I’m anticipating a relatively short post (especially for me) this time around but that shouldn’t minimize the importance. And, of course, I have a terrible track record at doing “short”. Postscript: After the fact, I can see that I’ve maintained my track record…

Last time around, I started writing about Wonders and what was necessary to make them amazing, and while there was some of that involved in the article that resulted, I ended up spending most of my time talking about the need to have them at all, and most or what remained, discussing the qualities that they had to have just to qualify for the label, “Wonder of the known world.” That’s because a whole section of the last article got yanked out in the final hours; a section entitled “Describing Wonders”. I pulled it when I realized that the subject applied more broadly, to locations in general, and deserved to be in an article of its own.

Part of the advice that I’ve offered in several of the articles on locations for the blog carnival, and in my earlier article, The Poetry Of Place: Describing Locations & Scenes in RPGs, is to use as little description up front as you can get away with (to some extent, this article can be considered a sequel to that one). ‘Less is more’ so it’s important to make the most of a few well-chosen adjectives.

The problem is that often, and for wonders in particular, you need to create a vision of otherworldly grandeur and magnificence, or of vastness, or of any of half a dozen other qualities, most of which got prominently mentioned in the last article. You need to create a sense of wonder and awe, and that’s hard to do with only a few words.

Use as many words as you need…

Does that make Wonders an exception to that general principle? Not entirely. The goal is to describe what needs to be described, plus sufficient additional description as may be needed to enable the imagination to fill in the rest of the environment to a sufficient degree to provide context. A good general impression is better than a lengthy and ponderous detailed impression of the whole – too many details get in the way of seeing the overall picture. If you describe every rock, animal, and tree, your readers/audience literally won’t be able to “see the forest for the trees”.

This hardly offers a precision guideline. It would be great to be able to say “the necessary plus two items” or “the necessary plus up to three” or some variation, but the reality is not so convenient. One “how to write” guide that I remember reading years ago(though I don’t remember who wrote it) suggested “The central focus of narrative attention, plus one or two general environmental impressions, plus one or two specific impressions, at least one of which has to be dynamic in nature, plus one statement for anything that does not fit the general environment or that distinguishes it from a dozen others, plus one specific reinforcing impression for each aberrant impression.” That’s a lot of description, especially since the guide was unclear on whether it was counting sentences or paragraphs. Nevertheless, I’ve found that its not too far off the mark – counting paragraphs in a novelized setting and sentences in RPGs and short stories, and employing a heavy editorial pen.

So let’s break it down into individual elements, and be clear about what each one is:

1. The central focus of narrative attention:
In principle, this is good, but right away there’s a problem in terms of RPG usage: sometimes we don’t want it to be apparent what the “central focus of narrative attention” should be. Thankfully, this is not the case when we’re talking about a Wonder or Monument. Even natural wonders, like a waterfall of spectacular beauty, or that flows upward for some reason, or is liquid helium, or whatever, have a central focus – though sometimes you may have to think about it. If a bay is sufficiently magnificent, is it the water, or the beach, or the trees, or the rocky prominences, or some interplay between two or more of these, that is the central focus? Or perhaps it is some collective quality that they all possess, or an attribute of the location in general rather than anything specific within it? What is so spectacular that this is a “Natural Wonder Of The World”? It’s not enough for it to be a picture-postcard of beauty.

What makes an Elven Forest different from any other forest in the Game World? What’s the difference between a Dwarven Mine and anyone else’s?

2. One or two general environmental impressions:
A general description of the broader environment in succinct form to provide surroundings for the central focus of narrative attention, and to provide a framework for the more detailed impressions to come.

3. One or two specific impressions, at least one of which has to be dynamic in nature:
When you look at a location, even one containing a wonder, there will be the central focus of attention and a general impression of what’s around it, plus one or two details that leap out at you from that general impression.

“Dynamic” requires some further explanation. I’m not just talking about active vs passive language, I’m talking about including some activity that goes with the scene – birds singing or a monkey swinging through the trees or clouds drifting lazily overhead. Note that these are not specific enough – you should name the species of bird and the quality of the song, or the species and size of monkey, or the type of clouds and relative direction of drift. This requirement keeps the scene you are describing from being a still portrait and brings it to life in some way. If the quality to be emphasized is tranquility, or calmness, or stillness, or silence, or something along those lines, the “dynamic impression” might have to come from a character’s reaction/action – drawing breath, or panting from exertions, or whatever.

4. A statement each for anything that does not fit the general environment or that distinguishes it:
The writer’s guide used the example of a WWII aircraft that had been reclaimed by the jungle. RPG locations can be a bit more exotic in nature, but the principle holds. Note that this requirement may already have been met if the “central focus of the narrative” is the only thing that doesn’t belong. It should really say “anything else that does not fit”, but that presupposes that the central focus doesn’t fit and would have become confusing.

If you’ve described a jungle, now is the time to mention that the plants are all red, or crystalline, or made of metal. If there are two moons in the sky, now’s the time to mention that, as well. If the lake holds the reflection of mountains that aren’t actually there on the horizon, take this moment to describe them.

5. One specific reinforcing impression for each aberrant impression:
For each element that doesn’t fit the general environmental picture that you offered in (3) and that isn’t the central focus of the narrative – in other words, for each descriptive ingredient you mention in (4) – you need to add one more item of the same type as (3). Otherwise the weight of the unusual will overwhelm the general impression that you are trying to convey – unless, of course, that is the goal. And again, at least half of these should be dynamic in some way.

In what order?
This is a very good question. Should the central focus be the last thing that you describe? Or after the general impression? Or before it? How about those unusual elements from (4), where should they be placed?

There are two competing principles. The most obvious should go first because it is the most obvious; the most obvious should go last so that it doesn’t distract the reader/audience from the rest of the description.

The same logic – both ways – can be applied to the unusual elements.

And finally, there are two more principles, which can also be in opposition: if something is expected or anticipated, it should be early, to satisfy that expectation; and juxtaposition can be used for contrast and emphasis.

With so many ‘rules of thumb’ at loggerheads, the best solution is to throw the rulebook away.

My Solution
I write using a word processor. So I can put each of the five sections of narrative on separate lines/paragraphs (even if they will eventually form one block of text) and then easily select, drag, and drop to try out different ways of ‘streaming’ the description. I’ve also found that doing so right after you’ve written them can be either the best time or the worst time to do so: the best time, because the impression that you have in your mind’s eye is at its most vivid at that point, the worst time because your players/readers won’t have the benefit of that vivid mental impression beforehand; your objective is to create it in the mind of someone who doesn’t already have it.

Copy-and-Paste comes to the rescue. I make three copies: one I leave unmodified, so that I can scrap my work and start over, one I modify right away, and the third I modify without having re-read the first two after doing something else for at least an hour, and preferably first thing the next morning. I can then compare the results of the newly-arranged second attempt with the first, and decide which is better – and if either are satisfactory.

That doesn’t mean that I get rid of the two that don’t measure up, not quite yet – I select them and change their color to Aqua or Grey or Silver or Yellow – some color that the eye will tend to skip over – and wait at least 48 hours and preferably 5 or 6 days before making my choice final. More than once I’ve found that what seemed clear the next day is as transparent as mud when I come on it completely fresh.

…but go light on the adjectives

Four or more descriptive passages? Each with one or two adjectives? No, no, no. That’s far too many.

In fact, the approach described above generally produces far more descriptive narrative than is needed. This is often a good thing if you then employ a little self-discipline and edit ruthlessly.

A writer (I forget who), discussing his editorial philosophy, said in one of his books, “If in doubt, cut it out. I have yet to encounter any book which could not be improved by the disciplined use of this technique.” Personally, I think that is going a little overboard and risks tossing junior out with his bathwater.

When I edit, I ask myself “What is this sentence/phrase/word contributing to the whole? Can it be removed without harming the whole? Is it redundant, tautological? Can I take whatever value was in this sentence/phrase/word and incorporate it into another so that I no longer need it? Can I make the description, or the situation clearer? Can I make the characters more expressive of their personality? Can I give them more personality?” (It’s probably worth mentioning that I perform next-to-no editing of my articles for Campaign Mastery beyond ensuring that the layout is correct, or they would take twice as long to write.)

While not all of that is relevant to descriptions of locations and Wonders, there’s enough validity that it is worth employing. And remember that there may be a Personality involved: either the personality of the builder/designer or the personality of, or that is attributed to, the subject.

Back to the subject at hand:
And speaking of subjects, let’s get back to ours. The guideline discussed above tosses “the central focus of narrative attention” aside with scant consideration, focusing more on everything else, and simply saying (in effect) ‘describe the Wonder’. Well, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, and this article is supposed to have the objective of showing you how – this dismissive approach just won’t cut it.

One Adjective to rule them all

When I want to describe a Wonder, I try to find one single adjective that most colorfully encapsulates the philosophy or quality that I want the Wonder to express. When I want to describe a more general scene, I try to find one single adjective that most encapsulates the general impression that I want the scene to have. When I want to describe a character, I try to find one single adjective that sums up the first impression that I want the character to express.

I call this the Ruling Adjective because it sums up the impression that I want the subject of the description to convey. I then build the rest of the description around that adjective. Let’s consider the process in greater detail:

Choosing the Ruling adjective

The first word that you think of is probably not the right one, but is usually related to the right one. The thesaurus is your friend; I look up that first word and make a list of related entries in the thesaurus, then look up each in turn until I find the one that contains the most nuance and implication for the subject of the description.

Although it’s called “the Ruling adjective”, I’ve been known to cheat. A noun may be the perfect metaphor or analogy for the adjective I want, which sometimes doesn’t actually exist.

Reject the self-evident

When I say “the first word”, I should qualify that: I mean the first word that is not self-evident. If the wonder is a very high waterfall, “high” or “tall” may be the first things that come to mind, but these are going to be obvious from the physical description. The “first word” expresses something more. It might be about the sound, or the way the water moves, or the light, or the color, or the smell, or some other quality of the waterfall. “Spire” or “Needle” or “Rainbow” or “Roaring” or “Stench” or “Emerald” or “Swirling” or “Cascading” or even “Misty”, all come to mind for describing different waterfalls – and those are just the terrestrial versions of the geologic phenomenon.

It Starts With A Name

The sense of awe and grandeur that we want to generate when people hear or read the description of the Wonder we are creating has to start somewhere, and the all-important first impression usually comes from the name. Nail that, and you’re half-way home; get it pedestrian, or worse, and you face an uphill battle.

So, what can you do to get the name right?

Past Lessons

Names are important. That’s’ why I wrote a whole series on the subject a while back. Part Five of that series (A Good Name Is Hard To Find) was entitled “Grokking The Message: Naming Places & Campaigns”, and the first part of that article might be useful – but naming Monuments and Wonders (other than natural ones) didn’t get mentioned. So in part, this article can be considered an extension of that series.

Nor is that the only past article to which I should refer readers at this point. In The poetry of meaning: 16 words to synopsize a national identity, I used translations of 16 key words to get inside the collective heads of a culture, building layers of meaning and depth onto simple foundations. The national identity of the naming culture is definitely useful in determining the name of a Wonder, so this article is also of definite – if indirect – relevance to the subject.

Neither of these actually answers the question of how you derive the perfect name for your Wonder, though they both address factors to keep in mind while working on the name.

The Standard Formats

There are two standard formats that are generally used for the name of Wonders:

• The [General] of [Specific]
• The [Specific] [General]

I realize these aren’t very clear, so let’s throw up an example of each:

• The [Colossus] of [Rhodes]
• The [Reichsbacht] [Falls]

The first is usually applied to Non-natural Wonders, while the second is applied to some Natural Wonders and to locations which are not always considered wonders.

Incorporating The Wonder

These traditional forms buy into the popular culture mystique of ‘Wonders Of The Known World’ by association of form within the name, but they don’t do a lot to convey the sense of awe and mystery and majesty (and whatever) that is our end-goal. Part of the problem is that the “Specific” part of the name is either a geographic reference – a place name, more to the point – or sometimes the name of the designer or builders, and none of that really fires up the imagination.

Using the same form, however, we can conjure up names for wonders that are far less prosaic while still harkening back to the source forms. Off the top of my head, try these two:

• The Veil of Symphony
• The Impulsive Jungle

I have no idea what these wonders are – but the names alone are enough to fire the imagination, to start suggesting possibilities of what they might be.

In other words, the same principles that apply to creating good names for magic items also apply to creating good names for Wonders! This also offers the potential for other name forms, but they will all contain the same two components – a [general] element and a [specific] element.

Of course, this is the 20th-century (and 21st) human approach; your society might employ different naming conventions. However, this can create an additional burden for the GM to overcome, since it gives up the cache of your player’s existing awareness of Wonders. So have a VERY good reason for employing that different naming convention, or play to your contemporary audience of players/readers.

Having broken the search for an effective name into two smaller components, let’s look briefly at each, and then wrap up this part of the discussion with a guiding principle.

The [General] Element

This can be prosaic – “Jungle” in the second example above – but if you can find an alternative noun that is descriptive, so much the better – “Veil” in the first example, because it gives you an extra descriptive element for the price of one.

The [Specific] Element

This is the element of the name that pins this particular Wonder down, as opposed to any other locations that might fit the [General] label. As such, it frequently carries the heavier burden, having to create the gosh-wow (or at least, lay the foundations for it) as well as being descriptive. As a rule of thumb, I will spend three times as much time and effort on the specific element as I will on the General Element, minimum.

Other Languages

Don’t forget that rendering the name you come up with into another language can add tons of flavor. “The Hall Of Shadows” is already a pretty good name, but here it is in a dozen other languages, courtesy of Google Translate:

• An Halla Na Scáthanna
• Aula Umbrae
• Hall nan nan lonbraj
• Hallen av skuggor
• Itzalak Aretoan
• La sala de las sombras
• Le hall d’ombres
• Mae’r neuadd o gysgodion
• Sál stín
• Sala cieni
• Salurinn á skugganum
• Zule nas

A Tip for using Google Translate:
Avoid unusual capitalizing. When I started the above list, I had entered “The Hall Of Shadows” and quite often the software failed to translate it at all. More than half the above list was only accessible once I had changed my entry to “The hall of shadows”.

Another Tip for using Google Translate:
Quite often, copying text from a website produces strange formatting. I keep an empty notepad (plain text) document on my desktop; I copy and paste any website text into it to strip away any formatting, then copy and paste that into my actual working document, where – being bereft of formatting – it will adopt whatever formatting (font etc) is already established. For a long time, I thought that I had to save it first, but have discovered that step to be unnecessary. :)

Imply the Ruling Adjective In The Name

This is tricky to do but can pay big dividends if you can manage it. Sometimes a variation on the General element will do the trick, at other times you have to add this to the requirements for the Specific element.

Cheating with a non-human language: The last resort

A whole section of my article appears to have vanished without a trace. I’ve done my best to recreate it at the VERY last minute, but if I’ve missed anything…

If worst comes to worst, and there is no word in the english language that contains everything you need it to, you can always create a word in a non-human language and use that in the title. When you do this, the sound of the word you create should be reflective of the Ruling Adjective; you can put everything else in the translated meaning.

The Construction Of A Description

So, we have a suitably inspirational name for our Wonder, and we have the surroundings covered – now it’s time to get on with the task of describing the elephant in the room.

As usual, firm rules and techniques are hard to come by. Some descriptions work best starting with the physical shape, others are more effective starting with a dominant feature, while still others are most successful focusing initially on some general impression. A fourth option is to start with a reaction induced by the totality, or some expression of the dominant quality that the Wonder is to represent.

My approach is reminiscent of that employed in generating the description of the environment, spelt out earlier in this article. Put all the sentences together on separate lines, shuffle the order for clarity, tone, and atmosphere, review – and, if necessary, rinse and repeat. Then edit heavily.

Beyond this, there are some specific guidelines that I can offer that usually serve me in good stead.

Reject synonyms of the ruling adjective

Because the Ruling Adjective is intended to cover the totality, it (and variations) will frequently make an appearance when describing individual elements of the Wonder. This is an extended tautology by association, and you are better off culling all or almost all of these adjectives. Once they are removed – something I achieve by changing font colors again – I will restore one, and only one, somewhere near the start of the description.

If I do retain an additional variation, I try to place that piece of the description last, so that I am bookending the description with this dominant theme.

You can either describe a detail or use an adjective to refer to that detail – not both

If we’re talking about a Statue with unusual eyes, you can either describe those eyes, or you can attribute the effect of the eyes on the totality to the statue as an adjective. Doing both is another redundancy, and can lead to confusion on the part of the reader/player.

As an alternative, describe a sub-feature of the detail instead of describing the entire detail. This focuses the attention on salient points without wasting a lot of verbiage on the detail containing the sub-element. Instead of the eyes of the statue, mention the irises.

If a building, describe the windows or the glass, or use an adjective to discuss the effect that they have – not both – and so on.

Employ adjectives from other domains of language

A trick which I have mentioned before is to employ an “adjective” from some other aspect of the language. Take an adjective that would normally be used to describe a character’s personality and apply it to the structure, for example. Take a verb that would normally be applied to a person’s actions or reactions and use it (suitably modified if necessary) to describe the relationship between the Wonder and the environment.

I’ve discussed this principle before, so I won’t go into further details here.

Build around the adjectives

Sentences are normally built around the noun. Adjectives and adverbs are used to nuance, classify, quantify, emphasize, and elaborate on some aspect of the noun. This is fine for a literal description, but not so great when atmosphere is the target. Try building your sentences around the adverbs and adjectives, instead, applying them to less-common or global attributes of the wonder or its environment.

Build qualifying double adjectives then remove the primary adjective

This is a favorite trick for condensing a description, and one that I rarely see mentioned anywhere. Actually, amend that to “never”. I’m sure someone has observed this principle before, but if they have, they aren’t talking about it anywhere that I have found.

Take the phrase “a cloudy sky”. What sort of clouds? Here’s a grab-bag of possible second adjectives, each of which have been used to qualify the adjective “cloudy”:

• A Leaden, Cloudy Sky
• A Brooding Cloudy Sky
• A Fiery, Cloudy Sky
• An Icy, Cloudy Sky
• A Windswept Cloudy Sky
• A Broken, Cloudy Sky
• A Tempestuously Cloudy Sky

Now remove the primary adjective “Cloudy” and see what happens:

• A Leaden Sky
• A Brooding Sky
• A Fiery Sky
• An Icy Sky
• A Windswept Sky
• A Broken Sky
• A Tempestuous Sky

The missing adjective’s presence is still implied but the unique secondary characteristic is strengthened in intensity. One adjective is doing the work of two. And, by eliminating one of them, you can now add a tertiary adjective if one seems necessary.

This doesn’t always work, but most of the time it will sharpen your language very effectively, especially if used sparingly.

Don’t rely on software like Word to find and fix these things for you. I use word for spellchecking these articles, and it had absolutely no problem with the long-form versions of the examples above.

Replace adjectives and nouns with a more expressive noun

This advice comes from Rachel Shirley and her web page entitled How to use Adjectives in Novels. She offers three examples in the section “Effective Use Of Adjectives”:

• A large stone is more succinctly described as a boulder.
• Steady rain could be described as drizzle.
• A thick book could be reworded as a tome.

(If you go browsing on her site, note that each article is in two-column format).

Another reference

Another page that’s worth a look, while you’re at it, is How the Right Adjective Can Breathe Life into Your Writing, by Nanci Panuccio.

Above All

Don’t be afraid to think big. Worry about questions of why and how later.

Just as it’s hard to infuse the mundane and trivial with a sense of wonder, it’s hard to keep the sense of wonder out of really big, creative, ideas. Be expansive.

One final reference

Creating a “Wonder of the world” is not all that difficult; you just need to get creative and find some inspiration. Describing one is not all that difficult either.

Doing it well is a whole different kettle of fish.

If you get stuck, try some of the solutions I offer in the parts of my series on writer’s block that focus on settings, especially the last quarter of part 2.

No campaign or literary world is complete without wonders and iconic locations. But these are neither wonderful nor iconic if poorly described. Your goal has to be to engage the imaginations of the readers/players with your words, and then sketch in just enough of the scenery that they get a sense of “being there” – additional details can always follow later.

Examples. You want some examples, right? Well, I’m working on some – I’m not sure if they will be ready Thursday or if they’ll have to wait until next Monday, but there are examples on the way. Just thought you’ld like to know.

Updated with an additional section in the comments

Mention of Easter Island in a previous article has had me thinking about monuments and places of wonder, and what is needed to make them amazing.

It’s a lesson that Australians in general don’t do very well at – hence “tourist attractions” like the “big prawn”, “big banana”, and “big pineapple”, collectively known as ‘Australia’s Big Things‘.

Most campaign creators don’t give enough thought to such monuments when they are setting up their game worlds.
 
 
 

All images used to illustrate this article, unless otherwise noted, were sourced from Wikipedia Commons and are subject to the GNU Free Documentation License and/or the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World

In the age of the ancient Greeks, various guidebooks began listing “must see” wonders of architecture and design around the Mediterranean Rim, especially the eastern side. These wonders are still known to much of the world even though only one survives into modern times, though most people couldn’t tell you anything more about any of them. They were:

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (destroyed by an earthquake sometime after 1 BC)
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephasus (destroyed by Arson and plundering)
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia (disassembled and later destroyed by fire)
• The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (destroyed by earthquakes)
• The Colossus of Rhodes (destroyed by an earthquake in 226 BC)
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria (destroyed by an earthquake in 1303 AD).

(I was always under the impression that the Great Library of Alexandria was also on the list, and I don’t recognize the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus – so maybe I learned a different list, or someone decided two in one place was a bit much?)

The original list has had many successors and imitators over the century, each drawing apon the mystique of the items by means of the association with the original list but also reinforcing the mystique of that original list, which is one reason why it remains embedded in the popular consciousness 2014 years or more after its first compilation. You can read about several of these lists at this Wikipedia Page. The commonly used phrase, “8th wonder of the world” adds to the popular awareness.

Wonder Characteristics

All these wonders have a number of broad general characteristics in common: Size, Beauty and/or Grandeur, Value, Cultural Importance or an Air Of Mystery or Historical Importance, and Symbolism.

Eiffel Tower at Sunrise, Photo by Tristan Nitot. Click thumbnail for a larger image.

Size

In an article entitled “Size is not enough”, this is the obvious place to start. Wonders and Monuments are all big. Impossible to miss. They stand out, either naturally or by design, and at a considerable distance. “Unmissable” has a double-meaning when used in reference to them.

Mitre Peak, New Zealand, photo by Grutness (James Dignan). Click thumbnail for a larger image.

Beauty, Grandeur, or both

For one reason or another, these things are always breathtaking or awesome or both. They totally dominate the landscape – but with something more than sheer size. A rock can be big, but it needs to have something more going for it in order to qualify as a natural wonder. A building can be monumental, but if it’s a monumentally ugly slab of stone, it’s probably not going to qualify.

If it doesn’t make your jaw drop, it doesn’t make the list.

I suppose it’s possible for something to be “monumentally, jaw-droppingly ugly” though….

Value

The first two characteristics usually add up to expense. These things don’t come cheap, and that means that whoever constructed them cared about doing so – a LOT. They were vitally important for some reason; they had value to the builders. That normally translates to having value in subsequent eras.

Unfortunately, that also translates into a place with value for looters and thieves. It’s something of a wonder (pun intended) in itself that more of the ancient wonders weren’t destroyed in this fashion.

Because they also have symbolic value in representing whoever cared enough about whatever they represent to have value as a symbolic target to those opposed to those people, and that value usually outstrips (to them) the cultural wealth of retaining them intact. If a city contains a wonder, that city’s enemies will tear it to rubble if the city ever falls to them.

Cultural Importance or Air Of Mystery or Historical Importance

I thought long and hard about this “quality” of wonders, especially in terms of “wonders of the natural world”, but realized that those have cultural importance.

Cultural Importance means that they influence, or have influenced, the general society in some fashion. They might be considered sacred, they might provide a natural defense, they might be the home of one or more Gods. They are mentioned in song and story even if there aren’t songs and stories about them specifically. If they are expensive, and have value and significance, then they also have a greater implication: that the people who built it were prosperous enough to do so. There’s a reason why so many of them have religious connotations; there’s a reason why so many are associated with rulers and the ruling classes. Cultural importance can also mean that the wonder is ironically representative of the city or country in which it is located.

But some wonders and monuments don’t meet this prescription. They carry with them an air of mystery, instead. Arguably, all wonders start with this when they are first discovered, and the cultural importance results from attempting to penetrate the mystery. Easter Island is one of the finest examples, but the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, and Stonehenge all possessed this mystique in the early and middle 20th century. They excite the imagination, entice speculation and supposition, and inspire myths and legends. Arguably, Tutankhamen is the most famous King ever to have reigned anywhere in the world; I’m sure that 99 out of 100 passersby on any western city would recognize his famous death mask right away, if not more.

Some sites have neither great cultural importance nor any real sense of mystery to them. What they have instead is an amplified historical significance. The Washington Monument comes to mind as an example. Westminster Abbey comes to mind as an example. The Empire State Building comes to mind as an example – it was the world’s tallest building for 42 years, and is iconic even today as a result.

Symbolism

The final attribute of most monuments and wonders is that they are, were, or are held to be, symbolic of some greater value or concept. Spiritualism. Faith. Democracy. Liberty. Justice. The power of nature. The beauty of nature. Love. Power. Exploration.

Just about anything that can be conceived of, no matter how abstract, can be the subject of a monument or wonder’s symbolism.

If I had more to say in this article, I would have added pictures of the Statue Of Liberty, Washington Monument, and Arlington National Cemetery to those chosen – I would argue that they all qualify as “wonders” under these criteria. I might also have chosen the White House.

Why is it so hard?

So why is it that so few campaigns make full use – or any use – of wonders? Why do so few worlds even mention them or provide a list of them? Why is it so hard?

Creativity Requirement

First, they impose a huge burden of creativity on the part of the GM. He or she is just one person; the wonders of our world are the handiwork of thousands of creative people over millennia, plus the natural wonders uncovered by hundreds of explorers.

Their historical importance means that they influence and shape history and culture. You can’t take your campaign background and simply tack them on as symbolic of some highlight; you have to create them at each stage of history and incorporate the reasons why these monuments are deemed important into the narrative, then have to keep track of them throughout the history that follows. It’s additional creative workload at a point in the campaign’s genesis that doesn’t need additional workload, and it’s easy to dismiss them as mere color, and hence something that can be sacrificed in favor of more directly-valuable efforts.

Artistic Requirement

Then, too, it’s never enough to be able to describe a wonder in words alone; they have to be depicted in some way, and that imposes an artistic requirement that not everyone can meet. Either you have to be really good at illustration or painting (including digital art), or you have to be good at image manipulation, or you have to find and adapt someone else’s image – which may not be at all suitable. “It’s like this except, and except, and except, and also…” …it just doesn’t work.

Me, I’m an OK-to-good artist (depending on the wind and phase of the moon and all sorts of other imponderables), and fairly good at image manipulation. I’m not an expert in either. I’ve done some work of which I’m proud (much of it in Assassin’s Amulet or here at Campaign Mastery) and some work which was just barely good enough, and some that I wish could have been done better – and there’s some that I won’t show anyone. But all that puts me nine leagues ahead of many, while leaving me in awe of the breathtaking work produced by others. I know just enough to know how hard it is :)

 

For example, what if you wanted a Jade Palace? One way you could get what you’re after might be to modify some other image, manipulating it to give it a green color. And if you wanted this to be a magical place, with a strange light show emanating from it? You could do that, too. I spent 10 minutes or so manipulating a small-sized low-resolution Taj Mahal image (shown to the right) to achieve a passable representation of those very results. Compare it with the source image shown earlier in this article. If I were doing it for real, I would have worked harder and used a higher-resolution image. I would also have played around with proportions of different elements to produce something that was less-obviously a derivative image, and maybe added some additional wings to the building.

If the skills to meet these artistic requirements aren’t in your toolbox, you’re in trouble.

Avoiding Kitsch

Not all ideas are good ones. But, by definition, only great ideas make it to becoming wonders. There’s a fundamental incompatibility that results from this combination; inevitably, some of the wonders you propose shouldn’t be anywhere near the list, never mind on it.

Honest self-criticism is one of the hardest abilities to develop that I can think of. Until you have it down pat, you are going to need some supporters to sit in judgment, and perhaps to throw new suggestions and ideas in your direction.

I’d like to think I’m getting better at artwork all the time – certainly, when I first started on Campaign Mastery, something like the Orcs & Elves titles would have been beyond me. Not to mention the “change in the weather” that I did for my the image of the Sydney Opera House in my previous article. But I can still deliver a clunker, an idea that just doesn’t work.

At all costs, you have to avoid being cute. Monuments and Wonders have to exude Gravitas – weight, seriousness, and dignity. Cute becomes Kitsch all too easily.

What to represent

But perhaps the hardest part of the entire process is the task of deciding what the wonders should be, what they should represent. What’s worthy? What’s not?

I touched on all this to some extent in an article from October 2009, Legendary Achievements: Coloring Your Campaign with Anecdote and Legend, in the section Legendary natural wonders to bring the geography to life,, but this is a whole new order of problem. Cute and Trivial worked just fine for the folksy local legends that I suggest there, but few objects and locations will qualify as a wonder of the world, and because they are exceptional, they have to be treated in an exceptional manner.

Solving The Problems

Okay, so having sorted why it’s so hard, why should you bother – and, if I can convince you that you should, how can you go about it?

Uluru (Helicopter view), photo by Huntster (Public Domain Image). Click on thumbnail for a larger image.

Why Do It?

Depth. Having wonders in your world gives it a sense of having existed before the PCs arrived, of being a real place. According to the DVD extras, Weta workshop put a lot of effort into constructing little bits of the Numenorian culture – statues and architecture and the like – that they could then demolish and leave lying around in various places, for this very reason.

Verisimilitude. The real world has them; your campaign world should have them. If they are absent, no-one might notice; but if they are present, they will notice that.

Filler. Wonders give the characters a chance to play tourist, soaking up the campaign world and its background and concepts in the process. This takes some of the burden of adventure creation away from the GM on a day-by-day basis; so the effort can be viewed as an investment in the future.

Landmarks ground a campaign. The landmarks give a framework around which the players can assemble the bits of campaign background knowledge that come their way. All too often, there seems to be a divorce between the background and the current-day reality of campaigns. By salting the background with the remnants and artifacts of the past, you can have action occur at those locations, giving a connection between the modern-day game world and the background.

