Traveller Sandbox

Life was too busy for too long and I completely lost my momentum with the Magic World write-ups. I hope to continue them in the autumn, but for now... have some more Traveller.

My Traveller Universe — or is it?

My first Traveller set came from a secondhand bookshop, some time in 1993/4 (I was at uni). It was the 1981 box set (the 3 LBBs) with a copy of Book 4: Mercenary, Double Adventure 3: Death Station / The Argon Gambit, and a photocopy of a White Dwarf article about Imperial Credits. I'd seen a handful of articles and ads in Dragon, and a few Megatraveller articles in the four issues of Challenge I'd gotten my hands on, but that's it.

My first adventures (solitaire, of course) were therefore set in my very own approximation of the Third Imperium setting. I rolled up a subsector, which I decided was part of the Spinward Marches (I knew the name but little else), and my newly-mustered out PCs set about exploring it in a scout ship. For the most part, the grand and sweeping aspects of the setting didn't matter much, but some things did need this context. Just about anything I needed I cribbed from either Asimov's Foundation (I'd read the first 3 books) or Dune (also the first three books, but primarily the David Lynch film).

In my early peregrinations through the internet I chanced upon some treasure troves of information in the form of fan-made Amber Zones and plain-text versions of the Library Data supplements typed out in full (this was at my uni's computer lab). Over the years I acquired a lot more Traveller books, and read a lot about the Official Traveller Universe (OTU), and played all my Traveller games (solo & group) there.

Some time ago I acquired physical copies of the two main German Traveller books from the 80s, The Regelbuch (Rulebook: The Traveller Book mixed with Starter Traveller) and Buch II, ITALSöldner, Scouts und Handelsprinzen (Mercenaries, Scouts and Merchant Princes, comprising Books 4-7, Special Supplements 1&2, plus the combat system from Azhanti High Lightning). I, of course, rolled up a pile of characters and a subsector or two and played out some solo adventures. The notes for these are all in German, as it seemed like a good way to practice my composition. For the adventures, I reverted to my old way of doing things, partly out of nostalgia, but partly to keep me from constantly looking up official translations of OTU concepts. And a lot of it I just made up as I went.

The first campaign set up a lot of what followed. After I rolled up the first subsector, I arbitrarily grouped systems together into polities and put amber zones at the sites where interstellar conflicts flared up. I was only using Buch I (so, LBB Books 1-3), so the setting was necessarily a 'small ship' universe. Even my naval campaign used Book 2 ships with High Guard PCs.

The technological basis uses standard LBB conventions. Socially, there is a distant Imperium with its concomitant nobility, but out on the fringes local stellar 'nations' hold sway. Very rarely the great ships of the emperor make an appearance -- these probably should use High Guard rules & sizes. No psionics or sentient aliens, but ruins of dead alien civilisations have been discovered elsewhere in space.

For tradition's sake as much as anything else, I'm using the 365-day Imperial calendar. To go with the German rules, I wanted the lingua franca to be futuristic space German, so the common tongue is called Galaktisch. Many people speak languages local to their world and/or ethnic enclave. Many more people speak only Galaktisch, though with a variety of local accents.

There is no subsector/sector-wide nobility outside the faraway Imperial core as the holdings are spread too thin. On the fringes, the ruler of a stellar 'nation' is usually the Fürst/Fürstin (lit. Prince/Princess, SOC F). Nobles of lesser rank administer worlds or parts of worlds. The 'nations' are therefore mostly principalities (in the literal sense of being ruled by a prince). They take their names from the ruler's Noble House, which in turn takes its name from / lends its name to the ruler's homeworld.

My Sandbox

My sandbox is in an (as yet un-named) sector on the coreward margin of the Imperium. The surrounding subsectors are sparely populated, and there are no systems within J-5 on any side (in case I want to do any deep space exploration adventures). It isn't quite the OTU's Island subsectors, but it is similarly self-contained. (I put the UWP data on a page here, mostly for my own easy reference. It won't be on the test.)

Internal politics are byzantine in their complexity, with some rulers being little more than figureheads. Because most of the noble houses and/or polities are in conflict with one another if not currently at war, a Sternenrat (Stellar Council) was founded on Ehembert, a pleasant (if dry) neutral planet. Most politicking takes place there; violence is strictly prohibited, though duelling is occasionally tolerated, and a formal Code Duello assures that duels may not be used as ersatz assassinations.

Situated at J-3 from Ehembert and J-2 from Gavf (an important, unaligned industrial world) is Wegpunkt (Waypoint), a space station orbiting a large brown dwarf. Wegpunkt exists both as a means of allowing governmental ships from the trailing polities to reach Ehembert without crossing through hostile territory and giving J-2 merchant ships a safe corridor through unaligned systems running Coreward to Rimward. The station contains a fuel refinery and a fleet of shuttles specially designed for skimming the turbulent atmosphere of the brown dwarf.

As usual, I got some very strong ideas about the setting and individual worlds as I was rolling it all up, but a lot of it is just basic data waiting for my adventurers to show up before I detail anything; and rather than witter on about the minutia of my setting, I will wait until my PCs' adventures make it important to write out any additional Library Data.

But I do have a few rules-related items of note, mostly concerning Law Levels.

The first is about bladed weapons. Marines training with the cutlass is embedded too deeply in Traveller's DNA to reject, so I'm keeping that in MTU. Nobles, however --and those who would be nobles, such naval officers especially-- always duel with daggers (like in Dune). A duel between nobles who are former marines may be fought with cutlasses at the challenged party's request. As the dagger is a symbol of nobility, nobles treat Law Level as [SOC-10] points lower for purposes of carrying bladed weapons. Thus, a Fürstin (SOC 15) would still be allowed to wear her dagger on a planet of LL 13, but no one else would. If she were an ex-marine as well, she could wear a cutlass on a planet of LL 12, but still would not be allowed any firearms.

The second item is that I increased a bunch of the Law Levels for various planets where the standard world creation procedure left them too low for my tastes. I've always thought that corporate worlds (Government type 1) should have much higher LLs than the 2D6-6 the rules prescribe. I left at least one as rolled, with LL 0 -- and made it a Red Zone due to whatever catastrophe caused such a breakdown. I similarly increased the LL of all the vacuum, insidious, and corrosive atmospheres to at least 7, as I always found it hard to justify letting people run round sealed environments with rifles slung on their shoulders (this eminently sensible idea actually comes from Star Frontiers).

