Temporary Place Names

Alex Schroeder has a quick blog post about place names and how to handle them, and has this to say:

If the village is run by a guy called Marcel, should it be Marcelsby, Marcelden, or perhaps based on the forest or river name? [ … ] Perhaps simply waiting for the players to name things works just as well.

That’s an approach I hadn’t even considered, even though I’m always going on about letting the world be created during play. Not everything can be left for players to name, though. Kingdoms, major cities, and large regions should get names. Basically, anything NPCs are going to use to give directions or mention in rumors.

One solution to the naming problem: temporary pseudonames. Take two or three features of a place, compress each down to a single word, and add the generic type (village, forest, river, etc.) This becomes a prompt to help describe a place: “paranoid mining village” means the mines and mining paraphenalia will get mentioned a lot, and NPCs will be secretive and hostile to outsiders.

This doesn’t mean that any of the features of the pseudoname will definitely be part of the actual name, especially if players are doing the naming. They might latch onto other features, perhaps those you don’t consider important.

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World-Building Handouts, Part III: Starting Area

Continuing the player handouts series:

1. Part I
2. Part II

(These are in response to a discussion on the handouts list post.)

Kingdoms Factoids

• Very distant kingdoms include Lesanggio and Deogosika.
• Somewhat distant kingdoms on the way to the sea: Seraphia, Senanpa, Sofaria, Senalia, Soconia, Tir na Diabhal.
• Home base is Port Skar along the banks of the Scarlet River where it is joined by the Great Murky River

The first two factoids are only hinted at, mainly on the local map handout. Originally, I only indicated Sofaria and Tir na Diabhal as direction arrows at the edge of the local map and didn’t mention other kingdoms.

In the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms, a kingdom (or barony, duchy, principality) rarely contains more than one city, from which the territory generally takes its name. That city controls several towns, villages, and hamlets.

Local Landmarks Factoids

• West of the Scarlet River is mostly fields and farmland, while east of the river becomes wild forest and hills.
• Nearby settlements Norskar, Weskar, Suskar, Arkandia
• Major landmarks: Devil’s Tower, Ivory Tower, Giant’s Causeway, Ziggurat of Mammon
• Nearby points of interest: Jagged Monolith, Mystic Dome, Dark Spiral Chasm

Only the first one of these is a player factoid, but some of the remaining information is on the local map handout.

My original map handout is kind of messy and hard to scan, but I plan on working up a new version with a sample handout collecting the info from this series.

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World-Building Handouts, Part II: History and Culture

Continuing with my handouts examples (see Part I here,) this time zooming in to history and culture factoids. This means I’m skipping over 2-6 in the original handouts list because it makes more sense in the context of my Nine and Thirty Kingdoms world. I’ll come back to those in future parts of the series.

History Factoids

• Thousands of years ago, Vaeturia conquered or colonized the entire coastline of the Great Fettered Sea, establishing a mighty and advanced empire.
• In The Wyrm Times, enormous vadwyrms destroyed most of civilization and scattered humanity.
• Three centuries later, dozens of tiny kingdoms, all a pale shadow of the nearly-forgotten empire, compete to become its replacement.
• Most monsters, including the vadwyrms, were created during Vaeturia’s decline.
• The island of Vaeturia still exists somewhere near the center of the Great Fettered Sea.

Again, only the first three factoids (in bold italics) would be included in the player handout. The last two wouldn’t be difficult to learn by asking the right scholars, but other information is GM-only and developed as needed: how and why the vadwyrms and other monsters were made, why things went out of control, how to get to Vaeturia, and what may be found there.

Religion Factoids

• After The Wyrm Times, a religious schism created the dominant monotheistic Church of Urizen and drove believers in the rest of the old pantheon underground.
• The Fist of Urizen crushes remnants of the old faith and heretical ideas about Urizen.
• The distant West revived belief in Urizen’s female companion as the Mysteries of Ahania, while a small mystical cult, the Children of Los, tries to maintain the full pantheon.
• Druids follow the old pantheon, mostly Urthona, but Chaos Druids and orcs revere Red Orc (not necessarily the same way.)
• The original schism began before The Wyrm Times, not after.

The first two factoids go on the player handout. The third can be discovered during play. If players ask, The Church of Urizen is roughly equivalent to the medieval Catholic Church, with saints and the like. Their relationship with the Mysteries of Ahania is similar to that of Christianity and Islam just before the Crusades. The Children of Los are basically Qabalists.