Reference. Wonders form landmarks in the players’ minds as well as on the map. This gives them a key which can be used to relate other aspects of the campaign. “Lilton” might be the small community where something happens that will be of interest to the characters, but it’s just a spot on the map unless they’ve already adventured in the region. If they can be told that it’s midway between the legendary Salt Mines of Tarah and the Waterfall of Niglesh, largest in the known world, suddenly it is a lot more than that (and a lot more interesting).

Individuality. My choices as Wonders will not be the same as your choices, which will not be the same choices as the GM who lives on the far side of town. Those choices help make your campaign distinctive. But even more valuably, if they are connected to the campaign background and its core concepts, they give the players a ‘hook’ from which to hang the uniqueness of the campaign. It’s amazing how much more accessible those unique elements become when you can point to a Wonder Of The World and describe how, at this particular place, that difference manifested in an unusual or significant outcome.

Integration.By virtue of these connections between campaign concept, campaign background, and contemporary campaign reality, Wonders can integrate the many facets of the campaign world into a unified whole. They become the ‘nails’ that hold the rest of the metaphoric structure together. Without them, the connections can seem superficial or even non-existent.

Moreover, they can help the GM integrate his own thinking and planning. If you exemplify a house rule with a World Wonder where it made a difference, you facilitate and help solidify your own thinking about how that house rule will manifest within the game reality. Sometimes you can discover unintended connections between, and implications of, those house rules, before they become a problem. One of the easiest ways to collapse a campaign is to have a house rule and a campaign background that doesn’t reflect the existence of that rule and its impact on the game reality. Wonders and Monuments can help avoid this problem.

Inspiration. I’m big on having explanations for everything, as long-time readers of this site will know. I go many, many, extra miles to maintain the internal coherence of my campaigns. Wonders give me the opportunity to be a little more playful, to build in something whose explanation I don’t know. I can stick a giant statue in the ground without knowing where it came from, just for the fun of it.

Mysteries and Lifesavers. Sometimes things fall in a heap of confusion. The PCs have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and done so in such a way that there seems to be no escape; the campaign looks like it’s about to collapse as a result. When everything that is already known tells you that the PCs have no hope, you have three choices:

• Learn to live with the PCs failure. More importantly, find a way for the campaign to live with the PCs failure. Or:
• A completely unsatisfying dues-ex-machina that solves the problem for them. Or:
• Enlarging the campaign to include things that were not already known, and that offer a potential way out for the PCs – if they discover it, and how to exploit it to score a surprise come-back at the 11th hour. And so far as the players have to know, you always intended it to happen that way.

Wonders with some inexplicable quality give you a hook to hang such solutions from. If they are established within the campaign already, they won’t even seem like Dues-ex-machinas; instead, they will be established plot elements whose significance is only now being revealed. And you will look like a genius.

Wonder. Wonders give you the chance to add some “Gosh-wow-cool” to your campaign. There is a reason they are called “wonders”, after all!

In Combination, those reasons are quite enough to justify the effort of including wonders – if a way can be offered to make them practical.

Dream Landscape, artwork by Chris Hortsch (www.chris-hortsch.de), sourced from SXC (Public Domain Image) – click thumbnail for a larger image.

What to represent

The place to start is always to decide what you want the wonders in your campaign to be.
 

• I start with Natural Wonders – Tallest Mountain, Greatest River, Biggest Waterfall, Biggest Bay, and other scenes of natural beauty. Virtually every game world will have these. Note that there may be taller mountains, bigger rivers, etc – these are simply the biggest in the known world.
• Next come the ruins and works of Lost Empires and Kingdoms, especially the most recent.
• Historical Icons I – I examine the campaign background for key events that would have been commemorated in some way, the bigger the better. I maintain a list as I work forwards through the background, looking for 1) events that can take place at the monument; and 2) for any impact that the presence of the monument might have on future events. If I want a certain event to be forgotten, and it would almost certainly have been commemorated, I can destroy or hide the monument (the latter is preferable, as its rediscovery gives me a way to reveal what was forgotten when it becomes significant).
• Historical Icons II – where were past capitals? Where were the obvious invasion routes, and how did past kingdoms/empires guard them? What happened to the defensive works – and how were they overcome, if they were?
• Mythical History/Prehistory – The sort of thing that Stonehenge was once thought to represent (and still does in the popular consciousness). What else can be left over from a mythic interpretation of prehistory?
• Gods & Supernatural Beings – in any world where these have an objective reality, expect even more effort to represent them in art, statuary, song – and monuments – than there was in our world, where their existence is subjective. These need bear no relation to the current theology within the campaign. I once thought up a game world in which someone had smashed every statue in existence of a particular Deity – without explanation. I never finished work on it.
• Cultural Greatness – Regimes at the height of their powers tend to celebrate their cultural greatness with expressions of that greatness that become wonders of the world either then or subsequently. And the contemporary regime is either declining, or is at the height of the power (so far). There is also an element of rivalry involved – ‘the ancients did that, and we’re better than they were, so we’re going to do this.’ And throw in the occasional splash of decadence and self-indulgence, while you’re at it.
• Campaign Uniqueness – What is there that is going to be different or unique about this campaign? Can I think of a way to exemplify or celebrate that difference with a Wonder Of The Known World?
• Magic – in any world where magic works, there should be monuments built in celebration of it. And monuments that are impossible without it. I let my imagination run wild for a while, then apply strict self-censorship. And get a second opinion on anything I’m unsure of.
• The Mysterious and Fantastic – Having warmed up with the preceding section, I’m ready to really get creative. Is there anything I can dream up that will add to the Mystique, Mystery, or Magic of the game world? Why not a house in which the interior rooms are all on the outside and a small garden is on the inside? A fairy palace? A gingerbread house? A cave in which up is down? A castle whose towers run down, into the ground, to protect from underground attack? A gypsy wagon (with occupants) trapped in Amber? I then apply strict self-censorship. And get a second opinion.
• Non-human races & Cultures – How would each non-human race’s mindset play into the concept of Wonders? Is there anything that would exemplify what makes that race unique? What might they create that humans would consider to be Wonders?

Photographic & Illustrative Inspiration

I keep a file full of ‘clip art’ that’s not for public circulation. Anytime I come across an image that I find interesting or inspiring, I save it to that file. When I find the time, I might plug a suitable search term into Google Images and go trolling for future ideas. When I know I’m going to want something specific in the future, I use a subfolder dedicated to the subject. I currently have one folder full of futuristic buildings, and one full of Lovecraftian Horrors, and one full of Digital Demons, and one full of Ice Terrains, and one of Ice Queens, and another of Hell. And I keep one of backgrounds and textures, and another of faces and people with particularly distinctive appearance.

Some of these provide direct inspiration for Wonders. But because I don’t restrict myself to public domain images, I will never display these publicly – they are kept for private use only.

Decide the significance

Context might not be everything, but it’s an awful lot. What is the current culture’s subjective appraisal of the significance of each wonder? Why is it remembered, and what is it considered to be symbolic of? Never mind what the people who created it thought – what do the people in the game world now think of it? And how does that color their impressions of those who created it?

In my unused adventure ideas file, there is the notion of a now-lost pacifist society who repress their aggressive tendencies and perversions through the most graphic artworks imaginable. Everyone made these, in one medium or another, or was branded a public danger and a criminal, and locked away. An archeologist has discovered the remains of this society and is trying to make sense of them, and getting entirely the wrong impression. A temporal accident then brings some of them forward in time, where they seek to impose their “perfection” on a nearby settlement; enter the PCs…

Connect with History

I make sure that every Wonder has some connection with the campaign history. Where this isn’t pivotal, I might set it aside for use as an anecdote relating to the Wonder if and when the PCs visit the scene (I like to have at least one of these for every wonder, better yet two or three – I add to the total in the step after next.)

Connect with Society & Culture

I examine each Wonder and consider what impact it has had, would have, or is having, on the contemporary society of the campaign. If I don’t want that, then the Wonder has to go ‘bang’ at some point in history. If I don’t want it to be happening yet, I have it get lost or stolen, only to be rediscovered at some future time. I once had this happen to an artifact, but had descriptions survive – all from a common source which had a mistranslation of the size. When it released the Evil that it had confined (after being rediscovered by some peasants), the PCs came looking to see if there was any way to re-confine the Evil in the Wonder – only to discover that it wasn’t 300 feet in size, it was 300 tenths of an inch in size, small enough to put in a backpack – which is what someone had done…

I also make sure that there are at least some cultural references to each Wonder in a list of the attributes of that wonder.

Create Events

I create more events as necessary to fill out the legend of the Wonder and supplement the unused historical references. These may be myth, legend, or rumor, and I make no decisions as to their validity – using a Question Mark to indicate this indecision, so that I can decide what’s true and what’s not when the time comes.

Fantasy Castle (Regaleira), photo by ladyleaf, sourced from SXC (Public Domain image) – click thumbnail for a larger image.

The Non-human Psyche

Are there any noteworthy differences in interpretation of the Wonder from particular non-human races that are present in the campaign world? Can I use these interpretations to justify some past event whose rationale is thin? Can they cause any holy wars? Are there any non-human Meccas?

Ruins of a castle in Ogrodzieniec, Poland, photo by Saiuri. Sourced from SXC, used subject to licence terms specified at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/598412 – click thumbnail for a larger image.

Where and When

Having decided what impact the Wonder will have, I can nail down where it is located and when it was constructed.

The Reef, photo by Markopolis, Sourced from SXC (Public Domain image) – click thumbnail for a larger image.

Current Status

What is the Wonder’s current status – lost, almost forgotten, well-known, destroyed, mythical? Why? When did whatever happened, happen?

Carina Nebula, photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over twenty-three years since Hubble was launched! Click thumbnail for a larger image.

The Visceral Reaction

One of the most important aspects of a Wonder is the visceral reaction that it has. If the imagery available is not good enough, and there is no prospect of being able to do better before the image is needed, make sure that the Wonder is lost or destroyed. At the same time, a great visceral response is reason enough to restore/rediscover a lost Wonder.

The Potala Palace, photo by Coolmanjackey. Click thumbnail for a larger image.

A Celebration Of Your Campaign

The Wonders of your game world should be a celebration of your campaign and its uniqueness. They should provide eye candy for your players that helps them feel their characters presence within the world and aids them in getting into character. They should inform everyone involved of the ‘magic’ of the world, and inspire. If they do all of these things, you can’t go too far wrong.
 
 

An afterword: Wiki Loves Monuments 2013

While gathering the images which adorn this article, I discovered that Wikimedia Commons are currently running a contest to capture, photographically, the cultural heritage of the world, Wiki Love Monuments. This contest is due to finish at the end of the month, but if you have any images that YOU have photographed that would be relevant, and your country is one of those participating this year, consider uploading them. No idea what the prizes are, but the FAQ definitely indicates that there are prizes.

This is a sheer coincidence; not only am I not a participant, my country is not even participating (and the 2012 definitions were way too restrictive for my tastes). But I thought it appropriate to spruik the event since I have used so many Wikipedia Commons images for this article. Fair’s Fair!

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question.

Today, the subject is one that’s even more difficult and wide-ranging: How do you choose or modify a location’s specifics to match its description to the needs of the plot?

Scope

There are three aspects of the location specification that can be modified to meet whatever secondary needs you have:

• Surrounding environment;
• Location specifics; and/or
• Choice of language.

A procedural approach

It’s possible to outline a procedural approach to the task, which would look something like this:

1. Identify the most important unresolved story need.
2. Can this story need be satisfied through location specifics?
3. If yes, amend the description accordingly. Proceed to step 9.
4. If no, can the location specifics support some other solution?
5. If the answer to that question is yes, amend the description to do so, and proceed to step 9.
6. If no, does the story need rule out any aspect of the location specifics?
7. If yes, note the restriction to the location description and proceed to step 9.
8. If no, consider the story need irrelevant to the location specification and set it aside.
9. If there are any important unresolved story needs, return to step 1.

…but I don’t find that approach to be all that helpful. There are too many conditional questions. It’s a bit clearer as a flowchart, as shown to the right, but even that leaves a lot to be desired.

Instead, let’s focus in on the critical steps: 1+2+3, 4+5, and 6+7.

Click the thumbnail for the full sized image. I’m proud of this image since on the original was taken on an especially gloomy day with lots of heavy gray clouds… :)

Story Needs that can be satisfied through location specifics

Since this is the central subject of the entire article, it is a little premature to go into too much detail; by the time I finished, the meaning of the other critical steps would be long forgotten. That, however, doesn’t stop me from offering a very general overview.

Locations are chosen to meet certain story requirements, as described in the article referenced above. But there are all sorts of nuances that can be added to the mix by tweaking the details. The general location may be just an environment. It may be a populated settlement – how large? It may be a specific settlement – where in that general location? It may be a type of building, a sheriff’s office or a hotel, for example – where, how large, what’s it look like, what are its surroundings? It may be a “specific” building, for example the Royal College Of Surgeons in Zanzibar (to invent a place off the top of my head) – same questions. Even if it’s a world famous landmark, like the Sydney Opera House, or Easter Island, environment – weather, visitors, activity, and mood can all have an impact on the perception of the location, as can the tone and language used to describe it. Or a location can be a specific room, or a vehicle interior.

The more story that can be conveyed by the location description, the less you have to do elsewhere; and the more strongly any story elements that are conveyed by the other instruments of play – dialogue, descriptions of people, etc – can be reinforced. The right location can “sell” the rest of the scene. In The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs I detailed the tools and techniques of doing so. Today’s subject is about choosing the raw ingredients to be subjected to this treatment.

Location as a solution support

Even when the details of a location can’t directly meet a story need, the right choices of details can make it easier (or even possible) to employ the other elements of the scene description to achieve a solution, or can make it more difficult to do so. Once a story need is identified, and you’ve determined that location alone is not enough, the next question has to be whether or not location details can at least contribute to solving that story need.

Location as an inhibitor

And, when that doesn’t appear to be the case, you have to ask whether or not the setting of the scene is getting in the way of a solution to that story need, and if so, what can be done about that. Only if the answer is “it isn’t getting in the way” or “nothing can be done about it” can you conclude that location isn’t going to help meet that need.

How far should this be carried?

There are limits to how far you can go, and those need to be recognized. In a work of fiction, you can normally get away with a page of description at most, less is better; in a roleplaying game, the pages are generally larger, but the same limit in terms of word-count is about the same; it works out to about half a page, absolute maximum. What’s more, no paragraph should be more than about 5 lines and each subsequent paragraph has to justify its existence against ever-stiffer requirements. Experience has taught me that anything more simply becomes noise, or early details get lost when players concentrate on the newer information.

One of the biggest benefits of a more poetic approach to descriptions is the compression that results. Each statement, each line, serves double or even triple purposes, enabling a page or more of description to be delivered more quickly and succinctly.

If you can’t satisfy every desirable end because of these limits, there is clearly a need for careful prioritization. Here, once again, the procedural approach described earlier falls down; “the most important story need” is not sufficient definition, not by a long shot.

Prioritization

This inadequacy exists because “the most important story need” might be solvable using something other than location specifics, while some other slightly lesser need might be solvable only with location details, or far more easily with the location. There are two factors to take into account, therefore – the importance of the story need, and the degree to which that need can be solved by something other than the location of the scene. To complicate matters still further, these are not entirely independent factors, as later steps in the procedure make clear. You could try to map out a procedure to take account of these but it quickly becomes so unwieldy in articulation and implementation that it is even more worthless than the rough procedure outlined.

I don’t have any hard and fast rules that I employ with any regularity. There are so many combinations and permutations of the arrangement of story needs and the means employed to satisfy them that no one process will come even close to being universal. Instead, there are a couple of things that I try to keep in mind:

• The #1 priority for each delivery method;
• The overall purpose of the scene;
• Any additional story needs that absolutely have to be met;
• The principle of consistency;
• The perpetual question, “Do I really need this?”; and
• The reason for this location choice in the first place.

I will generally try the most obvious approach, and if that does the job, I move on to the next scene. Only if there’s a problem, an additional story need that isn’t being met, will I toss that away and try to find some other configuration of narrative, description, tone, participants, dialogue, and action that might be more effective.

Satisfying Specific Types Of Story Need through Location options

There are at least nine different story needs that can be satisfied through configuration of the location and its description.

They are:

• Tactical,
• Tonal,
• Emotional,
• Informational,
• Contextual,
• Expressional,
• Philosophical,
• Intellectual, and
• Informative.

Each of these needs has a different way of impacting on the location. You’ll have noticed that I haven’t defined any of them. That’s because I’m now going to look at each in detail.

Tactics

There are a whole bucket-load of Tactical considerations that can influence a location, and often several can be accommodated. This is also the list that I apply (though not necessarily in this order) when I have to modify a general environment to get a specific location for a random wilderness encounter; in general, the more intelligent the creature encountered, and the more familiar they are with the region, the higher up this list my attention will be. The less relevance those two factors have, the more attention I will give to the bottom end of the list.

• Target Objective (non-random encounters only) – when the scene contains a participant’s objective or target, that’s an overriding tactical consideration.
• Defense Enhancement – a location that enhances the defenses of the participant with the choice of location.
• Attack Enhancement – a location that enhances the attack capabilities of the participant with the choice of location.
• Mobility Enhancement – a location that enhances the mobility options of the participant with the choice of location, especially if those mobility options are uncommon, like flight or swinging.
• Defense Minimization – a location that subdues or negates the defenses of the participant without the choice of location, especially if this does not affect the participant with the choice as severely or at all.
• Attack Minimization – a location that subdues or negates the most probable attack modes of the participant without the choice of location, especially if this does not affect the participant with the choice as severely or at all.
• Mobility Restriction – a location that reduces the mobility of the participant without the choice of location.
• Conflict Option – a location that offers the participant with the choice of location the ability to either force or avoid confrontation as they see fit;
• Intelligence – a location that reveals the participant without the choice of location without exposing the participant with the choice of location.
• Retreat/Escape Options – a location that offers options of retreat or escape to the participant with the choice of location that the participant without the choice probably cannot utilize.
• Direct Defense – a location that provides natural cover to both sides is always preferable to one that does not, provided that the mobility and attacks of the participant with the choice are not compromised.
• Location as a weapon – some locations are naturally hostile, and function as a weapon against one or both participants.
• Flexibility Minimization – some locations do nothing but compromise the range of attack/defense/mobility options available to one or both participants.
• Undesirability – a location can be undesirable because one or more of the above operate against the participant with the choice of location, but offer other advantages that compensate.
• Inevitability – sometimes the location is simply where one participant catches up with the other. It might not be a choice that either side would have made if they had the option.

An example of a tactical enhancement to a location description is placing an encounter with undead in an unhallowed graveyard; in my campaigns, this gives them all sorts of benefits and advantages. In contrast, placing hallowed ground in or near an encounter with undead offers the participants the option of retreating to somewhere where they have the advantage.

The more control the participant with the choice has over the location of the encounter, and the more time they have to invest in exercising that control, the more benefits they will stack in their favor. This is something that I always bear in mind when designing a villain’s lair.

Tone

Modifying the weather, and the descriptive language, enables the location to establish the tone of a scene. Not only is this more compelling than simply stating what the tone is, it supports other elements of the scene that is to take place by providing a tonal context. Enhancing the location details can add to this effect – mentioning ‘stone gargoyles’ on window ledges adds to the gothic character of a location, provided that those are consistent with the other details. You don’t find many modern skyscrapers adorned with them, for example.

One more example before I move on: A modern skyscraper’s exterior is mostly glass. That means that you have three choices in descriptive language when entering one, and all convey a different tone. You can talk about what is reflected in the glass; you can talk about what you can see through the glass; or you can talk about a cold, immaculate, pristine, exterior facade. The first can introduce tones from the gothic (storm clouds and lightning) to the warm and comforting (a family playground); the second can expose lush greenery, martial efficiency, paranoia, an ant’s nest, a beehive of activity, a sense of panic within. The building is still defined only as a “modern skyscraper”, with no supplementary details, but tone is being set by the environment in which the skyscraper is located – which means that you can use the actual architectural details – shape, size, connections to other buildings – to convey something else to the players, ie to achieve or support some other story objective.

Emotion

You can use the location to evoke particular emotional reactions in the players, or in the characters that they control, once again by a combination of content and descriptive language. The entire gamut of human emotion is open to you, if you are ingenious enough to invoke it. A school playground is just a place until you dress it with the sounds of children playing. A building site is just an arrangement of girders until it’s shadow falls on a nearby building like a sinister giant spider. An empty sporting ground invokes a sense of competition and a sense of teamwork and camaraderie at the same time; populate it with 10,000 screaming fans (or 100,000) and a close game in progress and you hint at passions and primal emotions. A park is just grass and trees – but throw in someone walking a dog, and someone else flying a kite, and you start evincing a sense of freedom and carefree existence, as well (perhaps) as a tinge of 50s nostalgia for those who were around then. A couple walking a baby in a stroller completes the wholesome scene. Now throw in some sort of a threat that they haven’t noticed yet, and it’s not just the people who are threatened; the emotional content is that the values – freedom, casual contentment, etc – are also threatened, and the players will react to that emotional content.

Information

Harder to achieve is the delivery of essential information through location detail, but it can be done. A billboard. A corporate logo being replaced by crane. A newsstand shouting the headlines. A news ticker. A media scrum. Proximity of two organizations (Lost & Found Rings, Inc., is located in The Saruman Tower!). Association: if strange things have been happening to the weather and the PCs have tracked the possible source to a particular location, a strange antenna pointed skywards provides information through the confluence of “strange” things. Even negative locations can provide information, as when the police go to the address of Elwood’s license in the Blues Brothers – it’s information about Elwood’s personality.

All these are so much better in a game than omniscient narration that I always look for any opportunity to incorporate into the location description any information that the scene is to convey – unless that leaves the scene itself an anticlimax, of course.

Context

Harder still, but even more rewarding, is the conveying of context via the location. This too, is possible however, depending on what the context is in reference to.

Consider a hotel of very specific style. If someone chooses to stay there when they have the choice, it establishes a connection between the location and that someone, which can place the individual’s personality, mindset, ambitions, and actions into a context.

We are all products of our environment to at least some extent. How normal would Friday have been if she didn’t grow up in the Addams’ Mansion, surrounded by the other members of the Addams Family? Even if they react against that early environment by going in the exact opposite direction, the description of that environment is still providing context to the personality etc of the person.

In fact, there are times when it is not only possible to convey context by location, it is the most efficient and interesting way to do so. It follows that if the scene is to provide context, considering the possibility of doing so by location is a very high priority.

Expression

Some locations are more expressive of the personality of the designer/constructor. Consider that hotel of specific style again. Someone had to think that it style was appealing, or at least a good idea even if they personally didn’t like it.

A villain’s lair should speak volumes about the villain. A good way to make the villain distinctive is through the decoration of his lair. If he has hundreds of species of bat stuffed and mounted on the walls, is he a Vampire? A Batman freak? Or simply fascinated by the species? Or perhaps he’s really interested in sound, or hearing, or sonar. Or maybe the room’s purpose is just to spook uninvited visitors. Even though you don’t know what it is, you can tell right away that the villain has bags of character.

This isn’t the only thing that can be expressed through location detail. Awe and Wonder are two of the most common expressions that a location can invoke. Grandeur and Might are right up there, too.

I have heard the expression used from time (in reference to both RPGs and Comics) that they have an unlimited special effects and sets budget – but have to be more careful how they use it as a consequence. It’s not really true when it comes to RPGs, as the section “How Far Should This Be Carried” explains; if you consider words to be the currency of an RPG, you are closer to the mark. You can have any special effect or set that you want – so long as you can explain it within the budget. That makes Awe, Wonder, Grandeur, and Might easy to do, but that the sort of very fine detail that distinguishes a period movie, for example something set in the Elizabethan period, can be a challenge. So, when there’s something that you need to express for a scene or adventure, locations can definitely carry their share of the burden.

Philosophy

Possibly hardest and most profound of them all, it is nevertheless possible to express a philosophy in architecture, which is one of those manipulable quantities in a location description. It’s a little easier when the philosophy in question is something that has been established in the real world, because you can research the real-world expression of that philosophy. It’s both harder and easier when you’re moving beyond the bounds of terrestrial reality; harder because you can’t lean as heavily on others, and because you may have to represent skills like architectural design that you don’t possess; easier because you have a great deal more freedom, and while there is no-one to tell you that you’ve got it all wrong, you can tell when you’ve hit the nail on the head.

For more on this subject, I refer the reader to my article, Creating the World Of Tomorrow: Postscript – The Design Ethos Of Tomorrow, in which I discuss the changing design styles of the twentieth century and they way they were reflected in everything from architecture to furniture design to the design of teapots. While this article concerns itself with extrapolation into the look-and-feel of the future, its a solid launchpad for the techniques of incorporating a particular philosophy into an environmental description. You can get more help by checking out any DVD extras that talk about set design, especially for Fantasy & Sci-Fi TV shows and movies (including police procedurals that use special effects in a fancy way like Numb3rs and the CSI franchise.

Intellect

Continuing to ascend the ladder of difficulty, we come to the communication of intellect, or ideas, by means of location details. There are two ways of achieving this, depending on the nature of the ideas to be communicated.

The first subcategory concerns ideas that the players will recognize even if their characters won’t. Inserting a Fascist Realm into a D&D campaign for example. It is easy to simply insert a swastika flying above the castle battlements – perhaps too easy, because that might get them wondering about time travelers and other distractions from the main point that you’re trying to make. The right way to go about this is to extrapolate the fundamental principles of Fascism into the technology and society of the era to determine how life, behavior, technology, and design would be influenced. I would start by hitting Wikipedia for some research, trying to identify and enunciate the basic tenets of this pseudo-fascism, and then trying to interpret them within the scene. The architecture, the clothing, the behavior, the insignia and flags, etc.

The results are likely to be less recognizable than the simple swastika idea, but will seem less tacked-on, feel more original, and be far more realistic; and will sell the concept far more effectively when the big reveal actually happens, probably as a result of the leader spouting a few unmistakably characteristic phrases.

The second subcategory is the communication of ideas with which the players will be unfamiliar because they are original or aren’t part of the real world. The key to communicating original ideas to the players by means of the location is to consider the consequences and ramifications of the idea to be conveyed. What does it make possible that would otherwise be impossible? What does it make impossible? What does it make desirable, and what does it make undesirable? The general principles closely resemble those of philosophical exposition through location, described in the preceding section; but instead of a system of thought, you are attempting to communicate an aspect of the physical ‘reality’ in which the location ‘exists’.

Take my Shards Of Divinity campaign, for example. In the past, a couple of unnatural buildings (and one flying city) were created. Now, magic is failing; some of those buildings are on the verge of collapse, and have been repaired in relatively ramshackle fashion (due to the urgency of the repairs when they became necessary, and the lack of practical skills on the part of those who dwell within).

Information

And, one step beyond the dissemination of ideas comes the dissemination of facts in exactly the same way.

Consider my Fumanor campaign, in which an excessive concentration of magic can yield what is known as a “wild magic” zone, within which all magic will twist in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Any building crafted to incorporate Epic Magic (and there are some) are therefore surrounded by Wild Magic zones – unless the mage is especially skilled and knowledgeable, and can build a suppression effect into these spells, ramping up the difficulty enormously. Too many spells cast in s specific location risks creating a dead magic zone, in which all magic fails. Each location therefore has a capacity for magic; exceed it, and your fancy magical building will collapse – and magic will cease working in the vicinity – and there is no known way of knowing how close you are to the limit. One spell too many, and the fairy castle comes crashing down.

Identifying a consequence and then applying it to the location description may not educate the players in the idea, but it will lay the groundwork for the idea to appear as an explanation for what they have seen at a later point. The result is an internal consistency that adds massively to the realism of the world.

Communication through Location

It can be difficult to communicate something to the players or to their characters through the choice of location details, but there are many-fold rewards for doing so. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief, depth, nuance, subtlety, and concision are just a few. Additional requirements can serve as a starting point for inspiration. But you have a practical limit and not an unlimited budget; so expend your capital wisely to get the greatest ‘bang’ for your ‘buck’.

For today’s entry into the Blog Carnival, I’m going to review a series of new products from Moebius Adventures – one free, and two at the low, low price of $1 (US) that collectively offer a trio of locations to drop into your campaigns.

The candy bar of RPG Supplements

Tiny PDF game supplements are the candy bars of RPG supplements – cheap to buy, consume ’til there’s nothing left, and discard when you’re done. They are also often lacking in substance, just like candy bars, with content missing that has to be written in by the GM before they can be used. You can’t apply the same standards to judging them as you would to something costing $5, $10, or $20+.

But, like the real-world range of candy bars, there is a lot of variety out there. In addition to unadulterated confectionary, you also have your health food bars, and a few products that explore a middle ground, and a whole bunch of products that claim to stand astride both camps. As always, value comes down to the actual content on offer.

The One Spot series: What are they?

The One Spot series is a collection of three (so far) system-neutral locations for RPGs. Each location gets its own 2-page PDF supplement. The front page is information that will be readily accessible by the PCs, so it doesn’t matter too much if it’s visible; the second page is DM’s info, to be shared out in the course of play and only when the GM thinks it appropriate.

Sidebar Disclaimer: Who are Moebius Adventures?
Before I go much farther, I should tell you about the publisher, .

MA were started in the Mid-90s by Brian Fitzpatrick and his buddy Sean Bindel. Sean was killed in an auto accident in 2000, but Fitz is carrying on alone to complete various projects the pair had started as a lasting memorial. (This appeals greatly to me as a sentimentalist, and regardless of the verdict below, I wish him every success in the endeavor).

Fitz is also well known as a writer/reviewer at and a long-time supporter of Campaign Mastery and myself. Although we have never met in person (Colorado is a long way from Sydney!), I also consider him a buddy.

The review copies were provided free.

I’ve tried not to let any of that sway me while writing these reviews, but you have been warned. Hopefully Fitz will still be talking to me after reading these reviews!

The three locations currently on offer are:

• One Spot #0: “” – Hand’s Goods is a mixed business/pawn shop specializing in (used) general produce and refurbished knickknacks, operated (and probably owned) by Taylor Hand, an ex-thief who was caught once too often.
• One Spot #1: “” – The Painted Man is a hole-in-the-wall tavern with a colorful, ever-changing clientele.
• One Spot #2: “” – The Magic Shoppe offers “Tomes and Trinkets”. Nothing gets sold without a thorough investigation by the owner, Angar Bossz. In particular, it focuses on tomes, toys, and interesting illusory items.

