Aussie money is some of the prettiest in the world and I’ve spent a lot of it on gaming products…

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!

I had the choice of a lot of metaphors for this illustration – Toolboxes, Magic Boxes, Treasure Chests, Open Boxes, Gift Boxes, Rubik’s Cubes, or the one chosen, a Black Box. But the others are also worth considering when reading the article.

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.

Getting your players to lead the way

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).

A bit of a departure from the usual today, with an article that is only indirectly game-related. Every now and then, you have to let your imagination run wild or it gets soft and flabby… normal service will resume on Thursday, this was just something that I had to get out of my system. Hopefully, it will still make for some fascinating reading…

A thought occurred to me a little while back, while thinking about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and some of the unexplored implications that it contains.

Consider that as an object approaches the speed of light, it’s aparrant length shrinks, eventually reaching the point at which that length is less than the Uncertainty limit. Once this point is reached, we can no longer be certain of exactly where the object is by an amount equal to the Uncertainty limit, and can speak of its position only as a statement of probabilities, just as we do subatomic particles of smaller size than this limit.

This error must lie in the direction of the object’s motion, and hence its true position is either forward or back of the apparent position. But the object’s position at any given instant of time is used to determine its velocity – if the object’s Uncertainty places its true position further forward of its apparent position at the instant of measurement, that means that its velocity has increased by a miniscule amount (distance over time). Eventually, if the object continues to accelerate by however miniscule an amount each second, it must get close enough to the speed of light that this increase in velocity exceeds the speed of light – which is, supposedly, an impossibility.

There are only three ways out of this conundrum:

• Either the Uncertainty ‘constant’ itself also shrinks with velocity, so that the amount of possible gain in apparent velocity is always less than the amount required to achieve the speed of light; or,
• The other quantity in our calculation of velocity, time, is also subject to an Uncertainty principle similar to that of space; or
• Faster than light travel is a valid physical phenomenon.

As a science-fiction enthusiast, I know which of these three I would like to be true, but let’s consider the alternatives for a moment.

Certainty at speed

If the Uncertainty constant shrinks with velocity in the direction of travel only, that would effectively mean that Certainty was achieved at the same instant as the object achieved the speed of light, i.e. that the quantum Uncertainty reaches a value of zero at the speed of light. I am quite sure that if this were the case, numerous particle acceleration experiments would have revealed it long ago, because as a particle accelerated to close to the speed of light, this effect would have thrown off the timing necessary to further accelerate the particle. Nevertheless, perhaps such effects have gone unnoticed.

If this were the case, how can the flawed designs have functioned? It could only have been a consequence of brute force methods, pumping additional (wasted) energy into the process of accelerating the particle sufficient to compensate. The implication is that particle accelerators can be much smaller and more powerful than our best designs to date; this has massive implications for weapons technology, if true, as well as for fusion research, and many other fields of high-energy engineering.

Uncertainty at any speed

If both space and time are subject to some sort of quantum Uncertainty, however, the effects are altogether more interesting, because every other phenomenon that physics can measure derives from one or both of these. A precise determination of gravitational attraction requires the precise measurement of distances between the two masses. Mass itself is measured by means of the force required to accelerate it, i.e. the acceleration due to gravity on earth, which involves both space and time. The Uncertainty principle would effectively impose a limit of resolution on all physical measurements, whether micro- or macroscopic. Of course, in the macro world, the degree of Uncertainty would be so small that it would be swamped by other margins of error, but no matter how instrumentation was improved, this limit of certainty would exist.

Computer Chips

And yet… there are macroscopic engineering products which are comprised of such sensitive components that quantum effects have to be taken into account in their design. Modern integrated circuits, for example – I remember reading that this was a subject of engineering concern when the Pentium was being designed. If computer chips are sensitive enough that spatial quantum effects are factors, surely they are also small enough, fast enough, to be subject to temporal Uncertainty as well? The implication is that there is a fundamental limit to computer clock speeds, and to the capacities of computer processors.

Fiber Optics

Another avenue of engineering worth considering in this context are fiber-optic communications, and specifically the precision of frequency of the laser beams used within such communications technologies. The distance from one peak to the next defines the wavelength of the energy beam; but any distance is subject to the Uncertainty principle, and the wavelengths in question are really, really small – more than small enough for Uncertainty to be a factor, smearing the frequency across a narrow band of frequencies.

And yet, I was once told, such a smearing effect was very real, and forced a limit to the distance that fiber optics could carry a recognizable stream of data. Some clever engineering by Australian researchers overcame the effect, which was due to the way the beam bounced off the walls of the glass ‘tube’ carrying the data signal. Refinements in the engineering of fiber optics which employed glass with different densities with respect of the permitted speed of light when viewed in cross section eliminated the smearing and gave us the capability of long-distance fiber optic connections. Did this engineering also unwittingly correct for any temporal Uncertainty, or is it another limitation that can be overcome with some clever engineering, vastly accelerating the rate of data communications?

Particle Accelerators – again

If there is a temporal Uncertainty factor, doesn’t this also bring us back to the same problems with particle accelerators, and the same potential for improvements in efficiency? Getting the timing right as a particle blasts past the electromagnets used to accelerate it is fundamental to the design and operation of such devices, after all.

Singularities are fuzzy

Another thought came to me as I was musing over all of the above, prior to writing this article. A singularity is a point in space at which physics breaks down, or appears to do so within the limits of our understanding due to the incomprehensibility of infinities. They exist at the heart of black holes, but Stephen Hawking showed that microscopic black holes could be formed, and could evaporate through pair production (another consequence of the Uncertainty principle), leaving the naked singularity behind.

How can you have a point in space when all distances are uncertain by the amount of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty constant? Just as the position of a subatomic particle cannot be precisely located, only stated as a probability function, surely the same must be true of a singularity, which is the ultimate expression of smallness?

And, if the position of a singularity can only be stated as a probability, then the balance of that probability must describe the likelyhood that the singularity’s properties do NOT prevail at position X relative to the centre of probability of the singularity. Space in the region around a singularity must therefore be – until the potential quantum states collapse into a solution – a strange mixture of normal physics and (for lack of a better term) abnormal singularity-physics, just as Schrödinger’s Cat is both alive and dead.

A singularity, therefore, cannot be a point except when its potential quantum states collapse; it must, most of the time, be a region one Heisenberg Uncertainty Limit in radius.

The Uncertainty Barrier

This in turn, gave rise to another thought: Is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Constant the dividing line between the macroscopic world and the world of Quantum effects? I’m not entirely sure where to go with this conjecture, but there has to be a dividing line somewhere between the two – a scale at which Quantum effects are no longer negligible. Or is it more that beyond this distance, the probability that Quantum effects are negligible exceeds the probability that they are not?

Time As A Vector

In my superhero game physics, one of the fundamental concepts of reality is that time is a vector in a three-dimensional temporal ‘space’. All human measurement of time are measurements in the rate of change of some physical phenomenon within a universe, effectively the equivalent of the scalar length along that timeline. This provides an answer to the question that arises from the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, “where are these alternative universes?”, by separating them in temporal ‘space’ from the pre-collapse universe from which they have branched. A universe becomes a tree through time, each branch representing a different quantum outcome where a probability function has collapsed into one specific possible outcome, with all unresolved quantum probabilities preserved. Because a timeline can be infinitely small, any number of space-times can lie alongside each other in this temporal volume. Because one quantum difference can interact with other quantum possibilities, space-times branching from a given event tend to separate from each other – in other words, the temporal vectors of each resulting “world” are different with respect to each other.

This gets interesting when the possibility of a temporal Uncertainty factor gets introduced, because what was a perfect line becomes fuzzy, just as one in space would do, due to the Uncertainty principle. For a period of time after branching from a quantum event, each resulting timeline would overlap with the others from which it branched, and all outcomes would momentarily exist within the one timeline. There would be a delay in the quantum collapse, in other words, in the amount of the temporal Uncertainty.

This gets really interesting when pair production is considered, because it implies that pair production that occurs during this delay can result in one or both of the resulting particles manifesting in a timeline other than the one in which the pair production took place, effectively crossing the Uncertainty threshold from one timeline to another. In effect, energy is siphoned from one timeline into another.

This presents the potential for a practical application: unlimited free energy, derived by inducing a quantum collapse virtually simultaneous with inducing pair production, then converting the resulting added mass into energy. Anything that can happen at a quantum scale, if repeated often enough in a sufficiently-confined space, becomes macroscopically significant. Free energy from space – sounds like something Nikola Tesla might have dreamed up!

The Edge Of Reality

Something that I find amusing is that the existence of temporal Uncertainty was built into my game physics inadvertently, from day one, by virtue of the explanation within that physics of Heisenberg Uncertainty. The theory runs like this: the ‘edge’ of the universe is itself subject to Heisenberg Uncertainty, therefore pair production means that some particles must manifest outside the space-time that created them, loose within the temporal ‘space’. The resulting loss of energy means that the universe itself shrinks a little, compressing all the distances within by an incredibly minute quantity.

It follows that other loose particles must impact the dimensional boundary, where they cease to be virtual particles in hyperspace and become real, inflating the universe a little.

