Image by Ted Erski from Pixabay

This was originally going to be one monster post containing three locations that I have devised recently for different campaigns. I quickly realized that this was too ambitious, so this will be a trilogy of articles, one every 2 weeks.

This is an idea that hints at deeper connections in the game world, metaphysical relationships that tantalize with a glimpse of a more complex reality. It’s suitable for a wide range of campaigns but is, perhaps, most powerful in a Fantasy context.

Naming strangeness in Arkansas…

• Perryville is the county seat for Perry county, which makes sense.
• Lonoke is the county seat for Lonoke County, which also seems reasonable. But then we start tiptoeing into the Twilight Zone.
• Bentonville is the county seat for Benton County.
• Benton is the county seat for Saline County.
• Nashville is the county seat for Holland County – but there’s no chance of it being confused with it’s more famous namesake in Tennessee, is there?
• Russellville is the county seat for Pope County (not Russell County, there’s no such thing).
• Pope County is not to be confused with Polk County (where Mena is the county seat) or Pike County (County Seat of Murfreesboro – at least that’s fairly distinctive, isn’t it? Oops, there’s three of them – one in Tennessee, one in North Carolina, and this one in Arkansas. Oh well…)
• Clinton is the county seat for Van Buren County.
• Van Buren, on the other hand, is the county seat for Crawford County.
• Clarksville is the county seat for Johnson County, not Clark County (whose County Seat is Arkadelphia).
• Mountain View is the County Seat for Stone County, Mountain Home is the County Seat for Baxter County. But no-one would ever confuse the two, would they?
• Yelville is County Seat for Marion County but there is also a Yell County which has TWO county seats – Dardonelle and Danville.
• On top of that, there is also a city named Marion which is the county seat for Crittendon County.
• Marion County is not the only one with authority shared between two county seats – in the case of Franklin County, it’s Charleston and Ozark…
• … Boonville and Paris are both county seats for Logan County….
• … Carroll County shares power between Berryville and Eureka Springs…
• …I mustn’t forget Arkansas County, which has both DeWitt and Stuttgart as County Seats…
• …Sebastian County has Greenwood and Fort Smith…
• …and in the case of Prairie County (which has a lot of ghost towns and unincorporated communities), it’s DeValls Bluff in the south and, to the North, the unincorporated city (one of two in the county) of Des Arc.
  

  For those that don’t know, an unincorporated area or community is a region not governed by a local municipal corporation. They may have a town council or other form of local government, or not, and it may be considered ‘attached’ to a larger region for various official purposes like a census.

• Hot Springs is the County Seat for Garland County.
• Malvern is the County Seat for Hot Spring County.
• And, last (and possibly least), The County Seat of Sharp County is Ash Flat which should have anyone who knows anything about music deep in thought!

But those alone weren’t enough to get my creative juices flowing. Nor was it the long list of towns and cities who share a name with somewhere else (and are usually better known), like Nashville, Melbourne, and Paris. There are lots of these in Arkansas, but I don’t know if they are more prevalent there than they are anywhere else in the world (it seems to be a quite common thing in the US, but it’s far from unheard-of here in Australia, either.

The Midways

Maybe the idea started with the Midways.

Lots of places have places named Midway, especially in the US.

You can generally expect one place called Midway in a given state or country, or some equivalent thereof, maybe even two. But, when you discover three of them that are visible at the same time on the map, and you notice them, it gets your attention.

I put this together using a screen capture from Google Maps just to show my players.

What I found out subsequently was that this was the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Wikipedia, on this page, lists 11 states with one place named Midway: Colorado, Delaware, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, plus part of the geothermal areas of Yellowstone.

The same list contains 23 more states with multiple places named Midway: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

According to this list, there are no less than 16 of them (including one ghost town)! Or maybe that’s not abnormal in the US?

Well, let’s see. Alabama has 5, California 4 (including a mountain), Florida 5, Illinois 8, Indiana 6 – so far, that 16-count is sticking out like a sore thumb!

Iowa has 5, one of them a ghost town; Kansas 3; Kentucky 5; Louisiana 5; Minnesota 2; Mississippi 7; and Missouri, 4. No, that list of 16 is definitely remarkable.

When I showed my players, they were equally intrigued. One made a comment about getting confused about where you were, and that planted the initial seed – but it would take further discoveries to bring it to bloom.

The Cemeteries of Arkansas

That was achieved by the cemeteries.

