Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. So far, these have appeared in exactly the same order as they were presented to my players in the initial pre-campaign briefing notes apon which these articles are being based. With this part, that changes; the next item on the agenda, if that pattern were to be followed, would be the Congressus Feyunctusora, the United Association of Fey, which is what I promised to address this time around. The Good News is that because the Fey have been a central part of the most recently-completed adventure within the campaign, I have done more development on this Realm than any other within the campaign. The Bad News is that because there has been so much development of the Realm, I don’t think I could have finished it in time to publish this article on schedule – so I’ve set the Fey aside for the moment and moved on to the Therassus Amora, The Centre Of Attraction. Which will only be about 11,300 Words…

Metagame Origins

The conceptual origins of this Realm were a combination of three strands of thought, which took place in three distinct stages of creation and conceptual refinement.

Line of thinking #1: The Common Standard

It’s a truism that’s been pointed out to me on a number of occasions by Ian Gray – Humans are the common standard against which all Fantasy races are measured, and hence every party should contain at least one human to make the uniqueness of the other races stand out. I agree with the first part, and can see his point with the second – though I don’t have 100% agreement with him in that respect. The logic connecting the “common standard” with the inclusion of a representative of that standard rests on the fallacy that characters (or individuals) from a particular race or culture will be exemplars of that race or culture.

When you’re dealing with cardboard cut-out NPCs, that may be true; but any decent NPC will have some individual traits that are not necessarily representative of his origins, and most PCs – at least those created by experienced or ambitious gamers – will be more individual than racial or social exemplars.

Most people, and most PCs, are not so much explorations of the cultural boundaries of their origins as they are partial projections from it. Their culture and society don’t define boundaries that restrict, confine, or channel their individuality; instead, there will be aspects of their society’s cultural ideals and standards that they exemplify, and aspects that they contradict, and aspects that never touch them.

This can be a hard concept to grasp without an example. The PHB (or equivalent volume) gives a page or more of description of elves and their society. These paragraphs don’t define limits beyond which elvish characters are not permitted to exceed; they define the mythical ‘typical’ elf, the statistical average if you will. Any given individual may vary from this model by a little or by a lot – but unless they are a cardboard cut-out of an Elf, they will vary from it in at least one respect. A race is a collection of individuals.

The Therassus Amora was intended to be the cultural equivalent of a “human” in Ian’s arguement. The Shared Kingdoms were so radical a concept that I wanted to include some familiar foundations, like the titles of nobility, which could act as touchstones for the players as they explored the world and the relationships and societies within it. Those cultural touchstones needed some point of origin. If there is a common standard of feudal society, you need at least one feudal society to provide that common standard for the other cultures to measure themselves against. Moreover, for the concepts within that society to be the universal standards, they must – at one time, at least – have been the dominant culture.

Line of thinking #2: Antithesis

The conceptual origin of this Realm was nothing more than the need to include a relatively “standard” fantasy feudal society. It’s history largely evolved as a result of the role it was intended to play within the broader society of the Shared Kingdoms. Of course, once it had provided those standards, once it had fulfilled that role, I was free to tinker with it, and take it beyond the equivalent of a cardboard cutout – to make it an individual unto itself. Certain elements of the culture had to remain fixed, because none of the other societies I had come up with were providing those elements to the Shared Kingdoms; but others lent more freedom. I didn’t need to integrate Wizards into the society, or Clerics, for example – because other members of the Shared Kingdoms were bringing those ingredients to the feast.

However, as I have noted in earlier parts of this series, I wanted each of the political ‘factions’ of the wider society to be evenly balanced with an opponent having an opposing principle. This not only provides contrast, but a structure of power struggles and convoluted politics, a delicate balance into which the PCs could intrude. Much of this opposition was built into other cultures that had been created, but there were a few areas that were left over. Where those elements were amongst the touchstones, fixed conceptual components that I needed to use as points of reference for the players, the opposition had to be placed into a new member of the shared Kingdoms, or added to the mixture of elements of an existing Realm; where they weren’t needed to be part of the common foundations of understanding, I was free to add an extreme ingredient to the makeup of the Therassus Amora.

At a metagame level, then, some of the social attitudes within this realm exist purely to act as antithesis and counterpoint to another of the member Realms.

Line Of Thinking #3: A dash of realism

When I first started playing RPGs, my concepts of Feudal Society were more fairytale than functional. The information provided in the AD&D volumes was scanty, to say the least, and I had not read a great deal of Fantasy literature; my first passion was Sci-Fi, and I had not strayed too far from those roots. I had read and enjoyed the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, but that was largely as far as it went. (And the Incompleat Enchanter, I might add). Movies were a bigger influence than literature, so far as fantasy societies went. My education in history had focused more on the ancient civilizations, the exploration of the pacific, some key battles, and World War II. The Medieval period of European history was largely skipped over.

Over time, my conceptualization built up, added to by articles in The Dragon, and exposure to the fantasy creations of other GMs, and water-cooler round circles with those GMs, and exposure to other sourcebooks. I also found other fantasy authors, notable Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings, Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffery’s Dragon series, Robert Asprin, and a few others. Nevertheless, my concepts were still more cartoon than concrete.

That changed when I stumbled over a TV program from the BBC called Time Team. The whole process of recreating the society of the past through the archeological exploration of the remains of that society was fascinating, and reawakened a general interest in understanding the historical foundations of fantasy societies. That, in turn, led me to a few reference books on the subject (listed at the bottom of this article, if you’re interested).

While I did not intend to go so far as to create an exact replica of a medieval society, I thought that incorporating a little more realism into the social structure would add a unique flavoring. The end result is undoubtedly as romanticized as any other FRP society, but I think that I’ve chosen some different aspects of the society to romanticize than are traditional.

The Road not travelled

Finally, there are a number of conceptual areas that have been left blank in this particular society. This is quite intentional – I don’t intend to fill those areas until something happens in-game to make the matter significant to the PCs and I will then choose answers that are most relevant to the campaign at the time. So, fair warning – this Realm won’t be as fully realized as some of the others that have been described thus far, or as some of those still to come will be.

In-Game Origins

The Galliamic Empire has been mentioned in this series on a couple of previous occasions, most notably in the introduction to the Capitas Duodiem, capital of the shared Kingdoms. In essence, there was once – at least according to most human histories – a unified human empire, known as the Galliamic Empire. Its capital was the Buhrs Galliamus. Something happened to that Empire which caused it to disintegrate, and which caused the destruction of the Buhrs Galliamus, at the time the largest (Human) city in the known world – the details as to what happened, and who did what to whom, differ from Kingdom to Kingdom and usually reflect the prejudices of the narrator or philosopher trying to explain it.

While most of the Empire splintered into the different factions that are now independent parts of the Shared Kingdoms, one still holds true to the culture and traditions of the Empire, or so they believe. That one is the Therassus Amora. According to their history, the destruction of the Galliamic Empire was the result of an economic crisis that resulted from the sheer costs of administering the Empire. The former subjects of the Empire were released to form their own independent Governments and the Therassus Amora became just one member of a community of many.

Between them, the other Kingdoms dispute just about every aspect of this story. Some claim that the Empire was declared more as wishful thinking and the announcement of planned conquest by the Therassus Amora, and that forces opposing the conquest were victorious and destroyed Behr Galliamus. Some claim that it was a single ambitious nobleman of Behr Galliamus who not only carried out an attempted coup within his own Kingdom but planned the violent conquest of the other Realms, and that it was the rightful rulers of Therassus Amora whose armies destroyed the usurper and his city. Still others place the blame on moral decay and the influence of Dark Forces – though they differ as to the identity of those Dark Forces. Some say Demons, some say Dragons, and some say that it was a Wizard’s experiment getting out of hand.

Several historians have assumed that each of these accounts contains some nugget of the truth, and have attempted to craft a coherent and internally consistent account based on those nuggets, with some success – but they all choose different nuggets.

The bottom line, then, is that no-one is really sure and no history of the Therassus Amora can be considered accurate. It simply is, and the truth is shrouded in mystery and uncertainty.

Internal Structure

In many ways, the Therassus Amora will be the most familiar nation within the Shared Kingdoms. They are a somewhat-generic Human Feudal Kingdom, and those have been a staple of the Fantasy Genre for so long that they are almost a cliché. And, superficially, the Therassus Amora would fulfill expectations in that respect – at least until you look beneath surface.

The Therassus Amora is the most decadent of the Kingdoms, the most formal and rigid in it’s social structure, and considers itself the most senior of the Shared Kingdoms and architect of the concept, but at the same time it is the most egalitarian in many respects. It is the most martial of the Kingdoms, responsible for maintaining and protecting the trade routes that bind the Shared Kingdoms together.

Although it appears a feudal society on the surface, closer examination reveals more than a little Plutocracy about the internal structure. While the familiar feudal system of interlocking debts and obligations is present, wealth dictates position within the nobility, and it is theoretically possible for individuals to climb the social ladder – or fall from grace. In practice, inheritance laws and taxes create a relatively-rigid set of social classes.

It can be generally stated that there are three hierarchies within the Therassus Amora: Farmers, Craftsmen, and Miners. Within each hierarchy are five levels – Worker, Peasant, Official, Noble, King. These are known by specialized terms within their own hierarchy but the features of each level are so similar that these distinctions are rarely applied, and it is generally sufficient to define and explain only these eight terms in order to have a working understanding of the society. Within some of these ranks are sub-ranks, the structure of which varies. Nor are the boundaries completely clear-cut; the edges are fuzzy, defined in part by birth and in part by prosperity. A particularly prosperous Official might outrank a particularly poorly-performing Noble, regardless of official rank or title.

Farmers

If it is a self-renewing or renewable resource, whether it be grown on the land or extracted from a watercourse, it is the province of the Farming hierarchy. This branch of society therefore includes forestry and fishermen.

In general, farmer produce is not ready to consume as is; the results of their labors (save that for their own use) are passed to Craftsmen for preparation.

Farmers come in two varieties: those that work the resources owned by a superior within their hierarchy, and those that own the resource themselves in trust from a superior within their hierarchy. The difference is one of liberty; the former have less of it, but greater protections and lower expectations, making it easier to survive and prosper, while the latter greater independence but higher obligations and expectations, making it harder to survive and harder again to prosper. Another title that could accurately be applied to the first group could be “debt-slaves”. The default status is for the farmer (and his immediate family) to own the land in trust, from which they are expected to earn a living, and pay taxes to the noble who has granted him the trusteeship over the land. When they cannot pay these taxes, or are failing to sufficiently provide for their family or their own well-being (and it is generally assumed that the farmer will feed himself first and pay his taxes second), the trust will be revoked and the farmer’s family will be forced to work lands owned directly by the noble under the direction of his appointed representatives until the debt has been repaid. He will then be issued a new trust (possibly to the same land he held before, but more likely to some other local tract of land), and can make a fresh start. If he has learned from his supervision how better to manage his trust, he may prosper; there is no animus within the society against those who have been temporarily indentured, though repeatedly failing is looked down apon.

Some taxes will often be paid in the form of produce. Because this bypasses the expense of a Craftsman’s fees, this is the most profitable outcome for the farmer, because the prices are still set by demand and the quality of the produce by the Craftsman. For the same reason, the purchaser also generally receives more produce for his money. This income can be applied directly to the farmer’s tax burden, being in the form of currency.

There is usually some bartered direct exchange of produce between two farmers that bypasses the official markets run by the Craftsmen and provides some variety to the diet, but opportunities to conduct such trades are rare, and restricted to monthly Market Days, or to trade between immediate neighbors. Because these trades avoid all, or almost all, Craftsman’s fees, they are also likely to be highly profitable for both sides, but they do nothing toward the farmer’s tax liability save maintaining his overall health and hence ability to work toward meeting those obligations.

Most of the time the farmer will sell the results of his labors to a Craftsman. A specialist Craftsman known as a buyer will establish the value of the produce as it will probably be when it comes to market and purchase the produce at that price, recording the value in his ledgers. To the total value he then adds a fixed fee by weight, a fixed fee by consignment, and a further fee based on his assessment of he value of the produce after it has been prepared professionally, to determine the price he must charge (by law) for the produce. Another Craftsman, known as a Carter, will then purchase the produce at this price or less, as agreed between the two, and add a surcharge by distance (measured in time) to the market he adjudges most profitable for this particular produce. The more distant the market, the higher the surcharge and final price, but the greater any decline in value through spoilage and weather; factoring in likely demand, there will always be an optimum location to sell the produce. He then transports the produce to that market and attempts to sell it to a third Craftsman. The price to be charged is completely deregulated; it is a question only of how much the Carter wants for the consignment (minimum), and how much the purchaser is willing to pay to obtain it. Sometimes the Carter will have overestimated the value or demand for the produce, and will lose money on the transaction; on other occasions, he will have underestimated one or both factors and will earn an additional profit.

Until the produce leaves the control of the Carter, it is still considered to be transitioning between the Farmer or primary producer and the Craftsman system. The valuation prior to sale of the Carter is used to assess the tax burden on the Buyer, whose valuation is in turn used to assess the tax burden on the Farmer. If one undervalues the produce, or persuades the preceding link in the chain to accept a lower valuation, the income from the produce is reduced, but so is the imposed tax liability.

Market Days

Thirteen times a year, each Noble holds a Market Day within the townships under his control. He is entitled to charge a small fee for entrance to this market, whether the attendee is buying, selling, or both, but derives no other income from any transaction conducted at the Market Day. Nobles will generally strive to keep this fee small; if they overcharge, the farmers will go elsewhere and he will receive no fee at all. Local Craftsmen, other farmers, and the Noble himself, are then free to purchase produce direct from the farmers, at prices set by the local Buyers, who receive a small fee from the Noble for providing the service. These purchases may be paid in coin (Craftsmen and Noble) or bartered exchange (other farmers). Either way, as noted above, these are usually the most profitable sales the farmer will make.

This is also considered a day for the dispensation of justice by the Nobles, the announcement of any new laws, and so on.

Some Market Days through the course of a year are popular and well attended, others are relatively poor (especially those in Winter). Produce is a seasonal commodity. Note that farmers are not permitted to speculate on the yield of a future crop – they can purchase using produce they have on hand, or coins received from produce they have previously sold, but may not sell orders in advance of the harvest.

Craftsmen

If it involves manipulating, transforming, preparing, or creating something, it is the province of the craftsmen. This hierarchy includes professionals of all sorts, from cooks to waggoners to apothecaries to furniture makers. Because this is a catch-all for any occupation which is not expressly part of the other two hierarchies, it includes servants and waiters. It is also the military hierarchy.

In general terms, a Craftsman does something to something, and are paid according to expertise, production, and service. Craftsmen’s fees are strongly regulated, but at each stage in the Production/Delivery/Sale process, the value assigned to the products of their labor are assessed by the purchaser according to the current market and the quality of the workmanship.

Where a Craftsman is a professional whose services do not yield a tangible product, the value of the service to the customer must be negotiated prior to the service being performed, and may not be altered afterwards, but no more than 1/3 of the agreed total may be paid in advance. Standard bonuses structures for rapid delivery and penalties for late delivery are also applied to the final sum, as may additional bonuses for performance. If a Noble’s military forces sacks a village at the behest of the Noble, the soldiers and officers will receive their standard pay, a bonus or penalty for early or slow success, and (depending on the Noble) an additional bonus for performance in the field. Timely Success is all that matters.

Again, there are two subcategories within the ranks of Craftsmen: those who own their own tools and professional license, and pay taxes based on their income; and those who have failed to pay those taxes and who have been indentured to the Noble’s Service at a fixed rate of pay, but who do not have to provide tools or purchase licenses, until their debt has been cleared. However, there is considerably greater disdain within the ranks of other Craftsmen for Craftsmen who fall even once into the latter group. This is because much of a Craftsman’s valuation derives from their reputation for professionalism, workmanship, artistry & creativity, and reliability. A failure to achieve sufficient income to pay their tax burdens is considered indicative of a serious failure of judgment, which in turn impacts one or more of those reputation indices. The age at which this occurs is also a factor: the very young are generally given greater latitude to make mistakes and learn from them, while the very elderly may experience symptoms of decrepitude but have a wealth of experience apon which to draw. It follows that the harshest judgments are reserved for those who fail while in their professional primes.

The majority of craftsmen are of the type who convert one or more raw materials into a finished product, whether that be a meal, a saddle, or a sword. The series of trades and purchases that result in end-purchaser receiving the product they have purchased is very similar to that described for the purchase of farm produce, though the titles of the specialists change somewhat. In place of a Buyer, we have a Valuer; in place of a Carter, we have a Distributor; and in place of the Craftsman who ultimately purchased the raw materials, we have a Vendor or Peddler (depending on whether they maintain a foxed point of sale or a travelling point of sale). To avoid confusion over the use of the term Craftsman, I will assume the Craftsman under discussion is a saddlemaker.

The Valuer specializes in buying raw materials that a Craftsman – a saddlemaker, in this case – can convert into finished goods, assessing the quality of the raw materials and the price that a skilled craftsman will pay for them. The more highly-skilled the saddlemaker who will utilize the raw materials, the less likely they are to purchase inferior quality materials, while the lower that skill, the less profit the Valuer can expect to make from the resale of high-quality materials. The Valuer’s primary skill is his ability to determine who gets what, matching the quality of produce with the skill of the purchaser to whom he intends to sell. He buys raw materials at the price agreed-to with the Carter, and sells for a percentage of the estimated value of the resulting product AFTER the saddlemaker has employed his skills.

That estimated value rests on the reputation of the saddlemaker, his known preferences in raw materials, and the quality (and rarity) of the raw materials. The Valuer buys the raw materials and conveys them to the saddlemaker they expect to want to purchase them. Another factor of which the Valuer must be mindful is the “saturation of the market” – if a saddlemaker already has too much raw material, he will be less inclined to buy more. Often a domino series of transactions is required, in which part of the payment accepted by the Valuer is raw material of a lower quality which can be resold to a less-skilled saddlemaker.

Quite often, as in this case, there will be an intermediary step – the Valuer sells hides to the tanner, then he or another Valuer purchases the tanned hides on behalf of the saddlemaker (or some other leatherworking tradesman such as a cobbler). He then sells the tanned hides to a tradesman – hopefully, the one he based his assessment of value on – based on a negotiation between the two of them. The saddlemaker then uses the leather (and other raw materials from other Valuers) to create a Saddle, which he sells to a Distributor for a sum the two negotiate, again based on the reputation of the artisan and the quality of the finished product. The Distributor determines the market at which he is most likely to get a good price for the saddle, factoring in the costs of transport and storage, and his own commission, takes the saddle there, and attempts to sell it to a Vendor or Peddler. If he fails, he can either attempt to sell it at a less-profitable market, or leave it in storage for a time until his targeted market becomes more willing to buy (losing him some profit in the process). The Vendor or Peddler who buys it adds his own commission to the price he paid, and attempts to interest a customer in purchasing the product. The higher the price, the higher his target will be ranked, because they are the ones with sufficient capital to pay his price – though a gullible purchaser of moderate rank may be more profitable than an expert of higher rank.

Taxes are assessed based on the assumption of sale at the value placed on the commodity by the prospective salesman – so the first Valuer’s taxes are assessed according to what he thinks he can get for the hides he has purchased from the tanner, the tanner’s taxes are assessed according to how much he thinks the second Valuer will pay for the tanned hides, and so on.

Miners

The extraction of any non-renewable resource is the province of the Miners, as is the refinement of that resource into a saleable commodity if that is necessary. There is less scope for direct trade between them, but in most other respects this branch of society is similar to that of the farmers.

The major distinction is the collective ownership of the extracted resource by everyone who participated in the extraction process. Once again, there are two subcategories within the ranks of the Miners – those who own a share of the mine & refinery, and those who do not. The first group are expected to pay taxes and purchase licenses, but are permitted to profit from their labors; the latter don’t have the obligations, but don’t work for a profit, and is reserved for those who have failed to meet their tax obligations, and who are ’employed’ by a nobleman directly – usually to work a mine that is currently untenanted, though any manual labor may be required of them.

The Potential For Corruption

There is a huge and obvious potential for corruption within these economic systems. Undervalue something, sell at the true value, and pocket the difference – and only pay taxes on the lower value. Two functions within the society exist to combat this potential; the first is the system of tithes, which is based on external measurements of prosperity and forms a second tier of taxation; and the second, and more important, is the right of Dominant Assessment.

Dominant Assessment

The authority issuing the license to mine, to function as a craftsman, or to work a tract of land, has the right at any time to seize 20% of the produce on hand, paying the assessed value on record in compensation. They must then sell this produce for whatever its true market value turns out to be. If that value is established as being in excess of the recorded value, the entire stock on hand at the time is considered to be undervalued by a like percentage, and the producer or craftsman is taxed at the higher rate so established – backdated by up to 5 years, or since the producer was last indentured. A degree of allowance is made for market fluctuations and slight under- or over-valuation, but significant excesses (more than 5-10%) are harshly punished.

If the actual value is significantly down on the estimate, the possessor of the merchandise is permitted to retain the inflated sum paid following the seizure – but the tax obligations owed are subjected to more intense scrutiny, and the process of Dominant Assessment is likely to be scheduled for early repetition. It is anticipated that over-valuing the product on hand means that the possessor will have trouble meeting his tax obligations, which are based on that over-inflated value. If there is a pattern of over-valued products and the citizen being able to pay his tax debts despite this, over a number of years, it is suggestive of some other illegal activity that is raising the needed funds.

Agents in the employ of the official, noble, or throne randomly spot-check all licensees within a five-year time-frame, so the punishment is always more than any actual gains through corruption.

Of course, corruption is still possible, through the use bribery on the Agents, or the unrecorded seizure of products for “Dominant Assessment”. To combat this, each level of society has the same right of Dominant Assessment apon the Agents of the rung immediately below them – so the Nobles spot-checks on Officials (the Agents), and the Crown spot-checks the Nobility. Successful systemic corruption by anyone except the Crown thus requires ever-increasing bribes.

Worker

Workers are those who do not hold licenses, and work on behalf of a license holder. Often family members, the license holder is expected to pay tithes and taxes (at one-fifth the standard rate) for workers, feed and clothe them adequately, provide them with suitable shelter, and so on. The definitions of “adequately” and “suitable” frequently vary considerably, however. The license holder is also required to provide all tools needed for the workers to carry out the tasks they are assigned.

Peasant

A Peasant holds a license issued by an Official which must be paid for every year.

Official

An Official is the holder of an Office granted him by a Noble for a period of time, renewable at the Noble’s discretion. The Official is permitted to issue a sub-license for any lands, mines, or businesses that he is in turn licensed to operate, but is not permitted to actively work these operations personally, and receives the taxes and fees for these sub-licenses. He may also perform other services for the Noble, for which he is remunerated by the Noble. His tax liability is assessed on the basis of this income, and he is tithed as a Craftsman.

The Official issues other licenses on the Noble’s behalf and on his instruction and accepts the proscribed payment for those licenses. He also collects taxes and tithes from the Peasants to whom he has issued licenses. The taxes paid are forwarded to the Noble who granted the Office, while the tithes are forwarded directly to the Throne.

Like Peasants, Officials may have a number of Workers in their employ. These (essentially) provide muscle. Some of these will be people who have been indentured for failure to meet their tax obligations, some may be contracted professionals.

Officials may also have subordinate Officials – who have to be paid out of the higher Official’s pocket. For obvious reasons, these subordinates will only be appointed if the income they will generate for the appointing Official will exceed the cost of employing them. Officials are also permitted to purchase licenses from the Nobles on whose behalf they are employed.

Nepotism and Bribery are rife within the ranks of Officials, and it is not uncommon for subordinates to pay regular Kickbacks to retain their positions. An Official is thus closer to being minor Nobility than the title suggests.

Noble

Nobles have to pay the Officials who work on their behalf. They will also have a number of Peasants and Workers in their direct service. Nobles have titles granted by the Throne which confers the right to earn income from them in return for meeting certain obligations imposed by the Throne. Some of the properties that accompany the Titles will be operated directly by the Noble using workers who have failed to meet their tax obligations, and who have to be clothed, fed, etc, by the Noble. Most such properties will be administered by Officials on behalf of the Noble, however, and subdivided amongst peasants licensed by the Official on the Noble’s behalf. Nobles receive the taxes and licenses paid to the Officials by these Peasants; some of this may be in the form of produce, but most will be in the form of currency, which the Noble can use to purchase goods and services.

Nobles do not pay taxes upward, but are required to provide services to the throne (such as supplying levees of armed and trained soldiers on demand), and are tithed far more stringently than those of lower social rank.

Nobles are required to house, feed, and pay Officials in their employ.

King

The King is the ultimate nominal “owner” of everything within the Therassus Amora. He receives tithes directly from every craftsman, peasant, and lesser Noble within the Realm. He has his own set of Officials who collect fees on his behalf for various public services. He will operate a few resources directly through his own set of Officials, but will mostly grant titles to others to operate his resources on his behalf.

In theory, anyone from any other rank can purchase ownership of property from the throne – if they can raise the money, and the King is willing to sell. In compensation for the moneys received for the purchase, the King gives up the right to tithes from the property, though the residents are still liable to pay taxes. In practice, only the most successful artisans and the nobility are able to afford to purchase property of their own. Although it may seem shortsighted, Kings are usually willing to accept such offers – at an exorbitant price – for the capital needed for large-scale civic improvements that boost the value of holdings he has not sold. The current monarch, Frugarus II, has also been known to sell titles to mines that have played out, and the occasional tract of useless swampland.

Tithes

Nobles are required to tithe a percentage of their body weight in silver (or equivalent) every year to the Noble to whom they are beholden, on the basis that the prosperous will gain weight while those who are less successful will be gaunt and drawn (and will therefore weigh less). This also reduces the tax burden imposed by the crown after a lean season (drought, plague, whatever) while increasing it in years of plenty. It is presumed that other inaccuracies within this system will balance out, either year-to-year, decade-to-decade, or generation-to-generation.

In turn, the Nobles charge merchants, tradesmen, and other individuals not engaged in primary industry or public/military service, a percentage of their body weight in bronze every year for the privilege of not having their businesses nationalized and themselves forced into service to the crown until the debt is discharged. With businesses, this debt is paid directly from profits; individuals must work for the noble to whom the debt is owed at whatever rate of pay the noble decrees, within the limits set by the crown, effectively providing a rotating force of debt-slaves. For those engaged in primary industry, the tithe is generally 1/5th of the production by weight of the product of their labors.

Failure to pay the tithe results in confiscation of the lands not ‘leased’ from the Noble, plus a 25% penalty. The resulting allotment of land can then be turned over to another farmer (or individual forced into service by tax debt), hopefully to be worked more profitably. These base rates varied slightly (±25%) from noble to noble.

The Reckoning

Taxes and Tithes are all reckoned on the second day of the 5th full moon of the year, which always commences on the 3rd moon after Midsummer’s Day. This is also commonly held to be the first day of autumn, when the harvests are all in and the winter crops are about to be planted. This day is known throughout Therassus Amora as The Reckoning.

Tolls, Fees, and Duties

The crown also charge tolls for the roads and maintains a network of inns along the most heavily-travelled, both of which are sources of direct capital to the King, which he uses to purchase mines and tracts of land; the ownership of which he leases or gifts to those members of his court which are adjudged best able to manage them (or most in need of a serving of Kingly largesse to ensure their continued loyalty). The king doesn’t quite own everything, but he owns many things and most of the land in between. As explained earlier, even these ‘bequests’ simply mean that the land is held in trust for the crown.

The Political Consequences

An awful lot of the preceding should sound fairly familiar to any fantasy enthusiast. The patterns are not quite the same as the villein-nobility-monarch relationship of the historical monarchy, but there are enough similarities that historians would find much that is plausible within the description.

The practical consequences are that the fortunes and power of the King are tied directly to the prosperity of the land, while that of the Nobility is not – and, to a large extent, the Nobility control the prosperity of the land. At the same time, the throne has the power to remove from power – if necessary by force – any Noble who is found to be acting against his interests. If a substantial minority of the Nobility were to oppose the King, the result would be Civil War – but that invites intervention by the other Shared Kingdoms, something neither faction would want.

Power is overtly, and tenuously, shared between Monarch and Nobles, and subject to ongoing revision and give-and-take, and is transferrable from one Noble to another – making the Court a hotbed of Machiavellian intrigue. It is not uncommon for one Noble to ally with another to undermine a third, even while collaborating with the third to disrupt the economic foundations of the second, in an elaborate scheme aimed at weakening an ally of a fourth for the – perceived – benefit to a fifth, who the first is hoping to woo into an alliance. Multiply this scheme a dozen-fold or more and the true complexity of the political situation becomes clear. It’s not uncommon for two nobles to be allies in one cause, opposed in a second, and feigning a relationship over a third.

More subtle is the power of the peasantry to bring a despotic noble to heel. Harvesting a little earlier or later than they should reduces the value of their crops, but also reduces their tax liability. The peasant thus foregoes a little luxury and profitability for the ability to influence the profitability of a greedy noble or oppressive official. If this pattern becomes sufficiently widespread, as is likely to be the case if many share the opinion of the peasant, they may be forced into the direct service of the King for a time – but the Noble will be ruined, if not beggared. If that keeps up for very long, the Noble will be stripped of influence by his rival Nobles, and then usually stripped of his holdings by the King.

A popular sentiment in Therassus Amora is that “Peasants are like raindrops – insignificant in isolation but given time and numbers, able to wear down the strongest rock.”

The Rules Of Inheritance

Inheritance of property (land & dwellings other than family estates) is from mother to daughter, inheritance of other property (including titles) is from father to son. Surviving eldest children of each gender at the time of the parents death inherit the entire ‘family fortune’. If there is no daughter, then the eldest son gets the property and the next eldest son gets everything else. If there are no sons, the eldest daughter gets everything. If there are no siblings, the crown reclaims title to the land, and whoever can make the best claim to being the closest companion of the deceased gets everything else. This ensures that the nobility must marry within its own social class or be reduced to relative paupers, while ensuring that families who gather sufficient wealth are able to bring fresh blood into the nobility.

Education

Eldest children are educated solely in how to manage the property or estate or inheritance, such as it may be, and how to behave appropriately within the family’s social stratum. Junior sons and daughters are given more general educations and for the most part are expected to make their own way in the world; they may receive a lesser share in an inheritance at the whim of the eldest children. Girls are also educated in music, etiquette, politics, etc – everything they need to snare themselves a husband; Boys are trained in arms and one or more trades of some sort (which in theory gives them what they need to support a wife). Note that widows inherit nothing from dead husbands (but custom has it that they are then cared for by the daughter who inherits the land), widowers inherit nothing from dead wives (but are required to be supported by the eldest son until remarrying).

Nobles & Nobility within the Causa Domasura

The Nobles of the Therassus Amora use the standard peerage structure, as described in the first part of this series (about 1/3 of the way down).

Geography

One of the largest and best-populated of the Shared Kingdoms, the Geography of Therassus Amora is as complex as such a large domain implies.

Borders

The principle region of Therassus Amora is roughly shaped like a pie wedge running from the edge of the region controlled by the Capitas Duodiem, which is built apon lands “donated” (for a fee) to the Shared Kingdoms.

The right-hand base of the wedge runs roughly east-west along the Via Negotarentur (Trade Road) (pronounced Neg-Oh-Sha-Rent-Ur) to the Lihumen Negotarenture Transitum (Stony River Trade Bridge), where the road crosses the Lihume Lapillos (Stony River). The border then follows the line of the river north until it emerges from Behr Yuralvus (the home of the Endless Library), located in the Montis Nixculum (Snow-capped Mountains).

Therassus Amora’s northern border continues along the Montis Nixculum past the border with Behr Yuralvus; every accessible point and valley in these mountains west of Behr Yuralvus and East of the Lihume Pallibus (White-flecked River) is claimed by the Kingdom.

The river runs slightly west of due south until it joins the Lihume Limosa (Slimy River) to form the beginnings of the Lihume Magnusortali (Great Eastern River), which turns Southeast, flowing past the Atterro Montis (the Waste Range) and the Buhrs Galliamus (The Ruined City), former capital of the Galliamic Empire, until it reaches the Capitas Duodiem.

Neighbors

The only civilized realm that lies to the north of Therassus Amora is Behr Yuralvus. To the west and to the south on the western side lies the Arred Anigesasi (The Black Lands) – an arid, rocky wasteland, occupied by intractable non-human enemies. The central south is the possession of the Capitas Duodiem, and the eastern south is the province of the Ineodolus Imperascora (The Traders And Commerce Empire). The eastern border is shared with the Causa Domasura.

Ecology

The southern parts of Therassus Amora are amongst the best farmland in the Shared Kingdoms, and especially those that lie to the East of a north-south line through the Capitas Duodiem – about half the Kingdom. The slopes to the north are heavily forested and one of the prime sources of lumber for the shared Kingdoms (this continues into the Causa Domasura). The more western regions are more desolate but suitable for goats and sheep. The northern and northwestern regions also contain numerous deposits of various minerals, while the southwestern line near the Lihume Limosa are a source of natural oil and tar springs, which give the Lihume Limosa its name.

Population

The majority of the population are concentrated to the south and east within the Kingdom, where the capital city of Behr Magnificus (Magnificent City) is located. Other regions are more sparsely populated. A string of forts and fortified villages are located along the western border, containing a substantial military presence and population to support them, a bastion against the “nightmares of the wilderness”.

From A PC Perspective

The Therassus Amora is an ideal place for PCs to use as a base of operations. People of all ranks rub shoulders with each other, and there is no restriction on the freedom or activities of peasants – provided that their taxes and tithes are paid. Rank isn’t quite for sale, but a quick relocation when sufficient fortune has been amassed will solve that problem.

Of course, it’s not that easy; two out of three adventurers don’t return, and only one of three of those who do achieve any profit from their expeditions.

There are always political games afoot, but these rarely impact on the lives of the lower classes, so PCs can choose to get involved or let these pass them by. As a foundation point, it presents the best of all worlds to any PCs.

From A GMs Perspective

it is almost as desirable from a GMs standpoint, being naturally sandboxed. Adventure lies to the west and the south, as does the political centre of the Shared Kingdoms; the major trade rival lies just to the south; and the conflict between Behr Yuralvus and the Causa Domasura occupies the eastern border. There are also all the mines of the north, and what they might uncover. So there’s plenty of scope for adventure all around, but only what is immediately needed has to be prepared.

The Language Relationships Table: The Unusual Languages

Recap: There are 26 spoken languages in Shards Of Divinity, divided into four groups: Common, Unusual, Rare, and Obscure. Knowledge in one language at a minimum level or greater confers +1 miscellaneous bonus to attempts to speak or interpret another, due to the commonality of certain words and structural elements. Controversially, some scholars have attempted to use these language relationships to construct a history of the world from a lingual perspective.

In this pasrt of the article, we’re going to look at the Unusual Languages. Note that this table includes languages that are currently not known to exist in the campaign world.

Unusual Languages	Relatedness
	Ranks	Related Languages
Old Kingdom	2 ranks	City-State
	4 ranks	Original, Druidic, Trade Tongue
	6 ranks	Kingdom, Gypsy, Aquan, Sylvan, Elvish, Draconic, Pious, Tribal
	8 ranks	Halfling, Giant, Orc, Goblin, Celestial, Dwarven
	10 ranks	Abyssal, Infernal, Ignan, Gnoll, Gnome, Pious, Undercommon, Draconian
	12 ranks	Terran
Tribal (by tribe)	2 ranks	Tribal (any other), Orc, Goblin, Giant, City-State
	4 ranks	Gnome, Gnoll, Ignan, Dwarven, Original
	6 ranks	Gypsy, Sylvan, Draconic, Draconian, Terran, Infernal, Pious
	8 ranks	Old Kingdom, Elvish, Undercommon, Abyssal, Celestial, Halfling
	10 ranks	Kingdom, Trade Tongue, Druidic, Aquan
Gypsy	2 ranks	Sylvan, City-State
	4 ranks	Druidic, Old Kingdom, Original, Elvish, Trade Tongue
	6 ranks	Aquan, Draconic, Tribal, Pious
	8 ranks	Undercommon, Dwarven, Orc, Goblin, Halfling, Kingdom
	10 ranks	Draconian, Celestial, Gnoll, Gnome
	12 ranks	Giant, Abyssal, Infernal, Terran
	14 ranks	Ignan
Druidic² Notes: ²Language is: Unusual for Druids only, Rare for Gypsies, Elves & Fey, Obscure for all others	2 ranks	Gypsy, Elvish, Sylvan, Aquan, Old Kingdom
	4 ranks	Halfling, City-State, Draconic
	6 ranks	Undercommon, Gnome, Trade Tongue, Original
	8 ranks	Kingdom, Draconian, Celestial, Orc, Giant, Tribal, Pious
	10 ranks	Goblin, Dwarven, Terran, Abyssal, Ignan
	12 ranks	Infernal, Gnoll
Halfling	2 ranks	Kingdom, Druidic, Gnome
	4 ranks	Old Kingdom, Trade Tongue, Gypsy, Sylvan, Elvish, Aquan, Giant, Orc
	6 ranks	City-State, Draconic, Dwarven, Ignan, Pious
	8 ranks	Original, Undercommon, Draconian, Terran, Celestial, Infernal, Goblin, Tribal
	10 ranks	Abyssal, Gnoll
Sylvan	2 ranks	Elvish
	4 ranks	Druidic, Gypsy, Aquan, Draconic, Gnome
	6 ranks	Old Kindom, City-state, Undercommon, Giant, Orc
	8 ranks	Abyssal, Celestial, Ignan, Draconian, Halfling, Dwarven, Trade Tongue, Original
	10 ranks	Tribal, Gnoll, Goblin, Pious, Terran, Infernal
Gnome	2 ranks	Giant, Orc, Sylvan
	4 ranks	Ignan, Halfling, Elvish, Draconic, Dwarven
	6 ranks	Terran, Draconian, Gnoll, Tribal, Kingdom, Druidic, Gypsy, Aquan
	8 ranks	City-State, Original, Undercommon, Abyssal, Celestial, Infernal, Goblin
	10 ranks	Old Kingdom, Pious, Trade Tongue
Undercommon³ Notes: ³Language is: Unusual for Elves, Dwarves, and Demons, Obscure for all others	2 ranks	Abyssal, Elvish
	4 ranks	Draconic, Terran, Celestial, Infernal
	6 ranks	Sylvan, Aquan, Druidic, Dwarven, Draconian
	8 ranks	Pious, Gypsy, Old Kingdom, Original, Ignan, Orc, Gnoll
	10 ranks	Gnome, Halfling, City-State, Giant
	12 ranks	Kingdom, Goblin, Tribal, Trade Tongue

Language Descriptions & Notes: The Unusual Languages

The following language descriptions frequently mention rendering text using particular fonts that I have in my collection. Some of these may have unrestricted licenses, some may be free only for non-commercial use, and a few may even have come with collections or software that is only available to paying customers. In the seventh section on Languages,, I’ll include a brief sample of text rendered into each language and displayed using the relevant font. For now, all that really needs to be noted is that I have chosen fonts that ‘look right’ for the language as I envisaged it for this campaign.

Similarly, a number of modified modern languages have been used as a shortcut for simulating the various fantasy tongues. The goal was not to create a genuine language, not even to be consistent, but simply to create an appropriately non-English “sound” with the right sort of accents and noises. I hope no speaker of any named language takes offense – or undue compliment – from the use of their native tongue. Such usage says nothing about the language itself, and even less about the people who actually use it; at most it is a commentary on the sounds and flow of syllables that result to English-speaking ears.

Some of the languages fall into multiple categories. While it might be redundant, each language description is included in all relevant categories.

Pious:

Also known as ‘Divine Speech’. Used exclusively for the conducting of human religious services and ceremonies, the way churches used to use Latin. It derives from one of the City-State languages (described separately below), making it the most ancient human tongue still in regular use. As such, it uses a lot of generic terms for more recent innovations; it has no descriptive terms or proper names for different non-human species, for example. Instead, it has a number of terms for describing an individual’s state of Grace, from “Irredeemable” through to “Most Holy”, which are applied to whole classes of non-human. “Heretics” might be Orcs or Elves or Fey or Wizards.

Pious is used for all formal church doctrines and holy books, and this blanket terminology shapes theological attitudes to non-human species. For example, the title ‘Paladin’ literally translates as Protector or Defender. As such, anyone who takes up arms to defend a Church may be blessed as a paladin by the church, and treated in the same way as would a Paladin, giving rise to such phrasing as ‘The Paladin then gathered to him paladins to oppose the heretic’.

