is just as great.

So opposed die rolls are now on my dirty list, something that I employ only when I have no other choice.

Timing Is Everything

Sometimes, you need to prompt a time out for roleplay, especially in combat. One of the best tools for doing so is unreservedly metagame in its approach: a deck of cards, or specifically enough cards from one suit, in sequence, to give everybody (including the GM) one. These should be shuffled and then dealt out at the start of combat. The GM should also take the Joker to use as a Wild Card on behalf of the NPCs.

At any point in combat, a player can play his card to interrupt it long enough to initiate a conversation. This conversation continues until whoever has it plays the next card in descending sequence to restart the battle from their Initiative count or their next action (however it works in your game mechanics). The player who put down the first card then gets immediate XP for roleplaying, doubled if the conflict is resolved through roleplay. If the player ending the discussion can justify doing so in terms of his character’s profile in the GM’s opinion then they also get XP. However, if the battle is not resolved in combat, no-one gets combat XP, though they may get XP from resolving the encounter peacefully.

The conversation doesn’t have to be with the enemy on the field; it can be with another character on “their side”, or it can even be a monologue, i.e. a dialogue with ‘the smartest person in the room’, themselves.

What’s to stop players gaming the system, interrupting the combat purely to gain the XP? They need to have something to say – it could be something witty, or a reminder of a tactical consideration that’s being forgotten, or a verbal challenge, or whatever, but it has to be something that the GM considers relevant to the situation. And they only get one chance, they only have one card to play.

And, if a player’s long-windedness grows boring, the GM can play his joker to end the dialogue, announcing that “[the enemy] grows tired of listening to you and attacks with a snarl” or something along those lines.

What of those who don’t get to play their cards? They hold onto them until the next battle of the day; at the end of the day’s play, they get half XP for any un-played cards, +1 if they have a second card of the same suit, x2 if they have one of each suit.

This deliberately introduces a mechanism for creating the pacing from a martial arts movie – in other words, a time to change “mental gears” rather than having to do so while still remaining tactically aware.

Complicated motivations require complicated (often-boring) Exposition

The best NPCs are those whose motivations, no matter how complex their mode of expression in terms of actions and decisions, can be boiled down into simple terms.

That doesn’t mean that they have to be obvious, or free of nuance; it just means that if all
the backstory is known, the personality will make the character’s subsequent path clear.

Thanos, as he appears in the source comics, makes a great case study of this. The character loves the conceptual entity of Death. That conceptual entity, in turn, flirts with Thanos from time to time, teasing at times, leading him on at others. Think of a jock and a fickle, manipulative cheerleader in a high school situation. This causes Thanos to continually see himself as falling short in her eyes (though he would never, could never, admit that to himself), and so he comes up with grandiose “romantic” schemes and plots in a perpetual effort to win her lasting affection.

Whether or not all this also applies to the character as he is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is unknown – we need to see Infinity War to make everything clearer.

The point is this: Thanos has an unrequited love for Death and continually tries to impress her. A simple motivation, when you boil it down, but one with lots of nuance and backstory – not all of it known. In particular, the origins of the relationship had not been revealed by the time I stopped collecting comics.

In comparison, the comics character of Kang is a muddle because his motivations are inconsistent. By being selective, you can construct a consistent characterization whose motivations are reasonable and rational – but which leaves open the questions of all the times the character appeared that don’t fit this mold.

One explanation that I like is that they are all parallel-future versions of the same character who has evolved different motivations as a consequence of different experiences. So the parts that don’t fit one explanation are explained by being part of the history of a completely-different version of the character. But that requires continuity to be rewritten, because sometimes these alternate versions seem to remember events occurring to other versions of the character as though they had happened to them.

An alternative explanation is that Kang is the victim of multiple changes in personal history by time-travelers – it’s easy to theorize that some individuals are more susceptible to this than others, which in turn implies that someone has to be the most susceptible. But Kang is a time-traveler (hence the susceptibility) and so is also partially resistant to these changes, retaining memories from after his personal timeline is rewritten, either by others or by himself.

But both of these seek to wallpaper over the fundamental truth – that the character has been mishandled drastically and treated inconsistently, throughout his existence. That would be fatal to a lesser concept, but there’s something appealing about the character, which is probably worth exploring on some other occasion.

Here’s one more example, this time generalized and abstracted to represent a huge range of characters:

Simple motivation: The character has a cause that he believes in to the point of being willing to sacrifice lives to achieve. That may or may not include his own. The more fruitcake the cause, the more questionable his logic, and the more resistant to reason he will be; but the less fruitcake the cause, the harder it is to find flaws in the logic that compels them.

I once ran an adventure in which a character was obsessed with making pi equal to 4 – not by some half-baked legislation or mathematical trickery, but by attempting to alter the curvature of the universe. Completely loopy, and failed to realize that even if he succeeded, while pi might have reached a value of 4 relative to the old shape of space-time, it would still have its value of 3.14159269 relative to its new shape. That’s because pi isn’t a constant of the universe, it’s a construct of abstract geometry, which wouldn’t be affected by anything that this villain did. But the side-effects of his (failed) attempts were dangerous and devastating, so he had to be stopped, and he was completely immune to reason, which left only the hard way – and hence, opposing him was an adventure.

You could run a similar plotline in a fantasy campaign with a character who wanted to “Sanctify” magic, who had become obsessed with the notion that non-clerical magic was the Unclean gift of Devils, a corruption that needed to be cleansed.

Or, try this: All life derives from the positive energy plane, which is therefore diminished by its separate existence; to prevent the negative energy from gaining ascendancy over all, dooming all to destruction throughout eternity, all life must be returned to its source.

Obsessives make such wonderful overt villains, distracting from the more subtle movements in the shadows…

Martial Arts movies. Like them or loathe them, they certainly offer up food for thought in an RPG context.

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit.

I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” (1970s and 80s) and its impact on Australian Culture, and came to the conclusion that it may have been even more profound than even the many fans of the show acknowledge, in three fundamentally-important ways.

Thought 1

First, by throwing together our domestic performers and the best and most-popular artists from overseas, the show challenged our domestic performers to step up – and celebrated them when they did so. These were the formative years for artists such as The Little River Band, AC/DC, Air Supply, INXS, and Men At Work, to name but a few. How many of those have you heard of?

By showing that local artists could compete with the best, when on a level playing field, the youth generation of the 1970s began to discard the Cultural Cringe that had afflicted Australian Culture since the country was first established as a British penal colony. As that generation matured over the next decade, they carried an attitude of “we’re as good as anyone else” with them into every sphere of activity.

That bastion of conservatism, Politics, remains the last hold-out for many dinosaurian attitudes of the past, but even there they are in the minority. So threatened do the traditionalists feel that a populist minority sub-culture has arisen to foam at the mouth, demand that the clock be wound back, and the tides be forced to retreat on command. To date, they have encountered markedly little success. Make no mistake, most of the adherents are good people who have become frightened of a world they no longer fully understand and over which they no longer perceive even the illusion of control; they see only the virtues of old that have been lost, without appreciating that for every loss there has been a greater gain.

Thought 2

Of course, the claim to fame that most people cite for Countdown – and that most critics dispute – is the allegation that they discovered many famous acts. Abba, Blondie, John Cougar (Mellencamp), Culture Club, Meatloaf, Boz Scaggs, the Motels – all had their first major success in Australia and Countdown was usually Australia’s first exposure to them. Other artists who succeeded despite little or no radio exposure – in part due to appearances on the show – include XTC, Elvis Costello, The Specials, Joe Jackson, The Cure, The Ramones, The Cars, The Bay City Rollers, Foreigner, Graham Parker & The Rumour, Daryl Hall & John Oates, The Police, Adam & The Ants, Simple Minds, Devo, and Duran Duran.

That might not be a complete ‘who’s who’ of popular music from the era, but it comes darned close!

Was Countdown the only show presenting what are now known as Videos or Video Clips? No. Sounds Unlimited, to name just one rival, was longer (hours) in airtime and so presented a broader palette each week. But their reach was tiny (though concentrated) in comparison to that of the national broadcaster, and they were less successful at spotting “The Next Big Thing”. Their time-slot – early Saturday Mornings – also limited their impact.

In fact, there is only one act that I can remember having any significant success during the Countdown era without ever appearing on the show (and often appearing there before anywhere else) – Midnight Oil – and that was because they refused to appear on it for ideological reasons; they considered it too commercially-driven (despite it being on the only non-commercial network, and their being happy to appear on other shows that were supported by advertising. No, that makes no sense to me, either.

That’s a huge impact on popular culture – something akin to the impact that MTV had on the US when it started – but Countdown was on the air in 1975.

More importantly, “Molly” Meldrum, the host and co-producer of the show, who hand-picked the artists and sometimes the songs that were to be performed, developed a reputation as having a “golden ear”. If he said something was going to be a hit, it often was – and record companies were quick to notice the pronouncements, often putting additional promotional dollars behind the artists in the UK and US, sometimes after all but giving up on them.

In part, the global impact of that great long list of artists can be traced back to Countdown. It became known internationally as THE show to do in Australia, and that helped put the country on the global “map.” Even those critics that I mentioned don’t dispute this; only the size of the contribution remains open to debate. But it’s worth pointing out that those critics are frequently contradicted by the artists themselves in interviews.

Both of these effects are things that I had realized before, and have written about – see, for example, Pickin’ and Choosin’ from almost a year ago (March 2016) (where does the time go?).

Thought 3

But my third thought grew out of the combination of awareness of the first two, plus the geographic sensitivity arising from the Diversity Of Seasons series, and, especially, part 1 of that series.

You see Australia became known globally as a trend-setter. Groundbreaking groups and artists through to the 2000s continually cite Australian acts that preceded them as inspiration, or consider their style as a reaction to such trends. It sometimes seems as though an Australian was in the forefront of every major pop-culture development of the last 50 years, but never more-so than during the Countdown era and the decade or so that followed it.

• In part, that can be dismissed as illusion; as Australians, we naturally pay more attention when someone mentions our country, whether that be Kurt Cobain or Johnny Rotten. And being listed as an “influence” says nothing of the relative significance of that influence.
• In part, it can be attributed to Australia being a cultural melting-pot, able to take an off-beat idea from somewhere obscure and integrate it with other influences to form something palatable to a broader market.
• In part, it can be considered a side-effect of that phenomenon, in that Australians don’t generally care where a good idea or a good song comes from; if we like it, we like it, and say so.
• In part, it can be directly attributed to Countdown, which showcased to the international visitors just what the local artists could do.
  

  I need to interrupt with a sidebar to expand on that point slightly. Countdown is often cited as being akin to Top Of The Pops by British visitors, but there is one important distinction: to get on the latter show, you had to already be successful. To some extent, that was true of Sounds, here in Australia, too, though they had some friends to whom they were loyal despite limited national success. There were restrictions on the equivalent shows in the US like American Bandstand and Solid Gold. To get on Countdown, you either had to be phenomenally successful, a part of Australian “Musical Royalty,” or ‘Molly’ had to like your song. Some artists who went on to substantial success, like Pseudo Echo, didn’t even have a recording contract when they appeared; that might not seem remarkable in this era of YouTube and Social Media and Independent Labels, but in the early 80s, it was remarkable.

• And, in part, the phenomenon can be viewed as the result of the Australian “Bush Engineering” attitude, which found ways to do things that the technology available said they shouldn’t be able to do.

But none of these, even in aggregate, seemed sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

This morning, I realized that the missing link was the enormous size of the country – very close to the same land-area as the continental United States, as I have pointed out before, notably as part of the Essential Reference Library For Pulp GMs (and others) series. In that series, I generated the image below, which shows both countries to scale:

(and here’s the European equivalent, from the same post, just so my British readers don’t feel left out:

Unlike the US, most of my country is very sparsely inhabited. Each of the states has a capital city but rarely any other settlements that even come close to a fifth of those cities in terms of population.

Populations, in other words, are reasonably isolated, a situation that inevitably creates the opportunity for distinctiveness. So, in each little corner of the country, artists were able to find their unique “voices”, deriving what they wanted or needed from those who had come before them and those who visited these shores, and twisting it to their own creative needs.

And, when they got good enough, polished enough, Countdown was waiting to elevate them overnight to national prominence, which could then become a springboard to international success, especially if a visiting international artist of the calibre of a David Bowie or Elton John heard them and returned home raving about what they had seen and heard – something that is known to have happened more than once.

Synthesizing a Gestalt Impression

The first influence of Countdown created the Mystique, Credibility, and Opportunity for the second. The second brought the Big Names from all over the world to the Countdown set. Given the nature of the show, and the nature of the Australian Landscape, the third was an inevitable outgrowth of the show’s very existence.

There was a stately inevitability about the whole thing that resulted from the show being
the right thing at the right time.

(Given all of the above, in hindsight, it’s hard to see why it was so difficult to convince television management that the show would be a phenomenal success if they simply left it alone, but it was. And even harder to see why it ultimately failed and was taken off the air. But that’s a subject for some other occasion).

Segueing into Relevance

At this point – still only a few minutes into that shower – the whole reverie fused with a thought that’s been hitting me repeatedly while reading The Rivan Codex by David and Leigh Eddings (this is the compilation of their background notes to the Belgariad (available as a set on Amazon) and the Mallorean (link to purchase the set), not to mention the Prequels, Belgarath The Sorcerer (quite cheap on Amazon) and Polgara The Sorceress (also very affordable).). If you’re adept at reading between the lines and are familiar with those books, the Codex is the Blueprint to the series, bearing the same relationship to them as a GM’s pre-campaign notes do to the Campaign that ultimately manifests from them.

The best history – real or game – makes the events that occur inevitable consequences of the conjunction of individuals and circumstances. No sudden changes of character, just a logical progression of cause to effect to second effect, and so on.

A plus B, plus C, plus D, plus E, makes F seem pretty inescapable. This is the ideal of campaign backgrounds; it exudes plausibility because the characters are consistent, and logical (to whatever extent is permissible given their personalities).

Another article that notes these patterns of inevitability and needs to be referenced at this point is Influences , Styles, Trends and Oscillations, which deals with the recurring motifs that underlie societies and politics throughout the world.

Questions of Technique

But let’s put all that into a new context and give it some new relevance by doing so. “A plus B leads to C, and C plus D leads to E, and E plus A leads to F,” in which F is what the GM wants the PCs to encounter and react to – probably, in this context, “…and F plus C leads to G”, i.e. F is the status quo brought about by A, and what the PCs will run into is C’s response to the situation.

There are two possible approaches to this: you can start with A, B, and .D, constructs – be they social or racial or economic or whatever – that will conflict or compound in interesting ways, and then simply let events shape themselves in the background until it is certain that the PCs will live in “interesting times” – with the occasional inevitable piece of hammering of the relationships and statuses and acts of random chance and moments of brilliance until you end up at F. That’s the easy way – and the clumsy way.

Every great fantasy novel that I’ve ever read functions more like the “A plus B” statement given – and the better the novel, the more inevitable the background makes the conflict at the heart of the story. That’s what most of us want from our RPG backgrounds.

We want, in other words, to tickle our backgrounds into shape with a feather, not pound them into submission using a bludgeon. We want the game world itself to generate the “interesting times” that surround the PCs and form the context and backdrop to whatever they want to do – and to ensure that no matter what they do, someone will do something interesting will begin to take note. Game backgrounds should behave like the famous quote from The Godfather III – “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” Or, in our case, “it pulls you back in.” Or, you could rephrase it, “Just when it looked safe to ignore it, the background becomes relevant again.”

That recipe is the difference between a good campaign and a great one. Push the dominoes over when they are facing one way, and one pattern will result; shift one of them ever-so-slightly in position and facing, and what results can be completely different.

The more that you can get your game background to do all the heavy lifting of putting the PCs into adventurous circumstances, the less you have to struggle with doing so. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to do anything except show up to interpret die rolls and fill the shoes of NPCs, and the rest does itself; but that’s an impossible standard of perfection. The reality is that some game prep will always be necessary, but it is possible to minimize and focus it.

Let’s Look At The Reality

To avoid getting bogged down in specifics, I’m going to keep this discussion as abstract as possible. It gets a little technical, so take your time and try to keep up!

Design Iteration One

So, let’s assume that you start with three conceptual building blocks, A, B, and D, with A and B in immediate contact.

What’s the result? Let’s call it C. At this point, one of two things can happen: D can encounter C, or A can act in response to D. Let’s say that one produces E, and the other F. E is what we are trying to achieve, but is this particular E what we want?

The Two-Question Test

I find that a good test of quality is, Can you generate at least 6 distinctly separate adventures off it in 15 seconds? Count them off with your fingers, then write them down when the count is complete.

And, if the answer to that is ‘yes’, Can you generate at least 6 more in a minute? Hint: think of the great character and racial PC archetypes and how they would be affected by, or would affect, the situation. You only need 6 “That could be interesting”s that you didn’t think of in round one of your testing. Importantly, this gives you 6 ideas that can directly involve PCs and 6 general ideas that can involve anyone not covered by the 6 archetype answers.

Write these down when you’ve finished counting, too.

Design Iteration One-point-five

It’s more likely that the answer is “no”. The next thing to look at is “D plus F” – does THAT give the result you want?

If the answer is ‘yes’ – i.e. it passes the two-fold test above – then you are on your way. But, once again, the answer is probably ‘no’.

Design Iteration Two

Which then leads to the next question: with the hindsight of the previous iterations, will the interaction of A and B ever produce something that will combine with D to produce the E/F you want?

You can get a feel for the question from how close you came to a ‘yes’ in the two-question test posed above. If you think that you’re close, then continue with alternating A plus B influences until you produce a product that will achieve what you want.

Occasionally, there will be a yes at this point, but more often not. Which is actually a Good Thing. Look at this way: what you’re generating here are the histories of the respective groups labeled A and B.

Design Iteration Three

Having determined that there’s no way to get where you want to go from here, it’s time to exercise our power as GMs. Can changing one of the three elements – A, B, or D – just a little – provide a solution to whatever is getting in the way of a ‘yes’ result? The answer is possibly yes, but more likely no. But until you’ve invested the thought required to get through Iterations one, one-point-five, and two, you simply don’t have a sufficiently solid concept of the elements and their potential interactions in order to evaluate a question this broad.

If you’re a sufficiently experienced GM, you may be able to substitute that expertise for intellectual appraisal – a sort of sixth sense about which ideas will get you close to a ‘yes’ and which won’t.

And, all along, you are subconsciously posing a third question regarding how much the proposed campaign appeals to you as a GM. You need a ‘yes’ to that question, too, or you will be looking for reasons to reject a possible ‘yes’ – be honest with yourself, it will save you time in the long run.

Design Iteration Three-point-five

It is often the case is that you can get half-way to a ‘yes’ with one form of A, B, and D, and half-way with something else in place of one of those elements. Call it G. G could be a replacement for the existing A, or the existing B, or the existing C.

You then need to contemplate whether or not the presence of the existing item being replaced will interfere with G doing what you want? And, can G still do so when it’s operating on E or F instead of C? Depending on the answers, you may need to introduce influence H to transform D into G when D has run it’s course in terms of campaign value.

