Hex Crawl 23 #127: The Way to Shasari

Seven hexes north of Alakran.

North of Nathrak, sand hills rise and fall, and the Band of Bronze more than once camped there and observed the doings of the menacing denizens of those ruins from their southern fringe. It is in those hills, too, that they met the hero of the Shasari province to the north, Halpashulupi, and his own band of adventurers. Thus started the campaign to free Shasari from the noxious influence of the priestess Azeneth and to protect it, first from the marauders of Nathrak, and finally from the chaotic coalition assembled under the wings of the mighty blue dragon Razisiz.

Here is a good time to start a new approach to the hexcrawl. Keeping the system of naming hexes by direction and distance from Alakran, we will start to describe the hexes belonging to a definite area in order, instead of spiraling around as before. This reflects that some areas of the map beyond thirty miles were not well developed in the campaign, and will increase the narrative coherence of the hex posts.

These hexes will be described in bands, moving northward. Thus, next post veers southwest to run up against the Scarp, before moving east to describe two more hexes that abut already described ones. Then northward again, movng eatward from the Scarp each time. When the developed environs of the province are fully described, I'll post an encounter map of five mile hexes.

Baroque Premises for a Game

With the doom of G+, I'm not sure whether to revive this blog or find some other media platform. Blogspot is a difficult place to hold a conversation, and the comment spam has really gotten out of hand in the past few years, with little ability to block it or completely remove deleted comments.

All the same, talking to Paolo a couple weeks back at Dragonmeet somewhat revived my interest in writing out "baroque" versions of selected pages of my 52 Pages ruleset. Previous efforts are here, and the general idea is to flip the concept of 52 Pages -- stripped down, graphics, generic -- into a specific, weird, ornate, textual mode.

So going back to the first page of the 52, here are 26 strange ideas to hack or design a role-playing game around, all of which technically can be played starting from the 52 Pages rules, or any old-school system with character levels and so on. Random generation can be had with a deck of cards (JQK = 11, 12 ,13; add 13 if red). Some are a little, um, derivative of other indie games, but all have had a personal touch added on. Click to enlarge, or read on.

      1.Each character is retelling (playing) a past solo adventure in turn. If any die, all are dead; it is revealed as a conversation among ghosts.
2.Planning a caper, characters play it 3 times with different hazards in their imagination, before the final run takes place in reality.
3.Each adventurer has a perfectionistic death wish as sole motive; GM grades their deaths on originality, virtuosity, and flamboyance.
4.GM takes all treasure from a published adventure, room by room. Players negotiate its division, may fight each other to gain more.
5.Characters inherit a dungeon, have to convince local fiends to move in, and stock enough treasure to attract marks bearing items.
6.One character may be a traitor, winning if all else die. Half secretly know at start they are loyal. The traitor finds out halfway through.
7.The characters are a set of enchanted regalia, without loyalty to their wielders, seeking to pass into the most powerful hands.
8.The world is a tiered mountain, challenges and rewards increasing upwards: at the right level you can pass up to the next tier.
9.The adventurers gain experience not for killing monsters, not for taking treasure, but for sketching and writing about these wonders.
10.You are criminals sentenced to fight through other mutated criminals, compelled to go as low as you can to take your place in the prison. Dreams of leading a revolt are natural but futile.
11.All life inhabits a braid of linear tunnels, arranged by hit dice, with humanity in the “ones and zeroes” and striving to go higher.
12.You have to put treasure back in a tomb guarded by traps and fierce defenders, to honour the terms of your realm’s treaty.
13.You already have all the treasure; use it to cajole and buy an army from the dungeon dwellers, later to fight in a wargame campaign.
14.You are all piloting a single character; GM presents decisions, character’s actions are resolved by vote. Ties mean 1 round indecision.
15.Player 1 runs a single character through a deadly dungeon, death is a “near miss” and the next player takes over. Most XP while playing wins.
16.The dungeon doors open once every 44 years for 22 hours. Gaining treasure and glory means you can marry earlier and richer, and so have more, older, better trained and equipped children for the next run.
17.The town is empty, but monsters that die in the dungeon turn back into the humans they once were. As the town refills, you have more resources, but also more intrigue and treachery to deal with.
18.You awake underground, to fight creatures whose hard parts become tools and weapons, and whose soft parts dissolve into rooms and passages shaped like the creature’s anatomy.
19.Players create a character and a monster, then write two conditions in the adventure for a character to become the monster. Monsters win by killing the party. Each player secretly draws, obeys one condition.
20.Everyone stays 1st level, gains a companion at each level. High level spells are multi-caster rituals. Adjacent companions give +1 hp.
21.“Gaining a level” means you have gathered enough treasure and trauma to retire from adventuring. Roll a new character at the higher level.
22.Characters are raiding a hell to rescue increasingly higher-level versions of themselves, and will become the henchmen of their better selves.
23.The adventure game is a metaphorical mechanism for social conflict in a series of masked balls. Hit points are reputation, melee is repartee, missile combat is gossip, and spells are appeals to higher powers.
24.Wizard magic changes the world forever—zones of sleep, illusions, death zones from fireballs—the world is full of these, and you will leave more.
25: Each of you prepares a short scenario as GM for player on the left. In turn, play through them. Player on the right of the GM prepares a description of what that play session symbolizes. Pass it back to the GM and use it as the basis of a new session. Repeat as needed.
26: Start as tiny people. Each level you gain, the scale, foes and material loot grow. 1: atomic, 2: microbial, 3: microscopic; 4: insect; 5: vole; 6: child; 7: titan; 8: continent strider; 9: planet shaper

