The Great North Is Great

In the new year, I will be moving towards a release of a Kickstarter for The Great North, and I am confident that I have enough of a grasp of the logistics, and am at an advanced enough stage of the project (all text and art is complete) to rapidly move from there to fulfilment. 

I will be putting up some teasers in the coming months, but in the meantime I merely wanted to show off some of Tom Kilian's simply exceptional art:

Wraparound front/back cover

The Hardwater

The Map

Joyous Garde

Drummond's Quarter

Cuddy's Well

The Emperor's Meadow

Twice-Bound

Knucker with Lamprey-men

Pwca

Silky and Shelly-coat

Knight-errant

Stuck Gates

Deadyoungestson

Grindylow

Lares

One of the 'zoomed in' maps

The Last Temptation of the DM: Why a Living Breathing World Needs Systematising

Is it possible to create a sandbox that is a 'living, breathing world'?

No. It is possible to create one that to all intents and purposes resembles such a thing. But we fool ourselves if we imagine that paper, dice, pencils and a bit of imagination can actually produce, rather than create a simulacrum of, genuine complexity.

The reason this comes up is that, in a recent post, I made the claim that it was not possible to set up a sandbox in which the PCs are the good guys responding to threats posed by evildoers without a way of systematising how the evildoers behave. There was some pushback on this in the comments, but I stood by my position. If there is not a way of systematising evildoer behaviour - if one just says to oneself, 'Well, I will just treat the evildoers in the sandbox as though they were PCs and ascribe to them motives and agency accordingly' then one will end up producing what is in effect a railroad. What do I mean by this?

Picture a hexmap. And picture a campaign in which the PCs are the 'goodies' - Knights of the Square Table. Their job is to protect the weak from evildoers. They live in Bamelot, where they serve King Marthur. 

For the sake of simplification, let's then say there are three factors of evildoers which you have created. There is the Red Baron and his minions, the Purple Vampire Count, and the Yellow Nosed Dwarfs.

Everything is set up - the hexmap is keyed and populated, Bamelot is filled up with interesting NPCs, etc. The campaign now begins: it's the 1st of January. Now, you want your sandbox to feel as though it is a 'living, breathing world'. So...what happens?

Well, if it is a living, breathing world, what do the Red Baron and his minions, the Purple Vampire Count, and the Yellow Nosed Dwarfs do? They pursue objectives. What are their objectives? Well, let's say the Red Baron, er, wants to abduct King Marthur's daughter because he wants to force her to marry him. And let's say the Purple Vampire Count needs the blood of innocent children to survive. And then let's say the Yellow Nosed Dwarfs want to raid Bamelot's treasure vaults to get King Marthur's gold.

Ok. So what happens now? Hmm. Let's say that the Red Baron sends his flying monkeys to kidnap King Marthur's daughter. And let's say that it will take them about two days to arrive based on distances on the map. Then let's say that the Purple Vampire Count goes off to raid the village of Autumnfield, and it will take five days for him to get there. And then let's say it will take a month for the Yellow Nosed Dwarfs to finish digging their tunnels all the way to Bamelot.

Right. So, in the meantime, what are the PCs doing? Maybe 'going out on patrol'. Maybe consulting the wizard Gerlin about what his soothsaying skills suggest about the emergence of future threats. Let's say they've chosen to go out on patrol. What happens? Hmm. Well, it would be boring if nothing happened when the PCs were out on patrol. So maybe they could get the opportunity to discover clues or hear rumours about flying monkeys, which would then give them the opportunity to pre-empt the Red Baron's kidnap attempt. Or maybe they could encounter some unrelated fourth threat? Or maybe they could get the chance to uncover information that might alert them to the activities of the Purple Vampire Count or the Yellow Nosed Dwarfs...?