The number of possible combinations of ingredients multiply faster than you can keep track of them. That’s where the artistry of campaign design occurs.

Once you have all that sorted out, it’s time to do for D (and probably G) what you have already done for C – define a couple of precursors that give it a past history. Call them I and J (and potentially K and L for G).

Of course, you can perpetuate this into infinity; another artistic judgment is when to stop, when you’ve done enough.

Let’s assume, though, that you have achieved a best – simplest – case outcome from the elements described.

Design Iteration Four

12 plots – not all of which you will be able to use in-game – are not enough. If you were certain of being able to use them all, that might be a different story. Fortunately, you have more plots at your fingertips than you might realize.

We currently have I and J creating D. We may also have K and L creating G. We have A and B creating C.

A, B, I, J, K, and L are what are called “Primary elements” – the starting points. So far, we have only looked at three interactions between them. The
next step, “Design Iteration Four,” is to list all the other valid possible interactions. When A meets I, what happens? It may be nothing interesting. It may be that there’s only one idea there – add it to the stockpile. Or it might be that you end up with another chain of interactions, like the “A+B=C, C+D=E, E=12 plotlines” chain that we started with. This may not yield 12 plotlines; that doesn’t matter, but it’s adding more than one to the list.

Repeat for all the possible combinations that you’ve listed.

Design Iteration Five

Are there any major archetypes within your campaign genre/game that you haven’t represented? Then you have four choices: Either they were never a part of this game world (and so are not available for PCs, something the Players need to know), or they existed and have been wiped out in some past historical event, or they have only just arisen, or they will come into existence some distance into the campaign. Each of the major racial and character archetypes need to be assigned to one or more of these categories (perhaps Drow keep arising and getting wiped out, but the potential for heresy lingers, awaiting it’s chance in a new generation?)

Actually, there’s a fifth option, which I’ll come to in Iteration Seven.

The choice should be based on whether or not their presence generates any additional plotlines, according to the circumstances and internal logic of the campaign that you have been formulating. If they contribute nothing, get rid of them.

Design Iteration Five-point-five

Each such design element that you add to the list has its own potential list of interactions – so repeat Iteration Four for each of them. Note that the more elements you add, the more potential interactions you have to consider – so be reasonably ruthless in your pruning in Iteration Five.

Design Iteration Six:

It’s time to ask the bigger questions, if you haven’t already been doing so. First, and most importantly, what is unique and different about this campaign, and do your adventures reflect that – or are they generic plug-ins? Second, what are the Gods and what’s the Theology? Third, what is magic/new tech and how does it work (if you need ideas, consult What Is Magic? Six Answers)? Fourth, what’s the fundamental cosmology? Fifth, what (broadly) are the creation beliefs? Sixth, what happens to the Spirit/Soul after death? Seventh, how do Undead fit into all this? And Eighth – after answering all of these – what now is the answer to the first question?

And then, the most complicated and tedious questions of them all: how are each of the campaign elements identified going to be affected? Ideally, you will get one additional adventure per big question for each of two or three different elements. The problems arise when the answers are incompatible with the interactions that you have mapped out; you either then have to complicate the situation, or change your answer to the Big Question, or start revising your campaign elements to avoid the problem. Which solution you choose should vary according to the situation; the big questions are often the most profound ones, the ones that define and distinguish a campaign.

Sometimes, answering them first can be productive. I tend to do so, but YMMV.

There’s also a second-order batch of questions that can be worth asking: How are magic items created? Can they be destroyed? How do Mages create new spells? How do Clerics acquire new spells? Is Necromancy fundamentally different in some respect? How about Fey Magic?

Design Iteration Seven

Next, it’s time to look at that long list of possible design elements that were rejected as not being central to the campaign back in Design Iteration Five. Unless their presence would undo something that you regard as essential, or contradict an answer to one of the Big Questions, it’s likely that they exist in the campaign background as “noise”, having never played a significant role in the shaping of events. Both parts of that “unless” are equally-important – some creatures are so influential that they can’t exist within a campaign without either extensive rewrites or influencing history – even if that influence isn’t yet recognized.

Once again, a weeding, but this time it’s a presumptive “include”, and always the implied question has to be answered, “why have these creatures/archetypes not been significant?”.

Design Iteration Eight

The final stage is to design a physical platform for all this to happen. There are those who think this should be designed back at the beginning, but I prefer to change the geography to support the campaign, and not the other way around. There will only be a few configurations of the different groups that fit the history you’ve put together, but all you need is one – and never forget the potential, perhaps even the likelihood, that some of the history you’ve defined will have had tangible effects on the landscape. Bringing this article back to one of it’s starting points, the cutting down of the great forest to incinerate the dead after the Battle of Vo Mimbre is a great example. This is also your opportunity to pepper your geography with locations of historical relevance and names of historic commemoration (refer Memorials To History). Not to mention a generous smattering of locations that are just plain interesting or weird (Six Wonders: A selected assortment of Wondrous Locations for a fantasy RPG and Five More Wonders: Another assortment of Locations for a fantasy RPG if you need inspiration or examples). You may also find People, Places, and Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs to be useful in this context.

It goes without saying (I hope) that this process works for designing any genre of campaign. Or key elements of any adventure within such a campaign. Or the background of any NPC within such an adventure. Or the history of any family or location in such an adventure. Or any vessel. Or any government, or any governmental policy, or any law (The sheer variety of application is a major reason why I wanted to keep the description as abstract as possible).

At the end of it – or any of the innumerable variations possible – you will have yourself a Campaign, a stockpile of adventure ideas, a guarantee of “interesting times” for the PCs, and a verisimilitude that money can’t buy. What more do you want?

With the 2nd part of the series containing some of the locations of greatest climatic diversity or other significant recent history that needed discussion, it threatened to grow far too large for ready consumption.

That necessitated a restructuring of this series into twenty parts instead of the sixteen originally planned.

Actually, the original plan was four posts, one per season, but it’s easy to see why that idea quickly vanished beneath the permafrost!

Under the restructure, this part will now focus on a number of locations that, between them, represent huge climatic diversity. And yet, if you exclude the ringer (Honolulu, Hawaii), the entire section focuses on just four degrees of latitude (2.22% of the hemisphere) on one continental landmass – from Chicago in the north to San Francisco in the south.

Part 1 of this series began a concordance of Seasonal Experiences with Winter descriptions for McMurdo (Antarctica), Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Tahiti, and Cairo.

Part 2 covered Winter in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Miami, New Orleans, and New York City.

This is Part 3, which will contain Omaha, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Honolulu. Now with extra added Detroit!

Part 4 will detail Tokyo, Montreal, Madrid, London, Glasgow, and Berlin.

Part 5 will wrap up Winter, dealing with Switzerland, Stockholm, Moscow, Siberia, Anchorage, and Reykjavik.

Thereafter, parts 6-10 will handle Spring (same cities), parts 11-15, Summer, and parts 16-20, Autumn. At about 10,000 words each, the series should total approaching a quarter of a million words by the time it’s done! I intend to put a week’s gap in between each quartet, so it should be finished sometime toward the end of the year!! In fact, the goal is to finish by December at the latest.**

I’ve written earlier in this series about the initial plan of presenting cities in sequence of latitude, from the extreme south to the extreme north, so as to take one variable out of the climatic equation and enable GMs to grasp the bigger picture, and of the discovery that, while it wasn’t a factor to be ignored, latitude was one of the least relevant factors.

Another way of looking at this series is: Part 1 looked at Latitude, Part 2 dealt with the Western Atlantic, Part 3 will look at Longitude, Part 4 will contrast the Western Pacific and the Eastern Atlantic, and Part 5 will focus on Eurasia and Latitude vs Longitude – then repeat the sequence for the other seasons of the year.

So, let’s sweep from the East to the West of the USA…

* This plan has since changed (again!) – refer the “Day 9” update in the comments!

13. Winter in Washington DC

New York may have justifiable claim to being the most famous city in the world, but Washington DC isn’t far behind, and just as full of iconic locations and buildings.

What would surprise quite a number of people who have never been there is how close these locations are to each other. A huge number of them stand within walking distance, as is shown by the first image after the maps in the montage to the right, where you can see both the US Capital Building, the reflecting pool, which readers may remember from Forest Gump if nothing else, and – in the extreme distance behind the Washington Monument – the Lincoln Memorial. What people might not realize or be able to make out in the image is that it also contains the Korean War Veterans Memorial (the famous three soldiers statue), the National World War II Memorial, the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Air and Space Museum, and the White House!

The city is built, famously, on reclaimed swampland. That fact conjures up certain perceptions about the geology and the climate that may not be all that accurate; so let’s set them aside and look at the facts.

Reclaiming swampland logically involves one or both of two things: building up the land, or preventing the water from reaching the land in the first place. The second approach leaves an area vulnerable to flooding but is faster, cheaper, and easier than the first.

In the case of Washington DC., neither was necessary. The story of Washington being built on reclaimed land is 99% myth. Some historians, I am informed, disregard that 1% and simply declare the whole story to be a falsehood; but according to the Washington Post, there was a small pocket of genuine swamp at the edge of the Anacostia, at Tiber Creek, which is now Constitution Avenue near the current location of the National Gallery, and at Swampoodle, an Irish neighborhood. The rest was perfectly arable farmland, forest, or waterway.

The page also busts a number of other myths about the capital; it’s fairly short, light, and good reading. Interestingly, the link to that page is the ONLY mention of “Swamp” on Wikipedia’s Washington DC page, which was a primary research source for this article.

Historical Fact & Political Reality

Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the National Capital, the states of Virginia and Maryland literally buying the right to have the then-unnamed District of Columbia located in their part of the world.

A locally-elected mayor and a 13-member council have governed the District since 1973, but Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. From time to time, the administration of the city has been turned into a political football by different administrations; this is particularly true of National Shutdowns, which affect DC disproportionately to anywhere else in the country. For this reason (amongst others), there is a continuous active minority agitating for DC to become a fully-fledged state in its own right. There have been many fruitless attempts to achieve this, the most recent being 1982 when citizens were last consulted – a consultation that Congress ignored almost completely.

The fact that DC has no representation in Congress (and therefore no say in its laws) is one of the primary motivators behind this statehood movement.

Despite the repeated failure of these attempts, Washington remains somewhat more politically-engaged than most US voting districts; 60-61% of the population have voted, each time, in the last three presidential elections. In terms of affiliation, D.C. is strongly Democrat; Donald Trump received only 4.1% support in the 2016 elections, while Clinton was the favored candidate of 90.5% of the population. This was the most polarized Presidential vote since participation began in 1964, the previous record being the 6.53% support for John McCain vs the 92.46% support for Barack Obama. Support for a Republican candidate has never outweighed that of the Democrats in DC; the closest elections have been for Richard Nixon (both in 1968 [18.18% vs 81.82%] and in 1972 [21.56% vs 78.10%]).

Like New York City, this is a location that I have visited, however briefly. We were about a block into what was later described to us as the “black neighborhood”, and one of the abiding memories is seeing a line item on the Pizzas my friends and I had delivered, ‘danger money’ (or words to that effect)! (Despite the mild paranoia created by that and the presence of a burned-out automobile across the road from our hotel window), it should be noted that we had zero negative experiences with the locals during our time there. At the time, we felt that we had allowed enough time to see it all, but afterwards we wished that we had more time (and budgetary resources) to spend.

Racial Migration

Washington DC has always had a large ethnic population; in 2014, 49% were black, 43.6% white, 4% Hispanic or Latino, and 3% asian. Interestingly, the black population is steadily declining as middle-class and professional African-Americans migrate into suburbs located within Maryland and Northern Virginia, pushed out by a rising cost of living in the area and the process of gentrification, which describes renovating dilapidated neighborhoods with an influx of more affluent residents. In this case, whites and asians are flooding into formerly black neighborhoods and renovating them, and the process is accelerating.

The Anomalous Climate

It is somehow apt that the climate of the city is anomalous. The surrounding region is considered to have a humid subtropical climate, but Washington is officially a Temperate Maritime Climate.

Winters are usually chilly with light snow, and summers are hot and humid. Spring and fall are mild to warm, while winter is chilly with annual snowfall averaging 15.5 inches (39 cm). Tornadoes and Hurricanes are both rare but possible events in the appropriate times of year.

Blizzards affect Washington on average once every four to six years. The most violent storms are called “nor’easters”, which often affect large sections of the East Coast.

January 27-28 of 1922 saw the city officially receive 28 inches (71 cm) of snowfall, the largest snowstorm since official measurements began in 1885.

Anecdotal records claim that the city received between 30 and 36 inches (76 and 91 cm) from a snowstorm in January 1772.

Winter is very clearly December to February. It is preceded by an autumn that is arguably only 2 months long and followed by three months of spring. The lowest recorded temperature is -15°F (-26°C), on February 11, right before the Great Blizzard of 1899. Typically, 64 nights a year are below freezing.

The record highs over these three months are 26°C (79°F) in December and January and 29°C (84°F) in February. Most days at this time of year are (respectively) around the 8.2°C (46.8°F), 6.3°C (43.4°F), 8.4°C (47.1°F) mark, but the hottest day of each month (on average) is 19.1°C (66.4°F), 18.6°C (65.5°F), and 19.7°C (67.5°F), respectively.

The record nightly lows are, respectively, -25°C (-13°F), -25.6°C (-14°F), and -26.1°C (-15°F), so getting slightly colder in each month of the season, but these are the results of unusual weather, showing that if it occurs, the later in the season, the worse it can be expected to be.

The usual minimum temperatures are 0.3°C (32.5°F), -1.9°C (28.6°F), and -0.6°C (30.9°F), respectively, which shows that midwinter is usually the coldest time of year. The coldest nights of each month average -7.7°C (18.2°F), -10.6°C (12.9°F), and -8.6°C (16.6°F), bearing out that analysis.

The humidity is relatively consistent all year round, varying from a high in late summer of 69.7% to a low of 58% in mid-spring. Through winter, the averages are 64.1%, 62.1%, and 60.5%, respectively.

Of the three months, December is the wettest, averaging 77.5mm (3.05”) of rain over 9.7 days (almost 1 day in 3). January and February average almost the same amount and frequency of rainfall if you correct February’s length to a more representative 30.5 days length – 71mm (2.8”) over 9.6 days out of 31 (9.7 in Feb, corrected), or roughly one in three-and-a-quarter days.

Of course, these are three of the four driest months of the year because snowfall is not counted in the above. While snow occasionally falls in November (1.3cm / 0.5”) and March (3.3cm / 1.3”), and trace amounts have even been reported in April, the winter months are the usual snow periods. December is the lightest snow month of the season (5.8cm / 2.3” over 1.5 snowy days); January sees falls of 14.2cm (5.6”) over 3 snow-days, while February is the most bitter with an average of 14.5cm (5.7”) over 2.4 snowy days despite the shortness of the month. Corrected to a comparable time-span, those values would be 15.6cm, 6.15”, and 2.6 snowy days – so there are fewer snowfalls late in the season but the ones that do occur are heavier.

Winter, plus the addition of November, averages significantly less snowfall hours per month than the rest of the year, more than can be accounted for by shortened days alone. The November average is 150.2 hrs (5 hrs per day, average); December is 133 hrs (4.3 hrs per day, average); January is 144.6 hrs (4.66 hrs per day, average), and February is 151.8 hrs (5.37 hrs per day, average). That equates to 50%, 45%, 48%, and 50% of the possible sunshine, respectively. The rest of the year has values of 203.6-280.5 hrs per month, respectively, so a significant drop occurs over these four months.

Only In Washington: Activities or the lack thereof

While there are a few seasonal activities like ice-skating by the waterfront or viewing the National Christmas Tree, most activities are simply the usual tourist displays with a seasonal twist – shopping in the cold instead of the humid heat, dining by the fire, visiting national attractions, museums, and so on – at least according to the city’s official tourism page for the season, ‘Your ultimate guide to wintertime‘.

Smart Destinations’ 10+ Things to do in Washington DC in Winter 2018 adopts a similar line, but still sells the tourist experience as being (arguably) better at this time of year; “You’ll be treated to shorter lines, cheaper hotel prices and airfare, and less crowding at the most popular attractions. Best of all? The cold weather doesn’t even really last that long, so by the end of February you’re looking at warming temps.”

The Smithsonian Zoo dresses up in hundreds of thousands of little twinkling lights, supplemented by live music, rides, snack and shopping opportunities. Since the Zoo isn’t usually open at night, this is a rare opportunity to view nocturnal residents and something genuinely different to the usual experience on offer.

But it – plus the aforementioned ice skating etc and other seasonal observances such as the National Hanukkah Menorah – is about it.

In a way, this is understandable. Washington is an archetypal “company town” in which the “company” is the National government. Even that winds down during December and early January – a little – unless you are directly engaged in service to the Government; you are either busy working or trying to get home to somewhere else where there may undoubtedly be seasonal activities. Inauguration Day and the 4th of July are when Washington really comes to life.

Of course, there are certain to be numerous private Christmas Parties and events within the White House itself for the benefit of those who have to work. Among the most prestigious of those “private” parties are the seasonal receptions of the city’s embassies; the number varies, but is usually 168-175. Chinese New Year is – as is the case in many other cities – a big deal, with an annual parade in WDC’s Chinatown. But other times of year are the setting for most of the significant cultural activities.

14. Winter in Detroit

Detroit is a city of three faces. In the 70s and before, the public image, at least as far as foreign consumption was concerned, was gleaming, modern, and industrial, the beating heart of the motor industry and Motown.

Even though the film was set in Pittsburgh and not Detroit, “Gung Ho” (known as “Working Class Man” here in Australia [and supposedly a comedy, though I’ve always assessed it as a dramatic work with a few comedic moments that mostly fell flat]) was the first inkling that many people had that all was not well in the American automotive industry.

People gradually became aware that the industry was crumbling, and the city it built along with it. Which brings forth the second face of Detroit – something that looks dystopian, even post-apocalyptic. It is this Detroit that provides the inspiration for the backdrop to the original Robocop, and it also forms much of the backdrop to the reality TV series, “Hardcore Pawn”. Detroit, in 2013, became the largest US City to file for bankruptcy.

But the auto industry eventually turned a corner (unlike the situation in Australia – but don’t get me started on that subject), and Detroit – at least in some areas – also began to recover. In December 2014, the city exited Bankruptcy and regained control of its finances. Restoration of many of the older buildings has produced the third face of Detroit – architecture that feels old in style (even medieval).

The heart of Detroit is still African-American, just as it was when Motown was at it’s height, but it is surrounded by a ring of Caucasian residences – and, through the process of gentrification (explained in the Washington DC entry) the city is slowly transforming itself into a new Detroit.

All three faces are contemporary to at least some extent, which is why all three are featured in the accompanying photo montage. Much of the city is populated by those suffering economic distress. But Detroit’s is a story of hope and renewal.

Perspectives & Distortions

The first thing that you notice when you look at the Aerial View of the city is that it seems much smaller than you imagined. This is a false impression, as you can see from the Census map that ends the montage, an illusion created by a small and compact high-rise region and a great deal of relatively flat suburban sprawl around it. In truth, this is the most populous city in Michigan and the 2nd-largest in the Midwest, second only to Chicago.

