Since I only got back to work on CM late last week, I decided at the last minute that I might need an extra week to finish up the Tavern Generator. So I’ve brought this post forward from it’s originally-scheduled position later in the month. This is yet another of the articles I wrote while on “Holiday”…

I was musing this morning on the fact that, in many ways, writing for an RPG is one of the most difficult creative activities one can pursue. More than anything else, this is the reason why not everyone is cut out for the role.

Rigid Format

Consider the rigidity of the format, for a start. Only on rare occasions can you hand-wave events to have them transpire in the manner most felicitous to the telling of an entertaining story; most of the time, you are bound to follow the game mechanics with some measure of rigidity. This means that if a particular result is required, you have to impose the logic of those game mechanics and alter the initial circumstances until the outcome matches requirements – something that is counterintuitive (reversing the flow of cause and effect) and far more difficult than simply having the outcome required for dramatic purposes, transpire.

Uncooperative Characters

You often hear novelists and scriptwriters complain about characters having a mind of their own, being uncooperative and stubborn, or taking over the story and moving it in unexpected directions. Ha! If they only knew…

Writing for an RPG is, by definition, writing with protagonists that are beyond the control of the author, who have minds of their own that are entirely separate and distinct from that of the GM. Even their capabilities might be, to some extent, unknown to the GM – this is especially true at the start of a campaign, but occurs regularly to some extent thereafter, simply because the GM has to do his writing in advance.

Multi-thread Anticipation

The upshot effect of the free will of the players is that any RPG Adventure is not one story, it’s several in parallel; like quantum states collapsing into a certainty, or Schroedinger’s Cat, however, the actual form that will result after the collapse is totally unknowable until that moment has actually been played.

Various articles here at Campaign Mastery have talked about Time Travel and Alternate Histories and the “critical moments” when decisions (or chance) can radically alter outcomes; this describes the reality of an RPG perfectly, and is one of the reasons why this perspective on time works so well for RPG applications. For long parts of the story, it will be more-or-less predictable; but then you will come to a critical event which can unfold in any of several different ways, with different outcomes, and become completely uncertain. Once past that critical moment, a new direction of plot is established, and things return to relative predictability – at least for a while.

The problem for the GM is that he has to encompass as many of these alternate tomorrows as he can anticipate – and every one that fails to materialize is therefore overhead, adding to the workload of the writing process without providing any tangible benefit to the storyline.

Many GMs solve this problem very cleverly, using something you might call “convergent plot evolution” – best summed up as “you can take the high road or the low road or even the side road, but the destination will still be the same.” Some simply live by their wits, while others adopt a blend of the two approaches – living by their wits while trying to steer the ship in a given general direction. Still others take the position of “I’ll get you into a fine mess and leave you to find your own way back out” – in other words, they set up an initial situation and leave resolution of that situation to the creativity and interaction of the players. Personally, I adopt a hybrid of that approach and “convergent plot evolution” in terms of the broader context – so the outcome of any given adventure is in the hands of the players, and I’m content for it to be so because the plot has already served it’s purpose in terms of advancing the broader narrative, the overarching plot thread.

But it all still rests on the efforts spent anticipating and preparing for the multitude of possible plot directions that the PCs might follow.

The vagaries of session length

Writing for an RPG is unusual in another respect: you don’t know how much time you need the story to occupy. It’s completely unpredictable. Novelists can – within reason – simply write until the story comes to an end. Short stories are more restricted, but nevertheless can be any suitable length within the parameters of the form. TV scripts are – in theory – far more rigidly defined, but 10 seconds of padding here and there can always be added in by the editors, and there are often ad-libs and varied deliveries filmed that take slightly different time frames; so a second can be added here or trimmed there from any given scene. Repeat hundreds of times and you could alter the running time of your story by as much as ten minutes an hour – or tweak it until it is exactly the length required. Which means that there is both a minimum and a maximum number of pages of script, but within that range, there is plenty of flexibility.

RPGs aren’t like that. You can know at the start of a day’s play that you need to reach either a resolution of the adventure or a break-point (a point at which the story can be interrupted, frequently a cliff-hanger, but it can also be a moment in which nothing is happening). But you don’t know how many pages of material you will need to fill the interval in between, and may not even know when writing the adventure when play will commence or end – making the scheduling of break points much, much harder. On session-length grounds alone, I could argue that writing for RPGs is the most difficult form of them all.

Innovation and Creativity

One problem that is common to all forms of writing but is more acute in television scriptwriting and RPGs is the need to constantly innovate and be creative. A novelist might write one, two, or even three novels in a year. Someone writing short stories might need to write a new story of publishable quality once a week, and find a home for that writing. A television script writer might need to fill 26 or 36 episodes a year with new stories – though there is usually a team of writers doing so, reducing the workload on any one pair of shoulders. If a GM runs his campaign once a fortnight, he will also need 26 new stories a year – but without anyone sharing that workload. And if he runs his campaign weekly, that’s 52 “episodes” a year to be filled.

I only run my campaigns once a month, but I have multiple campaigns in operation at any given time – sometimes that number is three, sometimes four, and at one point it was ten! Right now, I only have two, with two more in hiatus. This is a comfortable level that I am able to manage given my physical condition and the demands of Campaign Mastery.

For convenience, let’s say 50 new plots a year is typical. Over a five-year period, that’s 250 new story ideas. Over ten, it’s 500. I’ve been GMing since 1981, so even at just the average rate, that’s 1700 stories. The struggle to be innovative and creative is constant, and not everyone can do it, and few can keep it up year after year.

The Necessary Scope

Every writer does research, and 90% of that research never makes its way onto the page – though it can often be recycled for some other purpose. When writing a literary work, verisimilitude is essential (and that requires research) – but the scope of that research is limited to a relative handful of subjects; unless it directly affects the plot or involves details of a real-world setting, it can largely be hand-waved or created out of whole cloth from the imagination of the artist.

GMs, on the other hand, are expected to be Experts In Everything, and the entire world needs to be fleshed out to at least some extent because you can never know in advance exactly what you’re going to need. You can dodge this bullet somewhat by creating as you go – so long as you’re willing to risk writing yourself into a corner with contradictions – but even so, the scope demanded of writing for an RPG is greater than almost any other literary form (historical fiction might match the RPG in this respect, hence the caveat).

And, even less than other literary forms, the RPG writer is unable to predict or restrict what they are going to need to know. The last thing you want is to have to stop the game because “I haven’t figured that out yet” – but continuing on without that research being complete is when most of us get into the deepest trouble.

The Hanging Judges

Let’s be honest, in most forms of entertainment, the critics don’t matter. Sorry, critics, but it’s the truth. People will either like or dislike any creative product with or without anyone else’s opinion, and if the opinions are biased, or perceived as same, third party opinions will be discounted completely.

The best reviews always furnish the reader with enough information to be able to make allowances for any bias on the part of the reviewer – and we all have such biases; I’ve never met anyone who was completely neutral in their likes and dislikes.

RPGs aren’t like that. You are writing directly for a very select and small audience, your players, and your game will live or die on their verdict. Fail to entertain them too often, and they will find something else to do – or some other game to play in.

With any other form of literature, it doesn’t matter if half the potential readers hate what you’ve written, so long as the rest love it. The more approval, the better, quite obviously, but you have the capacity for at least some genericism in your target audience. When writing for an RPG campaign, the target audience is so small that even ambivalence can only be tolerated for so long.

Fortunately, the fact that you are all friends usually comes to your rescue – you will have a much clearer idea of your target audience’s foibles, likes, and dislikes before you even sit down to start writing, and can target them more effectively as a result.

That’s one reason it can be so traumatic adding a new player to the mix – you may or may not know their preferences, but even if you do, the adventure will almost certainly not have been written with them in mind. They inevitably change the table dynamic, and hence the tastes and reception that your efforts will engender.

Unlimited freedom – within limits

Unlike most other forms of writing, the GM has one saving grace to get them out of trouble: within these very narrow constraints, they have virtually unlimited freedom. Don’t like the way Elves are portrayed in your chosen game system? Change it. Don’t like the pantheon of gods on offer? Replace them.

There are no editors or censors or network executives to be appeased, the only compromises to be made are those of practicality, and what you have the time to do.

Not even novelists have this degree of freedom.

The Rewards

Being a GM is one of the most difficult pursuits you can adopt. So why do people do it?

First and foremost, it’s usually a lot of fun to revel in that unlimited creative freedom. Second by a very small margin, it facilitates a social interaction between the GM and his friends. The biggest reward that you can earn as a GM is a player saying “that was a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to next time.”

That’s the reward: getting to face the challenge all over again, because you have surmounted all the obstacles and entertained your audience.

Burnout happens when that is not enough to keep you going. When a former GM tells me that they used to run a game, but don’t any more, there are only three possibilities that leap to mind: either their efforts weren’t right for their target audience, or were technically deficient in some area, or they forgot that the GM has to have fun, too.

GMing should not be all hard work. Yes, there’s plenty of that, but the rewards are otherwise not enough to sustain you over the long haul. It’s very easy, when it stops being fun, to keep going because of social pressure; you may not be having fun anymore but the players are still enjoying the campaign and don’t want it to stop. This only makes a bad situation worse, a death-spiral of apocalyptic proportions that can lead a burned-out GM to quit the hobby altogether for years, or to simply renounce the GM’s chair forever.

Always remember that the first person you have to entertain is yourself, and the rest becomes much easier. In fact, it becomes merely the hardest form of literary pursuit imaginable. And every GM can perform three impossible tasks before breakfast…

This is the second of a two-part article that I wrote while away attending a brace of family functions. (Actually, technically, it’s the third of four-and-a-half, but why get picky?)

It’s so much easier when you’re dealing with an NPC. You have total control over everything. The character is what you define it to be and the circumstances are those that you engineer; it would be quite easy to make an NPC the central focus of an RPG adventure. But that’s not what RPGs should be about: the PCs are the stars.

If you want to make a PC the focus of an adventure, you will need to get inside the head of that PC – and that’s entirely under someone else’s control, and may not even be defined within the mind of that someone else. That makes it infinitely more difficult.

The Place To Start: Context

Before you can begin planning an adventure that will make one character the central focus, you need to know what the context of the adventure is going to be. I wrote about this some time ago in Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?.

Star Vehicles comprise adventures in which one character is the central focus most if not all the time, even when other characters have the spotlight. Ensemble Casts give everyone their share of the focus, and some characters may have no more than peripheral involvement in the significant components of the plot.

That doesn’t mean that non-featured characters have nothing to do in the course of the adventure, it simply means that the adventure can be divided into two components: one with long-term impact, repercussions, and significance, and one that is self-contained and has no such long-term relevance.

There are even hybrid models, in which adventures successively focus on different characters – so this adventure is a star vehicle for character X, the one that follows is a star vehicle for character Y, that’s followed by an Ensemble adventure in which all the characters are equally prominent, and then a star vehicle for character Z, and so on. That, for example, is the way the Adventurer’s Club is usually run. The Zenith-3 campaign, in comparison, is far more ensemble in nature most of the time, and – by definition – the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign is a star vehicle (one player, one PC)!

The characteristics of the campaign in this respect determine how the other characters are to be handled in the course of the adventure. For example, in order to ensure that Character A is highlighted, you may need to ensure that Character B is kept busy doing something else or their reactions to events might drown out the reaction of Character A, they might take control away from Character A, or steal the spotlight in some other respect. This is centrally important to the structure of the finished adventure.

A Clarification

Evidently I wasn’t clear enough in the above paragraph, or perhaps I misspoke. Don’t neglect the other PCs! But make their presence and involvement all about the character in the spotlight, and the situation that the plot focuses on. They can have a conversation about it, they can give an interview about it, they can decide to do something about it, they can state their sympathies or voice their congratulations or try and be supportive, or whatever.

Here’s an example to consider: It’s PC#1’s Wedding. PC#2 is the Best Man, PC#1’s sister is Maid of Honor, and the other PCs are guests. PC#1 is so deliriously overwhelmed that he couldn’t tell you what day of the week it is – or at least, that’s the way the player indicated to the GM that he was going to play it, when asked in advance. When PC#4 hears a rumor that the PCs arch-enemy is lurking around the ceremony somewhere, intentions unknown but presumed hostile, the other PCs can choose to join together to hunt the enemy down and drive him off so that nothing interferes with The Big Day, all without letting #1 know anything unusual is going on.

Half the day’s play can be all about PC#1 without his playing any significant role in it – though if I were writing this up as an adventure, I would keep cutting back to wedding preparation scenes (and would have re-watched Father Of The Bride for ideas, most likely). That at least gives the player something to do and the PC the chance to actually roleplay that deliriously overwhelmed status.

Stage 1: Preliminary Planning

Before you can get into detailed planning, or even analyze the PC who is to be the focal point of the adventure, you need to have some idea of what questions you need to ask. That requires having some idea of the broad scope of the adventure. “Something that the character wants to do something about, leads to the uncovering of something that makes the character angry, which leads the character to make what seems to be the right choice of action but which only makes matters worse, forcing the character to re-examine some of its most fundamental beliefs.” No specifics, just a vague outline.

There are innumerable such patterns beyond the example quoted.

Stage 2: The Interview

Once you have your preliminary planning sorted, the next step is to talk about the character with the player who controls it. In fact, it is often useful to have this be an interview conducted in-character, in a situation in which the PC is doing his best to cooperate by answering correctly and concisely. Even if there are details noted on the character sheet, which is often the case when dealing with games such as the Hero System, you want to tap into the way the character thinks when it is being roleplayed by the owner.

Start by setting the context, which is that you are working on an adventure that will feature the PC, and you want to get the players’ take on how the character thinks. All truth, but, like the questions that follow, shorn of all other context so that the questions don’t give away any of the intended content of the adventure.

Questions such as:

• “In order of intensity, high to low, list the top three things that make [PC Name] angry.”
• “Tell me, in as few words as possible, three circumstances that would make [PC Name] want to act upon a situation immediately, even if there was no urgent need to do so.”
• “What three things give [PC Name] the greatest pleasure?”

While these questions will include everything on the list of dominoes to fall that you compiled in your preliminary planning, at least 1/3 and perhaps as many as half should be totally unrelated.

In an interview, it’s often common for the response to include miscellaneous verbiage. People tend to reply to questions in full sentences, or to revise and clarify responses, or to consult the character sheet. You don’t want any of this. If the reply is “Probably… Injustice, especially for the poor and helpless – no, make that poor or helpless – and…”, trim it down to the essentials: “Injustice for the Poor/Helpless.”

At the same time, don’t be afraid to insert follow-up questions that may prove enlightening: “Is [PC Name] particularly conscious of apparent economic class, or is there some means that you use to determine whether someone qualifies as Poor or Helpless? Do you base everything on appearances or the claims of the person affected?”

These clarifying questions are frequently the most useful and revealing. It’s entirely likely that such questions will force the player to probe more deeply into the character than they ever have before, and reveal shortcomings to the persona that were not previously appreciated.

“Well… I guess I rely a bit on description but mostly I just take your [The GM’s] word for it.” Which, of course, would leave the character open to being deceived. Such material is Gold for both the GM and the player in terms of understanding the character. In fact, I would probably ask a further follow-up question immediately: “So, would you describe yourself as a sucker for a convincing sob story?”

Make sure you note the results in writing, and especially highlight any discrepancies that appear between past play and the answers that arise. These should be specifically questioned during the interview process. Why? Because sometimes there is a large gap between the character the way the player thinks that they play him, her, or it, and how they really play the PC. You want the latter, not the former.

Stage 3: Basic Planning

Basic planning consists firstly of translating the results of your interview into simple bullet points:

• Sucker for a sob story
• Often judges by superficial appearances
• Sympathizes with the poor and helpless
• Feels guilt over unearned luxury
  …

Include the answers to all your questions, even those that weren’t part of your original plan.

Secondly, you need to map a series of reactions and situations that will form the final plotline. Again, bullet-points are the best technique. The format is: situation, response, result – and repeat as often as necessary. To save time, precede each entry with the PCs name.

Thirdly, you need to map out the likely reactions to each situation of each of the other PCs, especially in light of the subject PC’s responses. Where this will enhance the plotline, you can permit the character to simply join in; where the reaction is going to be counterproductive, you need that character to be involved in some other situation at the time, which means inserting an empty “situation, response, result” set for the additional PC. Continue until you know what each PC is doing at each point in the adventure.

This might result in one or more having a mini-adventure that is completely unrelated to that of the main character. However, I find it beneficial to maintain the theme of each “situation, response, result” trilogy – so if the situation is supposed to deceive the subject PC, have the other PCs involved in some other form of deception.

I also try to contrast these thematic similarities with that of the main character – so if the main subject is to be deceived into doing something they shouldn’t, another character might be asked to help plan a surprise party for someone, and a third to look into a case of counterfeiting, and a fourth might foil the attempted theft of something only to learn that the object in question is a duplicate used by the owners to protect the real thing from such acts. Some of these are neutral, some are negative, and some are positive – but they all involve some form of deception. Another possibility might be a character receiving a “Nigerian Bank” spam email… the possibilities are almost endless, unless you have failed to generalize sufficiently in the translation stage.

If, therefore, you run out of alternatives, the solution is to expand on their number by interpreting the responses you got during the interview in a slightly broader fashion.

An extra tip:
It’s easy to confuse events that are supposed to occur to different PCs simultaneously with one set of “situation, response, result” relating to the subject PC, with the set that precedes or follows. You can solve this by dividing each trio of notes relating to the subject PC into separate Acts, or just put a blank line between them, or simply by numbering each trio of responses relating to the subject PC and applying the same number to those of all other PCs who are to be involved in something else at the same time.

One more tip:
By forcing the player to dig deeply into the specifics of the characterization that they have been applying to the character, you may persuade the player to alter or amend the way they play. For example, the player may decide that the character should henceforth be more cynical when it comes to swallowing “sob stories”. There are two ways to deal with this:

Firstly, in the interview process, you could ask outright, “Will this realization alter the way you play the character?” – but after the fifth or tenth time, this wears VERY thin. The alternative is to allow for the possibility in your planning.

To illustrate this, imagine that you have formulated a plan consisting of situation/response/result statements that have been numbered 1 through 5: “[PC Name] situation 1, [PC Name] response 1, [PC Name] result 1, [PC Name] situation 2, [PC Name] response 2, [PC Name] result 2,” and so on. To response 1, you would list the alternative response, with a note that this leads to plan A. At the end of your main plan, you would then start plan A with [PC Name] result A1, [PC Name] situation A2, [PC Name] response A2, [PC Name] result A2,” and so on:

• [PC Name] situation 1
• [PC Name] response 1
• [PC Name] result 1
• [PC Name] situation 2
• [PC Name] response 2
• [PC Name] result 2
  ….
• [PC Name] result A1
• [PC Name] situation A2
• [PC Name] response A2
• [PC Name] result A2
  ….

This more than doubles the scope of the planning, but it means that you are prepared for the major alternatives. If there were 5 response stages in the main plan, then options A through E will deal with variations based on those branches of the major plan, F through I will deal with the alternatives to responses in the A line, and so on. Go as deeply as you need to – you are only writing one line for each at this point.

Stage 4: Final Subject-specific Planning

Once you have your bullet-point plan and alternatives mapped as deeply as you feel necessary, it’s time to expand on the particulars. Specifically, you need to write up the details of the situations, and may need to clarify exactly how the response leads to the result.

You don’t need to do them all – I would at least do the main plan, but might leave the rest in bullet-point form an rely on my capacity for improv if things go that badly off-track.

If you are planning your adventure sufficiently in advance, you may even get hints as to the effects of the interview simply by paying closer attention to the way the character is played in between the interview and the planned adventure.

Stage 5: Other Beats

With the main action sorted, at least sufficiently for play, its time to turn your attention to the situations that apply to the other characters. While it might be clear to all concerned that a single PC is the focus of the adventure, the others should not be neglected in the process.

What not to discuss: Preserving the mystery

I’ve touched on this already, but want to emphasize it again: Avoid any discussion of outcomes, specific situations, or internal logic. Save all of that for the adventure itself, so that the responses of the featured PC are as “uncontaminated” by foreknowledge as possible.

Stage 6: Execution and Follow-up

The adventure is now ready to play. At it’s conclusion, some of the information that came out in the course of your interview will also have been brought to the attention of the PC (as opposed to his player) – so it is only reasonable that you have a discussion with the player about the longer-term consequences and how the player wants the character to develop as a result.

It might be that the player wants to eliminate the misjudgment potential that was exploited. There is nothing wrong with this, though the GM might rule that it is not that easy a change to make; but a clear path to doing so should be agreed between the two.

However, not every character flaw can be, nor should be, redacted. Remind the player that if all the character’s flaws are eliminated, they will effectively be ruling themselves out of such featured roles in the future, and that will eventually impact the character’s opportunities for further development. It can often be more fun for the player to retain a character flaw, knowing it to be a character flaw, and knowing that – from time to time – it might get the character into trouble.

Fun, after all, is the primary objective of the game.

I’m interrupting the flow of things with this two-part article, which is being written while I’m away from my usual resources. Technically, I’m supposed to be on Holidays, but in reality the vagaries of transport requirements have taken me away from those resources sooner than I wanted; the consequence is that I might not have time to prepare the next (and concluding) part of the tavern generator. So I’ve put that on hold for a week while I’m away, and instead have written this “quick” and “short” two-part article.

One of the challenges of GMing an RPG is operating many different characters in close succession, or even at the same time. This is a difficult art to master, and one that even experienced GMs struggle with on occasion. There are any number of tricks and techniques that can be used to ease this burden. Presenting some of these – my favorite techniques for doing so – is the purpose of this article.

Technique# 1: Know The Character

Before you can start, you need to know what you’re getting yourself into. That means knowing the personality of the NPC, his ambitions, his motivations, his likes and dislikes, and the things that make him overreact or even go completely spare.

These are vital facts because they give you cues to action and reaction, enabling snap decisions (or dithering as may be appropriate to the character). This capability essentially means that there are many decisions that the character can make that you don’t even have to think about – a godsend, because it permits you to invest more of your attention elsewhere.

Accessibility

While a deep understanding of the character is essential, it is absolutely critical that the information is concise and well-indexed. You can’t rely on memory – there are far too many distractions and events demanding your attention as GM for that – and you don’t have the time for studied and polished subtlety and nuance.

Superficiality is a far lighter burden than poor access to the information that you do have, as is easily demonstrated: Consider an NPC with a 7 page psychological profile. Even with section titles, such as I am using for this article, that’s still a huge amount to read and assimilate when the NPC turns up in the middle of the day’s play. This hypothetical NPC has an exquisitely deep character, but you can’t take the time to read through it to extract the content that you need to know in order to play the character. A much shallower presentation – a single paragraph of 8-10 lines, with the key words standing out in some way, permits the GM to read the material in advance and remind himself of it simply by glancing at those key words. The difference is between a functional level of characterization and (effectively) nothing at all.

Content and structure

It’s always tempting to achieve a deep understanding of the character, and that’s an approach that I whole-heartedly support – up to a point. But that deep analysis should always be used purely as a starting point for the generation of a synopsis or summary that contains nothing but what you absolutely have to know in order to run the character, shorn of any justification, explanation, or context. The fewer the barriers placed between you and getting into character, the better.

When I write, as I have explained previously, I generate a list of subjects or thoughts which are then sequenced in a way that permits a reasonable flow of “conversation” before being expanded – sometimes into a single paragraph, sometimes into a whole section of material. This expanded form, after a little editing, is what gets published in these articles.

I use the same technique to generate and understand the PCs and NPCs that I create. But I carefully retain the original list, because it provides a starting point for the next phase of character generation – the creation of the synopsis that I described at the start. In fact, I will reorder the content of the fuller explanations in order to make the synopsis more digestible, even if that sacrifices the neat “narrative flow” within the more expansive character writeup. After all, I’m not creating the character to be read like a biography, I’m creating it to be played.

In other words, the structure of the content should always be that which best facilitates the end-purpose – even if that means the content is slightly compromised in a literary sense.

The Difference between GMing and Playing

I always advise players to make all character decisions in character, to forget questions of what is best in terms of achieving team goals or practicality and – first and foremost – to be their characters as much as possible during play.

It might be going too far to choose “the yellow die” because “my character prefers yellow”, or to only write in green ink because “my character always uses green ink” – or it might be the stroke of genius that permits deep immersion within the character. The most practical and efficient course of action is rarely the most entertaining!

That doesn’t mean that those team goals should be ignored; but it should always be a case of “this is what my character would want to do – how can that bring the team closer to their goals? If it can’t, how would the character prioritize between the two choices, and how much of a compromise is required?”

While this deep immersion would also be the ideal for playing an NPC as the GM, it’s rare that you will have that luxury. Ninety-nine-point-nine times out of 100, it’s simply not possible.

And it’s a dangerous practice to indulge even on that one-in-a-thousandth time – because the next time the NPC appears, it’s most unlikely to be another one-in-one-thousand opportunity. Your comparative performance as the NPC can only suffer, and the discrepancy can be jarring to players, throwing them off their stride. A “feedback loop” sometimes arises in which everyone is off their game for the day – with no-one completely sure of why the magic just isn’t there this time.

As a GM, you have to be able to drop in and out of character at lightning speed, no matter how convoluted the psychology or how alien the perspective might be. This is the standard of ability of the majority of players, not that of the real elite. Being a good player can actually make you a worse GM – and being a good GM rarely helps you to be a great player. The skill-sets might overlap, but they are not the same!

The more concise and accessible the need-to-know facts and characterization prompts are, the more easily you can achieve this dropping-in-and-out of character – or even fake being in-character when your mind is really on the thousand-and-one other things that the GM has to manage.

Implementation advice

It doesn’t really matter how you do it, and there are a myriad of approaches – but do whatever you have to do in order to facilitate this accessibility, and do it in advance. This is just as important an element of game prep as generating the NPC in the first place!

Some methods that I have used, with varying degrees of success, are:

1. bolding key words;
2. highlighting key words;
3. underlining key words;
4. index cards containing the keywords;
5. primer notes containing the keywords; and,
6. hyperlinked pop-up notes.

Nor are these the only ones; and then there are combinations, as well. I’m not going to rank them in effectiveness because what works for me might not work so well for you, and vice-versa.

Technique #2: Find The Uniqueness

Every character will react to every situation slightly differently. In order to make the character stand out from the crowd in the minds of the players, you need to give them a point of distinctive uniqueness. If their reaction to events is going to be the same as that of several others (including, possibly, PCs) you need some distinctly identifiable way of expressing that reaction – unless the character is deliberately intended to mirror and represent the reaction of the faceless masses, with all their contradictions, of course.

Before you can express the uniqueness that makes this NPC distinctive, you need to know what that uniqueness is – that’s only common sense.

This is something entirely distinct from the quick-access personality primers discussed in Technique #1. The character’s “uniqueness” will vary with the situation they are in, their perception and assessment of that situation, their reaction to those perceptions (or to surprise if they were not previously aware of the situation), and the manner in which they express that reaction. None of these cognitive processes define uniqueness; this is a relative quality, one that can only be assessed in terms of this particular situation and the contrasts between the NPC and other characters experiencing the same situation.

But that long line of cognitive responses is very useful to the GM because any one of those processes can be the thing that sets this character’s thought process, and hence reactions, apart. Not to mention speed of response, degree of emphasis, and persistence of response.

That’s seven different variables that the GM can tweak to individualize the character! On top of that, there’s predisposition and state of mind, two more variables to play with.

Critically, several of these processes take place entirely within the character’s head, where the strings being pulled by the GM are hidden from view; all the players are aware of is that the character seems to be an individual. As a result, you can have almost-identical characters in almost-identical situations (or even in the exact same situation) who will react completely differently to that situation – making each unique and distinctive, compared to those around them.

Part of the GM’s “job” – unofficially – is to tweak and manipulate these variables, as subtly as possible, just enough to confer a uniqueness on each of the major NPCs involved.

This not only makes the individuals stand out in the players minds – remember, they don’t get to read the GM’s notes that explain how this NPC is different) and brings the character to life from their point of view.

It doesn’t matter how much of the NPC’s head-space you occupy, or vice-versa; at least, so far as the players are concerned, it doesn’t show. All they can react to is what they can “see” and hear.

Actually, I think it actually matters a great deal – it’s the nine-tenths of the metaphoric iceberg that doesn’t show. This “hidden headspace” – if it remains consistent over multiple events and multiple encounters – slowly becomes recognizable to the players, revealed by the implications of the decisions made and the actions chosen. That sort of long-term payoff is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the very best of GMs – provided they haven’t let the pursuit of it get in the way of anything else they need to do in the meantime.

By making each character unique in the player’s eyes, you give them a metaphoric “hook” to hang that NPC’s personality on. This makes it easier for them to relate their characters to the NPC, making for better roleplaying all round.

Technique #3: Manifesting The Uniqueness

I once explained the above (in more compact form) to another GM, and the reply was that it only worked when the circumstances were right for the character to manifest his distinctiveness. I was somewhat at a loss; he had clearly not understood what I was saying, which was to change the character, or his internal circumstances so that the game situation was the right one to bring out the distinctiveness.

But really, the GM creates the basic plotline; he has no excuse if it doesn’t allow the NPC to be sufficiently memorable. It doesn’t require much change, after all, to completely transform things.

When I dug deeper into the objection, what he was actually saying was that the plot currently went in the direction he wanted it to go, and altering it to elevate an NPC into prominence would threaten to derail his plans. (Yes, he actually used the term “derail”). Again, where do I start? It’s bad enough to railroad the PCs, but even worse to do so with bland characters. This is so far removed from good GMing practices that it beggars belief that this GM was in his third decade behind the screen.

Setting aside the larger problems for the moment, this is still no reason not to make the NPC more distinctive. You have total control over both what the NPCs triggers are and the events that will activate those triggers; all that’s needed is to pick one combination that makes the NPC distinctive and then apply domino theory if you really must tie yourself to a preordained plotline.

Plot as an instrument of characterization

Better practice still, why not use this power to enhance the uniqueness of the character by using it as a springboard into a demonstration of some other aspect of the personality? Use a flaw to bring a positive attribute to the fore, use a positive attribute to get the character in over their head, or to make a mistake with the best of intentions and make the character a more rounded individual.

This is most easily achieved by observing one simple fact: however the character reacts to the situation he finds himself in, as he perceives it, this will create a new situation in which some other character can react. Daisy-chaining one reaction to another in this way is fairly easy simply because the GM has control over the makeup of both the characters in question. This makes it easy for events to spin out of control (from the PCs perspective) or cancel out, or anything in between.

But it works even with established characters; it’s simply a question of working backwards. You want reaction “B” from NPC 2? Then find a trigger within NPC 2 that will lead to that reaction, and then identify any possible combination of circumstances and action by NPC 1 that would lead to his response being that trigger. Extend the technique as far as necessary.

This working backwards is NOT a plot train because it is emergent behavior from the personalities involved – it’s just that they have been cherry-picked and tweaked in such a way that they will advance the plot, and thereby complicate the lives of the PCs. When viewed from this perspective, all plot trains are matters of putting the cart before the horse; they define the plot and insist that the PCs follow it, which means that the NPCs create and enforce the predetermined plot. There is nothing wrong with an inevitability existing in relation to a plot development; the flaw is in trying to force the plot to a particular destination contrary to the characters involved.

You may now be wondering how the PCs figure into all this? They – and through them, the players – create the initial conditions, or the later conditions, through their own reactions. They are still a part of the world that the GM does not control, and if they can find or manufacture the right lever and fulcrum, and something to stand on, they can still move the world. Or get a whole bunch of NPCs to help them do it.

Motivation, circumstantial interpretation, and choice of response – understand those, and allow the characters to manifest them in a manner appropriate to their personalities, and the world is your oyster.

Here’s another way to look at it: you are using the plot to provide the NPC with an opportunity to express his character. Nothing wrong with that.

Technique #4: Plotting to Character

Why stop there? Why not set aside part of the plotline to demonstrate the personality of the antagonist? Once you know what is unique about the character and how to roleplay them, why not design part of the plot simply to give that character room to put on a show of who he is? If the antagonist is a villain, give him the chance to do something villainous – and then either have him not do it (expanding the personality beyond a caricature) or have him do it with relish (playing to the cliche), with good reason (within his personality profile).

In addition, however, there will always be circumstances and combinations of response and triggering circumstance that the GM feels uncomfortable with, or does not think that he can play, or where the NPC’s internal logic seems strained and possibly broken. Things that don’t make sense.

Why not plot to avoid such problems? This involves two steps: Knowing what the trouble-spots are, and avoiding them.

Knowing the trouble-spots

Where trouble will strike is going to be different for every combination of character and GM. There are some aspects of a personality that the GM just doesn’t feel confident in depicting. Anticipating these can only be done by considering the likely situations that the NPC is likely to find themselves in whilst in the presence of a PC – if there’s no PC present, this is fairly easy to hand-wave, which is the best way of avoiding the problems.

Personally, I often have trouble dealing with small talk – it requires too much immersion within the character. If I can arrange things so that there are few other demands on my attention, this can be managed, but the rest of the time, I know it to be a problem.

But I try to anticipate when an NPC is likely to have an extreme reaction that is going to be tricky to play by looking at the events to come, and looking at the personality triggers that I have built into the NPC.

Avoiding the trouble-spots

There are essentially three ways to avoid trouble-spots: change the situation, change the character’s predisposition or interpretation ever so slightly, or change the way that the character will react to something more manageable.

Changing the situation is often either the easiest solution or the most difficult. It depends on whether the situation is a key “domino” in the plot; if you can alter the situation so that it still serves the same plot function, then that’s the easiest solution. If the situation is not amenable to sufficient revision in circumstances, that leaves only the changes to the character and his circumstances.

Changing the way the character usually reacts to situations like the one that is being presented is relatively easy if the character has never appeared in that sort of context before, provided that the alternative is one that is consistent with the character otherwise; however, quite often elements of the NPCs personality have already been established, and so this alternative has to be taken off the menu.

Usually occupying the middle ground in difficulty is altering the mindset of the character so that they react differently, i.e. in a way that the GM will find easier to play. Quite often, the easiest way of doing so is to introduce a preliminary encounter for the NPC that the PCs might never even get to see that puts him into a particular frame of mind or emotional state. These will then alter the way in which he interprets the events-that-cannot-be-changed and hence the way he reacts to the situation. There will be occasions when the other alternatives have been ruled out, and this is therefore the only viable solution; to avoid overuse, I always consider this last, and give priority to either of the other answers if they will solve the problem.

Technique #5: NPC Interactions

The big secret to having two NPCs interact in the game is ensuring that each is distinctive. I’m useless when it comes to doing different voices, so I have had to evolve other techniques. These are mostly based on gestures and physical activity, and making the emotional content different – one character angry, another calm, and so on.

“Physical activity” could be anything from waving hands wildly (a very Italian cliche, but it works) to looking over the top of my glasses to holding one arm tightly to my chest as though it were in a sling. One character might scratch his ear constantly, or stroke the side of his nose.

The most extreme technique was to make two signs, each with the name of an NPC on them, and holding one in each hand, flat to the table; raising one indicated which NPC was speaking. On another occasion, I did something similar without the names using pieces of differently-colored cardboard. These two methods met with mixed success; the players got confused as to which character was represented by which color of cardboard, and at one point in the first conversation I got confused (after being interrupted by a player) and held up the wrong sign, much to the amusement of the players who were present!

Techniques #1 and #2 help immensely, by ensuring that the NPCs have different triggers and hence are experiencing different emotional states at any given point in the conversation that I am roleplaying between them.

Technique #6: NPC Decisions

Just as I mark or indicate key words to synopsize the personality content, I extract and key-word a summary of what matters to the NPC. This enables a quick decision when one is needed. In some cases, I will apply a similar technique to indicate the character’s boundaries, things that they will never do.

If you use highlighting as your methodology, I strongly recommend using different colors for these different types of content. It is essential that you do so with consistency if you follow this advice, however; that means that as soon as you glance at a given NPCs information, your eye will naturally go to the information that you seek.

If you write in the margins, use different colored inks for the same effect. Every brain cell that you can spare from the task of finding and interpreting the information you need is one that can be applied to some other task.

Technique #7: Passing Prominence

Something that few GMs spend enough time thinking about is how the NPC will hand the spotlight back to one or more of the PCs after they have said their bit. There are innumerable ways to end a conversation, but not all of them are equally felicitous in the way they hand the roleplaying baton back to the characters who should actually be the stars of the show.

There are three methods that I employ in particular:

• Ending with a question;
• Ending with a trigger;
• Ending with a name.

