Too many games...

I seem to be bouncing from game to game lately, and starting new ones without continuing current campaigns. I hope to have something turned from raw notes into a polished, postable entry soon, but in the interim here's a summary of what I've been up to...

Wanting to play some old (2nd ed.) Runequest, I went and bought the PDF of Snake Pipe Hollow off Drivethru. I don't like playing modules from the screen, so I printed it out, half-sized to save paper and also see more text all at once. It's also convenient to mark off hit points from the enemies and treasures looted right on the page. Since I didn't need a computer for the module, I went completely analog and took all the session notes on paper too, which is always freeing, but doesn't help with posting later.

Sometimes it's fun to just roll up a bunch of classic Traveller characters using just the basic character generation rules (little black books, Traveller book, etc.) and send them off into a random subsector to seek their fortunes. I'd also been wanting to try out Zozer's new Solo rules for Traveller Cepheus Engine. And I found an inexpensive copy of the original German rulebook to play with.

I also seem to have re-started my solitaire Call of Cthulhu LARP...

und dann...

A few weekends ago, being in the mood for some old-fashioned dungeon crawling, I had a marathon session. My newly constituted LotFP party, led by Manfred and Lycinia, sailed out to the island in the middle of lake Ild, on a mission bound for the ruins. The journey there was interesting, and the dungeon itself was a blast, but when it finally came time to write it all up for posting I just lost interest. The problem, once again, is that most of what the PCs' interactions with the world fell into one of two categories: hitting things in order to kill them, and making saving throws in order not to die. Fun to play, but I fear it will be a bit too repetitive to relate. I'm going to put it to one side for now. I will certainly come back to it at some point, because I always do; after 30 years B/X & AD&D still live on my shelf for a reason. And they were headed somewhere interesting at the bottom of the dungeon. I may truncate the narrative when I come back to it, I may not. But I didn't quite finish the dungeon yet so there's no good stopping point.

And in any case, I've been thinking about dungeon exploration and wanting to try a less-fighty approach. I made several false starts and gave up a few times. I thought about picking up with Runequest again, as there is some hex-crawling and underground exploration coming with that adventure, but I was having an impossible time setting the first scene. And it's not quite the dungeon-delving I had in mind.

Since the Time Was Not Yet Right, I put it aside, too, and played through some T&T solos as a palate-cleansing exercise, and followed that with some older MRQ ones. I don't want to write those up, though, as it would amount to a pile of spoilers for anyone who would want to play through themselves, and also substantially cut down on the replay value for me!

I was casting about for something indefinable, to which I could not rightly put a name -- nor can I yet. It has something to do with simulationism and interesting magic systems. The latter because I always play wizards, the former for a host of reasons.

Even when there are dragons flying in the sky in defiance of all known physical laws, I still want a degree of verisimilitude in the world and the characters actions therein. I'm sure I've mentioned my aversion to the cinematic in RPGs before. For the most part, I want something different out of an RPG than I do out of a novel or a film (my RQ adventure certainly goes against this, but that was a happy accident that took on a life of its own). I like my PCs to just have their lives, going from situation to situation without a need for an overarching plot which needs to develop according to any certain structure. Plots occur, and resolutions are sought, but in an organic way. Keep on the Borderlands is one of my favourite modules ever -- but it would make a shite film.

As a corollary, being a solo gamer, I find that interaction skills/rules are way more important than they are in a tabletop game. As a normal player, the DM can adjudicate my PC's attempts at schmoozing/threatening/lying etc. As a soloist, the rules need to be the DM. On the other hand, I don't need story-game type rules for adjudicating my PC's emotional life. After a few sessions I know how any of my characters will feel about any situation which crops up, and will play them accordingly. Since I know their Weltanschauung, I just need the rules to be die Welt.

But enough with the digressions.

