I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it in public, I’ll never get it done in time! A number of interruptions today have left me with only two (rather longish) chapters complete. Since some future chapters have to follow each other very closely, this forces me into a two-chapters-at-a-time pattern for the next couple of installments as well. I’m going to try and get ahead of the curve by writing three chapters at a time, though. After receiving no objections to the more condensed format used last time (and no approvals, either), I’m going to continue using it (with a tweak), because I think it sets these posts apart from the GM-advice articles that I offer on Fridays.

*************************************************************************************************

Clan Wars XV: A Desperate Plan

Goral, the Warblade of the Mailed Fist Clan, was a listener, the type of person who hears more than most and remains silent, the better to hear still more. This quality had been instrumental in his rise to his current position, for he excelled in using the babble he overheard to isolate key objectives, stratagems, and tactical considerations, welding them together into an overall plan. Too many leaders, in his view, stifled useful discussion in order to enforce their own will, or permitted the babble to continue until a consensus was formed – or until the leaders could choose a favorite. The first approach rested the decision on the capabilities and ego of a single mind, the second encouraged the formation of alliances – one or more of which would always oppose whatever decision was made.
    When it became clear that no-one else was going to speak, and that everything of value that could be said on the subject had already been said, he put this prodigious talent to work, and soon had the basic outline of a thin hope. The problem, as always, would be to convince the council to follow it; they would not like what he had to say. They never did. “I have a plan, a desperate plan,” he announced. “When two objectives are incompatible, one must give way to the other. Here we have three separate objectives, and it may be just barely be possible to achieve two of those three; if we attempt to achieve all, we will fail at all. If we admit that, then we can use the failure to achieve the abandoned objective as a strategic element to better the chances of success in the remainder.
    “The three objectives are the preservation of the city, the preservation of the clan, and the defeat of the enemy. All here have been thinking that the first two are the same thing, but if they are considered separately, possibilities open where before there were none.
    “The Ambassador said, earlier, ‘The right move at the wrong time would be disastrous’. This must be true of the enemy as well. If the Elves are right, and everything has been preplanned to an impossible degree, then a disruption in the timetable works for us, and against the enemy. If the Ambassador is right, and our foe is a quick-thinking opportunist, then he becomes better able to respond, but the principle still holds.
    “The prophecy says our walls will fall before noon. Very well, forget trying to preserve the city in favor of preserving the clan and defeating the enemy. Part of what the enemy has done has been to prevent those attacking us from succeeding too quickly for his liking; we can make it easy for them. If our defenses fail too soon for his liking, he must either deal with the invading troops burning and looting and getting in the way, or he must accelerate his efforts and risk his ritual going wrong. Either way, we make him start responding to us instead of us responding to what he does. We set the agenda, not him, and that always works in our favor. I do not know what will happen if his ritual is rushed too much, but there might be a way to take advantage of that. First, you say that your elvish spells-weaving is something like a ritual. Can you tell us what would happen if the ritual is done too quickly?”
    “A large part of any ritual is ensuring that all the parts work in harmony to support each other and hold the whole together. The more perfect this harmony, the greater the durability and effectiveness of the resulting spellweaving. Elves take so long at our weavings that the results are as near to permanent as anything created by mortals can be. We think the Gods are better at it, and can do it more quickly than we can, and that is how they can achieve effects that are miraculous in comparison with our best efforts. If any part of a weaving is done too quickly, then it is likely that the whole would unravel far more quickly than it would, like a garment woven in haste with a loose thread dangling. And that it will not function as well as it could, like a wagon wheel with a spoke that is far too short. And that not all of the side effects would be properly controlled and contained.”
    “So it would be weaker and more flimsy, and not fully in the control of its creator – that’s just what I hoped you would say. Earlier, you said that some rituals being the things summoned to where the caster wants them to go, and other rituals take the caster to the place where the creatures are. But they are both summoning rituals, and they probably aren’t very different. As an elf, you’re used to seeing one person take over the casting from another, because that’s how you elves do it, according to what you said before. So if the enemy isn’t in full control of the spell, maybe you could take it over and finish it the way you want instead of the way he wants – if he’s distracted by something, like the burning of the city as that lot out there get through the walls early. I know, none of you use this ability at home, you aren’t as good at it as the best of your people, and it wouldn’t be as good as if one of them had done it – but you’re the best we’ve got. If you can do that, then we can take the fight to this Hidden Dragon, whoever he is, and make him sorry for meddling in Orcish affairs.”
    “Make him VERY sorry,” chuckled the Clan-chief. “I like this plan. If we are going to fall, then let us go down fighting, and if the city is to be lost, then let us punish the one responsible before it is. Let’s work out the details of how to give the Hidden Dragon a good kick in the family jewels. We have a lot of work to do tonight if all is to be ready by morning…”

 
In an antechamber next to the place where the rituals were being cast, presumably by the invisible hand of the Hidden Dragon from afar, Second closed his eyes and concentrated. “I can sense the strands of weaving… the colors, the shapes… the threads that are still loose, and the picture they will form when it is complete… Yes, if we can make the Hidden Dragon loosen his grip on a few of them, it might be possible to tear them from his grip and reshape them, then complete a very poor rendition of what we seek to achieve. It is most unlikely that he will have anticipated that, and so will not have prepared a magical circle to contain any who traverse the connection-between-places that he is making. And yet, this must be the interference he feared we could achieve, and may be ready – if he is the careful planner, and not the instinctive opportunist.”
    “So whoever attacks will be helpless if we face a God, but there is a good chance that we don’t, and who may be able to act,” replied Goral, who had escorted the elf to the tower where the ritual had been prepared.
    “Only a few will be able to use the passage, and they may not be able to return – it will be fragile and will fail quickly.”
    “All acts in war are do-or-die, Elf. Why should this be any different?”

 
Three figures dressed in dark, hooded robes, crept through the shadows before the city walls. Around them, some groups wept in despair, others mutilated captured Minotaurs, a few fought amongst themselves, while others had drunk themselves into insensibility. They carried with them a flag of truce, but hoped not to rely on it; the attackers were under no obligation to honor it, even if they were in their right minds and under the control of their commanders, and with the death of Gruumsh at the hands of the unnamed Minotaur God (who had feigned being Hruggek, the God Of The Bugbears, long enough to draw Gruumsh into battle) – or so it had all seemed to the Red Eyes clan of the Orcs.
    “Garunch should have his tent somewhere around here. Hopefully he is not too far gone in drink or despair to listen,” whispered Kudja as quietly as his Orcish nature permitted. “Look for a tent which does not display the sign of the one-eyed skull – the Shaman of the Red Eye Clan puts such sigils on the inside, a constant reminder to all who enter that he is the servant of Gruumsh and all acts committed in his presence are also in the presence of the Creator Of The World.”
    “You defile his memory every time you speak his name, you filthy deserter,” came a loud voice from behind the trio. “Show your hands, or be killed where you stand!”
    Stiffening, the three figures cautiously raised their hands and turned. “I am no deserter,” said one, carefully drawing back his hood.
    “A Dark Elf! What are you doing here, meddler?”
    “I am an envoy of peace from the Clan Of Mailed Fists,” replied Ambassador Tathzyr, “and I bear a message of conditional surrender to Garunch, Shaman of the Red Eyes.”
    “Do you, now? What makes you think we are interested in your surrender, manipulator of lies? What makes you think we would trust a single thing you have to say?”
    “Because I testify to his message,” replied another of the cloaked figures, also removing his hood. “I am First, and I am here as a neutral peace broker. My companions are Tathzyr, Ambassador of the Drow, and Kudja, Shaman of the Mailed Fists, and I insist on being taken to Garunch that we may deliver that message.”
    “Well, now – Kudja! That is a fine prize to capture! Bind them and take them to Kyrd. Kill any that resist!”

 
The tent was opulent as such things go, with fabrics and furs of greater number and quality than was generally the case. Wooden chests bound with gold contained the wealth of the clan, such as it was, and a Golden throne on sticks for porters to carry announced clearly that this was the mobile domicile of the clan-chief. But there was something obviously wrong – clothes were piled high on the throne, which had been relegated to the most remote corner of the tent, while a rack of weapons of all shapes and sizes had been placed just inside the door. First gave voice to the confusion that was being experienced by all three.
    “This is the tent of the clan-chief, whose name is Zalgan, and who was described as fat, and luxury-minded, and no longer the fighter that he once was. But all the property of an overweight Orc has been thrown haphazardly on the throne of the clan-chief and moved out of the way, and freshly-maintained weapons moved into their place.”
    “Worse still – we should either have been taken to Garunch, as we requested, or to Zalgan himself,” replied Kudja. “And while Zalgan would have insisted on being involved in any discussions, he is too pious to stand in the way of a conversation between two Clan Shamans. But the guard said that we were to be taken to Kyrd, the Clan War-blade – and then we were brought here. Kyrd pays as little mind to the Gods and the Shaman as he can get away with, and is utterly ruthless. He will not be inclined to listen. If he has seized authority here, our whole mission lies in jeopardy.”
    “You permitted them to speak to each other?” demanded a tall Orc dressed in chainmail, wearing a heavy fur cloak, and carrying a spear, as he swirled into the tent, looking intently at the guards placed around the prisoners.
    “Yes, Kyrd. I thought that their words might tell us why they really came here.”
    “But if we had interrogated them separately, we could have compared their stories. It was a mistake, but you had some reason for it, and you admitted your error promptly,” replied the powerfully-built Orc, as he carefully placed the spear in the weapons rack. “That shows potential, so I will be merciful. Five public lashes to make the lesson memorable and no reduction in rank.”
    “I thank you for the mercy, Clan-Chief,” replied the leader of the guards, bowing.
    Seating himself on a simple field seat made of wood and canvas, the self-proclaimed leader of the Red Eyes clan continued, “So, what have we here? An Elf, A Manipulator, and a Clan Shaman. I am sure that you will spin some fable about the reasons for this visit, and the failings of my minion have given you time to prepare a tale in common, if you did not have a lie pre-arranged between you. Since I cannot trust anything you may say, we shall have to learn the truth in a manner more painful to you.”
    “Your pardon if I speak out of turn, my clan-chief,” said one of the guards, “but before they knew we were behind them, the Shaman was heard to instruct the other two in how to find the tent of Garunch.” Holding up the flag of truce, he added, “And they travelled with this in their possession.”
    Eyebrows raised, Kyrd examined the white cloth. “The long ears of a natural sneak may have spared you much discomfort, Mouse-droppings. A pity, I was looking forward to it. But since you have given the name of Garunch, showing him to be in league with our enemies and a traitor to his clan, I might be minded to be merciful to you, also – especially if you would be so kind as to repeat that name in a more public setting, such as his trial for treason.”
    “I will not cooperate in elevating your position above that of the Shaman of your clan, Warblade. You are not the rightful clan-chief here, and you overstep your authority,” replied Kudja. “Where is Zalgan? He commands the Red Eyes. If he wishes to be present when I give my message to Garunch, I will permit it.”
    “Our former clan-chief was so besotted with piety that he insisted on going into battle beside Gruumsh, and was slain in the battle,” smirked Kyrd. “As Warblade, in a time of conflict, I act in his place. You will not find me so easy to wrap around your finger, Priest.”
    “Going into combat? Zalgan could barely walk unaided,” retorted the Shaman. “I think you had him killed, or did it yourself, and claimed power you are not entitled to.”
    “It doesn’t matter what you think, Priest, but I can’t have you spreading such lies. Perhaps I can’t be so merciful after all.”
    “That is not your place to decide, Kyrd,” came a new voice from the entrance to the tent. “You have been accused of treason against your clan by a Clan Shaman, and have tried to silence the accuser – an act that suggests guilt – and that gives me the right to examine the truth of the matter.” The newcomer was much older than Kudja, dressed in a red robe beneath a light mail-shirt.
    “Stay out of my way, Garunch, and I might let you live to see another sunset. You accepted my right to lead with your silence during the ceremony of empowerment.”
    “You mistake yourself, Kyrd. I did not challenge you at the time, but neither did I endorse you. Only the tribal chiefs may choose the Clan-chief; I chose simply to wait, sure that you would overstep your bounds, and now you have. Gruumsh may have fallen, but he is not the only God for whom I speak!”
    “Brace yourself, First. I think we have a front-row seat for a confrontation that’s been coming for a very long time…”

 

Clan Wars XVI: In The Name Of Gruumsh

“I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, Priest. For too long, you have told us what to think, what to do and what not to do!” roared Kyrd, springing to his feet.
    “It is night, and the power of Shargaas, mistress of stealth and darkness is ascendant. In her name, I summon forth the shade of Zalgan to tell us of his death, and of what acts were committed in secret,” answered the shaman, calmly.
    Before their eyes, the shimmering outline of an extremely plump Orc materialized, his body pierced by multiple strokes of the blade, one arm hanging uselessly at his side. “For what reason do you disturb the dead?” it asked as Kyrd momentarily recoiled.
    “My clan-chief, long did you serve your people well, but they have need of one final service from you before you may rest,” answered the Clan Shaman. “Speak to us of your ending, Chief Zalgan. Tell us who should lead the Red Eyes clan now that we are without you until the clan meets in Moot to choose a lasting successor.”
    Kyrd reached into the weapons rack and pulled out his greatspear, obviously his favorite weapon, as a voice emerged from the shimmering outline “When Gruumsh fell, I was in despair, and I called to my Warblade, who stood beside me, and asked ‘What do we do now?’ He replied to me, ‘Now we begin a life of our own choosing without the meddling of the priests and their footstools,’ and then he drew a blade and ran me through. Not satisfied that he had struck a mortal blow, again and again he hacked at my body.”
    “You desecrate the dead by putting your words in the mouth of this light show, Priest,” raged Kyrd, a desperate expression on his face, and thrust his spear through it again and again. Finding his weapon useless, he dropped it and grabbed a mace, which he swung with great force, but it passed through the head of the former clan-chief without encountering anything of substance.
    “In the tribe of the Hawk’s Claws is a youth of promise, named Kurvath” continued the shade, unperturbed. “Though he knew it not, for I did not wish him to be shown favors, he is my son and heir. It is his place to speak for me until the Moot. And now, I beseech you to let me rest. Let me continue to search for the paradise beyond the sky claimed for us by Gruumsh.”
    “Return to your sleep, Great Clan-Chief. You have earned your place beyond the sky. Guards, I mark you as witnesses and order you to take former Warblade Kyrd prisoner. His fate shall be decreed by Kurvath, son of Zalgan.”
    “If I can’t kill Zalgan again, I can at least kill you, Priest,” the dethroned Orc leader bellowed.
    “How tiresome,” replied the Priest as the mace bounced off an invisible barrier surrounding him. The Guards each seized an arm, and forced Kyrd to drop his weapon, then bound him in chains and dragged him away. “Tie him to the whipping post and send for Kurvath,” instructed the priest as they departed, the ex-leader still spouting threats.

 
“Now, I was told that you had a message of surrender to give me. I find this surprising, and so I am wary.”
    “We should start by telling you that your entire clan has been deceived, Garunch. That was not Gruumsh who was killed, merely an apparition that looked like him,” replied Ambassador Tathzyr.
    “You think me a simpleton, to be tricked like a cub?”
    “Not at all, Garunch. Whatever tricked you was also good enough to make me think it was Baghtru. I have a way to prove it, but that comes later,” said the Shaman, soothingly.
    “We know that you were sent here by what you believed to Gruumsh. You must view what he told you to do as a Holy Quest, and would not attempt to dissuade you from it; while we believe that this war was also a deception, we cannot prove it to you, and do not propose to try,” said First. “What we must know is what exactly you were commanded to do, so that we can learn if there is room for the Mailed Fist clan to surrender to the inevitable.”
    “Continue,” instructed Garunch.
    “The heart of a Clan is its people. If the people can be spared, we will surrender the city to you at Dawn – on condition that the Red Eyes raze it to the ground.”
    As Garunch thought that surprising offer over, Kurvath arrived. Quickly, the young Orc was informed of his lineage and of the fate of Kyrd. For a moment, the fires of revenge burned in his eyes, and then he took in the others who were present in the command pavilion. “There’s more, isn’t there? This Orc wears the colors of a Clan Shaman, but I have never met him before. This is an Elf of some sort, and so is this. Why are they here?”
    “They convey an offer from the Mailed Fist clan to negotiate a surrender of the city. But this offer is contingent on the exact instructions given by Gruumsh. I could recite them, but my memory has no authority; you should send for the Keeper Of Memory,” responded the older Clan Shaman.
    “All right, let’s do that then. If I’m supposed to lead the clan, I probably should know what we’re here to do, anyway.” He paused, looked around, then leaned in close to his Clan Shaman, and whispered, “What do I do now, Garunch?”
    “You give an order, Kurvath,” replied the Shaman in a whisper of his own.
    “You should probably know, Clan-Chief Kurvath, that Elven ears are sharp enough to hear your words, even when you whisper,” announced First, calmly.
    “Oh well,” replied Kurvath, with a shrug. “Since you know, anyway, there’s no point in hiding it.” Raising his voice, he commanded, “Guards. Bring me the Keeper Of Memory.”

 
“Repeat for me the words of Gruumsh. What did he demand of us?” the young Orc ordered the Keeper Of Memory, perhaps the oldest Orc that any of them had ever seen. Wizened, stooped, and with a voice that occasionally cracked and wheezed when he spoke.
    “Yes Clan-(wheeze, gasp)-Chief. This (croak) is what Our God (gasp, wheeze) said to us (cough, cough, wheeze)”. Suddenly, the old Orc’s voice was as clear as a bell, as he recited, “I burn with shame and anger stirs within me when I think of the way a clan who dares to bear my mark permits another clan of Orcs to live in wasted-lands of stone, and grow crops like a farmer. These are not the ways a true Orc should live, grubbing in the dirt like swine. We are strong, and proud, and take what we need from where we find it. We live! We Hunt! We Fight! We Survive! They are not worthy to be called Orcs, and you are twice as not-worthy as for permitting it. I command you to rouse the Clan of the Red Eye and to march on these sites of corr-up-tion and purity of evil, and to tear the stones from the ground until good clean dirt is all that remains. The stones shall you throw into deep waters, so that they never de-spoil the true Orcish spirit again. I shall return to my palace beyond the sky, but I shall return in one-fist-and-one-hand of days, and if you are not on the march at that time to abate this mons-tros-it-ee, my wrath shall be beyond measure.”
    “Thank you, Zuglak. You may rest. You have done well.”
    “There were some very un-Orcish turns of phrase in that little epiphany,” suggested Ambassador Tathzyr. “Even the Keeper struggled with some of the words, as though he was reciting the sounds from memory without knowing what they meant.”
    “It did not sound like an Orc, it is true, but it is not for us to tell a God how to speak,” replied Garunch. “I don’t know what a mons-tros-it-ee is either, but sounds like a bad thing, and the instructions seem clear enough.”
    ” ‘A bad thing’ is fairly close to what it means, Clan Shaman. And ‘Corruption’ is the act of ‘making something bad’, like poisoning a well with a dead animal.”
    “A dead animal does not make water bad, Elf. Not for an Orc. Water is never bad-to-drink, but Ale tastes better. I do not know how something can be made bad; it is either good or it was always bad. There is nothing in between except those things that are bad until we get used to them, like rotten meat or black mushrooms.”
    “Not all creatures are as strong as Orcs, Clan-Chief. Horses will sicken and die if they drink from a well whose water has a dead thing in it, and so will other creatures. Make the water bad, and the creatures you hunt will die, and then there will be nothing to hunt tomorrow.”
    “I’m sure that’s very enlightening to the Clan-Chief, First, but not very important right now,” said the Ambassador. “Here is what matters: the Red Eyes were ordered to tear down the city and throw the stones in deep waters. There were no orders to kill the Mailed Fists, only to destroy the city.”
    “Yes, I see that,” answered the Clan-Chief. “You want us to let the Mailed Fists go if they will let us break the city and take it away, because Gruumsh did not tell us not to do that, am I right?”
    “That is exactly what we propose, Clan-Chief.”
    “It sounds alright to me, but the words of the Gods are for the Shamans to tell,” replied Kurvath. “What do you say, Garunch?”
    “It is not enough, Clan-Chief. If it is wrong now for Orcs to live in homes of stone, it is wrong always. The Mailed Fists must promise not to make any more cities like this one until the Gods say they can.”
    “But Gruumsh is dead. He died in battle. He can never say to stop tearing down cities,” said the Clan-Chief.
    “And Baghtru told us to build the city. If Baghtru tells us to make another, we will. If Baghtru tells you to let us, what will you do?” asked the city Clan Shaman.
    “That is a bad problem to have, Kudja, but it is not my problem. If you make another city, we will tear it down. If Baghtru tells us not to stop you, we will ask whoever rules in the sky to tell us what to do. But that brings us back to what you said before Clan-Chief Kurvath came to the tent – that you could prove that Gruumsh was not really dead. If you can’t do that, the Red Eyes will stay all broken apart as they are now, and it will not matter what we agree to do.”
    “You must agree before I tell you how to prove that Gruumsh lives, not just to yourself but to all the Red Eyes. You are right, we can worry about new cities tomorrow. Let us worry about this one today,” answered Kudja.
    “It is our faith to Gruumsh that holds the Red Eyes together, Clan-Chief. If you agree to this, you will be giving them their Clan in return for them giving you yours. If you do not, then in one fist of Winters, two at most, there will be no Clan Red-Eye.”
    “Then it is fair. We will let the Mailed Fist clan go if they let us tear down their city and take away the stones, so long as they know that if they make another one we will tear it down, too, until the King Of The Skies tells us to stop,” answered the Clan-Chief. “Bring Zuglak Back and we will speak this deal to the Keeper Of Memory,” he ordered one of the guards at the tent entrance.
    “One thing more, Clan-chief: a detail that may seem nothing to you, but that is very important to us all – you must begin at the time of Sunrise tomorrow-day.”
    “Why is that important?”
    “That is something that you will not believe until you know that Gruumsh lives. Only when you have proof that you were tricked will you be ready to hear our words and listen.”
    “That is thee-fingers times tonight that you have made me curious, Kudja. Very well, the night wears on.”

Sidebar: Orcish Numbers
Orcs aren’t great at numbers. They can count to five, no problem. Five fingers is called one ‘hand’. Five Hands is ‘one fist’. In other words, they count in Base 5. “One Fist and One Hand” is “110” in Base-5, which is 30 days. “One Fist Of Years, two at most” is “25 years, 50 at the most”. The highest number they can count to is “444”, which is 124 in Decimal numbers. After this, they need to grasp a broader concept in order to count – instead of days, they count seasons or moons if they need more than 124 days, instead of seasons or moons, they count Winters for years, and so on. Every 124 years marks a new ‘era’ on the Orcish Calendar, which are only named when they end. So “4-in-badger” might refer to 4 years older the end of the era of the “Badger”. No one has actually bothered to learn the order of eras, and only Keepers Of Memory know them all, anyway; to everyone else, more than 124 years ago is simply “Long ago” and it all happened at the same time.

I found these sites to be useful:

• Base-10 to Base-5 conversion
• Base-5 to Base-10 conversion

*************************************************************************************************

The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

I’m going to forego this while our attention is focussed on the Orcish side of the story, as it has no relevance to the narrative.

*************************************************************************************************

Next time: Have you figured out how to prove that Gruumsh lives? The clues are all there. Even if he doesn’t and never has. Chapters 71-72 will tell you how right or wrong you are!

This article is going to provide solutions to three of the specific types of writer’s block identified in the first part of this series:

• Conceptual Writer’s Block, when you trouble breaking an overall story idea down into a detailed plot outline,
• Specific-Scene Writer’s Block, which is a difficulty in taking that detailed plot and putting the key plot points into the best narrative sequence for telling the overall story, and
• Story Setting Writer’s Block, which deals in the difficulty of deciding in what location a specific plot event should take place.

Conceptual Problems

So you have a general plot idea, perhaps know exactly what the situation is at the start of a story or chapter and where the story is supposed to be at the end with a vague idea of what is to happen in between. (If you don’t even have that vague idea, use one of the eleven cures that I offered for that problem in part one of the series). Some of the solutions that I have for this problem are specifically-suited to RPGs, while others are more suited to fiction or are universally suited.

By way of example, the most recent chapter of the Orcs & Elves Series had a general outline that read, “Priest awakened, reveals prophecy that explains why the Clan Wars are happening. Oracle of Gottskragg (Dwarven name) prophecy that connect the Clan Wars to the founding of Tajik’s Misfits” – where ‘Tajik’s Misfits’ is the name chosen by the adventuring band that is led by the PCs of the campaign. So this chapter exists to explain the reason that the entire Clan Wars plot thread is in the Orcs & Elves story at all.

Prior to this chapter, it might be presumed that its the social impact on the Orcs (one of the PCs is an Orc) or because of the involvement of the Huyundaltha (who were the ‘quest object’ within the game for another of the PCs), or simply because it gave the first hints that an Elf and a Drow could find enough common ground to unite behind a single cause – which is another key ingredient of that adventuring band. In fact, all of those elements are relevant, and that was important because it hid that plot twist – revelation, if you prefer the term – until I was ready to reveal it.

When I broke this down into specific plot points, the list read something like this:

1. Re-establish Clan-Chief’s Orcish Personality
2. Priest awakened – how?
3. The coincidence of timing
4. Discovery of the Oracle of Gottskragg
5. The Prophecy of the Oracle – significance of the clan wars

It’s getting ahead of myself somewhat, but while this example is fresh in the mind of the reader, I thought it worth expanding on the writing process itself, and how this breakdown was influenced by it (because I knew I had this article coming up, I made a few notes). I always break down the plot of a big story a few chapters in advance, if I can, so that if there’s anything I need to introduce, I can do so.

So here are those notes, matched in order to the above breakdown:

1. Re-establish Clan-Chief’s Orcish Personality – Earlier events needed the clan-chief to be intelligent, reasoning, civilized, so much so that he was more like a human king than an Orc. He also turned out rather noble and likeable. I found myself having to continually dumb his dialogue down slightly to more accurately reflect the primitiveness of his culture as I was writing previous chapters. As soon as I could permit him to stop being so reasonable, I needed to re-establish him as an Orc and a relative barbarian. This was an addition that was made to the breakdown while working on previous chapters, and not part of the original plan.
2. Priest awakened – how? – When I started plotting this three-chapter burst, of which this was the third chapter, this is what description I had for this plot point. A lot of thinking about it led me to the realization that if all the priests were out of action, I needed the healing to be performed by a non-priest. I thought about having the Drow Ambassador provide the solution, I thought about a bargain between the Orcs and Lolth for a cure, and I thought about the possibility of the Elves providing the answer. But I realized that an unresolved accusation had been made against the “All-mother” of the Orcs, Luthic, Goddess of Healing (and various other things), and that by having an Orc provide the solution I could resolve that dangling plot point – and that led me to introduce a new participant in the chapter previous to this one as a plot mechanic to solve the problem of achieving this plot point.
3. The coincidence of timing – Originally, my thought was that the Priest would raise this point, but that just didn’t work, it made the Priest too omniscient, too much of deus-ex-machina. So I rewrote it as a conversation between The Drow Ambassador and the Elves, and moved it to occur before the Priest was awakened. This also reinforced the first plot point – the clan-chief expresses his irritability and frustration at doing nothing, and then there’s a lot of (relevant) discussion – and no action! The reader identifies with his expressed emotions, and he comes to represent them in the story.
4. Given that the first plot point was an addition to the outline, that the second was just a vague indication, and that the third was changed in both timing and delivery, its worth noting that this plot point was executed exactly the way I envisaged, breaking down the social unity that the Orcs seemed to have in the plot arc so far by showing the Priests keeping secrets from the leadership.
5. It’s a lot easier to write an accurate prophecy after the events have been described in the story than to get it right in advance. The trick was making it obscure enough that the Priests could not have interpreted it while keeping it clear enough to be understood in hindsight.
6. I also needed to tone down the clan-chief’s reaction – I had a big chunk of reaction to the revelation that the Priests had been keeping secrets that had been incorporated into the prophecy section, but it did nothing but get in the way of what was important about the chapter, and bog the plot down. So it got chopped.
7. Finally, when I plotted the chapters that are still to come, I added a couple of additional plot points and incorporated them as a lead-in to the discussion of The coincidence of timing. The first read, Perfect Planning? – mention: what would have happened if the attack on the city had succeeded?, and the second was Elvish fatalism, Enemy Opportunism, reaction – mention: right choice of action at wrong time is just as bad as a wrong choice. These lay the groundwork for the next chapter, and were taken out of that chapter’s outline, where they didn’t fit. This was a chapter of discussion and context, the next are to be about designing a plan and putting it into action.

This sort of plot breakdown is like putting up a set of signposts that lead from the situation before the chapter or adventure to the situation after. It’s a breakdown of the events within the overall plot, giving a structure and sequence to the story.

In a work of fiction, you have more options than you usually have when constructing an adventure for an RPG. Flashbacks, Flash-forwards, Framing Dialogue, showing events that the protagonists could not possibly know at the time – you have a lot of literary devices at your disposal, and can pick and choose whatever works best for the story. They also have to be more self-contained; if there is a mystery, readers expect it to be solved, if there is a relationship in transition readers expect it to be resolved, etc.

RPGs tend to need to be more linear in structure, and also tend to avoid giving the players knowledge that their characters don’t have – and if not everything gets explained or revealed in the end, so be it. Maybe a subsequent adventure can impart the missing information.

Here’s a little secret: you can still employ all those literary devices in a game context, you just need to do a little more work to implement or justify them. I’ve used them all before, when I found it to be indispensible to the need to make the story accessible to the players, or to rouse the interest in what would otherwise be a slow beginning. Here’s another secret: I usually place a couple of unreliable NPCs in a campaign, that can show up when I need them to and be unavailable the rest of the time, who can deliver obscure information, unexpected prophecies, and visions. The “Oracle of Gottskragg” is just such a plot device – it permits me to deliver prophecies as and when I need them, and keep them absent the rest of the time.

So this type of writer’s block occurs when you have a broad plot but are having trouble breaking it down into discrete events and components, into – as I said a couple of paragraphs ago – structure and sequence.

Cure #1: What haven’t you done?

This solution is a bit of a chameleon, meaning different things at different times and under different circumstances.

Quite often, you just need to get started. “Blank Page Syndrome” can strike anywhere in a story – one reason why I don’t write using a word processor that breaks the text up into discrete “virtual pages”, I worry about such formatting after I’ve got the story written.