Back and Forth and Sideways in Time

Last time I offered a breakdown of all the different ways a fantasy world could be tied to our own. Commenters offered a couple of extra ways, which I'll incorporate into this next phase: further describing the plot moves available to the creative world-rigger with each arrangement. This post covers the first three of (now) 14 arrangements.

1. You are in Earth's far or mythic past. 

Clues:

• prehistoric animals are everywhere 
• important names, maybe distorted, are recognizable as legendary heroes and places (Tolkien pulled this off with the lost continent called by some "Atalante" and reverse-engineered his language so that worked and also Artur means "noble lord")
• euhemerism is in effect so the local king may be called Lord Horus and his shield is a hawk and his chief advisor is the one-eyed Wizard Odin and in the throne room hangs the Golden Fleece 
• the maps have familiar if somewhat skewed shapes
• early-civ signifiers like ziggurats, human sacrifice, eyeliner and chariots are mixed in with the magitech and rustless pillars
• sense of boundless possibilities and newness. 

Plots:

•  "The magic is drying up" as in Larry Niven's stories
• a cataclysm is impending that little of the weird stuff will survive past, paving the way for the world as we know it
• you are trapped in a stasis cell destined to disgorge you sometime in Earth's timeline. Perhaps some deep-earth miners will find you. Have fun! 

2. You are in the present world's future.

Clues:

• the creatures and peoples that you meet show signs of fanciful mutation, alien origin, genetic engineering
• your legends are of modern-day celebrities, your place names worn-down distortions, look hard enough and you can find the Statue of Liberty, beware the Belieber Cult 
• the familiar maps are all marked up by global warming and nuclear megacraters and deserts and unspecified cataclysmic events 
• artifacts of the old world are everywhere or incredibly rare, depending on how much time has passed, sometimes tended by engineers of St. Leibowitz indistinguishable from a priesthood 
• sense of late-days malaise like in Dying Earth or Riddley Walker: the minerals are all mined, every tale has been told, there are no new genres of music just unfashionable ones, the sun could go out at any moment 

Plots:

• stasis works both ways, and some 21st century people who have just unwarped/ unfrozen/ unmirrored expecting utopia are having their expectations cruelly, cruelly broken 
• they're trying to bring back the Technology of the Ancients but of course they're about to do it horribly wrong 
• those deep-space near-lightspeed astronauts from the old order's final days are baaack 

3. You are in a parallel dimension, communicable with Earth.

Clues:

• strange wanderers who talk funny, dress funny, carry weird objects and drop completely baffling pop culture references 
• doctrine and teaching of the Multiverse, every schoolchild knows 
• someone in the distant past came, saw, conquered based on superior native technology, gravity, or disbelief of magic - and disappeared conveniently when things got hot 
• ethereal creatures and travelers sing strangely familiar and catchy songs 

Plots:

• fair enough, you find the gateway in the basement of Castle Greyhawk 
• one of those strange wanderers rolls up on you and is trying to convince you to make all these mixtures and build all these weird devices and is telling you when the next eclipse is going to be and you don't have the heart to tell him about 9th level spells 
•  oh psych that other universe isn't exactly our Earth it's a parallel universe Earth where ..

