Settling the Feral Shore

It's been quiet here blogside as of late, real world business, writing and gaming (ironically) have conspired to delay my triumphant return into regular blogging. (But really how much is there to say about a hobby?)

Besides the Reavers of the Weird miniatures campaign which launched this week with six players, the weekly Hill Cantons game has been going in some interesting directions in the new explore/clear/colonize the Feral Shore sideline. In other words doing domain-level play several levels before "name level" and firmly shaking out the notion that it is some kind of end-game retirement phase. 

A thriving (if squalid) little Jamestown-like fort settlement has sprung up and the players have already accomplished some rather heroic (for their general murderhobo scumbaggery) feats such as freeing an old pagan god chained to a lakefloor (who they think is the Cantons version of the Slavic god Veles), finding a book of a god, clearing a massive dam made wholly of human bones, exploring the Valley of Grot and its temple, etc.

As the foothold in the Weird expands, I find myself adapting many of the collection of subsystems designed for the two Domain Game experiments and the Borderlands (yeah, yeah eventually). Here is one of the ones I am currently using to set out what kind of broke-in-the-head people would be attracted to a muddy little clearing in the howling wilderness.

Settler Rules

Colonists can recruited to the settlement by the promise of free or cheap land. Colonists will only begin to arrive when the following conditions are met:

1. A two-mile hex and it's surrounding hexes have been rigorously explored and cleared of threats.

2. The players have set twice a week patrols of all six of those hexes.

3. The passage from the coast to the settlement is also explored, cleared, and patrolled.

Every three months a call can be issued back home in the Cantons. With each seasonal call, the player can grant and settle up a square miles of arable land in the settlement hex. Each hex is assumed to have four square miles of potentially grantable land.

Colonists work their own land and provide their own means, thus the players have no direct obligation to house, feed, and pay them as they do for their retainers, hirelings, and followers. They do however come under the obligation of paying taxes, tithes, fees, tariffs and obeying the rules set by the players within reason. An average rate of taxation—1 gold sun per family per month--will tend to not produce riotous conditions.

Roll on the following two tables for each seasonal settlement (or if a special campaign event calls for it).

Interesting Immigrants Table

Roll d20

1	Crazy old coot
2	Village idiot
3	Local gossip (also practices some kind of trade)
4	1d3 wanton harlots or strutting gigolos
5	Slave trader/Indentured Servant dealer or other scum bag, 1d3 slimy henchmen
6	Tavern/Wine den/Hallucinogen parlor keeper
7	Smelly kozak horse caravanserai and trade herd
8	Evening or Morning Star society heretic (also craftsmen)
9	Starry Void mystic (also craftsmen)
10	Silent God rebbe or Old Pahr pagan (also vinter, metalsmith, or sage)
11	Feral Dwarf hill scout
12	Half-Ogre goon
13	Black Hobbit professional maker of trouble
14	Fishing boatkeeper and family (or hunter if not on navigable water)
15	Recovering (perhaps) bandit/outlaw/poacher
16	Kezmaroki shabby gentily family (extravagant title but destitute)
17	1d3 defaulted Bonders (mercs) from Kezmarok (come with armor and weapons)
18	Guild of Condoterrie, Linkboys and Scalawags member (owes back dues)
19	Non-inimical monster from the Weird
20	Something truly fucked up (GM's discretion).

Boring Immigrants Table

Roll d10

1	none
2-3	16 families of tenant farmers
4-5	14 families of tenant farmers, 2 families of freeholders (80 suns for sale of land)
6	12 tenant farmers, 4 freeholders (160 suns sale)
7	12 tenant farmers, 4 military colonists
8	10 tenant farmers, 2 freeholder (80 suns sale), 1 boyar (160 suns)
9	10 tenant farmers, 2 military colonists (160suns sale), 1 boyar (160 suns)
10	8 tenant farmers, 4 freeholder (160suns sale), 1 boyar (160 suns)

*Any emigrating family can be substituted for a family of tenant farmer if desired.

Tenant Farmers

Free farming family that works a leased grant of 40 acres in exchange for farming work, militia service, and taxes. Typical family will be five with three working bodies that are available to work the landowner's seeding and harvest. The household will provide one unarmored combatant with club, dagger, or other makeshift weapon.

Freeholders

Free farming family of five that works a purchased grant of 40 acres. In an emergency situation, the household will provide one combatant with leather armor and a long bow or spear/shield.

Military colonists

Family headed by former mercenaries, landsknechts or Kezmaroki bonders that works a leased grant of 40 acres in exchange for militia service. The household will provide one combatant with half plate, short sword and a pike or crossbow.

Boyars

Wealthy, but not titled landholder that purchases 120 acres. One family of five with 12 servants. In an emergency situation, the household will provide one mounted warrior with half plate, shield, sword and lance and three unarmored combatants with club, dagger, or other makeshift weapon.

There and Back Again with the Domain Game

Maya Angelou once said that achievement was its own anti-climax. Hitting that last final control-S and closing out that nagging master document that has been sitting open on my desktop for more than half a year makes me feel a lot more out-to-sea than it does triumphant.

Yes, there's a lot still to do on the backend of the Hill Cantons: Borderlands project--editing, editing and more editing, art direction, layout, and promotion—but the longest truck haul is over. I should feel like breaking out the bubbly, instead I keep hearing the call of a little red pitchforked scamp on my shoulder whispering, “keep trucking, Chris.”

I am restless by nature and this entire project was built on exploration of a little-traveled area—domain-level play. The play of the Domain Game itself--supercharged with the ramped-up imaginations of the 20 players that touched it--generated the contours of the Borderlands, much more than the refining and revising playtesting of the last few months (valuable as it was).

