Rethinking Domain-Level Play in the Hill Cantons

If you've followed this blog for longer than you reasonably should, you may remember that 3-4 years back I had spent a good deal of time exploring domain level play. Indeed I ran two whole campaigns, the Domain Game I and II, revolving around that kind of play while trying to hothouse a whole rules supplement, the Borderlands.

My own gaming and writing was swimming around in a zeitgeist pool at that time--with ACKs and An Echo Resounding coming into being as the best published answers to that great supposedly unfulfilled promise of the “End Game.”

Eighty-odd pages of Borderlands were finished and it was closing in on that last push for being published. And then I balked it. I won't get into the nitty gritty (and some of it was an easy "I'm kind of tired of this shit" answer) let's leave it at “I was deeply dissatisfied with how it played.” In a nutshell it failed in the same way I believe most other attempts have failed by not making the “main thing” the main thing.

Anywho there is a lot meat here for a post debating the game design question “why most domain rules for D&D don't build meaningful, engaging long-term play for D&D campaigns.”

That's not this post.

This post is some show and tell of the rough, rough experimental system that we've been using on the Feral Shore portion of the Hill Cantons main campaign. The idea was to develop a system that is neither overly abstract “boardgamey” nor “beancounterly.” 

Instead it aimed to be more like the King of Dragon Pass and the freeform wargame Matrix Game. With NPC advisers carrying and hiding most of the actual domain business (by being “clicked on”) and presenting decision points that gave players choice without swamping the site-based adventure that is D&D's main thing. The system is still pretty underdeveloped and the results somewhat a mixed bag from my perspective to be sure. 

But that's the fun of hothousing these things in actual play, right?

An explored section of the Feral Shore.

Here's an actual example from campaign play. (Okko is a frozen-in-time trap engineer NPC the party rescued and recruited to be the chief steward of their Feral Shore colony.)

Okko's Report on King's Ten
Okko seems to warm to his job and appears to be loyal, able and competent from what you observe. He gives you the following report on how he sees things.

What Okko is buying/building with the 1000 suns (all work listed will be done before next week by the available labor):
1. Two 10-by-30 foot cypress-wood and thatch longhouses. One to be used as a workshop, the other for meetings/light work in the day and sleeping area for 15 at night.
2. A cypress-wood stockade roughly 6-foot high to enclose the area before a proper wooden palisade can be built.
3. 10 medium-sized tents for temporary housing
4. An on-site worker of wood and blacksmith
5. Food for the party and all the hired help for a month.

What Okko wants to know:
Do you want to keep this site as the basecamp? He lays out the pros and cons of the site below and says that since no work has been done yet that he can hold off on the work above if you want to place it  somewhere else.

Site Pros
1. The soil seems fairly rich and arable.
2. Killing off the two crocs seems to have cleared out the area of its most spectacular resident menace. There are normal-sized crocs in the area but nothing as comparable or aggressive.
3. The surrounding flooded areas and serpentine-like higher ground areas are pretty defensible
4. You have plenty of fresh (if brackish) water.

Site Cons
1. It's in the Weird (makes the hired help extremely nervous and likely to mean higher chances of encountering beings who live in the Weird.)
2. It's surrounded by a swamp (bugs, humidity and mud).

Domain Skills and Resolution
Each PC can take a Major concentration and a Minor from the following list and computes their skill on the second chart below.

Domain Skills
1. Martial (Strategy, Tactics)
2. Sorcery (Magic, Science)
3. Supernatural  (Religion, Mythic, The Weird)
4. Skullduggery (Intrigue, Diplomacy, Criminal)
5. Steward (Planning, Economic)
6. Ranging (Scouting, Hunting, Expeditions)

Domain Score
x1 level for your Major
x.5 level for your Minor (round down)
+/- best single ability modifier for INT, WIS and CHA
+/- special circumstances (things like education in a certain skill, upbringing, etc)

Example: Kraggo of the Mountains is a 4th level fighter with a 7 INT, 11 WIS and 17 CHA. He takes Martial for his Major which gives him for 4 for his lets plus 2 for his CHA for a total of 6. He takes Ranging as his minor for a total of 2.