Arkansas is home to 4224 of them. A lot of these cemeteries share a common name, or could be mistaken for having a common name.

Somewhere on the internet misinformed me that this was the greatest number per capita anywhere in the world (excluding temporary grave sites in War Zones, and counting mass burials as only one site), but verifying that has shown it to be false – Tennessee has more graveyards per 100,000 people than anywhere else in the world, and a total of 33,000 of them within the state.

The Searchable Database

But let’s get back to Arkansas. As anyone who’s been reading me for the last year or two knows, the PCs in my superhero campaign are in the process of converting a Mansion that I have positioned in Royal, Arkansas, having spent a couple of days on an extended road trip exploring the state.

In The Power Of Basic Utilities, I discussed the process of creating a searchable database of businesses and localities and sites of interest. That list deliberately excluded churches, landmarks, and cemeteries, for reasons that are too complicated to go into right now.

The Second Pass

But, in making a second sweep through the various relevant localities, having discovered that the scale I had been using left out entirely too many of the things that I wanted to list, I decided that selected landmarks needed to be included, and so did cemeteries.

The Lost Cemetery

I was about 95% through my data acquisition for the resulting additional sites when I had trouble finding a particular cemetery for a second time (I no longer remember which one it was). I had found it once to put it on my list, but finding it a second time to actually gather information about it simply wasn’t happening.

Google Search

I tried all the usual tricks that I had developed without success, until I was at what had become my last resort: a Google Search.

This had tracked down businesses that I had misnamed (2 or 3), businesses that had closed, businesses that had relocated, and so on – why couldn’t it find this particular cemetery?

Well, it not only did that, it provided links to a couple of really useful resources –

• The Arkansas page of The US Cemetery registry, which sometimes has details about a site that you can’t find anywhere else,
• And Roadside Thoughts, which has lists of all the communities in the US and Canada, but also lists of all the Cemeteries, divided by state or province. The list includes the county in which the cemetery is located and clicking on an entry takes you to a page with more information, including – crucially – GPS coordinates that can be plugged back into Google Maps.

Lost Cemetery – Found

This allowed me to locate the “lost cemetery” and discover that of all the functional zoom levels showing businesses etc, there was only ONE that showed this cemetery; the rest of the time, the name and marker was covered over by other points of greater potential importance.

There’s more where that came from. A LOT more.

It also revealed that there were a LOT more cemeteries in the target zone that were simply not showing up through Google Search (and that Google had a few showing that this source did not).

A lot of those resting places had the same name as ones that I had already processed – but I might have found 4 or 5 when there were twenty or more.

For example, there are six Adams Cemetery listings, plus Adams / Singer Cemetery and the Adams Chapel Cemetery. Sometimes, one county would have two or three with the same name – for example, Newton County has three named Curtis Cemetery.

Flash Of Inspiration

I’ll get to the why of it in a moment, but a flash of inspiration demanded that I work my way through their list, adding those names that recurred (and the occasional one that was too distinctive and intriguing to ignore) to my list.

So far, these additions total about 6 times the length of my original list – and right now, I’m in the middle of the O’s (Oak Grove Cemetery to be more specific), so probably half the names are still to come!

Almost everything in the list of place-name weirdness with which I started this part of the article was compiled from my side-notes on the entries and noticing the strangeness of some of the names.

My entries look like this:

O’Neel Cemetery [Lincoln County], Star City [33.8787, -91.7646] (note spelling)

– the name of the Cemetery, the County, the County Seat IF it’s close enough to the location that Google might cough up a street address if I search for the name and locality, the GPS coordinates, and – in this case – a notation to myself, which most don’t have).

Portals Connected By Names

But now we get to the flash of inspiration – what if there was an arcane connection between places that are named the same that permits relatively easy instant transit from one to another?

What if this was also possible to places that had similar but not identical names, especially of the names (when spoken aloud) were the same?

And, What if the planet-spanning enclave of Mages that were insinuating themselves into the fabric of society at every level knew how to use this trick?

Not to mention, What if the uniformity of design of fast food franchise outlets were an attempt at creating a less contentious network?

Intended Usage

At some point in the future of the Campaign, someone will mention the existence of this network to one or more of the PCs.

Or maybe they’ll ask to meet the PCs at a particular graveyard and “port in”, giving a visual demonstration that leads to an explanation.

Right now, the PCs are having to get used to being without their “instant teleport into the heart of a problem” – by the time they learn of something, it may have been resolved by conventional forces or it will have developed significantly by the time they arrive.

