The Great Hill Cantons 5e Experiment Begins: Marlinko Backgrounds

I still love the old ways, you can pry the increasingly deviant BX/OSE/LL subvariant of HC house system from my cold dead hands. But dammit has playing Baldurs Gate (purple-skinned Roy Kent being my own PC) got me at least wanting to experiment with a slimmed down, house ruled to death 5e as my next mini-campaign reboot of things Hill Cantons-y. 

So on that note, here is part 1 of Hill Cantons 5e Backgrounds starting with dear, dear Marlinko. A host of Marlinko Cantons backgrounds are next and they will be the usual mix of the weird and/or stupid. 

Marlinko Cantons Backgrounds

First and foremost a Marlinkan takes their identity from their contrada (even villagers in the Canton have their “team” in the city). All native Player Character Marlinkans thus must roll (or choose if one must) a contrada background before taking another background. The contrada background is in addition to a character’s standard background, but may also preclude some standard background choices.

From FDM: The four contradas do not reflect merely geographic or class divisions, but have deeply embedded cultural and psycho-geographical lives of their own. Each contrada organizes its own festivals, keeps its own histories, and pays fearful homage to the abstract-featured idol of its own unique “town god.” 

Each contrada also maintains its own contrada hall, a large, well-maintained, ceremonial gathering place where it keeps a collection of its own unique banners, ceremonial regalia, historical tapestries, mummies, and most importantly, the various trophies it has won in the single most important city-wide bi-annual event: the great chariot race that headlines the Ebon Horse Fair. Throughout the year, contrada trainers keep their chosen condemned convict-jockey revved up and ready for the Black Race. It is well that they do, for the losers are hanged while the winner earns a contrada trophy and freedom!

Roll d6

1-2 Svině (Golden Swine) Contrada

3 Soudce (Yare Domesman) Contrada

4-5 Obchodník (Mendacious Mercator) Contrada 

6 Včelar (Sullen Apiarian) Contrada

Svině (Golden Swine) Contrada

The northeastern ward, with its tusked, dolorous, golden boar's head banner on a field of teal, is by most accounts a benighted slum. It has two saving graces: 1. that most guilds and high offices maintain their halls in its precinct–if not their homes– (including the Rada's large council hall) and 2. that it holds the most trophies for Black Race wins. 

Skill Proficiencies: Deception or Sleight of Hand

Tool Proficiencies: Manual Labor

Languages: Svinish (contrada dialect/slang)

Equipment: Teal and gold contrada surcoat, simple, Jaunty Cap, Tiny amount of hruz paste. 

 

Forbidden Backgrounds: Noble

Soudce (Yare Domesman) Contrada

The southeastern quarter is (despite its rather dramatic banner displaying grotesquely fat red demonettes piloting finned sleds) a sleepy and mundane section of the city. The houses of quietly prosperous craftsmen and the shops of the middle ranks dominate the ward. 

Skill Proficiencies: Insight

Tool Proficiencies: One type of artisans tools

Languages: Soudci  (contrada dialect/slang)

Equipment: Grey and dull red contrada surcoat, burghers hat, set of workman’s tools

Forbidden Backgrounds: Anything vaguely criminal

Obchodník (Mendacious Mercator) Contrada 

The southwestern contrada of the city, with its great golden seal depicting a grasping human hand styled in mauve and silver, oversees most daily business in the city. The sprawling, bustling South Market with its countless booths and scams is the commercial heart of the center.

Skill Proficiencies: Deception or Persuasion 

Tool Proficiencies: Calligrapher's supplies, Cartographer's tools, or Navigator's Tools.

Languages: Obchod (contrada dialect/slang)

Equipment: Mauve and silver contrada surcoat, stack of blank contracts in vellum.

Forbidden Backgrounds: Charlatan, Mountebank, Huckster

Včelar (Sullen Apiarian) Contrada

The Northwestern Quarter, with its great yellow-and-black beehive and mopey deodand emblazoned banner, contains the greatest concentration of affluence and easy living in the city. The great painted-plastered town-manses of the wealthy dominate the coveted plaza and avenue fronts in this part of town. 

