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.

Since day one of the first part being published, this series has consistently had an entry amongst the top ten here at Campaign Mastery. Whether that magic continues or is subject-dependent remains to be seen, but – for now – I have to consider the serial blog format a success!

Part 1 of this series began a concordance of Seasonal Experiences with Winter descriptions for McMurdo (Antarctica), Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Tahiti, and Cairo.

This is part 2, which will cover Winter in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Miami, New Orleans, and New York City.

Part 3 will contain Omaha, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Honolulu.

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.

8. Winter In Brazil

Although, as a general rule, I have tried to make this about specific locations that could act as exemplars of the weather patterns experienced in that part of the world, it was essential that each location be somewhere that would be immediately recognized by the majority of readers. I didn’t choose French Polynesia, I chose Tahiti; I didn’t choose Egypt, I chose Cairo; and so on. Tropical Jungles are a key environment that needed to be represented, but when you look at a map, there are very few settlements of any size in those central regions of Africa, and certainly none that are household names; and while there are more large settlements to choose from in Brazil (i.e. locations large enough that I might be able to locate weather data for them), most of those hug the coastline and are still not recognizable by name to the majority. Thus, for the first time in this study, I have been forced to report on an entire region.

And it’s no small region, either. While mostly south of the equator, Brazil’s northernmost reaches do penetrate 5 or 600 km (310-373 miles) into the Northern hemisphere, while the southernmost tip of the nation is at roughly the same latitude as the bottom tip of South Africa, which is also the same latitude as Sydney. From it’s most northern projection to it’s most southern, Brazil is roughly 4400 km (2734 miles) in length! That’s the same as from central Guatemala to the northernmost borders of the continental US, or from Cairo to about 200km North of Helsinki, Finland, which shows the scale of the challenge posed by this part of the series!

One of the takeaways from part one that has received a lot of comment is that people never realized before how little distance it took to cause a profound change in the weather patterns experienced. Part of the “mission” for this series is to see whether or not that holds equally true no matter where you go, or do the differences become smaller per km in equatorial regions and/or extreme latitudes. The north-south distance between McMurdo and Hobart is more than TWICE that of Brazil (by a small margin). And if that seems unlikely to you, given the way things look on your world map, I suggest you consult my 2010 article, and still one of the most popular here at Campaign Mastery, Lessons From The West Wing II: The Psychology Of Maps.

This theory – that climatic differences are smaller and more generalized at the equator and the poles than through the temperate regions – will be directly tested by the weather of Brazil, and might just make the whole concept of rationally analyzing the climate of a location this large possible. So let’s get started…

According to Rikshaw Travel, “March to November are dry months and December to February are wet months in Southern Brazil. During the Brazilian winter (June to September) the weather in Rio and the surrounding area is similar to the summertime in Northern Europe. The rainforest areas, Pantanal and the Amazon, are warm and humid all year round. Tropical north eastern Brazil has two seasons, but you’ll hardly notice any difference between the two.”

This seems to divide the nation into three zones (or perhaps four) – a northern and central zone, a coastal zone around the mid-point of the country, and a southern zone. You might get the impression that these are fairly equivalent in size, or at least that the first and last are; and, if South America were rectangular, and you included Argentina on your climate map, the latter impression would be accurate. The reality is that the third zone comprises almost 90% of Brazil, with the second being a very small area in comparison, and the first being somewhere in between these two in size.

Of course, climatologists – who deal with these matters in a far more nuanced way – further subdivide and refine their definitions, as shown by the map to the right.

On the map to the right, the rainforest areas are shown in shades of blue, the Rio areas are a peach color, and the southern area in green.

The Climates To Travel website defines the regions slightly differently. They distinguish between Equatorial Brazil, including the Amazon basin and the Rio pocket, the “almost Mediterranean” Subtropical areas of Southern Brazil, and the Tropical areas consisting of a small portion of the extreme North and the vast majority of the central areas of the nation. This disagreement clearly shows that the differences between regions are of nuanced degrees; you can’t dispute their existence, they are matters of statistical fact, but trying to draw dividing lines is

Because the site provides specifics for each region, the Climates-To-Travel definitions are the areas that I will use for the rest of this section.

But let’s be fair – when you think of Brazil, you think of the legendary weather of Rio writ large over the whole country while thinking of the Amazon rainforest, and that’s an impression that is altogether inaccurate.

Southern Brazil

This part of Brazil is known as the “South Region”. Winter is from June to September. Evenings and nights can be cool; exceptional nights can approach freezing temperature. The farther south you travel, the cooler things get. Some days are cloudy, with rain, but there are also periods with significant sunshine. In fact, the average hours of sunlight per day are a surprisingly consistent 5-6 hours all year round.

Precipitation is the chief differentiation between the seasons. Rainfall is distributed throughout the year, but is less frequent and far less abundant in this time of year. April to September experiences 9 rainy days per month (on average) or less; in June, this tally drops to 6, while in July and August, it is 7. That’s one or two rainy days a week. The typical rainfall is 8-9mm per rainy day (about 1/3 of an inch). Again, the more southerly a location, the more strongly winter becomes the season of predominant rainfall, but the differences are largely statistical and not overly noticeable on the ground.

Although slightly north of the region when state boundaries are used as the basis of definition, Sao Paulo is considered to be on the boundary line between the climates, but is so heavy with atmospheric pollutants that the sunlight is often hazy even on clear days, and visitors frequently suffer nose and throat complaints. The winter weather of this area has been described as being like summer in Europe, especially the Mediterranean regions, as mentioned earlier.

Altitude is also a significant factor, as is proximity to the warmth of the breezes at sea level; the average difference from these factors alone is 3-4°C (up to 7°F), but it can easily be double that on a particular day or when a change comes through. Inland areas at altitude, such as Lages and Sao Joaquim, snow is possible from June to August.

As is typical of coastal areas, the ocean functions as a heat bank, storing vast amounts of energy during the daylight hours (and substantially less when cloud-bound); this produces an increasing pressure differential as the day proceeds, so that morning winds tend to be influenced by the temperatures of the mountains and afternoon/evening by the ocean temperatures. As a general rule, land is hotter than water, unless the land is snow-capped. A significantly cloudy day can lower the temperature of the breezes for several days afterwards even while moderating their strength. From late April through October, the sea temperatures are too cold for swimming, and only truly comfortable from January through March.

Tropical Brazil

Tropical Brazil has two seasons but it can be even more difficult to distinguish between them in the Northeast than it is in the Rainforests. The average temperature is 26°C to 30°C (79-86°F) all year – and remember that the nights will be a little cooler than the heat of the day, so average maximums will be higher. Showers can be refreshing but may seem to do nothing but increase the already-uncomfortable humidity. From Rio south, the variations – night vs day, etc – tend to grow more pronounced, and the occasional sea breeze combines with the high humidity to occasionally cool things down. The rainy season starts in January; the next three months are showers interspersed with periods of sunshine. In April, the rain becomes more frequent and more intense, and the sunshine more and more intermittent, signaling that “winter” (such as it is) is imminent. Warmer weather and sunshine return with the coming of Spring as the rains suddenly become extremely infrequent.

In the areas where the dry season is shortest, the forest can grows as though it were in the equatorial zone, otherwise the vegetation is less dense and more savanna-like, with increasing aridity indicated by the plant life (shrubs, cacti, etc).

In the interiors of states like Bahia and Pernambuco, the annual rainfall is only (on average) 4-500mm (15-20 inches) per year, but rainfall in what is known as the Nordeste is highly irregular, and even though it doesn’t happen often, there can be torrential rainfall leading to the “winter” months (November to March).

Altitude in some areas (500-1000m i.e. 1600-3300′) can temper the heat a little, but has less influence than is expected by those hailing from more temperate climes.

In the far north of Brazil is the Massif of Guyana, another area covered by savannah. Photographs of region are reminiscent of parts of Arizona – if the desert floor were replaced with jungle – and also contain rock formations that are reminiscent of those found in Australia; compare the middle image of the three shown in the montage at the start of this article with that of the Three Sisters (near Sydney) that was included in Part 1 of the series. This region is located just a little north of the equator (from 2.5°N to 5°N), so it is fascinating to observe that the hemispheric seasonal “flip” is so pronounced in the region.

The weather data for Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima, and located close to the extreme south of the region shows the pattern very clearly: February and March are very clearly the driest months of the year, though October through January are only marginally wetter: starting with October, the average number of rainy days per month are 5, 5, 5, 5, 3,and 4. This 6-month range is clearly preceded and followed by transitional months, defining a 1-month autumn and 2-month spring. Humidity is noticeably lower during this period, making it far more comfortable than the rest of the year. Temperature averages scarcely change throughout the year – average minimums range annually from 22°C to 24°C (72-75°F), while average maximums range from 30° to 34°C (86-93°F).

Further east, the “least rainy” period is shorter and runs from September to November – again, the pattern is for “winter” to come later, the closer you are to the coast when close to the equator. As you travel further south, the “winter” season becomes more pronounced and also shifts toward the middle of the year; these impacts combine when you consider the climate of Rio de Janeiro.

July and August are clearly the driest months (only 4-5 rainy days per month), though May (6), June (6), and September (7) are only marginally damp more often. The average rainfall for these periods is more compelling; June and August, 45mm (1.8 inches) in the month, July 40mm (1.6 inches). September is only slightly wetter, receiving 55mm (2.2 inches). April-May and October are clearly transitional months.

Rio is far enough south to experience cooler temperatures in winter; highs from May to October fall to around 25-26°C (77-79°F), and this can be the best time of the year to visit the city unless you want to swim; it’s warm but not hot, the sunshine hours count is good, and rainy periods are rare (but still possible). The exception is because the sea is a bit cool at this time, 22°C or so, though it is still possible to swim if you are brave enough.

Rio marks an internal climatic boundary within the region; south of this point (and excluding the pocket of equatorial climate already discussed), the climate begins to be rainy all year and winter becomes progressively cooler. Typical of this region’s climate in the inland is the national capital Brasilia, where the weather is “pleasantly warm all year round”. A perpetual influence on Brasilia’s weather is the altitude of about 1,000m (3300′) above sea level. Average maximums range from 25°-28°C (77°-82°C) all year round, while average minimums, while a less reliable guide to any particular night, vary from 13° to 18°C (25°-27°F). Nighttime temperatures are more variable, but generally cooler in winter. Winter (May to August), short outbreaks of cold air coming from the south can lower night temperatures to 5°C (41 °F) or occasionally less. Precipitation in Rio defines the ‘dry winter’ period as May to August.

Central Brazil

Also known as the Amazon Plain, but that gives the false impression that the two terms are synonymous. The most accurate name is Equatorial Brazil, which encompasses the Amazonian Plain, but extends beyond it. Most of this region was once the floor of a giant sea, and this area is full of places that have never been seen by anyone but native tribes indigenous to the area. The Brazilian rainforest is home to more “uncontacted tribes” than anywhere else in the world, many consisting of no more than a handful of members. Estimates of over 100 isolated groups are accepted internationally, and in September of 2017 it was reported that one such tribe were massacred by gold prospectors.

“Winter” is June and July, but the differences are marginal; the weather is hot and humid all year round, rarely falling below 20°C (68°F). These months are also the middle of the dryer season, when the wildlife is most active, but also notably less aggressive because food is in ample supply and they are aware that other predators are also active.

Rainfall comes as heavy showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon or evening. Winter is when rain events drop from two in three days to one in three or four. On the monthly scale, this drop is precipitous sudden; while there is a slight progressive buildup from the initial decline, there is an equally-sudden escalation in rain events in December.

Manaus, located in the center of the rainforest region, is fairly typical of the region, and provides a basis against which local variations can be measured.

The coastal city of Belem, for example, is hot and humid all year round (like Manaus) but does receive ocean breezes that can be soothing. Rainfall is more abundant, but follows a similar trend through the year, though the “dry” period (“dryer” period?) is delayed until October-November. The average number of sunshine hours per day for Belem is quite revealing of the weather pattern there: starting in January, these numbers are 4, 4, 3, 4, 6, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 7, and 6.

The dryer period (“less-rainy” period?) runs from August to November in the northern part of the Amazon, and June to September in the south/central part. Heavy rain remains possible in late afternoon regardless of season; these simply become less frequent.

The Salvadore region of the coast is notable for a very similar climate, though marginally drier; trade winds carry moist air from the ocean producing frequent rainfalls, the only difference is that they don’t last quite as long. This region still gets almost 2000mm (75 inches) of rainfall a year, but the interaction of trade winds and other climatic variables a drier summer, with Winter containing the wettest months. Compared with the main tropical region of Brazil, the weather is extremely topsy-turvy; temperatures and humidity tell one story, while rainfall tells another.

9. Winter In Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico (literally, “Port Rich”) is actually an archipelago among the Greater Antilles, consisting of the main island (also known as Puerto Rico) and 142 other islands, cays, and atolls. Of these, the only inhabited lands are the eponymous main island and the islands of Vieques and Culebra.

A Spanish property from 1493, Puerto Rico was obtained by the US as part of the settling of the Spanish-American War by the Treaty Of Paris. The citizens are, by law, natural-born citizens of the US and able to move freely between the island and the mainland.

Because it is not a state, Puerto Rico does not have a vote in the US Congress, though they have a non-voting representative called a Resident Commissioner. American Citizens residing in Puerto Rico are disenfranchised at the national level beyond this representative; they do not vote for the President or Vice-President, do not pay federal income tax, does not elect Senators, and the supreme political document is a constitution which permits residents to elect a Governor as well as local Senate and House.