Also, starports are owned by the planet they are built on/over, and have the same LL, with a minimum of 7 for orbital facilities. There's no extrality barrier, just customs checkpoints.

Adventures

Ultimately, my little setting is not noticably different to the OTU, and not at all different in the way I run my adventures. If I hadn't mentioned it, it would just seem like pocket empires or Imperial client states off in some far-flung sector. Its isolation makes it easier to treat as a self-contained unit, and the lack of non-imperial civilisations means everything has a certain inward focus. The adventure that shall follow was another completely random start, but more of that anon.

Into the Odd solo - Part IV : Fresh Blood

Three figures hurry through the nighttime streets of Burthen's warehouse district, scurrying from one pool of gaslight to the next.

"Why did we ever agree to this?" asks one.

"Have we any choice?" responds another.

"Ssshhh!" scolds the third. "We oughtn't discuss this out-of-doors. He has spies everywhere."

"Agreed," says the first, looking at a scrap of paper upon which an address has been written in a spidery hand. "And we shouldn't discuss this in front of the help. Speaking of which, this is the address."

They ascend a soot-stained staircase at the front of an old, crumbling brick warehouse, and rap soundly upon the front door.

[And thus, my next three PCs begin their Into the Odd sandbox adventure. As I mentioned in the last post, I've made a few improvements to the sandbox table.

Movement points & costs remain unchanged:
6 Movement Points per day.
clear: 1mp/hex
mushroom forest & swamp: 2mp/hex
broken lands & mountains: 3mp/hex

There is still a 1-in-6 chance per hex of an encounter. Each new hex explored requires a 1d30 roll to determine its contents, on a more sensible table than the last:

d30   Feature
----- -------
1-15  none
16    single dwelling
17    hamlet
18    village
19    castle/keep/stronghold
20    temple
21-24 ruins
25-30 special

More importantly, I've created Mission and Compensation tables. These will be fleshed out with sub-tables as I get to them. For now, variables will be pulled out of random picture folders or rolled for.

Mission (1d6):
1. find place X
2. take item X to place Y
3. bring me the head of person X
4. get me arcanum X from place Y
5. accompany person X to place Y
6. hunting party

Notes: Places are a random hex on the map; currently unexplored places will automatically have a feature of some kind (roll 1d12+15 on the feature table). Persons may or may not be human. A hunting party is 50% likely to be a hunt for a fantastic beast. The other 50% of the time, the hunting party is chasing after you, Most Dangerous Game style (in which case, no reward is offered).

Post-TPK rule: If your new party roll the same mission as the expedition that was just lost, they are hired to complete the failed quest. Assume 1d6 weeks have elapsed.

So, what mission did my new PCs get?
1d6=2; well, then...
1d6=5 weeks have passed

Compensation (1d6):
1. 2d6 shillings each
2. 1d4 guilders (total)
3. one-use arcanum (each)
4. stock tips
5. owed a favour
6. do it or else

1d6=6; the mysterious employer is certainly a being to be reckoned with.

At some point I will detail the Leaders and their Organisations, but for now I'm just pulling portratits that I've done up earlier out of a folder.

I think three PCs is a good number, but since the last lot of explorers didn't do so well, I'm using the Companions rule to bring the party up to six.

Companions: For small player groups, each player may create one or more companions. Roll their Ability Scores in order and give them 1 hp and a sword." (Into the Odd, p.4)

But lest one think these are nameless, faceless damage-sponges...]

In the back of the painter's warehouse-district studio, Severin slumps down on a settee and heaves a great sigh, drowning out for a moment the hiss of the gas lamps. "I said," he asks, "how much longer until you're finished?"

"One cannot rush Art," replies Gregor without even looking up from his canvas.

"Quite. Only we've already spent your entire commission for that painting, and we're out of money. I spent the last on cigarettes this morning."

"That was the last of our capital?" asks Wanda, throwing her hands up in frustration. "Why, oh why, dear Severin, didn't you at least buy good ones?"

"Wanda, be still!" growls Gregor. "I can't get the folds of your skirt right if you keep moving!"

"You both realise what this means?" continues Severin.

"Oh bother," says Wanda, pouting.

"I can get another commission," says Gregor, "providing you two stop ruining this painting."

"Gregor, dahling," says Wanda, "after that débâcle last season, you were damned lucky to get even this one. Or have you forgotten?"

"Is it my fault if the philistines of this pitiful little town weren't ready for my 'Erysichthon at table'. If I could show in Bastion..."

"Dear Gregor," says Severin, "the whole reason we left Bastion in the first place was to escape the uproar over your 'Thyestes asks for seconds'. Or had you forgotten?"

"Poor Gregor," teases Wanda, "your genius shall be unappreciated in your lifetime!"

"Well, then, I suppose we must count ourselves lucky that we have a career to fall back on."

"I'm glad we're all agreed," says Severin. "Mercenary work it is, then."

"Ugh! mercenary work," sighs Wanda.

"Severin, old chap, if you're finished smoking away the last of our riches, perhaps you'd like to get off your arse and find our swords. They're in here somewhere... I think with the costumes you wore for my 'Procne and Tereus'."

Wanda
STR 11, DEX 12, WIL 14, 1 HP
sword (d6)

Severin
STR 14, DEX 12, WIL 6, 1 HP
sword (d6)

Gregor
STR 6, DEX 8, WIL 6, 1 HP
sword (d6)

Just then comes a rapping at the door. "Since I was getting up anyways..." mutters Severin, rising from the settee.

"I wonder who it could be?" muses Wanda. "If we're just now out of money, it's too soon to be creditors..."

Severin disappears into the foyer for a few moments, then returns with the three new arrivals in tow. "I'm afraid it's worse than creditors, dear Wanda; it's my friends from Bastion, bearing a missive from -- well, you can guess who from. I'd better get those swords. We're going to need them presently."

"Are we to go with them into the Deep Country?" asks Gregor without turning round.

"Oh, dear Gregor," says Wanda, "if you'd but look at them, you'd not need to ask such a question!"

Gregor finally puts aside his brushes and turns about to see the callers. "My god, Severin" says he, "these are your friends from Bastion? What fresh nightmare have you gotten us into?"

And this is who he saw:

Randeep Khartoor
When Randeep Khartoor was thirty she lost the key of the gate of dreams.