Despite its wealthy cast, the contrada has a deeply-ingrained inferiority complex--due in large part to its century-long losing streak in the Black Race. The loss has become a self-fulfilling prophesy in recent years, as convict-jockeys regularly commit suicide rather than serve out what they consider to be a foregone death sentence. Roving gangs of youths from respected families are quick to draw rapiers against any slight, as if to compensate for the wound to their civic honor. 

Skill Proficiencies: Persuasion or Intimidation

Tool Proficiencies: Gaming set

Languages: Vče (contrada dialect/slang)

Equipment: Black and gold contrada surcoat, codpiece, rapier, IOU from a commoner worth 1d4x10 gold suns.

Forbidden Backgrounds: Anything vaguely criminal or commercial. 

Slumbering Ursine Dunes: The Extended Dance Version (Series Omnibus)

[Before we get into today's matter at hand, if you find this blog helpful and most of all want to help me get a new Hill Cantons book out please consider backing my Patreon. I am about to drop the first chapter of the new Revoca Hill Cantons book next week so it's really the optimum time.]

Going on two years now 1-2 times a month I seem to field a variant of the question “are there plans for a compiled version of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes books?” With a whole damn reddit thread (that I was blissfully ignorant of for a fortnight) and What Ho off my plate I think I've reached a tipping point.

Yes, I want to do an omnibus of the first four SUD books.

And I want to do it sooner rather than later with an eye for actual value and increased playability for both existing and new readers.

Likely Going In:

• All Four Books. All four SUD-kickstarter books back-to-back in sequence. So expect to see Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Marlinko, Misty Isles and What Ho under one cover with one unified, sharper, more user-friendly layout. Hell I want this for my own table.
• Larger Format. Likely switching from digest size to full 8.5 x 11. While digest is my own personal jam, we need to let some of those cramped tables and illustrations breathe.
• Hardcover. Preferably with stitching (better quality binding, easier to lay flat over time) and likely with a high-quality traditional print run rather than only Print on Demand.
• Index. A traditional back of the book index to assist with play at the table.
• Bookmarks for Digital. The PDF edition will have them for reasons above, a perennial ask for the books from readers and reviewers.
• More Illustrations. Luka's generous and productive mind packed the last two SUD books with illustrations, looking back from the Dunes and Marlinko they could use some more interior illustrations to snaz them up.
• Unified Appendices. All those new monsters, items, new classes, subsystems, and weirdo subsystems will be organized together for ease of use.
• New Cover. Hell, we do judge books by their cover, don't we? Something big, something splashy and hitting the Hill Cantons aesthetic just so.

Maybe:

• Supplementary and Cut Material. In the maybe category is pulling in wider material to give the books more context and usability. Why I say maybe is that I am laser focused right now on not only finishing the Revoca book but getting it out much quicker than the previous books (and at the same quality level) which means realistically my writing time is sparser. But with my recent move and crazy person level of organization I keep finding whole notebooks of campaign notes relevant to all four books (tons of monsters, items, and even some dungeons) and pinko DIY me loves throwing value at readers who support the Hydra.
• Design Notes. How and why the sausage was made.
• Largescale Aesthetic Makeover. Maybe even if we do crowdfunding really kicking it up some design chops (more than than the significant makeover I am imagining above even).
• Strong Unaccounted Stuff that Readers Want. Seriously, here's your time to chime in. What do you want? Nagging questions from the text? New vistas? The sky is the limit.

Contest and Video Review of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

A rather nice and thorough video review of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko by Talking About Games. Here's the fun part, the host is doing a contest based on my dumb Robo-Dwarf class presented in Marlinko  with a chance to win a copy of the book.  Contest deadline is August 12th (later today, so get entries in.)

Here are the contest particulars: "Send me a youtube message or write a comment below saying why it's a good thing and a bad thing to be a Robo-Dwarf."

The What in What Ho, Frog Demons

Writing my final (yay) Slumbering Ursine Dunes-related adventure, What Ho, Frog Demons, is well underway. (I've also had a rather pleasurable turn designing an Orbital Habitat generation chapter for Trey Causey's upcoming Strange Stars OSR).

What Ho is going to be a little different from Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Misty Isles in that it's going to be closer to the more modest 20-page small-adventure format we had intended the SUD bonus adventures (Marlinko was 72 pages and Misty Isles may end up around 92 whopping pages). That said it's still likely to jam in a lot of content and be something more like a mere 40-odd pages (ha).