While the numbers may give the appearance that the majority of citizens are indifferent to the question, a significant number have repeatedly shown a strong preference for full statehood over the present status as an Unincorporated Territory, arguing that the region’s needs are overlooked because of it’s status. The false impression is raised because one of the two major parties boycotted the last referendum on the subject. A second factor involves the government debt crisis that emerged in early 2017 after a decade-long recession. By August of last year, the debt was US$72 billion, the population was about 3.7 million, about 45% of whom lived in poverty.

Less than two months later, the territory was devastated by Hurricane Maria; the main island’s electrical grid was destroyed, creating the largest power outage in American History. Communications were also severely disrupted, roads cut, buildings leveled, etc. The total damage was estimated at US$95 billion, a situation worsened by the economic crisis which left the government ill-equipped to respond. By the end of November, FEMA had received more than a million applications for aid, and approved about a quarter of the requests. Many of the population found themselves without employment.

By the end of November 2017, more than 200,000 residents had relocated to Florida. It is estimated that despite the reported difficulties of the relocatees accessing health care and educational services, up to 14% of the population will depart for the mainland by 2019. Infrastructure and economic recovery is still continuing. It is accepted that completing that process and repairing the already-damaged economy will take years, and may not be complete by the time of the next Hurricane strike. Almost half the residents were still without electricity as of December, 2017, but two-thirds of the hotels have now reopened, for example.

Geographically, the main island is approximately rectangular, with a long-axis length of 180km (110 miles) and a maximum north-south length of 65 km (40 miles). The terrain is mostly mountainous with large coastal regions in the south and especially the north. The main mountain range is “La Cordillera Central” (The Central Range); the tallest peak of this range is Cerro de Punta at 1338m (4390′).

Puerto Rico has 17 lakes, all man-made, and more than 50 rivers, most originating in the Cordillera Central. Rivers in the northern region are typically longer and of higher water flow rates than those to the south, which receives less rain than the central and northern regions.

The Caribbean and North Atlantic tectonic plates intersect about 115km (71 miles) north of Puerto Rico at the Puerto Rico Trench, and the archipelago is being deformed by the resulting stresses, which can cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and (routinely), landslides. There has not been a major earthquake since 1918.

The climate is considered to be that of a Tropical Rainforest. San Juan, the largest city, is at a latitude of almost 18.5° North of the equator, so comparisons with the climate of Rio de Janeiro should be especially interesting (see ‘Tropical Brazil, above). Of course, being on the other side of the equator, the seasons will be reversed relative to that part of the world.

Temperatures are warm to hot all year, averaging near 29°C (85 °F) in lower elevations and 21°C (70°F) in the mountains. Easterly trade winds pass across the island year round. Puerto Rico has a rainy season which stretches from April into November; the winter is the dryer season. The mountains of the Cordillera Central are the main cause of variations in the temperature, wind speed, direction, and rainfall, and these can occur over very short distances and short time-spans. One source describes forecasts as “locally unstable” and indicating a general summary more than an accurate prediction.

Seasonal changes in the daily temperatures of the main island are quite small in the lowlands and coastal areas. The temperature in the south is usually a few degrees higher than the north and temperatures in the central interior mountains are always cooler than those on the rest of the island. The average maximum is 30°C (84.5°F) and the average minimum 19°C (82.4°F). Winter is roughly 3.3°C (6°F) cooler than summer, mainly due to the warm waters of the Atlantic, which significantly moderate cooler air moving in from the north and northwest.

The levels of sunshine scarcely change all year round, being consistently 8-9 hours a day, on average. Winter is the driest period of the year, running from January to March; December and April-June are transitional months, according to the average rainfall levels (with a significant anomaly in June). However, the rainy-day count per month displays the complexity of the local weather systems; January’s average is 17, very similar to that of the rainy period, while those of February, March, and April are 13, 12, and 13, respectively.

Coupling these facts together shows that winter starts with rainy periods declining in intensity and duration; over the next 3 months, they decline in frequency very consistently before abruptly increasing in intensity and/or duration but not frequency at the end of the winter season, as shown by the graph.

San Juan officially has a tropical monsoon climate. In winter, temperatures can drop as low as 16°C (60°F), though the average winter low is 6°C (11°F) warmer than that.

On average, a quarter of the annual rainfall comes from tropical cyclones, which are more prevalent during periods of El Nina than El Nino; a cyclone of tropical storm strength passes near to Puerto Rico every 5 years on average, while a hurricane passes the vicinity once every 7 years. However, a near miss is sufficient to cause significant infrastructure damage, as was the case prior to Hurricane Maria in 2017, another contributing factor to the region’s problems. Half of the hospitals were already operating on emergency generator power, for example.

Following Maria, the Jones Act’s protectionist measures were waived by President Trump for a mere ten days. This act essentially doubles the cost of goods relative to their neighbors. The manifest inadequacy of this relief measure means that tourism is the best means available to the locals for influxes of wealth and a return to (relative) prosperity.

Hence, there were numerous official declarations in the course of December that the island was once again open for tourism, and tourist attractions and accommodations were prioritized in term of restoration of services. This was the cause of some dissatisfaction at the time, but is at least understandable as the least-worst choice under the circumstances.

The peak season for tourism is Winter, but the advice offered by most travel sites is that most people will enjoy a better experience if they visit between mid-April through June, sandwiching your time in between the busy winter season and the rainy summer. Hotel prices can be over US$100 per night in the peak season, and as little as US$80 right after it, which adds up over a week or so.

Key events for this time of year include the San Sebastian Street Festival (January), the Maricao Coffee Festival (February), the Casals Festival (February-March), and the Ponce Carnival (March). The Puerto Rican Tourism Company will reportedly be announcing a series of ‘Rebuild Days’ where supporters of the island can come and contribute to its recovery, but none have yet been added to the event calendar. Some hotels are also organizing their own “voluntourism” efforts for guest volunteers.

Viewing that event calendar makes it clear that the majority of entertainments are smaller and more local in scale than those relatively major festivals – think more of numerous street parties with different themes, leavened with museum tours, historical re-enactments, art classes and demonstrations, and the like.

Puerto Rico is noted for celebrating Christmas/New Year from shortly after Thanksgiving (which is the fourth Thursday of November each year) until three weeks into January – almost 2 months of seasonal festivities, which culminate in the aforementioned San Sebastian Street Festival on the third weekend of January. San Sebastian st in old San Juan closes for four days of music, parades, and religious processions that have been described as the Puerto Rican Mardi Gras.

There are a number of unique cuisine specialties on offer at this time of year, including lechón asado (roasted pork), pollo guisado (chicken stew with potatoes and green olives), pasteles (mashed green bananas stuffed with meat and wrapped in banana leaves) and the coconut-based coquito (the Puerto Rican version of eggnog) which is available at almost every bar.

Some attractions remain closed for post-hurricane repairs, such as the EL Yunque National Park.

Most of the above information derives from Wikipedia and from the US News Travel Site‘s page, among numerous lesser reference sources.

10. Winter In Miami

My first exposure to Miami was almost certainly original episodes of Flipper when I was a child. I saw only one or two episodes of the Golden Girls and knew Miami Vice only through its associations and mentions in other popular culture such as John (Cougar) Mellencamp’s hit, “Miami”. No, until CSI Miami and True Lies came along, I think I knew more about the state of Florida in general than about it’s largest city. My general impression was always that it was “America’s Brisbane”, so it will be interesting to compare the information offered in part 1 for that city to what I’ve been able to glean about the American metropolis!

Well, to start with, Miami is a lot bigger than this impression would convey. Miami is the second-largest city in the South and East combined, by population, and has the third tallest skyline in the US with more than 300 high-rise buildings. It has branches (possibly even head offices) of more international banks than anywhere else in the US, and is second only to New York City as a tourism hub.

Not all of my early impressions are so inaccurate. Miami was ultra-conservative during the 1920s, with the chief of police proud to be a member of the KKK. Populations were relatively low until a land boom in this period, but the triple-punch of the end of that boom, the 1926 hurricane, and the Great depression slowed development. World War II saw Miami become a base for US Submarines defending against German submarines, which increased Miami’s population to a little over the 172,000 mark by 1940 – hardly a huge population!

The 1959 rise to power of Fidel Castro in nearby Cuba saw many Cubans relocate to Miami, and of course, the 1960s brought the Space Race to Florida. Seemingly overnight, the state went from being a half-forgotten backwater to being one of the best-known in the country, and what everyone knew about it was the sunshine. By the late 1970s it was known internationally as one of the favorite retirement destinations in the US, but few stopped to think about what that actually meant.

Every retiree requires several working-age people contributing to the economy in order to support them, and people go where the jobs are. On top of that, tourism was booming for the state, and Miami was the hub of it. By 2006, that 172,000 people had grown to 5.5 million – which means that on average it was doubling every five years. The city acquired the nickname “The Magic City” as a result of this rapid growth, winter visitors remarking that the city had grown so much from one year to the next that it was like magic.

While this growth has slowed, overall, one area in Downtown Miami saw a 2069% increase in population in the 2010 Census. One mitigating factor is that there is an ongoing migration of white residents out of the city, and that is having a profound effect on the demographics.

Racial distribution in Miami is less homogeneous than I would have expected, as shown by the accompanying map. Miami has the highest population of foreign-born residents of any city world-wide (59% in 2004, followed by Toronto, Canada with 50%), but is considered more of a multicultural mosaic than a melting pot; ethnic populations tend to congregate and retain to varying degrees their cultural traits.

The overall culture of Miami is heavily influenced by the large Hispanic population and Caribbean islanders. More than 70% of Miami’s residents over 5 years of age in the 2010 census spoke only Spanish at home, and Miami has the highest proportion of residents who speak languages other than English in the home of all US Cities (74.55% in 2000). Because of the migration of English-speakers out of the state, those percentages are expected both to have risen and to continue to rise, though recent improvements in Cuba-US relations will have an impact that has not yet been assessed.

However, cultural amalgamation has been taking place in the culinary domain, which has blended general American cuisine with strong influences from the Caribbean and Latin America to produce a unique Southern Florida style known as Floribbean Cuisine.

Fifteen miles (24 km) off the coast, the Gulf Stream warms the ocean, producing a climate that is warm and mild all year round. In terms of latitude, Miami is almost 26° North of the equator, which is very comparable to Brisbane’s almost 27.5°S. Officially, Miami has a tropical monsoon climate with a marked dry season in the winter. Winter temperatures generally range between highs of 73-80°F (23-27°C) and lows of 60-63°F (15.6-17.2°C).

However, periodic cold fronts in the course of the season bring cool air which settles over the city and produces much of the rainfall in this time of year; on average, 10-15 nights will experience lows below 50°F (10°C) following the passage of cold fronts.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in Miami is 27°F (-2.8°C) (Feb 3, 1917). Miami has never officially recorded snowfall since records have been kept, but snow flurries fell in some areas on January 19, 1977. There are also anecdotal accounts of flurries that lasted several hours before melting back in February 1899.

Hurricane Season is officially over at the start of Winter, but storms can strike later than the November 30 end-date. Miami experiences more thunderstorms than most US cities, with thunder reported, on average, 80 times a year. These storms are often strong with frequent lightning and very heavy rain; occasionally, they can be severe with damaging winds and large hail. Tornadoes and Waterspouts are also occasionally reported. I have no times of year for these occurrences, but assuming that hurricanes are excluded, it seems most probable that the November and March-April intermediate years are more susceptible.

As usual, though, once you start looking at the finer details, some of those generalizations become obscured (Summer in Miami is especially affected by this).

November is very clearly a transitional month between seasons; it’s temperatures are almost exactly mid-way between those of October (Autumn) and December (Winter). January is slightly colder than either December or February. March and April are, once again, transitional months, with March trending closer to Winter and April being warmer than November by a couple of degrees.

December has slightly more rainy days than January, which in turn has slightly more than February, but the rainfall is clearly monsoonal in pattern; the number of wet days in November is only one higher than those of December, and while the number increases from February to March ever so slightly, it drops to an even lower average in April. Overall, throughout the season, 6.5-7 rainy days will be experienced.

However, the average rainfall received declines from December through January but then begins to increase slightly with each passing month, so even though the number of rainy days may be low, the intensity of precipitation when it does tends to increase, or the rain tends to last longer when it does happen.

It’s worth observing that the southern tip of Florida, which includes Miami, has a very different climate to the majority of the state, which is considered subtropical.

During El Nino periods, Miami becomes cooler than normal in winter with above-average precipitation, while in La Nina, it becomes warmer and drier than normal.

Miami’s winter has a notable ecological impact; the occasional low temperature extremes in January and February, are sufficient to kill several tropical species, opening the environment up to colonization by more northerly species. When the weather returns to normal, the tropical species can and sometimes do return; so the biodiversity of the region is in a constant state of flux.

Miami’s tropical weather permits outdoor activities all year, and the city has numerous marinas, rivers, bays, canals, and of course, the Atlantic Ocean; boating, sailing and fishing are popular activities. Biscayne Bay has numerous coral reefs that make snorkeling and scuba diving popular. Zoo Miami is world-famous.

In recent years, Mayor Manny Diaz has led the city government to an ambitious stance in support of bicycling in Miami both for recreation and commuting. “Bike Miami” is a monthly event in which major streets in Downtown and Brickell are closed to automobiles but not to pedestrians or those riding bicycles. An extensive 20-year plan for the construction of bike routes and paths around the city was approved in 2009, and by law all future construction from that date must accommodate bike parking.