The net effect is that the ‘edge’ of the universe is constantly quivering like jello, and the ratio of maximum possible growth or shrinkage over average size is one-half of the Uncertainty total. Of course, the term ‘edge’ is a little question-begging here; because we are talking about the boundary in the three temporal dimensions, anywhere in the physical space is equally at the ‘edge’.

But, each of these incoming particles interacts with particles and energy that is already present, effectively altering the temporal vector of the combined whole. Just by a microscopic fraction, given their relative masses, but by a measurable amount nevertheless. So the vector itself must also be quivering ever so slightly – and that’s a temporal Uncertainty.

The Uncertainty Constant – the fundamental measure of length?

If The Uncertainty Constant is the limit of resolution that is theoretically possible without disturbing that which is being measured, does that make it the fundamental smallest length that can exist in any realistic model of the universe? There is an obvious arguement to be made in favor of a ‘yes’ answer. Beneath this limit, according to the conjectures made earlier, we are in the quantum world where position (and everything else) can only be stated as a probability percentage without interacting with the object being measured to such an extent that other key values are forever unknowable and – quite probably – the consequences of interaction will also alter the property being measured. We may know where something was, but that tells us nothing beyond some small generalities about where something now is.

For the sake of convenience, however, I’m going to set the minimum unit of length at one-fifth of Heisenberg Uncertainty, because doing so lets me demonstrate something cool (the exact numeric value doesn’t matter).

In a measurement that has to take into account Uncertainty, it is more accurate to state it as measured length ± Uncertainty. But that can be rephrased as minimum + X% of Uncertainty, with the trend of Uncertainty being 50%.

And that means that can rewrite our measurement, in our theoretical subatomic units, as (minimum – 1) +d6. (Actually, it’s minimum + (d6-1), but I’ve simplified it.

Now, if we take multiple readings of the length of an object, the minimum won’t vary – it will be a constant. Only the actual value will change. Giving us d6+C for our measurement. Look familiar? C is a very large number in this case, but the general statement should be recognized by every gamer out there.

Similarly, any time measurement can be written in the same format – only the units change. The Uncertainty limit would also present an absolute limit of resolution in time.

And that means that speeds – which are distance over time – can be written d6+Cd / d6+Ct.

That’s something we, as gamers, can get our teeth into!

Divided and Multiplied Die Rolls

A long time ago, there was an article on Divided Die Rolls in an issue of The Dragon. The whole concept fascinated me, in a way that nothing had done since an article in Scientific American about the patterns of Prime Numbers (long before my gaming days), and I spent a large chunk of my spare time playing around with various divided die rolls and the shapes of the probability curves that resulted, even deriving various mathematical laws describing minimum, maximum, average, median, etc. Some time later, it was pointed out to me that multiplication is easier than division, and multiplying die rolls had exactly the same effect as dividing them – but produced some more convenient numbers to work with.

You see, the thing with such rolls is that the probable results will tend to bunch up at the lower end of the range of possible results, with extreme values possible but unlikely. Consider the results for d6 × d6:

• 1st d6 rolls a 1: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
• 1st d6 rolls a 2: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.
• 1st d6 rolls a 3: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18.
• 1st d6 rolls a 4: 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24.
• 1st d6 rolls a 5: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30.
• 1st d6 rolls a 6: 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36.

The average of the possible results is 1+36/2 or 18.5. But 28 of the possible 36 results are less than this, and only 8 are higher. In fact, 21 of the 36 possible results are twelve or less, so more than half the possible outcomes are concentrated into 1/3 of the range of possible results – and into a range of double the unit size (2 × d6). Finally, 14 of the 36 possible outcomes fall within the range of the unit die (1-6). That’s almost 39%. Putting all of that together, and you get: 39% 1-6; 19.4% 7-12; 19.4% 13-18; 22.2% 19-36.

Let’s round that off a bit:

• 1-6: 40%;
• 7-12: 20%;
• 13-18: 20%;
• 19-36: 20%.

(It’s the unexpected patterns that i find so fascinating: 28, 21, 14 – all multiples of 7. Why)?

The Distribution Of Uncertainty

Of course, the distribution of Uncertainty may not be – probably is not – a flat curve. It’s just as likely to be a bell curve, something that might be better represented as 2d6 or even 3d6.

When you have compound die rolls, with their own probability curves, multiplied together – or divided by each other – the peak of the resulting probability curve falls at a point that can be derived by applying the average results of each side of the calculation.

• d6 × d6: peak probability is 3.5 × 3.5 = 12.25.
• 2d6 × d6: peak probability is 7 × 3.5 = 24.5.
• d6 × 2d6: peak probability is 3.5 × 7 = 24.5.
• 2d6 × 2d6: peak probability is 7 × 7 = 49.
• 3d6 x 3d6: peak probability is 10.5 × 10.5 = 110.25.
• d6/d6: peak probability is 3.5/ 3.5 = 1.
• 2d6/d6: peak probability is 7/ 3.5 = 2.
• d6/2d6: peak probability is 3.5/ 7 = 0.5.
• 2d6/2d6: peak probability is 7/ 7 = 1.
• 3d6/3d6: peak probability is 10.5/ 10.5 = 1.

(I must stop myself here, before I get too far off-track).

The uncertainty of speed

That means that the Uncertainty of speeds, deriving from the combination of Uncertainty in location and Uncertainty in time, is going to be smaller than the Uncertainty associated with the two values going into the calculation.

All speeds, including the speed of light itself.

The implication of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty is this: all values that we can measure are fuzzy, and have an inherent limit of resolution beyond which strange things can happen (from a macroscopic, familiar, perspective).

The Hero Connection

There’s one other place in gaming that something similar to these divided die rolls can be observed, and it also holds a lesson on the nature of Uncertainty.

In the Hero system, the price of a power is Base × (1 + total advantages) / (1 + total limitations).

When building characters to a budget, you often need to assess the impact of an additional advantage or limitation on the price. As someone who GMs a game using the Hero System (and GMs another two which use a derivative of that system), this is something that I felt I needed to have a solid understanding of.

To start with, let’s state the relationship:

• Price (New) = Base × (A0 +1 + DA) / (L0 +1 + DL),

where A0 is the total value of advantages already built into the power, LO is the total value of limitations already built into the power, and DA and DL are the total value of proposed new limitations. In effect, though, A0+1 and LO+1 are going to be constants – I’ll use C and K, respectively – which gives us

• Price (New) = Base × (DA + C) / (DL + K).

If we set the base price as 1, the structure of the resulting calculation is exactly the same as that for Speeds with Uncertainty in both distance and time.

It’s been my experience that the results are far more sensitive to changes in DL, the analogue of changes in time, than they are to changes in DA, the analogue of changes in distance. That’s because any increase on the denominator side divides any increase in the numerator into something smaller. The exact amounts change depending on the values of the constants – the larger one is, the smaller in proportion an increase of +1 is.

If K is 3, in other words, +1 is a bigger difference than if K was 103. But any change in the denominator reduces the impact of a change in the numerator (there are so many variables that it’s hard to get more specific without growing totally confusing.

To show how complicated these things can get, and as a bonus for other users of the Hero system:

• DP (change in price) = Base × [(DA × K) – (DL × C)] / [K × (K + DL)].

I find it simpler to consider things on a case-by-case basis, working with established and fixed values for K and C. But that’s the general solution, for whatever it’s worth.

Conclusion

Game mechanics is all about systems of simulation, about assigning numerical, manipulable quantities to our imaginations so that others can work with, interact with, and enjoy, the products of those imaginations. But systems of simulation have all sorts of real-world applications beyond the game table. The military use them for tactical planning. Science can use them, too.

The existence of Uncertainty inherent to one type of measurement makes all other types of measurement subject to their own Uncertainty. You don’t have to skim many of the Wikipedia articles on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and related phenomena (look especially for the name Planck, as in Planck Units and Planck Time to see that this is not entirely an original thought – though I hadn’t read them prior to writing this article!

The potential real-world technological implications discussed should manifest in any futuristic high-tech society, or at least be on their way.

But there’s a more important implication purely for us gamers: if the real world is fuzzy, so our simulated worlds should be fuzzy. So stress less about the last decimal place of accuracy in simulations and focus instead on the meaningful generality – and get on with the game. It’s that train of thought that leads to solutions like the 3-minute NPC. And that’s a “real world” benefit that we, as gamers, can all uniquely appreciate.

“I don’t care what anything was designed to do, or intended to do, I care about what it CAN do!” – Col. Jack O’Niell, Stargate SG-1

(I think – and possibly a misquotation, but the point is made…)

The King of a troubled land and his weakling allies face a troubled future. In a distant land, two dark Princes ally with the aim of overthrowing the King and his forces. Slowly, both sides build up their forces, making moves and countermoves in secret. One by one, each recruits secret allies, seemingly headed for a major confrontation. The King scores a major coup when a neighboring ruler joins his army.

Both experience reversals, as forces they expected to recruit gather in opposition camps or unite with independent groups. Ultimately, the Princes’ plans fall apart on them, and they retire to plot and plan another day. But in the meantime, an Evil Queen has been making secret alliances, out of sight of anyone else, emerging at the last possible minute to challenge the alliance of Kings, a threat which is only defeated when a third King, a secret ally, is revealed – but the exercise causes ill-will amongst the three, who disband their alliance. So outraged are the citizens that the King is forced into exile.