In fact, there are two adjacent high-rise areas – the Renaissance Center is an entirely separate cluster of skyscrapers.

Climate

Detroit’s story has always been entwined with the Detroit River and the Great Lakes into which it feeds, and it is obvious from the outset that this will also be a factor in the local weather patterns. Detroit’s weather is officially “Humid Continental” in type – the same as parts of New York City.

Winters are cold and experience moderate snowfall.

For 44 Days in a typical year, the temperature will not rise above freezing, and for an average of 4.4 days in the same span, they will drop below -18°C (0°F). The coldest temperature recorded in the city is -29°C (-21°F) [Jan 21, 1984]; the record low maximum is a relatively balmy -20°C (-4°F) [Jan 19, 1994]. The usual window for Freezing Temperatures is October 20 through to April 22.

Seasonally, the year is quite lopsided; October and November form a 2-month Autumn (more than half of which would be considered Winter in many other places), Winter is December, January, and February, and Spring, March and April – again with conditions that many places would consider Wintery. Summer conditions therefore start in May and last through September, or a full third of the year.

The record highs for the winter months are slightly on the cool side of shirtsleeve weather, like a building whose Air Con is turned up a little too high: 21°C (69°F), 19°C (67°F) and 21°C (70°F), respectively. Notice, too, that there is a clear midwinter month.

Usually, though, the warmest temperature of each month is much chillier: 12.4°C, 10.7°C, and 12.6°C (54.4°F, 51.2°F, and 54.6°F) respectively. Logically, most days are going to be cooler than this; the monthly average maximums are 2.3°C, 0°C, and 1.8°C (36.1°F, 32°F, and 35.2°F).

If you are going to have a monthly high that is 10°C or so warmer than the average, then you either have a day with a high that is 10°C cooler than that, or a number of days that are just a little cooler. The “44 days below freezing” quoted earlier argues in favor of the latter.

The usual lows are, -4.4°C, -7.2°C, and -6.1°C (24.1°F, 19.1°F, and 21°F), but there are times when the minimums drop to -14.8°C, -18.4°C, and -16.4°C (5.4°F, -1.2°F, and 2.9°F), respectively, or even colder – the record lows are -24°C, -29°C, and -29°C (-11°F, -21°F, and -21°F)!

Rainfall is moderate all year round, with a slightly wetter Summer than Winter. Thunderstorms are frequent, usually during Spring and Summer. At first glance, the annual rainfall patterns appear more complex than they really are, distorted by two factors: the shortness of February (as usual) and the fact that for most of the winter, most precipitation will occur as snow (which is counted separately).

More than 1 day in 3 but less than 1 in 2 will see rain to some degree throughout the winter. Despite this, January is the driest month, while February and March are almost identical when the former is corrected to a theoretical 30.5 days. December is slightly wetter again, and is the month with the greatest number of rainy days – 13.7, on average, which is getting awfully close to that 1 day in 2 number.

Snow typically falls in measurable quantities starting from November 15 and persisting through until April 4, but on rare occasions, the snow season can start as early as October, and on very rare occasions, can persist into May.

This paints a picture of a weather system that is usually stable, but which can occasionally veer into extreme instability. This impression is punctuated by the snowfall records: the norm is 108cm (42.5”), but the low is a mere 29cm (11.5”) in 1881-2 and the high a massive 241cm (94.9”) in 2013-14.

Despite these values, it’s rare for thick snow to be experienced at any given time; only 27.5 days a year usually have 7.6cm (3”) or more snow cover.

December usually sees 8.5 snowy days, January 10.4, and February 8.3 (which becomes almost 9 in a 30.5 day “month”). The average falls per snowy day are 2.9cm (1.14”), 3.1cm (1.22”), and 3.12 cm (1.23”), showing remarkable consistency. There is some suggestion that this is slightly misleading, and that the city experiences one winter storm depositing 6-9” of snow each year, but that this can occur at any point in the season.

During strong El Nino periods, Michigan usually experiences warmer than normal winter temperatures and reduced snowfall; the stronger the El Nino condition, the more pronounced the effects. The implication is that La Nina events will yield colder weather and heavier snowfalls. The interesting thing about these observations is that El Nino – La Nina is a PACIFIC OCEAN oscillation, while the Great Lakes connect to the Atlantic. The implication is that these events impact the Atlantic and that in turn impacts the Detroit weather, but I can’t state that as a definitive explanation, it’s just the best explanation I can come up with.

Cloud cover is a regular event during these months; December receives only 31% of the theoretically-available sunshine, rising to 41% and 47% in January and February, respectively. The “dark gray well” is often more traumatic and depressing than the snow and the temperatures. February also sees the coldest winds, sometimes described as “arctic blasts”.

Reactions To The Climate

You might get the impression that the climate is miserable, but the locals have acclimatized – “there are very few places in the lower 48 where winter is that unmanageable if you plan for it” writes one commentator; “most winters you would have had a lot of small snow events (2-3 inch storms) and several major storms (6-12 inch) storms and in some years really serious events like last year where blizzard conditions occur.”

But try telling that to the writers at The Thrillist, who ranked every state by how miserable their winters were, and placed Michigan 2nd worst (behind only Minnesota), writing,

“Winter in Michigan begins well before Thanksgiving and stretches far past Easter, which makes for four-to-six wearisome months of always-gray, always-cold, always-drizzly, but-rarely-snowy-in-a-good-way misery. Some other states may see colder temps or more snow, but Michigan winters are unrivaled for their utter lack of sunshine. The ceaseless cloud cover begins in October, and envelopes the state in a daily sense of gloom that only worsens when the apathetic sun slouches below the horizon at quarter-to-five.

“For the Michigander, this is winter: you leave work at 5 or 6, already in the dead of night, and fight your way down 94 or 96 or 75 or whatever Godforsaken stretch of highway. You can’t even tell if it is drizzling rain or snow, because the brown salt sludge that sprays up off the road coats your windshield more completely than anything that falls from the sky. Overnight, the road freezes. In the morning you wake up and it is still dark. You scrape off your car, then get stuck in traffic as the cars ahead of you gawk at the SUV that has slid into the ditch. You actually look forward to a proper snowfall, just to cover the dirt.”

Lawrence Ulrich of “The Drive” might agree; he selected Detroit as the worst city in America for winter driving:

“Bitter temperatures. Grim surroundings. Potholes upon potholes, another testament to the urban indifference of Republican Governor Rick Snyder, whose skinflint policies helped poison Flint’s water system. And, of course, snow and slush and that nasty stuff in between, like a dentist?s sandblaster aimed at your eyeballs.”

The introduction to “10 ways to survive a Michigan Winter” (by Kathleen Lavey, published in the Detroit Free Press) sums it all up fairly nicely, even if the publication date means that December is not included:

“A Michigan winter can be the best of times, with snow sports, snowmen and sleeping in on snow days.

“A Michigan winter can be the worst of times, with bone-chilling winds, drifts and dangerous driving.

“We’ve got most of January, all of February and much of unpredictable March to go. That means we could get 18 inches of snow (or equivalent rain), a flash of brilliant sunlight or days on end made dark by clouds.

“It’s predictably unpredictable.”

Activities or the lack thereof, II

Some sites complain that there are no real winter activities in Detroit. Maybe they’ve been under cloud cover for too long. Others paint a more positive picture.

There is a Thanksgiving Day Parade that is generally considered the first activity of the Winter Season, and a regular Christmas Spectacular at Radio City (the Fox Theater) featuring the famous Rockettes. The 110-room mansion at Meadow Brook Hall is normally opened for a Holiday Walk, and Holiday Lights are a big deal in Detroit, especially in three locations: the Wayne County Lightfest on Hines Drive, the Unger Family display in Royal Oak, and Dominos Farms in Ann Arbor.

Pre-Christmas, there is a Winter Market in Downtown Detroit, though this is a relatively recent addition. With 30 vendors spread over 4 locations, these are a relatively modest affair at present but could easily grow quickly.

But most winter activities take place on either the ice or the snow, some within the city boundaries, but many more elsewhere in the state; Michigan has 11,000 inland lakes and most will freeze sufficiently to permit ice skating.

Except that remarkably few locals take advantage of these opportunities. Remember those comments about the snow being more like a brown slushy? The dominant Detroit sport, at least at this time of year, is Ice Hockey, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it’s largely a spectator sport. Or, at least, that’s my impression.

Primary Sources:

• Wikipedia’s Detroit page;/li>
• MLive’s article about the Michigan weather for the 2017-18 Winter, El Nino a no-go this winter; What does that mean for Great Lakes winter“;
• Experience Detroit’s page, Winter Attractions & Things to Do;
• City-Data dot com’s forum page, “How bad it really becomes in winter (Detroit, Lansing Subdivision, living)“;
• Click On Detroit’s news article, “Michigan winters named 2nd ‘most miserable’ in the nation” by Ken Haddad, which reported and discussed the Thrillist article quoted;
• The Drive’s 2016 article, “Detroit Is America’s Worst Winter Driving City“.

15. Winter in Chicago

Like most people my age, I was introduced to the Windy City through the pages of fiction and the movies. A compound of a gleaming metropolis, the steelmaker of its nation, but in the harsh shadows lurked dark and sinister figures at every turn, or so it seemed. And like most perspectives generated from such source material, this view is three-quarters fanciful with a few nuggets of underlying historical truth.

Context Of The Industrial City

Chicago’s metropolitan center, known as the Iron Loop or simply “The Loop”, is noticeably bigger than that of Detroit, the other end of what I used to think of as the “Iron conveyor belt” – iron ore went in one end, and automobiles came out the other. Well, it’s been a long time since car bodies were made of steel (too heavy!) and the city had enough to do supplying girders for construction, anyway.

This is the largest city in the Midwest and third most-populated in the USA, with roughly 2.7 million residents as of the 2010 census.

Including the greater city area raises this tally to almost 10 million inhabitants of what is often called “Chicagoland” (note that there is no precise definition of just what “Chicagoland” does or doesn’t contain; it generally means the entire extended urban area. The term was coined by the Chicago Tribune who include the city, the surrounding county, eight nearby Illinois Counties and three in Indiana. The Illinois Department Of Tourism uses a different definition that excludes the city of Chicago itself, while the ‘Chicagoland Chamber Of Commerce employs a third that is somewhere in between the first two.)

Origins, Growth, and The Great Fire

Chicago was established as a Fur-trading outpost near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed, making it an important hub for trade. Rapid growth in the mid-nineteenth century (from 200 in 1833 to a million residents by 1890) led to the dominant use of timber as a construction material.

By 1871, more than two thirds of the structures in Chicago at the time of the fire were made entirely of wood, with most of the houses and buildings being topped with highly flammable tar or shingle roofs. All of the city’s sidewalks and many roads were also made of wood.

That year saw severe drought conditions – only 2.5cm (1”) of rain was recorded from July 4 to October 9.

The city was a tinderbox.

Numerous small fires and one large conflagration in the preceding week had been fought successfully by the Chicago Fire Department – 185 firefighters with just 17 horse-drawn steam engines to protect the entire city – which speaks to the intensity of the danger facing the city when fire broke out in a small barn belonging to the O’Leary family.

The exact cause of the blaze has never been determined – popular myth claims that Mrs O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, but this was later established to be a fabrication deriving from anti-Irish sentiments directed toward Mrs O’Leary. An amateur historian suggests that the man who first reported the fire may have started it accidentally while attempting to steal milk, but others are unconvinced by this attempt to embed a grain of truth into the popular myth. There have also been claims that a group of men were gambling within the barn and accidentally knocked over a lantern, while still other suggestions point at the other recent fires and speculate on one or more common causes.

The situation on October 8 was compounded by a litany of errors. Although the initial response by the fire department was quick, they were sent to the wrong location, allowing the fire to grow unchecked. A second alarm sent from nearby failed to register at the courthouse where the fire watchmen were, and the firemen themselves were exhausted.

Factor in the weather situation and the prevalence of extremely-flammable timber, and conditions were right for a small barn fire to escalate into a major conflagration. But even then the damage would have been contained, in all likelihood, were it not for the presence of strong southwest winds that carried burning embers toward the heart of the city.

When firefighters finally arrived, the fire had spread to neighboring buildings and was progressing towards the central business district. Any hope of extinguishing the blaze was gone; firefighters could only hope to contain it, with the South Branch of the Chicago River and an area that had previously thoroughly burned to act as a natural firebreak – if luck was with them.

It wasn’t. The river was lined with lumber yards, warehouses, coal yards, barges, and numerous bridges across the river. When the wind intensified and became super-heated, it began causing structures to catch fire from the heat and from burning debris blown by the wind. Around 11:30 pm., flaming debris blew across the river and landed on roofs and the South Side Gas Works and began moving rapidly toward the heart of the city.

The firemen did their best, nevertheless, but a short time after the fire jumped the river, a burning piece of timber lodged on the roof of the city’s waterworks. Within minutes, the interior of the building was engulfed in flames and the building was destroyed. With it, the city’s water mains went dry and the city was helpless.

Late into the evening of the 9th, the fire started to burn itself out, and it finally started to rain. No survey to establish the damage was possible for several days, so hot were the smoldering ruins.

Ultimately, the fire was found to have covered an area of more than 2000 acres (809 ha) and to have consumed more than 117km (73 miles) of roads, 190km (120 miles) of sidewalk, 2,000 lampposts, 17,500 buildings, and $222 million in property – about a third of the city’s value at the time, and about 4 billion dollars in 2016 currency.

One-third of the city’s 300,000 residents were suddenly homeless. 120 bodies were recovered but the death toll may have been as high as 300; the county coroner found an accurate count to be impossible, as some victims may have drowned or had been incinerated, leaving no remains.

Almost immediately, the city began to rewrite its fire standards, spurred by the efforts of leading insurance executives, and fire-prevention reformers. (Somehow the response reminds me of the tale of the Three Little Pigs).

It’s my personal opinion that the fire’s legacy had a profound and lasting impact that now manifests in the architecture of the city. They embraced brick, and then steel – materials that wouldn’t burn – and embedded an architectural style into the culture of the city that has outlasted the memory of its origins.

The explosion in Racial Diversity

The construction boom accelerated population growth throughout the following decades, and by 1900 Chicago was one of the five largest cities in the world. The boom started by incorporating neighboring townships between 1851 and 1920, with the largest growth from this source taking place in 1889, when 5 townships merged with the city, including the areas that now comprise most of the “South Side Of Chicago” and “Chicago’s Northwest Side”.

The flourishing economy that both drove this expansion and resulted from it attracted huge numbers of immigrants from both Europe and the Eastern US. By 1900, 77% of the population were either foreign-born or had foreign-born parents. Of these, almost 2/3 were German, Irish, Polish, Swedish, or Czech. 98.1% of population was white.

Growth, especially rapid growth, inevitably produces growing pains; in Chicago’s case, they took the form of labor conflicts, such as the rather dramatic Haymarket Affair (also known as the Haymarket Massacre or Haymarket Riot), in which a peaceful rally held in support of an 8-hour working day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by police escalated into a violent confrontation following police attempts to disperse the gathering and the throwing of a dynamite-based bomb at the lawmen.

The blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of 7 police officers and at least 4 civilians, with scores of others injured. Eight anarchists were subsequently convicted of conspiracy on the basis that one of them may have built the bomb.

The identity of the bomber was never conclusively proved. There is some suspicion that it may have been Rudolph Schnaubelt, the brother-in-law of one of the conspirators (who was later proven to have been addressing a completely different rally at the time of the bombing but who was found guilty anyway).

Seven were sentenced to death and the eighth to 15 years in prison. Two of the death sentences were subsequently commuted to life imprisonments and a third prisoner on death row committed suicide rather than face the gallows. The other four were hanged in November 1887.

The sentencing provoked outrage from labor and workers’ movements and their supporters, resulting in protests around the world, and elevating the defendants to the status of martyrs, especially abroad. Domestically, however, the press portrayed the anarchists as bloodthirsty foreign fanatics, polarizing public opinion against foreigners and strikers, despite the lead investigator of the case being dismissed from the police force for allegedly fabricating evidence in the case (he was reinstated 5 years later after the furor had died down).

Fifteen years later, the injustice perpetrated on what was clearly a politically-motivated show trial led to the surviving defendants being pardoned by the newly-installed Governor of the state, John Peter Altgeld, who called them victims of “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge”, and also faulted the city administration of the time for failing to hold Pinkerton guards responsible for repeated use of lethal violence against striking workers.

But though the violence may have died down, the battle lines had been drawn between the labor force and city officials, and would periodically erupt in industrial activism or strike action.

Lest the city government be unfairly characterized as repressive, over the next twenty years the city was recognized nationally as the leader of a movement to improve public health. City (and, later, state,) laws were both passed and enforced that upgraded standards for the medical profession and fought urban epidemics of cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever. These laws became templates for public health reform in other cities and states.

By now, Chicago had become the center of the nation’s railroad industry; by 1910 more than twenty railroads operated passenger services out of six different downtown terminals. The influence of the city can be clearly seen by the 1883 standardized system of North American time zones which is still in force today, developed because Chicago’s railway managers needed a general time convention in order to schedule and coordinate services.

During World War I and the 1920s there was a major expansion in industry. The availability of jobs attracted African-Americans from the Southern United States. Between 1910 and 1930, the African-American population of Chicago increased dramatically, from 44,103 to 233,903.

Of course this had a tremendous cultural impact, now called the Chicago Black Renaissance; but more importantly, these new workers had their own social axes to grind, and the existing tensions between industry and workers gave them an outlet for their frustrations, which had been exacerbated by social conditions and competition within the different racial factions for jobs and housing, and permitted to fester by police neglect of the situation.

The situation boiled over into turmoil following the death of an African-American youth who had accidentally drifted into a swimming area at an informally segregated beach. This triggered a melee that blew up into days of violent unrest, made still worse by a game of brinkmanship between the mayor of the city and the State Governor; the former steadfastly refusing to turn out the National Guard to quell the violence even though the latter had mobilized them to the city, where they were ready and waiting to intervene. The mayor was convinced that the trouble was Labor-related and not Race-related; nearly one-third of the African-American employees were non-union, had been used by management as strikebreakers in earlier years, and were resented by union employees as a consequence.

Sections of the Chicago economy were shut down for several days during and after the riots, since plants were closed to avoid interaction among bickering groups. By the time peace was restored, 38 people were dead (23 black and 15 white) and over 500 injured. Of course, this was only one event amongst approximately 25 riots during what is now sometimes named “Red Summer”.

Because of the violence, a significant percentage of the black residents relocated, especially to Detroit.

Crime Capital?

Even as frayed tempers were cooling, the 18th amendment was being ratified, and Prohibition became the law of the land. This his ushered in what is known as the Gangster Era, a time that roughly spans from 1919 until 1933, when the law was repealed.

The 1920s saw gangsters, including Al Capone, Dion O’Banion, Bugs Moran and Tony Accardo battle law enforcement and each other on the streets of Chicago. perhaps the most notable event of the gangland wars nationwide took place here, the 1929 St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Mafia groups had limited their activities to prostitution, gambling, and theft until 1920, when organized Bootlegging erupted in response to the “dry” laws. A profitable, often violent, black market for alcohol flourished. Prohibition provided a financial basis for organized crime to flourish.