The end result of all this is that I decided that I ought to try something that would be a little more varied than than D&D-esque dungeon crawling. Really what it boils down to is skills; the more a PC can do, the less repetitive the challenges should be. I've been cogitating over how to do this for a while.

The first step was to decide on a damn game already, a process which proved more agonising that it rightly should. I wanted something heavily simulationist. RQ6 has great magic rules, but the combat is just a bit too fiddly for my taste. And I've got a good thing going with it besides. I thought about older versions of RQ, or even just making a BRP variant of my own, but that sounded like too much work. In the end I settled on Magic World. It's familiar enough that I know the system, so won't spend all my time looking things up, but the magic is new to me so the spells will seem fresh. I'm going to try it as written, but I may switch to hit locations instead of the total HP / major wound system depending on how it goes. I will definitely be using the ship rules at some point, as I really love maritime adventures; the ship disaster tables alone may be worth the price of the game.

So, for the next little while, I'm going to be trying this new experiment. I'm not sure where it's headed, or for how long, but I only ever follow my inspiration with this stuff anyways. Stay tuned.

horror adventures with Mythic

I had been planning on doing a post to analyse the results of my Mythic-driven horror adventure when it was finished. MoonSylver asked about doing solo horror in the Lone Wolf Roleplaying community, and my answer there formed the basis of this post.

For my toolbox, I used the horror theme rules from Mythic Variations combined with some of the tables in the adventure generator section of the d30 Sandbox Companion (primarily Phenomena, Artifact/Relic, and Key NPC). The modified Event Focus table works brilliantly, but the chaos rules seem better on paper than in practice.

The chaos factor never falling starts to make the oracle feel a bit useless, since almost anything you ask comes back as a Yes. I hit Chaos 9 by scene 12, and the adventure lasted to scene 48! I found myself grossly inflating the unlikelihood of the questions just to make it worth using the oracle at all. This is actually a problem I have with Mythic in general; the higher the chaos factor, the more asking questions starts to feel like cheating.

The high Chaos factor also meant almost every scene was modified from the initial setup. The Altered scenes were far too frequent, but this was my fault for forgetting the change to the scene setup rule that determines which modified scene to use (1-3 Altered, 4+ under the chaos factor is Interrupt, rather than even/odd for Interrupt/Altered). The reasoning behind the change is solid, but practically every scene being modified did start to bog things down a little.

Whenever Mythic gave me a Horror event, I just rolled on the d30 Phenomena table and applied the results to the indicated N/PC in a gruesome fashion (the Random Characteristics table at the back of the Labyrinth Lord AEC would have worked well for this too; perhaps next time). Physical clues (necklace, scarab, mask, grimoire) came from the d30 Artifact/Relic table, and Key NPC introduced new NPCs as needed. These all worked perfectly, though if I'd been going for a less outlandish sort of horror, I would probably have limited the number of different Phenomena (perhaps by rolling a d6 or d8 every time a new one was indicated, and not adding new ones to the list once this die result was lower than the number that had already come up).

But that was just the easy & mechanical part. Here's how I actually made a horror adventure:

The seed of the adventure was something I'd always wanted to try, but never managed to play before. The basic premise was simple: PCs get snowed in to an old manor/castle, which is the ancestral home of at least one of them; the unseasonable weather was brought on by an evil cult who are using it to trap everyone there for their own fell purpose. The sort of horror story I was after works best with a limited number of people, so I made a few rolls on the d30 Noble Household Officers and Misc. Castle Jobs tables to populate the place and decided everyone else had fled.

I didn't worry about motivations or monsters or anything at this stage, just set the scene and let things fall out according to the oracle and random tables. The old Marquess languishing on his sickbed shut up in his tower was the only non-random element I added, though I had no idea that the cult were ultimately responsible, nor what they were even doing to him; that all came out in the course of play. He could just have easily been revealed to be a werewolf; maybe that would mean the cultists were werewolves. Or maybe it would have been the Dark Family Secret, and only a secondary horror to the main plot.