Doesn’t this sound like an awesome campaign background – not history, but ongoing developments in the background of the game?

Revealing the Metaphor Engine

Here’s what it really is: Player 1 is dealt a King and a three face-up and a seven, four, and nine facedown. Another player has two Jacks showing – Clubs and Spades. The player with the King showing opens the betting and is matched by the player with the jacks and by a third player; most of the others at the table fold. The player with the Kings discards two of his facedown cards and the three, drawing a ten face-up and a jack and five face-down to accompany his nine. The player with the jacks discards only his facedown cards and draws a third jack, an ace, and a four. The third player, who has a two and a four showing, discards one of his three face-down cards and both the visible cards, drawing the queen of spaces and the King of Diamonds face-up, and an ace which is face-down and hidden from the other players.

After a second round of betting, discarding, and drawing, the player with the King now has two of them face-up and one facedown. The Player with the two jacks showing has three facedown cards that are valueless to his hand. The third player now has a Queen and King showing, and has a Queen and two Aces facedown. A fourth player has received a jack face up, but folds his hand as the player with two Kings again opens the betting hard. The player with the jacks considers a bluff, but with one of the jacks known to be in someone else’s hand, decides against it, and folds; the player with the two Kings showing expects the remaining player to do the same, but that player chooses to see the bet. Both players reveal, but two pairs is beaten by the presence of the hidden third King. All the cards are then shuffled, ready for the next hand.

If each player represents a faction or government in the game world, and their winnings represents their relative power levels, then each hand of a poker game becomes a tale of intrigue and high drama within the game background. Slowly, one faction will gain dominance, while others will weaken or even collapse completely. The results can form a compelling narrative tool for your campaign, needing only a conversion via metaphor to translate the play – according to whatever rules you are playing by – be it Texas Hold-em or Stud or whatever – to render it into in-game terms. This page might help: list of poker variants as a starting point.

The Horsepower of the Metaphor Engine

I’ve seen a number of GMs use die rolls to determine the rise and fall of NPC nations in their games, but Poker is a far superior choice. This technique takes advantage of two of the primary principles of one game and states an equivalence with two of the primary principles in another: the building up of sets of matching cards represents the forming of alliances, or the gathering of servants, or the acquisition of tools to further the overall ambitions of the faction; and the ignorance of what the other players hold, and betting mechanism that is possible as a result, represents ignorance on the part of each faction about everything that the other factions are up to – though some activities might be obvious, which is the equivalent of inferring hand strengths from betting patterns.

I don’t know of any actual rules of poker that quite match the two-face-up-and-three-face-down that I used in my opening example, but there are many variants within the overall game that can be used.

Harnessing The Metaphor Engine

It’s easy to actually take this principle one step further, to truly harness the power of the Metaphor Engine that is a poker game. By designating the faction belonging to the player who eventually wins the entire game as the PCs, and the player who comes second as their major enemy, the conduct of the entire game can become a campaign planning tool that ensures a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Initially, the real enemy might even be anonymous, or weakened, while others loom large as an immediate threat. All that needs to be done to complete the transformation matrix of card game to RPG plot is to associate the key developments in the game with PC actions or failures to act, by regarding the next hand, or series of hands, as metaphors for the experiences to take place in the lives of the characters.

The Hand-In-Ignorance Technique

It might be tempting to map out an entire campaign using a single hand, or series of hands, but a far better choice is to play only one or two hands in advance, maintaining GM ignorance as to what will become significant and what will not. By avoiding the pitfalls of too much GM knowledge, the GM is forced to develop a number of separate plot threads, each rife with the potential for adventure, leaving the PCs to determine which one they will focus on next. The result is a virtual sandboxing, in which ‘factions’ are defined not as static entities at the start of a series of poker hands but by a combination of the outcome of a single hand or set of hands and the relative amount of attention being focused on a particular plot thread by the PCs.

Interpreting the progress and outcome of the card game in this way permits outcomes in which the PCs can be deceived into strengthening the position of their true enemies, or can focus attention on a seemingly more-urgent situation (or even an actually more-urgent situation), leaving their true enemy to strengthen his own position. The pattern of play may even be a metaphor for their enemy making a temporary alliance with them against a third party, or the PCs coming to the aid of their real enemy to deal with a mutual threat. Any sort of plot twist is possible.

Because the outcome is both held in ignorance by the GM, and yet has a continuity within the card game, any possible permutation of plot developments is possible, and the effects of the outcome of any individual plotline can be both surprising and yet leading to the inevitable. There is a chaos and unpredictability to events viewed in the finer scale of one game session or adventure, while there is an overall pattern to events that result from knowing who the ultimate winners and who their ultimate opponents are going to be.

The Compaction of Prep

One final benefit that is worth mentioning here is the implication for game prep. Activities that will spawn more untapped plot threads are encouraged, but detailed game prep is restricted to one specific element or plot thread. Game prep thus assumes a ‘fuzzy boundary’ in which the need for work outside the ‘virtual sandbox’ is minimized. The GM has less work to do, and operated with greater focus and efficiency, because only those elements that are needed will receive game prep.

In many ways, this parallels the approach taken by television series such as Stargate SG-1. The episode under development at the moment might focus on one particular Gou’uld enemy or one particular ally, whose circumstances and plotline are advanced; while all sorts of other plot threads are simply left dangling and undeveloped until they become the focus of a future episode.

This website may be useful, dealing as it does with real episodic television scripts, as does this site. I found this website to be very interesting, and the list of resources on the right-hand side looks extremely valuable in the context of writing episodic material of any sort – including RPG adventures! But, to get back to the discussion at hand:

Game prep thus becomes defined dynamically with changing and developing circumstances within the card game. The rules of the interpretational framework are such that no other plot threads can come to a conclusion, and yet have to be developed in response to events within the game, as each faction – unless they fold with the initial cards dealt, and simply mark time – at least attempts to advance their cause. So every subplot advances in the background, but only in such a way that the game itself yields more potential for future plotlines; only the primary plotline on which attention is currently focused has the potential of advancing significantly. Balances of power are constantly shifting, as factions jockey for position. The campaign plotline itself becomes more dynamic as a result.

Games to exclude

Not every series of poker hands results in a game with multiple changes of fortune. A sufficiently big confrontation in the early hands, as each player thinks they have a winning hand, can leave the overall winner with so big an advantage that the ultimate victory is inevitable. When used as a metaphor for the events which will occur in-game, the result is inevitably just as obvious and foregone a conclusion.

It may be necessary to play multiple series of hands, have multiple sessions of play, before an appropriately interesting and compelling narrative metaphor presents itself. This is something that GMs considering this technique should bear in mind.

The need for detailed records

Professional poker players analyze their performance, and the developments of each hand of the game, zealously. They seek to improve their games, to learn from their mistakes and from the mistakes of others. To this end, they keep detailed records of each hand played, whether they drop out early in the hand or not.

Since the GM cannot predict who will win each hand, or the total series of hands, in advance, it should be obvious that the GM needs to be just as assiduous in analyzing the events of each hand of the poker game being used as a metaphor engine for the plot.

Choosing the right poker client/site

Since the intention is to do things with the ongoing gameplay that are not really ‘intended’ to happen, it will be important to choose the right poker client and website. Fortunately, sites such as www.cardschat.com offer detailed reviews to help you.

At first, you might be tempted to employ such sites in tutorial mode (if they have one) or against ‘virtual’ (i.e. machine) opponents, but these are inherently more limited than playing against a human opponent, capable of flashes of instinct or insight, of bluffing, and of knowing when to bluff. The results will be better when they derive from a real game, with real opponents. What you want will be a way to log the progress of the game for later study – either using software functions or services provided by the website, or using some approach of your own – whether that’s some sort of video capture technique or hand-written notepad, or something else.

Creating most NPCs is like boiling an egg. They should take three minutes or less and be ‘boiled’ at the game table, not in advance – though you may want garnishes at the ready. In fact, most should take no more than thirty or fourty seconds.

Doesn’t sound possible? This article will show you how, and along the way will reveal why. I’ll wrap it up with some examples and discussion of how and when to advance and evolve an NPC created using this process.

The core of the system of NPC generation that I’m going to offer for consideration today revolves around 16 decisions and parameters, organized into three groups: Generalities, Dominants, and Secondaries.

• Generalities are three framing decisions that guide the GM to the answers to the more specific questions to follow. They define the broad parameters of the NPC.
• Dominants are the eight most important elements of the NPC. Get these right and the NPC is virtually ready-to-run. Many of them can be decided in no more than a second or two, some may require more careful consideration.
• Secondaries are supplemental elements that may or may not be needed for every NPC, though it is recommended that at least one be included in every NPC.
• In addition, two Optional Extras may be required for some campaigns. If they are needed at all, they will be additional Dominants, so these will be discussed at that point.

With this structure, the factors that determine how long an NPC will take to generate is (a) how quickly the GM can think of his answers, and (b) how quickly he can write his answers down – legibly, because he might need to read it and ‘recapture’ the NPC some years down the track.

