The examination of the consequences to a community being located close to the center of administrative, political, and economic power that is a national capital continues. To recap: So far, I have looked at:

1. Proximity To Power
2. Proximity To Authority
3. Proximity To News
4. Access To Communications
5. Proximity To Trade
6. Proximity To Opportunity
7. Proximity To Fashion
8. Proximity To Style
9. Proximity To Expertise
10. Proximity To Comfort
11. Protection From The Outside (“Monsters”/Aliens in D&D terms)
12. Protection From Foreigners

Twelve down, eleven to go….

13. Shelter From Disruption

Civil disruptions are always a headache for the authorities based in the primary population center. They, quite understandably, do everything they can to prevent or minimize these problems, but their reach is both limited and grows weaker with increasing distance from the seat of authority.

Such disruptions are also a problem for ordinary people because they are often accompanied by violence. People die in such human disasters. That means that the steps authorities take to prevent or stop these disruptions have the side effect of protecting those living near the authority center from the incidental consequences of the disruption.

14. Protection From Disaster

Note that this is true of every type of disruption that I can think of, from revolution to slave revolt to famine, with the possible exception (depending the actions of the authority) of plagues.

There are a couple of special cases that need to be considered.

Earthquakes can strike anywhere, though mountainous terrain is more likely to experience this type of distaste, mainly because the same forces that cause earthquakes also build mountains. However, it’s relatively rare for central governments to be located in such terrain. Because they are often amongst the oldest settlements within the nation, they tend to be located in places where civilizations get a leg up on survival – relatively flat land, good for crops, and with at least one and possibly two rivers in the vicinity. Coastal areas also gain access to the sea as a food source, providing a further advantage. While it’s possible to have a major settlement with one of these factors being absent, any more would place the community at such a competitive disadvantage that better-situated populations will soon outstrip the deficient one in terms of growth, preventing it from ever becoming the administrative center of a nation.

More mature cultures are a somewhat different story; as they become more adept at transport of goods and managing resources, defense comes to assume a more dominant role in the selection of a central point of authority; while defensibility might well have been an additional factor in early settlement locations (especially in a D&D-type world with lots of wild creatures posing extreme dangers to the populace), they are a remote consideration compared to the other necessities for life and growth.

So, both the central point of authority and the surrounding local communities are equally at risk from Earthquakes. However, if one does happen to strike, the expertise and manpower needed for a quick recovery from the event are more readily available in the primary population base than anywhere else in the nation. So the principle of Protection From Disaster still applies.

The other special case is that of a Flood. Remember the terrain description offered when discussing earthquakes – mostly flat, with one or more rivers (in fact, often where a fork in a river provides protection on multiple sides)? This is terrain that is acutely and regularly susceptible to Flooding.

Under some circumstances, that’s not a bad thing. Annual flooding by the Nile was what made the Ancient Egyptian civilization possible. If flooding can be contained and controlled, it poses little threat. When that’s not the case, floods can do a LOT of indiscriminate and widespread damage to infrastructure.

Flooding is one of those events that are vaguely cyclic in statistical intensity. Once a year, you will have a ‘typical’ flood, give or take a margin of error, and most years, that’s that. But the longer you make that time period, the more scope you have for a flood of greater destructive power to materialize. A ten-year flood is the average of the worst flood over multiple ten-year time-spans; once a decade, you can expect a flood of that power to eventuate and have to be dealt with. Once every 25 years, there will be a still-worse flood, because there’s more time for the long-odds to show up. Almost all cities will have protections in place sufficient to cope with a once-a-decade flood event; many will have invested the time, money, labor, and engineering expertise that will enable them to cope with a once-in-a-generation (i.e. 25 year) flood. But each time you extend the time period, the costs of the required engineering go up, and the return on investment grows proportionately smaller. Only key areas and buildings within a city will usually be engineered to survive a once-in-a-century event, if that. A once-in-a-millennium flood event? Not a chance.

There’s a simple mechanism by which the statistics of floods and similar recurring disasters (hurricanes, etc) can be examined – all you need is a die. The optimum choice is somewhere around the d12 mark. Each year, you roll for the intensity of the flooding, but if you roll an eleven or twelve, you roll again and add 10 to the result.

Using anydice, I rolled 200 of them, and here are the results (where a result exploded, the original result and the additional die roll results are shown bold in brackets before the actual result): 3, 3, 2, 4, 6, 10, 4, 4, 9, 3, 3, 4, 9, 2, 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 2, 3, (11. 2) 12, 6, 4, 3, 6, 4, (12, 4) 14, 7, 8, 4, 7, (12, 3) 13, (12, 8) 18, 3, 12, 4, 5, 7, 4, 4, (11, 10) 20, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 10, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 8, 6, 2, 7, 9, (12, 9) 19, 10, (11, 8) 18, 10, 10, (12, 10) 20, 8, 5, 2, 4, 4, 3, 2, (11, 10) 20, 12, 12, 9, 7, (11, 2) 12, 6, 9, (12, 7) 17, 9, 6, 5, 4, 7, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9, 8, (12, 7) 17, 4, 2, 7, 1, 5, 10, 7, (12, 9) 19, 2, 6, 2, 4, 2, 10, 4, 12, 2, 10, (11, 6) 16, 4, 9, 2, 5, 6, 6, 5, 2, 1, (11, 1) 11, 5, 6, 10, 10, 9, 6, 1, (12, 4) 14, 8, 9, (11, 9) 19, (11, 3) 13, 3, 2, (12, 8) 18, 7, 6, 3, (12, 11, 9) 29, 1, 2, 8, 3, 2, 3, (12, 6) 16, (12, 5) 15, 2, 6, 8, 3, 1, 9, 7, 2, 5, 9, 7, 2, 6, 1, 9, 8, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 6, 8, 6, 1, 4, 1, 1, (12, 11, 4) 24, 4, (11, 6) 16, 4, 10, 1, (12, 12, 3) 23, 8, 1, 4, 5, 4, 10, 7, 5, 9, 9, (11, 1) 11, 2, 2, 5, 6.

Ignoring all those numbers that ‘exploded’, I get an average of 5.135 from 170 results. If I average all 200, I get an average of 6.825. Since 30 of the results exploded, that means that the average interval between these results is 200/30 = 6-and-2/3rds years. Call it seven years. So, once every 7 years (on average) flooding will be worse than usual. How much worse? Well, the average of those 30 results is 16.4, and 16.4 is .almost 3.2 × 5.135 – so about 320% of the average ‘good’ year.

This is all rather arbitrary, the real thing wouldn’t be so linear, it would be a dumbbell curve of some sort with one side distorted – the sort of thing that you get from divided and multiplied die rolls. Something like [1d6 + (2d6 × d12)] / d6, round down, for example – which gives a result of 1 to 150, so we would then apply a numerical factor to get a more convenient scale. Which scale you use would depend on the number of results that were acceptable over the defining threshold value (the threshold in the simpler experiment was 10, and it gave us a once-in-seven years cycle; by choosing the number of results above “statistical normal” relative to the total number that you roll, you can define whether or not you’re scaling to get once-in-a-decade results or whatever). (If you use the averages of the individual die rolls, you can work out the mean result – [3.5 + (7×6.5)] / 3.5 = 14. On which basis, I would suggest that 28 is a natural threshold value. (Another big advantage of this approach is that there are a lot of results that will yield the minimum, effectively “no floods this year” – which is a lot more realistic).

Proximity here is the enemy of the neighboring community. What affects the population center also affects it, but it’s far less likely to be as well-resourced for recovery. So flooding is one case in which the protection of proximity fails, and in fact the opposite is true. But it’s very much the exception.

15. Exposure To Crime

Cities are notorious for crime. When I was growing up, in a small country town, we only locked the front door if we were all going away for some period of time. Going out for the day, or for an evening? No chance. We usually locked the door only when we went to bed for the night. I’m told that things have degenerate somewhat since, but it’s still a very safe community relative to the city in which I now live.

Being close to the population center means that you are also close to its vices, and that unfortunately includes crime.

16. Sensitivity To Disruption

There’s been a gradual general shift in emphasis from the positive to the negative in terms of characterizing the impact of proximity. That’s not entirely an accident. Back in item 13, I argued that a community in close proximity to the central authority was largely protected against the disruptions of chaos and anarchy that all human societies experience from time to time by the same mechanisms that the central authority uses to protect itself. But there’s a flip side to that coin, a converse case: if, despite their best efforts, the central authority is convulsed with some form of civil disruption, the impact on their regional neighbors will be almost as great. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that the central authority is the target of such unrest, and therefore a magnet for it, it would arguably be worse for the surrounding communities who don’t enjoy quite the same level of resources as the central authority. The only reason it’s worse for the central authority is because they are the natural target.

17. The Splash Effect

In fact, any measure aimed at the central authority is likely to hit the regional communities with a “splash effect”. This is to the benefit of the central authority, because it means that the neighboring regional communities have more in common with the central authority than they have differences, helping the central authority cement the loyalty of those from whom it would otherwise be in the greatest danger.

18. Conservatism

In modern times, it’s the populations farthest removed from central authority – “out in the sticks with the hicks” – that are notoriously conservative, while the relative luxury and leisure time afforded urban populations and exposure to foreign ideas permits the formulation of progressive, even radical, ideas. Things would not be so clear-cut in substantially different time periods. Protection and Shelter from so many potential dangers encourages support for the political power that provides that protection. The farther away you get, the looser the grip of that central authority, and the greater the self-reliance and likelihood of coming into contact with new ideas – so it is the areas closest to the major population bases that would be the most politically and ideologically conservative, and those remote that were the most progressive, independent of thought, and radical.

And yet, that’s not going to be true of all conservative values. Close to the central population bases, the economic pressured and opportunities are going to be disruptive to nuclear families to some extent. Those disruptive forces would also attenuate with distance, at least to some extent. That means that in terms of anything with a cause rooted in economics and opportunity, the neighboring communities are going to be more like the central urban population and less like the more remote rural communities.

19. Dependence

Another definite downside to derive from the close relationship between central authority and neighboring communities is also implied by the above section. More remote communities are generally accustomed to making what they need or doing without. But when any product you can afford is just a day or two away, the capacity to be self-reliant tends to be lost very quickly. It’s easier to go out and buy something than it is to learn how to do it yourself; and the work tends to be of a more professional standard.

All of which adds up to a growing dependence on the central authority. Farmers will start planting the crops that offer the greatest financial return, enabling them to trade their wares for goods and services, gradually becoming more of a suburban offshoot of the central population than an independent community.

The trend is for the residents to become, and to willfully aspire to become, more like their more urban neighbors.

20. Exposure To Inequality

There are a number of downsides to being closer to the main population base. One of them is that social and economic inequalities are going to be greater in frequency, in numbers affected, and in intensity, simply because the wealthy and connected can afford to gravitate toward that population base because they are amongst the few who can afford to do so. “Splash effect” then means that all the resulting social, political, and economic baggage that comes with such inequalities will spread out to affect the neighboring communities. Perhaps not to the same extent as the urban population, but to a nevertheless significant level.

The first consequence is that these inequalities will be replicated in smaller scale in the surrounding communities. Proximity to wealth and power always makes a lesser standard of wealth and power seem more inequitable. This only grows worse with increasing industrialization, because progress perpetually offers new pathways to wealth and power.

21. Exposure To Poverty

In particular, the gap between the richest members of the community and the poorest members of the community gets wider with every step toward the center of population. This, of course, is one of the reasons behind the increased exposure to crime (item 15 above) – you have a combination of inequity and a large amount of wealth in the form of the rich, the privileged, taxes, tithes, merchants and trade goods all funneling through these areas. It’s a combination that can’t help but attract criminals.

22. Exposure To Disease

With poverty typically comes disease, and disease is a great leveler in many societies. Anyone can become ill, and while the wealthy and privileged might be able to obtain better care, there are always limits to medical knowledge. In particular, many popular remedies are now recognized as having been worse than the disease. There have been times, for example, in which lead was in a great many products for the whitening properties of it’s compounds; there was a time when radium was in everything (including toothpaste!) because it’s glow was thought to symbolize vitality and energy; there was a time when arsenic compounds were all over the place because people liked the many hues of green that they contained (arsenic-colored wallpaper was especially popular and the rich green of Victorian times is still associated with that era)…. the list goes on and on.

And that’s before you even get to things like asbestos, considered a miracle material in its heyday. Then you throw in bloodletting, leeches, trepanning, electroshock, and prefrontal lobotomies, all accepted and recommended medical practices in their eras. So greater access to the medical profession is not necessarily a good thing! While many home remedies have been shown to be of dubious effectiveness, if not discredited entirely, for the most part, they at least did little or no harm….

23. Restriction Of Opportunity

I made a fuss in item 6 about residents having “access to opportunity”, and stand by it. But it is also true that opportunities are more easily lost or stifled, or appropriated by someone more wealthy or powerful. Many games are set in times and places where there was no protection of intellectual property, where you could come up with a good idea in the morning, develop it into profitability in the afternoon, and have better-resourced and opportunistic entrepreneurs move in on the idea in the evening.

The greater your proximity to those with the capacity to steal an innovation, the more likely someone of dubious morality will have the opportunity to do so.

The other form of opportunity is by way of discovery and exploration. In the capital, missions of exploration may be underwritten; in the fringes, one can go prospecting simply by keeping your eyes open and your wits about you as you go about your daily life. Opportunity is always somewhat stifled and restricted for those stuck in the middle.

The Reality Of Proximity

I can’t think of a single aspect of life that is not influenced, for good or ill (or both) by proximity to a major population center. It’s a factor that must be taken into account in assessing every creative decision you make. By shaping the external circumstances from which they derive, the effects on NPCs (and PCs) who were born or who reside in such locations are affected no less profoundly.

To some extent, both these truths reinforce each other; social circumstances are ultimately driven by people just as much as people are shaped by the environment around them.

And finally, any of these circumstances and effects can lie at the heart of an adventure, shaping it and the people encountered within it.

Part 3 of this series will follow in a week or two, in which the spotlight shifts to the remote fringes of a nation…

When I started writing this article, it was expected to be another short one. I had only 3 or 4 impacts in mind… deeper analysis when I started detailed planning soon dispelled that expectation. Of necessity, I’ve had to break it into smaller pieces…

Being close to the population / administration / social center of a nation has great social impact. In the course of this article, I will list and analyze no less than 23 consequences, both for good and ill.

And when that’s done, I have a similar list of consequences of being remote from the center of power. There’s a lot to do, so let’s get busy…

1. Proximity To Power

Being located close to the central power base means that you are squarely in the gaze of that power base. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, or even both in different respects at the same time. Local problems come to the attention of power quickly, and they are predisposed to resolve those problems expeditiously because of the proximity to themselves. Which can be either good or bad, depending on the fastest way to solve the problem!

2. Proximity To Authority

The converse is that the local community are going to be amongst the first to experience the impact of any decisions made by the power-base, usually with no regard of that local community.

3. Proximity To News

One of the consequences of proximity to a central population base is that there is a steady stream of traffic both to the population center and from it, and travelers carry news. The local community will be amongst the first to learn of events within the population center and will often learn of events in the outlands even before the central bureaucracy.

4. Access To Communications

Clever people will always recognize the potential in the proximity to news to shape the narrative of events in a manner that they can exploit. Actually being located in the central power-base is often considered the ideal placement for such purposes, but being on the fringes of it can be almost as good if not better. That’s because, despite the proximity to it, the local community is not the central base, and no matter how closely scrutinized that local community might be, it is not going to be as closely analyzed as the residents and important visitors of the population center itself. If you want to operate from the shadows, it can be helpful to take a small step away from the light.

But there is also a legitimate impact: access to communications helps keep families and friends united despite any separation between them. The consequence is that key families will be distributed across key areas of the nation and nevertheless present a relatively unified family structure. That positions them as movers and shakers, able to wield considerable influence from behind the scenes while rarely being noticed. Once again, if you want to operate from the shadows….

5. Proximity To Trade

It’s incredibly rare for a central population base to be self-sufficient. Food and resources almost always have to be brought in from the outside. Where commodities are perishable, the source needs to nevertheless be as close as possible to the central population. That makes the local communities with physical proximity to the central population the primary suppliers, as well as funnel points for other commodities passing through en route to the capital. On top of that, the proximity means that exotic supplies from elsewhere are either continuously passing through (and accessible) or not far away. All this presents ready-made opportunities for trade.

What’s more, a central bureaucracy always carries an overhead cost. The hope is always that buying in bulk and creating favorable regulations counterbalance that cost and keeps trade with the central community attractive to merchants. Canny local traders can sometimes intercept products bound for the central market when demand is higher than the merchants expect, undercutting the central economy to make a profit. This is an example of employing the proximity to news and their physical position as a gate-keeper to the central authority to achieve a trade advantage – a scenario whose prospects are only enhanced by the second impact of the access to communications impact. This combination means that many of the financial and trade leaders of the nation, the equivalent of “the titans of industry”, will emerge from the local communities close to the central population base.

The faster and more secure bulk transport and communications are, the farther these entrepreneurs origin points can be from the central authority, because the liabilities of remoteness are minimized.

6. Proximity To Opportunity

There will always be more opportunities generated in a major population center than in any other single location in a nation. But life in the population center is often so much of a struggle that it can be difficult to take advantage of those opportunities. It is often the case that those best positioned to do so are on the fringes of that population center. At least, many of them will think so, anyway.

The reality is slightly different. While there are always some who are consumed with their existing lives in the population center, there are still many more people where they came from; the reality is that there is almost always someone in a position to recognize and take up the opportunity within the dominant population center.

This is sure to be the cause for extremely bitterness to those residents of the neighboring local populations of entrepreneurial bent, who would feel that at best, they got the dregs of what the main population center left behind, the crumbs from their tables. Still others would live in perpetual expectation that one day, the stars would align and they would be in the right place at the right time. And a few, fueled by jealousy, would be determined to make their mark and force their way into the prosperity that was “up for grabs if you wanted it badly enough”.

Proximity To Opportunity would be a key factor in shaping the hopes and aspirations of many of those living near the central community.

7. Proximity To Fashion

One of the deepest insults that can be offered to a local community is to describe the citizenry as “quaint”, because while this is a polite phraseology, it implies that the community are out-of-touch, behind-the-times, and – in a word – uncool, just as “queer” was analogous to “strange” until the mid-twentieth century came along.

The closer one gets to the center of power in a nation, the more deeply this insult bites, because they are in close proximity to the latest fashions and trends. Indeed, many will be prone to taking this aspect of their social lives far more seriously than those who actually set those trends in the urban capital itself, who can approach the subject far more casually, almost as a byproduct of life in a contemporary metropolis.

Those living near to the population center will be amongst the first to learn – and the first to actively seek to learn – of the latest trends and stylings. This is not a superficiality to them; it is a key element not in an appearance of sophistication so much as avoiding the appearance of a lack of sophistication and culture.

8. Proximity To Style

That goes for every other form of cultural expression, not just clothing styles and hairdos and the like. There is often a slight cultural arrogance that results, a sense that the surrounding communities are adopting and expressing the latest styles in their most pure sense, of taking the melange of cultural influences at work in the central population and distilling out the ones that matter, that are important.

To those outside the immediate proximity, and any of those in the urban center itself, these cultural elements are trivial and pretentious, the farthest thing from important that you could get, which only serves to underscore the impact that Proximity To Fashion has on those surrounding communities.

9. Proximity To Expertise

There are all sorts of reasons for expertise to gravitate to the central community. That’s where the patrons are who value the service that they provide to the community and can afford to underwrite it. That’s where the customers are for the goods and services that they have to offer. That’s where decisions are made that will affect them, and where they have the opportunity to shape those decisions, or at least have their voices heard.

One result is that the local communities closest to the central community will know that any expertise that they happen to need is only a day or two’s travel away. This tends to downplay any independent creativity and raw resourcefulness; there is less of a “make do” attitude. Instead, the local communities become accustomed to paying for things instead of making something that’s “close enough” for themselves.