Plain and simple, now that I have gotten to the edge of the map I want to go on to the next edge.

To be sure there's a lot of off-road play to still be had with this stuff, I kept dumping sub-sections like ballast to get the whole project done on a reasonably timely basis. The cutting room floor has a number of things I still would like to see hothouse and there were paths opened in the first round of playing never even explored.

I am especially interested in getting a holistic thing going—putting the Middle Game/Pendragon D&D whirly bits together with the domain-ruling and mixing it with some ideas I have about deepening sandbox campaigning.

Now here's the open invitation to come sail off with Mad Captain Kutalik again. Based on past experience I am going to start on the modest and low-key end see what builds from there.

The nitty gritty:

Monthly “face-to-face” game. The main play arena will be a monthly video-conferenced game run on G+ with a rotating cast of four-six at a time.

Two levels of involvement. At the higher commitment end I am looking for one or two (maybe three if there is interest) players who will be the “primary cast”. These players will need to be able to make most if not all the monthly games and will play high-level “lord” characters. They will be the “deciders” around a limited range of domain rule and there may be some limited email exchanges about inter-session housekeeping with me between sessions.

The second level is for more casual players and here I am taking a more-than-merrier approach number-wise and are invited to play as much or as little as they like. Players here will make a mid-level character that will be either inactive or run as an NPC at the session proper.

Both levels will play together in the monthly sessions.

Co-Creation. We are going to start with a relatively blank slate type carved-out-of-the-wilds domain—though one that has been able to sink enough roots to harbor some intrigue. One thing I learned that if you let some of you maniacs loose with creating the details you come up with some jaw-droppingly fun and interesting details, so this we will repeat (albeit on a more collaborative, lesser scale).

Rules. Here I leave it up to the will of the readers—at least as bounded by my two-party duopoly.

Blue Party: The stolid old warhorse choice. OD&D plus Greyhawk possibly with some choice bits from Adventurer Conqueror King.

Red Party: The odd-ball party of “change”. Stormbringer, first edition with a raft of house rules naturally.

Both parties will of course make use of the Borderlands existing and cutting room floor sections.

There is of course a lot more to be said. If you are interested or have questions drop a comment here or email me at kutalik at the gmail dot com.  

Borderlands: Table of Contents

I have been blathering a good deal lately about this piece or that piece that will be coming out with the Hill Cantons: Borderlands sourcebook as of late, but realized I haven't done a general overview of where the draft version was at in a good, long while.

The recent spate of writing has me feeling a little cocksure about having the draft out by my first deadline (ominously I picked the same day that the United States may become a junk-bond trader of a country). Barring that by the end of the first week. A lot of the pieces have clicked into place and I now have at least some writing in every planned section which is a fine feeling.

Keeping with the open game design process we've been running with for the past seven months, I'm slapping up the draft table of contents as a PDF download here.

Note the sub-headers and section orders are highly likely to change--and you may see an addition or two in there--but overall this bad boy is heading down to the finish line.

Feel free to ask any questions if anything looks particularly tantalizing or mystifying. 

Where the Borderlands Meet the Conqueror King

For those looking to see an expansion of domain-level play options, this may be great summer. Both Hill Cantons: Borderlands (née The Domain Game) and the Adventurer Conqueror King System  will highly likely see the light of print day—and hopefully will set off the kind of homebrewing and kitbashing around that arena we all love in the DIY corner of our hobby.

Earlier this week, I mentioned briefly that I was in talks with the ACKS design team. Although I believe that most people interested in this kind of campaign play would cherry-pick pieces of either systems and spindle, fold, mutilate them into their home games, there was still some concerns on my part that we would overly-duplicate efforts.

After all both games had a bottom-up, granular design, a layered approach to the power arc of player characters, and posited themselves as trying to make good on the “Arnesonian” promise of the very early days of this great game.

Having read the recent draft of ACKS, I can say that while we started in similar places that each project has some interesting—and divergent—answers to the same questions. In fact, I feel that in a number of areas they complement each other with different strengths and thus expand the cherry-picking options greatly.

Skipping to the punchline here, ACKS provides an open-gaming license of its own by which a product can be labeled as a “compatible product”. Borderlands will become such a beast.

What does this mean in practical terms?

It doesn't mean that Borderlands will dramatically move much in it's main goals and execution. You will still see a modular collection of sub-systems to maximize the plug-and-play aspect of the sourcebook. The three layers of domain-level play I have been talking about: the mid-level campaign play, the early name-level play of wilderness clearing; and the high-level play of kingdom-ruling will still all be there.

It will mean, though, some adaption to play to the strengths of both publications. In particular it means you will see a heavier emphasis in HCB on the first and second layers of play—and the accompanying more free-form “narrativist” play style alternative. Expect to see meatier social advancement charts/play suggestions, more options for characters 4th-11^th level, an expansion of the epic campaign season concept, more fledgling settlement-subsistence work, and more.

Because the unified economic system inside ACKS is a really inspired piece of work you will also see a little less emphasis on the third layer and a general referring back to ACKS for certain pieces. Likely there will be more little changes here and there when we pass around the completed Borderlands manuscript in a couple weeks.

Lastly, before I sign out I wanted to make it clear that I haven't budged from my personal, non-commercial goals for this project. Though there is obviously a lot of talk about “licensing compatibility” and a “product identity” for HCB, I remain committed to this being a not-for-profit venture.

I intend on having the money move through the Pulp Fantasy Society, a non-profit organization. Additionally, I will strive to keep prices down on the consumer end while making sure that “profits” cover current and future production costs.