William Blake is the source of the pantheon, of course, but I use his ideas very loosely and don’t expect any player to read or memorize anything from Blake. In fact, I prefer players to make up their own religious beliefs about Urizen. It helps encourage heresy.

Cultural Factoids

• Languages change quickly over short distances
• Magic is unpopular in rural areas and with some urban commoners, especially witchcraft (any magic that doesn’t rely on books/scrolls.)

This section is short, because most cultural details will be generated as needed during play, using the guidelines already established.

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World-Building and Player Handouts, Part I: Cosmic and Continental

It seems like ages ago when I wrote about limiting info in handouts so that players – including yourself – don’t have to do tons of homework to play in the world. A couple people asked for a walk-through for the “factoid” approach I suggested, which means in general only describing each thing with about three short sentences and only filling in the details on the immediate locale. I’m going to break up the example over a series of posts.

Cosmic Scale Factoids

• Isolated Fairy-tale Europe tiny kingdoms in a seemingly endless wilderness centuries after an apocalypse
• Anything in European legend or Greek/Roman myth is common knowledge, even if few if any have seen these things
• Humans are the norm, but there about a couple thousand elves, dwarves, and orcs in the world. Any other “race” is one of a kind or just a handful of individuals
• Monsters don’t breed, they are created by magical accidents or lingering curses in regions.
• There are no other “planes”, but there are ethereal and astral states. There is an invisible topography co-existing with the physical world.
• The gods may or may not exist, but faith does exist, and lesser spirits can be commanded by those of strong faith.

The first three bold italic factoids would be in the player handout as something players would need to know to understand the campaign. The other three factoids are mostly for the GM, although players could learn these things in various ways. Long-time readers of my blog will have seen previous posts on all these factoids. Factoid #5 about the absence of planes is covered in the Infernal Neighbors posts and PDF, for example, and Factoid #6 is Clerics Without Spells.

Continent Factoids

Normally, factoids at this level would begin with the name of the starting continent, but because of the first factoid above, among other things, “continents” aren’t even necessarily common knowledge.

• The Great Fettered Sea is like a supersized Mediterranean Sea turned 90 degrees clockwise, with the northern straits leading into the sea blocked by the Endless Ice
• Middle regions on both sides of the sea are mostly forest and mountains, while the southern coast is more arid.
• For improvising details of distant coastal kingdoms, use the equivalent Mediterranean country for the equivalent language and culture.
• The further inland you travel, the weirder things become.

Again, only the first two factoids would be included in a player handout, perhaps with a crude map like the one below.

The third factoid merely means that, if a player asks a question about distant lands I haven’t mapped yet, I use medieval versions of existing reference points. You can see on the map that I have an elongated “clock” superimposed on the crude suggested coastline, and there are different coastal regions labeled based on what country they would be if this really were the Mediterranean rotated 90 degrees. Spain is roughly 2 o’clock, France at 3 o’clock, Italy at 3:30, and Greece at 4 o’clock.

But also, I match up the east coast of the sea with the west coast of North America, so each coastal region is a pseudo-medieval cross between a Mediterranean country and a modern day Pacific Coast urban area. France, in this case, is also the San Francisco Bay area, the dominant city being Sofaria. The starting locale in my campaign is upriver from the pseudo-French kingdoms, in Port Skar, which is on the edge of where things begin to get weird.

History and culture factoids will be covered in the second post of the series.

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Multiplying NPCs

A lot of advice for running sandbox campaigns talk about creating lots of material beforehand, for example lists of NPCs for players to interact with. This is a rather heavy workload, of course, so one of the other options is to use a random table. But there's very little advice for making such tables, and the example tables seem to mostly be just list of NPCs, sometimes a hundred different NPCs in a d100 table. Even that's not going to last forever, and you'll be back where you started: needing to make a table.

The opposite random tactic is to have tables of traits, skills, beliefs, and so on, to roll up each NPC. This can get bogged down, so it might be wiser to use a shortcut: create a small list of NPCs, say six, twelve, or twenty, and create the rest by multiplying those starter NPCs.  What I mean by that is mixing parts of two NPCs to make a third.

Let's illustrate this with just six NPCs and just the standard ability scores to start. You roll up six seed characters, exactly as if you were creating an adventure party:

1. Str 16 Int 13 Wis 16 Dex 6 Con 12 Cha 15
2. Str 11 Int 7 Wis 4 Dex 18 Con 17 Cha 15
3. Str 14 Int 4 Wis 13 Dex 12 Con 13 Cha 13
4. Str 11 Int 14 Wis 11 Dex 7 Con 9 Cha 5
5. Str 9 Int 7 Wis 3 Dex 9 Con 6 Cha 9
6. Str 3 Int 9 Wis 5 Dex 8 Con 7 Cha 6

You get a list of names, lots of names, maybe first and last name pairs. Write them on a sheet in rows and columns, for example three columns and 20 to 30 rows. You're going to use this as a drop dice table to roll random names.