Domain Ring NPCs

The Domain Ring is your team of NPC advisers. Beyond providing for gamable action points in and between sessions Ring NPCs are the ones taking on the actual (and often boring and/or granular) tasks of running the demense. Delegating work to the Ring represents “rule by sinecure” inherent for a game where the PCs are adventurers first and has a mechanical advantage as such. A single PC can add their skill level (must be the exact skill being used by the NPC) to any domain action roll taken by a Ring NPC.

Current Ring Members:
Okko, Steward 6
Balzas, Martial 4
The Holy Drunk, Supernatural 3

Priestess of Marzana, Sorcery 3, Supernatural 3

Domain Action Resolution
If there is a particular situation that I think will call for a roll against an appropriate PC or NPC's relevant skill. The relative difficulty of the course of action described will be adjudicated secretly from my judgment of what is described.

Near Impossible: 5d6 against relevant Domain Skill
Unlikely: 4d6
Fair: 3d6
Good: 2d6
Excellent: 1d6

Slam Dunk: 1d6-3

Small is Beautiful in the Sandbox

One of the most satisfying parts of being part of a hobbyist subculture that loves pulling up the hood and jawing at disturbing, perhaps commitable length about the various whirly bits is running into your own little epiphanies. Tuesday I slammed my laptop cover down and threw my triumphant fist in the air with a “fuccck yeah” with the last great push on the Misty Isles of the Eld manuscript (the second big stretch goal adventure coming out of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko being in lay out).

Later that night with the self-congratulation dying down it struck me that after laying down yet another small bounded 1-4 session wilderness area that the mini-sandbox has been my favorite way to game wilderness for a good long time. I mean thinking back to my beloved hoary TSR favorites Castle Amber, The Secret of Bone Hill, Keep, and that Gygax Lovecraftian temple one that I am suddenly too lazy to look up they all to a one have a small wilderness area (and often a small scale human civilization bit) as a short main exploration phase.

Somewhere horseshoe close to when D&D was born and the oil crisis was rearing its head, a collection of essays called Small is Beautiful became a public intellectual one-hit-wonder. Needling large-scale economies and political organization as being beyond a sustainable human scale.

Hey but fear not I come not to throw some politics or meaty real world thought in your face-- besides I'm still enough of an Old Leftist/Modernist reactionary to freakishly get a woody walking the grounds of the rusting hulk of a horizontally-integrated factory complex like the Ford Rouge—but to acknowledge there is something there there when it comes to designing to wilderness settings.

Insert your mileage disclaimer—by now we all know that people who talk in absolutes in a hobby environment are buttholes—but I think there really is something there in this area when it comes to sustaining a long campaign. Think of it this way, D&D is primarily a game where the main play experience is meticulously exploring highly-contained space. It doesn't have to be a dungeon but that classic format sure comes back over and over because it simply works

Wilderness hexcrawling has been there too as a suggested major play arena since the get go. OD&D has its random generators. B/X went even further presenting it as conceptually as a whole new campaign frame for when PCs hit mid-level. But from my experience there has always been something awkward and challenging about making all that wide yawning space notboring—and thus something you and the players will return to time and time again continuously.

I have been running the Feral Shore with its central hex-organized map as a major campaign phase now for a year and a half. But the actual thorough wilderness hexcrawl sessions have been a minority often a “we really need to get down to figuring out what is going on behind that ridgeline of the Domovoy villages” kind of impulse from the players. At most even when really player focused we have never done more than three such sessions in our weekly game in a row.

Invariably some other goal—exploring the smaller bounded area of say the Rusevin (a city ruins pointcrawl) or more prevalently a single-site or those beautifully eccentric player-driven quests (“shit really need to go find that Drinking Horn of Radegast to get those drained life levels back”)--pushes its way forward and becomes the main thing.

The hexcrawling in other words is more often a palate cleanser much like a one-off town adventure. Not consciously I believe that's how I prefer, short sprints of such activity around the main course. Maybe that's how it should be: better-designed wilderness should be small in frame and densely packed with sites. (Or maybe I am just rationalizing my own design choices with the Dunes as a small bounded mythical wilderness pointcrawl and the Misty Isles as a small bounded extra-planar pointcrawl?)

But back to you...

Is that the kind of thing you have experienced? Have you run—and enjoyed—long hexcrawl-centered campaigns or campaign phases? What made it different you think? What's your secret, bud? 