It's all about love of the (domain) game here at the Hill Cantons. Now back to work on some fun non-related posts (like a mechant-adventurer player class inspired by a recent Hari Ragat blog post.)

The Domain Game is Dead, Long Live...

...Borderlands. That's our winner, folks. As is my fellow Texan, Patrick W, for the winning suggestion.

Subtitle is either The Domain Game, Game of Domains, or Porky's variation Hill Cantons: Borderlands. The full title will be settled before this evening (announced in comments on this post). Last minute lobbying, of course, will be entertained.

Yes, yes I know there's a first-person shooter game, a Runequest adventure pack, a non-fictional book on a ritual slaying of one of my UT classmates, and a certain isolated fortification on the edge of Chaos all bearing variations of that title. 

But I was swayed by the simple, evocative punch of the title, it hit some visceral level for me. It didn't hurt that the first two non-gaming people I called over to see the list immediately pointed at it.

For the record, I did in fact roll a d10 half-jokingly when I sat down to do my deliberations. Inexplicably and hilariously, it came up with a “1” for Barons & Bugbears on my first two rolls. So I am thwarting both the vox populi and the fates themselves with this choice. Sorry Wampus Jim.

By This Axe I Rule and Domains of Lordly Might were my closest other choices. I am highly inclined to use them as titles in supplementary materials, if their creators are amenable.

Later today I will be making an announcement about where the game is headed now that we have a title. Big things are in the works. 

Cast Your Vote for the Domain Game

Tomorrow I will be officially (well as much as this blog can muster official) unveiling the winner of the Domain Game name contest.

I was pleased as punch with the recent stabs at participatory game design here at the HC, so I am going to throw the gates open to you, the unwashed masses, again.

Here's your chance to cast a consultative vote in the contest:

1. Look through the long, long list below of name nominees (sorry nominations are now closed).
2. Pick up to three names of your choice in the comments section. You are only allowed to vote for  one of your own nominees.
3. Feel free to motivate a particular choice (you don't have to).
4. At 8 pm CST tomorrow I will count up the votes—and choose one from the top ten most popular picks. Winner to be announced later that night.

Nominees:

Domains of Lordly Might

By Divine Right
Wizards and Warlords
Warlords and Warlocks
Barons and Bugbears

Dominions Of Mayhem And Iniquitous Nepotism

The End Game
Overlords
Playing for Keeps
Serfs and Turf
Domains and Dragons

Below Wild Skies
Wild Skies
It Shall be Ours!
Ours!
Sceptre
Sceptre and Orb
Reach
Order
Orders & Borders
Realm
Realms
Explore & Expand
Explorations & Expansions
Oats & Moats
Striking Out
Subjugation
Subjugator

Liege Lord
Feudalism: The RPG
Feudal Lord
Rule By Might
Do My Bidding
Yes My Regent
Regent
Heavy Lies The Crown
By This Axe I rule
Yes Your Grace
It's Good To Be The King
The Throne
Throne of Might
A Lord's Wishes
Your Wish Is My Command
Off With His Head
Lords & Peasants
Dreams of Empire
Strongholds & Stratagems
Liege

Tower, Temple and Keep
Lord and Master
Outrageous Fortunes
After the Dungeon
Name Level the RPG
Oath of Fealty

Lairs & Legacies

Legacy
Game of Princes
Sovereignty
Seasons of Glory

Hill Cantons

Cantons & Confederacy

Domain.

Land Lord
Power Play: Leadership and Machinations for Fantasy Role Playing Games.
Liege Lord
Sword & Crown
Domains of Adventure
Legacies of Power
Lordly Realms
By Might and by Right
Right of Birth

Eminent Domains
Immanent Domains
Manifest Destinies
Borderlands
Borders

Power Play
Aggrandizer!: playing for power in FRPGs

Cherry-Picking Domain-Level Play

Because the Internet is often tone-deaf, I wanted to be 100 percent clear about how I see the relationship between the Domain Game and Adventurer Conqueror King: f-bomb those guys.

Now that I got the interest of those who have a teaser-line feed, I don't mean that in the slightest. In fact, if it wasn't crystal clear from my last post and from Tavis's comments, I believe something(s) highly interesting and useful to our corner of the hobby is going to arise out of this. I don't know the exact shape of the end result, both parties still have some talking—and I have some writing and editing—to do yet.

There are a couple things that should get addressed in the mean time.

Thread one is the opinion that Austrodavicus (man, what a great handle) voiced here and on his matching post at Dungeons Down Under. Dave's punchline is that “people will pick through both works for their own games.”

My gut says this “yep, this likely is pretty what people in our DIY hobbyist end of things are going to do.” Hell, it's what I would do.

Although it came from a different impetus at the time, I should repeat that acknowledging that fact has been part of the core vision of the Domain Game for sometime. Cherry-picking is hardwired into the project.

I tried to accomplish this in a number of ways:

1. By making it fully, or at worst mostly, compatible to existing older and neo-classical flavors of D&D. You won't have to switch games or shoehorn what you are already playing overly much to use it.
   
   
2. By dividing certain sections into “basic”,“advanced”, and “narrativist” parts. Want to hand-wave the nitty-gritty details on how a domain gets a monthly income, but want a simple chart-based system? Stick to basic. Want to see how the sausage is made? Go with advanced. Want to take a freeform, off-stage approach to ruling? Go with the narrativist.
   
   
3. By making the granular, “advanced” parts modular. So you want to keep most domain-play basic, but you want to keep some detail on say how the annual grain harvest works or exactly how one attracts colonists to a strange land, you can use this piece or that in with the basic framework--or one of your making.
   