As a general rule, Spring is the peak tourist season for the region. Nevertheless, there are plenty of “winter” activities on offer:

• Every Friday and Saturday in December (often with extra dates as well), hundreds of thousands of fairy lights illuminate the trees at Zoo Miami. This is known as the “Zoo Lights”, and it is one of the most popular attractions at the start of Winter.
• This is also a popular time for Everglades Airboat Tours.
• January is headlined by the Miami Jewish Film Festival, with almost 100 feature-length and short films screened at multiple venues throughout the city.
• There is an annual Arts Festival at the University Of Florida’s Miami Campus in mid-January. This time of year also brings various themed exhibitions, fashion shows, and movie screenings on the sand of the beach; the 2017-18 theme is Art Deco. It isn’t clear from my research whether other years have different themes.
• A week or so later, the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden dedicates three days to it’s annual International Chocolate Festival. Activities include sample tastings, demonstrations, and lectures from some of the worlds leading chocolatiers. This is an event that appears to be growing in reputation and prestige.
• The end of the month brings the richest horse race in the world (a US$16 million purse), the Pegasus World Cup, on the Saturday at Gulfstream Park, with a party atmosphere described as bordering on that a South Beach Nightclub.
• That’s followed the next day by the Miami Marathon and Half Marathon.
• The last Saturday of the month brings the quarterly “Keep Winter Park Beautiful Watershed Cleanup.
• In mid-February the 5-day Miami International Boat Show rounds out the season’s attractions.

Of course, there are also numerous conferences and conventions taking advantage of the off-season discounts to take advantage of the winter sunshine.

And, if you want to get some idea of the retiree lifestyle, check out JAG Season 3 Episode 15, “Yesterday’s Heroes” which includes numerous such details, often in the background of scenes, occasionally more prominently. If you’d seen it, you would probably remember it; there is a prominent guest-star appearance by Ernest Borgnine.

And for more local color, and depending on when your game is set, Miami Vice and/or CSI Miami might be just what you need.

11. Winter In New Orleans

New Orleans seems to always be in one of four situations: Imminent Disaster, Disaster, Recovery, or the Good Times in between each trilogy. You almost need to treat the city as it was prior to Hurricane Katrina as a completely different entity to the one that is there now.

Katrina displaced 800,000 residents according to some reports. Think about that for a moment. Only 15 US cities have a higher population, according to the 2010 Census (the number might be as high as 17, now, according to official estimates). And that’s just the number who were forced out of their homes for an extended period of time.

In 2006, the population was 49% of what it had been prior to Katrina. By 2008, that was back up to about 74% according to census bureau estimates. By 2010, neighborhoods that had not been subjected to flooding were at or near pre-Katrina levels, but those that had been flooded were still only sluggishly recovering, if at all.

Looking at it another way, pre-Katrina, New Orleans was the 31st largest city in the US (2000 census); it is now the 49th, having fallen to the bottom end of the 300 largest cities immediately after the Hurricane struck.

Like many Australians, the situation when Hurricane Katrina struck reminded me of the devastation by Cyclone Tracy of the northern Australian city of Darwin over Christmas, 1974. That storm killed 65, caused AU$837 million in damage (1974 dollars, that’s more than 6.5 Billion today), and leveled 80% of the houses. Virtually the entire city was evacuated, and had to be rebuilt; many residents never returned. Some advocated moving the entire city to a new location. By 1978, much of the city had recovered and was able to house almost the same number of people as it had before the cyclone hit. That was less than four years – to rebuild in a remote location with traumatized citizens, to an entirely new building code, and despite several bungles along the way.

“Surely, no matter how badly the initial response by FEMA had been, a nation with the might and resources of the USA would not take anywhere near so long to rebuild New Orleans,” ran the widespread expectation of those on the outside.

In Episode 3 of Series 9 of Top Gear, the show did a special – The Used American Car for $1000 Challenge – in which the presenters wanted to know if it was easier to buy a cheap car for a holiday rather than buy one. Their journey takes them from Miami to New Orleans, which they expected to have fully recovered by now – after all, Katrina had been more than a year ago. Instead, they found the city still devastated. The planned conclusion had been for the presenters to sell their cars to see how much they could get back of their initial $1000, but upon seeing the damage, they abandoned the challenge and gave the cars away, or tried to.

It was one thing to read that the recovery was proving difficult, quite another to see it.

The next media report of impact, internationally, was an episode of the Foo Fighters documentary series, Sonic Highways, in 2014. While much of the episode focused on the unique heritage of New Orleans, both culturally and musically, a sense emerged of a city that was integrating the damage into its collective culture and rediscovering its roots in the process. From the outside, life in New Orleans seemed to be returning not to normal, but to a new “normal” that had been shaped by the challenges of the city’s recent history.

That’s an impression sustained by the third major media appearance of the city outside of feature films – as the host location for NCIS: New Orleans, which actually premiered at about the same time as Sonic Highways. But it’s a significant part of the background that recovery from Katrina has not been equal in all neighborhoods.

So central to the reality of New Orleans is this state of affairs that simply to make the available photographic references relevant to my Zenith-3 campaign, which is based in New Orleans 2056, that I needed to throw another fictitious Hurricane at the city into the campaign’s background some ten years prior to the in-game date of play commencing.

Architecturally, New Orleans is what I would call “differentiated”. Several different parts of the city have unique styles that instantly identify them. Breaking these patterns down is beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say that the architecture reflects the history, and needs specific research before New Orleans can be used as a template or setting.

The “America” section of the Wikipedia page on French Architecture is a start, but your next stop after absorbing that information should be the Buildings and architecture of New Orleans page, which doesn’t appear to have a link from the main New Orleans page for some reason.

New Orleans is split by the Mississippi River, with both the French Quarter and CBD on the northern side of the river. The CBD is home to skyscrapers that could belong to any metropolis; but the rest of the city is far more distinctive. Wikipedia has a separate article on the French Quarter as well as articles on many of the other districts that can be accessed from links on that page. Ironically, the iconic balconies of the French Quarter that are so recognizable these days were copied from Spanish architecture and then given a trademark stylistic French twist.

That’s actually a reasonably good motif for the city as a whole – selective integration of an outside cultural element which is then modified in style to integrate it with the base culture of the region.

Readers wanting to use New Orleans as a model or setting should also have a link to Wikipedia’s Neighborhoods in New Orleans page. While this page is little more than a collection of links to other pages, and doesn’t even have a map of the city’s districts to which it refers, it is nevertheless a vitally-useful resource that I have employed a number of times.

Geographically, one of the challenges that the city poses is that of determining whether an image is showing the river or Lake Pontchartrain; that 630-square-mile body of water lies to the North of New Orleans, and home to the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which is the longest straight bridge over water, world-wide. In fact, New Orleans started as a Native American portage site between the lake and the river.

The lake is a key geographic feature in terms of its influence over the climate. During a hurricane, wind can push water into the lake from the Gulf Of Mexico, and from there, it spills into New Orleans.

A hurricane in 1947 flooded much of Metairie, a CDP that forms a major part of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area, much of which is slightly below sea level due to land subsidence after marshland was drained. After the storm, hurricane-protection levees were built along Lake Pontchartrain’s south shore to protect New Orleans and nearby communities. A storm surge of 10 feet (3.0 m) from Hurricane Betsy overwhelmed some levees in eastern New Orleans in 1965, while storm surge funneled in by the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal and a levee failure flooded most of the Lower 9th Ward. After this the levees encircling the city and outlying parishes were raised to heights of 14 to 23 feet (4.3 to 7.0 m). Due to cost concerns, the levees were built to protect against only a Category 3 hurricane; however, some of the levees initially withstood the Category 5 storm surge of Hurricane Katrina (August 2005), and post-Katrina investigation showed that they had not actually failed to withstand the storm but had in fact failed due to faulty design, inadequate construction, or some combination of the two.

It’s noteworthy that while repairs have been carried out post-Katrina, any design/construction deficiencies remain, and funding is not available to strengthen the levees; the devastation of Hurricane Katrina will eventually strike again should this not change. This adds to the credibility of my creation of “Hurricane Landau” in the Zenith-3 campaign, which I referred to earlier. In fact, redevelopment of the Pines Village area and attempts to extend the CBD eastward of the Industrial Canal has produced the skyscraper that is the teams Headquarters – again a case of art imitating life, as this district was “significantly impacted” by Katrina, with more than 90% of residential properties as well as nearly all commercial properties in the neighborhood received flood damage, wind damage, or both. So it seemed credible that it could happen again. The pressure for growth of the CBD and the absence of viable alternative directions – the Lake lies to the north, the River to the south, and the tourist/cultural/protected French Quarter to the west – it seemed likely that this residential district would be rezoned and re-imagined. This is a good example of how existing reality can be extrapolated to obtain a credible adventure setting.

Which brings me to the climate. This is information that I’ve been meaning to research for quite some time for use in that campaign, so it’s important for me to get it right – and to use what I need for this to set the standards for climate reports for everywhere else!

To start with, Wikipedia has climate data for two locations: the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which is the default shown by the site, and Audubon Park in New Orleans. The former is actually about 11 miles west of downtown Los Angeles, and its weather is representative of the “Uptown” region of the city, while the latter is 6 miles west of the CBD. If both were equal in levels of detail, I would unhesitatingly choose the Park as the basis of this part of the article; they aren’t. It follows, based on my local experience here in Sydney, that the weather information available is only going to be generally accurate for most of the city.

Technically, the climate is considered to be “Humid Subtropical” with ‘short, mild, winters’ and ‘hot, humid, summers’. This is a summation that falls short of reality. One nickname for the city is “The Steamy City” – and they aren’t just talking about amorousness in the French Quarter!

Winters are cold in New Orleans and run from December to February, though they can start early and linger for a month, especially in terms of night-time minimums. Days can be warm-to-hot even in winter, however (only the degree varies), and the humidity is around the 75% mark (±3%) all year round.

In December, the typical high is almost 65°F (18°C), and the average of the hottest temperature of the month for the last 30 years is almost 80°F (26.5°C). The record high is four degrees F hotter again.

In January, those numbers are less comfortable: 62.1°F (16.7°C) is the typical high during the month, the average of the hottest temperature for the month is 77.2°F (25.1°C), and the record is 83°F (28°C).

Daytime Temperatures warm noticeably, even if just a little, in February. The typical high is 65.4°F (18.6°C). The 30-year average of the monthly high is 78.9°F (26.1°C), which at the usual humidity levels is warm enough to be just a little uncomfortable. The record high is 85°F (29°C), which is a warm day, anywhere!

At night, temperatures are far less temperate, and nightly lows can be thought of as extending Winter into both November and March. I haven’t done so, instead regarding those numbers as the cooler end of the seasonal transition, but a resident would probably feel differently. As with many places, warning of the oncoming Winter occurs at night, and its memory lingers after dark even after the days begin to warm up.

The normal daily low in December is just below 47°F (8.3°C), with at least one day in the month shivering at an average of just 29.6°F (-1.3°C) – which, of course, means that some years will be warmer than that and some colder. The record low for December is just 11°F (-12°C).

January is, unsurprisingly, cooler again. The average low is 44.7°F (7.1°C), and at least one day will usually experience temperatures on average of 27.6°F (-2.4°C) – which means the same thing in January as in December: some winters will be (relatively) mild, with temperatures that rarely drop below freezing for very long, while others will be bitterly cold. The record low for January is higher: 14°F (-10°C), which gives some indication of the degree of variation around those monthly minimums: 27.6-14=13.6° degrees of variation. Assuming something approaching a normal distribution (a dumbbell curve), you can guesstimate that somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 of that difference is usually what is experienced – so the coldest night of the month will usually be 27.6°F±5.6°F.

February is noticeably slightly warmer at night than January, too. The average low is 48.0°F (8.9°C), with temperatures as low as 31.3°F (-0.4°C) or less being recorded at some point, most years. The record low is still a chilly 16°F (-9°C), indicating that there is slightly more variability about the nightly temperatures in this month.

On average, New Orleans experiences 8.1 days per winter where the high does not exceed 50°F (10°C), and 8 nights with freezing lows. The temperature rarely falls as low as 20°F (-7°C) but it has happened. A small amount of snow fell during the 2004 Christmas Eve Snowstorm and again on Christmas (December 25) when a combination of rain, sleet, and snow fell on the city, leaving some bridges icy. The New Year’s Eve 1963 snowstorm affected New Orleans and brought 4.5 inches (11 cm). Snow fell again on December 22, 1989, when most of the city received 1-2 inches (2.5-5.1 cm). The last significant snowfall in New Orleans was on the morning of December 11, 2008. That’s 4 times (counting 2004 as one) in 55 years, or an average of once every 13.75 years.

Winter receives noticeably fewer sunshine hours than any other time of year – 157.8, 153, and 161.5, respectively. Compare those numbers with the monthly average over the entire year of more than 220; in late Spring and early summer, the monthly averages peak at 275 or better. That’s a substantially greater average – by about 2 hours less a day – than can be accounted for from shorter days, indicating that cloud cover is far more common and substantial during the winter.

Rainfall patterns are also distinctly different within the four seasons. The easiest way to synopsize them is for the city to have two rainy seasons, one (summer) dramatically greater than the other (winter). Winter rainfall usually accompanies the passage of a cold front; the average number of rainy days in the winter months is 9.2, 9.3, and 8.8, respectively, but if you correct February to a theoretical 30.5 days, you actually get a comparative value of 9.5 rainy days per month. As a general rule of thumb, that’s a consistent 1 day in 3, slightly more in February than December, but the difference is the sort of trend that is only noticeable statistically; daily weather variations are more than enough to completely obliterate it in any given year.

The same distinct pattern appears when you look at the amount of rain received. In fact, if you except the month of June, the rainfall per rainy day average is remarkably consistent over the entire year. Winter falls average slightly heavier (0.6 inches / 15.2 mm) than Spring / Autumn (and most of Summer too) at 0.5 inches but once again annual variations would completely overwhelm this. It’s worth noting that Hurricane Katrina occurred in August, and so is included in that ‘remarkably consistent’ average!