Let’s take a closer look at each:

The Content Of One Spot #0

For a small PDF, there’s an awful lot of content delivered. In fact, there’s so much that it’s spilling over into a ribbon running around the frame of the second page.

On the front page, you get:

• An exterior description detailing access to the store;
• A first impression / initial encounter with the proprietor;
• A description of the proprietor, Taylor Hand;
• A picture of said proprietor;
• A general description of the interior and the ‘shopping experience’, with some general impressions of the merchandise on offer;
• The prospects for employment in the store; and
• An image of the entranceway/exterior of the store.

On the second page, you get:

• A map of the store;
• An introduction the location;
• A history/backstory for the proprietor;
• Commodity availability, pricing, and handling instructions for the GM;
• Ten encounters that might take place within Hand’s Goods; and
• A set of nested tables describing 12 general encounter hooks for when those ten are used up. This is the content wrapping around the rest.

Yes, but tell me about the content

It’s all well-written, as you would expect from an author of Fitz’ experience. The front page is presented in a two-column format to give emphasis to the artwork, while the GM’s section is in three columns, making it easy to read each paragraph as a self-contained whole.

I would quite happily expect to be able to drop “Hand’s Goods” into any RPG campaign, with no prep whatsoever. Though you could spend some time generating a list of exactly what’s for sale at the current time, for the most part there will be better things to spend your time on.

But that’s only scratching the surface of what it has to offer.

A trio of campaigns?

There are two paragraphs in the GMs section that really enticed me. The first covers Taylor Hand’s relations with the local constabulary and thieves’ guild, with both of whom Hand manages to maintain a cooperative co-existence. Hand’s Goods is a place where these worlds intersect. The other local authority that gets mentioned is the local mage’s guild, who Hand keeps on-side without seemingly receiving much (beyond cash) in return.

Those two paragraphs immediately suggested three complete mini-campaign ideas to me.

• Campaign One: The first idea was for Hand to be framed for some serious crime (or possibly even be guilty of something that goes too far), or simply need to travel to somewhere distant ‘for his health’. Rather than selling the store, he hires the PCs to run it on his behalf while he goes into hiding. This means that instead of getting to change Hand’s policies, the PCs simply have to implement them, maintaining the fragile peaceful relations Hand has established between the authorities and the local Thieves’ Guild in the face of their growing suspicion that he is their man, and also maintaining his good relations with the great and powerful of the local region.
• Campaign Two: The 2nd idea is for the PCs to be members of the local constabulary maintaining a sometimes-friendly sometimes-adversarial relationship with Hand. Every time they think they have the goods on him, he is able to offer information on a more serious crime, or call in a favor from someone else he has helped to get the charges dropped. From time to time, he may even offer a free tip to the PCs just to keep them on-side or mend fences. This is essentially a police-procedural campaign with Hand as a recurring NPC.
• Campaign Three: The final idea was for Hand to come into possession of something that he tries to sell to the local Mage’s Guild, as is his usual practice, but which lands him in the eye of a tempest of circumstances. Someone else wants the item for themselves, and the people it was stolen from want it back, and the whole thing is part of some bigger plot against the established authorities. This could either stand alone or be tied into idea one as the dénouement of that campaign.

The Biggest Overall Flaw

For my money (all $0 of it, since this is a free supplement), the biggest flaw in this offering is that it is just a little too compressed and compacted. It would have been better expanded to three pages in size – half a page for the map, which is just a little too small to be completely clear and self-explanatory, especially without a key. The extra space could have been used to lay out the “spillover” content in more user-friendly fashion, and to expand the Important NPCs section: a regular seller, specific contacts in the constabulary, thieves’ guild, and mage’s guild, someone powerful who owes Hand a favor or vice-versa.

But really, this is nitpicking.

One Spot #1 in review

So here’s what you get when you plunk down your $1 for a copy of One Spot #1, The Painted Man, taken directly from the RPG Now product description:

• An introduction, location description, tavern map, and image of the tavern sign.
• A bit of background on the Painted Man himself, his mannerisms, and a picture.
• Descriptions for the other NPCs involved in operating the tavern, from the bubbly barmaid to the secretive owner.
• A suggestion of what items might currently be on the menu and on tap.
• A list (10 items) of potential facts and rumors to kick things off.
• A list of hooks (4 tables of hints) for how one or more of the PCs may have interacted with the tavern before.

Inns, Bars, & Taverns are always useful

The first thing I have to say is that inns, bars, and taverns are ubiquitous locations within RPGs, regardless of genre. You can never have too many of them written up, ready to drop into a campaign.

Lots of them out there

This ubiquity means that there are lots of them out there. Most city sourcebooks and game settings will have details of several for you to draw on, not to mention all the ones that have appeared in game modules over the years.

The extra necessary mile

The combination means that to offer value for money, an inn, tavern, or bar has to go an extra mile, offer something the others don’t, in order to stand out from the crowd. In this case, that extra comes in the form of the backstory of the proprietor and his relationship with the secretive owner. Rife with potential interest, an entire campaign could be built around that relationship. I would actually tie that campaign into Campaign Two from Hand’s Goods above, giving me a second location and source of adventures to draw on, adding some depth and variety to the mix, and offering the potential of cross-fertilization of ideas between the two.

The Shortcomings

Unfortunately, in addition to the same overcrowding described previously, that backstory is slightly vague and contradictory – or, at the very least, missing some key details. In particular, the relationship between The Painted Man and the Owner changes midway through the second paragraph of the “Important NPCs” section. There’s nothing there that can’t be resolved with some additional backstory and editorial tweaking – mostly changing the word “owes” to the past tense and filling in the blank spot in the evolution of the relationship that this change implies (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid giving secrets to any player who reads this). At least there’s a key with the map, this time.

So there is more prep work needed before this supplement can be used. Once that prep is performed, though – and it should only be the work of a few minutes – I would be comfortable dropping this location into a campaign as a one-off.

Still more prep work is needed to flesh out the history and activities of the owner before this could be used as a recurring location, though much of that can be done in the course of prepping subsequent adventures.

And, once again, there’s material that could have been included to fill out the empty space if this were three pages instead of two: one or two regular customers, a couple of contacts, and the material that I’ve suggested the GM needs to generate, described above.

Some perspective

On the other hand, how much do you really expect for just a buck? There’s a bucketload of potential in the location waiting to be tapped, and the work that needs doing is quick and not all that difficult. It could also be argued that its absence creates a broader contact patch in which to interface this product with an existing campaign. Its value-for-money quotient remains very high, more than enough to justify the price of the product. I’ve spent more for supplements that have delivered a lot less.

One Spot #2 in review

Like One Spot #1, this product will set you back a buck. For that investment, according to the DrivethruRPG product page, you get:

• An introduction, location description, bookstore map, and image of the sign on the window.
• A bit of background on Angar Bossz himself, his mannerisms, and a picture.
• Descriptions for the other NPCs involved in operating the store, including his assistant Radu and the store cat Iago.
• A suggestion of how Angar operates, what he can offer, and how he deals with customers.
• A list (16 items) of strange books and items Angar may have in stock.
• A list of hooks (4 tables of hints) for how one or more of the PCs may have interacted with the bookstore before.

Magic Shops in general

The very concept of a Magic Shop is less universal than the ubiquitous inn or second-hand goods shop. I rarely employ them in my campaigns, because the economics don’t make a lot of sense to me:

• Sales will be infrequent, though they will generate a lot of revenue when they happen. The number of customers who can afford multi-thousand-plus gold-piece items will be few.
• Costs are high if offering new items for sale. They will still be high, if not quite so ruinous, if the store deals predominantly in used merchandise.
• That means that the owner will have unrealistically-vast sums tied up in inventory.
• Shoplifting of even a single item can wipe out a decade’s profits.
• To buy items, the owner will need to have vast sums of ready cash on the premises. A minimum of 100,000gp in D&D terms.
• That demands a high level of security, and that’s a heavy overhead on top of the operating costs.
• Players expect no hidden surprises in their purchases. That takes away one of the GMs adventure-generation options.

There aren’t many such establishments on offer, though the occasional supplement will include one. The key to how well such a location works for me is how well it answers these problems. I’ve never seen one that does the job satisfactorily without capping the value of the items on sale to one or two thousand GPs – and 300% markup over list price.

Bad Associations

On top of all that, I have a number of bad associations from past gaming with such locations. In particular, they seem to be a favorite of munchkins and Monty Haul campaigns. I once saw a game in which a magic shop was just inside the door into the Dungeon, so that loot brought out could be exchanged without the bother of hauling it back to town – because the GM had found that to be inconvenient when he was a player.

So I openly admit that I’m prejudiced against Magic Shops in general. It’s not like Harry Potter, where magic items are relatively cheap, commonplace, and relatively low-powered; in most FRP campaigns, they are very expensive, and that doesn’t make sense unless they are also rare, and both of those argue against the practicality of the Magic Shop as a concept.

How does “Angar’s” stand up?

Not well, but no worse than most other examples of this type of location, in that not one of these concerns is addressed. In fact, just the opposite – the proprietor prefers to keep his purchases and sales activities as separate transactions rather than bartering exchanges of goods. And he looks far too much like a middle-aged Harry Potter in the illustration – the whole thing screams “cutesy”. He’s also far too helpful/useful to the PCs.

On top of that, it suffers from the same problems as the other offerings in the series. In particular, the map is so small that the key is barely legible, and it would be difficult to design a layout with worse security.

None of that matters if you’re GMing for children, and I would happily use the location as written if that were the case.

Salvaging Something

That’s not to say there’s nothing worthwhile. With a little tweaking, the proprietor could become one of those NPCs around which an entire campaign could be framed, someone who starts out as the PCs friend, becomes their employer in order to achieve his own goals, and then emerges as the ultimate villain of the campaign.

If you start with the premise that the layout is so poor for securing the goods that it’s an open invitation to shoplifters, and that this is by deliberate intent on the part of the owner, you could generate a quite interesting adventure from the raw materials here. Especially if this is happening despite the uneconomic nature of the business in general. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your conspiracy theories now.

The real treasure here is the list of current wares. These are interesting and creative, though I would want to adjust some of them before turning them loose in my campaign, in particular the Mirrored Box of Davos. The ability to hide “anything” from the view of “anyone” except the owner of the Box seems way too powerful to me, taken at face value. But most are far better than this example, and these are worth the $1 price-tag on their own. Anything else of value that can be extracted from the supplement is gravy.

The extra necessary mile

The shame of it all is that this offering has so much missed potential. Make the proprietor more sinister and more learned when it comes to illusions, without much change to the superficial personality. Replace the image, which is inappropriate to most fantasy campaigns. Give him some source of funds that he can exploit to keep the shop in operation despite turning a constant loss on every transaction, justifying that with his darker purpose (conquest?) using the Codex he seeks. Apply some magic to deal with the security problems and make the location more wondrous, such as shelves which are all-but invisible except directly in front of a customer, so that the proprietor can see any attempt to steal from him. Employ another clever deception to protect his liquidity – maybe that’s what the cat really is? And enlarge the map. Those sex steps are all that would have been needed to make this an absolutely killer product.

The conceptual problems I raised are not insuperable, but the solutions demand a little more creativity than usual, and this is one occasion when the extra necessary mile is a journey on which the supplement does not set forth.

Some perspective

Having criticized it mercilessly, I have to reiterate that I think this supplement worth the asking price even though it fails to achieve the stated objective of the One Spot series, of being locations ready to drop into any campaign.

And you might not have the same obsession with plausibility that I do, or the same negative associations; you might have no conceptual problems with dropping a magic shop into your campaign.

An Alternative Application

Of course, all these problems go away if we’re talking about an industrial civilization. Recasting the Magic Shop into a high-tech context solves all the problems. You can even still have Angar searching for a spiritual relic, if you want, minimizing the necessary changes. The overly-helpful and altogether too cute graphic remain, of course; but the major problems will have been solved.

Which shows, of course, that there’s nothing wrong with the execution, just a problem with the underlying assumptions.

Overall verdict

So, to sum up:

Content Quality

This varies from average to excellent, and there’s enough of that excellence in each of the offerings to justify the price tag.

Production Quality

I’d really like to have seen these done in a three-page layout, with a little extra content and a little more white space, and most especially, slightly bigger and more legible maps.

Conclusions

If I didn’t know about the excellence of the ideas in the “current wares” I probably wouldn’t have bought the second of these supplements if I came across it while browsing, but would have taken a chance on “The Painted Man”. But the real prize, and the standard-setter for the series, is the free product, “Hand’s Goods”. With that as the baseline, I would have been happily minded to buy the others in the series, and slightly disappointed that the others didn’t quite achieve the same luminescent standard. As a set, they are nevertheless more than good enough to convince me to await eagerly the next in the series, whatever – or should that be “wherever”? – it might be.

Some Background

There was a time when I never used miniatures in my gaming. This was for three reasons: they were expensive, they needed painting (which I wasn’t very good at doing), and I didn’t have any, anyway. Then a friend bequeathed me his Cardboard Heroes collection (Paper miniatures from Steve Jackson Games) and little by little, they began to seep into my games. Genre was largely irrelevant – I would quite happily use a character to represent an Orc one week and a supervillain the next.

Most of these encounters took place on a plain white hexgrid, or no hexgrid at all. Measurements were mostly by eye, though a plastic ruler might be used to determine whether a character’s line of sight was blocked. This gave the advantage of having no fixed scale, or – more to the point – of being able to use whatever scale was most useful for the encounter. Some printed map-pages got added to the mix, starting with some that I had from Marvel Superheroes modules, and supplemented by some from The Lord Of The Rings. The whole thing was very make-do, but it worked.

Over time, I developed a repertoire of techniques for extending the functionality of the collection. I’ll come back to that point in a moment.

Then collectable miniatures games came along. I never had the money to invest in them, but one of my friends did, and he started wheeling out his collection when a miniature was called for. Unless they were facing something unusual for which he knew he had both the figure and where it was in his collection, the PCs were represented by chosen figures from his collection while we continued to use the Cardboard Heroes for the villains and monsters.

With the figures came tiled battlemaps.

In the early days, there weren’t very many of these, and almost universally, they were fantasy/D&D oriented. This is not a problem when that’s what you’re playing, but is a little more problematic when you’re doing superheroes on a space station or a mad scientist’s lair. But we found that a number of the techniques that I had developed, mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, worked a treat to dress up and extend the usefulness of the battlemaps.

These were followed by dungeon tiles. Another friend amassed a substantial collection of these which he loaned to the cause of a better game, and they have become the mainstay of the miniature representation of my game worlds – but not always used in the most obvious manner, and still supplemented by the old techniques.

In this article, I’m going to share some of those techniques with you, and vastly increase the scope of what you can depict on your battlemaps. Some of these may be obvious, some may never have occurred to you. They come in two categories: Found Objects, and Made Objects.

Found Objects

I’m always on the lookout for objects which have a particular shape that can be used to represent something on the battlemap. I haven’t used all the following, but here are some of the most useful ideas:

1. Paperbacks & CD/DVD cases

These are a great way to add elevation to your map. Paperbacks are often uniform in dimensions other than thickness (though this is less true now than it used to be) and cut flush to the edges. CD & DVD cases are more uniform in size in all dimensions but aren’t completely flush. Place some tiles on the top and – if necessary – stand some more up, leaning against the sides. Use a little Blu-Tack to anchor them if you feel that necessary. Using a couple of small tiles stacked to a height half that of the ‘shelf’ constructed in this manner makes a great 3-D staircase. See also “cardboard steps” under ‘made objects’, below.

2. Tissue Boxes (unopened)

When you need a little more height, these can be useful, used in the same way as paperbacks and CD/DVD cases.

3. Tissue Boxes (opened)

I’ve only used this trick once. I built up the battlemap so that the whole thing was flush in height with the opened tissue box, and made sure to put a tile over the opening. When a PC stepped on the centre of the box, I removed the tile and pushed the miniature half-way through the opening as a dramatic representation of the quicksand he had stepped into. It would also work great for a pit, pushing the mini all the way into the box.

4. Tissues

Thick clouds or spiderwebs can be simulated very effectively simply by dropping a tissue over the top of the miniature; the softness of the tissue means that it will roughly conform to the shape of the victim. You can even poke an arm out through the tissue paper for additional realism and shock value. But there are even more effective techniques in the “made objects” section that I would use in preference – unless I wanted a particularly thick effect, in which case I would use cotton wool if I had it – and tissue if I didn’t.

5. Electric Motor innards

I pulled the rotor out of the electric motor from an old toy. Including the shaft, it’s about an inch-and-a-half long. I actually grabbed it because the shape reminded me of a sci-fi spacecraft. I’ve used this to represent everything from a weird gadget to a diesel generator to a nuclear bomb in games.

6. Cheap Takeaway Containers

These often have slightly oblique sides. Turning one upside down and placing tiles against the sides looks great. Alternatively, cover one in a brown gift-wrap or aluminium (“aluminum”) foil to represent a bunker or a large sci-fi machine, respectively.

7. Salad Bowl and/or Colander

Domed structures are common in sci-fi. Taking a large salad bowl and inverting it gives you something that’s close enough to a 3D representation of one. An inverted colander gives a slightly smaller example. You can also use a large salad bowl, right-way-up, to represent a crater, especially if you sticky-tape some heavy cloth around the edges to form a skirt (stuff the hollow with old scrunched-up newspaper or something). Build up the region around the outside in height using the paperback trick so that the bottom of the crater is below “ground level”. Ten minutes work produces unbelievable realism.

8. Strainer or small Tupperware/plastic bowl

The fact that these are translucent or see-through and come in various shapes and sizes makes them great for representing force-fields when inverted. They can also be used as sci-fi “set dressing”, missile silo hatches, or petrochemical tank farms in a refinery.

9. Measuring Cups

These are cheap, come in various sizes, and usually will sit flat on the battlemap when inverted. They are just the right size to represent various small vehicles, especially in a sci-fi game environment. Alternatively, use them right-way-up and you can fit the minis representing the passengers actually inside the container.

10. Spray Cans

Tall cylindrical shapes. Great for sci-fi furniture, missiles, and rockets. Less often useful but still occasionally warranted as stone columns.

11. Soft Drink Cans

Not quite as tall, but about the same size in diameter, you can alternate with spray cans to form crenellations. Build up the area behind them using DVD box sets standing on their sides or a tissue paper box on paperbacks and you can have minis stand “behind” the crenellations and look down on the battlemap.

12. Spray Can Lids

The lids on their own, inverted, are useful for sci-fi furniture. And you can stack one on top of a mini to represent a character flying overhead.

13. Gummy Snakes

When you really want a snake to look like a snake, use a snake! Bonus: you can eat them afterwards.

14. Jelly Babies

When you have to depict fourty cryogenic sleeper capsules, jelly babies work a treat. Bonus: a snack at the end of play!

15. Blu-Tack and string/colored cotton/wool

A few small blobs of Blu-Tack can be used to affix string or died cotton to the battlemap, permitting the outlining of various strange shapes and persistent effects like electric-eye beams. Throw in some slight 3D work on the “walls” using the techniques suggested above and you can set up a high-tech laser security system. By holding down one end and picking up the other, you can also simulate a laser firing at random. It adds a whole new layer of verisimilitude far in excess of the effort involved.

Taking this a step higher, string can be used to depict electrical cables, fire hoses, and the like. If you’re careful (to make sure that it can be cleaned off afterwards), you can even attach one end to the hand of the miniature “character” wielding the hose.

16. Tiddlywinks counters

Place these on the map board in random positions before the players arrive to simulate land mines. Take a couple of photos from various positions, then remove the counters. When the PCs step in a location that the photo shows used to have a tiddlywinks counter, the mine goes off – put the counter back on the board. Faster, easier, and far more graphic than anything else you can do.

17. Glass Ball

A few years ago, I bought a glass sculpture at a street fair. It has colored glass “streaks” through it but is mostly transparent. I’ve used it several times as a game prop for a crystal ball, and on one occasion used it to represent a dimensional portal on the battlemap.

18. Unusual small electric torches

I have a couple of these. One has a triangular shape, another has rounded edges, a third is all soft curves. They all make great sci-fi vehicles and stage dressings.

19. Abstract-print wallpaper, kitchen-counter surfaces, and gift paper

There are times when I want to depict a strange surface that the battlemaps don’t provide. A sheet of one of these with an appropriate pattern/color/texture can work a treat. Black for deep space; Blue for the ocean; and so on.

20. Adult workman’s boots

Put these on the battlemap to represent the feet of a really BIG opponent and watch your players’ eyes pop. Heck, one is probably enough! But it also works to represent the full “miniature” of a creature when you don’t have one that’s the right size, or the foot of a giant statue. Blue-tack a cutout illustration to each side for additional verisimilitude. If Ragnerok had ever been played out in my superhero campaign rather than occurring between campaigns set in the same game world, I would have used this technique, or something like it, to depict Fenris.

21. Children’s gumshoes

For something in-between a large mini and the BIG boot, use a child’s boot.

22. Artist’s Dummies

A further step down in size are poseable artist’s dummies. I have a pair about 10″ tall. These can be expensive, but I got them for their intended purpose – this function is an added bonus.

23. A long purple or black cotton sock

I’ll use something to wedge open the mouth of the sock without obstructing that mouth – a frame made from paddle pop sticks broken in half and held with Blu-Tack and sticky-tape will do, but I tend to use an egg-ring. The result is a purple worm big enough to actually swallow minis whole and that looks a bit wormlike. Don’t use ankle-high socks for the purpose, the proportions are wrong.

24. Plastic Toys – Dinosaurs

It doesn’t matter too much if these are to the right scale or not. They are close enough, and dinosaurs came in all sorts of sizes anyway.

25. Plastic Toys – Military Vehicles

On the other hand, there are a number of tanks and jeeps that are fairly close to the right scale out there, and quite cheap.

26. Toy Aircraft

It’s so much easier to describe an aerobatic maneuver using one of these as a model. Scale doesn’t matter – the ones I have are about 5 inches across and from WWI.

27. Sculptures & Unusual Cigarette Lighters

I have a small sculpture of a Horus head (about an inch-and-a-quarter tall). I have a sculpted cigarette lighter in the shape of a dragon about 8 inches long. The first screams “Ancient Egypt” as soon as you plonk it down. The second screams “trouble”. I’m always on the lookout for this sort of thing.

28. Blister Packs of Batteries

When you put these down on the battlemap, you get a row of cylindrical shapes about 8′ long (in scale), perfect for LPG gas tanks, modern missiles, etc. Vary the battery size to alter the dimensions of the “tanks”. Bonus: you get to use the batteries afterwards.

29. Large Screwdrivers

Something else that I’ve used to represent alien tech are screwdrivers. I’ve also sticky-taped a matchbox to the blade end to form something rather like a largish cannon. Or tell the players to ignore the shaft and blade and just use the handles to represent bigger storage tanks.

30. Boardgame Boards

There are times when a boardgame board makes the perfect replacement for a battlemap because of what is depicted on it. I’d love to get my hands on a couple of Robo Rally tiles for factories, for example.

31. Boardgame figures/counters

The more modern the game, the more likely it is that these will have a shape that can be used as a miniature. But I have a game from about 15 years ago (I forget the name) that used miniature tanks and army vehicles in different colors, only about 1/6 of an inch long, that work wonderfully as a rat horde, or the little bots from Star Wars. Whenever you find a boardgame at a Garage Sale, it’s always worth a look, and asking yourself “what could I use these for?”.

32. Large Post-it notes

This doesn’t always work perfectly. Covering the parts of the battlemap that the PCs can’t see preserves the mystery of what you’ve emplaced there. If one character has better vision than the rest, you can lift the non-adhesive flap to give them a sneak preview while concealing the contents from other players with a hand, clipboard, or whatever.

33. Toothpicks & Blu-Tack

These make great spears. The Blu-Tack lets them stand upright at an angle for added realism.

34. Aluminium Foil (“Aluminum Foil” in the US)

You can make all sorts of things out of this just by folding it, and alter the appearance of a lot of things by covering them with it. Take advantage of these facts. Heck, scrunching it up into boulders is worth thinking about and about as easy as it gets.

35. Cling-wrap

Some GMs may be reluctant to risk damaging their Dungeon Tiles and battlemaps with Blu-Tack. If you’re one of them (and I am, because I don’t own most of them), cover them in a little cling-wrap first.

36. Plastic Fan

I have a plastic battery-operated 3-bladed fan. It stands about 8″ tall. Which makes it close to the perfect scale for a ship’s propeller.

37. DVD Towers

These can serve as anything tall and cylindrical, from a lighthouse to a nuclear power-plant cooling tower. They are often stackable for extra height. Gift-wrap them with the pattern on the inside if you want opaque white.

Made Objects

Most of the found objects are usable “as-is” with little or no prep-time. But there are a few objects that require more prep.

38. Conical Jelly Containers

Over the last decade or so, Asian jellies have become commonly available in many supermarkets here in Australia. Some varieties come in lovely conical containers, each holding one mouthful or so of jelly. Wash them out afterwards and spray-paint them to create sci-fi window dressing, space capsules, or even generators. I once visited the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Plant (a school excursion) and the visible part of the generators were cones about this size rising from the floor).

39. Matchbox

Another method I’ve used to represent a dimensional portal is a matchbox with holes cut in front and back, and the whole thing wrapped in Aluminium (“Aluminum”) Foil.

40. Old Circuit Boards

These frequently have all sorts of wonderful electronic components on one side to use as “furniture”. The problem is that the other side, which has wonderful high-tech “patterns” on it, also has protruding wires that can be quite sharp and can damage tiles or battlemaps. Solve this by cutting a 1/4″ (1 cm) sheet of foam to the right dimensions and placing it underneath the board. You will also want to remove any wires or cables leading away from the circuit board.

If all you want is the “high-tech surface” of the underside of the device, use a soldering iron and pair of pliers to remove all the electronic components from the other side.

PS: You can get a great “fusion reactor” by finding an old-style TV and extracting the yoke (goes around the picture tube). Leave the wires attached to the yoke (cut them from the far end if you have to). Then stick the thing face-down on the game-board, with the “cables” running off the game-board.

41. Cardboard Steps

It can be useful to cut up an old, heavy-cardboard box into 1″ x 1″ and 1″ x 2″ shapes. You can then stack several of these, holding them together with sticky-tape, to create steps of any required thickness, or arena-like seating, or whatever.

42. Gift-wrap Excerpts

Some gift-wrap has sparkles and fireworks. Other gift-wrap has long streamers or ribbons. Cut these out and use them to represent special effects on the Battlemap.

43. Paper Clouds

I’ve lost count of the number of ways I’ve used these. Torn by hand in a pinch, they have since served as everything from a small pond to a petrol spill to radioactive cloud to trees (actually, that was what they were originally created for). They are just a more-or-less round shape, with somewhat-puffy protrusions, like a thought-bubble, in various sizes. Remember, meaning is whatever you assign. Paper and scissors does the job.

44. Plain-Lace Clouds

But an even better solution for some effects is to get some plain, unpatterned white lace, and cut it into rough circles of various sizes, and then given the “bulbous edges”. That’s because this stuff is semi-see-through, so you can drop it over the minis and still see what’s beneath.

Bonus: they also work very well for swarms of insects!

45. Patterned-Lace Spiderwebs

A similar approach using patterned-lace gives really incredible-looking giant-spider webs. WAY better than simply using tissues.

46. Patterned-Lace Trees

Take some of your spiderwebs and spray-paint them, or soak them in food coloring, or coat them in acrylic paint and water – not so thick that they become too stiff and have the stuff flake off onto the battlemaps. Heck, even washing them in warm water which contains the innards of water-soluble texta will do. The objective is to stain them green – you can then use them to depict trees.

47. Patterned-Lace Ice

Similarly, do some in a sky blue and you’ll get “cracked ice”. Maybe hand-coloring a patch in the centre to represent a hole in the ice.

48. Patterned-Lace Pits

The same technique applied to black lace gives very realistic Pits. Instead of putting the pit under the character, drop it over the top of the mini to show that he’s “in the pit”. You’ll have to explain it to your PCs the first time; after that, the simple act of dropping a “pit” onto someone should tell its own story.

49. Paper Dragons

On one occasion, I needed a large Chinese dragon. So I drew a crude one (outline only) that I could drop on the map-board and cut it out. If I were doing it again, I would then slice it across the flat “mini” at major joints in the neck, tail, & wings so that I could articulate it. I’d also use some cardboard instead of paper and try to find some suitable texture or gift-wrap to glue on it for more realism. Add some Blu-Tack holding a bead or two for the eyes, and you’d have something that could be reused time and time again. Store it in a sandwich bag to keep the pieces in one place.

I’ve also made paper rivers, jungle vines, rope bridges, And hovercraft.

50. Lightning effect, various lengths

Get a sheet of paper and lightly draw some sort of rough lightning bolt from one corner to another, no more than about 1/4″ thick. Trace the outline in a light blue texta. Cut it out, and then cut to various lengths. Do the same thing on the leftover paper until you can’t get any more from it. You should easily be able to make 100′ worth of lightning bolt in fifteen minutes.

The advantage of this is that it preserves the visibility of whatever the details are on the underlying battlemap.

Do the same thing with different colored texta for variations and other special effects. Use brightly-colored cardboard for still more variations. Fluero Yellow works especially well, but you will need a red texta not a blue one.

51. Fireballs from Gift-wrap & Red- or Yellow- tinted translucent contact plastic

Some gift-wrap has nice abstract patterns on it, but it’s rarely the right color for a fireball. So cover it in tinted contact plastic. Then cut out circles of different diameters, using salad bowls, plates, etc to get a round shape.

As a variation: Sandwich some patterned white lace between two layers of tinted contact plastic, glue side inward.

Five-to-ten minutes work gets you some custom fireballs that you can simply drape over “ground zero” without removing the miniatures.

52. Pipes from gummy snake and plastic straw segments

Plastic straws have been used to simulate pipes in models for decades. This often involves a lot of careful cutting and gluing to create bends in the “pipes”. You can do the same thing far more quickly by stretching an inch-long segment of a gummy snake until it’s just thin enough to fit into the end of the straw segments. Hint – stretch the snake before cutting the segments, it’s a lot easier.

In the old days, I might have used the runners from Airfix model kits – used to hold cast components together and left over after assembly of a model – for the same purpose. Easy to work with, but they still would have needed gluing. The only advantage would have been relative solidity and rigidity.