When it’s a “where do I begin” problem, I try to think of a way to start the adventure or story that I haven’t used before, then see if it fits the plotline. If it doesn’t fit, or I later swap it out for something more effective, I add it to a list of unused ideas that I keep handy for the next time I run into this problem. Your primary goal at the start of a story is to establish the situation, establish where the characters are and what they are doing, establish a starting point, but sometimes that is the worst possible place for you to start from a creativity perspective. This is especially the case when you know that subsequent events will make where the characters happen to be at the start of the story critical to the story – starting your writing in a strictly linear fashion in this circumstance is definitely counterproductive.

Cure #1 Variation
If you’ve already made a start in your breakdown, there are times when you reach an impasse, where you know something needs to happen but you haven’t got the faintest idea what that should be.

When that happens, it’s time to pause and take stock.

• What has happened that you haven’t explained?
• What is going to happen that can be explained in advance?
• Is there a context to events that hasn’t been revealed?
• Is there something that you can foreshadow – perhaps from a future complication or even targeting a future adventure?
• Is it realistic at this point in the story to serve up a piece of the everyday lives of the protagonists? Or, perhaps, of the antagonists?
• Is a relationship particularly important to the plot? – perhaps it’s time to check in on that relationship if you haven’t done so in a while.

That list isn’t comprehensive, it’s just a set of examples, but they all can be summed up in one: What haven’t you done that you need to do before the end of the story?

Make a checklist, if you can, then check off the items that are definitely dealt with by subsequent items on your plot breakdown. What’s left? If there are too many items, check off any of the remainder that you might be able to deal with in conjunction with future events. If you’re still looking at too many items – or if you’ve ticked off everything – try one of the other solutions in this section.

Cure #2: Go to context

If you’re really stuck, try going over old ground from a different perspective, and explaining what is going on, and why, to yourself. It might break the mental block, and if it really is redundant information, you can always delete it once you figure out where to go from here. It’s a simple trick, but it often works.

That simplicity, and the fact that this works as often as it does, are the reasons why this is my #2 cure that I try.

Cure #3: Go to a mood

Sometimes, the problem is that the mood that you’ve established at this point in the story is so at odds with the events that are to follow that your mind insists that there is something missing. And, in a way, it’s right, because either you revamp the most recent scene to create the correct mood, or you need to add another scene specifically to set the mood that you need – whether that be creepy, dramatic, affectionate, romantic, or whatever.

The reason why this particular cure is so high on the list is that if this is the problem, you can work through every other cure on offer and still be just as stuck, so it’s best to rule it out right away.

Even if this isn’t the problem, it can be useful to go to a different mood for a moment just to contrast with the prevailing tone. Some of the funniest or most rousing moments have come in otherwise dark moments – everything from “Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?” in Indiana Jones to “Get your hands off her you Bitch!” in Aliens.

Cure #4: Go to an explanation

If you have tried coming at things from the standpoint of logic (cure #1) and coming at the problem from a different perspective (cure #2) and ruled out a severe mismatch between events and mood, there are a number of cures that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.

The first is to explain something about the story that isn’t already explained, and that isn’t “what is happening and why”. It might be the personality of a character, it might be some piece of past history, it might be the significance of a costume or a location, it might be why someone who should logically be involved isn’t, or why someone who should know about events doesn’t. It might be the inner workings of a period weapon or piece of technology. The trick is that this explanation either has to be relevant, or has to be related to a reaction to something that is relevant, or has to be something that you can make relevant. While that rules out an awful lot of ground, it still leaves plenty of scope, and it boosts the chances of getting something useful out the other end.

You might not keep the results where you are right now in the plotline – if this gives you a connection to the story or the current circumstance within the story that enables you to see where you should actually go next, that’s fine. But don’t throw this work away, put it somewhere else in the plotline if you can – because you’ve already made sure that it’s a relevant key to understanding the events within the story.

Cure #5: Examine a personality

Sometimes, especially after a dramatic action sequence or ending on a cliffhanger, it is the best time to get inside the head of a key character within the story, or expand on their personality. It gives the reader/player a chance to come down from the adrenalin high and punctuates that action sequence; if you immediately throw to another action sequence, the lines between the two can blur. Sometimes, that’s what you want to happen, but a lot of the time, you’re far better off doing something introspective if you get stuck at such a point.

Television shows use this solution a lot. It’s probably described on TV Tropes somewhere, if you looked hard enough. You have some dramatic revelation or an action sequence, and the next scene shows two of the characters in earnest, quiet, conversation; or shows the antagonist in his natural setting; or shows two relevant characters living their lives or expressing their personalities. If the feature villain isn’t the recurring antagonist, you might cut to a scene in which that recurring antagonist learns of what is going on and reacts to it, or just does something villainous, or simply does something to show off his personality or circumstances – just to remind the audience that he exists, if for no other reason.

It’s done so often that it’s something of a cliché, but the reason it’s a cliche is that it works. And if it’s something that you want to include anyway, this is a great time to go to it, taking advantage of the punctuation effect.

The roleplaying equivalent is to do something with another of the PCs, but that doesn’t limit your options – because it suited the story and the character at the time, I once had a PC deduce almost the entire backstory of a villain at the appropriate time (which just happened to be at this particular time). Or daydream about the recurring villain’s reaction. Or simply show that life outside of the key events has continued.

Cure #6: Be predictable

Writer’s Block can occur under these circumstances because you’re trying too hard to do something different from your usual style or from what you (and everyone else) expects at this point. When you absolutely have to, be predictable, then proceed from there.

Variation on Cure #6: Be Predictable, then do the exact opposite
Something that sometimes works is to decide what you would normally expect to do at this point in the story, then deliberately don’t do it. This works by showing you why that particular style or technique is your predictable go-to in this situation. Once you have that reason, you can find a new way of “skinning the cat” knowing what you want to achieve at this particular point – or you might find that “the exact opposite” works in this particular case, adding a new string to your repertoiry bow.

Cure #7: Go to a twist

When the status quo has you stuck, it can sometimes be a great time to throw everything up in the air and let the pieces fall back down into a new shape – in other words, to introduce a twist. An ally opposes the protagonists unexpectedly, even if it is the wrong thing to do; all you have to do is expand their personality or backstory to explain why. An enemy comes to the protagonist’s aid – for their own reasons; all you have to do is work out how they intend to profit from this action.

When you’ve written yourself into a corner, apply a little high explosive. So long as you don’t fundamentally change anything at the end of the story, you have nothing to lose, and the potential to gain more rounded characters makes the attempt definitely worthwhile.

Cure #8: Go to a lie

Tell a lie about the current situation, or about one of the characters involved. Then decide who, in the game world, or in the story world, would have that opinion. Have them express that opinion in some way, or react accordingly. Or perhaps it’s a flawed theory on the part of a protagonist. Going to something you know to be untrue, but which may sound plausible – especially on limited information – can be a great way to transition from one scene to another. And sometimes, the lie will reveal some new nuance or context about the character doing the lying, or the character being lied about, or about the circumstances or event.

I do this sparingly, especially in an RPG, because it has the potential to really complicate a plotline. But sometimes, it can lead you to a plotting solution to an otherwise impassable boundary.

Cure #9: Identify and attack assumptions

If you reach the point where this is the only solution left, you are obviously getting desperate – and that’s not a good place to be. It’s time to try and pin down exactly why you’re blocked at this point. Perhaps events have forced a character to stray too far from their normal personality, and you need to get back in touch with that normal persona (or have someone call attention to that). Or perhaps your intended events and/or solution rest on an assumption that you’re having trouble swallowing. Or perhaps your protagonists have stumbled down a blind alley and can’t find their way out – or even your antagonist.

You might be assuming that the motives you have assigned someone for acting the way they have, or the way they are about to act, are the real motives. You might be assuming that a character is exactly who or what they appear to be. You might be assuming that physics works a particular way, or that a particular metaphor or analogy is the best way of explaining the way something works or the way something has happened. Identify as many of the assumptions you have made as possible, then – for each – ask yourself “what if that is not true?”

This is a great way to come up with clever plot twists relating to character objectives of the sort that makes the “Die Hard” movies so interesting – what the villains seem to want and what they really want can be two separate things. If you’ve written the first half with the notion that what they seem to want is their real objective, then the deception should be pretty convincing – it fooled you, didn’t it? There may be times where you have to go back and tweak what you have already written to get it to accommodate the new perspective, though, and when you are publishing in a serialized format, or playing an RPG, that’s not always possible.

If you run out of your personal assumptions, try attacking the assumptions of the protagonists (or, in an RPG, those of the players). Once again, this has happened on the various seasons of “24” that it has become a cliché, but when the original first aired, they were jaw-dropping plot twists.

Once you have run through all the protagonist assumptions that you can make, turn your attention to the implications and consequences, and attack those. Is that really how group “X” will react? This can lead you to identify a hole that you can fill (breaking through the writer’s block in the process), or it can cause you to reevaluate what you have already plotted, in such a way that you can bypass the block.

Cure #10: Research

When I get really desperate, I try to pick the primary plot elements that I have decided on and do some research on them. It might be how a particular piece of tech works, or who invented it, or how a physical law works, or what its like on a fishing trawler, or what a fishing trawler actually looks like, or the actual layout of a Boeing 747, or any of a thousand other things. Researching a relevant subject can sometimes throw up an insight that you can insert to get you past the block.

Above All

Never, Ever, simply sit and wait for inspiration to strike. It hardly ever does in these situations, and even more rarely happens on cue. You are far better off doing something else; a solution may come to you while you sleep, or in the shower, or in a chance remark.

When you sit and wait for inspiration, what you are really doing is waiting for your intuition to solve a problem that has proven too difficult for your entire rational mind to solve – especially if you have tried these cures for the writer’s block that has you bamboozled and come up empty. What makes you think your intuition is up to the job?

Specific-Scene Problems

This type of writer’s block occurs when you have all the pieces but aren’t sure of the right order in which to string them. Or perhaps that should read “the best order”, there are often no right or wrong answers in this respect.

Unfortunately, there is also no universal cure to this problem, only some sage advice (Nevertheless, I have outlined a procedure to provide a guideline, and called it a cure).

Nor am I going to spend a lot of space giving further description of the problem, or an example, because I’ve already done that in the sidebar to the example offered for the previous section.

Cure #1: Is It a higher-level problem?

Before embarking on any more comprehensive effort on this problem, try assuming that the reason you are having problems is that something is missing from your outline, and apply the many cures to that problem outlined in the previous section. Look, in particular, for scenes in which you have been too general or have several scenes lumped into a single entry; break these up and you may find the solution you’re seeking by intercutting between two different broad scenes.

Cure #2: Map the action

This is the one and only real cure offered to this problem, and it’s more of a process than it is a quick and simple solution.

Step One: Set Your Priorities
Your primary goal must always be clear communication. Artistic touches that detract from this clarity must always be subjected to a simply cost-benefit solution. In particular, any deviation from the most straightforward sequencing of events is, by definition, less clear to the reader/player than that straightforward linearity of plot, and must have a substantial payoff in meaning and richness of story to justify itself. It isn’t enough for it to create a potential benefit, the means of capitalizing on that potential must be obvious and explicitly defined in order to justify that deviation.

In particular, this gives a tool for solving the sub-problem of a scene that tries to do too much. When layering complications into the structure, starting with the most linear model possible and applying your ‘artistic re-sequencings’ one at a time in order of priority can reveal the complication that is ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.

So the first step is to decide what is most important to the overall story – after ‘clarity’, which is always number one. You don’t have to write these down (though that can be helpful), just bear them in mind. Once that is done, it’s time to construct that ‘most straightforward sequencing of events’, so we’ll start doing that in step 2.

Step 2: Find the cause for each effect
Every action or decision made by the characters in the plot is an effect, they all have some cause. Some of those causes may be implicit in the personality of the character or the backstory that precedes the current narrative, but they all have a cause of some sort.

In some form of tabular document – a sheet of paper with two columns, a spreadsheet, whatever – list the effects on the right-hand side and the events of the plot on the left-hand side. Then number them. One cause may have multiple effects, but each effect has just a single cause in the context of circumstances at the time that the cause has its impact on the plot. If you find yourself wanting to link two causes to the one effect, it’s a sign that you have confused that context for a cause, and that one of those two causes needs a separate effect that precedes the other and shapes the circumstances.

This actually brings to mind some of the problems that robotics researchers have had in creating robots to mimic simple human activities; what may initially seem to be a single, simple action (“bring me the red hat”), when you break it down into single discrete steps understandable by a machine turns out to involve dozens or hundreds of smaller actions, each of which can be inordinately difficult to achieve. Thankfully, you won’t have to break events down to that level of detail, but not breaking them down far enough can confuse the reader/player when a narrative is executed, and the writer in the course of that execution.

Every effect has one cause and one cause only. Break up your compounding complications until you achieve this level of simplicity.

This alone might be enough to solve the problem if the real problem was that your plot was so complicated that you were confusing yourself; but, assuming that this isn’t enough, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Step 3: Tear up any railroad tracks
Every decision implies an alternative choice, a road not taken. Where the plotting has broken down might be a case where the choice you have the characters making is not as logical, from their point of view and what they know, as that alternative road. The illogic can be hidden from your conscious view until you reach the point of plotting the story, when it manifests as a mental block at that point of the story. Before the decision will make sense, you have to at least have the character examine the road not taken; and it may be necessary to insert a new cause-and-effect sequence that alters the background to that decision enough to rule out the more logical choice of action.

Similarly, an action can be sensible, but so totally out-of-character that the plotting completely breaks down. Characters don’t make out-of-character decisions unless they are forced into them by circumstances; and if your circumstances aren’t forcing the character to make that choice, if the situation isn’t sufficiently desperate, then you need to worsen the circumstances.

Improbable choices are railroad tracks that lead to the plot assuming the shape you want it to take regardless of what the characters might want. In an RPG, these are intensely frowned apon, with good reason – but that’s a whole separate discussion. Suffice it to say that you can lead a PC to a decision point, but can’t make it choose the action you want. They are somewhat more tolerable in other forms of literature, but still to be avoided as the struggle to decide is the human drama that readers/viewers will identify with. Choices are what define a character to the reader/viewer, and every choice has to make sense in terms of both logic and personality, because the readers/viewers will assume that it does.

This is usually the problem that some writers are encountering when they say “their characters are refusing to cooperate.” The plot requires one choice, but the established personalities and internal logic mandate another. You can either abandon the plot (and perhaps end up writing yourself into a corner), or you can insert circumstances to make the plot-required choice the correct one – and then make the difficulty of that choice explicit in a scene.

Step 4: Link other effects & consequences to the single cause
No cause has just one effect. Even with the smallest plot development, there will always at least two characters affected – the character making the choice and the character forcing him or her to have a choice to make. There may well be more, if the event is a big one. Now is an opportune moment to check each of your causes and ask yourself if anyone else would logically be affected in some way. Sure, this can complicate your plot even more – but it makes it more robust and believable, binding the narrative environment to the events.

Step 5: Prioritize subtexts
Unless your story is to be as dry and un-engaging as a police report (“Just the facts, ma’am”) it will have subtexts. There will be human (and/or non-human) stories and emotions overlaid over the facts. You can’t focus on everyone’s reaction to an event at the same time, can’t have the reader identify with everyone at once. That means that you will have to prioritize which ones you concentrate on, usually choosing the strongest ones for the emotional impact, but sometimes choosing another because it can be encapsulated in the next cause-effect sequence that matters to the plot. Then have the characters at the heart of the chosen subtext observe the others, and react to them.

An excellent example of this is the impatience and frustration of the clan-chief in the earlier example. I could have focused on that, but instead I simply mentioned it and then focused on the debate between the Drow Ambassador and the leader of the Elves, knowing full well that after many, many pages of dialogue between the two, the readers would empathize with the clan-chief while still being interested in what the two were saying. So the highest priority was clarity – delivered by focusing on the discussion, which will become important, as suggested in my notes on the scene (also presented above); and the second priority was the clan-chief’s emotional state; and the third priority was the implied descriptions of aspects of the societies of the three characters. Everyone else involved in the chapter was left as virtually a cipher, with very little expressed personality.

A break of some sort in the narrative is necessary whenever you want to change this order of priority. It might be that what you are viewing as one chapter should be two, or a simple scene break might do the job, or you may be able to manage a seamless transition by switching point-of-view to somewhere else briefly.

Another way of phrasing this step is to decide what, in addition to the plot itself, you need to communicate to the reader/player/audience.

Step 6: Link causes
Next, connect each effect to the events that result. In other words, having drawn or indicated a lot of connections from the left column to the right, now it’s time to connect the right-hand-side with the left.

Each cause group forms a subplot within the chapter.

If your organization has been sloppy, these will be all over the place. If you have the causes in logical sequence, and have grouped the effects next to the causes, the result will be relatively orderly – at least in theory.

Step 7: Summarize each effect-to-cause relationship
I do this by numbering each of the right-to-left connections. Numbers may not repeat, they always increment – 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. The first cause gets the lowest numbers, and the direct effects of that cause get the following numbers. Since all the direct consequences can be considered to be essentially simultaneous, I will add an alphabetic code after the number – so I might get 1a, 2a, 3a, 4b, 5b, 6c or whatever. The “a” means that I can shuffle those three events in order within the narrative – it groups them together.

I then write these on index cards or lines of text, one to a number.

Most people think of the events in their stories as cause-then-effect. This breaks the scenes into effect-and-reaction, which is what we actually write when the time comes. By focusing on these connections, it makes the logical sequence of events within the narrative much clearer. This altered perspective can be enough to break the logjam, but if it’s not, don’t fret, we aren’t done yet.

Step 8: Arrange
Using select-and-drag (in a text document) or placing the index cards into a left-to-right tree formation in ascending numeric sequence, then tweaking elements within the alphabetic groups, you automatically achieve the arrangement of greatest clarity.

Step 9: Filter/rearrange
Using the priorities you have already assigned, and the principle of punctuating one tone or mood with another, you can then rearrange the sequence of events, layering one subtext after another. Save after each one (or renumber, if using index cards) so that you can go back to that arrangement if your changes make the plot unclear.

Once you have them in order, renumber them.

Step 9a: Rearrange again
It can often be helpful to re-arrange the cards/entries at this point, keeping the numbers unchanged, to reflect the order in which the protagonists become aware of each event. This is especially valuable in writing first-person stories and RPGs.

Step 10: Apply artistic touches
Finally, rearrange once again, building in any final artistic flourishes, the same as I did with the additional plot points in the example (described by note 6). You might want to resolve a subplot completely, even though it is out of strict chronological sequence, then step back in time to start following a chain of narrative or subplot that is, technically, concurrent with that resolved subplot. By ensuring that clarity is dominant, and that subtexts have been integrated in order of priority without having too many, before reaching this point, you automatically arrange the entries in your breakdown synopsis in the optimum order for telling your story, and you can immediately see when an artistic flourish is a step too far in terms of compromising that clarity.

Step 11:The final breakdown
The end result is the plot breakdown, in a step-by-step sequence – “write this, then this, then this, then this, then this, and finally (eventually) this”. If this has not solved your problem, and you have already ruled out a higher-order form of writer’s block, then it is practically certain that the problem is actually a lesser-order problem – the location may be wrong (or you haven’t been able to decide on one), for example, and that is why you are having trouble with the plotting.

This is the plot roadmap, reduced to a set of travel directions as straightforward as “East on Wilber Road to Montague, North on Montague to Dandelion, West on Dandelion to the highway, travel 120 miles, look for the farmhouse on the left.”

The joy of exploration

No plan, it is said, survives contact with the enemy. The writer’s equivalent might be “no plot breakdown survives the actual writing”. Don’t be surprised to find yourself tweaking this order of events even further in the course of the actual writing. A single plot point might take a page of content, or three lines – if the latter, you might not want it to exist in isolation, and it is surely worth considering moving it and wrapping up a subplot ‘early’.

It’s also, perhaps, worth noting that at least 9 times out of ten (if not 99 times out of 100), plot breakdowns and their structure can be done almost instinctively. Don’t waste time being meticulous and systematic like this unless its necessary because you’ve struck a problem.

When you DO strike trouble, you almost always have to retreat a step and incorporate something you’ve already done into your planning. Starting at the point of trouble will usually get you nowhere, because what you need is a path from what lies before the trouble point to what lies after it. Plot trouble always happens for a reason; investigate that reason or it may recur several times in each project.

Setting/Location Problems

Every event needs somewhere to happen. Deciding where something happens is a perennial problem for all writers. Let’s say that your plot breakdown requires a conversation – where does it happen? Why there? “When” is a sub-element within this question – a location at sunset is different from that same location in the early morning.

“Location,” in fact, embraces everything concerning the conditions, the environment, the lighting, the atmosphere, the sights, sounds, and smells, the context, the connotations, the timing and the incidental actions that are occupying the participants at the time of the event. It’s not just a city, it’s a place within that city at a particular time of day. It’s not just a home, it’s a particular room at a particular time, and the relationship between these specifics and the individuals.

Novice writers can take a full page or more describing a location. They are something that can be researched, and there is then a compulsion to put all of that research onto the page. The greater the skill, facility with language, and experience of the writer, the more they learn to compress this information into the minimum essentials; if you have to, in most writing disciplines, you can add additional details as the scene plays out, dressing up the dialogue with extra location details that keep it from being a static environment. This not only makes the location easier to picture for the reader, it helps with the dialogue.

Take the council chambers in which the scene with the Orc Clan-chief takes place. I have a firm idea of what they look like, but that isn’t all that essential to the story, so I haven’t bothered describing them. If I were to polish the Orcs & Elves series into a full novel, that wouldn’t fly. As a result, I would expect to spend text space conveying my vision for the council chamber, and would add to it throughout the scenes which take place there. This would not only make the reader’s vision of the place accord more strongly with my own, it would break up the monolithic blocks of dialogue which at the moment consume entire chapters. You can only say “X replied” or “Y said” so many times in a row without it becoming wearing.

Those writing scripts for plays, television, or movies, have a different obligation – they need to identify the location without superfluous description, and then describe everything that’s absolutely necessary to the plot and nothing more; this ensures that the set designers and lighting and props departments have the essential requirements and as much artistic and budgetary latitude as possible outside of those requirements.

I could write an entire article on location description techniques – maybe I will, one of these days† – but this section of this article is about making the decision about where the event is to occur, not about the language and techniques for describing a location once one has been selected.

†In fact, I did write such an article for Roleplaying Tips many years ago, but not only could I now do a better job of writing ir, but I would now have better material to include.

RPGs fall somewhere in between these two extremes; you have a full range of language tools to work with, but have to describe everything significant about a location with them, as succinctly as possible; you can’t drip the description out through the entire scene. In other words, they have the problems and requirements of both forms of descriptive writing.

Choosing A Location

Quite often, the location for an event is – to some extent, at least – already defined for you. You wouldn’t take a story that’s set entirely within a particular house and throw in a gratuitous hot dog stand as the location for a scene. If it’s absolutely necessary, you might have a hot dog vendor drive down the street and be seen through the window, though. If the protagonists of a scene are travelling from A to B, a scene involving those protagonists will occur either at A, at B, or at some point in between. If you’ve established that a character is in a particular location and can’t leave for some reason, any scene involving that character would take place at that location – unless there is a form of communications involved that permits the other participant to be elsewhere, in which case that can be the location.

Solution #1: Is there a logical location?
So some locations make more sense than others. This is the first thing I look for when choosing a location for a scene in a game or in a piece of text.

Solution #2: Is there a contributing location?
A location can enhance a mood or subtext by contributing to the appropriate tone and mood, or by offering a counterpoint that makes the dominant tone or mood more poignant by association or more intense by comparison. Can I think of a location that will achieve one or more of these effects without being clichéd? It’s like setting a scene in a horror story in a cemetery – something you have consider.

Solution #3: Is there an apt location?
Some locations have associations that can add a new overtone or subtext. A kitchen speaks of domesticity, security, and shelter. A bedroom hints at eroticism. A sporting field carries with the connotations of rivalry and competition. If nowhere is especially logical (or I have a short-list to choose from), and none (or several) choices can contribute to the scene equally well, this is the next quality that I look for.

Solution #4: Is there an interesting location?
Is there somewhere that I can make “visually” interesting? I once had a scene take place at a waterfall because I could have a thermal layer from the elemental plane of Cold (there was such a thing in this particular setting) that could freeze the water droplets part way down – it was a “snow-falls”, and the lake at its foot was so cold that it steamed – all of which was very interesting in a tropical location.

Another time, I needed an unusual rock formation in a desert environment. I did some trawling on the internet and found some pictures of a bird’s feather under a microscope, then described that. It worked well.

Solution #5: Is there a location that enables me to kill two birds with one narrative ‘stone’?
There might not be anything occurring at the location during this scene – but is there a subsequent scene at the same location (wherever it happens to be) or that can be set at that location which can be enhanced by the choice of location? In some ways, writing can be like a chess game, getting your pieces into place early can pay big dividends later on.

The problem of choice

The more choices you have, the less these guidelines help. Two antagonists snarling threats at each other? Where does that happen? It could be anywhere. A cheap-ass film crew fakes a zombie invasion because its cheaper to film the real police, fire crews, etc, than it is to do it on sets, with actors, lighting, etc? Could happen in just about any city or small town, anywhere in the world. A greedy mogul is gloating over his last business deal when he gets some bad news by mobile phone? Could happen anywhere, though perhaps on board some personal transport is one of the most likely options – right after his home base. A character receives an unwelcome phone call? Again, could be just about anywhere – the supermarket, a coffee shop, a butcher, a train, a bus, a living room.

If you have too many choices, you can find it so hard to pick one that your conscious mind can’t think of any – believe it or not. And, if there’s no tonal context to be conveyed in order to shape your decision and provide a spark of inspiration, where do you start? When I’m really, really, stuck, there are five go-to solutions that I consider.

Solution #6: Common ground for the participants
Is there some location that can be considered home ground or common ground for all the participants in the scene? This can sometimes be enough to narrow the options to a manageable number. Next, I look at whether or not there is a sub-location that hasn’t been used for a while (if ever) within that overall choice; and muse about whether or not the character whose circumstances least permits them to move around has a preferred location where they are more likely to be found; and other such options. Once you have the choices down to a manageable number, all the tools described in solutions 1 to 4 are at your disposal to narrow the choices still further until you get a result.

This solution is at its best when we’re talking about a scene between allied characters.

Solution #7: A Position Of Strength
Does one of the participants have a location which will reflect their being in a position of strength, power, authority, or dominance? If, for example, one of the participants is a King, the throne room has to be choice given serious consideration. If one is the President of the United States, the Oval Office has to be considered. If a scientist, their lab.

This solution is most useful when one of the characters is a neutral non-protagonist; it is their position of strength or authority that should be chosen. But it can also be used to illustrate the power and strength of the antagonist when dealing with a rival or a pawn.

Solution #8: Home turf for the weaker participant
Of course, if you want your antagonist to really show his confidence, you can have him show up on the home turf of the weaker participant of the scene – and still exert his authority. But if your villain is so tough and so self-confident that they are unconcerned about conceding the home ground advantage, be very careful about wimping them out later in the plot; by doing this, you are making a promise to your readers / players, and you have to keep that promise. The antagonist arrogant enough to do this has to be scary.

Solution #9: Emotional Translations
If there is no mood or tone to be reinforced in the scene in question by the location, try considering the tones of the scenes to either side of it. The last thing you want is for any two consecutive locations of these three to feel like their are the same place dressed differently. Sometimes, the lack of an enforced tone can be a gift that you should take full advantage of.

Solution #10: Iconic Locations
In every genre, every style of story, there are certain locations that are iconic. They are always considered iconic for a reason; if more specific requirements let me down, I always look to those iconic locations as a last resort. This could be higher on the list of solutions, but I always try to be original, and to serve the needs of the story ahead of the opportunities of the genre.

A final word on locations

The right location enhances your writing. A poor choice can inhibit or even detract from your writing. In between there are a lot of choices that are nothing options – they neither add nor subtract. Avoid the poor choices like the plague, covet the great choices when they come to you, and settle for a neutral choice only when you have to.

Next Time: In part 3, I tackle the remaining Primary types of writer’s block: Action, Persona, Dialogue, and Narrative..

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…

I’m trying a slight change in layout this week, formatting the text more closely to that of a book than the usual web format. Let me know if you think it’s an improvement. If too many people dislike it, or find it hard to read, I’ll reformat it.

PS: Sorry if the icon for this part is unclear – it looked fine when I created it, I assure you! It’s meant to be a table with people on all sides, and the person at the end of the table singled out with a reddish color. Unfortunately, by the time I shrank the picture down to a reasonable size, it wasn’t recognizable as anything in particular. Oh, well…

*************************************************************************************************

Clan Wars XIII: The Minotaur Revolution

Even as the Minotaurs struck in the council chamber, other attacks were being launched throughout the city. Every Orcish warrior, administrator, priest, farmer, or worker had at least one Minotaur in their household to do the manual labor. More attacks took place throughout the besieging army, all triggered by the Minotaur deity revealing himself: the signal for a slave uprising.
   Other Minotaurs raised signal flags. As slaves to the Orcs, they had a full understanding of the Orcish signal flag system used to coordinate attacks between units at a distance on the battlefield; in fact, it was usually their task to raise such flag signals, freeing Orcish warriors from such menial tasks when there was fighting to be done. Unknown to the Orcs, the Minotaurs had been exchanging members of their populations for those in service to other tribes, communicating with each other, and organizing; one young minotaur looked much the same as another, to the Orcs, who had forgotten that they successfully liberated themselves from the grip of the Ogres when in an even more primitive state than that of the Minotaurs, and that the Minotaurs could do the same thing to them.
   Throughout the Orclands, signals to launch the revolution spread from one tribe to another. Weapons secreted against this day were exhumed from hiding places, and trusted servants struck at their masters.
   The Minotaurs were not trained fighters, but they were cunning, strong, and motivated enemies, who took full benefit from the advantage of surprise. They were outnumbered, and in many cases, opposed by battle-hardened and experienced combatants. No more than one attempt in ten succeeded in killing the targets against which they were launched, and eight times out of ten, the Minotaur was killed – but not without inflicting damage. One-tenth of the Minotaur population escaped into the countryside, heading for a rendezvous point in the mountains that had been chosen and scouted many years earlier.

Far to the Sunrise, where night had fallen hours earlier, the uprising had an easier time of it, and the Bleeding Swords who had invaded the tribal lands of the Red Eye clan were decimated; sleeping foes offer little resistance. The guerilla raids of the Army Of The Skull were a more nocturnal activity, and slave numbers were low; they had migrated to the Sunset with the rest of the Orcish clan. Sensing that their moment had come, the Army Of The Skull were able to take advantage of the confusion and reclaim their home ranges after a pitched battle. To the Sunset, where it was still early afternoon, and the Orcs were active and alert, very few of the attacks were successful, and there were few Minotaur survivors. Before long, forward observers and scouts from the Bleeding Swords began to send back reports that the Bugbears had retreated in confusion to the fortified positions previously occupied by the Bleeding Swords clan – the same ones that had been previously overrun and captured by the Army Of The One Eye, only to be overrun by the Bugbears en route to the climactic confrontation. The new status quo in the region had yet to stabilize.

