Some Questions About Settings

I have a number of projects taking up much of my time, and a lot of procrastination eating away at the rest. So, I think I'll just ask some questions. Feel free to answer, or don't, or talk about something that interests you right now.

Some setting materials are designed with a particular game system in mind, so that the magic system fits the physical structures in the game world (Hârn does this, where the places the magicians live are built around the Hârnic magic system; most games do the same for religious structures, of course). When you are using a product with a game other than the one it was designed in conjunction with, how do you handle that? If your game of choice has a magic system that centers on massive fireballs and lightning storms as the magicians' combat abilities, how do you fit that into a low-magic setting's products? Or whatever.

In general, how do you use setting products? Do you always take the setting and run it as it is written? Or do you modify it to suit your tastes? Or do you even just pull out small sections, or even single locations, and set them down in a setting of your own design (that's my general use, though some settings, like Oerth, are too good to break up like that)?

When you are designing your own setting, do you use the assumptions in your game of choice directly (encounter tables, price charts, etc)? Or do you carefully redesign those components of the game to better suit your vision?

What is your general process for designing a setting? Do you have ideas that you set down before even sitting down at the table with the players? Do you have some general ideas, but keep things loose so that ideas can come up in play? Do you just let it go and do all of your designing at the table? Some combination of these?

Feeling Stupid, Plus Random Babble

Random babblings, not unlike these

I was going to post some more in the series about what I'd like to see in a tabletop roleplaying game, but it is too hot and humid to think or move. We don't have air conditioning here, mainly because that isn't a priority in our normal climate.

Anyway, I've been seeing some smart stuff by people about demographics that touches on and in many ways improves upon the material I'd been writing here. Rick Stump over at Don't Split The Party started on Wednesday with a really good article titled "Peasants, Nobles, Mages, Normals, and Heroes - How Many NPCs have Levels?", then followed that up with "Just How Big is your Army?" and "Economics of Having Levels". Now, Matt Jackson of msjx has weighed in with a piece titled "Low level characters, and the effects on play" that is pretty much a must-read for anyone playing a D&D-like game, I think.

You're probably aware that there has been some stupidity going on about the new D&D version because some people don't like two names (out of eight!) listed as "Additional Consultation provided by". As time has gone on, too, it's been conclusively shown that the complaints leveled by those people against those two names have been a tissue of lies and fabrication. There are plenty of reasons to dislike one or the other of them, sure - I'm none too fond of one of them as a human being, though I think that the other one is particularly smart and funny, and I read both because they are both of them smart - but to manufacture insane accusations because a person doesn't like them? And then to try to smear WotC with that? Those people doing the manufacturing of calumnies are human waste. And that is the end of my involvement with that topic on this blog.

Does anyone have any good resources (not gaming ones) on the characteristics of sailing ships and galleys? I'm interested to see what actual speeds of travel and cargo capacities were like for those, especially from the era of the 13th to 16th centuries, all the way up to the beginning of the 17th. I wouldn't mind information on the Viking Age Scandinavian vessels, either. Surprisingly, there are few hard numbers in my books on pirates (Rogoziński doesn't have much of anything outside of some scattered information on cargo capacities, for example, and neither does Cordingly; the others tend to focus on personalities or, like Peter Lamborn Wilson, the economics and politics of locations).

I am coming along with the revision/retroclone of Fantasy Wargaming. Part of that process has me looking at source materials, so I've been re-reading old magical Grimoires and examining the various names and functions of demons. Those guys got a lot of that stuff pretty much spot-on, though they abridged their sources quite a lot (perhaps not surprisingly, as they had limited space). Since I'm planning to just dump the background that takes up about half the book (there are plenty of resources on the Middle Ages available, and I'll just point people toward those), I'm going to have a lot of extra space available to fill those abridged gaps. For those interested in such things, I plan on sticking mainly to the Solomonic Grimoires, which seem to be the main source for the original game, plus the Grimoirium Verum and Clm 849 "The Munich Handbook of Necromancy". There are a ton of named spirits in that last, though, many of whom are not given any real information outside of their names, so I will almost certainly abridge that one greatly.

Speaking of that, does anyone know a good listing of Saints that were known in the period 500CE-1500CE or so? Concentrating on the Hundred Years' War period would be really good (so, no Joan of Arc, since she wasn't sanctified until the 20th century). I like the FW list, but I want to check their information and maybe expand it a little.