Ending with a question is an obvious technique because it prompts the PC to answer the question; it spurs a response from the PC with whom the NPC was speaking.

Ending with a trigger is more difficult, but if you can identify what triggers a PC has, you can play on those to your game’s advantage. This is relatively easy in the Hero System, where psychological limitations and triggers are an inherent component of every character; but it is more challenging in systems like Pathfinder or DnD where these are not explicitly specified, and the PCs personality is whatever the player thinks it is at the time.

Ending with a name is the most difficult technique at all, because it is very hard to actually make the dialogue flow in such a way that the name-drop feels natural and unforced. “Wouldn’t you agree, Damian Selfridge?” simply doesn’t work that well. However, the technique can be far more successful when the NPC isn’t speaking to the PC but is simply being overheard: “We have nothing to fear from the Kredlin-worshipers, Tamar; we have a secret weapon to deploy. His name is Damian Selfridge…”

Even though this statement is not directed to the PC, it naturally throws the spotlight onto him – or, more specifically, his player – for a reaction.

The Exhilaration Of Success

I must end with a slight word of warning: it’s easy to go too far with any of these techniques, especially when flushed with success. A little is far better than a lot. I try never to have more than five key words selected within any given category, and I am very stringent on only having the three categories that have been described in this article at most.

Applied properly, these techniques can greatly improve your representation of NPCs at the gaming table; taken to far, the benefits will be drowned out.

I’ve been making a conscious effort to use the term “Adventure” lately in articles here at Campaign Mastery, instead of any of the alternatives, simply because more people seemed familiar with it, and it seemed to be the most ubiquitous reference, but a few weeks back, I had a troubling thought: We all think we know what we mean by “An Adventure”, but do we really? When I stopped to think about it, I couldn’t actually put my mental finger on the definitive characteristic of the “object” named by the term. What is An Adventure?

Perhaps it would be best to start by asking whether it even matters?

Subtle Distinctions

It didn’t take a lot of thinking about the subject to realize that there was a profound but subtle point to using the correct terminology, because it reflects the approach that we use to “adventure” design, and that’s one of the three most important interfaces between the players and any game – the others are the GM, and the Rules.

The “Adventure,” in functional terms, is how Story connects with the Player Characters, and through them, to the Players. That makes it pretty darned important.

More practically, knowing what it is that you are supposed to prepare, and why, makes it easier to direct your efforts in the most profitable direction. Today’s article is all about exploring game prep from a different, more philosophic, direction to see what can be learned.

The Dictionary Definition

According to Google, “Adventure” is a noun that means “an unusual and exciting or daring experience”. The Merriam-Webster dictionary is a little more fulsome, listing the meanings as:

• An undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks;
• The encountering of risks (e.g. “the spirit of adventure”);
• An exciting or remarkable experience (e.g. “An adventure in exotic dining”); or
• An enterprise involving financial risks.

None of those definitions fully encompass the usage of the term in RPG circles, however. The first Meriam-Webster definition perhaps comes closest, but it still seems incomplete. So, let’s turn to some of those RPG sources in search of enlightenment.

The 3.x Definition

The Player’s Handbook for D&D 3.5 devotes a substantial subsection to the concept. Copyright restrictions mean that I can’t quote it directly, or in full, but that doesn’t matter, because they don’t really define it, either, except perhaps with the phrase “epic quests for fortune and glory.”

More pertinent, perhaps, is the statement that follows that line: “These quests unfold as stories created by the actions your characters perform and the situations your GM presents.” Right away, that destroys what most GMs will think is meant by the term “adventure” – because they apply it to what they bring to the table, and that – according to D&D, anyway – isn’t an Adventure; it only becomes an adventure when it is presented to the players and their responses become the Adventure.

The Pathfinder Definition

Pathfinder is even less helpful on the subject, though it seems to say the same thing – “the players take on the roles of heroes who form a group (or party) to set out on dangerous adventures. Helping them tell this story is the Game Master (or GM) who decides what threats the player characters (or PCs) face and what sort of rewards they earn…”

Exactly what is it that most GMs think of as “The Adventure” or “An Adventure”? Pathfinder goes on to suggest that participants in the game should think of the GM as the narrator – an omniscient voice-over guy, who – being omniscient – has the ultimate authority over what is really happening (as opposed to what the Players may think is happening).

If we can’t, or (more properly, shouldn’t) call it an “Adventure”, what should we call it? “Narrative” and “Narration” is only part of it, after all – an important component, but far less than the whole.

Synonyms for Adventure

Perhaps we can get an answer to that question by considering synonyms for the term adventure, and seeing if any of them fit the bill. Google offers the following: exploit, escapade, deed, feat, trial, experience, incident, occurrence, event, happening, episode, affair.

• An Exploit is a term used more in titles these days than in everyday speech, except when talking about the far more modern usage of referring to a flaw in a computer system, network, or software. In the literary sense, an Exploit is indeed often considered a story or quest full with dangerous encounters along the way – but that’s actually misusing the term, according to the dictionary, which defines it as “a bold or daring feat” and implies through an example – “through a series of colorful exploits, the daring adventurers achieved their mission” – that it takes more than one Exploit to make up a single story. That immediately rules “Exploit” out, we need something that encompasses that entire series, plus the narrative framework that surrounds it.
• The term, An Escapade, if used to apply to the entire adventure would accurately describe one type of adventure, but not every possible adventure. If applied to a single encounter or subplot, then it is too small a term to encompass the whole. “Escapade” will not work.
• Similarly, if the overall story of the Adventure is described as achieving something, of performing A Deed, then this is too specific in story structure, while if it is applied to a smaller story structure, it is too narrow to encompass the totality. In fact, these same problems scuttle all the remaining synonyms offered – we will have to look further afield.

Slices of Game

Things might be clearer if we narrow down exactly what it is that we’re talking about, using descriptive terminology since we don’t have a working definition.

• A “Campaign” is made up of Adventures that may or may not have a larger linking narrative and may or may not impose definitive contextual gaps in between (i.e. has a common attribute of “serial” or “episodic” continuity).
• Adventures are a single story or episode within the larger narrative of the Campaign, linked thematically, tonally, stylistically, and conceptually into a single sub-narrative. An adventure may also contain elements that violate those qualities but form part of a dispersed wider narrative. One Adventure may link to another in various ways, but each can be considered isolated and self-contained within the context of the Campaign. If the Campaign is a book, an Adventure is Chapter; if a Campaign is a book series, each Adventure is a separate volume.
• Adventures can be divided into Acts in which different dramatic considerations are in play, within the service of the Adventure as a story or plotline.
• Acts are comprised of Events and Scenes, each of which may be broken down further into elementary constituents of PC actions/interactions, GM Narration, Dialogue, etc.

So, are we all on the same page? Then let’s begin.

The question is what the part of the Adventure that the GM brings to the table, and may generate prior to play, should be named – and what that name reflects about the structure and nature of the overall Campaign that the GM is providing.

Adventure vs Story

You can think of an Adventure as a Story being co-written by the Players and GM. Each has their own specific limitations to what they are entitled to do – the Players are (theoretically) confined to the actions, thoughts, dialogue, emotions, and reactions of one or perhaps two specific characters each, and these are supposed to be the protagonists of the story. The GM is (theoretically) confined to everything else, including the antagonist of the story.

In practice, the creative lines are more blurred. The GM can select and impose events and circumstances that will deliberately provoke a given reaction from one or more of the Player Characters, can involve characters with whom those Player Characters have formed relationships (which should remain consistent over time, either evolving or remaining static). The Players can choose actions that confine the GM to a smaller part of the whole narrative that he has in mind, can make intuitive or logical leaps that cut across the lines of plot development as the GM envisaged them, and steer the campaign in directions to their liking, whether that fits into what the GM was planning, or not. Furthermore, simply by virtue of being the protagonists, the Player Characters shape each adventure to conform to their individual abilities and mindsets, with a cumulative effect that is at least as strong as the influence of the GM on that overall shape.

You could even say that the Campaign consists of tectonic layers that can move in different directions, with the Players controlling every second layer.

Clearly, what the GM provides is plot, context, and content, but not a whole and complete story. Is it even possible to craft a story without protagonists? Perhaps, as a literary experiment, it could be done, but I think it would suffer greatly in terms of story as a result, and would be nothing more than a curiosity.

Adventure vs Plot

Is it the case, then, that what most GMs describe as an adventure simply a plot and the elements that constitute and manifest that plot?

Alas, no. Any plot created by a GM is incomplete without the direction and contribution of the players and the PCs that they manage, no matter how much it may anticipate and manipulate those directions and contributions. Furthermore, in most games, there is a random element controlled by neither Players nor GM, to which both are to some extent subservient. Good GMs can, and do, build allowances into their adventures for these random turns of the dice, but there is a limit to how much can be done. While the GM can prepare an outline of a plot, the only way to be sure of following it is to deny the capacity for their character’s self-determination to the players, and that is quite rightly frowned upon – to put it mildly.

At the same time, what GMs routinely prepare and call “An Adventure” is far larger and more detailed than a mere synopsis, which is what you would generally equate with an “outline”.

The other type of writing that routinely uses the terms “plot” and “outline” is the media, and they have an intermediate stage between script and outline called a treatment. Could this be the term we’re looking for?

Adventure vs Treatment

It was interesting to note that only two of the half-dozen dictionaries that I checked (online) even mentioned the media-oriented usage of the word. From those stem three definitions:

• A written sketch outlining the plot, characters, and action for a screenplay but not including certain elements of a finished screenplay, such as camera directions and dialogue.
• An adaptation of a novel or other literary work that serves as the basis for a screenplay.
• A preliminary outline of a film or teleplay laying out the key scenes, characters, and locales.

Definition 1:

“A written sketch” suggests something that is not as fully-realized as most RPG Adventures, so that’s a warning note. Obviously, most of the “action” is generated as the game proceeds by the interplay between random chance, players, PCs, GM, NPCs, and environment, so we can ignore its inclusion in the first definition, at least in this context. Plot and characters are definitely part of what the GM prepares, so that all tracks – with that initial caveat. Unfortunately, it all then unravels: camera directions aren’t included (the RPG version not only includes the camera directions, and the lighting directions, and the sound effects, it includes the shot-and-edited footage, or its equivalent; I could forgive that, but dialogue being excluded? When you put it all together, this is simply an expanded synopsis. I generate these all the time, as a tool for turning my outline into a full Adventure; it’s the equivalent to an RPG of storyboarding a movie, and barely 5% of what’s in a full Adventure.

Definition 2:

“An adaptation of a novel or other literary work that serves as the basis for a screenplay”. This is definitely not what we want, but it is analogous, provided that a synopsis can be adjudged a “literary work”. So there’s a similarity of process, but not of product. Like several of the other possible terms that have been looked at, Treatment – at least in this sense of the word – isn’t a match.

Definition 3:

But then we come to Definition 3, and you have think again. We have the same caveat as suggested by definition 1, i.e. what we are looking to give a more appropriate name is far more substantial than this definition seems to allow; and the usage obviously has to substitute “RPG” for “film or teleplay”; but the rest of the definition seems right on the money. Aside from the things that it leaves out, but an adventure does not.

It’s definitely the closes match that we’ve found so far. But while the definition could be stretched to cover an RPG Adventure-in-waiting, the need to stretch it sort of leaves me wondering if there is anything better?

Adventure vs Module

Of course, when an adventure is published in (hypothetically) ready-to-play form, we refer to it as “A Module”, indicating that any given example is an optional extra to the core requirements for a game. Can we extend that term to cover what we, as GMs, produce?

I don’t think so, and the reason comes back to some of the things that I wrote earlier about the impact that the players and their characters have on a game. By definition, a commercially-satisfactory Module has to either include the characters as pre-Gens, or be character-agnostic. That criterion doesn’t apply to any of the “Adventures” that I create for my games, and never has; and, in fact, I have several times purchased or obtained “modules” through RPGNow and the like that failed in this respect quite noticeably, requiring at least some – and sometimes a complete – rewrite before they can be used; not because the characters in my game were so unusual in their abilities, or were completely different in character level, but because the characters in my campaign were not the characters in the author’s campaign.

Personally, I find that quite forgivable if what’s there is entertaining and interesting enough. And to be fair, I have only ever run two professionally-written module that needed zero rewriting – “Tomb Of Horrors” (AD&D) by Gary Gygax himself, when I was just starting out, and “Deep Horizon” (D&D 3.0) by Skip Williams. Also, to be fair, most of the modules that I have run were adapted to service an entirely different genre or game system.

• “Tomb Of Horrors” was included in the Dungeons Of Dread hardcover compilation in 2013. A few copies are still available through Amazon.
• There are also some copies of the original module available through Amazon, including 7 new copies – but even the cheapest costs more than the compilation. Possibly worth it if you want to run the module though, given the removable pages of illustrations that extensively display to the PCs what they are seeing.
• “Tomb Of Horrors” was also rewritten into a 4th Edition D&D Module by the same name. From reviews, it has some creative new ideas, but also loses a lot of the fearfulness within the original, replacing “save/win/make-no-mistakes or die” with “save/win/make-no-mistakes or almost die”. There are also copies of this version available on Amazon.
• Finally, there are copies of “Deep Horizon” that are quite reasonably priced at Amazon.

Development of a commercial-quality Module is a lot more work than most GMs put into their own home-brewed “Adventures”. Comparing the two is like saying that a billy-cart is the same as a Ferrari – because they both have four wheels on the ground. Or perhaps that’s being unkind, and the comparison should be between a Kia and a Formula 1 car. Either way, you get the point.

Extending the term “Module” in this way weakens the standard that it represents, and that standard is already under sufficient pressure. One of the unfortunate side-effects of sites like RPGNow is that it becomes a lot easier to publish something that’s substandard in quality. As I said earlier, I’ll forgive a lot if what is there is good enough to serve as a foundation, but I’m thankful that RPGNow uses the term “Adventure” instead of “Module”.

Adventure vs Drama

Perhaps I’m not finding what I’m looking for because I’m looking for the wrong thing. Maybe “Adventure” is not actually a noun when used in the RPG sense, but an adjective describing the whatever-it-is that a GM produces, and people use the word as a noun because there is nothing better, or as a verbal shorthand. Certainly, when a film is described as “an adventure”, that’s the reality – the correct usage would be “An adventure film”. Adventure thus describes a genre, and not the actual product itself.

Any television show that is described as “an adventure” is generally classified as a subtype of Drama, and certainly in past articles at Campaign Mastery have shown how many elements of Dramatic fiction (regardless of medium) are relevant to the creation of RPG adventures.

Should an RPG adventure be classified as a form of literary construct within the category of “Drama”?

It took a bit of reflection before I reached the conclusion that it could not. Why? Because of the inherent differences between an RPG and a Drama. Several of the principles of “good drama” like Chekhov’s Gun simply don’t apply to an RPG due to its unscripted nature, for example. And I discovered the hard way that the standard forms of dramatic plot twist don’t work with RPGs, either, and had to create my own list (Part 1 and Part 2). For all that some aspects of drama apply, such as the techniques of Emotional Intensity (Part 1, Part 2), too many don’t for this to be a functional description.

Adventure vs Narrative

When you look over the definitions quoted earlier, the key word that leaps out at me is “narrative”. The Pathfinder definition of the GM”s role in the game makes specific mention of this function. Is this what a GM brings to the table?

The term “narrative”, in this context, has one huge advantage – it is unrestricted in scope, unlike many of the possibilities that have been considered so far. A Narrative can be long or short, it can be detailed or a vague outline, or a blend of both (though that would make it rather inconsistent in a literary sense).

“Narrative” is essentially a synonym for “story”. The actual definition is “A spoken or written account of connected events; a story”. If we think about this in the context of a shared creative space, and define what we seek to properly identify as the GM’s share of the story, his corner of that shared creative space, then this might work – though perhaps “semi-narrative” might be more appropriate.

Even the fact that the GM’s efforts are obviously incomplete and occasionally vague in terms of definitive plotline, due to the as-yet-nonexistent contribution of the Players, is acceptable from this perspective as an inevitability of the collaborative process. You can even state that the non-literary elements that the GM incorporates, like necessary skill checks and outcome interpretations, and NPCs, are more about giving direction to those elements that have not been worked out in advance.

The major thing that I don’t like about the term, in this usage, is the implication that the story – or even the GM’s contribution to it – is relatively stable and fixed. While some games – usually those run by GMs with a more literate style – may hold true to this, my experience is that no Adventure ever runs exactly the way it was written. This is a necessity of the collaborative experience; it comes back to the Players conferring free will on their characters and having the freedom to interpret the situations that the GM presents to those characters as they see fit. The GM can shape those situations as he sees fit in anticipation of specific responses that move the anticipated story in the desired direction, but ultimately the responsibility for decisions and interpretation belong equally to the players and GM.

I suppose you could employ the term “Draft Narrative” to get around this problem, but that doesn’t quite work for me, either; it goes too far in the other direction. No, we need to keep looking.

Adventure vs Scenario

For most of the last 35 years, the term that I have used to describe what I bring to the table when I sit down to run a game is a “Scenario”, but I have stepped away from doing so in these pages over the last year or so because many readers seemed to have difficulty grasping what I meant by the term.

My fundamental premise for presenting an Adventure for collaborative exploration at the game table is this: Present the players’ characters, i.e. the protagonists, with a situation, one that I as GM understand fully. Let them decide what to do about it, and how. To some extent, these decisions may be foreseeable, enabling some sense of how the story that results might unfold, and permitting some components of that story to be crafted in advance for a higher quality of outcome; but there is no guarantee that this anticipation will prove accurate. More often than not, the GM will – at some point – need to improvise or interpret.

That is where understanding that initial situation, the participants and causes and motives and backstory, becomes so useful; it provides the tools to determine how the non-protagonist participants will act and react to unexpected changes in the situation as a result of player-derived PC free will.

Rather than crafting some specific outcome in advance, and then laboring to force the unfolding story to fit into that mould, such an understanding leaves me free to focus my attention at the game table on making sure that the story is of satisfying quality, no matter how it turns out.

So, what is “An Adventure”?

I look on things this way: the story is a boat on a river. The Players have their hands on the tiller, and control the rudder; I have control over the winds, tides, and currents. Initially, I will have almost total control over the situation, and can set the boat moving in whatever direction I want; but, over time, the players will first come to understand, and then, to master the individual conditions that I have set in motion. Ultimately, the final destination will be of their choosing, and will be the best possible outcome given the restricted options open to them as a result of those initial conditions. It’s a metaphor, but a useful one.

My “Adventure Phases” follow a predictable internal content pattern: very detailed at the start of each act, or phase, of the story, and increasingly vague as that act or phase progresses. My preparations focus intently on:

1. encapsulating the necessary understanding of the situation to be presented to the players;
2. providing any tools and raw materials necessary for integrating player choices into the developing situation;
3. anticipating the most likely turns in the plot, with notes and plans concerning how best to ensure a satisfactory experience for all participants in the current phase of the plotline and in the adventure overall;
4. drop-in plot elements that can be inserted wherever appropriate to ensure that success does not come too easily, and is at the same time, never entirely out of reach; and
5. ensuring that events that are currently out-of-reach of player interference set up the next phase of the plotline, enabling that next phase to begin on as firm a footing as the start of this phase of the Adventure did.

The only official stops on my railroad are the ones that lead to a more entertaining story, regardless of which branch-line the players choose to follow.

Each phase of the adventure thus consists of three distinct types of events/scenes/encounters:

1. Those over which the players have no control, which are designed to set up the next phase of the adventure;
2. Those over which the players have some measure of control or influence, which cumulatively give them more control over the shape of the phase outcome, and hence over the overall Adventure outcome; and,
3. Those that are designed as small characterization set-pieces, personal milestones and vignettes that exist for no other reason than to keep the players in touch with the ordinary lives and circumstances of their characters, over which the players have total control once the initial mini-situation is set in motion.

There is a certain amount of artistry and skill derived through expertise and experience that permits these to overlap to a certain extent, or permits one to act as a springboard into another, but that evolves of its own accord as you GM. These are the fundamentals.

By keeping the type and characteristics of these events in mind, and the necessary pattern of preparation content, I can restrict my attention on the most useful forms of game prep, and focus on ensuring the correct flow of emotional intensity within the Act that I am currently working on. This delivers to me, at the start of the days’ play, the tools and prefabricated materials to provide the most interesting and entertaining day’s play possible at the start of a game session, which then becomes the goal of actual play. To the maximum extent possible, every other concern and consideration has been prefabricated into those constituent prefab game elements.

The “Adventures” that I craft for my campaigns are half-finished blueprints; they can only ever be half-finished because the owners (the players) have not yet made the crucial decisions that will finish the specifications and parameters of the completed design. And my job, as GM, is to be the construction foreman and architect who produces the best possible finished “building” that can be constructed within the parameters of those decisions.

The “Adventure” that I bring to the table is not a finished work; its a set of building blocks, a foundation, and an attitude: the determination to make the day’s play as much fun as possible for the participants. There is no single term that is a definitive fit for this assemblage, because the content varies from case to case, from “adventure” to “adventure”. What doesn’t change is the process of putting those building blocks together into an entertaining collaborative storyline.

And that means that the most appropriate term for what I prepare before play is “an adventure” – not because it describes the product, but because it describes the process at the gaming table.

Part one of this series used six tables to define the physical properties of a tavern (no guest accommodations) or inn (with guest accommodations), plus – because the modifiers needed were at hand – the meals provided by the kitchens.

Part two used another six tables to determine everything that directly contributed to the ambience of the establishment, from the personality of the owner through to the decorations on the walls. In this final part of the generator, we’ll deal with the bartender’s family and process the worksheets that bring the whole tavern or inn together, ready for use.

Part three used another five tables and subtables and one worksheet to populate the extended-family-in-residence and establish what entertainments the tavern provides to keep the punters happy. That was supposed to be the final part (aside from a behind-the-curtain techniques discussion to be written down the track), but the examples grew uncontainably large, so the decision was made to separate the worksheets from the final set of rolls.

Part four contained worksheet 16, and provided detailed instructions for use (together with some tips and tricks for getting exactly the result you want from the generator).

Which brings me to this installment, which contains and explains tables 17a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, and 18a, b, c, d, and e. This is everything you need in order to generate the second level of the tavern or inn – which is usually where the owners reside, and where there will be guest accommodations if the tavern is also an inn. This was supposed to be the final piece of the puzzle, but the tables grew so large that there isn’t even room in this post for the examples – so they, and tables 19 and 20 – have been offloaded into what will be the final part of this series (not counting a planned behind-the-scenes article sharing the tricks and techniques that were used to create the tables, to be published on some future date).

The tables in this part are generally a LOT smaller than the worksheet in Part 4. I have assumed that you have already read and understood the principles outlined there, because there is more than enough that needs explanation in this article already – there simply isn’t enough room to do much recapitulation.

Tavern Generator (cont): “Tables” 17-18: First Floor Calculations Worksheets

As usual, we pick up the process right where we left off. Note that it is impossible to use this content without having completed the earlier parts of the process.

The basic principles that were used for the Ground Floor are the same for this level, but there are a couple of new wrinkles. The most substantial of these is that there is no indication at this point of how many guest quarters of the indicated relative size there are on the floor. This is determined by the GM generating the tavern by first calculating a range of possible results, then (optionally but recommended) determining a second range and narrowing the options to the overlap. If desired, an indicator of where within the resulting range the correct choice lies can also be determined. Once you know how many guest quarters there are, it’s a simply matter to determine the true size of each, using the procedures demonstrated by Table 16.

Rather than trying to cram everything into one massive worksheet and a couple of accompanying tables, I have focused on making many smaller, simpler worksheets.

Table 17a

The first range of possible numbers of guest rooms is generated by calculating a basis value and multiplying it by 0.5 and 2, respectively, to get the low and high values of the range. Table 17a does all the work for you; it takes the total relative floor space of the ground floor and deducts known quantities like stairwells and the family residence (assuming it is on this level, as is usually the case). It then Divides the total that remains by the relative room size of the guest quarters gives the number of guest rooms that would be available If a relative size of “1” means the same thing on this level as it did on the ground floor.

Range 1
Instructions	Values	Results
Total Spaces, Ground Floor	=
– Stairwells Down	–	=
– Stairwells Up	–	=
– Family Residence (if on this level)	–	=
– Other Spaces on this level	–	=
/ Relative Size, Guest Quarters = (a)	–	=
Range, 1/2 x (a) to 2 x (a)

Tables 17b-17h and 18a-18c overview

The second range is also determined by calculating a basis value and multiplying it by two different numbers to get the low and high values (that step actually occurs in Table 17e, which determines what those “two different numbers” are).

• The base value is calculated using Table 17b if there is only one residential floor, Table 17c if there are multiple residential floors and the family residence is on one of them, and you are willing to use a cheat that simplifies the problem, or Table 17d if you’re unwilling to use the cheat.
• Tables 18a through 18c then work out the demand for meals by passing traffic, based on price, on a 0-12 scale. Worksheet 18d then adjusts this value for a range of other considerations.
• Table 17e determines a range of possible room numbers from the base value determined in tables 17b, 17c, and/or 17d, based on the results from Worksheet 18d.
• Tables 17f through 17h combine the results from table 17a and Table 17e before arriving at a number of guest rooms that best fits everything known about the Tavern (comparing this result to the outcomes of tables 17a and 17b/c/d can provide valuable descriptive context).

Table 17b

Table 17b works by totaling the number of patrons who can be seated in the table area and dividing that by the number of patrons who can stay in a single room. The complications arise because this also has to include any guests accommodated on higher floors, which will usually NOT be the same as that on the first floor, because there is no “Family Residence” taking up space on the other levels. Obviously, if there are no other residential levels, this is not a problem. When you’ve finished, go to Table 18a (recognizable by the green colors).

Range 2 (2-story only)
Instructions	Values	Results
# Seats at a table
x # Tables	x	=
/ Average # Guests per room	/	=
/ # Residential Floors = base # of rooms	/	=

Table 17c

Table 17c shows how to employ a cheat to can correct for the complication if you have to: designating areas on those other levels as “suites” that are the same size as the family residence and can hence accommodate a different number of guests to the ordinary room. This trick effectively makes all the floors of the tavern the same in guest capacity, and therefore in the number of guest rooms. It works by deducting the number of guests who can be housed in suites (the same as the number of adults residing the family quarters, plus the number of children over 10 or 12) from the total patrons who can be seated in the tabled area, then dividing the remainder by the average number of occupants per room, and dividing thatresult by the number of guest-room accommodation levels. When you’ve finished, go to 18a (recognizable by the green colors) – unless you are unhappy with the result and want to try it without the cheat (Table 17d) and disregard this result, of course.

Range 2 (multistory cheat)
Instructions	Values	Results
# Seats at a table
x # Tables = (c)	x	=
Adults residing in family qtrs
+ Children over age limit	x	=
x # Residential Floors* = (d)	x	=
(c) – (d) =
/ Average # Guests per room	/	=
/ # Residential Floors = base # of rooms	/	=

* -1 if family residence is on one of those residential floors

Table 17d

If you don’t want to use this cheat and do it properly, you can; it’s just a little more complicated. The ratio of size of the family quarters divided by the average room size gives an estimate of the total number of additional rooms on levels that don’t have to accommodate that family residence. This HAS to be a whole number. Multiplying that by the number of such floors gives the total number of extra rooms that have to be allowed for. Next, we work backwards from the number who can be seated, dividing that by the average number of guests per room. Subtracting from that the number of extra rooms on all floors and then dividing by the number of residential floors gives what is – in theory – the total number of guest rooms on the level with the Family Residence, which is what we’re after.

Range 2 (no cheat)
Instructions	Values	Results
Family Qtrs Relative Size
/ Average Size Guest Qtrs =	/	=
Round to whole number
x (# Residential Floors – 1) = (e)	x	=
# Seats at a table
x # Tables =	x	=
/ Average # Guests per room	/	=
– (e) =
/ # Residential Floors = base # of rooms	x	=

Table 18a and 18b, Worksheets 18c and 18d, and Worksheet 17e

Ahh, if only it were that simple. If the tavern brings no outside traffic to occupy table space, then anything from three-quarters to double the number of rooms indicated is possible. Every seat at the tables that is potentially occupied by someone in off the streets for a meal reduces the capacity for guests.

Tables 18a and 18b provide values used in Worksheet 18c to derive an estimated demand for meals from outside traffic, on a scale from 0-12. These calculations ignore potential competitors, the capability of producing that many meals, space at tables, etc.

This is then adjusted in Table 17e along for various other parameters to estimate the reduction in guest capacity that it indicates, ending by deriving a range of values for the number of rooms on the first residential level, which is then applied to the result from tables 17b, c, or d to determine the second estimated number of guest rooms, taking into account the many factors that affect the demand for meals for guests.

The end result is a second range of possible numbers of rooms on the first level, to go with the first range derived in table 17a. In theory, these two ranges should overlap; somewhere in that overlap is the right number; but there are far too many variables involved at this point to actually be sure that this will be the case.

Originally, I intended to make the 18-series of tables and worksheets part of the 17-series – so 17e, f, g and h – but realized part-way through the design process that (1) they were sufficiently different from the tables surrounding them to merit differentiation, since they started with completely new facts about the taverns that had not previously been established, and (2) that treating them differently meant that I could use the color to guide users of the generator. That then left the question of what are now 17e, f, g, and h, and were previously 17i, j, k, and l – should they become a 19-series, or should the 18-group simply interrupt the 17’s? Because the process from 17b all the way through to 17e (including the 18’s) is all aimed at achieving a single result, I decided that the latter was the way to go. And that’s why the 18’s interrupt the 17’s. If you are looking for Table 17e, it follows worksheet 18d.

Table 18a

Table 18a determines a meal demand factor based on the price being charged per serving (which represents both quality and serving size) and the local economy, indexed on a scale of 0-6.

The local economy index value is up to the GM. I suggest starting by indexing the wealth of the town or city on a 1-5 scale, then adjusting that up or down one or even two according to the prosperity of this part of town. “0” represents both the poorest quarter of a poor community, and a completely rural location; either way, demand for meals doesn’t come from the locals, it depends exclusively on passing traffic, which is dealt with in table 18b.

Meal Demand (f) by Local Economic Index and Meal Price
Meal Price	Local Economy Index
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
1 sp	0.1	1	1.5	1.2	1	0.5	0	0
2 sp	0.1	1.9	1.8	1.4	1.1	0.5	0.5	0
3 sp	0.1	1.7	2	1.6	1.2	1.2	0.7	0.1
4 sp	0.1	1.5	1.9	1.8	1.4	1.4	1.2	0.2
5 sp	0.1	1.3	1.7	2	1.6	1.5	1	0.5
6 sp	0	1.2	1.5	1.9	1.8	1.6	1.3	1
7 sp	0	1.1	1.4	1.8	2	1.7	1.5	1.3
8 sp	0	1	1.3	1.6	1.9	1.8	1.7	1.5
9 sp	0	0.7	1.2	1.5	1.9	1.8	1.7	1.6
1 gp	0	0.5	1	1.4	1.6	2	2	1.7
2 gp	0	0.2	0.7	1.2	1.4	1.8	1.9	2
3 gp	0	0.1	0.4	1.1	1.3	1.6	1.8	2
5 gp	0	0	0.2	0.6	1	1.4	1.7	2
7 gp	0	0	0	0.3	0.7	1.2	1.4	1.8
10 gp	0	0	0	0	0.1	1	1.2	1.5

Table 18b

Table 18a determines a meal demand factor based on the price being charged per serving (which represents both quality and serving size) and a “passing traffic” index:

• One minor thoroughfare = 1
• Two minor thoroughfares intersecting = 2
• Two minor thoroughfares plus other* = 3
• One major thoroughfare = 2
• One major thoroughfare plus other* =3
• Two major thoroughfares intersecting = 4
• Two major thoroughfares intersecting plus other* = 5
• Three or more major thoroughfares intersecting = 6
• Three major thoroughfares intersecting plus other* = 6

* “other” could be another minor thoroughfare, a reason to stop in this location, a market square, etc.

Meal Demand (g) by Traffic Index and Meal Price
Meal Price	“Passing Traffic” Index
	1	2	3	4	5	6
1 sp	1.5	1.5	1.3	1.1	1.2	1.2
2 sp	1.6	1.5	1.4	1.2	1.2	1.3
3 sp	1.8	1.6	1.5	1.3	1.2	1.3
4 sp	1.9	1.7	1.5	1.5	1.5	1.3
5 sp	2	1.8	1.6	1.7	1.6	1.3
6 sp	1.9	1.9	1.7	1.8	1.7	1.4
7 sp	1.8	2	1.8	1.9	1.8	1.5
8 sp	1.4	1.9	1.9	2	1.9	1.6
9 sp	1.2	1.8	2	2	2	1.7
1 gp	1.1	1.7	1.9	2	2	1.9
2 gp	1.1	1.3	1.7	1.7	2	2
3 gp	1.1	1.1	1.3	1.5	1.7	2
5 gp	1.1	1.1	1.1	1.3	1.4	2
7 gp	1	1	1	1.1	1.2	1.7
10 gp	1	1	1	1.1	1.1	1.3

Worksheet 18c

This worksheet combines the values determined on the preceding tables to generate an overall demand score.

Overall Meal Demand
Instructions	Values	Results
Meal Demand, Local (f)
+ Meal Demand, Passing (g)	+	=
x Meal Demand, Passing (g)	x	= (h)
Meal Demand, Local (f) x 2	=
+ (h) = Overall Demand
x % market share (/100) = Demand	x	=

Worksheet notes:
Any Overall Demand >7 will probably result in a competitor arriving to steal market share. Any Overall Demand >10 will normally indicate at least one and probably more than one competitors, and probably established competitors at that. Overall Demand of 12 will normally indicate at least two established competitors. Set the Market Share of this establishment accordingly.

Worksheet 18d

While this result is probably interesting in an intellectual way as a purely abstract indication of the demand for the services that the Kitchens provide, there has to be more to the story. For a start, there’s the ability to actually satisfy that demand; no matter what the theoretical demand is, if you can’t meet it, the unsatisfied customers will go elsewhere and your market share will fall from that theoretical figure.

Are the cooking facilities adequate for the demands they are expected to meet? Lavish facilities may slightly enhance the products, but that’s a very minor factor compared to even a modest improvement in cooking skill. The converse is definitely not true: every compromise on the capacity and capability of the facilities has a direct and substantial impact on the quality of the food produced, and there’s relatively little that even a skilled cook can do to compensate. It takes more than a small improvement in skill to make up for a small compromise in facilities. As a rule of thumb, small facilities are adequate for a small (ie, low) demand, say 1-3; medium facilities are adequate for a moderate demand, roughly 4-6; and large facilities are adequate for high demand, the 7-9 range. As stated earlier, any demand of 10 or more tends to divide that demand amongst two or more establishments; so if demand grows over time, as you would expect, it goes from 9 to 5, 6, or 7 – with one or more new rivals picking up the 5, 4, or 3 respectively of the rest of the market. But there are a great many variables – position, reputation, exclusivity, established clientèle – that can affect that; the only certainty is that if demand ever hits levels of 10-12, they won’t stay there for very long, one way or another!

Price and quality also have a further impact; Tables 18a and 18b assume that prices are fair, given the quality and the quantity of a serving. They further assume that competition will keep prices fair, and they make no allowances for taxes above what we would consider relatively normal, ie a flat 10-20%, or a 25-35% margin with a tax-free threshold of roughly 15% of the average wage. You don’t need an economics or history degree to realize how improbable this is (which is a good thing, as I have neither). Price wars, price gouging, reputation, cooking skill, demand, captive markets, corruption, greed, taxes – they all impact the price that is charged, and the product that you get for that price.

And we’re still not finished. It can be argued that if the rooms are overpriced, the meals probably will be too – but it can just as easily be argued that the rooms are overpriced to subsidize the costs of the meals, bringing the real price charged down, so as to capture greater market share and, ultimately, a greater net profit. Properly assessing this requires just about every fact that’s been determined about the Inn or Tavern to date – everything from the repertoire of the bar to the size of the table area relative to everything else to the size of the table area relative to the kitchens to the personality of the barman, it all feeds into this question of price and whether or not that price is seen as fair.

Finally, there is the “x factor” – some places are simply popular for some reason, others are not. This factor takes into account anything, from the popularity of the ambiance through to the attractiveness of the barman’s daughter, that isn’t otherwise explicitly defined.

So there are a lot of factors that the theoretical figure for demand that has just been calculated doesn’t take into account; it needs quite a bit of adjustment to allow for all these “real-world” factors. That’s the function of this worksheet – to adjust that theoretical demand and then use the resulting figure to infer the implications for the residential capacity of the establishment.