Let’s talk about things to see and do during this season in New Orleans. If you want to avoid Mardi Gras crowds, December and January are considered the best time to visit the city. Note that some of the events listed below appear not to have been reinstated following Hurricane Katrina, but – given the propensities of the locals – that would seem to be but a matter of time.

That doesn’t mean that you would be in for a quiet time! It’s not true that there is a band on every corner – some are in basements, and many in pubs and clubs and the like. Music, especially gospel and Jazz, is everywhere. Frenchmen Street, where an entire block is lined with music clubs, helps raise the average.

On top of that you have the famous New Orleans Funeral processions – somber, mournful, and respectful on the way to the burial, a mobile street party on the way back. If you can play an instrument, you are expected to at least consider joining the ad-hock carnival, and anyone is welcome to participate in the festivities. Many people join in as the ‘party procession’ approaches them, stay for a city block or two, then drop out – quietly relinquishing their places to new arrivals doing exactly the same thing.

New Orleans residents will throw a parade or festival with just about any excuse, and it’s rare for a weekend not to contain at least one.

Once you have your head around the musical ubiquity, the next thing you need to understand is that parties rarely stay confined. It’s perfectly legal and socially acceptable to take a leisurely stroll with a cup of wine or a cold beer, and most venues can’t accommodate the number of patrons who gather, so they spill out onto the streets. This sort of culture will be very familiar to Australians of a certain vintage – before the wowsers began to clamp down.

In December the city is festooned with Christmas-themed decorations in every direction – up, down, left, right, and sideways. Child-friendly activities are commonplace during the season, from the Teddy Bear Tea with Santa at the Royal Sonesta to a festival of lights in City Park known as Celebration Under The Oaks, with rides, displays, wandering characters, stalls, music, and more. Then there is the Reindeer Run and Romp, a ‘marathon’ for kids down Canal Street, the main thoroughfare of the city. Participants receive t-shirts, antlers, and a bag of goodies.

There’s also an adult version held a little later in the month called the Running Of The Santas, which is actually part of a larger social activity in locations both American and International. The notion is that you run a bit, drink some alcohol, run some more, repeat. In Australia, we’d call it a pub crawl with added athletics. Live music and DJs are an essential part of the mix, and entrance fees are donated to charity.

Traditionally, this is also the time when it is most permissible to ‘get creative’ with traditional dishes like Gumbo, so food-wise the city can be an adventure that is perpetually reinventing itself. Also throughout the month, many restaurants serve 5-course “Reveillon Dinners”, a tradition that hearkens back to New Orleans’ time as a predominantly Catholic city and Creoles would end their Advent Fast with a huge celebratory late-night Christmas Eve dinner.

This is Oyster Season in New Orleans; while this romantic delicacy can be enjoyed year-round in the city, months that end in “R” are considered the best time for them.

Football is very popular in New Orleans and December is when the Saints are drawing to the end of their season, so it’s either a good time or an abysmally poor time to mention the subject to a local. Basketball is growing in popularity, with the local team being the Pelicans, and support is no less fervid.

Throughout the month, free classical and jazz music concerts are held many nights of the week in the St. Louis Cathedral in the heart of the French Quarter.

New Orleans has one of the oldest Jewish communities in the United States and during Hanukkah there is usually a full program of festivities such as concerts and other community events, attendance of which is open to all.

There is a tour (expensive) of some of the older homes in the Garden District of New Orleans, often the only opportunity that the public has to view these historical landmarks inside and out. This is a fundraising effort for the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans.

New Years’ Eve sees small celebrations throughout the city but the entire French Quarter essentially erupts into one big party, with fireworks and the unique (and slightly mad) “dropping the baby” New Year’s countdown. Not a real baby, but some sort of confectionery version, as I understand it, which is lowered or dropped from the roof of the Jax Brewery, where the French Quarter meets the River.

January 6th is the traditional date for buying and consuming King Cakes from one of the many vendors who supply them – everyone from bakeries (who you would expect) to Cochon Butcher (who you would not) gets involved. And that is followed (on the 29th this year) by a King Cake Festival.

January also includes the Sugar Bowl, an annual college football game played in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, and the Anniversary of the conclusion of the Battle Of New Orleans pm January 18th. And February-March is the Mardi Gras, of which little more need be said – I’ll save THAT for the Spring section!.

Some activities are all-year around attractions. Magazine Street, for example, is a 6-mile strip of tiny boutiques, snazzy cafes, quirky shops and art galleries.

Bicycle tours are offered by several venues, often with a high-class meal provided as part of the package. Bikes are also popular modes of transport for locals.

There is a National World War II Museum, the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, the Backstreet Cultural Museum, the Audubon Nature Institute (which has a Zoo, an Aquarium, and an Insectarium), the Louisiana Children’s Museum, Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World, the Steamboats, the Whitney Plantation Museum, Swamp Tours, and the New Orleans Museum Of Art amongst other attractions.

Speaking of Swamp Tours, Alligators usually hibernate from October through March, depending on temperatures, so Winter is not the best time of year for this activity, but some people prefer it because the mosquitoes are also asleep. In particular, if you don’t want to use mechanical transport, this is the time of year for alternatives such as Kayaks.

But I do want to correct a common misconception before wrapping up this section. How far are the Swamps from New Orleans? Because the impression an outside often gets from media portrayals is that the area is right outside the city limits.

Well, for once, those portrayals are not far wrong.

There are four primary tracts of Swampland in Louisiana. The most commonly photographed appears to be the westernmost, around Lake Martin, which is 105 miles (170 km) to the West-North-West. The next most distant runs from close to the first almost all the way to New Orleans. The two remaining areas are a short distance west and south of New Orleans and immediately north of west and north of Lake Pontchartrain.

The accompanying map comes from the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation (a not-for-profit whose mission is celebrating the legacy, revitalizing the careers, and preserving the history of American music & musicians), is one of the few that I could find tagged as being legal for reuse (Wikipedia doesn’t have one). I have highlighted the swamp areas. And note that the cropping of the key was a feature of the source map.

Sources:

• Trip Savvy‘s Visiting New Orleans In December page;
• 417 Magazine‘s (December 2015) 10 Reasons To Visit New Orleans This Winter;
• Trip Advisor Australia‘s New Orleans Forum (33,826 topics and counting).
• The Ponderosa Stomp Foundation‘s website.

My Thanks to them all!

12. Winter In New York City

Montage Notes & Credits:
1. NY Boroughs Map courtesy Quora;
2. Manhattan Vs Long Island, based on LIRR map 1876 and edited by Mike;
3. Districts Of Manhattan courtesy Quora (I did my best to clean up this over-compressed map because it was the clearest one I could find but there were two districts on the East Side coastline that I could not make out. One appears to start with a V and have the second word “City” as part of the name; the other is a little North of that, and appears to start with a P and be a word similar to “Passergy”. I also added the “Lower Manhattan” and “Lower West Side” region markers, so any errors in those are completely my responsibility);
4. “Above Gotham” by Anthony Quintano;
5. “Midtown Manhattan as seen from Weehawken, NJ” by Dmitry Avdeev;
6. “Past Vs Present” by Joe Deylamipour, which highlights the Empire State Building as seen at sunset from the top of the Rockefeller building with the one world trade center in the background;
7. “Park and 57th street Manhattan New York” by D Ramey Logan, highlighting the jagged/stepped construction technique that is common to many NYC buildings;
8. “Liberty statue from below” by Derek Jensen (aka “Tysto”);
9. “Gapstow Bridge, Central Park, New York,” public domain image, photographer unknown.

New York city is, if not the largest city in the world (in fact, it’s 27th on that list), almost certainly the most famous. That fame means that it’s also quite possibly the most nebulously-defined in the minds of those who have only ever heard of it.

In fact, what most people think of, when you say New York City is either Manhattan, or Long Island. So we should start with a little clarity of definition.

What Is New York?

According to Quora’s answer to the question, “…the City of Greater New York … consists of five Boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.” “Manhattan is an island (plus some outlying islets), as is Staten Island. Brooklyn and Queens are located on Long Island, which also includes two counties not part of New York City. The Bronx is part of the North American mainland” (Refer map 1 of the montage).

In fact, the vast majority of Long Island is not part of New York City, as shown by Map 2 of the montage.

Manhattan Island is further subdivided into a number of districts, some of them famous in their own right, such as Greenwich Village, and is home to a number of equally-famous specific locations and landmarks, such as Times Square and the Empire State Building. (Boroughs are called ‘Cities” here in Australia, while the ‘Districts’ are considered ‘Suburbs’). Don’t fret if the district map (Third item of the montage) is out-of-date, these are ‘common usage’ names that change dynamically as the city changes. Right now, there’s no area known as “Little Albania” to the best of my knowledge; but who knows what next week holds?

Right away, I’m sure that some readers are surprised that Manhattan and Long Island aren’t the same place, and that the Bronx is part of the mainland. How much variation is there in the weather between these Boroughs? I’m quite sure that it’s considerable; they are very distinct, geographically.

So far as this entry of the “Diversity Of Seasons” is concerned (and the same will hold true for “Spring”, “Summer”, and “Autumn” when they happen), “Winter In New York” will refer to the Weather in Manhattan, with such annotations as my research develops regarding the rest of the city.

The Geology of New York

Geologically, New York City is what happens when you take something resembling the Australian Mountains and add thousands of tons of glacial action. The peaks get ground into powder, which – when added to water and colonized by returning ground life when the glaciers recede – produces ripples of bedrock interspersed with depressions and grooves filled with softer earth and gravel.

There wasn’t a lot of room for this illustration but it’s just barely legible and you can click on the thumbnail for the full-sized original in a new tab.

This has a profound impact on the city’s construction – bedrock can support towers of almost unlimited height (other engineering restrictions dominate in determining just how tall you can go) while the softer ground not only requires deeper foundations for stability (adding to construction costs), but it limits the number of floors that can be supported.

Take a closer look at the aerial photo of the southern end of Manhattan, and – now that you know what to look for – you can actually SEE the ripples in the bedrock, amplified by the ease of construction of TALL high-rise buildings. There is one patch of them in the immediate foreground (Midtown) and then it all goes rather flat through Midtown South, Greenwich Village, Soho, Chinatown, etc only to rise again in Civic Center, White Hall, Ten Bridges, and Wall Street.

Some economists have disputed the relationship between the geology and the construction, finding that economic factors were more directly responsible for the locations of the taller skyscrapers. This finding ignores several facts, in my opinion:

• first, it attempts to treat the causes in isolation without looking at interlinks between them (it has already been pointed out that construction cost for smaller structures is lower and for taller structures higher when the bedrock is farther below the surface);
• second, it ignores the fact that even moderate structures generate a lot of capital for an area, i.e. there is a feedback loop involved (skyscrapers produce intensive business activity which produces the money for bigger skyscrapers, meaning that a small initial difference from the geology creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of taller structures);
• third, it ignores the secondary feedback loop in which infrastructure investment follows the money and produces greater wealth in an area, again amplifying even a small initial difference due to the geology.
• and finally, there is an element of “if you build it, they will come” self-fulfilling prophecy to the situations. First, there are competitive advantages to locating a business close to your rivals when your business naturally trades with those rivals, and disadvantages to being removed; that’s why financial “districts” tend to form in a great many cities even when they are initially more homogeneous. The same is true of civil administrations. This displaces unrelated businesses that don’t service the primary industry of the area, which not only creates space within the zone but makes it more economically viable for businesses within the same industry to move closer to their suppliers, i.e. into the forming ‘district’.

The economists findings are accurate in terms of the mechanisms that manifested the growth of the structures, but require the geological difference to ‘seed’ that growth.

This actually has a role to play in the climate experienced, as you will find out a little later in this section.

Winter Weather

At more than 40° north of the equator, New York is farther removed from that geographic reference point than Melbourne is. Officially, it’s considered a Humid Subtropical Climate, which might astonish those who have seen news footage of snow in the streets! It’s the northernmost city in North America to be so designated. The suburbs to the immediate north and west lie in the transitional zone between humid subtropical and humid continental climates. The city averages 234 days with at least some sunshine annually.

Winters are cold and damp, and prevailing wind patterns that blow offshore temper the moderating effects of the Atlantic Ocean; yet the Atlantic and the partial shielding from colder air by the Appalachians keep the city warmer in the winter than inland North American cities at similar or lesser latitudes such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. The weather records clearly establish the Winter months as December, January, and February, with November and March significantly warmer than the Winter averages.

The average high temperature for each of the Winter months is 6.1°C (43°F), 3.5°C (38.3°F), and 5.3°C (41.6°F) respectively, but the average of the single highest temperatures each month is considerably warmer than that at 16.8°C (62.2°F), 15.3°C (59.6°F), and 15.9°C (60.7°F), respectively. That describes a situation in which winter days are occasionally cold but reasonably pleasant and sometimes bitterly cold. This impression is reinforced by the record highs for these months of 24°C (75°F), 22°C (72°F), and 24°C (75°F) again, respectively. Those are considerably warmer even than the typical summer minimums.

The average low temperatures of the winter months tells a slightly different story; Winter seems to linger at night through into March, whose minimums are only slightly warmer than those of February. The specifics are 0°C (32°F), -2.8°C (26.9°F), -1.7°C (28.9°F), and 1.8°C (35.2°F), respectively. The average of the coldest temperatures recorded each month further extends the reach of Winter; November’s values may be warmer than those of December, but the differences aren’t huge. The same is true of March. This seems indicative of sudden changes between the seasons – winter beginning with a cold snap and ending with the arrival of warmer air to begin the spring thaw. Such sudden changes can easily come early or later than the calendar indicates.

In terms of rainy days, Manhattan has a slightly-dryer season (August to November), but when you dig into it, the actual differences are minimal; The wettest month by this measure having 11.5 rainy days and the driest, 8.7 of them. A single shower on one day, five years in fourteen, is quite enough to account for the difference. If you look at the actual records, you will note that February appears to be a drier month, and it is – ever so slightly – until you add in snowy days; doing so makes this month the “wettest” of the year by some margin.