To quote from Wikipedia’s page on Prohibition,

In a study of more than 30 major US. cities during the Prohibition years of 1920 and 1921, the number of crimes increased by 24%. Additionally, theft and burglaries increased by 9%, homicides by 12.7%, assaults and battery rose by 13%, drug addiction by 44.6%, and police department costs rose by 11.4%. This was largely the result of “black-market violence” and the diversion of law enforcement resources elsewhere. Despite the Prohibition movement’s hope that outlawing alcohol would reduce crime, the reality was that the Volstead Act led to higher crime rates than were experienced prior to Prohibition and the establishment of a black market dominated by criminal organizations.

…”Stronger liquor surged in popularity because its potency made it more profitable to smuggle. To prevent bootleggers from using industrial ethyl alcohol to produce illegal beverages, the federal government ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols. In response, bootleggers hired chemists who successfully renatured the alcohol to make it drinkable. As a response, the Treasury Department required manufacturers to add more deadly poisons, including the particularly deadly methyl alcohol”…

“As many as 10,000 people died from drinking denatured alcohol before Prohibition ended. New York City medical examiner Charles Norris believed the government took responsibility for murder when they knew the poison was not deterring people and they continued to poison industrial alcohol (which would be used in drinking alcohol) anyway.”

The more you read about the impact that was felt, the more repercussions you observe influencing American life even today.

• There was an increased acceptance of women drinking in the semi-public speakeasies, unifying them as a perceived marketing demographic for the first time. Many found their way into the Bootlegging industry themselves, discovering that they could make a living by brewing or selling alcohol. This was an important step on the road towards gender equality, and prepared many for the role they would play in the factories as workers and ‘foremen’ during WWII. It was also a step along the road to the social acceptance of women owning and running their own businesses.
• Prohibition destroyed the fledgling wine industry in the USA. Wine-quality grapevines which were just becoming productive were replaced by lower-quality vines that grew thicker-skinned grapes, which could be more easily transported. Institutional knowledge was also lost as winemakers either emigrated to other wine-producing countries, or left the business altogether. Only today, almost a century later, is the industry beginning to recover.
• American tastes changed. Distilled Spirits became more popular, partially because it was easier to transport than the bulkier (and lower alcohol-content beer and fermented wine), it became common to mix and dilute the hard alcohol.
• Loss of life as a consequence of the laws and policies enacted to support them had a substantial social impact that remains difficult to quantify. Families were torn apart by alcoholism that might have been mitigated or better managed, given the presence of support agencies that also vanished with the Volstead Act. In consequence and recognition of the social shortfall, a new support structure, Alcoholics Anonymous, was created in 1935.
• The speakeasies promoted other forms of cultural change, and in particular, Jazz. This laid some of the foundations for what would become Rock’n’Roll, upon which most modern music is at least partially founded.
• When Prohibition ended, organized crime had grown accustomed to the easy profits and social power that wealth produced. Some groups from the next generation turned to the smuggling and distribution of illegal drugs as a substitute, and gained so much wealth and power as a result that they came to dominate any who resisted – at least, if Goodfellas is to be believed. This website certainly gives the impression that the heart of the plotline is correct.
• And, of course, if anyone exemplifies the corruption of public officials and politicians, it is the notorious Al Capone.

Modern Chicago

Which brings us back to Modern Chicago, a hub for finance, commerce, industry, technology, telecommunications, and transportation that is international in scope. O’Hare International Airport is the second-busiest in the world by air traffic. Oh, and just to spike one more misconception: the city has one of the world’s largest and most diversified economies, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.

In 2016, Chicago hosted a record 54 million domestic and international visitors, making it one of the most visited cities in the United States.

Winter In Chicago

The story of Chicago would not be the same without the presence of Lake Michigan to the northeast of the city. Aside from the obvious historical, shipping, and economic impacts, the lake functions as a climate moderator, making waterfront neighborhoods slightly warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

The city is officially regarded as having a humid continental climate with four distinct seasons. Spring is wet and cool; Summer is hot and often humid; Autumn is considered pleasantly mild; and Winters are cold and snowy with few sunny days. Rainfall peaks in May/June and is at its lowest in January/February. The normal January high is just below freezing.

Chicago is known to experience winter cold waves and summer heat waves that can last for several consecutive days.

Like other major cities, Chicago experiences the urban heat island effect (which I discussed under New York City in part 2 of this series), making the city and its suburbs milder than surrounding rural areas, especially at night and in winter. Another effect of the urban heat island is to reduce rainfall in the area subject to the thermal differential, producing a commensurate increase in rainfall downwind of the Urban center.

It should be noted that most of the city’s overall weather data stems from O’Hare airport, which is not subject to either of these adjustments – so the GM using Chicago as a location should correct for both the influence of Lake Michigan and the Chicago heat island.

The lowest official temperature of -33°C (-27°F) was recorded on January 20, 1985, at O’Hare.

As usual, having looked at the overall ‘picture’ of the season, let’s dig into the actual weather data provided, in this case, by Wikipedia.

Winter is quite distinctly December through February, though both Spring and Autumn can be quite chilly. The latter season is arguably only two months long, making room for a longer summer. Record highs for these months are 22°C (71°F), 19°C (67°F), and 24°C (75°F). So, on rare occasions, you may be comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt, despite the season – if there is no wind-chill.

Which reminds me, readers should be aware of the impact of Wind-chill and how to apply it. In a 2014 article, I provided Wind-chill tables as a free download and a game mechanics infrastructure for using it – get it from A strong wind blows: Environmental effects for RPGs if you haven’t done so already.

Anyway, getting back to it: Winter in Chicago proves quite variable. The usual daily high during this time of year is 1.6°C (34.8°F), -0.6°C (31°F), and 1.8°C (35.3°F), respectively by month, and the average of the hottest recorded days of each month – 12.8°C (55°F), 10.8°C (51.4°F), and 13.6°C (56.5°F) – shows that any given day can be hotter or colder by roughly ±10°C (20°F) in December and January and ±9°C (16°F) in February.

The daily lows are more attention-getting; the records each month are -32°C (-25°F), -33°C (27°F), and -29°C (-21°F), respectively. The nights in March continue to be cold, too: -24°C (-12°F), only marginally warmer.

Fortunately, such bitter cold is rare. The normal daily lows are -6.3°C (20.7°F), -8.6°C (16.5°F), and -6.6°C (20.1°F), respectively by month; the average of the coldest recorded nights of each month are -17.8°C (-0.1°F), -20.9°C (-5.6°F), and -17.9°C (-0.3°F); and the combination shows that any given night can be hotter or colder by ±11.5°C (20.7°F) in December, ±12.3°C (22.1°F) in January, and ±11.3°C (20.3°F) in February.

Winter temperatures can vary tremendously within the span of one week. Temperatures drop to or below -18°C (0°F) on 5.5 nights annually at Midway and 8.2 nights at O’Hare, and up to 10-14 nights in some far western and northern suburbs, although subzero (°F) readings in the absence of snow cover are rare. There have been streaks of multiple winter seasons without a single subzero reading, and there have also been winters with 20 or more subzero readings.

Winter is the “dry” season (if snow is disregarded), as expected. 57.2mm (2.25”) over 11 rainy days is normal for December, 43.9mm (1.73”) over 10.5 days in January, and 45.5mm (1.79”) over 8.8 days in February (which corrects to comparable values of 49.1mm or 1.9” over 9.5 days).

Snow has been recorded as early as October and trace falls as late as May, but the serious falls start in late November or December, when 20.8cm (8.2”) (and note the change in unit) is typically recorded from 6.9 snowy days. January receives 27.4cm (10.8”) on average over 8.2 snowy days, and February 23.1cm (9.1”) over 5.9 days, which corrects to comparable values of 24.9cm (9.8”) over 6.4 days – so falls come less frequently but are heavier, late in the season. It continues to snow noticeably in March – 14.2cm (5.6”) over 4.2 days.

Seasonal snowfall in the city has ranged from 24.9cm (9.8”) in 1920-21 up to 228cm (89.7”) in 1978-79. The average annual snowfall in Chicago is 91cm (36”).

Most winters produce many snow falls during the season in light accumulations of around 2 in (5.1 cm). Cities on the other side of Lake Michigan usually receive more snow than Chicago because of the lake-effect snow (produced when a cold air mass moves across long expanses of warmer lake water, warming the lower layer of air which picks up water vapor from the lake, rises up through the colder air above, freezes and is deposited on the leeward (downwind) shores) that falls on these communities, even though northeasterly winds can sometimes bring lake-effect snow to Chicago area too.

Every three years or so during the winter Chicago experiences a heavier snowstorm that can produce over 25cm (10”) of snow over a 1- to 3-day period, a level of snowfall very often seen in cities on the “snowbelt” on other side of the lake.

Cloud cover in these months is common, though not as gloomily monotonous as in nearby Detroit. In November, 38% of the theoretically possible sunshine is actually experienced, falling to 37% in December, and rising to 46% in both January and February. In fact, November averages just 3.8 hrs of sunshine a day, and December a gloomy 3.4 hrs.

All this paints a very different picture to that of Detroit, even though it is geographically extremely close to Chicago – 375km (233 miles) as the jet flies. That’s only 40% or so of the distance between Sydney and Melbourne, and half the air distance between Sydney and Brisbane (ironically, by road, the first trip is shorter than the second).

Winter Activities, Chicago Style

Chicago hosts a number of attractions, some of the best of which are to be found indoors, while those outdoor attractions that are to be found often go that extra mile to make it worthwhile braving the cold – suitably bundled in warm clothing, of course.

Nevertheless, Chicago is often considered a Summer destination; the snow is rarely thick enough for serious Snow Frolicking and the slopes – those there are – are extremely gentle; there is just enough of it to be uncomfortable.

Chicago natives themselves use the description “Urban Hermits” to describe their preferred reaction to sub-zero temperatures, preferring nothing better than “snuggling in for a Netflix binge with a bottle of wine” and presumably a heater!

Since this is the off-peak season for tourism, a lot of usually-crowded attractions are relatively accessible, and many offer discount entry fees. This includes, in no particular order:

• The Art Institute of Chicago (the Lions out front wear festive wreaths in the holiday season);
• The Field Museum (which has spectacular Dinosaur and Mummy exhibits);
• The Museum of Science & Industry (a German submarine, replica coal mine, and the Apollo 8 spacecraft exhibits, amongst other features); in December, they traditionally feature a seasonal “Christmas Around the World” exhibit featuring dozens of trees, decorated to represent a unique culture.
• The Shedd Aquarium, with a famous Shark Exhibit that permits visitors to get closer than is really comfortable for most;
• The Ford Oriental and Cadillac Theaters, which host Broadway productions, many seasonally-themed;
• The Chicago Theater, which hosts a more diverse set of entertainments including plays, concerts, and comedy shows;
• The Tivoli Theater, which is a restored venue and traditionally presents holiday classics such as “A Christmas Story,” “Christmas Vacation,” and “White Christmas”, always preceded by a singalong lead by the Theater’s Wurlitzer Pipe Organ.
• The John Hancock Observatory not only offers famous views of the city such as the Skyline view included in the Montage above, it also contains the highest ice-skating rink in the world on the 94th floor, a full 1000′ into the air. The skating season typically starts in early January and ends in April.
• The Kane County Flea Market in St Charles contains a variety of vendors of Antiques and collectibles. Although it runs all year, this is the season when they aren’t swarmed under with casual antiquers.
• The Hollywood Casino is a riverboat located in Aurora, about an hour from Downtown Chicago, about as far out of the CBD as I am, in other words! Slot machines, a poker room, several dining choices, and live entertainment.
• If you prefer to stand on solid ground when you gamble, the Grand Victorian in Elgin might be more your speed. It’s a riverfront Casino in the Chicago suburbs about 45 minutes from the City, with slot machines (of course), table games, and a number of dining and entertainment choices.
• Remember what I said about Snow Frolics? Swallow Park in Palos Park has a hill and usually sufficient snow cover for sledding. The area used to be famous for its Toboggan slides, but they were demolished a few years ago – but the huge hill on which they stood remains. There are several other locations that offer similar opportunities in the Chicago Hills.
• The Little Red Schoolhouse in Willow Springs is surrounded by miles of Wooded Trails and also contains a state-of-the-art Nature Center. Closed only on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day & New Year’s Day, each season presents a different naturescape for the hiker willing to look for it.
• The Adler Planetarium is one of the best in America, with exhibits and incredible shows in the Grainger Sky Theater.
• Chicago is a city that revels in it’s history. There are at least 31 “Gangster/Crime/Prohibition” themed tours – I got that many listed from the single reference cited – plus a handful tours that focus on the Great Fire, and any number of more generic historical tours. Plus the museums, etc! Most of these are open all year round, but as with many other attractions, the peak lies in the Summer Months, so expect considerably less crowding at this time of year, and possible discounts aimed at wooing customers.. On the other hand, costs per tourist may be higher in Winter so it’s possible that you’ll pay an off-season premium.

On top of that, there are many many more seasonal events and attractions, mostly in December:

• The city has a number of parks that have been preserved from the encroachment of construction, and some of them such as Millennium Park are popular for Ice Skating.
• In addition to the famous shopping experience offered by the “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue, November offers the Magnificent Mile Holiday Lights Festival, which includes a parade, concerts, and a fireworks show over the Chicago River.
• Chicago’s Thanksgiving Day parade may not have the fame or cachet of that of the Macy’s Parade in New York City, but the event – now sponsored by McDonald’s – still runs down State Street from Congress to Randolph to packed crowds.
• That is followed by the Lincoln Park ZooLights Festival, a display of over 2 million lights, held annually each year at Chicago’s beautiful Lincoln Park Zoo, a free event that features multiple themed activities including ice carving demonstrations, carolers, and a synchronized music and light show. And, of course, vendors offering warm drinks, etc.
• The Hollywood Blvd/Palms Cinema is a unique dinner & movie theater concept located in the Chicago suburbs who frequently offer special celebrity hosted events, including meet and greet nights.
• Brookfield Zoo, 20 minutes outside the city, holds a “Holiday Magic” celebration every year. In addition to the usual activities and exhibits – an underwater polar bear viewing area, a dolphin show, and an indoor primate area being highlights – the “Holiday Magic” includes over a million dazzling LED lights festooning the Zoo, Christmas Carols, Santa visits, Holiday treats, and ice carving.
• The Scenic horse drawn carriage rides which travel the streets of downtown Chicago operate year-round, but the winter displays of Christmas Lights adds a popular seasonal touch.
• The Navy Pier is an amusement park built on an actual working pier – which is to say it’s accessible by both land and sea. In addition to all its usual attractions, which operate all year round, they host an annual “Winter Wonderfest” event, complete with ice skating, live entertainment, rides, and more.
• Christkindlmarket is a traditional “German shopping village” – i.e. an annual free outdoor market featuring vendors hand-crafted ornaments, toys, and unique holiday gifts from around the world as well as traditional German foods, sweets, and beverages. It has been a seasonal attraction in Chicago for 22 years, includes special events, performers, and activities, and – to be honest – is beginning to outgrow the available space. One of the most popular Chicago Winter attractions, it can be tightly-packed in warmer weather.
• In a similar vein is the Randolph Street Market Festival, where 200+ vendors hawk antique housewares, furniture, ephemera, clothing and more. While it adds an outdoor area for even more shopping and beer garden during the warmer months, the main festival is indoors, usually held on the last weekend of each month all year round.
• New Year’s Day this year was a little different to those of recent times. There were the usual Concert Events, the standard Parties, the anything-but-routine but still expected dinner specials, but one free attraction that usually brings in the big crowds didn’t happen: the rising of the giant star up the side of a Hotel in Chi-Town and the Loop, with a concert and fireworks – sort of a more triumphant version of the Times Square event in NYC.

January – because of the weather – is notoriously a slow month for events in Chicago. That’s one reason why there are so many December events – the weather hasn’t turned truly nasty yet. But February is busier.

• Once the hangovers have cleared, mid-January brings the Tomorrow Never Knows annual music festival which for five days focuses on rising bands, local acts, and comedians. But this and the New Year’s celebrations are the only notable events in the first calander month of each year.
• February kicks off with the Chinese New Year celebrations, as vibrant and exuberant here as anywhere with a significant Chinese population.
• Toward the end of February, the Chicago Auto Show is an annual showcase with close to 1000 vehicles on display at the 2018 edition.
• Overlapping with the Auto Show is the Chicago Black Restaurant Week, recognizing another of the cultural transformations that took place with the Black Influx at the start of the 20th century.
• Around the same time is the “Hump! Film Festival”, an annual screening of homemade amateur short porn films. This has grown into a celebration of sexual diversity that deliberately confronts all comers regardless of orientation.
• And the same weekend in 2018 also sees the 5th annual Cider Summit Chicago. SBS Imports and the Seattle Beer Collective are taking over the Grand Ballroom in Navy Pier and filling it with more than 140 ciders from throughout the US., Scotland, France, Spain, England and New Zealand.
• Not to be left out in the cold, the following weekend brings the fourth annual Frost Fest, an outdoor party at which attendees who dare brave the cold will be able to sample more than 50 craft beers from local breweries in a gigantic heated tent during three separate three-hour tasting sessions, all while surrounded by live music and food from local restaurants.

But none of these are the biggest Chicago draw of them all.

Some cities are just naturally sports-oriented. Sydney’s a bit like that, and so is Melbourne; it is sometimes said that we’ll watch anything that involves two or more players and a uniform of some kind; balls optional. Personally, I think speed chess might struggle to find a TV slot, but over the years we’ve seen just about everything else.

Chicago is exactly the same. One of the few cities represented in every major sporting franchise in North America, from Ice Hockey to Football to Basketball to Baseball to Field Hockey to (Google Search, Google Search)… yes, there is a Chicago Soccer Club and a Cricket League with 20 teams and 400+ players. And an internationally-known squash tournament. And a Badminton league… (I couldn’t find a Darts Championship. Next week, that may have changed – they have just about everything else.

You don’t get so many teams without two things: players at the grassroots to produce the players, and an audience that will pay to watch them. With so many sports on offer, there is virtually ALWAYS something to watch.

I’ve never been to Chicago but I feel like I know them already – and see them, or a people very much like them, every time I set foot out my door.

Primary sources:

• 50 fun things to do this winter in Chicago! by Maureen Therese from Top Ten Travel Blog;
• Things to do in Chicago this winter when you’re not hibernating by Grace Perry for Time Out, and several subsidiary pages;
• Yelp.com.au’s page, Top Gangster Tours in Chicago.

(I also checked a number of other sources without adding significantly to the list of events).

16. Winter In Omaha

Nebraska is pancake-flat, freezes solid in winter, and is a place that never changes – at least if the limited exposure of the state to international media is accurate. One of the purposes of this series is to replace supposition, conjecture, and misconception with accuracy, so let’s look at some facts.

Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska and located in the county seat of Douglas – except that it isn’t, really; the city has spread south beyond the county line, extended a tendril north to the county line (because the Glenn Cuningham Lake Campground is considered part of the city), and – to all intents and purposes – the townships in Iowa adjacent to the section of the Missouri River occupied by the city – should really be considered suburbs of the city at the very least. Is Council Bluffs, Iowa, directly connected to central Omaha by the 480, really a completely separate and distinct community?