One plan I have is to add the pantheons of the Welsh/British Celts, the Gaels, and the Slavic peoples. All of those were extant at least during part of FW's nominal period, and so I think that they should be dealt with to some extent. I have useful resources for those already. I wonder how best to approach dvoverie (the Slavic practice of being both Christian and pagan; it means "two faiths") in FW's rules? Probably just like it does for sorcery: invoking non-Christian gods is a Sin of whatever magnitude (probably the same as for invoking demons), and stick with the Christian Virtue/Sin templates for those trying to hold two faiths.

In my ideal game, of course, all of this Piety stuff is simplified down considerably. I'll get around to talking about that soon enough.

I haven't done any work on the Top Secret retroclone in the past couple of weeks. I need to pick that one back up, too.

State Of The Faoladh

Normally, today would be the day of the week that I post more factoids about the Middle Sea world, but I don't have enough currently to make a full post. I've been distracted by the World Cup and a couple of other projects.

First, I am actively writing a revision/retroclone of Fantasy Wargaming, which I still say has the potential of being one of the better games to come from the late '70s/early '80s era. It's a combination of writing and a back-and-forth discussion process with a collaborator, who is able to keep me from forgetting how awesome FW really is and flying off into a massive redesign.

In between that, I am also still slogging away at a Top Secret retroclone. I kinda wish that I'd already finished this, because of the fourth issue of Gygax magazine (which includes a new TS mission from Merle Rasmussen), but I only have myself to blame for that.

I would like to get back to writing a game using the Trait System that I designed a few years back (and which has seen some word-of-mouth success, albeit mainly in the storygame crowd, and after some changes from my original intent). I think that fantasy Elizabethan era is what it would work best for, and was what I had in mind when I originally worked out the basics, plus I just really like the idea of the era and setting. I've gotten a bit down in electrons for it, but it's been set aside for the moment.

I was reminded recently that I'd really like to see a setting of occult conspiracy in the late 18th century (the Enlightenment era of revolution). Mainly, I'd like to play in such a setting. The LotFP default assumptions come pretty close to that, but I don't know, it seems more Thirty Years' War rather than American Revolution.

I've been considering the points and counterpoints in the "rewards for roleplaying" debate that is currently going on. I tend toward the side that says it is actively detrimental to roleplaying at the table, but I want to address the issue with more nuance, since that simple argument doesn't really cover my full impression of the concept. I've been poking at an article for the blog on the matter, but it isn't really coming together yet.

I'm nearly ready to give up on finding a venue to run games face to face here (in my house is not an option). I am considering running online, but I have the small problem that I don't want to take the time to learn how to set up a virtual tabletop, and I'm not sure my poor antique laptop could take it and G+ Hangouts at the same time, anyway. Maybe I will still be able to find a workable option for gaming locally. Maybe I should start emailing people on Nearbygamers or whatever.

So, here's a question for you all: what settings or eras do you think would be a lot of fun to play in, but haven't seen much (or any) coverage in games to date? Post-oil? Neolithic fantasy? Gunboat diplomacy China? WWI Knights of the Air? Max Headroom Cyberpunk?

Gameable Fiction

I've been spending most of my reading time these days with George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. I was introduced to the setting through the excellent HBO adaptation, but quickly decided to read the books as I was sure that there was deeper content, and more of it. I was not disappointed.

Of course, we all know that the series has been adapted as a roleplaying game (though to be sure, I don't know very much about the game and how well it adapts the material; it seems to me that HârnMaster would go a long way toward developing the feel of the setting, with some work adapting the terrible and exotic magics of Martin's fantasy). There are a few other literary settings that have been adapted by specific roleplaying games: Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Vance's Dying Earth, Moorcock's Melnibone and some other Eternal Champion material, Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, Niven's Known Space, Fleming's James Bond (though perhaps that was more an adaptation of the movies), Constantine's Wraeththu, Herbert's Dune (twice, though only once officially), Butcher's Dresden Files, Zelazny's Amber, along with a very few others. This doesn't include those settings that were mere supplements for other games, such as Thieves' World, Wild Cards, or Adams's Horseclans. There are even a few, such as Howard's Conan, that have been adapted more than once. In addition to those, there are some movie and television settings that have seen adaptations, like Star Wars (three times so far!), Star Trek (more than three times, depending on how you count it!), Firefly, Babylon 5, and so on.

However, there are some settings of fiction that have not been adapted to roleplaying games, and I am not sure why that is. Eddings's Belgariad, Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, Butcher's Codex Alera, Burroughs's Barsoom (well, it sort of has, but not really), Lee's Flat Earth or Birthgrave, Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, Brooks's Shannara, and so on. Some of them, I can understand if the rights have issues or are otherwise difficult to secure, but the popularity of such as Malazan or Shannara would seem to have caused someone to go through the effort.