The same pattern of consistent rainfall holds true when you look at the amounts (again excluding snowfalls), with the rain being delivered by summer storms and showers ever so slightly heavier.

Snowy days therefore account for virtually all of the differences between the seasons, in terms of precipitation. These also give a good indication of the persistence of winter and the likelihood of it coming early in an acute form, so I will quote the full range of values: Nov 0.2, Dec 2.3, Jan 4.0, Feb 2.8, Mar 1.8, Apr 0.3 days. Correcting these to a hypothetical fortnightly value for each month gives Nov 0.09, Dec 1.04, Jan 1.81, Feb 1.39, Mar 0.81, Apr 0.14 days in fourteen.

What do these mean? Well, first, they show that winter is far more likely to linger than it is to come early – compare November with March, and October (no snow days) with April.

Second, those fortnightly values – what does 0.09 in 14 days mean, anyway? Well, if we assume that most of the time we’re talking a single snowy day and on rarer occasions, two, this can be used to work out how many years pass (on average) between such occurrences. 1 snowy day / (0.09 in 14) = once in 155.6 years. But we need to round that up to make room for two-snowy-days, so let’s say once in 175 years, or thereabouts. 1×14/175=0.08, so that leaves 0.01 to be accounted for. 2 snowy days / (0.01 in 14) = 2 in 1400 years = once in 700 years. The onset of winter is, therefore either quite remarkably reliable, or “winter weather” doesn’t really start until sometime in December, long after winter has officially started. If there’s a week either way in it, then it will usually commence by Dec 6 (leaving enough room for those rare November events); if two weeks either way, then Dec 13 is the date – and snow is not certain to have fallen on the city by Christmas, though it will have happened more often than not. My personal weather experience suggests that somewhere in between, but closer to the latter, is the most accurate interpretation. Call it December 10th on the average, and a twelve-day plus-or-minus. (To be more accurate, I would need daily statistics and those are not readily available).

The average snowfall per snowy day is also revealing. Nov: 4 cm (1.5”); Dec: 5.3 cm (2.09”); Jan: 4.45 cm (1.75”); Feb: 13 cm (3.29”); Mar: 5.5 cm (2.17”); and Apr: 5 cm (2”).

There is a PDF provided by the US weather bureau listing the biggest snowstorms (1 foot or more) recorded in Central Park from 1869 to the present (last updated Dec 26, 2017). All told, there have been 35 of them – none in November or April, Nine each in December and January, 13 in February, and 4 in March. Dividing the record snowfall for each month by the averages quoted above will give an indication as to the variability. Those records:

• December 26-27 of 1947: 65.5 cm (25.8”);
• January 22-24 of 2016: 69.8 cm (27.5”);
• February 11-12 of 2006: 68.3 cm (26.9”);
• March 12-14 of 1888: 52.34 cm (21”).

As it happens, those are also the four greatest falls on record. Doing the divisions:

• December: 65.5/5.3=×12.264;
• January: 69.8/4.45 =×15.685;
• February: 68.3/13 = ×5.25;
• March: 52.34/5.5 = ×9.516.

Because there always exists the possibility that a worse blizzard will eventually be recorded, any weather table for the area should exceed these values, and because the greater likelihood will be somewhere in the vicinity of the average, rolling 3-5 dice is going to be preferable. Since this is only one side of the possibility (the equal-and-opposite alternative being less snow than the average), we get:

• December: 12.264×2=24.528=25 values. That’s an odd number, so we need an even number of dice. d10+3d6-3 gives the range of results required. a roll of 13 produces the average, each +1 above that giving +100%, each -1 below it giving -10% (starting at 100%); with results of 1-3 meaning effectively “no snow”.
• January: 15.685×2=31.37=32 values. That’s an even number, so we need an odd number of dice, or to add a value for the “average” and an even number of dice – with the latter being the easier choice. So, 33 values: d10+2d8+2d6-4 works. A result of 17 gives the average, +100% for each +1 higher than that, and each -1 giving -4% (so that some snow always falls in the month).
• February: 5.25×2=10.5=11 values. Lets double that so that we have some elbow room: 22 values. d12+2d6-2 works. A result of 11 gives the average snowfall; each +1 above that is +50%, each -1 below that is -5% (so there will be significant snow even on a result of 1).
• March: 9.516×2=19.032= 20 values. As with January, adding an additional value for the “average” result and using an even number of dice is the easiest solution. 4d6-3 works, with 11 indicating the average snowfall; each +1 above that is +100%, each -1 below that is -12%, so results of 1-3 indicate “no snow”.
• Where there is no data available, the easiest answer is to base an answer on the closest month with values known and increase the size of each die by 1 step (greater variability). So, November: d12+3d8-3 gives 33 results. The 17th result would normally indicate the average “4 cm per day” result. A maximum yields 2 days worth at this rate, or 8 cm of snow for the month. 0.2 snowy days in the month is 1 snowy day in 5 years, but we need room for the 2-days result, so that has to blow out to 1 year in 7. That means that 6/7 of the possible results should yield “no snow” – that’s 1-28. So we need to allocate meanings to 29, 30, 31, and 32. I’ll set 31 as indicating the 4cm average, 30 as 2 cm, 29 as 1cm, and 32 as 6cm.
• I’ll leave April as an exercise for the reader, but it will be based on 4d8-3.

The size of buildings has a localized impact on the weather. First, hot air rises, so in winter, greater heating is required for lower floors than for upper floors unless thermal inefficiencies are so high that the heat has dissipated by the time it reaches the upper levels. That can mean that temperatures in some areas in the middle are too high in older buildings, and each will have hot spots and cold spots here and there. Of course, all this heated air has to eventually escape the building or still more energy be expended in pumping it back down for reheating. Modern construction generally means the latter.

Either way, some heat will escape through the roof of the building; each skyscraper is crowned with an invisible plume of heated air. Heated air is, of course, at a higher atmospheric pressure than the surrounding air, so there is a constant breeze outwards from the roof. It’s also a well-known fact that skyscrapers all generate updrafts around their outside walls, which tends to push that expanding plume of hot air upwards quite a bit. This can generate turbulence in the upper atmosphere, generating additional cloud, as well as locally raising the temperature above the dew point. This reduces rainfall downwind of the skyscraper just a little – but a great number of very tall structures in close confinement have a cumulative influence, creating a weather ‘shadow’ that is statistically noteworthy. The turbulence can also be the tipping point in the formation of storm clouds.

Another impact is that the mass of concrete and steel absorbs and retains heat from the sunlight, even in winter. They can remain significantly warmer than their surroundings for hours after sunset. Once they have cooled down, however, they can then absorb a great deal of heat that would otherwise have been received by buildings and terrain to the west and north-west of the building. This can make one side of the building hotter than the other in the mornings. This urban thermal ‘bloom’ thus exerts complex effects over the weather in the vicinity – not enough to alter the gross conditions forecast by the daily news, but more than enough to push conditions past critical thresholds – or prevent the crossing of such thresholds.

Poorly designed/maintained buildings can serve as chimneys, continually drawing in cooler air from the surrounding ground level, heating it, and drawing it up into the atmosphere. This can effectively lower the air pressure slightly in the vicinity, encouraging rain to fall more readily when temperatures were already close to the dew point.

The resulting micro-climates are complex and not readily subject to analysis because of the huge number of variables involved. While almost every city experiences these effects somewhat, New York is exceptional in terms of numbers of tall skyscrapers – and the presence of a large area that is NOT built up in the center of Manhattan Island (i.e. Central Park). As a result, New York experiences this situation more strongly than most cities. Some reports allege that the temperature in high-rise districts can be as much as 5°C (9°F) warmer than those of surrounding districts – and that without taking into account the impact of tall barriers on natural breezes and air currents, and the resulting wind chill effects in winter.

Winter Activities

Winter comprises some of the busiest event months of the city.

The first winter activity of the season is always the lighting of the Christmas Tree in the Rockefeller Center, which occurs late in November just after Thanksgiving (last year it was Nov 29th). The tree remains on display until the evening of January 7th.

Throughout December, there are special holiday-themed tours such as the Holiday Lights Tour.

Starting in early December is the annual Christmas Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall. This show evolves year-on-year; the 2018 version had nutcrackers, dancing animals, flying presents, amazing special effects, and the world-famous Rockettes®. You can also take a tour and go behind the scenes at other times.

Another Christmas tradition is the New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®. Like the Christmas Spectacular, this evolves from year-to-year. Tickets to the show tend to be expensive, especially if not booked well in advance.

There’s a major congregation every year at Times Square to watch the Superbowl on the big screens.

All winter, you can ice-skate at the Rockefeller Center’s Ice Rink.

In January, you can skate for free in the Bank Of America Winter Village at Bryant Park. Skate rentals, sharpening, lessons, and lockers are available. The Winter Village itself is a collection of eateries and kiosks and a pop-up Restaurant.

You can also skate at the Wollman Rink in Central Park, weather permitting.

Nearby attractions include the Museum of Modern Art, the Lincoln Center, the American Natural History Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum Of Art.

Speaking of Ice Skating, the Hockey Season is about to get underway. For the last ten years that has meant the NHL Winter Classic, with a free pre-game Festival for Hockey fans.

The baseball season may be a distant memory, but you can still take the Yankee Stadium Classic Tour. In fact, since it will not be restricted the way you would expect during a playing season, there are some areas like the dugout and the field that are accessible at this time of the year that you otherwise couldn’t get to.

There are also other annual December festivals and events, such as the Apollo Theater’s Kwanzaa Celebration in the African-American part of town, Good Riddance Day at Times Square (just before the end of the year), featuring the Latin American tradition of burning dolls that represent the current year’s problems.

Of course, the New Years Eve celebrations at Times Square are world-famous. This web-page by Smart Destinations contains tips and practical advice to make that experience more satisfying and memorable. But it all kicks off at about 6PM with the raising of the ball, and if you want to see anything, you’ll want to be there in advance.

The next day is the date of the annual Coney Island Polar Bear’s New Year’s Day Swim when hundreds of New Yorkers jump into the frigid winter Atlantic Ocean to raise money for a non-profit Camp for sick Children.

Starting shortly into the New Year is the “Under The Radar” festival at the Public Theater, which features over a dozen performances by comedy troupes from all over the world. The Festival runs for about a week-and-a-half.

Overlapping it is the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show which features miniature New York landmarks built out of living plants.

January 10-17 (or thereabouts) brings the Winter Jazzfest, an event that started as a one-day attraction and has grown into a week-long festival that features some of the biggest names in the genre. This is also the time-frame for the bi-Annual NYC Restaurant Week®, a promotional event in which 380 restaurants offer three-course deals (fixed menus) for lunch and dinner (the other one is around August each year) and the NYC Broadway Week. There is also a Hotel Week that offers discounted accommodations.

Early February (the 7th, this year) sees the Empire State Building Run-Up, a sprint to the top of the 86th floor of the iconic skyscraper. The fastest runners achieve this in 10 minutes (it takes the elevators less than a minute). Just before this event is the Superbowl, a key annual event for the many Sports Bars in the city as well as private and public parties all over the place.

Also around this time is the annual Dog Show at the Westminster Kennel Club, the Chinese New Year Firecracker Ceremony and Cultural Festival, and the Madison Street to Madison Avenue Lunar New Year celebration, a Festival of musical performances, family entertainments, and special discounts from local stores. Not to mention that this is when New York Fashion Week starts!

Those attractions all run down for about a week, which brings the calendar to Mardi Gras. New Orleans might be the most famous celebration of this event, but NYC has celebrations in various parts of the city, too.

Winter in New York encompasses Valentine’s Day and the public event of choice is the Cupid’s Undie Run – when participants strip down to their underwear and run a 1-mile dash to raise funds for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. The New York Planetarium often holds special Valentine’s Day events in the evening, and of course the many restaurants and eateries tend to be booked solid all day.

Sources:

• Wikipedia’s pages on New York City and Manhattan.
• Smart Destinations‘ 10+ Things to Do in New York in Winter 2018 – January & February Activities & More
• TimeOut New York‘s The best things to do in the winter in NYC
• Business Insider Australia‘s 32 Things Every New Yorker Should Do This Winter (Referring to the Winter of 2013)
• The NYC Insider Guide to Things to do in New York in Winter.

You may have noticed that the length of several of the sections in this post have led me to rearrange it into 20 parts instead of 16. The good news is that doing so enables me to fit in those extra locations I was unsure of accommodating. It also means that completing the entry on New York City completes this part of the article. Tomorrow, I start Part 3 and Winter In Omaha!

This weekend’s session of the Zenith-3 campaign was a great success, and one of the big reasons for that was the real sense that the PCs were fully integrated elements within the game world. This article is going to look at some of the major reasons for that so that you can do it in your games, too.

Trends

In a nutshell, I didn’t create static statuses within the campaign. When the PCs first encountered or learned of a situation or group, whatever impression they got of that group or situation was, at best, a freeze-frame of the dynamic processes already acting to evolve the subject.

What’s The Difference?

A status is a fixed statement of the way things are. It’s static and unchanging unless directly acted upon by the PCs (and sometimes even then, when it shouldn’t be).

A Trend defines not only the current status but what it is already on the way to becoming if no intervention takes place, together with some sort of time-frame for that change and how other groups will react to the change.

For example, a government might currently be formal and rigid, but be heading in the direction of practical and flexible, driven by public exasperation with what is seen as excessive inflexibility.

There are three possible subtexts to such a Trend: either the status is a legacy that the current government are trying to change, or the change is an opposition position to an unpopular government, or the change is being driven by public protests, marches, etc.