The most determined attacks occurred in the command pavilions of the various armies, for these were the places where there were more servants with access to weapons, and the greatest determination to succeed; if a command structure survived intact, the other Minotaur revolutionaries could not hope to escape and reach the rendezvous, and the sanctuary promised by their God. Only by sewing sufficient confusion by the deaths of those in command would the local slave populations escape. Most of these were successful to a somewhat greater extent.

In the Council Chamber of the Mailed Fists, the Huyundaltha reacted immediately to the attack, and were able to protect most of the Hierarchy of the clan. The majority of the revolting servants were killed before they could even attempt a strike. In the city beyond the council chamber, they met with greater success; but beyond the fortified walls, the Army Of The Crescent Moon had gone wild at the death of Gruumsh and were busy mounting a suicide charge on the walls when their Minotaur servants began slaughtering their women and cubs. They turned on this new enemy – one that could yield, and feel pain, unlike the impersonal city walls – with gusto and fury.
   Chief Agronak immediately instructed the Clan Warblade, Goral, to take several squads of Orc Soldiers to rescue the families of the councilors and return with them to the council chambers. He then resumed the council of war.
   “Now is much made clear,” commented the Drow Ambassador to Agronak. “The Armies knew where to mass against our forces because their Minotaurs got the information from other Minotaurs within your walls. Whoever was behind this clearly had one basic plan: they impersonated the deity most beloved of each population and lure them into a confrontation that achieved little but great death. But it was not merely the Orcs who were deceived; the Bugbears were likewise manipulated. And the whole point was to pressure you into preparing to cast forbidden rituals at the advice of a false Baghtru.
   “It is uncertain whether or not the purpose was a distraction to permit this uprising, but while I have no knowledge of the characteristics – or even name – of the Minotaur Deity, it seems too far removed from the nature of the worshippers for such a complex and convoluted scheme to originate in that quarter. Once again, the only product is death on a vast scale. The rituals are still somehow ‘casting themselves’. In light of these discoveries, I am not certain that we can delay investigating that to determine if that was indeed the purpose behind this bloody charade.”
   “The citizens are in riot. Progress will be slowed, and I wonder if that was not part of the plan behind events,” replied the leader of the Huyundaltha contingent. The Orcs are misled to provoke the rituals; the Bugbears to disrupt any military interference from the outside; and the Minotaur uprising to prevent interference from within.”
   “If your thought is truth – and I see little room for uncertainty when events are described so succinctly – then what must be done, above all else, is that somehow we must interfere with those rituals.”
   “The question is, how can we do that?”
   All eyes swept the room, seeking any glimmer of a notion that might lead to a solution, but the question remained unanswered.

Clan Wars XIV: Ritual Behavior

“If we can wake the Shaman from his stupor, he may be able to give an answer,” said Agronak. “There must be one; no-one would go to so much trouble to prevent interference if we did not have the capacity to get in the way, somehow. And I find it suspicious that the Shamans were all frozen in place like that.”
   “There is one possible way, Chief Agronak, but it is risky. Although we have strayed from his teachings, and exiled ourselves as punishment, Corallen may hear our call and intercede, if we beg him to do so.”
   “I will not beg an Elvish God,” replied the Chief. “I trust you but a little and him not at all.”
   “Then perhaps my mistress?” suggested Tathzyr. “I have not forsaken her, and she may perceive involving herself as advantageous.”
   “I trust her even less than the Elf-God, for that very reason. If there must be another deity brought into this, it is the province of Luthic the Allmother, who Baghtru told us was to blame for these troubles. And you have not convinced me that he was false to us. I agree that the pattern looks suspicious, but it will take more than suspicion for my faith to waver. We must invoke Luthic, and settle that question one way or another. If she is our enemy, she will either reveal that or heal the Shaman who speaks with Her Voice. If she is not, she will heal him. Either way, we will have the guidance of the Gods restored to us.”
   As Agronak spoke, the first of the squads returned with several of the family members of the council members, including Goral’s own mate and daughter. Goral was approaching the end of his life, as was his mate; he had long been a loyal supporter of the Chief, and his family all knew him like a member of their own tribal family. Goral’s mate immediately spoke up, even though not officially privileged to do so, “Everything the All-mother does is for her family or to satisfy her own needs. She would not place her first-mate in danger, and all this does not make more cubs.”
   Another of the councilors immediately warned her to be silent or he would cut out her tongue, only to be waved to silence by the Clan-Chief. “As a maker of cubs, you are closer to the all-mother than any warrior. You are used to seeking her aid for minor cuts, scrapes and fevers, and other childhood ailments. Will you invoke her powers to heal the Shaman who sleeps with eyes open and cannot awake?”
   “I am not a Shaman’s Mate, so She may not answer me, but I will try if you wish. There is a weed that grows amongst the fields which, when crushed, burned, and then boiled, aids against sleepiness through her grace. If Her name is invoked, She may strengthen its effects.”
   “Go with these warriors for protection. Find some of this root and return as swiftly as your aged bones permit. I will have water readied for your return, and a bowl. Hurry, now.” With that, Agronak raised his hand before lowering it sheepishly. ” ‘Old habits die hard,’ as the Humans say. I was about to call for servants to make the preparations. I guess we will have to get used to doing things for ourselves.” Turning to one of the squad, he instructed the warrior to prepare boiling water and a bowl; the Warrior immediately protested that this was ‘slave’s work’ and refused.
   “I gave you an order as your clan chief, Muk-lutt. Obey or your head will decorate a pike before the council chambers.” With ill grace, the Warrior put down his sword and went in search of the kitchens.
   The chief then turned back to the council, and looked pointedly at the Ambassador and the leader of the Huyundaltha. “Explain to me again the difference between a ritual and a spell.”

“The terms and concept are human, Clan-Chief,” replied the Ambassador. “As I understand it, a spell is a quick and sudden power, for the most part, which can be used with little or no preparations. Its quick utility restricts the power that can be drawn apon. In terms of summoning, a spell has limited scope for numbers and the beings summoned are constrained to obey, and they abide in this world for only a brief time. A ritual is much slower, more elaborate, usually involves more casters than but one, has no effects save those intentionally incorporated into its crafting, and has a far greater capacity for power or range of effect. Each ritual must contain several specific components and building blocks, some of which may be inferred logically, some of which have been discovered by accident, and many of which remain undiscovered territory. A Ritual Summoning can bring forth greater numbers who may persist in this world for much longer. Weeks instead of minutes, Months instead of days, Years instead of weeks, and may have them appear much farther removed from the source of the summons.”
   “But they are still constrained to obey?”
   “Not necessarily. They are confined to a magical circle until released, and such release is usually only granted if a bargain is, or has already been, struck. You summon, you barter for assistance, and you either accept the offer and release the creature, or refuse it and send the summoned creature back.”
   “Elf, you claim that you sensed the power of these rituals and named them ‘Forbidden’ – why?”
   “I know even less than the Ambassador in some respects, but have been told that if a bargain is struck and the summoned released, the power of the ritual compels it to obey its promises – though it may do more or less in addition, as they will it. There are some rituals that summon beings who cannot be constrained to obey by any mortal means, and that is one reason for them being Forbidden; and there are other rituals that forego the enforcement for still greater persistence. Worst of all, some rituals summon not the creature to the caster, but the caster to the creature as supplicant; it is then the caster who must agree to the terms dictated by the subject, and if he does so, the subject may travel freely between his or her realm, wherever it may be, and this one. Whatever the purpose of casting such a ritual was, it cannot be controlled, for it is the creature being ‘summoned’ who sets the terms, and who can often overpower the resistance of the caster by will alone. The caster will agree to anything, no matter what his original intent.
   “Why this particular ritual is Forbidden, I do not know. We merely sensed a ‘wrongness’ within the city walls, and the sensation of gathering ritual Magics, similar to the weaving of spells that my people use to reshape the world around us, the better to accommodate our companionship within it.”
   “So, in the end, you thrust you and your party into the heart of this affair totally on instinct. I was not aware that our estranged kindred had become so sensitive to the unseen forces; if we survive the events to come, I am sure that information will be of great value to my Mistress.”
   “It is a very Orcish response, and one that I did not think your people capable of. We do almost everything by instinct, tempering our instincts with understanding and experience. We had thought your kind too far removed from the reality of the world to feel the calling of blood, or sun-on-the-face, or the thrill of the contest. I am delighted to learn this, and for the first time, I feel sure that we are allies in these events rather than merely being curious. My council has wondered for some time if there might be some common ground between our peoples, and now we find it to be truth.”
   “Very enlightened of you, Agronak,” replied the Elf drily, with an open smile, a remark that greatly puzzled the Clan-Chief who did not understand humor at all, and who – taking the comment at face value – replied, “Yes, it is.” The Ambassador immediately collapsed into gales of laughter, a response that was even more puzzling to the Orcs.
   “Tathzyr has a strange way of thinking sometimes,” added the Clan-Chief, “but he is worth having around the rest of the time. So, you didn’t know what was wrong, just that something was wrong. Instead of running from the fire, you thrust yourself into its heart. Why?”
   “We have experienced a very… personal disgrace, of which I will not speak. We seek to redeem ourselves in our own eyes. That quest is what led us to your walls to sense the wrongness within, and what compelled us to offer what aid we could to stop it. This may be the redemption we seek, or merely the first step of a long journey. You will have noticed that we have not given our names; we feel that we are no longer entitled to those we formerly possessed. I am simply First, my second is merely Second, and so on, until we can honestly judge ourselves worthy of the names to which we once answered. I will not speak further on this matter.”
   This piqued the curiosity of the Ambassador enough to penetrate his laughter, and he commented, “You Elves have always been too judgmental, holding everyone to an impossible standard whether they wanted to adhere to it or not. I might have known that sooner or later that stiff-necked attitude would turn inward and some of you be found wanting. I’m sure that there is a story there that I would find interesting, but that would bore our hosts to the point open yawning, and be irrelevant to the current situation. So, getting back to more important subjects, it has been two hand’s-breadths of the sun since the rituals began ‘casting themselves’. How much longer will it be before they conclude?”
   “Elvish Spellweaving can take decades or centuries, but few have the patience for such attention to detail, and only our kind have the ability to begin a weaving and be relieved by another, enabling such continuous efforts over such spans of time. Human rituals can last as long as a day, but even that is of great difficulty, and most take a single hands-breadth of the sun, perhaps two. Anything between those two extremes is possible. I don’t know who or how is behind these rituals, but they have power enough to counterfeight several deities; how long can such continue to concentrate? It will take as long as it takes.”
   “That makes no sense, First,” replied Agronak. “You have said yourself that these troubles are done to prevent interference, and that this means that if we knew how to do it, we could interfere – something I intend to do, with great violence, when I can. But these troubles would not have distracted us forever, or even for very long. I am sure that many of our former servants have fled, only to be slaughtered by the ravening hordes of Red Eyes beyond the walls. Many more will be in hiding, waiting for nightfall, and their opportunity to slip away. Were it not for your actions, our subordinates would have found us dead here before much longer, and would now be engaged in a city-wide hunt for those responsible, but by the dawn, those who could be found would have been, and attention would return to the forbidden ritual. No, this distraction would have served only to prevent meddling this one night. Either there will be another distraction before the first light of day, or the ritual will be complete before that time.”
   “I can find no fault with your reasoning, Clan-Chief Agronak.”
   “Reasoning, bah! It is is tactics,” answered the Orc, who was being regarded with astonishment by both Ambassador Tathzyr and First, neither of whom had expected the Clan-Chief to have such insight.
   “Remind me never to underestimate you, Agronak,” replied the Ambassador.
   “No,” the Orc replied. This time it was First who collapsed in laughter, as the council again looked perplexed.

Clan Wars XIV: The Oracle Of Gottskragg

The mate of Goral had returned with a few of the precious plants. Her escort was wounded and proud of his success in fighting off a pair of Berserk Red-Eye warriors. Since the Red-eyes were ferocious in battle at the best of times, twice as capable on the battlefield as most ordinary Orcs, he had overcome an enemy strength of roughly four-to-one, and had every right to be satisfied with his success. She began to busy herself with preparing the root, crushing and brewing it.
   While the council of war waited, Agronak’s patience began to wear thin. He itched for action; this sitting around talking all day while things went on around him that he did not understand chafed, and the humiliation at the way he and his people had been used burned. The only thing that restrained his hand was the knowledge that the hasty stroke often goes astray, and no misstep could be permitted with the lives and existence of his clan at stake. But that did not mean that he had to like it, and he grew increasingly short-tempered as Ambassador Tathzyr and First continued to recount and reexamine everything they knew or surmised about the situation, dredging for fresh insights that might prove useful.
   “Has it come to your notice how fragile the plan is?” asked First.
   “What do you mean?” replied the Ambassador.
   “To succeed in persuading the Mailed Fists to his desires, our unknown enemy had to pose a credible threat to the city. Hence the “alliance” between the Red Eye and Bleeding Sword clans. But, at the same time, he could not afford their campaign to succeed; if the city were destroyed, his ritual would never be cast. Hence, the Bleeding Swords had to betray the alliance. But he could not afford for the Mailed Fists to feel relief or to lift the siege, or there would, once again, be no reason to complete preparations for the ritual, and he could not permit them to interfere with his designs, either, as we have already said; he needed a new threat to maintain the pressure and imminent danger to the city. Hence, the Bugbears were united behind what appeared to be their Deity, and what was no doubt intended simply as an alliance of convenience by the Bleeding Swords became a full invasion thrusting toward the city walls. But they could not be permitted to succeed, either, so he first feigns the destruction of Gruumsh to drive the remaining Red Eyes at the city gates berserk, both maintaining the danger to the city while ensuring their ineffectiveness, and then reveals himself to be an imposter to the Bugbears to dissipate the threat when it grew too risky. But that required a new threat to keep the city off-balance and acting as he wished, and hence the Minotaur Revolt, which would have to have been planned and prepared from a time long before any of this began, so far as the Orcs were aware. So many finely-balanced elements, so carefully orchestrated, so many things that could have gone wrong – and any mistake would have unraveled the whole plot. Surely such finesse in planning is beyond anything mortal? Even the plots of your mistress against my people do not approach such sophistication.”
   “You elves, always seeing deep planning and plotting behind every bush. Such a plan would not only be improbable to the point of impossibility, it would be doomed to failure. My Queen would reject out of hand any plan that relied on so many things transpiring as she desired. Not only would the beliefs and social attitudes of all the participants have to be known to an impossible degree, but the personalities of key individuals have to be anticipated in advance, as would the way they would react to situations with which none of them had ever been confronted before. While I agree with your superficial assessment of the strategy and the reasons for its shape, I disagree with your conclusion. No, you neglect the power of opportunism.
   “Assuming that the enemies objectives remain unchanging, he simple sets each wave of events in motion, observes the situation as it develops, and looks for an opportunity to interfere with the events he has set in motion whenever they go too far. The initial alliance between the wild clans and the subsequent betrayal are all that is needed to be planned in advance, and that is not so much a plan as it is a strategy. The Mailed Fists call in the Bugbears; the enemy takes advantage of that to maintain the imminent threat the city. The enslaved Minotaurs have no doubt been spinning legends and taking advantage of such opportunities to win their freedom for centuries, hence the intelligence leaked to the Red Eyes of the counterstrike plans by the Mailed Fists; again, the enemy simply takes advantage of the opportunity to disrupt interference. As usual, your kind reads too much significance, too much intent, into events. Opportunism harnessed to the needs of simple objectives is sufficient explanation, and since each move is based apon the situation as it stands at the moment of decision, there is no danger of misstep. If you do not assume a plan of impossible sophistication, you have no need to attribute such supernormal planning abilities to the enemy.”
   “How much longer must we wait? I need to do something, anything, to advantage our situation!” interjected Agronak. “You won’t even let me restore order to the streets, in case the enemy learns that the Clan Council has survived.”
   “I know it is difficult, Clan-Chief, but the wrong move could be disastrous, or even the right move, chosen by chance, at the wrong time. Your troops are adequate to the task,” replied the Ambassador.
   “The right move at the wrong time….” repeated First thoughtfully. “Why now? Why not last week, or last winter, or ten years ago – or ten years from now, for that matter?”
   “Everything that happens has to happen sometime. Now is as good a time as any. Perhaps it happens now simply because now is when the enemy first thought of his plan to use circumstances to his own ends.”
   “Perhaps, but do not reject the question because one possible answer makes it irrelevant. Assume that there is some significance to the timing, some trigger to these events – identifying it could be the key to unlocking all this, and giving or impatient friends a target upon which to vent their frustrations,” answered the leader of the Huyundaltha band.
   “Bring forth your Keeper Of Memory, Clan-Chief,” replied the Ambassador. “Let us consider what your Clan have been doing lately, and if any act has unwittingly set these events in motion.”
   Impatiently, the Clan-Chief waved the Keeper of memory, who had been engaged in writing down the conversation (even if he didn’t understand it all), forward to face the council.

“How much more time must we waste on this?” demanded Agronak, waving the Keeper Of Memory to silence in the middle of a recitation of the yield of a day’s harvest two years earlier. “Zagurk is not simply the rememberer, he is a member of the Clan council; if he had thought anything important he would have told it at once!”
   “Not if he did not know it to begin with, my Chief,” interrupted a new and somewhat shaky voice.
   “Kudja! Luthic be blessed, you awaken at last!”
   “Not completely, Agronak. Luthic’s intervention has blessed me with a brief respite – but perhaps one long enough to give the council the answers they seek.”
   “Mate of Goral, if Kudja’s words are true, you have earned the right to a name of your own with your service this day! Think upon your choice. Now, Kudja, what did you mean? It is the rule that the Keeper Of Memory be told everything that happens.”
   “It was the business of the Priests, My Clan-Chief. When we understood its meaning, we would have told the Keeper.
   “Some ten seasons past, The Council began sending explorers out to discover the shape of the lands in the places we had not trodden after the summer harvests were complete. Before the blanket of Ishlee [Goddess Of Cold, Snow, and Ice] last covered the mountains, one expedition returned with news of the discovery of a temple to an unknown god, covered with writing that moved, only to pause occasionally in place. They did not know the words, but they copied as much of what they saw as they could before it began to move again. None of them knew letters, though they knew what they were, so there were some inaccuracies, and much of what they copied were not our words. When they returned, the priests instructed the explorers not to reveal what they had found until we figured out the God to which the temple was dedicated, whether we should listen to what the words said to us, and what we should do about it. We have been trying to translate the words since then.”
   “Why did you not tell the Council of this before?”
   “The words are strange and hard to make sense of, and I am not a Keeper Of Memory; I needed to find the words that we had translated to see if they really did say what I thought they did. I retrieved them while preparing the rituals as instructed, and was going to return with them when I reported back to the council – but that was when the waking-sleep came apon me, and all the other priests.
   “Here is the text that I thought I remembered:

       When the Oracle Of Gottskragg is found,
       When Gods commit Heresies,
       The Hidden Dragon will awaken.

       When the Gods divide,
       And the peoples go to war,
       The Hidden Dragon will threaten.

       When the sundered unite,
       And the speakers fall silent,
       The walls fall as the Light rises overhead.”

       When the Empire of Gold threatens,
       And enemies become allies and allies estranged,
       Will the sundered Kindred threaten the Powers Of Destruction.”

   “That’s obscure to the point of invisibility,” acknowledged Ambassador Tathzyr. “I can see why you would want to review the exact text before mentioning it. If your recollection was wrong, you could waste a lot of time talking about something that had nothing to do with what was happening.”
   “It’s gibberish, a waste of time,” roared Agronak in frustration. “Give me an enemy to hit!”
   “Not complete gibberish, Clan-Chief. ‘Gottskragg’ is the name given to a mountain peak by a group of Dwarves who set out to explore it a few hundred years ago and lost track of all time for five years. Elves who passed nearby have reported having strange, inexplicable visions. And if this is a prophecy, which it certainly sounds like, that would make the ‘unknown temple’ an Oracle – so I think we can surmise that the Dwarves were compelled to construct it against their will, and the temple becomes ‘The Oracle Of Gottskragg’. Your explorers ‘found’ it. The Humans have been having trouble with their Gods committing Heresies for a decade or so, according to what their traders have revealed, tearing much of their society apart in the process. Those are both signs that the ‘Hidden Dragon’ will awaken. The next verse talks about what it will do once it’s awake – ‘When the Gods divide’ certainly sounds like Gruumsh, Ilneval, and Baghtru setting the Clans against each other in their names, and your peoples did ‘go to war’ as a result – signs that the ‘Hidden Dragon’, now awakened, will threaten someone or something. I don’t think it’s too big a leap to name our hidden enemy ‘The Hidden Dragon’ under those circumstances, do you?” replied the Ambassador.
   “And what of the rest of it?” frowned the Clan-Chief, his head throbbing from the effort of thinking such foreign thoughts.
   “The sundered have united, Chief Agronak,” came the answer from First, indicating both himself and Tathzyr – while reserving the thought that if the Orcs were, in fact, the ‘Other’ as his people believed, they also fit the title of ‘Sundered’, making the line even more appropriate.
   “As Priests, our role is to Speak for the Gods,” added a drowsy Kudja.
   “You certainly fell silent – unless you talk in your sleep, Kudja,” added the Ambassador. “So those are the final signals that the third verse is about to be complete. ‘The Walls fall as the Light rises overhead’ – sometime before the first noon after these Elves got here, your defenses are going to fail, presumably knocked down by your enemy, the Hidden Dragon. A Dragon would certainly be capable of bringing down a city wall or two, and letting that horde out there loose in your city, which would certainly keep you far too busy to prevent the ritual being completed – and presumably leaving him victorious. And, since it’s the only time of day mentioned, Noon is when the ritual will be complete, or when it becomes too late to stop it.”
   “The last verse talks about why all this is happening, Chief Agronak,” explained First. “Someday, when an Empire of Gold – whoever or whatever that is – threatens someone, presumably your people since this whole prophecy is aimed at them, and when some alliance is broken and former enemies become allies, a coalition of Elves and Drow will threaten the Powers Of Destruction, whoever they are. They’re threatened by that, and more particularly by you’re knowing about it, so they have unleashed one of their number, or a powerful minion, to destroy your populace. They wouldn’t do that unless your people were also to be instrumental to the success of that alliance. Just to be on the safe side – you’re part of this particular alliance of ‘The Sundered’ – you should probably make sure that an Orc is part of any such alliance, presuming that we win this particular encounter. The prophecy seems to be on our side, but we Elves have a saying, ‘Prophecy helps those who help themselves’. If we want the whole thing to come true, we have to make sure that we both fulfill the conditions of the prophecy and win this fight with ‘The Hidden Dragon’.”
   “Opportunism. We have to make the circumstances yield the effect we want, and use the enemy’s own tactics against him. How can we do that?”
   Once again, there was no answer.

*************************************************************************************************

The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

I’m going to forego this while our attention is focussed on the Orcish side of the story, as it has no relevance to the narrative.

*************************************************************************************************

Next time: In Chapters 69-71, a desperate plan is formulated and set in motion…

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective.

Mysteries are hard to write. Ones for Roleplaying are even harder – or maybe that should be the other way around. There are a lot of unique challenges that have to solved in a mystery that simply aren’t there in other forms of writing – not if the mystery is to succeed.

I write a lot, both fiction and non-fiction. A large part of my non-fiction output are game rules and supplements for the various RPG campaigns that I run, while an equally-significant majority of the fiction consists of adventures to take place in those campaigns.

RPGs as a media format

A roleplaying campaign bears a lot of resemblance to writing for a TV show with an almost unlimited budget – but having to write 4-10 hours worth of material almost every week. In general, the author knows the major cast – the characters operated by the players – and has a free hand to introduce supporting characters and featured guests as necessary. The task is made both easier and harder by the fact that these characters are neither designed by, nor under the control of, the author – he has to anticipate what they might do under the circumstances that he has created and be ready with further story that follows on from the decisions that those characters make. The better the roleplayer, the more they operate from the perspective of what their character knows, what their character can do, what their character wants to do, how their character thinks, and so on. In other formats, the author has greater control over these character parameters, and hence over the actions of the characters.

So roleplaying scenarios are just another format, with its advantages and weaknesses, and the peculiarities of that format have to be taken into account when writing for a game.

Mixing Genres

There are as many different genres of roleplaying game as there are genres of fiction, from high adventure, pulp, fantasy, spies and secret agents, cartoons, Japanese anime, superhero, post-apocalyptic, war, science fiction – you name it, it’s there (it might not be popular, but that’s a whole different issue). And just as within the bounds of any given genre of fiction you can write a story with the style of another genre. So it is the case with roleplaying scenarios – you could have a fantasy setting in which one scenario is a spies & secret agents thriller, followed by a war drama, followed by a romance. The only constants are the fixed and established background, the existing supporting cast, and the main characters.

The rules for writing to most of these genres are fairly straightforward and translate well from one to another. You have to be clear and concise; you have to be plausible, and believable (which is not the same thing), and use language to distinguish one character from another; and so on. In some formats, you can cheat a little, leaving the picky little details up to the set designers or sound effects men or whatever; in prose and in RPG scenarios, it all pretty much happens in the heads of the participants – the reader, or the players, and that means that you have to get a little more specific. At the same time, you can’t waffle on for pages establishing the scene – you need just enough detail that the players/readers are aware of the significant attributes of the scene and then you get on with the action. “Don’t tell, Show”.

Star Trek was one of the first TV shows to realize that the same held true of the Science Fiction genre. If it’s a technology that is used every day, you don’t spend half a page of dialogue explaining it – you just use it. You only get into the specifics if it becomes vital to the plot.

Modern fiction of all forms has taken that lesson to heart. Compare the writings of any turn-of-the-century writer with those of a modern author, and it is the vanishing of reams of descriptive prose that will strike you most forcefully. As a result, there is more action and reaction per page in modern writing than there used to be.

The Rules Of Mysteries

But there is a glaring exception to a lot of these principles, and that is the mystery. While you still have to respect all the requirements of good fiction in general, the mystery story has ironclad conventions that must be respected or the mystery loses credibility and audience/participant satisfaction:

• You must have a limited number of suspects (no matter how large the pool of potential suspects might be at the beginning of the story); introducing an eleventh-hour “ringer” upsets people terribly.
• You should never hide evidence from everyone but the chief investigator – that’s why Sherlock Holmes had to have his Watson.
• You have to make the mystery transparent enough to solve, but not so transparent that the readers get there first – in other words, you have to avoid an anticlimax. That means that you have to conceal vital facts without concealing them – doing so by distracting the audience in some way.
• There has to actually be a guilty party – a mystery in which no-one committed the crime is exceptionally tricky (though it has been pulled off every now and then, either by revealing a case of misadventure and suspicious circumstance, or by showing the crime to be self-inflicted for whatever reason.
• And you have to play fair with the audience.

That last one is implicit in all the others, but it is so important that it bears repeating: You Have To Play Fair With The Audience. All the other conventions are, when you think about them, simply concrete manifestations of this one super-rule.

Science-Fiction shows the way

For a long time, it was thought that this rule made science fiction and mysteries impossible to combine. The detective would whip out gadget “X” at the end of the story and announce, “but as everyone knows, the [gadget] reveals instantly [whatever it is supposed to reveal], which clearly shows [character name] to be the killer.”

It took one of the legends of the Science Fiction field, Isaac Asimov, to prove that this was not the case – simply because this “solution” was in violation of that one super-rule. If a futuristic technology was important to the story, you had to establish what it could do up-front and early on in the story; it had to be as much a part of the background as the crime scene. Even so, the need to explain more things (a truism of science fiction) is always at odds with the need to conceal things (a necessity for a good mystery), so the Science Fiction mystery remains very hard to write well.

But the same can in fact be said for any style of fiction in which a mystery story is set, let’s face it – one of the rules of good fiction is to be clear and concise; one of the needs of mysteries is to avoid being clear and concise about certain details while still revealing them – and without making it obvious that you are doing so.

The Underlying Conflicts

THE NEEDS OF A MYSTERY ARE IN INHERANT CONFLICT WITH THE RULES OF GOOD WRITING. How well that conflict can be resolved dictates how well an author can write mysteries.

It occurs to me that modern crime fiction owes more to Asimov than will ever be acknowledged, by the way. Modern technology has advanced so far that shows like CSI are essentially science fiction in genre – a thought that might amuse the writers and producers of such shows. But how else would you categorize a show whose description reads “A team of scientists solve crimes using advanced technology?”

Be that as it may, the format within which you are writing can equally be at odds with the nature of a mystery.

• In prose, you have to actually state things in black and white – hardly conducive to hiding things.
• In TV and movies, you can show key things in the background without calling attention to them, making them easy to conceal, but also making the anticlimax harder to avoid UNLESS at some point you make a fuss about them.
• Plays, unless they have improbably-lavish budgets (which is rare) can’t afford a major prop or scene unless it is important to the story – again making things harder to conceal.
• And in RPGs, the characters – who are operated by real people other than the author – are expected, and expect, to solve the mystery using their character’s abilities and knowledge. That means that the author has to respect and take into account not only the limitations and advantages of the characters, but of the real people behind them, providing additional explanations and descriptions as requested, which again makes it harder to conceal the key facts; it’s all too easy for the RPG mystery to become a logic puzzle (read anticlimax!).

The difficulty of distance

Writers have one key advantage over the audience, the reader, the player – they know whodunit. But this knowledge is dangerous – it makes the writer try harder to conceal this knowledge within the story so that he isn’t giving hints away, inadvertently. The writer can’t put himself in his audience’s shoes and approach the mystery from a perspective of ignorance – making it much harder to judge what is obvious, what is not obvious, and what is too well hidden.

Some writers “solve” this problem by NOT deciding who the killer is until the last possible moment – they describe an investigation with plot twists, revelations, high points and low points, and systematically cross off suspects until they are left with only one. The problem is that the author (usually) isn’t a super-genius, able to think of every possible factor or solution, so these can seem forced and contrived.

Others rely on feedback – exposing a representative member of the target population with the mystery who has not previously read the story/script and getting their reactions, in detail. But finding such people isn’t easy; other writers generally want to write their own material, not review other people’s; and non-writers tend to find it difficult to be detailed and precise enough in their feedback, telling the author what’s wrong in general, but not where, and not how to fix it.

