What else needs to be done, though? What areas are left unexplored? Where are the new frontiers for this corner of the hobby? Well, in my view they are:
- Innovations in overland travel. I think Veins of the Earth, when it eventually comes out, will do this for the underworld. And a lot has been written about dungeons. But it seems to me that "the PCs travel across the Dragon Mountains from point A to point B" is the kind of episode whose surface has barely been scratched. Making overland travel interesting is an area I want to see start to be really properly mined for ideas.
- Underwater adventures. The first person to make a really good underwater module, campaign setting, etc., wins a coconut.
- Exploration generally. There's a region of a campaign setting's map which is unexplored. The PCs set out to find out what's there. Currently what are the options apart from making it a hexcrawl with some random encounters and monster lairs thrown in?
- Usable systematic ways to make dungeons (or hexmaps or anything else) evolve over time with or without the influence of the PCs. I want to see ways to make a dungeon in particular change dynamically over time, so that the DM can roll a few dice in between visits by the PCs and find out what the inhabitants get up to in the interrim.
- Alchemy. Not just blowing stuff up.
- New real-world cultural inspiration from untapped mythologies and regions. Where's the Aztec-inspired campaign setting? The Maori-inspired one? The Ethiopian-inspired one? Etc.
That'll do for now. Get cracking.
Actually the AngryGM has a pretty nice article on overland travel. May not be exactly what you're looking for, but if you haven't read it before, I definitely recommend checking it out.
ReplyDeleteAnd I whole-heartedly agree on underwater adventures. I'm working on an idea myself, but the incorporation of the 3D elements is giving me most of my hangups.
There is no easy way out for a DM running an interesting campaign other than he read source material himself. If an adventure requires jungle/desert/mountain exploration then he should do research.
ReplyDeleteIt seems pointless to me that one person abstracts some rpg rules from his reading and writes them up for other gamers to use like some idiots' guide. There is no chance a DM can fake during play genuine understanding of real world exploration from rpg mechanics abstracted by someone else. In fact I would go further to say it is a mistake for someone who has done research to fix his knowledge in a paltry few tables and and rules with arbitrary probabilities. It is better to let what you read settle diffusely in your mind to be called on organically during play.
The reason overland travel is often a chore rather than interesting, it seems to me, is mainly because of the scale. Exploring a dungeon is interesting because it requires a lot of individual problems and choices that affect your immediate future, as opposed to just "ride west for three days". We all know the trick about ensuring there are multiple routes to a given destination presenting different difficulties - do we go through the Swamp of Despair or take a shortcut through the Forest of Flesh-Eating Apes - but that's usually large-scale too. Small hexes and a high degree of granularity would help solve this, but that requires a lot of work.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, encounters in a dungeon meaningfully interact with the environment, in terms of combat and manoeuvring, encounters in the middle of plains or undifferentiated forest not so much. I use an encounter table that also generates information about the surrounding terrain, and sometimes randomly-generated ruins and tombs and such, but I've found it not entirely satisfactory. One way around this would be to roll exclusively on a list of custom-built "special encounters" for each area, replacing those used with new ones as you go, but again there's the work/quality balance to contend with.
I have a Maori-inspired setting, BTW. Or rather, a large area with a lot of detail within a larger campaign that is Maori-inspired. I'm not sure why you're concerned about that last one; unlike your other complaints there's no benefit from following the example of others when creating a new setting.
Here's an innovation - or rather a regression to the very roots of RPGs - that would really be something: an efficient, workable and *fun* integration of RPG rules with wargaming ones. Chainmail and OD&D used to do this explicitly, I believe, and I know that there were later TSR attempts. They didn't appear to catch on. The very first Warhammer was in part an attempt to do something like this sort of scalable game, but it shed the RPG element fairly quickly.
ReplyDeleteWhat such a system would need is not just scalability from to brawl to skirmish to massed battle (and everything in between), but an ability to handle the micro (PC-level) stuff at the same time. And a way of avoiding too many sudden PC deaths! It's all very well having one hero the equivalent of 100 men until he gets shot at/speared/crushed by 200 men.
I could see the germ of an idea in piggybacking on Hordes of the Things - its speed of play, abstraction and 'zoomed-out' nature would allow plenty of space for PC goings on. If a turn is 15 minutes of game time but just takes five minutes in real time, there's plenty of opportunity for derring do.
This kind of thing wouldn't just be for high-level PCs; if it were done well, it would allow for lots of low-level Seven Samurai sort of stuff (which takes us back to Warhammer and the Magnificent Sven). And it would also enable lots of changes of pace: "After your success in driving off the hobgoblin raiders, you have been appointed military advisers to the Duke for his forthcoming campaign against the upstart state of Great Uncouth Bugbearia ...".
ACKS's Domains at War expansions purport to do just that. I do not have enough experience with the book to evaluate the success of its claims, but I find ACKS in general to be quite well-designed.
DeleteI have Domains at War but haven't read it yet.
DeleteThe new Amazons book is gonna be about wilderness and overland travel and hexcrawling
ReplyDeleteNice.