There will almost always be one or two incidents in the recent past that can be held up as “poster children” for the need for the Trend, and it’s often helpful to specify these in at least general terms. A popular celebrity dying after being turned away from medical treatment because their paperwork wasn’t in order, for example.

Each of the different subtexts has a different time-frame. The first is based on the remaining lifetime of the current government, which may be more than one term if they are still popular enough. The second is the next election plus however long the honeymoon period is – after that, the public would expect to see at least some shifts in policy. The third option is the most open-ended, with a time-frame that largely depends on how repressive the government in question is. The more dictatorial, the more likely that nothing short of revolution will achieve the reforms demanded, and the more subversive and secretive the activities of supporters will need to be. The more flexible and open and democratic the system of government, the greater its capacity to respond to demands for change.

What’s The Impact?

As soon as the PCs came to the attention of some other group, their presence began to influence and shape the already existing dynamic forces as the group began to work out whether the PCs were allies or enemies, and how best to use the fact of their existence or involvement to further their own agendas.

Because the PCs were receiving only the “polarioid moment” of the way things were now, a lot of relationships and plans were able to mature in the background.

This session, for the first time, all these seemingly-isolated events were connected and the relationships between them defined to the PCs for the first time. In other words, patterns within the isolated events began to become apparent to them, revealing a Bigger Picture that had been there all along.

To a certain extent, these were all logical developments of the situations that the PCs were already aware of, and so there was a manifest sense of inevitability to each shoe dropping.

Secondary Impacts

Every character will have some opinion on the subject. The Trend itself, as defined, will generally dictate the majority position, but acceptance of the Trend might be reluctant or eager. Conservatives might have a different position on the subject to Liberals, certain businesses will have positions based on the impact on their vested interests, and every position should have an intelligent opposition – something that I alluded to in Influences, Styles, Trends, and Oscillations.

In the case of the example Trend: Financial markets love stability and hate instability. The proposal would inevitably trade predictability for flexibility, and so the expectation would be that financial markets would fall in value, corporations would pay smaller dividends, and interest rates might need to be lowered to stimulate the economy and buffer against these effects, which would further depress the dividends paid by banks (because they would make less money on loan interest). That would reduce the value of the currency relative to other nations, so importers would need to pay more for their goods, costs that would be passed on to consumers, generating inflation. On the other hand, exporters would make more money from sales.

Already, then, you have some groups who would be opposed, and some who would be concerned about the proposed changes. “Anarchy and Depression,” they would forecast – as loudly as possible.

Another tack that would almost certainly manifest is that flexibility inevitably increases the risk of it being abused; rigidity might be unfair, but it’s equally unfair to everyone. So there would be a middle group on both sides of politics who agreed with the need for change but were concerned over the strength of the proposed safeguards against abuse. “They want to open the door to Corruption” would be a soundbite issuing forth from those opposed, and “Fix the system – don’t tear it down” would be another.

The farther such ripples can spread – no matter how much hyperbole and exaggeration and outright distortion may be involved in creating them – the more people will find a reason to take a stand, and the less clear-cut the whole thing becomes. Which is another way of saying, the more interesting it becomes, and the more susceptible to influence by the PCs. And the more enemies and allies they will make as a result.

The other thing that should be obvious from the example is how much more vibrant and dynamic the political environment becomes as a result.

Of course, the trend might not be so directly political. Equality is an issue that periodically manifests itself as a social dynamic, and we appear to be entering such a phase at the current time, at least in terms of the media and women’s rights. In the past, it might have taken six months or more for tangible manifestations of this stance to begin impacting the opinions of ordinary people and hence society at large, which made change slower and more measured; but we live in a world of Social Media and Mass Communications, much of it unfiltered (or with the filters/bias overwhelmed by the strength and voracity of the movement), so change will be faster and more likely to go too far, too fast – producing an eventual reaction.

Lest readers think that it is impossible for that to happen, we’ve had this situation with regard to the teaching profession for decades now, in which the mere accusation of misdeeds is enough to destroy careers, and there have been some cases of false accusation over the years, but – as yet – there has not been any cause celebre to trigger tightening of evidentiary standards. At the same time, of course, protection of children must be the paramount consideration; what is needed is some way of reconciling the conflicting demands that result. That’s far more easily said than done.

Shown, Not Told

“Show, Don’t Tell” has been a writer’s maxim for a very long time. To a very great extent, the ‘Trends’ technique is a manifestation of this principle, a technique for achieving it.

By making the group aware of a reaction to some past action in which they were involved, and then explaining it in the broader context, I was quite literally showing the PCs what was going on and how the world around them was evolving in response to their presence within it.

For example, through the context of a game show (more on that in a separate post to follow at a later time), I was able to bring back one of the bad guys from very early in the campaign, when the PCs accused him of hiring an assassination team to deal with a political enemy. While the Assassins were stopped, the PCs failed to locate proof of this politician’s involvement – so one of them leaked their suspicions anonymously to the internet, expecting that it would derail the political career of the total sleazeball in question.

His attempts to redeem his reputation in the course of the game show have failed miserably so far, but he was able to establish a political trend towards greater accountability for law-enforcement agencies and operatives, including the PCs, and that this was an election year.

Later, a message from something of an ally (I’ll get to that in a moment) made the PCs aware that because they were seen as allied to the current government, but too highly respected (and too popular) to attack directly, the opposition party would have no alternative but to try and utilize the PCs’ fame for their own political ends, even as they sought to take control of their activities.

This put into context multiple encounters with politicians – some seemingly supportive, some hostile – that had taken place in the past. It revealed a pattern – but not just a static pattern, a dynamic one.

If there is a burning issue of some kind – which is usually the case when there is a significant Trend – everything that is said and done will be interpreted through that filter, forcibly if necessary. That includes anything that the PCs said before they became aware that there was a Trend.

What’s
more, the PCs may well have opinions on the subject of their own – which may or may not match those of the players. That’s when Roleplaying becomes more challenging.

On top of that, if the PCs have been recognized as growing in stature, status, popularity, power, or fame, their very existence will begin having an impact; as they become a factor that could influence a Trend, groups who oppose the perceived direction of that influence will begin to perceive the PCs as political enemies and/or rivals.

Many Threads Winding Together

Many other plot threads formed part of the same picture. For some time, the bureaucrats of the civil service have been inflicting make-work and time-fillers on the party – their own means of taking control of the PCs. At the same time, the Crown Prince has been actively supporting the PCs – but using their association to enhance his own prestige and authority.

Both of these patterns – which the PCs had already recognized – were explained and expanded by this new context. But, even more importantly, they were also rendered parts of a dynamic, evolving picture, whereas in isolation they had seemed to be constants, static Polaroid moments.

Rich Characterization

Another aspect of these revelations was that none of the participating NPCs were cardboard cutouts. “Allies” had dark corners, and “Enemies” had bright spots, even if these had not been apparent at the time the PCs encountered them. In fact, the only outright villain to appear in this entire game session was that corrupt politician.

In an awful lot of cases, people (NPCs, of course) were going to seek to control or restrict the PCs because they genuinely consider that to be the best thing for the nation/Kingdom/empire or whatever.

Of course, they will also win allies, and that can be an even greater problem, because they may well do or say things that the PCs disagree with, or perform actions they can’t sanction in the name of the cause with which the PCs have been linked.

One of the major side-issues to be aired (both sides of the debate) in the course of the game-show related to the social responsibility of the famous – not just to be an example, and therefore held to a stricter code of conduct than that of mainstream society, but whether or not they have an obligation to speak up on social issues. At first, it might have seemed that this was simple color for the campaign; but later roleplay revealed that the PCs were famous, and so the entire question becomes a debate about whether or not the PCs have an obligation to speak up on social issues (something they have done their best to avoid doing, so far). Ultimately, this became a debate in-game over the right to privacy of the famous – and the PC participating was unable to avoid being painted as supporting that right over the obligation to use their fame responsibly.

Established Foundations

Since the campaign started, I’ve been laying foundations for later adventures. To the players, these frozen snapshots of the way things were at the time were undoubtedly taken to be static statuses. The other thing that I’ve been doing is (indirectly, most of the time) forcing the PCs to define the values that they would be perceived by the public as representing, i.e. defining the shape of the influence they would be inadvertently having on the existing Trends, and how the relationships would change as a consequence of these influences.

Suddenly, a whole bunch of unrelated events and relationships have been revealed to be part of a common narrative thread that’s been gestating under their noses the whole time I’ve been putting these building blocks in place.

Of course – and I’m not revealing anything that my players won’t be expecting at this point – this is only the beginning. The current situation is, itself, just a building block that will lead to new and different adventures.

The Core Design Principle

When you put all of this together, you start to realize that the game world as the PCs initially found it to be is not the game world that I “required” or “designed” to be the platform for their adventures in this campaign; instead, I created a game world that could become that platform in the course of play, shaped by decisions made by the players – sometimes in response to direct questions (the media make great mouthpieces), but more often as side-issues to whatever the action was.

For example, the PCs have established a policy of doing what they perceive to be “the right thing” (or “the lesser evil”) whether it conflicts with the law or not. They have sought out and received funding from a known drug dealer in order to secure a contract with the most-wanted freelance espionage operative on the planet.

If that situation had been posed to the players on play-day one, or even ten, the players would not have countenanced it. It took time to establish the trustworthiness of the drug-dealer in question (and that he really wasn’t all that bad a guy) in their minds, and to place limits on the relationship that gave the PCs the confidence to seek him out under these particular circumstances (for that matter, at that point in time, it would have been utterly unrealistic for him to trust them, either). It took time to build up awareness of just how bad the particular crisis was going to be, and to establish the credentials of the espionage operative in question.

But, with that groundwork all laid, I was completely confident of what the PCs would decide to do under the circumstances, and make it the undercoat of a much bigger picture. If you were to define the campaign as having a beginning, middle, and end, they are now transitioning from Beginning to Middle. That’s actually something of a misleading simplification, because I have multiple plotlines taking place concurrently, and more that have not yet started. But, for the first time, that bigger picture is starting to take shape for them.

The orchestra have finished tuning up, it’s time for the dancing to start…

Fear Itself

Fear is an enemy every GM will have to deal with on occasion; that’s simple reality. But fear comes in many different shapes and sizes, and many different intensities.

The level of Fear that few of us ever have to deal with (phobias excepted) is the sort of fear that paralyzes, that washes away moral codes, and causes us to betray friends, family, and principles.

Fear, ultimately, is an instinctive warning of a serious threat to our survival, but such threats do not necessarily induce total fear of the intensity described, which really is disproportionate to the point of being counterproductive.

Those who yield to such fear are often derided for cowardice, even as we feel sympathy for the situation they were placed in, and the opposing quality – courage – is quite properly lauded as a great and admirable virtue in those who demonstrate it.

Phobias are quite a different matter, in which the psychology of the individual over-inflates the danger posed by the phobia trigger. Phobic responses can amplify even something that may not be threatening at all beyond the point of any rational self-control. People can’t be faulted for their behavior under such circumstances, only helped. A phobia, once triggered, can be far more intense and crippling than a genuine threat to one’s safety.

I speak from experience: I was extremely arachnophobic as a child, unable to sleep until the covers and sheets were fully drawn back to show that I would have no ‘company’ while I slept, and still often awakening in the middle of the night screaming in terror from nightmares despite this reassurance. It might be the result of an incident that I now think was real, in which I ran between two rose bushes, and got covered in webbing and baby spiders, or that might be a particularly vivid creation of the phobia. And I have, three times, been threatened by individuals wielding weapons capable of causing severe injury or even death. As a result, I can state two things with certainty:

• When threatened by a weapon, I was able to act rationally and intelligently to minimize the threat to myself and others while retaining the ability to document and process events, despite an appropriate degree of apprehension; whereas,
• Even today, a completely harmless, totally non-venomous spider on my wall causes me greater anxiety and apprehension than being threatened by a deadly weapon in the hands of someone with both motive and intent to use it upon my person.

For the benefit of anyone else who suffers from a phobia, I should probably describe how I mitigated my phobia to the point of being reasonably casual around the trigger of my phobia, Spiders, and honest in describing the extent to which I have been “cured”.

I think I was about 8, and had started to outgrow the recurring nightmares a year or two earlier. I still pulled back each blanket and sheet one at a time on occasion before pulling the linen back up and getting into bed, but even that was growing more infrequent after years of finding nothing. I found that I could look at photos of spiders without panic, at least for a while, so I got a book with many such photos from the library and would stare at each image for as long as I could tolerate it. When I became so used to doing so that I was no longer aware of the exact position of the book within the room at all times, I progressed to trying to imagine each spider on the page (to the same scale as the photograph), and again doing so until I could do so without extreme stress. Finally, I progressed to imagining the spiders (however unrealistic in virtually all cases) as being the same size as the opened book, and moving around the walls, and – most importantly – being afraid of me, scurrying away when I drew closer, and even paralyzed with fear if I got too close.

No-one taught me how to go about this desensitization process; I figured it out for myself.

I was not “cured” yet; I simply had control of myself enough not to scream in fear or act in total panic at the presence of a spider.

By the time I was an adult, I was sufficiently adjusted to spiders that if one invaded my environment, I could – after getting over the initial shock, and with great wariness – kill it as painlessly as possible (keeping my distance at all times). Over the next decade or two, I had to do so perhaps four or five times; it got easier each time to do what had to be done.

About 8 years ago, a male Huntsman (about 7 inches across) found it’s way into my apartment. Because the complex had a problem with cockroaches at the time, having ascertained that it was unlikely to be aggressive, and that it fed on such insects, I decided to leave it be until it decided to leave of it’s own accord in search of a mate. I soon became sufficiently used to its presence that once I had established its location, I could ignore it completely. This almost pet-owner ‘relationship’ persisted for about 3 months before I came in one morning and found it dead on the floor, presumably of old age.