Certainly, the Omaha Chamber Of Commerce doesn’t seem to think so. Who am I to argue? So let’s just say that it’s a city most lies in Nebraska, on the Western Bank of the Missouri, and move on.

A potted social and economic history

The city was, in fact, founded by speculators from Council Bluffs, and a crossing called Lone Tree Ferry gave it the nickname, “The Gateway To The West”.

Omaha declared itself to the world when it hosted the 1898 World’s Fair, dubbed the “Trans-Mississippi Exposition”. By this time, its central location had caused it to become an important transport hub, and in the 20th century, it’s meatpacking plants became internationally prominent.

In fact, a several prominent businesses can be said to have either begun there, or have their headquarters there: Four Fortune 500 companies and 5 Fortune 1000 companies, including the mega-conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, headed by “local investor” Warren Buffett (to use the description provided by Wikipedia). Union Pacific, the largest railroad operator in the US is headquartered there, and so is the First National Bank of Omaha, which few will have heard of, but which is the largest privately-held bank in the US. So are three of the 10 largest architecture/engineering firms in the country, and the internationally famous market research firm, Gallup. Enron started in Omaha as Northern Natural Gas.

Omaha has given the world a number of important technological and cultural developments (and a few less important but historically-relevant ones, as well): the Bobby Pin and “pink hair curler”; Cake Mix; Center-Pivot irrigation; Raisin Bran; The Ski Lift; The “Top 40” radio format; and the TV Dinner.

Many historic buildings have been demolished and the land redeveloped; it simply happens at a slower pace than larger cities, where new construction projects begin as soon as another breaks ground.

Take, for example, the Hotel Fontanelle. An upmarket hotel which opened in 1915 and became the center of Omaha society, the site of numerous civic events, weddings, and conventions. In 1920, it was acquired by Gene Eppley and became the flagship of the Eppley Hotel Company, which operated 22 structures in six states, the largest privately held hotel company in the US. Eppley himself resided within from the time of the purchase until his death in 1958, two years after he sold his entire hotel empire to Sheraton Hotels, the second-largest hotel sale in US history. Sheraton operated the hotel until 1968, when it was sold and once again operated as an independent source of accommodation. But Omaha had grown westward, and as a result of the shifting demographics and aging construction, it faded from popularity, closing in 1970. Over the next 13 years, numerous attempts were made to redevelop the Fontanelle, but none were successful; finally, it was demolished in 1983, becoming the parking lot of the planned Federal Courthouse (which was completed and Dedicated in the year 2000).

Not all the history is so uplifting. In 1900, Omaha was the center of a national uproar over the kidnapping of Edward Cudahy, Jr., the son of a local meatpacking magnate, and the early 20th century also saw significant civil unrest.

The city’s labor and management clashed in bitter strikes, racial tension escalated as blacks were hired as strikebreakers, and ethnic strife broke out. A major riot by earlier immigrants in South Omaha destroyed the city’s Greek Town in 1909, completely driving out the Greek population. Only six year later, like Chicago, Omaha was caught up in the Red Summer riots when thousands of whites marched from South Omaha to the courthouse to lynch a black worker, Willy Brown, suspected in the alleged rape of a white woman; they burned the County Courthouse to get the prisoner, causing more than $1,000,000 damage. They hanged and shot Will Brown, then burned his body. Troops were called in from Fort Omaha to quell the riot, prevent more crowds gathering in South Omaha, and to protect the black community in North Omaha.

In the 1960s, three major race riots along North 24th Street destroyed the Near North Side’s economic base, with recovery slow for decades.

Nor was nature always kind;

The Great Flood of 1881 filled Omaha and Council Bluffs with water for almost a month, causing two fatalities and millions of dollars in damage. The Easter Sunday Tornado of 1913 destroyed much of the city’s African-American community, in addition to much of Midtown Omaha. As many as 1,000 people were displaced by a flood in 1943, and there was another in 1952 which led to 40,000 people being evacuated from East Omaha and Carter Lake. In 1975 another major tornado, along with a major blizzard, caused more than $100 million in damages in 1975 dollars

In 1989, Omaha gained the notorious designation of having demolished the largest-ever National Register historic district in the United States. The Jobbers Canyon Historic District, along the Missouri River, was felled for a new headquarters campus for ConAgra Foods, a company which threatened to relocate if Omaha did not allow them to raze the city’s historic district. The warehouses had been allowed to deteriorate and were the scene of several fires set by the homeless population that had come to live in the abandoned buildings, and at the time, there were no plans in place for revitalizing the buildings, a fact that was instrumental in the City’s decision.

To help place the decision in context, it must be acknowledged that throughout the 1980s and 90s, Omaha also saw several major company headquarters leave the city, including Enron and First Data Corporation, a large credit-card processor.

Public reaction was less favorably disposed toward the decision, and a push toward the preservation and restoration of historic structures resulted.

Economic infrastructure continued to depart the city for the rest of the 20th century despite all efforts at halting the slide. The history of the city over the latter half of that century is full of terms like “notorious” and “now-infamous” when describing corporate leaders of the time.

At the same time, continuous signs of economic recovery can be observed as far back as 1970; it simply took thirty years for the economy to turn around.

Around the start of the 21st century, several new downtown skyscrapers and cultural institutions were built, the first in an ongoing series of developments and redevelopments which have successfully renewed the fading vitality of the city.

All this is at odds with the popular perception of the city. Yes, good reader, Omaha has skyscrapers! It’s just that most of them aren’t very tall – certainly no real rivals to the towers of Steel and Concrete in New York City or Chicago.

The Topography

So, is Omaha really flat? The answer is yes – but it didn’t get that way naturally. There has been significant alteration of the natural topography, with substantial regrading throughout Downtown Omaha and scattered locations elsewhere all across the city. Minor land reclamation efforts coupled with the construction of dams further upstream have brought dozens of acres along the Missouri into usage. Many of the natural variations in elevation have been evened out by these processes.

The highest natural point in the city is Belvedere Point in North Omaha. The lowest is in East Omaha, which sits on a flood plain west of the Missouri River. East Omaha was also once the location of Florence Lake, which dried up at some point in the 1920s.

The Climate

Omaha is located a long way from moderating bodies of water or mountain ranges. The climate is often compared with that of Rome, Italy, which is at virtually the same latitude, but there are only about 25 minutes of arc separating Omaha and Chicago, or about 0.46% of the Northern hemisphere, which makes a comparison between those cities equally enlightening.

Officially, the city enjoys a humid continental climate, with hot summers and cold winters. This is exactly the same general classification as that of Chicago, so you would expect the two to have similar weather profiles.

July averages 24.8°C (76.7°F), with average relative humidity around 70% which then leads to relatively frequent, and often violent, thunderstorms, which are fully capable of spawning tornadoes. The January daily average is -4.7°C (23.5°F), with lows reaching -18°C(0°F) on 11 days each year. The lowest temperature recorded in the city was -36°C (-32°F) on January 5, 1884. Average yearly precipitation is 777mm (30.6”), falling mostly in the warmer months; what precipitation does fall in winter usually takes the form of snow, with average seasonal snowfall being 73cm (28.7”).

Based on 30-year averages obtained from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center for the months of December, January and February, Weather Channel ranked Omaha the 5th coldest major US. city as of 2014.

Chicago’s record low is 1°F cooler, but in most respects, Omaha is 5°F or more cooler during this time of year. Now, I can’t speak for anyone else, but 1°C is a definitely noticeable change in temperature, and 5°F is just over two-and-three-quarters of them.

Omaha has a very pronounced summer and a fairly vaguely-defined winter, with very brief transitional periods. Depending on which climactic yardstick you use, Winter could start in November and last until March (record low, snowfall) or be a more typical December-to-February deal (average low, average high – with the caveat that sometimes you won’t be able to distinguish late fall / early spring from the colder season they bracket. It’s also possible to argue that Winter is December to mid-march, based on the record high temperatures.

Since there’s nothing about Autumn that says it can’t snow, and the same for Spring, I’m going to go with the “standard winter” (with caveats) model.

And so to specifics. The record highs for the winter months are, respectively 22°C (72°F), 21°C (69°F), and 26°C (78°F), but those don’t come along very often. The usual daily highs are 1.8°C (35.3°F), 0.8°C (33.4°F), and 3.4°C (38.1°F).

No data has been provided on the mean of the highest or lowest temperatures achieved in each month, which is useful in assessing the variability from one day to the next; observation of such data from other cities suggests that the high is a degree or two higher than the average of the “usual daily high” and the “record high” for each month, and the low is similarly a degree or two colder than the equivalent mean. So I would estimate these values (highs) as being approximately 13.9°C (57°F), 12.9°C (55.2°F), and 16.7°C (62°F), respectively. I will provide similar estimates for the lows below, without reiterating the explanation.

Understandably, the average number of days above 32°C (90°F) for this time of year is zero – in fact, Omaha only gets about 28 of them a year.

The record lows are -32°C (-25°F), -36°C (-32°F), and -32°C (-26°F) – with honorable mentions for November [-26°C (-14°F)] and March [-27°C (-16°F)]. Only three months of the year do not have a record low that is subzero. I once had an NPC describe the winter weather as “feeling like the arctic circle was just north of the border – any border in that general direction”. Admittedly, he was referring to conditions with a 60 km/h wind blowing, worth -50°C (-90°F) in Wind Chill!

The usual lows are -8.5°C (16.7°F), -10.2°C (13.6°F), and -7.7°C (18.1°F). I estimate that the temperatures on any given day could drop as low as -22°C (-7.6°F), -23.1°C (-9.6°F), and -19.9°C (-3.8°F).

Equally useful to know is how often this happens. October averages 4.9 days (presumably, actually, nights) below freezing; November, 19.1; December, 29.2; January 30.1; February 25.4; March 20.4; and April 6.5. Two-to-three times a decade, there will be such a day in May or September.

Rainfall in December is about 60% of the rainfall in November (26.4mm/1.04” down from 41.7mm/1.64”), and drops still further in January (18.3mm/0.72”), with February somewhere in between (21.6mm/0.85). The March figure is over 50.5mm, or more than twice the February value; adjusting Feb’s numbers to a roughly-equivalent duration is nowhere near enough to change this (23.3mm).

The number of rainy days does not change anywhere near so severely; this indicates that the intensity and/or duration of the rainfall is the primary variable. 6.7 days in November becomes 6.6 in December, 6 in January, 6.5 in February (7 adjusted), and 8.2 in March.

Of course, you can only consider these to be the dryer months if you ignore the white stuff on the ground. Snow is a reality for Omaha that is, however, difficult to ignore for very long.

Snow can fall (and has fallen) as late as April and as early as October. Less than half the year – five months – are historically, snow-free. Admittedly, the amounts for several of those months are relatively light; The average is for 0.2 Snow days in October yielding 8mm (0.3”), and November typically has only 2.2 snow days producing 6.4cm (2.5″). December sees more snow, but the falls appear to be no heavier, just more frequent: 4.7 snow days producing 15.7cm (6.2”) of cover. It’s much the same story in January – 4.6 snow days and falls totaling 15.5cm (6.1”) on average. In February, the falls become slightly lighter but slightly more frequent: 4.9 snowy days (despite the shorter calendar month) and exactly the same amount of snow as January, on average. If you correct these to be of comparable length to the other months – 30.5 days – you get 5.2 days (still essentially 1 day in 6) and 16.7cm (6.6”). Overall, more snow falls in this month than any other, per day. March has 2.5 snow days, and April 0.8 – so it is roughly four times more likely for Winter to linger than it is to come early, and perhaps once in a decade or two, you would hit the ‘jackpot’ and have both.

November and December are the cloudiest months, receiving 50% and 47% of the theoretically-available sunshine, respectively. In January, that rises to 56%, in February (more frequent snowfalls, remember) it drops back to 53%, in March it rises back to the 56% mark, and the remainder of the year receives 62% or more. But the gloomiest days are during the holiday season.

Things To Do In An Omaha Winter

Some cities avoid the gloom, others defy it. Omaha seems to be one of the latter.

Some attractions are open all year round, though special events may commemorate the season. Highlight choices that fall into this category include:

• The Lauritzen Gardens – tropical temperatures and plants, on demand, thanks to the 10,000 square foot “tropical house”, waterfalls, and pond, and the 5,300 square feet of the “temperate house”, plus a large indoor gallery for floral displays and special events. The diversity can be summed up by mentioning three more attractions at the Gardens: The Rose Garden, the Wetlands Route, and special exhibits at the Visitors Center which have included life-sized Lego exhibits.
• 36 minute’s drive out of the city center is the SAC Aerospace Museum in Ashland – 300,000 square feet of displays and exhibits including iconic cold way aircraft; the collection of space-related artifacts of Nebraskan Astronaut Clayton Anderson; an open-to-the-public flight simulator; and a planetarium. On top of all that, the Museum hosts special events and camps through the winter months.
• The Henry Doorly Zoo And Aquarium – This features an indoor rainforest, a desert dome, “cat complex”, “giraffe barn”, gorilla and orangutan houses, a Madagascar exhibit, and the butterfly house, plus the Lozier IMAX theater. The Aquarium is also indoors – so even if the outside world is hibernating there’s plenty to see here.
• The Old Market and Old Market Passageway are home to dozens of boutique shops, art galleries, and diverse options for a warm meal. One noteworthy location in the latter is Hollywood Candy, which boasts a wide range of “vintage” candy and soda flavors, including what some consider the world’s largest collection of Pez Dispensers. They also sell vintage LPs, etc, all in a Malt-Shoppe-inspired surround.
• The Joslyn Art Museum features numerous galleries, a sculpture garden, a concert hall, and a lecture hall, all in use throughout the year. “Among visitors? favorite exhibits is the Chihuly glass that hangs floor to ceiling on the second level of the museum. The museum?s permanent collection includes pieces from early Egypt to modern interpretations of everyday life. Special exhibits (which have an admission fee) have included King Tut artifacts, Andy Warhol art and a look at the Union Pacific Railroad.” writes The Walking Tourist.
• An hour out of the city is usually stretching it, but I couldn’t ignore Licorice International in Lincoln, which sells nearly 160 different types of licorice from 12 countries as well as other gourmet candies and foods.
• Also in Lincoln, while you’re there, check out The Escape Room, a “real-life adventure game” (sounds like a LARP to me, with the players playing themselves) – you need to solve puzzles, riddles, and clues in order to escape within the 60-minute deadline.
• And, to round out the day, Lincoln is home to the state’s largest outdoor Ice-skating rink (winter only, of course!).
• Again from Best Things Ne: “In recent years, the craft beer scene in Omaha has exploded and most of the breweries offer fantastic tours year-round. But you can also plan your own tour by requesting a Craft Brew Explorer’s Journal at the Visit Omaha website, and take a journey to eight breweries across Omaha where you’ll enjoy a complimentary beer at each! Bonus: if you can make it through all eight breweries, the Omaha Visit Center will have a complimentary pint glass waiting for you at the finish line.”
• Film Streams is a “quaint” theater in downtown Omaha that specializes in obscure and foreign films, from independents to classics.
• The North of downtown Omaha is the “arty” district that many cities have, and is full of art shops ranging from Photography to glass blowing.
• Durham Museum is more about local history, located at the site of the old Union Station depot. Although I haven’t really discussed it, this was a vital link in the settlement of the Western USA, so this is something for any History buff to revel in. The top level offers a look back at a depot in the early days. The lower level houses permanent and temporary exhibits. Among the permanent collection is a look at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Fair and Native American life.
• The Children’s Museum is strictly for younger kids and is known as a place for them to burn off excess energy. Most of the exhibits are interactive, and many permit them to take real-life forms of “make-believe” to the next level – a grocery store area where kids can either “shop” or be “cashiers”, a mechanics garage, and scrap-booking.
• Joslyn Castle and its grounds are open for public tours, events, and private rental for private ‘special’ occasions. Winter may not be the best time to view the grounds, but there’s something very appropriate about touring something that looks like a castle when it’s cold and snowy out.
• It may be winter, but that won’t deter any serious Hiker. The Hummel Hike Club meets the first weekend of every month, seasons notwithstanding.

On top of that, there are a number of seasonal activities of particular note. In December:

• Early in the month, Pajama Night is held at the Union Pacific Museum from 5-7PM.
• The Lights Of Omaha – Some cities put on more of a show for Christmas than others. Omaha is one of the former: “the city comes to life with more than one million twinkling lights, family activities such as ice skating, and much more” according to Best Things Ne. The lights are switched on come Thanksgiving Night and stay lit for a month, signaling the annual Holiday Lights Festival, which features “live music, old-fashioned carolers, ice skating in the Old Market, Dancing Santas at the Symphony, the lighting of the official Christmas Tree, the traditional performance of A Christmas Carol, topped off with a beautiful fireworks display on New Year’s Eve that lights up the sky over the Heartland of America Park” (Official Blurb).
• Christmas at Union Station features the biggest indoor Christmas Tree in the Omaha Region. The Decorations are lit on the day after Thanksgiving, an event that draws thousands for the food and holiday-themed activities for children. The tree remains on display until the coming of the New Year. A number of other events, including an Ethnic Holiday Festival, Concert Series, exhibition about Christmas Trees and a Christmas-themed miniature display, have been folded into this broader occasion.
• In Early December for about 10 days, Sycamore Farms (in Waterloo, Nebraska) hosts Winter Wonderland. The century-old farmhouse and barns are festooned with lights and holiday decorations and hosts 70 indoor heated vintage vendors, makers, and artisans. Everything from Pony and Carriage Rides to Ice Sculpture live carvings and Classic Christmas movies. While this event has only been held once to date, 20,000 people registered their interest in attending, so it’s fairly safe to say that it will be an ongoing attraction henceforth.

But the two big events mentioned generally subordinate everything else for the month. In January:

• Things kick off with the New Years Fireworks Spectacular, the closing event of the Holiday Lights Festival.
• Winterfest At The Omaha Kroc Center – not to be confused with the other event called “Winterfest” listed in December, this is a strictly-for-kids event at the Salvation Army KROC Center, notably the location for a 2 1/2 story water-slide, the Stingray. (Water-slides and swimming in general are surprisingly popular activities in Nebraska, even though pools have to be indoors and heated or they will freeze solid).
• Mid-month, the SAC Aerospace Museum (see earlier) hosts an indoor air-show for remote-controlled models, with safety demonstrations and educational booths. Entry to the event is included in paid admission to the Museum.
• Late in January, the Cathedral Flower Festival draws more than 15,000 visitors to the historic St Cecilia Cathedral. Local florists transform thousands of varietals of flowers into works of art that decorate the cathedral space; special events are often scheduled during the run of the show.
• Also around this time of year, “Cold Day, Warm Hearts, and Family Fun” at the Owen Marina in Mahoney State Park is all about outdoor activities for the whole family such as Fishing, roasting hot dogs over an open bonfire, wintercrafts, and more. Admission is free to holders of a Park Permit, which is required for all attendees.
• And, at much the same time, the Omaha Children’s Museum holds its annual Star Wars Night.
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day in mid-January is a day of family-friendly volunteer activities throughout the city.
• Late in the month, a group of cinemas (collectively, the Marcus Theaters) present family-friendly movies as the “Kids Dream Winter Film Series”.
• Throughout January, the Omaha Public Library hosts a long list of children’s activities (some focusing on particular age groups e.g. Teens). This year there were 11, including one recurring item. Most events require registration.