I thought very carefully about how much adjustment there should be for each factor, and how that should be applied, and came to the conclusion that there is no right way or wrong way. So I’ve taken the simplest possible approach:

• Demand is greatly reduced: x0.77, round down
• Demand is somewhat reduced: x0.87, round down
• Demand is slightly reduced: x0.95, round down
• Demand is generally unchanged: x1
• Demand is slightly increased: x1.05, round up
• Demand is somewhat increased: x1.15, round up
• Demand is greatly increased: x1.3, round up

These modifiers are enough to turn a 1 into a 12 (if absolutely everything is in the establishment’s favor) or a 12 into 0.88 – which would round down to zero – when all ten adjustments are taken into consideration. (They can also turn a 12 into a 165, but that’s rather improbable!)

Food Demand Adjustments, see above for discussion
Instructions	Values	Results
Base Demand from Worksheet 18c
Adjustment factor for Cooking Facility Capacity	x	=
x Adjustment factor for Kitchen (Food Preparation) Capacity	x	=
x Adjustment factor for Actual prices vs fair price	x	=
x Adjustment factor for quantity of servings vs fair servings for the quality and price	x	=
x Adjustment factor for exceptionally low or high overhead and staff costs	x	=
x Adjustment factor for competition/price wars (if any) (or lack of same)	x	=
x Adjustment factor for Owner’s generosity/greed	x	=
x Adjustment factor for Exclusive deals, captive markets, and targeted clientèle	x	=
x Adjustment factor for impact of guest accommodation prices	x	=
x Adjustment factor for X-factors = adjusted demand	x	=

Table 17e

If the tables and kitchens are being used to feed passing traffic and local inhabitants, they aren’t being used to feed guests. Conversely, the less demand there is from outside, the more of the kitchen’s focus will be on those staying in any guest accommodations. Table 17e uses the corrected demand levels to determine the range of possible numbers of guest rooms after converting them into “room occupancy” scale.

Note that there is a considerable fudge factor built in. Ultimately, this part of the process is all about estimating the kitchen capacity that is dedicated to feeding guests and from that, the number of rooms available for guests – but is the basis of that capacity the normal level of occupancy, the maximum level of occupancy, the minimum expected level of occupancy, or something somewhere in between?

I could have had users of the system make this determination directly, but without any foundation, the results would have amounted to “your guess is as good as mine”. I’ve tried to put a bit more rigor into the process than that throughout, why throw all that away now?

Range of guest room numbers inferred from kitchens & meals
Instructions	Values	Results
Adjusted Demand
x # Seats per table	x	=
x # Tables	x	=
/ Average # Guests per room	/	=
/ # Residential Floors = (i)	/	=
85 – (i) = low (%)	85-	=
x Base # Rooms, round down = range low	x	(/100)=
(i) x 5 (scaling factor)		x 5 =
/ 2 (scaling factor) = (j)	/ 2	=
200 – (j)	200-	=
x Base # Rooms, round up = range high	x	(/100)=
write Range Low – Range High

Table 17f

In theory, the ranges determined by method 1 (worksheet 17a) and that determined by method 2 (worksheet 17b) should overlap, indicating where the correct value lies. If they do, simply write the overlap in the last space on this worksheet and move on.

There are far too many variables for me to have any confidence that there will, in fact, be an overlap. Table 17f adjusts the two ranges until there IS one. Use it if you have to, for as long as you have to, though in even the most extreme testing, only two iterations were needed. It adjusts range 1 to the averages of the two ranges extreme points and adjusts range 2 to a geometric combination of the extreme points. You will need a square root function, available on most calculators. Just in case, I’ve provided space for three iterations.

For the record, I tested the system using 5-10 for range 1 (almost certainly low) and 1000-5000 for range 2 (clearly ridiculously high). It still produced an overlap of 282-377 on the second iteration. I therefore have no doubt that if more reasonable values are entered, the results will be produced just as quickly, if not sooner.

Range Adjustment calculations
Instructions	Values	Results
Low, Range 1
+ Low, Range 2	+	=
/ 2, round down = new low, Range 1	/ 2	=
High, Range 1
+ High, Range 2	+	=
/ 2, round up = new high, Range 1	/ 2	=
Low, Range 1
x Low, Range 2	x	=
square root, round down = new low, Range 2	/ 2	=
High, Range 1
x High, Range 2	x	=
square root, round up = new high, Range 2	/ 2	=
New Range 1 Low – High
New Range 2 Low – High
	If there is an overlap, write the range of overlap in the space below. If not, repeat the process using the new values for ranges 1 and 2 recorded above.

Range Adjustment calculations
Instructions	Values	Results
Low, Range 1
+ Low, Range 2	+	=
/ 2, round down = new low, Range 1	/ 2	=
High, Range 1
+ High, Range 2	+	=
/ 2, round up = new high, Range 1	/ 2	=
Low, Range 1
x Low, Range 2	x	=
square root, round down = new low, Range 2	/ 2	=
High, Range 1
x High, Range 2	x	=
square root, round up = new high, Range 2	/ 2	=
New Range 1 Low – High
New Range 2 Low – High
	If there is an overlap, write the range of overlap in the space below. If not, repeat the process using the new values for ranges 1 and 2 recorded above.

Range Adjustment calculations
Instructions	Values	Results
Low, Range 1
+ Low, Range 2	+	=
/ 2, round down = new low, Range 1	/ 2	=
High, Range 1
+ High, Range 2	+	=
/ 2, round up = new high, Range 1	/ 2	=
Low, Range 1
x Low, Range 2	x	=
square root, round down = new low, Range 2	/ 2	=
High, Range 1
x High, Range 2	x	=
square root, round up = new high, Range 2	/ 2	=
New Range 1 Low – High
New Range 2 Low – High
	If there is an overlap, write the range of overlap in the space below. If not, repeat the process using the new values for ranges 1 and 2 recorded above.

Because I expect the examples to kick out reasonable results, and might possibly even produce overlaps in every case, I thought it worth doing a specific example of this process. I will take, as my starting point, a range 1 of 30-60 and range 2 of 10-25.

• Low, Range 1 = 30.
• Low, Range 2 = 10. 30 + 10 = 40.
• / 2 = 20. New Low, Range 1, is 20.
• High, Range 1 = 60.
• High, Range 2 = 25. 60 + 25 = 85.
• / 2, round up, = 43. New High, Range 1, is 43.
• Low, Range 1 = 30.
• Low, Range 2 = 10. 30 x 10 = 300.
• square root, round down, = 17. New Low, Range 2, is 17.
• High, Range 1 = 60.
• High, Range 2 = 25. 60 x 25 = 1500.
• square root, round up, = 39. New High, Range 2, is 39.
• New Range 1 is 20-43.
• New Range 2 is 17-39.
• We have an overlap: 20-39. No second iteration needed.

Worksheet 17g

Once you have a narrowed range, you are honing in on the correct value for the number of rooms. Table 17g tells you roughly where in that range the right value should be. It takes the real area that a relative size of “1” represents on the ground floor, and (after conversion) compares that to the descriptions of the room size. Along the way, there are many variable factors that get taken into account (most of which have already been determined in the course of worksheet 18c). Remember that each room also allows space for the corridor that leads to it!

All considerations that are taken into account on this worksheet are represented as %-plus-or-minus adjustments; these are added together to determine the final net adjustment to the calculated size of the guest quarters.

Adjustments are made according to three different scales. Two factors are given greater individual weight than the others; these are the “Local Economic Index” (Secondary weight) and the “Passing Traffic Index” (Primary Weight). These were also used in tables 18a and 18b respectively to assess the demand for meal services within the tavern. In assessing the Local Economic Index, there are multiple effects that affect the reasonable guest density, many of them contradictory. The intensity of these effects vary with room size, and economic basis. So look up the modifier that applies to this Inn on table 18e, below.

There are 10 other factors that also taken into account. The other modifiers are more straightforward to assess and are handled by two lists that follow Table 18e, followed by specific instructions and then by the worksheet itself.

The net effect of these adjustments can reduce the number of people it is reasonable to accommodate in a room of the theoretical size to 40% of the base value or increase it to 250% of the base value, or anything in between.

After allowing for these various factors, the worksheet ultimately results in a simple comparison: Taking all these things into account, does the room’s area seem too small or too large to match the descriptive elements?

• If it’s too small, the absolute value of a relative room size of “1” needs to increase, which is done by choosing a number of rooms in the lower half of the indicated range.
• If the area seems too large, then the absolute size of “1” needs to shrink, which is done by choosing a number of rooms in the upper half of the indicated range.
• Closer examination of the degree of difference between the numbers being compared shows you whether or not the value will be close to the middle (but to one side or the other), close to an extreme, or somewhere in between (and roughly how far towards the extreme).

Table 18e: Modifier from Local Economic Index:

Modifier for Local Economic Index by Room Factors
Rates are Charged	Room Size	Local Economic Index
		0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
per week	large	+16	+10	+6	+2	-1	-2	-4	-4
	medium	+16	+8	+4	+2	-2	-4	-8	-8
per night	large	+16	+16	+8	+4	+2	-1	-2	-2
	medium	+16	+8	+4	+2	+0	-2	-4	-4
	small	+8	+4	+2	-1	-1	-2	-2	-4
	tiny	+6	+4	+4	+2	+1	-1	-3	-6
per hour	medium	+16	+16	+8	+4	+1	-1	-2	-2
	small	+4	+2	-1	-2	+1	-1	-2	-3
	tiny	+6	+3	+2	+1	+0	+1	+2	+4

Modifier from “Passing Traffic” Index for Worksheet 17g

• Passing Traffic rating 1: Use modifier= -12
• Passing Traffic rating 2: Use modifier= -6
• Passing Traffic rating 3: Use modifier= -3
• Passing Traffic rating 4: Use modifier= +6
• Passing Traffic rating 5: Use modifier= +12
• Passing Traffic rating 6: Use modifier= +24

Other Modifiers for Worksheet 17g:

All other factors use the following adjustment scale:

• Reasonable Guest Density is greatly reduced: Use modifier -4
• Reasonable Guest Density is somewhat reduced: Use modifier -2
• Reasonable Guest Density is slightly reduced: Use modifier -1
• Reasonable Guest Density is generally unchanged: Use modifier +0
• Reasonable Guest Density is slightly increased: Use modifier +3
• Reasonable Guest Density is somewhat increased: Use modifier +7
• Reasonable Guest Density is greatly increased: Use modifier +11

Worksheet 17g Notes & Instructions

• Ground Floor Conversion Factor: This is the value that converts a relative room size to an actual area from worksheet 16.
• x Relative Size, Guest Accommodations: This is the relative size of the guest rooms.
• Set Reasonable # of guests in a room of this size: What do you think is a reasonable number of guests to physically accommodate in a space this size? Not a number that gives each person lots of space and not a number that packs guests in like sardines, but a reasonable number?
• Adjustment for “Quality of Accommodation” Description: The better the quality of the accommodation, the more space per person – so better quality is a negative adjustment.
• Adjustment for Room Size Description: Is the room area calculated on the second line of this worksheet an appropriate size for the description of the room (tiny, small, etc)? Or perhaps, that question should be asked the other way around – is the description reasonable for a room of this size? If the description indicates more space per person in order to be reasonable, there is is a negative modifier to guest density; if the description indicates less space per person, there is a positive modifier to guest density.
• Adjustment for Under-/Over Priced Description: If a room is under-priced, it suggests that there is less crowding than you might otherwise expect, a negative adjustment to reasonable guest density. If the room is overpriced, it suggests that there is more crowding than you might expect from the price, a positive adjustment. Once that is known, you have to decide how big a factor crowding is – if there are lots of other reasons for the price difference relative to what you might expect, then crowding is less important, and the modifier will move in the direction of zero. If these other factors are even more significant, it might be that they are more than overcoming the effects of a lack of crowding within rooms, moving this modifier beyond the zero point and onto the other side of the scale. Only if crowding (or the lack of it) is the ONLY factor in determining that the price charged is more or less than a reasonable price should the most extreme adjustments (greatly reduced or greatly increased) be used.
• Adjustment for Local Economy (NB uses different scale): This is the value from table 18e, above.
• Adjustment for Passing Traffic (NB uses different scale): This is the value from the first list, above.
• Adjustment for Actual Price (vs Fair Price): The price indicated during tavern generation is a reasonably “fair price” given all else is equal. The indication of over-pricing or under-pricing indicates a justifiable inequality in pricing – a price that is higher than might be expected for a room of that size alone for some valid reason, or lower for some valid reason. It says nothing about how much the owner is actually charging for his accommodation – so that’s what you have to decide here. If the price being charged is higher than it “should (justifiably) be”, it indicates an increase in the number of people crammed into the space (a positive modifier), if the price is lower than it “should (justifiably) be” then it indicates that people get better rooms than they might have expected from the price – and one of the reasons for that is they have more space per bed, or bigger beds, or otherwise have a reduction in guest density, a negative modifier.
• Adjustment for Exceptionally high or low overhead costs: If the owner has exceptionally high overhead costs – hidden costs or high tax rates or whatever – then he has to cram more people into a given space to spread that load as much as possible. So that’s a positive modifier. If, on the other hand, he has a large family and therefore doesn’t have to pay many outsiders, or for some other reason has lower-then-normal overheads, then he doesn’t even need to pack them in at the normal rate to cover that overhead – which could indicate a negative modifier, but probably doesn’t, because that would eat into profits. Instead, it would normally indicate minimal effect. The GM should take into account the local economic index and passing traffic index; a strong local economy and lots of passing traffic will increase overheads, while being in a depressed area and not having much passing traffic will reduce overheads; only when this combination is a valid description of the circumstances is a negative modifier greater than -1 justified, regardless of how low the overheads are. So this is usually a positive modifier.
• Adjustment for Competition/Price War (if any) or Lack of Same: Take a look at the market share adjustment at the end of worksheet 18c. If this is low, the Inn needs a competitive edge and that is a major negative modifier on the number of people in a given area of the inn’s guest accommodations. If it’s closer to 50-60%, this will be a relatively minor effect. Anything more than 60% indicates a positive modifier, from small at 60% to large at 100% (indicating that the inn has no competition). That means that this modifier is more likely to be a negative modifier than a positive one. The distance to the competition should also be taken into account – a strong competitor more than an hour away is probably no more important than a weak one that’s right next door.
• Adjustment for Exclusive Deals and Captive Markets: Inns have always loved exclusive deals with regular travelers who can pay. In modern times, that tends to be corporations; in a medieval milieu, it’s probably a deal with the local nobility to house messengers, troops, civil servants, etc, or a deal with the local Church to house visiting Priests, etc. But it might also be something that results from doing a deal with the local Thief’s Guild (“All your traveling fences stay here when they are in town and you can use the cellar for your Guild Headquarters for free”). A captive market means that the Inn has set itself up to cater for a specific segment of the population who will thus stay there in preference to any nearby rivals. Both of these effectively subsidize the cost of the accommodation by justifying higher prices, and that in turn reduces the need to pack customers from the rafters, and so result a negative modifier. NOT having such an advantage exacerbates the problems from competition, especially if they have such deals – so take your cue from the previous adjustment.
• Adjustment for Kitchen/Bar Subsidies: If the pattern indicated by the Kitchens profile (the results of worksheets 18d and 17e) suggest that the Kitchen or Bar are being subsidized by income from guest accommodation, that indicates that there are going to be more guests in a room of given size (because that reduces overhead costs), but this is balanced by there being more rooms, and therefore a smaller guest presence in each room – so this is a minor modifier. If, on the other hand, the pattern suggests that the room rates are being subsidized by high meal demand, that indicates there are fewer guests in a room of given size, so that’s a negative modifier. This requires the GM to decide, in other words, the relative earning power of the different parts of the establishment; it’s a truism that the most profitable parts will usually subsidize the less profitable parts so that the unprofitability isn’t reflected in higher prices which would drive demand still lower, making the problem worse.
• Adjustment for Generosity/Greed of owner: Greed indicates a positive modifier (cramming more people into the space); Generosity indicates a negative modifier.
• Adjustment factor for X-factors Does the inn have something that makes it “cool”, or the flavor of the month? Is it notorious for guests being robbed? What else can you think of? And, the $64,000 question: do these indicate that the number of people for a given area of accommodation should be higher or lower? Most X-factors will have little or no effect, but there’s always the possibility that something will.
• = Net Adjustment: Adding up all these adjustments on their own would give a plus-or-minus total percentage adjustment. However, I’m keeping things simple (some people have trouble with negative numbers) and adjusting the base 100% as I go. So this should be read as “N % of Base”. The following steps actually apply the adjustment to the base in precisely this way.
• Average number of guests per room: This is from the guest room description generated using Table 10.
• More Rooms or Fewer Rooms?: If the result after the modifications are taken into account is higher than the actual number of people indicated for a guest room within the inn, it means that the room if converted using the ground floor standard is larger than it should be – and that means “More” rooms are needed, so write “More” or (in extreme cases, “Much More” in this space. If the result is lower than the actual number of people indicated, it means that the room if converted using the ground floor standard is too small, and that means that “Less” or “Much Less” rooms are needed – so write that in this space. If the two are reasonably close, write “OK” and either “plus” or “minus” in the space – the plus indicating a small “more”, the minus indicating a small “less”.
• Range of possible room counts (from Table 17f): Simply copy the overlap range from worksheet 17f.
• Choose Number Of Guest Rooms (within range): This is the whole point of the exercise!
  • Much More indicates the number of rooms to be in the top 1/6th of the range.
  • More indicates the number of rooms to be somewhere around 3/4 of the way through the range.
  • OK+ indicates the number of rooms to be a little higher than the mid-point of the range.
  • OK- indicates the number of rooms to be a little lower than the mid-point of the range.
  • Less indicates the number of rooms to be somewhere around 1/4 of the way through the range.
  • Much Less indicates the number of rooms to be in the lowest 1/6th of the range.

Worksheet 17g

Reasonable Guest Density, see above for discussion
Instructions	Values	Results
Ground Floor Conversion Factor
x Relative Size, Guest Accommodations	x	=
Set Reasonable # of guests in a room of this size:	=
Base 100%	100
+ Adjustment for “Quality of Accommodation” Description	+	=
+ Adjustment for Room Size Description	+	=
+ Adjustment for Under-/Over Priced Description	+	=
+ Adjustment for Local Economy (NB uses different scale)	+	=
+ Adjustment for Passing Traffic (NB uses different scale)	+	=
+ Adjustment for Actual Price (vs Fair Price)	+	=
+ Adjustment for Exceptionally high or low overhead costs	+	=
+ Adjustment for Competition/Price War (if any) or Lack of Same	+	=
+ Adjustment for Exclusive Deals and Captive Markets	+	=
+ Adjustment for Kitchen/Bar Subsidies	+	=
+ Adjustment for Generosity/Greed of owner	+	=
+ Adjustment factor for X-factors = Net Adjustment	+	=
Average number of guests per room:	=
More Rooms or Fewer Rooms?	=
Range of possible room counts (from Table 17f):		=
Choose Number Of Guest Rooms (within range):	=

Worksheet 17h

We’ve jut about finished defining the first residential level (which is defined as the one with the family residence – assuming there is one on any residential level, regardless of which actual story of the structure it may be located on). The number of guest quarters is both the most important fact and last major decision that had to be made (that importance is the reason so much effort has been put into it). Worksheet 17h takes the various design elements of this level of the inn or tavern and applies the principles in the same way as was done for the ground floor to convert relative spaces into actual areas and then adjust for convenience.

Instructions	Working		Calculated Areas [Relative Size x (l)]	Area Adjustments	Final Areas
# Guest Rooms on this level
x Relative Size	x	=
+ Family Acommodations (if any on this level)	+	=
+ Stairwells Up		=
+ Stairwells Down		=
+ Storage Areas		=
+ Other Spaces (if any)= Total Relative Spaces, this level (k)		=
Total Footprint, Ground Level
Footprint, This level
/ (k) = 1st level conversion factor (l)		=
Other totals

A solid foundation: Prologue to part 6:

In the concluding post of this series (at least for now), part 6 will provide the worksheets for constructing other residential levels (now that the hard work is all done) and bring the examples to a complete finish (including demonstrations of using all of the above). Whew! There’s light at the end of the tunnel… now, what’s that rumbling sound…?

Chatting with a fellow GM on twitter recently, I was reminded of a technique that I use from time to time to generate backstories, that I thought I would share, in somewhat fuller and more developed form than I was able to convey in a handful of 140-character tweets! There are two ways to use it, and this article will deal with both. (It might look familiar to long-term readers of Campaign Mastery, because a variation on the technique was presented way back when as an NPC generator, in The Thumbnail Method).

At the heart of the process is a method of free association that is especially capable of direction and stepwise refinement. In effect, you shake ideas loose and then shape them into useful constructions.

The Setup

To use this technique, you need some sheets of blank paper, a writing pad (which can supply the sheets of blank paper in a pinch), something to write with, a few paper-clips, and an egg timer that makes a noise when the time is up. If you don’t have such a timer, use a CD of popular music that you know well, each of which is one turn of the “timer” (Classical music doesn’t work for this, I’m afraid – you need something that’s more radio-optimized, ie about 3 1/2 minutes to a track, and each track clearly distinguishable from the last). If you’re using the musical approach, it’s so much the better if the tone can suit the subject matter, but don’t get too hung up on that.

A packet of colored pencils can also be very useful, but aren’t strictly necessary.

For the blank paper, I find that a cheap artist’s A3 sketch-pad works best, but if you have to, use two smaller sheets of paper. You don’t have to physically join these together, though I find that to be helpful as well.

Take one page and divide it into 4 rows and 4 columns. Label this the “Abstracts Page”. It is important for this to be a single physical sheet, even if that means that it’s smaller in size:

Two Layouts – one optimum, one more practical

Take another page and divide it into four rows and 8 columns along the long side of the page. The size of the resulting spaces DOES matter for this page, so use two smaller pages if you have to. Note that if you do use two pages, your divisions should be along the two shorter sides of the pages! Label this/these “Working Pages”.

That’s it – prep done! Take a quick break to clear your mind and refresh yourself – things are about to get manic!

Technique 1: Expanding existing content

The first way of using the process is the one for which the technique was first developed. It proved so successful that I have applied it in many different ways since then, something that I’ll get into toward the end of the article. Since this is the version of the process that is easiest to understand and apply, this is the one that I’m going to use to explain the whole process.

Technique one is all about expanding or refurbishing existing content. You have something – a character, an organization, whatever – that has reached the end of its useful life and needs some new ideas to make it fresh again. Perhaps you created it some time ago and it no longer fits the style of your game, or it seems simplistic, or over-complicated, or it might be suffering from “Mud”.

“Mud” is the term my art teacher used to describe what happens when you have too many colors painted on top of each other before they are dry – everything turns into this dirty brown. It doesn’t matter what you are painting when this happens – it all turns to “mud”. I’ve found the term, and the abstract notion it represents, to be useful in all sorts of other areas, from adventures to characters to writing – if there’s too much diversity happening at the same time, it all bleeds into each other and blends into “mud,” it doesn’t matter what you are doing.

The Abstracts Page

We start with the “abstracts page”. This is a page for raw creativity, for the spontaneous expression of ideas with the most minimal of direction. Start the timer – whatever it is – and spend about 1/3 of the time available just thinking of the thing that you are working on, its past, its present, its appearance, its reputation. Let your thoughts roam freely within that context. If you have to refresh your recollection of the subject, do that before starting the timer.

Abstracts Rows 1 and 3

With the time remaining before your timer runs out, fill the boxes on rows 1 and 3 with the first things that come to mind, one to a panel. This could be a word, it could be a color, it could be a symbol, it could be something abstract. Don’t waste time trying to capture whatever’s in your head with any precision, speed is more important, and don’t spend any time trying to understand what the thought means – move on, as quickly as possible. I use only the top part of the space in each row; if I get to the end of the page and there is time remaining, I can start populating the bottom half of each row with a second idea.

This can be very difficult the first time that you try it; it does get easier with more practice.

You have roughly 120 seconds, maybe a little longer – so if you are going to fill each panel, you can’t spend more than about 15 seconds on the content of any one panel. I try to keep it down to 5-10 seconds so that I have a little time “in my pocket” for anything that takes a little longer to execute – and that’s how it sometimes happens that I have enough time left over to start a second run.

The results might resemble a child’s drawing, due to the speed; that’s fine, no-one ever need see your work. A splotch of green and a yellow disk with lines around it is enough to express an idea, as shown to the right. In fact, the less polished and precise your expression of the thought, the better, as you’ll see in a moment.

Abstracts Row 2 and 4

Take a minute or so to catch your metaphoric breath and clear your mind again. Then, in the empty panels of rows 2 and 4, and taking no longer than 30 seconds to a panel, list everything that the panel above suggests or symbolizes or expresses. If you run out of time, that’s all right – just move on to the next panel.

Take that quick two-color sketch: the list might read: “field, sun, warmth, nice, happy, countryside, peace, isolation, birdsong” – you are simply free associating with the image. You don’t have time to express anything too complicated, so keep it simple. Now, that quick thumbnail might have meant one thing when you drew it, but because of the simplicity of the execution, it can be interpreted as a whole raft of different things.

This exercise has a two-fold purpose: first, it serves as a warm-up to the imagination, and second, underlying most (if not all) of the ideas is some (possibly abstract) subconscious relationship or association with the subject that you are actually trying to redefine or rediscover, and that relationship will become clearer in the next phase.

When you’ve finished, fold the paper so that you can’t see rows 1 and 3 any more, only rows 2 and 4. Use a paper-clip to hold your folds in place.

Working Page, Row 1: Existing/Known Concepts/Symbolism/Traits/History

Take a minute to clear your mind, re-read the list of interpretations on the abstracts page, then start the timer. It’s time to tackle row 1 of the real thing.

This row is for you to express in a simple, abstract, or symbolic way everything you already know about the specific subject that you are exploring. Again, you have 8 boxes to fill, but you have a little more time to play with – 25-30 seconds a panel. However, it WILL get harder to fill the final panels, so try to spend less time on the first ones.

The rules are simple: no subsequent panel can contain anything already covered by another panel.

In panel one: what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the subject? In panel two: what’s the second thing? and so on. DON’T focus on whatever is wrong with the subject, or any emotional reaction you might have to the problems you have with them. There is also a specific process to follow:

1. Think about the subject. What’s the next thing that comes to mind?
2. Look at the panels you’ve already filled in this row. Is what you have thought of already described? If so, go back to step 1.
3. If your thought passes the “already covered” test, skim the Abstracts page, looking for anything that catches your eye and seems related to the thought. You are looking for terminology that relates to the thought, for ways of expressing it.
4. Express the thought in the panel. It might be a word, a phrase, an image, a symbol; once again, speed benefits you later in the process.
5. When time’s up for this panel – a total of 25-30 seconds maximum – move to the next panel and start again with step 1.

See what I meant when I said it would become harder with later panels? In theory, panel 1 captures the most important concept at the heart of the subject, panel 2 captures the next most important thing from amongst the rest, and so on. You might not get all eight panels filled, spending all the time allocated to later panels trying to capture a thought that isn’t suggested by what you’ve already done. At the same time, this trims away a lot of excess and complexity and focuses in on the concepts that matter most.

I often find it helpful at the end of step 3 to draw a circle around any keywords in the abstract panel that I’m about to use, so that I don’t use it again. This forces me to dig a little deeper and get a little more creative. If you do this, use a black-lead pencil so that you can erase your circles before starting row two.

Working Page, Row 2: Causes and Consequences

This process is very similar to that used to fill the first row, but what you are trying to express here are the causes and/or consequences of whatever you’ve put in the panel immediately above the one you are working on.

It’s actually important NOT to take a break before working on this row, beyond any time spent erasing the circles you may have drawn around items on the abstracts page. This is most effective when your subconscious is still focused on the thoughts you expressed in row 1.

The actual process is exactly the same as it was for row 1, but the rules against repetition are relaxed. If you didn’t get every panel in row 1 filled, you may have more time to spend on each panel in row 2, but the comprehensiveness of the results will suffer.

It’s also important to focus on the most important or significant cause or consequence first.

List: Interpretations

Again, this stage of the process works best if your mind is still chewing over what you’ve just done. This stage converts the panels of the working page into succinct statements that synopsize and encapsulate the contents of rows one and two. These statements might be vague or definitively concrete; either is fine. There is no time limit. Leave half-a-dozen blank lines at the top of the page.

These statements are placed in a list as they are written; you aren’t trying to wrest any coherence from them yet. Process panel 1 of row 1, then panel 1 of row 2, then move to the second panels in each row, and so on.

You should get at least two and preferably three or more statements from each pair of panels (feel free to rephrase):

1. [Subject] is/has [interpretation of panel in row 1].
2. This is because [interpretation of panel in row 2].
3. This [has/will] cause [interpretation of panel in row 2].

This may be the very minimum; quite often, you will derive multiple statements from the one key item, each statement stimulating the creation of another. If this happens, go with the flow!

List: Oddities

Erase any circles around items on your abstracts page. Now go through the page (still concealing rows 1 and 3) panel by panel, correlating with the statements that you’ve listed; if any statement clearly relates to a panel, place a tick in that panel. The objective is to find those panels that have NOT been referenced by any of the statements on your list already.

The challenge is to relate those panels to the subject in some reasonable, rational way, then express that as an additional statement on your list, followed (if possible) by a cause, and then by the impact that this has on the subject. It might be that there is no discernible cause, that this is simply the way the subject is.

The complete list forms an ordered hierarchy; they are in the sequence of most significant to least significant. That becomes important in the next phase of the process.

Once you have finished this phase of the process, take a longer break – at least five minutes and preferably ten.

Working Page, Row 3: Part 1: Expansion & Refinement

At the commencement of each stage of the process, you have built up an additional source of material to read and digest before you begin. After the abstracts page, it was the list of interpretations; after the first row of the working page, it was the causes and consequences; after those, it was the list of statements about the subject. The effect of these is to direct and focus your free associations and creative impulses in a productive direction, honing in on the central truths about, and central concepts of, the subject, through the power of iteration and stepwise refinement.

Iteration is one of the most powerful tools any creative person can have in their arsenal – so much so that I dedicated an entire article to exploring this significance (Top-Down Design, Domino Theory, and Iteration: The Magic Bullets of Creation). Stepwise Refinement is another; to quote from New Beginnings Phase 6,

Stepwise Refinement is the process of taking a general answer or task and dividing it into more specific elements, often called modules, each of which is then further designed.

I also listed it as one of the secrets to success in Phase X of that series:

Get the basics in place for everything, then refine and polish each element. The basics give strength, making the overall result robust enough to survive actual play; the refinement and polishing makes everything pretty.

We started this particular process with a broad, general concept of what “the subject” was all about, conceptually – nothing articulated, it was all in the head – and then applied directed free association in an iterative procedure to achieve stepwise refinement of the original idea. Now it’s time to start filling in the blanks and polishing the concept.

The way to do so is as follows:

1. Read through everything that’s been built up so far.
2. Start your timer.
3. Go through the list of statements from the top, stopping (and marking) the first one that needs further expansion or explanation, or that seems incompatible with something higher up the list.
4. In the first empty panel of row 3 of the working page, and taking no more than ten seconds for each, thumbnail as many different solutions or expansions as you can think of. Again, these could be a word, a phrase, an image, a symbol, whatever comes to mind. Stop when you run out of room in that panel.
5. If there is still time remaining on the timer, and still have empty panels in row 3, resume step 3, starting with the item below the one you’ve marked.

Some specific questions to help:

Statements Of Fact:

• If a statement could describe many different similar examples of [subject], what makes this one different from all of them?
• Would a fact about the subject make someone an enemy? Who? Are they actually enemies – and if not, why not?
• Would a fact about the subject make someone a potential ally? Who? Are they allied with them – and if not, why not?
• How else might a stated trait express itself?

Cause statements:

• What other consequences might there be as a result of the cause of a description or status identified in a statement?
• Reverse Domino Theory: Why did a causal event happen, in the opinion of the subject? If the subject views the causal event unfavorably, what similar contemporary events might they oppose? If they view the event favorably, how does the event manifest itself in their trappings and surroundings?

Consequence statements:

• If a consequence is contradictory to a statement elsewhere on the list, what is the subject doing about it?
• What other consequences might occur as a result of a consequence?
• Would a consequence, or behavior resulting from a consequence, make someone an enemy? Who? Are they actually enemies – and if not, why not?
• Would a consequence, or behavior resulting from a consequence, make someone a potential ally? Who? Are they allied with them – and if not, why not?

You won’t be able to work through the entire list, with so many open questions to answer; that’s fine. You will have expanded on the most significant details concerning the subject.

Working Page, Row 3: Part 2: New Abstractions

You’ve either run out of space in row 3, or run out of time with some panels empty. The latter is far more likely! Which means that you probably still have empty boxes in Row 3 to fill. So let’s fill them. (If you don’t have any, skip down to the next phase of the process).

By now, you should have a much clearer idea of the subject, and what matters most about them, than you did. That means that some more free associating in the manner of the abstract sheet might well shake loose recalcitrant concepts from the deeper recesses of your subconscious.

1. Restart the timer. How long you will have to spend on each panel will be a question of how many panels you have to fill, but be aware of the time limits for each panel.
2. Try to encapsulate everything you know about the subject in a single abstract image, phrase, or whatever, in the middle of the panel. Keep it a little small in size.
3. Surround this with as many related symbols or terms as you can think of. You should have room for at least four in the panel, though you may not be able to think of that many in the time available.
4. Move on to the next empty panel. Repeat the process from step 2 on, focusing on anything not covered by the previous panels filled during this phase of the process, until you run out of time or empty panels.

Working Page, Row 4: Interpretations

Row four is for interpreting the contents of row 3 into key words and descriptive phrases using the methods already described. The expansion items are treated as though they were in Row 1 of the working page, and the new abstractions are treated (unsurprisingly) as though they were on the initial abstracts page that we did.

List: Additional Statements

Next, you need to turn the contents of the row 4 panels into statements in the same manner as you did the row 2 contents. Start by numbering each of the marked entries on the list; because the expansion items are directly related to them, this shows where they should be inserted into the list. Of course, if you are producing your list of statements on a computer, you can simply insert lines at the relevant points, but I have found that even if that is your preferred mode of writing, there are benefits to having a physically-separate list. There is something psychologically different about the words being on paper in a physical form, as distinct from the mutability inherent in an electronic document. These numbers are then be used to index the inserts at the bottom of your existing list.

Any additional abstracts are treated a little differently. Because of the supposition that these are statements that get to the heart of the subject, the statements that you generate from them – and they will need a little more interpretation than most – get placed in the space at the top of the list that I had you leave blank.

Interpretation Allocation

Each of the statements that you have compiled is something that has:

1. been revealed in the past (assuming that the subject has appeared in your game before), or,
2. forms part of the backstory of the subject that is to be revealed in-game, or,
3. provides the foundation for a future plotline/revelation about or featuring the subject.

The final part of the process is to separate the statements into these three categories – the ‘revealed’, the ‘to be revealed’, and the ‘plot elements’. Once you’ve done that, you know what you’re doing with each of them.

Each statement can provide the foundation for an anecdote, story of the past, or future plotline. Expand on them, combine them in different ways, rewrite what you have on the list as a narrative, reorder them into sequential form – these are the “fundamental truths” of the subject, the concepts that are at the heart of the subject. They may bear little or no resemblance to the original manifestation, but that’s the point – they open new territory for you to explore, and may even require reinterpretations of past events or occurrences.

It’s usually worth trying to expand each doublet or triplet of statements into a narrative paragraph or two; saying A caused B might be clear to you now, but six months later, it might not be so self-explanatory.

Refinements: Additional Direction

Sometimes – all right, most of the time – I will employ a refinement of the original process to focus and narrow the direction into specific areas. This variation puts a label at the top of each column of row 1, and instead of discerning aspects of the subject from most fundamental to least important, each panel illuminates a different aspect of the subject. I virtually always use the same aspect labels because it facilitates usage of the results. What you want to do is fill each panel with symbology and ideas relating to that aspect of the subject.

Each column has multiple possible interpretations. It’s my goal to fill the panel with at least 4 ideas so that I can pick and choose, more than that is better. Because of that, I spend more time on each panel and take breaks between each.

Rows 1-2, Column 1: Profession

Everyone does something. This is what the subject does, either to earn money or fulfillment of some sort. Or perhaps what they want to do, or what they used to do.

Rows 1-2, Column 2: Personality

Everyone creates an impression of themselves. This describes that impression – either the one that the subject wants to project, or the one that they really show, or even how they feel inside despite outward appearances.