   
4. By having three distinct layers oriented to three different places in the power arcs of D&D characters. The “Pendragon D&D” work for the first layer (roughly levels 3-7). Clearing (or adapting) the wilderness--and scratching out a subsistence--for early name level at the second and larger-scale kingdom level action for even higher-level characters. One also has the flexibility to use any of these layers at any level, if that's where your think your game is going.

The second thread, on the nature of the old school second-wave--and where all this fits in--coming at you later today or tomorrow. 

Domain Game, the Last Stretch

First the good news, I rounded the 2/3rds done mark with the manuscript Tuesday—a highly-satisfying personal benchmark. Probably even more so if you've been anywhere around me in the last two months and had to suffer through my litany of whining about the horror of making it so much like real work (witness the recent post about Escapism).

The “Pendragon D&D” portions of the work were the real game-saver for me as it really gave me a jolt of energy to latch on to a way to bring domain-level play down to the mid-level character range. It didn't hurt that all those sections felt “right” and genuinely fun to my hobbyist gut—a notion only confirmed from the generous, thoughtful feedback from you fine folks out there.

Now the “bad news”—well, at least for me—yesterday evening I also got a heads-up from Ken, one of my former players from the Austin campaign, about Adventurer Conqueror King, a full-court press project that is taking on integrating domain-level play into a complete set of what they are calling a “second wave retro-clone” (think DCC RPG and LotFP here).

Much of it sounds a lot like parallel evolution (with some different mutations from what I read) to the granular, bottom-up domain-level goals of the DG. Big sigh.

The “worse” news is that the project is backed by an extremely talented team, Tavis from the excellent Mule Abides blog and the developer and business kingpin Alex of The Escapist website fame—and that the execution sounds damn good to me to date. I further love the fact that it sounded like some of the ideas grew organically out of real campaign play at Tavis' table. Potentially great stuff. 

All I can say is that I am damn glad that I am DIY hobbyist with zero percent interest in making my fortune and fame in the rpg industry (I already piss that opportunity away in my day job). 

Seriously though, my main goal in this whole project is purely of the “I want to see domain-play finally reach it's promised potential, so I can play it myself” kind. If that can happen with ACK bully for them, I'll play it. If not, hopefully the Domain Game will come through—or maybe fulfill different enough aspects of that overall goal to recapture "High Arnesonism".

If neither comes through, then, hell, I guess it's up to one of you to build this beast.

Off-Season Player Activities

One of the greatest advantages of throwing open your design process to all you DIY rapscallions out there is that your feedback without fail tends to fire off the sagging neurons in my brain and goad me into delving deeper and deeper into the subject on hand. 

Sadly for my ever-stretching personal deadlines, one of the greatest disadvantages is that your feedback fires off my imagination and goads me to delve...

Looking at many of your comments from this week, it became increasingly apparent that I would have to start getting into the nitty gritty of off-season activities in “Pendragon D&D”--really I need a better working title at this point--before getting much farther in detailing the other methods.

Some rough guidelines for running the 6-10 month period that characters aren't actively adventuring:

Cultural Limitations. Very few societies in well thought out campaign settings will allow a character free reign in all activities. Depending on the political, economic, cultural, and religious contours of the character's home area, some activities will be limited or banned altogether. It's important for the GM to think about these limitations and convey them to the player before she plans her off-season activity.

In many cases hurdles can be overcome with the right application of “juice”, bribes, political favors, and/or other influences (weighted CHA checks).

A high medieval European-like setting, for instance, is likely to have a rigid guild structure that forbids a character from being taught a craft or profession. The character may have to grease a few palms of guild master to get a dispensation to be taught—or seek and find an errant journeyman willing to break the heavy hand of the guild.

Compensation. Each activity reaps benefits:

Gold. Money produced per activity.

Experience Points. Modest exp awards per activity.

“In Kind” Compensation. Goods produced in an activity: magic items, weapons, hides, furs, food, etc.

Social Benefits. Advancement in a political, religious, cultural, professional hierarchy. Children, relationships, etc.

Skills. All labor is divided into four categories based on training in a trade: unskilled, semi-skilled, craft and expert. These four areas correspond to the Hirelings list found here.

Time requirements for activities. Here's the carrot that some of you mentioned. A character can engage in a range of activities in the months of the off-season, but each has a time requirement.

Many tasks can be completed indirectly by hiring or compelling free or unfree labor. No experience points are awarded from the secondary activity, but the character is allowed to forgo the time requirement (did I really need to spell that out?). Wage and/or upkeep costs apply.

Training in new areas will give a character a rudimentary working knowledge of the subject—speaking a new language at a grade-school level or being able to work metal crudely, for example. Further applications of training will progressively hone the skill level at the discretion of the GM. (Keeping with the core spirit of D&D interpretation of skills are wholly non-mechanical and rulings-based.)

Brief (1 month)

Swords & Sorcery-style Debauch/Carouse/Paint Town Red

Bribe/Use Influence

Work/Practice Trade

Run a Business

Join Guild, Order, or Other Association

Conduct Religious Acts (Penance, Absolution, Sacrifice etc)

Travel, Civilized Lands

Craft Potion, Scroll

Build a Structure (varies)

Commission Expedition

Buy/Sell Stolen Goods or Other Illegal Activity

Seasonal (3 months)

Courtship (includes trying to have children)

Read and Write Native Language

Learn a Semi-Skilled Trade

Train with Weapons

Embark on Pilgrimage, Short

Conduct Spell Research

Conduct Scholarly Research

Craft Minor Magic Item

Class-Appropriate Training(thieving, tracking, kung-fu, etc.)

