The Contents of Hexes

A few days ago I posted a selection of grabs from google maps, indicating how large a 1-mile hex actually is, and the kind of things that you might find in one. Then Chris responded, to the effect that (and I'm putting words into his mouth here) 1-mile hexes are all very well, but they are perhaps too granular - it's a heck of a lot of work to map out a setting at the 1-mile level. He posits an "emergent exploring rule" for 6-mile hexes, wherein you simply discover more things in a 6-mile hex the more time you spend exploring it and the more guidance/information you have about it.

The commenters immediately provide solutions, which are pretty good. Myrystyr's one seems like the best:

A generalised X-in-dY check per Z-time-period, mayhap? Default 2/1d6 per day - 1/ for stumbling-about blind luck, 3/ or 4/ for guides, clues, or character types with better search capability - and up to 3 or 4 times per day for potentially feature-rich locales... And, roll two different-coloured d6 at the same time, 1 the feature check and 1 the encounter check.

I like the elegant simplicity of this, and I think you can add some other modifiers: the chance would increase or decrease depending on terrain (lower for a forest, higher for plains), demographics (lower for empty wilderness, higher for settled), and so on.

Chris also suggests some other rules of thumb:

• Castles, cities and the like should all be in plain sight unless intentionally hidden away (like Gondolin or Derinkuyu). Heck, roads point you directly to most of them.
• Infamous lairs, ruins and dungeons should, of course, retain their "Here be dragons" hex map icons and easy-to-find status. The yokels can point out exactly in which direction the castle we don't go near lies.
• More obscure lairs, lost ruins, buried tombs and especially treasure map loot should require a bit of active hunting out by adventuring parties.

The main, immediately identifiable problem is that you now need some way of governing how many locales can be discovered in this way. The amount of "interesting stuff" in a hex has to be finite. But it is also variable. In my 1-mile hex examples, some have only one thing that you could make into a "locale", but some have several. This is a function, mostly, of how settled the area is, but it also introduces other factors. The more mountainous a region is, for instance, the more stuff you will get per hex on average, because each hex represents more land. (Hexes are "as the crow flies", whereas the land underneath is folded by hills and valleys, making it more packed with actual physical geography.)

What I would suggest is that, by default for a 6-mile hex, any settlement of more than 250 people, any castles or towers, and major geographical features like lakes, rives and mountains, are basically discoverable without the players doing much more than travel through the hex a few times.

You would then have a default of 3 'discoverable' things per 6-mile hex, modifiable by geography, level of settlement, history, and so on:

• One of these would be something that the players can find if they make an effort to explore. All it would require would be for them to say "we look around the area".
• Two of them would be 'secret', obscure, or lost things (a ruin, buried tomb, a secretive monster's lair, etc.) These would be near impossible to find by exploration without some level of guidance or inside knowledge. 

This would allow the players to discover stuff just by looking, but would also reward efforts they made to interact with locals to try to get information, and to risk random encounters by searching.

"Why 3 things per 6-mile hex? Isn't that too much?" I hear you cry.

The answer is: no. To illustrate, I'll use two of the 1-mile examples I put up a few days ago, zoomed out to 6-miles (ish; they're a bit smaller and probably more like 8 kilometres):

 

This is Canterbury. As you can see, there is not only the city itself, but two other large villages or small towns (Bridge and Sturry) plus a shitload of other hamlets, and plenty of woods as well as farmlands. In a densely settled area like this (probably much more densely settled than in medieval times, admittedly) you would need at the very least 3 adventuring locales not even mentioning Canterbury itself.

 

This is Tiree -a good chunk of the island. Note that there are 5 large bays to be found here, along with several smaller ones and a lot of little sheltered coves in the centre-right. There are four scattered farming villages, an airport, and 3 lochs. There are also some tiny islets here and there in the sea, too. Again, at least 3 adventuring locales needed.

But 3 is a default, and can be reduced. For example:

 

The mountains of Assynt. It's empty and devoid of settlement, though there is still plenty to interact with - 6 named lochs, plus lots of smaller ones, and a folded, rugged landscape concealing God Knows What. 3 adventuring locales might be inappropriate in such a landscape, because you don't want to be silly - not every lake has to have a Water in the Waters; not every mountain has to sit atop an ancient dwarven citadel. But perhaps it's also unrealistic to just say "it's an empty hex".