Generalities

These three items are the most important questions to be asked during NPC creation because they frame and serve as foundation for all the subsequent decisions to be made during the generation process. They are:

• Plot Function
• Social Standing
• Table Mood

1. Plot Function

The plot function of the character is the purpose of the character. Why is he in the game at all? What do the PCs want or expect from him, and what does the GM want his presence to cause to happen?

As much as possible, the answer to this question should be a single word, and is often more useful as a quite abstract summation. Ignore the mechanics of literary plot as much as possible and frame the question in an emotional or functional context. “Confusion” is a perfectly valid answer, as is “Direction”. “Exposition” is a common answer, though “Explanation” is usually more appropriate. “Betrayal”, “Merchant”, “Authority”, “Lawman”, “Mouthpiece”, “Soldier”, “Danger”, “Enemy”, and “Ally” are all valid answers. In one word, try to encapsulate who the NPC is and why he is being encountered.

The more abstract the answer, the more layers of meaning exist within it to be explored. The more functional the answer, the more “cardboard cutout” the NPC will be unless steps are taken in later questions to give the character additional depth.

Note that it is important to distinguish between the function of the character in terms of his plot purpose and his occupation. A barman whose role is to sell the PCs a Macguffin or some key information would be a “merchant”, not a “barman” – the latter is his occupation, but not his primary function. This is especially important given that English is such a slippery language – consider the possible answer, “spy”. This might mean that his occupation is as a spy, or that he is present in the campaign to spy on the PCs, if this clarification did not explicitly show the second to be the intended meaning.

2. Social Standing

While this is just one answer, it usually consists of three separate components. What is the character’s occupation, how successful is he at that occupation, and why?

A merchant may be very successful because he’s a charmer, or because he has a monopoly on some important aspect of the occupation, or because he buys on the black market to enhance his profit levels, or because he is widely known and trusted, or because he’s very shrewd, or a good bargainer, or has some inside connection.

A merchant may be very unsuccessful because he’s shifty, or because he is a spendthrift, or makes disastrous investments, or has a greedy family, or is being blackmailed out of his profits (and then some), or because his sense of timing is appalling, or because of a more successful rival leeching all his business away, or is a soft touch, or because he’s too busy running a shadowy cult to properly take care of business, or because he’s obsessed with fishing.

A merchant may be un-noteworthy because he’s unexceptional, or because he’s never had the opportunity for a really big score, or because he’s located in a dingy backwater, or because his suppliers are cheating him blind, or because he’s got a big family or a large debt that he is paying off, or because he’s trying to be anonymous, or simply because he’s lazy. He might have all the prerequisites of success, but also have one or more negative factors to offset that potential.

No matter what the NPCs occupation is, he will have some level of achievement within it (high, moderate, or poor) and there will always be a reason for that level of achievement. Immediately, this combination gives the NPC color beyond a simple expression of in-game occupation.

The character’s plot function may influence the choices made here. If the character’s role is to spy on the party (and not to get caught spying on the party), he will have been chosen for the assignment for a reason; if the role is to explain something to the party, his social standing has to explain how the NPC knows that explanation in the first place, and so on. The social standing needs to be chosen to permit the NPC to fulfill his plot function.

3. Table Mood

The answers so far have been about the character’s capabilities, though there may have been some that touch on the character’s personality; but this answer is focused squarely on that personality and its high-order summation. But it takes its cues from a left-field direction:

What is the prevalent mood at the table, and will this character buy into it, direct it, or oppose it? What is the dominant personality trait required to achieve this?

If the players (not the characters) are glum and downcast, the NPCs personality can:

• deepen this mood by being gloomy in personality;
• direct it by attributing responsibility for the mood to some real or imagined cause (Anything from ‘the weather’s been bad’ to ‘the crown’s been sorely oppressive’ to ‘these taxes are a crushing burden’ to ‘I’m in mourning for my goldfish’; or,
• oppose it by being cheery, light, humorous, wisecracking, ebullient, angry – in fact, anything but solemn and downbeat.

Determining what effect you want the NPC to have on the players, and choosing a personality that will have that effect, not only uses unpredictable real-world circumstances as a “randomizing factor” in NPC construction, but gives the NPC added layers of sophistication; not only is the NPC interacting with the PCs, but also with their players, directly. The normal effect is that the players will engage with the NPC more fully, rather than holding him at arm’s length and filtering the interaction exclusively through the ‘window’ of the character sheet. If quizzed afterwards, the players will often comment that they don’t know why but the NPCs seemed more alive than usual – but it won’t be anything they can (usually) put their finger on, unless you’re silly enough to let them see the wires running to behind the curtain.

What’s more, by eschewing simple labels and employing more abstract and functional labels, the sophistication of the resulting NPCs is far greater than might be expected from the minimalist approach to the character generation. You get more ground covered per second of creative effort than if you focused on generating the NPC at a game-system level.

Dominants

Once the three top-level questions are answered, the next step is to consider the eight dominant traits of the NPC, his circumstances, and his environment, each of which is captured by specific (if possibly abstract) answers to a specific question. These questions are:

• Why?
• Necessity
• Irregularity
• Environment
• Persona
• Expression
• Hook
• Name

4. Why?

What’s the NPC’s motive for fulfilling the plot function ascribed to him? How does his personality compliment, compound, enhance, or interfere with this function? How does his personality react to this motivation? Understanding the answers to this question not only tells you how the NPC will act and react, but in combination with the personality trait defined in response to the prevailing table mood, will tell you how he will interpret anything the PCs do or say.

5. Necessity

What traits and abilities does the NPC need to possess in order to achieve the social standing given him? What else does he need to fulfill his plot function? What are the things that he absolutely has to have in order to be the person already described?

6. Irregularity

Given his occupation and social standing, what makes this character different from the run-of-the-mill example of a stock character of the defined type? Everyone should have some point of uniqueness or irregularity to them – real people do. This answer’s purpose is to individualize the character. A merchant with unusual strength, a lawman with a gift for languages, a fisherman with a knack for tying knots – give him something distinctive and unusual.

7. Environment

How should the traits already established be reflected in the character’s environment? Does he live in the centre of a whirlwind even when sitting still? Does it appear that he has a bet on which will fall apart first – his body or his environment? Does he have a hobby or interest that can manifest itself in something visible or tangible in his environment? A Fisherman might have a prominent Rod and Reel handy, have a fishing lure absent-mindedly caught on his sleeve, have a “gone fishing” sign that’s a little too close to the door to be needed only occasionally?

If you can use the character’s environment to communicate one or more of his traits, you don’t need to describe or bring out those traits while acting as the character. This not only cuts down on the flavor text required, it aids consistency of characterization by making the character appear to be part of the environment that he inhabits rather than being cut-and-pasted into the scenery, and means that there is less work to be done by the GM in those less-than-three-minutes. It also opens an avenue of communications between the NPC and PCs, it’s a conversation starter. That makes it easier for both sides to roleplay the encounter. Finally, by suggesting something of the NPC beyond the bare essentials, it makes the character seem more rounded and fully-formed.

8. Persona

We all present a face to the world that is slightly different from our true selves. We tidy up our rough edges, polish our manners on social occasions, avoid expressing opinions that we know will be unpopular, wear a personality cloak for effect. This question can cut in one of two ways: if the personality determined in earlier questions refers primarily to the NPCs true plot function, if the personality traits determined earlier are more about his motivations and true opinions, this question is about the character that he appears to be on the outside; if the earlier personality definitions are more related to social standing and other external attributes, this question will relate to his true persona. It is important to add the words “true” and “apparent” where appropriate after determining the answer to this question so that you can later identify what is the real character and what is the superficial seeming presented to the world.

More often than not, what has already been decided will relate to the character’s external persona and this question will relate to his true personality.

9. Expression

How is the character going to express his personality? Just as we all wear masks in public situations, we all make subtle slips that hint at what is underneath. If we don’t do this, the superficial mask appears wooden and stilted, and an obvious subterfuge. The trick, in real life, is to find a way to let the underlying persona shine through the mask without destroying the credibility of the mask.

Consider, for example, the job interview. This is a nightmare that most of us have experienced on multiple occasions. We always attempt to present a veneer of employability, of competence, of being exactly what is needed for whatever the job is; we rarely speak as freely or comfortably as we would in a social situation. The applicants who appear most natural, most competent, and therefore most employable, are those who seem the most natural and relaxed, whose masks are less obviously artificial – who (apparently) don’t have to pretend to be right for the job because they are right for the job. In reality, they may be presenting just as false a mask as everyone else interviewed; but because they are able to respond casually and comfortably, letting a little of their real personality show through the veneer, their superficial appearance is far more plausible and believable.

In a role-playing encounter, we are faced with a slightly different challenge, but one that bears marked similarities to the job interview scenario. The GM is trying to camouflage his true thoughts and feelings beneath a superficial veneer of the NPCs character, which is itself masked by the impression the character wishes to convey. Sure, the GM can simply roll dice and announce that the PCs find the NPC to be utterly believable, no matter how poor his acting skills – but isn’t it better to have the NPC seem wholly and utterly sincere just from what the GM says and how he says it?

So the general question is, how to convert the persona in a plausible fashion?

There’s been lots of advice in answer to that question over the years – accents, body language, props, artificial mannerisms – but we aren’t interested in a general answer. The specific question to be asked right now is how the GM is going to express this particular character’s personality when roleplaying the NPC?