Trap/Hunt/Fish

Train an Animal

Use Ritual Magic

Quarterly (4 months)

Learn to Speak Easy Foreign Language

Learn to Read and Write Easy Foreign Language

Create a Work of Art (statue, epic poem, piece of music, etc)

Lead a Caravan, Civilized Area

Captain a Merchant Craft

Half-Year (6 months)

Learn a Craft 

Farm, Short Harvest Crop

Embark on Pilgrimage, Long

Learn to Speak Difficult Foreign Language

Read and Write Difficult Foreign Language

Long (9 months)

Switch Class

Farm, Long Harvest Crop

Rule/Govern

Found Settlement

Double-Season (18 months)

Learn an Expert Trade

Pendragon D&D: the Matrix Method

Today I trot out the first (and most bare bones) of four methods I am working on to help judges navigate the off-season in the “Pendragon D&D” section of the Domain Game. Note that all four are very rough at this point, almost more like a thinking out loud. 

Any input as always is greatly appreciated.

Method One: The Matrix Method

Have each player put together--at the end of the last adventure season session or in-between--a short narrative about what their character has been up to during the off-season. This can be accomplished either in a written pre-session format or in a round-robin oral manner as you go around the table calling on players--alternately this could be done in individual one-on-one sessions.

(In my own experience, handing out writing assignments will produce highly uneven results: some players will jump at the chance, others will roll eyes and bellyache, and some will just vote with their feet.)

Whatever format you decide on you should keep the same framing questions:

What are your character's goals for the season? Wealth? Fame? Experience? Knowledge?

What's he going to do to accomplish these goals? Packed up the elf henchman and visited the oracle? Captained a merchant vessel? Hired on with that crank of an alchemist in town?

Now on your end you match the logic of this argument to your own “counter-argument”.

How did the players preparations stack up against the dangers of your campaign world? What did she accurately take in to account or not? What is the endeavor going to cost the player, financially or other cost? Given the stated goals, how dangerous of an endeavor is the player embarking on?

With these questions in mind the GM makes an arbitrary call about the relative soundness of the plan. Detail, anticipation, and forethought are hallmarks of a stronger argument. Using the simple Engle Matrix chart below the GM finds the category that fits closest to this call. Now think about the dangers move the category up and down if you think that the danger warrants

Strength Of Argument	Dice Score To Be Successful
Very Strong Argument	6, 5, 4, 3, 2
Strong Argument	6, 5, 4, 3
Average Argument	6, 5, 4
Weak Argument	6, 5
Very Weak Argument	6
Stupid Argument	No Roll

If the roll is successful grant the player their goal. If the roll is two higher than the minimum grant them some extra boon. Make sure to account for any costs in the final reckoning.

Example: Umma the Undying says that this off-season she will turn “corsair” along the coast of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes with loot, loot, loot as her stated goal. She doesn't have money for a galley of her own, so she cooks up an elaborate plan to hire a crowd of rowdies and commander a vessel in the creepy seaside village of Ennsmuth.

The plan seems to account for a number of reasonable dangers (Strong Argument) but fails to account for the singular danger of Ennsmouth being a town infested with demons from the deep (move the Argument down to an Average one).

Umma rolls a “5” a success. The GM thinks up some appropriate loot for her level and risk and she leaves the off-season richer and refreshed. 

“Pendragon D&D”: Starting Points

Just got back from flying through 60 pages of manuscript of the Domain Game, and boy are my arms tired. Badum-ching.

Seriously though, it's a bit of a roller coaster doing this kind of project: an exuberant high when you are pounding the keyboard and making progress, side-splitting agony when you get bogged down. 

[Me finishing whiny screed and pontification on the high lonesome of writing.]

One byproduct of my recent burst of activity is going a bit farther in fleshing out the bits around “Pendragon D&D”, my shorthand for custom-fitting to classic D&D one specific—yet significant—element from Pendragon RPG: the long-haul timescale that punctuates annual adventures with longer off-table down seasons.

The “why” for this was kicked around here a few months back. As a reminder here was what I sad back then for its possible relevance to the Domain Game project:

A simple innovation [Pendragon's campaign phase] but one that added several layers of depth. Players could realistically play not only a character but a characters' children and grandchildren. The managing of realms—almost inherently a long-term project needing months if not years of “off-stage” time to be interesting—becomes an easier fit. The real sweep of history, more of a thing of years, decades, and centuries even, becomes something tangible in gameplay.

Sounds easy enough, right? Here's a peek at how I have started to over-complicate and badger this simple notion to death.

Part I: The Campaign Season

Like modern combat, adventuring is a physically, mentally, and psychically exhausting profession. Surrounded by near-constant danger, the body is flooded with stress hormones over and over again. The persistent tension, the hyper-vigilance, the physical toil of exertion and combat add up over the weeks. Even the most durable of grizzled veterans find themselves only able to sustain that kind of activity over a few months without starting to feel serious wear and tear.

Long periods of rest can relieve this pressure, allowing the would-be adventurer space to recoup and enter the fray anew.

In game terms, this is modeled by having each campaign year be divided into a “campaign season” of 2-4 months--or 1-2 multi-session “adventures”--and an “off-season” composed of all the time between each active adventure period.

Depending on the setting, the former season should be a contiguous, travel-friendly season, the warm summer and late spring months, for instance, in a cooler, temperate campaign setting or the dry season in a monsoon-drenched tropical one.

Because Pendragon D&D rests on a quicker pace, time moves quicker between table sessions. Where as older editions of D&D typically recommend that one game day elapses for each real day away from the game, this campaign style works better with three game days equaling one real day away. GM's can and should modify this baseline ratio as the need to contract and telescope action arises at the table.