Randeep Khartoor
STR 11, DEX 14, WIL 15, 6 HP
pistol (d6), knife (d6), bomb (d12), saw

Aurélius Colon
He could not traverse the gates of ivory or of horn which separate us
from the unseen world without a shudder.

Aurélius Colon
STR 13, DEX 16, WIL 9, 5 HP
pistol (d6), acid, animal repellent, prosthetic hand

Fridoline Rossignol
And no dream is fully a dream.

Fridoline Rossignol
STR 11, DEX 5, WIL 8, 2 HP
hatchet (d6), pistol (d6), bolt cutters, red-oil stave


Next post : the adventure commences anew !

Into the Odd solo - setup

Back in January I picked up a copy of Into the Odd. Normally I don't get on with rules-light games, but this one was just unusual enough to tempt me (there's a free version here which might tempt you, too). Besides, I've been concentrating on verisimilitude for a long while now, and a bit of abject surrealism sounds like a fun change.

In keeping with the simplicity of the game, I decided set-up shouldn't take more than an hour. The initial adventure was going to be 'take X from A to B'. I wanted both dungeons and wilderness to explore, so the first thing to do was set up a sandbox. Hexographer is great for random terrain, so I tweaked the settings to make them weird enough. I put the starting city and the destination city on the map, and that was that. Everything else would be discovered in the course of the game. I'm not entirely sure what some of the terrain is yet.

The party has 6 Movement Points per day. Costs are--
clear: 1mp/hex
mushroom forest & swamp: 2mp/hex
broken lands & mountains: 3mp/hex

Every time the party enter a new hex, 1d6 and 1d30 are rolled. There is a 1-in-6 chance of an encounter, and about a 47% chance of a feature (I'm not entirely happy with this table and will probably be changing it, but it has been fine so far). When the party retrace their steps, there is still the 1-in-6 encounter chance, but no new feature roll. I've been playing the adventure with Hexographer open, adding fortifications and features to the map as they occur, and putting an X in every hex they pass through that comes up empty so I know not to re-roll the d30 for features. The Xs are put in with the 'GM Only' box ticked, so I can hide them all and have a nice map without the clutter.

1d30  Feature
----  -------
1-16  none
17-18 single dwelling
19-20 thorp
21    hamlet
22-23 castle/keep/stronghold
24    temple
25-27 ruins
28-30 special

I've been using the d30 Sandbox Companion's NFP: Natural Features & Phenomena By Terrain Type to generate the Special features, and various other tables (e.g. CK2: Patrol Size and Makeup for patrols) as needed.

If the party camp out in the wilderness, there is a 1-in-6 chance of a nighttime encounter. Nocturnal settlement encounters can be avoided easily if the PCs have somewhere to stay; otherwise there's the usual 1-in-6 for something untoward to happen.

My toolbox, then, is:
- Mythic for random ideas
- MCSV for the Oracle (no scenes, static 1d8 chaos die)
- d30 Sandbox Companion
- UNE
- Hexographer
- Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator for dungeons
- folders full of pictures for encounters, treasure, etc.

Since getting underway, I've had some additional ideas which would make the hex-crawling a little more interesting, but those will have to wait until I've turned them into something coherent.

It probably took longer to write this out and post it than it did to actually set it up, including character creation. Speaking of which, here are my PCs:

Cpt. Aldous Thumbscrew
the forgotten hero of a foreign war

Cpt. Aldous Thumbscrew
STR 11, DEX 5, WIL 12, HP 1
club (d6), throwing knives (d6), miniaturisation coil

Miss Threnody Wolverhaven
a murderess running from her crimes

Miss Threnody Wolverhaven
STR 8, DEX 14, WIL 15, HP 3
club (d6), ether, crowbar, flute

Murt
Murt have axe

Murt
STR 15, DEX 8, WIL 7, HP 2
longaxe (d8), ferret, fire oil


. . . . . .

Next post (tomorrow) -- the adventure begins !

Das schwarze Auge solo - Sandbox

Having made my character, I then threw together a sandbox. It probably took longer to decide where to put it than it did to actually make the thing. This is the reason I rarely play in established or historical settings; I spend too much time on research. I don't even have that much source material beyond the basic books for 4th & 5th ed., but http://www.wiki-aventurica.de/ fills in a lot of gaps.

I knew I wanted mountains on one side, and forests & hills, and nothing too close to major civilised areas. Long story short... I placed it in roughly the middle of the continent of Aventurien (Aventuria) -- it's the red blob near the centre of the map (from the DSA Kartenpaket), about 250 Meilen (the aventurian Meile (mile, league) = 1 kilometre) from the capital.

The screen-sized sliver of my Dragon Warriors sandbox turned out to be really useful for playing, so I wanted to have the same sort of area. My screen made a 15x37 hex map the ideal size, so a scale of 2 Meilen per hex seemed workable. I zoomed into the area map until it was at the same scale relative to my screen, and messed about trying to find the area I wanted as a base. I couldn't quite find an area that worked, so I hit on the idea of rotating the map by 60° (i.e. one hex side).

I blew up the rotated bit of the map I needed to 575%, and used the Import Map to Trace feature in hexographer to make it into a hex map. It was a bit indistinct, so I kept the original to hand whilst I was tracing. With just terrain, a river, a minor road, and three settlements, the map was pretty empty at this point. I figured there should be some villages and farmland, and canonically there is a martial academy near Greifenberg, but to filling in the bulk of the map would require going back to the PC.

Based on her history, skills, and abilities, I knew the following things needed to exist:

Witches - she'll need to learn new spells and curses from them, and can only make more flying ointment together with them at the grand rite. The witches will probably want something from her before they let her into their circle.

Mage - witches can learn guild mage spells (though they will never master them). The mage will certainly want something in return. Also, I am constitutionally incapable of making a sandbox without a wizard's tower.

Ingredients - for alchemy & herbalism. She can't get them down the shops.

House - She'll need to live somewhere. And wherever it ends up being, she'll need room for her witch's kitchen / alchemy lab. But will she find one, have one constructed, move into town...?


With all that in mind, I started placing things around the map. For the ease of random determination, there will be 30 location icons on the map. But, to start, I'm only placing 20. These are the ones that are generally known to exist. The other 10 will be randomly generated as the game progresses. So, here is map, followed by the basic key to the numbered locations:

1. Gut Nebelstein
I can find no information on this, other than that it is a settlement in the Finsterkamm. It's out of the way enough that I will leave it a mystery for now.