Do I need to belabour the point further? I hope not. There is nothing about any of the above that is illegitimate and I do not mean to suggest that this way of playing a game would not be fun, but it is not a 'living, breathing world'. It is a world in which the DM is deciding more or less everything, either on the fly, or in reference to what he has pre-planned or thought up in advance - and, crucially, in light of his own particular tastes. Yes, the PCs do have a bit of agency in how they respond to events as they unfold. But they are really just living out an interaction with whatever the DM happens to think would be appropriate at any given moment. And they will not therefore be interacting with a 'living, breathing world' but in the end reacting to the DM's own implicit or explicit ideas about how he wants the campaign to emerge. What happens does not come about organically but because of what the DM wills, even if what he is willing does take place in response to what the PCs do at a particular time. And what happens in these circumstances will inevitably be led by whatever the DM happens to think would be good, or fun - in reference to his own tastes, desires, and vision.

A little of this is inevitable in a role playing game, as we all know, but by far the more authentic and, I think, rewarding way to simulate the existence of a 'living, breathing world' in such a way as to avoid the DM simply making things up as he goes along is to set up neutral systems of generation and decision-making. Instead of beginning with a Red Baron and a Purple Vampire Count and a tribe of Yellow Nosed Dwarfs, and ascribing to them motives, one instead comes up with a way of generating evildoers and then creating interactions between them, and the world around them, through the use of random tables. One comes up with neutral ways of determining, through the use of dice or other methods, how they pursue their objectives, and when. One creates methods for determining how new threats arise. One creates ways for seasonal and climactic factors to influence events. And so on. One, in other words, systematises as much as possible so as to ensure that the players are not in the end simply 'adventuring' in the DM's own hall of mirrors. 

The result is not a 'living, breathing world' either, but it is one that is much less immediately a representation of the DM's own conceptions of what would be best at any given moment. And that is a world which, while not 'living and breathing', does at least contain space for player agency to develop.

Teaching Tricks to Lego Cars: Being an NPC talking to an NPC

At the pub the other night a friend of mine was recounting an episode from the Tired Parent Wars. Apparently, his young son has got into a routine of taking a handful of lego cars with him into the water at bath time, so they can do 'tricks' in the bath itself (jumps, half-pipes, etc.). My friend was expressing his exasperation at the fact that this has transformed into a situation in which he (the father) has to teach new tricks to the cars and has to do it in an 'in universe' voice - so that he has to talk to the cars like a school teacher and instruct them in what to do, while also being in control of them as they perform the tricks in question. (His son apparently just watches.) 

My friend was recounting what a brain-borking activity this is, and you can understand why. 'Being' a car, as it were, doing tricks, is not too complicated. Nor would it be too complicated to pretend that one is the driver of one of the cars. But there is something about the extra level of creativity that is required to imagine being an instructor of a fictitous person, who one is also pretending to be in control of, that elevates the task beyond the capacities of the frazzled father after a long day at work. 

This spurred me to reflect on what has always struck me to be the most difficult and often most inert and boring aspect of being a DM, which is carrying on a conversation between two NPCs while the PCs listen. Acting the part of an NPC interacting with the PCs is not complicated, and often fun. But to carry on an overheard conversation of any length - say, more than four or five lines of dialogue - between two NPCs and make it interesting (at least without a pre-prepared script) is tough. Generally it is dull; at its worst, it can descend into a much less funny verson of a Tommy Cooper routine:

The only exceptions would appear to be those DMs blessed with genuine acting talent and a range of voices, who are able to dramatise speech between NPCs and hold attention - not by any means straightforward.

Can this skill be cultivated? I suppose it can, and one could even imagine that, blessed with time and inclination, one could practice and hone the ability. Just consult the following table, roll the dice, and see what type of conversation comes up, and then act it out: set yourself a timer (2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes) and see how long you can keep it going. Though I recommend doing it with nobody else in earshot...