The players can also elect to campaign over the four month limit, but will increasingly be susceptible to campaign fatigue and stress. At the beginning of each game-time week a check will be made against the character's WIS or CON (player's choice).

In the first month past the campaign season limit, the player rolls 3d6 against the attribute score in his weekly checks. If the score exceeds the attribute the character loses a one point of a randomly-chosen attribute (1d6 in order). For each month past the campaign season limit, 1d6 is added to the check, on the second month 4d6 are rolled, 5d6 on the third, and so on down the line.

A rest period of six, back-to-back months is required to restore lost attribute points.

In the next two parts I will take up four experimental methods to play out the off-season: two narrative and two mini-game methods.

Thoughts? Can you see this working in part or in whole? What would you change, spindle, mutilate, or fold?  

Whither the Domain Game?

Back when I was in college I had a running joke of a game with my jaded friends about small talk and dull conversation in general. I don't remember how it started, but we started substituting third-person generic phrases for the actual words themselves.

Thus instead of bitching about how hot the summer was in Texas (duh), my friend would say something like, “me commenting on obvious weather pattern” to which I would respond: “me agreeing and following with a bad joke about the two seasons in Texas. Me starting long, pointless observation about dream. ”

In the last four days I have received no less than five separate nudges from readers and Domain Game players in the last four days about where the project is to which I say, “me giving halfhearted excuse about real life distractions getting in the way of promised gaming work.”

Where is the Domain Game is at currently:

Sourcebook Writing. I have been mostly concentrating less on the fun work of game design and more on the necessary, but tedious work of writing all the exposition-style paragraphs to tie together the various subsystems and kooky ideas into a coherent product. 


Long story short is that when you are working on a product that is purely a labor of hobbyist love this kind of work is a lot slower than planned.

I will probably switch back to doing finishing the more fun promised subsystems (“Pendragon D&D” campaign time; the fantasy supplement for the mini rules; hex-filling for natural resources; espionage; etc.) this week just to keep the wind in my sails.

North Texas RPG Con. Highly unlikely that I will finish the DG sourcebook work in time for unrolling at the Con since that is less than two weeks away at this point—unless the wind picks up and I have a long streak this week. 

At any rate I am planning on having an interest meeting to discuss the project—fueled by drinks—on Saturday night at the Con, any and all readers are welcome to join.

Artwork. Some progress on this front, the drawing presented here is a draft sketch for the supplement by that notorious pie lover Johnathan Bingham . It shows an actual play example from the playtest, The Drune's creepy Thujans arriving by mysterious obelisk in the campaign world of Nowhere.

Playtest Game. The play-by-post is dragging a bit, slowed down by some late turn posting by players and me not riding herd really. I started gaming out the results of the expeditions' third month in Nowhere yesterday, so we are moving again.

If folks are interested—and the players give me permission--I will start posting highlights from the hundreds of pages of action the game has produced to date. 

Me saying that work continues and expressing excitement. 

Ditching the End Game

Let me tell you how I really feel: the End Game sucks. Not the gameplay of course—that would mean that my current obsessive project would be an exercise in extreme masochism—but the phrase itself.

I am not exactly sure when the phrase passed into the common parlance of the old school blogosphere. Perhaps it was this post on Grognardia two years ago that brought it into being. The original post was inspiring to me, for back in the day I loved the notion of kingdom-carving as part of the arc of character development.

And in many ways my own first experience with this kind of play was the classic AD&D End Game. When my first PC, Evaro IV, reached “name level” we promptly cracked open the holy of holy books, the DMG, and read aloud to the group, “When player characters reach upper levels and decide to establish a stronghold and rule a territory...” The operative word was “when” for us, not “if”. This was clearly what you were supposed to do with a high-level character.

Dutifully, I rolled on the requisite follower chart; packed up the utility belt of magic items and other belongings; and slogged out with my band of brothers to a lonely wooded hex in Greyhawk's Wild Coast (told you it was classic vanilla). Monster lairs were cleared and the foundations of a great keep laid. Wilderness clearing, patrolling, and attracting new colonists were the business of the random encounter charts in the appendices of the DMG—in general it was about the most by-the-book experience as we could muster back then.

I not only had a blast, but it whetted my appetite for an endless string of increasingly complex and immersive computer strategy games to come (please god, stop Paradox games before it designs another Europa Universalis-type game again).

So what the hell is my beef with the End Game?

It's with the proscriptive nature of the term. Months ago in the discussion and debates around domain-level play that led me down the road of perdition to the current Domain Game, Rob Kuntz took me to task for using the very phrase I am bagging on today. At that time he said:

“1974 OD&D never posed an "end-game" that was "retirement" and "winding down". The "end-game" connotation is strictly a "New" (and revised/tacked on) phrase which is interpreted in some strange way as being both an end and a retirement. It's just the campaign portion extending itself dynamically...”

The more I see the phrase used the more I agree with him. For what it implies is a very linear, dull even, way to approach this portion of gameplay that limits its open edges.

By coupling it with a certain point in the power arc—and one in the glacial pace of our adult campaigns we are unlikely to ever see—we put play of this kind in a tight-lidded box conceptually. It's akin to buying so much into the B/X and BECMI D&D marketing decisions to put wilderness travel and adventure into the second booklets, that we all decided to call it the “middle game” and limit participation it to being something only for characters levels 4-14.

Absurd, right?

You play a character for years adventuring the hell out of deep dark dungeons, far-flung wildernesses, other planes of existence even and then your great hero is stuck becoming a graying bean counter in some dreary stronghold as his life fades to black—or worse morphs into an NPC tool for the DM.

Borrrrrring. No wonder you hear any number of voices explicitly saying it's not for them.