In my previous Superhero campaign, there was a quintessentially British superhero NPC named Lionheart. Apparently aged in his early 20s, he was actually only a young teenager, about to turn 14. In order to make the character seem real, I had to let some thirteen-year-old traits shine through. My notes for the NPC were: “Hyper-enthusiastic, Gosh Wow tone, dripping !!.” At the same time, the character drew his powers from the public confidence in him, so he had to seem to take charge, give orders without hesitation, appear overconfident to the point of insanity (from the perspective of the PCs, who were feeling very un-confident). Because they saw the personality traits described previously ‘underneath’ what the character was saying and doing, he came across as being arrogant, forceful, dashing, stiff-upper-lip, and overconfident – so, when he dropped that mask (out of sight of the cameras), and his true (and typical) self-confidence issues came shining through, they suddenly saw that he was scared witless. The character had loads of depth and immediately became a player favorite – not least because as soon as the cameras turned back on, he didn’t let a trace of his sheer terror show through. He didn’t just talk a good game, he went in, boots and all, with sublime (superficial) confidence in the outcome. Who is more brave, the person who knows no fear, or the person who’s scared witless – but goes in anyway?

All this depth came from three lines of character summary – his apparent persona, his true persona, and the mode of expression used by me when playing the character. The whole is greater than the sum of those parts.

On another occasion, in the Pulp Game, I had to take on the role of Doctor Heinz Zarkovff, a mad scientist who combined Emmet Brown from Back To The Future and Dr Zarkov from the movie version of Flash Gordon (the one with the Queen soundtrack). Eccentric, Loopy, and Brilliant, he always talked to the smartest person in the room (himself) in a semi-deranged running monologue with slightly German, slightly Russian accent. He had the utmost respect for the PCs and their accomplishments, but at the same time he knew that they were not in his intellectual league – no matter how superior they might be in other areas. Everything they said to him was eventually worked into his monologue, as was every hole in the plans they put forward, and the answers and information they needed. Every question or statement made to him was restated as a rhetorical question to himself before being analyzed in every direction from Sunday and then answered. Even while my co-GM was actually running every other aspect of the encounter, describing the NPC, etc, I was quietly monologueing under my breath, my eyes darting wildly around the room. (There was also a little of the Russian cosmonaut from Armageddon mixed in there, with a bit of Zathras from Babylon 5 “No one listens to Zarkovff, never listen until it is too late, and then they come crawling and asking for the help, and this is the wrong tool…”). My expression notes: “Never-ending manic monologue, German/Russian accent, constantly speaks in third person to himself.”

10. Hook

Every NPC needs a hook, something to hang the rest of the character from. It might be something the character does, something he wears, something he says, or an object that he keeps in his possession, but it’s something symbolic of the entire character. If, for example, I refer to a character wearing a Deerstalker, 99.99% of the readers will immediately make the connection to Sherlock Holmes. Data, from Star Trek the Next Generation, is summed up (as early as the first episode!) as Pinocchio – an artificial being who yearns to be human.

Here are some unusual hooks to show you how broad the range of options really is:

• An especially bright, shiny, belt buckle – immediately identifies the character to the PCs even if he is in disguise, it is used as a recognition signal.
• A false scar on one lip – immediately reveals substitution by an impersonator if it is missing, it is used as a doppelganger check.
• Two-face – toys with a double-headed coin when under stress
• The Joker – the maniacal grin says it all
• Clark Kent – the eyeglasses
• Batman – his shadow always has a batwing effect (and usually bat-ears), no matter what disguise he is wearing.

A hat, a cloak, a shoe, painted fingernails, a monocle, a moustache, a green-colored glint in someone’s eye, a gray cloud, the rumble of distant thunder, freckles, a birthmark…

Try these: how long does it take you to figure out who they are from their hook or tagline?

• A white racing helmet that he never opens.
• “No Boom today. Boom Tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow.”
• “Logic dictates…”
• “…with the [a] and the [b] and the [c] overnheigen”
• Ruby Slippers
• “It’s Clobberin’ Time!”
• “Resistance is Futile.”
• “Want a jelly baby?”
• “D’oh!”
• A white rabbit with a gold fob watch.
• “I’ll be back.”
• “Skippeeeerrrrrr??”

Each of these is an iconic hook that in some way sums up the character. While some people might not get them all, I’ll lay odds that everyone will get all but one or two, three at the outside. That one point of distinctiveness acts as a central focus, a hook to hang all the characterization from.

11. Name

Last but not least in this category is the name. The more meaning you can build into the name by style and tone, the better. Introducing the characters to ‘Count Edwin Leopold Vatherwell D’etien Moncleef’ gives an entirely different impression of the character, even without a description, than that conveyed by “Bawon Weopold The Twelf”. There’s a reason why I’ve spent so much effort on a series of articles on character names!

Optional Extras

Some campaign genres demand something a little extra. Superhero, Pulp, some Fantasy… this is where those extras go. There are two types of extras: Theme and Gimmick.

12. Theme

The character’s Theme denotes the nature of their extra abilities. If they don’t have any, it might also be used to denote the nature of their gadgets. A character with cold-based abilities would have the theme “Cold”. Use as few words as possible to sum up the concept that unites the character’s special abilities, and give an indication of their overall power on a 1-to-ten scale, where 1 is apprentice and 10 is cosmic power – Galactus, or something on that level. Zues, Odin, and the like, would be level 9, other deities level 8 (probably Superman as well), demigods level 7 (probably appropriate for Dr Strange), the upper scale for mortal superheroes would be rank 6 (The Hulk might qualify here), and so on down the scale.

This is actually a fairly practical measure, in a lot of ways. Think of it as the chance in ten that the character has of being able to do something if it can be done at all using the character’s theme, though there is a little necessary flexibility here. No junior apprentice, no matter how talented, could dump 10 feet of snow over the entire globe – but a level 8 or 9 Ice Deity? No problem. The apprentice might be able to dump a foot of snow on a small field or a football stadium. At Rank 6 you might be able to do a small country, or perhaps only a city; certainly rank 7s could handle a small country and possible the entire planet, with a little support and assistance.

You don’t have to translate these abilities into game mechanics; you can use them as a direct index of what the end result of those game mechanics will be and create the actual abilities within the theme after the fact, or as you need them.

13. Gimmick

If you’ve got a theme, then you’ve got at least one gimmick to show off with within that theme. Sounds fairly obvious, doesn’t it? Thor has his hammer, Iron man his repulsor rays, Harry Potter his wand and broomstick, Dr Who has his Sonic Screwdriver and Luke his lightsabre. This is the place for a signature move or piece of kit, and every character who has a theme should have one that is unique to them.

Secondaries

Secondaries are more mundane and widespread optional extras. Not all characters will need all Secondaries, but it will be rare for a character to have none of them. The first question here is not “What is the character’s (x)” but “Does the character have an (x) at all?”

There are five secondaries to consider. They are:

• Secrets
• Attack
• Defense
• Connections, and
• Revisits.

14. Secrets

Most MPCs should have a secret of some sort, whether it’s a guilty little pleasure, a past indiscretion, or something more significant. The reason is that it provides an area or topic of conversation about which the character will react unusually strongly or in some unusual manner – even if that reaction is a bluff suggesting that they know nothing of it. The secret can be a plot hook to involve the NPC in a future adventure or it can be a justification for getting the NPC out of contact with the PCs if he is too useful to them, too much of a duex ex machina.

Sometimes, the nature of the secret will be mandated by decisions already made, such as an NPC whose job is to spy on the PCs and report back to someone else, or the bartender who is secretly the Grand Master of the Thieves’ Guild, or an informant working for the City Watch.

15. Attack

If the NPC is likely to engage in combat, you need to assign him an attack. The specifics depend on the particular game system in use, but the process of assigning an attack is standardized, and consists of a series of quick, simple, questions:

• What attack would a typical member of the character’s profession have, given his social standing?
• Is there any reason why the character should have a better attack? Adjust the first answer accordingly.
• Is there any reason why the character should have a worse attack? Adjust the first answer accordingly.

It’s really that simple. Assign a to-hit modifier and damage, or an OCV and at least one attack power (just number of dice and any effects that go with it), or whatever. For the standard Hero System, we use the multiples-of-five rule: 5 is poor, 10 is normal human, 15 is superior human, 20 is equal to several PCs and superior to just one, 25 is superior to a group of typical PCs, 30 is superheroic (and the absolute maximum for a pulp character). For d20 games such as D&D, I use multiples of 5 for fighter types (and subtract 5 from the result) and for non-fighter types I use multiples of 4, not 5, and subtract 8 from the result giving -4 is poor, +0 is normal human, +4 is superior human, +8 is equal to several PCs and superior to most single PCs, +12 is maximum for PCs, +16 is demigod status, and so on. Use the power scale from the character’s theme, if they have one.

16. Defense

If you need to know a character’s attack, you need to decide what the character’s defense is. Again, just pluck an appropriate value out of thin air and worry about justifying it later. As a general rule of thumb, for the Hero System we match DCV with OCV as a starting point and then vary it up ore down by as much as 10. For D&D and the like, I use multiples of 6 and add 4 for fighters, and multiples of 4 and add 6 for non-fighters, then tweak as necessary.