This sample phrase also shows other aspects of Pious deriving from it’s age: (1) a stilted, almost pretentious, phraseology; and (2) collective nouns are used only for the subject, not the object; ‘The Heretic’ might be one or it might be a besieging army. The next phrase in this story might well be ‘And the Heretic were layed low by the holy might of the paladin.” Sentences tend to be short and declarative, with full stops used where commas might be expected. It is also normal practice to number each statement.

Note that this language is not taught to non-priests, though many laymen will gradually pick up phrases here and there. To render text into Pious, translate into Greek without font change, then add or subtract vowels as necessary to permit a smooth flow.

Pious is considered a Common tongue for Human Clerics and Priests, a Rare language for other humans, and an Obscure language for non-humans.

Written form: display translated text using a Greek language or appropriate mathematical Symbols Font.

Old Kingdom:

This is now a dead language, and is also known as the language of Paradise. Although some Elves and members other non-human species survive from the time when it was in use, it had fragmented into dozens or even hundreds of Tribal Dialects following the human Expulsion before contact with those species took place. Nevertheless, it is the mother tongue of almost every other human language. Compare the English of Chaucer or Shakespeare with modern English. Reconstructing “Old Kingdom” is a popular research topic amongst historians.

Tribal:

The legend/myth/theology of human history is that when Humans were driven out of Paradise (the reasons given vary) they fragmented into hundreds of isolated tribes, one of which were the Gypsies. The most central of these reunified their language into Old Kingdom through mutual contact with the Gypsy Caravans, which wandered from settlement to settlement carrying trade goods and lost skills. More remote – and more primitive – settlements had no such unifying influence, and their language continues to be a degenerate form of Old Kingdom.

Translating text into tribal is best performed by translating into each of the City-State languages (see below) and picking and choosing amongst them, word-by-word. Written text should be rendered in Comic Book Commando or similar, supplemented where necessary by Comic Sans MS.

Gypsy:

Gypsy is a more florid, less formalized, and more sophisticated form of what became trade tongue. It is still spoken by the Pirates of the Solvo Mondibanus. The gypsies themselves became Traders (founding the Ineodolus Imperascora), evolved into the modern Bards as they found themselves more unwelcome and mistrusted, or became part of the Behr Yuralvus. Left behind by Civilized cultures, they had no choice but to evolve or segregate. Gypsy remains a common Linga Franca between the City-states of the Longex Dextora – which are really nothing more than tribes that have been civilized (to some extent) but which maintained political independence from the Galliamic Empire (aka the Shared Kingdoms).

In translations, simulate Gypsy by translating into Italian and adding or subtracting vowels and consonants for ease of pronunciation by an English-speaker.

Written Gypsy should be rendered into Nuptial or a similar cursive font if deriving from the Republic of Independent City-States or a Bard, into Devroye or similar if deriving from the Unified Association Of Free Ports, into Phosphorous if deriving from the Traders and Commerce Empire, and into Queensland if historical.

Druidic:

The first release of the Shards Of Divinity House Rules asserted that “Druids do not have a separate language’. Further examination of the campaign concepts have shown that this is both true and misleading; there IS a language called “Druidic”, but it is NOT a language that can be used to communicate effectively with anyone else that knows the language. Rather, it is a learned ability to communicate with nature, to hear what the surroundings have to say about the weather that is coming, the local conditions, any threats within the region, any sites with peculiarities nearby, where the nearest spring is, and so on. It is also employed to tell the spirits of nature that inhabit every geographic feature, that shelter and nurture every species of animal and plant, that bring the rain and the storms and the weather, exactly what the Druid would like them to do. They may not listen (they often don’t) and may not answer the request in a timely fashion (they don’t have the same concept of time as mortals, but neither do Druids, so that’s all right).

This “Druidic” language has evolved from little bits of a number of different languages, predominantly Elvish and Sylvan, but with a slight tinge of more human languages such as Gypsy and Old Kingdom. Each Druid’s Circle – and, in fact, each Druid – develops his own Druid’s Tongue. As initiates, this essentially comprises parts of the lowest common denominator amongst the “Druidic” of the Druid’s Circle that has accepted the initiate; as a character grows in understanding, so his version of “Druidic” becomes more and more unique, and more and more dedicated to the terrain in which he spends most of his time. It also, therefore, becomes less and less useful generically, ie when the Druid is outside his own terrain. Druids who adventure will often need to select companion species to accompany him; while they may be useful for other reasons, the dominant reason for their presence is to translate the Druid’s requests into the local dialect. Of course, the less native they are to the local environment, the less help they can be.

Druidic is considered an Unusual language for Druids, a Rare language for Gypsies, Elves & Fey, and an Obscure language for all others.

Translating into Druidic is an ‘entertaining’ exercise. Extract and translate proper nouns other than animal and plant species using a random choice of Sylvan, Elvish, or Kingdom. Translate the remaining nouns into sounds and/or actions that are characteristic of the creature. Reformat the rest of the text using Alphabet Of The Magi – then interpret loosely into animal noises, weather sound effects, hand gestures, and anything else that comes to mind.

There is no written form of this ‘Language’.

Halfling:

Halfling is, technically, the youngest language around. When first encountered, the Halflings spoke a dialect of Gnome and had no written language. Because Gnomish was not well-suited to their daily needs, they had already begun supplementing it with additional vocabulary, and quickly seized the opportunity to incorporate large extracts of Kingdom into their speech. Further, since Kingdom provided them with a written language for the first time, these supplements came to be the dominant feature in their language within a generation. In modern times, their language is essentially Kingdom with some phonetically-spelt Gnomish terms, rather more phonetically-spelt original terms, and a few supplementary bits and pieces lifted from other languages, such as Elvish, especially a fairly fundamental form of Druidic. They invent new terms at the drop of a hat to further supplement their language; these spread through the Halfling community like wildfire and usually vanish back into obscurity as quickly as they came, though a few persist (when they prove useful) and become part of the regular lexicon.

Halfling Names are as per the PHB, translated as below.

Translating into Halfling is best achieved by translating into Latin (as per Kingdom) and then stripping off Latin “affectations” such as the ‘-us’ from the words. ‘Primorus’ (First, Greatest) becomes ‘Primor’. Where this eliminates virtually the entire word, that word is omitted if possible and rendered into Gnomish otherwise, as are any terms that are untranslatable or that remain the same in Latin as in English.

Render using any Sans-serif font.

Sylvan:

Supposedly, the Sylvan tongue is a derivation of Elvish. But Fey seem able to impart a layer of communications between one another over the top in some fashion, which is suggestive of a second Sylvan tongue. Sylvan, and Fey Names, are simulated using Gaelic via an online translator and simplifying for pronouncability. I use http://www.englishirishdictionary.com/ for the purpose.

Written Sylvan is a recent innovation and is achieved by rendering the Gaelic in the Tengwar Sindarin font.

Gnome:

A later element of the anarchy of the wilds was the discovery by Orcs of the Gnomish settlements shortly after human tribes became the political ‘currency’ of Orcish and Goblin politics. Deprived of their chance of empire through conquest of the Goblins, the Orcs sought to turn their will apon the seemingly-vulnerable Gnomes. The result was an almost-stable condition of anarchy, with no group strong enough to dominate. But the Gnomes proved to be naturally-gifted at the Byzantine politics that emerged and were able to trade alliances with Goblins, rival Orc tribes, Human tribes, Gnolls, Giants, Fey, and Dwarves as necessary to always maintain enough strength to resist and those who would conquer them. Eventually, the Gnomish Monarchy rose to power in response to the human tribes coalescing into the Longex Dextora, and the Parumveneaora joined the Shared Kingdoms, giving the Gnomes enough military backing that they no longer need fear Orcish conquest.

Gnomes once spoke Sylvan, suggesting to some that they are another branch of the Fey, but the dominant experiences which shaped their language were their encounters with tribes of Giants and Orcs, both of whom imposed much of their grammar and language on the Gnomes. When these unwholesome and primitive elements were pushed back by the growth of civilization at the height of the Galliamic Empire, the Gnomish settlements were left behind. The Gnomish language is a blend of all three sources.

Gnomish Names:

• Gnomes use the Dwarven alphabet but associate different sounds with the Dwarvish runes. Replace all P’s with R’s, all H’s with N’s, all K’s with S’s, all Z’s with H’s. Add extra vowels as necessary, especially U’s and O’s.
• In construction, use PHB (except as noted below), but ignore the suggested names.
• Gnome names always mean something in common, often something ridiculous or seemingly incompatible. “Ash” and “String” might be joined to form the name “Ash-string”.
• To derive a gnomish name, use Spanish translations of what you want the name to mean and replace or remove consonants as per Dwarvish; then replace consonants as stated above and add vowels as necessary.
• Gnomes are not clan-oriented in Shards Of Divinity. In place of a clan name, a Patronomic is derived from syllables of the first name of the ruling lord in the region and the name of the year.
• Gnomes have a succession of 37 month-names that are 1 syllable long and are used in fixed order. Since there are 12 months in a year, each year can have a name derived from the months of the year which identifies that year with a name-pattern that will not repeat for 36 years. However, every 36 years they reorder the sequence using a lottery draw that extends the uniqueness indefinitely. The current sequence, which was introduced 28 years ago (and hence is to remain in effect for another 8 years) is:
   
  1 BEW – 2 VIL – 3 SHI – 4 JUF – 5 LAK – 6 SOR – 7 GAH – 8 GOS – 9 PAD – 10 JUF – 11 GYS – 12 MAJ – 13 PUW – 14 FEN – 15 WOF – 16 ZAS – 17 FID – 18 LAJ – 19 HOK – 20 FOP – 21 WUD – 22 FAH – 23 BIM – 24 TUW – 25 FAL – 26 NIL – 27 KAS – 28 FUJ – 29 LAS – 30 FEH – 31 NUD – 32 LOB – 33 PAS – 34 KUD – 35 NER – 36 WAD.
• The specific pattern, by year number, is:
  

  1: 1-12	2: 13-24 5: 12-23 8: 11-22 11: 10-21 14: 9-10 17: 8-19 20: 7-18 23: 6-17 26: 5-16 29: 4-15 32: 3-14 35: 2-13	3: 25-36 6: 24-35 9: 23-34 12: 22-33 15: 21-32 18: 20-31 21: 19-30 24: 18-29 27: 17-28 30: 16-27 33: 15-26 36: 14-25	4: 37 + 1-11 7: 36-37 + 1-10 10: 35-37 + 1-9 13: 34-37 + 1-8 16: 33-37 + 1-7 19: 32-37 + 1-6 22: 31-37 + 1-5 25: 30-37 + 1-4 28: 29-37 + 1-3 31: 28-37 + 1-2 34: 27-37 + 1
  …then repeat with new syllables

• That means that the current year is named Feh-Nud-Lob-Pas-Kud-Ner-Wad-Bew-Vil-Shi.
• The first-born takes the first syllable of the name of the current ruler, modified as appropriate, and the syllable formed from the vowel+ last consonant of the first month and the first consonant of the next month.
• The second-born takes the second syllable of the name of the current ruler and the syllable formed from the vowel and last consonant of the second month of the year of their birth and the first consonant of the 3rd month of the year they were born.
• …and so on. When they run out of syllables in the christian name of the ruler, they move on to the second name, then the surname, and then they start over. Again, this virtually guarantees a unique surname for the gnome.

Translating Gnomish is as described above. To display written Gnomish, simply render the resulting text in the Dwarvish font.

Simulating an unreal language

As promised, starting with this part of the series, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks for using the language simulation techniques described in the previous article (Causa Domasura, The Home Of Reason. Starting with: what’s the best approach to use in choosing a language as a basis?

Every language, to those who don’t speak it, has a particular sonic flavor when we hear it. Through character substitution (aka search-and-replace), two types of operation become possible:

1. changing the pattern of sounds and syntax without altering the overall tone; and
2. changing the overall tone by manipulating the syllables that generate it.

In order to choose a basis language, you have to (at the same time) consider exactly how you want to manipulate it to achieve your goals. That means that you have to identify the non-verbal components of each language and how they will fit the persona and style of the race that is to speak them.

Some languages sound harsh, such as those from Eastern Europe; others have a natural flow, like Japanese. Italian conveys a lot of passion because many of the words and names end in vowels, generally in a rising tone.

You don’t have to know these things, there is a shortcut, and that’s the subject of today’s tip: Use an online translator to translate a section of typical speech from the race or society in question. Note how many words won’t translate; attempt to sound it out based on an English-language rendering of the language. Look for common patterns and what you can do with them. Consider the history of the race and whether or not they would use some other race’s language for part or all of their speech.

The text to be translated should be more than a single sentence; it should be several sentences long, and perhaps even a full paragraph.

For example, to find a language for Dwarves, I might use:

The spirit of the earth is in his bones, the strength of the mountain in his heart. The bones of the world below speak to his feet. The no – beard (beardless) youth shows much promise. I shall lift (hoist) a tankard (mug) of ale in his name when we return to our camp. The wealth of kings will flow through his fingers, I am certain.

From this starting point, you can run through multiple possibilities for a foundation language quickly and easily.

• French: L’esprit de la terre est dans ses os, la force de la montagne dans son cœur. Les os du monde d’en bas parler à ses pieds. Le non – barbe (imberbe) montre des jeunes très prometteurs. Je lèverai (palan) une chope (tasse) de bière à son nom quand nous retournons à notre camp. La richesse des rois s’écoule à travers ses doigts, j’en suis certain.
• German: Der Geist der Erde ist in seinen Knochen, die Kraft des Berges in seinem Herzen. Die Knochen der Welt unter seine Füße sprechen. Die nicht – Bart (bartlos) Jugend zeigt viel versprechen. Ich werde heben (Hubwerk) ein Krug (mug) Ale in seinem Namen, wenn wir zu unserem Camp zurück. Der Reichtum der Könige durch seine Finger fließen, bin ich mir sicher.
• Hungarian: A szellem a föld az o csontjai, az erot a hegy szívében. A csontok, a világ alatt beszél a lábát. A nem – szakáll (beardless) ifjúsági mutat sok ígéret. Én Felvonó (emelo) egy korsó (bögre) sört az o nevét, amikor visszatérünk a táborba. A gazdag királyok fognak folyni az ujjai, biztos vagyok benne.

…and so on. With lots of z’s and k’s, Hungarian would be a good choice. Sure, there are some funny characters, like á, ü and so on – but they can be replaced by English-alphabet equivalents easily enough.

It’s as easy as that to choose a foundation language. Even with copy and paste, it took me longer to compile those three examples than it would have taken to try the translations – it’s that fast.

Next: Ineodolus Imperascora (The Traders And Commerce Empire). The Rare Languages. And how to choose modifying adjustments to your source language.

Hero Game’s Policy on publishing house rules is both enlightened and occasionally maddening.

They have no problem with people posting their own characters, or discussing their rules, or publishing house rules – provided that you don’t quote directly from their rulebooks and your rules don’t exceed 5,000 words in length. You can’t publish variations on any officially published Hero Games characters, or anything that looks like it came from Hero Games. And you can’t charge money for anything. There are more restriction, and exceptions can be made with the permission of Hero Games, but that’s the nutshell.

On the face of it, that’s a very user-friendly policy, and I commend them for it. At the same time, the inability to reproduce ANY of the tables or official rules is really constraining, and less user-friendly than the OGL of D&D 3.x.

Changing one rule, as I’ve said a number of times in the past, is like trying to eat just one potato chip, or take just one breath. A rules change is a domino in a china shop; the consequences ripple through a supersaturated solution of possibilities causing all sorts of odd crystals to assume solid form. Especially when you’re talking about a combat system or subsystem, there are all sorts of knock-on effects on other parts of the rules.

It’s my full intention to comply with these restrictions. So most of this article, and the next, will be discussion and commentary, Any rules will be contained in a colored box, and the total length of rules will be less than 5K Words – and in an attempt to ensure compliance in that respect, the article itself has been split in two. This first part will deal with speeding up the combat; the second part will deal with some of the consequences of the changes made to achieve that speed, and how some of the savings have been invested to make other parts of the game easier for participants to visualize and take part in. Between them, they offer a very different Hero System, and yet one that is going to sound strangely familiar…

The pace of battle

There are things that the Hero System does extremely well. Combat is not necessarily one of them; though there is nothing inherently wrong with the resolution systems, it just gets slow with increasing numbers of combatants and with combatant SPD. In fact, my experience is that combat slows as a function of both factors.

The reason for this is simple. Like all action resolution systems, there is a necessary level of overhead per action to be resolved. In the standard Hero system, each character has a SPD characteristic, which specifies how many times the character gets to act in a 12-second turn, which is subdivided into segments of 1 second each. A character’s phases may be of different lengths, or may all be exactly the same – depending on whether or not they are an even divisor of 12. Not all characters will complete a phase in the same segment; instead, they will be sequenced more-or-less evenly throughout the 12 seconds – except for “Segment 12, Everybody Acts”.

[Side-note:] One of the earliest changes that I made to the combat system in my Champions campaign was to devise a more even distribution pattern to do away with that last item – but I don’t think there’s going to be room within in the 5K words limit to present the alternative table I created, and it might be considered to look too much like the standard table, anyway. In any case, it’s been rendered moot, consigned to the pages of history by the later changes which are the subject of this pair of articles, so there’s no point in considering it at this time in any event.

Too Much Overhead

Let’s say that we have a team of 6 superheroes on the one side, most with a speed of 2 or 3 (assume they average 2½) – but one has a speed of 6 and another a speed of 10. They are opposed by a team of 4 supervillains and a dozen hired goons. The hired goons have a speed of 1, two of the supervillains have a speed of 3, one a speed of 5, and another a speed of 11. In a twelve-second turn, that’s 2×2 + 3×2 + 6 + 10 + 12×1 + 2×3 + 5 + 11 = 60 actions to be resolved in a turn – plus once-a-turn overheads like recoveries, one for each character – call that another 6 + 4 + 12 ‘actions’ for a total of 82.

Too freakin’ many. It’s rare for even a large battle to last more than 2 or 3 full turns – but at (say) a minute to complete each action, those 2-3 turns are 82×2 to 82×3 (=164 to 246) minutes of play. 2.75 to 4 hours. And yet, 24-36 seconds, game time, is an unreasonably short time for such a battle to take place.

It gets worse. If it takes an extra ten or twenty seconds to resolve an action or decide on an action or look something up on a character sheet or any of a dozen other things, those 24-36 seconds can easily inflate to five or six hours!

Solution 1:

Part of the problem can be resolved simply by increasing the length of a turn, say to 1, or 2, or 4, or 5, or 10 minutes in length. But the combats will still take an unreasonable length in real time and all sorts of consequences would have to be dealt with – starting with the fact that a lot of other game subsystems assume that a turn is 12 seconds long and would have to be rejigged.

Solution 2:

A more likely solution would be to junk many of the different elements of combat in favor of a more streamlined resolution system. You have an attack roll, you have a success-or-fail assessment, you have a roll for damage, you have a damage-handling vs target defenses assessment, you have two types of damage (Stun and Body), and two types of damage (Energy and Physical) and then there’s NND and it just goes on and on. Junk most of that, and you can attack part of the real problem at its core: that 1 minute resolution time per action. Couple this with Solution 1 and you have a result – or so it might seem.

The fact is that all this variety exists for a reason, the simulation of a wide variety of superheroic abilities crafted by hundreds of fertile imaginations through the roughly 80-90 years that superhero comics have been published.

[Side-note:] Officially, the first superhero comic is Superman, in 1933. But even before Siegel & Shuster’s seminal creation, there were arguably others, Pulp-derived characters like Dr Occult (also 1933), Buck Rogers (1929), and Tarzan (1929) make the beginnings slightly fuzzy; similar characters were usually considered superheroic after superman debuted, and it can therefore be argued that these prototypical characters and strips make deciding the actual starting point a little fuzzier. The first comic published in the US was a hardcover book published in 1842, but The Adventures Of Obadiah Oldbuck bore little resemblance to the Superhero genre.

That’s not the only problem

Here’s another problem: in combat, a player’s share of the screen time is directly proportionate to his character’s Speed, plus the time that he spends being a target. Excluding the latter, that means that in the example given in the previous section, the character with a SPD of 6 will be doing things three times as much as those with a SPD of 2, and twice as much as those with a SPD of 3, while the character with a SPD of 10 will have five times as much as the former and more than three times as much as the latter. Or to put it another way, and ignoring the character with a SPD of 6, the player whose character has a SPD of 10 will have as much screen time as all the other PCs – put together. Meanwhile, the rest are twiddling their thumbs.

And, in the variant rules…

…this problem is even worse. These rules are intended to facilitate characters of the power level of Thor, Superman, The Hulk, The Flash, and so on. Characters who can do the things that most characters can do in the comic books – and not characters who are on a par with most members of the Legion Of Superheroes in the 60s (1 power each), the original X-men of the 60s (1 power each), or the original Teen Titans of the 60s (kids who were barely teenaged, and who usually only had one or two weak powers each). That means that some of them have some very high stats – DEX of 200+, for example. That, in turn, gives SPDs of 20+, or it did until I changed the formula for calculating SPD. That doesn’t mean that the standards have changed – the average human still has a SPD of 2, maybe 3. It just means that the top end has shifted. In most ways, this is an improvement, since it provides more scope for variation between characters, especially those who specialize in super-speeds; but in terms of a fair allocation of screen time, it’s a total disaster.

In an effort to maintain some semblance of sanity at the gaming table, I imposed a maximum SPD for flesh-and-blood of 12 (machines could get up to 24, no more). It wasn’t enough. During the most recent rewrite, we decided to scrap the entire SPD subsystem and replace it with something we knew worked reasonably well.

A 3.x solution: Turn-based combat

It was with a certain wry amusement that I read Johnn’s articles about speeding up combat in his Pathfinder campaign, ‘My Group’s Time Thief Revealed‘ and ‘Fastest Pathfinder Combat Ever‘, because I turned to the 3.x system to speed up combat in my superhero campaign.

Initiative

Excerpt from the Zenith-3 Campaign Rules:  In-game activities take place in an Initiative Pass or Turn lasting 12 seconds. In an initiative pass characters act in initiative order which is determined by ranking the results of initiative rolls for each character. A character’s initiative = d20+SPD. Ties are settled by SPD. Initiative is generally rolled at the start of combat and persists throughout that combat, but the referee may require a reroll whenever her feels circumstances dictate one.

Surprise

Excerpt from the Zenith-3 Campaign Rules:  At the commencement of battle, when one side is ready for a fight and the other is not (for any reason), the GM may declare the other side Surprised. Those characters who are not surprised then participate in a special, extra Initiative Pass which occurs prior to the commencement of the first normal initiative pass.

 
There are some extreme/unusual circumstances where one set of characters may get multiple surprise passes, especially if they have surprise and do nothing to alert those surprised to the presence of enemies. Under some unusual conditions, the GM may also specify a certain roll that has to be achieved by the character before they come out of surprise. Both are rare and not worth detailing here.

There are also some special abilities that permit the character to always act in a special initiative pass in advance of the usual one unless they push. Again, this is a refinement that doesn’t need to be specified right now.

Pushing

Excerpt from the Zenith-3 Campaign Rules:  Pushing can occur in one of two ways: through the expenditure of a Heroic Action Point, or without such expenditure. If the character employs a Heroic Action Point then their action takes place at the normal time within the Initiative order. If the character does not employ a Heroic Action Point their actions are relegated to a special initiative pass exclusively for characters who are pushing in this manner, which follows the regular initiative pass (when necessary). Villains have an equivalent set of alternatives.

 
Heroic Action Points were something Ian Gray and I came up with to act as a genre-promoting game mechanic. In a nutshell, you get them for being heroic and doing heroic things; you can lose them for doing un-heroic things (doesn’t often happen) or for deliberate villainous actions. We were modeling the idea on Drama Dice from 7th Sea and didn’t realize that Hero Games were going to include something by the same name in Pulp Hero as optional rules. When we have time to put our heads together on the subject, we’ll come up with a different name because the HAPs in these house rules bear no resemblance to those in Pulp Hero, which more closely resemble the way our rules handle Luck. (I think he may have also lifted some ideas from the dice game FATE, but I’m not sure).

The GM can also dole out extras any time he feels like it, for good roleplay, for making the entire table laugh, or whatever. I’m not going to go into all the rules surrounding them, it’s not only off-topic but it would use up the 5K limit on them alone. They can be used for all sorts of things, something else I’m not going to go into, here and now.

When it’s your turn

Excerpt from the Zenith-3 Campaign Rules:  A character’s action consists of three parts: 1 Movement action, 1 Attack action, and 1 Utility action. These may be performed in any sequence desired by the character but they must all be completed before the next character’s initiative round begins. A movement action may be the character moving, operating a vehicle, or using a movement power. An attack action is any activity or use of a power that is intended to cause damage or directly inconveniences an enemy, this includes any combat maneuvers with a damage-to-target element such as move by or move through. A utility action is an action that does neither of these things, but may activate some defensive power or specify the performance of a defensive maneuver, use a sensory ability, or any other activity that meets these requirements. A character can choose to substitute his attack action for a second move action or can choose to forgo performing any actions to recover Endurance equal to the character’s REC or STUN equal to 1/10th the character’s REC.

 
Ian and I debated whether there should be two actions in a character’s phase or three. In the end, I gave in; I wanted characters to have to choose between moving (which carries its own defensive benefits) or employing a ‘static defense’ or a non-movement non-attack action as their utility action. The jury is still out on this minor phase of the rules; we’re trying them his way, and if they aren’t good enough then we’ll try it my way.

The other thing worth mentioning is that our rules don’t actually say “1/10th the Character’s REC” at the end. We have two recovery stats, once high and cheap (REC A) and one low and expensive (REC B). The first is usually used for STUN and END recovery amounts, the second for BODY recovery amounts. The Official system uses one stat and one-tenth of that stat for the same purposes; I simply wanted to make them independent of each other to forestall characters buying extra of one “only for the purposes of” increasing the other, which a couple of early characters did.

Deferred Actions

Excerpt from the Zenith-3 Campaign Rules:  Characters may specify a trigger event for part or all of their actions, eg “I wait until the third bad guy passes my hiding place”. This temporarily defers the action until either the trigger event takes place or everyone else has acted, but does not change the character’s initiative value. At the end of the Initiative Pass, any character who has not acted may choose to either use his action or continue awaiting the trigger event. Note that if the trigger event does not occur prior to the character’s next opportunity to act (in the next Initiative Pass) the character is assumed to have lost that action. Players may not attempt to ‘logic’ their way past this rule; ‘if nothing else happens before I can act again,’ or any variation, is not a valid trigger event.

 
Another rule that we considered and decided not to implement used up the character’s utility action watching for the trigger event.

Recovery Phase

Excerpt from the Zenith-3 Campaign Rules:  Each character automatically receives 2 Stun recoveries and 2 Endurance recoveries every 12 initiative passes. Both recover REC in the appropriate stat. These can be taken on any initiative pass but with no more than 1 of each on any given initiative pass. These recoveries occur after all actions have taken place in a pass. The powers Major Stun Recovery and Major Endurance Recovery give extra recoveries that must also follow the above rules.

 
The above might not be terribly clear without further explanation. Characters start combat with 2 STUN recoveries and 2 END recoveries. They can use one of these recoveries at the end of any Initiative Pass in what is known as the Recovery Phase. They have until the start of the 11th Initiative Pass to use all four, at which point the character’s ‘hope chest’ is refilled with 2 more recoveries of each type. Unused recoveries are simply lost. There are certain powers which we’ve added to the system that give extras to the number of recoveries.

Another area of the rules we’ve added converts excess STUN damage to additional BODY damage – making it plausible for one normal human to beat another to death in a reasonable time frame.

The consequence of these rules, in combination with those in the previous section, is to force characters to stop and rest in battle. Why a d12? I wanted to use a dice to count Initiative Passes. A d20 gave too few recoveries, Combat and skill checks had been changed over to a d% system so d10s were out, d6s are used in combat all the time, and d4s give too many recoveries – that leaves d12s and d8s. Which one to use was a bit of a toss-up, but we’re used to using a d12 to count segments in a turn. If 12 Initiative Passes prove too many, we can either try the d8 or increase one or both recoveries, or make it 4 recoveries but player’s choice of how to use them – so the d12 gave us more flexibility to tweak the system.

Some Additional options not trialed

Along the way, there were a number of other ideas that were either set aside for later consideration or junked altogether.

Act in unused Healing Phases
This would grant an extra partial action phase – attack, movement, or utility – if the character chose to use it, at the cost of one of the standard STUN or END recoveries specified in the previous section. This was junked for good reason: first, it would not have made a big difference in outcomes but would have made for massive inconvenience; second, it would have conferred an extra advantage to characters who bought the major Recovery powers; and third, it was potentially unbalancing in the hands of characters with enough END or STUN that they could afford to pass up a recovery.

Heroic Action Point for an extra action in a surprise round
The idea was that a character who spent a Heroic Action Point would be able to recover from Surprise quickly enough to act in a round in which they were surprised – but only after the last of the characters who weren’t surprised had acted. This was set aside because we think it might devalue surprise too much – but if surprise proves too powerful, it might make a late comeback.

Heroic Action Point to increase STUN recovery when resting
Actually, the rules as used to date don’t give any STUN recovery when resting. This didn’t seem right to me, in principle; and private testing suggested that a minor STUN recovery when resting, as an alternative to an END recovery, was both necessary and would not overly prolong combat. So I have added the appropriate rule above, and will be adding it to our House Rules when I’m done. So this option is one that has only just become possible – and that has been set aside until the impact of the minor recovery is assessed.

Randomized Axis Of Battle
Picture any superhero fight from the comics and you will see the characters dancing around all over the battlefield. The ‘attacks’ that are resolved as part of an Initiative Pass represent several feints, manouvers, attempted attacks, and ducks, bobs, and weaves. Under consideration at one point was a rule that stated that at the end of an initiative pass, any combatants in immediate proximity (adjacent hexes) who had been in battle with each other during that Initiative Pass should have the axis of the line connecting them rotated one hex-side about the slower (lower SPD) character. Overall position would not change by more than one hex, so if the roll indicated a location for the faster combatant two hexes away from their position prior to the randomized axis check, the slower character would move into the space being vacated by the faster character and the position of the faster character would then be adjusted relative to the new position of the slower character. Manouvers would permit characters to ignore the axis of battle to focus on some external orientation.

In principle, this all sounds good, but it was thought that in practice it would bog combat down too much. It remains on the list of items to revisit at a later time, especially given the solution to the problems of movement under the new rules (discussed in part 2).

The effects

So, let’s look at the effects of these changes. The downsides are obvious: Domino Changes to other rules, especially movement rules, and a new system for people to learn. Balanced against that are a quintet of seriously-significant advantages:

Faster Combat

In place of the 82 actions in a turn (to quote the example offered earlier), we now have one per character – 5+12+4=21. And those turns are now (on average) taking significantly less time – some take only 10 seconds, others 20, and about 1/6th still take the full minute. Overall, I would assess the average as being between 25 and 30 seconds a turn. The combination makes for serious time savings at the table – a combat turn (a full set of Initiative Passes and Recovery Phase) would now be 21x(25 to 30)/60 = 8.75 to 10.5 minutes of play – and not the 82 minutes mentioned earlier.

Slower Combat

At the same time, it takes more turns to complete the battle than the old average of about 2.5 – Five to Ten of them. That means the average fight is now lasting about a minute-and-a-half, game time. A big fight might last several times that long, 6-10 minutes in game time. These are still not completely realistic, but they are a lot closer to the mark.

Overall, combat has sped up significantly. Official System Benchmark: 82×2.5 = 205 minutes. New system: 21×7.5 = 157.5 minutes – and that’s while players are still learning the new system. In the long term, I expect it to drop below the two hour mark to somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes, real time. But even now, that’s almost a 25% improvement – which is 25% more gameplay every day.

More Tactical Battles

The new rules put a premium on exerting force where it will do the most good. When you only have one action in a combat round, there’s more pressure to make it count. At the same time, you have to remain flexible. This trend is further reinforced by some of the flow-on effects of the changes, to be discussed in part 2.

Reinforced Genre Flavor

Fights tend to be a lot more evenly balanced, with both sides taking rather more damage than previously. Even a weak set of opponents can last long enough to injure a much stronger character. The ebb and flow of battle is more noticeable. At the same time, the action feels faster, because your turn in combat rolls around much faster and more often, increasing the drama of the situation. The whole thing feels more like a comic-book donnybrook.

Equal Spotlight Time

Well, more equal, anyway. A character with a high SPD may act first, but he doesn’t act more often – so each character receives a nominally-equal share of the spotlight. Some abilities still take longer to resolve than others, but in general, things move along far more quickly.

In the pulse-pounding conclusion:
The knock-on effects to the rules, and some additional combat mechanisms to elevate the game experience even further.

I’m sneaking in after the deadline for last month’s blog carnival, hosted by Dice Monkey…

The benefits of an established setting

There are a lot of obvious benefits to the use of an established campaign setting. Because I expect a number of other carnival participants to have weighed in on this aspect of the topic, I’m just going to hit some of the high points here (in no particular order), and move on.

Depth of vision

The most obvious benefit is that most game settings have a lot of material to draw on. The 3.x release of Forgotten realms is nine volumes, according to a quick head-count on my bookshelf, while Ebberon is thirteen volumes. This is all material the GM doesn’t’ have to create. On top of that, there may be older versions and sourcebooks that can be easily adapted or simply used as game resources such as the 2nd ed version of “The Ruins Of Undermountain.” On top of that, there are anywhere from a few to a few hundred adventure modules that are designed to plug straight into the campaign setting. In some cases, such as TORG, it can be hard to tell where the game system stops and the campaign world begins. To an arguably lesser- or greater-extent, the same is true of 7th Sea.

Professional standards

Since the material is being published by a professional game company, it is hopefully being written and edited to a professional standard. Most GMs feel that this is inherently (choosing my words carefully) at least as good as anything they can come up with. What’s more, because you will get many authors contributing to the collective game setting, it should be a richer creation than is possible for any one GM working on his own.

Community support

Most commercially-published game settings have their own fanbase, which can operate as a consultancy when there’s an aspect of the setting that a GM is having trouble getting his head around. Such community contributions can even end up becoming canon within the setting. As a result, they are continually growing; rather than being a static environment, they can become a dynamic gaming environment. Probably the most extreme version of this was the Infiniverse updates for TORG, but most game settings exhibit it to some extent. There is a clear development path from this aspect of a campaign setting to the concept of an MMORPG.

Ubiquity

With the same gaming setting common to many different campaigns, transfer of existing characters into other GMs campaigns becomes relatively painless. This can be advantageous when a player has to move for reasons of education or employment. It is also a big factor in Convention play, where a large amount of the background material can be assumed to be already known to the participants, enabling them to get on with the game in a far more immersive environment.

Prep focus

And finally, an established setting takes a lot of the effort required, and a LOT of the time required, out of game prep. You don’t need to worry about game setting prep, you can get on with adventure creation. If you’re using an existing game module, you don’t even have to do that.

The price of an a-la-carte campaign world

There are shortcomings that come with any published setting though, and they are often the flip side of the advantages.

Familiarity

It’s a lot harder to surprise or challenge the players if they have all read the source material – and when you are dealing with commercially-published game settings, you have to assume that most if not all of it will be known to the players.

Baggage

All game settings come with baggage that you may or may not like. One GM I know found Kenders to be nothing but irritating. Another hated Elminster the Wizard, which he regarded as the most obnoxious dues-ex-machina ever published in a game setting. There’s an inherent lack of control over the contents of a commercial setting, and with that comes the absence of a sense of ownership of the setting and the game. There’ll be more on this aspect of an established setting, and how to solve this particular problem, in a subsequent section of this article.

Assumptions

Game settings can make assumptions about the way things work. Utilizing that game setting means accepting those assumptions, whether you agree with them or not. The big difference between material that falls into this category and that which falls under the heading of “Baggage” is that assumptions are about why things happen in a certain way – they concern philosophy, in-game physics, economics, and political theory. Baggage tends to be a concrete expression of some, all, or none of the above, and can be written out or written into the past without overly changing the game setting; Assumptions are more fundamental and much harder to remove.

Experts

The impolite term for an ‘expert’ is a ‘rules lawyer’. With a published game setting, you open yourself up to having to deal with a player who knows more about the campaign setting than you do, or – perhaps worse still – who thinks they do. Sure, this can be advantageous at times, but it can be an acute hindrance at others (or even at the same time).

It’s bad enough having a rules lawyer who is an expert in the rules themselves; there can usually be a beneficial relationship worked out with such a player, tapping them as an expert consultant; but when a player corrects you on elements of the game setting, they can undermine the whole adventure.

But it makes no sense

We’re all human and capable of errors of logic. That means that every game setting will contain such errors of logic, where the designers came up with an idea that sounded ‘cool’ but where their explanations made no sense. Standards have changed a great deal in this respect since the early days of RPGs, when it was acceptable to say ‘it makes no sense because your character doesn’t understand it’ and just move on.

A great example is the dimension of Aysle in TORG. A two-sided coin of a world, this is a fantasy game environment, but in every other respect physics seems to behave more or less as you would expect. Down is always perfectly perpendicular to the surfaces of each coin ‘face’, wherever you are, and gravity is always the same strength, no matter how close you are to the edge of the world – even though gravity functions as a point source. There were no unusual climatic effects of being near the edge, either, and there was no real concept of a sustainable ecosystem in place for the recirculation of water. It still had mountain ranges and volcanoes, but these never unbalanced the world. As adventuring environments went, it was dominated by law of cool – a genuine example of a flat ‘earth’ world. And yet the world was thick enough for mining operations, and underground societies.

The first two years of play in my TORG campaign was set in Aysle before the commencement of the Probability Wars. And most of it was dedicated to gradually educating the players in the changes to in-game physics that I had come up with to make sense of all of the above – and their ramifications. Educating them, in other words, in not only why the world made sense, but in the fact that – despite initial appearances – it did make sense. By extrapolation, this set a standard for all the other environments that they encountered while adventuring in the campaign world, which was not so much about the presence of these differing realities but in their interactions. Until you’ve come across the compounding of Nile Empire weird science and the horrors of Orrorsh, you’ve never really scared your players as much as they can be scared!

Sure, the results of my efforts made the game world completely different in rationale – and, through the logical exploitation of the physical principles I created, different in execution and technology in places – but superficially, everything looked pretty much the same as in the Aysle sourcebook. It’s just that it now made sense to a more cynical group of players, requiring less effort to suspend disbelief.

Incomplete worlds

Another ongoing problem with a published game setting is that it is almost certainly incomplete. The PCs will almost inevitably (at some point) intrude into this terra incognita. This forces the GM to decide what’s there – putting back onto his agenda work that he thought that he’d dodged using an established game setting, and leaving him exposed to the problem of the Incomplete World: what does he do when an official sourcebook plugs that particular gap in some way that contradicts his own creation?

This can be more trouble than creating the whole game setting yourself, depending on the importance of the differences, and how incompatible the two solutions are.

Hexagonal pegs in octagonal holes

Finally, there’s the problem of Hexagonal pegs in octagonal holes. No matter how good a game setting is, its largely worthless if it doesn’t permit the type of adventures the GM wants to run.

Choose the right world

Which brings me to my next major topic – choosing the right game setting to play in.

Subgenre

Is the subgenre the right one? Steampunk and high-fantasy are usually unhappy bedfellows. This is usually fairly easy to assess from online promotional materials and reviews.

Flavor

Assuming that subgenre appears to be correct, the next step is to assess the flavor of the campaign setting. This is the primary difference between Ebberon and the Forgotten Realms – while the former has some steampunk elements, these are baggage that can be easily set aside. The more fundamental differences are in the political structure, the nature of magic, and other such issues.

It’s my opinion that the best approach is to choose a published adventure from the campaign setting before committing to the campaign setting itself. Choose one that looks like it will be adaptable to your game purposes if you choose not to invest in that game setting, or that could be run in isolation. It’s also preferable to buy an adventure written by one or more of the primary authors of the game setting. If you find, on reading that adventure, that it’s exactly the sort of adventure that you want to run, that’s a big tick in favor of the game setting being suitable for your purposes; if not, then you’ve saved yourself hundreds of dollars.

Context

Finally, there’s the game setting itself, and how much it appeals to you. How easily can you envisage it in your mind’s eye? I always had trouble with the Nippon Tech world in TORG, for example – I could work with the characters, and the concepts, and the technology, and the politics, but I struggled to find ways of imagining and verbalizing the world itself.