What settings do you most want to see turned into freestanding roleplaying games? Which would be better off as a supplement for an existing game like D&D/Pathfinder, GURPS, BRP, or whatever?

[Obscure Games]I Love You Guys

So, I have a poll to help me make up my mind which game I should review, and what happens? A four-way tie.

Thanks guys.

OK, there needs to be a tie-breaker. I could just roll a d4, but that is being a little silly. No, I think that I'll be a lot sillier and have a poll to illuminate the results of the poll.

Go Vote! This one will only be up for a few days, so make your voice heard quickly.

[Obscure Games]What Should I Review?

I dunno. It's a kitten reading a book,
in preparation to review it, I guess?

Over on the right sidebar is a new poll, asking which games you are interested in reading an Obscure Games review about. It will only be up for a couple of weeks, so vote early and vote often!

You can select as many of the listed games as you like. If you need a brief description of any of them, feel free to ask me here.

Minigames

One thing that I've noticed while playing Traveller that I had not noticed much previously (keep in mind that I was attracted by the erroneous "storytelling" paradigm when I started to think seriously about adventure games, it being the dominant paradigm of the time) is the interrelation of various minigames (or perhaps "subsystems") as parts of the flow of play. As I prepare for the Terra Ultima game, I naturally am thinking about the sorts of minigames to make available.

The obvious ones are built into the main rules: combat, exploration and encounter in the dungeon and wilderness, NPC reactions, the "endgame", and so on. It seems like there are others, though, that should be available to the players. I am thinking here of ones that are obviously inspired by Traveller, such as a merchant minigame of speculative trade. I suppose that I'd do that in a manner based on Traveller's speculative trade system. Other examples might include astral exploration (different not only in appearance, but in basic format from standard wilderness or dungeon exploration).

What minigames (or subsystems, if you prefer) do you think should be available to the players at various points in the game?

Swords & Sorcery

I've been looking at the upcoming setting product Tales From the Fallen Empire, which looks really interesting to me. I love that it takes inspiration from the fantasy films of Roger Corman, such as The Warrior and the Sorceress and Deathstalker, as well as the more traditional sword & sorcery fiction of Leiber and Howard. The only thing I'm not so intrigued by is that it is going to be for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Now, I've not got much against that game, but it's just not likely to be one that I am going to pick up. I've already got a couple of class/level games that treat sword & sorcery topics well enough (I'm talking about D&D and S&W, as well as The Arcanum), and I haven't seen anything that really compels me about DCC.

Anyway, I discovered this setting when I was googling around for information about The Warrior and the Sorceress, and found a thread on one of the RPG boards about it where it was mentioned that one of the classes in the setting (the "Wanderer") was inspired by the Order of the Homerac from that film, or specifically by David Carradine's character in it. It got me thinking, though, about what specific movies and fiction I'd want to use as inspiration for a swords & sorcery setting, staying away from the obvious ones like Conan the Barbarian and the works of people like Howard or Leiber.

The Warrior and the Sorceress is a no-brainer. There's a lot of implied setting there that can serve as inspiration. Similarly, Deathstalker is pretty neat. There are some interesting ideas in Fire and Ice, which is pretty much what happens when you take Frazetta's art and make it into a setting and story. The "Taarna" sequence from Heavy Metal has a lot of inspirational imagery and concepts, and the "Den of Earth" sequence has a few ideas as well.

Speaking of Taarna, there's the story sequence of Arzach and Legends of Arzach by Moebius and Lofficier.

An unusual source which might be interesting is the boardgame Dark Emperor from Avalon Hill. The idea of an immortal necromancer coming back from the land of the dead with the Lord of Vampires and the Goddess of Fear to conquer a decaying empire is an interesting one. The unusual geography (it is based on a landscape of meteor strikes and the resulting round seas instead of plate tectonics) is neat, too.

Tanith Lee's Tales From the Flat Earth books are amazing. Vaguely Arabesque fantasy with a darkly modern perspective, like fairy tales told by a madwoman. She's also writing a couple of new ones, so soon there will be seven volumes or more, with the upcoming two to be published in 2014 and 2015.

Richard Tierney's Simon of Gitta stories are a wonderful mix of sword & sandal, sword & sorcery, and Lovecraftian themes, rationalizing the heretic Derleth's ideas with those of Lovecraft through the interpretation of Gnostic theology, but a lot more entertaining than that sounds. Most of the stories are collected in the Chaosium collection Scroll of Thoth, and the others are found in the novel The Drums of Chaos, one story in the Chaosium collection The Azathoth Cycle, and one story (originally published in the magazine Crypt of Cthulhu) online here. There's also a novel titled The Gardens of Lucullus, which is part of the cycle, but very hard to find at the moment. Loosely connected, the movie The Silver Chalice was an inspiration on this series of stories, as Tierney has said that Jack Palance's portrayal of Simon the Magician is how he envisions the main character.

