Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps

 

The world is extremely big. It's hard to appreciate how big it is without spending a lot of time of it on foot, and without making the effort to notice the bigness. But once one does, one cannot help but reflect on it. Landscapes contain, and conceal, great vastnesses of contents which the mind struggles to really grasp.

The photograph above was taken from the top of the highest hill in the town in which I live. It looks out over parts of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, and to beyond. I would like you to notice two things about it.

The first is that the hills in the distance, the Cheviot Hills - where the red arrow is pointing - are about 40 miles away. The hill from which the picture was taken, Sheriff Hill, is only about 500 feet high. This is a simple but important thing to observe: from a mound of any sort of prominence, it is possible to see very far indeed across a roughly flat landscape. 

The second is that between the viewpoint in question and the hill pointed to by the red arrow there is a very great deal of content. There is an entire city in the way, for one thing, as well as one of the country's largest and longest rivers, not to mention a large number of villages, entire towns, many smaller hills that just look like low undulations from this distance, streams, ponds, lakes, marshes, forests, heaths, and fields. As well as this, there is a large number of ruins, castles, churches, monasteries, monoliths, caves, chasms, and other features which one might describe as 'interesting' in some way. The world is full of stuff to interact with, especially in a fairly crowded and historied place like England - to an almost self-parodying extent. It might not look like it, because so much of the contents of the world are coyly hidden when it is examined from a distance. But one need only roam around it to discover the extent to which this is true. 

I have written a lot about what you might call the DMing side of these phenomena - namely, the importance for a hexmap to have a proper density of contents. (See the loosely connected series here, here, here and here.) But it is also important for PCs to be given the sense that they are immersed in a landscape of the proper bigness - that, if they climb up a hill and take a look around they will see an awfully big world around them, and that they will also get the sense that it is filled with stuff to do and places to explore if only they are motivated to look. This - conjuring in the mind the awesome scale and fullness of what lies before them in confronting the abstraction of the hexmap - is of vital importance in conveying to the players the impression that a campaign setting is something that is going to be rewarding and exciting with which to interact. 

Authority at the Table

The start of an RPG campaign is always an interesting anthropological moment - particularly if, as is often the case with an online game, the players do not know each other very well or have never been in a campaign together before. Everybody starts out ostensibly as 'equals' in the sense that there is no pre-appointed hierarchy - the PCs do not arrive with a leader, second-in-command, quartermaster, etc. But gradually, in the first couple of sessions, a sort of hierarchy or assortment of roles develops. This is often left entirely implicit, but typically one PC will become the one who 'takes charge'; another will become the calm voice of reason; another will become the court jester; another will become the unpredictable nutjob; and so on. 

Intriguingly, this is one of those moments when what is happening both within the game and at the table coincides - it is a process that happens among the PCs 'in universe', as it were, and among the players themselves in the real world. Some strange alchemy of personality, context, and luck seems to determine it. 

I've been thinking about this issue a lot in the last month or so as a result of reading two books which, oddly, relate to the same theme. The first is The Lord of the Flies. I've embarked on a mission to read all of Golding's works (thanks in part to a long-ago recommendation from a commenter on here that I read The Inheritors) and have finally made my way to Flies after not having read it or thought much about it since I read it at school at the age of, I think, 12 or 13. I'm almost at the end, and I've found the experience surprisingly rewarding. Without having to read it for school, and without any pressure to discuss the contents in the light of the weary prodding of some jaded teacher, I've been able to simply enjoy its brilliance - and it is brilliant: a miracle of a book. 

As you may recall, authority and how it emerges is one of the main themes of The Lord of the Flies. The boys find themelves on an island in the absence of any pre-existing framework of authority - there are no adults, parents, teachers, policemen, and so on. They are thrust together as ostensible 'equals' (although some, the 'littluns', are exempt from this). And from that, a hierarchy emerges, as well as a set of vaguely defined but fairly fixed roles - the chief (Ralph), the head of the hunters (Jack), the voice of reason (Piggy), the visonary (Simon), the clown (Morris) and so on. It is an unstable structure, to be sure, but it remains in place for a long time - the narrative implies that the boys live in relative harmony for some months. 