Here's a little rundown of what I'm planning on throwing in.

The basic frame is that this is a “further adventures” style product that will either: a. give your players more things to do in the immediate region around the Dunes and/or Marlinko or b. give you small site stuff to drop in digestible chunks (basically what I do with most published adventures).

There are two small easily-portable, small-scale dungeons: the greatly-feared in-campaign deathtrap, Frog Demon Temple (a shout out to Jeff Reints's chaotic frog gods of Cinder and some strange bedfellow Wodehouse elements) and Beet-God Manor, a manorhouse that has been possessed by a massive sentient and quite demonic beet (you read that right, inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's Mandrake short story). As a bonus two other unpublished locales from Hill Cantons players will likely find their way in there: Robert Parker's delightful, hilarious Chaos Monastery and Mike Davison's Fane of Grooze mini-dungeon.

So basically you get four small sites to plunk down and play with.

Expect a number of likely related bits including:

1. a hex or pointcrawl map of Marlinko Canton. Points from SUD, Marlinko and Misty Isles are included as well as some brief rundowns of local adventure sites like the Tomb of the Great Deodand, Lumas (Tower of Bone), Mountain Hall of the Hyperboreans, Bad Rajetz, and Revoca Canton.

2. A Frog Demon random generation system. I got some strong feedback from two backers about wanting something like this and it's a great idea (thanks guys). The system is shaping up to be based on the bio-diverse and delightfully strange range of actual existing and extinct batrachian adaptions (naturally with some weird twists and mutations).

3. Bite-sized Chaos Indexes for the sites that throw in some dynamic shifts.

4. Some supplementary info (mostly NPCs and Things to Buy) for greater Marlinko Canton.

5. A new, revised, yet still sophomoric Chaos Monk player class.

6. A lovely, large array of Chaos Monk equipment, mostly impractical martial arts weapons by Robert Parker.

As always a full plate, but I'm hoping to return to more regular(ish) content updates here on the blog. This year. 

Building Dynamic Sandboxes Part II

The Building Dynamic Sandboxes kickoff post felt a bit light without some of the supporting entries so instead of waiting until tomorrow I am going go ahead and post Part II. (There will indeed be a Part III centered on Faction Dynamics, NPC Actors, and Notebooks, likely Monday).

Beyond having a regular campaign news cycle and building less static encounter charts, I've found having generators for large-scale regional or realm-wide events to be extremely helpful in injecting fluid situations into the campaign. My personal druthers is to concentrate on (or at least having on hand) generators that are either escalating (with PC-action and NPC triggers) or random --even better is when I can manage to combine elements of both.

The Chaos Index. If you've read Slumbering Ursine Dunes or Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, you have perhaps an inkling of what the Chaos Index is. The Hill Cantons has a campaign conceit in which human civilization is hemmed and battered with supernatural/mythic/faerie zones known as the Weird. Because the boundaries between the Weird and civilization tend to move back and forth I put together a track similar to what one might find in wargames.

The track moves up and down when actions inside the game either roll back the forces of the Weird or trigger greater chaos. As the track escalates away from the baseline the afflicted campaign areas get more anarchic and stranger. When things get to relatively high levels things get really odd and start to set off various events.

One, of course, doesn't have to buy into that kind of pretentious cosmological shenanigans. Something like the Index can just easily be adapted for any escalating situation in your campaign: the ebbs and flows of a war and its impact on the surrounding countryside; the rise and fall of a sinister looming great evil/dark overlord, etc.

But let's go back to my Chaos Index for a concrete baseline example. Here's are a few index-related excerpts from Fever-Dreaming Marlinko.

Click on me.

Me too. 

Now that's pretty elaborate and takes some heavy lifting in terms of thinking about the variables that might apply to your own campaign world. The idea is to capture movement, no need to overdo it. 

And, hey, truth be told I use a way more stripped-down, loosey-goosy version at my own table most of the time. I tend to take notes at the end of a session and make a fast and loose judgment call about whether I should move the index. “So the players killed the Ernest Borgnine wizard creating badgerman clones in his vats?” That's going to ratchet down the Weird a slot. “Oh they broke open that lead-sealed chamber containing Nezarr the Aborted, well thats four slots upward.”