Of course, you wouldn't want your players to figure your system out. An alternative would be to randomise the number of adventuring locales in a 6-mile hex: d3-1 for sparse, d3 for average, d3+1 for settled, etc. Modified also by type of geography.

In Which I Am A Hypocrite

Patrick, one of the players in my regular group, has posted an AP of sorts for the session we had on Tuesday. We decided to create a shared world with Microscope, in which we plan to share a rotating GMship and run different campaigns in different genres.

I think we all started off with good intentions to create a darkish, hard SF setting, but things got weird, silly and fucked up very quickly - it progressed from a reasonable beginning to a sprawling melange involving, amongst other things, war meetings between the President of Humanity and his Chief Warlock, "ontological warheads", and a not-Tyranid race called the HMBTs (Hideous Murdering Bug Things). It ended up with a genetically engineered Velociraptor called Spielberg tending a sculpture garden in which a murder was taking place, on a space station in the Oort Cloud with a pseudo-Byzantine culture featuring an AI who was basically a futuristic version of OK Cupid. (And this after I'd claimed hypocritically to prefer my settings to be not-so-gonzo literally the day before.)

You can read all about it here, if you're odd enough to be interested.

Being an Illustration of the Contents of 1-Mile Hexes Through Examination of Divers Locations in the British Isles

How much adventure is contained in a 1-mile hex? Usually, more than you would think, although it depends very much on the context. Here are a series of illustrations - screen grabs from google maps of various locations around the British Isles, each approximately 1 square mile (at rough and ready estimates).

This is Canterbury, an ancient town in the South East of England. Here, as you can see, 1 square mile is enough to contain the entire old town (the oval shape of roads in the centre of the map, bounded in the West by the yellow ring road and in the East by Broad Street and Lower Bridge Street). The old town was encircled by huge walls built during the Roman era and maintained throughout the Middle Ages (and still present in places today). It contains, amongst other things, one of the largest and most famous cathedrals in Britain, numerous other churches, the town hall, the old 15th century library, a vast number of pubs, shops and restaurants, and several museums. Outside of the old town are two railway stations, wooded areas, plenty of houses, recreation grounds, and a university. Clearly, in this 1-mile hex the question is not where adventure could be found, but where it couldn't be.

This is an area of quintessential English countryside, in Somerset. There is a small village in the North East corner - a row of houses along a road - and several farms. While it looks relatively empty, each of those fields is divided by a hedgerow, and the land is flat, making visibility difficult. Travelling across this area would be fraught with tension as, effectively, you would never be able to see more than about 100 yards in any direction at any time, and more often much less.

This is a wooded area in the Forest of Dean, in South Wales. This is, I think, what much of Western Europe would once have resembled - mostly forest, with tracks and roads criss-crossing it, and the occasional glade where trees have been cleared for grazing or firewood. Even though the area is small, it is easy to get lost and even easier to stumble across dangerous wild animals, nefarious forest denizens, and god knows what. The glades would be dangerous to cross, as you would be exposed and plainly visible to onlookers. Naturally, the forest could hide openings to tunnels, ruins, abandoned camps, dead travellers, and so on.

This is Coquet Island, off the coast of North East England. It contains the ruins of a medieval monastery and a lighthouse, and is a refuge for seabirds - there are 18,000 puffins living on it. Clearly, the monastery could be haunted, be the entrance to a dungeon, or whatever else, and the nesting seabirds don't have to be puffins - they could be something more valuable or dangerous.

A Loch, in the Highlands of Scotland. This is rough, barren landscape - not a tree to be seen anywhere, or a scrap of cover except for heather and the folds of the land itself. Here, encounters would take place at a distance, as parties would be able to see each other plainly at great distances. At the same time, adventuring parties cross the area would be completely exposed to, perhaps unexpected, aerial attack. The Loch itself is dark and forboding; does it contain a Watcher in the Waters, the spawn of some ancient god, a forgotten plesiosaur? 

A stretch of open coastline on the island of Tiree. Note the airstrip in the North West - not very D&D. There are some tiny hamlets in the West, but the main attraction is of course the bay: a perfect landing point for vessels. Traders, vikings, colonists, explorers?

This is the Southern edge of Loch Ness, in Scotland. Fort Augustus guards the canal which links Loch Ness to other waters further south and allows boats to travel all the way from Inverness, the only city worthy of the name North of Aberdeen, with Fort William, the other major settlement in the Highlands. Fort Augustus itself is small, but includes notable attractions, not to mention a series of locks which control river traffic on the canal. To the East is the rough coast of Loch Ness itself, forested and dangerous.