Bridges to Reality

Let's define "autonomous fantasy": a work about a world not our own, without attempting within the text to place the created world in relation to our own world (henceforth known as "Earth").

But if you look at literature, autonomous fantasy is actually pretty rare. George R. R. Martin's wildly popular world is one such world. But most of the D&D inspiration list "Appendix N" is not. Most of the works there have some kind of link between the fantasy world and the real Earth.

Below is a list of the ways in fantasy world-building to link the created world ("you") to our own Earth. The list is, of course, exhaustive (this claim is meant to stir the blood to objection, so object away!)

It is also only coincidence that there are twelve is the number of entries in the list and twelve is the number of sides of that funny-looking die you have lying on your table there. Please do not leave such momentous decisions as the very nature of reality to the whim of the roll.

1. You are in Earth's far or mythic past.
Examples: Tolkien's Middle Earth, Howard's barbarians, Moorcock's Melnibone

2. You are in the real world's future
Examples: Wolfe's New Sun, Lanier's Hiero, Gerber's Thundarr the Barbarian, Okorafor's Who Fears Death, Boulle's Planet of the Apes

3. You are in a parallel dimension, communicable to Earth
Examples: D&D's default cosmos, Pratt & De Camp's Incomplete Enchanter, Moorcock's multiverse

4. You are on a distant planet where fantasy/magic holds sway
Examples: Farmer's World of Tiers, Barker's Tekumel, McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern

5. Your world and Earth are both the dream/simulation/shadow of a higher world
Example; Zelazny's Amber series

6. You are in the dream of someone on Earth
Examples: Lovecraft's Dreamlands, McCay's Little Nemo

The rest have less of a fictional pedigree to my knowledge, but are no less fascinating.

7. You are in a simulation run by someone on Earth
8. Earth is the dream of someone on your world
9. Your world is the afterlife of Earth
10. Earth is the afterlife of your world
11. You are in a fiction maintained by someone on Earth (the literal truth, and the doctrine of Narrativism, no, not that kind of Narrativism)
12. The wall is absolute (Westeros and all other self-contained worlds such as Earthsea)


At any rate, each idea suggests itself strongly as a Big Reveal that is hinted at in the middle of a fantasy gaming campaign, and that outright drives events in the later stages of such a campaign. And in the next post: what implications each of these ideas carry.

What's a Megadungeon?

JD Jarvis at Aeons and Auguries wants to know what constitutes a megadungeon.

Here's my short answer, assuming that "levels" and "experience points" are relevant in your game.

• It is a single adventuring site with multiple areas of increasing difficulty (challenge levels)
• with enough "experience points" (rewards of adventuring relevant to character  advancement) in each "challenge level"
• that two or more adventuring parties can advance to the character level needed to confront the next challenge level, without intruding on each other's sources of experience.

In other words, if in your game a single party will level up after exploring 30 rooms, then each level should have 60 rooms or more to be a megadungeon. To be clear, my definition is not so much about whether the megadungeon literally takes on multiple parties, but more about whether a single party feels that they have a great deal of freedom to get to the next level in multiple ways.

Anonymous, from plagmada,org

Compare this to the more typical adventure-based campaign where each individual adventure site gives all or part of the experience to advance one level. In that kind of campaign, multiple parties can coexist by visiting different adventure sites, instead of the same one.

Right now I'm running one of each kind of campaign and they each have their own rewards -- the multi-site campaign has a lot of breadth and variety while the single-site campaign offers intensity and the development of a strange, obsessive legendry over  multiple visits.