One key element of the searchable database will be how long it will take the PCs to get to “X”. If and when they learn of an incident, they will have to decide whether they can get to it in time – something they have never had to do before.

Once they have gotten somewhat used to the notion that they can’t be everywhere, and can’t solve every problem, it will be time to loosen the restraints a bit. That’s when and where this concept will come into play.

And there may be the occasional encounter in a location whose name is too inspirational to be refused along the way!

But that’s what I intend to do with it.

Other Uses

Writing Campaign Mastery has taught me well. As soon as I come up with something for one of my campaigns, I assess it for potential value for others.

I could see this being a useful gimmick in all sorts of modern Fantasy campaigns (including Vampire and the like), in Pulp campaigns, in Horror campaigns, and so on.

But in straight Fantasy lies perhaps its greatest potential. Most places would have only one or two graveyards in such campaigns, but the fact that the network would be small only makes it more manageable for the GM. It won’t break the game world, but it might create a backdoor into adventures.

Thoughts about controls

Just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it’s easy. There are three sorts of significant controls to contemplate:

• Usage Limits
• Usage Cost
• Usage Difficulty

Usage Limits

This is a simply a matter of a restriction on how many times the network can be used in a certain time frame, or how long you have to wait before it can be used again, or possibly both.

There are all sorts of pseudo-scientific rationales that can be offered, from an accumulated charge of some sort of strange static field, to incompatibility between the living and the dead, to a limited energy supply within the Cemetery Network.

More sophisticated limits may be used – a total distance traveled, or a delay factor deriving from the total distance traveled. But these are rarely as much trouble as they are worth.

Usage Cost

Another way of ensuring that the network isn’t taken for granted, becoming so ubiquitous that it dominates gameplay and tactical considerations, is for there to be some sort of significant cost involved in using it.

There are three common usage costs that can be applied.

1. stat points – Frankly, I don’t like this choice, even though it’s one I’ve seen used for this purpose any number of times. It doesn’t impart much flavor unless you can convince your players to roleplay the (temporary) characteristic loss.

2. hit points – using the network costs 25%, 50%, or 75% of a character’s hit points. These of course are easily recovered through rest and healing magic, but until that happens, characters using the Network will be vulnerable.

This WILL have implications for usage – short trips are viable but there will be times when travel plus rest time is equal to or greater than conventional travel. The more rest that is required, the greater the value for long trips.

A variation might be to associate the loss with distance traveled, but this will erode those implications to some extent, and I’m not sure the added complexity is worth it.

But my preferred answer is #3.

3. attack & defense values – using the network causes some disorientation and dizziness. This is expressed as a temporary loss of attack and defense scores, and probably anything DEX related as well, the amount of loss to be determined by a roll of some sort – perhaps d6+2, or d6+log(distance[km]).

The last is worth taking a moment to clarify:

.0-9 km = d6+0
10-99 km = d6+1
100-999 km = d6+2
1000-9999 km = d6+3
10,000-99,999 km = d6+4
….

A further variation divides the log of the distance value by log(5), or 0.699. Instead of powers of 10, this sets the threshold at powers of 5:

0-4 km = d6+0
5-24 km = d6+1
25-124 km = d6+2
125-624 km = d6+3
625-3124 km = d6+4
3125-15624 km = d6+5
and so on.

Or perhaps you would prefer to use log(2.5)=0.398?

0 – 2.4 km = d6+0
2.5 – 6.24 km = d6+1
6.25 – 15.624 km = d6+2 (note that 3 significant decimals is as far as I’ll go)
15.625 – 39.062 km = d6+3
39.063 – 97.656 km = d6+4
97.657 – 244.14 km = d6+5
244.141 – 610.351 km = d6+6
610.352 – 1525.879 km = d6+7
1525.88 – 3814.7 km = d6+8
3814.701 – 9536.743 km = d6+9
….

But if I was going in this direction, I would step it down to the much more elegant powers of 2, using log(2) = 0.30103

<2 km = d6+0
2 – 3.9 km = d6+1
4 – 7.9 km = d6+2
8 – 15.9 km = d6+3
16 – 31.9 km = d6+4
32 – 63.9 km = d6+5
64 – 127.9 km = d6+6
128 – 255.9 km = d6+7
256 – 511.9 km = d6+8
512 – 1023.9 km = d6+9
1024 – 2047.9 km = d6+10
2048 – 4095.9 km = d6+11
4096 – 8191.9 km = d6+12
8192 – 16383.9 km = d6+13
….