Dice	NPC 1	Wants to	NPC 2
1	Street hoodlum	Intimidate	Street hoodlum
2	Elderly sage		Elderly sage
3	Witch	Seduce	Witch
4	Knight		Knight
5	Ogre	Persuade	Ogre
6	Cat woman		Cat woman
7	Innkeeper	Trick	Innkeeper
8	Mayor		Mayor
9	Urchin	Warn	Urchin
10	Fisherman		Fisherman
11	Farmer	Plot with	Farmer
12	Tavern wench		Tavern wench

But Why Must Evil Barons and Vampire Counts Intervene?

In my most recent post and various others over the years, I made the case that the default OSR-style fantasy sandbox (and I suppose any other kind of sandbox) is ill-suited without modifications to a campaign in which the PCs are, self-consciously or otherwise, 'goodies'. There needs to be a way, I suggested, to systematise the appearances of threats which the PCs-as-goodies then defend against.

This prompted the following comment, on my most recent post:

But, in a game, a vile world is most conducive to PCs being the goodies. You can sandbox a game full of evil barons and vampire counts and the players can fight against it however they choose; if the world is doing well then the DM has to proactively introduce the bad elements, which is just not how this game functions best. That way lies predetermined narrative setups.

I take this to mean that there is in fact no need for any special systematisation or modification to run a 'goodies' sandbox. All you need is to fill a hexmap full of baddies and watch the PCs go out and fight against them. To 'proactively introduce bad elements' on the other hand is 'not how the game functions best' and leads to railroading.

I decided that this comment needed special rebuttal, as doing so will help to elucidate just why it is that fresh systematisation of 'goodies' sandbox gaming is necessary.

Let's go back, crucifixes and garlic in hand, to a time when Zak S was in his pomp and had not yet been declared persona non grata. In an old post from that era, which I can no longer find, Zak made the important and useful observation that there is a point of distinction between campaigns in which the PCs are rogues versus those in which they are heroes. In a campaign in which they are rogues, the PCs start with ready-made motives and can be (I don't remember if Zak put it in these terms) active while the world is passive. The PCs want gold. Off they go into a world of adventure to get it. The DM's job is to set up an interesting landscape - typically a hexmap - populated with various sites where treasure can be found. The PCs are thus the active agents; the landscape is passive - it is to be explored. 

In a heroic campaign, such a setup feels inert. What do heroes do? They don't go about just looking for bad guys to beat up. They protect people. They are much more passive against active threats - Clark Kent happens to notice a bank being robbed, jumps into the nearest phonebox, transforms into Superman, and catches the villains: this is contingent on the villains having taken the active step of robbing the bank in the first place.

The commenter's premise, then - that 'You can sandbox a game full of evil barons and vampire counts and the players can fight against it however they choose' - is, then, not really true. You could make a hexmap full of evil barons and vampire counts, for sure, but then why are the PCs going off into such a hexmap to fight them? Some unsatisfying and implausible conceit might justify it ('the PCs are Evil Hunters and have been tasked by Lord Uzanohakna to go out and smite evil wherever it can be found'), but the result feels bland and inert. One pictures the PCs waking up each morning and deciding between themselves, 'OK, which evil baron shall we go and slay today, then?' The result is fairly one-dimensional and, frankly, not all that heroic. 

No: what I believe is reqiured is a method by which threats are introduced into a sandbox, which the PCs must then deal with as they see fit as protectors or guardians or something of that sort. They live in a region of the world which has its own dangers but which, from time to time, is invaded by evil beings, whether from 'beyond the mountains' or another plane of existence or faerie or whatever, who must be found, rooted out, and destroyed. 

This method must be carefully designed so that the threats which appear are not scripted, are unique, and interact with existing elements of the campaign setting in interesting ways. But this can I think be done, and I indeed came up with the rudiments of such a system here. What is required is a more formal description, with lots of examples and options, and a bit more thought devoted to the subject of how the existence of threats is incorporated into the sandbox itself in an active way, how advancement takes place, and so on. But the basic model of 'you can sandbox a game full of evil barons and vampire counts and the players can fight against it however they choose' is, to my eye, in itself a non-starter. 

Must the World Be Saved?