Who Brings New Player Characters? The Plot-Copter Does

The usual way to integrate a new player-character into the party is some "hail fellow well met" cut scene at Ye Olde Tavern. But what happens if the party is on long-range recon and there isn't a tavern for miles?

Well, you can always be hardcore and require them to return to civilization before the new player can start. But that frustrates everyone.

Taking a cue from picaresque literature, I prefer the meeting to be on-site, and covered by the barest fig leaf of plausibility. There's always room in a fantastic universe for the party to meet up with a fellow "solo adventurer" in the ruins, or to encounter a wanderer from even stranger spaces and times who was placed in temporal stasis or thrust through a gate. A strange origin can itself be a plot hook for the new player.

In my campaign there have been three character introductions, none of them in a tavern. For the first, I took the character through a mini-game detailing his travels from south to north, before joining him to a caravan that the party had been hired to guard. For the second, two players had to be introduced, so I had it that the one (hermit) met the other (merchant agent), who had been hired by the party's current employer to follow the party, joining it if necessary, in order to make sure they were carrying out the duty they had been hired to do.

Most recently, a rogue and her wizardly henchwoman were introduced to the party in the middle of a coastal maze of cliffs and rocks. Having been shipwrecked, the new players had been huddling in a cave until the party showed up. Conveniently, this cave was a good parking place for the hermit character to go on a retreat, because her player was going to be away over the summer; another, less common real-world occurrence where an in-game solution needs to be thought up.

Regardless, I always also the new player with words such as "You take an instant liking to her for some reason" or "You all feel you can trust each other and move on." Yes, in reality, these kinds of wilderness meetings would be hedged round with suspicion, and any NPC met under those circumstances would be treated very differently.

But there's no getting around it; the players know that the new player wants to get along and become part of the band. Better to acknowledge that immediately and move on, rather than give the impression that the game is about setting the players against each other. If there's any jarring incongruity about the meeting, it will quickly be forgotten as the players create new memories of fun and adventure together.

Review: Microscope, as Campaign Helper

Ben Robbins' "story roleplaying game" Microscope is actually more like a writers' workshop exercise - but a very good one. It's a structure for a number of people to narrate a history within a given genre, with a definite starting and ending period. There are good rules for making the premises fresh (actively including non-cliched elements and excluding select cliched ones - I really appreciate this), for ensuring that everyone gets to contribute, and for working through detailed scenes in which small slices of the history are role-played out.

The end result - if somebody were taking dictation of the play - would read something like the Old Testament or Silmarillion: a succession of broadly described historically important events, punctuated by small, vivid, significant scenes. During the game, I found myself thinking of the "periods" level of detail as a timeline:

the "events" level as iconic historical painting:

and the "scenes" level as historical pageants expanding on the stories implied by the paintings.

The rules also ensure a certain amount of continuity across eras, as players take turns developing specific characters or themes in multiple settings.

One great use of Microscope is as a campaign session filler when there isn't a quorum to adventure; similar to playing out a contemporary NPC scene, the few players who have showed up can help develop the legends and known history of the world they live in. In this case, my campaign's elf and dwarf players worked with me to tell the story of the rupture between the elven and dwarven inhabitants of the Olbestaum, a large area of wooded mountains, and the migration away of the dwarves. About 200 minutes of play yielded the epic tale of a great underground tree that became the symbol of dwarven-elven cooperation in arts and technology, then was corrupted by a misguided attempt to break the creative stagnation that descended on the Olbestaum, involving the sacrifice of the first and only half-elf, half-dwarf child. The motivations, misdeeds and eventual destruction of the villains played out in a half-dozen scenes or so, with players taking shifting roles. As DM I subtly pushed the story toward establishing a perilous underground adventure setting around the ruins of the Tree and of the city built above it, now infested by horrible demons but brimming with the fallen treasures of the city.

If I have one criticism of Microscope it's that there are some mechanisms that seem unnecessarily complicated. For example, we ended up just ignoring the micro-level "push rule" about how to play scenes, leaving only the goal of answering a question in the story, scene setting and character thoughts, and the process of choosing and excluding characters. We figured that if there were serious disagreements about the tone or plot of a scene we would just take a vote and move on. Perhaps the push rules are there in case of a less congenial set of players, but I'm of the mind that cooperative games should assume a certain amount of, well, cooperation and good intent.