17. Connections

Everybody knows somebody, even if it’s a non-existent delusion entirely within their own head. But who will the NPC turn to for help (other than, perhaps, the PCs) if he gets in over his head? Who can he trust implicitly? Most NPCs will have at least one contact who will save their bacon, though perhaps at a price. Many have two or more – but it’s not necessary to list them all, just one or two who will be relevant should the plot function of the character be compromised.

18. Revisits

I hate my NPCs to be static and unchanging, unless that is a deliberate choice on my part. For that reason, each time an NPC gets involved with the PCs, I make a note in this section of how his life is altered by the experience. If the answer is not at all, then I add some other change, whether it is minor or major. I want the NPC to be able to say, the next time the PCs speak with him, “Since the last time I saw you…”

I employ different standards based on the likely frequency of contact with the PCs. A recurring NPC who will be seen every week should not have a dramatic upheaval unless it is directly plot related or caused by the PCs in some fashion, whereas one who might not be seen for a year or two, game time, may well have undergone a significant change of some sort – even if it’s just hiring a new apprentice (fantasy) or buying a new car (modern) or something of that sort.

Some Examples

I know that if I don’t include some examples, there will be a demand for them, even though I think this generation process is sufficiently straightforward not to really need any. So here are a couple from different fantasy campaigns:

Example: Sage

This is an actual example from game play this past weekend.

1. Plot Function: Give Direction
2. Social Standing: Sage, Great Reputation, Obsessive Investigator
3. Table Mood: Frustrated, Steer with calm competence
4. Why?: Inexhaustible Curiosity
5. Necessities: Knowitall 15/-, Good researcher 17/-, Honorable, Professional
6. Irregularity: Looks much weaker, older and frailer than he really is
7. Environment: Musty, dark, organized
8. Persona: Bookworm, XXXX a XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX for XXXXXXXXX with XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (redacted to keep secrets from my players)
9. Expression: Fussy, precise, detail-obsessed
10. Hook: An ever-present air of knowing more than he is telling
11. Name: Dominic Monterraign
12. Theme: Knowledge acquisition
13. Gimmick: His books follow him when he moves, levitating in the air when opened
14. Secrets: refer persona
15. Attack: –
16. Defense: –
17. Connections: The Ambassador to the Endless Library
18. Revisit: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX will have XXXXXX the XXXXXX (refer persona) in XXXXXX of the XXXXXXXXX XXXXX (redacted to keep secrets from my players)

It took a total of 35 seconds to create the NPC, largely because I already knew the answers to the questions that were to be put to him and where he would steer the PC with his answers. In short, he was a delivery mechanism for the knowledge that the subject of enquiry, a black sword whose wielder ‘must really hate Paladins’, had an Elven forged blade, a hilt of Dwarven manufacture, bindings of dragon creation using the actual flesh of the dragon, and a scabbard whose sole enchantment was to protect, maintain, and repair this particular sword, which dates back to the time of the original Drow Rebellion. Each of the named components has their own enchantment, and a low level of awareness (not to the point of sentience) but can only manifest this awareness when separated from the other components. Oh, and it’s a +3 Bastard Sword with 1 major and 2 minor abilities which resist Identification.

Example: Merchant

This is an example from last year or the year before, when this process was still in development. It took slightly longer, clocking in at about 45 seconds.

1. Plot Function: Sell the PCs information (directing the PCs into a trap)
2. Social Standing: Poor, due to partial ostracization from his native society
3. Table Mood: Eager, aid overconfidence by downplaying difficulties
4. Why?: Recognizes PCs as enemies of the state, desperation to regain former social standing
5. Necessities: Negotiation, Sly, Observant, Bluff
6. Irregularity: grossly overweight but very fleet-footed
7. Environment: bric-a-brac piled on rubbish piled on flotsam and jetsam, equivalent of a $2 shop
8. Persona: Appears a bumbling, lazy, fat, harmless merchant – used-car salesman
9. Expression: Oh, woe is me, everyone takes advantage of poor helpless [name]
10. Hook: “purveyor of junk and household necessities for the discerning buyer”
11. Name: Abdagashi Himono
12. Theme: –
13. Gimmick: –
14. Secrets: refer plot function
15. Attack: –
16. Defense: –
17. Connections: Local Priest of Beneck Wu
18. Revisit: Destitute wanderer, having been stripped of his business when the PCs escaped the trap he was instructed to lay for them. Bitter and angry, hates the world, possible convert to PC cause if they fast-talk him.

A tip on the side: If you need to stall for a couple of minutes, open a rulebook and pretend to read and take notes…

Using The NPC

Remember those three sub-questions from the section on Attack? Well, here they are again:

• What attack would a typical member of the character’s profession have, given his social standing?
• Is there any reason why the character should have a better attack? Adjust the first answer accordingly.
• Is there any reason why the character should have a worse attack? Adjust the first answer accordingly.

Exactly the same principle, the same three-step process, is used to determine any capability the NPC wants to exercise. A PC wants to sell him some knick-knack or doodad? Use the abstract parameters provided to determine whether or not the character is interested, how much over- or under- price he thinks it’s worth, and how good his bargaining skill is. The NPC attempts to shadow one of the PCs? Use the abstract parameters provided to estimate how good he is at stealthy movement and hiding in shadows. The character wants to shoot at a PC with a crossbow? Use the abstract parameters to determine his base attack ability, how likely he is to know how to use a crossbow, and so on.

For a paranormal character: The character wants to escape? Think of a means of doing so using his theme, and give him the appropriate power, at an appropriate strength, according to the abstract parameters of the character. Don’t worry about fine detail, just decide how many dice of effect he puts out and any direct modifiers to the ability’s effectiveness. GMs of superhero games have (effectively) an unlimited budget, so don’t worry about whether or not the books balance – give the character a reasonable ability, jot it down for reference next time, and let fly with it.

Refining The NPC

Take a moment to notice what we haven’t done. No stats, character classes, spell selection, hit point rolls, detailed equipment lists, detailed histories… we have created the bare minimum required for the NPC to function in-game as a personality or opponent.

Decide such minutia only when it becomes essential. And if your maths doesn’t quite add up – if you gave the NPC too good a skill check, or too low an AC, or dudded him out of a point of damage on each of his attacks – so what? Correct it, or choose to keep the incorrect score, and move on. The essential question is whether the character has served the plot function that was the only reason for its existence, or not? And if not, what can you learn from the reasons for the failure to make next time more likely to succeed?

When this is not enough

There will still be times when this is not going to be enough, though it makes a darned good starting point for full-scale character generation. In particular, important enemies and any NPCs who might become future PCs need to be detailed fully. But most of the time? A thumbnail personality that gets right to the heart of the character – why he’s there, what he can do, and what is his personality – is ample.

Organizing NPCs

This approach seems tailor-made for two methods of function: first, a database or spreadsheet using something like Crystal Reports, or second, a set of index cards. In which case, keep an index keyed by NPC name, but keep the records themselves in order of the plot function and the profession. Why? Because sooner or later you will need another NPC to serve the same function, and you want to make sure that this one is different to the last one – and the easiest way to do that is to know what characters of that type you have done before.

Alternately, you may find that you have already created the perfect NPC for the desired plot function – you just need to explain what he’s doing in this part of the world. Try to avoid the concept of coincidence, it never rings true to the players – unless the purpose is to foster suspicion and paranoia, of course. Instead, employ some form of deliberate cause-and-effect. “A witch foretold that you would come this way”. “I liked the sound of this town so much when you told me your adventures that I had to move here.” “I’ve been searching for you for months!” “I paid a Wizard to teleport me to wherever you were going to be.” Save “What a coincidence! What good luck!!” for those occasions when you WANT the players to respond, “Coincidence? Luck? Yeah, right – and I’m a goldfish.”

Just a heads-up that this approach works especially well with the techniques described in By The Seat Of Your Pants: Adventures On The Fly and the sequel, By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure!

~ Plato ~

400 is:

When I search my archived correspondence, the first mention of Campaign Mastery – the blog – that I can find is dated November 20, 2008. But the name and concept have roots that run much deeper. We knew as early as January 2008 that we were going to have a website named Campaign Mastery; it just took us that long to figure out what it was going to be.

I had already had a blog through the Yahoo 360 service. It was a more personal and perhaps typical blog (except perhaps that it went in for 5,000+ word posts), covering whatever was on my mind at the time – whether that be the cost of living in Sydney or devising new rules for AC in my Fumanor campaign, or whatever. By the time Yahoo shut down that service, some 6 months or so later, Johnn and I were already collaborating. I’d started by somewhat diffidently sending in a couple of reader’s tips to Roleplaying Tips and a brief article or two for Heather Grove’s Twilight Time, then an article or two for RPT, then some more articles. The feedback was encouraging and reader response was positive, and by the time 2009 had rolled around, it had reached the point where I would reply to virtually every issue of Johnn’s newsletter with a suggestion or two for extending or enhancing or adding a technique or twist to something that had appeared in that issue, most of which ended up as additional reader’s tips. All told, I had amassed 20-odd main article credits and was rapidly approaching three figures in published reader’s tips.