In all such, the first value – the more convenient one – can be considered a threshold; exceed it and you step up to the next penalty step.

To my tastes, this last choice goes too far, and the one before it is too complicated to casually remember. On the other hand, the powers-of-five peaks too quickly, and the powers-of-ten WAY too quickly.

What is needed is some mechanism to push results back up the list toward the top. I’ll get back to that thought in a moment. First, let’s put those distances into context.

To do that, some distances might be useful:









All distances are shown in kilometers, and thanks to Google Maps, make full allowance for the curvature of the Earth. The maps are copyright free.

I should caution readers that they were assembled and compiled in some haste, so they may not be error-free – in fact, as I was preparing the above artwork, I spotted at least one number that seemed rather dodgy to me. And there were another pair where I think I transposed them in my research – so I swapped them on the graphic.

Okay, I got carried away working on these maps, I admit. I estimated it to be a 2-3 hour job – but then I added all the smaller-scale illustrations.

Using the maps

Decide what scale your campaign world is, in terms of how far the PCs are free to roam. Find the largest number on the map. Look at the different penalty levels listed for that distance and decide on the one that seems most appropriate to you.

Choose high rather than low – having up to 5 levels ‘in hand’ can come in handy.

Remember, the highest value on your chart is how far the PCs can
(theoretically) jump in a single action. You might decide that you want it to take three jumps to cover the distance if your campaign – i.e. to get from one side of your playable area to the other; in that case, divide the distance determined by three to get the ‘jump scale’.

For example: GM chooses a European scale. He selects the map that includes southern Scandinavia. It has two numbers showing: 3183 and 3398. As instructed, he takes the higher of these. But he wants Jumps to be less powerful, so he decides that it will take 6 of them to get from one side of the 3398 to the other.

3398 / 6 = 566 1/3 km per maximum jump. That’s a d6+2 modifier on the powers-of-ten chart, d6+3 on the powers-of-5 chart, d6+5 on the powers-of-2.5 chart, and d6+9 on the powers-of-2 chart.

The first two are too low. The powers-of-2.5 seems about right, the powers-of-2 charts gives too high a result. But, bearing the advice to choose high in mind (even though I haven’t explained why yet), ht selects the latter.

Recovering Jump Shock

Each round after arrival, the character gets a save against FORT or some similar check. If they succeed, they recover one or perhaps two of the losses. So some characters will recover more quickly than others.

Usage Difficulty

The final form of restriction is to require some sort of skill check in order to use the Cemetery Gates.

There are so many advantages and benefits to this that It’s practically a necessity, in my view.

It lets you decide on how difficult a Cemetery Jump is at all. It lets you factor in very similar names (good) or not so similar names (more difficult). As characters advance in power, jumps that were once very difficult will become easier, making the system progressive. You can throw in all sorts of other modifiers as you see fit – perhaps there are ways of warding cemeteries against such purposes.

You also get to decide what the roll represents. Do you have to haggle with the Dead Residents every time? Do you have to arrange something in some arcane pattern? Perhaps you have to manipulate arcane energies, somehow?

You should only choose one – of these options. But you can use a different one in different campaigns to give their Cemetery Gates a somewhat different flavor.

In a 3d6 or d20 system, for every 2 points by which the character activating the Cemetery Gate makes his or her roll, move their Jump Shock up the table one step. With a d% system, it’s one step for every 10% success, and the minimum jump shock is the “+x” listed against the original entry.

In the example offered earlier, a maximum jump incurred a penalty of d6+9. So the minimum jump shock is 9. If the character succeeds in his roll by 12 (a very good roll), he can reduce it to d6+3, minimum 9. Quite obviously, there’s no point in rolling the d6; he has reduced the Jump Shock to the irreducible minimum.

If he succeeds by 6 (a good roll), he reduces it to d6+6, minimum 9. This is still a good result – less than half the time, the total will be worse than the 9 minimum.

If he succeeds by 2 (a fair roll), he reduces it to d6+8, minimum 9 – and may as well not have bothered.

Note that the characters can choose to jump less than the maximum, reducing their Jump Shock accordingly. It would probably be reasonable to give a bonus to the skill check for doing so, too.

So, there you have it. There is just so much flavor that you can build into your world with this campaign element, and it has such wide utility in terms of genre, that it has to be worth noting!