This is the true wilds of the Highlands, in Assynt, one of the most sparsely populated areas of Europe. This is harsh, remote, and unforgiving landscape, infested with midges, roamed by wolves, bears and who knows what else. In the South West is a deep forest of primeval Caledonian woodland; in the North East is a river with streams flowing downhill into boggy marshland in the North. Cross this wilderness at your peril.

If 1-mile hexes ever feel too small, or you find yourself leaving them blank on the map, think of this post and refer back to it in your mind, and give yourself a good sound spanking for ever having been so foolish.

Authenticity and Gamability and Gonzo, Oh My!

In the comments to yesterday's post, richard asks:

I find my tastes changing over time - I used to want authentick flavours, it didn't matter of what, really, but I wanted my Japan to be "really Japanese" and my medieval Europe to be "really medieval." Nowadays I've slid some distance from that position toward Xena - I want gonzo mashup more and find authentick a bit of a bore. Where do you find yourself on that scale?

The answer is: it depends. Slightly more detailed: I'm somewhere in the middle. Slightly more detailed yet: I can find virtues at various points of the spectrum, although too much gonzo makes me want to run for the hills.

I used to be more serious about setting. I actually put this down to lack of face-to-face game time. I'm not sure if this observation holds for everybody, but I think obsession with setting design is a kind of warped outgrowth from the mind of DMs who don't get the chance to actually play much. It was certainly true for me: I wasn't doing any face-to-face gaming (just lacklustre PBEMing and PBPing, which is generally quite lacklustre) and yet I wanted to - and I still enjoyed thinking about campaign worlds, drawing maps, creating bestiaries and NPCs, imagining trade routes and where resources would be found, dreaming up languages, and so on.

This also caused me to spend a lot of time and energy pursuing "authenticity"; the more time you have to think, the more you do think. I often thought about how to create a "really Japanese" game, for instance, given my experience living in the country and my interest in its history, and my utter loathing and disdain for the way in which RPG geeks approach the subject (which is either "samurai and ninja, cool!" or "anime, cool!"; there is not enough space in my head for my eyes to roll sufficiently far back to communicate how much I despise both Western anime fandom and samurai-wankery). 

Now I'm gaming quite a lot, and I'm also really busy, so my thinking time has been drastically reduced. This has both removed the urge to pursue authenticity, and also the opportunity. So while my setting design does not lean so far to the gonzo, it certainly doesn't involve chasing after the pipe dream of realism either. My main priorities are, simply, "What will I actually use?" and "What will be good for the game?"

But that said, too much gonzo doesn't really do it for me either. At a certain stage, it all feels like trying too hard to be irreverant. This leads us back to a post about humour that I wrote a few weeks ago. There's a strand of geekdom that repels me really quite strongly, and which others seem to find unaccountably attractive; it is the kind of straining towards "gonzo" that leads to inquisitors in Warhammer 40,000 with names like "Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau" and religions surrounding vast floating puddings or called "The Church of the Lucid Shirt Button". That kind of thing is so unfunny and uninteresting to me that I can't put it into words: it makes me want to bite my own fist for want of punching it through the face of anybody who would suggest otherwise. If that's what "gonzo mashup" means then no, thankyou, you may keep it, and also please fuck off and die.

If, on the other hand, "gonzo mashup" stretches to "this is a pseudo-oriental setting so I am going to borrow heavily from Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian and whatever other mythology because hey, life's too short and really, who cares?", then I am all for it.

Pseudo-Orientalism Grab-Bag

One of my absolute favourite setting ideas in the OSR blogosphere is one that (to me) got surprisingly little mention on the other blogs - Mu-Pan, from the Land of NOD. This is a pseudo-oriental setting of the absolute highest quality, far better in my view that anything TSR came up with. Take for example this:

6038. Umborodom’s Abbey: There is an ancient fortress-monastery constructed here of red bricks and tall, peaked roofs of copper. The roof is covered with hundreds of tall, copper spires that attract lightning. The monastery is dedicated to Umborodom, whose hound was the thunder. The monastery is inhabited by 16 low-level sohei and their abbess, Deneg, a temperamental woman with blue-gray eyes and a powerful hatred of the Jade Empress, who quells her lovely storms and keeps her “hounds” hungry.