RPGs: A fourth solution

The best answer I can think of is to use the skills of Roleplayers. Divide the material into acts or chapters. Give them a list of suspects. Have one player assume the role of each principle participant. Have them work through the mystery, from their character’s perspective, indicating at the end of each scene, act, or whatever whether the written words were being accurate to their character, were making their character seem suspicious or guilty, and who they thought the leading suspect was. This feedback is specific enough to be invaluable, and is based on a group of people that tend to be intelligent, articulate, well-read, and used to working within the boundaries of character limitations.

Better yet, let them work out their own solution to the mystery. Give them the initial specifics; when they ask the right questions, give them the appropriate answers. More importantly, listen to the “obvious questions” that they ask, and you didn’t, as leaving an obvious question unasked is a red-letter bold-capitals *hint* that is almost certain to lead to an anticlimax for a significant part of the audience. Not only will the characters come back to you more developed, often more rounded, and more plausible, so will the mystery.

So the only remaining mystery is why more authors don’t do this?

It’s my theory that the solution comes in two parts – a combination of ignorance, and of fear (never a good combination!).

Ignorance: of RPGs and what they can offer. This is (I believe) starting to fade; they have been around for quite a while now, and the urban legends of psychological trauma have been pretty strongly debunked, at the same level as the people who claim that the lyrics made them do it – song lyrics or RPGs might be the proximate trigger, and might shape the resulting psychosis, but the person was so mentally fragile that SOMETHING would have sent them over the edge eventually, anyway. But ignorance, of the “I just never thought of it” variety, remains an element.

Fear: that this literate, articulate, intelligent group will spread the plotline – and the solution – all over the internet, would seem to me to be the biggest reason why anyone who has thought of the idea has not implemented it. And, based on the behavior of some people out there, this fear is neither unreasonable, nor unwarranted.

But the solution seems simple; these problems were solved by movie studios decades ago, back when they first introduced test screenings of new releases. Contracts, stipulating a harsh penalty for revelation; a snippet or synopsis that avoids revealing the key ingredients, and that they ARE allowed to quote provided that the WHOLE is quoted, with each person receiving a slightly-different version. But these might put potential participants off.

An even simpler and better solution: trust. These people have a lot to gain from the experience: a new level of respect for themselves and their hobby, the pride of being on the inner circle, of having their names in the acknowledgements. There would still need to be contracts, stipulating that the copyright on any materials developed in the course of, or resulting from, the sessions remains the authors, and in return, the participants will be acknowledged as contributing to the final manuscript; but those need be nowhere near as scary, and can be in plain English, and still be just as binding.

It seems like the perfect solution to me – but then, I’m a roleplayer.

For those who have read this article looking for ways to write & run Mysteries for RPGs: this is a subject that I have addressed before.

I direct the reader’s attention to:

• Penetrating The Veil Of Mystery – there are some very useful contributions in the comments section as well, don’t miss them!
• The Butler Did It – again, the comments are definitely worth reading.
• And finally (as pointed to in the final comment), there are a couple of examples that I wasn’t able to include in the original article provided in The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch.

The illustration I found to accompany this article is so gorgeous that I had to share a full-sized version of it. Click to open in a new tab.

Exhaustion has gotten the better of me, I’m afraid, and has prevented me from making enough progress with the next part of the Orcs & Elves series. I always knew it was likely that sooner or later I would run into deadline trouble, and planned accordingly. So here’s an article that I prepared earlier and kept on standby against just such a necessity. I’m also posting it about an hour-and-a-half late because it took a lot longer than usual to get the layout right…

*******************************************************************************************

Measuring distances on a straight line from A to B is relatively simple. You get a ruler, you measure the distance, you measure the scale, divide the first by the second, and hey presto! You have a distance.

*******************************************************************************************

Even somewhat more complex maps consisting of a reasonably limited number of straight segments merely incorporate a simple addition to the problem.

*******************************************************************************************

Sometimes, relatively complicated problems can be treated as a straight line and the results will be near enough. The map below right is clearly a very straight line. Given that a the length of this line is more or less 25+ times the length of the scale line, a 0.5mm margin of error in measuring the map scale adds up to 25×0.5=±12.5 mm or more in calculating the total length of the route described by the line, measuring from start-point to end-point. More than a 2 centimeters of error (on the scale of the map) – that’s plenty to swallow the error caused by the “crinkles” in the route. I would be quite happy to guesstimate that journey as being measured length + 2.5cm (I know that it will be longer than the straight-line distance because the route is all slight deviations from that straight line).

What’s more, the usual reason for needing a distance is to convert it into a travel time, and it’s most improbable that any mode of transport other than an aircraft will maintain anything close to an even speed (and, depending on the weather, not even an aircraft might be able to do so). Again, an error source that will more than consume any discrepancy from taking the simple straight-line distance.

*******************************************************************************************

Mark Webber (Red Bull -Renault RB8), 2012 Malaysian GP.

A side-note: people constantly underestimate the impact curves have on average speed.

It is a given that elite racing drivers are sufficiently skilled that they will take corner at the highest possible speed, and will therefore minimize the losses due to cornering in the course of a race.

I should start by saying that although there has been some improvement in absolute top speed (from about 300-310 km/h to almost 345 km/h) in grand prix racing cars over the last 20 years, by far the biggest improvement has come in cornering speeds, with some additional gains in acceleration and braking. On at least 6 occasions in that time, the authorities that control the series have slowed the cars down, by:

• banning electronic driving aids and active suspension;
• banning turbocharged engines;
• banning exotic fuels and exotic fuel additives;
• restricting aerodynamics and wing sizes;
• banning super-sticky, super-fast, “qualifying” tires;
• restricting the width of the tires;
• banning V10s and mandating V8s;
• mandating grooves in the tires;
• restricting the ride height (the height of the cars above ground, which is a key factor in the aerodynamic efficiency of the car underside;
• freezing engine development;
• restricting in-season testing;
• mandating a minimum life for components such as engines and gearboxes; and
• restricting other (more technical) parts of the car design – and that’s a far from complete list.

Without these changes, mostly made on the grounds of safety, the cars at their fastest would be going considerably faster – perhaps 20-25 km/h or more in a straight line, and MUCH much more in corners.

I have chosen four Grand Prix to analyze from the 2012 season because (a) they offer a variety of circuit types, and (b) these particular circuits have not changed very much over the last twenty years, so a rough comparison becomes possible. Fastest speed varies with the aerodynamic set-up of the cars for the circuit and whether or not the straights are long enough for the cars to hit maximum speed. Also, all 8 races analyzed were run in dry weather.

• Monaco Grand Prix: Tight, twisty street circuit, with very short straights. 2012 average race speed: 147.312 km/h. Highest actual speed recorded (in Practice 3, like all these speed values, because those are the only ones that seem to be publicly available): 281.6 km/h. Race speed is only 52.3% of maximum speed. 1992 Average speed: 139.337 km/h. Gain in 20 years: 5.7% speed increase.
• Canadian Grand Prix: Slightly more open circuit with some tight corners and a variety of lengths of straight. 2012 average race speed: 198.028 km/h. Highest actual speed recorded: 324.7 km/h. Average Race speed is 61% of maximum speed. 1992 Average speed: 186.712 km/h. Gain in 20 years: 6%.
• Italian Grand Prix: Fastest circuit on the race calendar; long, open and flowing. 2012 average speed: 231.176 km/h. Highest actual speed recorded: 345.4 km/h. Average Race speed is 66.9% of maximum speed. 1992 Average Speed: 238.855 km/h. Modern cars are only 96.8% as fast as those of 20 years ago – possibly because they take the corners at higher speeds, and hence braking and acceleration gains are minimal and straight-line top speeds haven’t quite caught up with where they were, but more probably due to race circumstances like pit stops. Slight circuit changes also factor in, as do many other influences.
• Japanese Grand Prix: Fast, flowing, long circuit, with many medium-high speed corners. 2012 average speed: 207.632 km/h. Highest actual speed recorded: 309.6 km/h. Race speed is 67.1% of maximum speed. 1992 Average Speed: 183.808 km/h. Gain in 20 years: 13%.

Senna (McLaren-Honda MP4/7A) racing Mansell (Williams-Renault FW14B), Monaco, 1992

So, because of all those changes and restrictions, the cars are (mostly) going only a little faster than they were 20 years ago – and the average race speed is only about two-thirds of maximum speed. Corners that drivers used to have to brake for are now taken absolutely flat to the floor, such as the famous Au Rouge at Spa-Francorshamps.

It can be argued that when discussing ordinary traffic and obedience of the road rules, the losses due to cornering are reduced, because most corners can be taken at the legal speed limit. However, there are so many other causes of delay on a road with traffic that the variability is about the same.

The bottom line therefore, and the point, is that any given trip could reasonably take up to double the time at the posted speed limits, or 50% more than the time at the car’s top speed (if the speed limits are ignored) – even assuming good roads and weather – an error so large that any minor errors in measuring the distance to be travelled is irrelevant. And those are, very definitely, minimum adjustments.

So, a rough-and-ready measuring technique is quite good enough for practical purposes. What’s needed is a technique for doing so when the route to be travelled is a bit more complicated than these relatively simple ones, like the one to the right.

Well, I worked out just such a rough-and-ready technique a long time ago, and this article is going to share it with you, with step-by-step instructions.

Map Prep

Before you can use this technique, there are a couple of things you need to do to your map to prep it.

Step Zero: Print the map of the route

Since this technique leaves marks on the map, its best to work on a printed copy that can be thrown away afterwards.

Step One: Straight Lines

Using straight lines, I’ll then go over the route with a colored pen or texta, as shown:

This should be done fairly quickly. Don’t bother with a ruler, just do the best you can, freehand. Hint: if you move the pen or pencil back-and-forth a couple of times along the line that you want it to follow keeping it just above the page, you’ll get much straighter lines when you lower it that last millimeter or so to the paper.

Of course, since this map is going to be thrown away when we’re finished, why waste a lot of ink on the printing? Make it a light grey and not only will you save money (if your printer is smart enough) but the colored marks we are about to make will show up all the more clearly:

Going The Distance

Next, I’ll prepare the essential tool – a sheet of loose paper, or better yet, an index card, and a sharp pencil or colored pen. 0.5mm markers are perfect for visibility but a pencil mark can be erased and redone.

*******************************************************************************************

Initial Position

Position a left-hand corner of the card at the point where the route whose length is desired starts, as shown:

Pivot The Card

Pivot the card around that point until the edge lines up with the route. Wherever the route deviates from that straight line is the end of the segment that we’re about to measure:

Mark the segment

Starting on the card, put a mark that runs off the edge of the card and onto the map:

Pivot & Mark The Card

That mark becomes the new pivot point on both the map and the card. Rotate the card around that pivot point until it lines up with the next segment of the route and look for wherever the route moves off that line. Put another mark the same way you did the last one:

Pivot & Mark The Card

Once again, the mark you just made becomes the new pivot point. Rotate the card around it until it lines up with the next part of the route and make a third mark – which then becomes your new pivot point, and so on:

End Of One Side

Eventually, you will find that the remaining length of card is not enough to reach the end of a segment of the route. When that happens, extend the last mark you made on the card and put a distinguishing spot or mark on the end of it – I usually use a pennant-shaped triangle:

Then position the next corner of the card at the start of the segment that wouldn’t fit – you’ll know where it is because it’s the last mark on the map – and carry on as before.

End Of The Card

If the route is a long one, you may well reach the end of the card before you reach the end of the route:

There are two simple solutions to this problem: you can start using the same card sides again with a different color, or simpler yet, just turn the card over and start using the reverse side:

If that’s still not enough, you can do a subtotal, then cut off the edges of the card that has been marked, making a new (smaller) card and go again.

But a single 3″ x 5″ card will usually be more than enough for the most complex route printed on a single sheet of A4 paper – and letter sized pages are slightly smaller again.

Making the measurements

Once you have ‘measured’ the entire route, with all its twists and turns, on the card, it’s time to measure the card. Start in a top left corner and measure across to the first mark:

Write down the result, then move to the next of the measurements:

Eventually, you will have measured the entire route:

Conversion

But a distance in millimeters, or in inches and twelfths of an inch, or centimeters, doesn’t help much. Locate the scale on the map, as shown on the right:

*******************************************************************************************

Conversion step 2:

Using the same ruler or other distance-measuring device (so that internal errors remain consistent), measure the scale, as shown to the left:

*******************************************************************************************

Conversion step 3:

Next, note the relative distance that corresponds to the measurement you’ve just made, as shown to the right:

*******************************************************************************************

Conversion step 4:

Next, perform the scale calculation shown above, and hey presto! Instant, reasonably accurate, measurement of the route distance – no matter how complicated the route might be.

*******************************************************************************************

Alternative to scale marks

Some maps don’t offer scale marks, instead stating the scale as a ratio, for example “1:250,000,000”. The trick to using this is to make sure you get your unit conversions right.

If you measure the map in millimeters, multiplying by the conversion rate gives you a number “in the territory” in millimeters – you have to divide by 1000 to get meters, and then divide by 1000 again to get kilometers.

If you measure the map in inches and fractions, multiplying by the conversation rate gives you a number “in the territory” in inches and fractions – you have to divide by 12 to get feet, or 36 to get yards, or 63,360 to get miles.

And, of course, there are 1.6 kilometers in a mile, if you need to make that conversion!

For example, if we measure 28.7cm of route on a map with a scale of 1:250,000, we multiply 28.7 x 250,000 to get 7,175,000cm – divide by 100 to get 71750m, then by 1000 to get 71.75km. Which I would round to 72 km without a second thought.

Accuracy

While errors can accumulate, the more segments you have, the more likely those errors are to average out. That makes this an extraordinarily accurate system – for its simplicity.

Efficiency

I have to admit that it took me most of a day to produce the graphics that you can see here, digitally. The early marks on the card grew fuzzier and fuzzier due to the repeated rotations of the virtual “card”. It’s a lot clearer, and faster, to use the real thing; a complicated route like the one shown might run as long as a whole 5-10 minutes of card twisting and marking.

That makes it one heck of an efficient system – but is the accuracy worth that amount of time investment when you could do something similar with the ruler and about 5 direct measurements plus a guesstimate?

Neat Tricks

The answer is yes, because there are a few really neat tricks that you can do along the way:

Neat Trick: Elevation

Most inclined roads have a gradient of about 1 in 10. A steep one might be one in 5. A really steep one might be one in four. Ordinary vehicles tend to have trouble doing better than 1 in 3, and that with a good road surface – if either of those are untrue, we’re getting into 4WD territory. Even a 4WD will struggle to get up any incline that’s steeper than one in 2.5, or maybe one in 2.

What does that mean? It means that as you mark each segment, you can adjust the length to reflect the incline. For 1 in ten, allow an extra millimeter for every centimeter or so. For 1 in 5, an extra 2 millimeters. For 1 in 4, an extra 2 1/2. For 1 in 3, about 3 1/2. For one in 2.5, an extra 4; and for one in two, 5 mm for every centimeter.

If you’re using inches, 1 1/2 twelfths every inch for 1 in ten; 2 1/2 twelfths for 1 in 5; 3 twelfths for 1 in 4; 4 twelfths for 1 in 3; 5 for 1 in 2.5; and a full half-inch extra for every inch (or so) for 1-in-2.

Neat Trick: Speed Demons

If whatever vehicle is being used is being driven at something close to its top speed with no regard for the road rules, then it will speed up on the downhill sections about half as much as it slows down on the uphill segments. If you know in advance that what you care about is the travel time, and not the distance, you can make allowances appropriately, shortening downhill segments and lengthening uphill ones. For heavy vehicles, the ratio is more likely to be about 1/3.

If, on the other hand, it is being driven to the speed limit, then it’s only on the steeper slopes that the vehicle speed will be affected. Anticipating what you need the measurement for permits you to make the adjustments that are most useful to you.

Neat Trick: Tight Corners

Similarly, if there’s a tight corner, you can lengthen those segments (signifying a slower cornering speed) to take those into account – that’s where that analysis offered in the sidebar earlier comes into its own, in terms of value. If the speed limit is 60, and the fastest you think the corner can be taken is going to be 30, you double the length of the corner segment. It takes a little practice to guesstimate, but with that practice, you can make these adjustments as quickly as you can make marks on the index card.

Neat Trick: Road Conditions

The same technique can also be used to allow for road conditions – rain, fog, snow, whatever. If you want to build in a traffic delay, you can do so – in a far more accurate way than arbitrarily adding time.

The more such additional variables you take into account, the more useful – and accurate – the end result.

Maximum Utility for your efforts

Again, with a bit of practice, you’ll find yourself becoming adept at determining how precise you need to be with your initial straight lines. The more of these little segments you create – and it’s those straight lines that you are measuring with the card – the more accurate the result; the fewer, the faster you can get a result.

As a rule of thumb, segments about the length of the scale marker on the map will be accurate to within 2 x (relative distance divided by speed) in hours.

If the scale is about 1 cm long for 5 km, then 1 cm segments gets an accuracy at 60km/h of 5×2/60 = 1/6 hrs = 12 minutes. Half cm long gets about 6 minutes accuracy. A millimeter long gets an accuracy that’s near enough to a minute.

Same scale at 120 km/h = twice the error. Being able to call a trip of 600-700 km on a complex and convoluted route to within 2 minutes travel time is plenty accurate for most practical needs – and not bad for a 5-10 minute effort.

The typical human eye is good for half a millimeter of accuracy without using a scale or comparison. An artist can often have finer resolution – my vision is accurate to about 1/10th of a millimeter by eye (I can see the difference between marks 0.4 mm apart and those 0.5 mm apart, by eye, and without a ruler). That’s plenty accurate enough to call a travel time of hours down to plus-or-minus 12 seconds if I had to.

Universality

With a little thought (and perhaps some research), you can use this technique with ANY form of locomotion. Horses. Carts. Walking. Motorcycles. Hovercraft. Duck Dodgers on his way to Planet X. Whatever you need.

And that makes it a useful technique to have in your repertoire.

I’ve long thought that the term “writer’s block” is an oversimplification and generalization of a whole range of different phenomena that can afflict the creative endeavor. I have a unique perspective on the subject, being a writer, an artist, and a composer; all three bring with them virtually the same problems when confronted with an empty page, a shortage of ideas, or an apparent inability to get what’s in your head down on paper.

After breaking down the types of writer’s block, I was able to list a range of subtypes to the phenomenon, and identify the solutions that I use to get past them. In fact, I identified so many solutions that what was originally going to be a single quick article has turned into a five-part monster! In total, this series will present no less than 64 specific cures for 19 specific forms of writer’s block. (I say “no less than” because I’m still finding additional cures and slotting them into place!)

Be aware, though, that this list – long though it is – is far from exhaustive. The “three minute (or less) NPC” isn’t on the list. There’s virtually no overlap with the “great villains” series which looks in detail at The Mastermind as a villain, Combat Monsters, and The Character Villain. I’ve left out one of my favorite tools, The Thumbnail Method and in fact the whole Characterization Puzzle series – simply because they have appeared before. I could keep extending that list, because an awful lot of the content here at Campaign Mastery is about techniques for generating content for your game, or improving it. And while all that is related to the focus of this series, it isn’t the subject at hand.

Major Types Of Writer’s Block

There are four major types of Writer’s Block that I intend to focus on in the course of this series. They are:

• Blank Page Syndrome – Coming up with something to write about;
• Primary – Conceptual holes of varying degree;
• Translations – Technical & Process holes, and quick answers when you need to Improvise;
• Crowding – Too many ideas, and coping with the Fallacy Of Memory.

Each of these can be broken down into subtypes.

Blank Page Subtypes

Blank Page Syndrome is what most people think of when they think of writer’s block. It’s when you sit and stare at a blank page and nothing comes into your head. I’ve identified two subtypes of this type of Writer’s Block:

• Standalone – When nothing is known about the content that is required, which is rare for RPGs, but common when all you know is that you want to write a story or a novel; and
• Isolated – Where some ingredients are known, but you have no idea what to do with them. This is far more common for RPGs and series of all sorts, for obvious reasons.

Primary Subtypes

I developed this breakdown of places where the writer could “break down” by considering the process of writing itself, from vague notion to completed text. You’ll see what I mean when you look at the actual list of subtypes; they are all about moving from the general to the specific.

• Conceptual – When you have a more complete starting point but no plotline;
• Specific – When you have a broad plotline but don’t know what specific event comes next;
• Setting – When you have a specific event but need a place for it to happen;
• Action – When you don’t know what a character will do next;
• Persona – When you have an event planned but need a personality to participate in it;
• Dialogue – When you have a participant in a conversation but no idea what they will say next; and
• Narrative – When you have information to convey but have no idea how to explain it clearly.

The need to come up with something for the next page in any of these categories can be a mental road-block on the creative highway.

The occasions when this comes up most frequently for me – I can’t speak for any one else in this respect – is when something is present for plot reasons and not to serve a specific function in the current story – which, by virtue of the plot breakdown/integration techniques that I use, happens regularly. “Subplot: Introduce Character X” or “Subplot: Introduce Location X”, or “Subplot: Development in plot arc X” or “Reminder of unresolved plot arc X” – things like that crop up all the time. But these brief notes tell me only that something is required to happen at this time, they tell me nothing about what that “something” should be.

As an aside, that gives some insight into the difficulty of writing on this subject; at this point, I should probably link to all the articles I’ve written on plotting and plot sequencing, like the recent one entitled “Amazon Nazis On The Moon: Campaign Planning Revisited” and “The Seven Strata Of Story“. Articles on Writer’s Block are a sponge that soaks up every other discussion you can have on a subject; before you know it, the topic is as large as the entire literary universe, so large that the sheer scope of it makes the discussion impossible to manage. I’ve had to work very hard on confining the subject to manageable limits!

Most of the solutions to the primary types of writer’s block assume that you can devote time to the solution – I’ve still leaned towards quick solutions, because time is precious and prep-time especially so, but when you need to take five or ten minutes, you can usually do so, even if it means that something else doesn’t receive its usual polish; it’s better to have something concrete for the difficult parts and be able to improv the parts where you know what you want to do.

Translation Subtypes

My initial thinking was that the primary subtypes were all about generating content of the required type, while this major category was more concerned with taking the content from a prior primary content type and extending it downward to another subtype. Only when I started listing cures did I find that this distinction was entirely artificial, except in two respects: technical problems, relating to the author’s proficiency as a writer, and on-the-fly content for those times when we need to improvise something on the spot, or close to it. For example, the first category deals with translating from a vague general idea to the series of specific scenes or acts that are needed to express that idea; this is in no way different from generating specific scenes, and is therefore covered under the lower level of primary subtype already listed.

So the translation subtypes lean towards quicker, more rough-and-ready, on-the-spot, solutions. Don’t worry, I still found plenty to talk about!

The specific translation subtypes that I came up with are:

• Translation: Conceptual to Specific – When you know what you want to have happen in general but don’t know how to get there from here;
• Translation: Specific to Scene – When you know what the next part of the story is but don’t know how to manifest it;
• Translation: Specific to Setting – When you know what is to happen next but can’t find the right location;
• Translation: Specific to Action – When you know what is to happen but can’t describe the action;
• Translation: Specific to Persona – When you know what is to happen but can’t visualize who is to do it;
• Translation: Specific to Dialogue – When you know what the dialogue is to convey but it sounds forced;
• Translation: Specific to Narrative – When you know what the situational context is but can’t describe it clearly;
• Translation: Scene to Action – When the location and the action don’t seem to gel;
• Translation: Action to Narrative – When you can see the action in your head but can’t describe it fluently; and,
• Translation: Persona to Dialogue – When the dialogue doesn’t seem right coming from the character speaking.

Once again, each of these can easily derail the creative process and leave you sitting around with your chin in your hands and a blank look on your face as ideas avoid you in droves. This is especially bad in a “live” improv setting, when you don’t have any time to spend coming up with a solution.

That’s my breakdown of the types of writer’s block, and forms the road map to this series.

• In the remainder of this first article, I offer 4 solutions to each of the subtypes of Empty Page Syndrome, which can also be thought of as “traditional writer’s block”.
• In part 2, I will look at the first half of the Primary Writer’s Block subtypes, and offer cures for the problems of Conceptual, Specific, and Setting Blocks./li>
• In part 3, I will finish the discussion of the Primary Writer’s Block subtypes, and offer cures for Action, Personality, Dialogue, and Narrative Blocks.
• In part 4, I’ll move on to the Secondary Subtypes, and offer solutions for five of them.
• Finally, in part 5, I finish up the solutions to the Secondary Subtypes, and move on to the Crowding Subtypes, and cures for those. I’ll then wrap the whole series up with some well-meant general advice.

As one of my players is want to say on the periodic occasion, “That’s the plan; tell us where it goes wrong.” So let’s get started…

Empty Page Syndrome: Standalone

There is nothing so scary as an empty page when you have no idea what you can use to fill it. I’m going to talk specifically about Fear and Doubt at the end of this section. This is the “purest” form of writer’s block, and the one that most people think of when they hear the term; it’s also the source of that most vexing question, “where do you get your ideas?” – which I’ve heard more times than I can count at Science-Fiction conventions and “meet-the-author” sessions and interviews. I talked specifically about that question and the many responses that I’ve heard in By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure, where I discuss where I got my ideas from back in the days when I normally had zero prep time other than the trip to the game itself.

“Standalone” means that there is a completely blank slate apon which to write. This can be liberating, because you are not tied down to past works in any respect other than those you choose; it can also be inhibiting, because there is nothing on which to spark inspiration. It’s rare for this particular type of writer’s block to impact on an RPG, but it can happen – when you are creating a new game system, or a new campaign. It’s far more common for this to strike when you are dealing with other forms of writing – articles and short stories and novels and scripts and poetry.

The biggest mistake that writers – of anything – make is sitting in front of a blank page and waiting for inspiration to strike. By definition, a blank page contains NO ideas, NO inspiration – it’s empty (unless you can do something with the concept of emptiness itself, of course). So sitting and waiting for something to magically appear on that empty page doesn’t get you very far.

I have five cures – or six, depending on how you count them – for this type of writer’s block to offer, in addition to the six offered in the article referenced above.

Cure 1: Start with an opinion

Everyone has opinions. It could be about society, social issues, crime and punishment, business practices, a food preference, medical quackery, a television show, the weather, politics, religion, sport – you name it. Step One of this cure for writer’s block is to pick one of those opinions. Any of them.

Step Two is to generalize it. Take it from being your subjective opinion to being a broader opinion held by many others. Take it from being about one specific example – “I hate broccoli” – to a broader subject “some people hate green vegetables”.

Here’s the tricky, or perhaps I should say ‘clever’ bit: Step Three is to assign a new context to the opinion. Off the top of my head:

• What’s the evolutionary advantage in people having likes and dislikes?
• An man is selected as ambassador to a highly-developed plant-race because he doesn’t like salads, and is therefore less likely to offend them. Unknown to the authorities who chose him, they practice ritual cannibalism.
• How do people’s preferences change over time?
• Orcs don’t eat beanz.

Final step: write about it.

Cure 2: Start with a word or common phrase

Pick a word from a dictionary or a thesaurus. What does it mean? If applied to a different context, what might it mean? If its a word related to human behavior or activity – and almost all non-nouns are – how might its meaning change when considering a non-human society? What is “property” to an Elf, an Orc, or the Slime-people of Betelgeuse VII? What role does “value” have in human society? Ent society? Goblin society? What would an Artificial Intelligence value, how does that differ from what its creators value, and how might their interactions with each be affected? How does the word change when you add emphasis (some do)? Pick something of interest, then write about it!

Pick a common saying or phrase. Again, apply it to a different context. “Dressed To Kill” for example – that has multiple meanings even in human terms, depending on who is doing the dressing and whether or not “Kill” is meant literally. What new meanings might it assume in a non-human society? “In Style” – humans have fashion tastes that change regularly; keeping up with the latest style is expensive, and therefore always being ‘fashionably dressed’ is a mark of wealth, especially in olden times. What might the equivalent be? “The trolls are wearing their breach-cloths long this year.” Why?

Cure 3: Pick a random paragraph or line from a random source.

Grab a book or other source of text. Open it to a random page, and pick a passage of text randomly. Put it into a new context. Describe that context, then throw away the original paragraph or passage. Insert characters, and let them react to the situation.

“Harmony in music can be defined as any combination of notes that are played together at the same time.” The key words are “harmony”, “music”, “notes” and “time”. “Harmony in a meeting can be defined as any combination of suggestions that are put forward at the same time for the same purpose or achieving the same goal.” So we have a meeting, and a number of suggestions being made. These may be at cross purposes (lack of harmony) or in synch (in harmony). But people are more complicated than music – and a suggestion may be aimed superficially at one end while its true purpose may be something quite different. Start filling in the blanks and unknowns and you will describe the context: what is the superficial goal, and what is the real goal? What’s the backstory? Throw away the original text, put characters into the situation, and you have the beginnings of a story.

Instead of inserting characters, you could think about some attribute or aspect of the situation in general, or as applied to a particular group. You might take that same quote (it’s a line from “Music Composition For Dummies”, by the way) and do some research on the definitions of musical notes, which would lead you to the concept of intervals (which describe how different one note in a scale is from the next in a particular key), and to the discovery that other styles of music use different intervals – but that they are all regular ratios of each other when expressed as a constant, audible, frequency. Before you know it, you have spent ten minutes identifying the respects in which human music might differ from non-human music. And that’s an article. Or, if you apply it to a succession of non-human societies, a whole series of articles.

I recently offered as a free download an MP3 of my composition “Ogre” which was supposedly an example of the style of Music performed by the Ogre Clans in Fumanor. (You can get it from if you want it). What wasn’t stated at the time was a lot of the compositional context – the fact that making music was a community activity, and that Ogres are offended by the notion of excluding potential performers due to a lack of skill. They all have to contribute something to the performance. (Actually, it was a community Male activity, while singing is restricted to the females, who don’t ruin their voices with a lot of shouting). Those couple of lines, and the music itself, offer a window into one possible Ogrish society. How is elvish society expressed musically? Choral arpeggios? Wind instruments? Is “Greensleeves” the most quintessentially Elvish piece of music in existence in your campaign? Perhaps Drow go in for brass instruments instead?

I can talk about all this off the top of my head because I know something about music as a subject. That’s why that book was on my bookshelf in the first place. It follows that if YOU grab a book at random off your bookshelves, it will almost certainly be on a subject that you know something about, and can therefore write about.

And, if you come up dry with the line or paragraph that you selected? Pick another source, and choose another line. The objective is to stimulate your creativity with a topic or situation, a starting point.

Cure 4: What’s the first thing you can remember right now?