My biggest piece of advice is that, in a horror adventure, there are Things Man was not Meant to Know. And by man, I mean the PCs. Don't worry about the meaning of the clues that you find until you have enough of them that the answer seems obvious. If the clues are piling up and seeming less and less connected, don't be afraid to make some of them red herrings or limit the number of different kinds of evidence (like my suggestion for limiting types of horror results above). Some of them, though, may always remain a mystery. You can put your GM hat on later if you need to figure out for their significance yourself, but your PC may not ever be privy to this information. For example, all the 'suicides' were found with little trinkets. The PCs guessed that these somehow let the cultists will them to suicide or control their actions (especially after the necklace incident), but they never figured out that they formed a mystical link to channel evil magical energy [for Horror events] generally or that the psychic energy of the anguished deaths was feeding the Thing From Beyond at the centre of the cult -- things I decided later on out of a need for internal consistency in my game world. I could have made all the items scarabs, if I'd thought about it; the fact that two scarabs were found one after another was a mere coincidence: the kind that only happens 1 time in 30, to be sure.

My best advice for running a solo horror game would be to start with a vague concept, take it slowly, and let the tables build the mystery and horror a bit at a time. Don't try to figure out what's going on until it's too late for your PC. And don't let it tell you what the monster is until you're practically having to roll for initiative. Even the prefatory remarks in Mythic Variations say that the horror theme works best with a gamemaster, but I honestly don't think it's harder than any other kind of adventure that goes beyond hack-and-slash. I'll certainly be doing it again.

Random pictures for campaign background generation & solo play

Using pictures as random idea generators is hardly a novel idea. Sites like Meanwhile Back in The Dungeon...  and Build a Dungeon from Me have been offering up plenty of gaming  inspiration for a while now, and I've even stumbled across random idea websites for writers that offer up stock photos as writing challenges.

I've got a ton of old woodcuts & engravings & illustrations saved on my hard drive, and have started using some of them to illustrate my T&T Katabasis adventures, in the same way that I was using photos I took to illustrate LotFP. This is all well and good, but time consuming. Finding the right pictures to go with the story can often devolve into hours of flipping through pictures. I'll do this anyway, but it's nicer to do when you aren't constantly asking yourself, 'did my PCs just go there? How about there? Would it work if I photoshop out the car? &c'. I mostly have all the Greek woodcuts in one place, but even then only a small fraction of them are suitable for adventures: too many famous people. I sorted out a likely collection to put in my T&T folder, but I was still mostly playing the adventure and then looking for pictures that fit.

It occurred to me it would be much easier to do it the other way round. Not all the pictures I have are particularly useful for RPG adventures though, so some sort of system was going to be necessary.

Build a dungeon from me. I dare you.

The idea for the new campaign came to me as I was idly messing about with GIMP to turn a picture of Misenum into a mountain city. I realised I could set a high-fantasy campaign in such a place quite handily. And since it was a civilised environment, there would be a lot less combat. Of course, the city has to be somewhere. So what is surrounding it?

before & after

Organisation is not my strong suit, but in the main woodcuts folder I have a subfolder for landscapes and cityscapes, and also one for ruins. I went through them (and a few others) and pulled out everything that seemed like it would make for a good adventure location. I also grabbed a bunch of pictures of monsters that would make good wilderness encounters.

What I should have done at this point was start organising all the stuff I was putting in the new campaign folder, but I didn't. I exhort you to learn from my mistake and sort everything you find into folders as you go. You can always make more, and delete empty ones, or combine small ones later.

Next came NPCs. There are pictures of people spread all throughout the woodcut folders. I had already been leaning towards Runequest, so I pulled out all the ones that suited a pre-medieval feel and/or were interesting enough that I could justify their inclusion. Somewhere at this stage I found the pictures that inspired my main PC, and three people who are either subordinate PCs or major NPCs. I made sure to include some random groups of minor / incidental / cannon fodder NPCs as well.