One of the reasons I set my original superhero campaign in the 1950s, its sequel in the 1960s, and the sequel to that (which was the beginning of the main campaign that ran for a decade afterwards) in the 1970s – even thought the real calendar date was the 1980s – was that I found it easier to envisage that world, and I had more historical context and analysis to draw apon. I understood that era better than I did the world around me in the 80s. The current game date in that campaign world is 1987, but most of the campaign takes place in an alternate 2055. In writing the history (which I’ve been expanding in the ongoing series The Imperial History Of Earth Regency here at Campaign Mastery) is that it all went swimmingly until I reached the 1998-2015 era, the “Post Modernist Dark Age”. I could quite happily write in generalities, as I did in part 11 of the series, but specifics took a lot more time to research and write – which is why there’s only been the one part of the series done since. Part 13 is about 1/3 done, and has been for quite some time. (Part of the reason is that the original draft was written in 2003, and there wasn’t a lot of organized, published history available on the era at the time – there is now, but much of it is still in the form of dates and events, without contextual relationships and analysis. So I’ve been updating the original to encompass more of the events which actually occurred; real-world history forms a moving “wave front”, behind which organization is possible, in front of which vagueness is acceptable, and in which there is a middle ground of chaos.

In general, there is only one way to know for certain if the context of a published setting is right for you – and that’s to buy at least one volume of the game setting.

But there’s a hard choice to make: if you’re an early adopter, you are more likely to be caught by the problem of the Incomplete World; if you aren’t, and a lot of other people also hold back, then there might not be enough demand for the parts of the game setting that especially interest you to be published.

In a perfect world, I would advise the purchase of the core setting book and at least one volume that – like the adventure mentioned in the previous section – is potentially useful in a standalone context. For Faerun, “Underdark” or “Magic Of Faerun” leap out as the perfect starting points; for Ebberon, “Five Nations” or the “Explorer’s Handbook” or “Magic of Ebberon” or “City of Stormreach” would fit the bill. But this isn’t a perfect world.

To some extent, you can be guided by reviews – a positive reception generally means a greater likelyhood of more to come – but this is not a universal constant to be relied apon. In the end, you are better off buying the core setting book and making the decision, based on that book, to either buy nothing more – or to buy it all, as opportunity and financial resources permit, and hoping that if it doesn’t live up to expectations that you can recycle whatever you have bought.

Know the world thoroughly

Which brings us to making the game setting useful to you. Frankly, I have never run a game setting exactly as provided by the publisher, so I have only one piece of advice in this respect, and it’s summed up in the title of this section.

Read everything – several times over. Every time you come across rules content, cross-reference with the game system core rules. It might be going too far to buy a copy of the core rules just for use with this game setting and fill them with stick-on bookmarks and tabs that point to material that diverges in this particular game setting – but I know some GMs who do exactly that, at least in terms of the Player’s Handbook / DMG (or the Core Rulebook if we’re talking Pathfinder).

Any time you come across something you don’t understand, or can’t see the implications of, make a note of it on an index card – then, when you find material elsewhere that supplements or explains or clarifies that issue, add that to the note, building up a cross-indexed set of crib notes for “the hard parts” – then study them extensively.

To be honest, this can take as much time – if not more – than coming up with your own campaign setting, if you are any good at doing so; YMMV.

Making it your own

One of the questions that comes up regularly when official game settings are discussed is the degree of customization that is permissible. The more you make the campaign setting your own, the more you diminish both the advantages and the limitations that come with a commercially-available setting. There are an almost-infinite range of variations between the “as published” setting and the “complete rewrite”. I would contend, however, that even an “as published” campaign setting becomes uniquely your own in surprisingly short order – whether you realize it or not.

Divergence through rulesets

For a start, not everyone has the same sourcebooks, or even the same preference in sourcebooks. This is especially true when we’re talking about sourcebooks from third-party publishers – which means that the degree of commonality in 4e is far greater than is the case with 3.x/Pathfinder, simply because there are more third-party game supplements which can be recombined into the ruleset of the campaign setting.

If I incorporate, say, “Path Of Shadow” into a Forgotten Realms while my neighboring GM incorporates “Complete Scoundrel” and his neighbor incorporates both, we will all end up with slightly different treatments of Rogues, Scouts, Assassins, and any other thief-types. That will then have repercussions through game events on the world at large. The more game supplements there are, the more combinations become possible, and the greater the scope for divergence. Throw in the potential for additions from places like RPGNow, and the number becomes something monstrous – two to the power of the number of supplements, by my rough calculations. If there are a hundred game supplements, that’s a 29 digit number. If there are a thousand, which is more likely in the case of 3.x, it’s a 300-digit number. By way of comparison, it is estimated that the number of atoms in the milky-way galaxy is roughly ten to the 65th power, or a 64-digit number. So the number of combinations for each atom is itself a 235-digit number…

These numbers are so big as to be meaningless. Even ignoring the PDF market, and assuming absolutely no creativity on the part of the GM, many campaigns will be as individual as a fingerprint or a genetic code. Of course, some game supplements will be more ubiquitous than others, so there will be certain combinations that occur with greater frequency, so this alone is not enough to completely individualize every campaign. But the more game supplements you have, including the game setting books themselves, the more unique your campaign will inherently be.

If you want to ‘fingerprint’ your own campaign, count the number of game sourcebooks and supplements you have actually used in the course of the campaign, including adventure modules and Net supplements, add the number of PCs that have appeared, multiply by 0.30103, and subtract 1. The result is the number of digits in the answer. If there are 100,000 gamers in the world – a number off the top of my head – any result with more digits than that (6) is likely to be unique (24). To be on the safe side, the population of the world was 10 digits long in 2011, so any answer of 11 or more (40 supplements) can be virtually guaranteed unique. If you want even more certainty, any result of 13 will give a choice of at least 100 possible combinations for every person on the planet – 47 supplements.

Simply by virtue of the different combinations of rulesets, most campaigns are going to be unique to their GM.

I was talking to a GM at a Science Fiction convention, many years ago back in the days of AD&D, and it was his contention that the best way to assess a new game sourcebook was in isolation, using a published setting with which the GM was familiar (and temporary characters), before incorporating it into the “real” campaign. Even three or four weeks’ trial was enough to assess the impact that the new supplement would have, and show the GM any potential danger points in relation to other sourcebooks currently in use within the primary campaign. I can’t say that I’ve ever used this technique directly, but I was reminded of it when we decided to make the ongoing Warcry campaign a testbed for the rules of my superhero campaign.

Extemporizing the unoriginal

Next, unless the GM is simply parroting the words written in the campaign sourcebooks and modules verbatim at every point, he will inevitably put his own unique stamp on the campaign. Even two GMs running the same adventure with exactly the same rules may employ a different means of describing a scene or setting, or give an NPC a different accent, or have an NPC make a different choice at some branch in the road, or simply roll a different result on a die. Some of these differences will be so small they can’t be measured objectively, others may be so significant to the path taken to completion of the adventure that the campaign will forever after be a little different to all others.

One of the significant facts that everyone who uses text or email communication has to face, sooner or later, is that plain text does not convey tone of voice and is hence devoid of a certain level of contextual abstraction. It’s very easy to say something that is intended to be heavy in context, such as in a sarcastic mode, or as a joke, only to be taken literally. This same lesson applies to dialogue in an adventure, where only vague emotional overtones (at best) are provided – this version of the NPC is irritated, that version is friendly, another version is compassionate, still another is curious, and yet one more is arrogant – the words may be the same, but the context added to humanize the characters by the GM, i.e. to roleplay them, makes them different individuals. When the PCs react to these overtones, the campaign diverges, slightly or significantly, from its neighbor.

Try saying the following in six different ways, and imagine how your players would react each time:

• Arrogantly: “No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
• Regretfully: “No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
• Near tears: “No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition…”
• As a question: “No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition?”
• Conspirationally whispered as though sharing a secret: “No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
• Conversationally, emphasizing ‘Spanish”: “No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Over time, the accumulation of these small differences will make each campaign different. In one, this noble is a hothead, in another he’s a wimp.

‘It’s the game setting, Jim, but not as we know it’

PC actions – will transform a campaign setting until it’s no longer the same as any other. Just by being different people, your players cannot help but alter the game world, whether the setting is a published one or an original. Simply watch a couple of sessions of a Convention module – same GM, same characters, same situations, but different players – and see how different the outcomes are and how differently the paths taken to even similar outcomes, and this fact will become incontrovertible.

Monkeying with ‘perfection’

Original material – whether it’s adventures or house rules or metaphysical explanations or simply the knowledge possessed by one GM and not another – will have an even bigger and more dramatic impact. Repeating the Convention experiment with two different GMs will show this quite clearly, or reading almost any issue of Knights Of The Dinner Table. Much of the humor in that comic series derives from the players having their characters act outrageously, and experiencing equally-outrageous consequences as a result, in comparison to what would be expected at a “normal” game setting.

The surest and fastest way to individualize a campaign setting is to add something original to it, to change it in some way.

Some players enjoy this, because it means that two different GMs can run the same module and it will be different both times. To others, this is monkeying with ‘perfection’ and not to be tolerated. Ian Gray is that way about spells, classes, and feats – anything that is aimed at the players, in fact. He has no problem with GMs creating original magic items, or crafting original spells, or original monsters, or new game mechanics – but hands off the published player material.

Babies & bathwater

Every time you add something, you are almost certainly removing something, even if what is removed is simply the absence of whatever you have added. GMs should always be careful not to throw the Baby out with the Bathwater. There is often a good reason for the absence of something, whether that’s a rules subsystem or a particular encounter in an adventure.

There are, for example, a great many ways of adding to the combat system of any RPG. Anything from combat modifiers based on the potency of specific weapons against specific armor types through to critical hits and fumbles through to wounds and combat conditions. An injudicious “enhancement” to the combat system can destroy what little efficiency it has, slowing combat to a crawl. There are also various ways of streamlining combat by removing and simplifying rules, and it might be that if you really want your hit location system, you have to deliberately simplify some other aspect of game play to make room for it.

There is an analogous situation for a campaign setting. You can change the political structure of a city, or populate a region with your new Killer Orcs, or whatever – but if you aren’t careful, the flavor that led to the choice of this particular campaign setting in the first place can be lost.

The compromises

There are several ways to have your cake and eat it, too, when it comes to established game settings. I’m going to mention the five most common of them (some of which get pretty exotic, I warn you).

Across the pond

The simplest one is to emplace an established game setting within an original game environment, separated by some natural barrier. The PCs can adventure in the established setting, and at the same time make excursions into the unknown and original, just by crossing that natural barrier. It might be a mountain range, it might be an ocean – the details don’t matter. What is significant is that you have sandboxed your original content out of the primary campaign setting, so it can be junked or obliterated without completely obliterating the campaign.

This is an especially good technique for inexperienced GMs, because they can simply run adventures in the established setting until the next phase of ‘construction’ of the original content is complete, cross the pond, and explore the renovations and extensions – then go back while the GM takes as long as he needs to for the next part. One of my original dungeons had one area being “renovated and repopulated” by “Industrial Stone And Magic” – it was a large open area with stacks of raw materials, a number of caged beasties, and encounters for the unwary with uncaring automata that looked like bulldozers, forklifts, and so on. If the PCs proceeded too deeply without investigating fully those parts of the dungeon that had been completed, they might find themselves in a demolition zone or in an area being renovated. They got no experience for killing anything on those levels – but they took damage from them as usual. They soon learned that the yellow-and-black striped barricades meant “go elsewhere and come back later.” This solution to the question of using an established setting over a home-grown one applies a similar logic – in a more realistic and less tongue-in-cheek manner.

A long time ago…

Another solution is to take the established setting and retread it into it’s historical past. This gives you a starting point for your creative expression, while employing many of the strengths of the established setting. A key decision to be made with this approach is whether the established setting is the fore-destined outcome or just one possible future – the first means that the adventures will be about the PCs trying to make sure that events work out the way it says they did “in the book”, while the other employs the history simply as a background.

A divergent tomorrow

Another approach is to take the established game setting and add a century or more of original ‘future’ to it. This mitigates the problem of the players having read it all, because what they have read is a (possibly inaccurate or incomplete) foundation that relates only tangentially to what they are encountering. This often permits you to use the maps for the campaign setting virtually unchanged, which can be a desirable outcome. Of course, it’s a divergent future because that isolates the campaign from any incompatible changes resulting from the Incomplete Worlds problem. All you need to do is take whatever gets published subsequently and figure out how your game world got from the “A” provided to the “B” experienced.

Holes in space

Somewhat more exotic in flavor is the “holes in space” approach, in which the primary action takes place in the established setting, with one addition: periodically, on a semi-regular (perhaps even predictable) schedule, portals open to somewhere else. Miss the portal opening, and – like early Adam Strange adventures – you might have to make your way half-way round the world to catch the next one. Sometimes these holes in space can lead to another established setting, sometimes to a home-brewed environment. The great advantage to this approach is that all things become possible; you can adapt a Star Wars adventure this week and an Oriental Adventures module the week after. The imperative of the time pressure adds to the element of drama and tension, as does the fact that once through the portals the PCs have only what they have taken with them, what they can find, and what they can take. Limiting the portal size and duration of opening restricts what can be carried back, as well. “We only have four hours to clear the last level of the dungeon and get out – no time to wait for the cleric to recover his healing spells or the Wizard his fireballs!”

Still better is an additional consequence of the limited duration on the other side, which limits the amount of construction and assembly needed by the GM to manageable proportions, no matter how limited his prep time might be, and which prevents the players from digging too deeply behind the curtain, further limiting the amount of detailed work provided. I’ve only seen this approach used once, which is perhaps the biggest surprise of them all, since the benefits are so obvious.

The multiphasic world

The final solution to throw out there for GMs to consider is the multiphasic world. Every time I’ve seen this, it’s been linked to the phases of the moon or to the seasons. The notion is that world is sometimes an established setting, sometimes a homebrew setting, and sometimes something else – it changes in some cyclic way. Even the topology can twist and transform, though there may be a geographic or geological similarities between where you were and where you are. So if you’re on a lake, you will still be on a body of water. If you’re in a dungeon, you’re still in a dungeon – though this one’s upper levels won’t have been cleared, and you may be deeper or higher than you expect. If you’re in a town or city, you will still be in an urban environment of some sort – but it might be an elvish city or a Halfling hamlet.

Who benefits the most?

So, who benefits the most from using an established campaign setting?

Beginners

There are obvious advantages for new GMs, as it gives them time to master the basics of their craft before they move on to creating game settings of their own. Some never want to take that step, preferring to focus on other aspects of being a GM. Nothing wrong with that.

The time-squeezed

Another group to obviously benefit are those without the time to grow their own settings. Using an established setting is as much work as you let it be, most of the time.

Drag-and-drop game elements

Finally, there’s everyone else! We can all use the occasional assist from time to time, and the place you’re most likely to find whatever you need is something that’s already trying to be complete – and that’s an established campaign setting.

I started this article by extolling the virtues of the established setting, in general. Those virtues set a standard, one that everyone who doesn’t use an established setting tries to live up to with our own designs. If for nothing else, this purpose alone makes them invaluable!

Introduction: The Online World

The internet changes everything it touches. New production models, new distribution models, even new funding models. It blurs the line between professional and hobbyist by enabling the hobbyist to produce work of a professional standard – simply by replacing the infrastructure that an old-style game manufacturer needed to have with technological substitutes.

Some of these impacts, it must be said, are not strictly due to the internet per se but are the result of advances in the personal computer, one of the technologies that makes a wide-scale internet possible. I’m not interested in splitting hairs and in the wrap-up to the first part of this article I lumped it all in together.

To summarize where we’re at, here’s a quick look at the breakdown of key production costs and how the modern world affects them:

• Writing – slight increase in efficiency, but overall relatively unchanged.
• Art – budget for a major project is unchanged (but produces a higher art-to-page ratio). Assuming that you use clip art or digital artists that really take advantage of the technology available, art budget can be slashed dramatically for smaller products, even reduced to zero for tiny ones.
• Editing, Revision, and Layout – massive increases in efficiency. Assassins Amulet took months to write and weeks to edit. Some savings are offset by learning curves and new format requirements, and there can also be a large up-front investment in software – that can be spread over multiple products. Overall, editing is 10-25% of the production cost that it used to be. But these efficiencies affect both dead-tree and PDF products.
• Printing & Binding – non-existent in an electronic product. Can be as much as the first three categories put together in the case of a dead-tree product. Quality of paper and binding makes a big difference, and this is a per-page cost, so the more art and white space, the more it costs. Print-on-demand adds to the editing/layout budget but eliminates this factor.
• Distribution – very cheap for electronic products, still very expensive for dead-tree. Distance is not a factor in the first case, is a major factor in the second.
• Marketing – often cut too deeply in budgeting. Can be as much as the printing costs for a major dead-tree product – for a while. Electronic Marketing is possible but is usually under-budgeted and overvalued. A lot of small e-projects allocate virtually no budget for marketing.
• Management – the smaller the other costs, the smaller the project, the smaller this component is as a percentage of the total. Otherwise the same for both product types.
• Administration – mostly this is a project-based overhead. Unaffected by the publishing format.
• Taxes – the bigger the budget, the more likely this is to be a major factor. Can be 40-50% of the cost of a major dead-tree product – if it sells enough. Less likely to be a factor with PDF production, and may well be a smaller one, because electronic products can be one-man self-employed projects that fall into the category of personal taxes. Expect to spend money on professional advice at the start and spread the cost over multiple projects.
• Legal – as per taxes. Mostly a per-project overhead.
• General Overheads – time based, size-based. The bigger the project, the more this rises as a percentage of the whole. However, if you produce a LOT of products, this can be spread over them all – forcing an organization to grow.
• Profit margin – can be a little, a lot, or simply whatever is left over. In general, the more of a product you expect to sell, the smaller the per-unit profit margin can and should be.
• Commissions – Every time a dead-tree product changes hands from producer to customer, expect the price to inflate by 30-50%. That’s reality. Every time an electronic product changes hands between producer and customer, expect the price to inflate by 10-17%. And expect there to be few such handovers.
• Remainders – between 10% and 15% of the production costs of a dead-tree product – if you produce 5-10 per year. The fewer you produce, the more variability. A totally non-existent double-whammy for electronic products. Print-on-demand offers the best of both worlds – for the price of an extra commissions factor. So WOTC will probably never use print-on-demand but smaller game companies might.

The scores (estimated, and using writing as a unit cost of 1):

• PDFs etc: Small: 1.9888; Medium: 3.4465; Large 5.7065. Adding Print-on-demand: Add 0.565,1, 1.75 respectively.
• Print-on-demand: 4.52; Medium 8.03; Large 12.265
• Dead Tree: Small: 19.205; Medium 30.682; 45.862.

In compiling these estimates, I’ve tried to factor in the amount and quality of the art used and other typical factors. If you’re producing an atypical product, or have thought of something I haven’t, Your Mileage May Vary.

Profitability Impact

This is largely a function of sales. Because they have bigger distribution and more markets (bookstores etc) in which to sell, Dead-tree products can be 100x as profitable as a PDF of the same size. They will have a larger profit margin, and will reasonably expect to sell more copies. But the risks are also 100x as large, and the need to sell product month-in, month-out, is also 100x as large. Some of the costs and risks can be minimized with cheaper production – less art, less color, poorer binding, cheaper paper – at the expense of an unknown degree of loss of sales.

PDFs, on the other hand, have much smaller risks, are much faster to produce (typically days or weeks instead of months, months instead of half-years) and a far greater percentage of the money goes straight back into the producer’s pockets.

The sales targets for success are relatively proportionate to the square of these numbers. A dead-tree product with a net unit cost of 45.862 needs to sell 8×8=64 times as many copies as the equivalent PDF (costing 5.7065) to be considered as successful. (In fact, it’s probably higher, but that’s a fair baseline). Selling 1000 copies of such a PDF is roughly the equivalent of selling 64000 copies of a hard-covered dead-tree book. Selling 100 copies of a medium-sized PDF product, like a 10- or 20-page module or supplement, is the equivalent of selling 8000 copies of the same module or supplement as a dead-tree product. At the end of the day, after expenses, the creative staff get about the same money, either way.

Most people recognize these ratios – approximately – almost instinctively. And that impacts directly on value-for-money considerations, and buying decisions, when it comes to PDFs.

The Value-for-money of PDFs

In general, different standards are applied to PDFs as are applied to dead-tree products when it comes to assessments of value-for-money. There is room for a huge debate about whether or not it should be that way – and I can argue both sides of that question to a standstill – but that’s neither here nor there.

These standards differ, to some extent, based on size, and price. What’s more, the standards are also different if the product has to be printed in order to be useful. I don’t care how pretty a map tile is on the screen, what I’ll assess value-for-money on is the standard of the printed end-product.

So this is where it starts getting complicated. To cut through the fog, I’m going to look at each size of PDF separately – and subsection those as necessary.

The Amateur Press origins

The PDF industry can, if we’re honest, be traced back to an Amateur Press origin. All these GMs with their homebrew house rules sitting at a typewriter or an early word processor, waiting for their dot-matrix printers to spit out their latest stroke of genius.

If you were arrogant enough, or sure enough that what you were writing would be of value or interest to others, you might work up the nerve to submit your work of genius to Dragon magazine, or The Space Gamer, or Pyramid.

For most people, though, the distribution would have been either strictly local, around your own game table. The next step up from that was to publish a self-funded fanzine, either irregularly or regularly – the 1970s/80s equivalent of a blog. In the 70s, you would probably have used a stencil and run off 30, or 50, or 100 copies at your own expense. These would have been given away free, or (at most) you would charge costs-per-issue. The thought of making a profit from them was pie-in-the-sky.

Some enterprising people got together and realized that if they took copies of each of their fanzines and bundled them together, stapling them into one big volume, they could make their own work more desirable – value for money was a compound effect. These were generally known as APAs, or Amateur Press Associations. In Australia, the biggest RPG APA was Alarums & Excursions, and it collected about 40 amateur fanzines on the subject, of between two and ten pages each. Most of these were produced with stencils and typewriters. Some were even hand-written, though that was relatively rare.

In the later 80s and early 90s, the more technologically inclined may have taken their original plain-text documents from their primitive word processors and uploaded them to a bulletin board so that other computer users all over the world could download these 1-2K documents and see how brilliant you were (or weren’t). Current E-zines like Roleplaying Tips are the heirs to that legacy, their modern-day incarnation.

The desktop-publishing boom of the later 90s didn’t seem to have a huge direct impact on RPG materials, for some reason – at least not in Australia. I suspect the problem was the limited distribution mechanisms available. It may have been different elsewhere, but the primary impact appears to have been secondary – developing the tools that eventually became WYSIWIG word processing and the Portable Document Format or PDF.

Then came the world-wide-web and it all moved online. Suddenly, distribution was global, and the search engine was your friend. The documents themselves were still mostly plaintext, because embedding fonts was a huge pain in the posterior (I know, I looked into doing so). The only way to produce a high-quality PDF with embedded fonts, etc, was an A$1000 piece of software from Adobe. But you could take that plain text, and use some standard high-quality fonts, and turn it into a web page.

The problem was that web pages were ephemeral. They came and went with great regularity. A few sprung up that did nothing but archive material by others, leaving a legacy of their contributions behind when the original website vanished into the mists of the internet. Often hosted at universities, these persisted as long as the student responsible studied there – then these started to vanish as well. (There are a few left, often without a web front page, accessible through FTP, but they are becoming few and far between).

Drive-through RPG and RPGNow and a few similar sites took these amateur productions and monetized them. To start with, some were still plaintext documents, but the PDF was becoming more accessible as a format – and with it, enhancements in quality. Nevertheless, when it comes to tiny PDFs, the quality standard by which products are judged are those of a cleaned-up fanzine or a single blog article.

At the same time, PDF scans of larger dead-tree products began to circulate illegally. In time, some dead-tree game companies started to release and distribute electronic versions of their products, a trend that is continuing, even accelerating. So the larger a PDF is, in page count, the more likely it is to have the same production standards as a high-end dead-tree publication. And, in between, there is the middle ground.

That is the context within which the profitability, and perceptions of value-for-money, have to be assessed when we’re talking about PDFs.

Tiny PDFs

Anything under 10 pages I consider to be a tiny PDF. Most are half that size or less. These will typically cost $1-2 each. There may be a single piece of artwork, or there may be none – but that art won’t generally be of a very high quality. The standards applied are strictly about content functionality. Because the price is so low, I’ll often take a flier on something that sounds interesting.

These are often publications that the creator would have produced anyway. All GMs are creative, of necessity, and that creativity usually spills over. About half the price covers expenses of production, and the other half is total profit for the creator.

The typical post here at Campaign Mastery averages 2-5000 words in length. That’s the same size as these products. And I knock out two of them a week.

2 per week x 50 weeks a year x $1 each = $100 – selling one copy of each. If the minimum wage is about $500 per week, x52 = $26000 per annum – and that’s roughly right for Australia – you need to sell 260 copies of each to make the minimum wage.

Not going to happen.

Selling between 10 and 100 copies of each, with the average about 1/3 of the way through that range – call it 40 copies in a year – gets you to $4000 a year. That’s a part-time wage supplement, but don’t give away your day job.

Because the value-for-money standards are about perceived functionality of content and nothing more, it doesn’t take very high perceived value to make the purchase worthwhile to the customer – as I said, I will often take a chance on something that sounds interesting. And if it turns out that the product isn’t useful, I’m only out a dollar or two – no big deal.

Two Caveats
I said that sales of 260+ copies, on average, weren’t going to happen – I have to add a couple of caveats to that statement.

Caveat The First
The first caveat is Marketing. Most of these tiny PDFs receive little-to-no promotion. If you can invest some money in marketing a series of them, it might just be possible to double or quadruple sales – getting you close to that minimum wage. If 1-2% of these products is a smash hit that sells 500-1000 copies, and you produce 100 a year, that’s 1-2 bull’s-eyes. Marketing could double the number of bull’s-eyes, or more.

If you could get 10 products a year out of 100 to sell 1000 copies each, that’s an average of (9×40+1000)/10 = 136 copies, average. You need those 10 products a year to sell 2500 copies each to achieve an average of 286. That puts you well over the top of the minimum wage – so long as you keep writing.

Caveat The Second
The second caveat is accumulation – of both product and reputation. Accumulation of reputation over a period of years increases the number of sales of any product. Ian Gray and I are so taken by the various Mongoose products that we’ve bought over the years that we will buy any we come across, sight unseen. I feel almost the same way about FFG’s Legends & Lairs series.

Accumulation of Product is all about the accumulation of residual sales. Let’s say that after the first year, sales of any product drop to a steady 5% of what they were when the product was new. That’s 8 per product per year thereafter, or 800 a year. Since all the costs have been paid for in the initial flurry, except for the ongoing distribution cost, that means that of every $2 transaction, $1.76 is income. So that 800 sales a year is the same as 1408 sales in the year of release. The shortfall – discounting improbable hit products of unpredictable sales – from simply releasing new product is about $22000. And $22000 divided by 1408 is 15.625 years.

Now throw in the occasional big seller, and the effects of a growing reputation, and it should be possible to go from zero to earning a minimum wage in a decade – provided you can keep churning out two products a week for year after year.

Medium PDFs

Quadrupling the size of the PDFs brings you into the medium-sized territory. That’s between 10 and 40 pages, and usually closer to the higher end of this scale – 25-35 pages. These will typically cost about $5 to $7 – which means $2 to $3 in the pocket of the creator. These will usually have some cover art – some of it great and some of it poor, though they may not.

Tiny PDFs of maps and art also fall into this category, and this price range, because it usually takes longer to create a piece of reasonable-quality art than it does to write enough words to fill the same space.

You don’t have to be a genius at math to realize that on the face of it, this size of PDF is less profitable than smaller ones would be. You’re making $2-3 on something that takes about 4 times as long to create.

What’s more, the standards of production and content expected are considerably higher. So it could conceivably take five or six times as long to create.

Why on earth would you do it?

In a word: profit.

At this size, you have to sell a lot less product to get to that minimum-wage goal. Two of these a month selling 40 copies is the same as six-to-eight small PDFs selling 40 copies. At this page-count, print-on-demand starts to become viable, adding a relatively cheap extra sales platform to your arsenal. Sales on this size of product are easier to ramp up than sales on a long series of tiny PDFs because you don’t saturate the market as much – making people less inclined to tune out your advertising. If people find your product interesting, they are more likely to buy in the expectation of some depth to the subject matter – so average sales will probably be higher, anyway, maybe 60 copies a month instead of 40. You are no more likely to have a runaway success than before, that’s still 1-2% – but the scale of what you get with a runaway success can be several thousand copies, perhaps as many as 5000. And finally, those residual sales? Not only would you expect those to be higher, but after the first year, profits on them are MUCH higher.

Regular visitors to DriveThruRPG and RPGNow will have noticed their “copper sellers” and so on – how many have stopped to mentally observe the page counts? It’s rare to find anything smaller than 20-30 pages being a really good seller.

In the long run, it becomes possible to do this for a minimum wage at this scale (though just barely) – whereas with the tiny PDFs, it really is impractical. It will still take years, though. More likely, you would be able to do this part-time and supplement your income with another part-time job.

In order to achieve this, though, you are giving up a hefty percentage of the casual purchaser – maybe half, maybe more or less. And, as I said earlier, the standards of quality are expected to be a lot higher. It’s a trade-off that takes you from amateur to the fringes of the professional ranks.

Ironically, this is the size at which value-for-money is least important as a consideration. It’s cheap enough to get the occasional purchase on a whim, and cheap enough also that the potential for value is more important than the actual value at the end of the day. If you buy one and it’s not useful, you won’t be all that happy about it – but you won’t be overly distressed, either.

Big PDFs

Quadrupling the scales gives us the 50-160 page range, and now we’re into serious head-to-head comparisons between dead-tree products and PDFs. If the typical price of the dead-tree product is about $80, the ratios of production costs show that the price of a PDF equivalent should be around the $10 mark – but because we tend to equate something that size with a price that low as a bargain, anything up to $20 tends to be an acceptable price tag.

If you can write two or three of these a year, you can do fairly well out of it. Once again, it’s easier to use marketing to ramp up sales, and the scale of success for the occasional hit is even higher – up to perhaps 7500-to-10000 copies – and the residual sales are even juicier. More importantly, and the reason for that $20 price tag, it gives you room to employ discounting as a serious incentive in promotion and marketing. If the product costs you $10, plus $3 on the marketing, to earn you $5 at the end of each sale, you can drop 25% off (to $15) in a sale and still make not only that $5 but a couple of extra $ on the top.

Here’s the reality: If you see a product in this page size priced at around $7-8, it is below cost – or the costs have already been paid for by a dead-tree edition. If you see a product priced around the $10-12 mark, it’s at cost. And if you see one priced at $15-$20, the author is trying to make a living out of his writing – and more power to him.

Eating into all this profitability is the perception of value-for-money. At $20 for a PDF, and a page-count somewhere in the 80-100 page range, I’m not only not going to consider the product if it is not interesting, I’m going to assess the quality of the content, and how likely it is to be useful. I’m happy to invest that sort of money in something I can use time and time again; but each percentage of uncertainty about that reusability erodes at the likelyhood of converting interest into an actual sale.

Eye candy is very pretty, and can be genuinely inspiring – but at this price scale, perceived value in the content is going to come roaring back into consideration in a very big way. There is a delicate balance to be maintained – too little eye-candy makes the production look cheap and raises questions about how much the darned thing is costing (i.e. it undermines the perceived value for money), while too much looks like padding out the content (again undermining the perceived value for money).

This is also a scale at which a relatively small change in price – a couple of dollars – can nuance those value-for-money expectations. If the product is art-light but only costs $15, the page count promises a higher return in value for the investment. So the solution to the problem of too-little art is to drop the price a little (while staying within the overall profitability window).

I buy PDFs of this size about as often as I do a physical product of this size. The standards of perceived value for money are comparable, despite the 4-1 or more ratio of prices. The profitability of the product to the producer is often roughly comparable, as well.

The big return is in residual sales. While your initial sales will be depressed to some extent, they will be slower to tail off, and will remain higher than they would have with a smaller product, even allowing for substantial discounting – dropping the price to $8-12 after the first six months to a year, for example. Remember that after 12 months or so, that’s all income and it will persist for years.

Very Big PDFs

Once you go above the 160-pages or so, you’re into the terrain of the Very Big PDF. I’ve seen these priced at anywhere from $25 to $125. Page-count alone can remove print-on-demand from consideration unless you deliberately subdivide your PDF into a bundled product.

But here’s the thing: To buy one of these, even at the $25 price, I have to be darned convinced that I’m going to get something worthwhile out of it. I’ll check multiple reviews. I’ll expect a free sample – and that sample had better include something that’s usable outright, and not just a set of incomplete samples that might be useful if they were complete.

If I’m releasing one of these onto the market, I’d want to be darned sure that I had my marketing plan lined up and ready to go. Day 1, this happens. Day 2, I do this. Day 3, I do that. And so on, all the way through to about day 100. If I’m going to be spruiking its value on websites and blogs, I’m going to want the list of targets spelled out and in clickable form.

At 300 pages, this is the size category into which Assassin’s Amulet falls, and I’ll be talking specifically about it in a little while. At $20, it seems like a very fair price – a bargain, in fact – and that was the perception that we wanted it to have.

Check out the free sample from RPGNow if you’re interested in knowing more about Assassin’s Amulet).

Per-unit costs vs Amortized costs

The larger a product is in page count, regardless of publishing format, the goal is always to try and spread the costs out over as many copies as possible. Some costs can’t be minimized this way, they are a fixed $X per copy or per page. Some costs such as production overheads can be amortized over several copies. The real difference between dead-tree and electronic publishing is that the costs of the latter are smaller, with a greater percentage of them going to creators – but the dollar value at the end of the day is much the same in terms of income to the producers.

If you were to compare the value for money of a physical book – say, the DMG, or Pathfinder core rules – with the value-for-money perception of a copy of the same product in electronic form costing the same price, you might expect them to be the same. Some game companies do, and it’s a colossal mistake to make. The correct comparison for anything other than teeny-tiny PDFs is about 4-1 in price.

The customers aren’t dumb; they know that electronic publishing is a LOT cheaper, even if potentially a lot less profitable when sales are added up at the end of the day – simply because the market for PDFs is smaller than that for physical rulebooks (though its growing, and this won’t always be the case). Any attempt to charge the same price for a PDF as you do for a physical product simply makes the company seem greedy or stupid (to give them the benefit of the doubt), and therefore makes both versions seem overpriced – even if the actual perceived value-for-money of the physical product was reasonably good.

Print On Demand

I’ve mentioned print on demand a number of times in this article, and the reason is because I think it’s a game-changer. It offers an increasingly-viable means of generating a physical product for a price approaching that of an electronic one, plus postage and handling.

That’s because the product IS essentially an electronic one until it reaches the final step in the production process, which has been moved to AFTER the point of sale.

It used to be that print-on-demand had page limits, and was only about soft cover publishing. Those limitations have largely been erased over the last few months. I have seen POD services offering hard covers, and POD services offering products well over the old 100-page-or-so limit. I haven’t seen both from the same vendor, yet, but the market is moving fast.

Perceived Value vs. Actual Value

It’s probably worthwhile to discuss the differences between perceived value and actual value for a bit.

Actual value is a function of how much utility you get out of a product – how often you use it, how indispensible it is when you do, and so on. But there are no fixed standards that you can point and use to measure this. Instead, the standard is also a perceptual phenomenon.

You buy three or five or ten game products, and the average of their perceived actual value becomes the standard that you use to measure the potential value of future purchases.

Right away, there is a double standard and an element of fuzziness. The core books from any game system are, by definition, supposed to be at the heart of the system, the common touchstones, ubiquitous – and that gives them a fundamentally higher perceived actual value. Then there are world settings like Ebberon or the Forgotten Realms or Faerun – are these core books or game supplements? By which standards do you judge them?

Then there is the question of player vs. gm – sourcebooks that one finds irreplaceable might be worthless to the other. Throw in personal tastes, and customers looking for sourcebooks to shore up areas in which they might be weak, and it becomes apparent that my standards of actual value will be different to yours, which will be different to the next player or gm over. The best any reviewer of a product can say is that “I found this sourcebook to be useful/useless and here is why” – permitting the reader of the review to form his own opinion, according to his own standards, of whether or not the product represents value for money.

On top of that question comes the issue of the difference between actual value and perceived value as a basis for decision making. The first is a standard – now shown to be very loose and fuzzy – of actual usage, while the latter is about preconceptions and anticipation.

Everyone who buys anything regularly – whether it be toilet paper, music, or RPG products – has bought something that looked promising but turned out to be worthless, or at the very least, extremely poor value for money. Equally, we have all bought something cheap or heavily discounted because it didn’t look all that promising, only to discover a hidden gem.

So, what can be done drive up the Perceived Value of an RPG product? And does this translate to an increase in Actual Value?

Production costs

The bedrock foundation is the actual production cost of the product. This is the minimum price that a game company can charge for the product and break even. In a heavily-remaindered physical item, it can be a negative value, or close to it, because it’s costing the company warehouse space, earning them nothing, and the price of production has already been written off as a loss – so that anything you can get for it is a windfall. When this is the case, you would sell it at a pittance, or give it away, or simply have it destroyed.

A comparison of the retail price demanded with the typical price of a product indexes the expectations of this particular product against the personal value-for-money standards that you have developed.

The role of utility

A product can sound good, and even look good, but it’s worthless unless you actually use it. I don’t care what the actual page count is, if I’m only using 20 pages of a game product then so far as I am concerned it’s value is that of a 20-page sourcebook – depreciated because of all the dead weight that the rest of the book represents.

This is where the differences of perception between different GMs, and the differences of perception between player and GM have their foundation. And it reveals one of the cleverest, and most subtle, marketing tricks used by Paizo to make Pathfinder the success that it is today.

The Core Rulebook, as Greg pointed out in the comments to part 1 of this article, contains the equivalents of both the Player’s Handbook and GM’s guide in the one volume. This not only drives up the page count, it reduces the value of the overall book to both players and GM by incorporating a substantial chunk of material that is only of value to one of them – lowering expectations of value-for-money for subsequent game supplements. In other words, it makes the Core Rulebook appear to be more of a bargain while simultaneously lowering expectations – a very difficult trick to pull off at the best of times.

Vanity Upgrades

Ian Gray uses the special anniversary PHB that was brought out with the fancy pseudo-leather cover when he’s in one of my 3.x campaigns. He claims that he bought it because it incorporated all the errata up to the date of publication – but there was an ordinary edition at the same time that was just as up-to-date, and the errata had been pretty much all cleaned up in the previous printing, anyway.

Vanity upgrades have been used for years to market products. CD and DVD booklets are prime examples. They don’t add anything to the utility, but they do make the product prettier – at a price. Because you can actually see the extra price manifest in a physical difference to the product, you are predisposed to value the content more highly.

Immediate vs. Delayed utility

Of course, there are two different types of utility. There’s stuff that you can use immediately, and there’s stuff that will eventually be worthwhile but that can’t be used right away.

Market research has shown that immediate utility is typically valued over delayed utility, even if the ultimate value of the two is comparable. The reason relates to the psychology of need.

Advertising exists to generate a perceived need in the mind of the potential customer, and to then suggest the product being advertised as a solution to that need. It’s all about immediate gratification. The difference between immediate and delayed utility is analogous to the difference between a cheaper, disposable, product and a longer-lasting equivalent – unless the longer-lasting version can successfully be positioned as solving a broader immediate problem, the cheaper disposable product will outsell the more expensive one every time.

It’s to reinvent the “need” that razor-blade manufacturers keep changing the design of their products – so that they will no longer fit in the old handles, and we have to buy new ones.

The 95 cent phenomenon

Psychologically, there seems to be a big difference between $9.95 and $10. There is a smaller but still real perceptual difference between $9.99 and $10. In fact, it doesn’t matter much what the $ amounts concerned actually are – the .95 or .99 are the important part.

This scales, as well. That’s why car sellers price their cars at $32999 and the like. Would Assassin’s Amulet have sold better if we had priced it at $19.95 than it did at $20? I don’t know, I really don’t.

The Psychology of Price

I’ve touched on this already, but the fact is that price itself has its own direct impact on perceived value.

It’s human, but if we pay a high price for something, we need it to have a high value to justify that expense in our own minds. So the theory holds – but I have to admit I’m not completely sold on this one.