In 2008, at Johnn’s invitation, I had started work on an E-book, to be published by Johnn & I jointly through a website to be called Campaign Mastery. Originally intended to be a 20-page quickie, it reached 20 finished chapters in 71 pages, with another 42 chapters still waiting to be written. These were… no, I think I’ll keep the subject close to my chest. I’ll want to finish it someday…

400 is:

Anyway, the idea was that selected excerpts would appear as standalone articles on the website, up to half the book in fact, and the rest would be completely new material. Over the course of 2008, the concept evolved. Rather than writing the books and excerpting the material for blog posts, we decided that this approach was putting the cart before the horse; if we were to write e-book chapters as articles, and then compile them into eBooks, we could use feedback and comments to expand and improve the content. The ambition was to make the one set of words serve multiple functions. We’ve never gotten around to publishing those eBooks, but eventually it will happen.

There were seemingly-endless discussions of taxonomy (which wasn’t fully settled until February, 2009). Our business plans grew, and grew more convoluted. Over the period from the start of 2008 until the end of 2009, we designed and planned the creation of a publishing structure that was both complex and elegant. We had plans for the recruiting of additional staff, for operations as the publishers of game supplements by independent authors, for a series of books on the subject of Campaign Mastery which would join together to form a complete RPG How-to “Bible” of multiple volumes, for forums and game-aid software and, well, all sorts of things. All with one aim:

I was tired of looking for what would turn out to be another job lasting just a couple of years, and Johnn wanted to be able to give up his day job and do RPG stuff full-time.

400 is:

It’s said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. I have often joked that the RPG equivalents are ‘No planned adventure survives contact with the Players,’ and ‘No game supplement survives contact with the GM.’ To these maxims, I can now add a third and a fourth, also from personal experience: “No marketing plan survives contact with the customer,” and, “No business plan survives contact with the Real World.”

The plan we evolved was to deliver magazine-sized articles, between 1500 and 4500 words each, as blog posts, two a week – Johnn’s on one recurring, regular day, and mine half a week later. We would trade off as necessary. We wanted to avoid superficiality and create depth, value, and evergreen content, that could be edited, revised, and bundled into themed e-books. At the same time, we would be writing game supplements from scratch.

The first posts were intentionally brief; Johnn’s Cure DM Writer’s Block With A Map on November 29, 2008, his Maps Have Three Parts, part 1 on December 4th; his Races Should Make A Difference on December 6th; and my Spring Cleaning For Your Campaign on December 9th. These had a three-fold purpose: to establish that all our systems were functional, before they went public; to settle on our format and layout; and to ensure that when visitors arrived for the first time, they had something to read. There was no “this is our first blog post, yada-yada”, no beginning – we wanted Campaign Mastery to simply spring forth, fully-formed.

I’m not sure when we first started telling people that the blog existed, thereby taking it public for the first time, but I suspect it was either January 1, 2009 (a suitable date for beginnings) or December 25, 2008 (A Christmas present to both of us). But our first visitors arrived at the site on January 1 (we had a whole 6 of them that day) and our first comment, from Richard Whipple, was a couple of days later, on January 4th, in response to my article, ‘A Quality Of Spirit: Big Questions in RPGs’ from Dec 31st. The comment talks about the length of the article (long for a blog post), and mentions Plato and Socrates – so we were hitting our targets very quickly, and attracting thoughtful, substantative comment almost immediately. (In fact, we’ve had a lot of comments over the years – almost 3500 of them now, not counting the spam – and they have all been thoughtful, meaningful, contributions. Our commentators are the best! Of course, I’ve probably written close to 1500 of those as replies…)

400 is:

More importantly, Campaign Mastery was being taken seriously, from day 1. We had instant credibility, something we would work hard to maintain in the years that followed.

We achieved our first significant milestone in November 2009 (100 posts) and our first really big milestone (100,000 hits) on July 5th, 2010, which we celebrated with an out-of-continuity special post. But both of these were perhaps more meaningful than we realized at the time; of all the blogs that get started, most will fold after ten or twenty posts, most of those left will not reach 50 posts, and so on. As the targets climb, the ranks of those who achieve them thin.

Compare those milestones with our more recent ones, described in the post 300, 550, 37, 40, 3300, 387 – Thank You! and you can see that CM has not only survived, it has prospered. And let’s not overlook that fantastic ENnie nomination, the results of which will start being announced this Saturday morning (Australian time).

400 is:

Real Life has taken a serious toll on that initial business plan. Originally planned to run over a 5-6 year period, here we are approaching the end of year three and most of it has been put on hold if not completely abandoned. There were three reasons for this.

My back had become an ongoing medical issue since 2004, but it was only in late 2010 that the condition was correctly diagnosed and determined to be a degenerative condition that limited my ability to work and function. Whereas I once enjoyed the capacity to devote around 125 hours a week to various projects, I was reduced in capacity to 8-12 hrs a week, and much of it at something less than 100% effectiveness. I had less time available to devote to the plan.

Johnn, at around the same time, began to experience the effects of burnout and over-commitment. He, too, was finding that he had less time available to devote to the plan, and much of it was at less than 100% effectiveness.

And then, just as we were about to complete revising the plans to take account of these circumstances, the whole thing got derailed by an unexpected opportunity, as the Assassin’s Amulet project emerged from more-or-less nowhere to monopolize much of our spare time.

That’s why there have been no Campaign Mastery e-books produced yet, and why the monster e-book that I mentioned back at the start hasn’t been worked on since 2009, and why I never got to finish the more recent eBook that I started – and why it’s taking so long to get the sequel to AA written. After all, while we had 3 main authors and an outside contributor or two on the first one, this time it’s just me – and one or two of those outside contributors.

To our credit, I think, even when the AA project was at its craziest, CM didn’t even bobble; it just kept right on ticking over, racking up article after article.

And, most importantly, 400 is:

Johnn has stepped aside in recent months – a decision made early this year but on the cards for much longer – to try and achieve those personal goals down another path. There’s no ill-will on either side; the split has been entirely amicable. I continue to wish him good fortune and once again thank him for his ongoing support, just as I continue to support Roleplaying Tips.

We set out to deliver something more substantial than most blogs (though, perhaps not more substantial than most gaming blogs :) ), and I think that our longevity is, in part, due to that intention. It also helps that when we were first starting, I drew up a long list of potential blog topics – ninety percent of which are still on standby, in the queue.

Plans for the future definitely still include those Campaign Mastery eBooks, and finishing the other eBooks I’ve mentioned in passing in this article (hopefully without giving too much away). They include the sequel to AA, which hopefully will be finished in a month or two at the latest (but don’t hold your breath waiting). There are also a few supplemental items for AA still to be finished as time allows. If time gets short, I May  have to cut CM back to one article a week, though I don’t want to do that unless I have to; regularity and dependability are a large part of the reason CM has been successful so far. But beyond all that is this:- Campaign Mastery will continue to do its best to repay your investment of the time spent reading it with something worth reading.

So that’s 400 posts done. Now, to start thinking of how to commemorate post number 500 – that’s a bit less than a year away… Any ideas?

I’ve been hearing a lot of comments lately about how WOTC are pandering to the grognards who pine for a return to the days of old-school gaming. One person with whom I have corresponded on the subject through Twitter suggested that the divide was too great for it to possibly be bridged, and that WOTC were damned if the did and damned if they didn’t – that it would in fact be utterly impossible to satisfy everyone.

Another correspondent suggested that they should simply repackage and reprint AD&D to satisfy those longing for the days gone by and keep faith with those who have bought into the 4e community.

In short, the nay-sayers appear to be in the ascendancy, at least in terms of those making a lot of noise on the subject.

Those hostile to the entire concept of the philosophic approach to DnDNext announced by WOTC decry the return of infinite tables and unbalanced character classes and the Imperial Gamemaster. Those in favor rant with equal vehemence about reuniting players of the game under one banner, and complain that their debating opponents are speaking of hypothetical situations from a position of prejudice without judging the material being tested on its own merits, and – furthermore – that they are judging those materials against the standard of polished and playtested games.

I often think both sides are missing the point.

Old doesn’t mean it’s bad

When D&D, and AD&D, first came out, there was a wonderful sense of freedom in the air in gaming communities. If there wasn’t a rule to cover it, GMs were encouraged to create one. Rules lawyers were automatically ruled out of order, because the GM had created the game world and knew what worked and what didn’t, within it. There wasn’t a lot of money in gaming and game products, so publishers were less inclined to reach for the lawyers – and speed-dial wasn’t around yet, anyway. The games were, as a result, very open, and very varied. There were masses of 3rd party supplements out there for those who knew where to look. Often amateurish or flawed, but available, nevertheless. Every game had its house rules.

But there were always those who resented the power of the GM over the rules, who demanded to be able to know where they stood, who wanted everything in black and white.

New doesn’t mean it’s better

As time passed, the latter group won ground off the former, inch by inch, game iteration by game iteration. They achieved this by having a valid point or two – it’s all well and good for the GM to always be right because of his status at the game table, but without players, his game is an empty shell. At some point, an invisible line was crossed, and the game design priority became about putting the published rules ahead of the unrestrained creativity of the GM.