You're the best 1d6 friends a guy could ask for!

And now the game world was taking shape by itself... but more on this later.

At this point almost everything has been sorted into folders for the actual gaming. I'll be using Mythic with Mythic Variations for my GM emulator again. But when it comes up with stuff like Remote Event or New NPC, I'll just go into the appropriate folder and pull up a random picture to figure out the result. Some of the pictures I've named or even photoshopped (gimped?) in advance in order to have certain possibilities in the story: monsters I want to use, NPCs related to my character, etc. In theory I could even  make individual folders for all the categories on Mythic's Event Focus Table, but what I have suits my basic story so far.

Some of the folders (barbarian lands, battles and armies) are there to keep stuff that I won't be using unless the adventure goes a certain way. Gods and items are small folders to be dipped into primarily when events call for something specifically in them, though they may end up being used randomly as well (the party just met a priest of _____). PC stuff is pictures that look like the characters I rolled up; some of these are just portraits, others have definite encounter potential. Encounters is empty and should have been deleted; its contents got split early on between monsters and wilderness event. NPC portraits is the random NPC generator. NPC event is people actively doing things, urban event and wilderness event are things happening more generally; all three are good for Mythic's Remote events. Not shown here is another folder full of pictures of horned mammals and snakes whose heads will be photoshopped onto other bodies to make pictures of broo (chaos hybrids) and ophidians.

When I grow up, I'm going to be a broo!

I didn't agonise over where to put the pictures when I was filing or it would have taken forever. Some are probably misfiled, others could have gone in either of two folders equally well. I can move them when I find them, though they may just provide less obvious inspiration when they show up. So I will purposefully not be going through the folders to clean them up. Less prep = more gaming.

In the next post I'll show off the setting, and how I got there.

Rules & Ruminations

...and once again I feel myself being pulled in another direction, starting a new game and a new campaign before any of the other three have finished, or even come to a reasonable stopping point. Partly I'm just bad at finishing projects, but also I'm just starting to suffer from combat fatigue. As much fun as dungeon exploration can be, I feel like the main way my PCs interact with their world is by hitting things. Asking Mythic questions about what they can do is all well and good, but it requires a lot of arbitrary decisions about who can do what in the first place, and determining their relative levels of skill or competence on the fly. Now, this is something that never bothers me as a player or as a GM, but when I have to be both it's just too much; I might as well just be writing a story rather than gaming. Plus, I'm a simulationist at heart. I like game rules that model the real world, more-or-less, plus whatever fantastical elements the setting requires. I'm not a fan of larger-than-life PCs, overly abstract rules, or cinematic anything (varied and interesting combat is fine; John Woo-style heroics not so much).

For solo gaming, I find that having more definite rules makes it more like playing a proper game. For example, if the random dungeon generator gives me a 20' wide underground river bisecting the corridor, I like to be able to look over the character sheets and come up with a plausible solution for getting across based on the characters' skills and equipment (and probably have it made more difficult by the amount of crap they're hauling around). And the rulebook gets to be my GM; this is more fun for me  than saying 'O Mythic, I say it be Somewhat Likely that yon party can cross this Stream by dint of Skillfulness and a length of Rope: What say'st Thou?'. Sure, they're more likely to succeed with a roll on Mythic's Fate chart, but where's the fun in that? and when else am I going to get to use the swimming and drowning rules, anyways?

T&T avoids the all-combat problem with SRs, but that still leaves things quite open-ended. The simple solution would be to pick up with the Traveller game again, but I'm still in a fantasy mood. I thought briefly about trying to switch systems in the elven campaign, but that always strains my suspension of disbelief ('hey, Aldira, remember when magic used to work differently?' 'Yeah... what the hell happened last Tuesday?'). And in any case I am in the mood for less standard fantasy. Thus, all signs pointed to Runequest.