10. Proximity To Comfort

Another impact on the local communities is that they have easy access to luxuries. Expectations of comfort will be higher as a base-line and exceptions to that base-line will tend to be in the direction of greater luxury, overall. As with several of these impacts, you can even get a rough indication of distance from the population nexus by charting the minimum standards of luxury expected across a consistent measure, for example in a prosperous home.

11. Protection From The Outside

While this effect is true for all nations regardless of genre, it is most clearly explained by translating it into it’s interpretation in one specific game/genre: D&D/Pathfinder, where it would be described as “Protection From Monsters”. Because the lands around the central authority are going to be the most “pacified” of the entire nation, the best-cleared, few monsters will trouble them in comparison to communities in the outlands. What’s more, this is where the nation is militarily strongest, and best able to respond to those incidents that do occur.

If Dragons were as fearsome as they are in a Tolkien novel, there would be times when that would not mean very much, but most such creatures, though both tough and dangerous, can be driven off by military force; enough archers pose a definite threat to such creatures.

12. Protection From Foreigners

The same principle applies to other nations (including armies of more socially-organized creatures like Orcs). Before they can pose a direct threat to the administrative center of the nation, they will have had to bypass or batter their way through layer after layer of defenses. The surrounding local communities will also lie within virtually all these layers of protection. From the point of view of external threats, the regional communities that lie just outside the central authority are almost as well protected as the central authority itself.

Twelve down, and so far, they have all been decidedly beneficial for the neighboring communities. That leaves eleven more to be covered in part 2, where it’s not all such good news…

Have you ever tried to run a prison-break scenario? Was it as successful as you would have hoped?

I’m betting that most readers will have answered “no” to the first question and that virtually everyone else will have answered “no” to the second.

There’s good reason for this state of pessimism: no matter how essential it might be to the plot, no matter how reasonable or realistic it might be, no matter how strongly it accords with the PCs personality profile and circumstances, no matter how characteristic the development might be of the genre of game, players will resist letting their characters be captured unto their dying breath. Or reluctantly and begrudgingly accede because it is expected of them.

Yes, you can force the issue – wither by employing overwhelming force or declaring a fait accompli (“You wake up the next morning in the dungeons of the castle…”), but players are apt to resent either solution as manipulations and plot trains.

You have just run up – hard – against the reality of player psychology.

The Psychology Of Players

There are some things that players will do only reluctantly, if they will do them at all, and letting themselves be captured is right at the head of the list.

It doesn’t really matter what genre conventions say – there is always a genre convention about heroic struggles that the players can claim to be adhering to. It doesn’t matter what characterization should demand, either; there’s always enough fuzziness about such things that a character can claim to have been acting according to the dictates of another personality trait, or even struggling to overcome the personality trait in question.

Bottom line: players can almost always find some reason not to do anything that they really don’t want their characters to do.

The problems for the GM start when one of these things-players-don’t-want-to-do is a central premise of the planned adventure. Which brings us back to the prison-break plotline I mooted earlier: you can’t put the characters into an escape-from-the-prison plotline without first putting the characters into the prison, for example.

The secret to success in such cases is to make the decision to let themselves be captured, and thence to stage a prison break, one that comes from the players themselves.

If it’s their idea and not yours, the normal defenses and reluctance are circumvented.

In fact, you can convince the players that they are on the right track to demolish all your fiendish plans by playing hard-to-get – the normally prickly town guards have just been given a pay rise and are inclined to let minor offenders off with a warning; the attempt to fake a snatch-and-grab goes woefully wrong when a good Samaritan with sharp eyes steps in to give the accused an alibi; someone who wants to curry favor with the PCs bails them out prematurely the first time they actually manage to get themselves arrested…

The harder you struggle against letting the players do what you secretly wanted them to do all along, the more this will seem to be the right course of action to them. Confirmation Bias already has the players inclined to think that their plans are the best possible choice; by making yourself appear reluctant, you play into that confirmation bias. Do it right, and when they finally do get captured, you will have players high-fiving each other in celebration. Only when it becomes apparent, perhaps in hindsight, that you were way too prepared for this result will the truth begin to dawn on them – and by then, they won’t mind, because you’ll have made them ‘earn’ it.

The trick is always to know what actions the players will find objectionable. There is no real way to predict this; even putting yourself in their shoes can give only the broadest of hints. You can only test and tease and probe, every now and then, and extrapolate your results.

I have better luck assuming that every action the players want to attempt is the right solution until they decide otherwise, regardless of the undiscovered flaws and holes that they will eventually stumble upon, and making them earn their success no matter what they attempt. Make player psychology work for you, instead of holding you hostage, and the result will be a better game for everyone!

A needs hierarchy for players

For some time, I’ve been advocating Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs as a tool for the creation of Alien character archetypes and characters (see “Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ?Create A Character Clinic? To Non-Humans“). Perhaps a similar solution can be employed with respect to players in game situations?

5. The Physiological Needs Analogue

While PCs in-game and players as human beings in an out-of-game context might have survival needs like food and shelter, players in an in-game context do not. The best analogue for this need is in fact the potential for survival of the PC.- without the character, the player can do nothing. Having a viable (I almost said ‘living’, but a PC might still be ‘viable’ after death) character in a campaign is the most fundamental need.

4. The Safety Analogue

Safety Needs are all about personal security and potential for prosperity. Those mean very different things to a player with a character. There are three needs that potentially fit this description: the first is a GM who is not only fair, he is seen to be fair by the player; and the second, a consequence of the first, is the opportunity to improve his character’s situation in in-game ‘life’. The third is an expectation that the game world makes rational sense, when all the factors behind character and GM decisions are known and taken into account.

3. The Social Belonging Analogue

These are interpersonal needs. Again, the context creates a fundamental shift in the meaning of these requirements! At first glance, you might think that this refers to other PCs, but one-player games are not only possible, they can be a lot of fun. Them you might think that it refers to NPCs with whom to interact, but while roleplaying character interactions is an important element of most games, no-one would ever pretend that this was a ubiquitous requirement – you can have a perfectly satisfactory session in which no-one says one word “in character”, so that’s not it, either.

No, I think this is something more subtle – the sense that the character is part of the world and not some superficial and meaningless afterthought. This isn’t a need that the character has, it’s a need that the player needs to feel is satisfied in the case of his character.

There’s a whole lot of baggage that comes with that requirement – things that are needed in order to create that sense of belonging, or things that exist as a consequence of that subset of general verisimilitude. Society, Politics, Economics & Trade, Geography, Ecology, and so on – all the things that the GM should spend most of his time developing when he is “creating the campaign”.

On top of all that, there is the requirement for the PC to have a unique personality that expresses both the formative events of the character’s past and plausible and consistent reactions to those events. Characterization is also part of this sense of belonging.

2. The Esteem Analogue

The esteem needs are about the need to feel both self-respect and the respect of others, to be able to make independent decisions for yourself in areas of life that matter and are not just trivial. A game is not just about the character experiencing the story that the GM has laid before them, though that might be sufficient for the character’s needs; the player needs to feel that he has the ability to make decisions that affect the outcome of a situation, that in fact change the game world in however small a way.

1. The Self-actualization Analogue

Self-actualization is all about personal growth, and achieving potential, about being more than a job and a socioeconomic label. The player needs to feel that the character has both the scope and opportunity to develop as a characterization.

Validating the hierarchy

Probably the hardest part of interpreting the Hierarchy Of Needs was not devising the list of ‘needs’, but making sure that they are in the logical sequence. No step can be dependent on a higher step; in a nutshell, and satisfaction of the lower levels is a prerequisite for achieving the next.

5-to-4 validation:

Can a player have confidence in the fairness of the GM is his character is not a viable part of the game? If a legitimately-created character who has been approved for participation by the GM is not viable, does that not bring into question the fairness and/or competence of the GM? Does it not call into question the rational foundation of the game world (assuming that the character archetype is one of the principle character types of the game?) GM fairness and a rational world cannot exist with an nonviable character, because the GM should have recognized and pointed out the problems with the character instead of approving it as fit for the purpose of being played in the campaign. Check.

4-to-3 validation:

If the game world is not rational and predictable, how can a rational character create a sense that the character belongs to that world? Even a superficially mad world needs an underlying rationale. The player needs to be able to appreciate the presence of that underlying rationality even if the character can’t. Satisfying the third-tier need is impossible if the second tier is not adequately satisfied, at least at the meta-game level. Check.

3-to-2 validation:

Chaos theory is often expressed as a butterfly in Beijing flapping it’s wings and altering the eventual weather experienced by America or Europe. Unspoken is the assumption of a connectedness of the environments in question, a medium of transmission for the consequences of those flapping wings. That butterfly has zero impact on the weather of Jupiter, say.

The connection between player decision and game-world impact is the rationality of the game-world; without it, the consequences of any action would be random and unpredictable, in which case there is no rational basis upon which to make a decision. The third tier of needs is the equivalent of the atmosphere that connects the “butterfly’s wings” to the “experienced-weather consequences”, i.e. that connects decision to game-world impact in such a way that a rational decision is even possible. Check.

2-to-1 validation:

The final link to be validated is the easiest of them all. How can a characterization be developed if it isn’t defined in the first place? In order to develop, the character needs to be able to make rational decisions that have a measurable outcome on a situation. Check. In fact, the whole hierarchy seems to be on solid ground.

Where’s the fun?

It may be noted that there is no mention of the word ‘fun’ as an outcome of any of the needs beyond ascertaining that certain things do not prohibit it. Nor is there any mention of the many things that different gamer personality profiles enjoy. Why? Because these are all fundamental requirements to be achieved before the possibility of ‘fun’ even arises, no matter what form that individual’s ‘fun’ might take.

Application by example

With that done, let’s re-examine the problem of player resistance to PC captivity unless it’s the player’s idea.

The whole notion of surrendering control to the circumstances violates the second ‘need’ because it actively takes control away from the character, potentially risking fundamental injury to the first tier of needs. Forcing the issue violates the second tier need for fairness. These are the same drives that would be violated by locking the player up in real life without a fair hearing and giving them no way to improve their situation. Small wonder that they instinctively resist as though fighting for their very survival; they might well be doing just that!

The caveat, too, makes perfect sense in this context. A player choosing to let his PC be captured is voluntarily yielding control over his circumstances with the implication that this is a temporary measure that will enhance either the characters prospects for survival or prosperity (tier 1 and 2) in the long run. This is the sort of decision that can only be countenanced if the player has unshakable faith that the GM is, and will be, fair. There is also the implication that doing so will lead to validation and an enhancement of the character’s self-esteem, another tier-2 phenomenon.

If the GM analyzes a planned prison-break adventure with a view to satisfying the needs of the hierarchy, an action plan quickly suggests itself. First, he must ensure that the player is properly aware of the circumstances and how they will be changed by the outcome of the player’s decisions. Secondly, he needs to reiterate his fairness by giving the character the opportunity to escape if he chooses to take it; third, he needs to make it clear that capture entails certain risks, but also inherently makes available a reward of equal or greater measure, the furthering of one or more of the PCs goals, to wit, an increased satisfaction of his needs for esteem; and then fourth, he needs to leave it to the player to come to the decision in such circumstances and with a plan in place to restore the character’s independence. If the player then chooses to voluntarily surrender his character on his own terms, there is no problem. If he chooses not to, the GM must be prepared with another path to success in the adventure, though the price of that success might be higher. The adventure needs to be robust enough to survive a “no” decision by the player.

In other words, he needs to enlist the player as a knowing ally in his quest to deliver the adventure. If you can do that, the world – well, the game-world and the campaign – are your oyster.

I’ve read a lot of RPG content and advice over the years, much of it D&D related. I’ve contributed my fair share to that total, it must be admitted.

Every D&D supplement (that’s not explicitly a collection of monsters) contains new magic items. Websites and magazines abound in them. AD&D creatures, at least came with a “Treasure Type” that informed the GM what loot an encounter with the creature should yields – sometimes with a context, more frequently with a context simply assumed.

And (almost?) every one of these sources and references overlook something significant – the containers that the loot, magical or otherwise, comes in.

Once again, the AD&D DMG fares slightly better than average. They at least had a table for loot containers – part of the random dungeon generator, as I recall – and with absolutely no certainty that the treasure in question would actually fit within the container – but it at least listed several different possibilities.

My attention was first called to this situation by an article in The Dragon which looked at the specific volume and stacking of coins, both loose and tightly packed. But beyond this side issue, there was little-to-no acknowledgment of the problem. Sometime after that, containers seemed to degenerate into a parking place for traps, an obstacle between the party and the loot that had to be overcome, one final hurdle to clear.

Things improved ever-so-slightly in the latter days of 3.x, when enchanted scabbards began making token appearances here and there in selected supplements. But this idea seems to have made little impact and quietly vanished again shortly thereafter, thrown under the bus driving to fixed-magic-slot heaven. Pathfinder lists only two forms of magic container: Handy Haversacks and Bags Of Holding.

This state of affairs is intolerable, a collective failure of imagination on the part of published GMs everywhere. So let’s get some remedial action started…

Potion Bottles

• Lemarzixs’ Potion Bottles: A potion bottle that, when activated by the command word coupled with the removal of the stopper, flies through the air to an indicated target (friendly or otherwise) and pours its contents down the target’s throat. Range of 10′ per caster level, consumes a 1st level spell slot as though a 1st level spell had been cast. If the bottle is retrieved, it will be ready to be refilled with another potion from a standard potion bottle in 24 hours. Usually found in matching sets of 2-6, usually pre-filled. Minor Wondrous Item, 150 gp per bottle in the set.
• Lemarzixs’ Rogue Bottle: When a bottle in a set of Lemarzixs’ Potion Bottles is not retrieved, it becomes a Rogue Bottle. If the user makes a Will Save at DC 20, it behaves as usual, but the effect of the potion it contains is reversed (GM’s call on effect interpretation if necessary). If the save fails, the potion behaves as intended but the bottle targets a random character within a 20′ range of the intended target (which does include the intended target). Minor Wondrous Item, 50 gp.

Oil Flasks

• Kulkin’s Oil Of Inflammation: This magic item is a misnomer because it’s not the oil itself that is (necessarily) magical, it’s the flask. When the command word is uttered, loud enough to be heard at the location of the bottle, it shatters, and (if it contains ordinary lamp oil), 1-3 rounds later, ignites the oil. In addition to ordinary lantern oil, any potion with “oil” in the name can be used; when this oil is burned, through the magic of the flask, it becomes a cloud 10’x10′ which applies the magic of the oil to anyone passing through that space as though the oil had been splashed on the target via a thrown flask. 24 hours after use, the flask reforms and can be refilled. Minor Wondrous Item, 300 gp.

Pots

• Mannorkan’s Watched Pot: When this pot is filled with water and placed in a fire or on a stove, the water inside will never boil – it won’t even get warm. However, any water in a metal container of any sort that is brought within 10′ of the Watched Pot will boil within seconds as though it had been placed in the same fire for as long as the Watched Pot has been exposed to the heat. Removing the Watched Pot from the heat ends the effect but does not cool any water already heated. Minor Wondrous Item, 500 gp.
• Mannorkan’s Cooking Pot: Anything cooked in this pot is cooked perfectly; it will resist (STR 15) being removed from the heat until that is achieved. If a spice rack and a few handfuls of fresh or preserved herbs are placed within 10′ of the Cooking Pot, whatever is cooked will also be perfectly spiced and the flavor herbally enhanced. The result is a +8 to the results of the cooking check of the chef, enough to turn adequate ingredients into a royal feast, poor ingredients into a sumptuous meal, or an old boot into a deliciously tasty main course. What’s more, it can work this magic on up to three dishes at a time, magically separating each of the dishes into separate servings, simply by putting the ingredients for each into the pot in succession (but don’t get the order mixed up or the courses will also be muddled). Minor Wondrous Item, 500 gp.

Chests

In many ways, chests are the ultimate containers. They typically come in four sizes (the first of which is fairly rare):

1. Ginormous
2. Large
3. Medium
4. Small
   

   Ginormous Chests

   • The Many-fold Chest Of Things: This chest contains 6 layers of compartments. Any non-magical object or set of objects valued at less than 5 gp that is placed in one of the compartments of the bottom layer is magically replicated in similar compartments on the the other 5 layers. These objects must occupy a space of less than 2 x 3 x 3 inches in the case of 6 compartments, 4 x 3 x 3 inches in the case of a seventh, and 12 x 6 x 3 inches in the case of the eighth. Exception: For some reason, it doesn’t work with coins or gemstones, no-one knows why, and if such valuables are placed within the chest it will lock for eight hours, during which time the valuables simply vanish, seemingly into non-existence, though it’s possible that they are transferred into some extra-dimensional space that no-one has worked out how to access. The objects created by the Chest will last for eight hours before vanishing. Each time a duplicate is removed from the chest, the original object becomes more insubstantial; when the final copy is removed, the original vanishes. The chest is exotically decorated with inlaid woods and lined with soft velvet and a leather under-layer that makes each compartment waterproof. It weights 250 lb, which is considerably lighter than it looks like it should be from the size of the chest. It’s also notable that the volume of the compartments adds up to considerably less than the interior volume of the chest; what the “missing space” contains is another unknown. The scale of the difference varies from example to example, no two examples of this magic item are the same. Minor Wondrous Item, 500 gp.

   Large Chests

   • The Rummage Luggage: This is The Luggage from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. It contains at least one of every mundane item listed in the Core Rules (unless an item has been ruled culturally inappropriate by the GM). Finding any given item requires d12-1 minutes of rummaging around – there is a chance that it will be right on top! But, on a result of 11 (i.e. 12-1), the item cannot be found at all for the next 24 hours. The luggage itself is self-mobile and will follow its owner almost anywhere – though it might take it a while if it has to work it’s way through a stone wall. The luggage has 200hp, AC 15, and heals at the rate of 1hp a day; experts are divided on whether or not it is alive. Medium Wondrous Item, 20,000 gp.

   Medium Chests

   • Wakasham’s Portable Bookshelf: This chest is packed full of copies of books and (non-magical) scrolls, all related to the one subject. Once a book is removed from the chest, it locks until that book is opened to the last page or (if in scroll form) unrolled all the way; a magical sigil at the end of the ‘book’ then unlocks the chest and causes the book to evaporate. No more than one can be removed per day. Whenever the last book is removed from the Portable Bookshelf, it magically refills with books on a random variety of subjects; the next book removed from amongst those present “seeds” the Portable Bookshelf, replacing the rest of the contents with books related to that subject. Note that the contents are magically populated and can include any book ever published (but not books that have yet to be published). Making the Library even more useful is another property of the Portable Bookshelf; if, when it opens for you to take another book, you instead place a book from the outside into the “bookshelf” and close it for 24 hours, it will use that book as it’s “subject guideline” and repopulate itself with related books. GMs, take note: Any given book can be interpreted as relating to multiple subjects, it’s up to you to determine how a book’s “subject” is to be interpreted. Use this as a way to put relevant backstory in the hands of the PCs, not as a shortcut to secrets that you want to keep. Major Wondrous Item, 45,000 gp.
   • Manusian’s Compartment: This is a flat box about 1 inch in depth and 12 inches x 8 inches in plan size. When placed inside a chest, it forms an extra-dimensional secret compartment that can only be accessed by utilizing the command word that was written on the lid of the box. The chest must be large enough to contain the box, which will ‘stretch’ to the same size. Anything that will fit inside the chest plan dimensions and the one-inch depth will take up no space within the chest and have no weight. If it won’t fit in that space, it won’t go into the hidden compartment. Minor Wondrous Item, 15,000 gp.

   Small Chests

   Small chests are most commonly used for containing valuables, and these two magic items are no exceptions.
    