There are three factors that make a memory more accessible: routine, recency or personal significance. Skip the trivial – “I remember staring at this blank page”, “I remember making a cup of coffee”, and so on; pick a memory that is less immediate. My first ones were “My mother phoned to tell me she and my stepfather are back from their Holiday in England, where they met a whole bunch of long-lost relatives”; and of my Grandmother, cooking.

Why is it significant to you? Go beyond those three factors and keep asking “why” until you have the core truth of that memory nailed down.

What might someone else find significant for the same reason? Write about that something else as a way of introducing someone who cares about it.

If that doesn’t get you started, write about someone else’s memory of the same thing as a way of introducing a character, and their backstory. “I remember my grandmother’s cooking…” is a perfect way of starting a story – and because it’s a memory that YOU care about, that passion should make its way onto the page with conviction that sells the story and compels the reader to keep reading. – because they will associate the scene with their own memories and personal history. You engage their emotions. Where you take those emotions from there is up to you.

Cure 5: Maintain an ideas stockpile

I talked about this technique when I wrote One Word At A Time: How I (usually) Write A Blog Post, and have mentioned it in passing on a number of other occasions. I’m not actually going to go into it in any detail here; I’m saving it for a detailed discussion in the “too many ideas” section, which will be in Part 5 of the series. Suffice it to say that if you have a list of ideas that you add to whenever you think of a new one, and only draw from when you need to, you will soon have ample ideas for a long time to come. Pick one and start writing!

A Brief Word About Fear and Doubt

By far the biggest writer’s block is fear and self-doubt. Writers continually agonize over the quality of their work, and whether or not it is worth reading; every negative comment is a razor that cuts deeply into the creative soul. Non-authors often think that these nerves will ease over time, especially if that time is filled with a profusion of successes; it doesn’t work that way. The longer a streak of success continues, the greater the pressure to maintain that streak; in time, you either find yourself compromising your creativity to maintain an increasingly bland popularity (playing it safe) or you maintain your artistic (literary) integrity and continue doing the best job that you can – taking the risk that others will find it less appealing because it’s not just “more of the same”. A lot of authors have one successful book or story and become paralyzed by the question “can I do it again?” – and don’t try, for fear of failure.

Some writers are able to value positive feedback in equal measure to the negative; others can dismiss the negative with “everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and I don’t happen to agree with that one”, while others devalue positive feedback while agonizing over those who are more critical. Writers tend to be a neurotic lot – especially after they have been writing for a while. In my case, I value positive feedback more highly, but find it has a more fleeting effect than negative comments, which tend to fester for a while. And I’m sometimes extremely defensive toward negative comments because of that.

It’s especially easy to concede defeat by fear and doubt when you’ve been working on something for a while and hit a dry spell, where everything you write seems rubbish to you, or when you discover (in a non-fiction item especially) some fundamental error that requires throwing away a lot of work. Sometimes, the sheer scope of trying to pick up the thread of where you were up to before a forced interruption can be enough of a handicap to induce writer’s block. I suffer from that last problem all the time – that’s one reason why I have so many unfinished RPG books, and so many unfinished article series here at Campaign Mastery.

The cure for these problems is the same: archive where you were up to, and then – just write.

If it’s rubbish, you can throw it away. People will respect you a lot more for saying “I wrote an article for this week but it turned out to be rubbish and not worth publishing” than they will if you make an excuse (“I was too busy”) or simply don’t post anything. Save those excuses for when they are the gods-honest truth, and you will be forgiven – if you don’t make a habit of it. The respect comes from being self-critical.

Better yet, if it’s rubbish – publish it anyway, with a caveat. Not all people have the same taste, and your “rubbish” might appeal to a whole new market. By showing that even a successful writer gets it wrong some of the time, you encourage others by presenting an achievable standard – and they might well be better at it than they think (that’s their self-doubt coming into play). And you can never tell when someone will read it and think, “there’s the germ of a good idea in there, but I can do better than this with it” and be inspired.

I once read somewhere that no-one can truly evaluate the quality or significance of their own work, only the level of their satisfaction at having written it – and the two have nothing to do with each other. It’s something I happen to agree with, so don’t let fear or self-doubt stand in your way.

Empty Page Syndrome: Isolated

When you’re writing a series, or adventures for an RPG, this form of writer’s block is more common than that of the previous type. This is when you have some known ingredients, but they exist in isolation; you have no idea what to do with them.

The following cures for this problem are presented in addition to the techniques presented in “Been There, Done That, Doing It Again: The Sequel Campaign” (Part One, ‘Adventure Seeds‘ , Part Two, Sprouts and Saplings).

Cure 1: Find something relevant and describe it

The tricky part of employing this solution is that annoying word, “relevant”. A character might be relevant; so might a personality, or a single personality trait, or a relationship, or a location. It all depends on what the raw ingredients are that you have to work with. Whatever you choose is likely to become the focus of the adventure or plotline, so it is probably best if it is something that has not had a great deal of exposure so far, and preferably something for which you currently have no plans for future exposure. If two characters have a personality trait in common but don’t know it yet, that’s a great foundation to work from – but not if you already have plans for that particular revelation.

A useful variant involves “finding something relevant” using the internet. When you do this, “relevant” includes “symbolic”, which is not always the case – the term is usually meant more literally. For example, one of the characters in the pulp campaign is a sea captain, ex Royal Australian Navy; plugging “sea captain mystery” or “sea captain controversy” into Google and looking at the first couple of web results, or plugging it into an image search and finding an image that’s inspiring, can get you started on a fresh plotline.

Another source is music, and especially song lyrics. Again, the trick is to find something that’s relevant. The Split Enz song “6 months in a leaky boat” always comes to mind when I think about ships and music, a core part of the chorus reads “I spent six months in a leaky boat, lucky just to keep afloat”. This is from the album “Time and Tide” – perhaps an adventure relating to tides within the time-stream? Another song on the album is “Dirty Creature” – that might have something to do with why the character in the song spent “six months in a leaky boat”. Free associate with related elements until you have some starting point; even if you subsequently throw out those initial thoughts, once you have a beginning, other ideas will start to flow.

Cure 2: Describe something you DO know in a different way or from a different perspective

An example of the first: How might a circuit board look to an electron travelling through it?

An example of the second: “History is written by the winners”. Assume that a past event or adventure (that the PCs appeared to win) was actually a win for the antagonist without changing the outcome – then figure out why that might have been so – and why no-one in the campaign has noticed until now.

A second example: “3010” is “666” in base six, and looks suspiciously like a date. Computers work in bytes, and there are 8 bytes in a bit, and 666 in base 8 is 1232 – which also looks like a date. Does that mean that the apocalypse for computers was in 1232? Or that it will come 1232 years after the first one was created? That would be 1941+1232=3173, which is 63 years after 3010 – does that mean an automated post-apocalyptic paradise for thinking machines after the human apocalypse? If all this seems half-baked, it makes as much sense as the “2010 Mayan calendar end-of-the-world” – or at least 100 previous predictions of the apocalypse. Don’t believe me? Check this long list of predicted apocalyptic dates – I draw your attention in particular to the one for 500 CE, i.e. the year 500. Now the fun part: find a way to use the idea. A cult that believes it, for example, and wants to destroy all computers to prevent it, thinking that 3010 is the date the computers will revolt against humanity. Or maybe an AI that believes it.

Again – once you have an idea, it will get you started. Once you get started, you can throw that idea away if something better comes to mind.

Cure 3: Look for a context in which the something is incorrect or out-of-place – then describe it

We all make mistakes. Logic mistakes; rules interpretation mistakes; personal mistakes. Well, that last one is of no real help using this solution (but it is useful in a variant, which I’ll get to in a moment); so let’s focus on the first two. Pick a mistake, then figure out what would have been necessary for the call / decision that was made to be correct, even if that reason’s basis wasn’t noticed at the time. In other words, retcon history to show that you didn’t make a mistake, but find a way to do so that doesn’t invalidate the subsequent game play; then have the consequences lob up in the new story.

The best example I can offer of this technique was the “Emperor Of China” which I described in “My biggest mistakes: A slip of the tongue” back in September of ’09.

Put your mistakes to work on your behalf, and they won’t seem quite so bad. They certainly aren’t doing anything positive for you until you do!

Cure 3A: Personal Mistakes

These yield a story when you have someone else make the same mistake. You have two choices: A PC has made this mistake without realizing it, or an NPC has/will make this mistake in the course of the adventure/story that you are about to write.

Just be aware that the story of your personal mistake, and its consequences, is very likely to come out in the course of play, and this can be embarrassing or worse (depending on the nature of the mistake).

Be very careful about using a personal mistake by someone else, especially one of your players – this can be perceived as being judgmental, and of revealing secrets, and remind people of things that they would like to forget.

Quite often, the things we regret are the formative experiences that make us the people we are. Use that.

Cure 4: Start with an unknown

There’s not much more stimulating than to realize that there’s something you don’t know – and then fill that gap. I didn’t know how the Orcish Clan Wars were going to play out in the “Orcs and Elves” series – I just knew that I started with one set of circumstances and that a war between the three major clans ended in another set of circumstances. I don’t know how the specific insecticide in my can works – but maybe there’s a plotline there when I find out. I don’t know how Tesla’s bladeless turbine works – but it sounds a bit like the bladeless fans that you can buy these days, and maybe there’s a story there. What could be done to the Solar Wind using a larger-scale version of that technology? I don’t know but the idea is reminiscent of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “Sunbeam” (in the Lensman series). I don’t know how Bulgarian politics work (to pick a country at random) – but maybe there’s a story there.

Find something you don’t know, invent the answer (doing appropriate research) – then work the result into a story or adventure.

Cure 5: Start with a relevant question

This is very similar to the previous cure, but it is more focused. You’ve got six basic questions to work with: Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why. The question should relate to the past campaign or to one of the known elements. Can the laws of similarity and contagion be used (in a sufficiently flexible magic system) to connect a video recording of an object with the object itself to sharpen the image of that object on the video screen? This was a question that was posed in the most recent Zenith-3 scenario by an NPC to the PC Mage (who was absent that day, unfortunately). The answer was ‘yes’. What are the limits of this new capability? Those remain to be discovered – but there are some reasonable limits that I have put in place within the campaign. Is any of this covered by the rules? Not really.

Cure 6: Start with a relevant opinion

Finally, I’m going to return to the place where the solutions to this particular major type of writer’s block began: opinions. Pick an opinion about something – it could be yours, or someone else’s. You can either support it, counter it, or change it.

Supporting it works well if the opinion is that of one of your players or his character, but that accord leaves little room for conflict, and its the conflict that is usually at the heart of a good story. Having someone (an NPC) agree with the character’s opinion and using it to justify actions that the character can’t support is more interesting.

Opposing it works well if the opinion is that of one of your players or his character, because it automatically creates the conflict; just put that opinion into the hands of an antagonist, and start bringing the two together.

Changing it works well in some cases, especially where the opinion is related to some element within the game or background. “Character Type X is boring” you say? Okay, change that. Reshape that character type to make them non-boring. “Orcs are primitives”? Give them a culture. Do some research on “primitive” cultures and you will quickly find that their societies can be just as complex as our own. When I started GMing, Orcs were barbarians barely above the level of cavemen. The Clan-wars installments of “Orcs and Elves” show how radically that opinion of mine has changed. That made Bugbears savage primitives – until I started writing about their culture in that series, and suddenly they became deep and complex.

Next Time: In part 2, I tackle three of the Primary types of writer’s block: Concepts, Specific Events, and Settings for those events to occur in. But that might be in two weeks; I’m currently thinking of staggering entries in this series a fortnight apart to make room for other subjects.

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…

For those who read the player-redacted version of The Ages Of Existence (presented in Inventing & Reinventing Races in D&D: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3), it should be clear that the story is now deep in The Age Of Genocide, as humans call it. In contradiction to the human history, the Age Of Empires starts before the Age Of Heresies and continues straight through into the age of Genocide. But humans have always thought their own history is the more important than that of anyone else.

That might give the impression that we’re only about half-way through, but as the Ages grow more recent, they also get shorter – which means that I expect fewer chapters per Age. Even with the fact that this entire Orcish side of the story was originally only supposed to be three chapters – not the 17-or-so that it has turned into. Two more weeks should get us past that part of the story, at least.

What’s more, as they advance, there’s more that I can do with a copy-and-paste from existing materials, and there’s less critical info that the players don’t already know – so I can get a lot more compressed. All of which means there should be more chapters per week and fewer weeks to the finish. My best estimate is that the Orcs and Elves series is 70-75% complete as of the end of the end of the Orcish Clan Wars. And that’s a good thing – fiction, even of the campaign background sort, is a LOT more work than a non-fiction article of the same length!

Just thought I’d offer that as a time-check for those looking forward to my posting something else on these Mondays.

Oh yes, one more thing. Once again, this is very much a first draft, as can be discerned from the over-use of “signaler” and “signaling” in Chapter 64.

*************************************************************************************************

Clan Wars X: Huyundaltha On Tour

When Corallen set the Huyundaltha aside and taught them how to use their sheer “Elvishness” as a weapon in the defense of their race, he did more than simply create and educate them in a new fighting style and philosophy; he gave them new abilities that set them somewhat aside from their kin. Although the majority of Elves did not know it, the Huyundaltha were not simply a vocation, they were an entirely new sub-race of Elves – one that members of the core race could aspire to and join, for the differences between them were artificially imposed.

One of those gifts was a sharing of spirit, an ability to call apon each other’s reserves of stamina, clear-headedness, and resolve, of strength, nimbleness, and fortitude, and yes, of Elvishness itself, in time of need. Because it was contrary to their purpose for being, this was never revealed to even the most senior members of the Elvish Race; it was a secret known only to the Huyundaltha. When the inherent potential for bloodlust was aroused amongst the Huyundaltha expedition against Molgoth and his Cult Of Stone, those tainted by that disease of the spirit were not merely those present. While most remaining Huyundaltha were able to wall themselves off from it as anathema to their very Elvishness, they could do so only by sacrificing some of their own, drawing apon the spirit of Elvishness within them to protect the whole while leaving those donors unprotected.

Had there been warning, these donors might have been restrained. The reaction of the majority was instinctive, a part of their being. Twelve Huyundaltha gave of their souls and were corrupted in order to save the majority. These twelve were able to call apon the will and sense of purpose of their fellows to restrain their craving for blood, violence, and mayhem long enough to remove themselves from the conflict. Not to put too fine a point on it, they fled, lest their bloodlust turn them against their fellows. They had no inkling that this very bloodlust would become the key to victory against Molgoth. By the time the Demonic Agent of Chaos was destroyed, they were several days removed from the Elven Forest, on a self-imposed journey in search of redemption. They were listed as casualties of the final battle by their fellow Huyundaltha and, in its own somewhat existential way, that was truth.

They felt that destruction, even at that distance, and much of the insatiable need left them with that event; they had come to their senses, but still felt corrupted, tainted, by what they had experienced. Seeing themselves as condemned by their betrayal of the principles for which they stood, they remained resolute in their determination to exile themselves until they could achieve redemption. Travelling as surreptitiously as they could, feeling keenly that they were in hostile territory, they had observed parts of the Clan Wars of the Orcs, and pondered the meaning of events, and the motivations of those involved. They knew virtually nothing of Orcish Society, its organization, clan distinctions, and tensions; they perceived a monolithic culture inherently prone to violence. But their own recent experience opened a window to understanding and sympathy, and as they travelled through the Orclands and saw ample evidence of that propensity for violence, they also observed many acts of kindness and humanity that struck a familiar chord. A mother nursing her child; a beloved grandfather mourned; one sibling protecting another. Orcish society might be martial, and uncaring, and even cruel; but it was not inherently evil, and many Orcs had values in common with more civilized cultures. Perhaps there might even be sufficient common ground for eventual peace between Elves and Orcs.

This thought was something of a revelation to the Huyundaltha, and they decided to explore it further; they had no need to be anywhere urgently, and could linger over each new discovery for as long as desired. Those who dwelt in the walled cities were clearly the most civilized of the Orcs, and so they made the choice to watch events unfold and observe these dwellers in cities of stone. They had watched the betrayal of the alliance by the Bleeding Swords, had watched the division of the Army Of The One Eye, and had watched as Gruumsh exhorted the remnants of that army to cast the spells that would summon his army from beyond the sky.

This last development they had seen as greatly troubling, for the members of that army were not unlike Infelstreta, that which humans would term Demons. And then, their Elven Sight, enhanced by their nature as Huyundaltha, felt the first stirrings of the preparations within the city to repel the army encamped at their doorstep with forbidden magics, and knew they had to investigate. Entering the tunnels carved out by the Troglodyte Sappers at the commencement of hostilities, they had found the first Orcish Guard in sight and surrendered to him, demanding to be taken to the rulers of the city.

Clan Wars XI: The Improbable Alliance

Of course, The Huyundaltha did not explain all of this to the council when presented to them under guard. They spoke of fighting a great evil, and of watching their neighbors, and the common ground between Elves and Orcs that they had unexpectedly observed, and of witnessing the conflict between Orcish factions, and – lastly – of sensing the casting of forbidden magics within the walls of the city.

The council of Orcs refuted the statement, and declared the Elves to be liars, and untrustworthy; the council admitted to ordering preparations made, but had not ordered the rituals to be commenced. The Drow Ambassador, Tathzyr, sneered at them, taunting them with the fragility and improbability of their story. This infuriated the Huyundaltha, who seized the weapons of the guards who held them and moved to attack the Ambassador, the expressions on their faces showing that they relished this turn of events. The Guards attempted to impose themselves between the Huyundaltha and the Clan Council, but the Elves danced between them as though they were no more mobile than trees and closed on the Ambassador.

This turn of events astonished Tathzyr; violence had never been the first resort of choice of his surface kin, and when driven to it, they never exhibited such savage glee at the prospect. Belatedly, he realized that these are not like any other elves of his experience, they stood astride both Elvish and Drow natures, sharing a little of both. A squad of archers armed with crossbows emerged from the shadows and took aim at the Elves, as the Clan-Chief instructed them to put up their arms, the Drow was under the Council’s protection.

Before the elves could respond, a messenger burst into the council chambers, covered in blood. Without waiting for instructions to do so, he reports on the beginning of the Divine Battle on the plains before the city walls, and the citizens of the city are in panic. The Shamans have a strangely glazed look, and have become motionless where they stood, as rigid as statues, and the rituals are enacting themselves without Orcish participation, and he has had to fight his way through the streets to warn the council.

The Ambassador was forced to concede to the council that it sounded very much like their visitors may have been correct, as improbable as it seems. Since they were now as trapped within the city as the rest of the populace, perhaps common interests should be set before ingrained hostilities, as unnatural as that might seem – in the face of the greater unnaturalness that confronted them all – and told everything.

The Clan council mulled this over for a few moments, but the bloodied figure of the messenger, now swaying with exhaustion, served as a sobering reminder and spur to decision. The council demanded the Elves give their parole, and the Huyundaltha agreed. The Ambassador then gave a compressed briefing that synopsized circumstances and events with great economy, and the leader of the Elvish band was accepted as another Advisor to the Clan Council. The most unlikely of alliances began with a council of war.

Clan Wars XII: Council Of War

It might seem, to those who were not there, that the greater intellectual capacities of the Drow and Elves led them to dominate the council, but this ignores several important facts. While the Ambassador was arguably the most intellectually-gifted participant, he had limited understanding and less awareness of magic, much to the surprise of the Elves. The Huyundaltha possessed that awareness and as great an understanding of arcane and spiritual magical forces as could be boasted by any non-practitioner of the arts, but they were unfamiliar with the society, and were few in number. They were a martial order, but one trained to react and work in unison without need for lengthy and involved communications, almost by instinct; their training and abilities, by their nature, were not suited to operations in concert with members of other races. The Orcs, by contrast, were not merely a martial order, they were a martial society who practiced warfare as a professional art-form, and who had developed techniques for doing so in companionship with other races, and the clan council was comprised of the most gifted practitioners from amongst the clan. They were not merely muscle, they were experts, and this was their clan and their city, and that expertise enabled them to participate in the council of war as equals.

Sidebar: The Elvish Sight and Magic
Although at the time noted merely as a fact to be puzzled over when opportunity presented itself and accepted in the meantime, it is worth a brief diversion from the narrative to explore the inability of Ambassador Tathzyr to sense the ‘forbidden magic’ as did the Huyundaltha.

Only in recent times has it become clear that from the moment of division, Lolth began blocking her subjects from their training in the use of this sense. Some records suggest that she sought to transform this ability into another sense, akin to the first, but more adapted to the underground life of the Drow. Without training, “elvish sight” immediately began to stagnate amongst the Drow.

It is now believed that this was deliberate on her part and intended to aid her subjects in seeing her as a single divine being, forgetting her origins – and any vulnerabilities that this true nature might have entailed.

The few throwbacks who emerged in each generation were discovered at birth; the females were inducted into the priesthood, under Her direct control; the males were inducted into the Mages, a caste that were ruthlessly dominated by the rest of society, or marked as sacrifices to be killed in her name in stylized rituals.

It is often speculated that the lack of this sense was fundamental to the difference in character that can be observed when comparing Elves with Drow. While Elven sight can be used to sense arcane and spiritual forces, its primary function is as an awareness of life force and the bonds between all living things. This perception makes the Elves feel themselves to be a part of the natural world, its absence permitted the Drow to perceive themselves as dominant over nature, bending it to their will, and capable of acts of villainy and cruelty beyond anything that could be imagined by their Elvish kin.

There was little that could be done about the rituals casting themselves save to monitor events, and that was of little use if reports could not reach the council; messengers having to fight their way through the streets was entirely too problematic, proposed the Huyundaltha. The Orcs had developed a signaling system using flags that enabled them to coordinate tactics at a distance, replied the Council; the meaning attached to these signals was of no direct application, but new meanings could be assigned to those signals. The information would be simple, but communications would be immediate. It would take time to train the soldiers who knew this system of signaling in the new meanings, however.

Not necessarily, responded the Elves; they could learn the new meanings as quickly as they were devised and translate them into the old “language”, so that the Orcish signalers could convey them – provided they were instructed to signal exactly what they were told. This would require each signaler to be paired with an Elf, but not every site needed to be monitored in this way; what happened at one would match events at another. Some redundancy would be desirable, in case one pair were unable to signal due to events, but three or four such pairs should be more than enough.

Squads of soldiers should be positioned to defend these signalers and take action if instructed; those instructions must also be conveyed by means of this system of signaling, one of the Orcs suggested. Reinforcements should be stationed nearby, ready to take action should the first squad be attacked by whatever was being summoned, suggested another, tactics to which the rest readily agreed. They immediately began listing the intelligence and commands that might need to be communicated by the signals, which several of the Huyundaltha memorized before being paired with an Orc familiar with the signaling system.

One of the shaman should be removed from the place where they were preparing the rituals and brought to the council chambers for observation and examination, suggested the Ambassador. Yes, agreed the elves, and since presumably there were some Shamans-in-training who were not considered adept enough to assist in the preparations, someone should investigate to determine if they were all paralyzed in the same way as the participants were reported to be; if not, one of them may be able to invoke spiritual abilities to gain a better understanding of what problems afflicted the paralyzed, suggested the Elves. Squads were immediately dispatched to carry out these tasks.

The council then considered the problem of the divine conflict, and its participants. Gruumsh they knew, but why did the army summoned from beyond the sky not resemble the army of ascended Orcs that divine lore described? Who was his opponent, and what was his nature?

Did the Bugbears have a deity of their own?, asked the Elves, who had never thought of the creatures as especially spiritual before. They do, informed the Ambassador. When my Queen allied herself with the Ogres in ages past, the Bugbears adopted worship of her from their then-masters; but they gave her a Bugbear mate to symbolize the devotion of their race to her – some fictitious creation of their own delusions that they named Hruggek, who goes amongst his people in the guise of an ordinary Bugbear and delights in ambushing his opponents by means of that deception. They also had a god of the underworld where Bugbears found wanting were eternally tortured, though the Ambassador did not know his name, only that he was a great horned beast. Tathzyr had always been told that no such beings really existed, and it surpassed the bounds of his imagination to contemplate the Queen Of Spiders ever accepting such a mate. It simply wasn’t in her nature, agreed the Elves.

Nevertheless, this description so matched the events at the commencement of the divine battle that it was immediately accepted by the council that Hruggek, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, was now in battle with Gruumsh, the sound of the conflict having punctuated every word that had been said in the council. At this thought, the expression of the leader of the Huyundaltha grew troubled, but he said nothing of the reasons for his concern.

Much had been achieved in the first hours of the coalition between the unlikely allies, and the Clan Leader Agronak called for refreshments, and instructed the participants to take a few minutes’ break to calm their thoughts before the next problem was addressed. During this intermission, the leader of the Huyundaltha sought out the Drow Ambassador and began speaking to him in quiet tones so that the other council members could not overhear.

The similarities in the various situations could not be overlooked, he suggested. Their allies were probably not willing to accept the notion without some more concrete proof, but consider: Each of the forces involved had been disrupted by the intervention of the deity to whom they felt the greatest affinity. Gruumsh had led the Red Eye clan against the Mailed Fists, Ilneval had led the Bleeding Sword clan against the Red Eyes, Bahgtru had led the Mailed Fists in resisting both and advised them to prepare these now out-of-control rituals, and now Hruggek or some pretender to the name had led the Bugbears against the Red Eyes – and put them in position to oppose both the Mailed Fists and Bleeding Swords. If “Gruumsh” commanded an army that was not the one he was supposed to have, did that not cast doubts on his validity as well? None of the Orcish Deities would benefit from this general conflict; ‘Bahgtru’ may have suggested an outside influence, Luthic, as being responsible, but what if that was a half-truth? If ‘Hruggek’ and “Gruumsh’ were not what they appeared, none of the other ‘deities’ seemingly involved might be what they seemed, either.

What he did not mention out of consideration for the current alliance was that he was already predisposed to consider the possibility because the Elves considered Lolth to be a false Goddess – and that the Ambassador’s mind had probably rejected the possibility because it would naturally shy away from any such “heretical” thought. Repeatedly bearing down on the similarities in the way that he had left little room for the Ambassador to evade the proposition, and – by implication – the problem of how to broach the subject with the Orcs.

In the meantime, Goral, the Clan Warblade, had approached another member of the Huyundaltha and broached a subject that had vexed him repeatedly over the last few weeks. How could it be that no matter how secretly they laid their plans, the Red Eyes always knew where they were massing their forces to break out of the siege and were able to position their forces to prevent the success of the strategy? The Huyundaltha considered the problem while minotaur servants began distributing the refreshments ordered by Agronak. There can be only one possibility, he announced: you have a spy in your midst, or more than one, and they must be positioned to monitor the disposition of your forces. Impossible, came the reply; to foil such, we tried my issuing the instructions directly to the tribes concerned without notifying intermediaries, and chose the site at random. Abruptly, all heads turned toward the window as the fall of Gruumsh and the victory cry of Hruggek reverberated about the city.

At the sound of that victory cry, which was a signal as much as an exultation, each of the Minotaur servants drew weapons hidden in their peasant robes and stabbed at the nearest Orc with all his or her might. Only the ambassador remained at the window to witness the transformation of Hruggek into something that resembled both the underworld deity of the Bugbears – who quite understandably fled in terror from the apparition – and a Minotaur!

*************************************************************************************************

The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

I’m foregoing this while our attention is focussed on the Orcish side of the story, as it has no relevance to the narrative.

*************************************************************************************************

Next time: The Minotaur Revolution, The Hidden Dragon, and The Oracle of Gottskragg! Chapters 66-68!

Let’s talk about institutional secrecy.

Organizations have all sorts of reasons for keeping secrets. Good ones. Necessary ones. Bad ones.

I’ve watching repeats of JAG lately and recently they aired the Season 8 episode “Need to know” which is about a submarine which was lost at sea 34 years earlier, with the loss of all hands, while on a covert mission for the Central Intelligence Agency. The episode was about finding out what happened to give closure to the families of the men on board. There is a more complete synopsis at this website.

This brought to mind the subject of secrets, and the reasons they are kept, and in particular the work that I used to do for CLAN, the Care Leaver’s Australia Network, which is a support and advocacy organization dedicated to helping the children placed in orphanages and similar institutions in Australia, and in particular to their struggle for apologies and recognition from the organizations who ran those institutions, particularly with regard to the abuses that went on. Adding to that the recent admission of a cover-up by the Catholic Church in Australia of cases of child sexual abuse, including the creation of false documents, and similar admissions made in the US a few years ago and the huge settlements of compensation cases that accompanied it; and the book I am currently reading (a Biography of Nikola Tesla), which brought to mind the whole subtopic of industrial secrets, and you can see where the inspiration for this article came from.

The pattern of secrecy

Here’s the pattern when it comes to institutional secrecy:

• An institution decides that it has to keep something secret;
• Rumors and Allegations begin to circulate about the secret;
• A wall of denials is erected in order to protect the secret;
• In time, this gives rise to a second layer of secrets, aimed at protecting the parties to the first cover-up from embarrassment;
• Some time later again, a third layer of secrecy is adopted, aimed at protecting the institution from the damage that would result if it were ever revealed that they had covered something up.
• Eventually, the fact that they have a secret to keep becomes more important than the secret itself, which is usually common if unconfirmed knowledge. The initial secret has become institutionalized within the organization.

It doesn’t matter what the secret is. It could be something shameful, or something that needs to be secret for legitimate national security reasons, or a trade secret, or an outright criminal act. There may even be a concerted effort to destroy any records containing the truth and replace them with ones that protect the secrecy. A generation or so of management later, and the organization itself no longer knows that it is protecting a secret; the truth has been buried, leaving only rumor, innuendo, and official denials. Penetrating a veil of secrecy that has gone this far is a monumental task of assembling incongruities and details that don’t quite match up.

Of course, going the “false documents” route is extremely dangerous; if future managements are reassured that there is nothing to hide, they may well permit an investigation to “clear the air”, and find themselves then acting from a position of feeling their ideals have been compromised when the details don’t add up. Their sense of betrayal and outrage can lead to full cooperation with the investigation that, in turn, leads to the exposure of the true culprit. Well, it makes a good story; in reality, the likelyhood is that there will suddenly be a fresh wave of coverups.

What does all this mean?

Organizations in RPGs

RPGs are full of organizations. Orders of Knights. Political bodies and Courts. Businesses. Trade Missions. Diplomatic Missions. Schools Of Magic. Temples and theological hierarchies. Ship’s crews. Military Academies. Guilds. Armies. City Watches.

There are dozens of them. And they are all likely to have at least one secret that they would lie, bribe, and perhaps kill, to protect.