Then TSR went up in smoke, or got bought out (depending on who you ask), and WOTC set out to reinvent the game, with high-quality publishing. D&D suddenly represented quite a lot of invested money, and to have the maximum potential to capitalize on that investment, they wanted to encourage professional-standard game supplements – because each one required the purchase of (at the very least) the core rules set. It was “one for you, and three for me” – and then ‘four for me’, ‘five for me’, and so on, as additional ‘official’ expansions began to appear.

WOTC have openly admitted that the OGL was not what they intended, it was too open and unrestrained. The far more restrictive policies of 4e were what they were aiming for. But the serendipitous result was a huge mass of third party material that contributed to making D&D 3.0 the biggest game in town, and a huge success for them. So much so that WOTC was bought up for even larger sums of money by Hasbro – and they DID have the lawyers on speed-dial. They started by releasing version 3.5, correcting many of the errors, typos and other errata that had survived the initial publication – and at the same time, clamped down on the OGL just that little bit tighter.

The result was far fewer third party supplements and expansions aimed at 3.5 specifically – and the continuing publication of supplements aimed at 3.0, which were mostly compatible with the newer game anyway. The genie was out of the bottle, and not inclined to go quietly back into confinement.

Fourth edition followed in due course, with FAR more restrictive terms and conditions – and strict enforcement, backed up by the lawyers. This completely ignored the scale of the investment that most people now had in their 3.x collections – hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth – and declared them all ‘out of date’.

Unsurprisingly, the fan-base that had built up for D&D fractured – there were those who remained loyal to 3.x, there were those who sought to update and further clarify the 3.x into a new generation of d20 game system while preserving the openness of 3.x and eventually produced Pathfinder and Savage Lands and all the other variations out there. And few of these were minded to buy 4e products, and even fewer after purchasing the new game’s core rules and discovering that the spirit of openness that had characterized the game had been resoundingly ignored.

So far as these people were concerned, New certainly did not necessarily mean better. They went looking for the familiar, creating a demand – and some people were smart enough to fill that demand.

At the same time, 4e represented the ultimate achievement for those who wanted written rules and game balance and everything in black-and-white. Most of the criticism at the time seemed to focus on trivial manifestations such as the absence of gnomes or some such, while ignoring the deeper issue, and because that issue went unaddressed, even attempts to placate the complainers had little-to-no effect. Hasbro had what they wished for in the first place – but the result was hardly a resounding success on the scale of the heady 3.x days.

In part, this was because the licensing was so restrictive that it virtually penalized anyone wishing to publish an authorized 4e supplement, while Hasbro made darned sure that no-one went around publishing unofficial ones. In fact, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen more than half-a-dozen 3rd party supplements for 4e in total. Many of the companies that signed up to the restrictive programme tied their fortunes to it being a success – and went down with the ship, as a very large market segment stayed away in droves.

DnDNext: The Second Coming?

So now, WOTC are back to try again. Full of Mea Culpa’s for past sins (and rightfully so), they are looking to try and recapture at least some of the market that deserted them with the ill-judged release of 4e and one flawed plan after another that followed. Who can blame them?

But it does them no good to try and recapture the core 3.x/d20 crowd, there are other games out there now to cater to their wants and needs. Their only hope is to find something that might hold an even greater appeal, and that’s to recapture the spirit of independence, fun, and freedom that preceded the 3.x edition. That means harkening back to 2nd Ed, and to AD&D before that.

Not to emulate the past, or simply reprint it, or to ignore the mistakes that were made back then and all the lessons learned about game design since – but to recapture that spirit and embed it into a new generation of rules that would contain something that would appeal to everyone. If they are at all realistic, they would know that this will be impossible to achieve completely; the goal is to see how close to this ideal they can come.

Modern mechanics with the old-style sensibilities and freedom – that’s the primary goal.

So, what if they succeed?

Let’s be honest, here: Each of the disparate niche markets – 4e, Pathfinder, etc – has its die-hards who will not switch loyalties, no matter what. Some of these felt betrayed by WOTC when 4e was released, others feel burned by the fact that DnDNext will not be 100% 4e compatible. Heck, there are still a few die-hard AD&D and 2nd Ed players out there.

This market share is lost, and will not be recaptured. The rest are swinging voters, who could be swayed by a good product, with varying degrees of resistance. Some will be exceedingly reluctant, either due to past disputes with the approach of WOTC/Hasbro, while others will automatically sign up simply because it’s the latest, and (theoretically, in their minds), the greatest.

The real area for disagreement is over the relative sizes of these fractional markets. No-one has any data on which to base reasonable estimates, so we are equally ignorant, and anyone’s guess is as good as anyone else. What can be said definitively is that the new game cannot be perfect (nothing made by humans ever is) and therefore it will not succeed in capturing the entirety of the possible market share, even excluding those who will stand by their current systems of choice.

What, then, are the standards by which success can be guaged? The minimum standard of success has to be sales in excess of those for the all-too-divisive 4e. No matter by how little, ANY increase on that measure has to represent not only forgiveness of past sins but redemption and absolution. It will mean that WOTC will have more than replaced the sales lost to the 4e die-hards, and those will have to have come from elsewhere – in other words, be fans recaptured from other market segments. Anything better than a break even represents a success.

With Pathfinder supplements now out-selling 4e, the next benchmark has to be reclaiming the lost number one slot – not for the core rules, or even the first extra-game supplement or two, but with the third or the fourth. Sustained good sales will indicate that they have not only recaptured lost market share, they have recaptured the loyalties of those gamers. Achieving this will state that the new game is on a solid foundation.

Beyond these minimum standards, any improvement has to be considered a noteworthy success, and the sky is the limit.

And, if they are less than completely successful?

An awful lot will depend on WOTC’s unreliable – to say the least – love/hate relationship with third party publishers. Driving them off was literally the killing the goose that layed the golden eggs, causing a dramatic decline in public acceptance of 4e. Consider that every 3rd party product not only mandated the sale of copies of the core rules from WOTC, but provided free advertising for the official product; and, by refreshing and invigorating the market, kept demand for WOTC’s own products high. If DnDNext is to have any serious hope of exceeding those bare minimum standards of success, they must recapture the attention and affiliation of third party publishers. This is one promise that they have made to the market in general, but we are – quite obviously – a long way short of seeing any details as yet.

The first indicator of how well WOTC think they have done will be those detailed licenses. If they have backslid into the arrogance of old, these will be deeply restrictive and DnDNext will be dead in the water, awaiting only the last rites. If these are less than generous, but still workable, then the question of ultimate success will linger, unanswered, until the game actually goes on sale; but it will show some hesitation and uncertainty about their success. But if they are as generous and open as the original OGL, then it will show two things: that WOTC have, indeed, learned from the mistakes of the past, and that they are genuinely confident in the success of their product.

The Message For Now

The point that I am hoping to get across right now is that it is far too early to be passing judgment. DnDNext is still a work in development; it cannot be measured against finished products, for this is holding it to an unfair standard. And, if we don’t know what it is that we are judging, it is impossible to predict how successful it will be in the open marketplace. It is fair to predict that WOTC’s rivals will not let go of their market share without a fight – but a single misstep in that defense will have massive repercussions. All we can say for certain is that exciting times for the gaming industry lie ahead…

So, getting back to the question at hand

“Old-school” gaming can mean many things to many different people. To those viewing it with a negative perspective, it’s easy to accentuate the negative connotations of the term. To those viewing it with a positive disposition, it is all too easy to see only the beneficial aspects that have become muted or lost in recent generations of game. The term itself is so general that it can be twisted to whatever meaning the speaker desires. It is therefore neither good nor evil, neither positive or negative, but is the compound of many different concepts, each of which beings its own benefits and has its own price to exact. If the benefits outweigh the cost, then it is a positive contribution; if not, then the concept should be abandoned.

This is where the lessons learned in more modern gaming times have their part to play. It may be that the price that in the past was associated with a given benefit is no longer mandated, that we have found a better way to achieve an end. It may, in short, be possible to salvage that which would otherwise be abandoned. The second question that must be asked in the design process is whether or not something should be salvaged just because it can be. For those expecting any one game system to be all things to all gamers, they are doomed to be disappointed.

The ambition of uniting the best of the past with the lessons of recent times is a laudable one. But those who focus on the negatives are actively undermining the prospects of success, poisoning the atmosphere with small-minded criticisms that are unworthy of them, and of the ambition itself, whether out of pettiness, or bitterness, or resentment; mistrust, or ill-will, or vanity; genuine concern, or sincere doubt, or peer pressure. It is good to be ambitious, and to attempt to create something that is better than what has gone before. They may fail, but if they do, at least I will be able to say that it was not because I undermined their attempts at doing so. The next time you sound off about the difficulties faced by the designers at WOTC, whatever you may think of them personally, pause for a moment and ask yourself whether you are really saving “roleplaying as we know it” by doing so. In years to come, will you really be proud of your behavior? Will you remember with pride the support you gave to the ambition, regardless of the outcome? Or will you remember being a naysayer, a critic, a cynic, a prophet of doom – an enemy of the goal of bettering the roleplaying game?

Regardless of the success or failure of the endeavor, I can be proud of the part I’ve played in the attempt. Can others say the same?