Drop 2d6 on the table. Take the first name from wherever the lowest d6 lands, the second name from where the other die lands.If they tie, read from left to right on odd results, right to left on even.

For the second part of making the character, read the d6 results from left to right, looking up each result on the table of ability scores. The first d6 is the first three ability scores from your seed characters, the second d6 is the second three scores. That's 36 possible characters.

It can get more complicated. Label the first four seed characters Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, Thief, the last two as Merchant and Laborer. Roll a d6 for the class of common characters, a d4 when recruiting henchmen.

Or make a list of twenty random characters/ Label the first four Fighter, the next three Thief, the next two M-U, the tenth as a Cleric, and the rest as a mix of laborers and merchants. Or mix up the proportions to fit your preferred distribution. On your drop dice sheet of names, add one word traits to some or all of the names: Cruel, Gullible, Stubborn, whatever you wish. Roll 3d20 and interpret in order as first name, last name, trait (by position) and class, first three abilities, last three abilities (by value.) That's 2,000 mechanically distinct characters, with 8,100 possible names and a mix of personality traits.

Create a different list of names for each culture. If the proportions of classes change from region to region, you can change the seed character table, too. Endless character combos for your world.

Arbitrary, Random, Evil

There's an issue that kind of popped up in a previous post about the word "arbitrary". Perhaps I should make it clearer how I use it and how it impacts playing or running RPGs.

The various definitions of "arbitrary" in the non-RPG context revolve around who or what has an influence on how a choice is made. Many times, it means something is determined by chance or whim, or without any plan, in contrast to choices made based on rational decisions or in accordance with some system or need. A lot depends on what people are expecting as a selection criteria, which is why personal preferences can sometimes be arbitrary and sometimes not at all.

It's all about the perceived plan. Are you following the plan? Then you aren't making arbitrary decisions. Are you ignoring the plan? Then you are being arbitrary.

In RPGs, some people object to GMs who ignore challenge ratings or who let their personal feelings about players affect the decisions they make about characters. The infamous "Rocks fall, everyone dies", for example. If the players feel like the event happened because the GM was having a bad day, or just to exert some petty dominance, or because the players deviated from "the story", then they will say "That's so arbitrary!"

And so, people have kind of redefined "arbitrary" to mean "evil, spiteful GMing". But that wasn't what I was talking about in reference to sandbox GMing. The defining criteria of a sandbox is that it does not follow any GM plans or preference: no predefined story, no momentary anger, no punishment of players for heading into uncharted territory, no spur-of-the-moment encounters to strip characters of benefits or to show off something fancy. The GM is supposed to set up the world and any random tables in advance, but once play begins, the players or the dice or some other arbitrary method of selection have control over what happens next, NOT the GM.

This is why I made such a big deal about meaningful geographical freedom. If the players can go north, south, east, or west, but will encounter the same thing no matter what (because the GM just moved the "next" encounter to the appropriate location,) then the players had no real choice at all: their freedom was an illusion.

If, on the other hand, the GM has a list of encounters arranged in a random table, or if there's an unordered list and the GM uses a table like this:

• Players go North: Use encounter on top of list, cross it off.
• Players go South: Use encounter on bottom of list, cross it off.
• Players go East or West: Use encounter in middle of list, cross it off.
• Players go Northeast or Northwest: Use encounter above the one in the middle of the list, cross it off.
• Players go Southeast or Southwest: Use encounter below the one in the middle of the list, cross it off.

... Then that removes petty GM preferences from the equation and makes what happens next arbitrary.

Which is good.

Non-Random Sandbox

There’s a discussion about whether random encounter tables are necessary for a sandbox. People are sometimes distracted by the geographical features of almost all sandbox games, so much so that they believe the defining characteristic of a sandbox is geographical freedom (“We can go to the castle, or we can go to the swamp, or we can go to the desert.”) But having geographical freedom is meaningless if the GM still controls the sequence of encounters. It is absolutely critical in sandbox play that encounters are tied to specific geographical locations beforehand, so that geographical choices matter, or, if the encounter can occur anywhere, the GM’s decision is truly arbitrary.

And if you aren’t using dice or some other randomizer to select what happens next, how do you do that?