It is hard to reflect objectively on the nature of a book that is so well-known and which has been so influential as The Lord of the Rings. This means that we rarely, if ever, dwell on how strange it is: since its furniture is still to a large extent the furniture of the entire genre, we accept it as unthinkingly as we accept the decor in our own living rooms.

But the central feature of The Lord of the Rings is far from normal or banal - at its core it rests on positive answers to three questions which other novelists, prior to Tolkien, would rarely if ever have even thought to ask, namely:

1. Is it necessary to save the world?

2. Is it possible to?

3. Is it desirable?

In Tolkien's story, that is, the world is threatened, but it can be saved, however improbably, and it is worth saving. 

These are by no means the obvious answers to those questions, particularly when the questions are not being examined through a filter of Christianity, and ever since Tolkien was writing the major figures of the genre have been rowing back from them. To most genre writers today, save-the-world plots are a bit passe - it either isn't necessary to save the world to begin with (A Song of Ice and Fire; The Scar), is impossible (Lyonesse; Viriconium), or would not be particularly desirable in the first place (Stone Dance of the Chamleon). There are big exceptions, naturally, Gene Wolfe's work being very obviously and explicitly in the Tolkienian tradition, but overall the shift has been towards a much more secularised understanding of the role of humanity in the ongoing existence and justification of The World.

While this has no doubt opened the genre up to more creative applications - nobody would want endless Terry Brooks or Tad Williams retreads, as charming as they can be - the result can sometimes be a rejection of the concept of salvation as such. There is a strong antiheroic strand in modern fantasy writing (and particularly modern fantasy gaming) which rejects the very notion that there may indeed be things beyond the self that are worth saving from some threat - be they a nation, a place, a family, or even a single soul. In OSR gaming in particular the emphasis is almost exclusively on the mere survival or glorification of the individual often set against a backdrop of a decaying reality which is itself irredeemable or moribund. (This has even got itself a label: the aesthetics of ruin.) This is enjoyable, but thin; it does not speak to the drive within the human heart to be redeemed, or to redeem others.

I would like to find a way to combine the Old School emphasis on emergent narrative with the Tolkienian answers to the three questions posited above. I would like to design a game that is about redemption, or salvation, but that does so in a way that avoids railroading and predetermined narrative or plot. And I would like to do it in such a way that it makes use of the insights developed in the laboratory of OSR gaming. I have written various posts on this theme in the last couple of years, and have now collected them under the label of the Paladin Project. This can be considered a statement, or manifesto: expect more concrete details in the coming months. 

The Quadrants of Modern Fantasy

An entertaining recent episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy brought up the question of how to distinguish the genre of sword & sorcery from epic (or high) fantasy. I am a sucker for this kind of discussion, and I liked the answers offered, particularly the shorthand of 'If it reminds you of Conan the Barbarian, it's sword & sorcery, and if it reminds you of The Lord of the Rings, it's epic fantasy.' The problem with this definition of course is that there are lots of fantasy books that remind you of neither (Perdido Street Station, A Song of Ice and Fire, Little, Big) and lots that remind you of both (The Wizard Knight, Wizard's First Rule). And it also relies of course on received ideas about genre that may not be accurate. There are probably not many fantasy fans who have not read The Lord of the Rings but there will be many who have not read the Conan stories, or read them very deeply, and therefore form an impression of what they are like from cliche and hearsay. 

And that's of course to set to one side the existence of other subgenres - sword & sandal; science fantasy; low fantasy; etc. - which may or may not fall outside of this rubric altogether.

Entirely as a way of encouraging debate about this Extremely Important Issue, I would like to propose an alternative model for classifying fantasy fiction that is slightly more abstract. Here, the aim is not to rigidly box off individual works into neat categories, but rather to locate them thematically in such a way that no appeal needs to be made to specific genre furniture (such as that sword & sorcery books tend to treat magic as suspect and dangerous; that sword & sorcery books tend to have anti-heroes; that high fantasy books tend to involve saving the world; and so on), which always have so many exceptions that they are pointless in defining categories.