I haven't had much time to play lately, and I have other projects demanding my attention still, but I did/do have enough to think things over. And over. And over. After some edition waffling (I love 3rd, but 2nd has a lot of charm) I was finally won over by the possibilities of the newest (6th) edition. It does, hélas ! promise cinematic combat, but as a solitaire player I can manage to keep that toned way down to realistic levels. Besides, there shouldn't be all that much combat in the game I have in mind.

I also had an interesting idea about random idea generation during games, which I will showcase as I get playing. It's not really one I could suddenly throw onto my current campaigns (well, maybe T&T), so a fresh start seemed like a good idea.

Runequest, of course, really wants a good setting to be played in, and much more so than a lot of other games owing to the level of detail it lavishes on culture and communities. Since I'm not going to be using a published setting, that will necessitate some world-building. Fortunately, I have found another way around doing too much of it, one which is part of the random idea generation process I came up with. More on all of this in the next post.

Worldbuilding, and why I didn't do any

I've often heard it said that the more preparation you need for a solo game, the less likely it is you will ever get around to playing it. So when I decided to start a fantasy campaign, I wanted to do it with a minimum of set-up, lest it fail before the first session. I know a lot of people have a fantasy world they've been creating for years -- decades even -- but I'm not one of them. All the AD&D of my youth was set in Greyhawk. All I had was the boxed set, and I wasn't really interested in a level of detail beyond that. It was non-invasive, and provided ample room to tell whatever stories I could make up. After that, when campaigns gave way to more occasional one-shot adventures, the concomitant worlds had a much more ephemeral nature, seldom outlasting the session.

I was initially inspired by reading Tabletop Diversions' Ever-expanding Dungeon posts. That put me in the mood for some old-school D&D, which always conjures up visions of knights and castles in my head. I'd also been reading Fouqué's Der Zauberring; it's full of knights and castles, which always conjures up images of D&D (it's also the reason why all the post titles are lines from romantic poets). At first I figured I'd just use the genero-pseudo-medieval Europe of my youth, that nameless fantasy world we played in before setting became a real concern. But that was too high-fantasy for what I was after. I also wanted to use LotFP as the ruleset, which steadily won me over to using an early-modernish setting. I didn't want to set the game in the real world though, especially as I wanted the PCs to all be elves. But my campaign had to be set somewhere. So here's how I went about it.

I knew the rules set I would use (LotFP), the GM emulator (Mythic), the collections of charts for encounters &c (Basic & Expert set, d30 Sandbox Companion, some random monster & dungeon generators from Dragon Magazine and the 1st ed. DMG). More than enough to run a campaign with. I decided I would give the characters a starting quest, and let things develop into a sandbox (or not) on their own. So all I needed now was a world. Or at least part of one.

I wanted to try Hexographer, having just discovered it. After two or three false starts, I had tweaked the settings enough to produce a map with the right kind of terrain for what I had envisioned. It was randomly dotted with villages, castles, ruins, etc. I did clean it up a little bit: drew in some rivers and roads, put fields around the major cities, added more castles. Only about an evening's worth of work. Of course, as I did this, ideas presented themselves about what some of the locations might be, and what sort of people lived here or there, but I didn't write any of it down or worry about it overmuch. There was a big map full of unnamed features staring at me, but the more I tried to add to it, the less chance I would have of actually playing. So I left it alone. I decided that, since my PCs were all first level elves, they would never have left the Elven Forest before, and so had as vague an idea of what lay beyond as I did.