Since moving to my current residence, I have only encountered one spider. I was unsure of the species so I treated it with considerable caution, using a broom to chivy it onto a magazine I had placed on the floor (which also enabled me to estimate it’s speed of motion) and then trapping it under a small see-through bowl – I wanted to be sure of it’s position at all times! I then dragged the whole assembly outdoors by the edge of the magazine while using my other hand to keep the bowl pressed flat and therefore sealed. Once it was outside, I shook it off the insider of the bowl, and let it scurry away, fully prepared to retreat at any signs of threatening behavior.

In other words, while my heart was pounding, I was able to deal with the problem in a rational way that minimized the risk of harm to both myself and to the spider.

Fear is innately incredibly stressful. This is an article about the effects of fear on the GM, but right from the outset, I want to distinguish, and separate out, the effects of stress; those were addressed in my article, New Beginnings: Phase 2: Baggage Dump, starting with the section “Clearing Your Head” about 20% into the article, and continuing to the section “What to dump: Categories of baggage”, which constitutes the bulk of the article..

Fear, in lesser doses, can be a quite useful survival trait. I (quite reasonably) fear burning myself, so I’m cautious when handling saucepans, lighting fires, etc. I fear the consequences of dishonesty, so my nature is to be honest. I have a wary respect of snakes, which are far more aggressive in Australia and more dangerous; were I to encounter one, I know to stand absolutely still until it decides I’m not a threat, and then to get a professional animal control officer to remove it, and so on.

To distinguish between these grades of intensity, let’s define a fear continuity:

1. Acute Fear is crippling. The fear itself matters more than the object of that fear, which exists as a composite of reality and nightmare. And note the yellow waves of panic and how much they conceal.
2. Fear is disabling. Nothing matters except the fear, but action can be taken that removes or mitigates that fear – usually after the individual has had time to build themselves up to performing the task.
3. Extreme Anxiety is disturbing, but the sufferer can still function, albeit at very high stress levels, despite the anxiety.
4. Anxiety is that level of nervousness at which the subject experiences stress as a result of their nerves. That stress often persists beyond the point of no return in decision-making.
5. Nervousness is the level of fear that we experience about everyday decisions and activities, and is generally the result of uncertainty over the outcome. It frequently fades or vanishes once decisions or situations take effect.

When it comes to gaming activities, the highest level of fear to which we should ever be exposed is Anxiety, and even that should be relatively rare. But it’s worth remembering that even nervousness triggers a flood of adrenalin in the body, and that both can have profound impacts on the individual that they should be aware of, watch for, and make allowances for.

Nervous Triggers

I’ve identified a baker’s dozen of triggers that can make a GM nervous. Most of these will be fairly obvious, so I don’t intend to belabor the point.

• New Games – Doing anything for the first time is scary. This is usually a problem of expectations – the GM’s and the Players’, and doubts about whether or not the GM can live up to them.
• New Campaigns – Starting a new campaign brings very similar pressures, stresses, and nerves. While the challenge of a new game system is not involved, expectations about expertise in the game mechanics will be higher.
• New Adventures (investment-dependent) – Starting a new adventure is always a little nerve-wracking. Will it entertain? Will it derail? Is it too GM-dominant, or worse yet, a railroad? Will the spotlight sharing be adequate? Does it make sense? As a general rule of thumb, the more effort that they have invested in the new adventure, the more nervous a GM will be about running it.
• New Adventure Locales – Introducing a new adventuring location to the mix can also be quite nerve-wracking. Has the GM been too subtle? Too obvious? Too simple? Too complex? Will the potential adventures appeal to the players? Is the setting too detailed? Not detailed enough? Will it fit the campaign? The same general rule of thumb applies as for new adventures, but because a new locale is a lot more work to define well, this almost always ranks higher on the anxiety scale. Potentially compounding the problem is the fact that new locales also often mean the start of a new adventure.
• New Players – Introducing one new player is stressful and nerve-wracking. If the new player knows the other players, there may be expectations and baggage; and if not, there will almost certainly be an adjustment period as new and old get used to each other. Introducing more than one new player is exponentially worse. Starting a game with a whole new group is therefore the pinnacle of nervousness in this trigger area. This can be muted somewhat if you are also introducing new locales or campaigns or game elements, as the New Player factor tends to get subordinated by those more intense sources of nerves.
• Important Moments – Some moments are more important than others in a game, and we naturally get more nervous when an important moment approaches. You may have been building up to this moment for weeks, months, or even years; this might be the pivotal heartbeat of the entire campaign. The greater the consequence, the greater the investment that the GM has in the moment, and the greater the investment, the greater the nervousness.
• Stylistic Changes – Trying something in a new style can be exciting and thrilling and a fun change of pace – or it can all crash-and-burn horribly. What’s more, such changes frequently involve a fairly substantial commitment on the part of the GM, with nervousness escalating proportionately. One-offs can be written off; multi-session adventures can be written off less easily; multi-adventure plot arcs can often be written off only with extreme reluctance; and it’s often very hard to completely write off a new campaign because the style just doesn’t work or doesn’t fit what the players want (or worse yet, doesn’t fit what the GM promoted the campaign style to be), or doesn’t meet expectations in some other respect.
• Difficult Relationships – We all experience hurdles in our real-world relationships now and then. Games can either be an escape from those, or an amplifier. Consider the problems if two players happen to be husband and wife: if the relationship is happy, they are more likely to favor each other; if the relationship is strained, they are more likely to take it out on each other; and either way, real-world baggage has a way of leaking into the campaign. Things get even worse when one of the two is the GM. And then there are the problems when two former friends who now have a somewhat strained relationship find themselves playing in the same campaign. Again, baggage. The GM’s problems come when they become aware of any out-of-game baggage because they are the one who will have to deal with it’s potential impact, and they may already be distracted and distressed by virtue of their own relationships with the individuals. Uncertainty always promotes nervousness.
• Difficult Characters – Some characters are easy to run. Some require a lot more effort on the part of the player. And some require a lot more work on the part of the GM. And then there are complicated and complex NPCs. Difficult players always create nerves, usually in the form of anticipating problems that never materialize, and wasting time and energy prepping for them. And the more things that can go wrong, the more likely it is that something will go wrong that the GM didn’t anticipate. More nervousness. And finally, difficult characters often require a level of energy and activity from the GM during actual play that can be hard to achieve consistently, and can be a cause of apprehension.
• Public Exposure – You can’t really GM without your personal opinions and philosophies sneaking into the game – whether you know what they are or not, or realize they are present or not. You’re attaching your name, reputation, and credibility to something and doing it in the glare of a very large spotlight. That’s’ enough to make anyone nervous.
• Public Speaking – Some people have a mortal terror of public speaking. Some take to it like a duck to water. And some fall into the typical middle ground where public speaking makes them nervous. Some people will find their apprehension easing once they actually start, others are more glass-half-empty and will get more nervous if things seem to be going well (“don’t mess up now…”). Public speaking, especially when you know in advance that you have to do it, is frequently a source of nervousness.
• New Technology – It can be stressful, working with a new piece of technology for the first time “live for real” – no matter how much private practice you may have put in. It introduces a new variable that we have at best a vague handle on, and that is enough to make people (quite justifiably) nervous.
• Risks – Finally, there are times when we all need to take a risk of some sort beyond those identified above. Have you ever had the fate of an entire campaign come down to a single die roll? How about the life of your best friend’s favorite PC? Risks can arise anytime, and taking a risk always induces both nervousness and an adrenalin rush.

That list is as comprehensive as I could make it, and the bottom line is this: there are always lots of reasons for a GM to be nervous, most often at the start of a given day’s play or in the period leading up to it.

When you boil most of these down, though, you end up with three basic categories: Meeting Expectations, Excessive investment (too much prep), or Insufficient prep. Clearly there is a very delicate balancing act involved, and one that is changing constantly, and different for every individual.

Well, there are three basic responses to nerves. You can give in to them, you can ignore them, or you can attempt to manage them.

• Giving in basically means there will be no game. That’s a dead end outcome that’s to be avoided.
• Ignoring fears means that the consequences of nervous energy can catch you off-guard, and that can create situations that are even more nerve-wracking.
• That leaves Managing Your Fears, and that usually means acknowledging the fear and managing the consequences of it; in other words, managing your nervous reactions.

Nervous Reactions

I’ve identified ten reactions to nervousness that can afflict GMs, of varying levels of consequence. They are:

• Talking too much
• Giving Away too much
• Talking too fast
• Tendency to fixate
• Shortness of breath
• Disrupted sleep
• Overreact to Criticism
• Irritability
• Aggression
• Feeling Ill

Because there’s rather more to say about these, I’ve given each it’s own section, below.

Talking too much

Nervous babbling is a well-known phenomenon. Once it starts, it can be hard to stop. The best management techniques are to know what you want to say in advance, and say just that. If you have to enter into a dialogue, when in the guise of an NPC for example, if you detect any such tendency, take a deep breath and release it slowly before the scene begins.

Giving Away too much

A lesser form of talking too much is revealing too much. This is essentially a means of seeking reassurance and validation from the others at the game table, of trying to justify yourself and the decisions you’ve made. Unfortunately, in mid-game is hardly the right time for doing so, and seeking it from the people you are supposed to be keeping in the dark about something their characters don’t know is hardly the ideal means of calming your nerves.

This is also one of the hardest symptoms of nervousness to manage. The best technique is to have a third party who you can use as a sounding board in advance, but issues of differing style can complicate that. The second-best technique is to create an imaginary NPC and tell it to them (and have them approve what you’re doing) – because just as your apprehension is the result of imagined shortcomings in what you have planned for the session, so can be the safety valve.

Unfortunately, this can lead to secondary problems – the well-known echo chamber effect of social media has nothing on what can happen inside our own heads! Experienced GMs learn to distinguish between decisions that are really to cause angst at the game table and those that are just nerves on their part, and to ignore the latter and consult others regarding the former – and that’s easier than ever to do thanks to social media. So my advice would be to adapt the first solution to the 21st century if there’s no-one of like mind that you can consult in person.

Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the potential for disaster. The Adventurer’s Club has two full-time GMs who collaborate on everything, and we’ve still managed our share of catastrophically-bad decisions – see An Experimental Failure: 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session for an example. So you will make mistakes, everybody does. Learn from them and they will grow more and more infrequent.

Talking too fast

This is babbling without babbling – you deliver exactly what you wanted to deliver in terms of narrative and roleplay, but you talk so fast
that half of it goes over the intended recipients’ heads.

The solution to this problem is the deep breath mentioned earlier. The challenge is that this is the hardest symptom of nervousness to recognize when it occurring to you, and so you don’t know when to apply it. Players are all-too-prone to assuming that they are being unusually slow-witted, today and are the only person who is struggling with the pace of delivery, and so say nothing.

So the real solution to this problem is to assume that it could happen and to deliberately slow your pace of delivery just a little bit all the time so that you are still intelligible when it does. That takes practice, but it’s worth the effort.

Tendency to fixate

The fight-or-flight instinct that accompanies nervousness evolved as a defense against danger, and that evolution was more successful when those threatened could focus on the source of the danger and ignore distractions. That specific myopia poses a problem in the modern day, because it means that in a crisis (even a rather mild one, like being nervous before a game), the natural tendency is to focus on the trees and lose track of the forest, or even forget that the forest exists. Worse yet, we don’t even focus on all the important trees at once, instead fixating on first one and then the next.

There are two really good defenses against the problems that can quite obviously result, and I rely on both of them on a regular basis. They both take the form of game prep.

Defense one is to do my best to design my adventures in such a way that the big picture is inherently built into events, so that all I need to focus on at the game table is the “tree” in front of me. I’ve actually been working on an article about how to do exactly that, off and on, but it’s grown too large (104 pages containing more than 33,700 words) to actually post here at Campaign Mastery. The problem is that it doesn’t work well when broken up, either – so I’m contemplating publishing it as a low-priced e-book. But that would mean rewriting it as a lot of the contents are instructions to WordPress on how to format it…

Defense two is to structure the campaign in such a way that I naturally get opportunities for “bigger-picture reality checks”. Every adventure has a defined purpose within the context of the campaign; every act has a defined purpose within the adventure; every scene has a defined purpose within the act; every encounter either contributes to the purpose of that scene or it gets extracted and placed into its own scene. At the start of each scene, I remind myself of the purpose in a note to myself, and the same at the start of each act, and so on. Which means that if the players go off-the-rails, I know where I want the scene to go, and don’t really care whether we get there by high road, low road, submarine, helicopter, or parachute. So long as the purpose is achieved, everything else is wherever the players want to take things, and my planning only deals with the path I consider most likely to eventuate. But this also means that if I ever lose sight of the forest for the trees, there’s a built-in reminder.

Unless you have designed your adventures in this way, though, these defenses are not available to you. The only solution is to take that previously-recommended deep breath and deliberately remind yourself at every pause and interval to contemplate, however briefly, the big picture.

Shortness of breath

Another natural tendency from fight-or-flight instincts is the tendency to be as quiet as possible. That often translates into taking shallow breaths, which can mean that you run out of puff before you get to the end of any lengthy narrative passages. It doesn’t matter how easily you were able to get through such passages in rehearsals; this physical reality can still find you caught short.

Worsening this phenomenon is the fact that you have to project you voice loudly enough to be heard over both the ambient noise and everything else that might be going on at the table, and that usually requires a greater expenditure of breath when speaking.

Over time, you’ll learn (almost subconsciously) how much you can fit into a statement or passage of narrative, and begin to reshape them naturally to accommodate your limitations. Until that happens, new GMs can use this rule of thumb: If you can read it aloud one-and-a-half times before you run out of breath, you’re at the limit. If you can read it twice, you have a margin of comfort.