2. Ruins
Details of caves and ruins will be determined as the adventure leads them there.

3. Hexengipfel (witch's peak)
The witches congregate here for the annual rite. They may or may not come here at other times on various witchy errands.

4. Shrine to Efferd (the water god)
The source of the river is sacred, and the shrine here is attended by a handful of priests.

5. Winterfels
A village along the road, boasting a good travellers inn. The population of almost 200 mostly raise goats and sheep. Cheese-making is a big industry.

6. Herberge zum ruhigen Aufenthalt (Inn of the quiet stay)
A travellers' inn in a forest clearing off the road. Poor-quality stables, as horses can make the journey from Hohendorf to Winterfels in one day. It is rumoured that a gang of bandits either work out of the inn, or else meet here to form their nefarious designs.

7. Hohendorf
A crappy little village in the hills, population ~80. Forestry is the major industry, and a few villagers raise sheep and cows in the communal pasture. There is a good travellers' inn, and a small Praios temple. Our heroine's home town.

8. Mage's Tower
The peasantry are suitably terrified of the tower, and will never go near. The Mage is never seen, but sends servants abroad for supplies.

9. cave in the hills
Rumoured to be part of a cave complex that goes very deep. Perhaps even connects with cave #10.

10. cave in the mountains

11. Birkenhain
There are only 150 full-time residents of this village, but another 200 loggers call it home when they are not in their forest camps. The mage's servants are often here on minor supply runs, and the mage not infrequently lets the loggers work near his tower in exchange for firewood. Rumours that the mage has a lover in the village are wholly unsubstantiated.

12. ruins

13. Weihenhorst
Weihenhorst is a walled town that played an important strategic role in the orc war (1012BF - 28 years ago). There's at least 800 people living within the walls, and half again that many without. A few dwarfs and goblins call Weihenhorst home.

14. Raven Cloister
A monastery dedicated to Boron, the god of death and sleep (one of the Twelve Gods), who is usually depicted as a raven. There is a grand cemetery (Boronanger, lit. Boron's meadow) and extensive crypts. Despite its ominous and terrifying aspect, this is probably the safest place on the map. Boron's servants are arch-foes of the undead.

15. Almweide
A village of shepherds and subsistence farmers. Population ~150.

16. Cadet Academy
The officers' academy for soldiers of the March. Cadets are trained in bastard- and longsword, mace, and flail, and instilled with the values of Knighthood. On days of rest, the cadets are forbidden to go carousing in Weihenhorst; however...

17. Kalmansfeld
A large farming community. Only about 50 of the population of 700 live in the town centre, which is used as a trading post and farmers' market.

18. fairy glade
Scarcely one mortal in any given century visits the glen and returns, and even then they are never the same again. The mage or a powerful witch may know how to treat with the fairies. An elf might also be a trusty guide, but there are none locally. Just imagine the wond'rous plants growing here, and the magical properties they posses.

19. ruins

20. Greifenberg
Greifenberg is the seat of the Baron of Greifenberg. The baron's castle is on a solitary hill in the midst of a large town, boasting nearly 1000 inhabitants. Greifenberg was plundered by ork hordes in 1012BF. The road heading NW out of town is little better than a dirt track, whereas the SE road (off the map) leading to Greifenfurt (capital of the Markgraviate of which the barony is a part) is properly stone-faced and well-tended; this mirrors the attitude of the inhabitants of Greifenberg towards all those living closer to the Finsterkamm then they (save, of course, the cadets and the mage).


The sandbox is situated in the Barony of Greifenberg, which is in the Margraviate of Greifenfurt, in the so-called Shield Lands of the Middenrealm.

The mountains on the left side of the map belong to the Finsterkamm (Gloomy Peaks). They are home to gryphons, orks, and secretive clans of dwarfs.

The river is the Breite (meaning Wide), one of the headwaters of the Große Fluss (Great River). The Breite is only navigable as far as Greifenfurt (not on the sandbox map).

There may be occasional missions off the map. Above shows the sandbox situated in the surrounding lands (again, from the Kartenpaket). Greifenfurt is a city of 3800 inhabitants, and residence of the Marquise. Krayenhorst is a monster-infested ruined city in the midst of the Messergras Steppe. Arras de Mott is a mountaintop monastery devoted to Praios, which boasts a great library (forbidden to outsiders).

For getting round the map, I'm using movement points. According to the DSA rulebook, a human can travel 30 Meilen per day, and a horse 50. I'm translating those figures directly into movement points. Since one hex = 2 Meilen, a clear terrain hex costs 2MP. Grassy and barren hills take 3MP, forest takes 4MP, forested hills 5MP, and all mountains take 10MP, whether high, steep, and barren or lower and wooded. The snow-capped peaks will affect temperature, but not movement. The road is of low quality, and does not affect movement rates; it just obviates the need for skill checks not to get lost.

Factions

Each settlement, plus the Mage's tower and the witches, counts as a faction, and some are even subdivided. Their relationships are expressed in terms of modifiers to Social skill rolls made by a resident/representative of one towards the other. Negative numbers marked with an * indicate the relationship is based on fear, and should be converted to a positive modifier for intimidation checks. Intimidation checks for positive relationships only take effect when it makes sense (e.g. nobles intimidating peasants). I started making a table, but there were too many Neutral (+0) entries, so perhaps a summation is more in order. Individuals may, of course, vary, and the PC's reputation will be taken into account if/when her actions affect her standing towards any given community.

Merchants: stand outside the normal order of things, and count as Neutral (no modifiers) when conducting business.

Gut Nebelstein: this settlement is so far removed, that no modifers apply, unless you're a witch or mage.

Peasants: The populations of Winterfels, Hohendorf, Birkenhain, Almweide, and Kalmansfeld all have a very parochial outlook, giving them a -1 towards one another. And as they are all rustics, they have a -3 towards everyone in Weihenhorst, Greifenberg, and the Academy.

Nobles & Knights: +3 towards peasants, but only +1 against the populace of Weihenhorst.

Witches: almost everyone hates and fears the witches, so they have a -3* towards almost everyone; a suspected witch only has a -1*. The Mage respects them enough, so the penalty toward him and his servants is only -1.