Rows 1-2, Column 3: Family/Relationships

Everyone has someone or something that they are close to. This panel is used to summarize all of those relationships. In addition to the most obvious and literal interpretation relating to the actual relationships that the subject has at the moment, some of the contents may reflect the desires or attitudes of the subject, or the opinions of those with relationships with the subject, or what the subject thinks those opinions are.

Rows 1-2, Column 4: Faith

Everyone has something they believe in, a purpose or principle that shapes their approach to everything else in their lives – whether it’s theological, a way of thinking, an emotion, or whatever. This panel contains representations of those beliefs, or of the beliefs that they want to have, or that they no longer want to have, or that they oppose. The content could be anything from conspiracies to a belief that good guys always win, to a religious doctrine, to even “nothing matters”.

Rows 1-2, Column 5: Abilities

Everyone can do things, or wants to do be able to do things, or regrets missed opportunities to learn to do things, or was expected or desired by others to be able to do things. All these belong in the abilities column.

Rows 1-2, Column 6: Ambition

Everyone has ambitions, goals and desires. Some of these, they have yet to have the opportunity to fulfill. Some have already passed them by. Some they tried to achieve and failed. And a few, they have actually achieved. On top of all that, there are ambitions that the character is currently working on fulfilling. There’s lots that can go into this column.

Rows 1-2, Column 7: Desire

Everyone wants something – and make no mistake, this is quite different from an ambition. This category relates to the things that the subject desires, has desired in the past, the things they are trying to get now, and the things they wanted that they gave away – or had taken away from them. This column is also all about the people who stand in their way, or who have done so in the past, and about how the subject feels about that.

Rows 1-2, Column 8: Weaknesses/Flaws

There’s no one who can honestly say that they are perfect. We all have flaws that we recognize, flaws that we don’t recognize, flaws that other people assume or think that we have when we are simply misunderstood, and flaws in others that we dislike or hate. And we’ve all been affected by other people’s flaws. As if that weren’t enough, we all have things that hold us back, things that we can’t resist, and things that we don’t think we can live without (rightly or wrongly). This column is easy to populate; the hard part is trying to fit enough into the panel.

Cross-column correlations

The subconscious is not great at following the rules. If something looks out of place after populating the rows, it’s probably because it belongs in another column. Realizing this fact was a great step forward in the sophistication of this tool because it sparked a sub-technique that is not all that obvious and can be extremely enlightening.

After you’ve finished populating and interpreting, but before generating statements, take the contents of panel 8 and try each of them as an answer to the questions posed regarding panel 7, then panel 6, and so on. Then repeat with panel 7, etc.

Sometimes you will find unexpected correlations and cross-links. Every one of these that you find is sheer gold, tying the different aspects of the subject into a unified and cohesive whole.

It all comes back to domino theory: E happens because D happened because C happened because B happened because A happened. A might be a childhood experience, B might be what that experience did to someone else, C might be what that someone else did because of that experience, D is what that did to the subject’s family or professional life or whatever, and E is what that experience has now done to the subject, linking his choice of career, personal problems, and ambitions.

The six-row variation

I don’t encourage this variation simply because I don’t think it leaves enough space in the individual panels, but there is no other reason not to use both the directed variation and the traditional approach for a still more comprehensive analysis of the subject.

For particularly recalcitrant subjects, I might contemplate this variation anyway, but if I did, I would use the normal 4-rows arrangement and move the traditional rows 3 and 4 onto a separate page using the same layout as the abstracts page.

Technique 2: New creations

As much as the technique is great for reinventing old wheels, it’s perhaps at its best when used for new creations. This is simply a matter of (a) thinking about the role that the new creation is intended to fill, and (b) using the “refinement” variant from technique 1, abstracting as necessary.

Usage 1: What I have used this technique to create or reinvent

I’ve used the term “the subject” as much as possible in the preceding sections. While it made the phraseology tricky at times, it was the only reasonable choice, because of the vast range of game material that I have used this technique to create. It’s only when you see that full list that you begin to appreciate the full power of this technique.

PC: Paulo Lumière

I didn’t start out to GM the adventurer’s club campaign. I started as a player, with a Master Hypnotist. I used this technique to design Paulo Lumière’s background, crafting a tale of spies, deceit, betrayal, and revenge. Each set of statements that were generated using this technique described a key incident in the character’s past, each of which propelled him into becoming the character that he was. There were layers beneath layers that would have been fun revealing and exploring, assuming that the GM gave me the opportunity to do so.

I never finished writing that background. I was forty-something pages into it, and just getting to the betrayal of the Paulo by his arch-enemy and former mentor, when I set the character aside and stepped behind the co-GM screen. By the time I was finished – probably in another 40 pages or so – I would have justified every skill and ability that the character had developed, every character flaw, every vulnerability quirk.

Any time one of them made a difference in a plotline, I would have had an anecdote from the character’s past, or a particular reaction, lined up and ready to go. Any time that the character encountered something, I had a list of triggers to specific reactions that I could run down in less than 3 seconds to define any unusual behavior, and a personal motivation in back of it that could be explained via such an anecdote. This would have enabled me to focus on his dialogue, physical expressiveness, and relationship with the other PCs.

PC: Binary

For Graham McDonald’s short-lived superhero campaign, I used this technique to develop Binary, a sentient robot built by a supervillain as a sparring partner, who broke his programming when used as a physical host for a rogue AI built prior to the big bang (in fact, it was an evolved form of an AI built to conduct the experiment that destroyed the preceding universe and triggered the Big Bang). Again, a very complete character, with a background stretching waaaay back and some very dark guilty secrets – like the time emergency protocols that he didn’t know were part of his programming kicked in and he cannibalized his best friend (a more primitive robotic A.I. built by the same villain) for spare parts.

NPC: Former PC, Hellcat

Ian Mackinder, who last appeared in these pages with his two-part article on Vehicles in RPGs (Part 1, Part 2, created Hellcat as a character for my Project: Vanguard superhero campaign, a spin-off from the primary Champions campaign. Project: Vanguard, usually abbreviated P:V, was a team of teenaged trainees being schooled in what they needed to know in order to join the front-line ranks in what was “theoretically” relative safety. When the team graduated (because the campaign was winding up after, I think, 6 or 8 years of play), the players had a choice to make: they could carry the characters into the main campaign, or they could become NPCs and either fade quietly into the campaign background, pursuing private superheroic agendas. Problems arose because some of the players had existing characters in the main campaign that they wanted to keep in preference. So:

• Titan (Ian’s other P:V character) retired to found “Neutral Ground”, based on the game supplement from Hero Games;
• Ramjet (Stephen Tunnicliff‘s Character) retired back to South America to hunt Nazi War Criminals and super-scientists, appearing a couple of times as an NPC in later adventures;
• Psiber (Stephen’s other character) was accused of cheating on his final exams and became a wanted (NPC) super-criminal; later, it was discovered that he had uncovered a conspiracy and gone underground to (a) investigate it and (b) protect his family while he did so. Ultimately the character exposed the conspiracy but was seriously wounded and (seemingly) left physically unable to adventure – but this is a superhero game and no-one “retires” forever, the character’s just waiting for the right plotline to come along. Stephen liked his characters, but he already had one of the Mainstays of the team, Behemoth, who he enjoyed playing even more. So Psiber had to go.
• Vortex (Peter Hewett’s character) never got to graduate, having been Kidnapped by his adopted father’s arch-enemy when Peter joined the army and never returned to the game when Peter’s tour of duty was up).
• Thistle (Adrian Runchel’s character) also didn’t graduate, giving her life to save the rest of the team when the Kzin invaded during one of the campaign’s big anniversary specials (when the player retired from the campaign) – she was given an honorary graduation, becoming the first to “officially” graduate, but it’s not quite the same thing. But this is a superhero game and no-one dies forever, either; again, it’s a matter of waiting for the right plot to come along. Hmmm, both Psiber and Thistle are Psionics….
• There were a couple of other characters who came and went from the campaign before graduation.

And then, there was Hellcat. She was supposed to join the main team, but Ian wanted to bow out of the campaign at that point, letting the character become an NPC. The problem was that I was completely out of plotlines for the character. I had no ideas, no growth path, no ambitions, no nothing.

So I applied the techniques described in this article as a way of getting underneath the character’s skin and discovering new things about her. Through them, I discovered what the character really wanted, what her ambitions were, how she would go about achieving them, and some of the struggles that she would go through along the way.

The resulting insights completely reinvented the character beneath the skin and the central concept of the character as it manifested to the outside world, without actually changing the superficialities one bit. Hellcat went on to lead the team, become a Pulitzer-prize winning author and photographer, marry, become pregnant, resign & retire when her husband had an affair, reconcile, have children, come out of retirement, and become a part-time member of the team, and her story is far from finished yet.

Organizations: The Paladins of Thumaín

As part of the creation of various game elements for the Fumanor campaign, I created an order of Paladins, one of whom eventually became a temporally-displaced part of the Seeds Of Empire campaign. If you treat an organization as a “person” – an idea nicked from US Law – you can use the same techniques to create one. “Personality” becomes “Corporate Culture” or some other equivalent, for example – but if you simply leave the title as “Personality”, you know how to interpret it. I detail the Paladins of Thumaín in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3. In fact, I created about 6 different Orders of Paladin at the same time, simply so that they would have someone else to interact with.

Deities: The Orcish Gods

I won’t go into too much detail about these here, because I have already discussed them extensively in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Orcish Mythology. The entire pantheon was initially generated using this technique, and so was the Orcish creation myth and backstory. (I can call it a myth because an entirely different origin story was eventually revealed in the Orcs & Elves series. I also used this technique on individual deities within the pantheon when they became important enough to that story to require fleshing out.

Nations & Societies: The nations from the ‘Shards’ campaign

There are many of these that have been detailed (and some that haven’t been done yet) in the On Alien Languages series. Each one was initially developed using a variant on the 2nd technique, in which I identified the different parameters of each nation and filled that empty box labeled “content” from the results. I was also mindful, as I was creating them, that each nation should have at least one and preferably two points of interaction with each other nation – one favorable and one opposed – to make the politics of the campaign more interesting.

The Du’Lan from the Champions campaign (now the Zenith-3 campaign)

These started out as shape-shifters and a variant on the Durlans from The Legion Of Superheroes (before that series was rebooted in what has now become known as the “Five Years Later” era under Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum with assists by Al Gordon), with an original twist or two, but when it came time for the team to visit the Du’Lan home-world, they needed a complete reinvention. Using the techniques described in this article, I linked the concepts of diversity of cell function with a caste system to create something that I think was (and is) fairly novel: a society of shape-shifters whose role in society never changes (ahh, irony), and that models itself along biological lines at a cellular level, viewing the entire society as a single biological super-organism. In the process, their world went from being an arid wasteland (as is Durla, home-world of the Durlans) to being covered in what is effectively a Saline Solution, the role of their “police officers” became radically different (white blood cells), criminals became a literal “cancer upon society”, and their equivalent of “garbage-men” became amongst the most elite of professions because they keep the environment – including the citizens – alive by removing the biological and social waste that would poison them.

Usage 2: Confluences and Confoundings

I still haven’t reached the limits of what can be done using this technique. Consider the potentials for using two of them when developing related characters, groups, whatever. These come down to two very simple and powerful things: Confluences and Confoundings.

Confluences

Character A wants something or wants to do something. Character B either has the means or also wants to do that something, or something reasonably close. Alliances can be forged on this basis. But it’s even more useful when creating enemies that they have something in common with the characters or organizations or nations that they oppose, some common ground, because that makes them sympathetic and interesting to their opposition. Consider the potential if Character A is a PC, with a set of backstory boxes created by the player in conjunction with the GM and turned over to the GM for use in creating adventures for that character.

Contemplate, for example, a character who wants the same things as the PC does but who uses methods that the PC is unwilling to tolerate in order to achieve them. If these “same things” are ideals or spiritual goals or humanitarian causes or something else that is non-selfish in nature, the relationship between the two can take many forms in many different adventures. And the PC (and the villain) should always be reflecting on the fact that if their lives had been just a little different, “that might have been me”.

Confoundings

Talk of enemies naturally turns attention to the other side of the coin. Having a snapshot of the key facts of a character – what they want to do, what they can do now, what they desire, and what they believe in – makes possible an enemy who blocks, or stands in the way, of one or more of these things. The more they disagree on, the more passionate they will be in opposing one another. Opposing? “Despising” might be a better choice of phrase.

Character A wants desperately to achieve something. Character B is opposed to them for some reason, has always had what character A wants to achieve, and either debases or disregards it as worth having. Now put the two of them into contact with each other.

Or it might be nations, or organizations, or theologies. In fact, anything that you can create using this technique.

Usage 3: Past Events: Backstories

If you know what a character has achieved, and what they are currently trying to achieve; what their strengths and weaknesses and central concepts are, and the circumstances from which they came, you can chart a course from A (the beginning) to B (the now), and that creates that character’s backstory. What turned them into what they are today; what failures and successes they’ve had along the way, how they came to care about the things that currently matter to them, and how their flaws and personality have helped and hindered them. You know what circumstances and weaknesses the opposition that they may have faced have used against them. You know their story.

And, what’s more, you know it in a form that is readily analyzed, cross-referenced, collated, and digested. You can look at the essential details or delve deeply into the mindset. As a tool for character analysis and usage, things don’t get much better than that.

Let me put it another way: think of your list of notes as the “crib sheet” for that character. Won’t that make them easier to play?

Usage 4: Future Directions

Finally, you have all the tools to bring parts of the creation into conflict. Those conflicts are what provide a future direction for the character – the challenges that you will have them face, the trials and tribulations that will be visited upon them. The outcome of these conflicts is never certain, and always interesting. That, after all, is what lies at the heart of drama. And drama makes for compelling narratives – in novels, movies, television, politics, society – and games.

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Part one of this series used six tables to define the physical properties of a tavern (no guest accommodations) or inn (with guest accommodations), plus – because the modifiers needed were at hand – the meals provided by the kitchens.

Part two used another six tables to determine everything that directly contributed to the ambiance of the establishment, from the personality of the owner through to the decorations on the walls. In this final part of the generator, we’ll deal with the bartender’s family and process the worksheets that bring the whole tavern or inn together, ready for use.

Part three used another five tables and subtables and one worksheet to populate the extended-family-in-residence and establish what entertainments the tavern provides to keep the punters happy.

That was supposed to be the final part (aside from a behind-the-curtain techniques discussion to be written down the track), but the examples grew uncontainably large; the versions originally intended to appear in part three topped out at over 10,000 words and weren’t finished yet. So I took the 13th hour decision to split part three into two parts – and then a 14th hour decision to split the second of those once again, when it also topped 12,000 words and was still less than half done!

We pick up the process right where we left off. Note that it is impossible to use this content without having completed the earlier parts of the process.

Tavern Generator (continued): Worksheets & Tables 16-20: Final Calculations Worksheets

Although the building worksheets may look complicated, the basic principles that they represent are very simple:

• The total number of spaces on one level of a building is an abstract representation of the overall size of the building on that level.
• Dividing the actual floor space by this total gives the area represented by “relative size 1” for this particular floor of this particular building.
• Multiplying the relative size value of any area by the size of a single space gives an actual area for each space.
• Upper floors (if any) can be larger or smaller than this ground floor space depending on the building design.
• Family accommodations may be located on the ground floor or on another floor, with the latter more common but not universal.

Complexity arrives with options and alternatives and trying to accommodate at least the most common ones.

Worksheet 16: Ground Floor Calculations

While I have designed these worksheets to be as flexible as possible, they are designed to accommodate the most common layout practices, and may need adaption to service unusual designs. Take the time to understand how they normally work and you will have no trouble making such adjustments, because the actual process is quite straightforward (I nevertheless warn users of the generator that this is by far the most complex of these worksheets)!

The first column takes the relative sizes of the different areas located on the ground floor, and totals them. It is at this point that the GM must decide whether or not the building is a tavern (no guest accommodations other than the commons room) or an inn (with guest accommodations). It is also necessary to decide whether or not the family accommodations are located on the ground floor or on the first floor (both reasonably common), on a different floor, or even in an entirely separate building (rare).

The “footprint” of the ground floor – i.e. the area of the ground-floor plan, to be allocated by the GM – is then divided by the total to find out what one ground floor “unit of relative size” translates to.

If the resulting commons area is large enough to accommodate the table space determined in Table 3, it is simply part of the common room that has been set aside for the purpose. If it is not, then it is a separate area which requires a recalculation.

The second column translates the relative sizes of each of the ground floor locations into real-world dimensions. For detailed, step-by-step instructions, and a couple of tips and tricks in how to use this worksheet, refer to the examples.

Instructions	Base	Base x Size 2	Adjust	Final
Bar
Common Room
Ground Floor Storeroom
Ground Floor Family Dwelling
Cooking Facilities
Kitchen Space
Recreation Spaces
Stairwell Up?
Stairwell Down?
Ground Floor Accommodations
Total 1
Ground Floor Footprint
Footprint/Total 1 = Size 1
Common Room Relative Size
Common Room x Size 1
x 60% = Table Area Threshold
Table Area
Footprint Adjustment
Adjusted Footprint
Revised Footprint/Total 1 = Size 2
Old Commons Size
– Table Area	–
Adjusted Commons Size	=
/ Size 1	/
= Adjusted Relative Size	=

The Palomino and Fox continued:

The Palomino and Fox is an atypical example of the typical two-level tavern. The tavern has built up a definite character in the course of its generation, and now comes complete with a situation that could either be a side-plot or the springboard to something more important.

What we know so far:
The “Palomino and Fox” is a Medium-Large two-story rural tavern focused on hunting, especially fox-hunting; it hosts the local fox-hunting association, and has quite a respectable clientèle. The walls of the tavern are rough-hewn stone. Tavern Size Modifier is 4, Commons Size Modifier is 3.
    It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (2), and a Large Common Room (5). Beneath the tavern is a Storage Cellar, and part of the first floor consists of the Family Dwelling (2).
    Within the common room are 6 large tables that seat 20 each, occupying a total of 72 sqr m = 325 sqr ft = 13 x five-foot sqr spaces. The tables are L-shaped and made of wood.
    That common room is decorated with stuffed & preserved animal heads. Behind the bar, several weapons are mounted, intact and ready for use. The bar serves very poor quality versions of the two most popular drinks, locally. There are no better alternatives available to patrons. People don’t go there for the alcohol.
    In addition to the hunts that operate out of the Inn, The Palomino and Fox has a darts room (0.75) containing multiple boards, a dice pit (1.5) and smaller high-stakes area (1).
    The Kitchens consist of Medium Stove, Large Ovens, Medium Grill (1.75) and a Medium-sized Food Preparation area (2.5) (sizes relative to a business of this scale). The cuisine is Good quality food, a hearty meal with bread and meat/fish 0-1 (d3:0, 1/2, 1) day old, costing 7 sp per serving.
    Guest accommodations are medium,-sized (relative room size 1.9), capable of accommodating 2-4 people, and of Common quality. They are overpriced at 5.5 sp/night, or 3.5 gp/week.

The Barman’s skills are given by d4+1, and he counts as 1 worker, so he’s competent but nothing special as an innkeeper. He is tenderhearted, but hides it beneath a gruff, angry exterior. He is bold, fanatical about his religious beliefs, and tends to think with his emotions, not his head.
    The Barman lives with his large family, a wife and 5 children, in the family residence. The children are aged 2, 4, 5, 7, and 10. All those old enough work for the family business. The barman’s father-in-law resides in one of the guest quarters and also works for the Palomino and Fox. The Barman’s sister and sister-in-law share a second guest quarters. All told (excluding the barman), family provide the equivalent of 5.25 full-time staff to the Inn.
    To function fully, the Inn has to employ a further 4.75 staff. It is reasonable to suspect that many of the staff are “strays” that he has picked up along the way, and also live on the premises.

The barman has an ongoing conflict with a local Druidic order, who have used their powers to persuade all the foxes to go elsewhere. Their motives are unclear; it could easily be that the Druids tried to warn the local community of something but weren’t taken seriously, and so have taken matters into their own hands. Or it might simply be that they have a philosophic objection to hunting for sport. Rather than try to reach some settlement with the Druids, the Barman has resorted to “cheating” to make sure that each hunt bags something they can brag about. If this deception is exposed, he will have even more trouble with the Druids, and hence is a little paranoid about strangers. Because of his cheating, the tavern has built up a reputation, publicly justifying the “overpriced” accommodations; in reality, the extra covers the cost of maintaining that reputation.
    The barman has a strong sense of responsibility (to family, staff, and communities both local and which merely use his establishment as a base for their annual activities). Because of his stiff-necked pride, he has backed himself into a corner in which that sense of responsibility has forced him into a moral compromise – something that is clearly more palatable to him than admitting his error, but the source of considerable stress and feelings of guilt, nevertheless.
    His embarrassment over his hot-headedness and guilt over his “cheating” likely make the barman more grumpy than usual. I picture him as salt-of-the-earth but marred by pride and stubbornness, qualities that now have him in over his head.

Resuming the example: Worksheet 16, Column 1:

• Bar: Write 2, the relative size of the bar, in the first space.
• Common Room: Write 5, the relative size of the Commons, in the second space.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: Write the relative size of any Ground-floor storeroom, in the third space, or zero if there isn’t one. Note that even if the dice have indicated a cellar, the GM may choose to set aside a tiny (0.25-0.5) or small (0.5-0.75) space on the ground floor for the purpose – but remember also that in most fantasy games, there is no refrigeration; cellars were used for storage because they provided relatively cool temperatures. The “Palomino and Fox” will have a small pantry space (0.75) and a linen cupboard of similar size (0.75), for a total of 1.5 spaces on this line of the worksheet. Note the details on a piece of scratch paper for future reference.
• Ground Floor Family Dwelling: Write 2, the relative size of the Family accommodations if they are located on the ground floor, or zero if they are not, in the fourth space. In this case, I am going to place them on the ground floor, so “2” is the correct entry. Take care not to confuse this value with the “Family Size”, which refers to the total number of working staff the family provide – in this case, 5.25.)
• Cooking Facilities: You would normally write 1.75, the relative size of the Cooking Facilities, in the sixth space, but I have decided to place the kitchens etc on the first floor, just to be a little different, so this entry is actually zero.
• Kitchen space: As above, this would normally read 2.5, the relative size of the Food prep area, but I have relocated the kitchens so I write 0 in the seventh space.
• Recreation Spaces: Write 3.25, the relative size of the Recreation spaces, assuming they are all on the ground floor, in the eighth space. In this case, I decide to relocate the high-stakes gambling area (1 unit of that 3.25) to the first floor, leaving 2.25 to be written into the relevant space.
• Stairwell Up?: Count up the number of stairwells going up that you require (at least 1 if the inn/tavern has multiple stories). These can be sized 0.25 each (ladders), 0.5 each (tiny), 0.75 each (small), 1 each (normal), 1.25 each (large), or 2 each (grand staircases), or even a variety of sizes if you prefer. On your scratch paper, note your decisions and total the space devoted to stairwells up from the ground floor; write this total in the ninth space on the worksheet. In this case, I think that two stairwells is about right, each of normal size, so the entry on the worksheet is 2.
• Stairwell Down?: If there is a cellar, decide on the number of access points down to it and their relative sizes as above (making notes), determine the total relative sizes, and write that into the tenth space on the worksheet. Don’t forget to allow for deliveries, which usually require an external stairwell that still needs to be counted. In this case, a normal sized staircase for deliveries (1) and a smaller internal staircase (0.75) to access the storeroom sounds right to me. The total is 1.75, which gets written into the space provided.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: Are there any guest rooms on the ground floor? If so, the number of such rooms, multiplied by the relative size of the guest accommodations, gets written in this space (and note the specifics on your scratch paper. The total is then recorded in the eleventh space on the worksheet. In the case of the “Palomino and Fox,” My first thought was to have no ground floor “guest accommodations” but then I remembered that table 13 and associated subtables indicated that 2 guest quarters were taken up by extended family – one for the father-in-law, and one for the sister-in-law and sister (who share). I briefly consider placing these two guest quarters on the ground floor, decide not to – and then realize that none of the other examples will provide an opportunity to demonstrate this feature of the system, so reverse my decision. So, there are 2 guest accommodations on the ground floor, and the total is 2 times 1.9 (relative size of guest accommodations) = 3.8.
• Total 1: Add all these up and write the total on the twelfth line. Slightly different colors have been used to make this space stand out. The example total is 2 + 5 + 1.5 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 2.25 + 2 + 1.75 + 3.8 = 20.3, which I write in the appropriate space on the worksheet. If I had not relocated various items, and had added the two guest quarters, this total could have been 5.25 higher, for a total of 25.55 spaces – and each space would have been about 80% of the size it will actually be (20 divided by 25).
• Ground Floor Footprint: To fill the next space on the worksheet, we need to decide the ground-floor dimensions of the tavern. We then determine the total area covered in square feet, and that’s what gets entered. I find it useful not to decide this, except in vague terms, until I know what the total number of spaces is, so that I can pick any room for which I have a clear scale in mind and use that as my basis. In this case, I know that I want the bar area to be fairly substantial – perhaps 60′ x 40′ – so that would make 2400 sqr ft equivalent to a relative size of 2. So 1200 sqr ft x 20.3 = 24360 sq ft. If the building is 120′ in one direction, that would be 203′ in the other – roughly. That’s not bad – there have been warehouses and temples that size. It makes life more convenient if the footprint is a multiple of 25′, so for simplicity’s sake I’m going to call it 25000 sqr ft, perhaps 125 x 200′ – slightly thicker than a 2:1 ratio. But, square feet is often not the most useful measurement – it is often even more convenient to count a building in 5′ squares. This, conveniently, is one 25th of the sqr ft measurement – in this case, 1000 5′ x 5′ spaces – so that’s what gets written in the Ground Floor Footprint location on the worksheet. (NB: this may vary with other game systems – for the Hero System, everything is built on 2-meter-wide hexes, which therefore have an area of 4 square meters, so the golden rule would be a multiple of four, not a multiple of 25).
• Size 1: Divide the footprint (1000) by the number of spaces (20.3) to get 49.26. This is another inconvenient number, so let’s round it off to 50.
• Common Room Relative Size: Next, we need the common room relative size of 5 from higher up the table.
• Common Room x Size 1: Multiply the common room size by the result of Size 1: 5 x 50 = 250.
• x 60% = table area threshold: 250 x 60% is 60 x 2.5 = 120 + 30 = 150.
• Table Area: This was determined as part of the result from table 3, and is 72.
• Footprint Adjustments: If the tables won’t fit in 60% of the footprint, the “effective footprint” has to be reduced by the size of the table area, and the size of one unit recalculated. However, 72 will handily fit within 150, so there is no need to do so in this case:
  • Footprint adjustment: If you needed to reduce the size of the “effective footprint” you would write the amount of adjustment here. Write a zero in this space.
  • Adjusted Footprint: If you needed to adjust the “effective footprint”, you would write the revised total here. Copy the footprint from the earlier calculation into this space (1000).
  • Revised Footprint/Total 1 = Size 2: If you need to revise the size of “a space” because the effective footprint has changed, you would repeat the division (footprint / total of relative sizes) and put the result in this space. Since in this case, there has been no change, simply copy the result from the earlier calculation of “Size 1”, 50.
• Commons Adjustments: If there was NO need to adjust the “effective footprint”, it means that part of the common room contains the tables, and we want to know how large that actually makes the common room.
  • Old Commons Size: This was calculated a little earlier – look for Common Room x Size 1 a few lines up. 250, so copy this value into the space provided on the worksheet. If you don’t need to adjust the commons size because you’ve changed the footprint, simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • – Table Area: Copy the space occupied by the tables into this row of the worksheet. Make sure that you are using the same units for both this and the above line, or the only result will be confusion. In this case, 78 spaces are being used for the tables, so copy 78 to here from a few lines previous. If you don’t need to adjust the commons size because you’ve changed the footprint, simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • Adjusted Commons Size: First number minus the second number gives this value: 250 – 78 = 172. If you don’t need to adjust the commons size because you’ve changed the footprint, simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • / Size 1: Copy the “Size 1” value from earlier in the worksheet into this space (50). If you don’t need to adjust the commons size because you’ve changed the footprint, simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • Adjusted Relative Size: Write the results of the division in this space, rounding to no more than 2 decimal places. 172 / 50 = 3.44. So the Commons Room in this case has gone from a relative size of 5 to a relative size of 3.44, no longer counting the remainder (1.56) occupied by the tables. Write 3.44 into the space provided. If you don’t need to adjust the commons size because you’ve changed the footprint, simply copy the commons room size from the third row of the worksheet into this space.

Worksheet 16, Column 2:
The second column provides a space for you to write the results of multiplying the relative size of each area by Size 2 (which is why the value was copied in unchanged if there was no difference in “effective footprint”). This is easy in most cases: you have the number to be multiplied right next to the relevant empty space, in column 1.

• Bar: 2 (the relative size of the bar) x 50 (Size 2) = 100.
• Common Room: This is the Adjusted Commons Size from the third-last row of column 1, if there is a number there. If there is not, this is the result of multiplying the common room size shown to the left of the space by Size 2. In this case, the “Adjusted Commons Size” has a value, 172, so copy that into this space.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: 1.5 (the total relative sizes of storerooms) x 50 (Size 2) = 75. At the same time, perform the calculation of actual sizes for specific spaces on your scratch paper, noting the results:
  • Small Pantry Space: 0.75 x 50 = 37.5;
  • Linen Cupboard: 0.75 x 50 = 37.5.
  • Double-check that these add up to what is shown on the main worksheet: 37.5 + 37.5 = 75. This is obviously correct, but that might not always be the case.
• Ground Floor Family Dwelling: 2 (relative size of the Family accommodations located on the ground floor) x 50 (Size 2) = 100.
• Cooking Facilities: 0 (relative size of the cooking facilities located on the ground floor) x 50 (Size 2) is 0 – obviously.
• Kitchen space: 0 (relative size of the kitchen facilities located on the ground floor) x 50 (Size 2) is 0 – equally obviously.
• Recreation Spaces: 2.25, the relative size of the Recreation spaces on the ground floor x 50 (Size 2) = 112.5.
• Stairwell Up?: 2 (total relative size of stairwells up) x 50 (size 2) = 100. Note that because the tavern is unusually large, so are these staircases. When this happens (or the reverse) you have three options: (1) accept the results; (2) adjust the stairwell sizes, using the extra space to “tidy up” messier results (37.5 to 40 or 50, for example), or (3) revising the relative sizes of the stairwells and starting the worksheet over from the point where you first allocated space to them. You should also bear in mind that a stairwell is usually twice the size of a staircase, PLUS an intermediate landing, so the stairwells might not be as over-the-top as you may think. Whichever option you choose, it’s important to note it in your scratch notes because it will also affect all the other floors of the building. In this case, a standard staircase (2×4) plus landing (2×4) plus second staircase (2×4) or 24 spaces, is almost exactly half the size indicated – so the staircases are either twice as wide as normal, or need to be resized. I think I’ll hedge my bets – make one staircase double-width (for guests) while saving half the leftover from reducing the other one (for staff) in size. That gives me 25 spaces to be used to tidy up other spaces like the storage rooms and entertainment areas. After making any such decisions necessary, calculate the actual sizes for the individual staircases shown in your notes:
  • One double-width stairwell (1 x 50 (size 2) = 50 spaces): 4×4 staircase up, 2×8 landing, and twin 2×4 staircases up from the landing (one on either side) plus 1 space each for large statues at the ground-floor end of the handrails = 50 spaces;
  • One normal-width staircase (24 spaces); 2×4 staircase, 2×4 landing, 2×4 staircase;
  • 26 spaces in reserve to pad out other spaces.
• Stairwell Down?: 1.75 (total relative size of stairwells down) x 50 (Size 2) = 87.5, but it’s already clear to me from the staircases up that these are going to be about twice the size desired. I have the same three options, and this time I’m going to cut them all down and add to the 26 spaces “fudge factor” that I’ve got:
  • One stairwell 4 wide x2 deep; a 4×4 landing; another stairwell 4 wide and 2 deep; a second landing; and a third 4 x 2 stairwell, used for delivery of supplies to the cellar storeroom; total 56 spaces.
  • One staircase 2 wide by 4 deep, 2×2 landing , second staircase 2 wide by 4 deep, used for internal access to storeroom; total 20 spaces.
  • 12.5 spaces unused, reserved for “padding” other ground-floor spaces, making a total adjustment capacity of 38.5 spaces.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: 3.8 (total relative size of ground floor “guest” accommodations) x 50 (Size 2) = 190 spaces (i.e, 95 each for 2 rooms – but I would be tempted to make one slightly smaller (say, 80 spaces) and one a little larger (110 spaces) because one has a sole occupant and the other is shared between two adult, possibly even middle-aged, women).

Worksheet 16, Columns 3 and 4:
Column 3 is where you write in any adjustments to the sizes of the different areas to make them more convenient. Column 4 is space to write in the total of Columns 2 and 3, ie the total space allocated to this particular area. (Remember, all spaces are presumed to “own” any necessary corridor space).

You can do anything you like here, so long as the total adjustment is equal to the size of any “set aside” values from your earlier workings.

In the case of the Palomino and Fox, there are 38.5 spaces available. If necessary, more can be found by trimming other spaces, but that’s quite a lot to work with.

• Bar: 100 is convenient enough, no adjustment needed, so either write a +0 or leave the first space blank. I’m going to record a running total here, which I would normally put on scrap paper; this is also +0.
• Common Room: 172 is not quite so convenient, especially if the common room shares a dimension with the bar, as is often the case. +28 spaces makes 200, a far more acceptable number. Tally: +28.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: 75 is an awful lot of room for a small pantry and linen cupboard, even for an establishment of this size. I’m going to drop the Pantry to 20 spaces in size, and make the linen cupboard two 5-square areas, one for the tables and the other for the bar etc. That’s a total of 30 spaces, so there is an adjustment of -45. Tally: -17.
• Ground Floor Family Dwelling: 100 is a convenient number. And quite a large dwelling. No adjustment need, tally remains -17.
• Cooking Facilities: 0, no adjustment needed. Tally is -17.
• Kitchen space: 0, no adjustment needed. Tally is -17.
• Recreation Spaces: 112.5. Once again, this would be better as a number ending in zero, so I will apply an adjustment of 8.5 to get 120. Tally = -8.5.
• Stairwell Up?: I had already decided to reduce the space allocated to these stairwells, saving 26 spaces. This is where that adjustment gets recorded: adjustment of -26, tally -34.5.
• Stairwell Down?: 76 spaces used out of 87.5 allocated, so here’s another -12.5 adjustment that was decided upon earlier. Tally is now at -47 spaces.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: 190 spaces, divided into an 80-space room and a 110-space room. With 47 spaces to use up, and this being one of the last opportunities to do so, I decide to add 20 to the 80-space room and 10 to the 110-space room, leaving an unused adjustment of -17.
• Table Area: This was listed as 78 spaces, but I will use 22 of my remaining 17 to bring it up to an even 100 spaces. Tally = +5.
• Adjusted Footprint: There are several spaces in the worksheet that have been blacked out so that nothing can be written in them. In fact, the only remaining spaces on the worksheet are these. The total adjustment goes in this space in column three, and the final size of the footprint goes in column 4. In this case, our net adjustment (in column 3) would be +5, and the resulting footprint would be 1005 spaces. Alternatively, to reflect some space being slightly irregular because of the stairwells, I could go back and put a further adjustment of -5 into one of them (fortunately, I had simply left them blank – hint, hint) and maintain the nice neat total size of 1000 spaces. I decide to trim those 5 spaces out of the Bar, though I could just as easily have used one of the ground floor accommodations.

Observations/Notes:

It’s worth pointing out that the margins that you have for adjustment tend to be proportional to the overall size of the tavern, In this case, we have a quite large example, so I was able to be relatively lavish. I expect the other examples to pose more of a challenge!

And yes, it does strike me as rather strange that the pantry is on the ground floor while the kitchens are on the first floor. That probably bears some further thought, but it’s too late to change it now – if I can think of some plausible justification to explain it!

The Spotted Parrot continued:

The Spotted Parrot is a most unusual inn and provides an example of how to shape the random results to fit a preconceived concept – essentially re-rolling random results until you get results that “fit”.