You can do it with a fixed list of encounters written up beforehand. When an encounter is needed, the next encounter on the list is used. This does mean that the list can’t be in a logical order, arranged according to plot concerns, increasing/decreasing monster strength, or similar concerns. Alphabetical by landmark, object, class of NPC, or name of monster would be better. Each region can have its own list, perhaps more than one, categorized by season, or by encounter type. For example, in the wilderness, you can travel a road or path, look for shelter, look for food, or look for water, among other things. You could write four lists of things that happen when performing each action. Or, perhaps, eight lists, two for each: one of good results, one of bad results, with the specific list being chosen based on circumstances.

Written with StackEdit.

Random Castle

Here's something I'm working on that's related to condensing an entire campaign down to two pages: for the campaign I ran recently, I drew up some standard square and round tower layouts. Ground floor, middle floor(s) and rooftop, plus two or three layouts for ruined layers. The idea is that most towers are pretty much the same, so I could make notes for individual towers without drawing up individual maps. This isn't original; somewhere, I have a copy of Frontier Forts of Kelnore, which as I recall worked in a similar way, with the GM rolling for variations when placing a new fort (I'm hazy on the details because I inherited the module, but didn't run it; my friend used it when it was his turn to GM.)

This approach can work well for a number of campaign element, which can save a lot of space. For example, for hamlets and small villages, you can roll 2d6 for the number of buildings and just assume that the village is the intersection of two or three roads, eliminating any real need for a map. Castles are a good candidate for random variants of standard patterns, too... so I've been putting together a generic castle "map".

The castle towers, gatehouse, and keep are to scale, but the walls aren't necessarily that short, so the inner courtyard can be much larger, with additional buildings like a smithy, other craft shops, and stables. The map is divided into six regions labeled A through F, so that you can use these in area keys, with G reserved for the Gatehouse and K for the Keep (H, I, and J can be free-standing buildings. The wall is 15 feet high, the gatehouse is 20 feet, and the towers are 30 feet; arrow slits shown are actually only on the 20-foot level. The doors for the towers are on a windowless ground floor, while the doors for the keep are at the 20-foot elevation, reached by stairs. The gatehouse has an inner portcullis and an exterior reinforced wooden gate that lowers like a drawbridge, although this could be replaced with large double doors, iron doors, bronze doors, or many other options.

I haven't completed any tables for this yet, but you will note that each of the six sections has a different tower shape and a number, so that you could roll a d6 to determine the shape used for all towers. You can also use these numbers to determine which sections are missing, either because the castle was constructed that way (curtain wall runs diagonally from B to the gatehouse, for example) or the walls were breached. Similarly, you can use a d6 roll to determine which (ruined) tower is the tallest and which is the lowest, then roll a d4 for either extreme, treating a 4 as "no above-ground structure."

The Two-Page Campaign

The ODD74 forums also recently resurrected discussion of a post on JDJarvis's blog that I remember, but didn't comment on: basing an entire campaign on two pages of notes. Presumably, this just means the political and geographical layout and any magic or monster differences; individual dungeon maps would be extra, although the names and available knowledge of such dungeons would be part of the two-page rundown.

To a certain extent, that's how I ran the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms campaign. Of course, the two pages were mostly in my head, and I probably drew more area maps than I needed to. Which all makes me want to go back and condense the entire thing, maybe using the techniques for improv towns to keep the starting town descriptions short.

The way I see it, the trick to making a fairly detailed sandbox (sketchbox) campaign starting with only two pages is to stick to two or three broad statements at each level of detail and only expand things in play. You don't need the entire world; you just need enough nearby, far, and very far place names, eras, and cultures to drop into conversations with NPCs. And for villains and patrons in the area, you don't need a whole lot to start out with, or very much detail; just a name, level, short descriptive phrase, goal and obstacle (or peeve,) one or two of these per major locale. You can look that list over during play to decide what events will be set in motion ... not to create a story, but to create a background for what the PCs are doing, which might or might not intersect with or even make use of the "non-player events".

Wherever the PCs are right now, you're creating a current map, fleshing out details as needed using these broad statements. Draw a map for one significant dungeon near the PC home base, have a couple names and sketchy details of other, smaller dungeons. You can use a couple d6s with pips to create the basic layout of these small dungeons and stock them when needed, or maybe use a simple rule like "pull one random entrance geomorph and one other geomorph from a collection, add a few extra tunnels and rooms, and stock." If the player announce they are going somewhere new and they end the session traveling there or after investigating a randomly-generated entrance, you can complete it in a more satisfactory, less random, way before the next session.