Campaign News Porting to the Blog

For going on four years now I have been writing and posting the supposedly-weekly and increasingly idiosyncratic news report for players and spectators of the eponymous campaign to the Hill Cantons google plus page. Having written about how to use campaign news as continuity glue for a long-running campaign and having the blog slip way down the list of my hobby-writing priorities--and thus in need of some love—the news reports will now be appearing right here in the future.

And now the News...

Hinek the Aft, notable local lunatic and mariner, has been recounting wild tales of a supposed landing in the fabled Misty Isles by his patroness and captain the so-called Daughter of Ondrej. Bizarrely his first day of yarn-spinning in the Marlinko bathhouses told of a stark, dead land with “ridges made from the corpses of massive grubs”-- a story quite at odds with the popular conception of the eternally fog-shrouded islands as a bucolic paradise. Even stranger is his apparent self-beating over the night and subsequent retelling of the story in a broken monotone: “The...Misty Isles...are...a...wondrous place filled...with...laughter and light...and that I have...never visited nor can I speak with assurance..from a first-hand account.”

The recent opening of the gaily-painted, if disturbingly and atavistically pagan High Temple to All-Pahr Gods has brought in a influx of curious tourists and dour, bearded faithful to the Feral Shore. When clicked on, the colony steward, Okko, claims that nearly 900 gold suns have been brought in from sales of bric brac such as Svat the Four-Faced carved wooden posts, Marzana garlic wreaths and Radagast painted beer steins in the first two weeks alone.

But income from schlock is not the only thing the new Temple has brought in, the dedication has also brought along two new inhabitants both claiming to have been brought by visions sent from dying Pahr godlings.

The first of which is the strangest, a bass-toned skald with the head of an enormous red rooster by the name of Vyvod. Though an odd sight, residents of Karldeset and the Domovoy villages, have warmed to his deep, catchy, self-valorizing ballads and quite often one can hear on the winds the opening verses from his most popular tune:

“Little Pavol and Vyvod

strutt-ing through the for-est

Never evere dreamin' that a schemin' deodand and his posse
Was a-watchin' them an' gatherin' around.”

The rooster bard's appearance was followed the next day by a grizzled, long-bearded, wearing the antiquated heavy armor that scholars call chainmail and looking to all the world like he stepped out of a Pahr-themed historical tapestry. Captain Slavomil as he calls himself is said to have been touched in the head by a command from the long-thought dead god Velesh to throw his axe into a local lake, seek the blessing of the Lords of the Shore and begin to organize a warband for a long journey around the southlands cape to conquer the City of Porcelain, a distant, fabled, demon-haunted city of great delicacy.

Space Cantons Mini-Campaign III

With Fever Dreaming Marlinko (the first Dunes stretch goal adventure) going through proofing, Anthony's Cali Dunes manuscript going through its first round of comments/edits (so excited), and the Misty Isles of the Eld getting all playtested and written, I finally feel like I have some mental room to juggle some other things.

And those things as a palate cleanser point away from D&D and toward my old love Classic Traveller. The following is one of the hooks from my new Tuesday mini-campaign shared here because I hear sharing is caring. (My past Traveller house rules, variants and mini-campaign whoha can be seen here.)

The Adventure Hook

The Cerny Vlk, the subsector-famous Boloerium (a paraterraformed asteroid-vessel used for intra-system travel, see library data below) dedicated to preserving pre-uplift wolf stock--and manned by a cooperative of self-styled “lycanthropes”--has gone “dark” according to months-old reports from The Grange. That wild and wooly system of micro-republics hunkered down on trojan-point planetoids has produced a not-too surprisingly conflicting range of hotly-contested salvage claims. Putting hard credits where their vacc-suited comm-boxes are, the system's two fiestiest polities, Cockyagne and Hayduke, are reportedly both offering 500,000 CR bounties to a crack “salvage and rescue team” for in-hand repossession of the outbound ship.

Cylinder Interior (click to enlarge).
Scale is 250 meters per hex. Map "north" and "south" wrap around. 

Library Data: the Cerny Vlk Boloerium

Like most boloeriums, the CV is dual-roled as asteroid space habitats and intra-space vessel. The CV was constructed under the auspices of the Vlk Foundation, a philo-bolo (collective doubling as a non-profit charity), six decades ago for service in the Grange system. The foundation's terse bullet-pointed mission statement blandly refers to “pre-uplift conservation” and “maintaining the green fire of wild abandon that burns away the blandishments and corruption of hypermediated civilized life” as the Foundation's guiding vision.