I also didn't get the reason for the mechanism of Legacies, in which players champion a particular plot element persistently throughout the game. It seemed that continuity was adequately provided by the Lens/Focus rule, in which each round of adding to the story centers on a particular theme. If players have particular interests or obsessions, they will emerge naturally as additional threads. Including Legacies just seemed to delay and complicate the otherwise very natural sequence of a round.

Overall, though, the game is well worth the ten Yankee dollars for a pdf. Another plus: because the rules are geared toward respecting the creative contributions of each player, it seems a particularly good story/indie game for including less assertive players, who can make other kinds of GM-less games a little awkward.

Does Clerical Magic Mean You Know God?

When writers put on their brainy caps and work out the naturalistic consequences of a world built around the

D&D game rules, one common assumption is that the metaphysical world is known and familiar. You can tell who is really Lawful Good, at least if they're clerics or paladins, because they have their special spells. They can talk to their god and summon angels, and from this people gain tangible evidence of the world after death and the consequences of moral acts. As a result, everyone believes in religion; bad guys just pick a different team. And everyone can trust "working" clerics and paladins to be morally good. If they were corrupted somehow, they would lose their mojo. Oh yeah, all this and ... alignment detection too. Or better yet, alignment language.

The more I think about such a world, the more profoundly unsatisfying it appears, as a place to imagine and adventure in. I'm not even talking about limitations on the cleric player's actions, which I criticized last post.

I'm talking about a world that lacks:

• Dissension on moral issues within a religion
• Venal, self-interested priests
• Bad priests hiding within a good religion
• Outsider prophets who are persecuted by their own religion's conventions
• Uncertainty and debate about the ultimate nature of the universe
• People who act immorally in the here and now because there may not be an ultimate reward or punishment. 

Because of the oppressive obviousness of Truth in such a world, faith is not really faith, any more than believing in maple trees is faith.  Evil now needs an extra sales pitch - a devil convincing you that if you sin really flamboyantly, you'll get in on the ground floor of Hell's Fun Times.

You may as well cut these passages out from the scriptures of a less transparent world:

• Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 1:11)
• But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils. (Matthew 9:34)
• And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation. (Mark 8:12)

On the contrary, in my world, clerical magic is a mystery. It uses the standard invocations and rites of religion, but not every ordained minister who uses those invocations and rites will get the magical effect, and not every time - it is prophetic, not priestly. Regardless of whether the magic is reliable or ineffable, though, it ultimately does not depend on keeping up a certain standard of behavior. This is because:

1. The Mind of (a) God is vast, and contains many contradictions. A certain level of dissension in the Church reflects this, and reflects nothing more than the divine totality weighing arguments and coming to decisions. Almost all acts that are not inherently unholy - merciful or strict, generous or stingy - can be justified as a reflection of the Divine. Sufficient will, and the belief that one is holy, are enough to fuel prophetic magic.

2. A prophet sometimes has to break with conventional morality in order to send a lesson to the flock. What appears to be sin, violence, looting, lust ... can instead be a rebuke to a world consumed by these sins on a much higher level.

3. The above justifications come handily to those who cross the line into the foul and unholy. The Devil is a great deceiver; he will gladly step in to duplicate the healing miracles and exorcisms of one who has strayed from the path. If the player keeps their in-game benefits, what matter where they come from? Any discomfort at the slight stench of sulfur attending those miracle cures is entirely a matter of role-playing. Live for today, for there is no game after your character dies!

Monte Cook, as usual, can't be satisfied with a pat answer either. In the middle of Ptolus - a setting where clerics, by the book, dwell in every temple, and magic and the gods appear obvious and real - he leaves open this possibility:

The people here have come to listen to a new elf philosopher named Waeven Iosanil (male expert8), who is telling everyone who will listen that the gods are not truly divine, but only powerful entities, not unlike great wyrm dragons or powerful angels. The only true divine being is the world itself, this radical speaker claims. (p. 337)

Even if this elf is completely in the wrong, he opens up a strong breeze of freedom in the metaphysics of the setting. He allows for the possibility that the self-evident is actually false - and with this come the free will and uncertainty that makes for an interesting and complex game.