The inverse situation, on the other hand, is easy to demonstrate, as the following cautionary tale will demonstrate – even if it is a slight diversion from the topic at hand.

The Ausworld story

In 1999 and 2000, I was part of an ambitious attempt by a company called Ausworld Pty Ltd. This is the story of that project.

The goal was to provide Broadband internet access through dial-up modems, guaranteeing a maximum connection every time.

For the benefit of a modern audience, used to lightning-fast broadband on tap, a little context: the theoretical maximum connection of a 56K dialup broadband connection – the best going at the time – was actually 48Kb (that’s 48,000 bits a second, each bit being an eighth of a byte. A 1KB text file has 8000 bits. A 32KB graphic has 256,000 bits. A 500K hi-res graphic has 4,000,000 bits.) If you didn’t have a state-of-the-art modem, one that was less than 6 months old, the theoretical maximum was 33.6Kb!

But, in practice, you would rarely achieve this. A 56K modem might get you a 32K connection, if you were lucky – but more often would give 28K, or 24K, or even 16K if you were unlucky.

At 16KB usable, that 500Kb image would take 250 seconds to download to your computer screen – a bit more than 4 minutes!

Compare that to the 100Mb connection I now use, which could grab that same image in 0.004 seconds, at least in theory. In practice, overheads and route switching and slow connections elsewhere in the system mean that it’s probably closer to 4 seconds. I can live with that : )

The goal, then, was to use a state-of-the-art router to connect a hundred or so dial-up accounts directly to one of the two T1 underwater cables which between them (at the time) provided all internet connection to Australia (aside from some minor satellite connections). By adding more routers, we could divide that internet backbone connection amongst half a million customers and guarantee all of them a perfect, 48Kb, connection, every time.

What’s more, because we were using state-of-the-art technology, straight out of the laboratories of companies like Ericsson, the cost was going to be incredibly cheap to run (though it wasn’t cheap to set up in the first place – the router cost more half a million on its own).

From Bookkeeping to Network Engineering

I was originally brought on-board to design and implement the bookkeeping systems that would track usage of the bandwidth, print invoices, receipt payments from customers, and so on. But one of the people employed by the project failed to deliver the programming and configuration information needed to make the system operational – being careful to avoid naming names, you’ll notice – and the primary systems engineer and I had to step up to the plate.

We had expected the infrastructure and software to take 3-6 months to complete; because neither of us was an expert on what we were doing, and had to grope our way along, it ended up being 18. There was no operating manual for the router – we were writing it as we went! This delay ate into the budget for the project, which would have a critical impact on its ultimate outcome.

Sidebar: IPv6 vs. IPv4

This project was also the first implementation in Australia of IPv6, which is only now gaining momentum for a wider implementation. That shows how far ahead of its time the systems were that we were developing.

IPv4 and IPv6 are internet protocols. They describe how information is to be requested over the internet, broken up, and sent from the source back to the requesting computer.

The internet as we know it now is built on IPv4, which has a number of shortcomings. It was first designed back in 1980, and simply wasn’t designed for all the things we have very cleverly manipulated the internet into doing in the 32 years since. As a result, many of the things that we do – from streaming video to encrypting secure websites for e-commerce – are far less efficient than they could be (the wonder is that they work at all).

IPv6 solves these problems. It also has security benefits, solves (for at least the time being) the problem of the internet running out of IP addresses, and has a whole host of other advantages. The Wikipedia page listed above has a whole section devoted to comparing the two.

The Ausworld Price Comparison

At the time, a typical dial-up account cost about $30 a month. While some accounts were unlimited in the amount of traffic you could use at that price, others limited your bandwidth after a certain amount. There were on- and off-peak rates. Australia’s biggest internet provider had a number of plans – their “Power Plan”, for “Power Users” cost $39.95 a month for 40 hours of connection. Many charged a premium if you exceeded certain bandwidth limits.

Compare that with what Ausworld was charging – it’s significant. With a 900% profit margin, the highest we could justify charging, our charges were 1 cent a minute or 20 cents a megabyte, whichever was lower.

A dollar an hour is 100 cents for 60 minutes. We were charging 60 cents for the same connection time. Typically, in a month, a power user might download 25 or 30 Megabytes. Taking the higher number, you get about $6.00 under our pricing plans. So, for high-level usage, we were offering $40 worth of internet usage for about $6 – and it was costing us about $0.60 in costs to provide.

(In actuality, because of the setup expenses, it was going to cost us about $3, most of which was going to be used to pay off the technology – it was an overhead that was being distributed).

At those prices, we calculated that we needed only 100 customers to break even, each month. Anything over that was all gravy.

The price of delay

As I said, the delays ate into our budget, leaving virtually nothing for proper marketing. We didn’t really consider this a handicap when we finally had everything working, though; at our prices, we were sure that our services pretty much sold themselves, certainly enough to get that initial 100 customers. We printed up about 20,000 cardboard bookmarks and started handing them out at railway stations.

How many customers did we get? One, and that through a personal connection.

Feedback on the ground

The common perception we encountered was that our prices were so low, there had to be a hidden catch. A half-reasonable marketing campaign would have addressed the problem. We could have tripled our prices and then slowly dropped them as customers over the resulting 34 minimum came on board.

But, by the time we found out, it was too late. Our budget was depleted, bills needed to be paid, and the operation folded. One more month would have made the difference. An extra $5,000 for a serious marketing campaign would solved the perception issue. We could have offered a money-back guarantee.

No Price exists in a vacuum

There is a saying, “when it’s time to railroad, everybody railroads.” The corollary is that when it’s not time to railroad, you’ll have a hard time getting anybody on board one of those “damn fool dangerous contraptions”.

Ausworld was offering modern broadband prices and technology before the man in the street was ready to accept them. It’s that simple, when you get to the bottom of it.

Lessons for RPG Pricing

There is a lesson here for Game manufacturers. “If it seems to good to be true, it probably is” – so says conventional wisdom, and (most of the time) it’s good advice. The reality for game makers is that they have to charge a credible sum for their products, or they will have an uphill battle convincing people to buy their wares.

The Profitability Curve

If you lose sales for having prices too high, and you lose sales for having prices too low, then you have a curve of some kind, with an optimum pricing point, or even a couple of different optimum points.

Looking at that a slightly different way gives the following very interesting trio of curves:

Of course, various factors like the 95 cent phenomenon would distort these pretty curves. What’s even more interesting is what happens when you think about the impact of increased perceived value for money on them.

• Sales for a given price go up.
• Profit per sale for a given price goes up.
• Net Profit goes up by more than either of these increases alone, because these two increases compound geometrically.

The Value of Extras

The most obvious way of increasing the perceived value for money is to include extras. That’s hard to do with print products, though it can be done with shrink-wrapping and splashy stickers proclaiming the extra on the cover. It’s easy to do with electronic products that can be bundled into a zip, or with some method of distributing them to people who sign up for free updates to the product – which gives you a ready-made subscriber list for marketing future products to.

The last is the approach we used with Assassin’s Amulet.

The Scope of Assassin’s Amulet

The thought process behind what became the eventual shape of Assassin’s Amulet was to make sure that everyone got value for money, whether they were a player or a GM.

We also wanted to be sure that there was some content of immediate value as well as some content that would provide residual, long-term profits.

We wanted to avoid, as much as possible, content that would provide only one-time value, and to focus on reusable value. Even the map around which the entire sourcebook was oriented was capable of reuse, with multiple variations provided for each part of the map key – and advice on how to apply these variations in a consistent manner. I estimated that you could reuse the map about 100 times before all the possible variations that we had provided would be reused.

We deliberately targeted all varieties of campaign level, with content that was useful at low levels, content that was useful at mid-levels, and content that was useful at high levels – and we even had some content that was designed to span the entire length of a campaign.

Any idea that any of the three authors had for content was thrown into it, on the assumption that half of whatever we provided would be dead space to someone. It’s no coincidence that the sourcebook is priced appropriately for a volume of half the size – we were deliberately going for the “value for money” sales incentive.

At every step of the production, the goal was to set a standard that approached our theoretical ideals and then strive to achieve that standard. That includes the production of extras. Where traditional presentation methods wouldn’t meet our ideals, we tried to invent new ones, and it was in the extras that this really showed up. Even the number of extras was exceptional:

1. A 300dpi full-sized version of the map (spanning multiple sheets of paper);
2. A 600dpi full-sized version of the map (spanning multiple sheets of paper);
3. A 300dpi full-sized version of the map that obscured internal details from players;
4. A PDF containing the map sliced to fit A4 pages instead of letter-sized pages (18 pages);
5. A PDF, “A Player’s Guide to Legacy Items” (17 pages)
6. A PDF, “The expanded GMs companion guide to Legacy Items”, which was annotated with additional advice and behind-the-scenes info (26 pages)
7. A PDF Player’s version of “The Shield Of Madrassias”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (15 pages);
8. A PDF Player’s version of “The Mask Of Seriphides”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (20 pages);
9. A PDF Player’s version of “The Crown Of Thorns”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (16 pages);
10. A PDF Player’s version of “The Spiked Gauntlet Of B’rrastis”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (18 pages);
11. A PDF Player’s version of “The Cup Of Dewarr”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (17 pages);
12. A PDF Player’s version of “The Armor Of Atrisses”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (17 pages);
13. A PDF Player’s version of “The Lantern Of Tevariers”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (21 pages);
14. A PDF Player’s version of “The Shortsword Of The Shahd’rah”, one of the Legacy Items from the sourcebook (20 pages);

Plus, of course, the free sample version.

Nor was the intention to stop there. We had another 8 items planned that ultimately had to be shelved when Johnn began to wind down his involvement here; I had to choose between compromising Campaign Mastery, giving up on the sequel to Assassin’s Amulet, or giving up on the other freebies – at least for now.

The hard realities

It’s time to start bottom-lining this article. I have a whole list of points to make but I’m going to try and get through them as quickly as possible.

promo vs production

The hard reality is that people budget for production and don’t leave enough space in the budget for adequate promotion.

damned if you do, damned if you don’t #1 – Art

I worked damned hard producing the art for AA. There’s a lot more in there than was originally intended – simply to keep the art levels consistent throughout the book, because it looked unbalanced with only some chapters having extensive art. For about three weeks, I was producing three pieces of art a day – and was totally exhausted at the end of it, in fact it took more than two months to recover from it.

The hard reality is that if you don’t include art, your product can look cheap; and if you do include art, you have to either produce it yourself or pay someone else to do it, which can cost so much that your profits get completely wiped out. And if you do it yourself, as I did, there will be quality control issues; there’s some art in AA that I’m very proud of, and some that I worked very hard on and that still doesn’t look right. All I can say is that I did the best work I could in the time available.

The big mistake we made was committing ourselves to a publication date before the editing, layout, and art was finalized. Once we announced the forthcoming release here at CM, we had only so much material to expend in blog posts and articles at Roleplaying tips to generate buzz – and if we faltered, the buzz would die down.

damned if you do, damned if you don’t #2 – Freebies & Samplers

These take time to produce. And I’m the first to admit that we probably went overboard when it came to AA – but we were looking to provide a reason for people to keep talking about the product.

The problem is that this is dead time – unless it directly enhances the sales of the main product, its time spent creating for no return. You can minimize the negative impact by planning and creating these as you go, but most people aren’t that organized. And even when you are, it consumes time that could be spent on creating something else that earns money.

The more your product costs, or exceeds expectations, or is unusual in some way, the more you need these – but they are always a drain on your creative time and energy. So if you think a free sample is good, and especially if it persuades you to buy the full product, tell somebody. Tell the publisher. Tell the author. Tell someone else who might want to take a look. Let people know that the freebie has done its job – or they might stop including them.

Its All Compromise

With so many competing considerations, compromise is inevitable. With Assassin’s Amulet, we compromised as little as possible and while it didn’t fail, it wasn’t the roaring success we were aiming for. With Ausworld, there was no compromise at all, and it DID fail at the final hurdle. Certainly, the next game product I release will be compromised in various respects as a result of the AA experience and learning what is practical and what is not.

The Impact Of Kickstarter

Offering some sort of salvation from these problems is the phenomenon of Crowdfunding, through sites such as Kickstarter. The ability to raise the funds that you need to see a project through is a breakthrough. It offers a new purpose to freebies that has an immediate return to the creators. They can immediately see what’s popular and what’s not. I know Kickstarter say they are working to correct that limitation – but progress has been slow.

The only complaint I have about Kickstarter is that you have to from the US to use it. There are other crowdfunding sites, but none have quite the cache of and reputation of Kickstarter and are going to struggle that little bit more to achieve the same ends.

Feedback is gold

Finally, I want to reiterate a point I started to make a few paragraphs ago: feedback is like gold to a games publisher. If you don’t tell them what you like and what you don’t, they will either assume that nothing’s wrong unless sales are abysmal – in which case they can change all the things that were working and miss the real problem.

On top of that, there’s the fact that writing of any sort – whether it be a game product or a blog like this one – is hard work, and a very lonely pursuit at times. Sometimes you can wonder if anyone’s really listening, especially when no-one comments except the spambots. We all have days when we feel like tossing it in; without the occasional piece of encouragement, there is always the risk that someone will yield to that feeling. So if there’s a game product you really like, tell the creators!

So there it is – a comprehensive review of why game products cost what they do, why they might not be as successful as they could or should be, the role of perceived value for money in the purchasing decision – and why no game product will ever be exactly what you might want it to be.

Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. My players will be examining this one carefully for any additional nuggets of additional information that I include because this particular group are tied up in their current in-game situation. They think they know who’s responsible and have a working theory – are they right or wrong? Only time will tell – but they might get some additional hints from the content below…

Metagame Origins & Status

When I was creating the Kingdoms for the Shards Of Divinity campaign, I wanted to ensure that each Kingdom had a rival or counter-balancing influence. If things are more-or-less stable, politically, the environment permits the PCs to be the instruments of change within the campaign, inadvertently (or quite deliberately) promoting or provoking one faction over another.

I was also careful in delineating the origins of the Kingdoms, because again they had emerged from a stable political situation – a group of city-states in an isolated valley now remembered as Paradise. Each of these city-states was to be the origin of a Kingdom or other significant population within the Shared Kingdoms after a thousand years of Post-paradise Human History.

Finally, I wanted to seed the political scene with opportunities for roleplay and adventure. Each of the Kingdoms should present a different flavor and different set of circumstances from which an adventure can be derived.

Some of the members of the Shared Kingdoms better fulfill one or two of these criteria, but in the Causa Domasura, I think I hit the nail squarely on the head in all three departments. Based very directly on the civilization of the Ancient Greeks – with lots of other sources thrown in as seasoning – the results are a group that is always trying something new, that has a distinctly different attitude to most things. They might miss a lot – and that knocks their world-view askew – but if anyone’s going to breed a new bunch of bug-eyed monsters, this is them. Science and Reasoning without conscience, guided by the personal philosophy of each individual researcher – there’s no scope for adventure in that, surely? (Says the GM with a far-too-innocent smirk)…

I drew on a number of divergent resources in creating the Causa Domasura. Everything from the mad scientists of uncounted B-grade Horror and SF Movies of the 50s and 60s, to the West Wing, and historically, early American society (post- War Of Independence). There are also a few ideas from David Eddings’ Mallorean trilogy, from some of the Alien societies in Babylon 5, and the occasional sneaking subtext from the Unseen University of Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld. Like any good writer, I’ll steal ideas from anywhere I find them, file off the serial numbers, and claim them as my own – after throwing them together in new and interesting combinations. : )

In-Game Origins

One of the city-states of Paradise valued learning above all else. They dismissed the priests and the Gods as misunderstood natural phenomena, and built a city-state on the premise of scholarship and philosophy. They claim that it was the city-state of their forebears whose experiments invented steel weapons, but their history (written many years after the fact, and with the cataclysm in between) claim that they employed it purely defensively, and that it was the jealousy and ambition of another city-state that led to the theft of the technology and its use in an attempt to conquer Paradise. They also claim to have invented Magic independently (while conceding that the Elves helped with some of the more difficult implications of the theory).

A society of experimenters

It’s important to note the points of distinction between the Causa Domasura and Bher Yuralvus (which was the focus of the previous article in this series). Bher Yuralvus are scholars and record-keepers. They believe implicitly that if it is in writing, it contains at least a grain of truth, and when two sources conflict, learned debate is the way to resolve the dispute – identifying that grain of truth, identifying the misunderstandings that have led to a misinterpretation, and writing concordances and references to document these resolutions. The principles apon which the Causa Domasura operate are entirely different, and can be summed up:

• Develop a theory;
• Experiment to test that theory;
• Learn something new from the test;
• Use that something new to develop a new theory.

Some of their experiments and theories have yielded valuable innovations. While it is not recorded, the concept of the Shared Kingdoms as a working political relationship is almost certainly something that the Causa Domasura came up with, back when they (and everything else) was part of the Galliamic Empire. Their own internal structure is a hodge-podge of contradictory theories, a mish-mash of elements from this political theory and that, but somehow it seems to work reasonably well – at least as well as the government of any of the other Kingdoms. But if you don’t like the current form of government, just wait a generation and they’ll be trying something new.

That being said, the Causa Domasura is quite happy to employ the collected data from Bher Yuralvus, and Bher Yuralvus is happy to add the published books and writings of the Causa Domasura to their collection. The two exist in a practical symbiosis, and often align the same way in political debates. A key tactical consideration for other Kingdoms is how to separate the two on a policy issue should one of them oppose a measure and the other be more receptive.

Internal Structure

It’s impossible to consider the internal structure of the Causa Domasura without first considering the philosophical foundations apon which the entire “Kingdom” has been erected. This philosophy values intellectual capability over learning, learning over skill, skill over experience, experience over service, and service over everything else.

While the forms of governmental structures within the “Kingdom” change from time to time, this philosophy is the common uniting thread that ties them all together.

The current yield of governmental structure that has resulted is a combination of a unique Caste System and Republican Meritocracy dominated by Mages, with Democratic underpinnings.

The Caste System

The Caste system employed by the Causa Domasura permits lateral movement under direction of superiors and vertical movement by achievement. It thereby recognizes that the majority of citizens don’t have the ability to move beyond the social status inherited from their forebears while acknowledging that talent, and genius, can flower anywhere.

• At the lowermost rung are the Slaves, whose capacities for self-governance are so limited that they need someone to make the decisions for them, care for them, shelter them, and ensure that they are fed. In return for giving up any real independence, they are wrapped in cotton wool and cared for like children.
• The 2nd tier contains the military, police forces, slave masters, and other purely service-oriented occupations.
• The lower levels of the third tier overlaps the upper levels of the second, containing bureaucrats, civil servants, merchants, and so on. These are service occupations that require some capacity for judgment.
• The fourth tier contains the lower elite – any form of expert, teachers, and apprentices.
• The fifth tier is reserved for the true elite – administrators, researchers, mages who have completed their apprenticeship, and implementers of government policy.
• Finally, the Sixth tier is occupied by the Senate, who set government policy, and the Head of state, the Legatus.

The Republican Meritocracy – in theory

Individuals who are willing to serve in the various governmental positions are assessed to derive an order of merit based on intellect, achievement, and scholarship.

Positions are ranked in terms of difficulty and authority and filled from the top down with the most suitable eligible candidate.

Positions, willingness to serve, and suitability are all reassessed every 5 years. Should an individual die in office, the most recent order of merit is used to determine their successor.

Hereditary rank in the Republic has been completely eliminated, at least in theory. Service is rewarded both directly in remuneration, indirectly in services provided at government expense, and in the accumulation of tax credits against future taxation.

The flaws in the political model

In practice, this model of government has three major problems: (1) the examinations must be set and marked by people who are qualified to do so, but anyone who is that qualified should be a candidate; (2) the cost of the periodic examinations and reviews is substantial, and mandates an extremely high taxation rate; and (3) those with means (after the high taxation) can always afford the best education and preparation.

The combination of these problems and the tax credits system has produced an unofficial caste system which only superficially resembles the official system. While, in theory, it is possible for a plumber to become the head of state, in practice he never has a chance. The peerage consists of those with the opportunity to become peers.

Nevertheless, it is possible for a citizen to petition the administrator of whatever social fraction he is part of for a transfer into another social fraction, and to be tested for suitability (at his own expense); and it is also possible to rise through the ranks on merit. A plumber might not be able to go all the way to the top in one generation, but a plumber’s family can rise to dominance over multiple generations.

The Practical Solutions

The problem of suitable testing materials is partially solved by having all those already serving in official positions contribute one question each year to the official examinations. These are then sealed until the death of the serving individual, at which point they join a pool of questions for testing suitability for a position of that rank. A small number of these questions is then chosen at random for the assessment. That means that a question can be hundreds of years out of date (which might favor historians but no-one else) or might be reasonably contemporary or timeless. While imperfect, this seems satisfactory to those in charge, and is a reasonably functional compromise.

The Popular Vote

The administrators of the Causa Domusora recognize that their testing methodologies are not going to be universally accurate, and hence for the most important positions, the uppermost group of eligible candidates are then subjected to a popular vote for election to the governing body, The Senate. It is the senate’s role, led by the Legatus, to administer the Republic as a whole and to appoint other positions according to the order of merit. The republic does not support the concept of 1 man 1 vote, instead awarding individuals a number of votes based apon their (official) tier within the caste. It also restricts the franchise for all sorts of reasons.

Most of those reasons ultimately boil down to indicators of civil responsibility or a lack thereof. Unpaid debts, criminal behavior, holding unpopular philosophies or beliefs, a violation of the philosophic underpinnings of the society, or causing unauthorized trouble between the Causa Domasura and another of the Shared Kingdoms, are all valid reasons for the restriction or removal of the right to vote on the membership of the senate, or the identity of the Legatus.

There are also various mechanisms by which additional votes may be earned, such as years of public service (differentiated by rank), experience in other industries or capacities, (to a lesser extent), a particularly valuable expertise such as spellcraft, or even crass wealth.

Even slaves have the right to vote (assuming they pass all the civil responsibility criteria) – though it takes six of their votes to equal just one vote from a member of the existing Senate – before additional votes possessed are taken into account. Taking such additional votes into account, a past Senator’s opinion may be worth that of 200 or more slaves. Slaves cannot cede the right to vote on their behalf to their overseers; instead, a specialist department within the Bureaucracy who lobbies the Senate for Slave Welfare exercises any votes not actually cast by the Slave himself. It is also worth noting that each decade of service, even as a slave, earns additional votes.

The Political Consequences

While individually, the slaves may have little political power, collectively, the slave lobby can make or break a candidate on most occasions. As a result, political candidates work hard at keeping that lobby on-side.

One of the regular sources of debate and contention is the desire of various factions to elevate their own status within the caste system by achieving recognition of their expertise, and one of the keys to doing so is the development of specialized skillsets amongst the slaves that are employed within the industry. This effectively transfers the voting power of those slaves out of the hands of the Bureau of Slave Welfare and into the control of that faction while elevating the value of those votes, thereby creating a self-sustaining faction within the government that must be catered to. The support of the Bureau in any such endeavor is essential, and can only be obtained if they can be convinced that this is not only in the best interests of the slaves in question, but also in the interests of the Causa Domasura in general.

However, no candidate can champion an improvement in the condition of the slaves at the expense of the welfare of the rest of society without risking a united front against them, something the slave lobby cannot overcome. A delicate balance must be maintained if a candidate is to be successful. The final year of any election cycle is therefore a time of celebration and general wooing of votes, similar to that of the US prior to the rise of mass communications and railroads.

Slave Welfare

Life as a slave in the Causa Domasura would be completely unrecognizable by anyone who was subjected to that condition in our history. Their enfranchisement, even in a limited capacity, and the resulting power of their collective votes, has ensured that slaves are VERY well cared-for. They are pampered and cared for, and have – over the years – won many rights and privileges. Hours of labor are restricted, mistreatment is forbidden, they receive the finest of medical care, and even earn modest wages for their labor – which they are free to spend on luxuries. The burden of serious decisions and the daily struggle to survive has been taken from their shoulders, and all they have to do is their share of whatever task needs doing. Nor are these tasks overly arduous – slaves have been known to faint dead away at the mention of “hard work”, and then lodge a complaint with the Bureau.

The general solution is to pile more bodies onto whatever task needs doing, employing the maxim that many hands make light work, ensuring that the slave population – and the political power that it confers – remains high. At the same time, the Bureau of Slave Welfare is cognizant of the potential economic consequences of expanding this segment of the population – and the expense in maintenance that it carries – and strives to maintain a balance between slave numbers and conditions that optimizes the best interests of the slave population in the long term.

The existence of the Bureau of Slave Welfare, an administrative body with professional expertise in analyzing the impact on the slaves of any policy proposal, ensures that any attempt to appeal to the slaves directly during an election cycle is received with suspicion – but is essential to any policy that is unpopular with the Bureau. Analysis of a candidate’s lobbying of slaves directly is considered a barometer of their unstated intentions in other, more controversial, policy areas. However, there are always enough candidates for the Senate and the position of Legatus that there will be some – and this is considered essential to restraining the authority of the Bureau to within reasonable boundaries. Should the Bureau’s staff ever stop adequately and fairly representing the interests of the slaves, it will be relatively easy for a candidate to convince the slaves of this, winning their direct support (it’s happened a time or two).

Aged Care

Another faction that does very well out of the political system in the Causa Domasura are the elderly. Between the additional votes for years of service, accumulated wealth, and experience and expertise, they command significant power. This is usually dispersed behind multiple candidates, but occasionally an issue will unite a significant number of them. Self-interest ensures that the issues which most frequently unite them are those relating to aged care.

One of the characteristics of the elderly in general is a natural conservatism, and the awareness that most problems will solve themselves eventually. While some radical theory that becomes the flavor of the day may garner significant support in a single election cycle, enough conservative candidates will be elected that the policy’s implementation will be naturally limited and will be thrown out if it doesn’t work.

This is another major element of the system of checks and balances that act to stabilize the Causa Domasura, constraining their willingness to experiment by imposing practical limits to their experiments in government.

Youth Activism

If there is any faction that is marginalized in the Causa Domasura, it’s not the slaves but the young. Prone to headlong rushes into change for its own sake, filled with an excess of zeal and an impatience for change, they are the progressive, radical, and rowdy element of the political scene. Substituting rhetoric and volume for reasoned consideration, they rarely make a direct impact on the policies of the government, but frequently have a substantial indirect impact.

It is quite frequent for prospective members of the Senate to gather a small group of relatively young activists with whom they don’t disagree too profoundly, and who show some glimmer of promise, who they use to generate ideas. A radical agenda, once confined with a proper set of controls, a degree of practicality, and a means of monitoring outcomes, become progressive policies. In return, the youth become trained in the realities of practical politics, gradually becoming fit to pursue their own political careers.

Subterfuge, Intrigue, and Corruption

It should be obvious that one of the major dangers of this system of government is the political candidate who promises one thing while intending to do quite another. Safeguarding against such subterfuge is one of the priorities of the legislation that empowers the Senate and the Legature. Unless a real and pressing need for change is agreed by a three-quarters majority of the senate, the Legate is not permitted to enact any legislation not specifically put forward as a policy position during his candidature. Moreover, while the Legature receives a mandate for carrying out the changes and policies announced during his candidature for office, the Senate defines the scope of that mandate.

Both sides are fully aware that abusing these powers will normally result in a censure at the next election. Proposed changes to the scope and weighting of the franchise are the most contestable policy positions, preventing any attempts at self-perpetuation of a particular group. Furthermore, the Senate consists of those who came closest to winning the position of Legature without actually winning, and has no power to enact change on its own behalf – in other words, the current Legature’s political rivals and enemies.

Achievement of policy reform must be achieved by decree of the Legature – subject to the confirmation that it is within the scope of the Legature’s Mandate by the Senate – or with the support of three-quarters of the Senate. The inevitable result is a hotbed of political intrigue in which favors and support are exchanged constantly in return for support on other policy matters. Coalitions come and go without warning and without notice. This trend is accentuated even more by the banning of any form of overt political party structure or coalitions during elections. All elections are of individuals, and the scale of the majorities required to exceed a mandate is such that anyone attempting to form or permit such overt political alliances will not succeed, and will not be re-elected five years hence.

Bribery is a capital offence. There is a specialist branch of the Bureau of Laws which investigates any suspicion of bribery and who are required and empowered to arrest anyone if the charges can be proven to within a reasonable standard. Such criminal cases are always adjudicated by the next most highly-ranked official or member of the Senate – someone who will directly benefit from a guilty verdict, provided that they can convince the public at the next election of the rightness of their actions – but only after that official or Senator has been vetted by the Bureau of Laws to verify their own innocence in this respect. Arrest by the Bureau of Laws generally results in a pro-forma verdict of guilty.

However, the Lagature and the Senate are both empowered to investigate and prosecute any charges of corruption or abuse of authority by the Bureau of Laws. They all know that if the Bureau exceeds its authority, they might well be next on the chopping block – so they are both vigorous and zealous in this duty. Once again, any reasonable charge levied is followed by an almost pro-forma verdict of guilt – and, once again, the public are the final arbiters when it comes to abuse of this authority.

The same pattern persists throughout the government – a body with certain powers and authority, an enemy or rival charged with the monitoring of that rival, and the ultimate authority vested in those who are only permitted to enact the will of the people.

The Economics

This approach is also used to control economic management. The government taxes Labor Time (which includes time spent in thought and education, and the labor of slaves) and raw materials (which include the ownership of slaves). All government services, including service as a Senator or Legature, are paid from these taxes. The Senate sets pay rates and tax rates as necessary.

Should the Senate abuse this power, by voting themselves a big pay rise, they will be driving future votes toward a policy of tax reform. Should the government have insufficient funds to provide essential services, they will be driving votes toward candidates who promise a redistribution of funds.

Furthermore, service within the Senate is considered part-time, and remunerated accordingly; Senators are expected to operate their own sources of income but are barred from the most lucrative positions within government service (which have been filled by their less-popular and less-successful rivals). You can have power, or you can be well-paid for government service, but not both.

In practice, this results in political swings as candidates alternately stand for office with adequate funding and live off their savings while in office until they no longer have sufficient funds to be reelected – relegating them to a position with relatively little power but sufficient income to replenish those savings in 5-10 years – if they work hard and save their money.

Political fundraising of any sort is defined as “Soliciting Bribery” – punished by and in the same way as actually accepting a bribe or bribing someone. The only thing that is not forbidden is the provision of services to the public. A lobbyist seeking to curry favor cannot give money directly to the Senator he is courting, but can shore up his popularity amongst that senator’s supporters by providing them additional services or gifts. This is perceived as doing what he was elected to do, i.e. enhancing the lives of the people who elected him. Note that it is not permitted for restrictions on who may use such facilities on any political basis, though caste restrictions can apply.

The consequence is that such “lobbying” is always overt and obvious, and subject to public scrutiny – by both those who voted for a Senator and by those who voted for a rival. Once again, abuse of authority is subject to the approval of the public.

Nobles & Nobility within the Causa Domasura

The Causa Domusora have abandoned the concept of hereditary peerage. The head of state is given the title Legatus. Beneath him or her is the Senate, comprising Senators both male and female. The Senate appoints other positions within the civil hierarchy for a fixed term (currently and traditionally 5 years, though there is a growing movement toward six-year terms). There are currently 62 Senators.

The most senior positions appointed by the Senate are the Praefectus (Prefects) (the term is both singular and plural) who administer a city and the surrounding region. The Praefectus has a wide latitude of civil authority, able to dictate additional taxes (above the general standard set by the Senate), make local additions to the criminal code, instigate public works beyond the mandated minimums decreed by the senate, call tenders for contracts, and so on. Keeping the Praefectus in check to some extent is the requirement that he reside in the region for 5 years after being recalled from office (unless the Senate promotes him).

A second check apon excesses by the local Praefectus is the local Tribune, who serves as a magistrate and dispenses judgment according to the merits of the case and local laws. If he finds a law to be excessive, he can make it moot simply by sentencing offenders to a lesser verdict, or vice versa. He is also entitled to bring excesses to the attention of the Electum.

The Electum is a central body whose members are appointed by the Senate to investigate and (if necessary) prosecute, judge, and punish Praefects who are unsatisfactory in performing their duties. There are currently 24 Members of the Electum.

Beneath the Electum are a number of Bureaus, each of which is controlled by a Septras, and who has a deputy Sestras to assist him, both of whom are appointed by the Senate to control one Caste or Sub-caste. These are effectively Guilds with externally-appointed heads. They have the authority to set costs and pay scales within their Bureaus, both of labor and materials (which include slaves). These also have the responsibility for testing and administering internal rank within a caste or sub-caste, of setting approved standards of workmanship and behavior, and so on. There are 34 Septras at this time.

Monitoring and reviewing the decisions and actions of the Sestras and their civil servant subordinates are the Factras, another central body whose members are appointed by the senate. What the Electum are to the Praefectus, the Factras are to the Sestras – investigators, prosecutors, judges, and juries. There are currently 12 Factras. The Senate, in turn, oversees the activities fo the Electum and Factras, and is able to investigate, prosecute, and punish corruption or misbehavior within the ranks of their overseers.

Beneath all of these and assisting them are a number of civil service positions whose power and authority derive from the master they are appointed to serve. All such positions are assigned based on the order of merit last derived. These civil servants perform the bulk of the actual work of administrating the Republic, and are known collectively as the Civilis Vernula, and individually are given the title Vernulas.

Equivalent Titles

The Legatus is considered to be the equivalent of a King, Senators are Dukes & Duchesses, Tribunes, The Electum, Septras and the Factras are all considered Counts, and a Vernulas is considered to have a rank equivalent to that of a Knight. Since the other kingdoms are uncomfortable with the notion that these come and go with such regularity for a given individual, they often continue to treat a former ‘Noble’ of the Republic at his highest previously-achieved rank, and prefix their previous title with ‘Priori’ (former) to such individuals.

Geography

Geographically, the centre of power of the Causa Domasura lies to the Northeast of the Capitas Duodiem, beyond the Therasus Amora (Centre Of Attraction). It is bounded on to the north and west by natural features: Lihume Lapillos (Stony River) to the west, which flows through the valley of Bher Yuralvus from the Montis Nixcumulum (Snowcapped Mountains) which form the Northern boundary. East of Capitas Duodiem, the Via Negotarentur (Trade Road) forms the southern border where the Causa Domasura abuts the northern edge of the Ineodolus Imperascora (Traders & Commerce Empire).

Like the “Kingdom” itself, the Via Negotarentur (pronounced “Neg-Oh-Sha-Rent-Ur”) gradually peters out to the east, becoming little more than a track before vanishing completely into the Levitasvirga Abyssora (The Thunderhell). That region of rolling hills and unpleasant weather forms the southernmost part of the eastern boundary of the Causa Domasura. As one proceeds north, one runs into the marshy swamps of the Gramen Dromubyas (Grassland Marshes); these are quite impassable, and must be circumnavigated either west through the eastern regions of the Causa Domasura or east through the Thunderhell. Eventually, the Gramen Dromubyas gives way and the Thunderhell reunites with the eastern “border” of the Causa Domasura, slowly giving way to the more mountainous region of the Procerus Terrora (The Giantlands). These quickly become more mountainous until they merge with the Montis Nixcumulum, the northern border.

The northern regions of the Causa Domasura are heavily forested; the central, western and southern regions are fertile farmlands, becoming less so as one proceeds east. The Thunderhell is grassland; no trees or brushland can grow in that inhospitable domain save in small huddled clumps scattered here and there. Many small rivers flow north to southeast through the Kingdom, the most easterly of which emerge from the Giantlands, skirt the northern Thunderhell to the west, and then turn east to drain into the Grassland Marshes (which, ultimately, are little more than a flatter, somewhat depressed, region of the Thunderhell). It is believed that the Marshes, in turn, drain into one or more rivers that flow south through the Thunderhell past the Montis Levitasvirgo (Thunder Mountains) that lie beyond the Thunderhell, joined by many more creeks and streams from that font of unpleasantry, before emptying somewhere into the Undus Verdestus (Green Ocean) – but no-one can say for certain, the region remains unexplored.

From A PC Perspective

The Causa Domasura is the place to find an expert on just about anything contemporary or arcane, and the most skilled artisans except in certain specialist fields. If you need a spell cast, this is the place to come.

Remember not to try and bribe anyone and not to offer tips for service. Both are capitol offenses!

Carry plenty of cash, things are quite expensive – and being caught short gives one the choice of hunger or slavery.

Oh, and never be surprised at what might come crawling out from the East or North…

From A GMs Perspective

The Causa Domasura is a fun place for GMs. Almost anything can be justified as an “experiment gone awry”, you have Orcs and Goblins and Gnolls and Giants living in the Thunderhell and Giantlands, and the Marshes are a breeding ground for strange critters at the best of times. Add the potentials for more traditional plotlines involving magic itself and the political intrigues of the Republic and you have ample opportunities for adventure.

When writing up the players briefings, I tried to entice them in that direction by mentioning the practice of slavery without describing what that actually means in the Causa Domasura. They didn’t take the bait; other GMs using the ‘Kingdom’ in isolation may have better luck. Keep the possibility in mind.

Ambitions & Political Relations

The Causa Domasura continually plots to force Bher Yuralvus into their republic. The two are frequent political allies, and (as described above) have an ongoing symbiotic relationship, but it still irks the rulers of a Republic which reveres Knowledge and Expertise that the greatest collected source of knowledge stubbornly insists on its independence.

The other great ambition is to destabilize the Verus Fidesora (People Of True Faith). Religion and Progressive Science have never sat well together; the Verus Fidesora believe that the Causa Domasura lack morality and should be subordinate to them, the Causa Domasura believe the Verus Fidesora to be blinded by dogma and bent on the ideological conquest of the entire Shared Kingdoms – to which the Clerics respond, “Ideological Conversion, not Conquest!”

The Study Of Languages

One of the most controversial theories to emerge from the Causa Domasura concerns the relationships between languages. This theory holds that certain languages are related to each other, sharing vocabulary, syntax, and written forms in common. By measuring the degree of similarity between languages, the historical influence of one culture apon another can be determined. Put these together like a jigsaw and the lost history of the world can be recreated.

That’s the theory…

The Language Relationships Table: The Common Languages

There are 26 spoken languages in Shards Of Divinity, divided into four groups: Common, Unusual, Rare, and Obscure. As mentioned in the previous part of this series, if a character has more ranks in a language than its relatedness relative to the language he is trying to speak, he gains a +1 synergy bonus on his attempts to use the language.

For example, an elf would have Elvish (aka Elven) as his native language. If he was trying to speak Dwarven, he would get +1 if he had 8 ranks in his native language – or if he had 4 ranks in Draconian, Giant, or Terran, or 6 ranks in Trade Tongue or Abyssal or… well, the list goes on. He can qualify for multiple +1 bonuses if he meets multiple targets but only one per row on the chart – so he might get +1 for 4 ranks in Giant, +1 for 6 ranks in Trade Tongue, and +1 for 8 ranks in Elvish.

Twenty-six languages won’t fit all in one reasonable-length table, even though that’s how they were presented in the original house rules. So in this part of the series, I’m going to look at the Common Languages. Note that this table mentions languages that are currently not known to exist in the campaign world.

Following the table are descriptions of the languages and how to simulate them. Where they are appropriate for PCs, I’ve included discussion on the naming of characters – which is the point of the whole series!