Even without such pro nuances, taking that proverbial deep breath can help oxygenate the blood and mitigate the effects of any shallow breathing.

Disrupted sleep

When nervousness escalates into anxiety, worry can cause disruption to normal sleeping patterns. This probably won’t happen very often, and usually indicates that tolerance for anxiety has been eroded by other problems in life, but it can happen eventually, to any of us.

Adding to the problem is the tendency of a lot of us to leave game prep until the last minute, which – if it runs over-long – then eats into sleeping schedules. I have an unusually low requirement for sleep, and it’s happened to me, so I have no doubts that it happens all the more often to those who need a full eight hours rest in order to function.

I combat this by prioritizing my game prep (as described in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity) so that the most vitally important tasks are dealt with first. Knowing that relieves a huge burden from the mind, provided that you have prep time that it anywhere close to adequate; all that adding extra time does is allow you to polish and deal with relatively low-importance items on your prep-list, and means that getting a decent amount of sleep before game-day is something that can naturally be accommodated into the schedule. Not only are you going to get more sleep, you’ll worry less, and so that sleep will be of a better quality. That’s a win-win in my book.

Overreact to Criticism

The knock-on effects of disrupted sleep make a lot of preexisting responses to nervousness more acute, and one of the first is a tendency to overreact to criticism. Impartial and impersonal commentary assumes an unwarranted personal dimension, and thoughtless behavior by which absolutely nothing was meant can be interpreted as a willing, even deliberate, failure to appreciate your efforts.

Fact: Every GM feels underappreciated by their players every now and then.

Fact: Hardly ever do the players in question realize that they are triggering that response in the GM.

Before you respond to anything that has had a negative emotional impact on you at the gaming table, take a deep breath and use the moment to put whatever the “anything” was into a more realistic perspective; you will often find that you don’t actually have to say anything, because nothing was actually meant to be hostile. If you must respond, use the moment to deliberately keep your vocal tone normal – not unnaturally flat, or expressive of anger or impatience, or cold, or with any whine in your voice. Any of these will only escalate problems. And if you still have a problem with behavior at the game table, talk to the player involved during a break or at the end of the session, without interrupting play for the purpose. Why ruin everyone else’s fun? Or worse, force them to choose sides – when they might not choose yours?

Irritability

In fact, it’s fair to say that nervousness can make anyone a bit more irritable than they would otherwise be, and this is only exaggerated and compounded by irritability from any shortage of sleep. Now, some people’s tolerance levels are so high that this increase makes no practical difference whatsoever; in the vast majority, though, it is a factor that we need to take into account. If something is irritating you, ask yourself if it’s just the insomnia talking? Make the deliberate choice, when you think that you might be a little more prickly than usual, to make greater allowances for the irritations that are caused by others, and everyone will have a better time of it – including you.

Aggression

Aggression goes hand-in-hand with irritability, but it can also manifest in more subtle forms, sneaking up on the GM as it were. Grudge-monsters. Nit-picking. Pedanticism. Authoritarianism. Intimidation. Outbursts of anger. Penalties.

The PCs, and the players that control them, are not punching bags present for the GM to use in order to unwind and work out his issues. And, as a general rule of thumb, if the GM relaxes, lightens up, and has more fun, he’ll actually derive more benefit than if he unleashes such abuse of power, anyway.

Feeling Ill

Even quite low levels of nervousness – so low that you aren’t consciously aware of them – can impact on the GM’s sense of well-being, and – like virtually all the symptoms since it was mentioned (which is no accident), this is only exacerbated by inadequate sleep. How can you tell? If the feeling of ill-health goes away when you actually start running the game, the odds are that it was all psychosomatic in the first place, or a minor reaction to adrenalin.

Legends abound – some of them true – of actors and actresses who were so nervous before going on stage or before the cameras that they were physically ill. Being a GM is less stressful and more sheltered an experience, and results in a lesser form of the phenomenon. It’s always better – provided you aren’t infectious – to try to run the game and fail, than it is to call it off for an illness that will never go away if left untreated. If you feel unwell the morning of the game, focus on how much you are looking forward to the game, and on what specifically you are looking forward
to experiencing – for just long enough to get you through the nerves, then forget such expectations (disappointment if they are not forthcoming can feed back into a worse reaction next time).

There’s nothing wrong with being nervous before taking a big step in something that matters to you, or when doing something for the first time, or when you feel inadequate to the demands that are going to be placed on you. That’s life; harness the nervous energy and manage the downsides. Fear’s biggest virtue is that it holds us back when contemplating actions dangerous or foolish; the biggest reason why it is a bad thing is that it can hold us back when there is no real justification for it. Most of the time, we have nothing to fear that is so detrimental to our potential for success as Fear itself. Master your fears and you free yourself up to make rational choices, instead of being at the mercy of an irrational subconscious.

This idea came to me while watching the fifth and final Ashes test on the television. At first, I didn’t quite know exactly what I had, which is why this post has landed in the “short but profound” category!

Let’s try something radical (trust me)! Pick your favorite low-to-mid-level D&D monster. Now, halve it’s AC and write the number down on a piece of paper. Write a slash in front of it. Now multiply the result by the number of HD the monster has, and write that in front of the slash.

Next, take the number of Hit Points the monster typically has. Double it, and divide it by the number of Hit Dice. Round any fractions up.

These simple steps, plus a couple of house rules to frame the game mechanics around them, completely transform combat in any form of D&D (including Pathfinder), radically simplifying it while increasing verisimilitude and drama.

Those house rules:

1. Attempts to hit a target by all attackers reduce the first number, whether successful or not.
2. Until the AC Threshold is achieved, only critical hits do damage.
3. The damage done by a critical hit is halved; one half is applied to reducing the AC threshold to zero (any remainder after this is achieved is taken as actual damage), the other half is applied as damage.
4. The AC Threshold does not reset until the end of combat. It then returns at the rate of 10% per minute of rest.
5. Once the AC Threshold reaches zero, the “Innate AC” becomes the target to achieve in order to do damage. This value persists from attacker to attacker and combat round to combat round.
6. Every 10 points of actual damage inflicted adds 1 minute delay to the commencement of AC Threshold Reset.

That’s it, those are all the rules needed to accomplish this miracle.

So, what happens? What do these changes achieve?

Mechanically

As combat commences, both sides seem invulnerable to harm except through the rare lucky strike. In this phase of combat, participants are looking for weak points, flaws in defensive technique and other protections, etc. Those rare lucky strikes introduce a new weak point, reducing the “safe” period, and hurt the target. Once the threshold is achieved, any character can hit the target and do damage, though it is still not certain. Once you get through a target’s defenses, they tend to not last very long; overall, the length of combats should stay the same.

Cinematic

The flow of combat lends itself naturally to cinematic descriptions. “Malor attacked hard, as did Lulor. By occupying the beast’s attention so fully, Zelov the Mage was able to expose a velnerability, cracking open its defenses with his magic missiles. Crulor the barbarian was then able to savage it by way of that vulnerability, causing it to expose his throat as it attempted to protect itself, enabling Malor to end it’s existence. We recieved only a few scratches from the encounter, but it could have gone very differently had Malor’s initial strike not so threatened the creature.”

Dramatic

In theory at least, combat should be far more dramatic, with more ups and downs. Attackers on both sides should hit more often, but initial hits are unlikely to do damage beyond eroding defenses.

Simplification

Combat becomes far more of a group activity, and far more tactical. Overbearing rules are no longer required, and neither are facing rules, and you can also jetisson any issues with flanking; those are all built into these combat mechanics. In fact, most of the technicalities of combat are abstracted into this simple mechanic.

Faster

You can’t simplify combat without speeding it up, leaving more time for other forms of game-play. That would be a problem for any combat-junkies out there if it weren’t for the other effects, which means they will get more bang for their buck.

Realistic

One of the long-standing debates amongst players and GMs has been whether or not armor should be ablative, i.e. should wear away in effect in the course of combat. I’ve seen a number of proposals for doing this, because it is clearly a more realistic option, but they have all fallen upon the altar of practicality. This is the first proposal that I’ve ever seen that actually simplifies combat.

Strategic

This introduces a new strategic element into combat, encouraging a diversity of combat styles and amplifying existing points of differentiation. How you use a character who strikes often but does relatively little damage vs a heavy hitter becomes important, whereas in the official rules, all that you really care about is the total damage done at the end of the day.

Creature Differentiation

Similarly, this opens the door to a new mechanism for creature differentiation by the GM, enriching the flavor of the game world.

An Owbearish Example

An Owlbear (to pick a creature at random), according to Pathfinder, has AC 15 and 5 Hit Dice. Normal HP are 47.

So, under this set of optional rules, AC becomes 38/7. HP becomes 19.

• Attacker #1 is a 3rd-level fighter – base attack bonus +3, +3 from STR, +1 from a +1 longsword, doing d8+3 (STR) +1 (Magic) against a large creature, with critical threat range 19-20. Attacker #1 has (standard rules) AC 14 HP 29, (House Rules) AC 21/7 HP 20.
• Attacker #2 is also a 3rd-level fighter – base attack bonus +3, +1 from STR, +2 from a +2 longsword, doing d8+1 (STR) +2 (Magic) against a large creature, with critical threat range 19-20, and +1 from a +1 shortbow, doing 1d6 +1 (magic), with a critical threat of 20/x3.
• Attacker #3 is a 2nd-level Wizard – base attack bonus +1, +1 from a +1 dagger, doing d4 +1 (Magic) against a large creature, with critical threat range 19-20.
• Attacker #4 is a 3rd-level Cleric – base attack bonus +2, +1 from a +1 mace, doing d8+1 (STR) +1 (Magic) against a large creature, with critical threat range of 20.>/li>
• Attacker #5 is a 2nd-level Rogue – base attack bonus +1, +1d6 on a sneak attack, +2 from a +2 dagger doing d4 +2 (magic) against a larger creature, with a critical threat range of 20.

Attacker #5 has been scouting and has spotted the Owlbear trailing/persuing the party. Neither side have surprise on the other. The owlbear gets initiative 15 (rolled); the four attackers get initiative 17, 20, 12, 14, and 19, respectively (also rolled), so the combat order is:

Attacker #2 (Fighter)
Attacker #5 (Rogue)
Attacker #1 (Fighter)
Owlbear
Attacker #4 (Cleric)
Attacker #3 (Mage)

Combat proceeds:

• Attacker #2 unlimbers his shortbow and rolls a 6+3+1=10, reducing the owlbear’s AC to 28/7.
• Attacker #5 pulls back and conceals himself. He’ll seize any opportunities but has otherwise done his job.
• Attacker #1 closes on the owlbear and rolls 17+3+3+1=24, reducing the owlbear’s AC to 3/7.
• The Owlbear, stung badly by the ferocity of the attack, is likely to have only one chance to withdraw, but they don’t have a reputation for high intelligence and do have a reputation for aggression, so it will counter-attack Attacker #1, the only target in range, with both claws. He rolls a 19+8=27 and a 7+8=15, respectively. The First claw is more than enough to penetrate Attacker #1’s threshold, so the attack hits, and Attacker #1’s AC for the rest of the battle is 7, which means that the second attack also hits. Between them, these attacks do 2d6+8 which yields 16 points of damage. This isn’t enough to kill or incapacitate Attacker #1, who still has 4 HP left, but is nevertheless a serious injury. With both claws hitting, the Owlbear also grabs his attacker, so Attacker #1 will need to grapple with the Owlbear in his next round instead of attacking.
• Attacker #4 closes on the Owlbear to split it’s attention, but rather than attack, he uses a Cure Light Wounds on Attacker #1, healing 6 points of damage.
• Attacker #3 fires off Magic Missile doing 5 points of damage to the Owlbear. The first three points are consumed getting through the remaining AC threshold, leaving 2. This is the first physical harm actually inflicted on the Owlbear in the course of the battle and reduces its HP to 17.
• With two PCs in melee with the Owlbear, it’s too risky to use the shortbow, so Attacker #2 drops it and draws his sword, advances on the Owlbear, and attacks, rolling 13+1+2=16, hitting the target, and inflicting a further 9 points of damage. The Owlbear’s hit points are down to 8.
• Attacker #5, concerned for Attacker #1, launches a sneak attack, rolling a 5+1+2=8. This hits, though only just, and inflicts d4+2+1d6=10 points (rolled), killing the Owlbear just before things turned nasty.
• Attacker #1 is at least winded from the attack; his normal AC threshold will take 10+16=26 minutes to fully recover. Until then, he will be vulnerable to a greater or lesser extent, something the party will need to take into account before proceding.

Compare this with what would happen under the standard rules (assuming the same rolls): Attacker #2 hits with the shortbow, doing damage. Attacker #5 hides. Attacker #1 closes, hits, and does damage. The owlbear will be at about 30 out of 47 HP. The Owlbear attacks, hitting with both attacks, leaving attacker #1 with 13 out of 29 HP, slightly less than half. Attacker #4 heals 6 points, enough to shift the balance to slightly more than half, and hopefully enough to survive another round of engagement with the Owlbear. Attacker #4 uses his magic missile, getting the Owlbear down to about half hit-points. Attacker #2 attacks and does damage. The Owlbear is down to about 20 hit points. The rogue’s sneak attack won’t do anywhere near enough to kill the Owlbear, and Attacker #1 is not under the same level of threat, so he stays hidden and does nothing. The outcome remains unresolved.

So there’s more combat under the standard rules, but it’s more of the same – hit-and-do-damage-or-don’t, over and over – all the time, and would need a great deal more dramatic license to spin into a narrative. Such a simple change, but so many benefits – for just a few seconds of work with a calculator that can be done in advance!