The habitat's interior is a hollow cylinder 6 kilometers long with the long sides sloping upwards precipitously for a “height” of 1 kilometer.

The central space is dominated by an artificial lighting and weather system that simulates cloud cover that cycles randomly between a fine rain, partly cloudy and partly sunny conditions on a twice “daily” cycle. The ten hour “night period” is experienced universally across the interior when the “sunline” lighting is reduced to a low blue-gelled hue. Internal temperatures are set to range between a low of 45-60 and a high of 55-75 Fahrenheit.

Internally the CV underwent an extension biome renovation two decades ago, the old patchwork of 114 micro-biomes was replaced with two larger more continuous biome zones (and two sub-zones) to reflect a change in program direction by the Vlk Foundation:

1. Tundra. A large rolling plains like space punctuated by moody dark grey spray-foam rock formations. Contains xeno-caribou and giant jackalope herds for game.

2. Tanglewald. A dense twin-canopy bramble forest that is in fact a single rhizomatic macro-organism.

3. The Boreal Forest. Massive black-trunked conifers and large ferns cloned from ancient primordal amber tower over this micro-biome. Houses the White Lodge, a “Future-Past Age” spiritual healing center complete with enema kivas and healing lasers.

4. The Lake. Freshwater lake complete with paddle boat rental, tea pavillion and prediluvian megafauna.

The habitat in perpetual spin (assisted by the Forward Unit) creating internal gravity set at 0.8.

The CV is also set on a perpetual intra-system vector between the grange points hitting all of the major asteroids on the route in a slow annual route. It is impossible under the current Cantonment level of advancement (TL 13) to build power plants and jump systems large enough to be used on a Boloerium.

External structures include:

1. The Forward Unit or “Spinner”. The original complex set up at the aft of the asteroid to excavate the asteroid and importantly to to create its original spin with chemical propulsion systems (and which today serve as an emergency or correction system).

2. The Main Gate. An exterior complex of docking gates, observation decks, warehouses, schlocky gift shops and elevators to the interior.

3. The Pleasure Dome. A domed space to use “party as a verb.” Includes a small personal airlock and all the space mollusk tripdust one can hope for. Defenestrations are purely optional.  

Derailing Castle Amber

A couple days ago I had a strangely-urgent request from a two (and a half) year-old to read the Erol Otus-covered X2 Castle Amber (alternately titled now “The Giant Crashes the Castle”). When you get such a request only a douche doesn't comply and I duly read out the first three pages in High Children Books Narrator Voice.

While chuckle-making in itself it did give me an opportunity to reread that old favorite. I distinctly remember Castle Amber being the module that I enjoyed running over any other adventure TSR produced back then. Did it still merit top billing in my brain?

For sure I had no idea who Clark Ashton Smith was at the time (and it took me a full 25 years later to get acquainted with and dig his writing), but the Averoigne mini-setting folded up inside resonated with me in a way other TSR setting whoha didn't at that time. Growing up as a history fanatic, a France-like place circa 1100-1350 AD had a cultural reference point that made it easier to picture mentally.

Further because of that resonance, the gothic horror/weird fantasy elements of Clark Ashton Smith (not that I could have put my finger on it) just seemed sharper and more fantastic. That you would have pagans roaming the woods for human sacrifices or a blood-red comet that would induce an abbot to transform into hazy-formed beast struck me as more fantastic and terrifying than clearing a dungeon of humanoids in the Pomarj.

Restless soul that I am I put together a set of things I would do to hack, spindle and otherwise mutilate the module to fit my own play style and prejudices. In other words “gussing it up” a la Gus L's wonderful series of reviews and derailings of the old B-series modules.

Derailing

Current me hates the railroady overarching conceit of the adventure that you are trapped inside the castle. Even less particular early teen me got bored with too many sessions trapped away from the main campaign area and put in some handwavy, deus ex machina gates at the end of each session.

Change one would be to simply remove the lethal sorcerous mist that clings around the chateau. What the adventure (dubiously) loses with the dramatic tension of the players having to scramble to release the curse on Stephen Amber (who is trapped inside his tomb) and escape the chateau, it gains with expanding the choices for approaching it as a site-based adventure.