Homework for Players Bogged Down In A City

It turns out cities are not just the most dangerous adventure, but also the most bewildering, and least rewarding.

Where they are now, more or less.

Least rewarding in the traditional schemes of things because killing and stealing has nasty consequences and feels wrong most of the time.

Most bewildering especially when the party, like my own Band of Iron, is in between adventures ... and trying to buy stuff and work out contacts ... and living in the world I created, where there are visible signposts to the next adventure, but there is more than one signpost and they're merely visible or sometimes actually tucked away rather than neon-lit and blinking.

For any such players in a big and sprawling campaign, and especially my own, think about using "city time" in the following way:

1. Write down a list of "locks" - mysteries that remain mysterious, opportunities you don't quite know how to crack, things you would like to see happen.

2. Write down a list of "keys" - things that remain to be investigated, potential clues or leads, all the other social and magical ways you have of getting information.

3. When next you meet, prioritize the "keys" that seem to correspond to the most appealing "locks" but investigate as much as you have time for.

Or just ignore this advice and spend time wandering around in this wonderful huge city. Despite all your expenses, you've still got a chance to carouse, a chariot race to see ... Rule Number One is fun!

One Page Campaign

Moving on in the 52 Pages project, this is the first page after the character creation section. The basic points of the game have already been explained. Now it's time to be a little bit directive toward the DM and propose a tried and tested training-wheels approach to the campaign for levels 1-3. Amazingly, the isometric graphics are all public domain, from clker.com.

I think there's still a lot of room for DM creativity within this framework, but probably the most disagreement will be had about the campaign goal. My reasoning is:

• It's something to work towards, beyond just gaining levels.
• It gives a little taste of the domain game in a situation where very few adventure gaming groups stick it through to the high levels usually associated with that kind of action.
• It's a good move anyway, to have a safe "bank" protected by a grateful populace as more and more treasure flows through the party's hands.
• It drains off some the glut of money that can come with adventuring - and having a base to return to from far travels also drains off some of the glut of time in a campaign.

This last advantage, of course, is also a disadvantage to some. Many players see heroic adventurers as rootless by nature, chafing at any kind of ties to the land. They'd rather put their wealth into a pouch full of gems than real estate.

Which brings me to the final reason of all. It's foolish to pretend, when inventing the by now twenty-dozenth variation on D&D, that this is the Muad'Dib of heartbreakers that will sweep all before it and forge a new world order of roleplaying. No, the best you can hope for is that people will dabble with the system and swipe some of your best ideas. With that in mind I've tried to make it easy to carve the 52 Pages at the joints. Another logical progression from that idea is that, when choosing between generic and distinctive - go distinctive. You may be wrong, but you are doing something nobody else is doing, and diversifying the DNA of this much mutated game.

A Marked-Up Map

I'm much too kind to show the influence map the Band of Iron left behind in the northern lands. Let's just say that purple worm example in the last post was their doing. It ate a whole section of the town of Goran's Anvil, and the town elders know who was responsible. They also left mortal enemies in the town of Parmentell when they discovered the worm ivory scam, left a controversial legacy in Kaserolle, and oh yeah, the Onyx Sorceress wants to have a word with them about how they shamed one of her agents in Ironhoof.

Here's their much more respectable career in the South. (Ignore the animal lairs for now.)

Made with Hexographer Pro.

They started out in the village of Poynemara at the top, where they left roots (the white triangle) by settling a retired hireling, Adrem, there, and picking up a new henchwoman, Lintilla. Villages are easy when it comes to fame; the party got two stars pretty much by showing up and having those interactions.

Next stop was the small town of Famorgane, a trading post corrupted by fairy-fruit addiction and de facto ruled by the crime boss Anton. Their adventures there initially got the party two crosses at the top, as they somehow fell in Anton's good graces. But Famorgane became occupied by a holy army during the war with Faerie and Anton has fled, so the party only count on one star there, legacy of a public duel with one of Anton's henchmen.