Too many secrets?

don’t have such a secret.
How likely?

• Year 1: No secret = 0.98 to the first power = 2% chance of a secret.
• Year 2: No secret = 0.98 to the 2nd power =~ 0.96 = 4% chance of a secret.
• Year 3: No secret = 0.98 to the 3rd power =~ 0.94 = 6% chance of a secret.
• Year 4: No secret = 0.98 to the 4th power =~ 0.92 = 8% chance of a secret.
• Year 5: No secret = 0.98 to the 5th power =~ 0.9 = 10% chance of a secret.
• Year 6: No secret = 0.98 to the 6th power =~ 0.89 = 11% chance of a secret.
• Year 7: No secret = 0.98 to the 7th power =~ 0.87 = 13% chance of a secret.
• Year 8: No secret = 0.98 to the 8th power =~ 0.85 = 15% chance of a secret.
• Year 9: No secret = 0.98 to the 9th power =~ 0.83 = 17% chance of a secret.
• Year 10: No secret = 0.98 to the 10th power =~ 0.82 = 18% chance of a secret.
• Year 11: No secret = 0.98 to the 11th power =~ 0.8 = 20% chance of a secret.
• Year 12: No secret = 0.98 to the 12th power =~ 0.78 = 22% chance of a secret.
• Year 13: No secret = 0.98 to the 13th power =~ 0.77 = 23% chance of a secret.
• Year 14: No secret = 0.98 to the 14th power =~ 0.75 = 25% chance of a secret.
• Year 15: No secret = 0.98 to the 15th power =~ 0.74 = 26% chance of a secret.
• Year 16: No secret = 0.98 to the 16th power =~ 0.72 = 28% chance of a secret.
• Year 17: No secret = 0.98 to the 17th power =~ 0.71 = 29% chance of a secret.
• Year 18: No secret = 0.98 to the 18th power =~ 0.7 = 30% chance of a secret.
• Year 19: No secret = 0.98 to the 19th power =~ 0.68 = 32% chance of a secret.
• Year 20: No secret = 0.98 to the 20th power =~ 0.67 = 33% chance of a secret.
• Year 21: No secret = 0.98 to the 21st power =~ 0.65 = 35% chance of a secret.
• Year 22: No secret = 0.98 to the 22nd power =~ 0.64 = 36% chance of a secret.
• Year 23: No secret = 0.98 to the 23rd power =~ 0.63 = 37% chance of a secret.
• Year 24: No secret = 0.98 to the 24th power =~ 0.62 = 38% chance of a secret.
• Year 25: No secret = 0.98 to the 25th power =~ 0.6 = 40% chance of a secret.

You have to wait a long time for that to reach 100%. 263 years, in fact, before the chance of not having a secret to protect is less than 0.5% (at which point it would round to zero instead of rounding to 1%). But for the last century or so, the chance was in the 90%+ range.

But 2% is an extraordinarily low base chance. It might be appropriate for an order of Paladins or something along those lines, something where purity of spirit and purpose are enforced directly by Divine Power, but not for much else. What happens if we double it to 4% per year?

• Year 1: No secret = 0.96 to the first power = 4% chance of a secret.
• Year 2: No secret = 0.96 to the 2nd power =~ 0.92 = 8% chance of a secret.
• Year 3: No secret = 0.96 to the 3rd power =~ 0.88 = 12% chance of a secret.
• Year 4: No secret = 0.96 to the 4th power =~ 0.85 = 15% chance of a secret.
• Year 5: No secret = 0.96 to the 5th power =~ 0.82 = 18% chance of a secret.
• Year 6: No secret = 0.96 to the 6th power =~ 0.78 = 22% chance of a secret.
• Year 7: No secret = 0.96 to the 7th power =~ 0.75 = 25% chance of a secret.
• Year 8: No secret = 0.96 to the 8th power =~ 0.72 = 28% chance of a secret.
• Year 9: No secret = 0.96 to the 9th power =~ 0.69 = 31% chance of a secret.
• Year 10: No secret = 0.96 to the 10th power =~ 0.66 = 34% chance of a secret.
• Year 11: No secret = 0.96 to the 11th power =~ 0.64 = 36% chance of a secret.
• Year 12: No secret = 0.96 to the 12th power =~ 0.61 = 39% chance of a secret.
• Year 13: No secret = 0.96 to the 13th power =~ 0.59 = 41% chance of a secret.
• Year 14: No secret = 0.96 to the 14th power =~ 0.56 = 44% chance of a secret.
• Year 15: No secret = 0.96 to the 15th power =~ 0.54 = 46% chance of a secret.
• Year 16: No secret = 0.96 to the 16th power =~ 0.52 = 48% chance of a secret.
• Year 17: No secret = 0.96 to the 17th power =~ 0.50 = 50% chance of a secret.
• Year 18: No secret = 0.96 to the 18th power =~ 0.48 = 52% chance of a secret.
• Year 19: No secret = 0.96 to the 19th power =~ 0.46 = 54% chance of a secret.
• Year 20: No secret = 0.96 to the 20th power =~ 0.44 = 56% chance of a secret.
• Year 21: No secret = 0.96 to the 21st power =~ 0.42 = 58% chance of a secret.
• Year 22: No secret = 0.96 to the 22nd power =~ 0.41 = 59% chance of a secret.
• Year 23: No secret = 0.96 to the 23rd power =~ 0.39 = 61% chance of a secret.
• Year 24: No secret = 0.96 to the 24th power =~ 0.38 = 62% chance of a secret.
• Year 25: No secret = 0.96 to the 25th power =~ 0.36 = 64% chance of a secret.

It’s clear that the chances are going up a lot faster, but it still takes 130 years – a little less than half the 2% value – to reach a probable 100%. But for a good 60 or more of those years the chance was 90% or better that they would. Which is another way of saying that nine in ten organizations that are 70 years or more old will have such a secret.

This is possibly correct for an organization like a church that has political agendas as well as some divine enforcement. But if a Paladin loses his honor it is fairly obvious, whereas a cleric can remain hidden so long as he mouths the correct formulas and doesn’t try casting any spells. It’s even possible that this value is too low.

How about at a neat 10% per year?

• Year 1: No secret = 0.9 to the first power = 10% chance of a secret.
• Year 2: No secret = 0.9 to the 2nd power =~ 0.81 = 19% chance of a secret.
• Year 3: No secret = 0.9 to the 3rd power =~ 0.73 = 27% chance of a secret.
• Year 4: No secret = 0.9 to the 4th power =~ 0.66 = 34% chance of a secret.
• Year 5: No secret = 0.9 to the 5th power =~ 0.59 = 41% chance of a secret.
• Year 6: No secret = 0.9 to the 6th power =~ 0.53 = 47% chance of a secret.
• Year 7: No secret = 0.9 to the 7th power =~ 0.48 = 52% chance of a secret.
• Year 8: No secret = 0.9 to the 8th power =~ 0.43 = 57% chance of a secret.
• Year 9: No secret = 0.9 to the 9th power =~ 0.39 = 61% chance of a secret.
• Year 10: No secret = 0.9 to the 10th power =~ 0.35 = 65% chance of a secret.
• Year 11: No secret = 0.9 to the 11th power =~ 0.31 = 69% chance of a secret.
• Year 12: No secret = 0.9 to the 12th power =~ 0.28 = 72% chance of a secret.
• Year 13: No secret = 0.9 to the 13th power =~ 0.25 = 75% chance of a secret.
• Year 14: No secret = 0.9 to the 14th power =~ 0.23 = 77% chance of a secret.
• Year 15: No secret = 0.9 to the 15th power =~ 0.21 = 79% chance of a secret.
• Year 16: No secret = 0.9 to the 16th power =~ 0.19 = 81% chance of a secret.
• Year 17: No secret = 0.9 to the 17th power =~ 0.17 = 83% chance of a secret.
• Year 18: No secret = 0.9 to the 18th power =~ 0.15 = 85% chance of a secret.
• Year 19: No secret = 0.9 to the 19th power =~ 0.14 = 86% chance of a secret.
• Year 20: No secret = 0.9 to the 20th power =~ 0.12 = 88% chance of a secret.
• Year 21: No secret = 0.9 to the 21st power =~ 0.11 = 89% chance of a secret.
• Year 22: No secret = 0.9 to the 22nd power =~ 0.1 = 90% chance of a secret.
• Year 23: No secret = 0.9 to the 23rd power =~ 0.09 = 91% chance of a secret.
• Year 24: No secret = 0.9 to the 24th power =~ 0.08 = 92% chance of a secret.
• Year 25: No secret = 0.9 to the 25th power =~ 0.07 = 93% chance of a secret.

After 22 years, we hit the 90% mark – this is far quicker than a 4% chance was, in fact it’s less than half as long. But it still takes until Year 51 for rounding to take the chance to 100%. This is the right sort of chance for a basically honorable organization whose mission involves politics, statehood, and other such dangerous pursuits.

Doubling this to 20% per year gets us into the organizations that have slightly shady dealings every now and then.

• Year 1: No secret = 0.8 to the first power = 20% chance of a secret.
• Year 2: No secret = 0.8 to the 2nd power =~ 0.64 = 36% chance of a secret.
• Year 3: No secret = 0.8 to the 3rd power =~ 0.51 = 49% chance of a secret.
• Year 4: No secret = 0.8 to the 4th power =~ 0.41 = 59% chance of a secret.
• Year 5: No secret = 0.8 to the 5th power =~ 0.33 = 67% chance of a secret.
• Year 6: No secret = 0.8 to the 6th power =~ 0.26 = 74% chance of a secret.
• Year 7: No secret = 0.8 to the 7th power =~ 0.21 = 79% chance of a secret.
• Year 8: No secret = 0.8 to the 8th power =~ 0.17 = 83% chance of a secret.
• Year 9: No secret = 0.8 to the 9th power =~ 0.13 = 87% chance of a secret.
• Year 10: No secret = 0.8 to the 10th power =~ 0.11 = 89% chance of a secret.
• Year 11: No secret = 0.8 to the 11th power =~ 0.09 = 91% chance of a secret.
• Year 12: No secret = 0.8 to the 12th power =~ 0.07 = 93% chance of a secret.
• Year 13: No secret = 0.8 to the 13th power =~ 0.06 = 94% chance of a secret.
• Year 14: No secret = 0.8 to the 14th power =~ 0.04 = 96% chance of a secret.
• Year 15: No secret = 0.8 to the 15th power =~ 0.04 = 96% chance of a secret.
• Year 16: No secret = 0.8 to the 16th power =~ 0.03 = 97% chance of a secret.
• Year 17: No secret = 0.8 to the 17th power =~ 0.02 = 98% chance of a secret.
• Year 18: No secret = 0.8 to the 18th power =~ 0.02 = 98% chance of a secret.
• Year 19: No secret = 0.8 to the 19th power =~ 0.01 = 99% chance of a secret.
• Year 20: No secret = 0.8 to the 20th power =~ 0.01 = 99% chance of a secret.
• Year 21: No secret = 0.8 to the 21st power =~ 0.01 = 99% chance of a secret.
• Year 22: No secret = 0.8 to the 22nd power =~ 0.01 = 99% chance of a secret.
• Year 23: No secret = 0.8 to the 23rd power =~ 0.01 = 99% chance of a secret.
• Year 24: No secret = 0.8 to the 24th power =~ 0.00 = 100% chance of a secret.

Nine in ten slightly-shady organizations will have a secret that they are desperate to hide after just less than 11 years. And that’s completely ignoring the fact that such organizations come into existence for a reason, and that reason is probably itself a very deep secret.

So, what are the chances that an organization like this will have two such secrets? Well, it’s the chance that they already have one, multiplied by 100 minus the chance of not having one – which just happens to be the same as the chance that they already have one. If you could be sure that they would only acquire one such secret in a year, you would use the chance from the previous line, but there is no such restriction. And the chance of a third is the chance of two multiplied by the same chance again, and so on.

• 67% one secret
• 67 x 0.67 = 45% two secrets
• 67 x 0.67 x 0.67 = 30% three secrets
• 67 x 0.67 x 0.67 x 0.67 = 14% four secrets
• 67 x 0.67 x 0.67 x 0.67 x 0.67 = 9% five secrets.

These numbers overlap – technically, the first chance is actually the chance of having at least one secret, so, convert them into a table, you get:

• 01-09 = five secrets
• 10-14 = four secrets
• 15-30 = three secrets
• 31-45 = two secrets
• 46-67 = one secret
• 68-00 = no secret

Remembering that these are secrets that the organization will lie, bribe, and possibly kill, to protect, and that ignores any secrets stemming from the creation reason in the first place.

It’s probably worth remembering that a serious spy organization might undertake half a dozen or more missions a year, most of which would constitute such a secret (instead of years, count “missions”). Five missions a year for three years at even a paltry 20% chance each is 96% of a dirty little secret, like targetting someone they should not have, or for reasons they should not have.

The Secret Of Secrets

So, what’s the upshot?

Whenever you create an organization, give a passing moment’s thought to how likely they are to have secret worth killing over, or dying for, given how long they’ve been around. It’s not necessary to assign numbers – I’ve done so just to offer your intuition a guideline. Give your d% a roll, and react instinctively to the result. Then start thinking about what their lethal secrets might be, and whether or not a PC might stumble over one in the course of their interaction with that organization – if not now, then eventually. Because secrets have a way of getting out…

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…

This is the material that in the original plan (as revised a couple of weeks ago), would have been posted last week. Chapter 59’s content would have appeared as Chapter 55.

And so would the content of Chapters 60, 61, and 62.

Clearly, I had far too much content planned for inclusion in the old Chapter 55. In fact, I had so much content that I have not had time to even put it into full first-draft form; this is still very much just an outline of the content.

*************************************************************************************************

Clan Wars VI: Point Of View

For a time, all had proceeded as Baghtru had prophesied to the Mailed Fist clan: “The Red Eyes will attack the Mailed Fists, seemingly in alliance with the Bleeding Swords, but this alliance will then be apparently betrayed by the Bleeding Swords, who will rush to occupy the Home Ranges of the Red Eyes.”

Compare this to events as perceived by the Mailed Fists: They were besieged by the Red Eyes and Bleeding Swords as forecast. The Bleeding Swords then betrayed the alliance with the Red Eyes and invaded Red Eye homelands to the Sunrise, also as predicted. What they thought they would gain by this is unknown, but was thought irrelevant because the Mailed Fists believed the Bleeding Swords were being manipulated.

In response, the Red Eyes had then divided the Army Of The Crescent Moon into three; one force, 150,000 strong and renamed the Army Of The One Eye, withdrew to the Sunrise (presumably to fight the invading Bleeding Swords), while a second subdivision of 70,000, now named the Army Of The Skull withdrew to the Sunset and into Bleeding Swords home ranges for reasons that didn’t make a lot of tactical sense, but this was (once again) thought irrelevant because the Red Eyes were also being manipulated. Unknown to the Bleeding Swords, a second levee of 54,000 Orc Soldiers was separated from the Army Of The Crescent Moon two days later to act as reserves for the Army Of The Skull, leaving 140,000 besieging the walled cities of the Mailed Fists clan. 40,000 of these were killed in attempts to overrun the walls and other skirmishes, at the cost of another 5,000 of the defending City Dwellers. The remaining 100,000 had no hope of overcoming the 105,000 defenders; it was all they could do to keep them contained and besieged until one of the other Armies returned.

The defenders within the cities had made repeated attempts to break the seige, concentrating forces on this side or that, but somehow the besieging army seemed to know about their preparations as quickly as they were begun, and reinforcements summoned from other areas accordingly. This was a puzzle, but one of little urgency, because the Mailed Fists expected that the Burning Swords would now secretly make overtures toward renewing their alliance with the Mailed Fists.

Much to their surprise, this didn’t happen. Instead, a horde of 200,000 Bugbears – known allies of the Burning Swords – passed through Burning Swords territory without conflict and fell on the Army Of The Skull like a breaking wave, grinding it into Orcburger in less than a week, before marching toward the central regions and the Army Of The Crescent Moon.

The involvement and actions of the Bugbears were completely unexpected according to the guidance offered by Baghtru, who had returned to his Citadel in the Frozen Wastes to spy out the movements of the enemy. He returned in spirit form with fresh intelligence of what was happening, but not why. He told the council of the Mailed Fists that his father had sent part of the Army Of The Eye to besiege his citadel and prevent him from returning in the flesh, and that he would only be able to spend limited time with his children until that siege was lifted.

He reported that as the Bugbears advanced, they had split off squads to capture and hold the territory that had come into dispute, so that the invading force was reduced in size by the time it reached the City Walls and confronted the Red Eyes blockading the cities of the Mailed Fist clan, but still outnumbered them better than two-to-one.

Now the Red Eyes – trapped between city walls and Bugbear Horde, unable to maneuver without weakening or lifting the siege of the Mailed Fists – sent out negotiators to attempt to establish peaceful relations with the Bugbears. Those negotiators were skinned, dipped in honey, and returned to the Red Eyes in contemptuous manner.

Clan Wars VII: The Insights Of Ambassador Tathzyr

Lolth is not one to ignore a potential resource even if she had no immediate need of it. Living within the city of the Mailed Fists was an Ambassador of the Spider-Queen. Tathzyr normally kept a very low profile, bringing himself to the notice of the Orcs as little as possible, always aware that he was surrounded by a throng of hostile enemies who might turn on him at any moment. Shy, retiring, and scholarly (compared with most Drow), he was of the impression that both his Queen and the Orcs around him forgot that he was there, most of the time, and that was exactly how he liked it. It was with some disquiet that he received a summons from the Clan Council. When he reached the council, he was asked to shed any light that he could on the puzzles confronting the Mailed Fists.

Proceeding with caution and logic, he contributed little save tentative speculation; but chief amongst the notions that he hesitantly placed before the Council was the thought that if an enemy was not behaving as expected, it usually meant that some assumption about motives or objectives had been incorrectly assessed. Perhaps Baghtru had been misled, manipulated, in the same way as he believed the other Orcish Deities had been? He promised to use the arcane devices he had been issued by his Queen, against such need, to request any further intelligence that her infinitely greater resources and faculties could provide – but there was no treaty between the Mailed Fists and the Drow, and she might well refuse to disclose anything that she knew without one. Tathzyr desperately hoped that this line of arguement would persuade the Orcs that his offer was so unlikely to be productive that they would tell him not to bother. Instead, they simply grunted and pressed for an assessment of what he thought would happen next.

He replied that to assess the mind of an enemy, one had to attempt to put themselves into their boots. Gruumsh was in absolute command of the Red Eyes; in effect, the envoys sent by the Clan-Chief of the Red Eyes were personal representatives of Gruumsh. These had not just been rebuffed, they had been humiliated; when Gruumsh learns of this, he is likely to regard it as a personal insult, and do something Rash and Violent.

Now, the Bugbears, he continued: Gruumsh towers over the battlefield, unmistakable in his vastness. The Bugbears could not have failed to know that they were rebuffing and denigrating the personal envoy of a Deity. Something gave them the confidence to do so and while it was not apparent what that might be, it has to be of equal magnitude to Gruumsh – at least in the minds of the Bugbears. The Mailed Fist clan dared stand against Gruumsh only because they had the personal backing of Baghtru; the Bleeding Swords dared oppose him only because they had the support of Ilneval. The bugbears must have the support of a Deity of some sort, or think they did. Whatever Gruumsh did, the source of the Bugbear’s confidence could not fail to respond without all unity in his forces disappearing. Logically, then, he expected that the next development would be pitched battle between the Army Of The Crescent Moon and the Bugbear Horde, and an equally-direct confrontation between Gruumsh and whatever was backing the Bugbears.

Finally, consider the tactical situation: The Red Eyes were vastly outnumbered. Gruumsh has played at war for long enough to recognize this as a losing position; no matter how angered he might be, he is still a God Of War. Before he can properly punish the Bugbears for their disrespect, he will need to do something to equalize the forces of battle. From where can his additional troops be found? He cannot call apon the Mailed Fists, as he once might have done, because he is engaged in a Holy War with you. He has been betrayed by the Bleeding Swords. He has few remaining troglodytes to draw apon; they were engaged against the Bleeding Swords. It would take too long to negotiate an alliance with another mortal race and bring their armies to the battlefield. His only chance will be to call apon the troops that have supported him in his conquest of the places Beyond The Sky. The first sign of the coming conflict can only be the appearance on the battlefield of The Army Of The Eye.

Suddenly, Tathzyr realized that all eyes within the council chamber were focused intently apon him, that he had become so carried away by his own thoughts that he placed himself firmly in the spotlight, and that he had no idea of how to extricate himself from that position. Desperately, he tried to remember everything he had said – had he managed to insult the Clan, or the putative Deity, Baghtru?

The Orcish council shifted nervously in their seats at the silence that followed, until one by one their eyes turned to Baghtru. “Your thought is good, Tathzyr Consult your mistress. Tell her what is happening here. Tell her that I say you have spoken well, and with understanding, and should be rewarded.”

It was at that moment that Tathzyr discovered just how much he had exposed himself; if he disobeyed, his life might well be forfeit, and if he obeyed, his Queen’s attention would be firmly fixed apon him, and his life as he knew it would be over. With sinking heart, he acknowledged the instructions of the Orcish Deity.

Baghtru then rose from his position within the Council. “The Army Of The Eye is vast beyond numbering. Even a fraction will be enough for my father to bring superior numbers against the Bugbears, and leave enough spare to overrun your cities, my children.

“There are those who fight the Army Of The Eye; I did not wish to involve them but we may have no choice. They are creatures of horror and nightmare, over which little control may be exerted, and will be almost as dangerous to you as the Armies of Gruumsh. But I will teach the rituals of summoning to my shaman.”

Clan Wars VIII: Rituals Of War

Tathzyr, the Drow ambassador, almost had it right. Any casual observer would have said that his prognostications were right on the money, and paid off any bets accordingly. Only very close examination, and consultation with an Orcish Shaman, would have revealed any discrepancies.

Mid-afternoon on the third day after the council meeting of the Mailed Fists, howls of fury informed all within earshot that Gruumsh had received some personal insult and was infuriated by it. In his anger, he swelled in size to tower fifty feet above the heads of the tallest Orcs, and with a wild gesture, leveled one of the inner towers of the City, which crashed down in ruins apon the citizens below. Observers within the city watched reverently as he cleared a large space in the centre of the Army Of The Crescent Moon and thrust the head of his spear into the vacated ground, which began to reshape itself into a model of the terrain of the Orclands. Uprooting the tree which had been sheltering his pavilion since the commencement of the siege, he set it afire with a glance from his one good eye, a flame that burned with unnatural speed and ferocity. In minutes, the entire tree was wreathed in flame, and before much more time had passed, it was reduced to charcoal. Crushing the embers between his fists with one angry blow, he watched them rain down over the miniature continent, where they flowed unnaturally until each marked the disposition of a single participant in the conflict. Comparing the size of the bugbear horde with the numbers besieging the cities of the Mailed Fists, he again bellowed in fury. He then fixed his gaze apon the cowering Shamans who accompanied the Army Of The Crescent Moon, who sprang up as though poked with a stick, and began to race back to the tribes to which they belonged. With a cruel smile, and a somewhat smug expression, but still with a glare in his eye, he retrieved his spear, permitting the earth to resume its former shape, and returned to his pavilion, shrinking to his normal 20′ stature as he did so, and there he remained.

Each of the tribes of the Army Of The Crescent Sword, under the exhortations of their Shaman, then began to make preparations for what appeared to be a great feast. Wood was collected and built into vast bonfires, around each of which the entire tribe would tramp and dance, their voices raised in a song of unnatural language. From time to time, the shaman would sprinkle something on the flames which caused them to erupt in a shower of sparks. When the Orcs were exhausted by their frenzied efforts, others would take their place. This ‘feast’ was obviously some vast ritual. Why was he not summoning them himself, for surely he could do so more quickly and reliably than his Shamans could? Was it possible that Gruumsh was so infuriated that he planned to sacrifice the entire Army Of The Crescent Moon in order to summon forth the unnamable, uncountable hordes of the Army Of The Eye, that otherworldly force that Gruumsh commanded in the world beyond the Sky? Filled with apprehension, the Mailed fists began preparing the rituals in which Baghtru had educated them.

As the crescent moon reached it’s zenith in the sky that night, white flames began to flow outward from the bases of each great bonfire, following lines unnaturally straight, and unnaturally curved at the same time, and each Orc dancing around the bonfires was surrounded by a circle of white Flame. At all points where the unnatural lines of flame intersected, the flames grew into towering pillars of fire, so great that those within the city could feel their heat through the thickened and reinforced walls of stone. Abruptly, these pillars became a black so deep that the night sky was but a deep indigo in comparison, and from each came a flood of monstrosities. No two were alike; all were like unto a blending of Orc and other fell creatures. Some had vast bat-like wings, others antlers, still others tails or scaly skin, or long forked tongues that licked the air. All were tainted and rotted as though a week or more dead; some were almost completely skeletal. Baghtru had described the enemies of the Army Of The Eye as “creatures of horror and nightmare”, but had not described the Army itself as comprising the undead issue of mating between Orcs and these creatures. By morning, with the fires reduced to pyres of smoke rising to the heavens, the Army Of The Crescent Moon had been swelled in number eight-fold.

Only an Orcish Shaman could have known that these new forces bore no resemblance to those described in their Holy Lore as The Army Of The Eye. What they were was unknown, but the fact remained: 105,000 defenders and 160,000 bugbears now faced 900,000 enemies – more than enough to overrun the cities or annihilate the bugbears, but not quite enough to do both at once without suffering extreme casualties. In his current temper, though, casualties were not going to be uppermost in the mind of Gruumsh. They had no choice; the Shamans of the Mailed Fists began preparing the rituals of summoning.

As the sun rode ever-higher into the sky, Gruumsh emerged from his pavilion once more. With a bellow, he raised his axe overhead into the air and then let it drop like a banner. What will continue to be described inaccurately as “The Army Of The Eye” turned as one, facing in the direction of the Orc-God’s gaze, and with a single great roar, charged through the lines of the Army Of The Crescent Moon, led by the War-God himself. Some 10,000 of Gruumsh’s Orcs were killed or maimed, trampled underfoot as the throng of monstrosities charged. And, even as they did so, the Bugbear horde appeared, a distant smudge on the horizon, no more than 20 miles from the city walls.

Clan Wars IX: Battle Of Two Gods

As Gruumsh led his forces in a charge toward the Bugbear horde, he again began to swell in size. The bugbears responded with an uncoordinated and lumbering charge of their own. The crash of arms when the two armies reached each other was titanic, and clearly audible within the city. The sharpest-eyed inhabitants had once again been positioned in towers to spy what they could of the outcome, while others watched the forces which continued the siege lest they attempt to take advantage of the distraction to the sunset.

Then Gruumsh reached the enemy lines and began to swing his great axe, which had grown in stature with his own transformation. With every stroke of the blade, enemies and allies alike were tossed aside like leaves in the wind, many torn to shreds by the sheer force of the blow. The bugbears fought desperately, outnumbered by a crushing margin, until Gruumsh, panting with effort and soaked in blood and sweat, paused to recapture his breath. From behind him, one of the Bugbears began to glow and swell in size even as had Gruumsh; this apparition was also armed with a monstrous axe, though one with a longer handle and smaller blade. Without warning, the Deific Bugbear swung his axe, and the blade bit deep into the relatively unprotected back of the War-God of the Orcs.

This surprise assault was not enough to lay the War-God down, however; and what followed was a truly epic contest between two rivals fully matched in power. The earth split, nearby mountains spilled flame and molten rock from within their cores; the afternoon sky was ripped open to reveal the lurking night beneath it, and every swing of those gargantuan weapons was accompanied by a thunderous detonation of sound. So violent was the exchange that both armies retreated in disarray, for anyone nearby was torn to shreds by the magnitude of the forces unleashed, pausing to watch the contest from a distance, enemies standing uncaring beside each other and gazing in wonder at the battle.

For hour after hour, the contest raged; the Bugbear had speed and greater ability to maneuver, while Gruumsh struck less frequently, but with greater effect when he did land a blow. As the day wore on, though, it became clear that the Orc-God was struggling more and more; he had tired himself in mayhem before the Great Bugbear had emerged from his place of concealment as just another member of the Horde, and had received a terrible wound in the first blow. Gradually, he began to slow, and was forced to do nothing more than block the rain of blows from his enemy; and then he began to miss with even these defensive strokes, while his enemy seemed to remain as fresh as ever. Axe-stroke after axe-stroke found purchase in the flesh of the War-God, and his once pristine form was soon bleeding from over a score of deep wounds. Finally, his hands slick with his own blood, the great axe slipped partially from the hand of Gruumsh; the Orc-God snatched for it, while attempting to dodge the blow he knew was coming, but with one great overhead stroke, the Bugbear cleaved the Orc-god from the crown of his head to mid-abdomen.

For a moment, the Orc-god wavered on his feet, rocking back and forth as though trying to comprehend his defeat; and then, with a great crash, he fell to the ground, twitched thrice, and was still, and the Army Of The Eye crumbled to dust. With a great roar of victory, the Bugbear-deity raised his axe overhead, great horns erupted from his temples, and his snout began to lengthen and change in shape. The Bugbear horde stood and watched in disconcerted amazement, and then, as one, they turned and fled from the field of battle.

It might have been expected that the council of the Mailed Fists would have celebrated the fall of Gruumsh, or despaired, but they were too distracted by an unexpected development to react, for those guarding the tunnels carved through earth and stone by the Troglodytes at the start of the Clan War had intercepted a dozen intruders attempting to gain surreptitious entrance to the City while the besieging forces were distracted by the battle on the plain. But these were not Orcs, or Troglodytes, or Bugbears – they were Elves!

*************************************************************************************************

I don’t normally comment on articles in this series after the article itself, but I wanted to point out a couple of consequences of the difference between a proper first draft and the material above, now that I can do so without giving the plot twists away.

This post started as a single chapter, with a brief summary, which read something like “Bugbears refuse to negotiate with Red Eyes, Red Eyes summon nightmare army, Gruumsh killed by Bugbear God. Set up alliance” – where the “alliance” is defined in the notes on the following chapters.

Looking at the preceding, it seems like a reasonable single chapter, perhaps two at most. But what is not described is the context – how to get from the situation (as it was at the end of the last chapter) to the point where these actions make sense to the reader. Why do the Red Eyes send out negotiators? How do the bugbears react? How do the Red Eyes react? Why and How does this lead to the Red Eyes summoning the nightmare army? How does the battle between Gruumsh and the Bugbear God begin and end, and what happens in between? And one question whose answer is not going to be obvious from the preceding chapters: how does all this fit in with the overall narrative? Why is it happening, what’s the point?