Sketchbox vs. Sandbox

Over on RPGnet, Roger posted about his experiments with running minimal prep games. He jokingly refers to this as "slackbox", in contrast to "sandbox"; what he wants is the "go anywhere, do anything" feel of sandbox games without the heavy prep that many sandbox advocates do. His PDF is interesting reading, especially when he reduces mapping tasks to just getting a bunch of points (representing towns and dungeons,) laying them on top of a bunch of "blobs" or zones (representing terrain features,) and connecting some points with lines representing roads or rivers.

Turning Post-Apoc

A recent post on the Swords of Minaria about how sparsely populated the lands in a default LBB D&D campaign seem to be makes me want to re-visit the topic of post-apocalyptic D&D. I don't think the standard early settings were post-apocalyptic, as I've said. Just because there are remnants of a long-dead empire as part of a setting doesn't make the setting post-apocalyptic; there's got to be a statute of limitations. But that doesn't mean that you can't think post-apoc to make a more interesting setting... and large groups of wandering humans in an otherwise unsettled wilderness certainly suggests post-apocalyptic.

What might be a good move, especially when trying to build a game world as you play, is to limit the known world to no more than three smallish kingdoms. You really only need one: the home base. You might want one or two others to establish political tensions and provide options for play. These small kingdoms are surrounded by vast, mostly unexplored wilderness, simultaneously frightening and tempting. The kingdoms want to expand, which is why moving into a wilderness area, clearing the hex, and establishing a stronghold is encouraged.

There may be other kingdoms in the world, but they are very distant, out of touch, and considered legends. There's very little known about these mythical kingdoms. When contact is finally made with one, the kingdom should be weird; it's not like the known world, and the GM can feel free to make up random customs and factoids about the new kingdom without regard for what the players have come to expect as "normal". Establishing trade routes or political alliances with such kingdoms can be an adventure in itself, especially since there will be wild seas and untamed wilderness isolating the new kingdom from the known world.

Improvised Sandbox Journeys

Busy working on something for someone else, so I haven't been devoting my thought to follow-ups on the screwage post. However, someone on RPGnet asked about how to map an infinite plane, and as part of my answer, I described in detail a process for on-the-fly mapping in an improvised sandbox: what happens when you set no limits on where the PCs can travel, and they choose to go "off map"? How can you prepare for that? I figured I should preserve that answer here, with a little editing.

Mapping every corner of the world in 10 foot increments would be a ridiculously hard task. Instead, map the starting area and a few points of interest you know you'd like to use, plus describe major landmarks visible from the starting point (dark mountains to the east, ocean to the west.) This works sort of like a MUD/MOO: when the players choose to travel away from the starting point, they will describe what they do in terms of landmarks: "We follow the road out of town to the south for about a mile, then we veer off the path towards that hill with the outline of a crumbling ruin on it."

Also create one-sentence summaries of major conceptual groups at various levels of detail, starting at the top (how many continents are there, and how would you characterize them in one sentence?) and drilling down from one of the top-level groups into a sub-level, picking one of those as a start and drilling down further. For each item labeled "starting" (the starting continent, starting kingdom, starting province/barony, starting town,) add three to five one-sentence statements about what the players are likely to see or what is likely to happen to or around them. I call these "factoids".

Your process looks like this:

• there are five continents, here are one-sentence summaries of what they're like... here are 3-5 factoids about the starting continent.
  
• there are seven major political groups on the starting continent, here are one-sentence summaries of those...
• starting kingdom has three to five factoids, like "king enforces loyalty from subordinates with combination military/secret police that wears magical bone armor". We now know something about the king (he's distrustful, he spies, possibly tortures citizens,) and we know something the PCs might encounter (secret police, wearing bone armor,) and something about what might happen in the background (PCs hear that their favorite barkeep is gone because he was hauled away "by the bone folk".)
  
• here are the major forests, mountains, and other geographical features, with one-sentence summaries of what they are like... and here are 3-5 factoids about the starting area.
  

And so on, down to the town where the PCs start, which might be completely mapped out or only sketched, with maps of significant areas.

You now have sketchy details of the entire world, with more and more detail as you get closer to the starting area. When players ask questions about something not in the immediate area, you improvise based on the one-sentence summaries or bundles of factoids. When players decide where to go, it's true they could go absolutely anywhere, but either they will pick something you said that intrigued them ("I wonder what that continent of civilized winged monkeys is like?") or they will head towards a visible landmark. Thus, all you need to know is how to improvise a journey between two points.