Similarly what happens as you hit each level of escalation doesn't have to have a fully-developed chart. One can just as easily seat of your pants as I often do. “Oh this week the Index jumped up pretty high. So that must mean that the war against the kozaks is spiraling out of control. Let me say make it twice as likely that players will encounter a kozak warband.”

Event Charts. Event charts and similar mechanics have been with the tabletop hobby for a good long time but are strangely underdeveloped and neglected by designers. Wargamers of the 1960s-70s frequently employed random chance cards in battles and campaigns, a phenomena that got ported into Dave Arneson's Blackmoor with interesting and sometimes hilarious results.

Oriental Adventures fielded one of the few examples of a good overarching and flexible system for generating events in an old school D&D product. OA's system has multiple levels of magnitude. Big ticket events are diced once a year, medium/regional level events monthly and small-scale daily events are nicely cross-indexed to terrain (and produce some immediately actionable type things like discovering a lost ruined temple and the like).

Though it produces some events that are either or culturally-off (and I want my campaign-shaking events coming in more frequently than annually and monthly) it's an easy system to adapt. The general architecture fits in nicely with the routine of campaign news that I think is important to establishing good habits. I will admit to relying on OA's system quite often when I get stumped for ideas.

Surely you have some personal favorite campaign events systems? Designed your own? Jacked it from Birthright or some other product?

Building Dynamic RPG Sandboxes Part 1

[Part Two can be found here.]

Tabletop rpgs lord over other gaming forms in several key areas. One major area is in the ability to provide robustly reactive campaign worlds that can take players and GM alike into totally unexpected places.

I have my shortcomings as a GM (pacing in online sessions for one) but over the years that the Hill Cantons has been active I've worked like hell to make the campaign feel alive and ever changing—to make all the whirly bits whirl. I've tried to extend that dynamic feel to the published mini-sandboxes of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko. (The upcoming Misty Isles of the Eld has several, some that radically transform the region through player's actions.)

Often providing dynamism is just a matter of thinking through after a session ends how the various pieces of your sandbox (the machinations/reactions of NPCs high and low, what an in-game activity like a massive treasure haul did to change a base settlement, etc) are organically pushed and pulled by players (and other actors), but it helps immensely to develop a range of tools and habits to give it depth and consistent motion. Here are a few of my own tricks of the trade (cut into two parts for length).

Campaign News Cycle. I've written about this before in depth, but an important glue in the Hill Cantons campaign is the weekly news.

Regular news updates serve a triple function: 1. they force you as a GM to have think about the moving parts of your world on a regular basis, 2. it provides players frequent active choices in interacting with these moving parts, and 3. they create the illusion (and to some degree the reality) that your campaign world is a real, living place.

Dynamic Encounter Tables. This is a new piece for me. While I am generally pretty good at developing unique encounter tables (it's an easy and eminently practical shortcut in providing an interesting feel to an area) they have been mostly static.

I've started making them more dynamic in two ways:

1. Adding a variable New Developments slot that is basically a place holder for a special encounter tied to either a recent news event or an action that the party takes. A concrete example is that there has been a recent invasion by horse-nomads (kozaks) just to the north. If that slot is hit on the chart the party will hit something that has to do with event, maybe it's a patrol by the local militia, foraging stragglers from the horde, deserters etc.

2. I have been using encounter pools for total numbers of certain creatures (especially important in the colony-building Feral Shore campaign phase). Kill 30 Grotmen total over the next month? Well their local population is exhausted and something else will fill that niche. It's a pain to track so I do limit this to certain factions or types of monsters. It plays out at the table well, often giving me ideas for what's happening when new creatures step in.

Sample chart:

Upper North Mythic Woods Encounters

1-2  Personality

3-4  Creature

5  Mishaps and Magic

6  New Development

Creature

1. 1d6 War Bears pilgrims
2. 1d3 Revocan Honeyback Bears
3. 1d4 Infested Boars
4. 1d10 Reverse Centaurs (20 total)
5. 2d4 Dirt-Gnome Mushroom Hunters (30 total)
6. 1d4 Lost Village Children

In the next part I will chatter on about using a Chaos Index (or other overarching dynamic model), Encounter/Event Notebooks, Faction Dynamics and more. (Quite a bit more is written about sandbox mechanics here.)

Undoubtedly many of you sandbox vet GMs out there have a host of your own, feel free to lay them on in the comments.