What the book implies about the role of the leader is particularly interesting. At the beginning, indeed it is pretty much the first thing that happens, Piggy and Ralph find the conch, and Ralph uses it to summon the rest of the boys on the island. And he then provides them with a project: they are going to start a big fire and then be rescued. On this basis - the fact that he has a plan - he then becomes chief. Later - spoiler alert - the shift to the leadership of psychopathic Jack is accompanied by a similar assertion of a project: to hunt pigs and 'have fun'. 

This all makes visceral some remarks made by Alexandre Kojeve in The Notion of Authority. Here, Kojeve provides some brief notes of a theory of authority, and identifies a form of authority - that of the Leader - which emerges in this type of context. He puts before us the image of a group of children in a field. They are ostensibly in a position of atomised equality - each is a child the same as any other. But then one of them asserts a plan: he suggests going to raid the apple orchard next door to steal apples. Suddenly they are united - and he is the Leader.

He becomes the Leader, Kojeve elaborates, because he is the one who had a plan - he was able to envision a future (one in which the group gets the apples) and bring it into the present in the form of a project. He orients the group, as it were, towards the otherwise empty and contentless expanse of the future, and responds to it by imbuing it with content in the present. And everybody else goes along because of this claim to be able to see further; the others, recognising that they 'see less well and less for', willingly submit.

This obviously describes something of what goes on in the assertion of leadership by Ralph (and Jack) in The Lord of the Flies - and it is something that all of us remember from our playground days. The crudest and most immediate form of human authority is that in which a group of people are suddenly united (it can happen almost instantaneously) by one of them putting forward a project and orienting the others towards a future. And this is also something that all of us will recognise from playing RPGs, too. There, authority as such seems to emerge when one player (and one PC) shows himself willing to claim to see further than the others and lay out a project - and when the others, acccepting it, go along. It is not always necessarily the same person - authority in this context is very fluid - but it will tend to be the case that it most often is. There will be one person who the others tend to look towards for decisions. And this role will be taken on very early - usually in the first couple of sessions. In a brief moment, authority will be up for grabs, and seized, at the start.

What determines the identity of the person who will take on this role is mysterious - I earlier attributed it to an 'alchemy of personality, context, and luck' - and the process is, I think, inevitable. And it has its advantages and drawbacks. Without leaders, human beings are indecisive and vapid. But leaders can direct their charges into hideous mistakes. We will all be familiar with such scenarios. One way of shaking things up and experimenting in interesting ways might be to formalise roles and deliberately, before play starts, elect one person to be the leader - or even to circulate the leadership role each session. I would be curious to learn if anybody has ever tried such experiments, and what the results have been like. 

Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types

This post is a proposed Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign TYpes (or RISCTY - yes, I went there) for D&D and other fantasy tabletop RPGs. 

What is an incompletely systematised campaign type? In essence, it is a campaign type which OSR and wider nerd game blogosphere luminaries have not yet managed to exhaustively flesh-out through elucidating general principles, providing generalised or specific advice, coming up with iterative methods for generating content, producing substantive gameable material, and so on. In practice, it is probably best understood in opposition to the quintessential Completely Systematised Campaign Type - the megadungeon. Thanks to the hard work and applied wisdom of generations of deep and serious thinkers, nobody in 2024 who has access to the internet and knows what the acronym 'OSR' stands ought to have any difficulty setting up and running such a campaign, and will find a vast wealth of content that will help him to do so - indeed, scientists say that the number of blog entries dedicated to the matter of successful megadungeon campaigning would wrap around the Earth fifty-thousand times if printed out on postage stamps laid back to back.

Other more or less Completely Systematised Campaign Types would include the sandbox hexmap 'Western Marches' style campaign (even if I still think nobody has really come up with a way to make wilderness travel evocative and interesting) and perhaps the urban, city-based type. 

Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types that I think any sane person will at some point have entertained will include:

• The Lord of the Flies/Lost/Robinson Crusoe style campaign, in which the PCs are washed up ashore in some improbable spot without possessions of any kind.
• The underwater campaign, in which the PCs are inhabitants of an actual below-the-surface hexmapped region, or where most of the play takes place in such a setting.
• The saltbox campaign, in which sea travel, ship-to-ship combat, weather, trade, and so on are made the focus.
• The virtuous sandbox campaign, in which the PCs roam about doing good (although I have jotted down some ideas about this)
• The institutional campaign, in which the PCs have adventures in a narrowly-defined single location such as a monastery, university, cathedral, castle, etc.
• The murder-mystery investigation campaign, with bonus points if the mysteries involve the use of known D&D spells

Add your own in the comments!

Chaos: The Investigation Without End

Over the Christmas break, I caught up on a bit of reading for 'pleasure' with CHAOS, Tom O'Neill's account of his madcap 20-year effort to get to the heart of the Manson murders. I don't think this is a spoiler - the effort was fruitless. But the book does throw up a huge amount of fascinating speculation, and thereby succeeds in casting a lot of doubt on the 'official' story as to why the Tate-LaBianca killings happened. It may be the only book of its kind - devoted to debunking a widely accepted version of events and then, Rashomon-like, giving a smorgasbord of other options to believe in without itself committing to any of them. In the end, I don't think it quite works, but it is at least a riveting read. 

The experience of reading CHAOS, in any case, struck me as a good metaphor for a problem that has always made it difficult for me to conceive of running a genuine investigative 'mystery' game - namely, coming up with an Agatha Christie-level scenario that the players can solve, which doesn't feel too easy or too hard, and which doesn't rest on the tabletop RPG equivalent of pixel-bitching. That is to say, good mystery stories are like intricate faberge eggs in which every detail matters and the solution requires careful elucidation and focused awareness of all moving parts. And this isn't what tabletop RPGs excel at - RPG players are mainly good at causing, well, chaos, like a herd of bulls in a series of china shops. Coming up with a good, interconnected series of clues, NPCs, etc., in such a way that a group of players can figure out a way to the final mystery without getting sidetracked feels like a prohibitively difficult challenge.

RPG mysteries, in other words, strike me as being rather like O'Neill's frustrated attempts to uncover the truth about what really motivated Charles Manson. He starts off with a curious sequence of events - the murders themselves. And then he starts pulling at various threads which lead him to a haphazard collection of encounters with drug dealers, record producers, Beach Boys, former police officers, district attorneys, private investigators, washed up actors and has-beens, Hollywood stars and CIA spooks. He learns about elephants being dosed up with LSD, the infiltration of hippie-dom by the FBI, the corruption of the LA Sheriff's Office, possible murders incompetently disguised as suicides, free love gone wrong, torture and mayhem. It's very entertaining. But it goes nowhere.

It reads, in other words, rather like the 'Actual Play' from an RPG campaign (Unknown Armies, maybe?) in which the DM flung together an initial mysterious scenario and a big cast of NPCs, locations and events connected to it, without having a clear idea in his own mind what was really going on behind the scenes or what 'really happened' - and then just let the PCs have at it and see what they stumbled through. And whenever it seemed like they were about to exhaust a lead, he'd throw three more into the mix. It strikes me that somebody could easily run a campaign that way almost indefinitely, with the PCs going about ostensibly investigating something (a murder, a paranormal event, etc.) and from there simply uncovering yet more mysteries, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, having weird encounter after weird encounter, and never actually coming to an end. This would be a sort of open-ended investigation in which the journey was everything and the destination nonexistent.

This, I think, would at least be achievable and is, I suppose, what is really implied behind the classic idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign - a sort of sandbox of plot hooks that the PCs pursue until death or insanity claims them. But would it be satisfactory to actually play?