Common Languages	Relatedness
	Ranks	Related Languages
Kingdom	2 ranks	Trade Tongue
	4 ranks	Old Kingdom, Pious, Gypsy, Halfling
	6 ranks	City-State, Celestial, Sylvan, Dwarven, Druidic, Gnome
	8 ranks	Original, Elvish, Aquan, Draconic, Terran, Giant, Orc
	10 ranks	Abyssal, Draconian, Infernal, Tribal
	12 ranks	Undercommon, Goblin, Ignan
	14 ranks	Gnoll
Elvish	2 ranks	Draconic
	4 ranks	Druidic, Undercommon, Sylvan, Aquan
	6 ranks	Draconian, Gypsy, Old Kingdom, Celestial, Orc, Original
	8 ranks	Halfling, Abyssal, Dwarven, City-State, Gnome, Giant, Terran
	10 ranks	Trade Tongue, Kingdom, Infernal, Tribal, Goblin, Ignan, Pious
	12 ranks	Gnoll
Dwarven	4 ranks	Draconian, Giant, Terran
	6 ranks	Trade Tongue, Abyssal, Draconic, Infernal, Undercommon, Ignan
	8 ranks	Gnome, Tribal, Orc, Gypsy, Old Kingdom, Celestial, Elvish
	10 ranks	Kingdom, Sylvan, Goblin, City-State, Original, Gnoll
	12 ranks	Halfling, Druidic, Pious, Aquan
Pious¹ Notes: ¹Language is: Common for Human Clerics and Priests, Rare for other humans, Obscure for non-humans.	2 ranks	City-State, Celestial
	4 ranks	Original, Draconic
	6 ranks	Kingdom, Gypsy, Abyssal, Infernal
	8 ranks	Trade Tongue, Sylvan, Orc, Old Kingdom, Elvish, Draconian
	10 ranks	Druidic, Terran, Gnoll, Halfling, Undercommon, Dwarven
	12 ranks	Aquan, Ignan, Goblin, Tribal, Gnome
	14 ranks	Giant
Trade Tongue	2 ranks	Old Kingdom, Gypsy
	4 ranks	City-state, Kingdom, Sylvan, Dwarven
	6 ranks	Original, Elvish, Druidic
	8 ranks	Halfling, Aquan, Draconic, Draconian, Terran, Tribal, Gnome, Pious, Giant
	10 ranks	Undercommon, Orc, Goblin
	12 ranks	Gnoll, Abyssal, Celestial, Ignan
	14 ranks	Infernal

Language Descriptions & Notes: The Common Languages

The following language descriptions frequently mention rendering text using particular fonts that I have in my collection. Some of these may have unrestricted licenses, some may be free only for non-commercial use, and a few may even have come with collections or software that is only available to paying customers. In the seventh section on Languages,, I’ll include a brief sample of text rendered into each language and displayed using the relevant font. For now, all that really needs to be noted is that I have chosen fonts that ‘look right’ for the language as I envisaged it for this campaign.

Similarly, a number of modified modern languages have been used as a shortcut for simulating the various fantasy tongues. The goal was not to create a genuine language, not even to be consistent, but simply to create an appropriately non-English “sound” with the right sort of accents and noises. I hope no speaker of any named language takes offense – or undue compliment – from the use of their native tongue. Such usage says nothing about the language itself, and even less about the people who actually use it; at most it is a commentary on the sounds and flow of syllables that result to English-speaking ears.

Some of the languages fall into multiple categories. While it might be redundant, each language description is included in all relevant categories.

Kingdom:

Also known as common. Despite the name, this is not the usual Lingua Franca used for cross-cultural communications. Written Form: uses Roman characters.

Elvish:

Also known as Elven. Has three dialects, the skill conveys capacity in all three. Quenya is conversational Elvish, and the written form used by elves to pen quick notes. Sindarin is formal language, used for addressing Nobility, making official reports, diplomacy, etc. Naldori is a language used only for singing and for religious services. To the untrained ear, these are identical languages, differing more in manner and tone than in pronunciation. Sindarin is respectful, while Naldori is lilting and almost soporific.

Elvish Names:

• The elvish alphabet contains no equivalent letters to ‘c’, ‘ch’, ‘g’, ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘t’ (but does have ‘th’), ‘v’, ‘x’, and ‘z’. Use ‘s’ for ‘tt’ and ‘fl’ for ‘j’. Any ‘s’ followed by a consonant is doubled unless it is followed by a double consonant.
• Otherwise as per PHB.
• For inspiration, use French translations of what you want the name to mean and replace or remove letters that elvish doesn’t have. Use ‘Fe’ for ‘The’ and remove all spaces between words. Then tweak the result for a flowing pronunciation.

Written Form: Translate as per the Naming notes above. Then reformat using the Elvish fonts Tengwar Cursive, Tengwar Sindarin, and Tengwar Sindarin respectively.

Dwarven:

Also known as Dwarf.

Dwarvish Names:

• Dwarvish names emphasize A’s, K’s and Z’s. Replace all R’s with H’s.
• The syllable “Kha” often figures prominently and means ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ or ‘valuable’ or ‘important’ depending on the phrasing and pronunciation, much of which is inaudible to the human ear.
• Replace all S’s with Z’s.
• Otherwise as per PHB.
• For inspiration, use German, Hungarian or Russian translations of what you want the name to mean and replace or remove consonants as above.

Written Form: Translate as per the language notes above. Then reformat using a Dwarven Runes font.

Pious:

Also known as ‘Divine Speech’. Used exclusively for the conducting of human religious services and ceremonies, the way churches used to use Latin. It derives from one of the City-State languages (described separately below), making it the most ancient human tongue still in regular use. As such, it uses a lot of generic terms for more recent innovations; it has no descriptive terms or proper names for different non-human species, for example. Instead, it has a number of terms for describing an individual’s state of Grace, from “Irredeemable” through to “Most Holy”, which are applied to whole classes of non-human. “Heretics” might be Orcs or Elves or Fey or Wizards.

Pious is used for all formal church doctrines and holy books, and this blanket terminology shapes theological attitudes to non-human species. For example, the title ‘Paladin’ literally translates as Protector or Defender. As such, anyone who takes up arms to defend a Church may be blessed as a paladin by the church, and treated in the same way as would a Paladin, giving rise to such phrasing as ‘The Paladin then gathered to him paladins to oppose the heretic’.

This sample phrase also shows other aspects of Pious deriving from it’s age: (1) a stilted, almost pretentious, phraseology; and (2) collective nouns are used only for the subject, not the object; ‘The Heretic’ might be one or it might be a besieging army. The next phrase in this story might well be ‘And the Heretic were layed low by the holy might of the paladin.” Sentences tend to be short and declarative, with full stops used where commas might be expected. It is also normal practice to number each statement.

Note that this language is not taught to non-priests, though many laymen will gradually pick up phrases here and there. To render text into Pious, translate into Greek without font change, then add or subtract vowels as necessary to permit a smooth flow.

Pious is considered a Common tongue for Human Clerics and Priests, a Rare language for other humans, and an Obscure language for non-humans.

Written form: display translated text using a Greek language or appropriate mathematical Symbols Font.

Trade Tongue:

This human language is an evolution of Gypsy, described separately elsewhere, and is the most common lingua franca outside of the Shared Kingdoms. It has an extremely restrictive format, designed by discarding unnecessary terms and objects of reference. Every statement comes in three parts, which roughly translate as “You have,” “I/We have,” and “You/I/We could,”. The declarative mode is always used for the first two parts, which are statements of fact, and are always in the past tense; the third part is always tentative and suggestive in mode and always in the future tense. “We could” is always a proposal of action; the language has no terms for “I accept” or “I refuse”; these are indicated by one party performing an action proposed by the other. For example, consider the following exchange:

“You have many fine furs. I have nine silver coins. We could profit from an exchange.” (The speaker wants to buy a fur coat or cloak and offers 9 sp).

“You have nine coins. I have newly-tanned sable. You could earn more coins.” (The furrier rejects the offer, demanding a higher price).

“You have furs that have not yet fully cured. I have 2 golden coins. I could go to a different stall.” (The buyer counters the furriers arguement for a higher price, increases slightly the value of his offer and shifts the medium of exchange to gold, which is often more desirable, and threatens to go to a competitor – in other words, ‘take it or leave it’).

“You have a good eye. I have a fine family. We could share wine to celebrate an exchange.” (The seller accepts the bargain, to be sealed by a sip – less than a teaspoonful – of wine from a common mug.)

Notice that flattering the other side is inherently part of the exchange, but that the terms are very simple and could be quickly translated by either party with absolutely no knowledge of the other’s language, using signs and gestures.

Trade tongue is inherently diplomatic in nature, having expressly discarded everything that is not needed for the act of bargaining and simplifying what is left. It adds and subtracts words with every bargain and conversation, restricting itself to only those terms that are relevant to a particular negotiation.

A more highly-developed form of trade tongue in which whole paragraphs are dedicated to each of the three elements is the language of modern treaties and Diplomacy, capable of everything from ‘we demand your unconditional surrender or we invade’ to mutual defenses. When treaties are signed/accepted, they are rendered into the formal language of each party outlining their understanding of what the terms mean, but the actual treaty remains the common document in trade tongue. It is felt that this practice prevents either side from subverting the intent of a document through verbal trickery while leaving specifics loose enough to accommodate changes of circumstance.

Trade Tongue is also the primary mechanism by which terms and phrases from other languages enter Kingdom, as labels for new products and concepts.

Trade Tongue is best rendered by first writing the statements in the specified form and then translating only proper nouns into local languages, leaving everything else in plain English.

Creating RPG Languages The Modern Way

So now the big secret has been revealed! The easiest way to create an alien language is two-fold: Use a real language and apply a series of rules to it to create a consistent variation. Then use an appropriate font for the written form to make it LOOK alien.

Literal translations using the same rules make non-human character names easy and consistent.

No doubt readers can see the connection between the approach employed by my language generator and the techniques demonstrated above. And yet, without examples, it’s an incredibly difficult process to explain. Which is what lead to the current series of articles in the first place.

From this point in the series onwards, I’ll be concluding each article with a few tips on how to choose a language on which to model your artificial tongue, and how to come up with the rules – at least until I run out of tips to share! We’ll start with that in the next part. For now, I’ll leave you to get your heads around the concept itself.

In the next part of this series I’ll detail the Congressus Feyunctusora, the United Association Of Fey; Examine the Unusual Languages in Shards of Divinity; and share the first couple of tips on how to choose a real language on which to base your artificial construct.

But I like to interrupt series from time to time with an article that might be of value to people who might not be getting anything useful out of that series. It may be a day late (officially) but I have an article for this month’s Blog Carnival on adventuring in an Established Setting that I’d like to run…

I’m going to step aside from the usual practice of talking to GMs about how to improve their game for a few weeks in favor of what used to be a popular subject around the watercooler-analogue – and still causes game companies angst and sweaty nights, even today: the perceived value-for-money of game products.

If your perceived value is too low, it will obviously hurt sales. If your perceived value is too high, it will hurt sales just as badly. (Don’t believe me? I’ll get back to that, next time).

This is a subject that Johnn and I discussed at length by e-mail long before we got involved in the Assassin’s Amulet project, and it’s one that affects us all, whether we’re a customer or a producer. But before we can get into the question of perceived value, we need to look at actual value, and get some appreciation for the complexities of the subject and to put the discussions into context.

Dead-Tree Products through RPG history

A good place to start is to look at established pricing practices and their relationship to costs, because that’s the foundation of deciding the minimum price that can be charged for a product.

AD&D

I started my gaming experience with AD&D back in mid-1981. At the time, the volumes cost around A$18 each, which at the time was equivalent to US$10 each, plus air freight to Australia – a not inconsiderable factor, amounting to about a third of the total. At the time, the exchange rate was about A$1 = US$0.80. This was close to double the price of a standard paperback, and about half the price of a standard hardcover through a bookstore. It was also about the same price that was charged by University bookstores for general textbooks, thanks to the mass-production discounting possible when a book is going to be required by a large number of first-year students. The pricing immediately defined who the books were aimed at, and the target market responded through word of mouth.

What was interesting was that the volumes of rules were considered standalone products. You needed the Player’s handbook, but the GMs Guide was not considered essential – just nice to have. The Monster Manual, ditto. Deities & Demigods, double-ditto.

These were hardcover volumes, well-bound, with high production values for the time. The printing was black and white, most of the artwork was excellent, the paper was good quality and thick.

At the time I started GMing, a change of attitude swept through the local marketplace. The slightly-more-expensive GM’s Guide became the “essential to-have” – so long as one player had a copy of the PHB, that was considered good enough for a gaming table. Prices had also gone up somewhat, to about A$24 – inflation was a hot topic in Australia at the time, and this was perceived as just another example of it. But the cost of playing a game was still, typically, $24 for the DMG and $22 split 4-5 ways amongst the players – or about A$3 a head for the entire group.

Original Champions

A couple of years later, Champions reached our shores. This was a softcover, again with artwork that was better than acceptable for the most part (though a couple of illustrations looked decidedly amateurish – as always, the standard I used was “do I think I could do better?”). Binding was just a couple of staples. It cost about $10 or $15 and it was fully self-contained. It also had fewer pages than an AD&D volume, or at least that was the perception. But notice that spread amongst 4-players-and-a-GM, the total cost was still about $3 a head.

What was interesting was the way the game system was perceived from a marketing point of view. The slightly lower production values at one-third the price resulted in a general impression that this was a far more amateur effort than AD&D was – the prices of AD&D volumes was now nudging its way towards A$30 a volume, and there was a growing perception that they were overpriced. There was a lot of discussion in my local gaming circles over the value of binding. Perhaps the biggest difference was that the AD&D volumes were designed to be sold in a regular bookstore, while the Champions volume was designed to sell through a specialist game or comic shop. Different standards had to be applied, and there was considerable debate about which was the better direction, and what it all meant for the shape of the future of the hobby.

Nor was champions alone – there were a whole heap of other games coming out, and they all had similar prices and similar production values.

GURPS

Then GURPS came along in ’86 and seemed to straddle the fence. Its volumes were square bound paperbacks, and priced midway between the Champions products and AD&D, and that was what most of my local RPGers considered to be its masterstroke of genius. By now, the AD&D volumes were about A$35 a volume, and definitely considered overpriced – but that didn’t matter because we already owned them, anyway. Champions products had stayed about the same price, and Champions II and III weren’t considered essential anyway – they were add-ons to the original volume, which was still required to play the game.

But GURPS wasn’t fully self-contained – it had a core rules booklet of really cheap construction that came along with each genre pack, and a lot of the rules were contained outside of that core booklet. For the first time, multiple books were therefore required in order to play the game – the fact that one was free and only about 8 or 12 densely-packed pages long didn’t seem to make any difference. The fully-self-contained-games had produced a subtle shift in thinking that no-one really appreciated at the time. GURPS seemed to be something of a slow-starter in terms of sales, as a result. It was a long time before anyone I knew started playing it – the best part of a decade, in fact, in the mid-90s – though a number of copies of the odd individual volume were bought and modified for use in Champions campaigns! How typical this was, I couldn’t say.

2nd Ed

That was the big change in climate when D&D 2nd Ed arrived in 1989. Instead of one book being seen as essential and the rest as either add-ons or community property, for the first time it was perceived by the local gaming community that you had to buy all three volumes of “The Core Rules”, now priced at about A$40 each. Fourty times three is A$120, divided five ways is $24 a head – Eight Times the price per head that we had been used to. (The D&D Basic Set never really got off the ground here – but it fostered and played into this sense of ‘the core rules’.)

That did not go down very well. 2nd Ed sunk like a rock on the local games market. Nor was there any giant leap in production values (one color plus B&W interiors) or page count to justify the price tag. Instead, people started looking to different games to play – games that had been published in the square-bound soft-cover format. D&D seemed to have priced itself out of the market.

Ch 4e

Also in 1989, Champions 4th edition became the first edition of the game to be published in hardcover format. At about 250 pages length, and costing A$60, it was half the price of a set of core D&D rules and had similar production values to AD&D plus a slick, modern look (a definite step up in that respect compared to the previous game) – and was right on the edge of what was considered fair value for money. There was a sense that this was what TSR should have done with 2nd Ed – which might not have been entirely fair to TSR, as anyone with knowledge of old-school printing will appreciate. But right or wrong, in the eyes of the local gaming community, they had gotten it right and TSR had not.

The 80s and 90s were a good period in Australia in a lot of respects. We had gone from seeing ourselves as a third-tier country to being the second-best nation in the Commonwealth (with apologies to Canada, who was viewed as dominated by the US) and pushing hard for the top slot. Rock bands like AC/DC, Little River Band, INXS, and Midnight Oil were proving that in terms of modern culture, we were equal to anywhere else; the rest of the Commonwealth regularly came to Australia to play cricket and get beaten by the best team in the world; we had a better public health system and welfare system than anywhere else in the world, Australian universities were world-class (with a lot of students coming from overseas for their education), and we had kicked the Yank’s tails in the America’s Cup and sold the TV-soap Neighbours to the UK where it was a monster hit.

Disposable income was up, and there was the sense that we could pick and choose from the best of the rest of the world and made it our own – without all the baggage. Even the occasional recession was nothing more than a stumble along the way. We were as good as anyone else in the world, and better per capita if our relatively small population base was taken into account. Our staging and telecast of the Formula 1 GP set new standards and the rest of the world had to lift their game in order to catch up.

All that culminated in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, which was the nation’s coming-out party, the event where we clued everyone else in on just how good we were. The ambition was to set a new standard in every aspect of hosting and running a major event. We didn’t just want to be told that they were ‘the best games ever’, we wanted to make it a self-evident fact to every athlete, official, and tourist. (Our national pride seems to have eroded a bit since then – or maybe we’ve become more realistic. Oh, well – it was fun while it lasted).

3e

That was the atmosphere into which D&D 3e hit the local markets. Full colour, glossy paper – and A$70+ a volume. The perception was still that you needed all three core rulebooks in order to play, and – what’s more – everyone had to have their own copies, rather than one shared set. But times had changed so radically in Australia since the release of 2e that none of this was considered excessive. We drooled and gosh-wowed over the production values, which set a new standard in the value-for-money stakes.

3e Supplements

And, with the new standard, came the OGL explosion. These redefined perceived value in physical products and set standards that still hold to this day. If a game supplement had full-page artwork and hardcover binding, on good paper, it was worth $50-60, even in Black & White – depending on the value of the content. If it had black-and-white art that wasn’t full-page, hardcover binding, and good paper, it was worth A$30-$40. And these were all of a similar physical size, and hence had a similar page count.

If it was soft-covered but square-bound, with full-page art, and a similar page-count, it was worth A$30-$40. Halve the page count, and you reduced the perceived value a bit more than 25%; double it and it increased by about 25%. If it wasn’t square-bound, it was worth no more than A$25 – depending on the content.

Note that word, Content. This is the first time it has really gotten a mention here. Prior to the OGL explosion, there was a general perception that all content was of generally equal value – it was a game system that you wanted to play, or it wasn’t. The perceived merits played into the decision to purchase, but not into the relative pricing expectations. Now that changed, and content desirability became a genuine consideration in determining perceptions of value for money. Instead of an all-or-nothing, there were nuances and value judgments involved – and that was ultimately the result of there being so much material being published that you had to pick and choose, most people could not afford to buy it all. heck, I Still don’t have all the 3e stuff that I want!

Ch 5e

These were the standards against which Champions 5th edition was measured when it was published in 2002. At 372 pages, it was as physically thick as any two of the AD&D 3e core rulebooks or game supplements. Hardcover, black and white, no full-page art – but it cost A$100, and that was perceived as a little on the high side, by about $10-20 – so much so that a lot of people held off on buying copies. In fact, I never did buy one – I was loaned one by another gamer who wasn’t using it because he could borrow another, and then inherited the one that he was borrowing when its owner passed away.

AD&D 4e

All sorts of factors that had nothing to do with production quality and cost impacted the success or failure of 4e. So much so that it’s not really worth going into in any detail within this discussion. Suffice it to say that the volumes are consistently a little thinner, the art a little better, and the prices a little higher – and all of that’s a problem when pricing expectations haven’t changed. Any two of those would have been fine, but the combination of all three created a predisposition toward negativity, an unwillingness to take a chance, given the general climate of negativity that was its overall reception. But these was just a part of a much larger set of problems (real and perceived) that afflicted 4e’s reception.

Ch 6e

There’s no denying that Ch 6e is big. In two volumes because it was too big for one, it totals something on the order of 600 pages, maybe more. All full colour, and on glossy paper – but generally, not full-page art on every page. One costs A$120, and the other A$100, from memory. The two volumes are thicker than all three 3.5 Core rulebooks, combined – and that’s without making allowance for the presence of an extra set of covers on the 3.5 side of the ledger.

During the writing, there was a lot of noise made about a complete top-to-bottom reappraisal of the system concepts that got a lot of people excited. The reality was ultimately disappointing. There’s a lot of better explanations and supplemental material included, but in terms of changed system mechanics there is not really a lot to justify the purchase. And in the context of not-a-whole-lot-that’s-new, despite the page count, the perceived value-for-money evaporated very quickly. That’s why the Pulp Hero campaign that I co-GM is still using 5e – and why only one of the participants has bought a copy of 6e.

If the rewrite had addressed some or all of the major flaws that have always existed in the Hero System game mechanics, and been published to a lower production standard and correspondingly lower price tag, we might have converted to the new system years ago.

Like 4e, then, there are external factors of disillusionment and unfulfilled hype that compromise the ability to extrapolate lessons concerning the perception of value-for-money from its release.

Pathfinder

That really leaves only one objective measurement source for assessments of Value-for-money: Pathfinder. Production standards are easily the equal of 3e, if not even better. The Core Rulebook weighs in at 575 pages – almost twice the size of the PHB. There are still three core volumes – add the Gamemastery Guide and Bestiary – plus a couple of supplementary volumes. The Core Rulebook costs about A$100, the others about A$80 – which is, like 4e was, still way too much to buy on spec (I have copies because I want to be able to write Pathfinder-compatible game materials, not to play – though I may migrate my 3.x campaigns to Pathfinder at some future point).

The secret to Pathfinder’s success is compatibility. I have, at current count, something on the order of 110 3.x/d20 game supplements; at an average value of A$60 each, that’s over six-and-a-half-thousand dollars worth of investment in my game. Of these, I have bought about 1/2, been given about 1/6th, and inherited the rest. In theory, Pathfinder lets me use all of it.

And that doesn’t count the investment in PDFs, easily another thousand or two dollars, which I’ll talk about in more detail a little later. Including the 3.x core volumes and the 5 volumes of Pathfinder core volumes, that’s about nine thousand dollars, new.

Unfortunately, that very compatibility contaminates the question of value for money, when we’re talking about game systems, giving it an artificial leg-up.

Crystal Ball Gazing

So the six-million-dollar question (possibly more) is how the perception of value-for money is going to affect D&DNext when it finally comes out? After all, anyone who got into gaming with 4e and has bought all the books for it has probably made an investment of A$2000 or more in that section of the hobby – on a par with what I had invested in 3.x when 4e came out. If WOTC are to succeed in wooing the marketplace with D&DNext on the scale of a 3rd Ed success, they have to respect the investments of three diverse groups: the Pathfinder players, the 3.x die-hards like myself, AND the 4e players. They can’t simply repackage either 3.x or 4e and expect it to fly off the shelves. That’s an incredibly difficult task to pull off.

The secret to success will probably be a conversion process bundled with the D&DNext rules that make it possible (but slightly inconvenient) to employ all that existing material – creating the capacity for each game company (including themselves) to release an updated edition of each book that has all the conversion done, and that cleans up any outstanding issues or things that didn’t quite work out as intended. Some game companies will no longer exist to update their materials, but others – if the licensing permits – will be able to publish new D&DNext-compatible supplements to take their place. Is that what they have in mind? I have no idea.

The problem is that it has been over a decade since 3.0 was released, and in all that time, there has been no clear indication as to how the public perception of value-for-money in dead-tree products has shifted. That it will have shifted is almost as certain as anything can be – but trying to quantify the change is almost impossible. And that makes it incredibly hard to determine what price the market will support for D&DNext dead-tree products when they appear.

Overpricing will inevitably lead to failure. People will just keep playing pathfinder and 3.x.

Underpricing will eat into profits – but might be a smart move. Kids who were just entering school when 3.x was published will be in Universities and junior members of the workforce when D&DNext is published – targeting that market with lower-priced materials, even at an initial loss, would permit room for people to buy the system on spec, to take a chance. Once it has an established reputation and market, the losses can be made up with the release of updated supplementary materials. Just as printer manufacturers price their printers at or below cost, and make their profits on the inks, WOTC could price the core rules at or below cost – possibly even publishing a plain (“cheap”) and a deluxe set of editions, and sell the same books to the same people twice (assuming the system is any good, of course). Buy the black-and-white cheap paperback versions on spec, then upgrade to the full-colour deluxe versions.

This would also be cognizant of the elephant in the room, whose impact on perceived value-for-money of dead-tree publications has not been appraised – but which will also inevitably play a part – the rise of the online world and the PDF.

A Breakdown Of Production Costs – a comparison for an online world

The cost of producing a game supplement can be easily broken down into several categories. A comparison of the costs of dead-tree product costs in an online world makes for some very interesting reading and some startling insights.

1. Writing

It takes just as long to write 1000 words for use in a dead-tree publication as it does to write them for a PDF. This is one cost that doesn’t change in an online world.

That’s not to say that new efficiencies can’t be found. Wikipedia makes it much faster and easier to do basic research. Name generators can make it quicker to create characters, as can RPG software. Other utilities can make your work more efficient, or more professional – automated spellchecking, for example, makes it faster to write because accuracy can wait. But all of these have a relatively small effect; writing creatively, ultimately, is about the speed of developing ideas and the effectiveness of organizing and structuring them, and those have not changed very much.

Naturally, that means that the production cost of writing remains unchanged.

2. Art

Art in the internet age is almost as unaffected as writing – except that you can produce artwork online, if you know how. Sometimes, that can take longer, or be less effective than art using traditional media. The real savings offered by digital art stem from the things that no longer need to be done to it in order to use art in a game product: embedding the art directly in the manuscript for printing without the need for photography and related processing. While this is not an insignificant savings, its absence simply means that more art can and will be included in any given game supplement – the overall art budget will be exactly the same.

3. Editing, Revision, and Layout

Almost every advance in terms of the writing of a body of text falls into one of these categories, so this production cost would seem to have diminished as a result. That’s not necessarily a good thing; it can take time to polish any communication to make it function properly, and sometimes the editing is so quick and easy that you scarcely has time to realize what isn’t explained very clearly, never mind exploring alternative ways of phrasing the message you are trying to impart. Version control becomes a new problem with its own set of headaches, as well. Finally, counteracting the impact on production costs is the need to prepare material in multiple formats and handle conversion problems.

When we were working on Assassin’s Amulet, I compiled the final draft of the text in Word, adding the graphics as necessary. Johnn was using a different version of Word, adding to the complexity of the operation, and meaning that it all had to be done by the one set of hands. The results proved too large for Word’s built-in export-to-PDF function, so we turned to external conversion software. The software that I use most frequently for the purpose kept crashing due to the size of the finished product. A second insisted on saving the graphics as separate PDFs to the text, heaven only knows why. A third worked, but frequently introduced typographical corruption into the finished PDF – you had to convert the source document two or three times to get a usable product out the end. It also failed to preserve embedded internal links, and could not cope with external links spread over more than one line, which required re-editing the document. The ideal solution would have been to use Adobe Acrobat to perform the conversion, but it’s expensive – and additional costs were to be avoided if at all possible.

To publish in the Kindle format, the pages would also have needed to be saved in html5 format – and that’s a standard that neither Johnn nor I was familiar with. The book might also have needed reformatting, and there was an unresolved question about color graphics.

To publish as a dead-tree product, further questions about image resolution would need to be answered.

All this adds up to needing to do the task more than once – so technology needs to make this operation at least three times as efficient as it used to be just to break even – and that’s completely ignoring the time requirements of learning a new format. I still have occasional nightmares about it. :(

4. Printing & Binding

This is the first production cost that modern PDFs completely bypass. And it can be a big-ticket item. The more copies you print of something, the lower the price per unit through economies of scale – but the more you have to invest up-front, money that has a good chance of being wasted if the product doesn’t sell (see Remainders, below).

Actually, I should probably say “almost completely bypass” – because there’s a new kid on the block in this category called Print-On-Demand. But what are the formatting and layout requirements? Suddenly, a question that was hopefully settled back in the previous category comes back again. Like doing a Kindle version, this was something we wanted to get into with Assassin’s Amulet but never had the time to do. And then we had the question of how to handle some of the maps that couldn’t be simply printed and bound into a print-on-demand book – a problem we never found a solution for.

5. Distribution

Electronic distribution is a lot cheaper than dead-tree product distribution – in fact, it’s virtually free – so long as you sell through someone who already has their website and shopping cart systems set up. E-commerce can still get expensive to set up, configure, and debug, but it’s getting cheaper and more user-friendly all the time.

Compare that with the expense of shipping physical products around. Weight becomes a big factor, and then there’s warehouse space, and the administrative needs of distribution. Small wonder that specialist organizations used to deal with the headaches – for a fee.

6. Marketing

Marketing. Supposedly, it can be done on a shoestring for nothing but time. Don’t believe it.

A decent marketing plan requires advertising; it requires contests (which have administrative costs and also cost in free content, and every copy you give away is a potential sale that you don’t get paid for); it requires investments in public relations, and press releases, and so on and on and on. If we were physically in the US and had a dead-tree product, we would be looking a booth at one or more conventions, and those aren’t cheap, either. Then there are the production costs of marketing materials like fliers and advertising and, well, it just keeps going on and on.

These days, even if you’re talking about a dead-tree product, you have electronic freebies and samples that you need to produce – effectively, a whole new electronic book, probably smaller. Then you have to remember that reviewers will base their opinions of your real product on the quality of those freebies and samplers – so you need to make darned sure that the goodies are representative without giving away the best bits.

None of this changes very much when you’re talking about an e-book instead of a dead-tree publication. It’s still a nightmare.

7. Management

Everything that goes on needs to be managed. Communications are easier than ever, these days – which simply means that you are expected to spend more time communicating. And that’s all dead time when you aren’t being creative. The bigger a project, the longer it takes, and the more it all needs to be managed – in fact, the management requirement is probably an exponential factor of page count.

And that’s true regardless of the nature of the publication format. E-books have a slightly smaller management element because they usually take less time to travel from inception to publication – but not necessarily a very large amount less. If it takes six months to create and publish an E-book, it would take six-months plus perhaps a month to a month-and-a-half to create and publish the equivalent dead-tree product – most of it working with, and waiting for, the printer, plus allowing time for the printer to miss his deadlines, and ditto the distributor. That’s a 25% increase – and it’s probably an extreme example.

8. Administration

This is something that is quite separate from Management. It’s getting all the paperwork done, and cutting through all the red tape. It’s making sure that people that need to be paid are paid, and on time, and that there’s the money on hand to do it, and that the bills are paid, and that anything that needs to be bought is sourced, and so on and on.

Administrative overheads are slightly time-based (the longer a project runs, the more admin there will be), and slightly size-based (the larger and more complicated a project is, the more admin there will be), and slightly people based (the more people that are involved in a project, the more admin there will be) – but mostly it’s project-based and independent of all of the above. In fact, some of it happens whether there’s a project or not!

It doesn’t matter, therefore, whether the end-product is electronic or physical. The overhead is just there, regardless.

9. Taxes

Taxes are a fact of life for almost everyone. Personal, business, state, federal, capital-gains, service taxes, payroll, medical, superannuation – it’s a maze. If you have to pay a tax bill on income or expenditure and not simply on profits, you had darned well better build that cost into your pricing models. This is another item that can be very different in an online world – prices are smaller, and so may not exceed tax thresholds. But be darned sure you know what your liabilities are. And beware of sliding scales – the percentage might increase with success, in such a way that you actually take less money out the door at the end of the day.

10. Legal

Similarly, legal costs are a fact of life. You can try and get away without professional guidance if you want – it’s all a question of how much risk you want to live with. Licenses, copyrights, warranties, advertising codes, contracts – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Again, scale makes a difference, at least in theory – E-books are cheaper and generate lower revenues, and so are less likely to cause major upset than a dead-tree product that violates something, or cost you less when the time comes. And if you believe that’s the reality, there’s some swampland I’d like to interest you in, a guaranteed investment…

11. Overheads

Every business has overheads on top of all of the above. These could be printer paper, electricity, gas, coffee, rent, air fares, accommodation – you name it. In theory, a smaller operation that produces PDFs has smaller overheads – but the larger organizations that publish dead-tree products get to spread that cost over more copies of the product, so this production cost is probably smaller in comparison.

12. Profit margin

One economic theory holds that profits are whatever is left after deducting costs from income. Another is that you should build a minimum profit margin into your price per unit, just to make sure that the end price results in a profit.

If you subscribe to the latter school, then the profit margin is a production cost that has to be met, regardless of whether you’re talking about a dead-tree product or an electronic one.

13. Commissions

Someone has to sell the product when you finish it. They will expect to be paid for doing so. Commission structures need to be clearly understood before you set your final price, or you can discover that all the profits are going to the vendors and there’s nothing left for you. And that’s true of any retail operation you product gets sold through, regardless of format.

14. Remainders

Economies of scale mean that it’s cheaper to print a LOT of copies of a dead-tree product than a few. That permits you to lower the price, or increase the profit margin, or both. But it means that if copies don’t sell, you have a lot of deadwood on the premises – in which you have invested a great deal of production expense. Even if your product is successful, you can still end up with hundreds of copies floating around that no-one wants.

That leaves a dead-tree publisher with two choices: they can build the anticipated cost into their pricing model from the start, or they can risk not doing so. Every copy that is remaindered has a certain production cost, and those costs have to be met from the profits on those copies that are actually sold. If you’re a really large book publisher, you can afford to take a risk, confident that the remainder costs of one book will be paid by the sales of a more successful book; I don’t think any RPG publisher is that big, and possibly never will be.

This expense is one that electronic publishers don’t have to worry about, because a customer’s copy of a product only materializes when one is wanted. It’s an on-demand operation.

And that’s the big attraction of print-on-demand options – because that’s another way of avoiding the remaindering nightmare. The cost per printed copy might be higher – but it’s a known price, not an unknown overhead that is only revealed after a product is released. It enables book vendors to take a chance with smaller repercussions, and that’s a good thing.

Conclusions

So, when you add it all together, what do you get? Half the major costs are creative, and don’t change. A number of the lesser costs scale to some extent, making smaller, cheaper products potentially more profitable. The biggest differences between dead-tree and electronic production costs are printing, binding, distribution, and the remainder risk.

And that’s where things get interesting – because the higher the production standards of the product, the larger the risks those production costs pose. The more, in other words, you are betting on a product being a success.

PDFs take much of the gamble out of a product. But even so, the expectation is that a product can only be sold electronically for a little over half what it would cost in an equivalent dead-tree format.

It doesn’t take much of a browse through RPGNow to realize that this pricing expectation doesn’t match the reality. The reasons for that discrepancy are something that I’ll look at in part two…

* This article was updated on 23 Sept 2012 *

Metagame Origins & Status

Bher Yuralvus is one of the least-detailed of the Shared Kingdoms. Several Paragraphs of information concerning it appear to have gone missing during the editing process of the House Rules, so that what little remains is full of non-sequitors. As a result, most of what is presented in this article will be new even to the players of the campaign.

In conceptual origins, Bher Yuralvus owes its existence to a lot of seemingly-unrelated sources. The first is the Abbey at Sarth from Raymond E. Feist’s “Silverthorn.” The second is a mobile book van that takes library books to and from the homes of the elderly and infirm in my local neighborhood. A third is some musing on the unionization of Sages and Book copiers, filtered through a bit of “Yes, Prime Minister” and the “Mythadventures” series by Robert Asprin – with a little of the Library from the University of Magic from Ankh-Morpork thrown in around the edges. There is also a little of the Encyclopedia Galactica from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series (especially the first volume) in there. Finally, there’s more than a little of Tolnedra from the Belgariad series by David Eddings mixed in to bind it all together. And if that sounds like a bit of a mélange, it’s because it is!

A Blunt Political Summary

Bher Yuralvus is officially an Independent City-State, but in practice it is a Constitutional Monarchy that protects the ordinary citizens, perhaps the most egalitarian of the human kingdoms. Politically, it plays most of the other kingdoms against Causa Domusora, which in turn, spends a lot of its political time and effort trying to force Bher Yuralvus into their republic. Bher Yuralvus has the largest collection of written works imaginable, and makes its living from granting others access to its facilities – for a substantial fee. Writing and publishing are the most important industry, ranked equal in importance to all other industries combined. The domestic administration of the Kingdom is in second place, and everything else is lumped together as “support industries”. These three interests form a triumvirate of competing and cooperating power blocs.

Bher Yuralvus, of all the human Realms represented within the 12 Kingdoms, has a peerage least like the common model. Its ruler bears the title Primoris Interpar (‘First Among Equals’). He holds this position for life, or until he chooses to relinquish it, at which time a new Primoris Interpar is chosen by the Concilium Philologus Civitas (‘Council Of Learned Citizens’).

Membership of this body is achieved:

• by appointment of the Primoris Interpar;
• by becoming Presertim Custodia (‘Chief Custodian’) of the Endless Library;
• by being appointed Caput Etcapitis Topica (Department Head) by the current Presertim Custodia, the number of department heads being set equal to the number of public appointees by the Primoris Interpar (less one for the Presertim Costodia);
• or by popular acclaim amongst the merchants, tradesmen, and farmers of the district controlled by the city, who elect sufficient representatives to match the number of department heads, plus one.

In practice, this produces three competing power blocs of nominally equal size; the citizens of the City & surrounds, the Endless Library, and the established administration, with the current Primoris Interpar holding the balance of power.

The winner must achieve 75% approval amongst the Council of Learned Citizens. As a result, no two of these command sufficient seats on the council to elect a candidate, even were they to unite behind one; as a result, promises and politics are rife as power brokers forge deals and alliances. The necessity of gaining at least partial support within all three power blocs means that candidates cannot afford to ignore any of the three power bases. Candidates are not permitted to be members of the Council, and it is normal for the executive’s representatives on the council who opposed the eventual winner to be replaced by supporters and the failed candidates with whom deals were brokered. The age and health of the candidates thus have a material effect on who is willing to deal and who is not. Over the years, this has produced a number of ‘noble families’ who dominate for a time before retreating into less prominent social positions, only to rebuild their support networks and reemerge as the dominant force some generations later.

The council, as a body, exists to advise the Primoris Interpar, and many of its members also serve in other capacities – chief of the watch, master of ceremonies, head of protocol, chancellor, etc. The size of the Council has been known to vary from time to time; by dictating the number of positions he appoints, an incoming Primoris Interpar controls the size of the Council. The Library contingent sets a maximum to the number of representatives from each faction through the number of departments within the library; it is quite acceptable for a department head not to serve on the council, but if there are not enough departments, the Primoris cannot force them to create more.

A glimpse behind the curtain

The above is all that the PCs were told of Bher Yuralvus before play began. Everything else in this article will be new to them, and will usually be out-of-character knowledge to them. In part that’s due to the origins of the “Kingdom” and in part it’s because of the way Sages operate in the Shared Kingdoms.

Literacy and Numeracy in the Shared Kingdoms

Overall, the average rate of literacy is somewhere between 3% and 8%, and the numeracy rate – defined as any capability beyond the count-to-eleven (one for each finger and one for luck) standard of mathematics – is a little below that. Literacy and Numeracy vary from Kingdom to Kingdom, however, as well as from race to race. Most elves are literate, but very few are numerate, for example, while most Gnomes are numerate but very few are literate in the traditional sense.

Most people can’t read or write. Of those who can, perhaps one in 100 can read-and-write in a language other than their own. That means that most expertise is generational, handed down from master to apprentice or father to son. There are those who suggest that the differences in the way they think as a result of being literate is the main difference between Sorcerer and Wizard, though all concerned would vehemently deny that. In such an environment, there is plenty of opportunity for the travelling expert, who wanders into town, sets up his shingle for a few months, answers the questions of the locals on whatever problems are confronting them, and then moves on to another community.

When the twelve tribes were scattered (eleven if you accept the theological dogma of the Verus Fidesora, who provided the “origin scroll” presented piecemeal in the previous post in this series), knowledge was conveyed by Gypsies who (instead of settling down into a single community wandered between them). One of the gypsy’s habits was to acquire from the various communities they visited any books that had survived, so that the expertise they contained could be dispensed to all. They traded expertise for goods and goods for books which gave them more expertise.

At first, these gypsies were welcomed, because they provided essential commodities and services to communities who didn’t have them; but as these communities stabilized and established their own connections with the providers of merchandise, the habits of living off the land and taking whatever they needed when they found it became resented and the services they provided became less necessary. Most of the gypsies were forced to settle down and integrate with one community or another. Most became the founders of the Merchants Empire (Ineodolus Imperascora), but a few found the power of expertise to be more compelling than trade. In time, these Gypsies founded a town of their own as a central trading point amongst themselves – Bher Yuralvus.

As new books were written, copies found their way to Bher Yuralvus, until it became the Endless Library that is known today.

Consulting Sages

A sage will charge a fee for answering a question posed to him to the best of his personal knowledge. Such answers are immediate.

He will charge a larger fee for searching through his personal collection of copies of books (the originals remain in Bher Yuralvus). Such answers usually take a day or two.