My proposal then is that the modern fantasy genre can be divided into four quadrants, reflecting two broad axes that cut across the field and which seem to me to be important.

The first of these axes concerns the locus of the fiction: is it concerned with the fate of the individual or the world? I don't mean by this that the action is focused on one particular viewpoint character or incorporates many. Rather, I mean that there are some books that are concerned with a particular individual's (or set of individuals') struggle to find his own place in the world, and some books that are chiefly concerned with the fate of something much bigger - society, civilisation, the world itself - that tends to occupy the attention of the protagonist, 

And the second of these axes concerns what we'll call eschatology. Is there considered to be a final doom of the world, whether that is just something which is possible, or inevitable? Or is the world one of open historicity without a final cause or end? Does it just go on and on and on...?

Here, then, is a stab at plotting major fantasy works as follows:

Yes, yes, I know - Malazan Book of the Fallen. This me after I'd screenshotted the chart. What I'd like to focus on here is that this seems to group fantasy fiction in a way that does not do an injustice to important existing intuitions about what belongs where, but which also does not (I think) dwell too much on superficialities or tropes. Rather, it directs attention to certain themes which seem to my eye to transcend distinctions about substance (In Book X technology is vaguely medieval whereas in Book Y there are spaceships, etc.), and which rather concern genuine philosophical differences. For instance, it seems to me to matter that in the Bas Lag books the word as such will not 'end', whereas in The Lord of the Rings, it might, or indeed, in the fullness of time, will. And this matters much more than, say, the distinction that in the Bas Lag books technology has advanced to the steam age whereas in LOTR it has not.

You may now quibble with the existence of the axes, the places I have located the various works, and the purpose of the entire project, in the comments. 

All Work and No Play Makes Noisms a [Insert Insult of Choice Here]

For the past six weeks, this blog has lain in quiscence. There is a simple reason for this: I had too much going on. What I learned this summer was that there is only so long that one can maintain a 'proper' career, devote time to one's kids, run in effect two micro-businesses (my various RPG ventures, and another separate unrelated one), and keep up with the dramas that can arise in one's family and personal life, before something gives. At a certain point, in the same way that one's body under hardship focuses its energies on core functions, I found that my mind was taking a ruthless approach to making distinctions between necessary and unnecessary tasks. And posting here at Monsters & Manuals, regrettably, found itself in the category of 'Unnecessary Tasks'. 

The 'Necessary Tasks' column has, however, now thankfully had a large number of entries crossed out, and I find myself, like some previously hibernating animal, emerging from darkness into sunlight. I am a bit dazed and confused. But I also feel reinvigorated and full of ideas. And this is at least in part because I have discovered - this is likely also true of you, if you are reading this - that the imaginative, escapist aspect of the tabletop roleplaying hobby is not just a nice luxury but actually meets an important need of some kind that lies deep in my character.

There is an irony, here, in other words: for all that writing this blog was for some time 'unnecessary' in terms of immediate and pressing goals, it was connected to something that is actually very necessary in managing my stress levels - i.e. neckbeard elfgames. It is Important with a capital 'I' that I have imaginative outlets. If I don't, I become grumpy, short-tempered and boring. (Okay, okay, even more grumpy, short-tempered and boring.) Worse, I feel angsty and unfulfilled, as though there is a caged animal inside me that, in its frustration at not being allowed out, is beginning to attack its own cage with teeth and claws.

I can't explain why this is or why it is that I feel this way while others may get the same feeling from watching films or TV or playing video games or watching/playing sports or knitting or whatever else it might be. But I do feel this way and recognise it as a significant feature of my personality that will not change. 

In the forthcoming days and weeks, I intend to get back to a proper pattern of regular, two-or-three-times-a-week blogging. I also intend to get back to producing actual material for future releases. And I also have exciting news about forthcoming publication(s). But in the meantime, it's nice to be back - if anybody is still reading, of course! 