Ten Other Eccentrics, Scamps and Scumbags You Will Meet in Marlinko

The ever-talented Jason Sholtis made my week by drawing a just-perfect character sketch of Glamdalf (that's him above), one of many NPCs of escalating weirdness that appear in Fever-Dreaming Marlinko. It reminded me that I have been sitting on this list of “out-take” NPCs that didn't make it into the final draft.

Given that petty crime (especially small-scale grift) is a widespread, popular pastime in that strange little borderlands city, many of the following are likely to be in the annoying nuisance category of urban NPCs.

[Oh also I done got interviewed about the Hill Cantons by Jack. Check it out here.]

Roll a d10 (if you must)

1. Radko the Ruffler. 0-level Man-at-Arms. Leather Jack, tattered uniform surcoat, sabre. Approaches a Fighting Man and claims to have been a veteran in the Kozak Wars. Claims to be looking for honest work or a donation to get him through a hard time. If hired on, he will split at the first opportunity, stealing an item of value from the party.

2. Havol the Hooker. 0-level combatant. Padded, polearm. Hp 4. Despite the name Havol is not a prostitute but instead has gained his underworld nickname by using his long, hooked polearm to grab hang lines of clothes, spring open second-story shutters and commit other pole-related crimes.

3. Poor Tomas the Ubra-man. A second level mountebank. Hp 5. Feigns anxiety disorder claims that it prevents him from fulfilling seed money for a wilderness expedition and is now financially destitute. Carries an Ubra-stick, a white-painted staff that signifies a former patient/indentured servant of the Ubra work camp for the mentally ill. Will ask for specific amounts of alms money (5 gold and 2 silver), offering rumors and gossip (true and useful at first but increasingly more fanciful and far-fetched as he runs out of info). Will pretend to have a panic-induced heart attack if ever confronted.

4. Bedka the Bawdy Basket. First-level thief. Leather jack, hand axe. Hp 3. A matronly, rosy-cheeked pedlar of kitchen ware. She bribes servants to steal items of value from the townhouses of their patrons.

5. Petr, Prigger of Prancers. Second-level thief (stealth skill 4). Leather jack, lasso, sabre. Hp 10. A wee, bow-legged, skilled horse thief, Petr will approach the party either as means to off-load stolen horses (giving deep discounts of 40-50% off the listed horse price or as marks to be stolen from.

6. Janos the Jarkman. Forgerer of papers. He can knock off 200-400 gp worth of inducement fees (bribes) to Marlinko or contrada authorities by filing mountains of official-looking falsified paperwork. Takes a commission of 30% from any cash saved. He's backed by One Armed Jiri and any attempts to cheat or otherwise metaphorically fuck him will suffer retribution from his semi-criminal society.

7. Zela the Inflicted. 0-level woman-at-arms. Half plate (AC:5), spear, sword, large container of tallow soap. Hp 2. High strung, fidgety with deep black bags under her eyes, she will offer her services as a hireling. While earnest in trying to pull her weight, she will panic when asked to individually take on a task even half-dangerous. Discreetly soaping up her face, she will feign an epileptic seizure in such a case.

8. “Whipjack” Wahlo. 0-level man-at-arms. Studded leather. Trident. Hp 5. Broad-shouldered, black-skinned (literally) and barely speaking the local tongue, Wahlo is a shipwrecked sailor from the Scarlet Sultanate. He is quite anxious about his “papers” (forged by Janos above) and being picked up by the local authorities--and is sadly ignorant of the Overking's law granting free right of passage to distressed mariners. Manipulative PCs could wheedle him into serving at a pittance of the hireling rate. A patron however who informs of his legal rights and undue worry will gain his near-fanatical loyalty and gratitude.

9. “Upright Man” Uli. 3rd level thief. Leather, quarterstaff. Hp 15. Though dressed in a threadbare and patch-covered doublet, grey-haired Uli is almost stately in countenance. Uli has a finger in every small scam or theft below Jiri's interest. All on this list owe him a favor, the women owe their hearts and the petty criminals owe him grudging fealty. He may be persuaded to intercede in trouble with any listed here—for a fee.