What is known so far:
The Spotted Parrot is a floating medium-sized tavern constructed in an unseaworthy vessel that has been “recommissioned”. [Note to self: remember to give the vessel a name!] It contains (with relative sizes) a Bar (1.5), small-medium “Common Room” (3.5), Kitchens consisting of a small stove & ovens (0.75) and a medium-sized Food Prep area (0.75). Tavern Size Modifier is 2, Commons Size Modifier is 1.
    Meals are served on the deck, which functions as the “common room”, and have a definite seafood theme. There are 12 medium tables that seat 6 people each. These tables have a simple rectangular shape (2:1 proportions), and are made of stone [why?]; these occupy a total of 38.4 five-foot sqr spaces. The cuisine is of Good quality and consists of bread and a small meal (soup, stew, or pie) with fish 0-1 (d3:0, 1/2, 1) day old, costing 6 sp per serve.
    Accommodations are small staterooms below decks, barely large enough for a couple, of good quality, but overpriced at 6 sp per night (relative room size 0.95). The family live in accommodations (1.5) in former “officer’s country” on the ship’s deck level, which is also where the kitchens are located. The Ship’s former Holds now function as cellar/storage area. For obvious reasons, the internal areas all have walls are of sawn timber.
    The size of the kitchens makes it clear that these accommodations are quite limited in capacity; and, if anything, the number of people who can be seated at the tables (up to 60 at a time) is far in excess of what can be justified given the size of the kitchens, unless those tables are used for something more than meals. The suggestion is, therefore, that a lot of the tables are used for sitting and drinking, and not for the consumption of food.
    The “common room” (deck) is decorated with leg irons, cutlasses, and other piratical/nautical memorabilia, while the space behind the bar is decorated with a large and quite good painting of a ship at sea in a storm.
    A small area (0.5) above-decks is also used for card games.
    The bar serves average quality versions of the two most popular local drinks and has 1 uncommon option of Good Quality available. Given the motif, the “two most popular” are probably rum and ale, and the third, uncommon option might be a wine or brandy.

The Barman is unmarried and has no children. His parents have one of the guest staterooms and his brother lives in another; all three also help run the Tavern. In addition, the Spotted Parrot employs 2 additional staff.
    The barman’s skills are given by d6+1, and he counts as 2 workers, so he is skilled at his profession. He is polite, greedy, cautious, impious, sensible or practical, and lawless, a felon, or an ex-felon – a combination that sounds to me a lot like Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) from the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, maybe in retirement.

This is not be a hugely-profitable business, but one that is run for passion, for the love of the sea, and that is true of the clientèle as well.

Resuming the example: Worksheet 16, Column 1:

• Bar: Write 1.5, the relative size of the bar, in the first space.
• Common Room: Write 3.5, the relative size of the Commons, in the second space.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: Write the relative size of any Ground-floor storerooms in the third space, or zero if there aren’t any.
  • tiny pantry (0.25);
  • small linen closet (0.5);
  • total 0.75.
• Ground Floor Family Residence: Write 1.5, the relative size of the Family accommodations if they are located on the ground floor, or zero if they are not, in the fourth space. In this case, they are effectively on the ground floor.
• Cooking Facilities: Write 0.75, the relative size of the Cooking Facilities, in the sixth space.
• Kitchen space: Write 0.75, the relative size of the Food prep area into the seventh space.
• Recreation Spaces: Write 0.5, the relative size of the Recreation space, assuming they are all on the ground floor, in the eighth space. In this case, they are.
• Stairwell Up?: Count up the number of stairwells going up that you require (at least 1 if the inn/tavern has multiple stories). These can be sized 0.25 each (ladders), 0.5 each (tiny), 0.75 each (small), 1 each (normal), 1.25 each (large), or 2 each (grand staircases), or even a variety of sizes if you prefer. On your scratch paper, note your decisions and total the space devoted to stairwells up from the ground floor; write this total in the ninth space on the worksheet. For “The Spotted Parrot,” there is 0.25 spaces for a rope ladder to the masts (now only decorative), and I think that this is also a good place to allow for those masts – three at 0.5 each, for a subtotal of 1.5. Each of these would need a rope ladder, so that’s 3 x 0.25 for them, or another 0.75; putting those together gives a total of 2.25 spaces.
• Stairwell Down?: A tiny stairwell (0.5) leads from the deck near the kitchens to the hold used as a storeroom; a similar staircase (0.5) leads to passenger “cabins”; and the hold would have a hatch for the receipt of supplies (0.75). Total of 1.75, which gets written into the tenth space on the worksheet.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: Are there any guest rooms on the ground floor? In this case, no, so this recorded as a zero.
• Total 1: Add all these up and write the total on the twelfth line: 1.5 + 3.5 + 1.25 + 1.5 + 0.75 + 0.75 + 0.5 + 2.25 + 1.75 + 0 = 13.75, which I write in the appropriate space on the worksheet.
• Ground Floor Footprint: I’m note sure of the exact dimensions of ships, and expect that research would require me to get specific as to the type of ship. I’ve already decided that it is a three-masted vessel, but beyond that it is my intent to keep it fairly generic. As a result, I’ve decided to be arbitrary – the deck is 30ft across, and the length of the ship’s useful area is roughly 150′. That gives a total footprint of 4500′, or 180 5′ x 5′ squares.
• Size 1: Divide the footprint (180) by the number of spaces (13.75) to get 13.09. This is another inconvenient number – it would be far more useful as a multiple of the number of 5′ squares across the deck (6) – so I’ll round it down to 12.
• Common Room Relative Size: Next, we need the common room relative size of 3.5 from higher up the table.
• Common Room x Size 1: Multiply the common room size by the result of Size 1: 3.5 x 12 = 42.
• x 60% = table area threshold: 42 x 60% is 60 x 0.42 = 6 x 4.2 = 24 + 1.2 = 25.2.
• Table Area: This was determined as part of the result from table 3, and is 38.4. And that won’t fit into the 25.2 space reserve calculated a moment ago.
• Footprint Adjustments: If the tables won’t fit in 60% of the footprint, and in this case they won’t, the “effective footprint” has to be reduced by the size of the table area, and the size of one unit recalculated:
  • Footprint adjustment: You may be tempted to simply reduce the footprint by the extra space that you need (25.2 – 38.4 = -13.2) but doing so will not be exactly right, because the 25.2 reserve will also shrink. I’ll go into doing that with the next example. For now, let’s keep it simple (and as intended) and write -38.4 into this space, indicating that the entire tabled area is extra to the commons. Actually, let’s make it -40 for convenience.
  • Adjusted Footprint: Write the revised total here by subtracting the amount to be deducted from the original size – in this case, the calculation is 180 – 40 = 140.
  • Revised Footprint/Total 1 = Size 2: 140 divided by the 13.75 from Total 1 gives 10.18 squares per building unit. It’s still going to be convenient if this is a reasonable multiple of the width of the deck (6 squares), so let’s call it 10.5, so that each whole unit of space is 1.75 squares. The resulting ship will be just a little longer than we originally decided, but that’s OK by me. Heck, we could even take it back up to 12 for the convenience if we wanted to – making the ship about 18% longer. Our original length was 150 feet, adding 17% to that would get us about 177′ – call it 180 feet, if you like. Is that extra 30′ enough to make the ship improbable?

    I found a formula online (at www.eurobricks.com which states that the minimum width of a ship 114.8′ long is our width of 30′. That means that for any length greater than that, our width is inadequate, unrealistic, and unstable. If we were to double our width to 60′ (and redo everything), the formula fives an overall length for the ship of no more than 333′.

    For the record, the formula is: Minimum Beam = 1.2 x (1 + Length to the power of 0.67). So, for a vessel of length 200 ft:

    • Length to the power of 0.67 = 200^0.67 = 34.809;
    • Plus 1 = 35.809;
    • Times 1.2 = 42.97.

    The minimum stable beam (width across the widest part of the vessel at sea level) is roughly 43 feet.

    For comparison purposes, the Santa Maria was 80′ in overall length and the Nina about 50′; Captain’s Cook’s famous ship, the Endeavour, had an overall length of 105 feet. The Bounty was 180′ though, so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. In fact, looking over this list, which I have only just discovered (and which would have saved a lot of trouble), 180 feet of usable deck seems quite reasonable. I don’t know what that would make the overall length, but 200′ would not be a problem. 333′ is a whole different story; while there have been ten ships (according to the list) that are over 300′ long, that makes them rare enough to be noteworthy, even legendary – and this ship isn’t supposed to be that.

    The alternatives? Let the ship be unstable (too long for it’s width) or make the ship wider without making our ‘usable area’ any bigger. It doesn’t have to be by much – just be enough to make either 150 or 180′ reasonable. The minimum widths for ships of these overall lengths are (according to the formula I found) 39.65 and 40.1236′; allowing for the actual length to be greater than the “usable deck” of 150′, a width of 40′ works and is utterly plausible – but the deck remains only 30′ across, because the sides bulge outward – which means we’ll have more space for the guest rooms below deck, which is fine.

    So, 150′ x 30′ of usable deck space is completely reasonable, but the 180′ length strains credibility, and doubling the width to get around the problem just won’t work. I’m sticking with the 10.5 squares size, so that’s what gets written into the space on the worksheet as Size 2.

• Commons Adjustments: Since we adjusted the “effective footprint” there’s now a lot of work we don’t need to do.
  • Old Commons Size: Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • – Table Area: Copy the space occupied by the tables into this row of the worksheet. Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • Adjusted Commons Size: Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • / Size 1: Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • Adjusted Relative Size: Copy the commons room size from the third row of the worksheet into this space.

Worksheet 16, Column 2:
The second column is used to show the actual area of each of the spaces in whatever units you’re using – in our case, 5′ squares.

• Bar: 1.5 (the relative size of the bar) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 15.75.
• Common Room: This is the Adjusted Commons Size from the third-last row of column 1, if there is a number there – in this case, there isn’t, so this is the result of multiplying 3.5 (the common room size shown to the left of the space) by 10.5 (Size 2), for a result of 36.75.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: 1.25 (the total relative sizes of storerooms) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 13.125. At the same time, I calculate the actual sizes for the specific spaces on my scratch paper:
  • Small Pantry Space: 0.5 x 10.5 = 5.25;
  • Linen Cupboard: 0.75 x 10.5 = 7.875.
  • Double-check that these add up to what is shown on the main worksheet: 5.25 + 7.875 = 13.125. This is correct.
• Ground Floor Family Residence: 1.5 (relative size of the Family accommodations located on the ground floor) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 15.75.
• Cooking Facilities: 0.75 (relative size of the cooking facilities located on the ground floor) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 7.875.
• Kitchen space: 0.75 (relative size of the kitchen facilities located on the ground floor) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 7.875.
• Recreation Spaces: 0.5 (relative size of the Recreation spaces on the ground floor) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 5.25.
• Stairwell Up?: “2.25” (total relative size of stairwells up) x 10.5 (size 2) = 23.625. “The Spotted Parrot” has three masts (0.5) and three rope ladders that are purely decorative (0.25), as determined earlier. As usual, this part of the generator overestimates the space needed for such; 1 square is enough for each of the rope ladders, and 4 squares (2×2) is enough for each mast – using only 15 of these 23.625 spaces, and leaving 8.625 to be used to “top-up” other areas that have an odd size.
• Stairwell Down?: 1.75 (total relative size of stairwells down) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 18.375. “The Spotted Parrot” has two stairwells and a cargo hold hatch. Once again, the reality is slightly smaller in most of these cases:
  • One stairwell 2 wide x 2 deep to the guest quarters, total of 4 spaces;
  • Another staircase 2 wide x 4 deep, which will continue on the next level down, descending to the hold spaces below the guest quarters, total 8 spaces;
  • Cargo hatch 3 wide x 4 long, total 12 spaces;
  • that’s 24 spaces used from 18.375 capacity, so that uses up 5.625 of the savings from “stairs up”, leaving just 3 spaces unused.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: 0 (total relative size of ground floor “guest” accommodations) x 10.5 (Size 2) = 0, obviously.

Worksheet 16, Columns 3 and 4:
Column 3 permits adjustments to the areas to make them more convenient. Column 4 records the revised total of the areas of each space.

To begin with, I note that I have a grand total of 3 spaces available for adjustments – not really a significant amount. That means that if I use any more adjustment than this, I will need to take it from somewhere else.

The two largest areas on the “ground floor” of the Spotted Parrot are the tables area (which I increased to 40 spaces from the calculated 38.4) and the Commons area at 36.75 spaces. The first can’t be reduced beyond that 38.4 without reducing the number of tables – always an option – which leaves the Commons as the “area most likely to shrink”.

It’s also worth noting that I have decided that the deck is 30 feet across (6 spaces) – so multiples and simple fractions of 6 are to be preferred.

• Bar: 15.75 spaces – although it’s already small, I’m going to apply an adjustment of -0.75, and assume that the bar area is half the width of the deck and five spaces long. Write -0.75 into the space in column 3 and 15 into the space in column 4. As usual, I will keep a tally of the adjustments as I go for convenience, which now stands at -0.75.
• Common Room: 36.75 spaces, so it could do with some adjustment. But because this is the main area to be sacrificed, I’m actually going to leave it unchanged and come back to it later.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: 13.125, consisting of a small pantry (5.25 spaces) and a linen cupboard (7.875 spaces). I’m going to chop the pantry down to 5 spaces and boost the linen cupboard to 10. That’s a net adjustment of +1.875 spaces, bringing the tally to +1.175.
• Ground Floor Family Residence: 15.75. My first thought was to cut this down to 15, but then I remembered to check the size of the family living in this space – the Barman, alone. The other family members are living in some of the “guest” accommodations. So I’m fine to go with my first instinct. However, these were almost certainly the Captain’s Cabin – so why not go the other way, and make them 18 spaces in size? That’s an adjustment of +2.25, and brings the ongoing tally to +3.395.
• Cooking Facilities: 7.875 is tiny, as already noted. If I assume that some of the stair space makes this an irregular room, and not a neat half-deck in width, then 8 spaces would work. That’s an adjustment of +0.125, and brings the tally up to +3.52.
• Kitchen space: This is starting with an area the same as that occupied by the cooking facilities, 7.875; but (even though these are already tiny) I think that it’s time to repay a little of the space that I’ve been giving away, so I’m going to drop this to six. I would expect the ovens in the galley to be bigger than the rest of the kitchen, anyway. So that’s an adjustment of -1.875, and lowers the tally to +1.645.
• Recreation Spaces: 5.25 squares – a 3×2 area makes more sense, so I’m going to apply an adjustment of +0.75 to bring the total area up to 6 squares. The tally is +2.395.
• Stairwell Up?: There was an adjustment of -8.625 applied to these areas, most of which was then used for stairs down – we’ll get to that in a moment. For now, it’s enough to note -8.625 adjustment and a revised tally of -6.23.
• Stairwell Down?: This had an adjustment of +5.625, leaving the tally as exactly -3. Amazing how well that worked out, I assure readers that I wasn’t planning it that way at all, just doing what seemed most appropriate at the time!
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: 0, no adjustment required.
• Table Area: Still at 40 spaces, which is just barely plausible, given the size of the kitchen (or in this case, it should probably be called the galley). I could make it 43 spaces, but I don’t see the point of doing so.
• Common Room: Still at 36.75. Adding +3 would make it 39.75, but that’s not much more useful. Instead, I’m going to make an adjustment of -0.75 to get a neat 36 spaces, bringing the tally to -3.75. What to do with that 3.75 extra spaces? Ah, I have it:
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: Currently showing an adjustment of +1.875, for a total of 15 spaces. But I’m going to add a new element to this: a pair of covered longboats, each 3 or 4 spaces in size – but with only 3.75 spaces between them of deck space used. So that increases the adjustment to +5.625 spaces, and the total becomes 18.75 spaces. That leaves a tally of exactly zero.
• Adjusted Footprint: So, there is no further adjustment needed to the “footprint” of The Spotted Parrot, which remains at 140 spaces.

The Robber’s End continued:

“The Robber’s End” has a quite distinct and colorful character and ambiance; while the name is suggestive of several different interpretations, the meaning that has emerged from the tavern generator is far more metaphoric.

What we know so far:
“The Robber’s End” is a Small Tavern located in the poorer part of town. The walls of the tavern are plastered, surfaced, or rendered brick, and it might even be a remodeled square tower from ages past.
    It contains (with relative sizes) a Bar (1), a small-medium Common Room (3.5), a ground-floor Storeroom (0.75), and Kitchens consisting of a small pit/rack (0.5) and a small Food Prep Area (0.25). The first floor contains guest quarters and a Family Dwelling (1). The second and third floors are completely given over to guest accommodations. Tavern Size Modifier is 0, Commons Size Modifier is 1.
    The common room is decorated with tapestries of battle scenes. Behind the bar, a number of weapons that are bent, broken, and mangled have been mounted, clearly souvenirs of some past military campaign or battlefield booty.
    Within the common room are 12 small tables that seat 4 each, taking up 31.2 five-foot sqr spaces. The tables are square and made of wood. The kitchen produces food of Average Quality, normally bread with a soup, stew, or broth containing a little meat 0-3 (d4-1) days old. The tavern charges 2 sp per serving.
    The common room also contains a tiny (0.5) stage which provides a venue for musical performances, probably second-rate bards and locals who entertain for tips.

The bar serves poor quality versions of the three most popular local beverages. In a more affluent region, this would probably be unacceptable, but in this part of town, anything better would be unlikely.
    The barman’s skills are given by d3. He is barely competent to run a tavern, and counts as just 1 worker. Clearly he must bring something else to the role or the tavern would have gone under a long time ago.
    That something is his character; he is friendly but a penny-pincher, fearlessly brave, and a pious man without being fanatical. He is viewed as a respectable man, and coldly logical. Not the criminal type, in other words, or the type who would turn a blind eye to criminal activities that he came across. However, he does sound like the sort of person who would start a legitimate business in an area known to be rife with crime, insist on his establishment being neutral territory, and manage to make a go of things, eventually becoming a local fixture and trusted arbiter of neighborhood disputes.
    The focus on battle-related decorations, coupled with the barman’s profile, suggests that he served with distinction in the military before creating his establishment, and is probably still someone not to be messed with. The profile suggests the name of the Tavern be interpreted as being the place where ‘robbers cease to be robbers’. Perhaps many of the staff are reformed criminals, giving it a local nickname of the “second chance”.

The Barman resides with his wife and two children, aged 5 and 7, respectively. There are no other relatives in residence. They count as 1 and 1/4 staff, but the tavern requires another 6 staff to operate properly.
    There are not many guest-rooms on each level; it is a narrow, tall building with four floors, probably sandwiched between a couple of other buildings, almost a tower in design. Accommodations are small (barely big enough for a couple), of common quality, and under-priced (3 sp/night or 4 cp/hr). Relative room size is 0.85, which is almost “tiny”, but is appropriate given the size of the inn.
    Variations on the tavern’s backstory are many; if the region was invaded years earlier, perhaps the barman was already located here, and fought off the invaders rather than seeing his establishment razed, or perhaps it was one of his ancestors who did so, making this a long-established local fixture, or perhaps he was still serving in the military and made a stand here against the invaders, later retiring here (and possibly marrying into ownership of the tavern).

Resuming the example: Worksheet 16, Column 1:

• Bar: Write 1, the relative size of the bar, in the first space.
• Common Room: Write 3.5, the relative size of the Commons, in the second space.
• Ground-Floor Storeroom: Write the relative size of any Ground-floor storerooms in the third space, or zero if there aren’t any.
  • tiny pantry (0.25);
  • largish linen closet (0.75);
  • ground-floor storeroom (0.75);
  • total 1.75.
• Ground Floor Family Residence: Write 1, the relative size of the Family accommodations if they are located on the ground floor, or zero if they are not, in the fourth space. In this case, I have already determined that the family live on the first floor, so this is a zero.
• :Cooking Facilities Write 0.5, the relative size of the Cooking Facilities, in the sixth space.
• Kitchen space: Write 0.25, the relative size of the Food prep area into the seventh space.
• Recreation Spaces: Write 0.5, the relative size of the Recreation space, assuming they are all on the ground floor, in the eighth space. In this case, they are.
• Stairwell Up?: Count up the number of stairwells going up that you require (at least 1 if the inn/tavern has multiple stories). These can be sized 0.25 each (ladders), 0.5 each (tiny), 0.75 each (small), 1 each (normal), 1.25 each (large), or 2 each (grand staircases), or even a variety of sizes if you prefer. On your scratch paper, note your decisions and total the space devoted to stairwells up from the ground floor; write this total in the ninth space on the worksheet. For “The Robbers End,” one small (and rickety) staircase is enough (0.75).
• Stairwell Down?: There’s no official subterranean storage, but that doesn’t mean I can’t include one if I want to – perhaps one that used to be used for smuggling through the sewers, and that the Barman either doesn’t know about or doesn’t trust. A tiny stairwell (0.5) would be sufficient. This gets written into the tenth space on the worksheet.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: Are there any guest rooms on the ground floor? In this case, no, so this recorded as a zero.
• Total 1: Add all these up and write the total on the twelfth line: 1 + 3.5 + 1.75 + 0 + 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.5 + 0.75 + 0.5 + 0 = 8.75, which I write in the appropriate space on the worksheet.
• Ground Floor Footprint: How narrow is “narrow”? Just how small is “The Robber’s End”? My apartment is 15′ across in some parts and 20′ in others; it’s essentially a corridor with several rooms hanging off it, topologically (part of the corridor is a stair landing, and part of it is a small bedroom, and two of the three parts are on the opposite side to the other, but the principle holds). It’s also five or six times longer than it measures across. I’m going to take my lead from the area set aside for tables, whether or not that’s part of the commons room; 31.2 spaces. Ignoring the “.2”, how many configurations would give 31 spaces? Only one, because 31 is a prime number. But if there is a single space devoted to something else excluded, that lets us work with 32 – a far more flexible number. 32 x 1; 16 x 2; or 8 x 4, all would be valid choices. Since this area has to fit beside a path or corridor connecting other areas, I really want it to be 3 spaces wide. If there were two spaces used for something else, that would let us work with a total of 33 spaces, or 11 x 3 – perfect! So the width is going to be (effectively) 15′, and the length 75′ per level, maybe more. That’s a total footprint of 1125 sqr feet or 45 spaces in size – not counting the corridor down one side that connects all the different spaces. Our total areas is roughly 9, with which a 45-, 54, 63, or 72-space size would also be convenient – so I’ll start with 45 and see how things go!
• Size 1: Divide the footprint (45) by the number of spaces (8.75) to get 5.14. As usual, this is a slightly inconvenient number – I can either round it down (making the building smaller) or round it up (making it larger). Frankly, I don’t think anything smaller would be viable, so we’ll set size 1 to six.
• Common Room Relative Size: Next, we need the common room relative size of 3.5 from higher up the table. The observant may notice that this is exactly the same relative size as the common room of the “Spotted Parrot”, but the final area dimensions will be quite different because Size 1 is half what it was for that establishment.
• Common Room x Size 1: Multiply the common room size by Size 1: 3.5 x 6 = 21.
• x 60% = table area threshold: 21 x 60% is 60 x 0.21 = 6 x 2.1 = 12.6.
• Table Area: This is 31.2, as mentioned a moment ago. And that won’t fit into the 12.6 space reserve of the Robber’s End any more than the 38-odd would fit into the 25-point-something space of the Spotted Parrot would. Once again, the “effective footprint” will need to be recalculated. Note that this is most frequently the case – and that I was expecting this result (hence my promise to go into the trick of reducing the footprint by just what you need to, in this example).
• Footprint Adjustments: So the table area won’t fit into 60% of the commons, so the commons has to change size in order to accommodate them. But space in this venue is very limited, so we want the amount of loss to be as small as possible.
  • Footprint adjustment: Based on the numbers we have so far, you could simply reduce the footprint by the difference between the area we need and the area we have (12.6-31.2=18.6) spaces – but by changing the footprint by ANY amount, we also change that space available (the 12.6), so that reduction won’t be correct.
    There are three ways of getting around this:
    • (1) assume that the result will be near-enough, and if the tables overlap into the commons area by slightly more than that 60%, so be it;
    • (2) correct the reduction amount by estimating how much it will change – the reduction actually needed (R2) is going to be approximately = F / R x (F – R);
    • (3) adjust using the incorrect reduction, or part thereof, then determine a new shortfall – and increase the size of the building by that amount, effectively giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

    Personally, I don’t trust solution one, and I find it too easy to get confused and make a mess of things using solution 3, and that leaves only the adjustment correction calculation. For “The Robber’s End” that is: 45 x 18.6 / (45 – 18.6) = 837 / 26.4 = 31.7045 and a few more decimal places.

    Now, 45 – 31.7 won’t leave very much room for anything BUT the table area. The commons has a relative size of 3.5 and there’s a total relative size of 8.75, and 3.5 is 40% of that total – but 31.7 is way more than 40% of 45, and that 31.7 is only PART of the commons area. What that means is that our initial length of 45 is nowhere near long enough to have a table space of this magnitude taken out of it. Which is why the preferred option is always the one given in the example of “The Spotted Parrot”, plus revision of the footprint if necessary.

    Note that I expected this to be the outcome; our building size should be AT LEAST such that 31.7 is only 40% of the total. 40% times two-and-a-half is 100%, so if 31.7 is to be our 40% (or less) then the building has to be at least 2.5 x 31.7 = 79.25 spaces. There is a limited amount of margin in this estimate, because there can still be some overlap between the commons room and the table space; so what this tells me is that instead of 45 spaces, we should immediately go toward the outer limit of the proposals I listed under “Building Footprint” and make the place 72 spaces in size. Still only (effectively) 3 spaces wide, that makes it about 24 five-foot squares long, an 8:1 ratio (not counting the connecting corridor).

    So, let’s correct the footprint and start again…

• Ground Floor Footprint: Our building is 24 five-foot squares long, or 120′ in length. It’s 20′ wide, but 5′ of that is used for a corridor that connects everything else. So the total footprint is 72 spaces, effectively.
• Size 1: Divide the footprint (72) by the number of spaces (8.75) to get 8.228 and change. For convenience, I’ll use 8.5.
• Common Room Relative Size: Common room relative size is still 3.5.
• Common Room x Size 1: Multiply the common room size by Size 1: 3.5 x 8.5 = 29.75.
• x 60% = table area threshold: 29.75 x 60% = 17.85.
• Table Area: 31.2.
• Footprint Adjustments: That table area still won’t fit into 17.85; the goal was never to make the building large enough that we didn’t have to adjust the effective footprint, just to make it large enough for it to be practical to do so.
  • Footprint adjustment: Having made the building big enough to do so, we can now use the simpler and more straightforward option of reducing the effective footprint by the additional space required; option one will be now close enough for our purposes. 17.85-31.2 = -13.35.
  • Adjusted Footprint: Write the revised total here by subtracting the amount to be deducted from the original size – in this case, the calculation is 72 – 13.35 = 58.65.
  • Revised Footprint/Total 1 = Size 2: 58.65 divided by the 8.75 from Total 1 gives 6.7 squares per building unit.

• Commons Adjustments: Since we adjusted the “effective footprint” there’s now a lot of work we don’t need to do.
  • Old Commons Size: Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • – Table Area: Copy the space occupied by the tables into this row of the worksheet. Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • Adjusted Commons Size: Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • / Size 1: Simply put a dash in this space to remind you that you have actually processed this step.
  • Adjusted Relative Size: Copy the commons room size from the third row of the worksheet into this space.

Worksheet 16, Column 2:
Convert the relative size of the various areas into actual 5 foot squares:

• Bar: 1 (the relative size of the bar) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 6.7.
• Common Room: This is the Adjusted Commons Size from the third-last row of column 1, if there is a number there – in this case, there isn’t, so this is the result of multiplying 3.5 (the common room size shown to the left of the space) by 6.7 (Size 2), for a result of 23.45 and deducting the overlap of 17.85 to get 5.6.
• Ground-Floor Storerooms: 1.75 (the total relative sizes of storerooms) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 11.725. At the same time, I calculate the actual sizes for the specific spaces on my scratch paper:
  • Small Pantry Space: 0.25 x 6.7 = 1.675;
  • Linen Cupboard: 0.75 x 6.7 = 5.025.
  • Food Stores: 0.75 x 6.7 = 5.025.
  • Double-check that these add up to what is shown on the main worksheet: 5.025 + 5.025 + 1.675 = 11.725, confirmed.
• Ground Floor Family Residence: 0 (relative size of the Family accommodations located on the ground floor) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 0.
• Cooking Facilities: 0.5 (relative size of the cooking facilities located on the ground floor) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 3.35.
• Kitchen space: 0.25 (relative size of the kitchen facilities located on the ground floor) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 1.675.
• Recreation Spaces: 0.5 (relative size of the Recreation spaces on the ground floor) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 3.35.
• Stairwell Up?: 0.75 (total relative size of stairwells up) x 6.7 (size 2) = 5.025. This is one small and rickety staircase, and probably quite steep as well – one space wide by 2 deep, landing 1 space wide by two across, and one space wide by 2 up – 6 spaces in all, but that’s the sort of narrow, steep, staircase that we’re talking about.
• Stairwell Down?: 0.5 (total relative size of stairwells down) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 3.35. The only sort of stairwell that would fit in such a small area is a spiral one (2 x 2).
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: 0 (total relative size of ground floor “guest” accommodations) x 6.7 (Size 2) = 0, obviously.

Worksheet 16, Columns 3 and 4:
Tweak the sizes of the individual areas for convenience. Given the basic layout determined earlier of a 3-space wide building with a long corridor connecting it, multiples of 4 are what we would prefer for each space. However, when we calculated the areas for each space, we didn’t include the corridor, something that made life a little easier at the time but that will complicate things now, because each room is supposed to “own” the corridor run alongside it. Fixing that as we go will require decisions as to the actual proportions of each space, whereas if I hadn’t taken that shortcut earlier, those could be whatever works for the area.

This was done deliberately; like “The Spotted Parrot”, The Robber’s End is a tiny place with a total footprint (excluding the spinal corridor) of 72 spaces, which translates to a total of 96 spaces with the corridor. That makes the corridor of 24 spaces by far the biggest single feature of the Inn, and the place where I can best recover space by making the corridor part of the space. Unlike the other examples, I didn’t recover any space from stairwells – just the opposite – so any savings have to come from elsewhere. The storerooms look a little large, so I can recover a little bit from there, and the number 2 target is the corridor.

• Bar: 6.7 spaces; adjustment of +9.3 for size, to get an area of 16 spaces, 4×4 squares, which means that the “corridor” is simply part of the open space in this area. The tally would normally be +9.3, but I’m going to front-load the tally with the “pre-savings” of the corridor: -24 +9.3 gives a tally of -14.7. This is useful to tell me how much space I have left to play with.
• Common Room: 5.6 spaces, which I’m going to increase by 0.4 to get a 3×2 area; then add in the “corridor”, again making it part of the room, using an additional 2 spaces (the sames as the “x2”). That makes the total adjustment of the commons room +2.4 and takes the tally to -12.3.
• Ground-Floor Storerooms: Currently 11.725 spaces, but I am quite happy to save a few here:
  • Small Pantry Space: 1.675, but I’m going to take this up to two spaces and place it inside the Kitchens (so no corridor required). Adjustment +0.325, tally -11.975.
  • Linen Cupboard: 0.75 x 6.7 = 5.025. I’m going to drop this by -1.025 to make it four spaces, including the corridor. Tally -13.
  • Food Stores: 0.75 x 6.7 = 5.025. I’m going to reduce this to 5 spaces and also locate them within the kitchen, so no corridor required. Adjustment -0.025, tally -13.025.
• Ground Floor Family Residence: 0, no adjustment required.
• Cooking Facilities: 3.35 spaces, initially. I’m going to increase this to 6 spaces and once again place these within the kitchen space, so no corridor required. Adjustment +.65, tally -10.375.
• Kitchen space: 1.675 spaces initially. The decision to place the food store, pantry, and cooking facilities into the kitchens means that this area is effectively 14.675 spaces. Adjusting that by +0.325 up to 15 squares would make the kitchen space a compact, tidy 5×3 area; so an additional 5 spaces is needed for the corridor. The total adjustment is +5.325, and the tally is -5.05.
• Recreation Spaces: 3.35 to start with; I’m going to drop that down by -0.35 to get a 3×1 space and add 1 more space for the corridor, so that’s a net adjustment of +0.65, and reduces the tally to -4.4 squares.
• Stairwell Up?: This started as 5.025 squares, but I adjusted it to a 6 space area in a 2×3 configuration. That means that I need to use two spaces for the corridor that leads to it, with the staircase at right angles to the corridor; so that’s a total adjustment of 2.925 squares. The tally is reduced to -1.475.
• Stairwell Down?: This was initially calculated as 3.35 squares, and then increased to a 2×2 spiral staircase. That requires an initial adjustment of +0.65, but it’s an awkward fit at the moment given our 1-wide-corridor and 3-wide-room configuration. What’s more, a basement storage area and a spiral staircase don’t really go all that well together. I had earlier floated the notion that the barman might not trust the security of the basement, having discovered it after buying the building, possibly in the process of turning it into a tavern; that could mean that it’s actually located within another room of the building. At the time, I had visions in the back of my mind of this being in the bar, and that was in the back of my mind when making the size adjustments earlier. If I follow through with that idea, having built the size up to 4 spaces, I can then save that 4 spaces completely, for a total adjustment exactly equal to the initial size of the space, -3.35 squares. This brings the tally to -4.825.
• Ground Floor Guest Accommodations: 0, no adjustment required.
• Table Area: Currently 31.2. I can’t pull my earlier trick of making the space part of the corridor (or vice-versa if you prefer), because it’s hard to walk through solid tables; that means that I need this to fit into a 3-wide space, and then to enlarge it to create the corridor. Nor is there any real capacity to reduce this area without reducing the number of tables, so that means an initial adjustment of +2.8 in order to make the tabled area 3×11. I then need an additional 11 spaces for the corridor that runs alongside it, giving a total adjustment of +13.8 and a total area occupied by the tables of 44 spaces. The tally comes to +8.975 squares, so I have actually made the Robber’s End a little over 224 square feet larger.
• Adjusted Footprint: The final footprint of the Inn was 58.65 squares, but adding in the additional 8.975 that I have spread around brings the total to 67.625. Or does it? Didn’t I start by saying it was 72 spaces without the corridor, and 96 with it? This is an easy mistake to make. In fact, it doesn’t; the mistake in interpretation stems from a combination of rounding errors, and the reduction of space by the table area in order to determine how big the other spaces were. If you add up what we actually have in the building now, in the order we calculated them, you get quite a different result:
  • Bar: 16 squares, including the (hidden?) stairwell down.
  • Common Room: 8 squares, subtotal of 24.
  • Ground-Floor Storerooms: Linen Cupboard: 4 squares, subtotal of 28.
  • Kitchen space: 20 squares, including Cooking Facilities, Pantry, and Food Stores. Subtotal of 48.
  • Recreation Spaces: 4 squares, subtotal of 32.
  • Stairwell Up?: 8 squares, subtotal of 40.
  • Table Area: 44 squares, grand total of 84 squares.

That result, 84 squares, is right in the middle of the 72-and-96 numbers that were initially discussed. The 72 doesn’t count, because it didn’t include corridors, while both the 84 and 96 do. In effect, I can either make the building shorter (keeping the 84 length), or I can increase the size of any of the areas (4 squares at a time), or some compromise between the two. Where did those 12 squares come from?

They were actually corridor that was allocated to the spiral staircase, the Cooking Facilities, the Pantry, and the Food Stores. By putting them into other spaces within the Inn Layout, those corridor allocations went unused.

Getting back to the decision to be made, I decide to use all 12: I’m going to increase the common room by 4 squares, the recreation area by 4 squares, and I’m going to insert a corridor across the building somewhere in the middle, which is obviously going to be another 4 squares. This means that somewhere along it’s length, you come to a doorway beside a blank wall, the perfect place for some additional decoration. Bar, Stairs, Recreation Space, Common Room and Tabled Area should all be on the entrance side of that horizontal corridor, with the kitchen space and linen cupboard “hidden” from view. That means that if you were to walk the length of the Robber’s End, you walk down a long corridor, then cross to the other side of the building horizontally, before resuming your walk down a corridor.

This actually mimics the layout of my apartment in part, which has a stairwell off one side to a landing containing the front entrance, and an internal corridor on the opposite side of the building, accessible by crossing the living room. Visitors at the front door can’t see down the corridor as a result, sheltering the kitchen and bedrooms from view. Which is a wonderful example of symmetry, since the initial layout concept derived from the same source :)

So the final “footprint” is 96 squares, and the building is 4 squares wide by 24 long, and four stories tall.