He will charge a still larger fee for sending an adventurer or merchant to purchase a copy of one or more specific references from the endless library that he feels may contain pertinent information. A cross-indexed list of books held (with copying prices) and the subjects contained therein is published every decade by the Endless Library. Generally, the most relevant pages are copied first and sent as a dispatch to the Sage, to be followed by the rest of the manuscript; the Sage himself must bind it. He will often annotate his pages with research from other sources, eventually writing and publishing one or more books of his own, which he lodges with the Library. Every time one of his books is copied, he receives a commission from the Library, paid to him annually as a deduction to his taxes owed. These taxes are based on the cumulative number of reference books he has obtained in the course of his life from the Endless Library, and a lesser fee for each work inherited from a prior sage. The greater the expertise in a particular subject of a sage, the more highly-valued are his contributions to the subject. A preliminary answer – from just a page or two of relevant documentation – will take one-to-four weeks, while a more complete answer may take three-to-six months, depending on the location of residence of the sage at the time.

If the sage is “forced” to return to the library to conduct his own research into a complicated or subtle question, he will refuse to nominate a date, but instead will contract his “exclusive” services for a period of time – at the end of which, he may or may not have an answer. Some sages may be “exclusively” contracted to half-a-dozen individuals at the same time.

The Death of a Sage

Because literacy is relatively low, and because Sages like to translate their works into obscure languages, most communities will happily accept the 1gp reward per volume that is returned to the library from a Sages’ personal collection when a Sage dies, if there is no apprenticed heir to the collection. Some nobles – amongst whom the literacy rate is profoundly higher – have tried to hold onto all or part of such collections from time to time. The Library is happy to permit this, in return for an annual fee for that permission. The fee (1gp per hundred pages or part thereof, per volume, per year) is sufficiently high that no noble will hold onto a book that he cannot read, or that does not contain directly-useful information to him. A well-educated noble might have as many as twenty books on ‘loan’ from the Library in this way. Some nobles write their own books and ‘donate’ the manuscripts to the Library as an offset – such books are generally valued at up to one half what a sage of equivalent expertise would produce.

A few nobles, from time to time, make the mistake of refusing to pay these fees. Bher Yuralvus simply withholds from those nobles, and from the communities beholden to them, the services of their members until such time as the economic foundations of the nobles authority have been reduced by the debt owed, ten-fold. They will then subsidize a raiding party from amongst the noble’s political enemies to retrieve their stolen property, granting those enemies the benefits of their expertise for free in the planning of the mission; it is well-known that plans to the dwellings of all nobles are sequestered within the pages of the Endless Library.

There have also been cases where the reward for the return of a Sage’s library – often equal to the annual income for a village of a decade, or more – has tempted individuals to hasten the demise of the Sage. This is an extraordinarily bad mistake to make, as Bher Yuralvus will happily pay, even under suspicious circumstances, while quietly investigating the circumstances of the death with experts in the human body, monster lore, and/or whatever else may be relevant. Since no-one not of the Endless Library knows what expertise it contains and confers, there is perpetual uncertainty as to what its experts can uncover. If, after investigation, those suspicions appear well-founded, the Library will exact a terrible revenge on the behalf of the murdered sage – they will simply instruct every sage who visits that realm or deals with it’s citizens to lie to them half the time in such a manner that the results will be the opposite of those intended. Rather than instructions on how to combat a blight amongst the crops, or a coughing sickness amongst a herd, or how to design and construct a large hall safely, the blight will spread, the herd will be devastated, the hall – after much expense – will collapse and perhaps kill many of the workmen. This ‘treatment’ will continue for the expected remaining lifetime of the Sage, plus a punitive period based on his reputation, plus a day for every gold piece extorted from the Library with the original heinous act, plus compound interest.

The Dispersal Of Expertise – the rules

The public face of Bher Yuralvus are the sages, who are each experts in a given field. Without such expertise, skill levels are effectively capped at 10. Education and tutoring by such sages in specific subjects – frequently bestowed apon young nobles at great expense – raises the skill level cap to 15. With inherently creative fields, this cap refers to the number of skill ranks that can be applied to a skill; in all other fields, it refers to the total skill (including characteristic modifiers). There are exceptions to all of the above in the case of individual skills (eg “Spot”, “Listen”) and characters with other kingdoms of origin; these are more GM guidelines than hard-and-fast rules. Any feat which confers a skill bonus also increases the cap, for example, and the cap does not apply to characters who have reached Epic Levels (character level 21+). Some skills (e.g. “Knowledge: The Planes”) have separate and firmer restrictions.

Bher Yuralvus – The Geography

The best lands had been thoroughly claimed by the time the Gypsy founders of Bher Yuralvus began to think about settling down. As a result, they were forced to choose less-than desirable real estate for their city. Bher Yuralvus is located to the East-northeast of Capitas Duodiem, about two weeks travel along good, well-maintained roads. The region is mountainous, the soils are poor, water flows are often seasonal and prone to flash-flooding on occasion. Although at the time of it’s founding it was located at the fringes of civilization, a millennia of growth has led to it being completely surrounded by communities with other political affiliations.

The more closely-located a community is (in terms of travel time) relative to Bher Yuralvus, the more easily it can consult the Sages and the more frequently Sages pass through. This both raises their level of dependence apon the expertise of the Endless Library, and increases their productivity and hence their value to the Kingdoms with which they are affiliated. All of this increases the level of sympathy towards the administrators of Bher Yuralvus at the expense of their loyalty to their nominal Kingdoms.

The Dispersal Of Expertise – Demographics

Bher Yuralvus and its adherents are numerically the smallest of the Shared Kingdoms in terms of urban population, numbering perhaps 20,000 citizens in total. Of these, about 12,000 live and work in Bher Yuralvus itself. A further 2,000 operate as a network of roving resource allocators, moving from community to community and making recommendations as to the type of expertise that each is most in need of at any given time. There are 1,000 guards and watchmen for the city, about 2,000 sages, and about 2,000 guards / assistants to each sage. The last 1,000 are apprentice Sages and scribes employed directly by Sages. These are supported by a further 15,000 or so who live and work in the farms surrounding the city.

These 15,000 direct supporters receive the benefits of free consultation with the Sages of the Library. As a result, their farms are amongst the most prosperous in the Shared Kingdoms, despite the relatively poor location of the city.

Bher Yuralvus – Political Authority

This numeric inferiority in no way translates to their level of political authority within the Shared Kingdoms. After close to a millennium of gathering intelligence, they are believed to have it within their power to obliterate any community or Kingdom within the collective political region. They make few allies and few care to make them enemies; they tend to hold themselves aloof from the more rough-and-tumble world of temporal politics and preserve their independence and authority. On those rare occasions when they do issue a statement backing some political initiative, their position invariably weakens the opposition and brings in supporters who would otherwise not involve themselves. They are the Experts.

Gaps In The Knowledge

There are three areas of knowledge in which Bher Yuralvus can be considered deficient.

The first is the realm of Theology, which is the province (jealously guarded) of the Versus Fidesora, and all things related to it. While historical records may exist within Bher Yuralvus of relevance, they will be incomplete and, to some extent, inaccurate. If you want to understand the Gods, don’t ask a Sage.

The second is the realm of Magic and related fields of knowledge, again the zealously guarded province of another member of the Shared Kingdoms, the Causa Domasura. Records within Bher Yuralvus may state that something was achieved by magical means, or that something was affected by Magic, but explanations are few and operating principles unknown.

The third is in the contemporary knowledge (and, by association, the future). Bher Yuralvus draws its primary expertise from the past records. More works are published to the Endless Library each decade than can be indexed and catalogued; the gap currently stands at 15 years and rises by six months with each passing decade, despite the best efforts of the administrators to anticipate future needs. They are experts at taking historical record and unearthing relevance from past events to the modern world; but perspective takes time to achieve. They are historians and lorekeepers, but their expertise is always necessarily behind the times. This tends to make them relatively conservative, politically. They are also predisposed to be documenters and observers rather than participants, which reinforces that conservatism.

That doesn’t mean that they have NO knowledge more recent than this 15-year gap; it simply means that their knowledge and perspective is no better when it comes to contemporary matters than anyone else’s, unless they can bring some analogous situation to light from past events, to use as a guide.

What they do tend to have, far more than any other human-oriented members of the Shared Kingdoms, is a near-Elvish appreciation for the Long View. They aren’t interested in immediate solutions to immediate problems; they always want to consider the ramifications and impact of those “immediate solutions” and “immediate problems” a decade or more down the track. This can make them slow to react in emergencies and to sudden changes in circumstances, but also makes them far less prone to knee-jerk reactions and flawed solutions.

The Art Of Maximizing Prosperity

Given the unique means of appraising the value of any given text, there is an artful compromise between concision and content. The more pages a work contains, the more valuable it is deemed to be – but the less accessible the information within a given work, the less valuable it is. The greatest prosperity for an individual author or Sage is thus somewhere in between these two extremes. It is quite common to ‘pad’ a treatise with examples, ruminations on significance, circumstances leading to insight, philosophizing, recipes for chicken soup – in fact, just about anything that is, or can be, (however marginally,) connected to the point in question. Construction of some of this padding from material in other languages as a means of practicing those languages is also commonplace. Sages work assiduously at ensuring that no discernable pattern can be applied to extract the ‘gems’ from their published works, lest someone rewrite them into some more concise and less profitable format – something that happens from time to time anyway.

Consider the logic: if an author extracts all the value from a published work of 100-odd pages and boils it down to 80 pages, then adds another 20 pages of more recent developments or insights into the subject, he makes the value a little more accessible than it used to be and adds to it; his book will thus become more ‘popular’ as a reference than the old book, and its he that will reap the ‘sales’ rewards. If, on the other hand, he takes that 100-page effort and pads it to 120 pages in length, then adds another 20 pages of more contemporary content, for most questions on the subject the older, more accessible work will remain the standard, and the only people who will buy his book will be those for whom that more up-to-date content is relevant. The more padded a text, the greater the temptation to edit it into a more condensed form in order to ‘steal’ the revenue from its author for oneself.

The other danger with making your work too concise is that it becomes too easily comprehended, and – once comprehended – the book itself becomes unnecessary. The paper in which Sir Isaac Newton published his three laws of motion consists of the three laws, a justification for them, and an analysis of the theoretical repercussions of the theory. So far as an expert on anything other than the writings of Newton is concerned, as soon as the laws become accepted, it’s the three laws that become valuable and the rest is padding that can be ignored. This can be great for the prospects of name recognition, but means that the work can be summed up and dispersed on less than a single page of text to any with the wit to understand it. Hence, there is no need to buy a copy of the paper, just a copy of that half-page – if that.

A good Sage gives answers in the form of instructions to be followed – and with minimal explanation. Explanation means that his services are less likely to be required tomorrow. However, they can’t go so far as to insert nonsense into the instructions or what minimal explanations they provide; if the techniques are wrongly applied to some similar problem in the future, he will be the person blamed (for giving bad advice) and its his reputation which will suffer. The perfect middle ground is to provide just enough legitimate explanation to aid plausibility to the answers.

Languages in Shards Of Divinity

All of which brings us to the question of how Languages are handled in Shards Of Divinity. Let’s start with The Linguist Feat:

The Linguist Feat

Linguist [General]

Effect: Permits the character to have up to (5+ INT bonus) in ranks in any given language skill. Permits the character to expend 3 skill points to obtain +1 rank in all currently known spoken or all currently known written languages.

Special: This feat may be taken multiple times. Each time after the first, the increase in permitted ranks reduces by 1 (from 5+ to 4+, then to 3+, then 2+, and then finally to the minimum of 1+). IE a character who has taken this feat 7 times can have a maximum of 5+4+3+2+1+1+1+INT BONUS = 17+INT BONUS ranks in any of their language skills.

NB: This feat does not permit the character to ignore the normal restrictions on ranks by character level.

General Rules for Languages in Shards Of Divinity

The languages section of the House Rules for Shards is so extensive that it’s been broken into seven (!) more manageable parts. This is the first part, which gives context to the five that follow…

Spoken Languages:

Available Spoken Languages are divided into 5 categories: native, common, unusual, rare, and obscure. These categories are differentiated by miscellaneous modifiers. The referee may (should) specify these individually for characters of unusual background, race, or ethnicity.

Characters who have taken the “Linguist” Feat have the option of expending three skill points simultaneously to obtain 1 rank in all languages known. Characters who have not taken this feat must expend skill points to get skill ranks individually for each language.

Characters always get their first rank in “Speak Language: [native language]” free. Characters of high INT may also get 1 rank in other languages free.

Languages cannot have more ranks than the characters’ INT bonus. Characters receive a +1 miscellaneous bonus in a language when they achieve the maximum permitted ranks.

Characters automatically get a +5 miscellaneous bonus in their native language. They also get a +2 miscellaneous bonus in other free languages.

Language Modifiers for obscurity:

• Common languages receive a -1 miscellaneous bonus for every 3 skill ranks [excludes native languages] e.g. a human character with a +5 INT bonus learns the common language “Elven” using ‘Speak Language’. The first rank receives a -0 miscellaneous bonus, giving a roll of INT BON +1 -0 =6. The second rank also receives a -0 bonus, so the roll becomes INT BON +2 -0 =7. The third rank receives a -1 modifier, so the net roll becomes INT BON +3 -1 which still =7. The fourth rank receives no additional modifier, so the net roll becomes INT BON +4 -1 =8. The fifth rank received no additional modifier from the number of ranks, but does receive +1 because this is the maximum number of ranks the character is currently permitted in the language, so the net roll becomes INT BON +5 -0 = 10.
• Unusual languages receive a -1 miscellaneous bonus for every 2 skill ranks [excludes native languages].
• Rare languages receive a -2 miscellaneous bonus for every 3 skill ranks [excludes native languages]. They are also considered cross-class skills unless native to the character. If the language is native to the character, he must specify a common language that will be considered cross-class for the character and which will receive the miscellaneous modifier instead.
• Obscure languages receive a -3 miscellaneous bonus for every 4 skill ranks [excludes native languages]. They are also considered cross-class skills unless native to the character. If the language is native to the character, he must specify a common language that will be considered cross-class for the character and which will receive the miscellaneous modifier instead.

The purpose of these modifiers is to reflect the increased difficulty of mastering an obscure tongue. As far as possible, they should be spread evenly. For example, to gain +1 net rank in an Obscure language, (assuming it is not a native tongue to the character), he must invest 2 skill points each level over 4 levels.

The referee should also assess the ‘relatedness’ of languages in his campaign. If the character has more ranks in a language than it’s relatedness to the language he is trying to speak, he gains +1 synergy bonus on his attempts to speak the language in question.

The relatedness of the languages in Shards Of Divinity will be the subject of closer scrutiny in future articles in this series.

If there is sufficient time available, “Speak Language” skill checks always succeed and should be secretly rolled by the GM. The ‘additional time’ system should be employed to determine how long it takes the character to communicate whatever he was trying to say. On a ‘1,’ the character has (perhaps inadvertently) insulted or complimented the person he was speaking with (depending on what he was trying to do) and the referee should determine the reaction if the character is speaking to an NPC. On a 20, the character always manages to convey the sense of what he was trying to say.

Instead of a take-10 / take-20 option, this campaign uses a time-based modifier. A poor roll means the character takes longer to succeed if the task is not time-critical; if time becomes a problem, he can stop short of full success. Similarly, and using the same house rules, a character can attempt a task that would nornally require a certain amount of time to achieve in less time than it would normally take, simply by taking a modifier to his skill check.

In a time-critical situation or when attempting to use the skill for a purpose other than direct communications, the player rolls the check unless otherwise stated and there may be success or failure outright.

Written Languages

Characters do not normally get the written form of any language (if there is one) for free, they have to expend ‘free’ language slots to purchase “Write Language” for the appropriate tongue. However, for each ‘free’ spoken language known that has a written form, a character entering play is permitted to roll a Speak Language Check against a DC of 20; if the check succeeds, the character exhibited sufficient talent at speaking the language in question that they were also taught (spoken ranks)/2 in the written form, free. If it fails, it may not be rechecked at a later time, the character has to expend skill points and starts at 0 ranks. Note that this check should also be performed for the character’s native language, if appropriate.

Expertise in the written form does not automatically advance with increased skill in the spoken form, and vice-versa.

Written languages for non-obscure languages are always 1 grade more obscure than the spoken version.

There may be exceptions to these rules specified by the GM for any given campaign. There may also be specific written-only languages made available by the GM in specific campaigns.

In the next part: More of the shared Kingdoms, and we look at Common Languages in Shards Of Divinity!

We’ve all had mental blanks from time to time. When we’re players, a GM presents a problem that should be a slam-dunk to solve – but we can’t seem to grasp the blindingly obvious. Similarly, there are times as a GM when a problem has an obvious solution that we completely overlook, and times when we need to identify the obvious solutions – so that we can make the problem more challenging for the PCs. After all, a game in which the PCs automatically succeed in everything they attempt is quickly going to become dull, or worse still, devolve into a battle of wits between players and GM. Which can be fun in its own way, at least for a time – but is usually not enough to sustain a game in the longer term, and carries the potential for abuse of power, accusations of abuse of power, and other sources of ill-will. I have seen long-term friendships torn apart by these problems.

When I find myself confronted by any of these situations, I think of a box.

Doesn’t make sense? Well, let’s see it in action…

The Alleyway Of Doom

Thugs chase your character into an alleyway. How do you get out again?

The alley is a box. It has two sides, a top and a bottom, a front and a back. Presumably there’s a wall or something in front of you preventing you from simply continuing to run.

Each of these box surfaces contains potential ways out. Think about each in turn.

• Above: can you fly? If not, this might not be very helpful.
   
• Left and right: are there unlocked doors? Are there ladders you can climb? Is there somewhere you can grab with a grappling hook and rope? Is there anything you can hide behind?
   
• In front: can you jump over the wall? Can you climb it? Can you break through it by sheer force?
   
• Below: is there a sewer hatch? Behind: is there anything you can use with a running jump to leap over the heads of the pursuing thugs? Is there anything you can use as an improvised weapon?
   

This is a relatively trivial example. But almost any problem can be treated as a box – and can be simpler to solve when thought of in that way.

The properties of a box

A box has six faces. It has four edges on one side, four edges on the opposite side, and four edges at right angles to both. It has eight corners. All these are valuable attributes to using a box as problem-solving tool.

The Box as a metaphor

The trick is to use the box as a simulation or metaphor for the problem at hand. If necessary, simplify the problem and treat it more generically to make it fit.

This is useful because a cube is the most complex solid most people can visualize completely, within their heads. I can picture more complex forms, but not the whole thing at the same time.

The Sides

You’ve passed through an extra-dimensional portal that’s closed behind you. Supposedly the portal was to lead you to a confrontation with your ultimate enemies – whoever and wherever they are. You find yourself standing on a flat rock in deep space – but you can breathe. Your magic doesn’t work, and you are quite alone here – no enemies in sight. How do you escape? That’s the problem.

Define each aspect or parameter of the problem as the side of a box. Think about each in turn, looking for ways to escape from the box in that ‘direction’. Some might be literal, others metaphoric.

In this case, Above and Below are literal – you’re standing on something (below) and there’s space above you. The face in front of you, you might designate as representing the enemies you are supposed to be confronting. The face behind you is where you’ve come from – the portal (even though it has apparently closed). The left-hand face is metaphoric – your magic doesn’t work, and you had been relying on it to enable you to escape any trap. The right-hand face is also metaphoric – you can see, so there’s light of some sort from somewhere. What are the other characteristics of this strange space?
 

• In front: could it be that the enemies you’re after are actually here – but hidden or invisible? Or that they can be summoned to this place? Is there anything that might function as a signal?
   
• Above: can you jump high enough to escape? Is there something – that, perhaps, you can’t see – that you can grab hold of and climb out of this place? There’s breathable air – can you manipulate it somehow? Can you make wings or a parachute and just jump off the rock? (That’s a last resort unless you can find something to tie a rope to – in which case, it’s safe to experiment.)
   
• Below: is there anything written on the surface? Are there switches that can be manipulated? Is the rock completely featureless? Can you feel any objects that you can’t see?
   
• Behind: is the portal still there, just invisible? Can you get back to it by walking backwards? If the rock on which you’re standing is spinning on it’s axis, the portal might reappear if you wait (same thing if there is any other sort of cyclic phenomenon). Can you throw a rope with a grappling hook back through it and bootstrap yourself out of the trap?
   
• Left: is there something that might be preventing your magic from working that can be deactivated? Can it be overloaded? Are other spells working? Magic devices? Might it simply be that you have to rememorize your spells? Is it simply your type of magic that’s not working – could other types work? Or perhaps only one type can be blocked at a time? Can I draw or construct a ward or defence against whatever is blocking the magic? Is it possible that this is all an illusion?
   
• Right: What else is working here? Presumably gravity is – or the escape “above” would have succeeded. Where’s the light coming from? Even if the source is invisible, does it cause you to cast a shadow? Can you escape into that? If you pour some water on the rock, does it reveal any hidden features? Where does it flow to – and what happens when it reaches the edges of the rock? What are the physical parameters of this location? Does time flow at the same rate here? Do any materials in the character’s possession appear to have unusual properties? If I light a torch, can I tell anything about where the air is coming from – or where it is going?

Graham McDonald, a friend of mine (who, sadly, passed away last year) once trapped a party in just such a space, under exactly these circumstances, in a D&D campaign – except that he added a well and a waterfall. They looked around, saw nothing, and just sat down to wait until their characters thought of a way out. Graham was very old-school – you didn’t get answers, or even clues, from sitting on your duff. But his players couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t do something to get the game moving if they simply waited around for the solution to be handed to them on a silver platter – meaning that they had seriously underestimated Graham. After four hours of doing nothing, he told them to start rolling up new characters, because it didn’t look like their old ones were going to be getting anywhere anytime soon (I’m not necessarily endorsing the approach, just saying that’s the way it was).

On being told this story, I started running through the above litany of questions. By the time I was finished, I had found EIGHT different ways out of the trap (since Graham was the type of GM who improv’ed all the time and ruled that if you tried anything sensible to solve a problem, it would work) – five of which were things that even HE hadn’t thought of at the time. And that was before I even got started on the waterfall and the well!

The Edges

Depending on how you define the sides, the edges are where each combine or connect. This is useful for a GM looking to construct a challenge of some sort for the players to solve of the type “You can’t do X because if you do, Y will happen”.

For example, let’s assume that the problem is that the PCs want to prevent a political enemy from interfering in what the PCs are about to do. I would define each face as being a political ‘force’ or authority, and look for a way for that faction to take advantage of the political enemy being blocked – a way that will be detrimental to the PCs.

That would mean that the PCs can only achieve their ultimate goal – blocking their political enemy – after they have prevented each of the other factions from taking advantage of the situation, i.e. after they have created the ‘correct’ political climate. This will almost certainly involve playing one off against the other – in other words, exploiting the ‘edges’ of the box, where the two connect. The edges thus represent the current political and social relationships between the ‘sides’.

Alternately, you can list the first six possible ways of achieving the goal and assign each to a face – then complicate each of them by ensuring that the PCs know (or think) that someone is in position to take advantage of the resulting circumstances. This is, ultimately, less effective than the first technique, as the results are less robust and have a greater flavor of intentional railroading by the GM.

The first approach simply points out consequences of forces already at play in the campaign, the second manipulates what is there to block the PCs – and introduces new forces to do so if there’s nothing already in place that fits the recipe.

The Edges, Part II

This is also a great way to define a complex set of political or social relationships, the sort of complicated puzzle that comes into existence naturally all the time. Once they are defined, all you need is for the PCs to stumble into the middle of the labyrinth – the adventure writes itself, perfectly sandboxed. Define each “side” of the box as a faction or individual:

For example:

• Side 1: Town Council
• Side 2: The Head Priest
• Side 3: Town Militia
• Side 4: An external threat
• Side 5: An internal troublemaker
• Side 6: The Mayor

Next, define a relationship between each of these and one other – an ‘edge’ – which causes them to behave in a way that is not what the PCs want.
 

• 1: The Town Council would like to help the PCs, but the High Priest is already poised to denounce and rouse the populace against them and they are afraid of giving him any opportunities.
   
• 2: The High Priest believes the Mayor to be dangerously unstable and will block any sort of success on the part of his office. Paranoid, he will assume that the PCs are in league with the forces of evil that he believes are acting malevolently within the town.
   
• 3: The Town Militia are hyper-reactionary. The Mayor has given them directions to stomp any trouble or potential trouble into the ground – with prejudice – and Adventurers (PCs) are nothing but trouble waiting to happen.
   
• 4: There’s a tribe of Gnolls lurking outside of town who have been hired by the Town Council, who fear arrest by the Militia on trumped-up charges. But they are getting tired of waiting around, doing nothing.
   
• 5: The innkeeper is trying to bring down the town council supposedly because of the crushing taxes the council has been levying of late.
   
• 6: The Mayor is being forced by the innkeeper to enact repressive laws.
   

Now, get out a d6 and renumber the factions so that these relationships are reflected by an edge between the two numbered sides.
 

• The Town Council can stay as “1”. They are connected to the High Priest, who has to be 2, 3, 4, or 5.
   
• The High Priest can stay as “2”. He is connected to the Town Council and now adds a connection to the Mayor, who has to be 3, 4, or 6. We can’t yet see where the Mayor will fit.
   
• The Town Militia used to be “3”. They are connected to the Mayor. If the Mayor is 3 or 4, they have to be 5 or 6; if the Mayor is 6, they have to be 3, 4, or 5. We can’t tell which combination works best yet.
   
• The Gnolls connect to the town council (1) so they have to be 3, 4, or 5. They are not connected to anyone else, so anywhere will fit. There is no obvious potential for connection between them and the High Priest, so let’s put them opposite him in 5. This reduces our options for the Town Militia.
   
• The Innkeeper is connected to the town council (1) so he has to be 3 or 4. It’s still too soon to say which.
   
• The Mayor – already listed as being one of 3, 4, or 6 – also has a relationship with the Innkeeper. If the Innkeeper is a 3 or 4, as we just determined, the mayor has to stay 6 because 3 and 4 are opposite each other. So the mayor is a 6, the town militia are 3, and the innkeeper is 4.
   
• The upshot: the relationships we defined have resulted in the associations of faces 4 and 5 being exchanged. All others can stay as they are.
   

 
If you don’t have a d6 handy, remember: opposite sides always add up to 7. That will always tell you which side is NOT adjacent to the one you’re thinking of: If you are looking at face 2, 7-2=5 so five is opposite, and 1, 3, 4, and 6 are adjacent. This arrangement makes it harder to roll the dice and get a desired range of results – if all the high faces were adjacent, you can learn to bias your throw to only get low or high).

So, what we now have is:

• 1: The Town Council – connected to 2, 4, and 5.
• 2: The High Priest – connected to 1 and 6.
• 3: The Town Militia – connected to 6.
• 4: The Troublemaking Innkeeper – connected to 1.
• 5: The Gnolls – connected to 1.
• 6: The Mayor – connected to 2 and 3.

(This step may seem trivial, even a waste of time, but making sure the existing relationships are accommodated becomes essential as we add further layers to the mix). The third step is to make note of those factions that can never connect, and ask ourselves why not:
 

• 1, the Town Council, can never connect with 6, The Mayor, because: They ousted an killed the Mayor a decade ago – but he did not stay dead.
   
• 2, the High Priest, can never connect with 5, The Gnolls, because: They are servants of the Mayor who the High Priest opposes.
   
• 3, the Town Militia, can never connect with 4, The Innkeeper, because: They have been bought off, but can never publicly reveal this, so it is strictly business from all appearances and will stay that way.
   

At this point, I can start to see where this particular knotty problem is headed. Perhaps you can too. The PCs arrive in town and meet the friendly old innkeeper who tells them about the Gnolls, and how the mayor has been forced to instruct the militia to be harsh or even repressive in order to keep the council from seizing total power. ‘The people would get rid of the council’, he will tell them, ‘if it were not for the threat of the Gnolls with whom they have an alliance’. He hopes that the PCs will be fooled into doing his dirty work for him, ousting the council and leaving his puppet in charge. The PCs infiltrate the Gnolls and verify the arrangement between them and the council. They head off to confront the Council only to be attacked by the High Priest, who believes they are secretly in league with the Mayor. From him, they learn that things may not be quite as black-and-white as they seemed – the council are not the ultimate evil they had been led to believe, and the Mayor is allegedly a worse danger. The problem is that the mayor can’t be destroyed until his hidden master, who keeps returning him from the dead, is revealed and taken out. The PCs have now swung around to be wholly in sympathy with the position of the high priest – find the hidden master, eliminate him, permitting the mayor to be removed, permitting the council to release the Gnolls – but the Gnolls won’t go, they have been promised looting and women and fighting, and have to be driven out by the PCs. Knock over the first domino, and the whole mess unravels itself.

That’s a nice little adventure, with something for just about everyone in a typical party – investigation, cloak and dagger, political subterfuge, roleplaying, combat, and something for the party cleric. In itself, this shows the power of this technique – though there are other ways of achieving the same result. The real power of this technique lies in its ability to take matters further, something that most other methods of plotting have difficulty in achieving satisfactorily or easily.

There are two alternative approaches that can be used: the sympathetic connection and the conundrum mechanism.

The Sympathetic Connection

In this approach, we take each opposed faction and engineer them in such a way that they will appeal to one of the PCs if they would not normally do so, or be disliked or mistrusted by a PC if that PC would normally like or trust them. The party thus becomes a microcosm of the overall problem.

For example, what if the party cleric inherently mistrusted the High Priest? Perhaps the High Priest is a servant of a deity that the cleric dislikes, distrusts, or considers evil / manipulative. This throws immediate doubt over a key element of the plot outline – that the PCs would come around to the high priest’s way of thinking. If we use a similar technique to muddy the waters with respect to each of the PCs and another of the planks in the plotline, either by reinventing the faction or by outright deception by a faction, we complicate the whole situation to the point where it looks more like a Dallas episode than the relatively straightforward plotline presented earlier!

Perhaps:
 

• …when the PCs investigate the Gnolls they discover them conducting a ceremony worshipping a god of Justice, or Law, or Nobility. Suddenly, they aren’t just mercenaries…
   
• …the mayor offers a cock-and-bull story about refusing to remain in his grave while his beloved town is in danger from a hidden cult who seek to summon a nightmare from beyond reality, pointing the finger at the innkeeper, in an attempt to win free of his ‘master’…
   
• …the militia are tired of being hated by their friends and neighbors and are at the point of attempting a military coup, having been ‘encouraged’ by a smooth-talking stranger who has offered sympathy and support and financial aid – for no apparent reason (cue devilish laughter)…
   

…well, you get the idea.

There’s only one thing wrong with this approach: it relies on the PCs behaving in a manner that is predictable by the GM. Sometimes, that is possible, at other times it is not. When it works, it is the best possible solution, because it guarantees that the players will become engaged in the plotline, enriching that plotline in the process. But when it falls flat it can feel like an attempt by the GM to railroad the plot by manipulating the players – a truly cynical interpretation that is not entirely unwarranted.

Unless you are sure, absolutely sure, that you have correctly interpreted the way the PCs will react, you are often better off employing the alternative approach: The Conundrum Mechanism.

The Conundrum Mechanism

At it’s heart, the conundrum mechanism simply adds a second set of plots and relationships on top of the first. There are a lot of unexploited edges to our box, and linking them together to form a set of circumstances whose path to resolution is the exact opposite of the first does indeed achieve the stated goal of locking everything in stasis until the PCs arrive and start destabilizing the situation.

The requirements for the second plot layed out in the preceding paragraph make the task easier in some ways and more difficult in others. The nature of the factions and their relationship to this plot is clearly spelled, so instead of a blank canvas apon which to draw, we have a tightly restricted one. While that means that a subset of the full range of possibilities are all we need to consider, and we have some clues as a result of what the nature of those possible plot elements will be (that’s the easier part), we have to stay strictly within the confines dictated by the first plot and retain a consistency of characterization on the part of the factions – so the criteria to be satisfied are more strict (that’s the harder part).

The place to start is by summarizing the characterization of each faction from the first plotline and indicating thereby the role that the faction is to play in the new plotline. To continually remind myself that this is a counterplot, I generally list the participants in reverse order, from six to one.
 

• 6: The Mayor: an ambitious lesser evil, a high-level undead – Lich, Vampire, etc.
   
• 5: The Gnolls: monstrous mercenaries, supposedly in the service of the town council.
   
• 4: The Innkeeper: a troublemaker, secret master of the Mayor, and the hidden ultimate evil in town.
   
• 3: The Town Militia: corrupt forces of law and order, under the thumb of the mayor & his hidden master.
   
• 2: The High Priest: a slightly senile old man who reveals the truth to the PCs – eventually.
   
• 1: The Town Council: have resorted to evil (hiring evil mercenaries) to fight a larger evil – and keep themselves in power.
   

Next, I list the edges that don’t already have a plot connection:
 

• 6: The Mayor: 5
• 5: The Gnolls: 3, 4, 6
• 4: The Innkeeper: 2, 5
• 3: The Town Militia: 1, 2, 5
• 2: The High Priest: 3, 4
• 1: The Town Council: 3

Those are the resources we have with which to construct a second plot using the same factional elements. One weakness of the first plot is that it is very self-contained, with minimal connection to larger plotlines in the world outside – this can be an asset if you are running an episodic campaign, but even episodic campaigns can benefit from hinting at a future adventure. This is an opportunity to increase the scope of the overall adventure just a little.

It’s usually the case that there will be one or two factions with fewer options to exploit, and that’s the best place to start. In this case, that gives a choice between a Mayor/Gnolls connection and a Town Council/Militia connection. The first of these doesn’t spark any inspiration in me, so I will pick the second, a connection between the Town Council and the Town Militia. From that point on, I just build connections from amongst the remaining choices, crossing them off as we go. (NB: Crossing out didn’t show up very clearly so I’ve just rendered the numbers in red).
 

• 1: The Town Council: 3: So far the Town Council has been depicted in not too-unfavorable a light, overall. They’ve done some questionable things, but they’ve been desperate – so foolish, but not evil. So let’s darken them up a bit to make the PCs choice a little harder. Perhaps they have a line on some evil artifact that will permit them to do something nasty, but are blocked from going all-out for it while locked in this conflict with the Mayor. Their chief rivals for this is the head of the Town Militia, who has his own men searching for the artifact, using the martial law imposed by the Mayor in plotline #1 as a pretext.
   
• 3: The Town Militia: 1, 2, 5: The Militia have come to suspect that the High Priest has already located the artifact, or is deliberately blocking their attempts to locate it. They intend to raid the Temple complex under a pretext, and to arrest the High Priest if they can.
   
• 2: The High Priest: 3, 4: We have two choices with the high priest. We can either complete his rehabilitation or we can make him as sinister as the other characters in town, depending on how we handle his connection to the Macguffin. Does he have it in his possession, as the Militia believe? Or is he searching for it like everyone else? And what does he intend to do with it? We still have three factions to involve, and that should weigh into our decision as well. Perhaps he knows where it is but can’t retrieve it because of the trouble in town. That idea has possibilities….
   
  Okay, so let’s say that he found a map to the artifact, but when the trouble started in town, he hid it in the last place anyone would suspect – within the Mayor’s files, using a spell to actually remove the dangerous knowledge from his mind so that the Undead Mayor could not attempt to Charm Person it out of him. The Mayor is, after all, some type of high-level undead. Suddenly, the High Priest has a whole new reason for opposing the current regime, one that requires only the appearance of altruism.
   
  The problem with this is that it relies on a connection we already have for plot #1, so we also need a new connection, and out only remaining choice is a connection to the Innkeeper.
   
• 4: The Innkeeper: 2, 5: If the High Priest does not realize the connection between the Mayor and the Innkeeper from plot #1, but only knows that some hidden enemy keeps restoring the Mayor to life, he might have let his guard down a little. If the innkeeper was somehow capable of extracting part of the truth from the High Priest, we have our connection – but with the knowledge removed from his mind for safe keeping, the Innkeeper could not get the final piece of the puzzle. A disguised Mind Flayer fits our prescription, but then begs the question (which we have avoided so far) of just how the Innkeeper is controlling the Mayor. The relationship seems to go a bit beyond the normal domination by an evil cleric (rebuke undead), which might function when the dominating influence is present, but would hold little sway once the two were separated. It seems more persistent, and yet leaves the Mayor more capable of independent functioning.
   
  One way of explaining this is for the mayor to not actually BE an undead (making him resistant to the usual anti-undead tricks of a cleric) but is actually in some sort of state of “suspended resurrection” that the Innkeeper can complete – or cancel – at any time. This could also make him immune to attacks that usually work on non-undead, making him REALLY dangerous. It would also mean that the Mayor is elevated to sufficiently dangerous to make the fight with him a non-anticlimax. Perhaps a preliminary fight to show how tough he is, from which the PCs barely escape, before the party figure out that the “hidden master” has to be taken out to leave the Mayor vulnerable.
   
  One of the very first blogs I wrote for Campaign Mastery was ‘A Quality Of Spirit: Big Questions In RPGs’ which talks about not being afraid to look at some of the bigger questions in RPGs. The plotlines being developed, which threaten to involve the nature of life and death and undeath and how they are connected, is exactly what I was advocating.
  

  At this point in the article, I had written, “To keep this post manageable in length, I’m not going to go into the subject at this time – I’ll simply note that the GM will have needed to settle this question in his own mind before this plotlines can be completed, and move on.” The intention to leave things there lasted a whole three or four paragraphs, when inspiration struck. If the Mayer is just one in a series of such servants controlled by a conspiracy of Mind Flayers, and the artifact severed the links between body and spirit, it could conceivably destroy all undead then extant in the world, including the not-completely-dead servants of the Illithid collective. Or perhaps it is the connection that permits undead to exist at all – and cannot be destroyed permanently because doing so would end all opportunities for resurrection, reincarnation, or transit to an afterlife. Depending on what “life” actually is in the campaign, it might also severe the connection between the Gods and their worshippers, the Gods and their clerics, and even Devils and Demons and those they have corrupted.

  There would be all sorts of unlikely allies trying to get hold of such an artifact, and cooperating to restore it if it were ‘destroyed’.

  Or perhaps it simply slays all living things within a 10-mile radius and raises them as undead?

   
  If we’re going to continue linking all the factions to this second plot, we need a narrative connection between the Innkeeper and the only available faction he’s not linked to: The Gnolls. Perhaps the Innkeeper – a troublemaker, remember – has decided to use the Gnolls in the same way that the head of the town Militia is using his forces, and the reason the Gnolls are becoming more aggressive in plot #1 is that they are looking for a pretext to mount a raid in search of the artifact.
   

• 5: The Gnolls: 3, 4, 6: That’s remarkably un-Gnoll-like behavior. The Monster Manual describes a brutish and rather short-sighted species ruled by their stomachs. This is an opportunity to muddy the waters and shake the complacency of the PCs if they rely too strongly on “public” material. What if these Gnolls weren’t quite so primitive, and had rudimentary concepts of honor and nobility – if they were the most enlightened Gnolls the PCs had ever seen, who were only pretending to behave brutishly because that’s what they have been paid to do, they might be reluctant to wipe them out. Give them some civility and urbanity, even a hint of gentility. Throwing an appropriate alignment shift, to true Neutral or Lawful Neutral, completes the transformation into Gnolls their mothers would not recognize, and gives the PCs another conundrum to resolve; the Gnolls have at least a passing consideration for the ethics of a paid mercenary, they will do whatever they have been paid to do – which happens to include opposing the PCs. And while they would not be averse to a side-contract, they won’t do anything that compromises their original deal – which includes being bought off or driven away!
   
• 6: The Mayor: 5: The last link we have to consider is between the Mayor and the Gnolls. Frankly, I don’t think this is necessary; we already have an extra connection between the Mayor and the Innkeeper, and another between the Mayor and the High Priest, as part of plot #2. Of course, given where the map to the artifact has been hidden, the Mayor’s office will ultimately be the target of the Gnoll’s raid (though they don’t know that), so (in a way) there is just such a connection already.
   

Putting the resulting plotline together is then just a matter of copying and pasting the plot elements from plot#2 into the more straightforward plot #1. The result is a list of encounters and what can be learned from each, plus a “helping hand” starting point from the Innkeeper to get the PCs involved up to their necks (if not deeper)!

The Corners

The corners of a box are the ideal representation of political alliances and intrigues of the most Machiavellian sort, because each represents a confluence of three factions – and six factions give no less than eight alliances, each with a single objective. Each faction is allied to someone in order to achieve some goal while opposed to them achieving some other goal.