The 'I Want' PC

Readers who do not live in the dank earth beneath rocks with only woodlice and earthworms for company will no doubt have heard of something called K-Pop Demon Hunters. If you haven't heard of it: now you have, and the title is essentially everything you need to know. It's about K-Pop Demon Hunters - trust me, you now don't have to watch it.

The silver lining in the cloud that is having K-Pop Demon Hunters-obsessed children is that the songs are actually pretty catchy and well-executed, even if the lyrics are cringe-inducing doggerel ('Heels, nails, blade, mascara/Fit check for my napalm era/Need to beat my face, make it cute and savage/Mirror, mirror on my phone, who's the baddest?', indeed). And the soundtrack does have one bona fide banger of an 'I Want' Song: the uplifting, Let-It-Go-beating, every-local-grab-a-granny-nightclub-in-the-country-will-be-playing-this-for-years anthem, Golden. 

If you're wondering what an 'I Want' song is, it's the phrase used to describe the songs that basically all musicals have these days, in which the main character (typically a Disney princess) gives vent to her special snowflake feelings and proclaims the desire to escape social expectation/veer from the path laid out before her/find her true self/break free from an overbearing parent/etc. Prominent examples would include:

This species of song, and its role in the films in which it appears, is easily lampooned, but it is important to remember that everybody is young once, and it would be concerning to inhabit a world in which young people are not moved by the theme of 'I Want' songs. This is a necessary part of adolescence: feeling as though one is misunderstood, as though one has a special calling in life, and as though one is destined to do amazing things. What a sad indictment of the culture it would be if such songs did not exist.

For a long time, RPG culture has tilted in the direction of what I will call the 'I Want' PC, no doubt because this speaks to the adolescent craving to be special and because adolescents (and permament adolescents, let's face it) are the core audience for table top RPGs. I can well remember understanding, even as a 13-year-old, that my own instincts and feeling were being manipulated by the game designers in the extensive chargen options they laid before me so as to create my own, uniquely interesting and special, tiefling/werewolf/turtle-man fighter-mage with glaive proficiency and the curse of the bard's tongue. I recognised that this was manipulative even as I revelled in it; a very great deal of the fun that my friends and I got out of, say, Shadowrun or Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Cyberpunk 2020 was the process of simply making up characters.

A good 'I Want' PC should have the following characteristics:

1 - He or she should be wrestling with inner demons - and he or she must be driven by this sense of turmoil in the direction of adventure, preferably reluctantly. The K-Pop Demon Hunters iteration of this is that the main character, Rumi, is herself half-demon and gradually transforming into one; I have only caught snippets of the things because I find the experience of watching the film to be almost physically painful, but I understand this somehow gets resolved. See also: Elsa from Frozen, who can't control her ice magic powers; Ariel from The Little Mermaid, who wants to be human; Luke Skywalker, who wants to get out of Tatooine, etc. 

2 - He or she should be a misfit and set apart from society, preferably having been bullied or ostracised for some reason. Think Elphaba from Wicked with her green skin, Belle from Beauty & The Beast and her obsession with books, Harry Potter and his upbringing with the Dursleys, and so on. 

3 - He or she should have a special gift or blessing that makes for genuine superiority over the hoi polloi. It is no good wrestling with inner demons and being a misfit if one is not a misunderstood genius of some kind to compensate. Hence Harry Potter is actually the chosen one, Elsa is actually a demigod-like ice sorceress, Luke Skywalker is actually a Jedi and can use the Force, Moana is actually a blessed navigator, and so on.