   • The Currency Converter: This is a small chest with the capacity to hold 500 coins. If it is completely filled with coins of the same denomination and closed for 24 hours, it will replace those coins with the same value (less 5%) in the next larger denomination. If fewer coins than the 500 limit are placed in the chest, they will be converted into the next lower denomination (again less 5%), (but any coins beyond the 500 limit are then lost. (NB: Money-changers would typically charge 10-20% for the same service per step in denomination) – copper to silver to gold = 20-40% in fees). Minor Wondrous Item, 3,000 gp.
   • Laphalion’s Strongbox: If you wrote advertising for magic items, this would be the dream product – “the world’s strongest lock-box, all but unpickable, keeps your hard-earned money safe, safe, safe”! Laphalion’s Strongbox holds 300 coins. The strongbox has 500hp and ignores the first 10+d6 points of damage from any attack (roll for each attack as it happens). The lock is partially extra-dimensional in nature and has a DC of 30 to pick, i.e. only the best thieves in the world have even a small chance. Any failed attempt to break into the box (i.e. actually inflicting damage or attempting to pick the lock) triggers a Magic Mouth on the strongbox that screams “Stop Thief! I’m being robbed!” continuously at the top of “it’s lungs” until the command word etched on the inside of the lid is uttered. Minor Wondrous Item, 6,000 gp.

Coin Purses

• Light-fingered Louie: This is a coin purse and matching pair of soft silken gloves (usually black in color but variations are known to exist). When the gloves are worn by a thief, he can make a pick pockets attempt on a target, and – if successful – the stolen item (be it coins, keys, jewelery, or whatever) will appear in the coin purse provided that the coin purse is within 25′ of the thief. While thieves who are confident in their abilities may choose to wear the coin purse themselves, most will entrust it to a confederate whose job is to stay within the 25′ range without getting too close to the thief. Minor Wondrous Item, 1200 gp.
• Light-fingered Limwicke: Exactly the same as a Light-fingered Louie except that the coin purse can be within 75′ of the thief. Medium Wondrous Item, 6,000 gp.
• Light-fingered Lusan: Exactly the same as a Light-fingered Louie except that the coin purse can be within 250′ of the thief. Medium Wondrous Item, 3,0000 gp.
• The Purses Of Pashtachus: Reaching into the bottom of this coin-purse, a DEX roll against a DC of 15 enables the possessor to find a hidden seam. Pushing the fingers through this seam enables the hand to reach through an extra-dimensional space to another location and retrieve an object, or emplace an object. This location is usually a tabletop in a secure place, or something similar. A will save vs DC25 lets the owner alter the location to another place, but the owner must be physically present with the purse at the new location in order to do this. Note that anyone gaining physical access to the location has free access to anything stored through the coin purse, or may leave something for the owner to retrieve. Other limitations: the character must be physically able to touch/grasp the item to be retrieved as though they were physically present at the location, and objects must be able to physically fit through the Purse, whose opening is 1″ x 3″ in size. The Purses come in ten varieties, distinguishable by the color of the lining (see below). Category IV and above can also reach the location from another plane, the separation (number of intervening planes) being equal to the Category number minus 4 (so a Category VII purse could reach “through” 3 intervening planes). What this means in practice depends on the Cosmology decreed by the GM. Inter-dimensional access raises the DC of the DEX roll required by 5 per intervening plane, plus 15 (so a Category IV at maximum ‘range’ has a DC of 15+15=30, a Category V at maximum ‘range’ has a DC of 15+5+15=35, and so on).
  &nbsp:
  Limits:
  • White (Category I): Location must be within 10 miles of the purse.
  • Gray (Category II): Location must be within 20 miles of the purse.
  • Black (Category III): Location must be within 40 miles of the purse.
  • Violet (Category IV): Location must be within 100 miles of the purse (or in an adjacent plane at DC30).
  • Blue (Category V): Location must be within 200 miles of the purse (or through a maximum of 1 intervening plane at DC35).
  • Green (Category VI): Location must be within 400 miles of the purse (or through a maximum of 2 intervening planes at DC40).
  • Red (Category VII): Location must be within 750 miles of the purse (or through a maximum of 3 intervening planes at DC45).
  • Copper (Category VIII): Location must be within 1,000 miles of the purse (or through a maximum of 4 intervening planes at DC50).
  • Silver (Category IX): Location must be within 1,500 miles of the purse (or through a maximum of 5 intervening planes at DC55).
  • Gold (Category X): Location must be within 2000 miles of the purse )or through a maximum of 6 intervening planes at DC60).

  Values & Classifications:

  • White (Category I): Minor Wondrous Item, 1,000 gp.
  • Gray (Category II): Minor Wondrous Item, 2,000 gp.
  • Black (Category III): Minor Wondrous Item, 4,000 gp.
  • Violet (Category IV): Medium Wondrous Item, 8,000 gp.
  • Blue (Category V): Medium Wondrous Item, 12,000 gp.
  • Green (Category VI): Medium Wondrous Item, 16,000 gp.
  • Red (Category VII): Medium Wondrous Item, 3,0000 gp.
  • Copper (Category VIII): Major Wondrous Item, 45,000 gp.
  • Silver (Category IX): Major Wondrous Item, 60,000 gp.
  • Gold (Category X): Major Wondrous Item, 100,000 gp.

  (Inspired by the magic bag of Nakor in Raymond E. Feist’s novel, Prince Of The Blood).

Scabbards

• Scabbard Of Linostas: This scabbard is richly decorated and alters its size to accommodate any weapon. It comes in five varieties (class 1-5), and has a value of 2,000 x class number x class number x class number in gp (so 250,000 for a class 5). For a number of melee rounds equal to the class number, the scabbard increases the magic plus of the weapon by an amount equal to the class number. Types 1 and 2 are considered Minor Wondrous Items, Types 3 and 4 are Medium Wondrous Items, and Type 5 is a Major Wondrous Item.
• Scabbard Of Restoration: This scabbard restores a broken sword to pristine condition as though it were never damaged, provided that the owner of the broken weapon still lives. This process takes an hour, during which time the owner cannot do anything else (including rest). Minor Wondrous Item, 500 gp.
• Scabbard Of Life: This scabbard links the life of the wielder with the ‘life’ of his sword. If the owner is ever ‘killed’, the blade shatters and the weapon is destroyed, restoring the wielder to 1/2 of his normal hit points. Major Wondrous Item, 50,000 gp.
• Scabbard Of Nine Deaths: If any weapon drawn from this scabbard scores a critical hit, in addition to any critical multiplier, the base damage inflicted by the sword can be increased from +1 up to +9 dice. Each such increase consumes one “life” from the weapon (including a magical plus 1 from any enchantment within the weapon); when the ninth “life” is consumed, the sword shatters, doing 9d4 damage to anyone within 30′ range of it, including the wielder. Once a weapon so affected loses all of its magical pluses it becomes a cursed weapon; any other sword held by the character is instantly destroyed, he can wield no other. If the sword so destroyed is also enchanted, a “life” may be restored in the process, but each time this occurs it requires a sword of greater “plus” to be consumed – a +1 the first time, then a +2, then a +3, and so on.Medium Wondrous Item, 50,000 gp.

Money-belts

• Nysterial’s Money-belt: This magic item is very desirable for merchants because it offers them two large advantages – one, it automatically exchanges coin denominations down one when a single coin is fed into the money-belt, and two, it limits the amount of currency a merchant needs to have on hand, minimizing his exposure to thievery. It is actually a two-part item, the Coin Box and the Money-belt. The coin box is left in a secure location of the merchant’s choosing within 1/2 a mile of the place of business and stocked with the merchant’s change supply. The money-belt consists of a series of bone tubes, one for each currency denomination; When a coin is placed into the money belt, it is transported to the coin box and replaced with the equivalent value in the next smaller denomination, if there is one, unless the coin tube for the appropriate denomination is already full, in which case the coin is simply transferred to the coin box. Placing a coin in a full tube transports all but one of the coins in the tube to the coin box. Coins can be retrieved from the bottom of each tube by actuating a catch. Using the money-belt takes a little practice, but can usually be picked up quickly – If the merchant is being paid one gp and needs 3 silvers and 4 coppers to make change, he places the gold coin in the money-belt, receiving 10 silvers back; he then withdraws 4 silvers, giving three to the customer and placing the fourth back into the money-belt, receiving 10 coppers back; he then extracts 4 of them and gives them to the customer. Once practiced, change can be made in seconds. This behavior means that at any given time, the belt contains just no platinum, 1-10 gp, 1-10 sp, and 1-10 cp, representing the entire “exposure” of the merchant. The third ability of the pair is less frequently invoked, but is very useful when it becomes necessary: the coin box can be used to track the money-belt if it is stolen to whoever has come into contact with it, in chronological sequence. Exactly how this function operates is up to the individual GM, every box-and-belt combination is different; this was the one aspect of the design of the belt that Nysterial was not completely happy with, and he kept trying different approaches in search of the “perfect” solution. Medium Wondrous Item, 10,000 gp.

Quivers

• Quiver Of Three: A favorite enchanted quiver amongst the few archers who posses one; any time an archer scores a critical hit with an arrow drawn from this quiver, two more fly from the quiver to strike the same target. These additional arrows do not gain any additional damage or effects from class abilities, spells, or bow enchantments (unlike the actual arrow fired), but they do benefit from any magical enhancement incorporated into the arrows themselves. Minor Wondrous Item, 7,0000 gp.
• Quiver of Capacity: This is a matched set of three quivers, two of which can be placed in the baggage of the wearer or carried by a second party. Provided the archer is within 100′ of these quivers when he fires an arrow drawn from the quiver, it is automatically replenished from the stored quivers, effectively tripling it’s capacity from 20 arrows to 60. Popular with archery corps because each of the quivers can be used by different members of the company and continue to supply another member of the corps even if an individual archer falls in battle. Minor Wondrous Item, 4,000 gp.
• Quiver of Retrieval: After an arrow drawn from this quiver is fired, it is retrieved if intact when a command word is spoken. If the arrow shaft is broken but the arrow head is intact, the head is retrieved and placed in a compartment at the side of the quiver. If the head has been shattered but the shaft has survived, that is retrieved and placed in a compartment on the other side of the quiver. NB: most editions of D&D and Pathfinder don’t include rules on arrows breaking. I’ve placed the rules that I normally use in a sidebar below. Minor Wondrous Item, 2,000 gp.

Sidebar: Breaking arrows and bolts

Arrows normally break on a 1 on a d6 (if they hit the target) or 1 on d12 (if they miss). Bolts strike with greater force, so these break on a 2 (wooden shafts) (on d6 or d12, respectively) or 1 on a d20 (metal shaft).

Magical enchantment of the arrow or bolt reduces this chance by requiring the rolling of a second die at the same time, which must also come up with a 1 or 2. The die size depends on the enchantment: d4 for +1 or equivalent, d6 for +2, d8 for +3, d10 for +4, d12 for +5. If you have one (and you can get them from various specialty dice suppliers on the net), you can continue this progression with a d14, d16, and d18, but whenever you run out of by-two die sizes, the rest are rolled on a d20. So, if you have neither a d14 or d16, it’s “+6 or better: d20”. If you have a d14, it’s “+6: d14; +7 or better, d20”, and so on.

Magical enhancements of the bow or crossbow increase the risk. It is assumed that 1/2 of the magical enhancement takes the form of improved accuracy or target-seeking, and 1/2 takes the form of increased force of attack. Therefore, each +2 enhancement to the “delivery system” increases the risk of breakage by 1.

If the arrow or bolt has a non-metallic head (usually wood, bone, or stone), it will break/shatter in 25% of cases and remain intact the other 75% of the time. Metallic heads are blunted/bent (destroying them) in 10% of cases and remain intact the other 90% of the time. GMs can roll for each arrow/bolt (not recommended) or simply apply the percentages and round appropriately. Technically, the first approach is more accurate, but the second is much better for game-play.

Over To You….

These 22 Wondrous Items are just the beginning of what’s possible, created in just four hours or so to illustrate the point of this article – the utility of containers as magic items.

Nor are these all the possible sub-categories within this overarching category – I haven’t done jugs, urns, barrels, hip flasks…. heck, even clothes can be considered a container for the body that wears them!

The original intent was to list one item in each sub-category as example and inspiration, but when you get on a roll… Even now, I’m thinking up new ideas – a trapped coin pouch that entices would-be thieves to steal it (in preference to any other that the character might be wearing, for example….

But there’s still more! A Post-script Bonus

Every magic item has an original creator. Sometimes those are unknown, or simply not credited; in other cases, the creator’s name is announced right there in the spell title. Each and every spell in the game tells you something about its creator, especially if your interpretation of the spell mechanics is such that spells are very hard to tweak and play with other than through the use of metamagics. The alternative is to treat magic as a form of physics in which the input conditions can be varied in any number of ways (e.g. component substitution) and doing so can profoundly influence or shape the resulting spell. The more rigid the definitions of the process, the more a spell is like a “recipe” or “blueprint” that must be followed, the more the peculiarities of the spell speak to the character and abilities of the spellcrafter who created it. The more flexibility there is, the more a spell may have been tweaked this way and that, customized and modified and revised by multiple hands, and the more diluted the original contribution becomes.

You can even have it both ways – the spells that still bear their maker’s name are still (pretty much) “as they made them”, while those who no longer have a creators’ name attached have been optimized and tweaked until a consensus developed as to the most efficient variation – and that’s the one that everyone knows.

Every spell or magic item with a creator’s name therefore also creates an NPC, either past or present (or in the case of Temporal Magic, perhaps future?) and tells the world something about them – hints and teases, if nothing substantive.

And every act of creation has a story attached to it. Was the discovery a happy accident, a paid-for work-product, or the fulfillment of a need, real or anticipated? When you create a campaign, what are the unique needs that arose and the magic items that can only have been created in response to those challenges? The trials of yesterday are reflected in the capabilities of today – and that makes every spell list a distillation of campaign history. At least potentially. Furthermore, each tells you a little something about the society and culture of the time, when collated in aggregate and examined for trends.

And each is also potentially the gateway to an adventure, if you think about it. What back doors may have been secretly incorporated to keep spells out of the wrong hands? What else is a spell or magic item designed to do?

It cuts the other way, too. If you have a significant NPC Mage, what’s he done to earn his reputation?

It’s up to you to unify all these things. The door is there, if you want (and have the time and creativity) to step through it!

There’s an old saying: “you can choose your friends, but you cant’ choose your family.” I was thinking about that this morning and it suddenly struck me that there was an interesting RPG-related question that could be founded on that premise – the very question that forms the title of this article.

The Arguments for ‘Yes’:

The GM knows the campaign background and the experiences that the family have lived through far better than the player does, especially at the start of the campaign. He knows the prevailing trends in attitude and opinion, the philosophies that were current at the time, and the way events were impacting ordinary people at the time. All these developmental influences then define the way the PC relates to the history – is he/she a product of his time, or is he/she in rebellion against it? Is the character defined by his childhood experiences, or has he become what the player has in mind despite them?

This has several profound benefits for the campaign.

First, the player, and hence the PC, have a far greater connection to the campaign background, enabling them to hit the ground running when actual play starts.

Second, the player has a far stronger idea of the personality of his character at the commencement of play as a result of this interaction between character and campaign; quite often in a new campaign, it takes several sessions before the personality of the individual to emerge. This period of “semi-play” shortcuts that process, again letting the campaign start at something close to full throttle.

Third, the GM has a far clearer idea of the character of the PC as the player wants it to be in play, and can craft his campaign and adventures to suit, from the very beginning. It’s normal for the first adventure or two in a campaign to be generic and relatively bland in terms of customization to the characters – both players and GM have to feel their way forwards, groping toward the shape that the campaign will ultimately take as a result of the collaboration between the participants. Again, this gives the campaign a headstart.

Fourth, by defining the relationship between the character and his family, it gives the GM a domestic scene in which to introduce the character within the campaign. That won’t always be relevant or useful, but any gain over a zero starting position can only be beneficial to the campaign.

So far, it all sounds pretty compelling. But there are always at least two sides to every story.

The Arguments for ‘No’:

The player knows the character that he is creating, and the GM doesn’t. If the player designs the family relationships, he can ensure that they are consistent with the character that he wants to play, either as a supporting force or as a contrast. What’s more, there is no certainty, if the GM designs/creates the family, that they will provide the foundations of personality that the player wants. Ultimately, the family unit is a part of the character concept, and that’s part of the creative space of the player, not the GM.

If the family background is all wrong for the character that the player wants to play, a GM-designed family unit might in fact start the character off with a disconnect from the campaign – nullifying benefit one. It might be a benefit or it might not – and if it goes wrong, it will go horribly wrong. That’s too big a risk to take.

Sometimes the player has no idea of the personality of the character, and pitching him or her in at the deep end only confuses them. As with the first benefit, this one might materialize or might not, and having the GM design the family background might even be counterproductive.

The third and fourth benefits are real, but the risks involved in persuing them are equally real. Sometimes, when the stars align, they will be manifested, but the chance of the opposite occuring is at least as likely. And, when you factor in the number of PCs, these risks are compounded to the point where they are almost certain to materialize in at least some cases.

What’s more, there is one additional downside to the proposal that can’t be ignored: the potential for bland similarity between the families of the PCs. That’s always the danger when one person is creating so many iterations of the same thing. And trying to overcome that difficulty can artificially exaggerate the differences, putting the connection between PC and campaign under additional pressure.

So is there a middle direction?

I think that it should be possible to chart a middle course, in which there is a dialogue between the player and the GM about the family background. The player tells the GM what they think would work for their character, the GM tells the player how that would sit in the context of the times, and the concept evolves from there. Are the family conformists to the times, or rebels? This not only achieves all the benefits listed, it undercuts all the risks, and adds one additional benefit: putting the family into context of the background, not just the PC who is the focus of the exercise.

It’s also a far truer reflection of the collaborative nature of the game, giving the players an early opportunity to add their ideas and concepts to the campaign, helping the GM to shape it to fit the players and PCs.

Often, a compromise brings the disadvantages of both extreme alternatives. This is one of the rare exceptions, in which the compromise maximises the opportunity for advantaging the campaign.

Character skills can be divided into three categories (with some overlapping): skills that enhance the character’s ability to survive/succeed in adventures; skills that the character archetype is expected/required to have; and the oddballs from left field, which I refer to as Characterization Skills.

The last category also includes anything from the first two categories that the character has developed significantly more extensively than other skills in their respective categories.

Characterization skills representing defining personal traits and abilities of the character, things that make him or her stand out relative to their peers, a gold mine of characterization that GMs often fail to exploit.

Character Psychology

Why has the character chosen to learn the skill to the extent that they have? What does it say about the way the character thinks?

Take cooking – there are three basic approaches to the culinary art: precisely following directions, then tweaking it into perfection; throwing things together by instinct to construct a culinary tour-de-force; and incorporating a level of artistry into the finish of dishes. Each of these can be elevated to the point of being a master chef, but they represent very different philosophies.

Or take painting – there are multiple different schools and styles, but some of the key alternatives are minimalism (reducing a scene to its essentials), expressionism (using elements symbolically to provide additional information and context), enhancement (presenting images in a supra-realistic way), realism (presenting images as realistically as possible). Again, very different philosophies – and there are many more if you go beyond the styles that were developed after the reformation, which is the end of the time periods upon which most fantasy games are based. And, again, these can all be developed to the point of being a master painter.

In both of these examples, the philosophies can be extended to cover the whole approach to life of the character. They are representatives of an attitude, a way of thinking.

Sometimes, the player has given deep thought to how these choices reflect the character they want to play; at other times, it is incumbent on the GM and player to analyze the in-play persona presented by the character and interpret the skill retrospectively. Either way, these skills can be indicative of how the player want to interpret the character in play; the provision of opportunities to do so is then incumbent on the GM.

Character Background

Who taught the character the skill?s What did his parents and teachers think of the character learning the skills? What influence did it/they have on the character’s early life?

The answer to the last question might be ‘none’ – but the more tightly the character’s abilities and background can be entwine, bent to the purpose of making him unique and compelling, the better.

Character Activities

What do the skills say about the day-to-day activities of the character, especially those which take place in his leisure time? What opportunities for interaction with others do the skills provide? These are all opportunities to feed the character adventure hooks and roleplaying opportunities.

Character Socialization

Similarly, in in-game social occasions, these skills provide subjects for the character to discuss that are outside the normal expectations and clichés; they make the character more of an individual in such settings and less of a figurehead for his character class / archetype.