Conclusion

A lot of everyday objects have simple “primitive” shapes that can be used to represent all sorts of things on the game board. Heck, I once used a wall thermometer to represent the business end of a particle accelerator. When you have to represent a location or environment that doesn’t quite fit anything you’ve got in the form of a battlemap, or when elevation is going to be especially important, think outside the box – and then look around you. You might be surprised at what you find.

What is Blu-Tack?
At the last possible minute, I realized that Blu-Tack might be named something else in some countries. While a brand name, it has been generalized to a whole range of similar silly-putty type temporary adhesives here in Australia. So I thought I had better throw in an explanatory note, just in case. And if there’s anything else you don’t recognize, feel free to ask me.

Nyngan (pronounced Ning-gan) is the small town in central New South Wales where I grew up, so I know it well – at least as it used to be. It’s so remote that I haven’t been back there for years. In the following passages, I hope to bring it to life for my readers, then adapt the general description to various game settings.

The Real Nyngan

To begin with, let me acquant you with the real settlement, the township of Nyngan.

The Nyngan Environment

Technically, Nyngan stands astride the desert line, but compared to most towns in central and western New South Wales, they are very lucky in that they have ample water supplies most of the time, though minor water restrictions are permanently in place, and water rates are very expensive. Wooded stands are common, but the general natural ecology is scrubland.

Nyngan in Summer

The heat sucks the breath from your body, and it is all the casual visitor can do to pant and think of something cool and moist. It’s so hot that the bitumen softens to become sticky tar with gravel in it, The earth seems flat as a pancake, and the roads are so straight that they can be hypnotic. It rarely rains, droughts alternating with rare flood years, when sheets of water fifty or more kilometers across sweep over the landscape. In dry years, clouds of thick red dust that sticks to everything like glue occasionally choke the town. When it rains, this turns into a cloying, clinging mud that is more than enough to unbalance tires. Flies are common irritations, most are small in size but occasionally you will find one a centimeter or more in length. The record temperature is 47°C (116.6°F) in the shade, the average is 33°C (91.4°F).

Nyngan in Winter

There are colder places, but there are few that feel so chilly when the southerlies blow. They seem to ferret out any opening and insinuate themselves between coverings and flesh. At night, the temperature plunges, and thick frosts are not uncommon. Fog is infrequent but not unheard-of. The lowest temperature on record is -4°C (24.8°F), but the mid-winter average is about 8°C higher than this (39.2°F).

The Dwellings

Most houses stand alone on sizable blocks of land with front and/or back yards fully large enough for a second or even third dwelling. These tend to be individually fenced. When water restrictions do not force them to burn a withered yellow-brown, they are a vibrant green in summer, a little less so in winter. Burrs and weeds are common. Many have their own water-catchment tanks attached to supplement the town supply. Few homes these days don’t have air conditioning, though a few still make do with electric fans. Many of the homes now have solar panels on the roofs.

Houses all have screen doors in addition to more typical wooden doors. Homes are often unlocked when someone is at home, or even when nipping down to the shops to buy something; crime is relatively low. Many would fit the description, “spartan but homey and comfortable”, but over the years domestic improvements have accumulated. All told, the urban population numbers roughly a couple of thousand people.

Most of the streets are wide; some have gravel shoulders, others are bitumen all the way to the curbs. Trees are commonplace, and their shade provides welcome relief from the summer sun or the winter wind.

The Dangers Of Nyngan

In the surrounding lands, occasional wild dogs and wild boars may be encountered, but the most prevalent dangerous wildlife is the Kangaroo, predominantly the Eastern Grey and occasional Red. These can weigh as much as 90kg (200lb), stand 2m (6’6″) tall, and can leap more than a meter in the air to clear fences. They have sharp claws on feet and paws, and the former especially can be dangerous when the wild animals are confronted.

Black and Brown snakes are uncommon but can occasionally be found in gardens and yards even within the town boundaries. These are highly venomous. The browns are rarer, but often more aggressive, or maybe it’s the other way around – I honestly don’t recall.

Redback Spiders are a menace that children are taught to beware of from an early age; they like to crawl into cool and sheltered locations, under homes and into garages and tool sheds, and will often make a home in any opened can left lying around for long enough, or the undersides of toys.

Nyngan At Night

The stars are breathtaking, especially just outside of town, removed from the glare of streetlamps. Even within the town boundaries, the view is hundreds of times sharper and more densely-populated than the best city view. In summer, a chorus of insects fills the air. Mosquitoes are an ever-present nuisance in the hot seasons, especially at night; the locals avoid standing directly beneath streetlamps and overhead lighting in the open to avoid being (metaphorically) eaten alive.

The locals generally hate daylight savings; it frequently does not grow dark in midsummer until 8:30 or 9:00 PM. The gap between closing time for the businesses (generally 5:30) and darkness is when the town is at its social height (barring weekends). There’s really no excuse under such conditions for parents not spending time with their kids, though it still happens. Casually visiting friends and relatives is frequent during these hours, whether it be for 5-10 minutes or half-an-hour.

The Shopping Centre

Entering the settlement from the direction of the city, almost 600 kilometers away, one is almost immediately within the commercial district. A short distance into town, the major highway turns left to cross the railroad line, though the road itself continues straight ahead; this involves climbing an artificial hill to the not-at-all-level crossing. A system of flashing lights and bells warns when a train is approaching the intersection, but is rarely needed these days; passenger trains now stop at Dubbo, the nearest city, 170 kilometers away (this trip supposedly takes less than 2 hours but most drivers would consider that a good time, 2½-3 is more common, especially if part or all the travel is in twilight or at night). From Dubbo, you take a coach to Nyngan. However, the line remains open to freight trains.

Twilight travel requires both driver and passengers to be constantly alert for wildlife, especially Kangaroos, on the shoulders of the highway; hitting one at speed can write off a car or severely damage it, to say nothing of the potential consequences to vehicle occupants.

Some commercial properties lie along the original route, but it is only across the railroad crossing that the real town centre is reached, as the highway turns right and heads west. Secondary operations exist elsewhere in town, but 95% or more of retail operations occur along this stretch of road, or one of the side-streets branching off to the south, almost all within a block of the main street. Nyngan has the usual shops, but is oversupplied with taverns, pubs, and clubs for a town of its size. It is probably undersupplied with cafes, cake shops, and takeaways relative to most similar towns.

The people

In many ways, Nyngan is the same as any small town anywhere in the world – people are friendly, if not immediately embracing of strangers. The locals generally divide into two groups: those who live on farms and sheep/cattle stations (“ranches” for the American readers) outside of town, and the urban population. The latter like to think of themselves as the reason the town exists, but the reality is that everything local is infrastructure to support those who support the non-urban population.

A vital secondary function relates to the towns positioning on the major connection between Sydney and the capital of South Australia, Adelaide.

As well as sheep and cattle, Nyngan has a large and growing farming industry. Wheat, barley, oats, and canola, are the most commonly crops. This is a very costly and unrewarding occupation; if the rain does not come at the right time, farmers are lucky to cover their expenses, but the odd good year is enough to keep them trying again and again. Another new industry that has emerged in recent years in the area is mining. Nyngan currently mines copper ore only, but there has been minable gold discovered in the region too. For the immediate future, there are no plans to exploit this last development, but eventually it will almost certainly happen.

If this gives the impression that the residents are all optimists, it’s not far from the truth, though they can complain as much as anyone anywhere else. Most of the residents love a gamble but few risk to excess. “You have to be in it to win it” is very much a Nyngan philosophy that extends to all aspects of the lives of the population. Another characteristic is a steady, unwavering determination; no matter how bad the times are, economically, for the region, there is always a new prospect on the horizon that will keep the settlement ticking over.

Most Nynganites are very keen on sport. Rugby League is the most popular and men travel up to 200km each way to compete in both Rugby League and Rugby Union competitions. A local touch football competition is also very popular with high participation and strong local attendance. In summer there is a local cricket competition and both lawn bowls and golf are played all year round. Every few years, Tennis rises in local popularity.

Amongst families, little athletics is very popular and parents think nothing of taking their children long distances each weekend to compete with the “neighboring” towns.

Of course, given the summer temperatures, swimming is a popular recreation. This is not usually organized competition; its more about getting cool and wet, splashing around and having fun. Hundreds have been known to pack the municipal swimming pool at a time.

Leaving Town

Small roads leave town to the north and south. The main routes out of town are to the east (already discussed) and to the west. Taking that westerly course, you cross a bridge across a large, reasonably slow-moving river, the Bogan. Beyond this bridge is another park which provides access to the river for swimming and boating. This has only one advantage over the swimming pool: it’s free to use. Once or twice a year, major events draw hundreds of people to the site.

Facilities

The town has a library, a hospital, 3 churches, and an Olympic swimming pool. There’s a primary school, a catholic school, a high school, and a kindergarten. There are a few parks, a couple of ovals, and an aerodrome suitable for light aircraft. In recent times it has been announced that a huge solar energy farm will be constructed in the region that is expected to generate a lot of employment.

I still have aunts and cousins living in Nyngan, and other relatives who visit regularly so I had some of them review the above for accuracy and comment. I need to thank them for their contributions before I go any further.

The Nyngan Of The Past – a personal impression

Discounting recent developments such as the farming and mining, there’s been very little change in Nyngan over the years. A major event a decade seems to be the average; the pace of life is slower there. Beyond that, only minor differences divide one year from the next.

In part, that’s due to the dependence on the rural economy; if there’s a bad year, you cope and wait for the next in hopes of improvement. In part, it’s due to the isolation, which also insulates against whatever is going on in the wider world. Both of these elements attract a certain kind of personality, those who might list perseverance in the face of adversity in a profile – if they went in for such nonsense, which they don’t.

Roughly twenty years ago (give or take a couple of years), the town was at it’s lowest ebb. That was when the town was at the heart of the worst flood on record. Desperate attempts by the locals to reinforce levee banks failed, and the entire town had to be evacuated by helicopter. The rural economy had been failing for some time, and for many, this was the last straw. I was told that up to 1/3 of those evacuated did not return, and did not intend to return; this was an opportunity for a fresh start elsewhere. Many of my relatives felt the town was dying. And yet, the lure of the easygoing people and the cheap real estate and the homesickness factor has led many of those who departed to creep back in ones, twos, and threes, over the years, and the population level of the settlement is now almost exactly what it was in my youth.

25-30 years ago, passenger rail services to the town were stopped, producing the rail-bus arrangement described earlier, except for increasingly rare exceptions each day that eventually stopped completely. A few years earlier, the public high and primary schools had separated and the primary moved into a new complex. That happened the year before I entered Secondary Education (school years 7-12).

Fourty-five years ago, more-or-less, the swimming pool and municipal library opened, at close to the same time. I think the swimming pool came first by a couple of years, but couldn’t swear to it. I was just starting school.

That’s the pace of events and changes in Nyngan: slow to develop, slow to change, one day much like the next, and even more like the same day the year before. The town preserves, conserves, and encapsulates some of the best attributes of society in a more golden era. Think 1950s, but without the 1950s attitudes. There’s an unhurried pace to life, and the sense that there’s always time to pause and say hello to the people you know and have a chat about whatever. It’s a product of gritty determination, a hardy optimism that rarely if ever relents, a hostile climate, and a relative isolation that spares it from the volatility, the highs and lows, of much of the modern world. They have just enough contact to avoid becoming insular, to remain relatively cosmopolitan in outlook, and avoid living up the cliché of the country hick.

The Isolation Of Nyngan

It’s worth mentioning a trend that has continued for decades: In olden days, when cars and roads weren’t very good, there used to be a lot of country towns half-a-day’s travel or less from each other. As transport and infrastructure improved, people didn’t need to stop as frequently and undertook longer journeys. Travel to Sydney by car used to be a ten-hour all-day trip, departing early in the morning and arriving late in the afternoon; that has now been cut to six or seven hours.

The difference has been small but has accumulated, and many small country towns have withered and all but died. The same is true of many of the smaller settlements that surround Nyngan. This has led to the contact between the town and the outside world being diminished except for when special occasions prompt one or more locals to make the trip to “the big city”.

Prices In Nyngan

Every commodity seems to cost more in Nyngan, largely because it has to be transported to the town. Fuel prices are very high, and enough to invoke slightly bitter laughter when urban dwellers complain about the price of fuel going up; whatever the landmark valuation is, it was old news in Nyngan more than a decade earlier.

Balanced against that is the price of land and housing, which is a fraction of the city or suburban pricing. What would be a million-dollar home and block of land in a cheap Sydney suburb is a tenth that price in Nyngan. At one point I calculated that it would have cost only $5-$10 a week more than I was paying in rent and utilities to buy a house in Nyngan and commute by air to the city and back every weekend.

A lot of services that more populous centers take for granted just don’t exist. I remember it causing a minor sensation when Nyngan first got a taxi. At times there have been a couple, at other times none; whether or not there’s one at the moment, I don’t know. There’s no internal public transport aside from school busses, which collect kids from the surrounding country properties each morning and deliver them back at the end of the school day. You either provide your own transport, or you walk. The town is small enough that you can do that.

Nyngan in Fantasy

Nyngan can be used as a model for any isolated community without much change. The architecture would be different, and perhaps the wildlife that occasionally reminds the citizens that they are surrounded by nature. The climate would need to change to match the surrounding environment. The primary requirement would be to explain the isolation. This can be done with geographic distance, or with geographic difficulties. It’s not a place of high adventure, but it is the sort of place that might lie along an invasion route, or to which a dark evil might escape to lick its wounds in hidden shadows after a defeat. You could change the threat of floods to the threat of a volcanic eruption and never miss a beat.

Nyngan in SF

The same need has to be accommodated to use the town in an SF setting. It could be transplanted to become a small lunar colony, established to extract minerals from the lunar subsurface, an industry that has given way to hydroponic farming, for example.

You could easily scale up the township to provide the model for an agricultural world within some galactic federation or empire. The trick is to expand and analogize the elements that make up the town to the same scale – the major travel route passing through, the relative isolation, and so on.

Nyngan in Pulp & Horror

Nyngan is not the sort of town to feature in either of these genres unless the isolation was somehow unusual, the people trapped in a twilight zone where change hasn’t kept pace with its surroundings, and the citizens live in ignorance of the lurking horror or alien invaders amongst them. The township is even more isolated than the community that is the initial point of contact in “The Puppet Masters” by Robert A. Heinlein, so much so that there would be no need to disguise the spaceship of the Titans as a schoolboy publicity stunt; there wouldn’t be any media attention to begin with. It’s probably the least-likely place in the world from which to launch a bid for global domination – and that in itself makes it an attractive setting for the headquarters of such a bid to a GM.

Of course, it would only take a small exaggeration of the ‘friendliness’ of the locals and their willingness to go the extra mile to speed a stranded traveler on their way to make the township assume subtle but really creepy overtones.

Nyngan in a Western

If there is one genre for which Nyngan seems naturally suited, it’s that of the Western. Some municipal elements might need to be downgraded, and the technology regressed, but the town itself barely needs to change.

Nyngan in Cyberpunk

The internet reached Nyngan a long time ago, but even there it is relatively isolated by slow speeds, something that is only slowly changing. The latest generation of internet-enabled Smartphones have probably had a very big impact – something I hadn’t thought of when talking to my relatives about the content of this article, or I would have asked about it specifically.

What that means is that Nyngan is a surprisingly-good and interesting fit when viewed as a model for a community in this genre of game. You have the physical isolation, you could easily have a backwoods sub-society of cybernetically-enhanced toughs and hillbillies, and yet the township could easily form the nexus for a plot aimed at domination of the Net. Most of the town would be ignorant of this role, but the isolation and the small size of the community would provide a number of natural defenses to such an operation. Strangers would stand out from a mile away, and as I said in a another context a few paragraphs ago, this is the last place you would look for a plot aimed at global domination.

Nyngan & Superheroics

In one way, Nyngan and Superheroics just don’t mix. There’s nothing there to attract the sort of vile menace that four-colored heroes are prone to tackle. In another, since superhero campaigns can borrow plots from just about any other genre, the town is an easy fit. In a recent adventure within my superhero game, a corporation had set up a ‘facility’ for hiding people they wanted to bury away from public scrutiny, disguised as a hospital and attached car dealership. While the township itself was a small community set in Canada, I was all set to use Nyngan as my model for it – but the PCs never went there. It was that idea that initially led to the subject of this Blog Carnival.

The Wrap-up

Nyngan is a strange hybrid of isolated country town and cosmopolitan centre, of friendly folks and a distinct personality, that makes it a useful conceptual model for a wide range of communities in gaming. It is a chameleon, large enough to be used as an urban settlement and small enough to simply be the focal point of a region dominated by primary industry.

With the exception of a year or so back in the 80s, I haven’t lived there in more than 30 years, but it continues to exert an influence over my way of thinking and my personality; in many ways it is the wellspring from which I have sprung. Would I ever move back there? Almost certainly not; I’m too well-adapted to the larger urban environment in which I reside. But you can take the boy out of Nyngan, you can never take Nyngan out of the boy. It’s been a privilege to share my impressions of it with you.

How do you choose a location? Where do events transpire? What considerations should you take into account, and what is the process and the chain of logic that gives the best answers most rapidly? These are questions that Blair and I will have to tackle repeatedly tomorrow, as I write this, because our next pulp adventure has reached the point of being almost ready to improv; we need some places and descriptions, and then some names, some history, and perhaps a couple of pieces of canned dialogue and then we can move on to writing the adventure-after-next – and that’s exactly the order we plan on tackling these requirements.

The Application Of Logic

The usual starting point is to ask if there is anything about the scene’s content that mandates where it is to take place.

The Logic of Events

If the previous scene had the heroes discovering the Secret Lair™ of the villain, and this scene is a raid apon that villain’s base of operations, then it has to take place either at the villain’s lair or just outside it (depending on where we want to pick up the action).

If the scene involves dealing with the wounds inflicted by a battle, then logic dictates that events occur at the scene of the battle, nearby in a medical vehicle such as an ambulance, or at a hospital (or equivalent).

The Logic of Tactics

If the scene involves battling with a Demon, most PCs will seek the advantage of hallowed ground – so look for the nearest church or graveyard. Of course, the enemy will seek out ground on which they will have an advantage – is there such a thing as “unhallowed ground” (or some plot equivalent) and where is the nearest piece of that?

The Logic of Transit

If the scene takes place while characters are in transit, there are generally only three options: Departure, Arrival, or somewhere in between.

The Application of Persona

Basic logic of this sort will generally sort out two thirds of all required locations, or at least restrict them to a manageable subset of the entire range of options. It’s that last third, plus any cases where you still have a choice amongst members of a small set of options, that remain to be dealt with. Basic logic will only carry you so far, and then you are into the non-logical realms of style.

There are a number of factors and considerations that get incorporated into deciding the choice of locations for events when logic is not enough. These are usually not applied in any set sequence; sometimes there’s an elephant in the room that makes the impact of one or more considerations paramount over all others. At other times, these considerations serve to restrict the range of options available, or simply influence the decision, or be not obvious or applicable. Even though they are broadly grouped below, and (of necessity) presented in some sort of order, that’s simply a convenience for communication within this article; don’t take this order as a prioritization of any sort.

I have assembled the first group of considerations under the general heading of “Personalities” or “Persona”.

(Almost) All Events Have An Instigator

A fundamental consideration that should made be clear from the outset: it becomes much easier to make choices of locations if you can point to some one individual who has caused the event to occur at that particular time and place, some one person who has the choice of whether or not that is when it occurs. Of course, chance and opportunism and destiny can all play their part, but even then, some individual has to make the choice to take advantage of such factors when they present the option. Identifying who is responsible for the choice of location of the action within a scene simplifies every other decision regarding the location.

It’s a mistake to think of this only applying to straightforward confrontations, though they keep coming to mind as I write this text. For example, let’s say that the question is where the PCs are going to be, and what they are going to be doing, when they hear about some action that someone has performed (which required a decision to perform that action), or some decision that has been made. The making of the original decision, and its consequences, form one parameter of the location choice. The next parameter is the speed of communications, which dictates how quickly the news can travel. From there, the news has to reach some individual who makes the choice to disseminate the news, and the PCs have to make the conscious decision to engage with the purveyor of that news. So, viewed in context, three agencies can be considered to be the instigators of this simple sequence.

But, more practically, it is a question of opportunity, and the decision to take advantage of that opportunity, or the decision not to. The news in question exists, and there will be various opportunities available for people to hear it. If it’s the sort of news that sets tongues wagging, each person who hears it becomes a further distribution channel for the information. At some point, the set of locations in which the PCs would have the opportunity to hear the news will intersect with the set of locations that define their lives without this information – at which point the PC who becomes aware of the opportunity becomes the instigator. “You’re passing down the street when you notice a crowd gathered around a gossipmonger.” “Escorts blow a fanfare to draw attention to a Herald.” “The innkeeper asks if you’ve heard the news.” “The merchant wants to gossip.” “A town crier rings the bell he carries, announcing without words that he has news available for those who wish to buy it from him.” The circumstances create the opportunity, and the decision to take advantage of the opportunity belongs to the PC. If not taken up, another opportunity will eventually present itself. It’s easy to set up a prioritization list based on who is providing that opportunity, their mobility, and how they will hear the news.

All events within a game can be viewed as the interaction (however removed) between two characters, even if they don’t even know of each other’s existence, or are functioning through proxies. And that means that the choice of a location is dictated by one or both parties.

The Influence of Initiative

The Instigator of the action generally has the choice of where the action will occur, unless it is their choice to go to or confront the Target of the action within the scene – sometimes Mohammed must go to the Mountain, other times he can wait for it to show up.

Not as fundamental as advantage, that comes under the heading of Logic, previously; this requires some analysis of the personality of the instigator and a determination of how that personality will bear apon the choice of location.

The Influence of Timing

The more abruptly and forcefully the instigator is reacting to previous events, the more likely it is to take place either at a Decisive Location, or at somewhere close to the location of the previous scene.

The Influence of Inertia

People’s lives have an inertia. They can be prodded into a particular direction by any number of things, discussed separately below, but in the absence of any of those things, the inertia of past events on both Instigator and Respondent restrict the opportunity for the two paths to overlap to a few occasions. This is especially true early in a story or adventure, and less influential late in a story or adventure when conscious decisions play a much larger role. If neither side is bringing about the action of the scene through conscious and deliberate choice, then the location of the scene must be one of those intersections in the personal histories of the participants, so look for common ground in habits and activities.

The Influence of Comfort

People will naturally seek out places and circumstances that reassure them, even if their confidence boost is the only benefit that they accrue with this particular choice. So the instigator of a scene will tend to make choices with which they are comfortable unless they gain a clear benefit through their own discomfort or are forced into a less comfortable choice by some other factor.

That means that not only can thinking about what location choice would be most contributory to the comfort of the instigator offer a clear and compelling choice, or restrict the range of options, but that subsequently thinking about why the instigator would not choose such a location can serve as a touchstone to guide you through the many options open to you.

The Influence of Discomfort

Equally, characters will tend to avoid situations that make them uncomfortable unless they have strong reasons not to do so.

The Influence of Arrogance

It’s overconfidence if not warranted and arrogance if merited, but ego and hubris can play a definite role in the choice of location by the instigator. The stronger this element of their persona, the more likely they are deliberately override comfort factors, or even go to the opposite extreme of deliberately choosing a venue that places them at an apparent disadvantage. You should always think carefully about the level of arrogance in the instigator’s makeup.

The Influence of Circumstance

Sometimes there is no choice about where an event will occur even if this decisiveness is not founded on strict logic but on some other factor relating to the participants. This often relates to practicalities concerning what the instigator is doing immediately prior to or following the event.

Time is one circumstance that can have a profound influence, especially if one participant in the scene is feeling the pressure of time. This generally produces a situation in which the instigator has fewer choices open to them, and initiative shifts to whatever the respondent is doing in the absence or in ignorance of the scene that is about to transpire.

The Influence of Opportunity

I’ve already preempted a lot of my thunder under this subtopic with my earlier example. An instigator can simply be taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity that presents itself, which means that the inertial activities of the respondent dictate the location.

The Influence of Need

If there is something that the Instigator personally or professionally needs, or needs for the respondent to do, this need will often be a factor in determining the choice of location.

The Influence of Outcomes

Finally, the more of a planner and plotter the instigator is, the stronger the role that the desired outcome of events will play in determining the location of an event.

The compounding of Influences

Like many decisions in life, the totality of influence of personality on decisions is a compounding of many different smaller influences, some of them contradictory. The act of making a decision as to location when personality is a factor is actually roleplaying on the part of the GM; the more successfully he can put himself into the shoes of the instigator, the better will be his choice of location.

The Application of Genre

If only it were that easy! Every factor mentioned so far, from logic to personality, has to be filtered through the Application of Genre.

The Creation of Options

Specific genres can create options that simply don’t exist in other genres, or that can exist only by being reinterpreted.

Fairytale Castles can exist in cartoonish genres; can be given a more realistic rendering (with losing the fantasticality) in high-fantasy; and have to shed most of that extraordinariness in low-fantasy. They are less likely to be encountered in the pulp and secret agent genres, are still more infrequent in realistic genres, extremely infrequent in science fiction, and virtually unheard-of in western and oriental genres – though the latter have their own unique variations on the concept. Arguably, the superheroic and horror genres are the most generous, capable of encompassing locations from any other genre with varying levels of credibility that are more strongly related to internal consistency with the individual adventure than anything else.

Another example, left to the creativity of the readers as an exercise, is the Space Station (try it – you have the genre list in the preceding paragraph).

When considering locations, you always need to be aware of the additional creative options that the genre is offering. What’s more, there is no small validity to the arguement that giving preference to these options reinforces the presence of the genre and thereby benefits the game.

The Restriction of Options

As is made clear in the preceding section, for every door that opens, another closes – at least in most genres. Skyscraper office blocks and suburban shopping malls are rare in Westerns – I’m tempted to say they are unheard of.

The presence of a location that is contrary to the genre is almost a demand that it be given prominence. I may have argued in the past against the principle of Chekhov’s Gun, but this is one occasion when it absolutely applies. That in turn means that you should never introduce such a location without making it central to the plotline from the moment it first appears, even if it’s only an indirect influence at first.

The Shaping of Options

The rules of the genre may not rule a location out, or create the opportunity for a genre-specific location, but even in a more general context, they can shape the options that you have available. Warehouses may be commonly found in several genres, but in the Pulp genre they should have a particular ubiquity and a particular look and feel. It’s almost not going too far to describe them as the “gothic architecture” of the Genre. Almost.

The Application of Style

You also have to consider the stylistic overtones of the adventure/story that you’re working on, and how to use your location choices to reflect and reinforce that style. The next adventure in the Pulp Campaign, which I mentioned earlier in this article, has a very Film Noir feel to it, and that’s going to shape every other decision we can make. I’m even thinking about giving some of the primary NPCs soliloquies through the “fourth wall”, and trying to figure out a way for the PCs to respond in kind. Thankfully, it’s usually more straightforward than that.

The Application of Meaning

It is sometimes possible to add additional depth of meaning to a story with a choice of location. Stories that begin in a morgue or cemetery, or other location symbolic of endings, for example – though that’s perhaps a little heavy-handed. If you can’t communicate it any other way than being preachy, try using a location symbolic of what you want to say. (I had a great example to offer at this point, but it’s gone completely out of my head). Irony, Pathos, Melodrama – they can all be added, sometimes, to a scene by the choice of location.

The Application of Icons

Every city has them, though only a few are famous enough to be known to outsiders the world over. Iconic locations that represent the city in question. Big Ben, The Eifel Tower, Mount Fuji, The Statue Of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, The Sydney Opera House. Some national capitals seem to have more than their share – The White House, Washington Monument, Pentagon, Arch de Triumph, Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street.

Especially in a scene early in an adventure, or shortly after the characters first arrive, its a good idea to show or mention one of these iconic locations if you’re in a city that has one – it simply helps establish in the player’s minds that this is where they are. That means setting such a scene where the iconic structure is at least visible in the distance.

The Application Of The Mundane

On the other hand, when the events within the scene are supposed to be especially dramatic or surprising to the players, it can often be a good idea to make the setting somewhere ordinary or mundane – so that they aren’t too busy looking at the scenery to pay attention to the action.

If players are expecting something weird or supernatural, you can sometimes get extra mileage from a mundane locations – especially if you keep emphasizing how ‘ordinary’ everything is. Because after they get used to this, use of the terms ‘typical’ or ‘ordinary’ can really give players’ paranoia a workout.

The Application of Illustration

Sometimes a location will be chosen simply because you can, or have, found some particularly tasty eye candy that meets the general requirements. This is a perfectly valid justification.

The Application of Representation

Still another factor to take into consideration is whether or not you can represent it on a battlemap if that’s necessary. I intend to provide a future article for this Blog Carnival on ways to extend the functionality of battlemaps using props and other tricks and techniques which will expand your scope and reduce the significance of this factor somewhat, but it can still be a valid concern.

The Application of Inspiration

Never neglect the value of a location that inspires you. Your descriptions will be better, and the presence of the point of inspiration will even help with the writing of surrounding passages of text and interaction. Inspiration can persist for a surprisingly long time. And hopefully, it will also provide a factor of “cool” for your players to enjoy in the game.

The Application of Artistry

In some scenes, the location can do more than one job. Providing inspiration is an example, but is so significant that I’ve separated it out to stand alone, but there are other functions to consider – clues to future adventures, for example, or even clues to the solution to the current problem. Deeper meanings and in-jokes can be buried within locations. It just takes a little creativity.

Even more usefully, verisimilitude can be built into the choice of location. I have a theory that any given adventure needs a certain amount of plausibility as a base, plus extra to offset any lack realism about the action or the participants. That plausibility has to come from somewhere – some of it can derive from believable character reactions, some from dialogue, some from the application of an in-game physics, and some from the choice and description of the location.

That doesn’t mean that a location can’t be fantastic or amazing or awesome to behold; this simply means that the burden is transferred somewhere else. Extra realism in one location can counterbalance fantasticality in another. I always try to keep this balance in mind when choosing locations.

The Absence Of Application

Using these guidelines to what you require from your choice of location will deal with 99 cases out of 100, or more. But sometimes, even these are not enough, and you simply have no clue in what sort of location your scene should transpire.

When that happens, let your players decide – without even being asked. You should know what you want to have happen; simply let events develop from the previous scene until one of the PCs goes somewhere that presents an opportunity for that plot development to take place.