Again, it would help if you had a d6 handy to contemplate at this point. Consider the 1,4,5 corner – the 2,4,6 corner opposite would be opposed to whatever the 1-4-5 group wants to achieve, by definition. At the same time, the 1,2,4 coalition wants to achieve something else, opposed by the 3,5,6 allegiance.

In fact, the same principle can represent the politics of many more factions provided that the others are neutral with respect to the ambition or plot in question, and that you swap the members represented by each face around as necessary when considering other issues.

Larger dice, like a d8 or d12, as a representation, permits even more byzantine politics to be codified.

To use this simulation as a plotting tool, it is only necessary to remember that for every move, a rival faction must make a countermove, which then weakens or strengthens another faction to which they belong, which necessitates a member of that faction to respond or attempt to take advantage of the situation, which then… but the chain of effect should be obvious at this point.

In fact, it should be so obvious that at this point, I think I’ll call it a post. So the next time you’re in a bind, whether you’re a player or a GM, try thinking your way into or out of a box. It might just get you to a solution.

Here’s where we’re at: In order to complete my series on Names, I need to deal with non-human languages; and the best – in fact, the only – approach that I have found for explaining the procedure that I’ve come up with for the creation of such languages is to describe how I do it in my Shards Of Divinity campaign. But, in order to do an adequate job of doing that, I first need to divert from my diversion to explain the background and premise of the campaign, to lay a foundation as it were for the discussions to follow.

So, after two ninety-degree turns in the conversation in rapid succession, we now find ourselves going neither left nor right but straight up – relative to the original line of discussion. I know a writer’s job can sometimes get complicated, but this is up close and personal with a ridiculous extreme!

Nevertheless, that’s where things stand, so let’s plunge onward…

The Shared Kingdoms: Conceptual Origins

I got the idea for the Shared Kingdoms whilst waxing philosophical about the impact of the Internet on the society of the future, specifically, the concept that the internet will reduce all domestic laws to the lowest common international denominator because nothing else is practicable of enforcement. That got me to thinking about the processes of formation of Kingdoms and Cultures in human history, and whether or not anything analogous could ever come into existence in a fantasy setting, and just what it would look like.

Unfortunately, I suffered a failure of imagination at the critical moment and couldn’t come up with a viable solution. The premise was set aside for consideration some other time, and went no further.

Step forward in time almost a decade, to the point at which I was thinking about the setting for my Shards Of Divinity campaign. I had an original idea for how magic worked, and working backwards gave me an origin-of-the-universe story; those two in combination gave me a unique origin-of-the-gods and an overall campaign premise. The campaign was being created to focus on one particular player and his character, and was designed to let him achieve all the things that he had always wanted to do in a game and not been permitted to do by other GMs – conquer the world, become a Demi-Lich, become a dragon, become a God and reshape the world as he saw fit, that sort of thing. Achieving those goals required him to receive a singular education in the nature of reality, to perceive things that no-one else had ever done before. It would then take him many years of game time to understand what it was that he head experienced and how to convert it into practical advantage; as he did so, he would learn to do things that no mortal had ever been able to do before (in this world at least).

As I set out to chronicle what he had experienced – without explanations – I discovered, much to my surprise, that the end result was exactly what I had attempted to create those many years earlier. So, at a metagame level, that’s the story of the origins of the Shared Kingdoms.

The Shared Kingdoms: In-Game Origins

The “origin story” of the Shared Kingdoms – as it is known to the priests of this world – is presented within the “scroll excerpts” used to illustrate this article. It is presented here for the first time anywhere, the players have not seen it before. It is not entirely accurate, is far from complete, and lacks any comprehension as to why certain events took place. Nevertheless, it is the best truth available to most of the world, and theologians within the campaign believe it implicitly. Only one person knows better, having not only seen the events unfold, but having been privileged to look behind the curtain. That, of course, is Lucius, the PC about whom the entire campaign revolves, a character who has seen things and knows things, but does not yet understand them or their significance…

The Shared Kingdoms: The Concept

The Shared Kingdoms are a social, cultural, economic, and political palimpsest – multiple realms (not all of which are Kingdoms) occupying the same geographic area. A citizen of the Shared Kingdoms belongs to one of these realms, and is responsible to its laws and cultural demands, everywhere within the Shared Kingdoms that he goes.

European Similarity

The situation is slightly similar to that presented by modern Europe, in which a person is a native of a particular country, but may pass freely into any other nation within the greater common Europe. While a tourist, he is answerable both to the local laws he may encounter and to his domestic laws at the same time. Take away that nation of origin and disperse it throughout “Europe” whilst retaining it as a collective conceptual entity, and you have the shared Kingdoms.

Australian Similarity

It also has its similarities to the political structure with which I am most familiar, since I live in it and have done so since birth – Australia. We have local governments. We also have collective regional state governments. And we have an overriding Federal government. All of these are elected independently, no representatives are appointed by any other level of government, so they do not form a strict hierarchy; instead, they form three layers of an overall map.

This is analogous to, and will be directly understood by, citizens of many other countries, such as Canada and the USA. The primary difference between the US and Australia is that within the US, State Laws are secondary to Federal Laws – but there are strictly defined prerogatives of authority beyond which the Federal government must cede control to the states.

In theory, in Australia, the situation is the other way around – the states have all the authority and the Federal Government only has authority in those areas in which the states have relinquished that authority. In practice, we are becoming more like the US every day, but that’s another discussion for another time.

Connecting The Dots

So it is within the Shared Kingdoms. An individual is responsible to his local government for strictly local matters; an individual is responsible to the government of which he is a citizen for wider matters; and there is a common overall law that concerns itself with interactions between citizens of different governments.

There are no boundaries between Kingdoms, just one political boundary around the entire collective Shared Kingdom. And even that is not a border per se – civilization just sort of dissolves around the fringes.

This is not to say that there aren’t societies beyond this boundary – it is just that these governments are not part of the Shared Kingdoms, and are not recognized as legitimate by the Shared Kingdoms. They are outlaw states, populated by rogues and criminals – because, so far as the Shared Kingdoms are concerned, no other legitimate political authority exists. That’s because as they have come across these, they have either absorbed them into the overall collective (shades of the Borg!) or declared them enemies of civilization.

The Reality

Of course, this is a hypothetical situation, an ideal. Each of these realms originated in a different location and built up a local power base before running into each other. Within the overall union of “The Shared Kingdoms,” there are localities that are dominated by individual member realms. Once the shared kingdoms were unified into a single political body, individuals from different realms would have sought out places to pursue their trade, just as in the Middle Ages the apprentice to a relatively young blacksmith would have to move elsewhere to pursue his trade if there was not enough local demand to support a second Blacksmith.

Historically, that entailed paying an annual fee for permission to relocate to the noble from whose domain the former apprentice derived. In the Shared Kingdoms, because the individual remains a part of his original realm even when he relocates to a location where his services will be in demand, still paying his taxes to that realm and still responsible to its laws (except in purely local matters), this arrangement is not only simplified but the economic drain of paying two sets of taxes is avoided, so the Shared Kingdoms are more prosperous than the equivalent medieval political model.

Get enough people in a particular village or minor community with the same political opinion and that opinion will become official. The village of Vedusia might start off being allied with one realm, but slowly strangers relocate to there who are affiliated with another, until they become the dominate population. When that happens, the local government changes allegiance, and the village can petition that second realm to become part of it, instead of being part of the first realm.

The end result is simulated by the somewhat abstracted “map” to the right. Red represents “civilization” and black “the unclaimed wilderness”, home to states which are not members of the Shared Kingdoms. Seven hypothetical “Shared Kingdoms” are shown – one in yellow, two in pink, two in brown, one in blue, and one in green. Each has a central power base but they don’t have a definable boundary – they just sort of disperse into each other. Note that this square shape has nothing to do with the real shape of the shared Kingdoms – it is for illustrative purposes only.

Ideological Relocation

Naturally, economic prosperity is not the only reason people relocate, given the option of doing so at will, or close to it. Followers of a particular religious, social, or political bent can move to someplace where their views are more welcome, or can function as missionaries and representatives of their point of view. Each of the realms vies for the opportunity to educate young nobles in their own ideology, their own perspective on how and why the Shared Kingdoms should function. The more senior the Noble, the more likely it is that he will have two or more tutors, theoretically broadening the education of that young noble. That makes the Shared Kingdoms more progressive than a typical medieval culture, socially, and helps maintain both the unity of the collective and keep the peace internally.

Titles

The overall pattern is medieval, with appropriate titles – the value and meaning of which varies from one member kingdom to another.

Most Human Kingdoms have the same basic structure of nobility, with variations. Non-human Kingdoms have equivalents to many of these titles, sometimes adapted after contact with Humans. Greater variation exists in questions of inheritance and bestowing of titles. This basic structure is:

• Emperors & Empresses rule multiple Kingdoms.
• Kings & Queens rule countries. Kings & Queens can bestow or vacate any lesser rank.
• Dukes & Duchesses rule Regions. Dukes may appoint Viscountries, Baronages, and Knighthoods.
• Viscounts & Viscountesses rule Cities in Regions. They may recommend Knighthoods.
• Earls & Earlesses rule Isolated Cities. They may bestow Knighthoods and appoint Counthoods and Baronies.
• Counts & Countesses rule districts in capital cities and isolated estates without cities. They may recommend Knighthoods.
• Barons & Dames rule towns, outposts, towers, guard posts, settlements, estates, and the like (specific locations). They may recommend Knighthoods.
• Knighthoods recognize exceptional service to the throne or its nobles, or achievement, or bravery, or some other special merit.

• Princes & Princesses are children of Emperors & Empresses and Kings & Queens. They may bestow Knighthoods.
• Baronells and Baronines are children of Dukes. They may recommend Knighthoods, approval is usually pro-forma.
• Margraves and Margravines are children of Viscounts. They have no authority to make or recommend appointments.
• Baronets & Ladies are children of Counts, Earls & Barons. They have no authority to make or recommend appointments.

Noble titles other than Knighthoods are hereditary unless designated otherwise by the issuing authority. Titles are not normally cumulative through the generations. However, Kings also have personal estates (and the title of Duke that comes with them) and Dukes have a city which heads their domain, and hence also have the title of Viscount. In addition, one or more Baronies may be conferred apon a noble of any more senior rank in addition to their dominant noble title.

A specific exception is made for the Capitas Duodiem and surrounding lands, which are ruled by a Duke with no Viscounts, Counts, or Baronies as vassals. Technically, this is a concession to the importance of the Capital of the Shared Kingdoms, in practice it is a measure of the political power and independence conferred by, and necessary for, it’s status.

Lesser titles belong to the administrators of smaller communities. A count may hold “title” granted by one of the Kingdoms to administer half a dozen communities with little or no geographic or physical consanguity. That carries with it responsibilities to the parent realm which the noble is required to enforce and authority to match (at least in theory).

When a community changes “hands”, there are only two solutions: change the noble, or give him a new allegiance and title. Since the first would quickly cause the whole thing to fall apart into a multitude of small civil wars, rapidly growing union-wide, the second is preferred. The same administrative head governs the community, but he now has two titles and a different set of laws to enforce so far as that village is concerned. His obligations and authority levels will also change, and so might his revenues from the community. Balancing any shortfall may be a stipend from the new “crown” to which the village looks. Note that the change of allegiance is not his choice, it is made by the local government of the community.

A nobleman may have several titles, and be active within several different courts. This affords him political connections, allies, and support that he might otherwise be hard-pressed to achieve. The more elevated the nobleman, the more likely it is that he will actively seek out many titles for this reason. A nobleman might be Baron of this, Count of that, and Viscount of something else, all at the same time, and all titles from different member realms.

The Social Impact

This has a substantial social impact on communities within the Shared Kingdoms in that it provides a mechanism by which a nobleman is held responsible by the communities that he governs. A repressive nobleman might find his villages all switching to a political view that minimizes his powers and revenues, effectively stripping him of one or more of his titles – potentially, all of his titles. Since this effectively weakens the realms in whose name the communities used to be held, while strengthening others, this often makes him very unpopular with his peers and superiors within those realms.

Over time, depending on the ability of their leaders, different realms will be more prosperous than others, and will swell in political authority overall as a result. The result is a byzantine web of political games and intrigue as each member realm seeks to become the dominant philosophic and political power within the Shared Kingdoms, to steer the overall direction they take in the future to one of their liking. This is only possible by so managing their realms that communities belonging to their rivals change allegiances – a tricky balancing act, since those already belonging to a political group expect to reap the rewards when that group prospers, not see it frittered away on those jumping onto a bandwagon after all the hard work us done.

Economic and political management are always a challenging juggling act in the Shared Kingdoms, and ambition has been the undoing of many Noblemen. Able rulers must often use the revenues from one title to shore up the popularity of a rival realm in order to maintain their overall position.

Ending The Preamble

All this has been preamble, additional explanation. My players are still trying to wrap their heads around the concept, more than two years after we started play, so I thought it might be beneficial to spell a few things out a little more fully. The rest of this article will mostly be verbatim extracts from the briefing packages provided to the players, with some additional commentary and explanation as needed.

Some of this information will be redundant, covering ground already discussed. I make no promises with respect to accuracy or completeness – this is the briefing given to the PCs as what their characters can know through general knowledge.

A unique form of Internationalism

Although they started out as separate realms, over time the members of the Shared Kingdoms have expanded in and past and through each other, or one has come to completely surround another. Political expediency has forced mutual recognition and ultimately a unique internationalism in which the political boundaries of each member state are considered to extend throughout the shared jurisdiction (like states within a country) without any loss of sovereignty. This seemingly-unstable situation has persisted for hundreds of years, maintained by political balance and peer pressure.

The Capital city of the Shared Kingdoms is named Capitas Duodiem.

Laws

Each Kingdom can only pass laws affecting its own citizens, and transfer from one Kingdom to another is rarely possible (with a few exceptions amongst the human Kingdoms). Relations between the Shared Kingdoms are controlled by the Council Of Kings, also known as the Council of 12. While each ruler has his own administrative and support staff, there is an overall bureaucracy dealing with Council matters.

When problems arise between the subjects of two different Kingdoms, the law that applies is always that of the complaining victim. Reciprocal jurisdiction is universal – Dwarvish authorities will hold a troublemaker until the Elvish authorities arrive to take a drunken Halfling into custody.

The Galliamic Code

Laws are built around something called the Galliamic Code, which accords serfs and peasants certain rights and protections against the depravities of their rulers. The laws are based on the premise that without workers to plant the crops, dig the mines, etc, a noble’s holdings are worthless. In exchange for honoring this rights and protections, the local Lord is entitled to a tithe of the products of the workers, is entitled to draft them as manpower or for military service, and so on. The peasants and serfs also have duties and obligations that must be met. The code sets limits to the severity of punishment that can be assigned for failing in these responsibilities.

In general, the higher one’s social level, the more proof must be provided of an offence. The code restricts the wealthy and powerful less than might be expected. The nobility are always entitled to present a defense, and can afford to call in professionals to argue that defense. Over time, the number of loopholes so established have given the nobility a fairly free hand. The Code is enforced collectively by the Kingdoms; no one Kingdom’s nobles dare break it or all the other Kingdoms would turn on them.

The Member States

There are currently twelve member states within the Shared Kingdoms:

• Bher Yuralvus – an Independent City-State, also known popularly as The Home of the Endless Library.
• The Causa Domusora – a Human Republican Meritocracy, Mage Dominated, also known as The Home Of Reason.
• The Congressus Feyunctusora – An Association of independent Fey & Sylvan Clans, also known as The United Association of Fey.
• The Therassus Amora – A Human Feudal Kingdom, also known as The Centre Of Attraction.
• The Ineodolus Imperascora – A human Plutocracy, also known as The Traders And Commerce Empire.
• The Longex Dextora – a Republic Of Independent City-States, located in a region commonly known as The Hinterlands.
• Parumveneaora – a Gnomish Monarchy, occupying a mountainous region named The Vale Of Dreams.
• Silvunduzora – a Dwarvish Monarchy, located in a mountainous region known more popularly as The Deep Hollows.
• Sylvarnpluprasi – The Dryad Forest, a monarchy, also known as The Sylvan Grange.
• The Temmanora – a loose association of Halfling Feudal Clans. The common people refer to the region it occupies as The Halfling Lands.
• The Verus Fidesora – a human Theocracy and centre of religion within the Shared Kingdoms. The scroll excerpted throughout this article derives from The People Of True Faith and tells the only doctrinally-approved version of the origins of the Shared Kingdoms, starting about 1000 years ago.
• The Iriduserde Foliumprasi – an Elvish Monarchy, seat of the Drow Rebellion. The name translates as The Vivid Green-Leaf Forest .

Since each of these will be given their own, more detailed article, I’ve avoided going into substantial detail here.

The Surrounding Wilderness & Outlaw States

There are also ten notable regions/outlaw states in the ‘wilderness’ surrounding the Shared Kingdoms. These are:

• Procerus Terrora – (The Giantlands) – located to the North & Northeast of the shared kingdoms, this is a vast plain marked by sudden crevasses and unexpected bogs. In the middle of this plain is vast forest of trees that stand hundreds of feet tall. Beyond these a massive snow-capped mountain range is visible. These are collectively known as The Giantlands, because everything in them seems to grow larger than it does anywhere else. Giants of all kinds abound in these regions, and they discourage human visitors. While the southernmost areas are quite temperate, the farther north one proceeds, the colder the surroundings become.
• Gramen Domubyas (The Grasshome Marshes) – Located to the East of the Shared Kingdoms. Rivers running from the mountains of the Giantlands and through the fissures and lakes of the north country eventually feed into this vast marshland of scrub and drifting mangroves. The internal terrain of the marshes is always being rearranged as currents shift this way and that. These fens, bogs, and marshes are the home of innumerable small and vicious creatures. The most dominant and dangerous inhabitants are the cannibalistic Gnoll tribes, who regard human as a delicacy. From time to time, they will raid into the Eastern parts of the Shared Kingdoms for fresh meat, especially in late winter when the local food supplies tend to become scarce.
• Levitasvirga Abyssora (The Thunderhell). South of the Grasshome Marshes and East of the shared Kingdoms is another vast area of plains and rolling hills known as the Thunderhell, which also extends northwards on the far side of the Gramen Domubyas. Beyond the hills is another vast mountain range, the Montis Levitasvirgo (Thunder Mountains). These seem to be perpetually cloaked in storm clouds, and are responsible for the weather that gives the Thunderhell it’s name. In winter, icy sleet regularly rains down from the east, chilling all to the bone. In spring, heavy rain extends the Grasshome Marshes to the feet of the Montis Levitasvirgo and fills the air with the stench of decay. In summer, the air almost broils with the temperature of the fiery winds from the South, interspersed with the occasional storm that sweeps down from the East to start grassfires. When weather conditions are right, the firestorms that result when these grassfires are carried by the Incendiventus (Firewinds) can travel as much as 100 miles in a day. And in autumn, the days are either stiflingly hot and humid or icy-cold and even more humid.
• The Solvo Mondibanus, also known as The Unified Association Of Free Ports. South of the Thunderhell, and Southeast of the Shared Kingdoms, lie the eastward prominence of the Shared Kingdoms, running all the way down to the Undus Verdestus, Green Ocean. The coastline to the north is dotted with small islands and coastal settlements, parts of either the Ineodolus Imperascora or Longex Dextora. To the south are a collection of larger, more scattered, tropical islands, somewhere amongst which can be found the Free Ports of the Solvo Mondibanus, an “Association” of independent Human Plutocracies. To the uninformed, these often represent a romantic ideal, a collection of ports whose inhabitants worship the sea and refuse to be bound to any less freedom than “she” is. In practice, these are pirate havens of near-total lawlessness where it’s as easy to get your throat cut as it is to be forcibly indentured into a life of slavery. It is rumored that these are actually former parts of the Longex Dextora that were bribed into a life of plunder and violence by the Solvo Mondibanus, and who then turned on their ‘benefactors’. They answer only to their own code of laws and do not recognize the rights granted by the Galliamic code. Unless you are a trusted member of the Solvo Mondibanus, or are vouched for by one, you have no rights and no authority and are viewed as prey.
• The Tawnton Dieltriporprasi: South of the Shared Kingdoms lies a massive band of Jungle, home to the Tawnton Dieltriporprasi, a collection of independent Tribes. Although the Shared Kingdoms consider them collectively and don’t distinguish one tribe from the next, they are actually separate political entities with minimal connections to one another. In a state of near-perpetual war with each other are rogue Kingdom colonies, barbarian Orcs, and all manner of other strange creatures. It is often said that no good comes from the Townton, only varying degrees of trouble and strife.
• Arechanora (The Spiderlands) – located to the Southwest of the Shared Kingdoms. The heavy rains that blow in from the Undus Verdestus can only penetrate so far inland across the jungle before being blocked by the Montus Townton (Jungle Mountains), a rainforest-and-jungle-covered mountain range running from East to West, whose peaks slowly ascend as they move inland before ending suddenly in a series of incredible cliff-faces, the Townton Ascenza (Jungle Cliffs). Beyond the cliffs, the forest gives way to the Silververdis Arechanorprasi, more commonly known as the Arechanora – the Spiderlands. Dominated by Giant Spiders and fell creatures, this is a nightmarish place and a favorite refuge for Drow training camps. It is rumored that the Drow and the Spiders are allied, and that there is an entire Drow City somewhere in the Arechanora.
• The Buhrs Galliamus (The City Of Ruins, aka The Ruined City, The Demolished City). – located to the immediate west of the Capital of the shared Kingdoms, the Buhrs Galliamus was once the greatest human city in the world, capital of a unified Human empire, the cause of its fall and the disintegration of the political unity that surrounded it are long forgotten by all except the most learned of historians. This was the source of the Galliamic Code, which is the foundation of Common Law throughout the Shared Kingdoms, and of the legendary Pax Galliamus, byword and metaphor throughout the Shared Kingdoms for ‘Wishful Thinking’. In modern times, the ruins have become a haven for all manner of creatures strange and foul (and the occasional criminal fleeing from the Shared Kingdoms). And yes, the fact that the “origins scroll” doesn’t even mention it is evidence that the scroll doesn’t tell the whole story.
• Arred Anigesasi (The Black Lands) – located West-Northwest of Buhrs Galliamus, this region is an arid and rocky wasteland, home to trolls, kobolds, and other lizard-like creatures who like the heat. No one is completely sure what’s out there. Much of the rocks are black in colour, hence the name. There are reportedly sinkholes of superfine black sand.
• Attero Montis (The Waste Range) – to the West-South-West of the ruined city and south of the Arred Anigesasi rise the Attero Montis, the most diabolical mountain range conceivable. Legend holds that hidden somewhere in it’s steep vastness is the lost utopian Kingdom of Cosmopolita, where life was so perfect even the gods were jealous. Many citizens of the Verus Fidusora claim that it was not jealousy that led to man’s exile from The Garden Of Plenty, it was the wickedness of Magic, though earlier documents – like the scroll quoted throughout this article – also point to the discovery of Steel. Cosmopolita was supposedly a Paradise, all things to all men. Every human child fantasizes about living in Cosmopolita whenever they are punished, or worked hard, or feel put apon. Assuming that Cosmopolita was real, and was destroyed as per the legends, the accounts in the various ancient holy books were all written decades or centuries after the fact, and contain as much prejudice and surmise as fact. The Elves claim to know the truth, but their version is also incomplete and internally contradictory, possibly a consequence of the shattering of Elvish Society by the Drow Uprising.
• Diabolectus Pectusora (The Devil’s Heart) – West-Southwest, beyond the Blacklands, lies a vast desert of blistering heat and ancient ruins and monuments whose origins are long-forgotten. Explorers sometimes return with vast treasures found in ancient tombs.

Capitas Duodiem – Capital Of The Shared Kingdoms

Located at an intersection point between Therassus Amora (Centre Of Attraction), Ineodolus Imperascora (Traders & Commerce Empire), and Longex Dextora (The Hinterlands), and which should probably be considered a 13th Kingdom as it’s status forces a political separation between the city and Therassus Amora, the Kingdom to which it is nominally associated. The capital is also the central marketplace of the Shared Kingdoms. To fund Shared Kingdom activities and maintain official structures, it taxes trade. As part of its parent Kingdom, it is also required to pay taxes to the Therassus Amora.

Click to open a larger hi-res version

It may be worth noting that the description below was written in advance of the map being generated – something that was only possible because I had a clear image of what the map would look like in mind before I started. In fact, the first set of game sessions set within the city employed only the verbal descriptions and a very rough hand-sketched map produced on the spot. The description given has now been updated to include the map references.

The main road through the city is the Foliatus Tectum (Leafy Shelter) [1-2-3], which runs east-to-west and bisects the city. Outside of the walls of the fortified town, many other roads and trails connect to this main thoroughfare [not shown]. Part-way into town, it splits [2] and a second road [10] forms a leaf-shaped central area [5, 7, 9] that contains the Castle of Duke Caius Etennius [5]. On the Southern side of the original road is the Fortified Court of the Council Of Kings [8]. The second road is named the Avenue Of Temples [10] and is lined on the Southern side by Temples to the different Gods. The Avenue Of Temples is wide and clearly the subject of additional upkeep, paid for by Verus Fidusora. Cutting across the Leaf are a number of narrow lanes, the largest of which is Links Lane [9]. This runs alongside the Gardens [between 7 and 9] outside the entrance to the Castle. These gardens are named for the wife of one of the past Dukes, the Duchess Sepphrina. The area south of the Garden is the worst part of town, known as the Pohl Riore (The Rogue’s Quarter) [11], which is full of pickpockets, rogues, thugs, drunks, and ruffians. This is an area of warehouses, grain silos, and low-quality taverns & inns.

Facing the temples is the most prosperous and up-market mercantile operations, two- and even three- story buildings (the upper floors of which are residential) [12]. Behind these is the Urbem Opulentam (Wealthy Quarter) [13], slowly decreasing in quality as Meridius Via (the Southroad) [14] is approached.

The Southroad and Antemeridius Via (The Northroad) [15] are (in theory) restricted to military use, and only blank walls are permitted to face them. These walls must be built to a certain specification that includes arrow slits, flat roofs, archer’s nests, and a uniform height and spacing. Effectively, they form a second wall around the city and are intended to form a killing field should the outer wall ever be breached, and a means of rapid redeployment of defenders in the meantime.

Radiating out from the central ‘leaf’ are a number of smaller roads and avenues, periodically cross-connected with roads running parallel to the Foliatus Tectum and the Avenue Of Temples [major roads shown]. Sections of these are bricked closed to form a maze. These are predominantly residential on the northwestern corner side of the city, and there is an inner strip of residential area on the northeastern side as well. The latter are mainly occupied by the Embassies of the 12 Kingdoms [shown in deepest red], the residences of the representatives of those Kingdoms on the Council Of Kings (it’s quite rare for the actual Kings to be in residence, each member of the Shared Kingdoms having its own ‘capital’). inward of these are a line of servants quarters and ancillary buildings [lightest pink], facing an important secondary street, the Exsequor Muneris (Avenue Of Service) [East of 11]. Merchants and wealthier individuals without the political status of the diplomats are located in a residential zone between the servants and the embassies [darker pink].

On the other side of the Avenue Of Service are a number of public buildings and offices – the main Watch house, the offices of the Exchequer, and so on [6]. These include a museum owned by the Causa Domusora and the Cives Templum Common Temple owned by the Verus Fidusora, where ordinary citizens worship.

A further line of poorer and smaller accommodations lies beyond these [yellow area], designed to accommodate in comfort Fey, Halflings, Gnomes, and Dwarves, facing the Brevis Via The Short Road. Opposite is a large ‘park’ where the Elvish and Dryad residents of the city make their home [grey area], and another area of generic accommodations [northwestern pink area], all of which face the Aurum Vicus (Gold Street). This is where the blacksmiths, waggoners, potters, carpenters, masons, leatherworkers, and other tradespeople live and work. These are built to a similar specification as the dwellings alongside the Southroad, but reinforced doors are permitted to face the Northroad.

Facing these workshops and built against the outer walls of the city on this side are four army barracks and related buildings [lighter gray area at 14] and a wagon marshalling area, and a number of livestock pens ranging from the small to the large [western pale brown area to both north and south]. The largest enclosures, to the north, are used for horses and cattle. The larger area contains many smaller enclosures for sheep, pigs, dogs, goats, chickens & game birds, pigeons, and so on. The Wagon Marshalling area [brown area inset into 11] lies between these enclosures and the warehouse district.

NB: Some areas are unlabelled and some roads not shown because I ran out of time when producing the map. The most important parts are shown, because I used a priorities list – main roads, walls, areas and regions, secondary roads of importance, and label as you go.

The Rulers

The Capital of the Shared Kingdoms is ruled by Duke Caius Etennius and his wife, the Duchess Marcia Secamiliter. Their roles are largely reflections of their domain’s special place in the politics of the Shared Kingdoms: the capital is, by it’s nature, a microcosm of the Shared Kingdoms and exhibits all the tensions of the broader populace. The Duke’s primary responsibility is to keep passions calm and the assembled Nobles from very disparate cultures from molesting each other while avoiding partisanship, a constant political juggling act. His secondary tasks are to ensure the comfort and safety of those Nobles, and his Tertiary task is to regulate and protect the trade that takes place in this traditional marketplace. His wife’s task is to ensure the comfort of the wives of the nobles and handle the many social occasions and ceremonies that the presence of so many dignitaries constantly demand. These tasks leave little time for the administration of the city in the traditional sense, and as a result, the capital affords its residents more freedom than can be found in any other place within the Shared Kingdoms.

The Common Language

The common language of the Shared Kingdoms is a form of psuedo-latin. In practice, everything except the names of people and places are rendered in English. What do I mean by psuedo-latin? I decide what I want the name to mean in English, apply a Latin translator, and then simplify to achieve easy pronunciation – because neither my players nor I are Latin speakers.

Geographic Feature Names in ‘Shards Of Divinity’

It’s the usual practice to give the “English translation” of place names after the ‘proper’ version of the name, as shown throughout the above text.

• Large, self-contained areas are given names that start with a consonant, have 1-2 syllables, + end in ‘eda” (islands, continents). Many also incorporate the word “Ager” (Land) after the name.
• Smaller regions, nations, etc start with a consonant, have 1-3 syllables, + end in “ora”. Many precede the name with “Regio” (region), “Plaga” (place of), or follow it with “Situs”.
• Forests start with a vowel, have 1-2 syllables, + end in “-prasi”. Most precede the name with “Verdisilva”.
• Deserts start with a vowel, have 1-2 syllables, + end in “-asi”. Almost always preceded by the word “Arr-ed”.
• Oceans start with a vowel, have 1-2 syllables, + end in “-us” or “estus”. All have the word “Undus” either preceding or following the name.
• Seas have 1-3 syllables and start and end with consonants. All names are preceded by the word “Maris”, the word “Aequior”, or are followed or preceded by the word “Qalassa”.
• Lakes are 1-3 syllables long. All names are preceded by the word “Larcus” (saltwater), or “Limuh” (freshwater), or “Temprus” (seasonal).
• Rivers are 1-3 syllables long. All names are preceded by the word “Lihume”. Estuaries and dams are name preceded or followed by “Halimh”. Canals are “Cannali”. Waterfalls are name followed by “Cratari”.
• Swamps, wetlands, and marshlands may be called “Byas”, especially if they are sufficiently wet that dwellings must be built on stilts.
• Farmland where a river forks or floods annually are name preceded or followed by “Pot-ahmi”. A river delta is river name followed by “Potasus”.
• Mountain names are preceded or followed by “Mons” (individual) or “Montis” (range). A cliff is usually a 1 or 2 syllable name hyphenated to the mountain name (without Mons or Montis) followed by “Ascenz”; a mountain pass is the same thing but ends in the word “Descenzus”.
• Volcanos are mountain name followed by “Hasteio” (which generally means ‘fast’ or ‘fast-tempered’) instead of Mons or Montis.
• Cities are name preceded or followed by the word “Burs”, unless that syllable is used to end the name. Regions within a city are name/function preceded by “Pohl”. For convenience, English functions will often be used, e.g. “The Temple Region” would be named “Pohl Temple”. The generic name for any urban area is an “Urbanis”, so an unknown Drow City would be named a “Drow Urbanis”. Cities have 5,000-20,000 inhabitants. A city which is also a capital is named “Capitas” instead of “Burs”.
• Towns are name followed or preceded by the word “Arx”. The generic name for a town is “Arxes”. Towns have at least 1000-2000 residents and up to 4 times this number engaged in some form of primary production outside the urban area – farming, mining, tree-felling, etc. They must also have less than 8,000 residents all told.
• Villages have less than 1000 residents, and up to 5 times this number engaged in some form of primary production outside the urban area. They must have a total population of less than 5,000 residents. Village names are named “Villa” + name. The general name for villages is “Vicus”. Non-permanent or nomadic villages are “Crio” + name.
• New settlements are name + “Kolon”. The general name for settlements are “Colonia”.
• Farms in general are named “Agri” + name or “Ager” + name. The general name for farms is “Agrokthma”. The residential/settled part of a farm is “Agribanis” + the name of the owner, and that of the region.
• Outposts are name + “Castellum”. The general term for one or more outposts is “Castrum”. Forts and Lookout Towers and other purely military structures are name preceded or followed by “Prostasia”. A military fortification that uses a moat instead of walls may instead be called “Empodio” + name. Exceptionally large or strong examples of these structures may have the prefix “Pares” attached to the word, ie “Parescastellum”, “Parescastrum”, “Paresprostasia” and “Paresempodio” (‘Pares’ generally means ‘great’). Exceptionally small, weak, undefended, ruined, or overrun examples would use the prefix “Toico” instead of “Pares” (‘Toico’ generally means ‘undefended’).

The use of a common “language base” – no matter what the language might be – conveys a unified flavor to the environment, making it feel more real, and at the same time, just a little alien. This was a deliberate choice to distinguish this campaign from the other campaigns I was running concurrently, which used more “English”/traditional-fantasy names for places.

Click to open a larger hi-res version

After the PCs departed from Capitas Duodiem and explored the Black Pyramid, they were given a treasure map, shown on the left. For some reason I neglected to translate some of the names – “White Sands”, “Black Sands”, “Forgotten Wastes”, “Trackless Sands”, “Endless Sands” – while doing a proper job with the others (Lihume Klega, Mons Eclyptos, Gher Rubea, Gher Vallus, Gher Verdus, Verdisilva Aridiprasi). I think it might have been that the translated names were actual names while the ‘names’ given only in English were merely descriptive.

Whatever the reason, the players began to exclusively use the translated names, and the “magic” of the fantasy environment vanished completely. That taught me a valuable lesson: it’s better to leave a label off than to mix messages that way. Next time I have to produce such a map (and the occasion is fast approaching), everything will be in the psuedo-latin, without translations.

Human Character Names (etc) in ‘Shards Of Divinity’

These are also in Pseudo-Roman style. Children have what we call a christian name, which they call a ‘child-name’ followed by “et” or “en” (as though it were a middle name) and then the father’s adult christian name. “et” means ‘son of’, ‘en’ means ‘daughter of’.

Apon reaching the age of 16, the new adult chooses a new christian name for themselves, their child-name becomes a new middle name, and they can choose a surname. Surnames are one of the following:

1. “Am-” plus the name of the clan to which the child belongs;
2. “Or-” plus the name of the profession to which the child has dedicated themselves (in psuedo-latin);
3. “Hu-” plus the name of a group to which the child has chosen to swear allegiance (in psuedo-latin);
4. “Ne-” plus a word that has some personal meaning or significance to the child or his nature (psuedo-latin); or
5. [Males]: “Et-” plus father’s chosen surname; {Females]: “En-” plus mother’s first name.

If you want to have a go at coming up with your own name, the following sites might be useful:

• Roman Name Generator
• Google English-to-Latin Translation
• Free Text Translator (Latin is the very LAST language on the list)

As discussed earlier, the difference between Pseudo-Latin and Latin is ease of pronunciation. For example, “Society Of The Red Hand” is “Congregatio Rutilus Manus” in Latin, which I would simplify to “The Conrutilus Manus” in Pseudo-Latin.

Still to come: Non-human races languages in Shards Of Divinity, and the politics and descriptions of the different realms of the Shared Kingdoms.

A number of my recent articles here at Campaign Mastery have been derived from conversations with other GMs on Twitter (yes, readers, we GMs do actually talk to each other – and no, it’s not to find better ways to screw the players, well usually not.)

Today’s article derives from just such a discussion between myself and Chris from Osaka (@HyveMynd) which started with an interesting quotation by @NewbieDM: “At a typical rpg table, with 4 PCs and a GM, the burden of the story lies on 20% of that table”.

The Burdon Of The Story

Now, some GMs don’t agree with this quote, and many more only begrudge a qualified agreement. Nor was there a consensus over whether or not this was the way things should be. Personally, my opinion is that some players are pro-active, and go out looking for the adventure, while others are passive, and wait for the adventure to come to them. It only needs one proactive player in a group for a significant redistribution of that burden.

My personal preference, and the approach that I employ in my superhero campaigns, is that a healthy campaign requires both approaches. I like to develop adventures that force the players to drive the plot forward, with some plots involving the PCs simply because they live in a world in which certain events are taking place, and others which involve the PCs because they derive from the characters themselves.

The Passive Approach

The key with the passive approach, where the plotlines come into existence and entangle the PCs within their narrative, requires a couple of key structural elements to be present within the adventure. They must:

• derive from the actions, personalities, ambitions, and/or choices of NPCs;
• have consequences that the PCs will care about;
• engage the interest of the players;
• promise the style of play that one or more players desire; and
• be internally consistent and logical.

Adventures that derive from the actions, personalities, ambitions, and/or choices of NPCs

There are two sources of adventures that are worth noting within the Passive Approach. The first are plots that derive from previously-encountered NPCs. A would-be world conqueror won’t give up just because the PCs beat his plan into submission the last time around; he will attempt to determine where the flaw in his plans was, and look for ways to neutralize that factor or even turn it into an asset. Revenge, or previously-thwarted ambitions, make for powerful motivating factors.

A sub-source within this category are plots that derive from character actions, as the NPC strives to take advantage of, or undo, consequences of events from a previous appearance. A PC revealing a previously-unknown technology, a serendipitous side-effect, and a calamitous discovery, are just a few of the myriad of sources of such plotlines.

Bonus kudos may be awarded if the GM takes advantage of the opportunity for some personal growth in the instigating NPC’s character. Show something more about them, or have them change (perhaps just a little) as a consequence of their first encounter with the PCs.

The alternative source of adventures within this category stem from the GM having a plot idea and creating an opponent whose personality and/or ambitions will bring about that plot.

The richer the palette of NPCs within the campaign, the more likely it is that the right fit can be found between plot and an existing instigator, but it’s better to create a new foe than try to shoehorn an NPC into the role of instigator of a plotline that doesn’t quite fit.

When an adventure connects with a previous one in this way, player engagement with the plot happens more quickly because part of it will carry over from the previous plotline. That means the players will get involved in the plot more quickly and take a more active role in furthering the plotline.

Adventures that have consequences that the PCs will care about

These consequences may derive from the ultimate outcome of the plot (if the enemy succeeds) or be a byproduct or stepping stone of the plot. If the PCs have invested a lot of time and effort into setting up an Inn, threaten that Inn. If one of the NPCs cares about children, put some in danger. If a PC is addicted to coffee, threaten an import ban.

Don’t continually reuse the same shtick; find different ways to involve the PCs soft spots.

Take that Inn, for example: Having a noble threaten to confiscate it should only happen once. Threaten it indirectly by disrupting supply, by having a rival open its doors, by having the PCs overlook an obscure licensing fee or law, by threatening them with a health inspection after a plague of rats. Threaten it directly by a maniac running rampant through the city who likes to light fires, by a criminal or con-man taking lodgings there, by having an NPC (who doesn’t actually own the inn but who is associated with the PCs) losing “title” to it to the Thieves’ Guild in a game of cards, by having someone who is being chased by the watch take refuge within, by robbing a wealthy patron, by a storm that leaves the roof in need of repairs – after a minor incident or misunderstanding angers the builders at just the wrong time, by having it be located exactly where a mystic conjunction is going to take place, releasing some monster from the nether planes… if the PCs care about the inn, treat it as an NPC and look for ways to get IT involved in the plots. By virtue of the bond they have with it, they will care about the plotline.

If the adventure matters to the players, they will more readily act to further the plot.