Character Knowledge

What associated and ancillary knowledge does the character posses as a result of having the skills? Scientific history is full of serendipitous combinations of seemingly-unrelated knowledge; the more of these that the GM can find/create and then incorporate into his adventures, the more the character’s role within those adventures comes to feel like an outgrowth of who he is, and not something that could have happened to any random character. If this occurs regularly, it can impart a sense that the current in-game situation (whatever it is) was always destined to happen to this particular character or group of characters. That can be a useful conceit to infuse into a campaign in which the PCs star to an extent that begins to strain verisimilitude (“Why does this sort of thing always happen to ME?”)

Character Challenges

Again similarly, the more a character can utilize these aspects of his uniqueness to solve problems encountered in-play, the more the game harnesses and reflects the uniqueness of the character, and his personal approaches to life. This never happens by accident; it can result from the player looking for opportunities to utilize a skill into which he has pumped skill points, or simply finding ways to match his expertise to the needs of a situation in order to find a solution to whatever problem has been encountered. But, by far, the most common reason such opportunities exist is because the GM has deliberately built them into the game that he is running.

It’s a reasonable assumption that the character is always looking for ways to exploit whatever skills and knowledge he has to get himself out of trouble; that should force the GM to do likewise when designing campaigns and adventures.

Intra-party relationships

There are three ways in which characterization skills can be relevant to intra-party relationships. First, one character can consume the product of the skill; everyone eats, for example. Second, relationships between skills can provide topics of mutual conversation, creating those relationships in the first place or providing them with added depth – a cook and farmer, for example. And third, once again, is the concept of serendipitous combinations of skills yielding a sum greater than their parts – an artist and a bureaucrat can cooperate to forge official documents more effectively than either alone, for example.

Once again, this won’t happen by accident; the players have to be actively looking for ways in which they can combine their different talents in response to the in-game situation, and that (in turn) won’t happen unless the GM first gets the players into the habit of doing so (by actively suggesting it as a solution to a problem that would otherwise be much harder to solve), and second by creating opportunities for the players to look outside the box, in particular by blocking more obvious approaches (or seeming to – quite often, one character can provide a means by which a second can bypass such blocks).

It is also often necessary to break up the party, at least temporarily, by requiring characters to be in multiple locations at the same time, then twisting the situation so that the skills that the players thought would be necessary to advancing the plot are no longer relevant, forcing the characters to improvise. After all, assuming they are playing intelligently, they will do their best to match ‘assignments’ to ‘skillsets’; it follows that the situations will usually need to be somewhat different to appearances if this sort of innovation is to become relevant.

Forcing Characterization Skills?

Characterization skills are so useful, indirectly, that some GMs actually mandate that characters take at least one. Players who are good roleplayers will often take one or more without prompting, whereas most Combat Monsters and Min-Maxers will have to be dragged there, kicking and screaming. I know at least one GM who offers extra skill points at character creating while restricting what they can be spent on, purely to encourage the selection of Characterization Skills. Still others threaten players with a reduction in XP awards (on an individual basis) if characters don’t contribute to solving the challenges of the day.

Personally, I find all three of these approaches to be heavy-handed (but better than nothing in the case of options one and two); a far better approach is to warn players that there will be times when being a rounded individual will be more important than focusing completely on character enhancement in areas they are already competent in, defining what is meant by “well-rounded” (it doesn’t mean a skill level in every possible skill, for example) – then following through by designing challenges that can’t be solved by force or simple skill rolls.

This is a lot more difficult than designing challenges that can be overcome in these more straightforward manner, but the rewards are fairly obvious. And, once players get into the habit of viewing their characters holistically, they will carry the approach into other games under other GMs, even into games of unrelated genres, where that GM will be educated in the significance of the approach – spreading the assumption of good roleplay as they go.

Can you name the Characterization Skills of each party member in your current campaign? Do you keep a list of them handy? Have you looked for the serendipitous combinations, and ways to exploit them? If you answered in the negative, perhaps you should think about doing something to remedy the lack. Look for the Characterization Skills and ways of taking advantage of them!

Readers may have noticed that the last couple of posts have been unusually short and to the point, instead of the usual depth that is the hallmark here at Campaign Mastery. There’s a couple of reasons for that.

First, I have a family function coming up in June and won’t be around to write my usual posts. Rather than letting readers down who may have been looking for something new, I’m trying to build up some lead time so that I can leave a couple of posts scheduled for publication in advance.

Second, being (mostly) cut off from the internet limits the amount of research that I can do, so I’ve deliberately chosen articles that don’t need a lot of it.

Third, when it looked like I might need to make my way during business hours to an internet cafe in order to post anything at all, I sat down with a pad, wrote the two articles you’ve already read, and came up with half-a-dozen more ideas that could be knocked out in reasonably short, sharp posts.

I’ve always written with the philosophy that an article should be no longer than it needs to be in order to address the subject of the article. It just so happens that these articles don’t need to be very long.

Today, I’m going to share with you a simple technique for creating interesting and original magical weapons.

As an added bonus, if you can find the right technobabble to explain the properties of the weapons, they can work in a sci-fi or superheroic setting. But the primary focus is fantasy gaming.

The heart of the technique is a simple question:

What can’t the weapon type usually do?

Let’s look at swords by way of example, and see some of the things that you can achieve with this simple conceptual technique.

Range

Swords don’t have any range beyond arm’s length, so a sword whose slashes and thrusts extend beyond the normal reach of the weapon is a wondrous weapon indeed. When you strike in the direction of an opponent at range, a cutting force extends out, traveling to the nearest opponent(s)in that direction. The weapon strikes as though the target were in the adjacent space, but for every 5′ between the wielder and the target, damage done is reduced by 2 to a minimum of zero. A blow can’t affect more targets than a normal sword could affect in adjacent spaces to the wielder.

This example also illustrates a couple of important principles of the technique.

1. The basic nature of the weapon remains unchanged.
2. The concept has to be described in simple game mechanics.
3. The limitations of the weapon not directly related to the magical capability being imparted remain explicitly unchanged.

Sounds good? Let’s do another one:

Returns To The Hand

The implication of the simple question are that you are imparting a quality to the weapon that you are “enchanting” that it doesn’t normally posses, but that another type of weapon does. This idea derives from an icon of Australia, the Boomerang.

There are several youTube videos demonstrating Boomerang Throwing; I’ve linked to one (3:05) which also has several more on the page. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to view any of them because the computer with the internet access is so old it doesn’t play youTube videos, so you may have to look at several of them if you’re unfamiliar with the technique.

The problem with applying this to a sword is that swords don’t usually leave the hand of the wielder. But throwing knives do, so why not a sword that has to be thrown like a knife? Make it a curved blade because the shape will add to the credibility and mystique of the weapon’s ‘special ability’.

What you end up with is a sword that you throw; the sword then strikes a single target at range, doing its full damage. Range interval would be about 15′, about half that of a hand crossbow, based on what I’ve seen expert boomerang throwers achieve. The weapon then returns to your hand as part of the same attack action. A Dex roll at DC equal to the attack total is required to catch the hilt; failure means that the wielder has caught the ‘sharp end’ inflicting 1+magical plusses damage. Damage includes the normal Strength bonus.

Of course, you might feel that this is altering the basic nature of the sword too much – in which case, apply this ability to something like a hand axe.

This illustrates another couple of important principles:

4. The resulting weapon respects game balance – because it is restricted to a single target, it does full damage, unlike the previous ‘at range’ example.
5. The structure and behavior of the weapon are adjusted as necessary to achieve reasonable plausibility.

One more example:

Entangle

This takes the basic properties of a net and imparts them to a sword. I’ve picked it because there is a reasonable sci-fi variation, which I’ll look at after describing the basic fantasy weapon.

Instead of damaging the target, this weapon severs the planar bonds that hold the plane together around the target, which then curl back, binding the target. The attack roll total is the DC for a reflex save to avoid being entangled; the damage that would normally be inflicted is the damage that must be ‘inflicted’ by straight strength before the entangled character can wrest himself free of the tangling bonds of invisible force. This may take one or more rounds. The character is held immobile, but is still able to attack anyone within arm’s reach as usual (which inflicts no damage on the restraints, it should be noted).

On a critical hit, the severing of planar bonds is sufficient to open a portal into an adjacent Plane. Reality inflicts 1d6 damage per round on the opening, eventually healing the ‘wound’ in reality. The target, if not anchored, is sucked into the other plane, releasing him from his bonds in the process, but exposing him to the environment of that adjacent plane. If multiple planes can be considered adjacent to the Plane on which the target was located, the GM should choose randomly between them. There is a 1-in-20 chance, per round that the ‘portal’ is open, that something native to the adjacent plane will cross into the plane in which the attack took place.

Nets don’t normally inflict damage, so it’s necessary for the sword’s ability to do something else with the damage that a sword normally inflicts. Using it to resemble the behavior of a net in a more exotic way is a neat solution.

Sci-Fi Variant

The sword rips a hole in the space-time continuum around part of the target, binding him in the surface tension. So far as anyone else is concerned, that space ceases to exist; objects and missiles pass through it as though it weren’t there. This includes light – the affected part of the trapped character becomes invisible, as though it were in a blind spot. Mechanics are as described for the fantasy version.

Creativity Unbound – within reason

There are two big advantages to this approach.

The first is that it sparks creativity. The second is that it constrains that creativity to reasonable limits. This combination produces original creations that don’t overpower the game system, enabling them to be dropped directly into a campaign. And it takes only seconds.

On a note completely unrelated to today’s post: J.T. over at Ravenous Role Playing said some very nice things about recent articles in his most recent blog post. I tried leaving a reply at the site but this browser is so inadequate that his authentication routine won’t work with it. Here’s what I tried to say:

Thanks for the Kudos, J.T.! For some strange reason, I didn’t get any pingbacks showing up at Campaign Mastery when you posted your reviews, though, or I’d have said so sooner!

Regarding your problem with factions, having them all pursue their objectives is ‘morally gray’ but it’s also morally bland, which might have an impact on the way your players react to them. Try tossing in a faction who try to do the right thing, but aren’t always sure what it is, and so make mistakes every now and then. Or a faction that is loyal to their friends and allies to a fault – taking what is normally a positive virtue and twisting it to potentially negative ends. Of course, these need to be balanced with the occasional group who fall on the other side of the line – “So I’m kind to my grandmother – I still want to see the establishment BURN”, or “It’s all the Elves fault, we should obliterate the Elvish Pestilence from the face of the Earth!” A full spectrum of options includes the entire palette of choices – good for the right reasons, good for the wrong reasons, bad but honest about it, bad but tries not to look it…

I suppose, if you put his words together with the reply above, this could constitute a bonus tip for everyone else! Which is how I can justify publishing my comment here…

Things didn’t exactly go according to plan in the Adventurer’s Club campaign this weekend past. Entirely my fault; I was running late and assumed that the adventure that we were about to start had been copied onto a USB stick as is our usual practice. After all, it was finished several months ago.

On top of that, transport headaches meant that several people arrived late and were going to have to finish early, myself included.

Decision

We were faced with three choices: abandon play for the day, despite everyone being there and ready to play; try to run a complex multi-part adventure with strong reliance on visuals with neither the adventure nor the visuals; or for my co-GM and I to put our heads together and improv something pretty much off-the-cuff.

It wasn’t a hard decision to make. The campaign was in-between adventures, which was why the adventure hadn’t been loaded onto the USB stick, but which is also the perfect time to drop in a ‘filler’ adventure.

Conceptualizing

To start with, we took advantage of the fact that this campaign has two GMs. We stepped outside for five minutes to brainstorm. Initially, Blair focused on what we could do while I thought about the limitations we faced. First up, the timing between the last adventure and the next planned adventure is fairly tightly controlled in a number of respects, so there wasn’t going to be enough game time for the PCs to travel anywhere; the adventure was going to have to take place in New York City. Second, this particular combination of PCs haven’t been together for very long, so if we wanted to connect the mini-adventure with their past, we had to work out how to involve everyone. I particularly wanted to avoid a situation in which only a couple of the PCs were involved for any length of time purely because they had been with the campaign the longest.

Blair’s initial ideas were for the PCs to be gathered somewhere, for something to happen, leading them into a chase situation through the city. Unfortunately, chase scenes are really hard to do well without adequate prep and planning, and the idea seemed a little bland. But, because we had a relatively small window of playable time, I liked the idea of starting off with the PCs already in one place.

I suggested a mole-men riff, which led to the thought of a ‘land that time forgot’. The very first adventure in the campaign – which predates even my involvement in it in any capacity whatsoever – took place on an island with Killer Apes. The idea was that the PCs had been involved in an incident in the course of that adventure that had been blocked from their memories until now. If the older PCs were to suddenly find themselves reliving that past adventure and acting accordingly, we could turn the dichotomy from a liability into an advantage.

It also let us pull in an exotic location without having to travel to it. Next, to why the PCs remember the events on the island. Several options commended themselves: the PCs did, and were just having flashbacks to the incident; or something was interfering with their memories now; or something had interfered with their memories back then. Again acting on the principle of turning a potential liability into an asset, I suggested that they discovered a mind-control crystal being used by a local warlord, but ended the threat; this not only made those present more sensitive to the effects of such a crystal showing up nearby, awakening those memories, but awakened a resistance to a ‘cloaking effect’ that prevented NYC locals from noticing the crystal until they were under its’ control.

With this notion that both sub-groups of PCs were being affected but in different ways, bringing them into conflict as the newer characters sought to protect the older ones from themselves, and the suggestion that one of these older PCs, once freed from the influence of the crystal, could use his defenses against occult evil to ward the PCs, giving them independence of action when all those around them were being controlled, the basic outline of the plot was complete, and we were ready to play.

Implementation

The lack of prep time invested in the adventure showed up almost immediately. One of the PCs assumed that he was hallucinating and tried to snap himself out of it, because we failed to make it clear that for those affected, the last two-and-a-half years hadn’t happened. If we’d invested prep time in the adventure, we would have made certain that our prepared text delivered everything that the PCs needed to know.

But that was the only real hiccup along the way, and – because they knew that the whole adventure was being improvised – the players cut us a little more slack than they otherwise would have.

The resulting day’s play wasn’t as polished or nuanced as most adventures in the campaign, but everyone had fun. Since that’s always the primary goal, we would have to rate the day as a success.

Feedback

Midway through, during a break, one of the players indicated that he was surprised that we had even contemplated an improv adventure, because it is the total opposite of the way we – and especially I – usually run games.

Long-time readers will probably know better; there was a period of time when I had zero time for prep, and had to devise the week’s adventures in the car on the way to gaming – not once, but every week for more than two-and-a-half years.

Like so many things in life, improv is a compromise with its own pros and cons. Some of those adventures were great, some were a bit so-so. When you improv, there’s no time to ponder, reflect, edit, and censor your ideas to weed out the rubbish. Any flaws or errors are magnified and in-your-face.

At the same time, though, you give yourself the freedom to throw in twists as they come to you, to extend those plot sequences that are working well, and to cut short those that aren’t.

That’s a good thing, because you will need to take advantage of that flexibility more often when you improv.

That’s not to say that pre-planning and prep are perfect. As demonstrated by An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session, prep-heavy approaches run the risk of getting too close to a flawed idea and finding yourself trapped by it. In a lot of ways, it’s a line-ball judgment between the two. But improv has one final deficiency, and for me, that’s the one that makes the ultimate difference between the two.

If you have no time for prep, you also have no time for adventure logging. Even if the lack of prep is a choice, and not a necessity, adventure logging after the fact is a lot harder to keep comprehensive and up-to-date. The more that you can cut-and-paste from prepared notes, the better, in terms of having a continuity that you can build on.

Prep investment, in other words, creates more of a campaign than a series of marginally-connected adventures, and that broader tapestry permits more interesting adventures. Like improv, it makes everything bigger and stronger, emphasizing and building upon the positive aspects of preparing material at an adventure scale.

Lessons

For the right type of campaign, I wouldn’t hesitate to go full-improv, all the time. If the campaign plans are such that the strengths of an improv approach were maximized and the downsides minimized, it would definitely be the way to go.

Regardless of the adventure style that you choose, there are a number of lessons from this experience to take away for your games.

• Be aware of the plot limitations and plan around them.
• Be aware of the strengths you can draw upon and plan to make the most of them.
• Be aware of the weaknesses that you have to live with and plan to minimize their importance.
• Always look for a way to turn a liability or constraint into an asset.
• Both improv and careful planning have their strengths and weaknesses.
• The important thing is for everyone to have fun!

Disaster has struck, and the laptop that I have been using to do – well, everything – has lost it’s visual display. It’s possible that this is simply a new symptom of the battery power problem that it’s been experiencing for some time, or it might be some new devilry.

This problem is complicated by the fact that it’s the only reasonably-modern computer in the house that recognizes my USB modem, so I have also lost almost all internet connectivity. I’m hoping to resolve that sooner rather than later, but it might be that the only way that I have been able to let you read these words is by utilizing an internet cafe for the upload. If that’s the case, it’s not something that I’m going to be able to do for very long. Look for an update at the end of the article that will advise on the latest information.

It also means that I no longer have access to the spell-checker that I have been using – so I apologize in advance for any misspellings!

How large should a kingdom be?

It’s not as straightforward a question as it seems. But if you look at the examples provided in most fantasy literature, you would get the impression that most of them are the size of modern France, or Germany, or China. A few might make the kingdoms the size of Great Britain, or India. Some have Empires the size of Europe, or even Europe plus the Middle East.

These are fine if you have a good reason for that size and know what you are doing. Most people don’t have the first idea. Historically, Kingdoms were often the size of countries like Belgium or Luxembourg or Switzerland. Italy once comprised several city-states (7 I think, but I’m not sure and without the internet, can’t check). Of course, these were not always actually named “Kingdoms” by the locals, though that is the way the word might be translated today.

Over time, marriages and conquests unified these into larger administrative nationalities. These were often conquests from the outside, forcing a new relationship onto the conquered peoples – and then falling apart. Kingdoms the size of France or Britain or Italy couldn’t exist without the Roman Empire.

Another mistake that a lot of people make are having firm, defined borders. Unless you’re on a major trade route or invasion path or something of that nature, borders – like citizenship – are rather more vague and unofficial. Technically, a border might be precisely defined – but there is a difference between what you can claim and what claims you can enforce.

Kingdoms, in order to be practical, need to be administered. The decrees of the throne have to be enforced, the taxes have to be collected. There are practical limits to how much of this is possible.

Transport Modes

Transport modes are vitally important to determining the size of a Kingdom or Realm. It’s one full third of the story.

Game systems frequently give movement rates for horses and other mounts but don’t write about how long they can sustain this rate of movement, and that’s what dictates how far they can travel. The same is true for characters.

I do most of my regional maps at a scale of 6 miles to the hex. That gives a daily movement rate on foot on roads, paths, and trails of 4 hexes or 5 for a forced march. Horses travel about 6 hexes in a day unless you change mounts regularly – which messengers often do but which is not an option for military and commercial traffic. I then adjust these movement rates for terrain and roads – -1 for a light impediment, -2 for 1 serious impediment or two light impediments in composition, -3 (minimum 1) for two serious impediments. Boats heading upstream can travel 2-4 hexes, those traveling downstream 4-8.

Another way of looking at these numbers is that an official can travel two hexes from his administration center and back again in a day. Every two hexes and changes in policy, in laws, in politics, are all a day out of date and a day weaker.

Roads & Settlements

The quality of roads is already factored into the above, but this is sufficiently important that it’s worth re-emphasizing. The quality of the roads is a key factor in determining how large a nation can be.

Settlements tend to be one day removed from each other. The average community in the middle ages was about 2000 people. As it happens, thats about the same size as the town I grew up in, so I can relate to such communities almost without thinking about it. Everyone knows all, or almost all, of the businesses in town. At least a third of the town is known by name, about half of that number by their first names.