Not all 'I Want' characters have all three of these characteristics but an 'I Want' PC really should. And it is fairly straightforward to make up some tables to supply them. Here is a 1d8 one, but you could easily expand it to 1d30, 1d100, etc. with more detailed rows:

1d8	Inner demons	Misfit because…	Special gift
1	Actually has an inner demon	Is especially ugly or in some other way repellent	Can manipulate one of the elements
2	Wants to be physically different in some way	Has very distinctively coloured skin or some other unusual physical feature or mutation	Can always tell when somebody is lying
3	Has an uncontrollable, destructive power	Is an orphan and has been raised in unusual circumstances	Can teleport short distances
4	Was prophesied to have a vitally important life mission	Has been raised by neglectful or cruel parents or guardians	Can go invisible for short periods
5	Has a ‘dark side’ that comes out in some specified set of circumstances	Has a disability that is maligned by a misunderstanding society, such as mutism or deafness	Can fly for short periods
6	Goes through periods of debilitating depression, weakness, lethargy, etc.	Is of a different species or is a different type of entity to those in mainstream society	Has X-ray vision
7	Has an uncontrollable appetite or unrestrainable addiction	Has a strange social impairment such as an inability to lie, or smile	Is telekinetic
8	Has an arch enemy	Is the victim of strange rumours	Can breathe underwater

The Roundabout Animal Fantasy World

This is a picture of 'the most dangerous roundabout' in the North East of England, not far from where I work. The persistent local rumour is that the roundabout was installed the wrong way around when it was built, in the 1960s, so that the ramps from the central motorway that take traffic up to it (it is built on a concrete flyover) are too long, and those which take traffic down from it to the motorway are too short. Certainly, exiting it northbound can be a hair-raising experience and I see pretty frequent minor collisions when walking in the vicinity - usually when a timid driver has become intimidated and hit the brakes and then been rear-ended by a somebody tailgating from behind.

The vagaries of road traffic in Newcastle upon Tyne being as they may, though, my interest in this roundabout is somewhat esoteric: I like to imagine it as a location for animal fantasy gaming.

I have had a fascination with roundabouts for a long time, partly because they are a peculiar illustration of British design genius (the first having been biult here, in the early 20th century), but mostly because of the way they tend to implant a small island of greenery into the middle of what is often a lake of concrete and tarmac populated by loud, tooting and vrooming vehicles. They are little blobs of tranquility in amongst a lot of noise and bother. And it is easy to imagine them as little universes of their own, untouched by the outside world - populated by creatures unknown, furtive, mysterious, strange.

The roundabout near where I work mostly contains rabbits. In summer, they're often out there of a morning drinking the dew off the grass and frolicking cutely in the golden sun. There are presumably also rats and mice in abundance - not to mention spiders, beetles, ants. With a little stretch of the imagination one could envisage owls and bats in the trees, perhaps a fox. This makes it relatively easy to see it as a potential Duncton Wood or Redwall-type world if given a little poetic license with regard to scale - the roundabout I am describing is perhaps 25 metres in diameter, whereas if it felt more like 100 metres then you would be cooking with gas for a 'mice with swords' or 'moles who war over sacred menhirs' or 'rabbits who set up a totalitarian dictatorship' campaign setting.

But another idea, I think more compelling, would be one in which the roundabout itself serves as a kind of gateway to another realm - a realm of Nature, or Aelfrice, or faerie; something like a Mythago Wood of the big bad city. While the roundabout may only look, from the outside, as though it is 25m across, when one has stepped into the trees one suddenly finds oneself able to travel in deeper, and deeper, and deeper, as though the greenery never ends. There, the noise of the traffic rapidly recedes, and one is then brought into another reality - a world of natural magic, of fox-men and owl gods and crow kings and mole-women, of masked outlaws and lost wanderers from ancient days, of ghosts and spirits and dark creeping nameless things thirsty for blood or men's souls.

There are two ways of taking this latter option. The first conceit could be that the PCs are animals (rabbits, mice, whatever) who have made their way to the roundabout and wandered through the gateway, and have then found themselves transformed into intelligent, humanoid versions of themselves. Perhaps this is just what happens when passing beyond the threshold, and perhaps they return to normal when passing back through it. Perhaps there is a miniature society of creatures who do this.