Castles In The Air: Prologue to part 5:

This was supposed to be the end of the story. I would present the worksheets and wrap up the examples, and leave only an article discussing the behind-the-scenes chicanery used to construct the tables for some later date. Well, the size of those worksheets combined with the size of the examples needed to show how they work have put paid to that idea – not once, but thrice. This part of the series has finalized the Ground Floor; Part 5 will detail the worksheets and tables that define the first residential level of an Inn (a tavern doesn’t have any, strictly speaking). Instead of one big worksheet, the residential levels take the form of many smaller, and (in most cases) simpler worksheets. But there was no room in the that next part for the continuing examples, or for the worksheets that define any other residential levels – so all of that will appear in Part 6…

This month’s blog carnival is being hosted by Johnn over at Roleplaying Tips. The subject is Curses….

Curses are pretty weak and trivial things in D&D/Pathfinder, let’s be honest. This is especially the case in light of the spell level of Bestow Curse and Remove Curse – I mean Cleric 3, Sorcerer/Wizard 4, just for that?

In literature and folk-tale, anyone could bestow a curse, if their righteous anger was strong enough – say, at the point of being murdered. It became far more uncertain if lesser offenses were committed. Like simply reading the wrong book, or violating sanctified ground.

What Empowers A Curse?

I got to wondering if the reason the curses bestowed by the spell were so wimpy was because the cleric or mage was empowering the spell with his own emotion, and if bigger curses, or harder-to-remove curses, could not be leveraged by tapping into some other power source?

Enhancing Curses

There are other ways of enhancing a curse that bear consideration, either independently or in conjunction with this proposal.

Relative Caster Levels

Of course, even without going that far, curses can be made far more dangerous – and restored to something more akin to their original intent – by the simple expedient of specifying that the caster level needed to remove a curse is always greater than the caster level of whoever inflicted the curse. A curse from a high-level caster thus becomes a serious handicap, one that will be difficult and/or expensive to lift.

Options

Or perhaps its a caster-level vs caster level check (ie each “side” rolls d20 and adds their caster level). If the character seeking to lift the curse gets a total higher than the other side, he succeeds, if not, he fails. In practice, the GM would make such a roll when the curse was inflicted to set a DC for the removal of the curse using the appropriate spell.

You could also contemplate adding a +1 to the difficulty of doing so for each time that a failed attempt is made, meaning that you can’t afford to mess around, you need the services of the most experienced spellcaster that you can find.

Further tweaks might distinguish between clerical and arcane curses, with only a character of the same class able to permanently lift a curse.

Temporary Lifting, not Removal

If that seems like it might be going a little too far, you might amend “Remove Curse” so that if the caster is of insufficient caster levels to permanently remove the curse, he can at least lift it for a while – say, a day for every 3 caster levels that he does have, or maybe one for every five.

Further tweaks are possible in the search for the right balance between inconvenience and inconsequential. It might be that the difference between caster level required to remove a curse and that of the person lifting the curse is the number of days that the character has to endure the curse before it can be even temporarily lifted – a clock that would restart each time the curse returned.

Simpler yet might be the statement that each time a curse is temporarily lifted, the number of days that it is lifted for decreases by one.

Curses from Deities: A Curse In The Name Of…

The notion that caster level makes a curse harder to remove brings into force a number of the traditional trappings of curses. First, a curse from a deity – any deity – becomes a lot more potent, because most of them have very high caster levels in virtually any game system. So much so that it might well require the intervention of another deity, or somehow persuading the cursing authority to relent, before one could be lifted. Of lesser authority (by an amount to be determined by the GM) would be a curse in the name of the deity – a priestly invocation might be 75% of the deities caster level if the deity approved the curse and was willing to enforce it, a pious follower’s curse might be at half the deity’s caster level (same caveat), a non-follower might be at 1/4 power.

The deity’s interests, portfolio, and personality are rendered into palpable forces within the campaign without the deity themselves ever actually turning up. In fact, if you gathered enough tales of people being cursed in the name of the deity, you could make a reasonable beginning at determining those attributes of the deity! The need to have the deity’s approval for the curse also manifests an inherent moralizing context to the curse, one that may offer a means by which the curse may be automatically lifted – “I curse you to blah until you humbug!” where “humbug” is some form of reparation or moral lesson that must be learned and demonstrated.

The Spontaneous Curse

Some horror stories visit people with curses with no-one actually bestowing the curse. You can assume that some deity was so affronted by whatever the subject did to deserve the curse that they acted without mortal intervention, or that someone, somewhere, bestowed a general curse (“A pox upon all liars and cheats”) that just happened to land on this particular target – that’s up to the GM. If a direct action by a deity is the in-game mechanism, a further decision is the degree to which the caster level is attenuated by the circumstances; I could make any number of decisions, from “not at all” to “almost completely”.

This is actually a fairly important decision, because it will reflect and, in part, define, the relationship between deities and their priests. It can actually represent an answer to the question of why they need priests or other mortal agents at all. This is also the sort of variable that I would probably change from campaign to campaign, depending on that conceptual relationship.

Of course, there is always the possibility of even more complex and meaningful cosmic relationships being fundamental to the whole question of Curses…

The Demonic Cool

Devils have this whole plotting/scheming thing to give them cool, and Demons have nothing but hedonism and mischief-making in comparison. Why not make most (ordinary) Curses demoniacally empowered?

This concept has a profound effect on the cosmology and symbology of a campaign world. Demons exist, under this concept, to do the dirty work of the Gods. They do this because they take pleasure in the act itself, not because of any cosmic ideology or theological respect. They are transformed into a species that is, in their own way, every bit as mortal as humans. They might even think that their acts are their own idea; perhaps a curse by a God merely opens a “channel” through which a Demon can act, and the randomness of curses becomes an expression of their chaotic nature.

It might be, on the other hand, that they do recognize the situation, and resent it. The more powerful the Demon, the more they have managed to break free of the will of the Gods, freeing them to act as they see fit. This would give a cosmological justification for the antipathy between Gods and Demons beyond mere alignment differences.

It would also be the God’s dirty little secret, from the point of view of any mortal who learned the truth. It gives deities a stick to go with the carrot, a set of thugs to act as their enforcers, permitting them to keep their hands seemingly squeaky-clean, lapping up the adoration of the masses.

Making Demons just a little more sympathetic, and giving Gods just a little tinge of mud on their boots, makes both types of “creature” far more rounded, and gives a lot more room to explore them as personalities when they appear within a campaign, either directly or by proxy.

There’s still more that can be done. Perhaps the Demons were actually created to be tools of the Devils, and the Gods stole them out from under the Devils’ noses, giving them a modicum of independence – so long as they did what the Gods wanted, every now and then. This would take resentment of both by the Demons to new heights; all they want to be do is to be left alone to spread anarchy and chaos anywhere and everywhere that they can, but the bindings and exploitation that they have suffered at the hands of first one and then the other group of existential beings hold them in check. Still more angst, anger, resentment, and outrage!!

Such demons would be a lot more fun to roleplay, in my opinion!

The Metagame Counter

The reason curses are so weak in the D&D / Pathfinder rules canon is, I think, because the designers didn’t want the curse to become the central consideration of anyone suffering from one. Instead, it needed to be weak enough that you could continue adventuring with it – an inconvenience, nothing more. But they are so easily removed by PC clerics that they aren’t even that.

That’s a problem for the whole question – after all, if a curse is so weak, whatever powers them must also be fairly weak. In fact, it can be seen as undermining the whole proposal for beefing up both curses and power sources.

I don’t fully agree with such an assessment; as I pointed out, at the moment, they only serve their function if the targets (and the PCs) are relatively low level characters. At medium levels, they become trivial annoyances, and at high levels they are virtual irrelevancies. Rather than beefing up curses indiscriminately, perhaps what is needed has to be a little more selective.

A Curse Subsystem

Ignoring, for the moment, any questions of gameplay practicality, what is really needed is some controllable and manipulable “intensity” mechanic that makes some curses more powerful than others, so that at rising caster levels you can inflict something nastier than you could previously.

Such a system would be devilishly difficult to create, and would be highly subjective. A first draft would require the GM to contemplate each possible curse effect and assess it for relative power, then match that with a caster level.

A second draft would then need to build in variations in triggering condition (ie when the Curse makes a difference in gameplay) and in relieving condition (what has to be done to expiate the curse without it being lifted by a cleric).

A third draft would build in variations in difficulty of casting vs difficulty of lifting. That’s no less than six variables, resulting in a relatively complex subsystem within the game mechanics. Correction: Seven variables; I was forgetting the caster level or DC required to attempt to lift a curse without achieving expiation. Oh, wait: Spell Levels (because all this is a bit much to build into a single spell-and-counterspell combination). In fact, the more variations in spell that you have, the more granularity and control you have over the system, trading expansiveness for (relative) ease in construction.

This is not a set of game mechanics that I would like to try and write; complicated, a lot of work for a relatively thin end result, and of limited utility, even assuming practicality of function.

Curse Variations

Setting all that aside, let’s return the basic premise of this article – considering whether or not Curses can and should be more powerful at all.

Curses of greater power

This is not the first time I’ve looked at the subject of Curses; I greatly expanded the range and variety of curses for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and added a number of House Rules on the subject to that campaign’s DNA. Those House Rules, and the expanded list of possible curses, were previously published in May the camels of 1,000 fleas – wait, that’s not right: Improving Curses in 3.x.

The basic premise of that article was to make the Curse more powerful, and harder to lift, in order to justify the spell level.

But this is not the only variation that is possible.

Minimum Suffering

Why not amend the spell description to state that a Curse can only be lifted after it has been suffered for a number of days equal to the caster level? This restores what I consider to be the original intent and goes some way to justifying the relatively high Spell Level involved.

Restart The Clock

Another idea to add to that would be the possibility that this “clock” restarted if the character re-offended in the same way before the curse had run its course. This would mandate that the reason for the curse be made clear at the time of infliction, but that’s not a bad thing, surely? This would take some of the capriciousness out of the the process, and embody both cause and effect within the concept. The character would know that they were suffering from this effect because of a specific offense to someone, a specific misdeed.

The Downside Of Abuse

But it’s not too difficult to see how the idea of re-triggering could be abused. The inflicter of the Curse simply has to specify the offense that “re-triggers” the Curse (and justifies its being inflicted at all) as something trivial, some action that the target cannot help but re-offend by recommitting – like eating, or drinking, or not bathing every hour. What you get is something closer to a perpetual curse where the “clock” perpetually restarts and the Curse never expires.

Curse Rebound

This problem can be solved by having such ‘curse abuses’ redirect themselves to target the caster. This suits both the moralizing context of Deific curses and the capricious nature of Demonic curses, so it works with several of the other concepts offered in this article.

Curses & Punishment

If Curses are harder to lift, and embody greater variety, it even becomes possible that they would become a standard punishment for some offenses – a punishment with a built-in parole system, one that saves the state all the cost of incarcerating and maintaining a prisoner. You simply load the criminal down with a Curse of Effect commensurate with their crime, and send them on their way.

If Curses leave some sort of permanent stain on the soul – a perfectly valid conceptual construct – then it even becomes possible to identify recidivists with no need for extensive records being kept and consulted in each case.

So, What Empowers A Curse?

I curse all who read this article to think about these things, and whether or not they would add a new element to your games that is worth whatever hassle is involved at a metagame level! What empowers your curses?

Part one of this series used six tables to define the physical properties of a tavern (no guest accommodations) or inn (with guest accommodations), plus – because the modifiers needed were at hand – the meals provided by the kitchens.

Part two used another six tables to determine everything that directly contributed to the ambiance of the establishment, from the personality of the owner through to the decorations on the walls. In this final part of the generator, we’ll deal with the bartender’s family and process the worksheets that bring the whole tavern or inn together, ready for use.

Tavern Generator (cont)

We pick up the process right where we left off. Note that it is impossible to use most of these tables without having completed the earlier parts of the process.

Table 13: Family Size – Children in residence

Roll d% to determine the size of the barman’s family-in-residence. May give a modifier to Table 13a. Each entry also gives a Family Size Modifier representing the number of “staff” the family can provide (younger children are less than a whole worker). A pre-calculated distribution of ages is assumed.

d%	Number of children in residence	Modifier to co-owner’s table (13a), if any	Family Size Modifier
01-07	No Children	–	–
08-18	1 child, aged 5-6	+0	0.25
19-42	2 children ages 3-5 and 7-8	+0	0.25
43-62	3 children, ages 2-5, 5-6, and 8-9	+0	0.5
63-76	4 children, ages 1-4, 5-6, 6-7, and 9-10	+1	1
77-86	5 children, ages 1-4, 4-5, 5-6, 7-8, and 9-10	+1	1.25
87-93	6 children, ages 1-4, 5, 6, 7, 8-9, and 10-12	+2	2
94-98	7 children, ages 1-4, 5, 5, 6, 7-8, 9-10, and 11-14	+2	3.25
99-00	8 children, ages 1-4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9-11, 11-13, and 14-19	+3	3.5

Technical Notes: The number of children calculation is based on (2d6+d8)/(d4+1), but has been modified somewhat, notably to increase the chance of no children and remove the 9- & 10-children results. The model for the distribution of ages for the bartender’s children is (5d6+d8+1)/(d4+1). Try them when you need to generate family details, they work :)

 

Table 13a: Family Size: Co-Owners In Residence?

Roll d10 to determine the presence of co-owners who also work in the tavern. Some results require rolls on Tables 13b and 13c. Some entries also give a bonus to the Family Size Modifier.

d10 + Modifier from Table 13	Co-owner presence	Family Size Modifier for spouse, if any
1-4	Single Parent	+0
5-7	Couple	+1
8	Couple with Third Party/Parties (-1 guest quarters) – roll on tables 13b and 13c	+1
9+	Single Parent with Third Party/Parties (-1 guest quarters) – roll on tables 13b and 13c	+0

Table 13b: Family Size: Parental Presence

Roll d20 to determine the presence of parents or in-laws. Most entries also give a bonus to the Family Size Modifier.

d20	Presence of parents or in-laws	Family Size Modifier (if any) for parents or in-laws	Guest Quarters Adjustment
1-7	no parents, no parent-in-laws in residence	+0	-1 (50% if gender matches barman)*
8-10	father	+1	-1
11-13	mother	+1	-1
14-15	father & mother	+2	-1
16-17	father-in-law	+1	-1
18-19	mother-in-law	+1	-1
20	both father- and mother-in-law	+2	-1

* residence for unrelated partner. The “50%” indicates that half the time, the partner will share quarters with the barman to save money / make more profit. Note that this assumes that the Barman’s gender is known, and could be either male or female, even though no such determination has been made in the course of generating these results.

Table 13c: Family Size: Non-parental relatives in residence

Roll d% to determine the presence of relatives other than parents and in-laws.

If parents, in-laws, and other relatives are not present, any third party indicated by Table 13a is an unrelated business partner who also works in the Tavern. Most entries also give a bonus to the Family Size Modifier.

Add 1/4 of the Family Size Modifier to the Family Residence size from table 1 and make a note of the result – more people require slightly bigger accommodations.

d%	Additional relatives in residence	Family Size Modifier	Guest Quarters Adjustment
01-13 (13%)	None, reroll if this occurs on a “roll twice” check	+0	-0
14-27 (14%)	Brother	+1	-1 (70% 0, if gender matches barman)*
28-41 (14%)	Sister	+1	-1 (70% 0, if gender matches barman)*
42-45 (4%)	Stepfather	+1	-1 (25% 0, if gender matches barman)*
46-49 (4%)	Stepmother	+1	-1 (25% 0, if gender matches barman)*
50 (1%)	Stepfather and Stepmother or other exotic	+2	-1
51-53 (3%)	Stepbrother	+1	-1 (30% 0, if gender matches barman)*
54-56 (3%)	Stepsister	+1	-1 (30% 0, if gender matches barman)*
57-59 (3%)	Brother-in-law	+1	-1 (25% 0, if gender matches barman)*
60-62 (3%)	Sister-in-law	+1	-1 (25% 0, if gender matches barman)*
63-64 (2%)	Brother-in-law and Sister-in-law	+1	-1 (25% 0, if gender matches barman)*
65-70 (6%)	Cousin	+1	-1 (30% 0, if gender matches barman)*
71-72 (2%)	Uncle	+1	-1 (50% 0, if gender matches barman)*
73-74 (2%)	Aunt	+1	-1 (50% 0, if gender matches barman)*
75 (1%)	Uncle and Aunt	+2	-1
76-77 (2%)	Nephew	+1	-1 (60% 0, if gender matches barman)*
78-80 (2%)	Neice	+1	-1 (60% 0, if gender matches barman)*
81-83 (3%)	Grandfather	+1	-1 (80% 0, if gender matches barman)*
84-86 (3%)	Grandmother	+1	-1 (80% 0, if gender matches barman)*
87-88 (2%)	Grandfather and Grandmother	+2	-1
89-90 (2%)	Grandson	+1	-1 (75% 0, if gender matches barman)*
91-92 (2%)	Granddaughter	+1	-1 (75% 0, if gender matches barman)*
93-00 (8%)	Roll twice, re-rolling this result if it recurs	–	–

* indicates accommodations shared with the Barman. Note that this assumes that the Barman’s gender is known, and could be either male or female, even though no such determination has been made in the course of generating these results.

Table Notes:

• The table above reasonably accurately represents the social norms of the real world, shorn of any gender bias in the results, i.e. assuming that women are just as likely as men to become soldiers and get killed in battles, similar birthrates and survival rates, similar inheritance laws, etc. However, it is capable of near-infinite adjustment to reflect social practices within your campaign, and GMs are encouraged to make such adjustments. To facilitate this, the table indicates after each roll the percentage share allocated to that result.
• For example, it might be traditional for a second child to apprentice or understudy at a brother’s business as second-in-line to inherit that business should the brother’s first son die young. This would greatly increase the “nephew”, “niece”, “uncle”, and “aunt” presences, at the expense of reducing the likelihood of sibling co-owners.
• “Cousins” are possibly over-represented, but this is a staple of fantasy that recurs frequently.
• Some relationships were deemed sufficiently improbable that they are not explicitly described, such as “Grandparent-in-law”. Such relationships can be assumed to be encompassed within the most closely-related category, i.e. “Grandfather-in-law” could be included in “Grandfather”, or included in the only such relationship to be afforded a place in the table, “Stepfather and Stepmother or other exotic”.
• That relationship probably requires a little explanation, though it’s not completely inobvious when you think about it: Couple marry and have a child (our barman). One spouse dies, the other remarries. The surviving spouse then dies, and the surviving second spouse remarries. The result is that the child is related to both the married “parents” present only through past marriages, hence “Stepfather and Stepmother” are in residence.

Table 14: Employees & Entertainment

Roll 2d4, add both the Tavern Size Modifier and Commons Size Modifier to determine the number of staff required to maintain and operate the Tavern.

Subtract the Barman’s Staff Modifier from the result. Subtract the total Family Size to get the number of paid employees required. Note that it is up to the GM to determine how many staff the Tavern actually employs, taking into consideration the Barman’s personality.

The third line of the worksheet uses some of these numbers to calculate the number of rolls to be made on Table 15. Any entertainers are in addition to the staff numbers indicated. A “1/3” result means roll an additional time and decide based on the result whether or not it suits the “look and feel” of the tavern; a “2/3” result means doing this twice. There is a minimum result of 1.

Specific, step-by-step, instructions may be found in the examples – consult them if anything is unclear.

2d4 (a)	+ Tav Size Mod	+ Cmmns Size Mod	= Subtotal 1
	+	+	=
Subtot 1	– Barman	– Family Size	= Paid Employees Rqd
	–	–	=
Tav Size Mod	+ Cmmns Size Mod	= Subtotal 2	1/3 Of Subtotal 2 =
	+	=	/3=

Table 15: Entertainment by Tavern Size Modifier

Roll d% and cross-reference with the Tavern Size Modifier to determine the type of entertainment (if any) offered by the Tavern. GMs should override this result if they have something specific in mind, eg a high-stakes poker game in a back room. Each entry is accompanied by relative size for the space inside the tavern that is consumed by the entertainment. Multiple rolls may be required on this table, as determined in the previous step.

The entertainments on offer can reinforce or clarify the ambiance determinations, or can contradict and cloud that ambiance. It is vitally important that these results achieve the first and not the second; this may require a degree of censorship, an element of creative reinterpretation, or even an outright reject-and-reroll by the GM.

Table Notes:

• Some activities may be illegal in some societies. The GM should decide based on the barman’s personality whether to accept such results or roll again.
• Some activities may simply be unheard-of, socially taboo, or just culturally inappropriate. The GM should decide based on the barman’s personality whether to accept such results or roll again, with the latter the more frequent choice.
• Some activities may be euphemisms for less socially-acceptable pastimes, eg a “sparring ring” might actually be used for cock-fighting. Such substitutions/interpretations are for the GM to decide, but the lower the quality of the establishment and more disreputable the barman, the more likely they would be.
• Some activities may require materials that are much rarer or completely unavailable, eg Billiards, Pool, and Snooker requires a source of ivory.The referee is free to reroll any results that don’t make sense. It is also recommended that if there are any such results on the table, the GM should replace them with something else – whether that be pigeon-keeping, chess, falconry, displays of magic, or public meetings is up to him.
• The tables were derived by mapping the likelihood of that much space being devoted to such an activity in a tavern or inn of that size, and has produced some anomalies – for example, there are only two entries for “outside entertainment” – one for lawn bowls and one for a sports team’s changing rooms. If the GM wishes to increase the likelihood of such results because they are more culturally appropriate than shown, I recommend adding:
  • d10-1 plus tavern size mod to the d% roll, increasing the range of results depending on the size of the tavern, and extending the table accordingly up to a maximum possible result of 116, or
  • d20-1 plus tavern size mod to the d% roll, increasing the range of results depending on the size of the tavern, and extending the table accordingly up to a maximum possible result of 126.
• I have included space for eight additional entries in the table for this purpose. The effect will be a distortion in the likelihood of low-roll results, as shown by the probability graphs that follow the table.

d20 by Tavern Size Mod					Entertainment
Tav Size Mod 0	Tav Size Mod 1	Tav Size Mod 2	Tav Size Mod 4	Tav Size Mod 6
01-02	01-03	01-04	01-03	01	attached bowling green(s) (0)
03-09	04-08	05-09	04-07	02-03	backgammon (0.25)
10-13	09-12	10-14	08-12	04-05	bingo (0.25)
14-28	13-21	15-19	13-16	06-07	card games/gambling (0.5)
29-38	22-26	20-21	17	08	dartboard (one) (0.25)
39-53	27-35	22-26	18-21	09-10	dice games/gambling (0.5)
54-56	36-38	27-28	22	11	poetry recital (0.25)
57-65	39-46	29-32	23-24	12	small function room (0.5)
66-69	47-50	33-34	25	13	tiny stage, comedian/juggler/other performer (0.5)
70-78	51-58	35-39	26-30	14-15	tiny stage, live music (0.5)
79-80	59-60	40-41	31-32	16	billiards table (one) (0.75)
81-84	61-64	42-49	33-39	17-19	card games/gambling (1)
85-86	65-67	50-52	40-41	20-24	card games/gambling (1), small high-stakes area (0.25)
87	68-69	53	42	25	cooking/baking judging or market stall (0.75)
88-91	70-73	54-58	43-46	26-27	darts (multiple boards) (0.75)
92-93	74-76	59-64	47-50	28-29	dice games/gambling (0.75)
94-95	77-79	65-67	51	30-33	dice games/gambling (1.5), small high-stakes area (1)
96-97	80-81	68-69	52-53	34	pool table (one) (0.75)
98-99	82-83	70-71	54-55	35	snooker table (one) (0.75)
00	84-85	72-73	56-57	36	tiny stage & dance floor (1.25)
–	86-88	74-77	58-60	37-40	1 medium function room or 2 small function rooms (1.5)
–	89-90	78-80	61-65	41-43	attached sports field space includes change rooms (d6/4)
–	91-92	81-82	66	44	small stage, comedian/troupe (0.75)
–	93-95	83-86	67-70	45	small stage, live music (0.75)
–	96-97	87-89	71-74	46	small stage, pantomime production (0.75)
–	98-00	90-92	75-77	47-48	small stage, stripper/dancer & musician or other performance art (0.75)
–	–	93-94	78-79	48-52	1 large function room or 2 medium function rooms (2)
–	–	–	80	53-56	1 large function room or 2 medium function rooms (2.5)
–	–	95	81-82	57-60	duelling circle (2)
–	–	96	83-84	61-64	fencing circle (1.5)
–	–	97	85	65-68	medium stage, play or troupe of entertainers (1.25)
–	–	98	86-87	69-74	small stage & dance floor (2)
–	–	99	88-89	75-78	sparring/boxing ring (2.5)
–	–	00	90-91	79-82	wrestling ring (2.5)
–	–	–	92-94	83-88	billiards tables (2.25)
–	–	–	95-97	89-94	pool tables (2.25)
–	–	–	98-00	95-00	snooker tables (2.25)

Example: The Palomino and Fox (cont)

I knew that I wanted one multi-story establishment and one more typical two-level tavern. Turns out that this is the latter, though that question was up in the air for quite a while, until the randomly-generated ambiance resolved it. The tavern has come a long way in it’s concept from initial vague beginnings, and now has a definite character!

What we know so far:
The “Palomino and Fox” is a Medium-Large two-story rural tavern focused on hunting, especially fox-hunting; it hosts the local fox-hunting association, and has quite a respectable clientèle. It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (2), and a Large Common Room (5). Beneath the tavern is a Storage Cellar, and part of the first floor consists of the Family Dwelling (2). The walls of the tavern are rough-hewn stone.

Within the common room are 6 large tables that seat 20 each, occupying a total of 72 sqr m = 325 sqr ft = 13 x five-foot sqr spaces. The tables are L-shaped and made of wood.

The common room is decorated with stuffed/preserved animal heads. Behind the bar, several weapons are mounted, intact and ready for use. The bar serves very poor quality versions of the two most popular drinks, locally. There are no better alternatives available to patrons. People don’t come to the “Palomino and Fox” for the alcohol.

The Kitchens consist of Medium Stove, Large Ovens, Medium Grill (1.75) and a Medium-sized Food Prep area (2.5) relative to a business of this size [Total Kitchen Area 4.25]. The cuisine is Good Quality Food, a hearty meal with bread and meat/fish 0-1 (d3:0, 1/2, 1) day old, costing 7 sp.

Guest accommodations are medium,-sized, capable of accommodating 2-4 people, and of common quality. They are overpriced at 5.5 sp/night, or 3.5 gp/week. Relative room size 1.9.

The barman’s skills are given by d4+1, and he counts as 1 worker, so he’s nothing special as an inn-keep. He is tenderhearted, but hides it beneath a gruff, angry exterior. He is bold, fanatical about his religious beliefs, and tends to think with his emotions, not his head.

The barman has an ongoing conflict with a local Druidic order, who have used their powers to persuade all the foxes to go elsewhere. Rather than try to actually reach some settlement with the Druids, who have a philosophic objection to hunting for sport, the Barman has resorted to “cheating” to make sure that each hunt bags something they can brag about. If this deception is exposed, he will have even more trouble with the Druids, and hence is a little paranoid about strangers. Because of his cheating, the tavern has built up a reputation, publicly justifying the “overpriced” accommodations; in reality, the extra covers the cost of maintaining that reputation.

Tavern Size Modifier is 4, Commons Size Modifier is 3.

Resuming the example:
As elements of the ambiance fell into place last time, you can’t have helped but notice how most of our unanswered questions resolved themselves or otherwise melted away. All that remains is to dot the I’s and cross the T’s – starting with the question of who else lives, works, and co-owns the tavern? (I have to admit that my inclination is to staff it with a large family, but let’s see what the dice say…)

• Table 13: Roll 78: 5 children in residence, aged 1-4: 2, 4-5: 4, 5-6: 5, 7-8: 7, and 9-10: 10. There’s a +1 modifier to table 13a, and the family count as 1.25 staff (so far).
• Table 13a: 7 rolled +1 modifier from table 13 = 8: Family is a couple plus third parties residing in 1 of the guest quarters; roll on tables 13b and 13c. +1 family size modifier, so the family (not counting barman) represent 2.25 staff so far.
• Table 13b: Roll 17: Father-in-law present; +1 family size for a total of 3.25 staff, -1 guest quarters (as indicated previously).
• Table 13c: Roll 00: “Roll twice, rerolling this result if it recurs”.
• Table 13c, 2nd roll: Roll 10: “None, reroll if this occurs on a ‘roll twice'” (which it has).
• Table 13c, 3rd roll: Roll 61: Sister-in-law present, +1 family size to 4.25 staff, -1 guest quarters (bringing the total guest quarters occupied by extended family to -2). Note that the chance of shared accommodations does not apply because the barman has a primary family in residence.
• Table 13c, 4th roll: Roll 39: [Barman’s] Sister in residence, +1 family size to 5.25, and possibly -1 guest quarters. Normally, the chance of shared accommodations would not apply because the barman has a primary family in residence, but there is a possibility that the Sister and Sister-in-law share a room, so using the % chance of shared accommodations for that (70% chance, roll 66:= “yes”, so no additional loss of guest accommodations.
• “Table” 14, line 1:
  • 2d4, 4 rolled: write 4 in the first space of the worksheet.
  • + Tav Size Mod write 4, the Tavern Size Modifier, in the second space.
  • + Cmmns Size Mod write 3, the Commons Room Size Modifier, in the third space.
  • Subtotal 1 4+4+3=11, so write 11 in the space provided, and copy the total into the first space on the next line.
• “Table” 14, line 2:
  • – Barman write 1, the barman’s quality rating, in the second space of the worksheet.
  • – Family Size Mod write 5.25, the total Family Size determined above, in the third space.
  • Paid Employees Required 11-1=10; 10-5.25=4.75. Write 4.75 in the final space on this line, indicating that the tavern should employ 4 full-time and 1 part-time staff whenever it is open (which might in fact be 1 part-time worker (=0.5 full-time staff) and 1 casual worker (=0.25 full-time staff).
• “Table” 14, line 3:
  • Tav Size Mod write 4, the Tavern Size Modifier, in the first space.
  • + Cmmns Size Mod write 3, the Commons Room Size Modifier, in the third space.
  • Subtotal 2 4+3=7, so write 7 in the third space provided.
  • /3 = #Entertainments: 7 divided by 3 is 2 and 1/3, so write 2 1/3 in the final space, indicating that the tavern definitely has 2 entertainment features and may have a third.
• Table 15, roll #1 of 2 1/3: Roll 43 in the “Tavern Size Mod 4” column: darts (multiple boards) Relative size 0.75.
• Table 15, roll #2 of 2 1/3: Roll 51 in the “Tavern Size Mod 4” column: dice games (gambling) area (relative size 1.5), plus a small high-stakes area (relative size 1). Total relative spaces devoted to recreation so far = 3.25 (note this on some scratch paper).
• Table 15, roll #3 of 2 1/3: Roll 71 in the “Tavern Size Mod 4” column: small stage (0.75) with a pantomime production? I can see this working in a common inn or tavern, but it doesn’t fit the “hunting lodge” motif; disregarded. Final total of recreation space = 3.25.

With such a large family in residence – barman, wife, and father-in-law as the three co-owners, plus 5 children, and sisters to both the barman and his wife, for a total of ten people – this is definitely a family business. Several of the children are old enough to help out around the place and there are also plenty of adults to share the supervision of the younger children. I would suspect that several of the staff are also “strays” who have wandered in, down on their luck and looking to change their lives, who have been “adopted” by the barman and family as well.

All that starts to explain why the barman has felt the need to cheat. His is a story of stiff-necked pride leading him into a situation in which his sense of responsibility has forced a moral compromise – something that is clearly more palatable than admitting his error. The Palomino and Fox makes and excellent mini-adventure – the PCs can either discover and expose the barman, or can attempt to broker peace between the Druids and barman; and it can also serve as the springboard to something larger if there is more to the Druid’s motivations than meets the eye. It could easily be that the Druids tried to warn the local community of something but weren’t taken seriously – and so have taken matters into their own hands, efforts that the barman is unknowingly undermining.

It also seems likely that embarrassment over his hot-headedness and guilt over his “cheating” would make the barman more grumpy than usual. I’m picturing him as salt-of-the-earth but marred by pride and stubbornness, qualities that now have him in over his head.

Second example: The Spotted Parrot (cont)

The name is so suggestive of pirates that I wanted to play on that; this is an example of how to shape the results to fit a preconceived idea or requirement, essentially re-rolling until you get results that “fit” – not that I’ve had to do much of that, so far!

What is known so far:
The Spotted Parrot is a floating medium-sized tavern constructed in an unseaworthy vessel that has been “recommissioned”. It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (1.5), Small-Medium “Common Room” (3.5), Kitchens consisting of Small Stove & Ovens (0.75) and a Medium-sized Food Prep area (0.75) [Total Kitchen Area 1.5].

Meals are served on the deck, which functions as the “common room”, and have a definite seafood theme. There are 12 medium tables that seat 6 each of rectangular shape (2:1 proportions), made of stone; these occupy a total of 38.4 five-foot sqr spaces. The cuisine is of Good Quality and consists of bread and a small meal (soup, stew, or pie) with fish 0-1 (d3:0, 1/2, 1) day old, costing 6 sp per serve.

Accommodations are small staterooms below decks, (barely large enough for a couple), of good quality, but overpriced at 6 sp per night (relative room size 0.95). The family live in accommodations (1.5) also located in former “officer’s country” on the ship’s deck level, which is also where the kitchens are located. One of the Ship’s former Holds now function as cellar/storage area. For obvious reasons, these walls are of sawn timber.

The size of the kitchens makes it clear that these accommodations are quite limited in capacity; and, if anything, the number of people who can be seated at the tables (up to 60 at a time) is far in excess of what can be justified given the size of the kitchens, unless those tables are used for something more than meals. The suggestion is, therefore, that a lot of the tables are used for sitting and drinking, and not for the consumption of food.

The “common room” (deck) is decorated with leg irons, cutlasses, and other piratical/nautical memorabilia, while the space behind the bar is decorated with a large and quite good painting of a ship at sea in a storm.

The bar serves average quality versions of the two most popular local drinks and has 1 uncommon option of Good Quality available. Given the motif, the “two most popular” are probably rum and ale, and the third, uncommon option might be a wine or brandy.

The barman’s skills are given by d6+1, and he counts as 2 workers, so he is skilled at his profession. He is polite, greedy, cautious, impious, sensible or practical, and lawless, a felon, or an ex-felon. Sounds a lot like Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) from the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, maybe in retirement.

Tavern Size Modifier is 2, Commons Size Modifier is 1.

Resuming the example:
As I confessed in part 1, I had a fairly strong vision for this tavern from the very beginning, and have been consciously shaping the random results accordingly. The few unanswered questions that were part of that vision have largely been answered, leaving a very well-defined concept for the place.

• Table : Roll 04: There are no children in residence, and hence there’s no modifier to table 13a.
• Table 13a: 9 rolled, no modifier: “Single Parent” (no children present) with third party or parties in residence in one of the guest quarters; roll on tables 13b and 13c.
• Table 13b: Roll 15: Father and Mother present, +2 family size = 2, -1 guest quarters as indicated previously. Note that if the roll had indicated no parental presence, it might have signified a business partner, depending on the outcome from Table 13c.
• Table 13c: Roll 26: Brother in residence, +1 family size = 3, 70% chance brother shares quarters with the barman Roll 83 Brother has his own room, -1 guest quarters.
• “Table” 14, line 1:
  • 2d4, 6 rolled: write 6 in the first space of the worksheet.
  • + Tav Size Mod write 2, the Tavern Size Modifier, in the second space.
  • + Cmmns Size Mod write 1, the Commons Room Size Modifier, in the third space.
  • Subtotal 1 6+2+1=9, so write 9 in the space provided, and copy the total into the first space on the next line.
• “Table” 14, line 2:
  • – Barman write 2, the barman’s quality rating, in the second space of the worksheet.
  • – Family Size Mod write 3, the total Family Size determined above, in the third space.
  • Paid Employees Required 9-2=5; 5-3=2. Write 2 in the final space on this line, indicating that the tavern should employ 2 staff whenever it is open.
• “Table” 14, line 3:
  • Tav Size Mod write 2, the Tavern Size Modifier, in the first space.
  • + Cmmns Size Mod write 1, the Commons Room Size Modifier, in the third space.
  • Subtotal 2 2+1=3, so write 3 in the third space provided.
  • /3 = #Entertainments: 3 divided by 3 is 1, so write 1 in the final space, indicating that the tavern has only 1 entertainment feature. Note that this is also the minimum result permitted for this result.
• Table 15, roll #1 of 1: Roll 41 in the “Tavern Size Mod 2” column: a billiards room with a single billiards table (0.75). This doesn’t fit the motif, so roll again:
• Table 15, roll #2 of 1: Roll 19 in the “Tavern Size Mod 2” column: a small room for card games (and gambling), relative size 0.5. Dice games may have been more appropriate, but I can accept this result. Since this is the only entertainment space, 0.5 is also the total relative size devoted to such purposes.