The only reason this is in last place is because there’s no capacity for prep, and that can mean inadequate descriptions or visualization and more work for the GM. So the odds are low that this will be the “Best” answer and even lower that it will be “Easiest”.

We all suffer from the occasional bout of writer’s block. This series started with the premise that different types of content meant different kinds of writer’s block, and needed different solutions to the problem. The immediate success of listing so many different solutions while outlining the article showed the validity of the approach; so far, no less than eighty solutions to thirteen types of writer’s block have been delivered, and this article is going to add sixteen-plus and seven to those tallies!

A quick recap:
Content can be thought of as consisting of layers, each layer providing a means of execution and development of the layer above it. From overall plot to specific scene, from specific scene to the setting in which the scene takes place, to the persona required, or to the narrative or dialogue required to achieve a specific outcome that propels this scene into the next, following the path dictated by the overall plot, writers sometimes have trouble translating known content from one layer into the next layer down (in fact, as the diagram in part 5 showed, the real situation is a little more complicated, but let’s not get bogged down). These types of problem are called Translation Writer’s Blocks, and there are lots of them.

If you have plenty of time, the solutions described for generating content for each layer independently (the Primary types of Writer’s block) can usually do a better job of solving the problem. But when you need a solution in a hurry, or just want a quick answer to get your mental gears unstuck, these problem usually take on added dimensions, and that’s where the solutions currently being discussed enter the picture.

Translation: Specific to Dialogue

Quite often, the only reason for two characters to have a scene together is to permit character A to give some information (or misinformation) to character B. This type of writer’s block occurs When you know what the dialogue is to convey but it sounds forced or unnatural.

Solution 1: Small Talk

People rarely get right to the point. Find a subject about which the character can make small talk and look for a way to segue into the information you want to convey. Don’t try to force the phraseology; use the small talk to find the natural voice of the character, then use that voice to convey the information in the dialogue. If you’re writing rather than improvising at the game table, you can even write and then delete this small talk, entering the scene at the point where things get interesting, but having found that character’s personal voice and mode of expression – though I would argue that in most cases, the extra verisimilitude and definition of the character’s personality that results from keeping it in is usually worth the price.

An exception is usually found in military and emergency services during an actual emergency or official report, in which case there’s no problem with it sounding forced, just be careful to have the character’s intelligence and expertise (or lack thereof) correctly portrayed within the dialogue.

Solution 2: Cut the jargon, cut the slang

One of the chief reasons for dialogue to sound forced is because the mode of expression you are using to surround the dialogue is forced. Don’t use jargon unless you know what it means and how it is naturally used by the type of person doing the speaking – in which case, it should sound natural.

Don’t use slang unless you can make it sound realistic. And be especially careful when it comes to profanity – uncensored it can become more important than the substance of what you are trying to deliver, poorly-censored it can just become muddy and confusing.

If you have to, cut these elements and use plain English. This sacrifices verisimilitude for clarity – sometimes a necessary evil.

Solution 3: A Third Party

An excellent solution is to introduce a third party who needs to have the jargon translated into plain English. After the first serving of jargon, to establish the primary speaker’s manner of speaking, focus on the translation as though the translator was the person delivering the dialogue. “If we maximize the over-under delivery of reducables the 702s will be executed with minimal losses within the context of retroactive split-board trading shares” – means absolutely nothing because there’s way too much jargon and assumed knowledge, but it establishes what the primary speaker is saying and how. The meaningful part of the dialogue is the translation.

Solution 4: Use Accents and selected phonetics sparingly

Writers often spell accented words phonetically to ensure that the audience hears the accent of the speaker. It’s easy to go way overboard on this stuff, and the more there is of it, the harder it is to execute it ‘cleanly’. Each phonetically-spelled intrusion of accent sacrifices a little clarity for verisimilitude and risks making the delivery seem unnatural – so be sparing. Accent the first word in a line of dialogue or the last, and perhaps one key word, and that will usually be enough. As the dialogue progresses, accent even less frequently than that. It can often be useful to insert or append a word or phrase that is essentially irrelevant to the content of the line of dialogue that can carry the accent – starting a line with “Mon Ami,” or “Mademoiselle,” immediately delivers a French accent; “Oh, I Say!” does the same for a British accent. The more of these stock phrases you have on tap, the more choice you have for utilizing this technique. The same trick also works for slang, but usually fails when it comes to jargon. If your dialogue is sounding unrealistic, try cutting some or all of the accents and phonetics.

Whenever I have a passage of dialogue that is to be delivered by an accented character, I always try to write it in plain English first and then insert the accent selectively. It saves a lot of wasted effort.

Sidebar: Foreign Language Text
In olden days, it was very difficult to render anything in a foreign language unless you happened to speak that particular language. These days, internet translation can deliver what sounds, to lay ears, like a reasonable rendition of text in a foreign language. For anything permanent, these translations are worth the paper they are printed on – when they are viewed on a screen. No internet translation will ever be as polished or successful as the real thing. But you can fake it. Here’s the first line of this paragraph in a selection of languages, generated using Google Translate (I’ve replaced characters that wouldn’t display with something visually equivalent):

• French: Dans les temps anciens, il était très difficile de rendre quelque chose dans une langue étrangère à moins que vous arrivé à parler cette langue en particulier.
• German: In alten Zeiten war es sehr schwierig, etwas in einer fremden Sprache zu machen, wenn Sie auf die jeweilige Sprache sprechen passiert.
• Hungarian: A régi idokben, nagyon nehéz volt, hogy tegyék valami idegen nyelven, ha nem történt, beszélni az adott nyelvet.
• Polish: W dawnych czasach, to bylo bardzo trudne, aby uczynic cos w obcym jezyku, chyba ze sie mówic, ze dany jezyk.
• Swedish: Förr i tiden var det mycket svårt att göra något på ett främmande språk om du råkade tala om att visst språk.
• Turkish: Eski günlerde, bu söz konusu dili konusan oldu sürece yabanci dilde bir sey islemek için çok zor oldu.

I could stumble my way through most of these, no doubt mispronouncing horribly, without practice; but given a few minutes advance warning (and having a prepared phrase in the required language prepared for use) and a little practice at speaking it aloud, I could do a much better job of mangling whatever language was needed. Proof of the mangling? Try reverse-translating the above back into English. The French comes close, but the German totally inverts the meaning by offering “In ancient times it was very difficult to make something in a foreign language if you happen to speak the language”. The Polish is near-perfect, but the others contain fundamental problems of various magnitudes. My favorite is the Turkish, which manages to be almost lyrical in its failure to deliver the meaning of the original sentence: “In olden days, it was out of the question unless you speak the language, foreign language, something that was very difficult to handle.”

In a nutshell: DON’T use an internet translator for any foreign-language material that is to be published, you’ll only embarrass yourself with anyone who actually speaks the language (individual words may be OK); and if you’re in a spoken-dialogue situation (at the game table) where the goal is to capture the flavor of the language without saying anything that you don’t mind being garbled in translation, try to practice in advance.

Translation: Specific to Narrative

Narrative text is used to describe something. It could be a place, an environment, a machine, a special effect, a state of mind, a perception of reality – anything from metaphysics through to the most objective of realities. Most of these are relatively straightforward, but there are times when nuance or context appears to get lost.

When you know what the situational context is but can’t describe it clearly, the problem is defined as a Specific-to-Narrative translation block. In effect, the meaning of the situation is getting lost, or your descriptions of that situation are confusing or inadequate. This can be amongst the most frustrating forms of Writer’s Block, and is amongst the most frequent in an RPG; but it can also be a blessing in disguise because it is often caused by muddled or vague thinking, or by trying to tell and not show.

Fortunately, it’s also a problem with a bucketload of solutions.

Solution 1: Through The Eyes

Pick an NPC (or a PC) and examine the scene through his eyes. What does he see? What does it mean? Why is it happening?

Solution 2: Mouthpiece

If you are trying to convey some insight into what’s been happening, or some implication or understanding that has escaped the players, pick an NPC who might be able to make that observation and put the words into his mouth as dialogue.

Solution 3: Personal Revelation

If there are no NPCs capable of having that insight, take a player aside and let his PC have a private revelation – in writing, so that it can be accurately conveyed to the other players. Make your choice based on the character most likely to have the insight, rejecting any who have already committed themselves to one specific interpretation of events because they will color the information you provide with that interpretation. That often means giving it to the player who has had the least screen time in the last few minutes, which is a side-benefit.

Solution 4: A public voice

A great standby is to have a reporter show up (or town cryer if that’s more appropriate for the era) and let them describe events – incorporating the situational context that you’re having trouble conveying.

Solution 5: Clarity

If none of these solutions work, the problem is most likely to be muddled or vague thinking. There’s a gap in your thinking that you have instinctively or intuitively jumped over, and when you are trying to communicate that thought process, you keep running up against that gap. What’s worse, running over it multiple times in your head often gets your thoughts stuck in a well-worn rut – straight to that chasm.

To solve this problem, you need to stop and take five. Dscribe the situation to a non-participant and explain the contextual point that you want to make; often you will identify the gap and plug it yourself, but if you don’t, your sounding board will usually be able to set you straight.

Solution 6: Live to fight another day

And if that doesn’t work, leave it unsaid and find a way to make the context clear in retrospect by showing the consequences in a later adventure or scene.

Translation: Specific to Narrative

A second form of this type of writer’s block occurs when you are attempting to describe some effect or image that you know is taking place, but which you are having trouble seeing in your own head. “The two realities intersect.” “Space and time begin to shred.” “A glorious sunset is unnaturally calming.” “The overlocking frammistat begins to tear itself apart.” Knowing in an abstract way what is happening doesn’t automatically mean that you can describe it in literal, non-abstract, terms.

This is also a very common problem. Actually, it’s several different specific problems, each exemplified by one of the examples offered, and – once again – each has a slightly different solution.

Metaphysical impacts on the Physical world

“The two realities intersect.” Something metaphysical is happening, and you need to describe what is being perceived by a witness, real or hypothetical. The key to this is the selection of the frame of reference; you would use very different narrative if describing this from the point of view of a witness within one of the realities instead of from outside observer looking on.

In the first case, you have to translate the metaphysical protrusion into the reality being observed; the solution here is to use terminology appropriate to actions that could normally take place in the normal reality. Use physical terms like “stretch”, “distort”, “ripple”, “swirling”, and/or “spinning”; use physical forms to depict the intersection like “a point growing”, or “a perfect ellipse in midair”; use physically transformative phenomena such as “boiling”, “condensing”, or “splintering”. Above all, keep the description dynamic and not static; you aren’t trying to describe the phenomenon, you are describing the transformations caused by the phenomenon. Identifying the phenomenon itself is an act of interpretation, and that should be conveyed either in the first person by the thoughts of the witness in the course of the narrative, or conveyed in dialogue at the end. If we’re talking about an RPG situation, interpretation should be left to the player; let him make skill checks against whatever skills he thinks appropriate in order for the character to interpret the phenomenon.

From the outside observer’s perspective, abstractions and symbolic representations are the order of the day. Identify some way of symbolizing a “reality” and then use that to describe two of them joining, fusing, blending or intersecting. Keep the language more impersonal and remote; personal and subjective reactions should be conveyed separately. In an RPG, it might be necessary to fuel the fire – “[character name] can’t help imagining what it must feel like to those poor souls who feel the fabric of their existence being mangled and twisted; you can’t see how any unprepared mind could experience such shock and remain entirely rational and sane” – but make sure that any such prompts are appropriate to the character to whom they are directed.

It is often helpful to find some real physical-world process that can be used as the foundation of such a narrative. The sudden condensing of a cloud of vapor where nothing was visible; the effect when ink-drops fall into a glass of water; the time-lapse growing of a plant or a crystal; animations of cell colony growth; even camera wipes – any would make a suitable metaphors apon which to base a description of the example phenomenon.

Physical impacts on a Metaphysical reality

“Space and time begin to shred.” Here we have a defined physical transformation – “shred” – being applied to a metaphysical or emotional object. “As the words penetrated, his heart turned to ground glass in his chest” is another reasonable example from an entirely different context. The key here is abstracting the metaphysical reality or object into something physical that can serve as a metaphor, and that can be subjected to the transformation.

This is a useful technique because the abstraction-to-reality effect of the metaphor is subconsciously and emotionally balanced by an unstated reality-to-abstraction effect symbolized by the physical transformation. The trick is making sure that all of these elements work in harmony with each other – if the metaphoric object is not symbolic enough of what it is supposed to represent, or if the physical action is not in keeping with the physical transformation (“the marshmallow shatters”?) then the whole thing will fall flat. If you’re having trouble employing such a narrative technique, it’s almost certainly because one of the elements that you’re employing is out of synch with the others. Where the metaphor is common enough, you might be able to get away with it (we’ve all heard of a heart shattering or being broken, and that’s why the second example works, even though hearts don’t physically transform into ground glass), but it may still feel just a little clumsy.

One word of warning regarding this narrative technique: many abstraction-to-reality metaphors are pretty universally understood, but some may be culturally-derived and meaningless to those from a different culture. Be careful you don’t get too clever.

Sidebar
Deliberately choosing an unlikely metaphor can be a great way of symbolizing an alien perspective – so long as you can find a way for it to make sense in the context of the society, personality, etc of the alien in question. “My minor heart soared with hope, but my major heart was still solidly grounded in the real world” works as an alien symbol of pessimism, for example.

Induced Emotional Context

“A glorious sunset is unnaturally calming.” “The sounds of nature are unusually disturbing.” Narrative often exists to induce an emotional reaction or convey an emotional context. Some come easily, others are difficult, because they are extreme or unnatural. The usual problem that people have in writing ordinary narrative is that it is easy to slip into cliché, and that is solved by finding some original metaphor that can be used to connect the perspective with the emotion that is to be induced.

The cause of most problems when attempting to induce an unnatural or extreme emotion is getting too quickly to the emotional point that they are trying to make; the result seems forced because it is. To solve this problem, the narrative needs to start with an emotional association that is reasonable for the perception and then develop or transform, step-by-step, into the distorted emotional context that is to be conveyed.

The first example is about an unnatural extreme. To make such narrative successful, start with a reasonable emotional tone and continue to layer appropriate descriptive terms until the accumulation becomes entirely too overwhelming to be natural. “The sunset is glorious, full of the promise of a new day and the optimism of hope. Golds and Reds and Purples wrap themselves around the landscape like silk sheets. The breeze is warm and pleasant and clings like honey. A faintly saccharine tinge colors the scent of flowers that fills the air; even the cesspool smells sweet, perfumed, perfect. You have never felt so sheltered, so calm, so safe and secure.” By which point the reader – or the player – is feeling anything but sheltered, calm, and secure. “Caged” probably comes closer, because they have gone on a journey from a reasonable emotional tone to something so extreme as to be unnatural – and that means that someone has done or is doing this to them, and the reality will bear little or no resemblance to the perception. If I had stopped at “warm and pleasant”, the description could have been taken at face value; “clings like honey” is the point at which the description goes just a little too far, and each phrase thereafter carries the reader further into discomfort. The payoff is the four-fold statement of emotional reaction; again, any one of these placed just after “warm and pleasant” would be utterly plausible, but the final statement that exists goes entirely too far to be accepted. If I were to use this in a game, every time the character tried to do something, I would mention “a wave of comfortable drowsiness” that had to be overcome, or something similar; by the third or fourth time, at the very latest, the character’s confinement would be a confirmed if unstated fact in the player’s mind.

Taking the reader on a trip to an unusual emotional destination is a little harder. Start with a general overview and a normal emotional context; then focus on details that can be associated with the desired destination emotion, and describe them in a neutral tone. Next, move to exaggerated details – things the character could not possibly sense – again with a mainly neutral tone with at most just a tinge of the desired emotional end-point. Finally, deliver the reader/audience to that endpoint, having layed the foundations through the earlier parts of the narrative. “The sounds of nature surround you; the burble of a brook, the whisper of a waterfall, the song of the birds, and the whistle of the wind surround you and make you feel intimately connected to world, vital and alive. Carried on the breeze comes the sound of a lion gnawing on a fallen zebra, while jackals circle impatiently waiting for the leftovers. Elsewhere, a great cat stalks its prey, the soft sound of its shallow breaths a barely perceptible presage to the bloodletting to come. Two dogs fight over a bone. Insects scream their outrage as each races to deny the others of its kind their share of the abundant food. One of the dogs bites the other, the whimper of pain melding with the angry growls of the aggressor. Even the waterfall and brook grind inexorably at the rock, slowly devouring it. Everywhere is the sound of one life seeking the destruction of another for its own gain, and the spilling of blood, and you feel a sudden wave of revulsion at the savagery and horror that surrounds you as you realize that everything that exists is a predator at heart, filled with violence and need.” The idea that the sounds of nature are a compounding of the violence and inflicted pain and misery of everything around the person is the perspective-shift needed to go from feeling a “part of nature” to being emotionally disturbed by the horror implied by the elements of that compounding. If I were to visit a Druid’s grove and had this description read to me, I would have a very different view of the druid in question afterwards! (PS: This is a very toned-down version, I could have been far more graphic and extreme!)

Ill-defined physical reality

“The overlocking frammistat begins to tear itself apart.” The problem here is probably that the GM/author has no clear idea of what an “overlocking frammistat” looks like when it’s NOT tearing itself apart. Picturing the device whole, and then what it looks like in proper operation, is an essential requirement for being able to describe the parts flying off as it disassembles itself. I can describe a spectacular engine failure because I know what an engine looks like, I can imagine the parts moving inside it, and so on.

Of course, form follows function; in order to be able to describe that form, I need at least some notion of the way the thing is supposed to work.

Another trap that a lot of writers fall into is describing a machine in isolation. Cables and pipes and hoses tearing loose do a great job of enabling the description to be more dynamic and engaging. And never forget the showers of sparks!

Translation: Scene to Action

All of which provides the perfect segue into our next category, which is all about dynamism. When the location and the action don’t seem to gel, you have the Scene to Action Translation wrong. Trying to set a barroom brawl in a china shop doesn’t work. The “bystanders” don’t fit, and the action you want to take place doesn’t fit.

Solution:

Presuming that it’s too late now to change the setting, what you need to do is to modify the action to have it interact with the environment, and modify the participants other than the protagonists of the action scene to make them appropriate to the setting. Instead of breaking mugs over people’s heads, have someone start throwing china. Which immediately suggests a shrieking housewife, maybe armed with a broom. Have the people who should be there chase out the ones that don’t fit, then have them turn on the PCs – who also (presumably) don’t fit the environment, either.

Translation: Action to Narrative

Describing Action scenes is an art unto itself. Some people can do it fluently and effortlessly, others struggle. I naturally have one foot on the dividing line and the other firmly planted in the “difficult” category. When you can see the action in your head but can’t describe it fluently, you have an Action to Narrative Block.

Solution 1: Game Aids

The best solution to this problem is usually to use some sort of game aid to take some of the descriptive burden off your hands, enabling you to focus on the rest. This doesn’t have to be miniatures and a battlemap; it could be a photograph or piece of art that you’ve found on the net, or it could be a quickly-sketched map on scrap paper. There are times when I’ll dig out “Orbit War” for its counters and game board, or 2038, or some other board game. Fancy contact plastic or stick-on kitchen-surface coating or even scraps of unused wallpaper or carpet can all assume radically different meanings when miniatures are placed on them (green shag-pile for jungle, anyone?)

Solution 2: Divide and conquer

Sometimes it can be helpful to break one big action sequence into several smaller ones, and describe each separately. In an RPG, you don’t really want to focus on one participant for that length of time while excluding the other players, though, so this is an approach that’s better used in writing fiction.

Solution 3: Strobe Light

The final technique is to strobe-light it into a series of freeze-frames. A game aid can be especially helpful in providing continuity to the description.

The ‘Divide and Conquer’ procedure can be extended to permit the recombination of separate action sequences into one massive sequence.

1. Divide scrap paper into as many columns as you have separate action sequences.
2. In the first column, break the events in that combat/action sequence down into discrete actions, reactions, and consequences. Choose the one that is most likely to have a disruptive impact on the environment.
3. In the second column, break the events of the next combat/action sequence down into discrete actions, reactions, and consequences. Take due account of any environmental changes and distractions resulting from the first combat.
4. Ditto the third column, and so on.
5. Locate the shortest column. As soon as that action sequence is complete, any participants not rendered inactive are free to join another action sequence, which will need to be revised from that point on.
6. Compare the recovery time for each character rendered inactive with the remaining steps in the longest combat sequence. It’s possible that they might reenter the action, starting a new combat sequence at the point of their recovery. Or they might be able to escape while everyone’s distracted.
7. Now comes the recombination: going across the page, describe the first action/reaction/consequence set from the first battle, then the first from the second, then the first from the third, and so on.
8. Repeat for the second, then the third, and so on.
9. Or you can use an intermediate arrangement: describe one action sequence up to the point where it influences a second. Then describe that second one up to that point. By flagging or highlighting the points at which one sequence influences another, you identify the natural break-points in the narrative. Crossing off those that have been reintegrated makes sure that you don’t miss any.

Sidebar: The Strobe-light technique in RPGs
Although it might not seem so, an analogous technique can be very useful in an RPG. When the party are divided, and one has a battle or action sequence, make sure that they ALL do (even if these events are not occurring simultaneously). Then you can run each as one big combat taking place in multiple locations at the same time, giving everyone their normal combat screen time. Trust me, it works. The key to success is take each character’s independent plotline to the point where they are about to enter an action sequence and then switching attention to the next plotline. Rapid interchanges between plotlines in a non-combat mode (I try for 2-3 minutes a plotline, 5 minutes at most) achieve the same function outside of an action sequence. Use a stopwatch or egg-timer if you have to. Don’t be afraid to split conversations in the middle. As soon as the end of allocated time begins to approach, look to get that plotline to a point where it can be interrupted. The time required to achieve that is the source of the variability.

Translation: Persona to Dialogue

The drunken cowboy bellied up to the bar and announced, “Proton decay in the antimatter sheath. Should’ve seen it coming,” and burped noisily, reaching for the whiskey bottle. The space pilot opened his comm. channel to home base and solemnly announced, “The fairy queen marches beneath a banner of blood surrounded by fell magiks.” The high priest fell to his knees and prayed loudly to his god, “Why howdy, partners. Who’s got a deck of cards? I got me a powerful itch to play me some poker.”

Smile; you’ve just been bitten by the Persona to Dialogue Translation Block, where the dialogue doesn’t seem right coming from the character speaking. Okay, so these are extreme (and extremely unlikely and obvious) examples.

This type of problem occurs when you have a character saying something that the plot requires be said – but the character is all wrong for the dialogue. Marginally more subtle examples might be a sociopath offering a victim’s perspective, a hard-nosed cop discussing the poetic allusions in Byron, or a bumpkin offering a cogent mathematical arguement. A still more realistic offering might be someone offering a helpful suggestion to a person with whom they have a blood feud.

There are multiple solutions.

Solutions 1-4: Massage the dialogue

The same as described above under “Translation: Specific to dialogue” at the start of this article.

Solution 5: Someone Said

Have the character doing the speaking quote the parts that don’t seem appropriate as having been said by someone else.

Solution 6: Party for three

Introduce another character (who probably has some connection to the character doing the speaking) who can offer the dialogue that doesn’t fit the first character. Depending on the circumstances, this could be a wife, a family member, a friend, a lawyer, whatever. Try to pick someone appropriate to the information that you want the ill-fitting dialogue to convey.

Solution 7: Emphasize the incongruity

One final solution to consider is making the character more complex. This won’t always work, but a policeman who’s useless at interpersonal relations and generally incompetent – except at deducing the events at a crime scene – can be an entertaining character. Just make sure that their personal and professional lives carry the scars of their failures.

Crowding: too many ideas

It’s happened to most creative people at least once – you have so many ideas that by the time you’ve finished articulating one, another that was there has completely evaporated.

Solution Part 1: A Quick Synopsis

When you have an idea, jot it down somewhere as quickly and succinctly as possible. Try not to expand on the original premise too much. More than a line or two is probably too much, unless you can set aside whatever you’re doing and devote time to the idea. More to the point, when you have several ideas, write them down as quickly as possible before you get distracted; you can always discard rubbish ones later.

Try to limit the development time you spend on an idea until you intend to use it. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had an idea and spent time developing it, only to throw all that development away when a completely different need came to light for which the original, undeveloped idea would provide a perfectly acceptable solution.

I keep a file of plot ideas for each campaign that I run. Despite the vast number of plots already integrated into my current superhero campaign, I have already amassed 15 more that I have on standby. Some I might integrate into the main plot where my current planning simply tells me I have a metaplot development that needs a plot to happen in, others might never be used. And note that I’m not actively trying to come up with ideas for the campaign, it’s already pretty chock-full.

Once you have the idea written down somewhere, try to connect it with other ideas you might have. Don’t actually put the two together, simply note the possibility of a connection. While you’re at it, list anything else that the new idea might be good for. That’s because some of the ideas that I have had are extremely incomplete, and this new idea might be exactly what I need to plug one of the gaps.

It’s useful to code and number the ideas. That gives you a means of referring to the idea without replicating the whole thing.

Solution Part 2: Consequences, connections, metaplots, and ulterior motives

When you come to the conclusion that you need an idea from your ideas file, for example as a plot vehicle to introduce a new NPC, what you really need is a means of choosing the best idea for the job from amongst those on file – or rejecting all of them and beginning to hunt for something new.

For example, let’s say that I need an adventure to introduce a new high-tech villain. I have a name and a profile for the villain, but no idea what he is up to. I go through my ideas file looking for ideas that have the right sort of consequences and connections. I need the plot idea to integrate with the overall metaplot and to address any ulterior motives that I might have for the adventure. I might come across an idea “stress fractures in the supercooled memory cores of super-computers giving wrong answers”. The team’s base relies on an AI running on just such a supercomputer. So do a couple of high-tech research facilities, and a global security oversight computer. Maybe the latter develops rationality flaws due to this problem and begins inserting a fictitious villain that it has created for systems testing into the live records as though he really exists; his autonomic functions then detect the intruder and sound security alarms, to which it responds by focusing conscious attention on the scene, distracting him from the delusion and causing the ‘intruder’ to vanish into thin air. So, no crime has taken place, no living person has ever seen the villain, no-one knows who they are or what they are up to – but there is ‘incontrovertible proof’ that he exists. Attempting to rationalize and understand what is going on, as its systems degenerate, the AI begins ‘uncovering’ criminal acts that were not noticed on first analysis. These start off being credible, but become more and more unlikely, and the team come to realize that the whole thing is a computer-generated fiction. Why? Who’s behind it? Is someone testing the defenses? Is someone tampering with the AI? And then, more or less at the same time, an accident of some sort downloads the fictitious criminal “identity” into an android body at the same time as a genuine criminal decides to take advantage of the hype and paranoia being generated by this mysterious identity and adopts it for himself – leading to a conflict over who really is the owner of the criminal identity, and to the team being embarrassed when the ‘computer glitch’ shows up somewhere in real life.

I would probably never run this adventure; I don’t want the PCs to mistrust the AI at the Knightly Building, their base of operations. But his combines five mini-ideas: “Virtual criminal in cyberspace”, “AI inadvertently downloaded into android”, “AI has delusions”, “two criminals claim the same identity”, and the original, “stress fractures in the supercooled memory cores of super-computers giving wrong answers”. Instead, I would probably go with the notion that the criminal was somehow inducing these fractures for his own benefit, so that this becomes a plot about a potential threat to an ally of the team – the AI at the Knightly Building.

Crowding: the fallacy of memory

Inevitably, when you look at an idea snippet that you jotted down months or years earlier, sometimes it will be just a cryptic jumble – you’ve forgotten what it means.

When this occurs, you have two options:

• Try to recapture the meaning, or
• Ignore the original meaning.

Recapture

What might the idea mean? Clues may be offered by considering the idea just before it, or by considering any connections or consequences noted. Any of the terms mentioned might be the key to recapturing the original thought. But, if you try all these, and still can’t remember what you meant by “Gilgamesh the Serpents” or something equally strange, you can move to option B:

Ignore the original meaning

If you can’t remember what you meant, and have failed to recapture the original idea, take what you have as a suggestive phrase and try to construct a new interpretation. On rare occasions, this will actually permit the recapture of the original notion – giving you a choice of interpretations. If that doesn’t happen, there are still two outcomes possible: success or failure.

A meaning is found

Regardless of whether the interpretation you come up with is the original or a new idea inspired by the cryptic phrase, the first thing to do is to add a add a contextual keyword or phrase to avoid the problem next time. If you are lucky enough to now have two interpretations, put them both down. Expand and clarify.

Failure

Discard the idea by crossing it out or color-coding it, NOT by deleting it. The answer might come to you hours or days later, or next time you look through the ideas file.

The End Of The Road

That’s almost it for the article series. But I have some parting advice to conclude the series:

When All Else Fails

The ultimate solution to writer’s block, when everything else suggested has failed to solve your problem is this: Retreat a step, change something, and try to go forward again. It’s better to take one step back for three steps forward than it is to be stuck.

Above all, don’t stop working on it for any length of time. There’s always more going on in your head than the part that’s giving you trouble; if you stop, all that will get lost. I’ve occasionally had success by ignoring the problem and starting work on the next section, having made a note about the problem. Sometimes you can work backwards from a future point to solve the problem – and break through your writer’s block.

Everything has to happen somewhere, and that means that locations are an essential element of RPGs and RPG settings. And that makes locations a worthy subject for this month’s Blog Carnival.

Posts I would like to see as part of this month’s carnival are:-

• How do you choose a location?
• How do you represent a location if you don’t have a matching Battlemap?
• How do you modify a location to achieve a specific story requirement?
• Location Descriptions: There are places each of us know because that’s where we live, or work, or grew up. GMs who don’t have that advantage can use that knowledge. Describe the places you know – a town, a suburb, a city, a state, a building. But don’t describe it physically, with facts that can be gotten from a Wikipedia page or a government website; try to capture the flavor of the location, as briefly as possible.
• Location Descriptions Take Two: And then, try to shift the location in time. What will it be like in 50, 100 years? What was it like 50, 100, 200 years ago? What would it be like if it was transplanted to an equivalent location in a fantasy location? Or a moonbase? Or a space station? The more variations on your description you can offer, the more likely it is that it will be of use to someone else.
• Location Descriptions Take Three: If you’re still looking for ideas, you could describe one or more fantastic locations from one of your games. Or talk about how you created it. Or both.
• How do you improvise a location if the dice indicate a random wilderness encounter?
• And finally, anything else you can think of concerning locations, how to choose them, describe them, use them.