The second conceit could be that the PCs are urban explorers, occultists, paranormal researchers, or whatever, who know of the gateway and go back and forth through it. Retaining the animal fantasy motif, perhaps beyond the gateway itself there are many 'raised' or 'fae' animals who inhabit an entire world. Perhaps some of these beings are hostile, perhaps some are welcoming, perhaps some are in between - perhaps most are not what they seem. Perhaps they bestow gifts or possess goods that are of use in our world - or impose curses on interlopers. 

Either way, the sense of the roundabout as small, visible and isolated and yet the same time a threshold to something vast and unknowable is compelling. Roundabouts, as they are, stand as small pockets of mystery within the urban landscape - the trick is to turn them into more than mere pockets: into worlds. 

Monster Manual Deadly 60

Do Americans know about Deadly 60? This is a kids' wildlife programme that has been aired on the BBC since 2009; the conceit is that the presenter, Steve Backshall, travels to a different location each episode in search of a few of 'the Deadly 60', meaning the sixty 'deadliest' animals on the planet. 

How 'deadly' is defined is never made explicit - sometimes it seems to mean 'deadly to humans' (king cobra, crocodile, black widow, and so on) and sometimes it seems to mean 'deadly to its prey' (chameleon, gannet, dolphin). Each creature on the list is given a Top Trumps style set of stats for things like speed, weapons, armour, etc., but these seem to just be assigned for fun and Steve has by now encountered far, far more than sixty animals. Really, it is just a wheeze for an entertaining programme about wildlife - and it works surprisingly well for an adult audience as well as for kids. There is a mixture of real-life animal-bothering (excuses are often made for Steve to get into situations in which he ends up getting nipped by a wolf, having his hand crushed by an anaconda, fending off crocodiles with sticks, etc.), fact files and experiments (is a peregrine falcon faster than a car?) and sheer japes and shenanigans - it's a very good, entertaining programme made by an evidently nice and enthusiastic team of people who get on well. I recommend it, if you are able to watch it and have children who are into wildlife.

But the reason I ask is that it brings me back to the idea, the subject of many posts passim, about exploring the world and interacting with it for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of extrinsic objectives such as treasure or XP. I do not mean to suggest that one should or could base a campaign around the 'Krynn Deadly 60' or 'Athas Deadly 60' (though that might indeed be fun...), but rather that there is something pure and refreshing about the concept of a campaign in which the PCs direct their energies towards finding weird and rare creatures to interact with rather than kill and take their stuff. 

'Interactions' cover a wide range of scenarios, though. Some thoughts:

• We are familiar with the concepts of snake charming, lion taming and the like. It is difficult perhaps to envisage how to make a long-term, open-ended campaign about a troupe of dragon tamers or cyclops hypnotisers or gargantua charmers who rove the wilderness in search of subjects...but not impossible.
• The PCs are in the employ of a wealthy eccentric/scholarly institute/guild/menagerie, etc., and go off in search of exotic creatures to bring back alive.
• The PCs are wannabe Steve Backshalls (or Herculeses) who simply want to test their strength against dangerous, powerful or strange monsters - wrestling hydras, boxing minotaurs, riding tarrasques and so on - without killing them.
• The PCs are themselves scholars who go out in order to study and learn about the capabilities and behaviour of monsters for the sake of the advancement of knowledge, presumably working for some kind of institute of higher education.
• The PCs are 'beast masters' who gain abilities, enhanced spiritual awareness, good juju, or whatever, from communing with monstrous beings

And so on.

The trick here is, as ever, to come up with ways to advance levels without deploying XP for gold, or at least in such a way as to emulate what is good about XP for gold through another form of token. One of the underrated virtues of XP for gold is that, in encouraging the PCs to amass wealth, it opens avenues to different modes of gameplay through the spending of their fortunes on, for example, commercial ventures, fortresses, specialist hirelings, and so on. Any replacement XP method should ideally have this potential, but it is difficult to see how this can be facilitated within the confines of a campaign focusing on PC-to-monster interactions.