If there was any institution that I expected to best suit a bachelor or small family, it’s The Spotted Parrot, but once again the dice have had a very different idea. As it is, the effective family outnumber the paid staff – which (in hindsight) makes sense; the uniqueness of the facility would demand a lot of expensive ongoing maintenance, and only the savings possible to a largely family-operated establishment would make that practical.

This, then, would not be a hugely-profitable business, but one that is run for passion, for the love of the sea, and that would be true of the clientèle as well.

At some points, during the evolution of this Tavern as a concept, I thought about mechanical means being employed to simulate the rolling of the deck on an open sea and the sound of the waves such as a weight running length-ways back and forth along the ship’s axis and another from side-to-side, and “paddles” hidden beneath the waterline to create surface waves as the ship gently “rocked”. Some graphical analysis (as shown below) looked promising but insufficient, and I ultimately decided that it was probably impractical; I mention it because it would not only be consistent with the findings above, other GMs might find it sufficiently plausible and appropriate to their game worlds to support suspension of disbelief.

Image generated using FooPlot, click the image to visit the site. Click HERE to open full-sized image.

Third Example: The Robber’s End (cont)

Since the “Palomino and Fox” isn’t the multi-story establishment, it follows that “The Robber’s End” is. This has turned out to be an excellent example of how a name can be suggestive of one thing (two possible things, actually) while meaning something completely different; the reality has been shaped by the random-generation process into a structure with a quite distinct and colorful ambiance.

What we know so far:
“The Robber’s End” is a Small Tavern located in the poorer part of town. The walls of the tavern are plastered, surfaced, or rendered brick, and it might even be a remodeled square tower from ages past.

It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (1), Small-Medium Common Room (3.5), Ground-floor storeroom (0.75), and Kitchens consisting of a Small Pit/Rack (0.5) and a Small Food Prep area (0.25) [Total Kitchen Area 0.75]. The first floor contains guest quarters and a Family Dwelling (1). The second and third floors are completely given over to guest accommodations.

The common room is decorated with tapestries of battle scenes. Behind the bar, a number of weapons that are bent, broken, and mangled have been mounted, clearly souvenirs of some past military campaign or battlefield booty.

The bar serves poor quality versions of the three most popular local beverages.

Within the common room are 12 small tables that seat 4 each, taking up 31.2 x five-foot sqr spaces. The tables are square and made of wood. The kitchen produces food of Average Quality, normally bread with a soup, stew, or broth containing a little meat 0-3 (d4-1) days old, and costs 2 sp per serving.

The barman’s skills are given by d3. He is barely competent to run a tavern, and counts as just 1 worker. Clearly he must bring something else to the role or the tavern would have gone under a long time ago. That something is his character; he is friendly but a penny-pincher, fearlessly brave, and a pious man without being fanatical. He is viewed as a respectable man, and coldly logical. Not the criminal type, in other words, or the type who would turn a blind eye to criminal activities that he came across. However, he does sound like the sort of person who would start a legitimate business in an area known to be rife with crime, insist on his establishment being neutral territory, and manage to make a go of things, eventually becoming a local fixture and trusted arbiter of neighborhood disputes.

The focus on battle-related decorations, coupled with the barman’s profile, suggests that he served with distinction in the military before creating his establishment, and is probably still someone not to be messed with. The profile suggests the name be interpreted as being the place where ‘robbers cease to be robbers’. Perhaps many of the staff are reformed criminals, giving it the local nickname of the “second chance”.

There are not many guest-rooms on each level; it is a narrow, tall building with four floors, probably sandwiched between a couple of other buildings, almost a tower in design. Accommodations are small (barely big enough for a couple), of common quality, and under-priced (3 sp/night or 4 cp/hr). Relative room size is 0.85, which is almost “tiny”, but is appropriate given the size of the inn.

Variations on the tavern’s backstory are many; if the region was invaded years earlier, perhaps the barman was already located here, and fought off the invaders rather than seeing his establishment razed, or perhaps it was one of his ancestors who did so, making this a long-established local fixture, or perhaps he was still serving in the military and made a stand here against the invaders, later retiring here (and possibly marrying into ownership of the tavern).

Tavern Size Modifier is 0, Commons Size Modifier is 1.

Resuming the example:
As with the other examples, the “ambiance” part of the process (in Part 2) has done an excellent job of clarifying a distinctive structure that started as absolutely nothing, including the possible backstory that has started to emerge.

• Table 13: Roll 24: 2 children, aged 3-5: 5 and 7-8: 7, respectively, are in residence. They count as 0.25 staff members. There is a +0 modifier to table 13a.
• Table 13a: 5 rolled, +0 modifier: Couple; +1 to family size for a total of 1. Do not roll on tables 13b or 13c.
• Table 13b: No Roll required.
• Table 13c: No Roll required.
• “Table” 14, line 1:
  • 2d4, 7 rolled: write 7 in the first space of the worksheet.
  • + Tav Size Mod write 0 in the second space.
  • + Cmmns Size Mod write 1 in the third space.
  • Subtotal 1 write 8, the total of these three numbers in the space provided, and copy the total into the space on the next line.
• “Table” 14, line 2:
  • – Barman write 1, the barman’s quality rating, in the second space of the worksheet.
  • – Family Size Mod write 1, the Family Size determined above, in the third space.
  • Paid Employees Required 8-1=7; 7-1=6. Write 6 in the final space on this line, indicating that the tavern should employ 6 staff whenever it is open.
• “Table” 14, line 3:
  • Tav Size Mod write 0, the Tavern Size Modifier, in the first space.
  • + Cmmns Size Mod write 1, the Commons Room Size Modifier, in the third space.
  • Subtotal 2 0+1=1, so write 1 in the third space provided.
  • /3 = #Entertainments: 1 divided by 3 is 1/3, but there is a minimum result of 1 for this calculation, so write 1/3 in the final space followed by a 1 in brackets, indicating that the tavern has 1 entertainment feature.
• Table 15, roll #1 of 1: Roll 74 in the “Tavern Size Mod 0” column: a tiny stage (relative size 0.5) which provides a venue for live music. Again, because this is the only entertainment space, this relative size is also the total space devoted to the purpose.

This tavern suits a small family, and that’s exactly what the dice have indicated. Staff would probably come and go with great regularity. The Robber’s End definitely suits an urban setting. It’s the sort of place where something would always be happening, a central hub around which the community gravitates, a place where PCs can come to hear gossip and rumors, or possibly even use as a long-term residence. Even the entertainment on offer is well-suited to that interpretation.

Rome Wasn’T Built In A Day: Prologue To Part 4

The die rolls in the Tavern Generator are the raw materials required to construct a tavern, but many of them require interpretation. In particular, the area that each space within the tavern encompasses and the number of guest quarters remain open questions at this point. Usually, the ground floor is the most complex area in terms of the variety of spaces it contains, and for that reason, finalizing the details of that ground level is the subject of the next part of this series.

The Context

Saxon, one of my players and a fellow GM who has contributed guidance through ATGMs on a number of occasions was telling an anecdote the other week about what transpired in the D&D 5e campaign that he plays in.

It seems that one of the players was unable to attend. That happens in every group from time to time, and every group has a different way of handling it. The group in question used to have another player handle the PC belonging to the absent player – I’m not sure whether the GM did the allocating, the absent player nominated someone, or someone simply put their hand up. After a couple of bad experiences where players felt their characters were abused or disrespected (Irish Mine-detector Syndrome), the policy had been established that the present players ran the absent-player PC as a group, making collective decisions about what the character was doing, and that has apparently worked out satisfactorily for them.

On this particular occasion, the group decided that the absent-player PC – a Rogue – would climb the walls and hide out on the roof of the church where bad things were going on, avoiding committing herself to any particular course of action while things remained unclear. One of the group then rolled for the Rogue to climb the wall – and got a critical failure. The character fell to the ground with a great clatter and promptly became the center of attention for the bad guys, and was lucky to escape with her life.

After hearing this anecdote a second time – Saxon had also mentioned it the week before – I began to wonder whether or not an absent-player PC should be permitted to suffer critical failures or successes, regardless of what was rolled on the dice. This was not a question that had ever arisen for any of those present in the past, and no-one had a ready answer. The consensus was, however, that it was a very interesting question, and so that’s the subject of today’s discussion.

Actually, it turns out that there was rather more to the story. But that doesn’t invalidate the principle that was raised, even though it is less directly applicable than I thought. More on that at the end of the article.

Critical Failures – An Unwarranted Risk?

Do critical failures represent an unwarranted risk to a character whose owner is “loaning” it to the group?

That they pose a risk is incontrovertible, and so is the fact the player who owns the character is not there to choose whether or not to expose the character to the risk in question. So the key question is whether or not this rises to the level of “unwarranted”?

The dictionary definition of “unwarranted” is “not justified or authorized”. Justification obviously relates to the circumstances, and that’s what the group judgment is there to assess, so the risks can’t be considered unwarranted on that front. But unauthorized? That’s the rub.

It’s not like the player in question is handing the group power of attorney, with complete control over the character, and complete willingness to accept whatever may happen; the entire point of handing control to the group instead of another individual is to limit the degree of authority held over the character.

Which means that unless the player specifically foresaw the circumstances even in general terms and explicitly authorized the taking of risks of this magnitude, the dangers can indeed be considered unwarranted.

A Failure Of Trust?

If a PC dies because of a critical failure, either directly or indirectly, is that a failure of the trust placed in whoever was looking after the character in the absence of its owner?

To answer this question, I need to pose another: What was it that the player who owns the character was entrusting the player who looked after the character to do? What should be the priority?

Are they being entrusted to use the character to assist the team in achieving their goals? Or is priority number one to look after the character’s interests, even at the expense of compromising that success?

Neither of these are black-and-white yes-and-no decisions. There are degrees of risk, and degrees of consequence being risked, and degrees of benefit to those team goals that results from a success. Clearly, substantial risk for a minor gain is unwarranted – yes, there’s that word again – but things grow murkier when the potential rewards from the team perspective outweigh the degree of risk. What we have here is a three-dimensional moral space in which risks may be justified – but which has very fuzzy edges, not sharp boundaries.

In other words, the answer to the first question is that “it depends on what the expectations were of the player caring for the character in the first place”.

Now, in the incident that sparked this discussion, there is no question of any failure of trust; the players caring for the character were trying to do the right thing and get the character out of harm’s way; it’s just that this attempt went horribly wrong. And that’s an important principle to note: risk can be minimized but never eliminated whilst a character is in the field.

It’s that principle that makes this particular question so important – and so interesting.

Balanced Contributions: No Critical Successes

If you take away the risk of critical failures, balance demands that you also take away the chance of a critical success. The character can still succeed or fail, and may still get killed, but the dangers are significantly reduced.

The converse of this statement is that if the character under absentee ownership is deemed capable of achieving extraordinary results – i.e. critical successes – then she must also face the commensurate risk of failure.

Interpretational Confinement

Outside of combat, when predetermined game rules define a critical success and there is no such thing as a critical failure, it might be possible to cut this Gordian knot, because under these circumstances, it is the referee’s job to interpret the results. Simply by showing some restraint in that interpretation as a matter of policy, the GM can mitigate against the criticality of the question.

Take the case in question: the GM was the one who decided that the critical failure would result in a fall. Having so decided, it is entirely reasonable for the noise to attract enemy attention, but the GM could easily have taken the intention of the players and the metagame circumstances into account and found some other interpretation of the critical failure.

I’ll come back to this point, shortly – because it’s not all honey and sunshine.

An NPC’S Share Of The Spotlight?

A side benefit of taking critical successes (and failures) off the menu is that a “lucky shot” by what is effectively an NPC (for the session) poses less danger of stealing the thunder from those characters whose players are present.

It’s the players who are present who should get spotlight share, not players who are absent. Because the absent player has a PC, it would be impossible to completely deny them a small share of the spotlight – usually in passing – unless you completely cut the character out of the adventure with no in-game explanation.

Perhaps it’s more realistic to expect that the absent player’s PC would receive an NPC’s share of the spotlight – i.e. none of their own accord, but whatever is appropriate when they are interacting with another PC. And no more, which is the point that I’m making here.

You don’t play a game for the people who aren’t there; you play it for those who are. However, when someone who is usually there is absent, their future participation has to be protected, and their past participation has to be respected. And the best way of doing that is to have their character step back from the spotlight while they are away.

Potential Abuse

That’s all good in theory, but as a policy it can be abused. If a player knows that there is a fight coming up next session that they aren’t sure their character will survive, and don’t particularly want to have, what’s to stop that player from making some excuse not to turn up so that his character is protected? What if you had a big fight an nobody came?

In effect, this would mean that the player was willing to raise the danger level to all the other PCs in order to protect his own character. I’m quite sure that this would not apply to any of the players that I deal with in my current games, but have definitely known one or two in the past who were overprotective of their characters to this extreme.

Be Less Than You Can Be? – A Counterpoint

Which, in fact, brings up a counterpoint that needs to be acknowledged and considered: Should the absence of a player be permitted to diminish the opportunities for success for the entire group?

You can’t remove the potential for critical successes from one segment of the group and not have it affect the aggregbate capabilities of the group. A vigorous argument can therefore be made that the diminished likelihood of group success establishes that it is in the group’s best interests for critical successes to remain an option.

Balanced Contributions: You Took The Risk

But if you permit whatever chance of critical success normally applies to remain in force, even when the character’s owner is absent, then balanced contributions demands that the risk to the absent-player’s PC also apply. Any alternative to this policy gives the players an advantage that they shouldn’t have. Suddenly, the whole question doesn’t seem so cut-and-dried.

The Willing Acceptance Of Danger

You can also argue that the absent player knew the risks of ceding control to someone else and accepted them when he decided not to attend. This too, is not an entirely invalid point, especially if the character’s intentions and priorities, as determined in advance by the absent player, are respected. The willing acceptance of danger has always been a mitigating factor in lawsuits, especially civil liability cases; a great deal of court proceedings in such cases relate to the degree of contribution to whatever occurred by the nominal victim. If you choose to play on the train-tracks, you can’t really sue your public transport authority when you get hit by a train – or simply trip over and break your arm or leg, for that matter. The “reasonable person” standard generally applies, to wit: were the consequences of the act reasonably foreseeable by a reasonable person?

There are many parallels between such civil liability cases and the question under consideration. One of the limitations on the “reasonable person” mitigation is the principle of a Duty Of Care. A Duty of care is essentially a legal responsibility for the wellbeing of an individual under defined conditions that cannot be abrogated even if the other party is willing to do so. This often comes up in cases where an employee has been injured and is claiming negligence on the part of his employer, for example.

A “Duty of Care” also has limitations; it’s unreasonable for the employer to be responsible for ‘acts of god’, for example. Enter, once again, “the reasonable person” and what they can “reasonably foresee”.

There is a perception in some quarters that when lawyers talk about “the reasonable person”, they are really asking the jury to put themselves in the place of that hypothetical individual, but that’s not the case – a juror can be more or less intelligent, have received better or worse education, may have a greater or lesser degree of relevant experience, and none of that matters; it’s not a question of what any individual juror can or can’t foresee, does or doesn’t consider reasonable. Nor is it a question of the average person’s abilities and perspectives; what has to be determined is what it was reasonable for an individual responsible for the decision, given the expertise and qualifications that they can be assumed to posses, to foresee, and it’s exactly the same when a Judge making the decision.

So, the questions can also be phrased: “What, if any, Duty Of Care is owed to the absent player’s property, i.e. his character, and by whom?”, and “How far does that duty of care extend?”, and “Were the dangers to which that property was exposed foreseeable by a reasonable person?” – because, if they were, it’s reasonable to assume that the owning player gave his permission – and the argument then shifts grounds to a debate over whether or not that permission has, or should have, any enforceable authority.

Rebuttal: Not All Absence Can Be Controlled

What if someone can’t attend because they have to work unexpectedly, or have been hospitalized, or has to care for a sick relative? They had no choice in their absence, and hence can’t be considered to have weighed the pros and cons and risks; they simply accepted them as something beyond their control, or the price of honoring a more important commitment (it might seem like I’m arguing in circles, but that happens when you look at an important subjective question from all sides. This isn’t something that can be resolved by findings of fact, it’s one of those far messier (and often, more important) questions).

Real life happens, and only the most obsessed would argue that it should not take priority over a source of entertainment. The issue has to be kept in perspective.

GMs normally take a player’s word for it when they claim such extenuating circumstances, and it’s only reasonable for players to have an expectation of such credibility. But this puts “the willing acceptance of risk” into an entirely different perspective; every argument that falls into that category presupposes that the absence was voluntary. What if it was not, or has to be deemed to be involuntary because a reasonable assessment of the social value of gaming places a higher relative value on other events?

If the absence stems from circumstances beyond the player’s reasonable control, then the degree to which the other participants are bound by a duty of care obviously rises. They are the ones choosing to proceed with the game in the absence of one of the participants. after all, so they are the ones choosing to expose the character to risk.

Now, it’s not normally reasonable for everyone’s fun to be ruined because one player can’t be present, which is what cancellation would represent. So that puts the obligation and onus squarely back on the shoulders of those players and GM who were present, demanding that the character receive an extraordinary level of protection – and that, in turn, means taking both critical failures and successes off the table.

The Willing Acceptance Of Danger, Part 2

A good lawyer, treating this as a compensation case, would no doubt point out that “The Willing Acceptance Of Danger” also undermines all arguments about the party members whose players are present being exposed to greater risk because of the absence of the player, either directly (character is removed from the danger) or indirectly (reducing the group firepower).

They were the ones who chose to go ahead with the game, after all, when it would be completely obvious to them that the group’s effectiveness might be compromised by the absence. They accepted the risks, and so have no grounds for complaint about the absent character being “sheltered” by table policy.

A Halfway House: The Torg Inspiration

Perhaps circumstances can be divided by the GM into two categories – Dramatic and Normal. Dramatic situations entitle the absent-player PC to both risks and rewards from criticals; ordinary situations do not. The GM should make the decision as to which category any given situation falls into, depending on the consequences to the overall game. That would mean that the chance of an extraordinary success – counterbalanced by the risk of a critical failure – is only invoked when the situation is at its most dire, and the outcome of an individual check would have consequences for the entire party.

Returning to the anecdote which spurred this discussion, it seems clear to me that the game did not, or should not, hinge on whether or not the absent-player’s character made her climbing roll or not when the objective was to remove her from a position in which she might have such an impact on the game. She was effectively an NPC and should not be placed in a spotlight position like that. Therefore, this would not qualify as a Dramatic situation, and both critical success and failure should be off the table.

On the other hand, if another PC were climbing alongside the absent-player’s character, and suffered a critical failure, falling to the ground and alerting their enemies, until another PC reached a position to participate in the battle, a PC’s life would hang in the balance, and that’s a dramatic enough circumstance that both critical hits and failures should be in force. As soon as another PC can join the melee, however, principle responsibility for rescuing the fallen character shifts to them, and the combat stops being “dramatic” from the point-of-view of the absent-player’s character.

As a compromise solution, this has a lot to commend it.

Vox Populi: An Alternative Solution

Or perhaps one of the choices available to the controlling group is whether or not the risk is merited according to the circumstance. They could make this decision for the entire session, or on a roll-by-roll basis – and this would be part of the responsibility that they took on by running the character. The implication would be that part of the control conceded by the absent player is the right to determine whether or not the PC should take the risk.

Avoiding The Issue?

You might think that you’re avoiding the whole problem by choosing one of the many alternative solutions to the problem of what to do with a character whose player is absent – giving control of the character to the GM, having the character mysteriously vanish from the playing field (only to reappear when their character does), but that’s really substituting one headache for a completely different set.

I looked at a range of such solutions in Missing In Action: Maintaining a campaign in the face of player absence in response to a question sent to Roleplaying Tips and which appeared in issue 522. A whole bunch of solutions from other readers also appeared in Issue 523, which have never been posted online in their archives, which jump from Issue 513 to Issue 619. Johnn is slowly getting the gap filled in but progress has been slow and sporadic. (If they aren’t available to readers, they might as well not exist, Johnn! I think it’s time for another push on this front…)

Questions get raised by the alternatives such as “Is it right for characters to earn experience for events they were not present for?”; “Is it right for the difficulty level of an adventure to effectively increase perhaps beyond the point of possible satisfactory resolution because player absence reduces the resources available to the PCs?” and “Is it fair for a player’s absence to impose additional workload on the GM?” – questions that are beyond the scope of this article, but which are no more susceptible to easy answers than the problems raised here.

So here’s another (somewhat rhetorical) one: “Have you really dodged the bullet when you (or your campaign) gets wounded by another (metaphoric) projectile instead?” For my money, the answer is no.

Clouding The Issue: Sauce for the gander

If you accept the principle that any character should only be exposed to the risks of a critical failure and the benefits of a critical success under certain circumstances (such as their player being present, or having explicitly authorized such risks), a further headache looms on the horizon. Should PCs whose players are present also have the authority to determine whether or not to risk a critical failure in the pursuit of a critical success?

This puts a whole new spin on the concept of an “optional rule”, and is technically beyond the direct scope of this article, but it’s definitely a question that merits debate!

My Usual Solution

My usual solution to the problem of absent players doesn’t really help shed a lot of light on the issue. I first determine the level of criticality to the expected course of play of the absent player’s character.

• If they are central to the adventure, then I cancel game sessions rather than adopt any other solution.
• If they aren’t, but do have one or more crucial decisions to make in the course of the adventure, then I run the character as a semi-protected NPC to whom nothing permanently bad will be inflicted, after soliciting specific guidance from the player in question on the decision to be made. If necessary, I will even reveal details of the planned plotline to the player who is going to be absent.
• If they are simply making up the numbers through the course of play, then they will be run by me as sheltered NPCs who fade into the background unless they have some specific knowledge or ability to contribute.
• And no, the character doesn’t get XP if the player is not present, unless I regard the absence as reasonable and the player has made all reasonable efforts to provide reasonable notice of their absence. Reasons of health, unexpected family commitments, work demands – those are all on my list of reasonable grounds for absence, and the question of adequate notice depends on how much notice the player in question had. On at least one occasion (following the death of the player) I specifically got in a guest player to look after the PC so that the character could be given an appropriate honorable retirement from the campaign.

So my answer is a blend of the Interpretational solution and the avoidance of both critical successes and failures. I simply hadn’t thought to frame the question in quite this way before; it wasn’t an official policy, just an instinctive one on my part. Needless to say, it will be such a policy going forward.

A Question Of Policy

This isn’t about how your group handles absent players, but whether or not a character whose player is absent should be increased in mediocrity for the protection of both that character and the game overall. That’s a fairly deep and profound question, at the end of the day, with deep roots in the gaming philosophy of the GM and group. It should be clear from the above discussion that this is one of those occasions in which there is no one perfect answer. Perhaps this is another question to which each group must define its own answer?

Any decision will work provided that it is known to everyone in advance. All the complicated questions about acceptance of risk go away when a reasonably-accurate determination of that risk can be made in advance – when players know what they are letting their characters in for in the event of their absence.

Communication is the key – at least, that’s my conclusion.

Addenda

I forwarded the draft of this article to Saxon for him to pass on to the other members of his playing group and to offer an opportunity for any correction needed. Here’s his reply (slightly edited, and with subheadings added to break it up a little):

Hi Mike,

Just three points of clarification, plus some quick thoughts that I came up with overnight.

• The rogue character in question was female – so, minor nitpick on pronoun [fixed].
• Another nitpick is that this was the first time that any GM deliberately assigned the group-of-players-who-were-present-on-the-night to run the non-present PC (as well as the collective actions of the NPCs inside the temple of Chauntae in planning the defense against a siege).

  I’m not sure if that was an idea that the GM in question (TeacherDave, in this case) used because it was simply something that was useful at the time, or whether it was a considered response to the Irish Mine Detector phenomenon. I can asked TeacherDave if you want.

  The “IMD” phenomenon has been an issue within that group for a very long time, and one of the players and sometime-GMs (Peter) has been very vocal about avoiding it, both in his own game and warning against its dangers when it comes up in other games. For his part, when Peter runs his Space1889/Call of Cthulhu campaign, if a player is not present, their character simply comes down with a bout of ‘Martian Lurgi’ and is medically incapacitated for the session(s). (At one point I made a similar ruling for my own Dr Who game, and had the characters be temporarily retconned out of existence by fallout from the Time War, with a vague intention that this may become a future plot point).

• A final nitpick, and arguably the most important, is that the Rogue who tried to climb the roof fell because of the bad roll, but that failed action was not what attracted the attention of the enemy kobolds. A few rounds later, when the besiegers started killing off a number of townsfolk NPCs inside the temple, was when it was decided that she would start using her back-stab attack to reduce the number of attackers, and that was when she successfully made one kill but failed on the second, attracting attention to herself and forcing her to flee.

A Question Of Intentions

Thinking about it, that last paragraph raises an interesting point that may be relevant: at the time in-game, when the other players were feeling stressed because the group of allied NPCs in the temple were being killed, was it appropriate for the players-who-were-present to assume that the rogue character would be moved by the slaughter inside the temple to try and help them with some surreptitious backstabbing?

Or was that simply a rationalization by the players to try and get as many favorable factors engaged on their side of the battle?

I looked at her character sheet and can confirm that she was of Good alignment and had the character trait summarizable as ‘I don’t make long term plans and tend to act on the spur of the moment’ – so there was nothing there that argued against her actions; but the character’s backstory plot hook that was given out by the GM was that she was in this town (called Greenest) as part of an attempt to infiltrate the cult that was planning to attack the town.

So on the one hand she had no particular commitment to the cult’s stated plans of killing everybody and looting the town, but on the other hand, would she have necessarily broken cover if her player had been there to make decisions for her? Doing what’s right in the short term versus following a plan for a long term good? And as always, there’s the question of whether a character will follow even strongly held beliefs if it’s done at the risk of their life.

The Psychology Of Spotlights

There’s also an interesting thought that occurred to me about all players getting to feature, getting “a share of the spotlight”, as you put it.

Usually it’s the case that GMs need to make sure that all players get to do something in the course of the game, simply to stave off boredom. With that in mind, some overview of this game: It’s the first adventure that we’ve played under 5e D&D, and the characters are all new rather than imports from TeacherDave’s 4e campaign. The GM is playing a ‘getting the band together for the first time’ angle, but rather than everyone meeting in the proverbial tavern the characters had been traveling singly to Greenest for their own reasons. In the first session, some (but not all) of the characters had been introduced to each other. The Druid (PC of DrDave) and the Bard (PC of Johno) had been traveling together to Greenest for work; had encountered the overturned carriage of the Warlock (PC of Peter) and then fought off some kobolds that were working with the cult. They then continued to Greenest to discover it under large scale attack, and got into a fight to defend a family (who were related to the PC of Ray – another player who was not present for the first two sessions). During session 1 neither my Wizard, nor Urban’s Rogue, got any gameplay – although we did get some summarized backstory developed by the GM about our motivations for being in Greenest, in order to keep us at least vaguely interested.

In the second session, we cut to another part of Greenest, for the siege of the temple of Chauntae. My Wizard was inside, helping the townsfolk NPCs to defend themselves. Urban’s Rogue was on the outside.

In the third session all the players were present, and as a result of our various fights the characters all shepherded scared and wounded townsfolk NPCs to the safety of the town’s keep, where the characters were recruited to go and gather other townsfolk still trapped outside.

Now, Urban had known weeks in advance that he would not be available for the second session, since he would be at his mother’s farm hundreds of kilometers away. He had expressed surprise and mild irritation that he would not be there to play the first actions of his character in the game.

Is it possible that, subconsciously, the players wanted to make sure that Urban got to do *something*, even if only by proxy? Frankly I’m unsure, and think it more likely that the aforementioned theory of needing to have all hands on deck to defend the townsfolk played a more direct role in the decision-making – but it’s an interesting idea.

An Option of Hand-waving

Finally, a weird thought on handling the situation: most of your article has dealt with the aspects of fairness and responsibility and dealing with consequences. However, there is precedent for hand-waving the whole thing away.

I have a vague recollection from one of the 2e Dragonlance products given GM advice that if the main villain of the plot gets killed and he’s needed later in the storyline, simply declare that the dead villain was an underling who had been sent in the main villains place, and because of the masks that the commanders of the Dragon Armies wear that player (and their PCs) would never know the difference).

In the same vein, I came across a random spoiler for Horde of the Dragon Queen in the form of an observation/complaint that that plot line was set up to have specific villains later in the story, and if those villains get killed then the GM should arrange for it to have happened to substitutes.

But even if my memory is inaccurate, if it’s fair play for GM’s to hand-wave events to suit plots, then that begs the question of whether or not (and if so, when) it is fair to do so for characters.

Obviously this would need to be handled carefully, but in this instance: not only was the player genuinely away and acting in good faith (I’m honestly not even sure whether the GM had consulted with the player about using the Rogue character in this way), but also the actions that took place were away from the sight of the other characters. Those events could have very easily been retconned away.

This is exactly what I was proposing when I wrote about “interpreting the critical” in some other way, though Saxon’s proposal goes further – Mike

Now, in the end, the way things turned out were good, since Urban’s character developed a reason to flee the cultists and join the other player characters inside the keep as a result. In practical terms, the party got together, and his character wasn’t sidelined any further. But in other circumstances this may have led to rather more annoying results.

So the general premise holds, even if the inspirational circumstances weren’t quite as I understood them to be.

A Projection Of Intentions?

But this raised a further possibility in my mind: that the group, aware of the desire to “get the band together” had made choices that were more likely to bring about that result rather than preserving the initial independence of the Rogue character, or that the GM had steered events on such a course. Saxon also replied to this possibility, when I raised it:

I don’t think that the GM engineered things that way. I also don’t recall any discussion among the players towards that end, even off-the-cuff joke suggestions. I think it was a combination of bad rolls and decisions made on the spur of moment.

Due to a battery failure, we were not able to get a podcast recording for the benefit of the two players who were not present, and I did a writeup the following day while my memory was still fresh. Consulting it now, I see that there were at least two really bad rolls (5 week old memory suggests that there were 2 critical failures, but the second back-stab on the kobold may have been a mere very low roll). Not that that makes a lot of difference.

First-hand absence of the experience

I was also particularly interested in the take of the player who was most directly involved, Urban, who I have never met. He is the player who was absent and had conceded control of his character for its first in-game appearance as a result. I’ve never met him (as far as I know) but Saxon agreed to forward the draft article for his consideration.

Here are Urban’s thoughts:

It’s a very interesting article but I think our group doesn’t really fit into these structures. I think all our GMs all seem to have their own rules (Peter’s Martian lurgy for example) but basically [we]`make it up as we go along. I think you guys must take play very seriously that you send apologies and give adequate reasons not to come to a session as well as setting up what seems almost like a constitution. We seem to play it more by ear.

I don’t really have a problem with my character being played by others because I feel the chance of my buggering up a roll is the same as anyone else and I have put my own characters in crazy situations. My frustration was produced from the context in which the buggering up happened. This has more to do with the GMs organization and our lack of structure, something you guys seem to be more on the ball about.

Thanks for sending the article Saxon, it’s very thought provoking.

I can certainly appreciate that point of view; it’s one that I suspect many readers will share. I’ve taken the question seriously because it bears thinking about, even if you reach the same conclusion that he has, and because many groups will consider the question more seriously.

The Last Word?

However, it seems that even the group with which he plays is not always quite as devil-may-care about the issue, as Saxon acknowledges in some additional remarks included when forwarding Urban’s reply:

For all that they are very general, I think they are spot on in that the overall style of the Wednesday group is far more casual in style. A looser and often more silly game, where simply socializing over a shared hobby is often just as important as any in-game continuity, can afford to do that.

That said, I will offer one last observation that occurs to me as I read and forward Urban’s comments. There is the phenomenon of players identifying with their characters to the point where they have trouble separating the fantasy from the reality on an emotional level even when they can easily differentiate it on an intellectual level.

I know this feeling because it happened to me about a decade ago, and in the five minutes of quick recollection that I’m doing now I think that it was simply the case of one of the Wednesday-group GMs doing a quick shuffle of what the character was doing in order to quickly fill a plot hole in an adventure.

Because I was aware of the phenomenon and try to be an analytic person, my eventual reaction – starting from the day after, when I’d had time to sleep on it – was to go “Huh. So that’s what it feels like. Interesting.”

But I distinctly recall that at the time and for the hour or so of the trip home that evening, I was feeling resentful. And this proprietorial feeling was simply from having the GM decide on something that the character would do to fit a plot point – nowhere near as serious (or permanent) as having the character seriously injured or even killed through carelessness, malice, or simple circumstance when control was taken away from me as a player. Just a random thought that may be useful.

It’s certainly a relevant point, and one that ties the whole subject line back together. I’ve certainly both been in Saxon’s shoes in terms of the type of incident that he describes – and I’ve also been on the other side of the (metaphoric) GM’s screen when it’s happened, and (on at least two occasions that I can recall) when I was falsely accused of same.

Every GMing decision that does not immediately and fully yield gratification to the player concerned risks treading on toes, however lightly. If those toes are sore from past abuse, or simply more sensitive than most, or if the GM has used spiked boots instead of the lightest of dancing shoes when tap-dancing on the toes in question, there can be bruised egos and even wounded friendships.

That is an issue that deserves to be taken seriously, no matter how casual and easygoing the group may be. And, depending on the circumstances, that is exactly the type of damage that can result from a critical – when the owning player is absent. If a critical failure, it’s the absent player who suffers, whether they can shrug it off or not; if a critical success, it’s another player at the table who suffers, losing the chance at his moment of glory because what is effectively a glorified NPC has made off with their share of the spotlight.

The price of not at least thinking about the questions that I’ve raised in this article is too high for my tastes, and not worth the “purity” of game system or maintenance of a casual attitude. You don’t have to change anything about the way you game, if you don’t want to, or don’t think it necessary; but at least you should make a conscious decision not to do so, in light of the possible repercussions. Or, to phrase it a different way, we’re serious about having fun, here at Campaign Mastery!

PS:

If any other members of Saxon’s Wednesday group wants to comment, I welcome their thoughts. The same goes for the rest of the readership here at Campaign Mastery, of course, but I wanted to extend a special invitation to them, since they are at the heart of the incident that sparked the discussion.

Alas, this article is being posted late; I lost track of time working on the Tavern Generator. My apologies to anyone affected!

In part one of this series, six tables (and one set of subtables) defined the physical properties of a tavern (no guest accommodations) or inn (with guest accommodations), plus – because the modifiers needed were at hand – the meals provided by the kitchens. (This is an era when “restaurants” (i.e. locations for the sole purpose of dining) were fairly rare, but most taverns and inns provided meals of some sort for those who patronized the establishment. It might be that it was the introduction of age restrictions on the labor force that led to age restrictions on entry to pubs and taverns, and hence to the introduction of dedicated dining establishments – that’s just a theory on my part, I have no information from which to determine its validity. I mention it only because any GMs who have such restrictions as part of a “progressive” society in their worlds might need to investigate further).

The establishments created using this generator assume that there are no such age or gender restrictions in place!

A Note Regarding Table 12

I also want to draw reader’s attentions to Table 12, which is a simplified form of a personality generation system that I created for my TORG campaign. That system used a d20 to select from 20 tables each of which had 20 related personality traits. There were also various ways of biasing the results thanks to the way they were organized, so that I could roll d6+14 for trait one if I wanted a criminal, or d6 for a lawman, and so on. One of these days, when I find where I filed it away after that campaign closed down, I’ll present it in a game supplement or something – but, in the meantime, Table 12 can exist quite happily as a standalone personality generator for use in just about any campaign for just about any NPC.

Tavern Generator (cont)

We pick up the process right where we left off. It is not possible to use some of these tables without having completed the first part of the process.