Guided by the (still secret) answer to the last question, the next step is to fill in the answers to the rest of them – usually in the form of scrawled notes on a page with a lot of empty space around them. These are then connected by arrows to give the order in which particular points should be brought out, and writing these up in that order should give a logical narrative flow to the whole thing. Sometimes, the way this bullet-point blow-by-blow summary is translated into text suggests a minor tweak of this flow, but for the most part it works in a pretty linear fashion.

The differences between this rough draft and a finished first draft are three-fold: Descriptions are sparse or missing altogether; Dialogue is sparse or missing altogether; and the language of the actual text has to be cleaned up. I’m very aware, for example, that the word “besieged” is over-used in chapters 59 and 60. In the final form of the first draft, I’d put effort into rephrasing and polishing the text to eliminate that problem.

Why is all this useful information? Because a lot of the time, when preparing an adventure for a game, you have to follow this exact process – working out in broad strokes what is going to happen, filling in the blanks needed to get from A to B to C, then working out how best to get the things they need to know, in order to make decisions, to the PCs! The final polish to a finished first draft is adding descriptions, and exposition, and any key pieces of dialogue.

But, in a pinch, you can do without those polishing touches; the full-note-form is enough for you to be able to get on with play. And that’s the first point that this postscript is intended to emphasize.

The second point is this: If I had focused on getting the first chapter or two into fully polished first-draft form, I would have run out of time to get the third and fourth chapters done at all. That’s the equivalent of running out of game prep half-way through the day’s play, which is no fun for anyone. It’s better to have enough done, in somewhat rougher form, than to have part of what’s needed done to a higher standard and the rest not at all. This is analogous to a process called stepwise refinement – laying something out vaguely and then refining the details of each component to a higher standard. Something else for GMs to remember when they are pressed for time – and I’ve never known a GM who was actually running a game who wasn’t pressed for time.

*************************************************************************************************

Next time (if all goes according to plan): What the Elves are doing there, Who the guy with the big horns is, and answers to a great many questions begin to be discovered. Oh, and the most unlikely alliance of all. That’s All (supposed to be) in Chapters 63-65!

I thought I was done with this series, I really did. But then I watched a seemingly-unrelated TV documentary series called The Genius Of Design from the BBC, (available on DVD from Amazon), and a persuasive new perspective was opened for my consideration. (You might want to read of the series to see why it is worth your consideration).

This is not so much about putting the science into science fiction, which was the heart of the subject; this is more about the look and feel of the world of tomorrow.

It’s the transformation of the mundane world that occurs as a result of the application of the design ethos to everyday life, projected forward into the future.

Extrapolating from today to tomorrow

Every society projects the historic trends in industrial design that have shaped it, into the look and feel of the world of tomorrow as they see it. Those at the cutting edge of design awareness and philosophy may be able to detect and incorporate emerging trends into this vision of the future, but in general that only occurs when specialists are speculating about the future of their own specialty. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, hasn’t written a lot of science fiction, but the work he has done focuses very strongly on his specialty and has minimal depiction of the changes in the look and feel of the wider society beyond this specialty.

The Victorian Age was the age of large industrial machinery, of pumps and pistons and steam; the science fiction of the Victorian age, the visions of tomorrow of people like HG Welles, reflect this design ethos.

The Modernist view of the post-WWI period is reflected in the design of the machinery, and the society that wraps around that machinery, to give the classic ‘look and feel’ of early sci-fi like Metropolis and Space Opera. The latter style of fiction in particular, as exemplified by the early works of writers like EE ‘Doc’ Smith, projects the technological developments of the era into space – elements of which survive to this day. Thus, the “Battleship of space” is the most powerful weapon out there, and the while guns may now operate on “rays of radiant energy” instead of shells, their combat characteristics are clearly analogous to those of their earlier, sea-locked, namesakes.

In World War Two, supremacy came to be represented by the Aircraft Carrier. The look and feel of the space opera era, stretched to accommodate the carrier, and married to a stripped-back 1970s aesthetic, produces the imagery of Star Wars with its Star Destroyers and Death Stars.

The utilitarian style of the 1950s and 60s, when projected into the future, is expressed by the look and feel of the sets of the Enterprise on the original Star Trek TV Series. There is little ornamentation, and function clearly dominates aesthetics everywhere human that they go. For budgetary reasons, the show made use of a lot of sets and props from other shows and productions to represent alien worlds and civilizations, which is why some have Greek columns and so on; these can’t be considered indicative of the design philosophy of the future, they are too heavily compromised by production necessity.

In the 1980s, changes in design aesthetics were taking place, and the perfect reflection of those changes can be seen in the bridge of the Enterprise-D of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There is more space, there are carpeted floors, there is wood paneling, and there are artistic curves for no better reason than being able to use an aesthetic shape without compromising functionality. The same design trends, earlier in their development, and with less ostentation, can be seen in the visuals of BBC science fiction of the era – most especially, Blake’s 7.

It’s always easier to see these trends, and the implications of the consequences of past trends, from a distance. The changes in design aesthetic from the original Star Wars Trilogy to the Prequels is a mirror to the changes in the look-and-feel of the cutting edge of military design of the era, which in turn is reflected in the look-and-feel of everything from the shape of cups to the design of coffeepots and water jugs. Who can fail to see the connection in design style between the SR-71 blackbird – then the cutting edge of design – and the ships used by Obi-Wan and his mentor in those movies?

The connection between the way we see the future and the most “modern” look of the world around us is obvious in still more examples. The original Tron comes to mind. 2001 A Space Odyssey. Westworld (excluding the actual simulated past worlds themselves).

You can continually date the production date of sci-fi media by the way they envisage the look-and-feel of the future, because they are always looking forwards from the “now” of that production date.

The writers and designers of Star Trek Voyager were able to play on these values very cleverly in the “Captain Proton” episodes. I always knew that these worked by evoking the style of the 1930s sci-fi serials; I simply didn’t appreciate how – until this connection between “modern design” and the look-and-feel of the future occurred to me.

Necessity

To some extent, this is necessary. Audiences have to be able to relate to the world depicted and immediately feel like it is the future. That means taking the design styles that they think of as “Modern” and projecting them forward. It only takes a little imagination to see how badly it would work if someone were to put Wedgewood China on the table in the Death Star; it’s so incongruous that it immediately raises a chuckle, if not a laugh.

The Application to RPGs

Genre to Subgenre to Style to Look-and-feel – that’s the essential lesson to be learned. Traveller is very 1930s/40s/50s space opera sci-fi in style and subgenre, and the look-and-feel of everyday objects, as described by the GM, should reflect that design sensibility. Those objects would have a completely different look and feel if you were running a Star Wars RPG, or Babylon-5, or Dr Who. Even Car Wars has a very Mad Max look-and-feel behind it. The trick is to take advantage of the heavy lifting done by the designers of the original media apon which these games derive. Everything from clothing fashions to furniture, from spaceships to architecture, should correlate.

When those designers have let the aspiring author down by not actually showing an example, you can often extrapolate from what they have shown you without really thinking about the design philosophies behind it all. Most GMs do this instinctively.

Sometimes, the required object is so far removed from what has been shown in the original media that this is not enough, and this is also the case when (shock! horror!) you are trying to achieve something original. That’s when you have to start looking deeper, extrapolating the existing look-and-feel to the core principles and philosophies behind them, and then projecting those principles and philosophies into the conceptual designs of the desired object.

From this point, the article is going to start drifting down some strange byways, the relevance of which may not always be clear. Bear with me.

The Philosophies Of Design

Every time period in industrial design is characterized by a particular style. The unity of style that makes it characteristic derives from the philosophy of design that is expressed in individual examples of that style. Each time period is dominated by one or two such philosophies; they are like schools of art (and often parallel contemporary art movements). So intimately connected are these two strands of expression that art movements and design styles often share a common name, and seem to go together in a period setting. If the art doesn’t match the colors and textures of a room and the objects within, the whole doesn’t look quite right.

The initial subsections of this part of the article are synopsized highlights of excerpts from The Genius Of Design.

Pre-WWI

Following the turn of the 19th century, the height of design was the Art Nouveau movement. Over-decorated, with aesthetic properties so dominant that function was often compromised for the sake of appearance, conspicuous artistry was the hallmark of the age.

Post-WWI

The Bauhaus movement was a rebellion against Art Nouveau. Post-WWI, it sought to strip all ornamentation from design, and to simplify that design to the most fundamental and minimalist elements. It was dominated by the shapes that were possible from the bending of steel, especially tubular steel. There was, nevertheless, a certain elegance to the Bauhaus design which is one of the reasons why it persists to this day and still looks modern and futuristic, approaching a century after the beginnings of the style. The fundamental tenet of the Bauhaus movement was “Form follows function.”

WWII

World War II mandated efficiency as the core goal of design. Moving parts were reduced to the bare minimum, and function was elevated even higher, to the point where it almost completely obliterated any consideration of aesthetics or ergonomics (referred to at the time as “Human Factors”. Simplicity, and the ability to mass-produce a product as quickly and cheaply as possible, to be able to use and maintain it with as little instruction and expense as possible, these were the goals imposed on all design of the era. The diversion of substantial manufacturing capacity into the production of war material on all sides of the conflict meant that the same design ethos translated into what civilian products were available.

Post-War

The end of the war brought an end to the economic suffering tolerated by the civilian populations while the conflict was playing out. With manufacturing once again devoted to civilian production, the design ethos of the war became directed toward everyday objects; but the sensibilities of the time now redefined “functionality”. Comfort was the driving demand of the post-war consumer, and satisfying this demand while maintaining the efficiencies (and hence affordability) of objects became the primary requirement of design. To achieve this, it was necessary for the concept of function to expand, incorporating the new concept of “human factors”, which was becoming known as “ergonomics”. To succeed in this era, it was necessary for an object to first, perform whatever function it was supposed to achieve, second, be affordable to the mass markets now coming into existence, and third to provide comfort and reassurance to the user. Decoration, ornamentation, and aesthetics were all secondary contributors to this comfort and reassurance.

I missed one episode of the series, so these next sections are a personal extrapolation from other sources and of patterns that have been personally observed.

The Birth of Plastics

The post-war science boom of the 60s resulted in new materials reshaping the industrial landscape; the results were plastics, and Tupperware. Initially, these were so modern in their qualities – cheapness, light weight, and versatility – that a plastic product was synonymous with quality. One of the reasons why plastics became so ubiquitous was that they permitted the satisfaction of a rising trend: self-identification through color and style. In an extremely limited sense, aesthetics had made a comeback as a separate principle of design. By restricting the palette of choices, variations in design became mass-producible. This was the ultimate manifestation and recapitulation of the principle that first ushered in the world of modern industrial design; Henry Ford’s Model-T which was available “in any color you wanted, as long as it was black” vs. Chrysler who found ways of keeping the engineering the same while varying the external shell, and offering consumers a choice.

This was also the rise of the concept of the teenager, and of directed marketing. The underlying engineering of a transistor radio might be the same, but the exterior could be altered to appeal to one particular market segment – teen girls, teen boys, single men, stylish women, families, and so on and on. Prior to this point, people were thought of as transitioning from the stages of childhood directly into being “young men” and “young women”; it was the identification of an intermediate stage, the “teenager”, and marketing directly to that population segment, that established the concept fundamentally within modern society.

The ’70s

Over the next decade, environmentalism became a significant social force, and plastic products became so ubiquitous that the glamour was lost and “plastic” became synonymous with “cheap” and “nasty”. The pre-yuppies of the 70s began to decry the sacrifice of build quality for cheapness, and demanded a rebalancing of the price-vs-quality balance. A demand to return to “traditional values” was also gathering strength as a reaction to the hedonism of the 60s and early 70s, and coincided with the rise of appliances made of metals and woods. The “brushed aluminum” look seems symbolic of the era.

The ’80s

In the 1980s, the yuppies became ascendant, and these trends were carried to fruition. “Faux-natural” became the dominant look – simulated wood-grains on plastic and metal appliances and a seemingly-final divorce between appearance of materials and actual construction. It became acceptable to manufacture something out of whatever materials were appropriate to the engineering and make them look like whatever materials were in-demand aesthetically. The Yuppies were upwardly mobile, or wanted to think they were, and they insisted on looking like they were successful – at a price they could afford, but the lower classes could not. Aesthetics and ornamentation once again reigned supreme. This was a decade of excess.

Here is where the missed episode ended, and the series began to wrap up. What follows is a blend of the content and enlightenment it provided and some notions/observations of my own.

The ’90s

In the 1990s, we began to pay the price of the piper. Every extremist movement in design generates a counterculture that gains ascendancy, or incorporation, in the ensuing era. It was in the 90s that once again saw a stripping back of ostentation, which had once again reached the point where aesthetics were dominating functionality. Over the course of this decade, customizability and individuality would become resurgent, and the keywords were once again functionality and flexibility, but this time without the crassness and lack of true aesthetics of the 60s and 70s. In fact, there was something of a design “war” between the functionalists and the aesthetes over the course of the decade.

Computer Interfaces: Mac vs. PC

This was also the era of the rise of the personal computer, and this design war was reflected in the two dominant styles of Personal Computer. From Apple, we had the Macintosh, which sacrificed customizability of appearance for commonality of interface, which was a doorway into greater ease of use and hence functionality; from Microsoft, we had Windows, consistency was sacrificed to individuality and customizability. One was almost industrial in on-screen appearance, while the other was splashy and colorful for no better reason than that it made it stand out.

Integrated personal customization of aesthetics and interface was one of the defining differences between the two operating systems, and the hardware differences were simply along for the ride. People didn’t choose between the hardware differences of the two brands (there may have been exceptions), they chose between the operating systems and underlying philosophies, and bought whatever hardware was necessary to create an environment in which those operating systems could perform. The Mac had very limited customizability, while Windows was more flexible, more difficult to use, less reliable, but offered the user far greater control over not just what functions the device could perform but what those functions looked like on the screen. This was a battle that Windows would ultimately win, a victory of flexible ostentation over minimalism – a point to which I will return in due course.

IKEA and The Noughties

As it was on the computer screen, so it was in the real world. The surprise winner of the style wars was someone who had been there for decades without changing their essential design philosophy. The world evolved to catch up with their way of thinking and discovered the Scandinavian furniture company ready to satisfy their evolving tastes. IKEA had been founded in 1943, been small through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, growing in the 70s and 80s, and in the 90s and 2000s became absolutely dominant in the field of furniture retail. Offering quality products at an extremely affordable price by engineering them for self-assembly (cutting out one of the primary production phases and associated expense), the mix-and-match approach to combinational diversity permits the customer the ability to shape his furniture choices to fit his style and environment. In many ways, this is the ultimate expression of design; functionality combining with flexibility and aesthetics at a mass-consumer price.

From this point forward, I am again on my own, reporting my own observations and analyses. As the review intimates, The Genius Of Design doesn’t advance beyond the point of the Design War.

Hard on the heels of the first wave of global success by IKEA came the DIY renovation boom of the noughties. It was no longer enough to customize the choice of objects within an occupational space; now that space itself would be customized to fit the ‘vision’ of the home renovator. This was an expression of the same trend which won the operating-system war between Apple and Microsoft, and which had made IKEA a household name in 38 countries.

German design during the years following the rise of Hitler had obsessed over achieving perfection of function and delivering identical expressions of that perfection as products. The DIY era represents as completely-180-degrees turn in dominant philosophy as it is possible to envisage; while the underlying mechanics may achieve ‘functional perfection’ (or as close to it as it is possible to come), the objective of the German design philosophy is taken for granted, and the point of distinction between rival products is what you put on top of that underlying mechanics.

Looking ahead to Now

That subheading might seem strange, but it’s perfectly expressive when you realize that only distance lends perspective – in this case, distance in time. In this subsection, I’m going to try to identify the design trends that are just beginning to manifest themselves as new movements “now” – but to gain the necessary perspective, I have to look ahead to a time when current events are sufficiently distant that the significances can be seen.

It’s my personal theory that computer technology is more responsive to changes in design ethos because there is no need for the production delay, the lag between conceptual design and the manufacture of physical products that reflect that conceptual design. This enabled the Mac-PC design war to anticipate the rise of the DIY-boom, and it means that by examining the current trends in computing it should be possible to anticipate where design is heading right now, but hasn’t quite reached yet.

Apple Redux

Apple is at the forefront of two different design philosophies with three of its products. The first is the iPod, which strips functionality to its bare minimum and presents it in a form that is capable of infinite redressing and customizability. Lesser exemplars of this design philosophy are gaming consoles, which extract one function from the domain of the PC and place it in a purpose-driven appliance. It can be argued that the iPod is the ultimate expression of the minimalist/customizability architecture, but I don’t think so. The same underlying philosophy appears in the iPhone and the iPad, a trio of products that exemplify the modern design ethic, but which have not yet reached full expression.

At first glance, the iPhone and iPad seem to be cut from entirely different cloth to the iPad; but look beneath the surface and a similarity of design ethos becomes apparent. They are both successors to the “Mac” way of thinking, in which you can choose the functions that you have but not the look and feel, dressed up in the flash and color that won Microsoft round one of the contest between the two companies. Both the iPhone and iPad are computational devices that use “apps” to add selected functionality to the basic device; customizability of function, in other words – but these occur at the expense of customizability of interface. You have to use these products the apple way, or not at all.

Products to order

The phenomenal success of these products and this approach over the last five or so years marks this as a dominant design trend that has not yet fully manifested in other fields of design. yet, the promise of modern technology is that it will do so, through the advent of 3D printing. Using an appropriate App, the future of design appears to be the capacity to integrate desired functionality from standard IKEA-style mix-and-match building blocks to produce a uniquely-customized functionality that does exactly what we want it to, and then produces the product to order. It used to be that having products made to order was the mark of wealth and personal prosperity. My first prediction is that these technologies are about to democratize this mark of privilege.

Cloud Computing: Form over function

The second trend that has been gathering strength over the last decade or so is the advent of cloud computing. This essentially separates function from interface, enabling that interface to be a customized front end to a common functionality set. Another way of looking at this trend is this: the removal of the need to compromise aesthetics in order to accommodate functionality. How will this play out in the real world of physical products, how will it manifest? That’s a little harder to see.

A partial answer lies in the advent of another design trend: centralization. More and more, one product is doing the work of what used to be a multitude. Once, I would have had a sound system to play music on, and physical media on which that music was permanently stored; these days, the music is in the form of impermanent digital files, and my computing device plays them for me. The same device can be a word processor, an email application, and a telephone, all at the same time. Moreover, by simplifying the hardware requirements, cloud computing makes it possible for ever-greater functionality to be expressed remotely. We haven’t yet reached the point where our interface device connects to custom-made back-ends that provide only a specialist function, but the day is surely coming. Having a massive user-base enables a different kind of economy of scale, something more akin to the infrastructure developments of the early 20th century, and sooner or later someone will identify a function that requires custom-built infrastructure at the functional end but which can be controlled through a ubiquitous central front-end interface at a lower cost than is possible providing all functionality at the user end (if they haven’t already done so).

Don’t see it? Here’s one possible example of how life might change to express this design philosophy: You specify a meal several days in advance by selecting all the recipes from a menu on your central device. The device polls the appliances in your kitchen to determine what parts of the work you can do for yourself with the tools you have at hand and which should be prepped in advance by the machinery at the store. Ingredients are automatically ordered, including whatever preparation is needed to make the recipe compatible with your equipment, then delivered on an appropriate time and date. Your central control device tells you, step by step, at the right times, what to do to complete cooking of the meal – “Take chicken pieces out of refrigerator (do not open bag). Place in Microwave. Touch key when step complete.” You don’t have to tell the microwave/oven how long to cook them for; the recipe does that, via the central controller. The menu you have chosen, the recipes you have chosen, are assembled with minimal personal activity and intrusion in a way that has been customized to the capabilities of your equipment, and perhaps to your level of culinary expertise. It might even tell your TV to pause your programme while you are busy. Sounds like science fiction? I reckon it’s maybe a decade away, maybe less.

Neo Nouveau

Before the PC, Design had been focused on physical objects. In the modern age, with more and more functionality being provided by virtual objects in a digital domain, design has had to expand in meaning. It is now all about aesthetics, interface, and control. You can have many different MP3 players, but they all have the same basic functionality; every “virtual object” intended to perform a function is differentiated from all others intended to perform that function by aesthetics.

With interface divorced from functionality, there will be a resurgence in the ornamentation of those interfaces, and this will be reflected in products in the material world. 130 years after the Art Nouveau movement flourished, ostentatious decoration will once again be able to flourish.

Into The Future

Every trend gives rise to its countertrend, which becomes central to whatever comes after it, as I said earlier. So successful has the iPhone/iPad “App” interface been that Microsoft have copied it for Windows 8, abandoning its own fading central design ethos in the process. And already there is a backlash; people don’t like being told what to do, and don’t like to be told how to do it, and don’t like to feel out of control of the process. Microsoft always catered to the customizability market, and as a result, has been encountering resistance and vilification of its new OS from some quarters. The same thing happened when they introduced the “Ribbon” in Office 2007, and when they introduced Vista, both of which represented unpopular attempts to change the way people interacted with their computing devices; only by taking at least a partial backwards step were these changes made at least partially palatable. Already, there is talk of such a backwards half-step in Windows 8.1. A number of Microsoft customers went from Windows 98 direct to Windows XP to Windows 7, skipping every second generation of the OS. Unless Windows 8.1 contains just such a backwards step, I would fully expect a substantial share of the market to wait for Windows 9 – if the company survives that long. The problem is that by deciding “if you can’t beat them, join them”, they have hitched their collective futures to a trend that’s already at or approaching its zenith; instead of preparing to provide the next big thing, and accepting lean times in the meantime, they have mortgaged the future for more immediate expediency – and this at a time when it will only take a small improvement in user-friendliness for Linux to steal the market share that feels abandoned by Microsoft, and when Google is developing its own Operating System to compete with Windows. It’s either going to be a masterstroke or the biggest mistake in their corporate history.

In the interests of disclosure, I should state that I currently use Windows XP, and still have not been able to replace all the functionality provided by software that I used to have on my Win98 system just 2½ years ago. I may eventually be forced to migrate to Win 7 – but that day is years away, because I already know that some of the software that I use every day is not compatible with the new system and replacements are either not available or very expensive. Heck, some of the software that I use regularly was written for Windows 3.1, and there is nothing out there that is as user-friendly, even though there have been many years of software development since. So I may be biased – but every complaint about Microsoft’s products cited in the preceding paragraph came from one or more third parties, so I’m not alone.

That countertrend will be exhibited in every other aspect of design in due course, and the seeds of that trend are also evident, if one looks for them. As the review of “The Genius Of Design” points out, not everyone is a genius of design, and for every renovation that succeeds, there’s at least one that makes the viewer cringe. The opposite to self-expression through design and choice is the consultation of expertise, and a unified style with customization restricted to those choices that meet an arbitrary standard of good taste. Restraint and elegance for the masses, guided by consulted expertise and people who make a profession from “designing a living” will be the most probable wave of the future in rebellion against what I’ve described as the Neo Nouveau movement. Decoration will be sparing and restrained, used as a highlight or an accent – and “Less is more” will once again be in vogue. 2040 or 2050 might really look like the Bauhaus predictions – with decorative flourishes on top.

Getting To The Point

As the above should make clear, design trends don’t exist in a vacuum. They both shape, and are shaped, by the society around them, which in turn is shaped by the economic realities, which is itself an outgrowth of social and political forces. Successful designs embrace and satisfy whatever the dominant demand is of the surrounding society, and designs that don’t do so, don’t sell. Earlier parts of this series showed you how to determine the shape of the technology of the society by extrapolating from modern implements, appliances, and social trends; this postscript shows how to reflect the resulting changes in the design of everything else to be found in that world. The ongoing oscillation between decoration and functionality is part of human nature; it will continually find new modes of expression through new social trends and new materials, but the fundamentals and their impact aren’t going to go away anytime soon.

In fact, they probably won’t go away until we get exposed to some alien viewpoint – whether that be from outer space or from an artificial intelligence with its own sensibilities remains to be seen.

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…

It’s a peculiar thing when you’re writing. You are continually reshaping and tweaking the content to be included to make the narrative as clear and valuable as possible, and sometimes what seemed like a good or even necessary idea at the time suddenly doesn’t make much sense when you expand your notes to full passages of text. Which brings me to this week’s article, which continues the tale of the Orcish Clan Wars.

Originally, everything presented below was to be included in a single chapter that followed last week’s chapters. It all seemed to make perfect sense when each chapter was synopsized as a single line of text. When I actually got there, though, the text took on a life of its own, and this didn’t seem to fit – so, last week, I decided to cut it. Only a single phrase survived the culling, and that was moved to the start of the preceding chapter: “The roles of the allies should not be neglected by anyone seeking to understand the course of this conflict”.

That was last week. This week, as I looked on it with fresh eyes, I suddenly saw how the material that had been cut not only belonged at this point in the narrative, but was absolutely necessary for the whole thing to make sense, and far from having to be cut, it had to be expanded – to fill this entire post.

This revelation came so late in the day that I’m not sure I’m going to get the whole thing finished in time. But sitting here talking about it certainly isn’t going to get anything done, so it’s time for me to get to work…

*************************************************************************************************

Clan Wars IV: The Fires Of Sunrise

Having breached the reserve lines of the Red Eye clan, the Bleeding Swords flooded out into the relatively undefended homelands of the rival clan. The Red eyes, engaged in what they had been told (by their God no less) was a Holy War had stripped their range of virtually every able-bodied combatant. Being an essentially mobile society, these had brought their women and children with them, many of whom were also fighting in The Army Of The Crescent Moon. Only those too ill, too injured, or too old to fight effectively had been left behind. Their role was to hunt for the tribes and convey those supplies forward to the Army. Prior to the launching of the invasion, a Great Hunt had stocked the army’s mobile larders with smoked and preserved meat as well as fresh, which would make Game on the Sunrise Coast scarce. As the ill and injured recovered, they were to have taken over the primary responsibility for leading those hunts. These supply lines were easily cut by the marauding Bleeding Swords clan, at least in the beginning. It was expected that this would be a short campaign, and that the Red Eyes would quickly be forced to capitulate.

In thinking thus, the Bleeding Swords committed a fundamental tactical error of judgment, failing to take into account the profound differences in thinking between the Clans. The Red Eyes were nomadic hunters; they held no affection for any territory over any other. The heart of their domain was not the land apon which they hunted, it was wherever they happened to be at the time. All else was simply a matter of convenience. They fought back against the Bleeding Swords not out of territorial sentimentality but out of fury at the betrayal of the alliance dictated by Gruumsh. In short, the Bleeding Swords expected the Red Eyes to think – and react – in the same way that they did.

Were it not for one essential factor (and their overwhelming rage), the Red Eyes would have been happy to cede possession of these impoverished hunting grounds to the Bleeding Swords. There was insufficient game remaining to feed an army of the size fielded by the Bleeding Swords; they would have simply surrounded the territory and starved the larger army out. This would, ironically, have been making the same mistake as that which had been committed by the Bleeding Swords; for it failed to take into account the gains in agricultural productivity that the practices of farming, herding, and animal husbandry could achieve. There would have been some losses at first, but a new equilibrium would quickly be established in which the Bleeding Swords would prosper with scarcely diminished strength.

The consideration that saved the Red Eyes from committing this tactical error was their alliance with the Troglodytes, and it was this alliance that dictated the shape of their defensive campaign once the first flush of blind rage had faded. Dividing their army into three, the Red Eyes dedicated one force – the Army Of The Crescent Moon – to the task of sealing the Mailed Fists up within their walled cities and townships.

The second force, The Army Of The Skull, was dispatched to raid and occupy the home range of the Bleeding Swords, in a tit-for-tat maneuver that was perhaps the most effective move that the Red Eye Clan could make. The fate of this army is a subject to be taken up at another time, for it is central to subsequent events; but for now, our attention should remain fixed apon the third force of the Red Eyes Clan, the Army Of The One Eye.

This force was dispersed into small hunting groups, and detailed to hunt Bleeding Swords as though they were a large herd of horses, wild cattle, buffalo, or other such natural grouping of wildlife. Strike without warning at a convenient location, kill a few enemies, then melt back into the natural terrain to emerge a day or two later to repeat the process. To infuriate the foe, where possible, the kills should be dressed and hung as though they were a side of venison, and the locations of these passed to the nearest nest of their allies, the Troglodytes. The Bleeding Swords were not sentimentalists any more than the Red Eyes; they had no funerary rites to observe, and would leave the dead to rot as they found them, but the vulnerability these kills implied would make them uncomfortable (to say the least) and prime them to react appropriately when those Troglodyte Allies showed up to claim the bounty offered. They would either move away from the location, disrupting the orderly progress of their army, or they would remain and be engaged in a battle in which the Troglodytes held all the advantages, suffering brutal damage. Either course was a net victory for the Red Eyes, at least on a small scale.

The Coldness Of A Reptilian Heart

Since Troglodytes and their society thus become significant, this is an opportune moment to discuss this race, who offend almost all sentient life.

To a Troglodyte, all life that is not Troglodyte is meat, or feeds meat. This includes the dead of their own kind. Exclusively carnivorous, they will eat anything or anyone they find or kill. A troglodyte nest consists of four or five mated pairs, twenty to twenty-five nestlings, and fourty to fifty eggs, and are located in all sorts of terrains. Their preference is cooler temperatures, and they are most active at night and when underground; they will naturally gravitate to caves and natural shelters to remove them from the midday heat in summer, though some will nest in the branches of a clump of sheltered trees or in swamps. Only in winter do they become dangerous when the sun is at its height. Possessed of a simple intelligence, their culture and societies are primitive and their grasp of technology almost nonexistent. Beads and decorations are prized, but even more highly values are implements of metal, and weapons of steel are valued most highly of all. They have no concept of loyalty other than to their own kind, and even that is limited and must be continually earned anew, a fleeting and ephemeral thing.

Each nest is ruled by the strongest male. Each winter, the males contest for primacy and for the favor of the most attractive and strong females, to whom they will partner and with whom they will mate for the next year. Each pairing will produce a clutch of eggs in the spring while collectively supervising the young of the female’s previous layings. At the beginning of summer, when they are at their most languid, they can no longer spare the energy to provide enough food for all; the adults feed first, and then the youngest clutch; those approaching maturity get what little remains. Hunger drives the weakest out to face the dangers of the world outside, encountering and competing with those of other nests, returning to the nest with the dawn. As they mature, their range in these nocturnal expeditions will increase; in due course, they will either challenge one of the weakening males of their own nest for his place, find a suitable location and attract a mate, founding a new nest, or find their way into an existing understrength nest and join it. The weakest, and the unlucky, simply starve. At the end of summer, as the leaves brown, the nests hatch, just as the Nest is growing more active and able to hunt for additional food to provide for the newborn.