And, in February:

• Groundhog Day is early in the month and the Union Pacific Museum has special events centered around Shadows and Groundhogs to celebrate.
• The Omaha Public Library holds still more events on the weekends.
• Valentine’s Day appears to be a big deal in this part of the world with more than 25 family-friendly events taking place in Omaha and surrounding townships throughout the first half of the month. Several of these involve making Valentine’s for others to give, such as Seniors and the residents of the Open Door Mission.
• Later in the month, there is a Draw-A-Thon for Teens at the Joslyn Art Museum, where attendees get to meet local artists, make art, dance, and eat pizza from 6:30PM until Midnight as they move through small-group art-making workshops in different areas of the Museum.
• For more than 30 years, the Figure Skating Club of Omaha (and the Edge Figure Skating Club) have co-hosted the Omaha Winter Festival (aka Winterfest), an annual competition that regularly attracts more than 200 competitors representing 20 clubs from a 7-state region. Every skater in a group receives an award (medal or ribbon) and gets to demonstrate their accomplishments to friends and family. Attendance is free and open to the public. This year the Festival will be held on February 22-25, and presumably the date would be similar (late February) every year.

The major sports in this part of the world are basketball (indoors) and Ice hockey, both played by college teams. Omaha has hosted the annual NCAA College World Series (men’s basketball) every June since 1950. The major local teams (and their sports) are the Creighton Bluejays (Men’s Basketball), the Omaha Storm Chasers (Baseball), Omaha Diamond Spirit (Summer Baseball), Omaha Lancers (Ice Hockey), Omaha Mavericks (Ice Hockey), Creighton Bluejays (Men’s Soccer), and the latest addition, the Omaha Pioneers. Omaha also has a history of success in Curling, having produced multiple junior national champions.

But perhaps the most surprising thing about Omaha is that this is the quiet part of the year, despite a list of activities sufficient to satisfy any population. Trust me, this list barely scratches the surface of the annual activities and events!

Sources

• Wikipedia‘s page on Omaha
• 15 of Nebraska’s Best Winter Activities by Katie Griffing for Best Things Nebraska;
• 10 things to do in Omaha during winter by Tim Trudell for The Walking Tourists;
• Omaha Winter Festival from the Figure Skating Club of Omaha;
• Winter Wonderland at Sycamore Farms;
• Omaha Annual Events from VisitOmaha.com
• Annual Events in Omaha by Omaha.net;
• 59 festivals in the Omaha area to check out this year curated by Kate Malott for Omaha.com;
• Annual Events & Festivals – Omaha, Nebraska from City-Data.com (a page that could have been really useful if they had provided dates for the annual events and festivals);
• Omaha Winter Fun Guide from FamilyFuninOmaha.com (a portal page to a lot of information. NB, right-clicking is disabled on the site).

With the Day 9 update, this part of the series is considered complete. Tomorrow, I start work on Part 4! “But wait,” you may say, “what about the promised entries for Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Honolulu? I was looking forward to those – I wanted to see how closely Honolulu’s weather resembled that of Puerto Rico!” For the answer to those questions, see the Day 9 update below.

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”.

Projecting Forwards

Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 points every ten years, which enables some forecasts (assuming current trends continue): Fifty years from now, the average will be about 145 relative to the then 150-years old standard, and the average person will be a “genius”, but the century-prior average will also have risen by 15 points, so the relative-to-a-century-ago comparison is still only “gifted”. But 50 years after that, a century from now, when the average IQ score is 160, and the average score from right now is 130, it will be true to say that “the average person is a genius relative to the norm of a century ago”.

Think about that for a moment. A century from now, on current trends, the average person will be be a genius by our standards.

Looking backwards

Next, let’s extrapolate backwards. Go back 200 years, and the average person would be considered “below average”, maybe even “slow”, by the standards of a century ago, and would certainly be “slow” by modern standards.

Quite obviously, the trend can’t continue in a straight line or we’ll get to an average score of 0 somewhere in the 15th century. But if we assume that the rate of increase has been accelerating, we can reverse that and assume that the rate of decline is slowing – 400 years, 1600 years, 6400 years, and 25,600 years between 15-point declines, and starting from a date of 1900.

So in 1500 AD, the average would have been about 85, which is the minimum considered sufficient to function independently in modern society according to the standards of the early 20th century. In 100 BC, the average modern person would have been “gifted”, relative to the populous at large, while the average person would be considered a high-level disabled by 20th century standards.

In 6500 BC, Britain became an island and humans were hunter gatherers using stone tools, fire, and group tactics. The average person in that era would be “severely disabled” by the standards of the 20th century – capable of learning simple practical skills by rote and practice, and of cooperating in groups, and of simple communications with a profoundly limited vocabulary – while even the rare “genius” of the era would have trouble keeping up in the early 20th century, even afforded every advantage.

And, way back in 32,100 BC, around the time of the invention of cooking, the average IQ would have been 35, and the average person would be profoundly limited by the standards of the 20th century, while a “genius” would be a “slow learner” by those same standards.

RPG Significance

This is something that I’ve never seen mentioned in any RPG – sci-fi games for the projections forward, and fantasy games in terms of the retrospective (doesn’t mean it hasn’t been, just that I haven’t seen it).

Think about those abilities in that context. While they typically borrow from many different eras, in terms of the social, technical, and political concepts, that 15th century standard would not be too far off the mark. Your brightest and best – INT 20 mages and paladins and the like – are “gifted”, NOT “genius”-level intellects. The best of the Gods, INT 25 or so, are the “genius” thinkers, capable of thinking in purely abstract and theoretical terms.

Now, all that’s interesting enough, but it makes a fairly broad assumption, and one that I’ve been deliberately and willfully challenging for the last 44 or 45 years – that an IQ score is in any way relevant to, well, anything other than your ability to score well on an IQ test. And it makes another assumption that I’ve been fighting for about 35 of those years, and that is a corollary of the first – that an INT score has any relationship to an IQ score.

IQ Score? What is that, really?

At best, I consider an IQ score to be an oversimplification. That’s a view that science has slowly come around to over the last 50 years or so; when I was first tested, it was considered an “ability score” that measured the totality of potential, and defining of one’s future. As I was in 3rd grade at the time, making the year 1971, I resisted strenuously that interpretation. For a start, the test made the (hidden) assumption that each person attempting it would put the same degree of effort into it, and that was inherently laughable on the face of it. Those predisposed to a lackadaisical attitude toward scholastic achievement would inherently under-perform in such tests. Consequently, I was seriously opposed to the use of IQ testing as a means of distribution of educational resources.

To be fair, as other forms of reasoning and rationality have become recognized as something only peripherally related to IQ, and the qualities tested by IQ tests have been better defined (if only by exclusion), the tests have become better. There is far less contamination from the capacity to read English fluently, for example.

These days, IQ Tests are measurements of the capacity for abstract thinking at speed.

You’ll note that I didn’t say simply “abstract thinking”; the mere fact that you don’t have effectively unlimited time to come up with an answer means that the speed of the testee’s logical processes is directly relevant to their final score.

IQ tests attempt to compensate for that variable by presenting problems in a sequence that rises in difficulty and instructing participants to skip problems that they can’t solve, but the sequencing is imprecise and the degree of compensation involved is subjective.

Right away, then, we have two traits that are measured by both IQ and form aspects of INT – abstract reasoning and speed of thought.

Two qualities that are not measured by IQ tests are the ability to associate abstract reasoning with the real world, and the converse ability to analyze the real world in abstract terms. These functions of Intelligence relate directly to the relevance of IQ tests, which is why the part of me that is occasionally intrigued by conspiracy theories finds their omission a little curious. But it might well be that they are simply very hard to test qualitatively, and – to be honest – I can’t think of a way of doing so that doesn’t reintroduce a bias towards written comprehension.

My Early INT Breakdown

One of my first attempts at breaking INT down divided it into three equal contributors:

• Abstract Reasoning,
• Memory, and
• Capacity to learn.

This breakdown was actually used in an appendix of my superhero rules to enable players of non-human characters to determine what their PCs INT scores should be on the human scale. This enabled them to choose their scores to reflect the character’s abilities relative to their native population and then convert those values to the “standard scale” – a subject for another article. The following is based upon my notes of the time (1985-6).

Abstract Reasoning

(From 1985:) When you actually look at the definitions in place, it’s clear that this is the familiar “abstract reasoning at speed” typically measured by IQ tests. Using distance as an easily-understood analogue, it suggests that thinking speeds are not greatly variable, and recommends a value of 0.9 – 1.1 as “normal”. Furthermore, each 0.1 below 0.9 was then used to cap the maximum possible result and as a factor in Capacity to learn. The normal human with appropriate mental exercises performed on a regular basis was defined by the system as 20 (25 with such exercises), and each 0.1 less than on thinking speed reduced those limits by 3. A character with a thinking speed of 0.5, who was literally “slow”, therefore had a limit (without mental exercises) of 20-12=8, and with such exercises, of 25-12=13. Since the ‘typical human’ value was defined as 10, this bracketed those values perfectly.

The character’s IQ could then be converted to an INT contribution. This was a little bit trickier; INT scores of 0-10 essentially covered the IQ range of 60-100, scores of 10-15 covered 100-120m scores of 15-20 covered 120-140, and scores of 20-25 covered 140-160. Each additional point of INT thereafter (possible for GM-created alien races and AIs) added +1 to the IQ.

Multiply one value by another and you got the Abstract Reasoning score for the character, relative to his native population.

Memory

(From 1986:) Memory is actually a far more complex phenomenon than the rules simulated. A simple score out of 20 reflected the character’s capability to remember something – eventually. In reality, we have short term memory, intermediate filtering and buffering, long-term memory, muscle memory, visual memory, and non-visual sensory memory (tactile, scent, auditory).

Short-term memory is the memory of events that have occurred in the last ten minutes or so. Some say 15 minutes. These memories are more or less instantly available to us, with only small losses due to forgetfulness and memory lapses. This memory is like a water tank with pressure-relief valves all over the surface, with new memories continually being pumped in at the bottom and those that reach the top being siphoned off for additional processing. Sensory overload produces memory overload (i.e. over-pressure) and the system responds by “leaking” some of it’s memories, especially those of the event causing the “over-pressure”. Instead of details, general impressions are retained.

Adrenalin and Excitement actually diminish the capacity of the tank,
so that when total attention on the here-and-now is required for survival, we aren’t distracted by what happened five minutes ago, or the grocery shopping list, or whatever.

The intermediate buffering and filtering memory is the traffic manager for long-term memory. Not everything in there is going to be readily accessible, and many memories will have certain triggers that bring them to the fore. Those need to be readily accessible through long-term memory, but that means that the memory itself can be relatively buried. Intermediate buffering holds the memory while it is being processed, and filtering selects where in long-term memory it should be stored, what triggers are involved, where they should be stored, and so on.

Triggers function because of Associations, which connect the trigger to the memory; access the trigger, and the memory gets transferred temporarily back into short-term memory, from whence the cognitive systems of the brain can process it. But associations tend to form between all memories, including triggers, and for that reason it is necessary to subdivide them into visual and non-visual sensory memories. The Visual group connects images and shapes and colors and lighting patterns and motions all the other things that we associate with a visual impression with similar visuals. When you look at a photo or movie sequence and think “I’ve seen that, or something like it, before”, you are trying to access your visual memory.

It’s my experience that the other types of sensory triggers tend to get all lumped together, perhaps because they are all connected with what we consider the sense of ‘taste’. When you think of or remember, for example, the taste of an apple pie, you also find the smell of one cooking, and the tactile sensation of baked apple chunks on the tongue. Similarly, the flavor “lemon”stands alone in isolation, but as soon as you associate that with a particular dish – Lemon Meringue Pie, Lemon Cheesecake, Lemon Chicken – all the other associations that come with each of those dishes flood into memory. And something similar happens when you think of something else that has the same scent, but isn’t a food, such as Lemon fabric softener.

Slightly different again is “muscle memory”, in which a particular set of motions gets repeated so often that the motions become automatic, leaving the mind relatively free to contemplate other things. Artists can free their minds to be creative, designers can free their minds to design, craftsmen can free their minds to produce masterworks, and so on.

With each of these types of memory, there are at least three attributes to consider. The speed of learning, the accuracy of retention, and the speed of retrieval of memory. But – again speaking from experience – each of these is actually more complicated than that. Speed of learning is different for different subjects for different individuals; accuracy of retention can vary over time and by subject; and some people “revise” their memories less than others, though we all do it to some extent without even realizing it; and speed of retrieval of memories is a complex subject that is not fully understood – sometimes it can be quick, and sometimes slow, even on the same subject; some subjects are more accessible than others, as well, but that also varies from individual to individual.

Memory is clearly a far more complex subject than that simple score suggests.

Capacity To Learn

The capacity of an individual to learn was one of the analyses that I was proudest of. From 1985:

Every individual has an optimum method of learning. Some respond best to tutoring and one-on-one interaction, others thrive in a lecture environment, self-education works best for others, the hybrid approach of the school classroom suits still another group, and for some, techniques that we have yet to imagine will be the optimum, such as computer-based interaction, direct RNA injection, study under hypnosis, telepathic transfer or who knows what.

On top of that, degree of immersion, periods of greatest intensity, and the interval between such periods, all complicate and compound the degree of individual differentiation.

It’s fair to say that each individual would also have one particular method that they struggle with more than any others, too.

Every society adopts a different system for different stages of education and provides minimal flexibility in that choice, though some institutions may do things differently. Actually earning a higher degree in the western world tends to require successfully adapting to each of them to at least some extent before you can progress to the next stage of your education

Reasoning Ability Analysis

The next distinctive elements of Intelligence that I became aware of was an analysis of my reasoning abilities. This was part of my testing to qualify for the intensive course in systems analysis and computer programming that was to earn me my professional degree – a full Bachelor Degree equivalent in just 12 weeks. In order to be able to complete that brutal course, you needed to test in the top 4% of the population in Numeric, Verbal, and Abstract Reasoning, to have Clerical “Aptitude” of 90% or better. So let’s run through those, and see how they relate to the facets of Intelligence that I had identified a few years earlier.

Numeric Aptitude was the ability to perform basic mathematical operations. They didn’t care what support tools you had to use to get the correct answers, just that you did so – whether that was pen and paper or using a calculator. As the test proceeded, the complexity of the problems grew, and you needed to be able to recognize trends and patterns of numbers – geometric expansions, exponential expansions, trigonometric curves, estimating first and second differentials from a list of raw data, and so on. A small amount of that is to be found in the standard IQ test.

Verbal Reasoning is the item I have the least memory of, but I think it was about interpreting written and verbal speech into logical terminology to identify the correct solution from amongst four presented.

Abstract Reasoning is the traditional IQ test of pattern recognition and determining which item would logically come next.

Clerical Aptitude was the ability to compare two lists and find items that matched, or items that were different, the ability to put a list of items into the correct order, and so on.

So, none of these really tested memory very much, or the capacity to learn; but only part of what was tested corresponds to IQ testing.

The Plastic Brain

Virtually everyone learns one language, but it was surprising to a lot of people to find that the most difficult language to learn was the second. Once you had leaned a second language, it became relatively easy to learn a third, and a fourth, and then a fifth, and so on. Investigating why this was so (and whether or not the phenomenon was real or entirely anecdotal) revealed the surprising fact that those who had learned a second language and those who had not had different brain structures! Until this discovery, it was unquestioned that the human brain didn’t change once development was complete.

Fast forward ten years or so, and the new buzzword is “plastic brain”. People who have learned to use hearing like a bat in order to replace sight. People who have recovered brain functions that once would have been thought permanently lost or damaged by injury. Amnesiacs who have found new pathways of association to recover much of their memories.

Is this another aspect of Intelligence? I’ve never seen anyone discuss the question. At first glance, you might say that the answer is no, but then there is the principle of multilingual capability. Does the same hold true with, say, musical instruments? Or Painting Styles? Or types of mathematical concept – algebra vs trigonometry, say? I don’t know – but it suddenly makes a ‘yes’ response seem a whole lot more plausible, doesn’t it?

Other forms of Intelligence

Not long after, new forms of intelligence began to be spoken of. The most commonly mentioned is Emotional Intelligence, which is the ability to project one’s empathic capacity into a future hypothetical situation and use the results to inform what you say to someone now. In other words, it’s the ability to know the right thing to say without finding out the hard way!

Another term that has been used more extensively of late, and that is arguably another aspect of Intelligence, is Social Conscience, the ability to take a situation and not simply apply an existing moral code to it, to evolve that moral code in response to the outcome, and to then undertake some remedial action. Personally, I consider this to be a relatively minor aspect of Intelligence that is amplified enormously by the social media echo chamber, but I have nothing to point at in favor of that position – and nothing to point at in opposition, either.

One term that’s been around for a very long time but that needs fresh attention and to be viewed in a fresh context is Creativity. Long regarded as something completely separate and distinct from Intelligence – in fact, the creative instinct was deemed to be opposed to intelligence for a long time – it’s actually relatively easy to argue the contrary case to that long-held position. Creativity is finding a way to do something when it is commonly accepted that it can’t be done, or seeing the potential uses for something new faster or more clearly or more adroitly than anyone else, or finding new ideas to explore that no-one has considered before in exactly the same way as what you are doing.

The Skill Bonus Question

All this comes to mind every time I see a D&D character’s skills, simply because of the structure of the game mechanics. A skill rating consists of learned ranks, a stat bonus, and any other bonuses, and the questions that flash through my mind (only to be suppressed most of the time) are always, “What does the stat bonus represent?” “What does the Skill itself represent?” “Should there be different structures in place for the creative use of the skill?”

“What does the stat bonus represent?”

Is it innate capability? An aptitude? Or what?

The answer is more important than you realize, because no matter what you answer, the system inherently compromises verisimilitude. That would be fine if it were explained in the text – there are times when it is preferable to compromise the simulation of reality in favor of playability, as I have explained in past articles – but it isn’t; the Player’s Handbook describes “what it is” in purely mechanical terms while never explaining why. Every time I see the text in question, it begs the question, did the authors even consider the question, or did they simply adapt the game-mechanics principle from earlier generations of the rules?

“What does the Skill itself represent?”

To understand the significance of the first question, you need to answer this second one – not for yourself (which is relatively easy), but in terms of what the game designers intended. In the absence of explanations from them, it’s not so easy – you can second-guess the intended interpretation from the game mechanics, and in some cases from the detailed descriptions of some individual skills, but that’s as good as it gets, and – as you’ll see – it’s not good enough.

To demonstrate the truth of that last statement, the simplest way is to look at a specific example or two. “Craft: Silversmith” will do, at least at first. This is an INT based skill and means “you are trained in [the] craft, trade, or art”.