Mage's Tower: almost everyone respects and fears the Mage. He has a +2 when dealing with others, except in Birkenhain where he has a +3. He prefers to be left alone, so everyone else has a -2 when dealing with him (again save Birkenhain, who have a +1). The mage's servants speak in his name, and enjoy his modifiers.

Priests at the Shrine of Efferd: +1 (mutual) for other priests of The 12 Gods, +3 (also mutual) for actual pilgrims, otherwise no modifiers.

Herberge: peasants have a -1 here, witches and the mage count as normal, all others are Neutral. The staff count as peasants if they should ever leave the inn.

Rabenkloster: uniformly neutral, as all must come into Boron's realm in the end.

Kadettenakademie: the instructors are all Knights, and many of them nobles as well (modifiers as above). The cadets are afforded less respect (+1) by the peasantry, and are positively hated in Weihenhorst for the trouble they cause there (-3, except in certain louche establishments who cater to their vices).

Weihenhorst: The people of Weihenhorst who live inside the walls look down on the provincials who surround them. Assume a -2 to deal with them, unless a worse penalty is specifically indicated. Outside the walls everyone is a Peasant, so those modifiers apply.

Greifenberg: everyone here is either a noble or peasant. The baron (only) gets a +4 almost everywhere (+3 in Weienhorst, +2 with the mage and witches).

Next post, the adventure begins...

Dragon Warriors - character creation

As is standard procedure, after a brief read-through of the rulebook, I rolled up about 10 characters. I assigned a Profession (character class) to each set of stats to form a stable of PCs, but decided that I would focus on just a handful to start, leaving the others a bit vague until either the GM emulator or simple inspiration suggested a use for them. As this is an adventure about knights & castles, the main starting PC would certainly be a Knight.

So, what does a Knight in Dragon Warriors look like? PCs have 5 characteristics, ranging from 3-18 as was common practice for games of this vintage. They are Strength (both physical strength and endurance), Reflexes (dexterity and agility), Intelligence (what it says), Psychic Talent (intuition and facility with magic), and Looks (charisma and appearance). I rolled 3d6 in order for each character, and assigned professions based on the results (and crossed out two hopeless characters). The set I chose for the Knight is:

Strength: 13
Reflexes: 9
Intelligence: 11
Psychic Talent: 12
Looks: 15

He's strong, if occasionally clumsy, but he certainly has a commanding presence. He'll certainly do as the leader of his eventual party.

Following the rulebook, the next step is to roll for Health Points (hit points). This is 1d6 + a modifier based on profession, anywhere from +9 (barbarians) to +4 (sorcerer). Knights get 1d6+7; a crap roll of 2 gives my knight 9hp.

The next few steps of character creation are determining a set of scores for combat, sneaking, dodging, etc.

These all start at a fixed level determined by the character's Profession, but may be modified by attributes falling outside the human average (9-12). They mostly come in pairs: Attack & Defence, Stealth & Perception, Magical Attack & Magical Defence, and Evasion. To hit in combat, you need to roll your Attack minus your opponent's Defence or lower on 1d20. The others are the same, except they use 2d10. Evasion is subtracted from an object's Speed if the character needs to dodge. It's a very simple system at heart. To provide context, here are the base scores for a beginning Knight next to the numbers for a normal, non-adventuring human:

           Knight  Avg.Human
Attack        13      11
Defence        7       3

Stealth       13      12
Perception     5       4

Mag. Att.      -       -
Mag. Def.      3       3

Evasion        4       3

HP            d6+7    d6+3

Due to his high Strength, my knight has a 14 attack, but is otherwise as above.

As a knight, he starts with three special abilities: Track, Armour Expert, and Ride Warhorse. Knights can wear any kind of armour without penalty, and along with Barbarians and some Warlocks (fighter-mages, like Elric) are the only ones capable of riding a warhorse.

Starting characters get equipment based on Profession as well. A knight is initially equipped with plate armour, shield, dagger, lantern, flint-and-tinder, backpack, 25 florins (silver coins), and a sword or morning star. Despite being only 1st Rank (rank=level, but also directly corresponds to one's professional standing), beginning characters stand above the common herd.

This is really all you need to make a character and get playing, but there's a whole section on generating your PC's background. The tables to be consulted vary by profession. Knights start by rolling d% to determine their social class (which is more likely than any other to be Noble [1-18] or Gentry [19-53]; sorcerers are the next highest with 1-13/14-22). My knight is born of noble blood, and will have all the duties and privileges commensurate therewith. He hails from Albion (England) in Ellesland (Britannia), so speaks Elleslandic as his native tongue. As a noble, there was a 40% to speak a second language in addition, but he failed the roll. Fully 15% of the nobility is literate; alas our knight had no time in his youth for bookish pursuits -- leave that to the sons of doctors, lawyers, and architects (who get a whopping 35%). Illiteracy means no chance of knowing ancient languages, so this concluded character creation by the book.

Oh, but he needs a name, doesn't he. Rather than making up vaguely-plausible sounding names, I have been grabbing everything (so far) from here: http://www.infernaldreams.com/names/Europe/Medieval/England.htm

My knight is thus yclep'd Loys (Louis), a nice name of Frankish origin.

I decided that I've been playing a lot of games with starting characters, so it might be nice to start this one out a little higher. Also, I really want to use the Jousting and Tournament rules, and a 1st rank knight cannot reasonably expect to make much of an impression in a tourney. So I bumped my knight up to 3rd rank. This provided increases to Attack, Defence, Magical Defence, and Health Points... of +1 per rank. DW is not a game of super-human heroics!

das In-der-Spielwelt-sein

Since Loys is a noble, I wanted him to have more of a connection to the sandbox. Dragon magazine #96 has an excellent article, 'What good PCs are made of' by Katherine Kerr, on generating a (human) PC's history, using the actual middle ages as a guide. Skipping the parts that were already covered by the DW rules, it transpires that Loys is a legitimate child of his parents, but the youngest of three living brothers. Three other siblings died when he was still a child. His family is poor by the standards of the nobility, and he is more hostile towards them than is usual. The knight to whom he was made a squire was of a low status (I imagine the family pawned him off at the first opportunity due to the mutual animosity poisoning their happy home), but at least this knight treated him warmly. I haven't come up with a name for the family yet, but I will when it becomes important.