They have a number of natural abilities that aid them in this lifestyle. Acute night vision, better than that of many other species; claws; and hunting instincts. Add to those a poison brewed from certain toadstools which induces temporary blindness, an innate ferocity, and a brutality born of their racial convictions, and the result is a species that is far more effective than their size suggests. They are also natural diggers and burrowers, able to conceal themselves below ground or erect earthen defenses in a fraction of the time it would take even trained soldiers from other races, and they are a race to be feared and respected, however disliked.

Troglodytes are fiercely territorial, and will fight to the death to protect their young and their eggs. Only if all the eggs are killed unborn will a nest be considered untenable and abandoned in a nest migration, as the adults search for a new location in which to nest. It is almost certain that an abandoned nest will be claimed by the young of some other nest within a season or two.

All may be meat, but that does not preclude the tolerance for certain “pets” who provide meat for the nest. The society of the Red Eye Clan is the only one that could possibly forge an alliance with the Troglodytes; a ritual outgrowth of the hunting-oriented society made it a social practice to share the spoils of a particularly-successful hunt with visitors from other tribes. Inevitably, given their proximity, a pair of hunting Troglodytes came across a Red Eye tribe about to begin such a celebration; recognizing the behavior of the reptilian strangers, and aware that they were intelligent enough to have created and using primitive weapons, the Chief Hunter decreed them fellow hunters, and that they must be included amongst the guests at the feast. In one night, the Troglodytes were fed more richly than they would normally fare in a week, and the basic relationship was established; the Orcs left offerings of meat and offal for the nests closest to their hunting grounds, and the Troglodytes left them alone and unmolested, and even joined with them for the occasional joint hunt or other mutual action.

Alliance did not come naturally to the Troglodytes, it was always a function of convenience to them. Nevertheless, its advent had a great impact on their society, essentially doubling their food supplies. Nests grew larger, and stronger, and prospered; and while they could never understand why the Orcs did this, they were perfectly willing to take advantage of it. Over time, a social symbiosis developed between the Red Eye Tribes and the Troglodytes. Both sides view the other as something to be tolerated for their usefulness, and consider themselves to be the dominant partners of the alliance.

Of course, the Red Eyes had no reason to explain any of this to the other clans, and less social opportunity; and the Bleeding Swords had fundamentally different social customs; so the invaders from the Bleeding Sword clan did not behave in the customary manner, did not offer the traditional obeisance or expected offerings which would have earned them tolerated status in the eyes of the Troglodytes. That made them meat, the same as any other animal. The Army Of The One Eye, on the other hand, did practice the proprieties, and even left offerings of meat; it did not bother the Troglodytes one iota that the Bleeding Swords might fight back, that simply gave them the opportunity to add treasured relics of steel to the spoils of their hunts. The Red Eyes may not have been territorial, but the Troglodytes were, and the Bleeding Swords had invaded that territory. The only significance of the home ranges to the Red Eyes was that the Troglodytes defended it for them.

Clan Wars V: The Fires Of Sunset

The third division of the Red Eyes, the Army Of The One Eye, had been sent to rampage through the home ranges of the Bleeding Swords that lay to the Sunset of the walled cities. Unlike the Red Eyes, the Bleeding swords were only semi-nomadic, and were territorial by society. Also unlike the Bleeding Swords, they had not sent virtually their entire populations to the front; their herds and the farms that fed those herds still required maintenance, and their martial leadership was separate to their social leadership. The clan leaders had remained behind, in their positions of power, save for a few who were more naturally belligerent. Of course, the phrase “more naturally belligerent” takes on a slightly different meaning when one is speaking of Orcs!

Seventy Thousand Orc Warriors – plus semi-combatants and family members – is a force that is not to be taken lightly, however; factoring in the renowned ferocity of the Red Eyes in combat, and the adoption of tactics that took advantage of their greater mobility, and the rampaging hordes of the Army Of The One Eye packed a punch beyond that of the mere numbers. While a strict nose-count may have given the advantage to the defenders, they were isolated and dispersed; by focusing their efforts on one or two tribal grounds at a time, the Red Eyes were able to overrun the defenses one bite at a time, capturing the herds, and slaughtering them to feed the oncoming army. Nor could the defenders strip their tribal lands of effectives to create an army capable of making a stand against the invaders; their alliance with the Bugbears was based on strength, and would be quickly abrogated if they betrayed any sign of weakness, exposing them to danger on two fronts.

Fortunately, that alliance also held the solution to their immediate problem, though it would come at a price. The leaders of the Bleeding Swords went to the chiefs of the Bugbears, and told them of the oncoming hordes, depicting them as an irritation that could be easily smashed by a superior force, and stating that while they had sufficient force to do so, they thought the bugbears might like to lead the counterassault – on the usual terms: captives as slaves, and first choice of the booty.

The Bugbears had been considered simple by the Orcs, an attitude they had been happy to foster; they knew instinctively that being underestimated would always bring opportunities for gain. They were craftier, and had a better grasp of the tactical situation, than the Orcs had given them credit for, and they chose this moment to show their hand. While they were happy to accept “the usual terms” for leading the attack on the invading Red Eyes, they insisted that the Orcs feed their Strongarms while they were fighting for the Bleeding Swords; and that for every Bugbear-length of territory that they recaptured from the invaders, they would keep one half, to be ransomed back to the Bleeding Swords with future booty and largesse – and that they would keep their share of the captured territory until payment was agreed and made. This amounted to a shifting of power in the alliance from the Orcs to the Bugbears, and would vastly complicate future relations; but the Orcs needed the Bugbears to fight off the rival clan, and this was the price that would have to be paid; the Red Eyes had already established that they could reach an accommodation with a more territorial ally, and if they didn’t agree, the bugbears could very well take what they wanted (and more) anyway, then establish a new border with the Red Eyes.

Faced with no other prospects save ruination, they reluctantly agreed, and renewed their alliances with the Bugbear tribes. Their allies enthusiastically launched themselves into the campaign, with the Bleeding Swords surprised to learn that the Bugbears were far more numerous than they had ever suspected. Rather than the 20,000-or-so Strongarms that they expected their allies to field as a strike force against the invading army, two-hundred-thousand armed and armored veteran warriors streamed across the border to meet the invaders in a titanic clash of arms, each the equal of a similarly experienced Orc. These were numbers sufficient not simply to defeat the enemy, but to grind his bones to powder; nor had the Bleeding Swords made any arrangements with respect to the lands currently nominally the property of the Red Hands, but this multitude would have no reason to stop until deep within lands. They might even divide the Orclands, sundering all connection between the Clans. But that, too, was a problem for another day.

The Measurement Of Abasement

Bugbear society is more complex and rich than the Burning Swords ever appreciated, because its depths do not show to the casual observer. The central principles around which it is organized are Strength, Intimidation, and Abasement. The strongest lead a tribe until successfully challenged over a question of “what to do next/today”. Like troglodytes, Bugbears consider all prey to be food, though they are more refined in that they demand that the meat be fresh, and will not eat offal. Minor contests of strength and brutality occur constantly within the tribe, with the pecking order continually being reappraised. While these contests are rarely carried to the point of permanent injury or death, accidents will happen; there are no old Bugbears.

A Bugbear will concede authority to one who is stronger, and their social interactions contain dozens of ways of reminding the lesser of their place; their dialect of Goblinoid contains over one hundred different ways of demanding “obedience”, with different nuances and contexts, many of them non-verbal. It is considered a sign of weakness to directly concede that another is superior, and a Bugbear will fight to the death against impossible odds rather than do so. However, there are numerous indirect means of acknowledging that another is – at least temporarily – superior in prowess, strength, or position (tactical, financial, or social). There is absolute equality between the genders, though the females are usually less ferocious than the males except when defending their cubs from direct attack.

At the same time, Bugbears are fully conversant with the concept of strength through numbers. A Bugbear who concedes superiority to another gains authority in proportion to the combined strength of the association; such concession carries the implication that the stronger will support and protect the weaker, so while he may concede some of his personal authority, he also gains a small part of the authority of the stronger partner in the arrangement. The stronger the Bugbear, the more lesser Bugbears have conceded to his authority, and the greater the strength of the group that results. Bugbear protocols may be superficially simple, but beneath the surface of what appears to be boasting and wrestling, sophisticated relationships are established with minimal bloodshed. “You will obey me because while I am weaker than you, I have greater numbers behind me” is conveyed by a single word describing the demand. “I obey because it amuses me to pretend to be weaker” is conveyed by a different word.

(Side-note: if bugbears were not constitutionally unable to bow to another – that being a direct concession of inferiority – their society would bear considerable resemblance to a more primitive version of that of feudal Japan, without the concepts of Giru and Gimu.)

Obligations are accepted or refused according to whether or not the individual believes he can carry out the obligation; once accepted, there are no excuses, it’s succeed or die trying. Accepting an obligation demands that the Bugbear commit his or her every resource to the completion of the task. Only if released from the obligation by a superior to whom the Bugbear has conceded authority can the Bugbear avoid this commitment. The entire society will turn against one who offends this propriety. Nevertheless, refusal to accept an obligation demanded by one to whom the Bugbear has conceded authority is a public humiliation that strips the Bugbear of all respect within the society; the remainder of those who have conceded to that authority will be shamed by association and exact violent revenge against the one who showed the superior as being too weak to enforce his demands.

As a result, Bugbear society is constantly collapsing and being reformed around new figures of strength; it is inherently anarchic.

*************************************************************************************************

Next time: The material that was supposed to appear this week: Nightmares are given flesh, the Orcish Gods join the brouhaha, the Huyundaltha find themselves in the middle of a powder-keg, and the unlikeliest of all possible alliances – all in Chapters 59-62!

A well-crafted campaign – or video game, novel, TV Show, movie, or short story – is composed of multiple layers acting in harmony and in concert. This is a simple point that is often overlooked, especially by novices or those focusing too intensively on a single medium, and not looking at the wider world around them.

Although there are many ways of dividing and structuring the layers within a single adventure or story, and many more ways of prioritizing and delivering each layers component of the overall story, I normally consider seven specific layers as the scaffolding apon which the specific elements of a particular story or adventure are erected:

• Action Narrative Layer
• Tactical Structure Layer
• Plot Narrative Layer
• Relationship Layer
• Character Narrative Layers
• Context Layer
• Background Layer

What are these layers and what goes into them?

The Action Narrative Layer

The Action Narrative Layer contains characters doing things. In a game, this layer is subdivided into two sub-layers, one for PC actions and one for NPC actions; in other media, these merge. That’s because there is a qualitative difference between the two insofar as one is under the control of the GM/author and one functions completely independently of that individual. This also contains any narrative describing the immediate, physical, consequences of individual actions. A GM who knows the PCs and knows the players of those characters can sometimes anticipate what the choice of actions will be and can plan accordingly. Railroading occurs when choices in this domain are constrained to an unrealistic degree.

Without the Action layer, we would transition immediately from a character who has decided to act into the consequences of those acts; while such telescoping of action can sometimes benefit a written story, and even can be sometimes handwaved in an RPG, it is more common to describe the action layer content in a flashback after characterizing the results: “It was a disaster. The team had made entry by stealth, only for…”

It is still more common to simply continue directly from the setup for the action that is to take place into a description of events as they unfolded. “The team make their entry by stealth. Suddenly…”

The Tactical Layer

This layer serves as an intermediary between other layers and the action layer. It contains descriptions of the circumstances which direct and constrain the choices of action, and narrative elements located within this layer are frequently concerned with motivations for specific actions, and are goal-oriented. Connections from this layer to the action layer specify what the broad action is intended to achieve by the character performing it. Connections from the Action layer to the Tactical Layer describe changes to the tactical situation that occur as a consequence of the action. In a story without personality, or a narrative without a story, these two layers can be entirely self-contained, resulting in an extremely shallow experience. In some stories, there may be no action layer at all, and even no tactical layer. These signify that both antagonists and protagonists are helpless to act in the face of events, and once again these stories are usually completely unsatisfying, though there may be exceptions.

For example, I once read a brilliant short story that gave a first-person tour of the protagonist’s madness. The character never did anything, and neither did anyone else, because actions were both completely abstracted and subjective; they could more properly be described as stimuli that were completely contained within the character’s perceptions of events (I can’t remember either name or author or I would cite them). There were never any descriptions of events, only descriptions of his perception of events. That alone was enough to provide a skew to the writing, a disconnection between a more subjective vision of reality and the insanity of the character that put the reader off-balance immediately. Just as in a sensory-deprivation situation, people will latch onto any source of stimulation, it created an immediate connection between the skewed worldview of the character and the reader that served the overall concept very well indeed. That was what made the writing brilliant. But I’m not convinced that this could be sustained over any larger work, or that it would serve at all in a roleplaying context.

This layer contains the meaning of events, all of which occur in the action layer. The motivations, and how the consequences have changed the situation in which the characters had found themselves prior to the events taking place. Without this layer, the action is mindless and exists for its own sake – something that RPG Wandering Monster encounters are plagued with, a subject that I addressed in my article series on that subject.

The Plot Layer

The Plot Layer contains the overall structure and goal of the overall story. It can be completely self-contained or it can connect to the plot layers in other stories or adventures to form a larger structure. Every story should, well, tell a story; it should have a beginning, middle, and ending. It may have one or more reverses. It may be divided into two, three, four, or five acts.

Stories that seem muddled, or directionless, or pointless, are all deficient in their Plot Layers, or missing these altogether.

It should be noted that not everything needs to be resolved within the one Plot layer; the function of continuity is to bridge the gap from the Plot layer of one story to the Plot Layer of the next. Only in strictly episodic narratives should such a line between plots be drawn, dividing one adventure from another. This also mandates static characters that never grow and change, so most RPGs violate the “strictly episodic” concept at a fundamental level even if the plots themselves are self-contained.

The plot layer contains plans that a character makes to achieve some goal, and the goal itself; the plan manifests as a plot connection to the Action layer via the Tactical Layer, and may be discarded or fail, while the goal itself persists. Other characters may act, or implement plans to achieve goals of their own, that may reshape both circumstances (the tactical layer) and alter the goals of the first character. In other words, the plot layer is objective-driven, and those objectives should be manifestations of the interplay between character and environment.

The Relationship Layer

This is where all character interactions take place that are not actions. It is where, unsurprisingly, relationships between characters are described and where they manifest and change. It is also where changes in relationships as a consequence of interactions (including Actions) take place.

Because each participant can have a different perception of a single relationship, relationships can be thought of as a property of the participant, moving much of the content from this Layer into the Character layer below it; but the fact that the relationship is a shared interaction, and can therefore be described by a hypothetical super-observer (even in a first-person narrative) as an independent entity linking the characters concerned, means that this layer can only be removed if the relationships within the plot never change in the plot. Even confirming or reaffirming a relationship is enough to mandate a relationship layer.

The true significance of this layer, though, lies in the connections from the Relationship layer to the Plot and Tactical Layers. Only if the relationships never shape or steer events within the plot are those connections absent, and when this is the case, characters appear wooden and lifeless no matter how well-realized they may appear. It’s one thing to create an interesting character, but such interest is superficial and hypothetical until it manifests in that character’s interaction with other characters in the story/adventure.

The Character Layers

The Character Layers are where the Personality and Capabilities of the character live. Changes in either of these, or in the character’s awareness of these, take place at this level. While it can be occasionally convenient to consider these to be one large layer containing all the characters within a story, it is usually beneficial to divide this Layer into sub-layers.

If characters never change, never evolve, never discover things about themselves, this layer is missing. That also means that relationships are frozen, so the Relationship Layer is intimately connected to these layers.

I usually classify the character layers into four groups:

• Protagonists
• Antagonists
• Color & Support Characters
• Exposition Delivery Characters

Protagonists

Each Protagonist should have his own layer. Using our dictum of a good story having some development or event in each layer of a story, that’s the equivalent of saying that each Protagonist should have some unique contribution to make to the story. This is a principle that has been a deliberate policy in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, and that has immeasurably strengthened that campaign. It is also a general (but sometimes unstated) guideline in my other campaigns.

If a PC doesn’t have some unique contribution to make to an adventure, he needs some subplot of his own within the adventure. If he doesn’t have a subplot of his own, he should at least have some development in his personal life – the establishing of a new relationship, a development in an existing relationship of importance to the character, or some personal discovery or change in ability. That then becomes the subplot. Without these things, the PC is just another warm body.

Sometimes it can be difficult to accommodate something for each character, especially with a large cast. This is especially true of episodic TV, where some characters might be superfluous to this week’s story (even completely absent) and where time constraints preclude expanding the canvas to cover the absence.

Things are often simpler in other media where there is only one protagonist.

Antagonists

Antagonists should never exist in isolation; they should always have some connection or relevance to the protagonist. That relationship – even if the two have never met, and don’t even know of each other’s existence – is what makes the antagonist matter, and what stimulates the Protagonist to care about the Plot. What’s more, the Protagonists should be shaped, influenced, and perhaps even transformed, by the relationship.

Additional life and interest can often result from considering the antagonist to be another protagonist, with all the privileges and responsibilities that go with a starring role. “Q” from Star Trek The Next Generation fits that description.

Still more depth can be obtained by a less stereotypical view in which a character has an antagonists relationship with one protagonist, has a support character role with another protagonist, and is occasionally an protagonist in his own right. “Quark” in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and “Charles Emerson Winchester III” in MASH both fit that description. “Winchester” also gains in comparison with the character that he replaced, Frank Burns, who served as Antagonist throughout his run, and is clearly one-dimensional in comparison to the former.

Color & Support Characters

Some characters are simply present to make situations more interesting, more realistic, or for the protagonists and/or antagonists to interact with, usually to display some aspect of the personalities involved. The more seamlessly these functions can be incorporated into the narrative, the more seamless and flowing the story becomes. These characters have no need to change and evolve, and are often static – though permitting them to do so gives a huge boost to the verisimilitude of the story and its setting. Sometimes, these can evolve to become minor antagonists in their own right, sometimes they were always intended to serve in that role; that occurs when the dominant characteristic of the minor antagonist is his role in the ambitions and plots of the major antagonist.

The other function served is to support the protagonist by taking any activity that is going to be dull, or beyond the capabilities, of the protagonist. He becomes, in effect, an extra pair of existential “hands” for the Protagonist. I would argue that Lestrade is such a character in the Sherlock Holmes stories (as are most of the other police officers).

Exposition Delivery Characters

The final category takes exposition out of the province of some omniscient narrator and delivers it by means of some distinct individual who exists for no other reason. The current plotline being prepared for the Adventurer’s Club campaign includes, by necessity, a couple of Guides whose job is simply to enable the characters to travel from point A to point B. Having done so, they become superfluous to the plot (though my co-writer and I have not yet decided what to do with them). Having given them interesting personalities for the PCs to interact with, at least enough to sustain interest for the extent of their involvement in the plot, we found that they made a convenient conduit to explaining the hazards of the environment in which the adventure takes place and exposition about the location.

It’s still the GM talking to the Players, but it is also the Exposition Delivery Character talking to the Protagonists, and that makes the content more interesting. It’s the difference between “show” and “tell” – there is an interaction and a relationship between the EDC and the protagonists. It might take an extra minute or two to impart information this way, but it is far more likely to hold the players’ interest.

Oh, and the duller and more technical the exposition, the more eccentric and vibrant the messenger needs to be. And the longer the exposition, the more you need to break it up into digestible chunks with something else happening in between. These days, I consider a full page of 12-point type to be the absolute limit (and the extreme) for exposition. A four- or five-line paragraph is better. If the exposition is going to be longer than half-a-page, it’s often better to provide it as written text instead of reading it aloud (because most people read faster than they speak).

The Context Layer

This Layer is often unnecessary. Like the Plot layer, this is about the bigger picture of what is going on and not the immediate interplay of action and reaction. Tone and style can sometimes be thought of as properties of content within this Layer.

If I had to encapsulate the content of this layer (and I do), I would describe it as the wider meaning of the plot. Subtexts and ironies, metaphysics and themes, morals, and insights, also lurk in this layer, running beneath the surface, as it were. The deeper and more complex the content of this layer, the more significant the writing is considered by literary critics; no matter how entertaining and popular, movies that lack a substantial Context Layer usually fare poorly at the stuffier (more formal?) awards shows. Die Hard doesn’t have much of a Context Layer. Fun movie, though.

A context layer that is antisocial in some respect can have profound impact on the reception of a work – for example, all the noise that was made about the Grand Theft Auto series a couple of years back, and more recently, Soldier Of Fortune. Whole articles could be devoted to the context layer elements that are inherent within games like D&D and Champions.

Like the Tactical layer, the Context Layer also exists to function as an intermediary, this time between the Plot Layer, the Character Layers, and the Background Layer. The characters have to emerge naturally and organically from the Background; they must have experienced the events that took place in that background prior to the opening of the story, and have been shaped by them. The plot should emerge organically as the inevitable consequence of the Characters and the Background. If either of these is not true, the character will be less than compelling, and will seem two-dimensional (no matter how complex it might be); and the plot will seem superficial. The more concrete the developmental connection between these elements and the background via the Context Layer that shapes and nuances them, the more real the characters and plot will feel, and that results in greater engagement in the end result.

The Background Layer

The Background Layer is the place for history, for events that are not instigated by the Characters, for the stuff that just happens. This content can be vague, muddled, misinterpreted, inadequate, misleading, or simply mistaken, but it can never be absent. It can be static and unchanging; but stories are always more interesting when the characters discover things about their world that they did not know, or did not previously understand. These discoveries can be so profound that they radically alter the character, or they can explain traits that the character did not understand.

The Background is the foundation, the bedrock, of the story. It’s “how everybody got here” at the start of a story.

It can also be frighteningly dull if imparted in a story or adventure from an omniscient narrator. When dealing with the Blog Carnival series on ‘My Biggest Mistakes‘ in September of ’09, I addressed this problem directly in the article Information Overload in the Zenith-3 Campaign. On the occasion that I discuss in that article, I tried to spice up the presentation of the campaign background by putting it into the mouths of various NPCs, each of whom had their own interesting delivery method to dress up what was otherwise a dull recitation of facts and figures, and while that helped, it was nowhere near enough, because it was still one character, always played by the GM, lecturing the players.

That’s why, for the new Zenith-3 campaign, I adopted a different approach: providing most of it in the form of articles that could be read at leisure, and building still more into adventures in small chunks. Some adventures in the planned campaign exist for no other reason than to place an interesting framework around some key piece of Campaign Background.

Layer Connections

Every development or event in one of these layers should have connections to one or more other layer. Nothing should exist in isolation. Reaction should follow “action” of any sort. Each of those reactions should then be considered an “action” in its own right, connecting with still more layers. This is what forms the narrative or plot. It is these connections that give rise to the “scaffolding” analogy that I employed at the start of this article.

More to the point, after each “action”, the author or GM should examine each of the other layers and ascertain positively what impact, if any, that layer’s content experiences as a consequence. Character development should be an outgrowth of experiences, not independent of them; if character growth appears divorced from experiences that are a principle element of the plot, then a subplot should provide the experiences that makes them internally consistent with the overall plot.

This is both easier to do, and harder, than it might at first appear. Easier, in that the larger task is – by virtue of the layered approach – broken into simpler sub-tasks; Harder, in that it becomes easier to lose track of the overall structure in focusing on one small part of it. When writers speak of their characters seizing control of the story and moving it in unexpected directions, this is the phenomenon that they are discussing; some sub-task’s result has introduced a development or reaction that is not in keeping with the direction of the intended overall action. Unless they can pinpoint exactly what the rogue element is, it is often easier to let the story evolve in a new direction. When we’re talking about RPGs, with the protagonists placed by definition beyond the control of the “author”, the phenomenon occurs all the more readily and regularly; “Sandboxing” is all about confining the scope of such changes to a manageable level. Sometimes, logic flaws in the original plot emerge as the reason for the change in direction; this is another way of saying “given these characters, this background, and these events, the outcome will be at variance to what was expected.”

Often, the easiest way to proceed is not to have any fixed destination in mind in the first place – placing “these characters” in “this situation” and seeing what happens, using the context, plot, tactical, and relationship layers as guides to how to shape future events.

The Action/Reaction Cavalcade

Some events are so drastic and dramatic that they reach into virtually every layer, changing personalities and relationships and objectives. Such watershed events are usually the focus of the plot in and of themselves. Consider the murder of Doctor Kimble’s wife in The Fugitive – is there a single character or relationship that has been established within the movie who is not touched or transformed as a result? It creates new relationships, connecting new characters (such as the Tommy Lee Jones character, Gerard), with the Protagonist.

Using the Layers

The layers are a planning and character development tool. They should be used to plan what an antagonist will do; how events should be shaped, when the GM/Author has a choice of outcome or reaction; and how to phrase and deliver context. Given a preexisting set of protagonists (the PCs), a GM can work backwards from desired action to motives & goals, to Antagonist via Background. The way the layers interconnect defines what is needed within a narrative to advance the story in the most effective manner, though some “layer developments” will have such far-reaching consequences that there may still remain the choice of sequence and manner in which these simultaneous reactions are described. As a general rule of thumb, the immediacy of any action in consequence should be coupled as tightly as possible to the reaction that caused that action, but there are so many reasons for violating that general rule that it is often little more than a vague intention.

A barely-adequate example

Let’s consider a simple plot to see how it works: “Stop The Bad Guy”. I’ll assume three protagonists.

What are the logical steps to the plot?
a) Protagonists become aware of Antagonist’s scheme
b) Protagonists stop the scheme
c) Protagonists locate the Antagonist
d) Protagonists confront the Antagonist

Right away, it can be seen that there are three action stages (b, c, and d). So we can tailor antagonist and scheme to give each of the three protagonists centre-stage in one of these stages. Protagonist 1 is central to stopping the scheme, Protagonist 2 is central to locating the Antagonist, and Protagonist 3 is central to the confrontation.

Why should they care? “Because the antagonist is an antagonist” is a superficial answer; the story would be far more powerful and interesting if one of the PCs was personally affected, and that drags in the other two by virtue of the relationship between them. This motivation should emerge as quickly into the plot as possible, so that tells us that the scheme personally affects one of the characters in some way. It might be Protagonist 1, who is instrumental in stopping the scheme. It might be Protagonist 3, who has a relationship with the Antagonist by virtue of the confrontation that is to come. It’s not likely to be Protagonist 2, because finding the Antagonist is not as sexy as stopping him or his scheme.

In fact, Protagonist 2 is a little underdone in this outline. So let’s redress the balance by making him the conduit to plot stage a – he’s the one who becomes aware of the antagonist’s scheme and tells the others.

Continue to fill in the blanks. Having beefed up Protagonist 2’s role, whichever of the other 2 is NOT directly connected with the antagonist will be relatively superfluous in comparison with the other two. Throwing in a transportation requirement between the “locate” and the “confront” stage might resolve that. But, since we want the action relating to any given protagonist to be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the narrative, this argues against the candidacy of Protagonist 3, who would feature in two successive stages. So the transportation has to be attached to Protagonist 1, and therefore the personal connection is with Protagonist 3, and is part of the climax of the plot.

So we’ve got something in the Action layer, the tactical layer, the plot layer, the relationship layer, the character layer, and – by definition – the background layer. At the moment, the character layer is weak (only one protagonist will be influenced significantly), and nothing at all in the context layer. Filling in those blank spaces requires expanding on the simple plot, defining the antagonist, and connecting everything to the background via a context. But its getting hard to continue developing this example in the abstract, because the protagonists involved will shape the antagonist and both the protagonist 1 and the antagonist will shape the scheme. We’ve now reached the point where specifics are required.

From those specifics, you can address the great unanswered questions of “how”. How is Protagonist 1 central to stopping or undoing the scheme? How does Protagonist 2 track down the Antagonist? How is Protagonist 3 central to the confrontation?

Using the principles of having a central plotline (and this example is terribly vague), established protagonists and background, and an equal share of the spotlight, every plot can be broken down this way, and any blank spots identified and filled.

Creating a coalition

For example, let’s say that this is the first adventure of a campaign, and that the PCs have no reason to be connected. The antagonist and his scheme can be the glue that brings the Protagonists together – simply give each of them a personal involvement in the scheme. One might have a support character with whom he has a relationship involved directly, another might be involved directly himself, or have a professional interest in the nature or subject of the scheme, and the third could have a personality trait that compels him to get involved. The outline that we have of the action makes it clear that the antagonist is remote to the scheme, and initially anonymous or hiding behind a false identity of some kind, which makes him quite likely to be a mastermind, using a flunky to execute the scheme. One of the Protagonists – probably number 2 – might recognize the flunky as being formerly associated with the mastermind, with whom he has a past protagonist-antagonist relationship.

Using the layers with the Amazon Nazis campaign planning technique

Just over a month ago, I described a simple campaign planning technique in Amazon Nazis On The Moon that dovetails nicely with this structured view of adventure development. That approach was to come up with an adventure idea or outline, and determine which PCs (protagonists) would logically feature in that adventure because of who or what they were. The rest of that technique related to planning and sequencing the adventures, which doesn’t matter to us right now.

From the perspective of the layers approach, that gives us a content description for the plot layer, identifies the protagonists, and connects one or more of them to the plot, from the outset. From that point on, it’s just a matter of breaking down the plot into logical stages and steps, and filling in the blanks according to the principle of equitable screen time. (Unfortunately, the example for which that article was named doesn’t feature any PCs outright, or I would be able to demonstrate). As it is, one of the PCs in the campaign is a female, and a fairly liberated one for her era (ex-Mountie, member of Canadian Intelligence on furlough) – a connection to the Amazons would not be too hard to establish. The biological aspects of the Amazons could be a connection with the Doctor who is a member of the party. Another member of the party is probably the best brawler, and could be given a starring role against the Nazis. He is also an uncomfortable passenger when it comes to flying, so there’s the scope for some interesting character development when confronted with a Rocket Ship. That leaves only the Priest and Paranormal Expert of the group in need of a share of the prominent spotlight. Perhaps he has a contact who can get the PCs into Germany without arousing suspicion, another Catholic Priest for example.

All you have to do is connect a plotline to the protagonists, use that plotline and its context to derive the nature and characteristics of the antagonist (or the nature of the antagonist and the plotline to come up with the context) and fill in the blanks, proceeding systematically through the narrative, until you have not just an element within every layer, but a development of some sort within those layers, as part of the story.

Action, Plot, Relationships, and Characters – the more closely connected to the story these are, the better the story that results. Something worth aiming for, don’t you agree?