Secondly, I wouldn't ditch freeing Stephen Amber as a potential framing quest--just replace the stick with a carrot. The trapped mage showers the party with big ticket value jewelry and magic items anyway, perhaps just have him appear as an apparition when the party finds the “clues” scroll (hidden in three spots) or some other trigger and promise the party cash on the drum for getting him out of his jam. The clues themselves give a nice framing quest for exploring Averoigne complete with some red herring so retain that.

(And while you are at, now that the party can retreat and rest outside like in a typical sandbox campaign, ditch that heavy-handed freebie bit in which Stephan magically protects the party inside from all harm when they rest.)

Click to Enlarge

Chokepoints, Sideloops and Non-Linearity

At first glance the design of the “dungeon” looked very linear and dull to current me (you can see a copy of the map here). The adventure starts from a single point the entrance to the West wing and has a single hallway with side chambers.

Interestingly though some closer spatial analysis (see above) reveals it to be a more interesting space with slightly wider exploration choices (though one still a little marred by the railroaded single entrance and funneled exploration). Each wing (Moldvay suggests that each section is designed for a single session's worth of exploration) is chokepointed but all seem to have a few side-loops. The dungeon itself is relatively small but is nicely non-linear with two entrances from separate wings (the Chapel and East Wing) and two compact but internally non-linear side-sections.

While theoretically non-linear, the extreme lethality of stepping off the single path in the central Indoor Forest creates too much funnel for my taste. I would ratchet back or eliminate some of the thorn walls, pits and encounters. Let the players wander right into that Wild Hunt that breaks the hill open on there own.

Removing the railroad above really heightens the non-linear approach by eliminating the single entrance and instantly gives three easily-approachable front entrances to the West Wing, Indoor Forest, and East Wing (see the illustration) and numerous potential entrances through the numerous large-paned windows (though I would add some kind of challenge or obstacle to doing so like the windows being only breakable or high of the ground as the stairs up to the porticos suggest). Adding that front door entrance to the Indoor Forest gives players even more options.

Enlarge me

Replace the Hex Map

The hex map of Averoigne is functional and fine though it seems pointless to have it be at such a large scale (12 whopping miles per hex giving long travel periods between the sites). The hexes are superfluous anyway as the sites are teased and the exploration presumed to be goal oriented in searching for the four quest items to open the gate to Stephen Amber's tomb (and thus less about meticulous 360 degree exploration).

Tim Kirk's map (above) is such a beauty I would just go ahead and swap it out for the module map, maybe adding a simple pointcrawl diagram to keep track of the players' positions.

Kingdom of the Ghouls

One of my favorite bits in the module is Room 56 which appears at first glance to just be a boring old pit with some ghouls guarding it. The terse room description reveals it to be in fact a vast labyrinth and entrance to an entire land of ghouls (which naturally you had to develop on your own). I continue to eat up those kinds of challenges.

Fitting the faux-France angle here why not just take the fantastic sprawling maps and setting décor of the actual Paris Catacombs. Further make it an interactable place with interesting NPCs, hooks and internal tensions by reskinning the Dead Nations from Planescape Torment wholecloth.

Amp up the CAS

Rereading the module got me to also reread a few choices stories from CAS's Averoigne cycle. While Moldvay does a bang up job of adapting elements from the stories to a game context, I certainly felt that taking up his suggestion to expand the sites with unused elements from the stories was a good and noble effort. There is some weird fantasy gold missing such as the grotesque Mother of Toads in Les Hiboux, the haunted castle Fausseflammes, vampire lair etc that just cry out for someone with time on their hands to expand (cough, cough not me).

What would your Castle Amber look like?

Hill Cantons Compendium II Released

After half an eternity (in internet gaming circles time) the Hill Cantons Compendium has been revised and extended. You can Pay Whatever the Hell You Want for the PDF right here on DriveThru.

Gone thanks to Mike Davison's able layout hand is the clumsy (I would like to think charmingly amateur, but who am I fooling) layout and unused house rule sections. Expanded (almost doubled) are the number of dumb/brilliant player classes and I even threw several pages of special snowflake information about the Hill Cantons proper.

What you will find inside:

• Nine variant old school fantasy (and Labyrinth Lord)-compatible player classes: the Mountebank, Chaos Monk, Robo-Dwarf, Feral Dwarf, White Wizard, Half-Ogre, Black “Halflings”, Pantless Barbarian and, of course, the War Bear.
• Character background mini-game/alternative generator with quick random equipment charts.
• Zero-level character generation and play rules.
• Variant rules for simple attribute checks.