I thought it best to figure out which castle he calls home. I made a quick-and-dirty origins map; this is just a copy of the hexmap with gigantic (72-point font size) numbers on it, so that when viewed all on one screen they are legible. Red numbers are castles, blue are monasteries and cloisters (in which priestly types are trained; more on this later). Note that blue #4 is the cathedral in Ebrac; there is also a castle in the city, but PCs won't be from there. A die roll makes Loys from castle #12.

castles and monasteries

I was inspired by a random 'your PC might be...' statement in the rulebook to make Loys' first adventure start as he is coming home from the Crusades. The first scene will find him still aboard ship with his squire Reynaud, who is the other Knight I rolled up (and who remains 1st rank). Reynaud is from castle #10, of a noble family who are more secure than Loys'. He's either Loys' squire because the families are connected by alliances and possibly intermarriage, or Loys' took him on to spite his family by having a squire from a rival house. I haven't decided which yet, but either way it will breathe a bit of life into the setting. At some point after I started playing I had a flash of inspiration about events that befell this pair of stalwart crusaders in the month or so before the start of game time; but this will all be revealed in play, as random events are interpreted around it.

Rather than justifying the rest of the PCs' presence on the boat with them, I have elected to have them gradually introduced over the course of the game. But I did want them to all start knowing Loys, and possibly each other. And as they all have skills and abilities which would benefit a party of adventurers, I scattered them around an area of the map so that, should Loys decide he needs the services of one of them, the journey to where they (probably) are will provide extra opportunities for exploration. I left the Elementalist (shaman) and two Barbarians out of the mix, though. They will show up together at some point when I have need of them, but they would not have any obvious connection with the more 'civilised' PCs.

For inter-relationships, I naturally turned to the NPC Relationship Table in Star Trader. I rolled once for each PC to determine their relationship with Loys, and then once again for each of them as if they were a 4-person ship crew, i.e. one roll relating to a randomly-determined other character.

Here is a summary of the other PCs:

Reynaud the Knight is Loys' life-long friend (being his squire, he looks up to him as an older brother, perhaps even a surrogate father). Reynaud is secretly an enemy of Ysmena the Sorceress, and is waiting for his chance to strike.

Ysmena the sorceress: Blames Loys for a past event (the death of the abbot who taught her sorcery at the monastery). She knows a dark secret about Hubertus the Priest.

Fr. Hubertus the Priest is Loys' friend, but only through guilt. He is an old (and these days, ex-) friend of Claricia, the Assassin.

Claricia the Assassin is one of Loys' cousins, who are amongst the gentry living in Ebrac; she's a bit cold towards him. She shares a secret past incident with the Priest. Whatever it is that she and the priest did, it seems to have ended their friendship, and caused Hubertus a lot of guilt besides. I wonder what they will do when they discover that the sorceress knows the horrible truth...

The sorceress learnt magic in the monastery at blue #1. The priest took orders at blue #2. The Priest profession is in the Players Guide; it represents not the average clerics, but the philosopher priests like Thomas Aquinas or Averroës. I almost used Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon as the examples, but in Dragon Warriors legends are all true, so the former's alchemical pursuits make him a Sorcerer, whilst the latter is a Demonologist.

a screen's worth for starters

Since the adventure necessarily starts in just a small portion of the map, I made a sub-map for the beginning. Focussing the map on Ebrac, I cropped it so it displayed 30 settlements on my screen, and numbered them. The knight's ship will be heading for the city, and from there adventure can compel them in any direction. I spread the other PCs around the map at the whim of my d30, and gave them each a reason for being there via Mythic. All will be revealed as they come into the story, but for the moment:

Sorceress: at 26 : Spy / The spiritual
Priest: at 13 : Gratify / Weapons
Assassin: at 19 : Dispute / Enemies

So now everything is prepared. Next post: the adventure begins.

Knights & Castles - Dragon Warriors sandbox

Switching gears again... A post by Moonsylver in the Lone Wolf Roleplaying group got me thinking about a sandbox game I started up a while ago and never got around to posting. It's caught my interest again, so here goes:

Rambling proöemium

In c.30 years of gaming I have never owned a pad of hex paper. Wilderness maps were either sketched on anything I had to hand, or put on regular graph paper, which worked well enough. Honestly, most overland adventures used either the World of Greyhawk maps or something borrowed from a published module -- if they used a map at all. My best ever solitaire wilderness sandbox was on regular graph paper, all mapped out in advance; I should probably see if I still have it to mine for ideas. A friend once did give me a couple sheets of hex paper. One of them was wasted in drawing a series of caverns that I never used for anything, and the other lay fallow for many a year until I finally found something to do with it. At some point I decided I wanted to play a game about knights and castles, chivalry and the high (fantasy-) middle ages -- indeed, just like the guys on the cover of the WOG box set. The PCs were a group of knights (4th-7th level cavaliers and paladins) and their attendant cleric. I put a town at the bottom of the map for the starting point, and dotted castles around the rest of the page. The adventure was handled with the random wilderness tables in the back of the DMG, each hex's terrain being revealed only as it was explored by the brave knights on their holy quest to do deeds of valour in exchange for experience points. The Lords and Ladies ruling each castle were fleshed out with the NPC personality tables, and given alliances and rivalries, and had the adventure continued there would have eventually been armies from rival castles taking the field under the Battlesystem rules. It was all great fun for a while, but in the end I abandoned it in favour of getting back to the exploits of my elven magic-user, or possibly Star Frontiers.

I did always intend to get back to it some day, but it never happened. It wasn't quite the fairytale adventure I wanted, and the random terrain made it a bit too far-fetched; the castles were never anywhere really sensible and seemed to exist without any need for peasants to till the land. The game probably would have worked better for Pendragon or Chivalry & Sorcery, or with rules from the D&D Companion set, but I didn't have any of those. I started thinking about it again recently when I came across some blog posts about sandboxes and hexcrawls. I was also trying to think about where to go after finishing my latest series of dungeon escapades; fun as they are, I was starting to suffer from writing-about-combat fatigue again.