10. Frazalina. Daughter of Fraza the curio dealer. Thin, spindly-necked and sharped-nosed, Frazalina is uncannily similar to her old man in both appearance and aspect, she is also freakishly honest—and a racist. She is likely to offer a commission for appropriating rare macguffins in local murderholes. She is in terrible company on this chart.  

Suggested Readings for Running Fantasy Cities

Regrets weigh on my mind. I cut a few sections from the Fever-Dreaming Marlinko manuscript and one of them I am already rueful about is the Suggested Reading section.

Oh hey, make sure to check out Hydra's Saturnalia in Summer Sale for 25% discounts on Marlinko and all other products (end pimp). 

The readings from the gaming product list (I will post the non-fictional and fictional suggestions if there is reader interest) are for the most part geared around the central design challenge that nagged the hell out of me during the writing and playtesting: how can we do a better job presenting gameable fantasy cities by minimizing the traditional layering of boring, not-useful mundanities (the whole “here's a hobbit bootmaker with 3 hp and two daughters” syndrome) and maximizing things that either give it more flavor or make for better adventures at the table?

The products in the list below are all things that helped me think that framing question through (though it's up to y'all to decide if Marlinko succeeds).

In-Print Gaming

Vornheim 

There's been a good deal of digital ink spilled on this one and for good reason—it is a forceful, articulate partisan of the “can the mundane” way of running large, sprawling cities. Of particular utility at the table are the numerous generators for things such as random streets, neighborhoods, taverns, NPCs (and their quirks and motivations), etc.

Weird Adventures

In a recent social media exchange WA author Trey Causey (and for full disclosure, one of my fellow co-partners in the Hydra Collective) said:“ If you want a Lankhmar or New Crubozon, it means the city has to be almost a character. It needs to inhabit mostly a space of content in players' minds, not as much a place of spatial location."

This seems not only broadly true but something I found deeply inspiring about WA's centerpiece City (a 1930s-ish fantasy NYC). I found his general approach of imaging the hell out of the features of a city that make it unique and memorable coupled with a neighborhood focus (with sidebars and boxes for unique social features or gameable charts) to be worth reading for the how to bring out the flavor and life in a fantasy city. You get a strong whiff of it on his blog index.

Pavis/Big Rubble 

Glorantha produced a wonderfully adventurable city in the Chaosium-era boxed sets (republished together with a huge expansion by Moon Design). While I found some of the building entries to be on the bland side in Pavis, the product makes up for it by having evocative and interesting factions, distinct neighborhoods (each with their own street gang), town god cult (Pavis), dwarven undercity and best of all a massive ruinscrawl in the next-door Big Rubble.

Mad Monks of Kwantoom 

The city write-up section is a flavorful exploration of an Asian-inspired city (and thus a nice departure from the standard more Western-based city books). I love the variant equipment lists and neighborhood encounter charts.

Lesserton and Mor 

Lesserton and Mor seems to be directly inspired by the Big Rubble or at least it's very similar (ruinscrawl next to small base town). I found Lessertown, as a good solid example of an interesting adventurer boomtown, to be surprisingly more interesting than the ruined Mor.

Out of Print Gaming

Cities

City adventures run as much or more on navigating humanity and information as they do on site exploration. As such Cities by Midkemia Press (and later Chaosium) with it's massive array of city encounter charts is a huge inspiration for its breadth and depth (covering everything from a table of accidental jostlings of and by NPCs to a sub-table for the rare appearance of gods). The back section of the booklet is an intriguing downtime system that lets players run a minigame for what happens to them between adventures. 

(Btw Jeremy Duncan's cover for Marlinko is a bit of an homage to the second edition cover by Richard Becker).

Lankhmar

First most on any list of suggested readings for fantasy cities just has to be Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories. TSR's first and second edition are uneven but have some highly useful urban geomorphs and a beautiful map (that allows space for said geomorphs).

City State of the Invincible Overlord

The granddaddy of all fantasy gameable cities has to make the list even for all its mundane aspects. I dig the weird little sub-systems such as the strange and vicious court system.

City State of the World Emperor

Much as above though I found much of the actual city detail to be weirder, more evocative and more interesting than its brother CSIO.

Jonril

Loaded down with a heap of mundane descriptions and some of the worst and blandest character names, Midkemia's Jonril makes the cut by having a really interesting expedition sub-system for generating missions in the nearby howling wilderness of the Sunken Lands.