So, you can have DEX 3 and your skill as a Silversmith is unaffected by your manual clumsiness. Or, you can have DEX 300 and still be hopelessly incompetent as a silversmith. And, on top of that, Creativity is defined as something that can be learned.

Every skill has two applications: advancing the state-of-the-art, and execution or technique. Everything in the rule-books describes the skill as conferring the second, and says nothing about the character’s ability to devise a new theory, create a new style or “school”, or create something with originality, something never seen before. In some cases, such as “Fishing,” the dichotomy is better reflected as “Theory” and “Practice” – the latter is “what works in the real world” and the former is “why it works”.

Surely it’s not too stretching of credibility to think that these might be separate capabilities?

“Should there be different structures in place for the creative use of the skill?”

One of the house rules that I routinely put in place in my campaigns was always to separate the “theory” from the “practice”. If the skill wasn’t INT-based, what was described by the rules and listed on the default character sheets was the “practice”, and included a bare minimum of any ancillary capabilities – being a “blacksmith” gave sufficient rudimentary education in the keeping of accounts, and the social mores relating to the profession, such as how to address, and respond to, the different social ranks. But only a lucky accident would advance the state of the art, and 99 times out of a hundred, you would not understand why that lucky accident produced a better outcome, and so could not replicate it.

For that, you could buy “Theory Of [Skill].” This was always INT-based. OR you could buy “Creativity in [Skill]”, which gave a lesser understanding of the past and underlying theories (fallacies and all), but permitted new and exotic applications of the skill that would manifest in a tangible product. NOT both, because they tended to be mutually exclusive – your priority could be expertise or innovation, not both.

The first could be passed on to students, the second could not. But the ability to replicate the results of “Creativity” was an application of “Theory”.

It follows that if you focus your abilities on creativity, you want to attract students of theory, so that they can take your inspirations and spread them far and wide, building your fame and hence the value of your work – but, if you are famed as an innovator, the students you will naturally attract will be other creative types who draw inspiration from you (i.e. potential rivals). If you focus your abilities on theory, your claim to fame is your craftsmanship, and the more creative a student is, the more he is inclined to take liberties with your “perfection” of result, and the less you will want to have him around. The students you want are those like yourself, but the innovator is also seeking them out; if you want any assistants at all, you may have to settle for a creative soul and future rival. But, in the meantime, the quality of your product speaks for itself.

Things do get a little stickier when it comes to skills of education, i.e. to INT-based skills – something like “History” for example. “Creativity In History” is not something to be encouraged! But the distinction between rote learning and understanding is capable of similar distinction, and the latter sounds a lot like “the theory of,” when you get down to it. So the “theory” and “practice” distinction still holds up. The difference is that the theory is the default skill; the “practice” might be based on DEX.

Where does IQ fit in?

The bottom-line is that it doesn’t. I have deliberately, with this approach, bypassed the abstract understanding of how intelligence works and is measured, and focused on its practical applications within the game world. In the process, I ignore the many contaminants of the IQ score, and the many things that it does not measure at all in favor of something more abstract and yet more functional, for game purposes.

Strictly speaking, you would get a truer picture if you were to purchase the skill bonuses both from understanding and from capability and somehow aggregate them to determine the character’s INT. Determining the IQ would be a similar process of extracting the skills whose “understanding” indicated facility in the ability to think in abstract terms – at speed. But why would you bother?

The creativity stat: A Home-brew House Rules Solution for D&D/Pathfinder

The rather vague house rules that I gave earlier can be greatly simplified with a little thought. While I have never applied this particular solution in a game myself, I thought I would present it anyway – what I described earlier is what I have actually used. You can determine their relative merits for yourself.

This solution starts by defining a new stat, Creativity:
     CRE = INT+2d6-2d6

Every skill comes in three varieties. You buy ranks for the skill only once.

• Variety #1 is INT based, regardless of what the rule-book says, and it deals with the history and theory of the subject. Reference books give additional bonuses to this skill.
• Variety #2 is as per the existing rules, and deals with the practicalities of using the skill. Tools give additional bonuses to this skill.
• Variety #3 is CRE based, regardless of what the rule-book says, and it deals with the design of new creations within whatever practical limitations apply. A successful practical roll is also required to actually manufacture the item.

You are not allowed to have equal ranks in any two varieties at any given time.

All skill point allocations are doubled. Note that this effectively reduces overall skill ranks – twice as many split three ways – which further forces inequalities such as that mandated above and choices between the options.

Redefining Intelligence: The Zenith-3 Solution

I took a slightly different tack when creating the rules for my Zenith-3 game.

Based on INT and other stats, a sequence of APTITUDES are determined. Characters can purchase improvements to these aptitudes, up to a hard limit of 50 higher than the base value (all skills are measured on a percentile scale in this system).

SKILLs are based on the net values of the aptitude scores or characteristics considered most relevant.

A key aspect of the system is that it puts a fire-break between stat increases and skills. Put a stat up, and your aptitude increases, but that does NOT increase your skill roll.

That also means that ability-draining attacks don’t alter skill rolls. Before this system was introduced, such attacks necessitated a major game delay, so much so that other (rather fuzzier) ways were found of simulating the net effects of such attacks and abilities. Variations on the Luck game mechanic, in particular, were highly useful at providing an abstract representation of all sorts of abilities, but it suffers from a fundamental problem: the laws of probability state that as the number of dice rise – and that is the primary mechanism for ‘intensifying’ the effect – the probabilities invert such that more substantial results become more common than lesser ones. Yes, the interpretations could be made still fuzzier to compensate, but the whole thing was so counter-intuitive that it threw both players and GM (me) for a loop, time after time.

On top of that, skills were subdivided into three groups: Fundamental Skills, in which everyone had a basic capacity (and which were grouped into “families” according to the aptitude of which they were an expression), common expert skills which required specific training or education, and advanced expert skills which not only required such training/education, but also required the character to have learned specific common skills as a fundamental basis. Each of these levels also constituted a “fire-break” – if you raised your competence in a common skill, the expert skills upon which it were based did not automatically increase, only the capacity for improvement in those skills. Which meant that you could spend character points to raise one skill and get on with play almost immediately.

The Aptitudes, and the fundamental skills that derive from them, are:

Dexterity Aptitude (DEX)	Clinging Draw Weapon Sketch & Plan
Empathic Aptitude (EMPA)	Animal Handling, Elementary Conversation Presence Defense
Linguistic Aptitude (LING)	Barter Clerical Skills Languages, Native Languages, Familiar
Nimbleness (NIMB)	Acrobatics Climbing Missile Defense, Thrown (i.e. Deflection of thrown objects) Running Stealth
Numeric Aptitude (NUMA)	Arithmetic Bookkeeping Gambling Statics
Perceptiveness (PERC)	Analyze Powers Bugging Concealment Disguise Local Knowledges, Common Search Spot Hidden
Scholastic Aptitude (SCHOL)	Botany Chemical Properties Computer Operations History, General Laboratory Techniques Librarianship & Research Practical Law
Physical Aptitude (PHYS)	Brawling Digging Survival, Native Environment Swimming Swinging Tunneling
Scientific Aptitude (SCIEN)	Deduction, Elementary Physics Scientific Method
Social Aptitude (SOCA)	Oratory Basic Culture & Etiquette Teamwork
Technical Aptitude (TECHA)	Construction Maintenance Mechanical Repairs
Vehicular Operation Aptitude (VEHCO) (sometimes referred to as “Mobility Aptitude”)	Machine Operation (includes basic operation of Electronic Devices) Operation, Common Transport #1 (character’s choice, restricted options) Operation, Common Transport #2 (character’s choice, restricted options)
Miscellaneous Aptitude (GENA)	First Aid General Studies Navigation, Land/Sea Wilderness Lore

Most will require no further explanation, and the exceptions are too far off-point.

It’s the Aptitudes that are relevant to this discussion. One way of interpreting them is as different forms of Intelligence. This steps right over the concept of IQ – if you were to try and map it onto the aptitudes, you would find that it’s mostly Logic, which is to say Scientific Aptitude, but with some Numeric Aptitude, a little Numeric Aptitude, and a healthy slathering of Perceptiveness as the “Special Sauce”. Deficiency in any one of them – a relative term – would represent a lower IQ than would otherwise be the case, but it’s the first and last that are the most directly relevant. What’s more, because all the important characteristics of the character are employed in deriving these values, this system avoids the twin fallacies of other attempts that I have seen:

• A character can have an aptitude in something physical, representing how easily the character learns to use what they have got, that is entirely independent of both their INT and their physical characteristic;
• Having such an aptitude does not automatically imply a high score in the physical characteristic that represents how much of the quantifiable capability the character has access to.

Ultimately, what this comes down to is a redefinition of INT itself, one that pushes aside the fallacious notion that IQ and INT are directly related in some fashion. IQ is part of INT, but it is NOT the whole story, and the Aptitudes structure is an attempt to produce a definition by extension: “A holistic abstraction of the character’s capacity to reason, learn, and apply knowledge”. Which explicitly puts IQ scores in their place.

The statistic that I discussed at the start of this article, and its projections forward and back in time, are all very interesting, but only affect one of the three factors that make up INT. If all three are equal in significance, it becomes possible to correct for that. But I have no evidence to that effect. It remains, therefore, an extremely interesting fact, but accommodating it in an RPG involves assumption and interpretation.

That puts the whole question within the purview of the GM, and makes it a part of campaign design – but a question that few would even know to ask. So you have to ask yourself, what is the standard of INT in your campaign?

The metagaming back-door

There’s a back-door solution to the whole mess, a trapdoor down which I expect most GMs to make a hasty escape.

It doesn’t matter what the standards are, because (1) PCs are exceptional, and are therefore exceptions to those standards; (2) the changes in IQ scores are all relative anyway, and so cancel out; and most importantly, (3), the PCs all have to be played by modern-day people, and so that’s the standard that should be employed – with any discrepancies eaten up by point (2).

If that’s your decision, I have no quarrel with it. It certainly negates any need for complicated discussion of the issue, and it neatly grandfathers an explanation into a campaign that’s already underway.

But, when next you are contemplating a new campaign, this is one variable of design that is usually overlooked, and doesn’t deserve to be. So, give it some thought, and – if necessary – adjust the definitions of what any specific INT score really means.

I get all sorts of articles offered to me here at Campaign Mastery. Some are completely irrelevant to the purpose of the site, others so poorly written as to be unpublishable. On rare occasions, one hits the ball out of the park. Some, however, are like this guest article: very well written, articulate in making its point, but only indirectly relevant to tabletop RPGs, let alone how to be more successful at running them, and that’s what the site is all about.

And, on very rare occasions, one arrives that prompts new thoughts in response to the author’s submission that lift it out of that almost-good-enough compartment into something Campaign Mastery is proud to be associated with. So read what Raul has written, and I’ll be back with some thoughts in response.
– Mike

Are All Games Becoming RPGs? A Guest Article by Raul Miranda

You may have noticed it happening when you were selecting your character class in Destiny. Or perhaps whilst working your way through Fifa’s story mode. It could even have hit you when choosing your career path in Stardew Valley. Wherever you look these days, in the online gaming world, RPG elements have spread through the industry like wildfire. From character leveling, to loot and inventory systems, many games have borrowed from the RPG genre, and in most cases it seems to work extremely well. But why is this, and is it always right to do so?

It all started on a board

The early days of the RPG, or role-playing games to give them their full title, introduced us to class systems in games that were previously confined to niche games such as Dungeons & Dragons (which, by the way, is making a surprise comeback) [Actually, it’s neither making a comeback nor surprising that it’s popular, it’s just that the mass media have noticed it again, IMO – Mike]. Different characters had different abilities, and progression systems allowed characters to develop with the player. If you happened to pick a character that was good at fighting, your game would be very different than if you had picked a stealthy character. These characters would also progress through the game, and the character would improve in their particular area of expertise.

The reason this sort of game mechanic has slowly infiltrated other gaming genres is multi-faceted. An often overlooked reason, is that gamers enjoy having unique experiences. When we enjoy a game, we often recount tales of our experiences to friends, and these stories are never as vivid as when we feel a connection to the character we control. It can be as simple as choosing a characters clothes, but these little unique changes build a bond with the characters that we play with. This is also a huge reason why simply allowing a player to name their own character in some of the more ‘story-driven’ online games has become so popular. It is a simple tactic by game developers, but one that has deeper repercussions than we imagine.

This level of customization has obviously become a lot deeper in recent years, with some online shooters in particular allowing for a staggering amount of customization and leveling. Looking at the likes of Battlefield 1, and comparing it to the initial version of Unreal Tournament, can illustrate just how far these RPG elements have traveled outside of their natural home. As you play your character gains experience, and with this comes the ability to purchase better weaponry. The different character classes also allow for different abilities within the game. Medics can heal teammates, Assault class allows for heavier guns, and the Scout class can pick off rivals from a distance with their use of sniper rifles. This may sound very obvious, but it wasn’t long ago that these classes didn’t exist outside of the role-playing game.

Mobile levels up

It is not just console and PC games that have been given the ‘RPG makeover’ either. Mobile games are littered with RPG-style elements too, these days. In fact, mobile games could even be said to suit some RPG elements even better than their ‘full-fat’ brethren; with a lot of mobile games being lighter on ‘action’, due to the fact you don’t usually have a controller (apologies to the Switch owners out there, as you people are straddling two worlds!), and leveling up and customization of characters have become intrinsic parts of the game play. All you have to do is look at the likes of Fallout Shelter, Tiny Towers, or Hill Climb Racing to see how important leveling has become in these games.

Are the elements always needed?

Is it always a good thing though? Well, the answer to this is a firm no. Not every online game should have RPG elements. If you were to instill these nuances in a game like Starwhal or Rocket League, you would take away a lot of the appeal. Games like these rely on a ‘fairness’ factor, and as such, any type of character building would make the game far too slanted in the favor of those who have been playing for longer. They do, however, take the customization concept from RPGs in the form of different ‘skins’, so even when we find evidence of games that really shouldn’t be merged with lots of RPG elements, we can often find that they still have a little ‘role-playing’ in their heart.

So for those of you who love RPGs, you can happily boast about how you favorite genre has shaped gaming more than most. If you happen to hate RPGs [then you’re probably reading the wrong blog – Mike], perhaps a little recognition wouldn’t go amiss, seeing as your favorite game will most probably owe some of its success to those old fantasy RPGs you dislike so much. Either way, it looks like character progression, leveling systems, and character customization are here to stay, and that should be something that we can all agree, is a good thing.

About the Author:

Raul is a freelance writer, based in the UK, that specializes in ‘all things tech’ with a large side order of gaming. After spending five years in the corporate field, he has found himself now writing for various publications across the web, on subjects that are close to his heart, and is much happier for it.

A Tale Of Two Industries: A Reaction, by Mike

It’s inarguable that RPGs and Online Gaming appear to be converging, with RPG elements becoming ubiquitous in computer games, and it’s easy to see why. There are distinct forces at work in both spheres pushing trends toward a similar end-goal.

In the tabletop domain, what started with digital dice-rollers is now rapidly evolving into a completely interactive gaming environment that permits tabletop gaming at a distance. No player need never be isolated again!

I have to admit that I’ve never had the time to investigate fully the current state of the art in these systems; it’s entirely possible that they are even more advanced than I have given them credit for. Certainly, more and more GMs of my online acquaintance are signing up to play or run games on platforms such as Twitch or Roll20.

At the same time, MMOs and “Computer RPGs” are becoming more flexible and incorporating more elements from Tabletop gaming all the time. Again, it’s easy to see why, but it might require a bit more description for tabletop players who may not be quite as familiar with them.

The advantages of RPG elements

There was a time when the only hooks that “computer games” had to keep players going back for more, buying sequels and expansions, or putting coins into slots, were improved graphics and addictive game-play.

The first is technologically-restricted, and it perpetually grows harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. 3D with 32-bit color (which some games now use) is pretty close to photo-realism – it’s now down to 3D-modelling and rendering engines, and processing speeds, and those are often functions of game-play.

Tetris surprised everyone with it’s phenomenal success. It had very limited graphics, but simply oozed addictive game-play. The same could be said for Pac-Man and several other of the classic games.

But innovative and addictive game-play is hard, and change that is not for the better, purely as a point of distinctiveness, actually inhibits player satisfaction.

That leaves only the third plank of game design, the one that I haven’t yet mentioned: story.

Story Progressions

Stories in computer games started simple; there was only one path to victory, and any wrong choice or action resulted in the need to start over. Some games permitted resumption from a fixed reset point prior to the failure, which minimized the annoyance.

It wasn’t long before program sophistication permitted multiple paths to victory, and perhaps even crafted victory message variations. But these were, in reality, simple progressions branching off from the core progression, and the depth was illusory.

Nevertheless, for the first time, story could carry a game despite a slightly dodgy interface and generation-old graphics.

Multiple outcomes and multiple varieties of “winning” brought new levels of sophistication to stories.

At first, this was an artificial development; choices that did not progress the character within the plotline didn’t really make much difference to the outcome; plots were no better nor worse than a choose-your-own-adventure book. Players had only the illusion of choice, or at best, could choose which of a small handful of railroad tracks on which their game’s story would run.

Up to that point, Tabletop RPGs were clearly more advanced than computer games in terms of story, at least in the hands of a half-competent GM, because of the interactivity with players. But Computer Game developers were learning fast, and game plots were becoming more sophisticated and reactive, often with multiple goals that could be pursued, some mutually exclusive. Still, the holy grail was interaction between two (or more) real players; random numbers and personality profiles could never match the creativity of another human.

That’s where MMOs come into the picture. World Of Warcraft was the first, and it is no coincidence that it borrowed heavily from the stockpile of fantasy RPG elements. These days, MMOs seem to be a dime a dozen, some better-executed than others.

Characterization

The second element that computer games drew from RPGs was characterization, first of characters encountered (where it could be faked with narrative) and then with restricted interactions. Slowly, these became more sophisticated in their presentation of personas, and more interactive.

This is not all that surprising; the best stories are an outgrowth of characterization, and it’s hard to keep characterization consistent without pre-programming responses and restricting interactions.

It is impossible to experience the growth in storytelling sophistication beyond artificial progressions without one of two things: interaction with other players who have the capacity to reshape the game, or a strength of characterization that yields a variety of significant responses based not on pure randomness but on stimuli provided by the player and responses.

Character Progression

Character progression is another aspect of computer games that appears, at first glance, to have been imported from tabletop gaming, but in reality, there have been upgrade paths in computer games for a very long time – consider the ship enhancements in Galaga. Heck, even the capacity to earn additional lives can be considered a limited character progression.

In reality, character progression in computer games has mirrored the structure of the narratives that drive, and result from, more sophisticated storytelling. They started simple and linear, evolved through the stages of superficial and artificial progressions, and are now the driving force of complex progression, in which outcomes and encounters vary with the development path chosen by the player.

The form that this progression typically takes has been borrowed from tabletop RPGs because both have the same objective for this subsystem to achieve: the simulation of a complex individual within a rules structure. The only difference is that in a computer game, the rules structure is often covert and implied, part of the programming, while in a tabletop game it is overt, manipulable, and customizable.