A recent article that I posted here at Campaign Mastery might be helpful: The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs. One of the reasons I’ve been holding back on this blog carnival topic, which I’ve had in mind for some months, is that I wanted to have that article available as a reference for participants.

I have ideas in mind for all of the above topics to appear here at Campaign Mastery. Whether or not I get all of them done, or burn out on the subject before I get that far, is another matter. But it’s a big topic, with plenty of scope.

Finally, a piece of information that might be of interest, and of relevance: I once talked at length with a real estate agent about how they value properties. I thought that there was some system, that you set a base price according to the size and number of rooms, type of building, etc, modified it for proximity to amenities, shopping, parks, etc, then applied a factor of some sort to represent the typical relative value shift of the location – some suburbs are worth more than others. But oh, no, that’s not the case at all. It’s one part historical records for the region, one part adjustment for the current property market and general demand for property of that type, one part the value at which neighboring buildings were sold, one part guesswork, and one part chutzpah. They make it up as they go along – though a lot of people like to pretend otherwise. Personally, I think that a really good statistical analysis by a large real estate firm could probably permit then to be a lot more scientific in their approach, but what do I know? I’m not a trained real estate salesman. Think about that, the next time your PCs want to rent a warehouse or buy property on which to build a base…

Location! Location! Location! Let’s go…

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, I’ll never get it done in time…
   A triple-sized serving of the Orcs and Elves series today, to make up for missing last week, and to wrap up the Clan Wars plotline.
   I explained what had occurred to destroy last week’s posting in a series of comments attached to the then-most-recent article, but for the benefit of anyone who didn’t read those, here’s what happened.
   After working all day – well, as close to it as my physical condition permits – I was about half-way through Chapter 80 when the combination of time, infirmity, and exhaustion caught up with me and my creative juices just stopped flowing. For various reasons, I knew that I had to get to the end of what is now chapter 86 in the course of the next two parts of the series, and to ensure correct continuity, I had to at least have them outlined in pretty solid detail before I could commit to the content of Chapter 79, especially the dates and lifespans.
   I returned to working on it on Tuesday Night, and in one burst of sheer creativity, I finished Chapter 80 and wrote everything that now comprises chapters 81-86 as a single massive chapter. And then had a systems crash in the middle of saving the updated text. I tried everything that I could to recover the lost data, even searching for ways to do a memory dump, but to no avail.
   I got up early Wednesday, and working from a backup of everything that I had done on Monday, I was able to reconstruct in detailed note form everything that had been lost, in the process plugging a couple of logic holes and breaking what was a monster chapter into the five that it now occupies, from memory – a task that took almost as long as writing it in the first place had done. But by now it was too late to publish it, I had to start work on the article for Thursday – which was delayed and compromised by a blackout. The payoff was that it was a breeze to convert those notes into finished text.
   There’s another reason for the extra-large post this week, which I’ll get to in a concluding footnote.

Of course, I still have notes that didn’t get used in the course of the series. The Warblade and Clan Shaman of the Burning Swords don’t get named until Chapter 79, for example. I had the names all along, it just never became important.
   More significant is the role of Yurtrus, Orcish Goddess of Death and Decay, mate of Baghtru, and since it’s what inspired the whole interpretation of the “stupidity” associated with that deity, which is explained in the course of these chapters, it’s worth noting. Medieval cities tended to have very poor waste-disposal systems – they were unsanitary to the extreme. And if any race could find a way to raise the bar of “extreme” in this context, it would have to be the Orcs, who had naturally immunity to diseases and poisons. Orcish cities would therefore be a breeding ground for pestilences of the worst kind, uninhabitable by anyone but Orcs. Parts of this came out, parts were hinted at, but the obvious logic of one of the patron deities of cities being Yurtrus was never made clear, it simply never seemed to fit.

Unexpectedly, what began as a blend of footnote and afterthought has become one of the most complete and compelling parts of the narrative – originally just three chapters, it mushroomed by more than twenty. Does that mean that I embraced my inner Orc?
   In the process, a lot of what were originally just vague notes – “Verde discovers the truth about his quest”, for example – became clarified by situations and personalities.
  I hope my readers have enjoyed it.

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A couple of reminders that may be useful:
Directions in Fumanor are Sunset, Sunrise, Dexter (90° left of Sunrise), and Sinister (90° right of Sunrise). Modern maps are usually drawn with Sunrise at the top, but when the terms were coined, the practice was to make Sunset the dominant direction. Orcs count in base five, ie 1-2-3-4 fingers, 1 hand=5, 1-hand-and-one=6, and so on through to 4 hands and 4 fingers, which is followed by 1 fist=25. Orcs cannot count higher than 4 fists, 4 hands, and 4 fingers = 125, they have to group larger numbers into groups or units that can be counted on this scale.

Clan Wars XXIII: The Resumption of Normal Hostilities

Corallen illuminated the rim of the portal, and one by one the triumphant survivors passed through. The moment before they entered the passageway back to the doomed city of the Mailed Fist Clan, the Elvish God clouded their memories of events. They would still remember that they had achieved a great victory at equally great cost – of the nine who had dared the Lair of the Hidden Dragon, only five were returning – and would remember what needed to be done next, but not why. The weapon arm of the three Orcs who had struck the fateful blows against the chains that had bound their enemy in slumber had begun to tingle, and the strength in those limbs was fading. In the days that followed, the wounds would with and become diseased – a noteworthy event for a race that had never succumbed to such illnesses before – and the disease resisted all curative blessings. When the trio grew feverish, the decision was made to amputate the rotting limbs. Fortunately, this drastic action, another imitation of human practices, served the immediate need, but they would never be as capable of their former roles in their native societies again.
   They returned to a ruined city; every structure save that of the tower itself had been demolished, reduced to rubble, some of it completely covering the entrance. It took them almost eight hours to dig their way out of the debris. After reporting to the young Clan Chieftain of the Red Eyes, they collapsed in exhaustion.
   The next day, Garunch and his counterpart from the Mailed Fist Clan and old friend, Kudja, supervised a mass prayer to Gruumsh of all the Shaman of the Red Eye clan, beseeching him to tear open the earth beneath the tower and let the river of melted rock beneath well up through the crack to seal the tower for eternity, making it as close to a monument of solid rock as the Orc-God was capable of achieving. First then summoned the power and craftsmanship of the God Of Elves to finish the monument, polishing, carving, smoothing, and inscribing it in Orcish to commemorate the fallen city and the dictum of Gruumsh as reinterpreted by the Burning Eyes and Mailed Fist clan: no Orcish community greater in number than 4 hands of dwelling clusters would be permitted, and no such collection of dwellings to contain more than 4 fists of Orcs, numbering all from eldest to newborn – in other words, the largest permitted communities were to number 2000 Orcs. An exception was declared for Moots, when a temporary gathering of 5 fists of clusters would be permitted (10,000 Orcs) – but these dwellings must be temporary and completely destroyed or removed at the end of the Moot. Even these were barely enough for the Clans to bring a single leader and escort to a moot.

But there was one individual ‘present’ whose memory had not been clouded by Corallen, nor is it clear that he would be able to do so if he wished to attempt the deed. He was completely unaware that Lolth had been present at the fall of the Hidden Dragon not merely by proxy (in the form of Ambassador Tathzyr) but more directly through the spiderweb mirror he had carried in his pouch. She had heard it all, and did not like what she had heard. The destiny that Corallen sought to ensure had spoken of a day in which Elves, Drow and Orcs would unite to threaten the Chaos Powers directly; since she had expressly forbidden any congress with outsiders save that personally directed by her, and she had no interest in exposing herself to a direct threat by the Chaos Powers, this mandated that her children would one day supplant their love of her for another, as she had long feared. Once again, she realized that she would need to intensify her search for a new populace to rule, one which could never rebel against her; in the meantime, this mooted alliance must be rendered as improbable as it sounded, and placed as distantly into the future as she could possibly contrive.
   It was a simple matter for her to “clear the memories” of her Ambassador, filling his mind with her version of events, and to instruct him to reveal that “discovered truth” to the Orcs. With the Orcish threat and potential of the city dispersed, she had no further need of an Ambassador to the Orcs in any event, though she would keep the now-trusted Tathzyr in place as an agent within the court of the newly-dominant Orcish sub-nation, the clan of the Burning Eye.
   As instructed, Tathzyr went at once to Kurvath, the young Clan-chief, and told him that his mistress had removed the clouds placed on his memory by Corallen of the Elves and revealed to his memory that the entire Clan-War had been the result of an Elvish manipulation of the Orcs. Long ago, they had awakened a sleeping power that was too great for them to control without great bloodshed and loss of life, and so they had – under the direction of Corallen – carefully crafted a deception to cause the Orcs to suffer and die in their place.
   This deception contained just enough truth to completely convince the newly-elevated and yet-to-be-confirmed Clan-Chief, who immediately gathered two fists of Warriors and confronted First and the rest of the Elvish Band. The Huyundaltha were detained and condemned to death, but Second had learned much of Orcish customs during his brief stay and was able to invoke a custom designed to permit defeated clan-leaders to end conflicts without one side completely killing the other. Because the Orcs were celebrating a great victory, and because they had decided that the Elves were their enemies in that conflict, he was able to demand Banishment from the Orc-lands for himself and his companions. Although Kurvath was furious over ‘the deception’, Tathzyr convinced the Orcish leader that it was better to send the Elves home with a warning to stay out of Orcish affairs or face eternal enmity and utter ruination. This was Lolth’s subtle way of warning Corallen that she knew of what she saw as ‘his machinations against her’, and would oppose him at every turn.
   Kurvath relented, and grudgingly granted the Elves the minimum time permitted under Orcish Custom to depart; when the sun had travelled across the sky the width of his First, any Elf in the Orclands would be considered fair game, and his hunters would be dispatched at that time to pursue those fleeing with all the relentless indefatigability at their command.

Thus ended the first great alliance between Elves, Orcs, and Drow, with a restoration of the Status Quo between the three races, but its effectiveness would serve as a Harbinger of the future. While the tale would degenerate over the centuries amongst the Orcs, reduced to myth, anecdote, and custom, Lolth would remember it, and would devote herself to preparing against the day her children rebelled against her rule; Corallen would remember it, and devote himself to safeguarding all three races (from the shadows if necessary), even if that meant that some won temporary victories over one of the others; and there was one other.
   Careful to let his face reveal nothing, First framed a silent communion with his Deity. Since his return from the Lair of the Hidden Dragon, he had been by withdrawn and uncharacteristically silent, feigning a spiritual wound as deep as the physical wounds of the Orcs. With Ambassador Tathzyr squirming under the direct scrutiny of his Mistress, the deception had been accepted without question; even when he and his fellow Huyundaltha had stood accused of being the architects of the misery of the Orcs, he had remained mute. Now, in the silences of his mind, he finally broke that silence. “Great Corallen, Father of all Elves, I must advise that you have failed. My recollection remains clear and my memory of events remains unclouded. I have played my part in furthering your intent as best I could while amongst the Orcs, but now I must have your guidance. What am I to do, now that we return as promised to our homeland?”
   — You have played the wounded spirit perfectly, my son, and I am well-pleased with you. I wondered how long it would take you to broach this subject —
   “I bask in the warmth of your praise, My Lord, but praise answers no questions. I beg for your enlightenment apon my path henceforward.”
   — The tasks that lie before me are many and arduous, and it is possible that I will prove insufficient to their measure. If that should transpire, there must be a way for the truths which have been revealed to you to find their way to the members of the Great Alliance that is to come. Your continued memory is a safeguard against mischance, failure, and chaos. The path to the fulfillment of the prophecy is yet unclear; I must prepare as many avenues to the ultimate victory as I can conceive —
   “If one may remember, why not all? Is not the prophecy complete? We had an alliance of Orcs, Elves, and Drow – and I marvel that I was a part of such an unprecedented event – and there was, too, our hidden ally, the Verdonne – a ‘walking tree’ exactly as foretold – and by undoing the schemes of the Dreamer, did we not threaten the supremacy of the Chaos Powers? And more, did we not forge the bonds of mortality apon them? Where one has been ended, all others become vulnerable, though it take centuries to accomplish the inevitable.”
   — There was more to the prophecy, my son. Some could not be translated by the Orcs, some was cast in languages that do not yet exist and remain impenetrable even to me. No, the true Great Alliance lies in the days to come; your victory lies in setting feet apon paths not yet perceived, and that alone is enough for now —
   “Then the clouding of memory of the other participants was to permit Lolth to serve your needs in restoring relations between the races to what they were?”
   — Exactly so, for there were two cloudings of memory each, and not one. Each of the participants beyond yourself retains part of the truth, enough to prepare them for when the time is right, and these will linger, passed down through myth and race memory from parent to child amongst the Orcs. Lolth, too, remembers, and will unknowingly instill the key fragments of memory in those of her servants who need to know. And you shall perpetuate your own memories against the day when these preparations come to fruition. This was necessary, for should any remember completely, the Chaos Powers would be aware of events and would move to block the path to success before all is prepared for them. All will have their parts to play in making what remains only a dimly-perceived future opportunity for victory, and eventual success is not prophesied – but neither is failure —
   “Then I ask again for your guidance. What must I do, now?”
   — Apon your return to your homeland, you will remake the Huyundaltha, establishing a secret order within their ranks. That secret order shall be tasked with the protection of the One who bears the truth, even should all Elvenkind fail and perish from the World. That one shall bear the title of First, which you have made a name of great honor. And you will cloak the secret task of that order in the guise of the restoring of the Noletinechor, the Guardians of all that is Elvish – a role that is now expanded to include the training of the Huyundaltha. The Order of The Noletinechor will be an elite within the elite. This is a task that will consume the remainder of your days, and at the end of that span, you may pass to the Heavenly Isles content with your life’s achievements. This is my will and my instruction —
   “It will be done, My Lord, to the best of my abilities. It might be well if these others who shared in self-imposed Exile were the first members of the reborn Noletinechor, for in truth, we have all seen enough of War that none will think it strange that we choose a more peaceful role in life.”
   — That would be well. Shared experience is ever a bonding agent. But understand this: you are the keeper of the secret; it would be most unwise to expose yourself in addition to the demands of leadership of those who protect that secret —
   “Second has stepped forward to act as spokesman after I seemed to withdraw. I will appoint him as leader of the Noletinechor.”
   — A wise choice. Put these decisions into action, and I will know that the path into the future is well-cared for. I leave you with this thought, to engage your mind in the quiet times when these deeds are accomplished: Chance favors the opportunist, but none are so vulnerable to the control of chance by the power of destiny. In that thought lies the key to this victory over the Powers Of Anarchy and Destruction. I have always known this fact; now they have learned it, too. It will be a central influence on the shaping of the days to come; learn this lesson well, that it may bring enlightenment to you and those who follow you as First. —
   Straightening from his bowed and stooped position, First looked around at the others in his company, seeming to throw off his solemn and withdrawn mood. Noting that the Elves had just passed the traditional boundary that the Orcs held to be the border of the Orclands, and that they were safe from pursuit, he spoke to his companions. “Our Lord has need of our services, but before I may reveal to you his requirements, I shall require oaths of service and fealty to his cause from you all…”

Orcish Victory Songs

And the fates of the other individuals whose lives were swept up in the Clan Wars?

The Red Eye Clan:

Tathzyr lived out his life under the intense scrutiny of his Mistress, who trusted him and his unorthodoxy even less than she trusted most of her children. The strain prematurely aged him, and his life came to a close a scant century after the fall of the Orcish City. His family, too, were marked with the taint of suspicion, and his male descendants were favorite choices for sacrifice in Lolth’s name thereafter.
   Kurvath went on to become as enlightened a leader as the Red Eyes Clan had ever known, laying the foundations of a unified Orcish Society, drawing apon the harsh lessons of disunity and Clan War.
   Lukzal, eldest child of Kyrd, The Usurper, lost his preeminence amongst the warriors with the loss of his weapon arm, but this bothered him not. Events within the Cavern beneath the Oracle Of Gottskragg had awakened his mind to a larger reality in which the power of strength of arms was a very small thing indeed; he entered the Priesthood, and despite coming to this path relatively late in life, the same determination that had led him to prominence as a Warrior and an ability to see through complexities to the simple truths at their core more than compensated. He would become one of the greatest Clan Shamans in Red Eye history, and would be a staunch supporter of Kurvath for the remainder of his days. In the process, he would revise the belief amongst his race that a maiming was the end of usefulness to the Clan.
   Garunch was already elderly for an Orc when he participated in the raid apon the Hidden Dragon. He survived but a handful of years thereafter, devoted single-mindedly to grooming his hand-picked successor and most devoted student, Lukzal.

The Mailed Fist Clan:

Clan-Chief Agronak never fully recovered from the loss of prestige that accompanied the destruction of the city his ancestors had helped found. Although his followers held him blameless, and even revered him for safeguarding the lives of his clan through extraordinary challenges, his leadership was reduced to timidity. In time, his son would challenge his rule and force him to retire.
   Goral yielded his position as Warblade, and devoted his remaining days to a quest to find and tear down the Oracle of Gottskragg, but even though he was given descriptions to where the explorers of the Mailed Fists had encountered it, he could never find it. He blamed this failure on Elvish Deception, and would rail endlessly against ‘pointed-ear treachery’ to the point where even his most supportive kin thought him addle-minded on the subject.
   Goral’s Mate chose the name Enkarapra, which was Orcish for “Abandoned Child”. Although proud of being granted a name, and of her role in preserving her clan, it was a bittersweet reward for her, for though her husband had survived, his obsessions effectively widowed her. Her simple wisdom led her to be granted a position on the Clan Council, and she was always a welcome guest in the home of Agronak, but this was poor compensation for the loss of loving husband.
   Kudja, who had sacrificed his arm to preserve the existence of his clan, felt humiliated at being left out of the great quest that he had helped to engineer. Compounding his humiliation, he was revered as a folk hero amongst both his own clan and the Red Eyes; their celebrations of his deeds whenever he chanced to be nearby kept the emotional wounds burning fresh in his spirit. While he recovered physically, his mind was never quite right thereafter; he threw his remaining days into an obsessive need to drive the bugbears out of Mailed Fist territory with a cruelty and ruthlessness that was utterly uncharacteristic of the enlightened person that he been previously. No victory was sufficient to restore his pride, and eventually he took one desperate chance too many and was killed in a hopeless raid. Ironically, his sacrifice was instrumental in uniting the Red Eye Clan and Mailed Fist clan in the bonds of mutual peace, securing the prosperity and safety of his Clan; doubly-ironically, his obsession would yield a bitter harvest and be responsible for as much misery for his race and clan as that which it had prevented, re-unifying the Bugbears and triggering a second Clan War against the Bleeding Swords.

The Bleeding Sword Clan:

In every war, there are winners, losers, and victims. Some winners achieve greatness, others are transformed by their experiences into something greater than they could ever have achieved before the events that marked them, and some pay a price for the victory. If any group can be singled out as the victims of the Clan War, it is the Bleeding Sword Clan. Reviled by the Red Eyes for their treachery, condemned by the Mailed Fists for unleashing the Bugbears, and despised by all three for their leader’s cowardice in remaining behind and cowering in safety when the call to battle was sounded in the clan wars, they were left friendless and mistrusted in a hostile situation of their own making.
   Most despised of all was Morbag, the Clan-chief held most directly responsible for these failings, which went against all the precepts of Orcish Society. When the other Clans met in moot to settle their differences, he was unable to attend, surrounded by a wall of Bugbear-claimed territory, earning him further contempt for not even making the attempt. A messenger from the Mailed Fists, as the closest thing to a neutral party between the betrayed and betrayers, had braved the dangers to command his presence at the moot, and even survived to bring word of the Clan-Chief’s refusal to even attempt the journey. His name became a curse throughout the rest of the Orclands, and it became popular sentiment that it was the Bleeding Swords who were the Bugbear’s allies, and not vice-versa.
   Spared some of the acute disrespect and anger of the other clans was their Clan Warblade, Drash, who had led the invasion of Red Eye territory, and who was killed by the Red Eye’s troglodyte allies. Nevertheless, it was popular sentiment that he should have challenged the cowardly and treacherous policies of his Clan-Chief and that he had failed in his duty to do so. The claim of wrong-doing at the instructions of a superior became known throughout the other Orc-Clans as the Drash Excuse, and all Orcs were taught that resorting to it indicated guilt of a crime as great as the misdeeds themselves. “I was only following orders” is an admission of criminal guilt in Orcish Society, and that principle is enshrined in the name of the deceased Warblade.
   Vaaga, the clan Shaman, was held to be largely blameless. With no authority to challenge the Clan-chief, and convinced in what he was doing by falsehoods of sufficient quality to have deceived the other Clan shamans, it there was nothing that he could have done to avert disaster. Nevertheless, the name was considered to be bad luck by the populace thereafter, and became a metaphor for helplessness in the face of impending disaster.
   Surrounded by enemies, Besieged by hostile forces, and held in contempt by their own kind, the Bleeding Swords were the only clan not singing Orcish Victory Songs at the end of the Clan Wars.

The Tranquil Years

For most of the peoples of the world, what followed were three centuries of relative peace and prosperity. The reasons for this have been the subjects of endless speculation by theologians and philosophers; what is clear is that by the end of what has become known as The Tranquil Years, the various races had come to regard the social and political conditions under which they lived as natural and normal, no matter how great a shift they represented at the commencement. Patterns had become established, and memories of the past had faded.
   The consensus amongst the learned was that for some reason, the Chaos Powers had been thrown into disarray by the defeat of their puppets in the Elven Lands, which was itself but the final act in a failed attempt to achieve their goals through acts of genocide against the worshippers of the Gods.
   Humans still thought of themselves as the centre of creation, and few of these learned individuals even know of the events in the Orclands, never mind paying them any regard. They continued to form Kingdoms and Empires and play political games with each other, and considered those games to be the most important events in history.
   The Elves welcomed back the Huyundaltha who had entered voluntary exile, and accepted their story that they had been receiving instruction and training from Corallen, and contented themselves with expanding their forests. The restoration of the Noletinechor as a sect within the Huyundaltha was seen as a return to normality by the bulk of society; the Huyundaltha had been created as an act of desperation, and represented a deviation from the true purpose of the Order. While the Huyundaltha would remain the Elves’ front-line defenders against their enemies, their true purpose was to preserve Elvish Society. Not to shape it, or direct it, but to encapsulate and sustain it in a world where practicality mandates the compromising of ideals. Ellionara, who secretly bore the title of First, made it the Noletinechor’s public mission to find ways of bending the forms and expressions of Elvishness to necessity without sacrificing the quintessential philosophical foundation of Elvishness itself.

   Ellionara thought long and deeply about the parting words of Corallen, and everything that he had experienced in the Orcish Clan Wars, and in the Dwarfwar which had preceded it; he absorbed all that he could learn of human theology, the only one which acknowledge the Chaos Powers, and winnowed through it, discarding self-serving human perspectives and rationalizations, expanding apon the results with his own experiences. Had he published his findings, he might well have been regarded as one of the greatest philosophers ever produced by the Elvish Race; but he kept his own council, and contented himself with being ready to pass his writings on to his successor when the time came.
   His reflections penetrated and punctuated the limited human concept of “Chaos Powers”. These beings were not truly Chaotic, but were expressions of a fundamental incompatibility with structure. They did not desire destruction, they demanded isolation from the impinging of external stimuli apon their personal universe of experience. This left them inherently unstable in any collaboration or cooperation, fighting their own natural instincts. The fact that they were able to unite at all was proof that they had been ‘contaminated’ by order, and were at war with their own propensities; even if they were to succeed, they would remain unsatisfied. They could never go back to what they had been.
   And that, even more than the mere imperative of self-preservation, was why they had to be opposed the last breath of the last living thing. It could be argued that they had the right of prior claim over all existence, and if a void could be created that mimicked the state of existence they desired, a peaceable settlement might have been reached with them; but with that flaw in their nature, this would only delay the inevitable and enhance their destructiveness. They would no longer have anything left to lose, existence would be intolerable to them, and they would be willing to trade their own destruction for the destruction of everything that vexed them – which was, quite literally, everything.
   And that small contamination with order made them all the more dangerous. It gave them the capacity to cooperate with each other to at least some degree, it gave them the capacity to comprehend the world around them, and the capacity to plan intelligently; and with each step, each failed scheme, the capacity for an orderly response in service to their natural anarchy would grow within them. They would learn from every failed encounter, and only grow more dangerous with time. But at the current time, the races in opposition were like babes at arms in comparison; the only hope for success was for them to learn from every encounter as well, and to learn faster and better than their enemy. The Gods, Corallen included, had the power to forestall the enemy, but not to defeat them; their primary task was to draw the attention of the enemy until it was too late.
   Ellionara realized early that it was most unlikely that Ethraztia had told the Chaos Powers the details of his vision of the future. At best, he would have told them that he saw the future; but in order to do obtain that ability, he had embraced the order within and around him, which would have made his presence uncomfortable to his fellows. They would have avoided him as much as possible, having no idea that they were vulnerable to destruction by virtue of the contamination of order, and presuming that this was an advantage that they could exploit until the day of their final success.
   The loss of that ability would have two effects on them, and the combination explained the Tranquil Years. First, they would have learned that there was an advantage to be had by embracing, rather than avoiding, the Order within their anarchy, harnessing it to their own goals; but that would take time. When next they struck, they would be ten times as dangerous, and infinitely more subtle. Second, they would have to come to terms with the fact that embracing this advantage would also embrace the vulnerability and mortality that came with it, and that would encourage them to adopting a more covert and indirect role than they had done in the past; but proxies and lieutenants take time to train, and the Chaos Powers would have to come to terms with the limited lifespans of their recruits. It would undoubtedly take them time and a few false starts to get that right.
   Ellionara spent much of his time coming to an understanding of Corallen’s cryptic final words, and the more time he spent on that task, the more importance he attached to them. The power to direct chance that the Verdonne had shown was the Key; not only would he travel back and forth through time ensuring that chance worked to bring about the opportunity for a direct attack on the Chaos Powers, bringing together the right people with the right potentials and capacities, but he quite literally held the one power to which the Chaos Powers were most innately vulnerable. And yet, Verde’s capacities were not infinite, while those of the enemy he faced were, or were close to it; he would need to husband his resources for those key moments, and influencing just a few key individuals and outcomes throughout history.
   His first priority would have been to ensure that the circumstances arose which had set him on this course in the first instance. That would require ensuring that the alliance that had brought him to a full understanding of his power and his destiny would have to be ensured and preserved, and the confrontation with the Hidden Dragon was a key element of that requirement; and more importantly, the knowledge, wisdom, and insight that Ellionara was cultivating and preserving was also essential to setting that destiny in motion. It was, or would be, in order to recover that knowledge that the Unlikely Alliance – what had Verde called it, “Tajik’s Misfits”? – would deliver Verde to the one that held the keys to Verde’s understanding of his destiny. Whatever was needed to ensure that the “Misfits” were the people required to achieve that, in the circumstances that required it, would be done. Verde’s task was, without doubt, the most cold-blooded and cold-hearted that any being could willingly undertake; if need be, tens of thousands or more would be killed to deliver the messengers to the message. Only once that self-fulfilling prophecy was complete could Verde use whatever power he retained to strike against the real enemy.
   And he could not be infallible; he was mortal, and as capable of misjudgment and error as any other mortal being. While he could use his powers to ensure that such errors were not fatal to his cause, to a certain extent anything less than fatal error would need to be tolerated; chance still favored the opportunist, and the Chaos Powers, the would-be nullifiers of existence, were nothing if not masters of opportunism. Whatever the final confrontation comprised, it would still be a desperate confrontation, with everything to play for.

Dwarves had long memories, and they were of an increasingly solitary and belligerent bent. They wanted to be left alone, mistrusting every other race, and they wanted it with an aggressiveness that posed ongoing risks for the Drow, who the Dwarves had particular reason to hate. Lolth knew that their numbers would increase more rapidly than those of Her followers, and was disinclined to be over-reliant on those followers to begin with; She resolved to be even more ruthless in expending those followers to achieve her goals than ever before, but they could do nothing if the Dwarves invaded her realm or sealed off the hidden entrances that led directly to her hidden tunnels and caves.
   The Minotaur servants of the Orcs were as ill-used in the confrontation with the Hidden Dragon as anyone else could claim to be. While their lives may have been those of indentured servants, they were not poorly cared for under the Orcish regime; but they had been persuaded, compelled, by the dream of liberty into throwing that away. When it was revealed as a chimera, they were trapped with – they thought – all hands raised against them. When a Drow carried to them an offer of Sanctuary.
   Lolth’s plan was to use the Minotaurs to bar the Dwarves from the surface by infesting their upper tunnels with the Minotaurs. She correctly surmised that the Minotaur and Dwarvish cultures would cross-pollinate; the Dwarves would react to this invasion with hostility, the Minotaurs would assume that the Dwarves wished to re-enslave them, and in order to protect themselves would adopt a martial culture of their own. Eventually, a stalemate would be achieved, which would bar the Dwarves from accessing the raw materials they needed to expand their realm; this in turn would force them to limit their population to a manageable number.
   Of course, this risked turning Dwarvish hostility toward her children below; to combat this, even while the Orcish Clan Wars were underway, Lolth had sent Drow Envoys rescue some of the Troglodytes attacked by the invaders from the Bleeding Sword clan, and had “given” them the tunnels that led from her realm to that of the Dwarves to inhabit, escorting them into position through the direct Drow tunnels. In this way, she sought to ensure that no-one living in the tunnels had scope for expansion save her own followers. To ensure her own safety, she clouded their memories, having learned to do so by closely watching Corallen in the cavern beneath the Oracle of Gottskragg.
   This situation quickly degenerated into a messy three-way conflict between the Dwarves, Minotaurs, and Troglodytes, with each side gaining ascendancy over the others in some parts of the underground realm, and taking members of the other races as Slaves. But Lolth’s goals were achieved, as they kept each other far too busy to worry about the Drow beneath their feet.
   Nor was this the only dispossessed group with whom Lolth established relations in this time. The others were the Trolls, who Lolth offered protection if they would guard the surface entrances her people employed against Elvish incursion. For a relatively small investment in effort, Lolth persuaded others to secure her borders for her, then used her new-found ‘party trick’ to make the participants think it was their own idea to do so. It matters not what you promise if the other party cannot remember the promises to hold you to the agreed-upon terms.