DeleteQuick note here as a New Zealander: Don't expect to see a setting based in Māori culture as it isn't in the public domain. The culture is alive and well, and most aspects of it are treated as taonga/significant and commercial usage is heavily frowned upon. The country's founding document basically ensures a level of protection of Māori tradition, and if it gets used in for-profit endeavours you do get chased up. There's valid need to tread carefully with this sort of thing - see the controversy around Monte Cook's use of First Nation imagery in The Strange for similar sentiments.
ReplyDeleteWhat a sad world we live in! (dodges out of the way to avoid the predictable backlash my comment will generate)
DeleteNo worries! Our culture is always open for use by anyone, anytime, any purpose, free of charge and scrutiny by utter fuckwits. Because that's just how we roll.
DeleteSincerely,
Europeans
Interesting. I can see both arguments to that. Things that are religiously or culturally significant should be treated sensitively. But on the other hand it's not as though there is any aspect of British culture that isn't appropriated willy-nilly by everybody in the world all the time.
DeleteI'm also a New Zealander. Since every reply was in some part against the Maori protection of their culture, I'll defend it, even though I don't fully agree with it myself. European culture does not exist as a minority within a much larger and all-pervasive foreign culture. It's self-centred and myopic to stand up as a product of the dominant Western culture, which has insinuated itself everywhere in the world, and proclaim that minority groups shouldn't take steps to preserve their own historic culture and ancestral religions simply because we don't feel the need to do the same.
DeleteI understand those arguments - that's why I'm sort of on the fence about it. I suppose fundamentally I find it all a bit too essentialist. Would it really endanger Maori culture if I was to make a game based on Maori folklore that had the nature of a homage? If so...how would that work? What would be the mechanism by which that game would act to undermine the preservation of Maori culture? I don't really think of culture as something that you can somehow steal or appropriate. Ideas are just ideas.
DeleteI guess that's a roundabout way of saying that loss of culture is a tragic thing and its acceleration is dismaying to me, but I'm not sure I understand why "cultural appropriation" is bad or to be thought of as part of that process.
I believe the concern is that pop-culture could distort and overshadow the original. Like, a taniwha is an important religious entity; I can see how it could be upsetting if the average person's reaction was "A taniwha? Oh yeah, I know that from D&D. It's a three-headed dragon that spits lightning", a la Tiamat. Mana, for example, has been co-opted as a word for "magic points", and that definition is far more well-known than the original concept (although it doesn't seem to me that it's done any harm).
DeleteMore interesting than an Aztec or Maori (or other non-euro) setting, might be to take another culture/mythology and reskin it so that at first glance everything looks like the stuff we know, only it isn't :-)
ReplyDeleteNew Fire: Temikamatl and Totems of the Dead aren't OSR, I suppose, but they're both pretty cool Pre-Columbian America settings.
ReplyDeleteTHE DEEP
ReplyDeleteunderwater adventure sourcebook by Susannah Redelfs
was published by Mystic Eye Games in 2003 for D20
easier to modify and adjust then reinvent the wheel
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+deep+underwater+adventures
Couple of things:
ReplyDeletePaolo Greco's Herbalism and Pharmacology system in Cthonic Codex seems like a great seed idea for an alchemical system.
JC mentioned a warfare system and I was reminded of Delta's Book of War. I think it's a little fiddly incorporating PCs, but it seems to scale pretty well for OD&D-based games.
I am right now working on an exploration sandbox set in a world largely inspired by Morrowind, Barsoom, and the chaotic good corner of Planescape.
ReplyDeleteIt still surprises me how very little seems to be done with settings that aren't either generic human/dwarf/elf fantasy or human only worlds with a strong medieval Europe bend. Yoon-Suin being the one notable exception. The world needs a lot more giant reptiles, giant insects, and giant cephalopods that are fighting beastmen and goblins with bronze spears and axes.
One minor innovation, that I've not actually seen mentioned before, is to ditch the hex map for a wilderness exploration campaign. Inspired the above mentioned travel system from Angry GM, I am going with a system where you need to have directions to known places to have any hope of finding anything in the forest. The idea of combing a six mile hex of dense forest for an unassuming hole in the ground just doesn't sit right with me. Finding a map with an X and going to look what you find at the spot is enough of exploration freedom to me. Accidental discoveries of minor lairs are handled as random encounters and these locations will only be added to the GM map once they were rolled in the encounter table.
@Yora
Deletemy Jasoomian Dreams blog spot might help you with your Barsoom research ... most of ERBs stuff is now in public domain ... also check out
Warriors of the Red Planet blog spot
Yeah, the hex thing really only makes sense for distance tracking, I think (and convenience). If you're interested in modelling actual travel/exploration it's pretty meaningless.
DeleteDo you mind unpacking why you don't like the OSR label?
ReplyDeleteI think the self-congratulatory nature of the phrase "old school" is a bit irritating when not used in a tongue-in-cheek way. Also a lot of the participants aren't really "old school" at all - I'm certainly not. I wasn't even born when OD&D or AD&D 1st edition came out.
Delete