I knew there was a big human kingdom occupying the eastern half of the map. I figured out where the capital of the Kingdom was (though didn't name it until scene 18) and then named a handful of things in and around the elven forest. Nothing even got described until I was about to start the first session, when I wrote:

"Feyalldra is the great elven city in the Elven Forest (all the heavy forest west of the river/lake - Elves move through their forest as if it were clear terrain, and automatically find enough food and water). The stone circle is a meeting place for the humans and elves to conduct trade. Cheapington is (as its name suggests) a mercantile town that grew up because of the human-elf trade. The Church of St. Gelevaard is a church of the Light God, built on the very site where St. Gelevaard was martyred 1000 years ago. The climate and and pseudo-medievality is that of southern England circa 1550AD. There is a large bay 20 miles south of Cheapington, the ocean proper is 20 miles further south. This area is on the border of civilisation, so firearms are a bit rarer than in other parts (to the East). I'll make up / randomly determine the rest as I go."

And I that was it. Some things had to be added to the map along the way. E.g. Wandlebourne and some as-yet-nameless town got added in a fit of logic when I noticed there was this huge protected bay that would be the ideal base for fishing and the sea trade.

But the first little paragraph, describing a mere 21x13 hexes, set the tone for everything that followed. It fixed the climactic, technological, and social base so that I could extrapolate all the mundane aspects of the world, and stick a low-fantasy overlay on top. Elements introduced in the first few sessions were a bit more random than those that followed. By now I have a feel for what definitely does and doesn't fit, and re-roll and/or modify tables accordingly. Here's some notes on how it played out:

Non-humans

Elves are a dying race, as presented in the LotFP rules. They are creatures of faerie, and live in the Elven Forest, wherein lies their wondrous city of (fair) Feyalldra. But that's only half of the great faerie forest. Across the river (this hasn't been shown on any of the small maps yet) is the Goblin Forest, where the ugly, twisted, and malevolent faeries live. The faerie forest is actually the first thing I made up, and the goblin half has simply never come into play yet: exactly the reason I didn't go naming every location on the map.

Goblins are creatures of faerie as much as are elves. They will use halfling stats, should it come up. There are no halflings in my campaign, because I don't care for them.

Dwarves are by the book. They live underground, but I don't know where their big city is yet. There's at least a big outpost somewhere within ~20 hexes of the Ruined Monastery, since rescue missions were sent to find the dwarven expedition that never returned from there.

I'm undecided about orcs. I don't need hobgoblins. Bugbears and kobolds will be extremely rare if indeed they ever appear. There is a far-off race of cynocephaloi (gnolls), but they don't live locally. Ogres compete for space with the hill tribes.


Pseudo-medievality

Or, if you will, pseudo-early-modernity. I chose 1550 to make it still a bit medieval; to be fair I've mushed some ideas from earlier into it, but I'm aiming for that vague sort of realm where fairy tales are from, not Montaillou, village occitan, de 1294 à 1324. Also, the main kingdom is small and civilisation does not extend far beyond it. I chose southern England for the climate because it's damp and rainy and I like it that way. But it also helped with other things, such as--

Religion

To start with, all I knew was that the main religion would be a pantheistic version of the pre-reformation catholic church. Since the first mini-map had a chuch on it, I had to figure out the patron deity on the spot; thus the Light God came into being. At first it was just a shorthand notation, but it ended up setting the tone for religion: the Roman model of personified ideas rather then the Greek gods with personalities. It's not the only human pantheon, just the only one in the kingdom. I guess I'll have to decide what sort of religion the elves have if they ever make it to the elven temple.

Language

The trick for me was not over thinking this. I tried very hard to just use a nice D&D-style Common tongue for humanity, but I just couldn't leave it alone. So then, Common, which I mention several times in various adventures, is sort of middle English. It is the language of all the common folk of the Kingdom. Many of the noble families came originally as conquerors from the Continent, and so there's a second common tongue which is like old french, used more by the upper classes than the lower, though many people are likely to know both. Scholars and wizards will know an ancient language from a fallen kingdom of old (Latin), and may well know other ancient and esoteric languages besides. They are also likely to know one or more non-human languages (architects and engineers would tend to study High Dwarven, for example). Elves all speak Low Elven, which is sort of the elven version of Common and the dialect that non-elves learn. There's also High Elven, which is totally different from region to region (probably only Théscine speaks the continental tongue, as she's the only one with family ties to elves outside Feyalldra). There's also a literary language which no one speaks, as such: sort of the elf equivalent of Homeric Greek. Elves also learn the human languages of the region, and magic-using elves are taught the ancient (scholarly) tongue during their arcane studies. I don't know what the humans bordering the kingdom speak yet; maybe just different dialects of old/middle-English, or perhaps a pretend Celtic language. I'm not even sure if the kingdom to the north is even a human one yet, to be honest. Should the PCs venture that far on the map, I will figure it out based on whatever I'm in the mood for at the moment.