I mentioned the medieval kick I'd been on somewhere in one of the LotFP dungeon write-ups. Since then, I went visiting in the Midlands and got to go explore an actual castle, which is in fact what reminded me of the old knights & castles hex adventure in all its glory -- and in all its inaccuracies. Not only was the castle was right by the town, but the subterranean passages weren't even close to 10' wide. The cellars of the 18th century manor house we saw that weekend were much more classically dungeon-sized, if somewhat linear and frequently open to the outside.

fig. 1 - Medieval, about 3' wide, maybe 6 1/2' high

fig. 2 - 18th century. Still not 10x10' squares

Added to all this, I recently discovered the Dragon Warriors RPG. Growing up I'd never heard of it, and to be honest, the name probably would have put me off. But when I looked into it the setting really spoke to me in a way that few fantasy games ever had. Briefly, it has both the feel of the actual middle ages and the wonder of proper old fairytales that I was always looking for. The DW setting and ethos are definitely similar to the way I had been setting up my LotFP campaign, only without the baggage of certain D&Disms.

Setting the scene

So, how did I set up the sandbox? I like the basic DW setting, so I am using it for the broad strokes of the world. I am starting with the standard campaign setting of Albion (fantasy England) and I found a big blank space on the world map in which to place my hexcrawl. It corresponds roughly to Yorkshire, which is a good model for the setting I want (i.e. lots of spooky moors to get lost in). I'm using 1-mile hexes, so a 60x80 hexmap (4800 square miles) is about 2/3 the size of actual Yorkshire, and doesn't run over into other parts of the world map.

I've got Hexographer instead of paper, which drastically speeds up the process of map making. The basic random terrain distribution is a bit bizarre though, so I changed it to suit the climate of the region in the Custom Terrain settings. I didn't like the first map it generated at all, but the second one was usable. It still needed a lot of work to clean up (by which I mean it took one whole evening).

First I added the coast, and drew rough lines down it and around the lakes so it looked more like real terrain. I still wasn't happy with the amount of moorland, so I increased that, and even put in a bit of broken lands way out on the western side of the map for the site of some magical disaster or other.

Had I been working on paper, I would have added in rivers next, but with the Add Random Features tool in Hexographer, it makes more sense to see where the settlements are and use those as a guide to laying down the rivers. Since I'm going for verisimilitude, I did a bit of looking online and found, quite handily, a population-density map of Yorkshire based on the Domesday Book. I knew my LotFP map was woefully underpopulated, but even this admission now seems like comic understatement. DW divides settlements into Castles, Towns, and Villages. So, to get a reasonable amount of starting settlements, I first ran the tool with just the Village icon, and bumped up the density from the base .5% to 2%. After that, I put the density back to normal and ran the tool again, placing castles, forts, churches, ruins, &c.

Then I went through the whole map and made sense of it all. Villages were added in big, empty areas of cultivated land, removed from swamps, etc. Castles were moved near villages and vice versa. I added a lot of settlements and fortifications on the coast. And I added a single city icon to represent the largest settlement, where the Earl holds his court. I'm calling it Ebrac, as it is obviously pretend-York (Latin Eboracum).

Once I was satisfied with all that I added rivers, and made sure that all settlements had some sort of believable water supply. I also connected a lot of the settlements by roads, which would have been built in the days when the island was a province of the Selentine (faux-Roman) empire. I made sure to include lots of crossroads so there is somewhere to display the bodies of criminals hanging in gibbets.

fig. 3 - This is just part of the map, and at half size.
Ebrac is on the river, south of the crossroads near the centre.

And that was sort of it. Other than the one city, I will be putting off naming things until it becomes necessary. NPCs, factions, and everything else will come out in play.

Next post: character creation (& more setting)

Traveller - Star Trader (Setup)

I decided to randomly play a little Traveller a while back using Star Trader. I wrote it all out but got distracted with Runequest, so forgot to ever post it. I shall rectify that now, since I haven't got anything post-able for RQ adventure #2 yet.

Here is the setup, 5 totally random characters and their ship. They were all generated with Classic Traveller rules. The last line of each 'character sheet ' shows the source: mostly Merchant Prince but some JTAS articles as well. Some day I will get back to my Traveller campaign properly, and these PCs may surface again should I need a merchant crew. 

Anyway, here they are. Their adventure (so far) will come tomorrow.

Captain Inty Liljingiv - Captain / Owner aboard / Navigator
939A84   Age 38   ex-Merchant   5 terms
Homeworld: Mingiz/Foreven (A668887-C Ri Cp)
Human female

Admin-1, Gambling-3, Gunnery-1, JOT-1, Leader-2, Legal-1, Liaison-1, Navigation-1, Pilot-1, Ship's Boat-1, Steward-2, Vacc-1, Zero-G Combat-1

Cr40000, Far Trader (30 yr. mortgage), Mid Passage x5
Relationship: Sexual partner of Orneev Herremmenen
Career: Failed to secure a job aboard a free trader, so joined an interface line instead as a purser. After serving two terms, was sent to Deck school and steadily worked her way up to ship's captain.
Book 7


Dr. Fomrut Kwoxon - Medic
668B9A   Age 35   ex-Navy O3   4 terms
Homeworld: Tierdan/Foreven (3238 B200862-C Na Va)
Human Male

Admin-2, Carousing-1, Computer-1, Electronics-2, JOT-1, Medic-4 (Pathology-1, Lab tech-1), Navigation-1, Vacc-1

Blade, Low Passage
Relationship: Knows a dark secret about Diula Korfize
Career: Graduated with honours from the Imperial Naval academy on Tierdan, then opted for Medical school, again graduating with honours. Promoted up to Lieutenant Commander in his first term of active duty (term 3). Admitted to the prestigious Imperial Academy of Science and Medicine to study pathology (term 4), but failed out in the last year. Demoted back to lieutenant. Injured on patrol mission (faled survival roll first year of term 5) and mustered out.
Book 5
Imperial Academy of Science and Medicine JTAS 22


Auoth Epperson - Pilot
7B9A96   Age 38   ex-Merchant O2   5 terms
Homeworld: Mzarz/Foreven(2639 A221775-B Na Po)
Human Male

Admin-2, ATV-1, Blade-1, Electronics-1, Engineering-1, Leader-1, Legal-1, Liaison-1, Navigation-1, Pilot-1, Ship'sBoat-2, Vacc-2

Cr7500
Carbine
Middle Passage
Relationship: Friendship through guilt with Orneev Herremmenen
Career: Has spent his entire, rather lacklustre, career working in the engineering department for an interface line. Wnted to be a pilot, but didn't quite manage a chance until now.
Book 7


Orneev Herremmenen - Steward
86B798   Age 34   ex- Merchant O1   4 terms
Homeworld: Haarui/Foreven (2540 C6B5555-8 Fl Ni)
Human Male