It was in the Orclands that the greatest turmoil persisted during the “tranquil years”, where life was not tranquil at all. To the contrary, in Orcish history, these were the Decades of Blood. Central to the turmoil were the Bugbears.

The Decades Of Blood I: Empire Of The Bugbears

Bugbears have never been known as the most pious of races. They have no trouble believing in Gods in the abstract, but have conceptual problems translating that faith into any sort of real expectation of influence, interaction, or concrete reality. Even when one of their gods was standing right in front of them, or so it seemed, they had difficulty believing that the Divine Being was capable of more than what the physical reality appeared able to do, like any other concrete being, and their shamans struggled to invoke more than the most basic of blessings or healing spells. Their society is one bound apon the concept of obedience to the stronger – and of constantly challenging that ‘stronger’ to prove that they are still capable of enforcing their commands.
   When the minion of the Hidden Dragon first came amongst them and commanded them to breed beyond the capacity of the lands in preparation for a campaign of glory and conquest to come, once they had established that the minion had sufficiently great personal strength to force them to his will, they were perfectly willing to obey. Three generations of Bugbears sprouted like weeds in a field, and only their traditional tribal structure and practice of abdicating authority to the strongest whenever two came in contact with each other kept the peace in their numbers as they were reduced to the edge of starvation by their swelling numbers. Although it had not been realized at the time – the full scope of the Hidden Dragon’s machinations was still being discovered by the Unlikely Alliance – in order to achieve the staggering population levels revealed during the Clan Wars, the intervention in the society of Bugbears must have been the true beginning of the Clan War. If Ambassador Tathzyr’s “opportunist” assessment is accepted – and it accords with everything known or believed about the Chaos Powers and their natures – it is likely that the Hidden Dragon did not know at the time to what purpose this army was being raised; it was simply an opportune resource to cultivate and have on hand.
   The very nature of Bugbear religious fidelity makes this a rational choice, since they are not prone to asking deep or awkward questions once authority is established by simple force of arms. The minions of the Hidden Dragon could afford to make mistakes and correct them without significant impact, could practice and perfect their impersonations until they got them right. Gradually, they would have worked their way up to more discriminating and independent audiences – the Minotaurs, and then the Orcs themselves.
   So it was that when the Bleeding Swords concluded their bargain with the Bugbears, expecting a yield of a mere thousand or perhaps two, the Bugbears had both the capacity and incentive to stream into the fertile central Orclands in numbers measured in the hundreds of thousands. These forces were confused and scattered by the transformation of their Deity into what in their eyes was a demonic entity. There had been little interaction between the Bugbears and Minotaurs, and what interaction had occurred was not of a nature to lead to any understanding of Minotaur theology; the Bugbears simply would not have cared about the subject. This left them incapable of associating the apparition with Minotaurs, and ironically left their assessment closer to the truth than that of anyone else at the time.
   But they were too significant in numbers to be cowed for very long; and the lack of depth to their faith also reduced the impact of their disillusionment. Heresy only matters to the pious.
   By the time of the conclusion of the Clan Wars, two fingers out of every hand’s worth of the Orclands had been occupied by the Bugbears. These lands were barely sufficient to sustain the excessive bugbear population. Half of this territory had been captured from the Mailed Fists, the other half was former property of the Bleeding Swords clan that had been captured by the Red Eye counter-invasion and liberated by the Bugbears – who were not inclined to go anywhere.

When the armistice between Red Eye and Mailed Fist clans was confirmed following the return of the Unlikely Allies from the temple of the Hidden Dragon, most of the remaining members of the Red Eye clan’s armies returned to the lands they traditionally claimed. The surviving Bleeding Sword invasion force, already disrupted and reduced to unsteady morale by the guerilla tactics of the Army Of The One Eye and their Troglodyte allies, were ground into hamburger by weight of numbers, more proficient combat tactics, and sheer ferocity, until they were forced to flee. Perhaps the greatest differential were the differences in morale; where the Bleeding Swords army was divided, uncoordinated, and ranged from nervous to near-panic, the Army of the One Eye were united, coordinated, and left confident by a great victory. The outcome of this encounter between Orcish Armies was not all that surprising, and generally all the returning victors had to do was show up to put the invaders into a forced retreat – if not an outright rout.
   Cities may have been forbidden by the Divine Edict that they had agreed to regard as genuine, but that did not mean that the Mailed Fists abandoned or forgot everything that they had learned by imitating humans; immediately the Red Eye clan had quit the field in victory, the Mailed Fists had begun to construct a string of fortified villages surrounded by palisades and prepared defensive trenches. In time, the dimly-remembered events of the Clan War would color even Orcish attitudes toward the Mailed Fists patron Deity, whose policy of putting all his (metaphoric) eggs into “one basket” (one city) became symbolic of foolishness; the most intellectual of the Orcish Gods would become known to the population as the most stupid.
   Long before that perception spread throughout the population, however, the remnants of the Bleeding Sword Army fleeing from the wrath of the Red Eye clan found themselves trapped by this line of fortified emplacements. With the Elvish Forest and impassable mountains occupied by belligerent Dwarves and Desperate Minotaurs on the one side, a hostile army at their rear, and these fortified positions before them, they had no choice but to turn to the Sinister and race for the coastline, then to attempt to cross the hostile territory down the frozen coastline, short of food and ill-prepared for the conditions. Along the way, they had to cross the lines of Red Eye soldiers stretching to the coast, engaged in carrying rubble from the fallen cities of the Mailed Fists (as Gruumsh had commanded them to do) – a task they were quite happy to set aside in order to pursue the hated would-be invaders of their homeland. Past this series of death-traps, they came to the vast territories occupied by the Bugbears, but the latter dislike coastal regions, and provided that they starved themselves by staying away from the more temperate regions where food could be obtained, they were relatively unmolested; conditions and nature picked them off, there was no need for an army to do so. Few survived to return to their clan.

High summer of the following year saw the long-awaited Moot which formalized the peace terms between the Red Eye and Mailed Fist clans, and acknowledged and enshrined the bonds forged in blood and shared battle between the two clans. The Bleeding Swords leaders declined to send representatives, earning them the contempt of the rest of Orcish Society, but they were being squeezed between two populations of Bugbears and their former prosperity was a distant memory. It had only been a matter of time before they defaulted on their agreement with the Bugbear mercenaries they had engaged to fight on their behalf, and the Bugbears had turned on their former allies; they were now overrunning and enslaving them, one isolated household at a time.
   After five years of constant assault, the Bleeding Swords were reduced to small pockets of Orcish culture. That year, the Bleeding Swords swallowed their pride and begged the Red Eye and Mailed Fist clans for aid, a request that was summarily rejected.
   Two fists of years after the end of the Clan War, the last of the Bleeding Sword homesteads was overrun, and the entire Sunset region south of the fortified villages of the Mailed Firsts became one continuous Bugbear Feudal Empire.
   This empire was inherently unstable, in a condition of perpetual imminent collapse into anarchy that never quite fell apart. First one tribe would become ascendant, and then it would fall, its authority successfully challenged by a subordinate, who would then take its place as the rulers of the Empire (or a region within it), only to be challenged in its turn. The only marked change in their rather sloppily-defined borders came as the Bugbears withdrew from the coast; Bugbears swim quite badly when their fur becomes waterlogged, unless they have the chance to protect it by coating themselves in animal fat. Consequently, the Bugbears have never liked the sea, and avoid coastal regions whenever possible.

The Decades Of Blood II: Kudja’s Raiders

Ironically. one of the unifying forces that helped hold the Bugbear Empire together were the ongoing attacks by Kudja’s Raiders, which comprised dispossessed Mailed Fists from the sunset regions of their former clan territory. They did not mind overly if the Bugbears had conquered and humiliated the Bleeding Swords, but were intent on liberating those territories that were formerly claimed by their clan. Kudja himself was a folk hero amongst his people, and this crusade had considerable popular support as a result.
   Now, Kudja was a high priest, who had risen to become the ultimate spiritual authority within his clan, the former Clan Shaman. Even reduced to one arm, it might seem surprising that the Bugbears could seriously oppose the forces, both temporal and spiritual, that Kudja could put in the field, and certainly when he began his crusade, Kudja expected the Bugbears to be easy prey; his first recruits were gathered to serve as bodyguards to protect him while he did the ‘real work’ of pushing back the Bugbears. Earthquakes, Pillars Of Fire, and withering storms were amongst the tools Kudja could call apon. If need be, he could raise a volcano beneath the feet of the invaders, shift the courses of rivers, or rain fire from the clouds; how could the Bugbears hope to stand against such might?
   It came as something of a rude shock for Kudja to discover that the indifferent faith of the Bugbears was sufficient to enable them to resist the effects of his most potent spells, imperfectly and inconstantly, but enough that his campaign was not the inevitable and assured victory that he expected. A compounding of overconfidence in his divine abilities, obsession with his mission, and his desperation to repay the faith placed in him by his fanatically-loyal followers, lead Kudja into an ongoing series of narrow escapes and improbable victories. These heroic exploits, exaggerated by those loyal supporters, only reinforces his folk hero status amongst the Mailed Fists, so he was never short of willing recruits and supporters willing to donate food to maintain his crusade against the usurping Bugbears.
   It might have been possible for the Mailed Fists to reach an accord with the Bugbear Empire, had they been willing to accept the status quo as a reality, but the esteem in which Kudja and his crusade were held squandered any opportunity for peace. Time and time again, Kudja would lead his forces in an incursion into the Bugbear empire which would savage one targeted tribe or stronghold only to be driven back when his divinely-granted spells failed him; and, it must be stated, Kudja was no great military tactician. Several times he was captured by his enemies, only to be rescued in daring raids in which his forces traded their lives for his liberation and the continuation of the struggle. Between the dishonor of the Bleeding Swords and the obsessive irrationality of Kudja’s raiders, it should not be too surprising that the Bugbears declared themselves the enemies of all Orc Clans.
   After four fists of years mauling the Bugbear boarders and singlehandedly creating a no-mans-land between the Empire and the Orc Clans, Kudja engaged in one raid against overwhelming odds too many, and was slain. The Bugbear who achieved this victory changed his name in celebration to Urka Priestkiller, and became the first Bugbear in twenty years to become High Lord of the Bugbear Empire unopposed – for all of a year. With Kudja’s passing, the spark of obsessed inspiration went out of the raiders, and their numbers began to dwindle. Slowly the Bugbear borders were secured, and then they began to exact their revenge; over the next 30 years, they overran the fortified villages and townships of the Mailed Fist clan. If they had still possessed their fortified cities, these might have held out long enough to become rallying points, but they were long gone, and no village can support the same levels of protection that city walls afford. The Mailed Fist captives that were taken when their townships fell were executed or enslaved.
   It is often said that Pride goes before a fall, and so it proved for the Mailed Fists. Sure that they would eventually prevail against the Bugbears, so slowly were their enemies proceeding, that they stood alone until the last possible minute, accepting only token reinforcements from their allies in the Red Eye clan. Only when they were reduced to a single stronghold did they reluctantly accept that they were insufficient to the needs they faced; a rider carried word to their old friends and allies in the Red Eye clan, begging for help. Unlike the similar call three Orc Generations earlier by the Bleeding Swords, the Mailed Fists and Red Eyes had established respect for each other and even some limited intermarriage; the Red Eye’s army was gathered and marched as quickly as it could be raised, but it was still too late to save the final refuge of the Mailed Fists.
   Now the Bugbears changed tactics unexpectedly, revealing that the decades of internal struggle had left marks within their society, as well; with the last of the fortified villages overrun, they did not stop to consolidate their conquest, as they had after each previous victory; instead they rushed forward to confront the Red Eye army directly.
   The ferocity of this attack forced the Red Eyes, caught unprepared and out of position, into a defensive battle, trading lives for space, and eventually halting and beating back the advance. Year after year, the Empire would engage the Red Eyes in battle, penetrate deeply into their lines, and be driven back – but each time, they would halt and hold firm just a little deeper into Orcish territory. The Bugbear Empire continued to expand, step by step, year by year, as inexorable as the coming of winter.

The Decades Of Blood III: Strategies And Armies

A century of unremitting warfare took their toll on Orcish society. Much of the progress toward culture that had been achieved was lost; the education of the young became ever-more-confined in scope, the average age of their commanders slowly fell, and the people stopped thinking beyond the next year’s battle. Despite this cultural decline, some advancements took place and became entrenched, most notably those which yielded improvements in efficiency. For example, they had discovered the power of numbering in units of ten, and the use of simplified basic arithmetic that it permitted. Then, too, the Red Eyes had learned from the fate of the Mailed Fists, and from the now legendary exploits of the Clan Wars, though these were now shrouded in myth. They might have been the most culturally insular and intransigent of the Orcish Clans, least willing of all to change their traditions, but even these will bend when enough of those traditional roots are eroded; with two-thirds of their territory forfeit, and the last year’s bugbear incursion halted only fifty leagues from the Clan-Chief’s stronghold at the foot of the mountains, they evolved a desperate, enlightened, and progressive four-fold strategy.
   As was their tradition when faced with the need to accomplish multiple objectives, they divided their Army and tasked each with the single-minded achievement of a single objective.
   The Army Of The Skull was tasked with emulating some of the tricks of the Mailed Fists, constructing defenses and trading their lives to slow the incursions of the Bugbear Marauders, buying time for the other armies to achieve their objectives. The new front-line was their responsibility.
   The Army Of The Moon was tasked with providing offensive counterstrokes to harass and further delay the enemy, supported by the Red Eye’s troglodyte allies, then falling back to prepared positions that were being dug into the foothills. With mountain strongholds held by allies at their backs, they were the Rearguard.
   Ambassador Tathzyr had remained with the Red Eyes at his Queen’s instruction since the fall of the Orcish Cities. In that time, he had helped to educate several receptive officers and warriors in the tactics of stealth and subterfuge. Now near death from premature old age, he nevertheless lived long enough to see those special pupils gathered together into The Army Of The Night Crow, charged with scouting the enemy, functioning as spies deep within their territories, and recruiting slaves within each Tribal Kingdom of the Bugbear Empire to serve as a fifth column and resistance.
   And finally, a select band showing sufficient leadership potential and tactical expertise were formed into the core of the Army Of The Open Hand, their purpose to recruit Allies.
   Each of the three Great Orcish Clans had been socially advanced over the others in it’s own way. The Mailed Fists had excelled in agriculture, domesticity, philosophy, and the intellectual pursuits, especially architecture; the Bleeding Swords had been the most culturally advanced and most adept at making alliances and treaties, the most able to see things from an outsider’s perspective and adjust their own thinking to take advantage of that perspective; and the Red Eye had excelled in remaining true to their cultural heritage and roots, were the most Noble of the clans, and – while not as adept at forging alliances – had proven their capacity for fidelity to such alliances as they had formed over the centuries. The Orcs of the Red Eyes had long recognized that as a cultural strength of their clan, and now they determined to use it as a weapon against the invading Bugbears by recruiting allies into the Army of the Open Hand and welding them into a strike force of diverse abilities.
   In overall command was Kazbran, Warblade of the Clan, responsible for coordinating the activities of the four armies and orchestrating those activities into an overall campaign. It was he who had made the intellectual leap required to seek allies from amongst the other races that surrounded the Orclands.

One by one, members of this fourth force went forth at great risk to themselves and sought out the populations of the neighboring regions, bargaining with them for aid in repelling the Bugbears, and one by one they returned to report varying degrees of success, each now tasked with the responsibility of serving as liaison and overall commander of the troops they had recruited. Each had been given strict negotiating parameters and a free hand within those limits, ensuring that whatever the price demanded, it would be within the capacity of the Orcs to pay should the campaign succeed.
   The first recruits to the Army Of The Open Hand were 2312 Ogres under the command of 35 Ogre Magi. These were soon joined by 431 Black and Green Trolls, each a small army in their own right. Although the Gnolls declared themselves officially neutral (they shared a border with the Bugbear Empire, after all), 1655 Gnoll “irregulars” chose to take advantage of the opportunity for looting.
   In light of the century of good relations with the Red Eyes, and in return for the Orcish promise to serve her in a future military campaign of her choosing, Lolth sent 2400 Drow archers, 3600 swordsmen, 600 mages transformed into Dryders, 4500 of the Giant Spyders of various kinds, and fifty priests to heal the wounded but not take part in combat.
   But not all the recruiters were successful. The Elves refused the entreaty. The Goblins were inaccessible, blockaded by the Gnolls. The humans were unreachable, their Kingdoms and Empires lying beyond the Elven Forest or through more than 1000 miles of Goblin territory. Dwarves were unobtainable, access to their subterranean kingdom blocked by Minotaurs with neither love nor trust for Orcs; these were not even contemplated as potential allies. Together with the Army Of The Open Hand that had recruited them and the surviving members of the Army Of The Skull as they fell back to their prepared positions behind the lines of the Army Of The Moon, these became the Army Of The Five Hands – one hand for each of the Races allied (treating the Dryders and Spyders as part of the Drow contingent).
   The Bugbears had strength of numbers, strength of position, and only the Trolls could match them for physical force, one-on-one (though the Ogres came close).
   The recruitment and assembling of these forces took ten years. In the interim, the fecundity of the Orcs was their salvation. But slowly these forces were gathered behind the protection of the Army Of The Moon to strategize and develop coordinated tactics while awaiting intelligence from the Army Of The Night Crow. When those long-awaited reports finally began to reach the Clan Warblade, they transformed the nature and conduct of the entire war.

The Decades Of Blood IV: The Fall Of Night Campaign

Ogres are simple creatures. Ogre Magi were intelligent, educated, oppressive, and barbarous. Bugbears were merely savage – smarter and more cunning than Ogres, but simpler and more brutal – but they smart enough to adopt good ideas from whatever source they derived.
   Starting with administration of the hunting and herding, captured Orcs of the Bleeding Sword clan had slowly insinuated themselves as the administrators of the households, controllers of the supply lines, dictating strategies and tactics and logistics. Bleeding Swords had become the powers behind the thrones, pampered and preened, feigning subservience, and using their Bugbear ‘Masters’ to exact revenge apon the clans that had spurned them in their time of need. These were the true unifying force that had held the Bugbear Empire intact in the face of its innate propensity to collapse, for more than a century. The true slaves of the Bugbear Empire were captured Red Eye and Mailed Fist clans, Orcs who had been subjugated – in some cases – for generations.
   Peace between the Bleeding Swords and the other Orcish clans had not been established because the former had not attended the Moot where the Clan Wars had been ended. To the Red Eyes and Mailed Fists, this was considered irrelevant, because the Bleeding Swords had been wiped out by their Bugbear ‘allies’; now it was revealed that all this time, the Bugbear Empire had simply been the weapon with which the Bleeding Swords had perpetuated the Clan War against the rest of their race.
   Simple plans for a single thrust through the heart of the Bugbear army to capture the current Great Lord of the Bugbear Empire, Ruckal The Strong, and force the Bugbears to give up their captured territories as the price of his release, were replaced with a far more subtle and sophisticated strategy that drew apon the individual strengths and abilities of the allies and the vulnerabilities of the disposition of the enemy forces, which were concentrated most strongly in the front lines.
   The Ogrish instinct for engineering was turned to the construction of great ships, taking advantage of the thin Bugbear forces along the coastal regions. While these were under construction, the Army Of The Night Raven worked to fulfill its mandate to recruit the slaves of the Bugbear Empire into a fifth column. Much of the overall strategy was modeled on the slave revolt of the Minotaurs a century earlier, and the dimly-remembered events of the Orcs slave revolt against the Ogres centuries earlier.
   All proceeded according to plan, which was a first in the history of conflict. Gruumsh clearly smiled apon their endeavors.

   When the ships were complete, they were used to ferry alliance forces to selected staging points up and down the coast. From these staging points, each force from the Army Of The Five Hands struck inland to capture key points, isolating one Bugbear tribal kingdom from another, and slicing the Bugbear Empire into smaller factions.
   At a prearranged time, those Orcish Slaves in each Bugbear tribal Kingdom who had been recruited into the Army Of The Night Raven emulated the Minotaur revolt, slaying the Bleeding Sword ‘heads of households’ before fleeing toward these rendezvous points. At the same time, Ogres and Trolls disguised as Bugbears through Ogre Magi and Dryder magic, and bearing the colors of a neighboring Bugbear tribal Kingdom, staged from the strategic positions they had established, with Gnoll irregulars in reserve to fend off any attempts to cut their lines. When these thrusts were fully extended, they withdrew under cover of Drow bow-fire, hopefully having been reached by the fleeing Army Of The Night Raven. When they had returned to the forward positions held secure by the Orcs and Drow, the entire force would retreat to the initial staging positions along the coast, leaving the path clear for each tribal Kingdom to turn on the neighbor who they thought had attacked it.
   The key to victory was the Army Of The Night Raven; the Bleeding Swords ‘administrators’ would have been able to reassert order and prevent the Empire from devolving into ten, twenty, even thirty simultaneous civil wars that would eviscerate it. Most of the members of this fifth column were killed by outraged Bugbear “Lords”, but many were liberated. The fifth column was under no illusions about their chances, but the chance of freedom was worth the risk of death, as the Orcs had learned when they had been subjugated by the Ogres centuries earlier, and the slaves themselves had been awaiting an opportune time to again strike for their freedom. Plans and techniques had been passed down from slave generation to slave generation under the very noses of their slave-masters, who had grown complacent. Each household’s slaves knew which of their numbers could be trusted, who had become soft and compliant, and who were pampered collaborators and could not be trusted. At the right time, there were a series of ‘accidents’ that left the overseers without their cadre of stool pigeons and informants, followed shortly by the actual revolt which left those overseers dead.
   Any tribal Kingdom that showed signs of restoring internal order were subjected to a fresh strike by the Army Of The Five Hands, bolstered by the abandonment of disguises which enabled the use of more direct magic against the enemy, but it was hoped and expected that nine tenths of the Bugbear Empire would destroy itself while leaving the majority of the Five Hands forces intact, bolstered in numbers by escaping members of the Army Of The Night Raven. These would then sally forth to occupy defensive positions and consolidate the recapture of the Orclands, and so it proved.

With their supply lines cut, the front lines of the Bugbear Army had no choice but to retreat, harried at every step by the Army Of The Moon and the Troglodyte allies of the Red Eyes. By the time they reached the lands that the Bugbear Empire had settled and not merely captured, the Army Of The Five Hands had fortified, and the Bugbear forces were trapped with nowhere to go, just as the Bleeding Sword’s original Army had been at the end of the Clan War. The plan had been to employ Orcish fecundity to reinforce each defensive position annually, while the returning army was trapped between hostile armies and facing the onset of Winter. With each passing year, the Bugbear army was lured deeper back into the heart of their former Empire; each mile of regained territory costing lives, while fresh forces were put in place to both front and rear. Priority was given to the killing of any Bleeding Sword accompanying the Army, which degenerated with every step into a rabble as the cohesion that sustained and administered it was cut away or starved out, one slice at a time. Thirty Orcs dead for each Bugbear was a net victory for the Orcs. Eventually the Bugbear Army fell apon itself and collapsed, the survivors fleeing as a rabble.
   The Fall Of Night campaign was a slow grinding away of an overwhelming force that was never permitted to come to grips with its enemies. It took twenty years to complete from the day the first ships sailed, and it cost over two million dead by the time it concluded, more than a century after the ‘official’ end of the Clan Wars. One quarter of the fallen were Bugbears, 475,000 were Bleeding Swords or slaves which were killed by their Bugbear “Masters”, and one-and-a-half million were Orcs killed over the 150 years of the conflict that followed the end of the Clan Wars. Only then did the Tranquil Years at last descend apon the so-called Fallen Races.

The Decades Of Blood V: The Price Of Virtue

Victory in the Fall Of Night Campaign was not purchased cheaply. Bugbear numbers were reduced to less than one-third what they had been prior to the intervention of the Hidden Dragon, and the Orcish population was a tenth of what it had been prior to the Clan Wars. In its own way, this was fortuitous, for the promises which had secured the services of the Orcs’ allies in the Army Of Five Hands represented a heavy burden to shoulder.
   Gnoll opportunists had consumed the sunset third of the original Bugbear realm all the while proclaiming their official ‘neutrality’, and had begun to harbor their own dreams of conquest and looting.
   The Sunrise third of the former Bugbear realm, and the adjoining Sunset third of the original Bleeding Sword territory, was given by treaty to the Ogres, who settled in the mountains to the Dexter and only emerged from their hidden valleys to hunt.
   The Dexter Third of the territory that had once belonged to the Mailed Fists, and which contained the paths to the Elven Forest, was given to the Trolls, the first time this simple race had been given a homeland of its own.
   Between the Troll-lands and the Ogres lay the forested mountain passes that led to the Drow and the most sunset-facing of the Dwarven tunnels; this region was given to the Drow, who turned it over (per Lolth’s instruction) to the Spyders to further isolate the Elves and Dwarves, and to place a barrier between the Orcs and the Elves; the prophecy of the Oracle Of Gottskragg was ever-present in her mind. She did not know what turn of events would lead to her children turning against her, but any barrier that could be placed between the races of the prophesied alliance might serve to delay the day.
   The mountains to the Dexter of the former Red Eye lands were offered to the Troglodytes, including those fortified valleys that had been refuge to the Ogres, but they only wanted the tunnels below the rocks and to be left alone; those mountains and fortified valleys were left unclaimed, for the Orcs did not want them.
   Even ceding more than a full third of the former Orclands to their Allies left the Orcs with too great a region to administer. Communities were isolated, and the survivors of the great clans fractured into many smaller clans over the years that followed. They would not reunite as a race until the Drow demanded, in Lolth’s name, that they pay the price of the aid that she had granted the Orcs in this struggle, some centuries later, when the world was a very different place. Orcish society became a more uniform blend of the three former clans; fortified villages surrounded by cultivated farms, in the manner of the Mailed Fists, and herds in the way of the Bleeding Swords, and from which they hunted the wilderness which surrounded their communities as had the Red Eyes.
   So few in number were the surviving Orcs, and so isolated from each other, that they were unable to mount any coordinated defense when one of the human Kingdoms, searching for room in which to expand, discovered passes that could be made traversable into the fortified valleys that had once served as refuges to the Ogres, and descended from the mountains past the tunnels of the Troglodytes onto the great coastal plains of the Orclands.
   These were humans who had grown used to a general peace over a span of nearly 250 years, and while they looked apon the Orcs with contempt as primitives, it was easier to give them a wide berth; the reduced Orclands were still sparsely populated in comparison to their potential, and there was plenty of room for everyone. In time, these human communities even dared to tentatively trade with their Orcish neighbors; thus were the Orcs exposed directly to human culture, human theology, and human politics. There were things they liked about their new neighbors, and things that revolted them, but on the whole, they got on. And so the Tranquil Years rolled on. Amongst some Orcish communities, their Gods came to be seen as one pantheon amongst many, while others abandoned their own Gods in favor of those worshipped by the humans.
   But Chaos never sleeps for long, and the Orcs failed to recognize that in embracing community with their new human neighbors, they were left vulnerable to the tribulations and vagarities of human society…

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The Return of the Ongoing Elvish Glossary

• Alkaith: Curved 14-inch dagger favored as a weapon and general cutting tool by Elvish Spellcasters and some High Elves.
• Arnost: Simple Speech (Modern “Common”, a human tongue)
• Arrunquessor: Plains Elves
• Ayer: Nuthanori word meaning “Squat”. Mont Ayer is the name of one of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands.
• Calquissir: High Elves
• Ciltherosa: A variety of tree which grows very tall before erupting into successive crowns of branches of diminishing size which arch and curve horizontally.
• Comesdhail Osfadara­ Litrithe Congress Of Spellweavers
• Corellan: The First
• Drow: “Those Who Dwell Apart” (in Nuthanorl). Added to Ogre by the Drow with the meaning of “Smart”.
• Ellessarune: The “Shining City” of the Tarquessir, home of the Elvish King and capital of the Elven Lands to this day.
• Eltrhinast: “Guiding Spirit”
• Elvarheim: “Blessed Leafy Home”: The Elven Forest, homeland of the Tarquessir and the centre of Elven Power in modern times
• Gilandthor: “The Gathering”, the formal title of the Elvish Council.
• Hithainduil: High Elven Language
• Huyundaltha: “Masters Of The Ondaltha” (literal), “Bladedancers” (colloquial). Formerly Noletinechor, now Guardians Of Elvish Society.
• Illvayssor: “The Other”, a mythical race
• Infelstreta: “Demon” in Hithainduil.
• Isallithin: “The Sundered”, a name applied to Aquatic Elves
• King: A human title interpreted by Elves as “speaker to others” and defined as such within their language.
• Lesiatrame: “Bright Ego”, a deprecating term used to describe Human Gods, rendered suspect during the commencement of the third Great Dwarfwar.
• Magi: A corruption of the Zamiel word “Machus”, which means “of the wise.”
• Magfelstreta: “Devil” in Hithainduil.
• Mithryl: the Elvish name of an extremely fragile metal given in trade by the Dwarves to the Elves. The word is imported from Dwarven, who in turn obtained it from the Zamiel Tongue name of the metal, “Mithral”. “Mithryl” means “Moonsilver” in Elven. The word also enjoys popular usage as a metaphor for a treasure found which appears initially worthless.
• Mithral: the Drow name for Mithryl. A literal translation from Zamiel is “Shadowsilver”.
• Mont: Nuthanori word meaning “High Place”. Used human-style in the naming of Mountains.
• Noletinechor: “Lore Shields”, an elvish historical vocation, and a secret order withing the Huyundaltha who mask their activities under the cover of this historical vocation.
• Nuthanorl: Low Elven Language, Common Elven
• Ondaltha: A two-weapon combat style based apon Elvish Dance, practiced exclusively by Huyundaltha.
• Osfadara­ Litrithe Spellweaver, literally ‘Weaver of Harmony’.
• Sarner: A human abbreviation of the Hithainduil word “Saranariuthenal” which means, literally, “Swift and Wide”. The River Sarner runs through the central valley of Elvarheim.
• Siurthua: Tainted
• Tarquessir: Forest Elves
• Thonsutriane: “Dark Egos”, a deprecating term used to describe Chaos Powers, rendered suspect during the commencement of the third Great Dwarfwar.
• Thuyon: Nuthanori word meaning “Tall Spires”. Mont Thuyon is the name of the taller of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands; Modern Elvarheim lies between the foothills of Mont Thuyon and the River Sarner.
• Verdonne: “Quickbranch”, an artificial race created by Elves to be “The Guardians Of The Forest”.
• Zamiel: Drow Language

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The Orcs and Elves series is taking a break for most of the next month, when Campaign Mastery is hosting the Blog Carnival. The subject is “Location, Location, Location” and it kicks off on Thursday with a rare double-post…

When it returns, “The Politics Of Heaven” come under scrutiny…

So far, I’ve looked at what I’ve defined as the primary types of writer’s block – initial ideas, detailed plots, settings, actions, character personalities, and narrative – and offered an absolute treasure-trove of solutions. Sixty-five solutions to six types of writer’s block, and few if any of them that can transfer to a different type of problem.