The dominant factor when it comes to town size is the ability for food to reach the community. A ring one hex deep and seven hexes in total area would be enough to feed a community of 1000 people – if the people involved in the agriculture didn’t have to eat, themselves. To allow for this factor, we need to push out another hex in radius, adding another 12 hexes to the agricultural base, of which six hexes can be stored against future famines or shipped to feed a larger community elsewhere. The other 13 hexes worth are consumed locally (including stores for next year’s planting).

This requirement can be halved for especially fertile land, and doubled for especially poor croplands.

By an absolutely amazing coincidence, this is the same distance over which direct daily supervision is possible, and half the distance between communities.

Which means that a nation of arable land that is fully occupied with settlements delivers 6 hexes out of 13 needed for every 1000 citizens – two such towns are almost but not quite enough to support an extra 1000 people. Which should make it clear that towns with 2000 people have a substantial level of malnourishment in a poor social class.

The average size of 2000 people also means that a lot of communities are going to be smaller. In fact, communities tend to roughly follow a geometric expansion: 62, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, 32000, 64000, 128000, and so on. For any community size, the next size down tend to be 5-20 times as numerous (these are very rough guidelines only).

The important thing to note about such communities is the number of hexes of arable-land-equivalent produce they have left over, because that is where the food supply for those communities larger than 2000 people come from.

Using these numbers, you can easily count up the number of farm hexes ‘left over’ from each community size category and how many of the larger communities they can support. Twenty towns of 1000 people on arable land gives a total of 20×6=120 hexes ‘spare’. At 13 hexes per thousand people that’s 9000 people that can be fed adequately, or 18000 people that can be fed at typical levels, on top of the base 2000. So one community of 20,000 people can be fed by the land around it and 20 communities around that.

The best approach is to work the size list from one size to the next – how much excess food out, how much excess food required. The geographic size and the relative quality of the land will thereby dictate the size of the communities contained within a kingdom.

These numbers also take into consideration the likelihood that some communities – perhaps as many as 1 in 4 – will generate some non-edible commodity. Logging and Quarries and Mines and so on. Fishing can also bump up the numbers considerably for communities on the coast, or which contain major river systems because a fishing fleet can exploit more hexes, and can also yield greater food densities (i.e. each fishing hex counts as 1.5 ‘arable land’ hexes). That means that a coastal fishing community can exploit areas up to four hexes away – if half the are around the town is water, that’s a total of 32 fishing hexes which is the equivalent of 48 ‘arable land’ hexes – plus the 5 hexes of arable land that they actually have for a grand total of 53. They need 7 of those hexes to feed themselves; the other 46 can either go to supporting a larger fishing community, or be shipped to support a number of other communities.

In practice, however, with communities 4 hexes apart, perhaps even less and smaller in size along the coast, no one community is going to get it’s entire potential allocation – their neighbors will get some of it. Trying to figure out which community gets how much sea is a waste of your time; simply add up the number of sea hexes within reach of any port and divide by the number of coastal communities to determine how much ‘sea’ each one gets, and hence, how much they can contribute to the population size of the kingdom.

Note that all this is a far simpler and less accurate method than others that I have seen. It’s a compromise between accuracy and speed.

Administrative Radius

Now for the fun part: Every whole number of towns supplying food for a single larger community can be considered under the control of that community. The lands administered by a noble are thus a function of the size of the largest community within that Noble’s domain.

It’s relatively easy to create a list of courtly ranks and allocate communities of a certain size to these ranks. A town of 4000 might have a count, 8000 an earl, 16000 a duke, 32000 a prince, and 64000 a King – or whatever. The important thing is to set King to the largest community that the Kingdom you have mapped out can support, then spread the lesser noble ranks through the rest. Titles in the capital city tend to get a “bump’ of one grade, so bear that in mind.

A Kingdom is all the lands beholden to the most highly-ranked noble, plus all the lands beholden to those below him in rank who have any part of their domains within the King’s administrative reach. Kingdoms thus tend to stretch out along rivers and trade routes, and be walled off by natural barriers.

Efficiency

The third major factor in the size of a Kingdom or Realm is much harder to quantify, and is far more abstract. All sorts of things go into it, from literacy and numeracy rates to theology to philosophy of government, but it can be summed up in a single pair of words: Administrative Efficiency. If the bureaucracy is poor, with records held only locally, administrative radii are of the size indicated. With each increase in efficiency, the radii expand. Good record-keeping permits accurate tallies of resources, incomes, and taxation. That’s how an Empire the size of the Romans becomes possible, and how nations the size of those larger geographic entities can function.

The British Empire achieved its growth by centralizing broad policy decisions and placing daily oversight in the hands of governors with considerable freedom of action – then making sure that those governors were loyal. China became the size it is today because of the Imperial Bureaucracy that was capable of administering a nation of that size, and through having sufficient military force under that control to expand. If the Bureaucracy wasn’t up to the job, lands would be conquered and the conquerors would then create their own little fiefdoms, effectively fragmenting the resulting nation back into manageable chunks.

With every hex you travel away from the administrative center, control weakens. That’s the lesson of the Roman conquest of England – they could get as far as Hadrian’s Wall, but no further.

This barely scratches the surface; there are a great many more complexities involved in Kingdom size. But as generalizations go, it’s a useful one.

Update:
I have been in contact with my ISP. They tell me that because my modem is more than 7 years old, installation disks are no longer available, but because I have been a customer for so long, they will ship me a replacement modem that my computers will be able to access, free. (It will also be fully NBN-compatible, which won’t mean anything to anyone outside Australia but which is a big deal, locally – without it, I would have had to replace the modem again next year.

In the meantime, I’ve been able to get a very slow internet connection happening with a very slow computer which has only an even slower and more limited browser – but which should be good enough for me to upload this post and the one that’s due to be published later this week, which I have also written already.

Normal Campaign Mastery service should be resumed by the weekend :)

How do you take three plot ideas and interlink them to make one grand adventure? I’ve often skimmed over this point because it’s usually arisen in the context of campaign planning, so I thought it was high time that I went into it in greater detail.

Another reason why I’ve been dodging this discussion for so long is that it’s really hard to find general rules or instructions to describe the process. To be sufficiently broad in content, it’s necessary to become so abstract and vague that you lose all meaning in terms of directly useful advice. Nevertheless, I’m going to dive in and have a go (I may follow this up with an example in a separate article if there’s enough demand).

Known Elements and Unknown Elements

With any one-line plot synopsis, there will be a few known facts and a lot of indeterminate facts. By the end of the design process, everything will need to be known of course; but those unknowns are critically important connection points to use in constructing the full plot. In addition, there will always be two – possibly three – additional elements: beginning, PC involvement, and Resolution. At the moment, any of these could be known, but almost certainly two of the three will be unknown. If there are only two elements, it’s because beginning and PC involvement are the same thing because the PCs are being targeted by the villain of the plotline. On top of those, each plot thread will have up to 16 additional structural elements, bringing the total to 19. Almost all of these will be unknown at this point in the adventure creation process. In fact, some of them will be unknown until just before the start of play, and some will remain in that condition right up to the point when they take place in-play!

The complete list of plot elements is:

1. Initial Status – Everything the GM needs to know in advance about the setting and context in which the adventure is to take place, including any plans, goals, or ambitions of the PCs that are in effect immediately prior to the commencement of the plot thread?
2. Beginning/Background/Purpose – What? Why? – What is the Enemy trying to do and why?
3. Who? – Who is the Enemy? Are they a Villain, an Antihero, an Ally, a Betrayer, what?
4. Plan – How? When? Where? – How is the enemy going to achieve his purpose, in his initial opinion? When and Where? How will the outcome bring about the enemy’s desired consequence? Optional: What are the flaws in the plans and why has the enemy not foreseen them?
5. Action – What exactly is the enemy going to do from an outside/onlooker’s perspective?
6. Victims/Target – Who does the immediate action target? Who does the ultimate consequence intended by the enemy target?
7. PC Involvement – How are the PCs going to get mixed up in the events? Why?
8. PC Reaction – How are the PCs likely to react to the combination of their involvement (7), the context and circumstances (1), the immediate victim(s) (6), and the Action described in (5)? How will the PCs involvement relate to their plans, goals, and ambitions? (1)
9. Initial Outcome – Taking into account any enemy anticipation of the involvement of the PCs, either specifically or generally (it just happens to be the PCs but it might have been anyone in the right place at the right time), and the plan, what will the outcome of the initial action be from both the enemy’s and the PCs points of view?
10. Witnesses/Experts/Informants – Information has to come from somewhere, and it’s always better to put most of it in the mouths of NPCs. In some campaigns you can also get extra mileage by placing these people in danger.
11. Comprehension – At some point, the significance of the plan will dawn on the PCs. You can’t predict when that will be, but you can state an absolutely final point at which such comprehension will have taken place. Either way, you need to build time into your game for this to occur, possibly even a cut scene to be ‘spliced in’ whenever it takes place.
12. Modified Plan – How will the initial outcome (9) and the fact of the PCs involvement (7) affect the plan (4)? Will it be revised, and if so, in what way? What will be the next steps in that revised plan?
13. Response – At the same time, the PCs may be making plans of their own. You can’t normally predict what those plans will be, but need to allow in-game time for this planning to take place.
14. Conflict – The combination of the modified plan and the PCs response to events will be a conflict between the PCs and the agents of the Enemy. Where and when will this conflict occur?
15. Conflict Outcome – What will the outcome of the conflict be, from both the PCs and the enemies’ points of view?
16. Setback – Third Plan Iteration – A part of any good dramatic structure, the PCs need to encounter a setback, probably as a consequence of a third revision of the enemy’s plans.
17. Advancement – The PCs overcome the setback and make progress despite it.
18. Twist – Not always present, but a plot twist can happen in or after any one of several of these stages. There can even be more than one. A previous article listed eleven types of plot twist: Part 1 and Part 2.
19. Confrontation (Climax Pt 1) – That advancement leads the PCs into a confrontation with the enemy and/or the enemy’s plan.
20. Resolution (Climax Pt 2) – That confrontation is resolved with a new outcome.
21. Consequences – There should always be consequences – those experienced by the enemy, by the PCs, and by various affected segments of the general population.

These don’t necessarily have to occur in the sequence given. In fact, this neat, orderly progression will be the exception and not the rule. Some may not take place at all. But most of the sequence will be intact.

Two Dimensional Plot Structure

Using the known and selected unknown plot elements, the idea is to build up a two-dimensional plot structure that defines the relationship between the elements of the plotline, taking three individual plot ideas and turning them into one cohesive plot.

There are three types of connection between plotlines, and they all take the form of a relationship between an element of one plotline and an element of another:

• Direct Connections
• Common Links
• Consequences

  Let’s look at each of these.

  Element Connections: Direct

  A direct connection occurs when an element of one plot thread is also an element in another, linking the two stories. A witness to one event is secretly the enemy in another, for example, or investigating a red herring in one case leads to the accidental exposure of another (unrelated) problem. Direct connections are usually fairly rare and always significant.

  Element Connections: Common Links

  A common link occurs when an element in one plot thread is closely related to an element in another. These are often interpreted as being more significant than they are intended to be. It’s like investigating a fraud allegation against a businessman only to discover (a) that it’s his partner who’s been committing criminal fraud, and (b) the businessman has engaged in corrupt behavior with a political figure. Or investigating an arms merchant for his involvement in a murder only to find that he was engaged in a completely different murder at the time of the first act.

  Common links can be sub-classified into associated, coincidental, improbable, and implausible. Associated links describe the situation in which both elements are connected to the respective plotlines as a result of some common causal factor. This is often that case when crimes occur in a very small community in which everyone knows everyone else, for example. You’re investigating something, and someone who is guilty of something else thinks your story is just a cover for the truth, and attempts to ‘deal with the problem’ – or simply flees instead of answering questions, or answers with easily-penetrated lies to buy themselves time to flee. It’s pulling someone over for bald tires and discovering a stash of guns and money in the back seat.

  Associated links are fine. Coincidental can be acceptable or problematic – refer The Conundrum Of Coincidence. Improbable links stretch credibility, but are occasionally unavoidable; they require special attention to detail. Implausible links directly impact on the verisimilitude of your story, and are to be avoided.

  It may not always be obvious to which classification a given link belongs. For example, a link may appear improbable or even implausible. A player remarks on it, to which you reply that his character is probably having a hard time believing it, too – inviting the player to get paranoid about who is trying to fool whom and what they are trying to cover up. And then the connection is validated and explained by an unexpected development, and the player discovers that it was an associated link after all, and makes perfect sense – once all the facts are known!

  Element Connections: Consequential

  Consequential Links describe a situation in which one element’s relationship with one plotline leads directly to another plotline. That makes them very similar to associated common links in virtually every respect, but the causality dominoes affect each other directly. One person does something criminal, bringing an investigation that panics someone who’s been planning something else illegal into acting prematurely, for example, so that the second plotline is a direct consequence of the first. The connection between the plotlines is thus more direct and intimate than is the case with associated direct links.

Completing The Plot Elements (preliminary)

Starting with the known elements, decide on any connections between them. Connections are always resolved in the sequence Direct, Consequential, Common.

Next, look over the unknown elements, and decide on the content of each unknown and the nature of the links. The sequence remains the same. Once all the linking elements are determined, and all the plotlines have been tied together into the one interwoven plotline, complete the remaining unknowns by assigning details to them.

Most of these connections will be preliminary in nature, the details subject to revision as necessary. Replace and refine until you are satisfied with the merged plotline.

Is there an Uber-villain?

One decision that will have to be made fairly early on is whether or not there is a single Uber-villain pulling the strings in the first two plotlines who will then be confronted in the third or even in a fourth. You can even let the uber-villain be long gone by the time the PCs put the clues together, letting him return to bedevil the PCs at a future time. The main consideration with an Uber-villain is making sure that your “why” decisions are rock-solid.

Climax Point

With three plotlines, you have three choices of climax for the overall adventure. Which is the most rational from a plot point of view? Which one is the most dramatic? Which one is the most exciting in play? If you’re lucky, all three will point to the one choice as the ultimate climax of the adventure; but as often as not, you will have more than one choice indicated, and will have to make the decision without a clear indicator.

This is a critical part of determining the adventure structure. You can’t proceed until you get it right.

Initial Entry Point

Next, which element is the most instantly intriguing – which one has the biggest hook? This will vary from case to case. Remember, too, that anything that connects to something one or more PCs wanted to do automatically gets a boost in this category. This is going to be the way you start the adventure, so you have to make every effort to get the choice right.

Linear Structural Rendering

From that starting point, you can work out the overall structure of the adventure as it will be experienced in play, i.e. in linear fashion. There are innumerable possible structures, but in most cases you will find that the choice of starting and climax points, with some basic guidelines, will make most of the choices logical and relatively easy to make. Those guidelines:

• Use confusion where necessary, but unless it’s present deliberately, keep it to a minimum.
• It’s not enough for the total spotlight time to be more-or-less even across all the PCs; you also need to share out the spotlight evenly throughout the adventure. It’s even possible that you will need to devise additional go-nowhere-significant plotlines for some PCs and integrate them into your overall adventure in the same way as described above in order to achieve this.
• If a particular player needs a particular type of content – or needs a particular type of content to be applied sparingly – you have to be sure to touch on his needs at least once per game session. This introduces a new parameter that we haven’t mentioned before, adventure length. Right now, it’s very hard to judge this with any measure of accuracy, but you have to estimate it anyway in order to satisfy this guideline.
• Theme can manifest in one of two ways – as variations that become relevant to each PC in success, forming a secondary plot through-line; or in clumps at appropriate times in the adventure.
• Emotional Pacing needs to make sense – refer to Swell and Lull: Emotional Pacing in RPGs (Part 1, Part 2).
• Revelations only pay off if the pre-existing beliefs are reiterated and reinforced first. Similarly, you need to prepare the ‘ground’ for plot twists in order to make them most effective.
• Successive scenes need to contrast in tone.
• Avoid patterns of PC involvement sequences. If A is followed by B is followed by C (where A, B, and C are scenes starring particular PCs), the next iteration should be in a different sequence – adding in extra scenes to be roleplayed as necessary that could otherwise be handwaved.

Oh, if only it were that easy.

What usually happens is that natural fragments will present themselves – one scene followed by another followed by… – but these won’t link together, or there may be multiple choices of structure. At the same time, you may compile a section in which you know that a number of scenes will take place, but you have no idea what the best sequence of them will be. Finally, there will usually be a few bits that just don’t fit comfortably.

Nevertheless, you have to fit things together as well as you can. This is one area where the real artistry of adventure design takes place; each GM will develop his own style. It’s rare that there is only one right answer but normal that there are multiple wrong answers to be winnowed out. You may need to tweak and revise multiple times before you find the structure that will work best, all things considered.

Incorporating the third dimension: The Timeline of events

Once you have divided the adventure into individual scenes and arranged them in such a way that they tell the story of the unified plot thread in a way that meets all the criteria spelt out above, you can start using context and continuity to make your plotline three dimensional. Doing so is a little difficult to explain, but here goes:

It’s extremely unlikely that the backgrounds and contexts of the three adventures will be identical. This is information that you have to get to the players in the course of play, but in such a way that it doesn’t provide spoilers to the plot twists and revelations that you have incorporated.

In addition, it means that you need to incorporate events into the background of various scenes to provide the necessary information and to show the (gradual? abrupt? a little of both?) transformation of one background/context into another.

Next, you need to look at what each NPC was doing in the course of previous scenes to the one in which they first appear. Passing encounters and brief interchanges and the consequences of any actions all build a foundation of verisimilitude upon which the adventure itself rests.

The more of these additional, incidental, cross-links that you can build into your adventure, the more three-dimensional your adventure will become. This is the second area in which the true artistry of adventure design makes a difference.

It’s also important to make a note of why each such scene is where it is so that if your planning needs to evolve in response to unexpected PC choices, you can assess how they are to be affected.

Internal Logic Check

At this point, you have have a complete adventure laid out, scene by scene, in synopsis form, with reasons for each item being where it is within the structure.

That means that this is the first (and last) point in the process that is suitable for a complete internal logic check.

Things to particularly look out for are:

• Decisions made prior to receiving the information that justifies them.
• Continuity errors in which an inconsistency in characterization occurs without explanation.
• Is every decision made by an NPC sensible given what that NPC would know at the time of making the decision?
• Is every choice of action reasonable under the circumstances the NPC believes to be in effect at the time?
• Is every piece of information to be provided to the PCs something that they could reasonably learn, based on what they were doing in the scene in which they last appeared prior to the scene in which they acquire or demonstrably have the information?

Plot Dynamism

Where the major PC decision points and what if they make unexpected choices at those points? If the PCs engage in an activity – be it rock climbing or combat – that you have assumed will result in one particular outcome – success or failure – what are the alternatives? Is there anywhere in the adventure where the players should have a choice, but don’t?

While it’s perfectly acceptable to evolve the plot on the fly – and a great deal of the effort above is designed to enable you to do so, effectively – Spending a few minutes pondering these questions and making preliminary notes imbues the plot with dynamism, permitting it to evolve in response to changing circumstances.

While you’re at it, making notes to ensure that you will have any information that you might need to run the adventure at hand is time well spent.

This is the third major area where artistry in adventure design is a factor.

The Work Isn’t Done Until It’s Saved

I’m going to end this article with a couple of pieces of advice that everyone should have burned into their minds at all time. I generally do my element relationships on a page or two of notepaper, which is (relatively) permanent; but the many potential changes and evolutions that a plot undergoes during the development process means that electronic writing is infinitely more useful. Ans, whenever you are dealing with electronic documents in progress, this maxim is a must.

You can spend six hours working on something only to have it lost to a power failure, or a systems crash, or simply closing the wrong document prematurely. If you haven’t been saving it as you go, that work is lost, and may or may not be re-creatable. Either way, you have to spend time recreating it, or creating something else in its place.

The work isn’t done until it’s saved.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

This is a maxim from carpentry, but it applies to many other situations either directly or as allegory. What it means is this: don’t do anything from which you can’t recover until you are SURE that it is what you want to do. If you have to, save first with a version number appended to your filename. The number of times this practice will save your bacon is hard to overestimate!