Adventures that engage the interest of the players and avoid the dis-interest of the players

I have one player in some of my campaigns who loves mysteries but hates roleplaying detective stories because he is no good at solving mysteries. I have another player who hates big, “cosmic” stuff going on, but who enjoys sci-fi and space opera. A third player loves figuring out what’s going on a metagame level, getting inside my head and figuring out why things are happening and what’s going to happen next – and who absolutely lives for the times when a completely logical plot twist takes him completely by surprise, but who is easily bored by routine. A fourth player can’t stand to be a fifth wheel for an entire session of play – but doesn’t mind his character taking a back seat if he personally is enjoying the story.

If you can get the players engaged in the plotline, their characters will follow. If the players are not into the plotline, no matter what it might say on the character sheet, involvement in the game will only be half-hearted. So it’s important to be able to assess what your players want (even if they don’t know themselves, half the time), and if the day’s menu features something that won’t interest one of them, make sure it offers that player some other vector of connection to the plot, something else within the adventure to focus on.

If the plot interests a player, he will be more ready to get involved in it.

Adventures that promise the style of play that one or more players desire

Some players like intellectual challenges; others like to perform; some want to thump something. There are many different attempts to analyze player preferences out there in internet-land, and none of them have ever been completely convincing to me. Nevertheless, there are some styles of play that obviously appeal to a particular player more than others, and its important that the style of an adventure appeals to at least one player, who will then tend to take the lead in furthering that plot. If the plot doesn’t appeal to anyone – if the players are all thinkers and the adventure is a hack-and-slash masterpiece – they will act to reinforce each other’s negative perceptions; things will start badly and go downhill from there.

An essential distinction to make is the difference between this point and the preceding one. The earlier criteria was about the content of the adventure; this is about the style and tone of the activity within it.

If a plot lets a player do the type of things he enjoys having his character do, the player and his character will work to drive the plot forward.

Adventures that are internally consistent and logical

The final point to be considered under this heading is that adventures have to make sense. If there is a logical disconnect, it derails not only the suspension of disbelief, but the depth of motivation for the players to do something, get active, get involved – drive the plot. It will confuse them and make them second-guess themselves, or simply give up and say “it doesn’t matter what we do” – not a happy outcome.

The only flaw that comes close to being this bad for an adventure is an anticlimax. When a plot twist is revealed, you want to try and make the player’s jaws hit the deck – hit the table, at a dead minimum. When combat is about to come to a head, make sure it doesn’t end with a whimper but with a melodramatic roar with fireworks, explosions, lights, sound effects, and the kitchen sink.

Plotlines that don’t make sense force the players into introspective mental attitudes, trying over and over to find some rational explanation (that isn’t there), analyzing the whichness of the why not instead of making quick and decisive decisions and bold moves that will drive the plotline forward.

The Interactive approach

But, so far as I am concerned, all of the above are the lesser approach, that should make up no more than 40% of a campaigns plotlines (preferably 25% or so). The dominant source of adventures, which should get the players to drive the plotlines forward, are those resulting from the Interactive approach, in which the players have an active role in developing the adventures for the campaign.

I have a five-step process for achieving this. But before I go into specifics, there’s a caveat to admit to.

Aiming for the next level

The process that I am going to describe is the one that I am using for my current Zenith-3 superhero campaign – for the first time. The previous Zenith-3 campaign used a similar approach later in the campaign, but one that was not quite as developed; a still more-primitive version before that; and a barely-recognizable antecedent for the campaign’s first three or four years. At each stage, the evolution in the process & procedure has been logical – but at the same time, I have to admit that the current implementation is still in the promising-but-unproven category.

It should work. All the indications are that it will work and is working. But this is the bleeding edge of my development in this respect, and it is possible that it has gone too far.

It is also possible – even probable – that what works to a given standard within my campaigns will work to a different standard in another GMs games, with different players and GMing skills and preferences and circumstances.

All of which means that those reading this should be prepared to dial it back. Expect fewer plot threads or less complicated emergent plots or less tightly-plotted interconnections – none of which will mean very much to anyone yet, since I haven’t yet outlined the process, but the warning is there and will be reiterated as necessary.

Step One: Backgrounds Of Depth – with loose ends and integrated plotlines

The process starts with demanding that each player create a character background. In fact, it goes further than that in my campaigns: bonus building points are awarded for minor plots, for major plots, for plot hooks, for new and interesting NPCs, and for integration with established campaign background and canon.

Some definitions:

• A plot is an adventure outline, with beginning, middle, end, and consequences, usually contained in written text between one paragraph and one page in length. It should be taken for granted that any player-provided plot will be revised substantially – if not completely – by the GM; it’s an outline of an idea for something that the player thinks would be fun for the character to play through.
• A Minor Plot comes and goes with only minor consequences. It is a plotline that will be only one-to-three game sessions in length, the general content of each being specified within the written material submitted by the player.
• Major Plots are more substantial, with subplots before, during, and after the main plot, and with deliberate potential for significant impact on the life or circumstances of the featured PC. The player has to indicate the general content of both the plot, offer suggestions of the subplots that lead to the main plot, explain why this plotline will be so significant to the character and what the changes within the character will be afterwards, if any.
• Plot Hooks are loose threads in the characters background which the player has left unresolved. The player may or may not offer some indication of how he would like to see the loose thread resolved.
• Shallow NPCs are little more than names and perhaps shticks.
• Medium-defined NPCs mention the NPC’s objectives, techniques, and style in addition to the elements of a Shallow NPC.
• Strongly-defined NPCs further detail the NPC with background, motives, and at least an indication of the character’s psychology, in addition to the elements of a Medium NPC. The result is a blueprint for the construction of the character.
• Integration with established campaign background and canon, at its simplest level, simply requires that the character background does not contradict anything in the campaign background. A slightly more substantial approach ensures that established events in the campaign background are reflected in the character’s background in a logical manner, shedding new light on the events or their consequences. At it’s most innovative, the character background may turn an established event on its head, completely reinterpreting what took place without altering the outcome of the event or contradicting the experiences of the NPCs (and/or former PCs) who experienced the events at the time.

Some examples: (all invented for a fictitious, non-existent, campaign):
(I’ve decided to forego examples and discussion of background integration, simply to keep the size of this article manageable!)

• A Minor Plot by the player of Cocoa-Bean: Cocoa-Bean is kidnapped and magically reprogrammed to think she is Queen of the Lima Beans, who are under threat by a horde of bulldozers under the command of the Evil Developer. A simulacrum takes her place amongst the Bean Crop to buy the kidnapper time for Cocoa to complete the task she has been assigned, but the Simulacrum lacks drive and the ability to make decisions, while Cocoa is the leader of the Bean Crop. In part one, the substitution takes place and the PCs have to overcome a dangerous threat without the leadership they have come to rely on; the simulacrum will inadvertently make the situation much more dangerous. In part 2, the PCs overcome the simulacrum and follow the kidnapper’s mystic trail, guided by the power of cocoa, whose true identity emerges when she sleeps, an extremely hazardous journey as they will have to overcome the kidnapper, who wants no interference. In part 3, the PCs rescue Cocoa only to discover that the kidnapping was for a Noble Purpose, and have to deal with the menace of the Evil Developer and his bulldozers before returning home.
• A Major Plot by the Player of Vanilla Bean, with input from the player of Cocoa Bean: Summary: Vanilla bean is haunted by an evil future self who attempts to take control of the young bean’s actions in order to ensure that the evil future self comes into being. Pre-scenario subplot: Vanilla begins making mistakes in battle, having some difficulty with decision-making, and experiences heightened levels of aggressive tendencies intermixed with angst. She will have trouble sleeping and become noticeably tired and short-tempered. This should transpire over a 10-day period, game time, with each day exhibiting more severe symptoms (to a maximum of half the time).
   
  In part 1, evil-future-Vanilla takes total control of young-Vanilla for a short period of time at the height of a battle with the Wicked Lemur, leading young Vanilla to attack full-strength despite the presence of, and danger to, hostages. As a result, Wicked Lemur will escape when the other members of the Bean Crop divert from their planned and coordinated attack to protect the hostages. Afterwards, she won’t know what came over her.
   
  In part 2, evil-future-Vanilla will act to sever the growing relationship between young-Vanilla and Runner-bean, attacking Runner when his attentions grow too cloying for evil-future-Vanilla. The viciousness of the attack will add to the growing concern of her team-mates about Vanilla’s stability. As the team search for clues as to where Wicked Lemur will have holed up, Vanilla will take matters into her own hands, attacking a number of old cronies and former allies of Lemur to ‘force’ information about Lemur out of them. As a result, they become even less inclined to cooperate; Vanilla’s solution is to become even more aggressive.
   
  In part 3, Vanilla disobeys a direct order from Cocoa-Bean and interrogates Ferret Whistler so hard that the elderly former criminal suffers a major heart attack. When reprimanded by one or more of the team, she physically attacks the members criticizing her before quitting the group to go her own way. She warns the team to stay out of her way or she will reveal the secrets of the Bean Crop.
   
  Part 4 takes place a couple of days later; the Bean Crop’s attempts to track down Wicked Lemur have come to naught, while Vanilla has been cutting a swathe of destruction through the seedier parts of the City, and is now just as big a threat as Lemur, if not worse. Cocoa resolves that when next Vanilla reveals herself, the team have to treat her like any other Villain, regardless of the consequences. They don’t have long to wait; somehow, Vanilla has located the nursing home in which Wicked Lemur’s aged grandmother resides, and is threatening to destroy it if Lemur doesn’t reveal himself within the hour. The remaining members of the Bean Crop are about to depart to stop Vanilla – any way they have to – when the mysterious Tomato The Conqueror, a sometimes villain sometimes ally, appears and announces ‘this must not be’. He reveals to the team the interference of evil-future-Vanilla and offers them the chance to stop her before it is too late, because this is the act that will make evil-future-Vanilla’s existence inevitable – a being of darkness and evil who will destroy the Bean Crop and subjugate not only the planet but lay the foundations of an empire that will eventually crush freedom throughout the galaxy. Tomato will offer the team a bargain – if they promise not to oppose Tomato the next time they meet, Tomato will take the rest of the team forward through time to confront evil-future-Vanilla in a contest for the soul of their team-mate. Of course, evil-Vanilla will have grown in power in the intervening period, so this will be no simple challenge…
   
  Part 5 shows Cocoa-bean reluctant to agree to Tomato’s terms, citing suspicion about his motives. Tomato takes the team into the future to show them the dystopian nightmare that the world will come under the heel of, should they not agree to his terms. Eventually, Cocoa is forced to agree. The under-strength Bean Crop engage evil Vanilla. At the height of the battle (and the end of the game session), Tomato is revealed as a cybernetic rebuild of what was left of Cocoa Bean after Cocoa was almost killed by evil Vanilla. (Note to GM: This may be a deception on the part of Tomato – which is why Tomato did not reveal it when trying to convince the team. As always, Tomato is working to his/her own agenda.)
   
  Part 6 resumes with the Bean Crop attacking Evil Vanilla in 2112 while the villainous former member reacts to the revelation by Tomato. If they can take advantage of the distraction caused (and not get caught up in the shock themselves), they can slowly seize the advantage over Evil Vanilla; even if they don’t win, they can succeed in severing evil-Vanilla’s temporal connection to her younger heroic self. As soon as that is done, back in 2012, they undo the event that creates Evil Vanilla in the first place, so she fades from existence. Tomato, emotionless, even icy-cold, returns the team to the past (proving with the very fact of his/her continued existence that the ‘revelation’ was a trick, or was he/she protected from the change by being outside normal time when it took place? Tomato is always deceptive). The team can then confront Vanilla, who has come to her senses, with full memory of what she has done but thinks it was all her own idea.
   
  Aftermath: When the Bean Crop finally catch up with Wicked Lemur, it will transpire that he was hiding in a place with no access to media at all – he didn’t know about the threat to his grandmother and couldn’t have answered young-evil-Vanilla’s threat even if he had wanted to. Which means that if not stopped in 2112, Vanilla – dominated by Evil-future-Vanilla – would have carried out her threat. She will have to come to terms with what she did, and with the dark potential that she has found within her. The team, also knowing of that dark potential and never quite being sure of what might bring it out again, will no longer trust Vanilla to the same extent that they used to. Her personal relationship with Runner Bean has been damaged perhaps irretrievably. On the rebound, she will start to hook up with individuals who are the exact opposite so that they don’t remind her of Runner – bad boys, in other words – which (under the circumstances) will not exactly reassure the rest of the Bean Crop. Finally, there is the promise to Tomato – when will that chip get called in, and will Cocoa Bean honor the deal when the time comes?
• A Plot Hook from the player of Runner Bean: He got his costume from a trunk in his parent’s attic. He has no idea where it came from.
• A Shallow NPC from the player of Runner Bean: Sweet Pea attempted to seduce him into letting her go, not realizing how young he was. He ignored her charms and took her in.
• A Medium-defined NPC from the player of Cocoa Bean: Coffee Bean is not really a bean at all, he is a mushroom who has been surgically rebuilt into what he considers a higher form of life. Since his hybridized existence is “naturally” superior to all others, he naturally should rule it all. To this end, he hybridizes other residents of Florina City, building their obedience into their very genetic code. While some of these hybrids are obvious, such as the immensely tough coconauts and the nightmarishly over-sized Karrots, some appear externally unchanged; using these hidden hybrids, he has infiltrated virtually every branch of the local authorities. You never know where one will be located, and any NPC can at any time be converted – then returned to their normal lives.
• A Strongly-defined NPC from the player of Vanilla Bean: Beetroot Borer rules an underground kingdom of blind asparagus. Hidden tunnels connect him with cellars and underground structures and utilities all over the city. He only needs to pass close to a telephone cable to be able to hear what is being said, and can comprehend hundreds of conversations at the same time. He greatly resents being forced into this underground existence, and is naturally melodramatic and over-the-top in everything he does. Anger, cruelty, and frustration are never far from the surface, and he will be destructive just to see something in ruins. He is infatuated with Vanilla Bean, who he wants to make his Queen, but she can’t stand his bloated red appearance. He doesn’t realize that his asparagus citizens are mildly psionic and collectively bind him to them, which is why he can’t abandon them despite his loathing of the underground lifestyle he leads.

Some notes on these examples::

• The Minor Plot by the player of Cocoa-Bean: This is barely adequate as a minor plot. Motivations are weak, the NPCs are weak, and the plot is somewhat cheesy. There’s just enough there for the GM to work with.
• The Major Plot by the Player of Vanilla Bean, with input from the player of Cocoa Bean: This is a far more substantial plotline, and one that would only be possible with the cooperation of the players in question. The player of Vanilla Bean will obviously also play Evil-Future-Vanilla. Note that the only actions, decisions, or reactions by other PCs which are ‘pre-scripted’ are the planned reactions of Cocoa-Bean to the offer by the manipulative Tomato, and a continuation of romantic advances by the hot-blooded Runner Bean; the latter is predictable, an ongoing relationship the two have developed in roleplay, and the former is acceptable only because the author of the plotline has consulted Cocoa-Bean’s player and posed a hypothetical question about how Cocoa would react. Despite initial appearances, there is no real railroading in the plot; all actions are instigated by Vanilla or by an NPC. The plot would take very little additional development to be ready to run – details of Future-Vanilla’s abilities, the villainous Wicked Lemur, some locations and some flavor text.
   
  More importantly, this shows the power of the technique. A GM should never come up with a plot like this, it changes a PC, and relationships between PCs, too fundamentally – unless, of course, the players ask him to craft an adventure that brings about these changes. But as a plotline goes, it’s pretty stonking good!
• The Plot Hook from the player of Runner Bean: Barely adequate even as a plot hook.
• A Shallow NPC from the player of Runner Bean: Also barely adequate, though the idea of a would-be seductress named “Sweet Pea” in such a campaign has promise. There’s something both alluring and mysterious in the name – a lot of flavor.
• A Medium-defined NPC from the player of Cocoa Bean: The player of Cocoa Bean is showing a predilection for certain types of plotline, between this NPCs background and the earlier Minor Plot – something the GM should carefully note. There’s a definite X-files ‘tinge’ here.
• A Strongly-defined NPC from the player of Vanilla Bean: There is some real depth and imagination in this NPC, and some subtle nuances that are only hinted at. While the name is not of the same caliber as “Sweet Pea”, and might well be changed by the GM, the personality and characterization are very deep. The same can also be said of “Tomato The Conqueror” from the Major Plot. Vanilla Bean’s player is also definitely showing a preference for complicated plots with subtle and deep characterization. This is the sort of thing that I really love to GM – a challenge, but loads of fun if I can pull it off.

Step Two: One Weaving To Bind Them

The GM links these loose plot threads and NPCs together into an overall tapestry and integrates them into his overall plot. For example, he needs to establish the character of “Tomato The Conqueror” long before the plotline with “Evil Future Vanilla” takes place. After that plotline, he can use a “Bad boy” relationship between Vanilla and some other NPC to lead into another plotline. I’ve discussed this sort of integration in past articles quite extensively – consider:

• Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work
• Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures
• Back To Basics Part 2: Campaign Structures (includes a long list of other related articles here at CM at the bottom)
• Back To Basics: Example: The White Tower
• Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra
• The Echo Of Events To Come: Foreshadowing in a campaign structure

…so I don’t think I need to go into too much detail. If I were constructing the “Bean” campaign, perhaps I might link the psionic Asparagus-people with the true origin of Tomato the Conqueror, for example. It’s about taking ideas from two or more people and weaving them together.

More importantly, and this is why all this discussion is present here, because of the involvement of one or more players in developing the plot, to some extent, the passive phase has already taken place, and the players concerned are ready and willing to drive the plot forward with little or no effort from the GM.

Step Three: Plots that Offer to Screw with The Characters

Yes, I know – that subsection title makes it sound like I am now advocating exactly what I said a GM shouldn’t do, in Step 1 (when discussing the “Dark Vanilla” plot). But it’s not quite the same thing: that plot does screw with a character, with that character’s player’s full connivance. What I’m advocating here is occasionally crafting a plot that will have a negative impact on the PCs if they don’t act – but leaving the choice of reaction as open as possible.

By virtue of the GMs prior choices of what resources (contacts, equipment, etc) he has already made available, and the creations of the players at the time of character generation and approval, the choice of reactions is pre-sandboxed.

This pushes the players into action, rather than standing around talking about what they might do, which can help develop the habit of driving the plot, at least somewhat. I find this subtype of solution to be especially useful after a plotline with a lot of roleplaying and not a lot of combat.

If the situation can’t possibly get any worse, the players are encouraged to “do something – anything – about it” and reassess the situation. You want at least one of them to say “This is something we can do” and for the others to reply “Then let’s do that”. Or to put it another way, get the players – when confronted by a seemingly-insoluble problem – to immediately act to solve any part of the problem they do understand, then look at what’s left.

The secret to the success of this approach is that the GM isn’t really out to screw the players, or even the characters; he just wants to make them sweat for a while. He is a double-agent, working on behalf of the evil plot that he has hatched at the same time as helping the PCs achieve their goal of achieving a solution to the plot.

Step Four: Consequences are a dish best served cold

Keep track of what the PCs do and use the consequences (both intended & unintended) to build a new plot. To some extent, the players will see this not as a new plot with a new passive phase, but as a continuation of the old plot. Once again, they will already be predisposed to action, because that action will be perceived as an extension of what they had already decided to do. When your campaign consists of nothing more than a chain of consequences to an initial ‘seed’ planted by the GM, it will be fully player-driven, at least that is the theory.

In practice, the GM will need to stimulate circumstances with fresh seeds from time to time, but 95% player-driven campaigns should be quite achievable.

Step Five: Tie it all together in a way that makes it personal

The final step is to connect more character-derived plot threads with these actions and consequences to bind your plots to the PCs. Players are far more pro-active when their characters are already directly involved.

The Passive-Interactive Campaign

In combination, the passive and interactive techniques outlined above should make the players co-conspirators in driving the plots, relieving the GM of much of the burden described in the quotation given at the start of this article. And that’s only fair – the players have at least as big a desire to make the campaign successful and enjoyable as the GM does. Using the interactive approach, besides generating plot material for the direct consumption by the GM, gives valuable clues as to how to identify the content that meets the requirements of the passive approach. Together, the two are more powerful, and more effective, than either would be on their own.

But there’s an up-side for players, too: there is less likelyhood that the GM’s plots will be detrimental to the player in unexpected and undesirable ways for the sake of involving the PCs more intimately in the action if they have pre-selected the plot hooks they want the GM to “use against their characters”.

Your campaign will be the real winner, and both your players and yourself will be the beneficiaries. Bargain!

I’ve tried every way I can think of to set this topic aside until after I had finished the series on names, but it just doesn’t work.

So I guess it’s time to take a side-trip into the wonderful world of creating and simulating Alien Languages in RPGs…

I once, back in the early 1990s, wrote a piece of software for my Commodore-128 that created alien languages on demand. It took about three 16-hour days.

The catalyst was a library book on codes which contained a number of tables, including:

• first syllables of a word by frequency of occurrence in English;
• last syllables of a word by frequency of occurrence in English;
• frequency of occurrence of individual letters of the alphabet in English;
• frequency of occurrence of individual letters of the alphabet as the first character of a word, in English;
• intervening syllables of words by frequency of occurrence in English and total word syllable count;
• likelihoods of a specific letter of the alphabet being followed by another specific letter of the alphabet in English;
• probability of a word containing a specific number of syllables by specificity and technicality of subject.

Adding to that was some information from other sources (I no longer recall what they were):

• derivation trees showing inheritance of related words;
• word relationship chart showing the degree of change in language over time with a concordance of key events stimulating that change.

The premise behind the software’s function was simple: a text editor that mapped a new language onto an English “translation” that had been entered.

Step One: Create the Language morphology

The first step was creating the language morphology, the shape of the language. The book on codes had talked about the creation of random words in English using these probability charts as a means of generating a code that could not be broken using frequency tables because the frequencies of occurrence would be the same as natural English. I thought that was a brilliant idea if reversed – so that an alien language (bereft of all word meanings and relationships) could be created simply by randomizing the numeric values in the different tables mentioned in the first list and using the result to generate a list of words.

The Morphology Algorithm

This starts with a table of every possible syllable, defined as a vowel or vowel set, plus a consonant or consonant set. This was generated using a simple nested set of loops and stored in a language file on the PC.

Another set of loops then added each possible consonant to the start of each of these to create a larger list of additional possible first-syllables for words. These were stored in a separate language file on the PC.

A new pair of loops then assigned random ratings out of 1000 to preset table structures to create the equivalents of the tables derived from the code book for the new language. A high value was “common”, a low value was “rare”. In the more sophisticated later versions of the program, these tables were presented onscreen for manual editing. Once complete, these were stored in additional language files on the PC.

Each syllable in the first table was then analyzed for frequency of occurrence in different places within a word: first syllable, first intervening syllable, second and subsequent intervening syllables, and last syllable, all according to the rules defined in the previous step. For convenience, two separate tables were output – one was the combination of all syllables from both tables one and two, and only applied to the first syllables of words, while the second dealt with syllables in the rest of the world. The updated language morphology files were then written back to disk.

This approach was used because it permitted backtracking part or all of the way, if the results proved undesirable – I could generate a list of the 50 syllables most likely to start a word and display them, then go back and tweak the ‘rules’ accordingly. I could extract a list of the words which had the highest start-of-sentence rating multiplied by the end-of-sentence rating to derive the most common monosyllable words of the language – then tweak the language morphology if I didn’t like what I saw, then the most common two-syllable words (combining the most common start-syllables with the most common end-syllables.)

I could also manually override individual results, something I did to ensure that the most common words were not recognizable English and were readily pronounceable.

Step Two: Generating The Language

The initial version of the language generator did nothing more than take a piece of English text, break it into individual words, then generate a new non-human word using the tables of probability of occurrence of individual syllables.

I quickly started adding refinements to this basic model.

Remembering a word allocation

The first refinement added seems fairly obvious – keeping a running dictionary of English-to-alien words so that the same English word didn’t end up with three different alien words. Each time an English word was offered for translation, this dictionary was consulted for a prior translation, and if one was found, it was used. Each time a word was generated and matched to an English equivalent, it was compared to the list of alien words already constructed and if it matched an already-allocated word, it was discarded and a new translation-word generated.

Preloading the translations: a working vocabulary

The second refinement was to preload the translations with a working vocabulary. I started with the 100 most common English words – things like “An”, “And”, “But”, and so on. I then added a “specialist interest” – defining one or two subjects which were fundamental to the race to whom the language belonged. For the elves, it was plants and plant parts and words associated with the plant side of biology such as “grow”, “bud”, “shoot”, “leaf”, and so on. For Dwarves it was minerals and mining and tools relating to that activity. Orcs were tactics, and war, and hunting, and so on. These were padded out using a thesaurus – the same one to which I refer to this day – until I reached somewhere between 500 and a thousand English words, which I defined as the language’s working vocabulary. Translating those – with a weighted algorithm to select shorter words – gave me a massive head-start in constructing alien languages. Oh, and I also included words relating to any special abilities the race might have, and any values the race lauded or looked down apon.

Elementary Grammar

After that, I worked out a way to define a basic grammar, which defined the English words as one of four things: Nouns, Verbs, Words relating to a racial specialty, all other words were lowercase. This was achieved simply by listing the English text with a number in front of each English word (starting the count at zero and increasing it by one) and then telling the computer which numbered words were nouns, then which ones were verbs, and so on. A further refinement still later dealt with grammatical relationships, connecting verbs with the subject of the action (what it was being done to), the tool or operator (what it was being done with) and so on.

All this permitted me to incorporate simple non-English grammatical rules to both the order of the words and the spellings – for example, I could set a rule that the subject of a verb always start with the first letter of the verb inserted to the word. These rules were necessarily hard-coded into each language – I always intended to work out a soft-coding solution but never got around to it.

A key principle was always to effect these grammatical changes to the English to be translated BEFORE any translation took place so that I could see what was happening, and make sure the ‘rules’ were working properly.

Tenses

As part of the elementary grammar project, I inserted rules into the translation algorithm to permit standardized changes to indicate tenses, and grammatical rules to translate the English text into the current tense plus (for future) or minus (for past), and so on. These also grew in sophistication over time, permitting me in the case of a long-lived race to impart nuances such as “the past within my lifetime” and “the past in the time of my parents or ancestors” or “before I am no more” or “after I am gone”.

The general principle

The general principle was to use a body of English text as a test-translation. Each one would introduce some new concept to be taken into consideration, whether that was the relationship between verbs and their associated nouns, or tenses, or whatever; once built into the rules of the translator, I could move on to the next attribute of ordinary English.

One of the big improvements was to subdivide that list of words from key subjects from the initial elementary grammar and use them as metaphors for root words describing more complex, advanced, or subtle terms, in exactly the same way that real languages develop. this was achieved by numbering the English root words from the key subjects and appending the appropriate number to a related English word as a step in a translation, building the language up, one word at a time.

This produced some interesting and insightful language elements along the way – the Elvish words for battle, war, and violence in general became derived from their words for “Spring” (the season) and the competition between plants for sunlight. This provided a key insight into their perception of the world – what a human might see as a peaceful glade became a battleground of unceasing violence between plants, simply because the Elvish perception of time was different, a longer view if you will. This was a random choice on the part of the language-generation software which I could have overridden if it seemed inappropriate – if I had, it would have produced a different but still sensible alternative, resulting in a distinctly different conception of elves.

Similarly, the root word for weapons, battle, and so on, was randomly chosen to be “stick”, with a hyphenated preliminary syllable describing the construction material and a hyphenated subsequent syllable describing the shape of the “stick”, followed by another describing the type of movement or action required to use it. A sword might thus be literally described as a “metal-stick-sharpedged-slash” – which, in Orcish, might be “Zhu-est-con-zah”.

The Aging of a language

As time passes, languages become more streamlined, some words pass out of favor and others are introduced to describe new relationships, perceptions, or phenomena. While fully simulating this process was way beyond the program that I wrote, some rudimentary consideration was given to how these phenomena would manifest on words and phrases that were already old.

Initially, I did this manually, simply by saying translated words and phrases quickly (aloud) and seeing how things ran together. If there was a natural divide, where the tongue stumbled, either the language would change to become more sophisticated or the word would change to become more easily pronounced. For example, take that Orcish word for sword – “”Zhu-est-con-gah” – either the word for sword becomes “Conzar”, one of a class of objects which can be described as “Zhooest”, or the word itself runs together – “Zoostonga” – and then possibly just “Zoostong”.

But then I found a way to simulate this using a random action within the language generation system itself. The notion is that certain consonant pairs would be depreciated in favor of a simpler combination or just one of the pair. Where these consonant pairs couple two syllables of a word together, the resulting word becomes more streamlined. A random determination – which could be weighted or have its own logical rules applied – would decide whether the language or the word would evolve.

This language aging was further reinforced by having the rules of the language evolve over time, updating the core tables that are used to generate words. I determined, based on the information in those other sources, that a language would evolve between 0.1 and 0.5 % each year. Certainly, that seemed about right for English, where text from a century earlier (HG Wells or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example) had a slightly different flavor but was still mostly understandable without difficulty, while the writing of Shakespeare and Chaucer is much less so – and if one goes back a little further still, into medieval times, it is almost unrecognizable.

Under the principles of word breakdown (language evolution) vs word streamlining, the degree to which a word was subject to streamlining – its age – could be randomly assigned, as could a timeline of the degree of language drift each year. Accumulating drift as a word grew older then gave a percentage chance of that word being streamlined, and the depreciation rules would then indicate how that streamlining would occur within that particular word.

The Integrated Evolution of History

With this as a basis, it was even possible to indicate “key years for key subjects” – years in which great progress was made in one subject or another, and which therefore had an unusually high chance of language evolution. Words describing agriculture would necessarily become more diverse and specialized with the invention of crop rotation, or irrigation, or any of a number of other developments. Metalworking would similarly have its watershed years.

At first, it seemed like there would be altogether too many such to be useful, but it soon dawned on me that I only ever needed to deal with a small subset of the possible watershed years and subjects. They key point that I had initially overlooked was that I wasn’t constructing a whole language – I was constructing a mechanism that developed a basic core of a language that was extended as necessary to translate key elements of dialogue. I would never need to write a book in Elvish or Dwarvish or whatever – just some key phrases and perhaps a page or two of old text.

This realization made it possible to simply keep track of when certain words evolved, establishing a timeline of changes within the translation for just those subjects touched on in whatever I happened to be translating at the time.

In modern times

All this was done long before the internet really reached the masses. I wouldn’t, and don’t, do things this way any more. So how do I create non-human languages in the modern era?

The seeds of the technique have evolved out of the work that I did back in the 90s. But, rather than explain it now – because I’m out of time – I’m going to demonstrate it with material from my Shards Of Divinity campaign.

So here’s what’s going to happen from here: starting in a week or two, and continuing every 2nd week or so until they are finished, I’m going to be presenting one of the national states from that campaign. I’ll be supplying exactly what I gave the players, but where the information was presented to them by subject – everything on politics for all of the Kingdoms at the same time, for example – here, everything will be organized into a kingdom dossier. That includes notes on the naming of characters and instructions on translating the language, which is the whole point of the series – everything else is there to provide context. I’ll round out each one with some discussion on the principles used, and some of the background of the different ideas and why I chose those particular nations – and I might even slip in some additional notes and hints that the players haven’t received yet.

Oh, and I’ll precede the whole thing with a quick introduction to the overall political concept, which is so deep that the players haven’t fully grasped it yet!

So buckle up – this discussion is about to take a left-hand-turn at high speed…

This is actually the article that was supposed to appear next Monday. I started making some notes for it, and before I knew it, the whole article was written – and I no longer had enough time to finish the article that I had intended to write for today’s post (I got about half-way through it, so it will appear next week)…

I zapped a piece of spam this week that actually had a point of interest lurking underneath the superficial and ill-formed outpouring of semi-sentient garbage that forms the output of 99+% of spambots. This particular collection of semi-random phrases suggested that American Football was big business and that it is responsible for Monday Night parties – and that if that particular entertainment (Monday Night Football) was banned, the parties would go away as well.

Setting aside the fact that in Australia it’s the Friday Night and weekend games that are the tribal gatherings, and some specific Wednesday night matches (I’m referring to the State Of Origin series), which implies that cultural factors have a part to play, there is a point worth discussing in there. I can accept that American Football is big business in the US, that’s irrelevant to the subject I’m going to discuss. No, the subject is cause and effect in a social context, tradition, and the relationship between Marketing and GMing.

Cause And Effect

The first thought that came to me, even as I was verifying that this particular comment offered for consideration here at CM was indeed Spam, was to wonder to what extent the spambot had the relationship between cause and effect back to front. Did these ‘Monday Night Parties’ happen (assuming that they do) because that was when the Game was on – or was the Game scheduled for Monday Nights because that was when there was a pre-existing predilection to party, i.e. engage in tribal social activities?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Well, technically the egg did, since dinosaurs were laying eggs long before there were chickens or birds of any sort, but you get the point).

There is a certain logic to a predilection for social gatherings on a Monday. It’s like capturing a little extra piece of weekend. After a day or more of loafing and social/home activities, the return to work is always a rude reawakening, even if you love your job – assuming that you work a normal 5- or 6- day working week. A little piece of relaxation after that return to stress can better prepare you to face the rest of the week.

A similar logic manifests about Mid-week games, which can act as punctuation to the working week, breaking it into two smaller, more manageable halves.

And of course, Friday nights kick-start the weekend – which (according to this theory) doesn’t start on Saturday, it starts when you down tools on Friday. Or even lunchtime Friday!

That leaves Tuesday and Thursday as the dullest days of the week, with no socially-redeeming value. Which sounds like an excellent reason to schedule something uplifting or entertaining on those days – there is a reason why Tuesday is traditionally ‘the’ night for comedy and light programming on Australian television screens, while Thursday was always good for action-adventure and Cop shows on TV, something that got the pulse going a bit, rejuvenating the viewer after 4 days of hard grind in the vineyard. Thursday was also the night that Sci-Fi on commercial TV always seemed to migrate towards – Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and the various incarnations of Star Trek all migrated here. Though perhaps that’s because audience numbers are down due to late-night-shopping, which happens on Thursday Nights here in Australia, and these shows were programmed by the local networks to sacrifice themselves in the ratings in preference to anything else – Australian TV has never quite ‘gotten’ sci-fi (sigh).

Monday night football has been tried here many times, and each time it has ultimately failed to match the viewing numbers of Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night games – or those Wednesday specials, for that matter.

The Mind-manipulators

It’s a popular belief that marketing can change our minds. It’s not true. Marketing can create a demand for a particular type of product or service; it can position one brand more prominently in the minds of shoppers once that demand has been created; but it can’t actually make up our minds for us. It is limited to creating the conditions under which a product can flourish – and doesn’t always even succeed at that. Remember the New Coke fiasco?

So it is with the question of when to present football games on TV. I find it very hard to believe that a social phenomenon (Monday night football parties) can be created by marketing alone; at best, it can tap into a pre-existing propensity for such activities to occur on that particular night, and advise that scheduling the right product (sports entertainment, in this case) in that timeslot can take advantage of that social propensity. In other words, Monday night football will rate better on Mondays, because of the Monday night parties, not the other way around.

The Power Of Tradition

Once something is established, it becomes habitual amongst the general population fairly quickly. It becomes traditional. The longer it persists, the harder that tradition becomes to break. I feel entirely confident that if Monday Night Football were to go away, the parties would persist – and people would find some other justification for them. If and when those Monday Night games resumed, they would find a ready market for them, re-establishing themselves via the power of tradition.

The In-Game Implications

Any aspect of social behavior that becomes understood, or that we simply become aware of, has implications for an RPG, both internally and externally. Let’s look at the in-game ramifications first.

We often attribute various social activities within a fantasy society to tradition – it’s a nice, neat, short-cut to justification that lets us create the society that we want within the game and move on. The better GMs will give passing thought to the historical precedents that led to that social activity becoming a tradition in the first place. There is usually very little thought given as to the psychological and social reasons for the social practice in question becoming an accepted tradition, and that is shortchanging our understanding of the society that we are creating.

Or, to put it another way, once we understand the reasons why that tradition resonates with the populace in question, those reasons can manifest in other impacts on the society and its inhabitants.

There are a lot of benefits to be accrued from such an approach.

• The society becomes more internally consistent, and hence is more believable.
• It saves the GM work because there is less the GM has to create out of whole cloth.
• It saves the GM work because there is less that the GM has to create in advance.
• It makes GMing easier because there is less for the GM to remember about the society – remember the causes and not the effects.
• It makes the society easier to communicate to the players because the reasons are their own shorthand notation about the society they have encountered.
• It makes the society easier for the players to understand, because it boils the differences within the society down to manifestations of a particular cause.

That’s a lot of benefit from a relatively small investment of skull sweat.

For Example

Let’s say we want to create a society for use within a fantasy game. They are to have a tradition of fasting each midwinter’s day before a communal feast when the sun goes down, accompanied by the burning of a dried branch from an aromatic tree.

An imaginative GM will go that far and not much farther – after all, that’s all he needs the PCs to see, and he can explain it simply as a tradition.

An imaginative GM seeking to create a consistent, fleshed out campaign will ask themselves about the historical origins of the tradition, and its theological foundation. Perhaps it is symbolic of the hunger experienced during hunter-gatherer days, and the communal feast celebrates the coming of spring – in which case, the god of spring or spirit of spring should be somehow represented at the feast. This additional bit of description, offered to the players, would let them make sense of the tradition, creating that much more verisimilitude.

But a really good GM will look at why this tradition is important to the locals, because that gives leads and clues to other aspects of the lives of the villagers. Perhaps they are only permitted to celebrate on a few theologically-significant occasions, living grim, grey lives of abstinence and moral purity the rest of the year. Or perhaps there is only enough food for one feast a year, because the rest is preserved in case of famine. Perhaps Winter is seen as some dreadful beast that must be defeated each year by the spirit of spring.

Which suggests the possibility that the beast is real, and – just as each spring is a new one – must be defeated by a stranger. Imagine the PCs surprise, when (after thinking they understood the origins of the feast) they suddenly find themselves the guests of honor, the embodiment of spring, being feted and celebrated – and then learn that the reason is because at Dawn they are expected to go bravely forth and defeat the Monster Of Winter…

A few seconds of thought have not only told us a lot more about how the NPCs of the village will treat the PCs, but how they will act in other ways, and we have derived an adventure to feature this behavior from that explanation. And all because we understand the people more clearly.

The Metagame Implications

Marketing, at its heart, is all about finding out what people want and repackaging what you have to fit that desire. Successful marketing of a product makes that product popular amongst those who consume it. If that’s not directly applicable to GMs selling players on the campaign that they have created, or the adventure that is currently underway, I don’t know what is.

To be a great GM you need to identify what sort of campaign, and what sort of adventures, your players want. Either you incorporate those desires into the game that you are offering, or the players will be unsatisfied. This truth extends throughout the campaign at every level, from the NPCs and enemies that have to be overcome, to the inherent morality of the world, to the ratio of treasure to magic, to the rate at which experience is earned, to the style of the adventures the PCs undertake, to the way the GM handles the rules, to the environment and scheduling of play. Every facet of running a game is encompassed.

Marketing is a two-way process – customers can be led in a particular direction to a certain extent, and so can players. Marketing, in other words, is also about creating a demand and then satisfying that demand. And neither occurs in a vacuum – there is always the power of tradition, which can hinder this process or be harnessed to boost it.

The Marketing Cornucopia

We are surrounded by marketing all the time. Quite often, we do our best to ignore it. This is a major mistake on the part of a GM.

Another way of looking at the above situation is, we are surrounded by opportunities to self-educate ourselves about marketing all the time.

The next time you see a billboard, or a magazine ad, or a TV advert, or a TV show, or a movie, spend a little time thinking about who it is designed to appeal to, how it achieves – or fails to achieve – this appeal, and how you could change it to appeal to a different market segment or audience. When there’s a documentary on marketing and the role it plays in our lives available, such as The Gruen Transfer (later known as Gruen Planet, Gruen Nation, and most recently, Gruen Sweat), watch it. Learn from it. Talk on social media to people who really are marketing gurus or social media pundits. The skills so acquired are surprisingly relevant to the craft of being a good GM.

Some seasons of The Gruen Transfer are available on DVD in Australia from the ABC shop, but these will be region-4 encoded and may not function on DVD players from other countries. They are VERY strongly recommended if you think you can play them. There is also a book (top of the results list from the above link), which will work in any English-speaking location, and a website for you to explore. (You can also find some segments from the show on YouTube, but don’t tell the producers).