The larger town of Lugho is a place the party has never been, but due to services rendered on behalf of the Duke and Hierarch of the place, they enjoy two forward slashes (beneficial deeds) and one cross of high-level influence.

Schiecchi is the city of the region. It's harder to get fame there, but due to some carousing and a noteworthy incident in which the party's hermit prophet impressed a rich woman with her generosity, they are on one star. They also have a connection with the influential white magician Ulena, hence the one cross.

Finally, they are undoubtedly in the bad books of the faerie lady of the Vernal House for stealing away her mesmerized bard lover. Perhaps there should be "X" 's on top for enmity instead of influence with the ruler? At any rate, the whole house will be talking about the raid for years to come, so three stars.

The passage of time, and normal social forces, can alter the ratings. For example, fame can spread to settlements of equal or lesser size. If they do something that gets them two stars in Schiecchi, Lugho will almost certainly hear of it.

Influence can also spread, following political lines. The famous deed against the interests of the Vernal House will certainly cause enmity among the House's allies, and may even gain the party good will among its enemies. This is what happened in the north, as the warlord Hugo became friendly to the party largely because they were causing so much havoc among his rivals.

And of course, if enough years pass, fickle fame will fade from memory; but the party's roots, influence and deeds will live longer.

Four Clocks: Real, Play, Game, Leveling

Time passes in four ways when you're playing a D&D-based campaign. Real time marches on; in that real time, you are playing at a certain pace and length of sessions; on top of that, you're keeping track of in-game time, or Gary's no friend of yours; and your players' characters are leveling at a certain rate, which determines how fast they can progress to new challenges.

Not quite what I meant ..

Here's how my currently longest running, Band of Iron campaign is tracking in terms of the three clocks:

Real time: About 13 months
Play time: About 35 roughly 4-hour sessions
Game time: About 3 months
Leveling time: Near or at Level 5

While I think the ratio of play to leveling time under my 52 Pages rules is just about right, and the ratio of play to real time is about as good as we can make it, game time is progressing awfully fast. Spring has barely turned to summer in the game world. But in the space of 3 months the party has visited 6 adventure sites, had two extended wilderness treks, dealt with business and pleasure in 5 different towns and cities, and gone from zeroes to heroes.

AD&D did a better job, as I recall, of pacing out the action in game-time. My characters only have to train one day per level they're gaining. AD&D had a system which nobody ever followed strictly, in which players got graded on a 1 (best)-4 (worst) scale for how they'd played their characters, and then had to take that amount of weeks times their level to train up, paying a brutal 1500 gp a week. The costs may have been impossible, but leaving them aside, the long passage of time between adventures lent a certain grace to the campaign. Also, the different experience amounts to advance meant it was rare that two characters trained at the same time, so that's more time waiting, visiting home villages while your companions level up and so on. In the high school campaign I played in, long travel times also advanced the calendar, especially combined with the requirement to visit fixed sites for training or plot reasons.

Better.

And yet ... A stately pace is realistic and satisfying, perhaps, to the world builder, but it's also anathema to a certain kind of scenario where there's time pressure, or things get scarier under the players' noses. In that case, players can end up frustrated, able to level but unable to spare a month or two while a villain still remains at large or the world slides into danger.

It is possible to just arbitrarily key time to adventures, as in some of the suggestions on this thread - take a year in between scenarios, and so on, making sure all the level advancement happens when adventures are not on. I'm not entirely happy with this, for the same reason I prefer experience points to session-based leveling. I like players to have an in-world reason their characters are passing  time, rather than just enforcing artificial time-outs.

Perhaps a good compromise is to have players get their hit points as soon as they level - representing the development of their instinct - but get other level-related stuff only after training. I could also stand to examine some of the other features of the system, such as prophets being able to heal up a seriously injured character who doesn't get a terrible death and dismemberment roll at zero hit points or less. Maybe those seriously injured guys need to spend some time in bed, prophet or no prophet. The "Pow! Healed! Walk again!" does get a little disconcerting when a character, by all rights and rules, ought to be spending some time in the penalty box, if not outright dead.

Any other thoughts on how to handle the long-term passage of time?