The “hounds” are three lightning elementals that dwell within a golden matrix that serves as the monastery’s idol. The monastery is surrounded by a village of red brick buildings inhabited by about 150 tin miners. The mines are of ancient vintage, but still producing tin and a few tourmalines and topaz each month. Tourmalines are claimed by the sohei and topaz by the empress.

The sohei of the monastery wear blue armor and carry large, steel-shod mallets.

This:

5140. Fey Samurai: A fairy knight in the trappings of a samurai has made camp here. He has been wandering the land searching for an honest man, for it is the kiss of an honest man that will awaken the Silver Maiden who sleeps beneath the mountains.

And this:

4921. Forest of Legs: The forest of trees in this hex gradually turns into a forest of giant, stone legs. The legs are limestone and carved from the “living rock” as some people say. They once held aloft a create limestone cavern that was apparently pulled apart in ancient times. The woodland of stone legs is inhabited by giant blue eagles and silver foxes, and a few of the legs serve as the roosts of hermits, devout wushen who seek enlightenment through the denial of comforts like regular meals and bathing.

It's to die for if pseudo-orientalism is your thing - which it is mine.

It's reminiscent to me of an old favourite of mine: Sword of the Samurai. This was a fantasy gamebook set in "Hachiman", the quasi-Japan of the Fighting Fantasy world - another setting which, like Matt's Mu-Pan, captures the atmosphere of a fae-tinged, delicate, misty, melancholic Eastern "other". Edward Said would not approve, but who gives a fuck what that old bore thinks?

Finally, to round off this rather incoherent and unstructured ramble of a blog entry, I would like to direct new readers to one of my all time favourite pieces of pseudo-orientalism: Borges' The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, in which he fabricates an ancient Chinese encyclopedia which categorises all the animals in the world into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor
2. the embalmed
3. the trained
4. piglets
5. sirens
6. the fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. those included in this classification
9. those that tremble as if they were mad
10. innumerables
11. those that are drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. those that have just broken a flower vase
14. those that from a distance look like flies

If you don't find yourself wishing that this encyclopedia really existed, I don't know what's wrong with you.

Describe and Stat this Monster

This is an aye-aye:

Let's D&D-ify it. Give it some stats, special abilities, a different name, a background, whatever you like. Post in the comments or your own blog. Do it now.

The Hickman Revolution and the Frustrated Novelist

There's a post today on The Mule Abides about "the Hickman Revolution", or, as James Maliszewski put it in the Golden Age of his blog, How Dragonlance Ruined Everything. The theory here, for those who are unwilling to follow links for some reason, is that the Dragonlance series, and Tracy Hickman in particular, are in no small part responsible for the general slide in gaming style and gaming design from 'traditional' sandbox-style play towards GM-plot-driven obsession with 'story' and, basically, railroaded narrative. The 'smoking gun' is the introduction to Pharoah, in which Hickman sets out a manifesto of sorts for his own design philosophy:

1. A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing. 
2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into play itself. 
3. Dungeons with an architectural sense. 
4. An attainable and honorable end within one to two sessions playing time.

The Mule Abides and Grognardia deal with these issues eloquently, and how they are indicative of the (lamentable, to me) shift in RPG design philosophy which occurred during the 80s, so I won't cover them here - I provide all this by way of background.

What I would like to add is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to the shift towards GM-driven story - Hickman is not just a game designer. He is also a novelist. Indeed, I think that it's safe to say that he is primarily a novelist. And the four elements of his design manifesto are exactly the kind of thing that somebody who wants to be a novelist would want in a game: objectives (to drive the plot), and intriguing story, a world that makes sense, and closure/a happy ending.

They are not the kind of things that somebody who just wants to create role playing games would want in a game, which would be more like: objectives (to keep score), freedom (for players to pursue their own goals), challenging settings, and open-ended design. 

There is a reason why Hickman's approach chimed with many gamers, and why ultimately it came to dominate the hobby during the 80s, 90s and 00s before story/hipster/forge games and the OSR began to slay the beast: many, I would say perhaps the majority, of GMs are frustrated novelists, just like Tracy Hickman was. To them, there was an allure in the idea that they could create games which were not mere games (a frivolous pursuit) but which were also stories - it was an outlet for their desire to be writers, which they could not fulfil due to lack of talent, time, dedication or all three.