D&D was originally (and brilliantly) conceived as a game with few edges and had little in the way of proscription about what a character should or shouldn't be doing in his career.

There was no End Game in Arneson's Blackmoor, It started in fact as the great clash of armies and rulers and the players throughout its existence found themselves playing all kinds of roles in the realms of that campaign. Here was a high priest or town merchant, there a vampire.

The classic kingdom-carving phase when players moved off the southern edge of the map to that famous hex map from Outdoor Survival grew dynamically out of the machinations of the players. It wasn't the end, it was just another big leap into something new—and something fun.

As the Domain Game rolls forward I am all for figuring ways to subvert the End Game. Decoupling it from rail-car linear boxes and creating avenues to expand domain-level play to all levels.

After all we have a world to win—even if it only exists in our imaginations and Sunday afternoons.

And Now the News

The Domain Game playtest is moving again, if slowly. The rift in the barrier between the planes that separates Nowhere from Elsewhere apparently fluctuates from time to time. The two weeks to one month turns have become something like five weeks to to one month, maybe it will shrink again as spring gives way to summer.

News from Nowhere:

Sourcebook Writing. Lots on the plate, but progress is being made. This month I will be turning my attention to finishing the sections on hex content generation (this not includes expanding the usual D&D fare, but a more detailed approach to topography and resources), a Pendragon-like system for handling longer-time scale gaming, domain-level ritual magic (thanks, Tim), the fantasy supplement for my mini rules (the first playtest being the battle on the golden barge pictured to below), settlement growth rules, the extended equipment list, and more.

Expect to see more related output on the blog, if all goes well.

Extension of Phase One. Given the delay in finishing the last turn, I extended the choice to the Phase One players to continue this part of the playtest until June or to go with the Phase Two plan of bending the rift to fast-forward a few years. The vote was unanimously in favor of the extension, so for now our brave little expeditions on the edge of the universe soldier on, fewer but stronger.

If you are one of the several players who queued up nice and polite like to play in what was supposed to be Phase Two by now, drop me an email at kutalik at gmail dot com, we may have a role for you yet in one of the existing expeditions (or of course in Phase Two).

New Tin God Revealed. The Gods of Nowhere--with the exception of the mercurial attention whore of a god that lives in the hills--prize shrouding themselves in the cloak of mystery and anonymity, but a new master of the game has revealed himself. Ragnorakk of Tran Eskoor an Doon blog has had some experience running a similar-minded domain-level play-by-post and has graciously agreed to help out as a co-GM. Once he makes his way through the small mountain of documents this game has already generated (hey, we have fertile imaginations we do

Glorious Shen Expeditions Regal Tekumel with Their Annals. Shen-blog make for good reading for curious monkey-allies here.

Prince Khuvu of Thuja watches his shieldwall ready itself for the short, sharp, shock of combat on the foredeck of the mist-shrouded golden barge. 

Revised Hirelings and Domain Rules Downloads

Just a quick note to let folks know that I have a updated and revised (based on recommendations from you fine folks) the long hireling, retainers, and flunky list I put up last month. It is available along with the most recent version of the Domain Games guidelines (compiling several recent posts) as free PDFs here.

As always appreciate any and all feedback.  

To the Garden, the World, Anew Ascending

Learning to appreciate and like even the campaign worlds hammered out of your imagination as a GM is an easy enough trick—truly being immersed enough to “get” them on some visceral, emotional level is something much more elusive.

Yeah sure, I have enjoyed the act of ongoing creation that any half-assed campaign setting can give you, but the moments that I felt the vivid “realness” of them, truth be told, have been rare to none.

Worldbuilding for me as a mostly bottom-up creator has been mostly a process of “yes and...”: filling in a space here and there when the wanderings and machinations of the players create the need to do so--or better when they co-create a detail that I want to riff off. A gleaming, teetering tower made of bones looming over an ancient battlefield suddenly flashes into existence or an long-lost Amazon goddess of Pain and Retribution instantly has an elaborate player-known rite.

I enjoy this in the same way I enjoy watching improv. It gets some much needed exercise out of the brain and sometimes the funny bone.

Yet, something gnaws enviously at me when talk comes around about the tabletop experiences with the great top-down rpg world builders: how it was to play with a M.A.R. Barker in Tekumel or a Greg Stafford in Glorantha. How each not only felt a deep connection to the reality of their worlds, but could impart in others the same feeling of immersion in a fantasy world. Inevitably I alternate between questions like “how do they do that?” with “is that obsession fun and crazy, or just plain crazy?” But always I feel like I am missing something.

This week some of the Domain Game players though made me think that our shared world, Nowhere, may be vectoring toward such an experience. Nowhere on the face of it is a highly unlikely candidate. Nowhere is supposed to be the ultimate blank slate of a campaign experience, a playtest white board where virtually the only visible sentient life was exported by the diverse players—all representing expeditions whose cultures and backgrounds where creations almost completely of their own.

Sure I had a giant hex map with honed down to a fine five-mile hex zoom and a giant mess of half-baked charts, tables, and other exceedingly granular lists for filling them in, but not much else really.

All the poking, prodding, and barraging of literally hundreds of cascading questions by the tentative new explorers of this land changed that dynamic quickly. What kind of animals are found here? Are they herd animals? Is their hide good for tanning? What's the arability of the soil like? Is the wood here soft or hard? How big are the wooded clumps? What's the drainage of this rolling plain like? Can I find clay to make pots? Stone to make ziggurats? Gravel to make roads? Fodder for yaks? Etc. etc.