This distinction is under siege by certain games, however. One of my long-time friends has been playing a computer game for years for which hundreds or thousands of “mods” and patches have been released that totally transform the game-play and the game functions available. He started writing about the mods that he had selected and why they had been chosen and in the course of doing so, found himself writing a novelization of the ship, it’s crew, and their adventures within the game environment.

And, of course, the D&D adaptions by SSI, starting with 1988’s Pool Of Radiance, which I wrote about when discussing The Success Of DnD, showed that tabletop RPG rules, or a simplified subset thereof, could form the foundations of a computer game (to be fair, my memory is that a computer-based adaption of Empire Of The Petal Throne called Tekumel predated Pool Of Radiance, but I’m uncertain of the dates involved).

Depth Of Interaction

The final RPG element that I am going to discuss in relation to computer games deals with the environment itself, and is also a manifestation of the increased sophistication of plotlines. It used to be that games would not permit you to interact with anyone who was not directly relevant to the plotline; then you could interact with characters who were outside of this plotline, but they were ciphers, cardboard cutouts who were exactly the same every time and in every interaction. This was followed by side-quests with dedicated characters, and then with interactions with real characters created and operated by other players.

Matching this increase in the levels of interaction that were possible was an increase in the number of ways that a character could interact with, and influence, the development of the game environment or world. But this was the big advance that made MMORPGs different from their forebears – for the first time, characters engaged independently in similar quests could interact and/or compete, and when one succeeded, the resulting change to the status of the game world, or its repercussions, could (and would, if they were significant enough) be felt by every other player whether they were involved in that particular quest or not.

Of course, both forms of interaction were inherently a feature of tabletop games practically from the very beginning. Some would say that this was the ultimate responsibility of the GM: to create and roleplay NPCs, to create adventures and administrate the consequences.

The advantages of these elements

One of the great limiting factors on game-play in computer games was always that, after a while, you had done it all. You had explored every alternate ending, completed every side-quest, toyed with every known Easter egg. Simple structures limited the popularity and repeat potential of games, and superficial and artificial enhancements to the sophistication only increased the number of such paths and convolutions beyond the point of tedium. Hence the appeal of a game environment and plotline that are always evolving and never static, that emerge as a shared property of the mutual exploration of the world.

Are Computer RPGs really RPGs?

Computer games may have been progressively integrating RPG elements into their structures, but – as with tabletop gaming – the most important decision is always what to leave out, and that’s a lesson that game developers are having to learn the hard way.

There is a progressive continuum between “pure action” games with no RPG elements whatsoever, and fully immersive interactivity experiences like an MMORPG, with the latter virtually indistinguishable from a tabletop game save that it has pretty pictures to illustrate the action. Any given game to which you point these days will fall somewhere on that spectrum, and the debate is always over where to put the dividing line.

To a certain extent, I wish the computer games industry had chosen its own terminology to distinguish itself from tabletop RPGs; certainly, “games” and “RPGs” as search terms pull up a lot of irrelevant results because both industries use these terms to mean subtly different things, but English (and Google) conflate them – and there is some overlap.

When I read someone’s twitter profile and they describe themselves as a “gamer”, with no clarification, I am sometimes offended by the arrogance as though this were the only type of gaming that existed – because what they mean by the term is that they play and are interested in their type of gaming with limited interest in anything else. I’m sure some of them are wonderful people who meant absolutely no offense, but why make me do all the hard work of interpreting nuances within your profile?

And, certainly, as this evolution continues, so these interests will continue to converge. There’s already a huge degree of overlap behind the scenes. There are undoubtedly lessons for the computer gaming industry in plot structure and rules structure that can be found in tabletop RPGs. Convergence will be almost complete when this information flow begins to reverse – books on narrative structuring for CRPGs that have some insight useful to an TTRPG GM, for example. We aren’t quite there yet (so far as I am aware), but we’re fast approaching that point.

Not every game with RPG-sourced or related game elements is an RPG, regardless of the use of that term by the marketers responsible for promoting and selling copies of the game. It’s even arguable that any game that isn’t an MMORPG is actually an RPG – by the tabletop RPG standards and definition. When you hear debate raging over whether or not games like Assassin Creed: Origins are or are not RPGs, what’s really driving the debate – and what’s ultimately at stake – are the nuances of the definition of what is an RPG. Essentially, such debates arise because a game falls on one side of that boundary line for some, and on the other side for others.

The Bandwagon Effect

There is always a strong bandwagon effect in Computer RPG development. Sideways scrollers were ‘in’ for a while, and then Vertical Scrollers, and then early pseudo-RPGs, and then sports sims, and now it’s RPGs. Every new game needs to incorporate RPG elements in order to be viewed as credible. Unlike previous such trends, however, this one is becoming sustained because of the huge advantages that RPG-related elements offer to a computer game from a sales and marketing perspective.

To whatever extent a game is enhanced by the incorporation of RPG elements, that’s a good thing, but there is a downside that is only reluctantly being acknowledged. As with games that used to tout a new advance in graphic realism, it’s all too easy for game-play to stagnate, and even for games that boast nothing but incredible game-play to face additional barriers to acceptance.

It took almost a decade for Rubik’s Cube to go from being a concept and teaching aid to being a toy and a world-wide success. The first version of Tetris was released in 1984 and it was five years before the massively-popular game-boy version was released. These days, development costs for both types of product have skyrocketed, as has the investment required to bring a successful product to market, and part of that rise has been the shift in the balance between game-play and story.

I do worry that in this rush to incorporate story, game-play is being lost.

Every computer game should be judged on its merits during its development cycle, and only those RPG elements that represent a positive contribution incorporated. But I can’t see that happening until a new terminology evolves in the marketing department, one that identifies in a positive way those games that are not full CRPGs. Nevertheless, at the very least, internal discussions on the point are beginning, as evidenced by articles such as Raul’s, that are questioning the underlying assumptions.

Any game that fits anywhere on that spectrum between pure game-play and pure-RPG should be welcome, with the determining factors always being how much fun they are to play and how strongly they engage the player.

And, ironically, that’s a lesson that tabletop RPG GMs also sometimes need to relearn.

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the process, you also get to know the celebrity a little better. But, for me, one of the greatest benefits of the series are the insights that you get into the ordinary and people of the past and how some of them become shaped by circumstance into extraordinary people.

Australians are fortunate in that we get not only our own domestic series, but also both the US series and the original British series. Between them, they also convey insights into Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Europe, both east and west. The only thing we’re missing is that I think there’s a New Zealand series and selected episodes of that would also be of interest to Aussies.

In any event, I was watching an episode last week, and at one point, a simplified family tree was presented. Instinctively, I thought about the parts of the family tree that weren’t being shown, and I quite suddenly found myself in possession of an insight into the inevitability of extraordinary ancestors that makes the entire series concept viable.

Generations Past

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there’s a 5% chance that an ancestor was or did things that were extraordinary.

1. Two parents: 2 × 5 = 10%
2. Four Grandparents: 4 × 5 = 20%, + 10% = 30%
3. Eight Great-grandparents: 8 × 5 = 40% + 30% = 70%
4. Sixteen Great-great-grandparents: 16 × 5 = 80% + 70% = 150%
5. Thirty-two Great×3-grandparents: 32 × 5 = 160% + 150% = 310%
6. Sixty-four Great×4-grandparents: 64 × 5 = 320% + 310% = 630%
7. One hundred twenty-eight Great×5-grandparents: 128 × 5 = 640% + 630% = 1270%
8. Two hundred fifty-six Great×6-grandparents: 256 × 5 = 1280% + 1270% = 2550%.

The numbers on the left count the generations back into history. Right away, you can see the power of exponential numbers, and also that 5% is WAY too generous. But even if we knock it back to 1%, yielding 510% from the combined total of eight generations, it only makes a difference of scale, not of principle.

But it’s not just the direct ancestors who can be extraordinary. Each and every one of those individuals is part of a family – they not only have fathers and mothers (already counted for 7 of the generations) but they have brothers and sisters. The chance of significance, whatever it really is, shouldn’t be multiplied by 2, but by the average family size for that generation, plus the parents.

And then there are remarriages to consider – although not as common in the past as in modern times, they did sometimes happen, and usually for dramatic reasons.

And, on top of that, we have indirect relationships. “My great-granddaddy ×5 stayed with Thomas Jefferson” or whatever.

Drama Vs Greatness

I touched on a point a moment ago that is worth amplifying. To qualify as an extraordinary ancestor who makes a subject for great television, it’s not necessary for the individual to have been exceptional or Great in any respect; they need only have encountered a sufficiently dramatic situation within their lives and to have failed to crumble under the pressure.

Ordinary people being swept up within extraordinary times are often just as interesting, as can ordinary people trapped by dramatic circumstances. Quite often, you can see the impact that such times have caused on subsequent generations; the show gives you context, and that helps you to envisage how NPCs would react to the circumstances you impose on your campaign.

Because the term “greatness/drama” is a little clumsy, I think that a better term for the qualities described would be Significance and it’s linguistic variants.

Opportunities For Greatness

It can be said that the potential for greatness lies in many, if if not all, of us, lacking only the opportunity for it manifest. I am not so convinced of the first part of that statement – there are so many paths to obscurity and/or ignominy and/or failure and/or timidity – but think that the broader statement might well be accurate.

So, let’s say – for the sake of the argument – that the potential for Significance is that original 5% – but that the opportunity for it to materialize is ALSO about the same.

In effect, that means that the chance of all the ducks lining up in a row will be 1/20th of 5%, or 0.25%.

Let’s look at things another way – if the average size of the extended family (siblings, siblings-in-law, step-parents) in each generation is four, that more-or-less takes us (effectively) back up to the overall 1% chance.

Extraordinary Inheritances

Significant people create Extraordinary Opportunities for their relatives and especially for the descendants. How many times have you heard about an old family friend giving a young man or girl their first opportunity because of the bond with the Significant family member?

And, of course, if wealth or fame are a by-product of the Significance, that has a way of “rubbing off” on the next generation (however inconvenient that might be at times).

People involved in dramatic events, too, are frequently damaged in the process, and that damage can shape subsequent generations. It’s as though the Significance was “sticky”, possessing a residual impact that takes generations to dissipate.

I tried to make this as clearly legible as possible but in order to view this diagram clearly you need to open a larger version in a new tab by clicking the above thumbnail.

The diagram above describes two different models of inheritance of Significance in terms of the effects that are passed down through the generations (and yes, there’s a reason for showing both of them that will become clear). The 50% Model on the left shows each generation being affected half as much as the previous one, with only the individual receiving 100% of the impact – so 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 6.25%, and 3.125% five generations later. 3.125% might not sound like much, but as you will shortly see, it’s enough to be barely noticeable. What is clearly going to be noticeable is the impact on parents and especially grandparents.

The 75/25% Model on the right shows a stronger impact on the immediate family, but one that declines more rapidly – 100%, 75%, 16.25%, 4.06%, 1.01%, 0.25% (these make more sense when you realize that the “75” refers to the initial inheritance and that each generation removed reduces the inheritance to 1/4 of whatever it was previously). The fourth generation after will barely notice the effects, but their parents would be directly influenced by them, even if they don’t realize it.

To get a better understanding of which model is more accurate, let’s look at a realistic case. Person Red-Dot, at the upper left of the family tree, is accused of Murder. He loses his position of trust, his source of income, and the respect of his neighbors as a result of the accusation, and struggles to recoup those losses even though he is found not guilty. He becomes bitter and reclusive.

Consider the impact on his young family. They are pariahs by association, the targets of rumor, slander, and innuendo within the community, and have effectively lost their breadwinner. Hard times follow, as the family relocates several times in an attempt to start over, only for these rumors and tales to follow them.

Each of the children react differently – resentment against the system, a hatred of injustice, respect for the process that eventually exonerated their father, and perhaps, an “upstanding citizen” attitude which demands that all those around them hold themselves to a higher standard and be seen to do so – to be seen, in fact, as a Pillar of the Community.

Given the family history, it’s hard to see how child #4 could tolerate living in the same community as his or her disgraced father, and it’s quite possible that #s 1 and 2 would also strike out on their own. Certainly, there would be extreme hostility between siblings 1 and 4. It’s also likely that Sibling #1 would soon develop his own history with the law.

Any one of these, in the right circumstance, could be the right person at the right time to achieve something Significant or even Great – be it heading a revolution or reform process of some kind (#1), becoming a renowned advocate for individual rights (#2), a lawman of note (#3), or a staunch center around which the populace can rally in troubled times (#4).

The attitudes of these people would certainly also impact on their children and the upbringing those offspring receive, either positively or negatively, but generally speaking, to a lesser extent. They would then make choices in their own lives within the window of potential so created, based on the compound of their personalities and their upbringing, choices that would in turn have impacts upon the succeeding generation.

By now, however, the connection to the original events would be waning, and relatively easily overcome by more immediate circumstances and events. You could say that the third generation were impacted in terms of personality but not circumstance. By the time of the fourth generation, all direct impact from the original event will have dissipated, a skeleton lurking unsuspected in the family closet to be rediscovered at some later date. What persists into this generation are the secondary effects and consequences and reactions to the original event, but in the next generation, even those will have largely faded into obscurity.

It doesn’t much matter what the original event is. “Found Guilty Of Murder”, “Was Murdered”, “Ran off to join the circus abandoning his wife and children”, “was killed in the war” – the same pattern of inheritance, of an immediate impact on the circumstances of the family, of reactions to that impact, of the indirect impact of those reactions on the shaping of personalities, and finally, indirect impact of reactions to those personalities in the fourth generation, would remain approximately accurate.

So the 75/25 model is pretty close to correct.

The Difference between Significant and Dramatic

This pattern changes if the individual achieved Significant deeds rather than merely dramatic ones, because those deeds are likely to open doors for their children that would otherwise remain closed to them.

Those doors represent new opportunities for greatness or for achieving new deeds of significance. It doesn’t much matter if the deeds are in the categories of business, or industry, or politics, or social movement, or entertainment, or war.

This clearly overrides one of the critical factors that seriously impacts the chance of a noteworthy ancestor. It takes a deed of equally-great infamy (or vice-versa) to shut down this chain of “inherited” opportunities, or the passing of considerable time.

Deeds of Significance are therefore more accurately reflected by the 50% model, and moreover, make it possible for the next generation to also achieve something either significant or dramatic, perpetuating and restarting the entire sequence.

The Immediacy Of Impact

Most people know or knew their grandparents personally. Many will have known their great-grandparents as living people within their lifetime – I certainly did, or some of them anyway, even though most died when I was quite young.

That means that Significant Deeds five generations earlier, or Dramatic events three generations earlier, will have had noticeable impact on the life and personality of a relative who you know or knew personally, and who may well have played a role – perhaps a substantial one – in shaping your personality.

Great Grandparents = three generations ago. Add five generations to that, and it can be seen that your life is (at least in part) the result of the cumulative influence of no less than 8 generations of forebears.

Your four-times-great-Grandparents helped shape your life to some degree! Perhaps only a little – there’s plenty of time and opportunity for reversals of fortune in those generations – but the influence, however indirect, will be there.

The Significance For RPGs

PCs, by their very nature, are exceptional people with exceptional opportunities for Great Deeds. Except for sometimes being ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, depending on the campaign concept of the GM.

In fact, it’s not going too far to describe the GMs role as providing the opportunity for Greatness, and the Players’ as deciding when and how to respond to it. Will they take up the challenge and risk failure to achieve Significance? Or will they be cautious and timid and safe, cowering in the fear of being noticed by a predator passing by their small pond? This dilemma stands at the heart of almost all RPGs, regardless of genre. You can interpret everything from D&D to Toon, from Star Trek to Tunnels & Trolls, through this prism.

But – and here’s the important point – should the Player accept the GM’s challenge, the role of the latter changes. That acceptance effectively seals a contract between the two, in which the GM promises the Player the chance to steer the PC to Greatness. This should not come easily, and success should not be assured, but should the PC succeed, it becomes the GM’s obligation to pay out on the “wager”. No welshing, backhanders, caveats, or other tricks.

No PC scheme is ever completely hair-brained if it works, and the unlikely plan at least has the virtue of surprise.

But the outcome is not the only guarantee that the GM has unwittingly made; the method by which this outcome is to be achieved is just as important as the outcome, specifically the pathway to an outcome must be as entertaining to both the player and the GM as the GM can make it. This is the entire premise of Campaign Mastery!

The Significance For PCs

Of course, that’s a very high-level big-picture interpretation of the significance. For most GMs, a lower-level interpretation will be just as useful.

This is a technique by which the GM can directly connect the PCs to the game history and to the Villains, adding to the depth of the character by giving them some personal circumstances to react to from very early on in the campaign. Sometimes, persuading players to put some skin in the game can be the hardest trick of the lot; this solves that problem.

Imagine, for example, that rather than taking up the plot hooks that the GM has been dangling in front of them, the players want to do their own thing. Fine, the GM grudgingly concedes, as he must. But by involving the PCs family history in the situation that the PC is steadfastly ignoring, this act of player rebellion gains a context as an act of PC rebellion against a family legacy that he had no say in (just as the player had no say in what the GM is foisting upon him). And, by virtue of that context, the PC becomes connected to the main plot that the GM wants to run by virtue of their act of rebellion.

On the other hand, should the PC have taken the bait, such a connection to the character’s family history can then emerge to give the PC added investment in the cause or mission. It’s no longer a case of “well, that’s the adventure hook, I guess we should take it” – the decision matters to the PC and to the NPCs around him – his family and childhood friends.

Either way, the PC is suddenly a part of the game world and not a figurehead tacked on to the superstructure of the campaign.

Ancestors of Significance make the campaign Significant to the PC. That’s a powerful tool.

And, of course, it can be taken as read that it can also be used to link exceptional NPCs to the history of the campaign as well. The GM can always do that anyway; the chief benefit here lies in the provision of context and a mechanism of inheritance, and, in particular, getting the GM to consider the possibilities in a more structured and viable way. Being able to pluck ideas from thin air is always good, but such wild fancies are often incompletely viable (let’s be generous), a problem that this technique avoids to a large extent.

Beware Excess

And, as I’ve said on other occasions about other tools that I’ve offered here at Campaign Mastery, the more powerful the tool, the greater the damage that it can do if misused. Don’t attempt to give every PC an ancestor of Significance; most will have only events of high Drama in their backgrounds. The PCs are not all the descendants of some Magnificent Seven of the past; one such is enough, and then have the others drawn into his resulting story. A descendant of the last survivor of such a group is more than powerful enough. Frodo only needed to come into possession of one ring…

Used with flair and delicacy, this can be a very useful addition to your repertoire. But less is definitely more! Use it with restraint.

Related Resources & Discussion

Of course, this isn’t the only genealogy-related tool that I’ve offered here at Campaign Mastery. Most notably, in Throw Me A Life-line, I provided a free planning tool that permits the GM to map the ages of family members to critical events, permitting the impact of those events to be assessed.

You could even suggest that the life-line tool was designed to enable the accurate population of this tool, it is so perfect for the purpose. You’d be wrong, but it would be an understandable error!

I would also be remiss if I didn’t point the reader to Should GMs design a PC’s Family? in which some of the potential benefits – and problems – that could arise from using this tool are discussed. Everything in that article is pretty much relevant to this one.