I’ve been holding off on this article for almost 9 months because I wanted to make sure I had an RPG connection. Last week, I finally found it.

2016: The Myth

2016 is perceived to have been a horror year for the loss of celebrities. One famous face or voice left us after another. It started with David Bowie early in January, and ended with the departures of George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds late in the year. I think it was in late August (Gene Wilder) that I first saw social media suggestions that 2016 was a Horror Year, and that was when this article began percolating in the back of my mind.

First, though there were any number of people whose loss I mourn, who enlivened and enlightened my world, 2016 didn’t seem that much worse than 2015 had been; and second, it didn’t come as any great surprise to me. I’ll get to the latter point in a little bit, but first, let’s look at the question – just how bad was 2016 for celebrity deaths?

2016: The Statistics

Using the resources of Wikipedia’s list of deaths by year, I performed an only slightly scientific analysis. For the years 2012-2016, I counted up the number of deaths of people whose names I recognized, and because we’ve had four months of 2017, I also kept a separate count of the number of deaths for the first four months of the year. If my theories – which I’ll get to shortly – were correct, 2017 would be no better than 2016 or even 2015, or not much so, anyway. You can see the results to the right. It contains both what I expected to find, and a surprise or two.

The first thing that I noticed was in the April results, which showed a clear trend over the 2013-to-2016 range. That’s very close to a straight line.

The second thing I noticed is that 2013 was a very good year for celebrity deaths. Both the April and Whole-year numbers are significantly down on the years to either side of it.

The third point is from the overall numbers, showing that – in terms of the celebrities whose names I recognized, which include musicians, actors, directors, politicians, sportsmen, and authors – 2015 was indeed slightly worse than 2016, but they were close enough to be comparable. So why was 2016 perceived as being so much worse than 2015? The answer seems to me to lie in the peak in the end-of-April numbers. This created a subconscious predisposition that 2016 was going to be a bad year. In fact, the remainder of 2016 was not as bad – if the 2015 rest-of-year were applied to the 2016 start-of-year, 2016 would have a total of 41 significant losses, not the 35 that were actually recorded.

The end of April is 1/3 of the year, or close enough to it. So you would expect the April numbers to be about 1/3 of the total. In 2012, the ratio was 1/5; in 2013, 1/6; 2014, 1/4; 2015, just over 1/3; and 2016, a smidgen higher again. This is another key to the perceptions of both 2015 and 2016 – it wasn’t so much that they were worse than expected as that the three years before them were so much better.

It can be argued that in fact, the perceptions of 2015 and 2016 were the consequences of better-than-the-odds numbers of celebrity mortality in the preceding three years, that some of those who passed away managed to beat the odds long enough to claim a couple of extra years on this planet. From that perspective, the high number of celebrity deaths in 2015-2016 were something to celebrate!

But there’s more to the story. These results were (mostly) pretty much what I expected to see, even before I opened the website to do the research. What’s more, the reasons for that show that years like 2015-2016 will be happening again and again over the next few years. While the start of 2017 has not been as bad as 2016, it has been very much on-par with 2015, and I expect the rest of the year to follow a similar pattern.

Inevitable Mortality in the Modern World

As preamble to the reasons for expecting these things, it’s worth taking a quick look at the causes of mortality in the modern world.

Accident

While death from accident can and does still happen – Paul Walker in 2013, for example – for the most part, that is a relatively small contributor to celebrity deaths, a distinguishing characteristic relative to the general population. While having the financial resources to ensure the best care does help mitigate the consequences of accidents slightly, a far bigger factor is avoiding accidents in the first place. As a general rule – again with exceptions – most accidental deaths suffered by celebrities occur when they are doing something extreme, either in a relative wilderness setting (Lisa Lopes of TLC in 2002) or involving a vehicle of some kind (Walker again), and the reduction in mortality from accidental causes is more related to a reduction in incidence of lethal accidents in general for celebrities relative to the general population.

Violence

Relatively few celebrities die from violent circumstances, though there are tragic exceptions. John Lennon, for example, murdered in 1980, or Bob Welch, the former guitarist for Fleetwood Mac who had commercial success with “Ebony Eyes,” “Sentimental Lady,” and “Precious Love” in the late seventies, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2012. While Celebrities may be the targets of violence, due to their perceived affluence, they can also usually afford better protection and security, so violence is an uncommon cause of death in this subpopulation.

Addiction

With two major causes of mortality relatively reduced in significance, those that remain are heightened in prevalence. Death from addiction, in the form of both legal and illegal substance abuse, remains a high risk for celebrities. A combination of the pressures of the various occupations that made them famous, the relative availability through the social ‘scenes’ they inhabit, and the financial wherewithal to satisfy such needs is responsible. This is a problem that particularly afflicts those at the younger end of the age scale.

I can never discuss this subject without thinking, first, of various interviews with Alice Cooper over recent years, secondly of Aerosmith, third of Keith Richards, fourth of Joe Walsh from the Eagles, and fifth of Stevie Nicks.

Cooper has said a number of times that it was discovering blood in his vomit that prompted him to give up alcohol, and that he then took stock and noticed how few of his hard-drinking friends were still alive. In particular, he attributes many of his problems to his friendship with The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon. ‘The difference with Keith Moon — with most celebrities, only ten percent of what you read about is true. With Keith Moon, you’ve only heard about ten percent of the stories and they’re all true,’ he said during his appearance on Top Gear (the quote might be slightly incorrect but is accurate in meaning and sentiment).

Aerosmith, famously, were growing in popularity until drug addiction took their toll on the band, Joe Perry and Brad Whitford leaving as a result. Eventually, the band reunited and completed successful courses of rehabilitation before reigniting their careers and resuming their upward trajectory in popularity through their well-known collaboration with Run-DMC. These days, they speak openly of the period when drugs ruled their lives and take great pride in being clean.

Keith Richards had a reputation for drug use in the popular zeitgeist that far outstrips the reality. He kicked his heroin habit in 1978, and stopped using cocaine after requiring surgery when he fell out of a tree in 2006; when discussing the subject, he often says that he simply “got lucky” whereas a number of his fellow musicians such as Bryan Jones, did not.

In “The History Of The Eagles,” Joe Walsh spoke very poignantly about his addiction – ‘There was a time, very briefly, where it helped [creatively], and then it stops working and you start to chase it’. This always resonates for me with the Beatles and their experimentation with (then-legal) mind-expanding drugs in the mid-60s, when there was a perception that drugs could stimulate creativity.’ Without LSD, it was often said, Jimi Hendrix would not have been as brilliant or successful as he was; what no-one thought to ask was whether or not he might have been even better and bigger without them’ – I forget who gave that statement (which I am sure I am misquoting, but the gist of it is accurate) but it places the celebrity drug culture into real perspective. David Bowie expressed similar thoughts about his collaborations with Brian Eno and Robert Fripp in Germany.

Many others have spoken on the subject over the years, but these vignettes touch on most of the key themes common to these stories. It might be a false impression, but I get the personal feeling that such cautionary tales have seeped into the creative community over the years and drug abuse by celebrities is diminishing as a cause of death as a result.

Cancer

There are three medical conditions which are largely unresponsive to the better health-care available to the wealthy and famous, and hence figure more frequently (in relative terms) in celebrity mortality. The first of these is Cancer, one of the leading causes of death globally. One question that I have frequently debated is whether or not Cancer is a product of the industrial revolution, or whether the potential was always there for it to be a massive killer, but people died before that could manifest. I used to lean more toward the former, these days I think the latter is more probably true, but if you asked me again next week, you might get a different answer.

For a long time, Cancer was perceived as an old person’s disease, but it is now recognized that people in their twenties and thirties can experience the disease, and some forms can even afflict children. However, age seems to have a profound effect on survivability – my impression is that it’s a case of accumulated damage reducing the body’s capacity to cope with the side effects of the medication, while also increasing the number of compromised systems that can become terminal conditions.

Cardiac Arrest

The second of the major medical conditions is what is commonly known as a heart attack or heart failure. The fact is that, with prompt care, about 22% of those who experience a cardiac episode will survive; that’s the survival rate where the experience takes place in a hospital situation. Where the incident occurs outside of such a setting, without medical care at hand, survival rates drop to only 7%. And that’s despite the modern awareness of the dangers involved, and all the apparatus of ambulance services and early diagnosis of the risk factors.

Cardiac problems, in other words, usually kill too quickly for medical assistance to make any difference. The consequence is that cardiac arrest doesn’t play favorites.

Stroke

Between 1990 and 2010 the number of strokes which occurred each year decreased by approximately 10% in the developed world and increased by 10% in the developing world. In 2015, stroke was the second most frequent cause of death after coronary artery disease, accounting for 6.3 million deaths (11% of the total), worldwide. About half of people who have had a stroke live less than one year.

About 75% of those who experience a stroke suffer sufficient disability that enjoyment of life is impaired. Despite ranking as the number-2 killer, world-wide, around 75% will survive their first incident [Stroke Statistics: 9 Sobering Survival Facts You Should Know]. Putting that information together with that in the previous paragraph paints a grim picture: a stroke is probably a death sentence, but you may linger long enough to suffer before the end.

Strokes are principally an old-age condition. 2/3 of all strokes occur in people 65 years or older, and 95% of them take place in people 45 years or older.

AIDS

HIV is believed to have originated in west-central Africa during the late 19th or early 20th century. AIDS was first recognized by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1981, and HIV identified as the cause a few years later. While there are tragic exceptions, in particular transmission from mothers to unborn children, the majority of human cases stem either from intravenous drug use or gay sexual practices. But that wasn’t known in the early 80s, as the documentary “Queen: Days Of Our Lives” makes clear. Through the course of the 1980s, the number of people living with the disease rose steadily to about 800,000 in the US, while the number of new cases steadily declined. For the next five years, the number of cases stabilized, indicating that deaths and new cases were roughly equal. From 1995 onwards, the number of new cases declined steadily while the number of cases of survivors grew steadily. At around 2006, the rate of increase began to slow, but still to increase steadily; by 2012, about 1.2 million people were living with the disease.

That is only possible if survival rates rise, i.e. if mortality rates decline. Celebrities will continue to die of AIDs, but more often it will be the result of AIDS-related complications to other medical problems.

AIDS deaths were not age-related, but with the problem becoming chronic more than directly-terminal, that is changing.

Other

There are lots of other ways for people to die, but between them, the selected list above accounts easily for the vast majority of deaths, celebrity or otherwise. What’s clear is that while celebrities are no more immune from them than anyone else, celebrities have the maximum opportunity to take care of themselves and thereby to delay or reduce the majority of the risks involved.

Susceptibility By Era

With that preamble, let me turn my attention to explaining the reasons why I was not all that surprised by the compiled results of my research. To do so, I need to look at when celebrities became famous.

The Pre-60s

Most people become celebrities in their 20s and 30s. A few manage it while younger, and a few when older, but that’s certainly the peak age range. Anyone who became famous before 1960 would therefore probably have been born between 1920 and 1939. That places them in the 77-96 age bracket in 2016. While there are a few who survive for that length of time, they are few and far between, and even fewer would also happen to be celebrities for some reason other than their age. It follows that every celebrity from this era is either gone or will probably leave us over the next decade. There were no less than 13 celebrities of this vintage who departed this mortal coil in the course of 2016 (whose name I recognized, the yardstick of celebrity that I am employing). 13 out of 36 is a significant percentage, almost one third. That can’t be particularly surprising. With every year that passes, there will be fewer representatives of this historical period remaining, and so this number is likely to drop precipitously in coming years. People like Cliff Richard and the remaining members of the Beach Boys are likely to soon leave us.

The 1960s

The early boom in television took place in the course of 1960s. The Beatles instigated a seismic shift in music and popular culture in 1963-4; they and the many musicians who were inspired to enter the industry following their example skew the average celebrity age younger from this time onwards. The explosion in popular culture greatly increased the number of living celebrities.

If you became famous in the period 1960-1970, you would have been born in between 1930 and 1949, and in 2016 you would have been between 67 and 86. It should come as no surprise that a great many celebrities of this vintage have also passed away, but the vast increase in numbers ensured that a few would survive to this point. Virtually all of these early stars can be expected to pass away in the next 10-20 years, and most in the next decade. The surviving Beatles and The Rolling Stones amongst them.

A decade earlier, and members of this age group would have ranged in age from 57 to 76. While a number of the older members would probably have passed away, most of the younger ones would not be in extraordinary danger. This is the group most likely to figure prominently in the obituary columns over the next decade.

The 1970s

The seventies saw a further groundswell in popular culture. Television brought forth stars in ever-increasing number, as did popular music. If you became famous between 1970 and 1979, you were probably born between the years 1940 and 1959, and in 2016 you would have been aged between 57 and 76. This is the age bracket at which mortality becomes pronounced; most people can expect to live that long, accidents and addiction-related deaths excepted. There will always be exceptions, people who passed away despite youth, but people in this age bracket are just starting to enter the danger zone. This, therefore, is the group whose numbers are most likely to grow, year-on-year, in terms of presence in the obituary columns. And that, combined with the boom in numbers of celebrities, means that obituary lists are only likely to grow in length over the next decade.

Carrie Fischer was merely one of the early casualties of her generation.

The 1980s

The 1980s brought the commencement of cable television and MTV and a new explosion in popular culture, but many of the newly-discovered ‘stars’ had been around for years without achieving the celebrity prominence they enjoyed thereafter. This, then, was the decade in which the imbalance caused by the ‘youth factor’ in the 1960s and 1970s began to fade from prominence.

Celebrities who became famous between 1980 and 1989 were probably born between 1950 and 1969. In 2016, they would have been aged between 47 and 66 – young enough that death is unlikely enough to shock, and yet a certain percentage are always going to pass away. Larry Drake, Prince, and Jerry Doyle were celebrities of this age bracket who were lost to us in 2016. George Michael was at the younger end of the age bracket, having been born in 1963.

While a few celebrities aged in this bracket will pass away each year, unless AIDS, Drug abuse, or Accident are involved, most will be with us for at least another decade. That’s when it starts becoming more problematic. Celebrities of this vintage will dominate the obituary lists of 2026-2035.

The 1990s and Beyond

The younger the celebrity, the more cheated we all feel when they meet an untimely demise. Of the handful of individuals listed by Wikipedia as having passed away from this age bracket in 2016, none had names that were familiar to me – not even the Australian Tennis Player. In 2015, however, there were three names that I recognized from this age bracket.

Most people who became famous in the 1990s, or more recently, will still be with us for the next 20 years. Mortality rates will only become significant for this age bracket in 2036-2045, assuming no significant medical breakthroughs – but that’s twenty to thirty years from now, so that’s a rather fraught assumption.

The Passage Of Time

Each decade of the forty-year period 1950-1990 saw a new boom in the numbers of celebrities. Those celebrities are aging with each passing year. 2000 brought the celebrities of the 1950s into the age bracket at which mortality becomes significant. 2010 did the same for those who became famous in the 1960s. 2020 will do likewise for those whose fame began in the 1970s. Each of these waves of celebrity is larger than the one before. More television channels, more new TV shows, more channels for the promotion of music, more televising of sports – more opportunities for people to become famous.

On top of that, syndication and secondary channels and classic-TV channels and new distribution channels for movies and music tend to keep refreshing the fame of such stars. A quick glance at today’s TV schedule for my local region reveals repeats of Charlie’s Angels, Friends, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, JAG, M*A*S*H, Hogan’s Heroes, DCI Banks, Bewitched, I Dream Of Jeannie, Who’s The Boss, Diff’rent Strokes, Married With Children, Heartbeat, Judging Amy, Becker, The King Of Queens, Rules Of Engagement, Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier, Get Smart, Cheers, Matlock, Jake And The Fatman, Diagnosis Murder, Star Trek The Next Generation, The Nanny, Top Gear, Two And A Half Men, The Simpsons, How I Met Your Mother, The X-files, South Park and Mythbusters. On the movie front, we have repeats of The Pelican Brief, Speed, Beverly Hills Cop II, and the Monuments Men. And that’s all on free-to-air network television, not even looking at the various cable-tv channels dedicated to “oldies” and “classic movies” and so on. At least twelve of those TV shows star people who are now deceased but who live on through their work. Their celebrity – like those of the stars who still live from those shows – is being constantly rejuvenated.

The upshot is that, with each passing decade (for the next few to come, at least), there will be more celebrities to die and more of those celebrities will be in the higher-risk brackets for mortality – inevitably resulting in an increase in the number of celebrity deaths each year, until some measure of stability is reached in the middle of the century.

Mortality in an RPG

I promised at the head of this article that all this has some application to RPGs. No, I’m not going to suggest that RPG creators and bloggers are celebrities. Instead, I’m talking about famous NPCs within a campaign.

Let us say that 30 years ago, there was a terrible War. Or maybe it was 40 years ago. And another two decades earlier. How many surviving veterans of that first war would there be in your campaign? How many people would have memories of that time?

To answer this question, you need to compile actuarial tables for your campaign world. And that’s not quite as simple as it sounds, because these tables need to reflect your campaign history. And there are all sorts of tools that you might need.

For example, let’s say that you have an expanding Kingdom, and that the dangers are three times as great in a fringe around the edges of the civilized lands. Let’s say that the Kingdom has been doubling in area every eight years, and each time it does so, the fringe increases in width by 20%. Let’s further state that 65 years ago, the civilized Kingdom was 31,416 square miles in area and the ‘fringe’ was a fifty-mile-wide band around the perimeter.

This is a pair of fairly basic geometric progressions describing some simple geometry. The kingdom’s civilized areas are a rough circle. The area of a circle is pi times radius squared. So 65 years ago, the civilized area was a circle with the average radius 100 miles, and the “wilds” were a band of further radius 50 miles around this circle.

In eight years, the inner-kingdom area doubles. In 16 years, it doubles again. That effectively doubles the radius to 200 miles. In 32 years, it doubles again, to 400 miles. In 48 years, it doubles a third time, and in 64 years it doubles for a fourth.
So it’s now 1600 miles average radius – or about 8,042,500 square miles in size.

The wilds increase 20% in radius after the first eight years, and again after another eight years. So in 16 years, they are x1.2×1.2 =x1.44 in additional radius. In another 16 years, or 32 years in total, the size would be x1.44 x144 = 2.0736, and after 48 years it would be x2.0736 x1.44. After 64 years, the wilds have increased in depth by x2.0736 x2.0736 = very close to 4.3, and would now be 215 miles in additional radius. So the total average radius of the Kingdom is 1815 miles, and the total area is 10,349,113 square miles. That’s more than 2 million square miles of semi-civilized ‘fringe’ where adventure comes a-calling.

Let’s say that the inner kingdom has a population density of 5 people per square mile, while the average in the ‘wilds’ is only 2. How many people are in the Kingdom now, and how many of them live in the wilds? 40,212,500 in the inner Kingdom. and 4,613,226 in the fringes. More than 10% of the population, in other words. But 65 years ago, those numbers were only 157,080 and 78,538, respectively – almost exactly a third of the populace lives in the wilds.

Note that both these numbers are extremely high. More typical would be for the inner kingdom to double in size every 40 years or so (the population level rises faster, but some of the newcomers will migrate to the cities), with the ‘wilds’ increasing about 50% in that sort of period.

The only reason to distinguish between the two types of area is so that you can estimate the danger levels separately, i.e. the mortality rates. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Average Biological Lifespan

There are all sorts of ways to define the typical lifespan, and most of them are useless to us, because mortality rates are different for different age brackets. Simply stating an average, which gives the most intuitive ‘feel’ for the race, is really hard to translate into meaningful mortality rates. It’s actually a lot more useful to define the average usually quoted as the medical value, the average that would apply if nothing intervened to hasten death, i.e. the average under ideal circumstances, because that then lets us completely ignore it except as a guideline.

What we really need is a statement that reads, ‘at age X, Y per cent of the population have died.’ That lets us determine a series of mortality rates, and an average family size in order to achieve whatever growth rate of the society that has been decreed, simply by virtue of the number of survivors needed.