Each and everyone of those hexes were forced to become something so finely detailed that the realness started to feel unescapable. And right behind this physical vivid mental picture came the inexorable march of Big Mysteries. Who build all the monoliths and their extra-planar gates? Where did they go? What hand launched that golden barge off the coast? Who dug that canal and raised that metal dome? 

Behind the mysteries came the Great Themes. The largest of all a primal myth for us Americans: the eery emptiness and menace of true wilderness. Not the typical D&D wilderness which seems so very “busy” here an orc tribe, there a veritable monster condo of a cave system, but the true subtle danger of a blank slate world—that had the touch of someone somewhere lurking behind the next bush or hill line.

Samwise, master of the yak-loving theocratic Gibliki, nailed this in a recent intra-group email in a way I frankly never put my head around completely myself:

Nowhere is like a fresh undisturbed paradise of sorts, or like a pearl just waiting to be found and plucked (or admired for its beauty as it is)...In some ways it feels like no one else has been here before, or that perhaps people were here a very long time ago and then went extinct for some unknown reason. It makes me think of the show Life After People, in that the natural world continues to go on, and is happy to do so.

The Fog Of War way that you are handling the maps also leaves much of the wider world as an unknown mystery, and enigma, that wants to be found out with more exploration (if only we could make sure we feed everyone, and shelter everyone first). It makes you way what your wants and needs are, and more often the needs take precedent.

The setting makes me think of those explorers that first mapped out an unknown continent (even if those maps were horribly distorted). "Here be dragons." In some ways this feels like my first Hex Crawl (as I've never one a campaign like that). Even though you may know that there are trees in a nearby hex, you don't know what is lurking beneath those leaves and branches until you go and look around a bit.

Reading those words, made me feel like I had finally “got” it myself about Nowhere.

If you made it through this far in this great bit of navel-gazing and thinking out loud, I commend your endurance. And as always I am all ears when it comes to your own experiences as a world builder.

Did you ever feel that you real “got” your own world? Why? What role did your players play in this?

Founding a Fantasy Town, Part I

Last night I started getting my head back in the game--the Domain Game that is. (Thanks to all the players and volunteers nudging, cajoling, and encouraging me in the last couple weeks).

I put out some rule guidelines last month for how would-be rulers, warlords and satraps could attract rural settlers to their newly-carved lands, this month we take a look at what it takes to dupe unsuspecting urban types to your hold.

Where does the aspiring city builder begin?

First and foremost is the locating, surveying, and clearing of a proper site. A number of important questions need to be answered:

1. Does the site have access to a fresh water source? Will it have enough water to sustain larger populations as the settlement grows?
2. Does the site have enough arable land to support it? If not, how will food be secured to sustain the incoming hordes?
3. Is the site in an economically feasible area? Will enough trade and commerce pass through the area to make it sustainable or prosper even? Is there enough work available for the new population?
4. Is the site secure enough? Is the surrounding local area secured and patrolled adequately? Is it properly fortified? Is the new settlement policed sufficiently?
5. Is the site properly drained? Is it on high, stable enough land to sink foundations and be resistant to floods?
6. Will the new settlement meet the cultural and religious needs of its new citizens? Will the bread be supplemented by

Recruiting Urban Settlers

Once these questions have been considered and a charter issued, the local lord can begin the all-important task of attracting new denizens to the settlement.

A roll can be made once a year on the following chart for each farmed square mile newly-dedicated to supporting the settlement (roll only once for each). Note that at a minimum each 100 citizens will settle in land equaling roughly .1 square miles. Thus a town of 1,000 citizens will take up a 1 square mile area. (More spacious lots can be given to settlement residents if desired.)

Roll d10

1	None attracted
2	2 laboring-class families
3	4 laboring class, 1 semi-skilled
4-5	8 laboring class, 2 semi-skilled
6	12 laboring class, 3 semi-skilled
7	16 laboring class, 4 semi-skilled, 1 expert
8	20 laboring class, 5 semi-skilled, 1 expert, 1 patrician
9	24 laboring class, 6 semi-skilled, 2 expert, 1 patrician
10	28 laboring class, 7 semi-skilled, 2 expert, 1 patrician

Modifiers:

-2 land secured in less than a year

-2 inhospitable environs (inadequate water, uncomfortable terrain like marsh, etc.)

+1 land secured more than five years

+1 settlement has developed cultural/religious amenities

+2 settlement on established trade route

+1 settlement site has wooden palisade

+2 settlement site has stone walls

Types of Urban Colonist Families

Each family is assumed for simplicity sake to be made up of five members (two of working age, one potential for militia service). The varying classes correspond to the categories on my Hirelings charts.

Laboring class families

This colonist class is made up of escaped slaves (or serfs), penniless freemen, drifters, etc. New colonists of this type will settle into available economic niches as urban laborers, apprentices, underworld types, etc. They can also be coerced or enticed into moving into work as cottars, harvest workers, and other agricultural labor in surrounding farmlands.

Semi-skilled and Expert families

Semi-skilled and expert families will take up shop in the settlement, initially (and literally) as small, independent providers. As the settlement grows from hamlet or village to town, these workers will found or import related-guilds, societies, and other mutual associations. The exact occupation of each family is to be determined by the GM.

Patrician families

Wealthy families that represent guildmasters, wealthy merchants, and/or minor nobles. Each household will hire 5-20 local residents to meet their own domestic and economic needs. (If none available they will “import” 1-4 laboring class families of their own.)

Optional: Colonist Cultural Identity Chart

Roll once for each incoming group.

Roll 1d8

1-5	Colonist group made up of same culture, ethnic group, and race
6-7	Colonist group made up of different culture or ethnic group (same race)
8	Colonist group made up of non-humans