Table 7: Common Room Wall Decorations

Roll d% to determine the nature of the decorations in the Common Room.

d%	Common Room Decorations
1-7	Stuffed heads, animal
8	Stuffed heads, enemy
9-12	Skulls, animal
13	Skulls, enemy
14-18	Religious iconography
19-26	Tapestries – battle scenes
27-30	Tapestries – historical scenes
31-36	Tapestries – drinking scenes
37-40	Tapestries – other social scenes
41-47	Tapestries – farming scenes
48-54	Shields, whole
55-56	Shields, battle-scarred/damaged
57-59	Weapons, whole
60-61	Weapons, damaged
62-65	Paintings, poor quality
65-67	Paintings, good quality
68	Paintings, high quality
69-72	Stained-glass windows, poor quality
73-74	Stained-glass windows, good quality
75-80	Scoreboards/honor rolls
81-84	Roll twice, alternating between results
85-91	Roll again, alternating with bare wall
92-98	Roll twice, alternating between results, seperated by bare wall pattern -A-B-A-B-A-
99-00	Roll three times, pattern ABACABACA

Table 8: Bar Decorations

Roll d20 to determine the decorations behind the bar.

d20	Bar decoration
1	Stuffed heads, animal
2	Stuffed heads, enemy
3	Skulls, animal
4	Skulls, enemy
5	Religious iconography
6	Tapestry – battle scene
7	Tapestry – historical scene
8	Tapestry – drinking scene
9	Tapestry – other social scene
10	Tapestry – farming scene
11	Shields, whole
12	Shields, battle-scarred/damaged
13	Weapons, whole
14	Weapons, damaged
15	Painting, poor quality
16	Painting, good quality
17	Painting, high quality
18	Scoreboards/honor rolls
19	Mirror
20	Bare wall

Table 9: Librations Served

Roll 5d6 and add the Tavern Size Modifier to determine the range and quality of the drinks provided by the tavern.

5d6 + Tav Size Mod	Common Drinks Available	Additional Uncommon Drinks Available (if any)	Additional Rare Drinks Available (if any)
5	2 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	2 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
6	3 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	2 uncommon options, Poor Quality	–
7	3 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	2 uncommon options, Good Quality	–
8	3 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	2 uncommon options, Average Quality	–
9	2 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	2 uncommon options, Poor Quality	–
10	3 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	2 uncommon options, Poor Quality	–
11	2 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	2 uncommon options, Average Quality	–
12	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	2 uncommon options, Good Quality	–
13	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	2 uncommon options, Poor Quality	–
14	3 most popular beverages locally, Good Quality	–	–
15	3 most popular beverages locally, Poor Quality	–	–
16	Single most popular beverage locally, Very poor quality	–	–
17	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	–	–
18	Single most popular beverage locally, Poor quality	–	–
19	3 most popular beverages locally, Average Quality	–	–
20	2 most popular beverages locally, Poor quality	–	–
21	2 most popular beverages locally, Very Poor quality	–	–
22	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	1 uncommon option, Poor Quality	–
23	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	1 uncommon option, Very Poor Quality	–
24	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	1 uncommon option, Good Quality	–
25	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	2 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
26	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	4 uncommon options, Good Quality	–
27	3 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	2 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
28	2 most popular beverages locally, Average quality	4 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
29	2 most popular beverages locally, Poor quality	4 uncommon options, Good Quality	–
30	2 most popular beverages locally, Poor quality	4 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
31	3 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	2 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
32	Single most popular beverage locally, Poor Quality	4 uncommon options, Average Quality	1 rare option, Excellent Quality
33	2 most popular beverages locally, Good quality	4 uncommon options, Excellent Quality	–
34	Single most popular beverage locally, Average Quality	4 uncommon options, Good Quality	1 rare option, Excellent Quality
35	2 most popular beverages locally, Good Quality	4 uncommon options, Average Quality	1 rare option, Poor Quality
36	2 most popular beverages locally, Poor Quality	3 uncommon options, Good Quality	2 rare options, Excellent Quality

Hint: Think about what this result says about the clientele and why they might choose to drink there. And if the business doesn’t seem viable given the location, it’s a good bet that the tavern owner has at least one “additional” source of income on the side!

Table 10: Accommodations Details

Roll 3d6 OR 2d6 + Tavern Size Modifier (GM’s Choice) to determine the size, quality, and suggested price of accommodation in rooms provided by the tavern. The referee should use the latter as nothing more than a guide; proximity to services, travel routes, etc will all alter the value, as will the type of local businesses and so on. Most taverns will permit travelers to sleep in the Commons Room for 1 cp per night. It is assumed that these accommodations are on a second story. Prices are based on those quoted in the Pathfinder Core Rules p159.

3d6 or 2d6 + Tav Size Mod	Size (guests)	Size (spaces)	Quality	Suggested price per night
3	Large (two-eight people)	0.1 x (d12+15)	Good	Underpriced (8 sp/night or 5.5 gp/week)*
4	Large (two-eight people)	0.1 x (2d6+15)	Common	Overpriced (6 sp/night or 4.5 gp/week)**
5	Medium (two-four people)	0.1 x (2d6+10)	Good	Underpriced (6 sp/night or 4 gp/week)*
6	Tiny (single)	0.1 x (d8+5)	Good	Overpriced (4 sp/night or 5 cp/hr)**
7	Tiny (single)	0.1 x (d8+5)	Poor	Underpriced (1 sp/night or 1 cp/hr)*
8	Tiny (single)	0.1 x (d10+5)	Poor	Overpriced (2 sp/night or 2.5 cp/hr)**
9	Small (couple)	0.1 x (d12+7.5)	Poor	Underpriced (1.5 sp/night or 2 cp/hr)*
10	Small (couple)	0.1 x (d10+7.5)	Poor	Overpriced (3 sp/night or 4 cp/hr)**
11	Small (couple)	0.1 x (d10+7.5)	Common	Overpriced (4 sp/night or 5 cp/hr)**
12	Small (couple)	0.1 x (d10+7.5)	Common	Underpriced (3 sp/night or 4 cp/hr)*
13	Tiny (single)	0.1 x (d10+5)	Common	Overpriced (3 sp/night or 4 cp/hr)**
14	Small (couple)	0.1 x (d12+7.5)	Good	Overpriced (6 sp/night or 8 cp/hr)**
15	Medium (two-four people)	0.1 x (d12+10)	Common	Overpriced (5.5 sp/night, 7 cp/hr, or 3.5 gp/week)**
16	Medium (two-four people)	0.1 x (2d6+10)	Poor	Overpriced (5 sp/night, 7 cp/hr, or 3 gp/week)**
17	Large (two-eight people)	0.1 x (3d6+15)	Common	Underpriced (5 sp/night, 7 cp/hr, or 3.5 gp/week)*
18	Large (two-eight people)	0.1 x (3d6+15)	Good	Overpriced (12 sp/night or 8 gp/week)**

* suggests proximity to disreputable parts of town, undesirable industry, location in the poor/slum quarter, etc.

** suggests proximity to the better parts of town, protection from undesirables, location in the mercantile or wealthy quarter, on a major thoroughfaire, etc. If none of these is true, it suggest that the innkeeper has some reason for not wanting strangers to reside in the inn, is using pricing to drive customers away, and is probably up to something underhanded.

NB: Most taverns of common or good quality will not let rooms by the hour – this usually signifies a brothel operating within the tavern.

NB2: Note that this table does not tell you how many of these rooms there are, that is calculated later.

A Word On The Interpretation Of Quality

I’m not going to reiterate my precious spiel on the subjectivity of statements of quality; for one thing, objectivity is easier when describing a room relative to the more personal experience of consuming food.

Quality of accommodations is best defined as the intersection point of additional services & comforts and the quality of both those and the more fundamental elements of residential existence, but that is a definition that might not be clear to the casual reader; it requires explanation, and hence this brief insert.

The more services and comforts that are included with the residence, the more quality that accommodation will be percieved as having. A room with a view is better than one without; a room with better access to amenities is better than the alternative; additional furniture for the use of the resident, services such as the provision of fresh linen on a regular basis, and so on, all contribute to a better percieved standard of quality.

But each and every one of these additional services and comforts can be better or worse, a relative value statement, and if they are sufficiently poor, they may as well not be there, or could even be contrary to a better quality assessment; a room with a view of a dungheap may have “natural light, fresh air and a view” but the view is undesirable, the fresh air smells foul, and the natural light is not worth the price of the problems that come with it; better to brick up that window, cover it with a tapestry, and provide an extra lantern!

On top of that, basic expectations of accommodation are subject to the same demand for a satisfactory standard. It doesn’t generally matter how good the view is if the walls are dirty and the linen mouldy! Basic expectations can only lift quality of accommodations so far, however; beyond that, it is the presence of extras also of a satisfactory standard, or better, that can elevate quality.

Table 11: Barman skill

Roll d6 and add the Tavern Size Modifier to determine the skill of the barman. Each result also specifies a “Staff Modifier” which is a reflection of how many typical staff the Barman counts as – a skilled individual may be worth as many as 4 or 5 average staff.

“Barman skill” should be used as the number of ranks in all relevant skills in D&D 3.x / Pathfinder. It may need interpretation for use with any other system. It has been expressed as a die roll which should be rolled seperately for each such skill.

d6 + Tav Size Mod	Barman skill	Staff Modifier
1	d3	1
2	d3+1	1
3	d4	1
4	d4+1	1
5	d6	1
6	d4+2	2
7	d6+1	2
8	d4+3	3
9	d6+3	3
10	d6+4	3
11	d5+6	4
12	d6+8	5

Table 12: Barman personality profile

Roll d20 three times to determine the basic personality profile of the barman. I think I’ve weeded out all the nonsense combinations.

d20	Barman Hostility & Greed	d20	Barman Bravery & Religion	d20	Barman Lawfulness & Rationality
1	hostile, greedy	1	cowardly, irreligious	1	lawman/ex-lawman*, coldly logical
2	hostile, mercenary	2	cowardly, impious	2	lawman/ex-lawman*, sensible/practical
3	hostile, penny pincher	3	cowardly, pious	3	lawman/ex-lawman*, thinks with emotions
4	hostile, soft-hearted	4	cowardly, fanatical	4	respectable, coldly logical
5	angry, greedy	5	cautious, irreligious	5	respectable, sensible/practical
6	angry, mercenary	6	cautious, impious	6	respectable, thinks with emotions
7	angry, penny pincher	7	cautious, pious	7	respectable, can be confused
8	angry, soft-hearted	8	cautious, fanatical	8	respectable, scatterbrained
9	calm, greedy	9	bold, irreligious	9	blind monkey, coldly logical
10	calm, mercenary	10	bold, impious	10	blind monkey, sensible/practical
11	calm, penny pincher	11	bold, pious	11	blind monkey, thinks with emotions
12	calm, soft-hearted	12	bold, fanatical	12	blind monkey, can be confused
13	polite, greedy	13	brave, irreligious	13	snitch/cheat, coldly logical
14	polite, mercenary	14	brave, impious	14	snitch/cheat, sensible/practical
15	polite, penny pincher	15	brave, pious	15	snitch/cheat, thinks with emotions
16	polite, soft-hearted	16	brave, fanatical	16	snitch/cheat, can be confused
17	friendly, greedy	17	fearless, irreligious	17	lawless/felon/ex-felon, coldly logical
18	friendly, mercenary	18	fearless, impious	18	lawless/felon/ex-felon, sensible/practical
19	friendly, penny pincher	19	fearless, pious	19	lawless/felon/ex-felon, thinks with emotions
20	friendly, soft-hearted	20	fearless, fanatical	20	lawless/felon/ex-felon, can be confused

* note that most members of the watch / local law-enforcement will prefer to drink at an establishment run by an ex-colleague of good character/reputation.

** fanatics may refuse service to particular groups, individuals, races, or professions. This result may modify the outcome of other rolls.

Example: The Palomino and Fox (continued)

What we know so far:
The “Palomino and Fox” is a Medium-Large Tavern. It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (2), Large Common Room (5), Storage Cellar, and Family Dwelling (2). The Kitchens consist of Medium Stove, Large Ovens, Medium Grill (1.75) and a Medium-sized Food Prep area (2.5) relative to a business of this size [Total Kitchen Area 4.25]. The cuisine is Good Quality Food, a hearty meal with bread and meat/fish 0-1 (d3:0, 1/2, 1) day old, costing 7 sp.

Within the common room are 6 large tables that seat 20 each, occupying a total of 72 five-foot square spaces. The tables are L-shaped and made of wood. The walls of the tavern are rough-hewn stone.

The name is suggestive either of a tavern sign featuring the named animals, or of hunting, but which one has yet to be determined.

I want either The Palomino and Fox or Example #3, “The Robber’s End”, to be a multistory residential Inn, while the other is to be a more typical 2-story building, but haven’t decided which yet.

Tavern Size Modifier is 4, Commons Size Modifier is 3.

Resuming the example:
It’s always worth re-examining undecided questions after each major stage of the process, to see if any can now be resolved. In this case, there are two questions, both indicated above:

• Is this tavern/inn a hunting lodge or similar, or just a name? And,
• Is it more appropriate for this to be the larger building example that I want to include, or should I leave that “honor” to “The Robber’s End”?

There’s been nothing decided that contributes to the first question in any way; it’s still completely up in the air. Some clues may come from the ambience, which is the subject of this part of the generation process, in particular from the decorations; if anything comes up that might be reflective of hunting, that would be a positive indicator. That could be scoreboards, or trophies, or weapons, or even some of the tapestry options.

What is more clear is that the size of the tavern is very relevant to the second question. With a large tavern, multiple stories for guest accommodations would indicate a substantial residential capacity, and that would be consistent with the size of the kitchens and the size and number of tables in the common area; but that in turn is suggestive of a location that is very central to a well-populated area that many guests would travel to, which is not appropriate to the hunting-oriented approach. The roll results therefore indicate that this is an either-or situation: either this tavern is a hunting-oriented establishment, or it is located near the capital or in some other major population centre to which many guests will flock, and is the multi-story example.

In actual use for a game, of course, you wouldn’t generate an Inn or Tavern for the sake of generating one, you would generate it for a specific locality, and this would be decided on that basis. I, on the other hand, have that luxury, and hence don’t have to decide yet; I can let the results continue to speak for themselves.

• Table 7: Roll 02: Common Room Decorations are stuffed or preserved animal heads.
• Table 8: Roll of 13: Behind the bar are mounted weapons, whole and intact. These last two results are definitely supportive of the “hunting lodge” interpretation, and are less appropriate for a major urban inn. Even the name has a slightly rural feel to it, now that I think about it.
• Table 9: 17 rolled, plus Tavern Size Modifier 4, = 21: The bar serves very poor quality versions of the two most popular drinks, locally. There are no better alternatives available to patrons. Whatever people come here for, it’s not the alcohol.
• Table 10: Because the tavern size is somewhat unusual, I am choosing the 2d6 option. Roll of 11 + Tavern Size Mod 4 = 15: Rooms (if any) are medium, capable of accommodating 2-4 people, and of common quality. They are overpriced at 5.5 sp/night, or 3.5 gp/week. Relative room size is 0.1 x (d12+10): 9 rolled, so 0.1 x (9+10) = 1.9.
• Table 11: 2 rolled, plus Tavern Size Modifier 4, = 6: The barman’s skills are given by d4+1. I could roll once for all of them (the quick & generic solution) or seperately for each relevant skill. He counts as 1 worker, so nothing special.
• Table 12: rolls of 8, 12, and 15: The barman’s personality profile is angry but soft-hearted, bold, fanatical about his religious beliefs, and a snitch or cheat who thinks with his emotions. “Snitch” doesn’t seem to fit, so he’s a cheat of some sort, behavior that obviously is not forbidden by his faith. The subject/cause of his anger remains undecided and suggests that he tries to mask his tenderheartedness behind a gruff exterior, so it might not even be real.

More fairly rural results. Every result this time around argues in favor of the “hunting lodge” approach, with only one floor for accommodations.

So that decision is made, but there’s a new question or two to take it’s place: what (if anything) is the barman angry about, and what does he cheat at?

My preliminary thoughts are that the Tavern is the centre of a fox-hunting club or association, with a quite respectable clientele, and that they have run afoul of a Druidic order in the vicinity, who have used their powers to persuade all the foxes to go elsewhere. Rather than try to actually reach some settlement with the Druids, who have a philosophic objection to hunting for sports, the Barman has resorted to “cheating” to make sure that each hunt bags something they can brag about. If this deception is exposed, he will have even more trouble with the Druids, and hence would be a little paranoid about strangers. Because of his cheating, the tavern/inn has built up a reputation, publicly justifying the “overpriced” accommodations; in reality, the extra covers the cost of maintaining that reputation.

Example: The Spotted Parrot (continued)

The name is so suggestive of pirates that I wanted to play on that; this is an example of how to shape the results to fit a preconcieved idea or requirement, essentially re-rolling until you get results that “fit”.

The concept is of a floating tavern, either a barge decked out to look like a sailing ship, or an unseaworthy vessel that has been recommissioned as a novel tavern or inn. The presence of a cellar would decide which. Meals would be served on the deck, and would have a definite seafood theme. If there are any accommodations – something I haven’t yet decided – these would be small staterooms, probably below decks, while the family would live in accommodations on the ship’s deck level, which is also where the kitchens would be located.

What is known so far:
The “Spotted Parrot” is a Medium-sized Tavern. It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (1.5), Small-Medium Common Room (3.5), Storage Cellar, and Family Dwelling (1.5). The Kitchens consist of Small Stove & Ovens (0.75) and a Medium-sized Food Prep area (0.75) [Total Kitchen Area 1.5]. The cuisine is of Good Quality and consists of bread and a small meal (soup, stew, or pie) AND meat/fish 0-1 (d3:0, 1/2, 1) day old, costing 6 sp per serve.

Within the common room are 12 medium tables that seat 6 each of rectangular shape (2:1 proportions), made of stone; these occupy a total of 38.4 five-foot square spaces. The walls of the tavern are sawn timber.

Tavern Size Modifier is 2, Commons Size Modifier is 1.

Resuming the example:
As stated above, this is a good point to take stock of the unanswered questions. The fact that this tavern indicates a storage cellar instead of ground-floor storage rules out a barge, and automatically makes the inn big enough to have guest quarters. However, the size of the kitchens makes it clear that these would be quite limited in capacity; and, if anything, the number of people who can be seated at the tables (up to 60 at a time) is far in excess of what can be justified given the size of the kitchens, unless those tables are used for something more than meals. The suggestion is, therefore, that a lot of the tables are used for sitting and drinking, and not for the consumption of food.

• Table 7: Roll of 76: The Common Room decorations are scoreboards or honor rolls. That doesn’t quite make sense in light of the piratic “theme”, but can be reinterpreted as a series of wooden panels illustrating infamous acts of piracy, which does fit the ambience. The “scores” are thus the tonnage of ships captured or raided, the value of treasures looted, and so on, and might be half-truths or complete fictions.
• Table 8: Roll of 4: Behind the bar, the skulls of slain enemies are mounted as decorations – or (it may be assumed) reasonable facsimiles, thereof. This is a result that feels like it might or might not fit, with a little more thought. Just in case it doesn’t work out, I made a second roll – result of 16 – which yields, “Painting, Good Quality.”
• Table 9: 22 rolled, plus Tavern Size Modifier 2, = 24: The bar serves average quality versions of the two most popular local drinks and has 1 uncommon option of Good Quality available. Given the motif, the “two most popular” are probably rum and ale, and the third, uncommon option might be a wine or brandy.
• Table 10: The tavern size is not all that exceptional, so I choose the 3d6 option and roll a 14: Any accommodations are small (large enough for a couple), of good quality, but overpriced at 6 sp per night. The actual room size is determined by 0.1 x (d12+7.5); 2 rolled = 0.95.
• Table 11: 5 rolled, plus Tavern Size Modifier 2, = 7: The barman’s skills are given by d6+1. I could roll once for all of them (the quick & generic solution) or seperately for each relevant skill. He counts as 2 workers, so he is skilled at his profession.
• Table 12: rolls of 13, 6, and 18: The barman is polite, greedy, cautious, impious, sensible or practical, and lawless, a felon, or an ex-felon. Sounds a lot like Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) from the Pirates Of The Carribbean movies, maybe in retirement.

This all seems to be coming together nicely – and I didn’t even have to reroll anything!

The behind-the-bar decorations remain a problem. The thought that was eluding me during the generation process was sets of skull-and-crossbones using real bones inset into the timber behind the bar; that sort of works, but seems a bit cheesy, in hindsight. Similarly, the “wooden panels” idea seems a bit too Walt Disney. So I’m going to override the latter result and go with the alternative roll for the former: The common room is decorated with leg irons, cutlasses, and other piratical/nautical memorobilia, while the space behind the bar is decorated with a large and quite good painting of a ship at sea in a storm.

Example: The Robber’s End (continued)

What we know so far:
“The Robber’s End” is a Small Tavern. It contains (with relative sizes) a bar (1), Small-Medium Common Room (3.5), Ground-floor storeroom (0.75), and Family Dwelling (1). The Kitchens consist of a Small Pit/Rack (0.5) and a Small Food Prep area (0.25) [Total Kitchen Area 0.75]. The cuisine is of Average Quality, normally bread with soups, stews, or broths containing a little meat 0-3 (d4-1) days old, and costs 2 sp per serving.

Within the common room are 12 small tables that seat 4 each, taking up 31.2 five-foot sqr spaces. The tables are square and made of wood. The walls of the tavern are plastered/surfaced/rendered brick.

Tavern Size Modifier is 0, Commons Size Modifier is 1.

Resuming the example:
“The Robber’s End” is defined more as being whatever the “Palomino and Fox” are not than by any other preconcieved ideas. This is very much whatever the dice decide to throw out.

What can be said is that if “The Robber’s End” is the multistory establishment, there would not be very many rooms on each level; it would be a small building with many floors, probably sandwiched between a couple of other buildings, almost a tower in design. That would posess a rather interesting ambience.

The alternative suggests that most if not all of the one residential floor would be taken up with the family accommodations, especially if the family (to be generated in part 3) is large in size. There would be few if any guest accommodations, and that points to this being a rather more seedy and disreputable establishment in the poorer quarter of a large town or a city.

The name, “The Robber’s End,” is also quite suggestive – but can be interpreted in many different ways. Is this a hangout for thieves, burglars, and pickpockets? Is this where a famous criminal was hunted down, hanged, or otherwise brough to justice? Is it both, signifying a wittier owner than is normally the case? No decisions can yet be made, but at least we know what to look out for, as we proceed!

• Table 7: 23 Rolled; The common room is decorated with tapestries of battle scenes.
• Table 8: Roll of 14: Behind the bar, weapons that are bent, broken, and mangled are mounted, clearly souvenirs of some past military campaign or battlefield booty.
• Table 9: Roll 15, plus Tavern Size Modifier 0, = 15: The bar serves poor quality versions of the three most popular local beverages, which fits well with the suggestion that this establishment is located in the poorer part of a community.
• Table 10: This tavern is unusually small, so I choose the 2d6 option. 12 rolled, plus Tavern Size Mod 0, = 12: Accommodations (if any) are small (big enough for a couple), of common quality, and underpriced (3 sp/night or 4 cp/hr). Relative room size is 0.1 x (d10+7.5); 1 rolled = 0.85, which is almost “tiny”, but is appropriate given the size of the inn.
• Table 11: 1 rolled, plus Tavern Size Modifier 0, = 1: The barman’s skills are given by d3. He counts as just 1 worker, so nothing special.
• Table 12: rolls of 19, 19, and 4: The Barman is friendly but a penny-pincher, fearlessly brave and a pious man without being fanatical, viewed as a respectable man, and coldly logical. Not the criminal type, in other words, or the type who would turn a blind eye to criminal activities that he came across. However, he does sound like the sort of person who would start a legitimate business in an area known to be rife with crime, insist on his establishment being neutral territory, and manage to make a go of things, eventually becoming a local fixture and trusted arbiter of neighberhood disputes.

The focus on battle-related decorations, coupled with the barman’s profile, suggests that he served with distinction in the military before creating his establishment, and is probably still someone not to be messed with. The profile suggests a third interpretation of the name: this is where ‘robbers cease to be robbers’. Perhaps many of the staff are reformed criminals. It might even have the local nickname of the “second chance”.

It has been decided by their respective results that this is the tall, small-footprint idea, possibly built into what used to be a square Tower.

Variations on the idea are still possible; if the region was invaded, years earlier, perhaps the barman was already located here, and fought off the invaders rather than seeing his establishment razed, or perhaps it was one of his ancestors who did so, making this a long-established local fixture.

If these walls could talk: wrap-up and prolog to part 3

With the three example taverns taking clear shape and distinctive character – exactly what the “ambiance” section was supposed to provide – we next must turn our attention to the questions of guests and other residents. That happens in Part 3, which includes the most comprehensive medieval family generator that I’ve ever seen, anywhere…

How do you work accents into your speech patterns for voicing NPCs? I have three techniques that I use repeatedly, and two general principles that I rely on continuously. Today’s article is going to look at these five secret weapons in my characterization arsenal (some of which I have described before, I must admit, though I’m digging a little deeper into them this time around).

A caveat:

the techniques offered in this article work to deliver foreign accents in English. I don’t know if they will work for foreign accents in any other language – nor do I know they won’t. I have often wondered, in fact, at what French spoken in an Irish accent, or a Russian Accent, or in fact any other combination of language and accents, sounds to those who speak the foreign language. So it might work, but I can make no guarantees. Let me know!!

Technique 1: The locking phrase

To start with, I know I’ve repeated this tip many times. It actually derives from Babylon-5, and is the technique that Peter Jurrasic used to get into character as Londo Mollari. He discovered a “locking phrase”, a series of words that he could not possibly forget which automatically – when delivered in Londo’s faux-Hungarian accent – “locked” his voice ‘in character’ for any text that the script required him to deliver. His phrase was “Good Morning, Mis-ter Garaboldi”.

The trick is working out – and documenting for later use – the best possible locking phrase. Jurassic discovered his because this was something that early scripts had him say on several occasions – sheer coincidence and fate played their part in the outcome, in other words. You probably won’t be so lucky.

There are five requirements that a potential locking phrase needs to meet in order to succeed in performing this function. It needs to:

• …make the accent accessible – there’s no use having a locking phrase that doesn’t deliver the accent!
• …work quickly and silently – unlike a television set, where you can say or do whatever you need to before the cameras start rolling in order to get into character, you can’t go around repeating your locking phrase out loud. And it has to be very short, or it will disrupt the rhythm of play.
• …be reliable and persistent – you don’t get to re-shoot a scene where it doesn’t work, so your locking phrase needs to work almost every time – and it has to reinforce the accent you are impersonating strongly enough that you can drop it (for narrative and game admin delivery) and pick it back up (for dialogue), both at a moment’s notice.
• …be appropriate to the character – the identification between the NPC that you are playing and the way that character speaks needs to be definitive; the result states by definition that the NPC always speaks that way.
• …make the accent obvious without being a caricature – perhaps the hardest requirement of all, and achieved by applying some of the other techniques and principles I’ll be discussing in this article.

That’s a pretty tall order, but it can still be done. The secret is to:

1. Pick a phrase that the character is going to say early in most conversations; it might be a greeting, or “let’s get down to business”, or any of a hundred other lines that can become a vocal habit of the NPC.
2. Pick a phrase that captures the key elements of the accent.
3. Customize that phrase in some manner that is distinctive to the NPC.
4. Use the phrase as a tag to indicate that the NPC associated with it is doing the talking.

Two Standards

I use two standards for accents: the stock character and the key NPC. Most of the instructions above refer to the more demanding of those standards. For stock characters, the bar is set much lower.

It’s often helpful to “channel” some actor or on-screen character who has the same accent. You want Austrian? “I’ll Be Back” (impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger) works for most people, but isn’t something you can place early in most conversations. But choosing some other famous line by Arnie that is more appropriate to such placement gets you there. And if none come to mind, use it silently – it’s brief enough.

“Faith and Beggorrah” works for me for Irish accents. Sometimes “Saints and Beggorah” as a variation.

For German, I use “Gut Mornink, Herr Kapitan” – which is probably appalling sentence construction, but it gets my mind and tongue moving in the right ways.

For Russian, “Can you direct me to the nuclear wessels?” (or just “nuclear wessels”) does the trick.

For Scottish, “Och Aye, the noon; Captain, my wee bairns canna take any more”.

For British, I use Sir Humphrey Appelby (spelling? never mind) at his smarmiest, “Dear Lady”, “Prime Minister” (condescending, disapproving), etc.

For Spanish, I channel Speedy Gonzales: “Senõr Duck, I presume? Welcome to me-hi-co” …. You get the idea.

Technique 2: The foreign excursion

The occasional word in a native tongue, especially when the players will still understand the statement, works wonders. Favorite words for the purpose are “yes”, “no”, “hello”, “goodbye”, and “excuse me”/”pardon me”.

“Si”, “Hola” and “Scuza”- Spanish.
“Da” and “Nyet” – Russian.
“Oui”, “Non” and “Pardohn?” (and “Madamoiselle” which is not on the standard list) – French.
“Si” and “Ciao” – Italian.

And always get a translation of “I do not speak English” and “My English is not so good” or “… is so-so” and write it down phonetically!

Technique 3: The Rhyming Dictionary

An accent is basically a consistently-different way of pronouncing certain syllables. Pick the one that you find the most iconically representative of the accent that you are trying to convey – that’s fairly easy, because these are the sounds that are exaggerated in caricatures of the population in question – and then find one or two words that contain that syllable. Then look these words up in a rhyming dictionary.

Rhyming dictionaries are designed for use by poets and lyric writers, but they work wonderfully in identifying words that contain the “accented sound” that you have chosen – then all you have to do is find ways of working those words into your dialogue. Don’t force them in, use them only when it seems natural in preference to some synonym, and you will deliver your accent in a way that seems natural and unforced – because it is.

Here are a few for you to consider:

• New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary – Most expensive of them all, but also seemingly the most up-to-date and Oxford’s reputation secures it pride of place on the list
• Merriam-Webster’s Rhyming Dictionary – Reputation is there but this appears to be an older edition by almost 8 years. At least it’s relatively cheap – but you’re mostly relying on second-hand copies for anything but the Oxford, and that’s why I’ve listed so many
• Essential Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary – Looks good but I haven’t used it. The first rhyming dictionary I ever saw had the same name, and was excellent – but I’m not sure it was the same book, that was many many years ago, so I can’t give it bonus marks for that.
• The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary – Most of my readers are from the USA (Canada, the UK, and Australia are next best, with the order changing somewhat from time to time), so this might be more useful to them than I would consider it. But it’s affordable – while copies last.
• Scholastic Rhyming Dictionary – I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this one; it might be excellent, or it might focus on the correct pronunciation of words rather than the everyday usage of those words. But it seemed quite affordable, though copies are limited.
• The Complete Rhyming Dictionary by Clement Wood and Ronald J. Bogus – The first book that Amazon offered me in response to my search and also the one that I am least confident in recommending because of the second part of the title: “Including The Poet’s Craft Book”. Now, if you want to use poetry in your games and need a hand writing it, this might be the perfect weapon; I don’t, so it makes the list – in last place.

There were more, but these should be enough to get one for everyone whose inspired by this tip enough to buy one – for at least the reasonably-foreseeable future.

General Principle 1: A little applied consistently is better than a lot applied inconsistently

Having dispensed my three killer techniques (three-and-a-half if you want to get technical), it’s time to move on to the two general principles that I always try to follow, and which have been rammed home to me repeatedly.

At one point I developed the theory that it was better to establish the accent or foreign language all at once and that the memory of that would then persist, refreshed with the occasional reminder. As a theory, it sounds good – but in practice it simply didn’t work. The opening salvo was so densely-populated with accented words and foreign language that it was incomprehensible to the players, especially in a noisy environment.

I was also busy in that opening salvo with establishing the personality of the character doing the talking – and there wasn’t enough room to do both, and as a result, both purposes failed, as did the primary purpose of the dialogue, to communicate. Three strikes, and the theory was out.

A light, but more consistent, sprinkling quickly proved more effective. I try to make sure that there’s at least one reminder of the accent in every substantial paragraph of dialogue. And I try to put one in for every three or four lines of canned dialogue, or every 45-seconds-to-a-minute or so of improvised dialogue.

What’s more, I discovered that I gained greater control over nuance by adopting this theory; by increasing the frequency just a little (to one every 30 seconds, say) I could distinguish between characters with heavily-accented English and characters with excellent English who were not native English-speakers, all without compromising comprehension on the part of the players. This turned the accent from a detriment in characterization to an asset that aided it. General principles don’t get much better – or more useful – than that!

General Principle 2: A little applied consistently is better than a lot applied consistently

It’s still necessary to watch out for overload. A particular problem arises when you are playing an NPC who speaks no English with someone – could be a PC, could be an NPC – translating (or even occasionally, mistranslating). Once again, you need to provide an opening salvo in the foreign language, which needs to be prepped in advance, and in which you also need to establish the initial perception of the personality of the speaker; then you need to shift gears and deliver the comprehensible translation without losing the identification as a foreign-language speaker.

Because you no longer require that opening paragraph to be comprehensible to the players, this becomes a manageable process. There’s enough room in any given piece of dialogue for it to do two jobs, but not three, which means that for every piece of dialogue you need to choose which combination of two you want to achieve:

• Delivery of information & comprehension of that information;
• Delivery of accent/foreign language;
• Delivery of characterization.

By ruling that the first paragraph of dialogue did nothing but focus on jobs two and three and ignored job one, and then shifting to a different focus in which job one is primary and jobs 2 and 3 alternate in some ratio as room within the dialogue permits, the situation becomes manageable.

What I have found is that you can employ the “little, consistently” as an accent (even if the translator speaks both languages like a native), you can manage to perform all three jobs at the same time, with that opening salvo as a platform.

This seems to contradict the findings reported in describing the first principle, but there is a subtle difference in the circumstances, and thinking about that difference led me to formulate the principle now under discussion.

You can think of any dialogue as possessing information content and having a limited “overhead capacity” to convey other information. Processing an accent is one of the things that can occupy that overhead capacity – but if you oversaturate the dialogue with an accent, you suck all the air out of that capacity, air that you need for other purposes – characterization, emotion, etc.

What’s more, one of the surest routes to caricature is to overemphasize the accent. That might be fine for a cartoon Pepe Le Pew, but it’s no good for any serious characters in a believable RPG.

The process

I write the first couple of lines of whatever dialogue the character is to deliver in English. I then copy and paste into Google translate, and then attempt to sound out the translated lines in an appropriate accent. After doing that a couple of times, and editing to replace any words that don’t translate into something that will, I copy and paste the translated text back into my word processor and rewrite them as phonetically as possible. After that, I switch to delivering the dialogue in accented English.

For example:

• “Disaster at the old farmstead, come at once! The midnight cockerel has been slain by the a nightmare guardian!”

In French, this becomes:

• “Catastrophes à l’ancienne ferme, venez à la fois! Le cockerel de minuit a été tué par le tuteur d’un cauchemar!”

Replacing “Cockerel” with “bird” gives me:

• “Catastrophes à l’ancienne ferme, venez à la fois! L’oiseau de minuit a été tué par le tuteur d’un cauchemar!”

Now, I don’t speak French, so I make my best guess as to what this would sound like, phonetically (with apologies to anyone who does for the hatchet-job I am about to perpetrate on their language):

• “Catastroph alan-sien fer-me, venez ala fois! Loys-oo de min-wit a-ete tue-par le-tut-you-are dun corsh-em-ar!”

With a minute or two to practice a few times before the game, I can just about rattle that off in a pseudo-French accent and at least sound like I know what I’m doing.

Next, I take that French translation, and plug it back into Google translate to render it back into English:

• “Catastrophes à l’ancienne ferme, venez à la fois! L’oiseau de minuit a été tué par le tuteur d’un cauchemar!”

becomes

• “Catastrophes in the old farm, come at once! The bird midnight was killed by the guardian of a nightmare!”

The burst of faked French dialogue is followed by a “translation” based on this reverse-translation, also delivered in faux-French accent: “Mon Diu, he says there has been catastrophe at the old farm. Le black bird was killed by a monster who guards nightmares.”

Everything that follows is simply written in plain English (or improvised on the spot) and delivered with false French accent. Job done.

Bonus (marginally-relevant) tip: you can sometimes get ideas for the most wonderful mistranslations by taking the foreign-language version and spell-checking it using an appopriate dictionary (I write for an American audience, so I use an American English Dictionary):

• “Catastrophes e ancientness femme, veneer e la foist! Aloise de Minuit a étude tun par el hauteur dun gaucher!”

which I would render as

• “An old woman has exposed herself to the audience while doing the minute song in her best dress! It was catastrophic!”

Any resemblance between this translation and the “real” meaning are purely coincidental… :)

Conclusion

More than once, people have told me they “can’t do accents”. Heck, I’ve said it myself on occasion, because I can’t do real accents. But I can fake them – and now, so can you.