There I go off on a tangent. The point of all this was that I started with a very basic idea (it's sort of medieval England-y) and the details filled themselves in from there. When some -one/-where new crops up, I can either try to make up a fantasy-sounding name (Zormagax the Invoker), go for euphony (Ildmarch), or I can pick words at semi-random from a glossary, which is much simpler and sometimes more evocative. Sir Gaunet's name is old french for 'yellowish' whence we get 'gaunt' in English. His castle is from old English roots: hræfn (raven) + mor (moor). Chateau l'Oret (old french = 'wind') is in the middle of a windy plain. Sumpffort is by the swamp, Foehrenfort in the pine forest, etc. Some of it plays against type: the evil count lives in Chateau Pruduems (Prud’homme).


So there it is: my setting, or at least the apologia for its sketchy nature. The funny thing is, all the stuff I've written in this post is the stuff that developed in such an easy and natural fashion that I've never had to write it down; it's all in my head and informs every further development in the setting and every interpretation of the random idea generators. I hope that showing my work, as it were, and discussing the process of creation will be of some use to others.

notes on notes

Sophia over at Lone Wolf Roleplaying asked "How do you actually write down your solo rpg session?" I'd been wondering how other people go about it as well.

It seems (though there's only 6 responses as I write this) that journalling is a pretty popular format. I've only ever kept one RPG character's diary, years ago, and it was more of a writing exercise than a record of play. I didn't take any notes at all during the game, and wrote it all strictly from memory afterwards.

For the (so far) two solo campaigns I'm chronicling on this blog, I've been taking sketchy notes in Notepad as an aide memoire for writing the posts up into coherent narratives (I was using paper when I started, but that just made extra work as I had to type up the notes...). It's as much about the gaming as it is the story, so I try to maintain a balance between game mechanic-y things and pure fiction writing. Oddly, it's the game mechanics that need notes the most; the imagery and scraps of dialogue I make up stay in my head much more readily.

Combat is the hardest part to make interesting. I have long since stopped recording all the die rolls, though I occasionally note the ones that seem interesting in one way or another (e.g. the attack that would have hit but for the character's shield).  I notice the combat system of the game pretty much sets the narrative style, though there are ways around it. My current LotFP game is an ensemble piece, so the combats (mostly) adhere to the sequence of actions in a round. There's a lot less combat in my Traveller game (on hiatus, but I will get back to it some day) and only one PC, so I can narrate combat as she experiences it personally.

Just for fun, here are the completely unedited notes I took for Part XXV and Part XXVI of my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign, which includes some NPC notes that aren't in the actual post:

Sci-fi/Fantasy & the gender imbalance

The random NPCs from Traveller episode 11 (and earlier) got me to thinking. There were three groups, the N/PC party of four, the four criminals, and the six soldiers. In each group there was one woman, the rest being men. The party had been determined in advance by the same system (d6, 1-3=m, 4-6=f). My character's gender was not determined at random, but all her shipmates' were, and as luck would have it she replaced the sole female member of that group when she was hired as the temporary pilot. The gender imbalance of the Galatea's crew did strike me a bit odd at the time, but I sort of forgot about it as it was more interesting to find out (via the NPC Relationship Table) that the (vilani) Captain was schtupping the (solomani) engineer, who was scarcely half his age.