Interval Length

The lifetime of individuals is broken into intervals for the purposes of calculation. The most sensitive and nuanced approach is year-by-year, but the more intervals you have, the more work is involved. It’s not hard work, it’s just onerous, and makes for a boring article. So, for the purposes of this article, I’m going to use 15-year intervals, but in reality I would use 3- or 5-year intervals.

Base Mortality Progression

Let’s say that we have decided that 90% of the populace is dead at the age of 50. This is indicative of quite a dangerous life, even in the inner Kingdom.

The first step is to count the number of intervals required to reach that measurement age. So, 0-15 is one interval; 16-30 is two; 31-45 is three; and 50 is therefore three and one third.

The basic formula is

M = m ^ I

where M is the defined mortality rate (90%, or 0.9 in the example), I is the number of intervals (4 1/3 in the example), and m is the average mortality per interval. Since 0% of the population are dead at the age of 0, I and m define a simple geometric progression, or in this case, a base mortality progression.

0.9 = m ^ 3.3333333

Looks messy, doesn’t it? This can be quite a tricky calculation to solve. But there’s a simple way of restating the calculation so that it becomes a lot easier with a scientific calculator:

Log (1-M) = I x log(m)

or, using our example:

log (1-0.9) = 3.33333333 x log(m)

which becomes

-1 = 3.3333333 x log(m)

or log (m) = -1 / 3.3333333333 = -0.3

So, m = 0.501187233627 = 50.1187233627%. Call it 50.11%.

That means that for every interval that passes, only 50.11% of the population will survive. Or, if you prefer, the base mortality rate is 49.89%.

I find that it is useful at this point to set out a table showing intervals and the net mortality rate based on this base progression.

I=1, 1-15 years, 50.11% survive.
I=2, 16-30 years, 50.11% = 25.11% survive.
I=3, 31-45 years, 50.11% = 12.58% survive.
I=4, 46-60 years, 50.11% = 6.31% survive.
I=5, 61-75 years, 50.11% = 3.16% survive.
I=6, 76-90 years, 50.11% = 1.58% survive.
I=7, 91-105 years, 50.11% = 0.8% survive.
I=8, 106-120 years, 50.11% = 0.4% survive.
I=9, 121-135 years, 50.11% = 0.2% survive.
I=10, 136-160 years, 50.11% = 0.1% survive.

The first % shows the number that we calculated, i.e. the number who survive to the end of the interval. The second percentage is the net survival rate from birth to the end of the interval.

If this is for humans, it looks out of whack. No-one I know of has ever lived to 160 years of age. But that’s fine, because we are not locked in stone on this beyond the I=4 number. Well, actually, beyond I = 3 1/3. We can vary the other numbers to whatever seems reasonable:

I=1, 1-15 years, 50.11% survive.
I=2, 16-30 years, 50.11% = 25.11% survive.
I=3, 31-45 years, 50.11% = 12.58% survive.
I=4, 46-60 years, 50.11% = 6.31% survive.
I=5, 61-75 years, 3% survive (from 47.5%).
I=6, 76-90 years, 0.5% survive (from 16.67%).
I=7, 91-105 years, 0.01% survive (from 2%).

The first four values are unchanged. The values for the 5th interval were determined by setting the net % to whatever I wanted and then determining what the interval mortality rate had to be to achieve it. For example, to make the 5th interval come out to a net 3% survival rate, you have to apply a (3%/6.31%=47.5%) adjustment – in other words, 3% is 47.5% of 6.31%. The previous net mortality rate and the new net mortality rate determine the interval mortality rate.

Multiplying these values by the higher value in the age brackets and adding up the total actually gives the average lifespan, taking into account all the circumstances that are incorporated into the mortality rate.

50.11% x 15 = 7.5165.
25.11% x 30 = 7.533.
12.58% x 45 = 5.661.
6.31% x 60 = 3.786.
3% x 75 = 2.25.
0.5% x 90 = 0.45
0.01% x 105 = 0.0105.

Total = 27.207 years.

Variable Geometric Progression

But, for that matter, why use the base progression? In most populations without advanced medicine, infant and child mortality rates tend to be much higher than those of young adults, and those of the middle-aged tend to be greater than those of young adults. With the numbers we already know, it’s easy to adjust these tables as we wish. The key is that whatever we do one way, as a factor, has to be balanced by an equal and opposing adjustment somewhere else.

I=1, 1-15 years, 50.11 / 1.75 = 28.63% survive.
I=2, 16-30 years, 50.11 / 1.25 = 40.09% survive.
I=3, 31-45 years, 50.11 x 1.5 = 75.17% survive.
I=4, 46-60 years, 50.11 xX = % survive.
I=5, 61-75 years, 47.5 / 1.3 = 36.5% survive.
I=6, 76-90 years, 16.67 x 1.3 31.67% survive.
I=7, 91-105 years, 2% = 0.01% survive.

Above, I’ve paid a x1.3 adjustment with a /1.3 adjustment. I’ve listed a /1.75 and /1.25 adjustment and paired them with a x1.5 and a xX adjustment – so I need to calculate X:

1.75 x 1.25 = 1.5 x X
2.1875 = 1.5 x X
X = 2.1875 / 1.5 = 1.46.

So, I get:

I=1, 1-15 years, 50.11 / 1.75 = 28.63% survive.
I=2, 16-30 years, 50.11 / 1.25 = 40.09% = 11.48% survive.
I=3, 31-45 years, 50.11 x 1.5 = 75.17% = 8.63% survive.
I=4, 46-60 years, 50.11 x1.46 = 73.16% = 6.31% survive.
I=5, 61-75 years, 47.5 / 1.3 = 36.5% = 2.3% survive.
I=6, 76-90 years, 16.67 x 1.3 = 31.67% = 0.73% survive.
I=7, 91-105 years, 2% = 0.01% survive.

28.63% x 15 = 4.2945
11.48% x 30 = 3.444
8.63% x 45 = 3.8835
6.31% x 60 = 3.786
2.3% x 75 = 1.725
0.73% x 90 = 0.657
0.01% x 105 = 0.0105

Total = 17.8005 years.

So, by increasing child mortality rates and compensating in a later age group the average age has dropped substantially.

Minimum Family Size

The final calculation that is possible from these numbers is the size of the average family in order to achieve a given rate of population expansion. We know that some will be childless, whether they are a couple or not; so the initial calculation will look at 50 families with children, and we will then adjust for the ratio of families to childless pairs of people.

If we start with two people, it’s easy to calculate how many children they need to have in order to end up with two children surviving to the 16-30 age bracket, the age at which those children can take up the burden of maintaining population numbers:

2 / 11.48% = 17.42.

This calculation shows quite clearly that our adjustments went too far. No matter, that’s easy to correct with some more adjustments:

I=1, 1-15 years, 28.63% x1.25 = 35.79% survive.
I=2, 16-30 years, 40.09% x1.5 = 60.14% = 21.5% survive.
I=3, 31-45 years, 75.17% = 15.32% survive.
I=4, 46-60 years, 73.16% = 11.21% survive.
I=5, 61-75 years, 36.5% /1.25 = 29.2% = 3.27% survive.
I=6, 76-90 years, 31.67% /1.5 = 21.11% = 0.69% survive.
I=7, 91-105 years, 2% = 0.01% survive.

35.79% x 15 = 5.3685
21.5% x 30 = 6.45
15.32% x 45 = 6.894
11.21% x 60 = 6.726
3.27% x 75 = 2.4525
0.69% x 90 = 0.621
0.01% x 105 = 0.0105

Total = 28.5225 years.

Family Size: 2 / 21.5% = 9.3.

You might think that this number says that we still haven’t gone far enough, but it’s misleading. This is the number of children required for a couple to be sure that two of them will reach the age of 30. We only need them to live long enough to have two children who in turn will live long enough to have another two children. To find that out, we need two things – the year-on-year mortality rate and the age at which marriage becomes legal. The first can be calculated:

i x log (f) = log (p2 / p1)

where i is the number of years in an Interval, f is the result we are looking for, p2 is the cumulative mortality rate at the end of the period being subdivided, and p1 is the mortality rate at the start of the period. In the case of this example, i is 15 years, p2 is 21.5% and p1 is 35.79%. In fact, we already know that p2/p1 is 60.14%.

15 log (f) = log (0.6014), so
log (f) = -0.220836576236 / 15 = -0.0147224384157, so
f = 0.966668488301 = 96.667%.

Family size if ‘instant’ = 2 / 35.79 = 5.59. Assume 1 year to have each child, adds 5.59 years to 16 years, the start of the age bracket being subdivided, which equals 21.59. Add 1 year for each year the age of marriage is over 16.

Historically, 16 was a very common age for marriage and 14 was not uncommon. 18 or 21 as ages of consent are relatively recent social developments.

In this case, given the child mortality rates, I’m going to assume that social pressures would favor wedlock sooner rather than later, with the assumption that the bride would be with child as soon as possible thereafter. This would also discourage experimentation and children born out of wedlock, both potential drains on the state. It’s even possible that there would be a small cash bonus paid – say, 5 GP upon falling pregnant, another 5 on the birth of a healthy child, and 2 GP a year until the age of apprenticeship – which could be anything from 8 to 14. Twelve is a reasonably common age, historically, with ascent to journeyman status at 16 (apprentices should not be distracted by a bride or a husband). So let’s say 16.

In which case, 21.59 + 0 = 21.59 – so 22 years old should get us to the point of success.

15 years = 35.79%
16 years = 35.79% x 96.667% = 34.6%
17 years = 34.6 x 96.667% = 33.444%
18 years = 33.444 x 96.667% = 32.33%
19 years = 32.33 x 96.667% = 31.25%
20 years = 31.25 x 96.667% = 30.21%
21 years = 30.21 x 96.667% = 29.2%
22 years = 29.2 x 96.667% = 28.23%

2 / 28.23 = 7.08.

Seven children by the age of 22 is just possible if the first is conceived at the age of 16. But 7 mouths (plus two adults) to feed is a heavy burden; children would be put to work on behalf of the family as soon as they were old enough to understand what was required from them. Only a paying apprenticeship, returning money to the family, would excuse a child from his share of the workload.

It is also more than most couples had, even historically – that’s a consequence of the harsh child mortality rates, which are higher even than medieval history (9 in 10 survivors, or 6 in 7 according to some accounts, is closer to the historical average).

Couples Percentage

Next, out of 100 adult individuals, how many are members of a couple? You want this to be a reasonable percentage, and the smaller it is, the larger average family size has to grow to compensate. Social pressures are sure to result from families of 7 children, even if only 35.79% of them reach the age of 16, and these would favor something close to universal marriage.

If the ratio is 98/100=0.98, divide the 7.08 by 0.98. It follows that so long as R is not enough to increase the requirement to 8, the situation is socially tolerable. In other words, 8 = 7.08/R, i,e, R= 7.08/8 = 88.5. Since couples come in pairs, 88 is not enough but 90 is acceptable. That means that there would be socially acceptable reasons for not marrying – but not many and they would be hard to qualify for.

Typical Family Size

As a rough rule of thumb, if 7 children is the minimum required to achieve a static population level, assuming only 28.23 of them live long enough to produce grandchildren, a couple can bring about population growth simply by ‘replenishing’ and ‘replacing’ any who fall victim to mortality before the grandchildren stage. Adding more children to the brood only increases the effect. If a couple has 15 or 20 children, even with the 28.23% survival rate, 4.3-5.6 people per couple will comprise the next generation – more than doubling and almost tripling the population every 31-36 years.

That’s an unsustainable rate of growth. But it’s far short of the doubling every eight years that would be required to sustain the population density. It follows that either much of the land is unoccupied, even within the central Kingdom, or that subject peoples have to be added to the mix.

In a way, that’s only reasonable – someone would have laid claim to the lands into which the Kingdom is expanding; having the land already populated is the fastest way to grow the population.

This would explain another phenomenon, too – the population density that I selected for this example is way less than would be historically accurate. Medieval France, with its fertile plains and rolling hills, had a population density in medieval times of 25 people per square mile. England, with far more rocky and inhospitable terrain, was 8-10. For this kingdom, I specified 5 in the “densely packed” inner core and 2 in the outer fringe.

Additional Dangers & Their Impact

A similar technique, to the one used for previous adjustments, without the ‘compensating effect,’ enables the tables to be adjusted to incorporate any dangers that aren’t already factored in – like wild critters crashing the party. As a general rule of thumb, mortality rates will be much higher in the outlands. It can even be argued that cross-adjustments should be applied – for every reduction in survival rates in the outland, an increase should be applied to the inner kingdom. That’s getting a bit fussy and technical, but it would certainly be realistic.

For the sake of brevity, and because it doesn’t present much in the way of novel features to be understood, I’ll forgo that this time around. Given the relatively low population density, it’s questionable just how well the inner Kingdom has been cleared, anyway, and that tends to suggest that the mortality rates would be similar in both parts of the Kingdom. So I’ll simply assume that the numbers derived above apply universally.

Demographics

Time intervals can be matched to intervals to derive pseudo-generations. The percentage who survive the previous interval can be deemed to be the surviving numbers of the base population of that interval. Deriving a population growth rate measured in intervals then permits a complete breakdown of the demography of the Kingdom by interval bracket.

This is exactly what I did – with minimal numbers – when discussing the decades of the twentieth century in which celebrities became famous.

Here are the actuarial tables I worked out above once again, for reference. You’ll need them for reference.

I=1, 1-15 years, 28.63% x1.25 = 35.79% survive.
I=2, 16-30 years, 40.09% x1.5 = 60.14% = 21.5% survive.
I=3, 31-45 years, 75.17% = 15.32% survive.
I=4, 46-60 years, 73.16% = 11.21% survive.
I=5, 61-75 years, 36.5% /1.25 = 29.2% = 3.27% survive.
I=6, 76-90 years, 31.67% /1.5 = 21.11% = 0.69% survive.
I=7, 91-105 years, 2% = 0.01% survive.

If you look at any given interval to work out the Demographics, something interesting happens. Let’s assume that we have a growth rate of G – I’ll show you how to work it out, in just a minute – and a base population 7 ‘pseudo-generations’ ago of B.

In any given interval, you will have 0.01% (the survivors) x B, from 6 pseudo-generations earlier.
You will have 0.69% x G x B, from 5 pseudo-generations ago.
You will have 3.27% x G^2 x B, from 4 pseudo-generations ago.
You will have 11.21% x G^3 x B, from 3 pseudo-generations ago.
You will have 15.32% x G^4 x B, from 2 pseudo-generations ago.
You will have 21.5% x G^5 x B, from the previous generation.
You will have 35.79% x G^6 x B, from the current generation of children.

(note that by putting these in the order of increasing powers of G, the mortality rates are reversed relative to the earlier tables).

Every interval, you simply have to multiply each of the results by G to get the total numbers in the new generation. Add them up, and you always get the total population at the end of the current interval. So long as there is no change to your actuarial tables, the demographic breakdown by age is that simple.

Determining Growth by Interval

We had already specified that the Inner Kingdom doubled in size every 8 years. We know the geographic size that it was, 64 years ago – 100 miles radius. We know that the population rate is not matching this expansion in geography through internal growth, but it is presumably doing so through assimilation of captured nations/kingdoms.

So let’s work with doubling every 8 years. That means that it is increasing four-fold every 16 years. 16 is a little longer than the interval we have to work with, so we have to adjust this growth rate to determine the rate of growth every 15 years (because that’s out chosen interval).

Two relatively simple calculations do the job:

N log (R) = log (G1)

where N and G1 are the numbers specified for the quadrupling in size. So (in this case) N = 16 years and G1 = 4. R is worth noting down, it’s the annual growth, and you’ll need that number every calendar year of in-game time.

So,

16 log (R) = log (4) = 0.60206
log (R) = 0.602/16 = 0.03763
R = 1.0905 = +9.05%.

Then,

I x log (R) = log (G).

So, for the example, we have I = 15 and log (R) = 0.03763, which gives us:

15 x 0.03763 = 0.56445 = log (G)
G = 3.668

So the kingdom is growing at just under +267% every Interval.

The calculation to standardize population growth rates is exactly the same, you just have to substitute in the known values and whatever estimates seem appropriate, apply the (in this case) 22-year survival rate to the average number of children per family, and determine a 22-year (N) growth level (G1). Knowing I and the resulting log (R), it’s easy to calculate G.

Our example case is even simpler, because we’ve said that it matches growth in area, as a result of conquest of existing settlements. So the population growth per interval is exactly the same as the geographic growth by interval – both G values are 3.668.

It’s convenient at this point to work out the G-factors for each pseudo-generation:

G = 3.668
G^2 = 3.668 x 3.668 = 13.454
G^3 = 13.454 x 3.668 = 49.35
G^4 = 181
G^5 = 664
G^6 = 2,435.4

Base Population

We know that the total population is currently 40,212,500 – that was one of the first things that we worked out. But that’s not the Base Population.

We need to apply the demographics with B as an unknown variable, add them all up, and then determine B.

Growth = 3.668 per Interval
From 6 pseudo-generations ago: 0.0001 x B.
From 5 pseudo-generations ago: 69% x G x B = 69% x 3.668 x B = 0.0253 x B
From 4 pseudo-generations ago: 3.27% x G^2 x B = 3.27% x 13.454 x B = 0.44 x B
From 3 pseudo-generations ago: 11.21% x G^3 x B = 11.21% x 49.35 x B = 5.53 x B
From 2 pseudo-generations ago: 15.32% x G^4 x B = 15.32% x 181 x B = 27.73 x B
From 1 pseudo-generations ago: 21.5% x G^5 x B = 21.5% x 664 x B = 142.76 x B
From now: 35.79% x G^6 x B = 35.79% x 2435.4 x B = 871.63 x B

Adding those up, you get 1,048.1154 x B, and we know that equals 40,212,500, so B must be 38,366.

Plugging that number into the individual calculations and putting them back into the usual order gives:

Growth = 3.668 per Interval
I=1, 1-15 years = 33,440,956
I=2, 16-30 years = 5,477,130
I=3, 31-45 years = 1,063,889
I=4, 46-60 years = 212,164
I=5, 61-75 years = 16,881
I=6, 76-90 years = 971
I=7, 91-105 years = 4

These are the actual numbers of the current generation, broken down by age. To get the numbers for any earlier era, simply divide by G for each interval into the past. To get the numbers for any point in the future, simply multiply by G for each successive Interval. (That’s why I listed G at the start of the demographic breakdown).

Multiracial Demographics

In a multiracial region, if the input values – growth rates, mortality rates, etc – are different, you need to track each race separately. And be prepared for some interesting dynamics; we’re dealing with exponential and geometric growth rates here, and it’s entirely possible that you will discover that you need to extend your campaign background to include racially-specific plagues or other calamities just to keep a fast-growing race from crowding out everyone else, or from totally dominating the campaign. Unless, of course, that’s what you want.

Shutter Events

Every now and then, there will be a ‘shutter event’ – an event that makes a significant adjustment to the population levels. A plague, a way, a famine, a flood. Disaster of some kind. This is an event that permits some part of the population to pass through (relatively) unscathed while blocking another part completely.

To apply a shutter effect, you need to know two things: the proportion of each population group who are exposed to the shutter effect, and the survival rate of the event by age of participant at the time.

For example, in an attempted invasion from without the Kingdom that penetrates the inner Kingdom before being rebuffed, a certain percentage of the population in the wilderness will confront the event, as will a certain percentage of those resident in the Inner Kingdom. These are the residents of ‘ground zero’ of the event. In addition, from other parts of the inner Kingdom, an army will be raised of a certain size. Those who are NOT part of this group can be deemed to automatically survive the event; those who ARE have to be subdivided by interval bracket, and then be reduced in number according to the survival rate you have set.

I started this part of the article by asking about veterans from a past war. That is quite obviously a shutter event. So let’s see what happens. Just to have some way to refer to it, I’ll toss out a random name: “The Julien Divide”. For some reason, the notion of something corrupting children into murderous monsters who turn on their family – how that relates to the title of the conflict, I have no idea. I put a little more thought (by about 20 seconds) into the composition of the Kingdom Army. For a start, I decided that the army is about 20% of the citizenry. From there I plugged in values that seemed about right to give a reasonable command structure. One of the good things about a 15-year Interval is that you can be reasonably sure that each interval represents an elevation in the command structure.