Tracy Hickman turned out to be a decent story teller and writer, in actual fact (despite Dragonlance, the Death Gate Cycle, and so forth being terribly cliched and lightweight, the guy knows how to write). But the impact of his ideas, and those of others like him, on the hobby, have been rather negative, because all those frustrated-novelist GMs can't become writers too. Their desire to be novelists can only be channelled into their other imaginative activity - gaming - where they have a captive audience (their players) and a blank canvas (a 4 hour gaming session on a Saturday afternoon). This is the perfect storm for railroad-y, GM-led, story-obsessed play.

I feel bad for Tracy Hickman, as in our corner of the blogosphere his name seems to have become synonymous for "where it all went wrong". This is harsh, because he's obviously a very nice guy, and talented with it. This post is not to impugn him or his reputation. It's to lament the way in which D&D in particular has become a vehicle for so many people who really want to be doing something else than playing games: writing fantasy novels for a living. There is little that could be more detrimental to good gaming.

HP Lovecraft and the BBC

Somebody discerning seems to have taken over the BBC news magazine - which is usually an unbearably banal thing airing the most pathetic lightweight stories you can possibly imagine. (Stuff like "Is cheese good for you?") Last week it was rather sympathetically talking about Warhammer 40,000. Today, it's paying tribute to HP Lovecraft on the 75th anniversary of his death. (The piece is written by Ramsay Campbell, who by coincidence is the father of a childhood friend of mine, as well as being possibly the best living British horror writer.) The conclusion is very nice, and bears reprinting:

In striving to write fiction which would make positive use both of his talents and of his limitations, in particular his difficulties with creating characters, Lovecraft developed near-perfect structures for the horror story.  

His determination to convey awe gives his tales a quality too seldom found. His work unites the British and American traditions of horror fiction - it unites the realistic and the fantastic, the personal and the cosmic, the occult and the scientific.

I wonder what anniversaries are coming up that the BBC news magazine can cover. They've done the 25th year of 40k, they've done 75 years since Lovecraft's death... What next? 25 years since Iain M Banks published Consider Phlebas? 25 years since the release of Cyborg Commando? I notice that next year is the 25th anniversary of Cyberpunk 2020. I hope you're paying attention, BBC news magazine editors.

Sabaw

So yesterday I generated some random races on which to hang a campaign setting. They were the Jackalwere, beaver, sirine, ankheg, wererat, and satyr. Here goes:

Jackalwere and Wererats
These are the females and males of the same race. Their society is matriarchal and dominated by the Jackalwere, who select mates from the wererat populace. In order to breed, both must assume human form, though generally they appear as hybrids. They live in cities of pyramids, surrounded by moats. The Jackalwere inhabit the pyramids and the wererats live in the subterranean moats around them.

Sirine and Satyrs
The sirine inhabit reefs and kelp forests in off shore shallows, and like the Jackalwere and Wererats form a symbiotic relationship with coastal communities of satyrs, who provide them with "companionship" and breeding. Neither sirine nor satyr forms organised societies, preferring to live in relative anarchy.

Ankheg
Intelligent Ankhegs live in huge underground kingdoms deep underneath the thickest forests. They war constantly with all other beings, seeing them merely as food, and they cannot be communicated with - their language is composed entirely of posture and the release of hormones, which other races cannot emulate. Their culture and society is largely unknown.

Beaver
Intelligent beavers inhabit lakes and rivers, creating huge riparian dam-cities. Surrounding these cities they tend huge areas of cultivated forest, so as to provide them with endless supplies of wood. This brings them into constant conflict with Ankheg interlopers who seek the loamy soil of these beaver-made forests.

I call this campaign setting "Symbiants and Also Beavers and Ankheg World". Or Sabaw for short.

Random Campaign Setting Major Races

Let's play a game. Take the 2nd edtion AD&D Monstrous Manual (or any bestiary of your choice), and randomly select 2d6 monsters from it using this.

For the Monstous Manual this is between 1 and 1,089 (the number of monsters in the book), or you could do it by page number if that's easier. 

If you get something unintelligent or of animal intelligence, imagine an intelligent version.

These selections are the dominant intelligent races of a campaign world. You now have to figure out how to build a setting around them.

I got 6:

Jackalwere, beaver, sirine, ankheg, wererat, satyr. I'll talk about a campaign world idea based on them tomorrow.