What odd sources would you use for a sword & sorcery setting?

Wednesday Morning Randomness

1) I've been re-reading MegaTraveller. I'm surprised at how very simple the rules are, except for the vehicle design sequences. Most of the first two books are taken up with either those design sequences, the world generation sequences, or the character generation tables. Only a very small amount is taken up with resolution systems.

2) Work proceeds on the Top Secret clone. I'm keeping things pretty close to the basic book, but there are bits from the Top Secret Companion that I feel like I really want to include. I'm also making sure that some of the material from Dragon magazine would be usable by including the extra stats from, for instance, the space program articles and the wilderness survival article. I'll probably include highly simplified ways of using those.

3) Almost no one seems to be voting on the poll to the right. Please vote.

4) One of my projects for this year is to finish all of the Burroughs Barsoom books. I'm on the eighth, Swords of Mars, now.

5) I'm really looking forward to Prometheus. I may go see it in the theater, something I only rarely do - most recently, I've gone to see John Carter and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. I can't even remember what movie I went out to previous to that (the first Iron Man, maybe?). Yeah, I don't go to the theater much.

Some Semi-Random Notes

1) After thinking about the setting of the Black-Blooded Earth, it's occurred to me that one of the elements I was planning to use is at odds with one of the major themes of the setting. So, no more portals or skyships. They conflict with the idea that there is nowhere to run if the world is rendered uninhabitable.

2) Over on Hill Cantons, there's an excellent series ongoing examining the domain game as presented in 1st edition AD&D. In addition, there's a discussion of what reading the situation as given says about the implied setting of AD&D. I have to consider this discussion and what it means for the Black-Blooded Earth, since I'll be running it with AD&D.

3) On that topic, I've decided that the house rules I outlined earlier will be the only ones in use that alter the rules as written. I may use other systems to cover specific situations that are not covered in the AD&D rules (material component availability and costs, for a notable one), but otherwise I'm sticking to the rules in the books and making up other stuff as it comes up (or grabbing a Dragon article as necessary).

4) Work continues on the Top Secret clone. Slowly, but it continues.

5) I'm considering several games for the next installment of Obscure Games. Should it be Fantasy Wargaming? I seem to be one of only two or three people in the world who like that game. How about  Celtic Legends? High Colonies? The Arcanum? I have others in the offing, but one of those will be next. Let me know which ones you're most interested in hearing about.

Other Projects

I try to keep myself busy, I guess. In addition to the WRG-based game, I have other projects that keep me going.

One of them is improving my computer programming skills and working on a sandbox computer rpg with domain-level aspects. I intend to base the general idea of the interface on an old game called Darklands, which is pretty much my favorite computer game of all time. It was a precursor, in many ways, to Fallout, which was designed by the same studio. I'm also looking at Dwarf Fortress as a model, as it includes most of the ideas that I want to pursue, except that its world generation is not customizable in the ways that I want it to be. In addition, its tone is pretty well set at a particular kind of humor that, though I enjoy it, is not what I want for the game I am designing. I'm also looking at the pencil-and-paper game Flashing Blades for ideas on social structure. I've done a little bit of work on this, mostly laying out some general flowcharts.

Another project is a fantasy world that has been in my head for years. I have made some attempts to develop that world design in the past, but I am currently looking at developing it in play. Some of the important exceptions to that are the languages, which I want to develop as, at least, naming languages, if not the whole way to fully-fleshed-out conlangs.

I have an idea in the back of my head to design a game to deal with my ideas of spaceship SF, but I haven't done any work on it yet. It would include a vehicle/spaceship design system, domain-level ideas to cover colony campaigns, and such.

Another computer-based project I've thought about is a multiplayer online game of domain control. I'm still working out how I want to regulate the turn structure of this idea, but right now most of the ideas I have are really too complex for the sort of semi-casual audience I'd be targeting it at.

I've always wanted to write some supplements for Flashing Blades, covering other parts of the world, such as England and Ireland (and Wales, and Scotland), the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, North Africa, Russia, Germany, Poland, and such, even as far away as Japan. It could even be worth it to develop a magic system for it, on the GURPS Voodoo model, but that might be going too far.

Which of these would be most interesting, do you think?