To start with, we have to work out how many intervals into the past we’re talking about. Let’s try 30 years, because that’s a simple example – two intervals.

Two intervals means that we are dividing the population numbers by G^2. Normally, you’d have to work that out from scratch, but as it happens, I just did that – 13.454.

Commencement Of The Julien Divide
Growth = 3.668 per Interval
I=1, 1-15 years = 33,440,956 / 13.454 = 2,485,577
I=2, 16-30 years = 5,477,130 / 13.454 = 407,100
I=3, 31-45 years = 1,063,889 / 13.454 = 79,076
I=4, 46-60 years = 212,164 / 13.454 = 15,770
I=5, 61-75 years = 16,881 / 13.454 = 1,255
I=6, 76-90 years = 971 = 0
I=7, 91-105 years = 4 = 0

Exposure I: Victims
I=1, 1-15 years = 2,485,577 x 25% = 621,394
I=2, 16-30 years = 407,100 x 17% = 69,207
I=3, 31-45 years = 79,076 x 5% = 3,954
I=4, 46-60 years = 15,770 x 3% = 473
I=5, 61-75 years = 1,255 x 1% = 12

Exposure II: Armies
I=1, 1-15 years = 2,485,577 /5 x 12% = 59,654
I=2, 16-30 years = 407,100 /5 x 30% = 24,426
I=3, 31-45 years = 79,076 /5 x 8% = 4,745
I=4, 46-60 years = 15,770 /5 x 3% = 95
I=5, 61-75 years = 1,255 /5x 1% = 3

The next step is to determine the casualty rates, and then apply them to the two exposed groups.

Exposure I: Victims
I=1, 1-15 years = 621,394 x 33.333% = 207,129
I=2, 16-30 years = 69,207 x 75% = 51,905
I=3, 31-45 years = 3,954 x 80% = 3,163
I=4, 46-60 years = 473 x 90% = 426
I=5, 61-75 years = 12 x 95% = 11

Exposure II: Armies
I=1, 1-15 years = 59,654 x 35% = 20,879
I=2, 16-30 years = 24,426 x 25% = 6,107
I=3, 31-45 years = 4,745 x 15% = 712
I=4, 46-60 years = 95 x 5% = 5
I=5, 61-75 years = 3 x 34% = 1

Next, you have to reduce the starting population at this point in time by the amount of these losses.

Commencement Of The Julien Divide
Growth = 3.668 per Interval
I=1, 1-15 years = 2,485,577 -207,129 -20,879 = 2,257,569
I=2, 16-30 years = 407,100 -51,905 -6,107 = 349,088
I=3, 31-45 years = 79,076 -3,163 -712 = 75,201
I=4, 46-60 years = 15,770 -426 -5 = 15,339
I=5, 61-75 years = 1,255 -11 -1 = 1,243
I=6, 76-90 years = 0 -0 -0 = 0
I=7, 91-105 years = 0 -0 -0 = 0

The second-last step is to age these back one interval toward the contemporary time period. Transpose each population number down 1 slot and multiply by the mortality rate of the old slot and the growth rate. To get the new 1st slot, multiply the old 1st slot value by the growth rate.

15 years after The Julien Divide
Growth = 3.668 per Interval
I=1, 1-15 years = 2,257,569 x 3.668 = 8,280,763
I=2, 16-30 years = 2,257,569 x 3.668 x 35.79% = 2,963,685
I=3, 31-45 years = 349,088 x 3.668 x 21.5% = 275,297
I=4, 46-60 years = 75,201 x 3.668 x 15.32% = 42,258
I=5, 61-75 years = 15,339 x 3.668 x 11.21% = 6,307
I=6, 76-90 years = 1,243 x 3.668 x 3.27% = 149
I=7, 91-105 years = 0 x 3.668 x 0.69% = 0

The last step is to do that again.

30 years after The Julien Divide
Growth = 3.668 per Interval
I=1, 1-15 years = 8,280,763 x 3.668 = 30,373,839
I=2, 16-30 years = 8,280,763 x 3.668 x 35.79% = 10,870,797
I=3, 31-45 years = 2,963,685 x 3.668 x 21.5% = 2,337,221
I=4, 46-60 years = 275,297 x 3.668 x 15.32% = 154,700
I=5, 61-75 years = 42,258 x 3.668 x 11.21% = 17,376
I=6, 76-90 years = 6,307 x 3.668 x 3.27% = 756
I=7, 91-105 years = 149 x 3.668 x 0.69% = 4

Compare these results to the original “current population” and you can see what a huge impact this conflict had on the Kingdom.

I=1, 1-15 years = 33,440,956
I=2, 16-30 years = 5,477,130
I=3, 31-45 years = 1,063,889
I=4, 46-60 years = 212,164
I=5, 61-75 years = 16,881
I=6, 76-90 years = 971
I=7, 91-105 years = 4

The Value Of Demographics

Demographics can give you another tool to bring your campaign to life, because they reflect your campaign’s history and its consequences in the modern game world. They also make a formidable analytic tool; unexpected patterns and tensions can be revealed that you didn’t even realize were present. You can either revel in these, or take action to defuse them; either will add to the verisimilitude of the campaign. Best of all, once the information is compiled it needs virtually no maintenance, thanks to the use of intervals. Years of game time will have to pass before the information is out-of-date.

“A difference that makes no difference is no difference.”
— William James

“So make sure that the smallest difference makes a difference.”
— Mike’s Corollary to William James’ statement (as applied to RPG Plotting)

In Monday’s article, I looked at the first question raised by Ronald, “In fantasy settings, how can the GM and players [distinguish] factions when they are very similar?” Today, I’ll tackle the much larger second question, “How can GMs effectively make a story without being repetitive in a campaign [where groups/factions have such] strong [similarity]?”

It’s always difficult to know where to start with big questions like this. Get it wrong and you not only confuse the reader, you can get yourself lost in a jungle of backtracking. Get it almost right and you can invest a lot of hours chasing into cul-de-sacs and dead ends.

One way to avoid those problems is to play with the scale of the problem – simplify it, or only look at part of it, or ignore some of the restrictions that make it difficult. Or you can offer an answer based purely on theory that sounds good but doesn’t actually provide any tangible benefit when you try to turn theory into practice.

I’m going to attempt to evade both of those approaches by making sure that we’re all on the same page with the fundamentals before we start.

The Anatomy Of A Campaign

The image to the right is a small-scale illustration of the constituent parts of a 3-player adventure, and how they in turn combine with the adventures to either side of them in continuity to form part of a campaign.

The Blue dots are the main plotline of each adventure, and they are connected by the big blue arrow of time running down the page.

The Yellow dots represent character ‘moments’ for each of the PC; these are part of the adventure that is specifically tailored to involve interaction between the plot and a specific PC.

The Green Dots represent immediate character ambitions that are peripheral to the adventure itself but that are to be addressed within the context of the adventure.

Lastly, the red dots represent ongoing plotlines for each PC in the form of subplots, also known as character ‘loops’; because these are not intended to resolve themselves within the current adventure, but form an ongoing narrative within the campaign, they too are connected by arrows.

These distinctions are all lost on the players in the course of play; to them, one plot element within of the adventure is the same as another, and they don’t distinguish between them.

What’s more, all of these can have shockwaves and interactions with all the others. Those shockwaves are also represented surrounding each of the elements just described, but the interactions would have complicated the diagram to the point where the meaning became unclear.

In the real world, things can be even more complicated. A character’s subplot may require time to mature, so that subplot may not get mentioned in terms of ongoing plot developments; since it’s unfair to give one PC less spotlight time than others who do have subplot developments, this is usually dealt with by giving that PC an extra green or yellow dot in place of the red, and the subplot arrow would arc around the adventure to connect with the next one in which that subplot progresses.

A character’s desired actions during the adventure that don’t relate to the adventure proper – the green dots – can be inspired by their personal subplot, or can feed into that subplot, such as solving a short-term problem at the price of complicating the long-term situation.

Or the main adventure can simply alter the context surround a personal subplot, or vice-versa. Eventually, the personal subplots will need to become elements of a bigger picture, so each of those smaller arrows will end up leading to a yellow or blue dot. And if that doesn’t happen at either the end or near-end of the campaign, a new subplot will then spring up for that particular PC.

In addition, character’s subplots can sometimes interact with the subplots of another PC. Sometimes? I mean often. How often has your boss, or your neighbor, or a family member solved a problem (or partially solved one) in such a way that your life became more complicated? For example: Problem: It’s been a while since the family all got back together. Solution: Relative X is having a birthday/anniversary soon, let’s make it an unofficial family reunion. This doesn’t really address the reasons why family reunions don’t often happen – distance, other commitments, expense, health, whatever.

And, in reality, a character can have multiple subplots going on at the same time (not all of which get a mention in any given adventure), or multiple scenes in which they are furthering personal ambitions. That’s the sort of thing that makes character lives rich and fulfilling to play.

So, each adventure is composed of at least 3 constituent parts per PC and one more that binds everything together.

The number of combinations then tells us how many possible interactions there are. The formula is horrendously complex to calculate, because you can have combinations of 2, or 3, or 4, all the way up to a single combination of every constituent element. Even with the minimal structure illustrated, that’s 1,013 possible interaction modes. If a fourth PC joins the campaign, that goes up to 8,178. If you double the number of subplots or side-plots that each character becomes involved in within a single adventure, that’s 524,268 with three PCs and even more with four. (with thanks to Stat Trek for providing the online calculator used in generating these totals).

It’s not uncommon for a campaign to have five or more PCs.

The total is an absolutely horrendous number of possible combinations. A campaign with 6 PCs is roughly the same in combination-count as a 3-player campaign where each PC gets two pieces of plot interaction of each type – so the simplest 6-player campaign has roughly 524,268 ways campaign elements can interact, per adventure.

But, when you boil it all down, you are left with those same five types of elements. And while they each have characteristics that distinguish each type, in many ways, you can further simplify things down to three simpler elements: character subplots (which may or may not be fully resolved), character moments as part of the overall adventure, and the overall plotline itself.

Know/Define Your Differences

I made a big point about creating differences, however small, in the previous answer, and it should come as no surprise that this is once again a critical stage in developing faction-related plotlines. But, where the differences were primarily expression-oriented for roleplaying purposes last time, this time they should be more external in orientation, relating not only to the politics, society, and theology of the individual factions, but to the differences in their attitudes toward the world around them and the phenomena that inhabit them.

Differences come in two varieties: attitudes and sensitivities. A difference in attitude means that the faction has a relatively distinctive opinion or attitude toward something, either positive or negative; a sensitivity means that the faction is distinctively more prickly in it’s attitude towards the subject (relative to the other factions), less tolerant of any differences of opinion.

I have a long list of possible areas of distinctiveness but these are just the tip of the iceberg; don’t be afraid to throw something else into your choices.

• Religious Tolerance
• Theft & Petty Crime
• Serious Crime
• Judicial Independence
• Inheritance
• Gender Equality
• Intellectual Freedom
• Non-religious artistic endeavors
• Personal Rights
• Elves
• Dwarves
• Halflings
• Orcs
• Other neighboring races
• Outsiders
• Clerical Spellcasting
• Arcane Magic
• Magical Items
• Other valuables
• Taxation
• Sorcery
• Literacy
• Political Authority
• Days of Worship
• Theological Leadership
• Austerity
• Social Stratification
• Theological Doctrine

As I said, these are just the beginning, feel free to extend the list.

There should be one point of distinctiveness for every faction, no matter how small, minimum. But if I were populating a world such as the one described by Ronald, I would list the faction and then allocate all the points of distinctiveness, both in attitudes and sensitivities, between the factions, spreading them out reasonably evenly. And note that there is absolutely no reason why two different factions can’t be distinctive in the same area but in different ways.

Full Profiles

If you wanted to work up a full profile, in fact, you should do something like rolling d-something minus half maximum, with a score of less zero indicating a sensitivity and a score greater than zero indicating an attitude. A zero qualifies as an “indifference”. But that’s too complicated for our purposes here; it becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Succinct Profiles

Instead, what we are generating are ‘succinct profiles’ that only hit the high points, the most extreme results one way or the other.

Once you have the selections made, the next step is to work out what the specifics of each point of distinction, at least in broad terms.

Make a list, and number each point of distinction.

Compatibility/Relations

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to explore the ways in which these factions – nations, businesses, political parties, organizations of all sorts – interact.

1. Make a list of the factions, and assign each of them an alphabetic letter code. If there are five factions, use A through E, and so on.
2. Draw up a table, with one column for every faction and one row for every faction, and label them with the alphabetic codes. Put an “X” in those cells where both row and column indicate the same faction unless a point of distinctiveness for that faction can be described as internally disputed.
3. Now, we fill in the cells, so we start with the “A” row and work our way across all the columns, starting with “A”. Look at the two factions; if there is a point of agreement in attitude, put a plus in the cell and write the number of the point of distinctiveness. If one has a distinctive attitude, and the other has a sensitivity on the subject, write a – and the number of the point of distinctiveness. If the faction internally disputes something, write the number of the point of distinctiveness with a minus sign. It’s possible and even desirable that you end up with multiple entries in a single cell.
4. Points of distinctiveness that accord (the plusses) are the foundations of alliances between the two factions. Points of contrast are the foundations of rivalries and disagreement. For each faction, note which factions they have differences of opinion with, and which faction(s) they have the most in common with.
5. This starts to give you a feel for relations between the factions. But we aren’t quite finished yet. Next, you need to draw a rough map of the territories claimed by the different factions. This can be highly abstract. Label each faction’s territory with the alphabetic code of the faction and the results from analyzing that faction’s row.
6. Find the two factions that are most widely separated. If they have a common border, they have a separation of zero, if you have to go through one other faction’s territory to move from one of the two to another, they have a separation of one, and so on. You want the two factions with the highest separation.
7. The farther apart two factions are, the less opportunity they have for their points of disagreement to result in conflict. The closer two factions are, the more a faction will have its metaphoric nose rubbed in any disagreement. Add notes about the separation and attitudes toward their neighbors to your details regarding the factions.

Additional Questions To Ask Yourself

Which faction has the most wealth, and which the greatest economic need?

Which faction has the greatest military power?

Which faction has the greatest quantity of arable land, and which is the hungriest?

Which faction is the sneakiest, and which is the most trustworthy?

Which faction owes the greatest debts, and are they becoming more desperate than they were? Or more untrustworthy?

Which faction has the greatest friction with those outside the factions, and which enjoys the best relationship?

Plots

There are two basic plots: responses to stimuli and conflicts. Conflicts can be social, political, military, economic, or anything else that seems appropriate. Stimuli are outside events that affect the Faction. Every point of disagreement is the foundation for at least one plot; most points of distinctiveness are also the basis for a plotline. To get involved in one, all you need is for the PCs to be in one of the two factions or to cross the border between two factions.

Remember what I said about the combinations of plot elements within an adventure? The same math applies to the number of possible plotlines. Taking the 28 areas of possible distinctiveness or disagreement, doubling because we have both, and then determining the number of possible combinations taken N at a time (usually 2, sometimes 3) can yield astronomical numbers. 56 items taken two at a time = 1540 plotlines with zero repetition. Taken three at a time – for example, one faction stirring up trouble between two others, with the PCs caught in the middle – yields 27,720 possible combinations.

Throw in the answers to the questions raised a moment ago, and there’s plenty of depth.

It doesn’t really matter what the PCs do, it will make at least one faction like them more and at least one faction like them less. Throw in stimuli, and you literally have thousands of possible plotlines to work with. Now complicate the whole thing with personalities and factions and leaders growing senile or just old and rebellious youngsters. After all, what you have generated is a snapshot of the way things are now – but everything is subject to change!

Questions To Ask

You should have some overall plotline involved. What that is will depend on the actual choices you make as to distinctiveness within the factions, so I can’t give a lot of advice from this specific point of view – there have been lots of articles on the subject of campaign structure and plotting here at campaign mastery, consult and apply them.

The ideal solution is a domino structure in which each adventure brings about the next, regardless of the outcome of that adventure. But that can be very tricky to arrange; it’s usually easier to use a structure in which subplots turn into main plots, and leave yourself enough flexibility to cope with sequel adventures and unresolved plot threads.

The Seven Stages Of Adventure Definition

Click on the link for a larger image in a new tab

I know that if you read some of the articles that I’ve written, people can get the impression that everything is pre-planned in great detail in advance. That’s not actually the case, and this is one application of campaign planning where that impression can get you into a lot of trouble.

There are six stages of completeness when it comes to campaign planning, as illustrated above, plus a seventh that would have been almost completely empty (so I left it out of the diagram). From most-complete to least-complete, they are:

1. The current adventure is as clearly-defined as it’s possible for an adventure to get. You know what’s going on, what NPCs are doing and why, what the locations are going to be, what they look like, and how this sequence of events over here will relate to that sequence of events over there. The illustration depicts the current adventure as half-complete, by which point you should also have a fair idea of how it is likely to end (even if more than one outcome is possible).
2. The next adventure that you are going to run is almost ready to go. You still have some t’s to cross and i’s to dot, and there will be some loose ends from the current adventure to integrate (such as player decisions about what their PCs want to get up to during the ‘downtime’ between adventures), but the structure of the plot will be clear and the content mostly defined to a playable state, needing only some final polish.
3. The adventure after next is partially done. You’ll have some of the content defined – narrative, locations, NPCs; you’ll know the broad outlines of the plot structure; but there are substantial unknowns still be determined.
4. The adventure after that will be even less defined, less locked in. You will have ideas for some of the content, you’ll know parts of the plot structure, but more remains to be decided than is already known.
5. The fourth adventure after the one now being run is even less coherently defined. You will have a vague idea of the content, a vague idea of the overall plot, but it’s mostly just ideas with a little fleshing out done, at best.
6. The fifth adventure to come is probably little more than a one-paragraph summary. There may be some vague ideas about content, there may be a plot outline, but mostly it’s just hints and concepts.
7. The earliest stage of development is just a one-line bullet-point synopsis of an idea. “Count Montedevo plots against the PCs”, or something like that.

As play proceeds, you are continually getting fresh input from ongoing adventures, and player decisions, and good (or bad) die rolls, and from flashes of inspiration. Each adventure is a domino that both partially-defines and ‘knocks over’ the next, and (to a lesser extent) the one after that, and the one after that again, and so on.

My practice is (usually) to map out an entire campaign in one-line bullet point ideas (however vague), so that I have a road-map of sorts to follow. About 1/3 of any given adventure derives from past adventures, the outcome of which provides the context in which those bullet-point ideas to manifest. This often takes the shape of a number of subplots that are also outlined in bullet point summaries, one event after another, but that are subject to variation and change based on PC choices, actions, and outcomes. The remaining third comes from decisions taken in past game sessions that did not relate to the main adventure at the time – “[My PC] wants to study [insert subject here]” or “I don’t trust [name of NPC], I think he’s hiding something and want to spend some time investigating him.”

The first third are long-term planning, the second third is medium-to-short-term, and the last are short-term to immediate components of the overall plan. The plot structure defines which of these items will progress first, in player-chronological sequence (not game time). “Johnny’s going to get a hint about the Dark Cult, then Matt’s going to have his studies interrupted by the consequences of what Ray did last week, and even though the two have nothing to do with each other, Ray will put two and two together to make five, sending the PCs off in completely the wrong direction but enabling them to stumble into the main plot, which starts with….”

Don’t get too far ahead of yourself and let the adventures evolve organically – always with an eye to the ‘big picture’ of the overall campaign that only you can see.

Ultimately, every campaign is a confluence of what characters want to achieve, what they are willing to do to achieve it, and the repercussions of those actions. The players and the GM are equal contributors, collaborators in the tale of what happens to the PCs. Building plots around a number of factions with similar philosophies and members of similar capabilities within a similar environment should be no harder than doing so for any other campaign.

Hope that answers your questions, Ronald!