When I rolled for the genders of the criminals and the soldiers, I was again struck by the weird imbalance. At the time, I wrote in my game notes:

"Gender is indicated for the bad guys to make them slightly more than a collection of stats. I actually rolled 10d6 for all the NPCs in this scene (1-3 m, 4-6 f), and only 2 of those dice were 4 or higher (gaming flashback to the crappiest fireball ever cast)."

I've always liked the implicit assumption that Traveller's universe of the far future had gotten over biases based on gender and skin colouration, as summed up in the note at the end of the character generation section:


A NOTE ON GENDER AND RACE

Nowhere in these rules is a specific requirement established that any character (player or non-player) be of a specific gender or race. Any character is potentially of any race and of either sex.
-Traveller (Bk. 1 p.25, Starter Traveller Bk 1 p.17, Traveller Book p.30)


To be sure, the results I rolled were hardly outside the realm of possibility; sometimes random results just don't average out. What bothered me, though, was the fact that if I had merely presented the three groups without comment, it would have hardly seemed as if anything unusual had occurred. Perhaps it would even seem progressive of me to have included a woman in each of the groups.

The imbalance is so prevalent as to become background noise; if I had just seen the NPCs presented like that, or even with no women present, I might not have noticed, either. That's the most insidious part of the problem; we're so used to seeing it done that way we don't even find it remarkable. But if you swing the balance the other way, it stands out in an instant.

Groups of thugs and soldiers tend towards being all-male affairs. If there is a woman present, she's usually the only one, and never just one of the rank-and-file. She will usually be the smartest, sexiest, meanest &c one of the group, and the only one with different stats. If in a fantasy environment, she'll have the best armour. If there's an illustration, it will usually be plate mail with inexplicable décolleté.

The men under her command are almost never portrayed as if being commanded by such a woman is anything unusual (ok, they're a single stat block: but it seems like this is the implication). It's nice that there's no glass ceiling in Magicdale, but it does seem odd that no one else is following her example. She wasn't born a 6th level fighter. Why do the PCs never wander into a village to find such a personage at the beginning of her career?

This setup is something that's altogether too common in RPGs, even when they are ostensibly trying to be more egalitarian than other media. By only including women who are unusual in their level of attainment or 0-level peasants, it implies that, whilst women can be the equals of men, really only very few of them are.

There is always the argument that the gender roles in these worlds are based on medieval Europe (or wherever, but usually Europe), but if we can posit a 'medieval' world where pseudo-vikings team up with pseudo-hoplites to fight actual dragons, I think we can safely declare that argument invalid. Besides, it's not really the values of medieval europe that are the problem; it's the sad justification for the modern-day values being used in their place (this goes double for Game of Thrones).

Things are starting to change, but even so, it seems like the imbalance is still creeps in unconsciously even when it is consciouly addressed. Many adventures present groups of cannon fodder NPCs that just have a bunch of stats and are designated simply 'Bandits, 0-level human warriors' or the like, but just as often the text accompanying them makes bland references to 'the men'. By not specifying a gender, it re-enforces the default male stereotype unthinkingly. By implication, all other generic humans in the adventure will seem male unless it is specifically stated otherwise. Often the women primarily show up only as peasants ('20 farmers, human, m or f').

And there are also lots of adventures where the gender of generic stat-block NPCs isn't mentioned at all. I wonder what the implication is? Do we assume they're all male? That seems to be the default setting. I'd like to read it otherwise, but I'm afraid this is just attempting to look at it charitably.


P.S. For extra fun, re-read this essay but mentally substitute white/non-white person for male/female.

P.P.S. Yes, I realise I've written this whole thing with an absolute gender binary. Can anyone think of an example of a published RPG supplement that presents a human/humanoid culture without one? Monsters and aliens with 3+ biological sexes don't count. Das Schwarze Auge's elves are supposed to be all fairly androgynous, but I don't think they're exactly presented as being genderqueer.