But that’s just the beginning. In that first part, I also proposed the concept of Translation Blocks, and that’s an entire subject that still has to be explored, and solutions presented.

Translation Blocks in General

A reminder: what are translation blocks?

Translation blocks are all about moving from one level or layer of the story that you’re telling to the next. You already have a road mapped out of where you are going, and you already know where you are coming from, but trying to make a seamless connection from point A to B seems to escape you.

I realize that speaking in generalities isn’t very helpful, so here’s a more concrete and realistic example: You know the plot situation, you have just introduced a new character into the story. You know what that character’s personality is going to be, and you know what information that character has to impart with his dialogue. What needs doing is to express that personality in description and perhaps initial activity while setting the scene, and then use the personality to shape the dialogue so that the information being presented is saturated, or perhaps you would prefer suffused, with that personality. In other words, you have the elements, but you need to bind them together into a seamless whole. This is an example of three different translation blocks in succession: Specific to Narrative, Action to Narrative, and Persona to Dialogue.

The diagram above illustrates the ways in which the elements of a scene relate to each other. Each of these lines represents a translation of what is known, or has been decided, about a scene, to the next thing that is to be presented in the scene. Not all scenes will have all elements, and “Action” can be considered a special form of narrative in literature.

Causes of Translation Block

There are three general causes of Translation Block:

• Inadequate Foundations,
• Technical & Process problems, and
• Transitional Issues.

Inadequate Foundations

Nothing creates writer’s block faster than not having your prep done properly. Any inadequacies in any single element contaminate every connection between that element and the rest of your writing. How can you get the dialogue right if you don’t know who the character doing the speaking is? How can you get the action right if you don’t see how the character’s capabilities can react to the existing situation? How can the character decide what to do in order to advance their goals if you don’t know what the character’s goals are, or what opportunities exist within the current situation for the advancement of the character’s agenda?

In every scene, a writer needs to be able to explain to himself why the scene is present, what its purpose is, who is participating, where it is taking place, what is supposed to happen – and how it will lead to the next step in the overall plotline. Any weakness in any of these foundations can manifest as writer’s block and frustration.

The solution to this type of writer’s block is relatively simple: identify the area of inadequate preparation and generate the missing detail. Invent it out of whole cloth, if you have to, then think about how it will fit – and then change it if the fit is not good enough. The previous parts of this series should give you all the tools that you need – if you have the time to employ them.

Technical & Process problems

It’s one thing being able to come up with ideas. It can be quite another to present them in a clear and concise manner. The more writing you do, the more skilled and polished you become. Writer’s block can be a manifestation of the writer simply not having the technical skills to achieve his objectives. This is the hardest type of writer’s block to overcome quickly, but is the easiest type of writer’s block to resolve in the long term; the cure is to read books on writing, attend workshops, and/or write something else; repeat until you achieve the necessary proficiency.

In the meantime, fake it. There are no new problems in writing, and therefore someone else has confronted this issue and solved it before. Spend a few minutes thinking about all the books that you’ve read, trying to identify the single sequence in one that is closest to the situation you have before you, then look at how it was solved by that author. Outline a rough draft of that solution, then polish it using your character names and personalities and situation. The solution used by the author won’t be an exact match to your situation, so it will need to be modified, line by line and word by word, until it solves your problem. Once you have done all that, and have that solution clearly in mind, delete it from your text and write, from scratch, using your own phrases, style, and vernacular, that solution. This eliminates any potential problems over plagiarism.

But this solution, though it is an immediate way out of the creative bottleneck, takes time. What do you do if you don’t have that time?

Hold that thought, and I’ll get back to you in just a moment.

Transitional Issues

These occur when you discover a hole in your planning. A plotting analogy should make this source clearer: you know that you need to move your plot from “A” to “C”, which logically implies a scene in the middle, “B”, to do just that – but have no idea what should be in that scene.

The same thing can occur internally within a scene. You can have a setting, and a character, and something that you want that character to say or do – but no idea of how to passage seamlessly from your description of the setting to the dialogue. Simply describing the physical appearance of the character reads too much like writing by numbers (the equivalent of painting with numbers) – it looks artificial or sounds forced, or – worse yet – fills the page with dull narrative that does nothing but tread water without moving the story forward.

Most of these problems can be dealt with by employing the solutions offered for the type of content that you are trying to create within the scene. Again, the solutions already provided hold the answers you need – if there’s plenty of time to implement them.

Improvising solutions

It’s when there’s no time that you need a different technique – that of improvising a solution. That doesn’t happen very often in most forms of literature, but it’s all too common in an RPG.

I should start by referring the reader to

• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Adventures On The Fly,
• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure,
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC, and
• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Using Ad-hoc statistics,

my previous articles on improvisation at the game table. These can solve a lot of problems, especially when it comes to the Plot Phase, or the need to create a quick character for a one-off encounter.

If you count up the links leading into, or present within, the Scene Phase, you will find there to be eleven of them. I have solutions for nine of these eleven – not because the others were unworthy, but because they can usually be solved by “backtracking” and taking a different path to where it is that you need to go within the scene. I have also added a ringer from the Plot Phase. These ten problems, and one or more solutions to each (plus a few additional specific problem-and-solution ringers here and there in sidebars) comprise the remainder of this series.

I should stress that there is no reason why these solutions won’t work for literary writers; they have been excerpted and extracted because they are problems to which GMs of RPGs often need to improvise ad-hoc solutions. These solutions are probably not going to be quite as refined or pretty as those resulting from long hours sweating over the word processor, but they have the advantage of answering the need, “I-need-it-right-now!”.

Translation: Conceptual to Specific

I’m starting with a deliberate ringer. This type of writer’s block is defined as when you know what you want to do in general but don’t know how to get there from here. It can occur when the players make an unexpected choice and you have to improv a scene on the spot – hopefully one that will get the overall adventure back on track, if that’s necessary.

Solution #1 (if blockage is due to an unexpected PC choice):

The Best Thing That You Can Do is to admit, “I didn’t think of that, give me a minute to work out what will happen.” Then let the players high-five each other while you think.

The Worst Thing That You Can Do is to say, “No, you can’t do that.” Even if they can’t.

The Second-Worst Thing That You Can Do is to get too attached to the original plotline.

So start by jettisoning that and seeing what will happen as a consequence. Here’s a checklist of questions – work through them, answering each.
 

1. Will their action solve their problem?

• Is there anything they already know that their solution overlooks and that will invalidate it?
• Is there anything they don’t know that will invalidate their solution?
• Are they making a false assumption?

 

2. If they are overlooking something:

• What is the last possible moment at which they can be reminded of that something that leaves them time to solve the problem?
• Will their solution actually make it impossible to solve the problem? In this case, and in this case only, the GM is justified in employing some more heavy-handed solution like a dice roll to “remember” the forgotten detail, or having an NPC point out “There’s something you’re overlooking.” And if there are no NPCs present, have one arrive who can demand to be brought up to date – then make the “There’s something you’re overlooking” speech.
• Is there a natural way in which they can be reminded of what they are overlooking prior to that point in time?
• Is there a point at which it will become obvious from the lack of results that their solution is not working? Insert a scene with an NPC at that point and have him voice the obvious: “It’s not working, you must have overlooked something”, then let the PCs try to figure out what the something was (with the GM’s assistance).

 

3. If there is something they don’t know that will invalidate their solution:

• What is the last possible moment at which they can discover that something which still leaves them time to solve the problem?
• Will their solution actually make it impossible to solve the problem? If so, what is the last possible moment at which they can discover this fact that avoids this difficulty?
• Is there a point at which it will become obvious that their solution is not working?
• Is there a natural way in which their actions will lead to the discovery of the missing information prior to the earliest of these points in time? If not, you will have to orchestrate one – or let the PCs live with the consequences of failure.

 

4. If they are making a false assumption:

• What is the last possible moment at which they can discover their error that leaves them time to solve the problem?
• Will their mistake actually make it impossible to solve the problem? If so, what is the last possible moment at which they can discover this fact that will avoid this difficulty?
• Is there a point at which it will become obvious that they have made a mistake?
• Is there a natural way in which they can discover their mistake prior to the earliest of these points in time? If not, you will have to orchestrate one – or let the PCs live with the consequences of failure.

 

5. What will the immediate consequences of the PCs choice be?

• What plot elements – setting, characters, etc – will you need to roleplay the scene?
• In general terms, what will happen after that, and after that, and after that, and so on?

Sidebar:
These question follow four key principles that are worth enunciating:

• Never, ever, start a plotline without thinking about what will happen if the PCs fail, and how you can recover the campaign from that point.
• Always let the PCs follow their own course until the point where the campaign/adventure is about to become unsalvageable, while watching for opportunities to get things back on track if necessary.
• Never say “No”; find a way for the players to decide to change what they are doing of their own volition.
• Where there is one solution to a problem, there’s usually more than one. If the PCs find a working solution you hadn’t thought of, it’s up to you to accept it, and adapt the rest of the adventure to accommodate it.

Solution #2 (if blockage is NOT due to an unexpected PC choice):

Which brings me to the general solution: Determine how the general plot to this point will interact with the everyday life or lives of the PCs/protagonists and start with the roleplaying/writing of that everyday life, then introduce the interactions. Fiction writers have more scope, as they can use the impact on a minor character.

If you’re desperate and there isn’t an immediate impact on the ordinary life of the PCs/Protagonists, let an NPC feel the impact and roleplay a scene where they meet the PC/Protagonist and tell them their story.

This solution works by casting everything that happens prior to the PCs becoming aware of the situation into the past. This makes the situation established historical fact that can be described far more succinctly and propels the characters straight into the search for a solution, bypassing the scene with the problem. Nothing matters until it affects a PC.

Translation: Specific to Scene

This type of writer’s block is defined as knowing what the next part of the story is but don’t know how to manifest it in a scene.

Solution:

Choose an unrelated setting and let the PCs roleplay something that has nothing to do with the main plot, or is tangental to it. It could be as simple as briefing someone else about the situation. This scene exists purely to stall the action. Use the additional time to (mentally) review where each of the primary characters are and what they are doing. Look for a way to connect those activities with the next part of the plot.

At the end of the stalling scene, touch base with each of the PCs and roleplay their current activities for a minute or two, scheduling whichever one best connects with the next part of the plot, last. Use that connection to lead into the next part of the story.

Translation: Specific to Setting

There are two subtypes to this type of Translation Block.

Needing a location

When you know what is to happen next but can’t find the right location in which to have the events unfold.

Solution:

Identify the key characteristic that the location is going to bring to the story. That’s usually either resources for the protagonists to use, resources that the antagonist has used or stolen, or a particular tone or mood. Then try to encapsulate the resources, tone, or mood into a specific location – choosing with logic in the first case and emotion in the second.

Having an incongruent location

When you know what is to happen next but the location where the characters are doesn’t seem right for it.

Three Solutions:

This usually means that the tone of the story and the logic of the situation are in conflict. If you can change the scene without completely fouling up the story, that’s usually the better solution; but more often than not, you will need to transition the setting to convey the tone of the story, or possibly even set the scene in a completely different location, inserting a scene transiting from one location to the other. A third solution is to play up the incongruity between location and tone.
 

Sidebar:
A shortcut that I sometimes employ when in desperate need is to pick one key adjective, think of a location that encapsulates or matches that adjective, and use that as my starting point for a location. For a variation, try for a location that would normally contradict the adjective. “Sterile” or “Antiseptic” would normally suggest a hospital or doctor’s office. A family home is usually the last place to which such a description would apply – but using it as a starting point conjures a fairly vivid image.

 

Translation: Specific to Action

When you know what is to happen but can’t describe the action.

This type of translation block has two possible causes, and each requires different solutions. The first possible cause is conceptual – you can’t visualize what’s going on in your imagination, so you have trouble describing it. The second is trying to compress or abstract the action too much.

Solution 1 to cause 1:

Simplify the problem. Picture one thing that’s going on, then add each of the other effects or activities one at a time until you can visualize the whole. Sometimes it’s better to imagine the scene as a freeze-frame or a painting, other times it’s easier to get one dynamic process in mind and view it as an imaginary animated sequence. Whenever possible, use the second of these approaches; the first can solve the immediate problem only to have it recur a few seconds later when the PCs respond and react.

Solution 2 to cause 1:

Sometimes there’s a specific reason why you’re having trouble conceptualizing a specific effect, and it’s usually because you are trying too hard to be unique or original. Almost everything in the way of visual effects that can be done has been done by someone, and trying to avoid the ‘classic’ appearance of an effect can become a real mental block.

The best solution to this version of the problem is to start from a “classic” form of the visual effect, then tweak it. Make the energy beam narrower, or phase it in and out of visibility, or have it pulse, or change the color, or something. Think about the ancillary effects that Hollywood often neglects – the thunderclap caused by heating of the air, the red shift caused by the gravitational field of extremely concentrated energy – it takes a lot less energy to shift colors. If you can emphasize these secondary consequences, or make them unique, you can solve your problem indirectly.

And if you really want to stretch your imagination, read some of the classic Dr Strange by Steve Ditko.

Solution to cause 2:

Slow it down, take it step by step. If you have to, break the action into second-by-second components, or even smaller. If you have to, look at the action from one character’s point of view at a time.

General note:

This situation is where game aids like miniatures or even just hand-drawn quick maps come into their own. They take some of the work out of visualizing the action by doing part of the job for you. A lot of writers of literary fiction might find that using miniatures to plot out their action sequences makes them a lot easier, too.

One of these days I’ll get around to an article on some tips and tricks I’ve developed to extend the usefulness of minis in describing a particular scene.

Translation: Specific to Persona

When you know what is to happen but can’t visualize who is to do it.

Solution:

The key to this problem is motive. What is the individual to do, why are they going to do it, and what do they think they are accomplishing? Once you have that, you have a generic profile of the required character. From there, the techniques offered in By The Seat Of The Pants: The Three Minute (or less) NPC will do the rest.

Sidebar
You can sometimes solve persona questions by taking the same adjectives that you’ve used to describe the setting and applying them to a person. They may require reinterpretation, but it almost automatically makes the person you’re describing fit their environment. Then rephrase.

 

Five Translation Blocks down, five to go.

I commented in the previous article (when explaining the trials and tribulations I had experienced in trying to get the next part of the Orcs And Elves series, “When it rains, it pours”. Well, sometimes when it pours, it can be a deluge. In this case, a massive power failure affecting 60,000 homes in Sydney, including mine (a substation exploded, I think), left me with a lot less time to write this article than I expected or anticipated. It’s all there, but it might be a little less fulsome and explanatory than it would otherwise have been. There’s only one part left of this series, but in September I’m committed to hosting the Blog Carnival here at Campaign Mastery – so look for the final article in this series to appear as part of a double-post next week!

A change of pace this week, as I want to talk about some observed trends in internet usage patterns and the impact that they have on sites like Campaign Mastery. This is not only directly relevant to the value that I can offer our readers, but – since many RPGs are set in the ‘now’ or ‘near-now’ – are also relevant to game backgrounds.

Likes, Tweets, and the dying of comments

Over the last five years, there has been a pronounced drop-off in the number of (non-spam) comments made to sites like mine. The prevalent trend is to Like something via facebook, Tweet that you have read or are reading something via Twitter, or something similar. This essentially informs the public at large and particularly the social circle of the individual (which presumably includes those of similar interests) of the existence of something interesting, with minimum effort by the reader. We’ve become something of a pushbutton internet.

Smartphones and Tablets

Part of the reason may well be the rise in popularity, even to the point of dominance, of internet-capable devices that usually don’t have a hardware keyboard. I don’t consider it a coincidence that these two trends are coinciding. If you don’t have a physical keyboard, composing any sort of text message is a lot more work in comparison to simply pushing a button and letting the site’s social media plugins compose the message for you.

Upsides

There are a number of compelling advantages to the user in this behavior. It’s easier (as noted already), and it’s much faster. Two clicks and you’re done.

It’s anonymous, so far as the site is concerned – they can maintain a nose count of the number of people who have done so, including any retweets or likes of likes, but that’s about it. In modern times, personal data security is a genuine concern for a lot of people (or should be), and the anonymity is therefore a definite advantage to them.

And it’s not bad news for the site, either, because it publicizes the site in a focused manner to what is hopefully a target audience interested in the subject, and can therefore generate immediate traffic to the site. I have already noted a strong correlation between “extra traffic” (over and above the usual minimum) and social media responses to articles. What’s more, this tends to be an immediate hit, within 24 hours at the most (arguably less – much less).

In The Middle

One consequence is a change in the sense of positive reinforcement. In broad, Likes and Tweets can be considered the equivalent of compliments and kudos, at least until you look more closely. All those tweets might be about how unsatisfactory the article is, or how the author failed his spot-the-bleeding-obvious skill check. Likes are a little more significant as an indicator, therefore, because they are only positive statements.

But even there, there’s a problem. What if thee-quarters of an article is brilliant but the author has crashed-and-burned in the final part? What if there’s a problem that readers are willing to overlook because a post is top-quality in every other respect?

There’s no specificity. If an article is popular, the author no longer gets feedback on what they did right to make it so, and where they can improve. All they can do is try to capture the same genie in the same bottle, or take a chance that their next article is not going to be as popular as their last.

And make no mistake, there is a momentum to success. One hit after another has a compounding effect on site popularity, while a string of misses has a dampening effect. “People say X is great, but I was disappointed the last time I went there, so maybe I won’t bother right now, I’ll look at it some other time when I’m not so busy.” It’s very easy to go from a must-read to a maybe-I’ll-read – and the result is that in any given week, half the potential readership don’t show up.

So, while it’s easier to offer general encouragement and positive reinforcement, it’s a lot harder to get specific feedback and therefore to improve.

Downsides

The transition from textual comments has some pronounced downsides. To start with, both Tweets and Likes tend to be transitory, visible for only a brief time (unless one digs for them), while comments remain visible with the article forever (or until deleted). That means that the traffic boost that is received from social media also tends to be transitory; at the very least, you would have to describe it as ‘volatile’. You could also describe this as a deterioration in Site Loyalty relative to Casual Readership.

One capacity that has largely been lost in consequence of the change is the potential for a lasting dialogue. I’ve been looking over a lot of our older articles lately, and time after time I have observed a dialogue in the comments that extends, enhances, or clarifies the content. These days, such discussions seem to take place within social media if at all, and as such, they are also transitory, and not a resource that the casual reader can benefit from in a year or two, and something that the site author may never even hear about.

Finally, one of the things that used to happen in the comments was the provision by readers of links to other relevant articles, blog posts, and resources. The ‘web’ was self-assembling, with crosslinks to other relevant material. These days, the web consists of more centralized hubs without the richness of those crosslinks (except where the author has provided them). Twitter is a hub. Facebook is a hub. Tweet Aggregators are hubs. Google is a hub. The casual visitor comes from one of these hubs to a site that looks interesting, but then has nowhere to go except along paths the author has defined, or back to the hub.

In the ‘old days’ of the web, the wealth of cross-connections were able to extend the knowledge of the author as well as the reader, and web-surfing took you from one site to another related site. The result is the increasing isolation of the author, which in turn restricts his growth and hence impacts the quality of the material he is able to offer. It gets harder to write something of quality, and more of the author’s creative time is consumed by research.

This is a self-accelerating phenomenon; the harder it becomes to contribute something of value, the less frequently it will happen, and the more reliant the public become on those centralizing hubs to separate wheat from chaff, making it even harder to contribute something of value.

Long-term impacts

In my original draft of this article, that was about as far as it went. But the penalty for being of an analytic bent, philosophically-inclined, and used to extrapolating from the known or assumed to a bigger picture, is that first drafts are usually only a small fraction of the content; I kept moving the goal-posts of the article as I found more things to say on the subject. I started this downhill slide by asking myself, “What are the long-term implications of this trend and the associated consequences that I have identified?”

Reduction of long-term traffic flows

Here’s how the web used to work: A site would publish a new piece of content. After a day or three of peak traffic brought in by the newness of the content, it would get replaced with something else that was the newest content on the site, and the older piece of content would begin generating residual traffic. That residual traffic stemmed from other websites referring to the content, from search engines referring readers to the content, from internal links contained within newer content by the same author, and by the occasional reader who explored the site’s archives. In general, it would be a fraction of the initial traffic, but it would persist for years, if not forever. The more content that you provided, the more these fractions would accumulate to increase the site’s overall traffic. Comments and pingbacks were significant sources of some of that residual traffic.

I might post an article, and someone else would be inspired to write an article based on something I had written in that article, and that would inspire someone else in turn, and we would all tell each other about those articles in the comments sections. Traffic to any one of those sites would connect through the links within the comments to each of the other pages. Particularly valuable in that respect were sites where an author would aggregate and review links to the content that he had discovered during the last week. There used to be lots of them, but most are now gone, killed by the instant (quicker and easier) push of a like or tweet button and changing priorities.

The result is that residual traffic sources are shrinking, with one exception: search engine results. Even these depreciate over time, but relevance remains a primary factor. This in turn has several flow-on effects.

Reduced economic and social viability of websites

Websites take time to create and maintain. Campaign Mastery is my sole source of income outside a disability pension. That income is proportionate to the traffic that a site generates. Anything that reduces the long-term traffic flow to the site reduces the economic viability of the website and the ability of the site’s authors to justify the time and expense of maintaining that website and adding new content. Dozens of sites devoted to the RPG ‘niche’ have gone dark over the last few years; it used to be that for every site that died, one or more would take their place. That doesn’t seem to happen as often anymore, because they are simply not as viable as they once were.

I remember when almost every internet user seemed to have a personal website. Those days are gone; the web is shrinking in diversity. Does that mean that those users no longer have something to contribute? No. It just means that they are making that contribution through social media, or youTube, or podcasts, instead. Transitory media, generating transitory traffic. (Podcasts are amongst the worst problems in this respect; you can’t embed a hyperlink in them, they aren’t searchable, and there is no direct traffic generation as a result. But it’s easier to talk about something than it is to write about something, and the results have an immediacy, so they aren’t going to go away).

They were replaced by, or have evolved into, subject-oriented specialist sites like Campaign Mastery. Or they have simply stopped, as hard economic realities dictate that a time-consuming hobby becomes less worthwhile than something that is more fun and less expensive.

Greater reliance on SEO and search-engine traffic

As other forms of residual traffic dry up, sites become increasingly reliant on the few that remain. That means an increasing reliance on the relevance of search engine results and search engine placements. And that means that SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) becomes a critical consideration.

Just what website owners didn’t need – another overhead to worry about. SEO either adds to the administrative burden of the site, or it adds to the economic pressure on the sites viability if a consultant does it for you. Or you can largely ignore it, and continue to focus on generating relevant and interesting content – and watch your site’s residual traffic diminish over time. But if one site does it, everyone has to; those who don’t will fall off the front pages of results.

‘Content-is-king’ replaced by ‘Publish-or-perish’ paradigm

This inevitably leads to a fundamental shift in the operational principles of websites. An increased reliance on the initial surge of readers from the newness of content to maintain viability promotes a change from “Content Is King” to “Publish Or Perish.” The newness value of a post is more important than the depth and long-term value of the content. Hit-and-run articles become the norm – something quick and concise and easily-digested.

Economics-driven publishing

What this amounts to is more cutthroat economics-driven publishing designed to appeal to a wider audience and less hobbyist/special-interest niche content. Reduced Feedback equals less encouragement for mavericks and individualization and more ‘lowest common denominator’ editorial direction. This trend can be summed up as “The homogenization of the web.”

I don’t yet know of any website owners who choose what to publish in any given week based on what will give them the biggest hit in the search engine results, but the increased emphasis on SEO leads to an increased awareness of what is popular, and an increased temptation to pander to that popularity. There is an analogy to be made, comparing this with the transition of television from 1950s and 60s – when it was easier for individual visions to make it to the screen, and networks would take chances and see what worked – to the television of the 1970s onwards, where networks lived and died by the ratings. It might seem a long step to go from the shift to social media expressions of approval to viewing SEO as ‘pandering to the ratings’ and ‘publishing by the numbers for mass appeal’, but the path seems clear.

Worst-case prognostication

Extrapolating a little further leads to the death of the web as we know it today, reduced to function-driven websites or ‘virtual apps’ linked by search engines and other traffic hubs.

What do I mean by “virtual apps”? I mean that content is function-driven. Visitors only go to that site when they want to employ that specific ‘function’. The transitory traffic becomes all-important.

Do I think that this is what’s going to happen”? Yes and no. Let’s consider an alternative long-term view.

An alternative future

Sites become forced to optimize their subject matter to rely on ever-more-targeted search engine results. SEO therefore forces websites to specialize in increasingly-narrow niches within even a specialist subject (excluding e-commerce sites, of course): a site that specializes only in maps, a site that specializes only in Science-Fiction gaming, a site that specializes in world-creation, a site that only deals in encounters.

It can be argued that the reduction in ‘link review’ sites/series that has taken place is a sign of this narrowing of focus on the part of those sites. ‘Content is king’ thus becomes ‘publish-or-perish’ without sites changing anything that they are doing other than narrowing their definition of ‘content’.

But this future holds more scope for synergies amongst web conglomerates resulting in site mergers. Megasites that, like a shopping mall, consist of sub-sites dedicated to each specialty subject within the general. There’s an analogy here to what happened to business in the 1980s and 90s – corporate takeovers and mergers, with shared overheads reducing the economic burden and increasing the economic viability of the sub-sites. I would also point to the rise of book and media merchants who rely on Amazon for point-of-sale services. These have nothing but “back ends” and use a third party for the showrooms of their products. There’s a clear similarity between this business model and this projected future of the internet.

The narrowing of focus will mean that the content gap, where articles bridge one part of a hobby or interest to another, becomes wider. Gaps will open up, creating opportunities for new sites. However, the reduced economic viability of individual sites means only the real anoraks of a sub-industry, driven by personal interest and not by economics, will be willing to take a chance on exploiting them. This will produce a model more reminiscent of the glory days of the web, where start-ups could produce rags-to-riches stories – but for every over-the-top survivor gone-viral success story, 100 others will fail and vanish, or be absorbed into the conglomerate sites.

Ultimately this leads to the same worst-case prognostications by a different road.

A Personal view

I sure hope I’m wrong. I like the way the web was, even 3 or 4 years ago. People contributed more. The blogosphere and internet in general feel colder and its components more isolated, these days. There’s less of a sense of community, and less of an opportunity to explore; the better the SEO-and-search-engine marriage becomes at filtering out the not-quite-relevant, the less scope there is for the accidental discovery.

Avoiding the worst-case

By nature, another of my personal attributes is that I’m a problem-solver. Having identified what I perceive as a growing problem, I had to turn my attention to possible solutions.

The reduction in comments simply makes each comment received, each favorable review of a piece of your content, that much more valuable to a site owner. Right now, a tweet or like is worth roughly the same as a comment, but this ratio is dropping.

So the most immediate action you can take to avoid the worst-case and to combat this trend is this: If you have something to say, don’t just commit it to a perishable visible-today-gone-tomorrow social media mention, post it to the website as well.

Tell someone you like what they have done. Tell someone if you have a different idea. Ask a question. Criticize if that’s warranted.

And get into the habit of doing so, before rising spam levels lead sites to stop accepting comments at all.

But that’s a short-term behavioral solution, and the problem is really a technological one. What we really need is a technological solution.

A search engine for old social media mentions that works

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to search for something on twitter. The results are the worst, most literal, that it is possible to conceive. There’s no relevance ranking, there’s no context, there’s not even a sorting so that items with multiple keyword matches are at the top of the results. The search functions are primitive at best.

Searching for something on facebook is worse.

I know of absolutely no way to find out what people on facebook are saying about a site that they like. I know of no way to even find out who liked it.

This seems strange to me; if we both like the same thing, it seems likely that we have at least a chance of wanting to become followers of each other’s accounts. If I like an article, I have something in common with others who also like that article. Failing to provide a way to identify those people with whom I have a common interest seems a fundamental hole in the services provided by Facebook.

I’m not talking about a Google web search, which can include tweets and facebook mentions. I’m talking about a dedicated and optimized search engine dedicated to showing “what people are saying about [search subject]”, with a full range of tools for narrowing the results.

Automatic Feedback

Next, as part of this solution, we need a way for those mention results to connect related posts and replies within that search engine, so that site owners (and the general internet user) can see the whole conversation – the whole iceberg – and not just the mention (the tip of the iceberg).

It then becomes a simple matter for site owners to include a pushbutton “see what others are saying” on the content page.

The Lasting Conversation

Finally, we need a plug-in for websites that permanently and automatically attaches those search results to the comments section of the site via the original “tweet” or “like”. This represents a genuine coming-together of the social-media pushbutton and the comment so that sites can automatically capture, store, and display those social media conversations AS comments on the content – essentially, self-generating forums powered by social media as part of the site platform.

Right now, the internet and social media are like a couple on their first date, only barely connecting with each other, a little shy and awkward, and a little clumsy in their connection. They need to become more tightly married together, to integrate into a more seamless whole.

Put all three of these developments together, and social media comments can become a true replacement for old-style “manual” comments. All those negative and gloomy prognostications go away.

To make this happen

Part of the problem is that social media platforms change the way they do things all the time. Twitter Apps need to be constantly rewritten and revised to deal with changes in the way Twitter works “under the hood”, and that is difficult and time-consuming. To make these solutions viable, what’s really needed is a way to monetize this platform integration feature, so that investing the time and effort into maintaining the service becomes profitable. Alas, that’s where I get stuck.

So it’s over to those more qualified in the relevant technologies than I am. Experts in the configuration of blogging platforms. Experts in SEO and search-engine software. Experts in Social Media Apps and Add-ons. The future of the internet is in your hands. Don’t break it.