Brawling-1, Bribery-1, Broker-3, Dagger-1, Gambling-1, Legal-2, Steward-2

Cr41000
Dagger
Relationship: Secretly hates Diula Korfize
Career: Learnt a lot about interstellar commerce (legal and otherwise) travelling around on various free traders both within and without the Imperium. After an injury sustained repelling pirates near Estoner, he was forced to spend time recuperating in hospital. Once healed, he hired on aboard the first trader that would have him.
Book 7


Diula Korfize - Engineer
85C798   Age 34   ex-Skyport Authority   4 terms
Homeworld: Veegint/Foreven (3234 B743784-A)
Solomani female

Admin-3, Body Pistol-1, Bribery-1, Engineering-1, Gambling-1, Gravitics-1, Interrogation-2, Streetwise-1

Cr20000
dagger
Relationship: Bitter about a past event towards Lt. Fomrut Kwoxon
Career: Spent 16 years working for the Veegint port authority in the freight handling department at the downport. A lot of questionable things passed through her office, but she usually managed to keep her nose clean(ish). Things eventually caught up with her, and she was forced to leave under a cloud of suspicion (failed re-enlistment roll).
Skyport Authority JTAS 19



The Ship & Expenses

The Hekabe
Ship type: Far Trader type A2
Life support (per trip):
    Crew: (5) Cr10000
    High/medium: Cr2000x 1-5
    Low: Cr100 x 1-4
Fuel Tonnage: 50t
    Cost
    Refined: 25000
    Unrefined: 5000
Berthing: Cr100
Total/trip:
    (Full J1: 35500
    (Full J2: 45500
Crew salaries (Monthly):
    Captain -
    Pilot 6000
    navigator -
    medic 2600
    engineer 4000
    Steward 3600
Mortgage: 275729
Maintenance: (annual) due in 171 days

The accidental world-builder

As I said in the last post, the whole of the setting for my new Runequest campaign branched out from the picture above. Here I have a wondrous city of (mixed) classical architecture rising up the summit of a mountain. There's a few trees and some scrub for vegetation.

A good start, but by itself rather vague. So I went through my picture folders and sorted out a bunch of people and places that seemed like they'd be good for Runequest. All the vikings and Germanic tribes and Celts got put to one side, and I was left with classical Greeks and Romans, ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, Africans, and a few Arabs. Mostly these came from books on history and anthropology, but there were a few adventure novels thrown in for good measure.

So dividing it up by cultures (RQ style), the European types are Barbarians, the Arabs & North Africans are Nomads, and the rest are Civilised. There's also a bunch of stone age people (truly bons sauvages)  from a rather mad french book on human origins in case I need any Primitive people. There's a lot of pictures that could conceivably fall in more than one category; the boundaries between Civilised and Nomad are particularly fluid, and many priestly types could easily be Civilised or Barbarian. But as a rough guide:

civilised

nomad

barbarian

primitive

barbarian? civilised? nomad?

Most of the pictures of the person(s) that inspired the PC I will make were Egyptian, but everything hinges on them being a citizen of this great city. So instead of dividing up all the Civilised peoples into cultures and giving each one a city-state, there is one big city made up of the remnants of many different cultures to form a single poly-ethnic gens. This will also explain how my PC sometimes looks to be dressed more like a Mesopotamian or Persian. It also lets me use the Greek & Roman warriors for the city's armies, as there is a dearth of good pictures of Egyptian soldiers.

except these guys in stripey PJs

The wilderness locations were similarly mixed: Africa and the middle east with mostly classical and Egyptian ruins. Almost everything is a desert or empty plain. Plus some viking stuff.

random adventure location

So putting it all together I have a cosmopolitan mountain city surrounded by the ruins of many older civilisations. The remnants of these civilisations now make up the populace of the city, whence their ancestors fled in the time of a great cataclysm where chaos creatures overran the land, about ~500 years prior to game time. There are a few other city states, similarly organised, separated by vast wastelands. Nomads traverse the wastes, taking trade caravans from city to city. Barbarians live a short way across the sea (lots of pictures of viking ships) and occasionally come down to trade.

A few details:

Between their inclusion in the new RQ rules and stumbling across this picture, I had to put Ophidians into the setting.

unedited

I went for the classic swords & sorcery trope of the serpent people being an ancient and sorcerous race. But instead of making them evil, I instead put a small enclave of ~200 of them in the city. They run the sorcery colleges, and so have inordinate influence in the city. Many view them with suspicion, though they are essentially harmless; just alien. Their major plots and schemes all revolve around sending sorcerers east into the lands that were once the ophidians' empire(s) in quest of lost knowledge -- which could potentially make a nice adventure.

There are broo (chaos hybrids) and other vile creatures in the wastelands. None of them have the might to take on the city. Yet.

I'm keeping the 3rd edition monster book handy for headhanger stats

All able-bodied citizens are required to turn out for militia service. [Rules Alert] The default Civilised combat style is Citizen Militia, giving training in shortspear, shortsword, and medium shield with the Formation Fighting trait. There is also a troop of elite soldiers, who train battleaxe, javelin, shortspear, and scutum [Elite soldier combat style]. They eschew wearing armour in favour of better mobility, and so receive the Daredevil trait (May use Evade to dodge blows in hand to hand combat without ending up prone. I chose it for the effect rather than the name). The elite warriors are classed as a Brotherhood (using the default Warband package in the rulebook).

elite soldiers

I'm opting for a high-magic setting, with the Ubiquitous Folk Magic rule and overnight regeneration of personal Magic Points (basically, everything like in RQ3). Sorcerous colleges will be all the non-evil seeming ones from the main book and Monster Island. Theism cults will be abundant. The city's Street of Temples claims to have temple, altar, or shrine to every known god in the world. The major religions are the obvious ones, being the list of sample Theist Cults in the rulebook. The most popular/important religions are the gods of the Sun and of Mountains, and the eponymous city god.

To make the gods slightly less generic, I picked random images and assigned the god to them; I'll figure out what they're all like (and name them) as it becomes important. But for now:

Writing this all down was considerably more time-consuming than making it all up in the first place. I have more setting notes than just these, for certain, but I'll let them come out during play.

Edited to add -- I forgot to mention the name of the place: Anzakàr (Sumerian for tower or fort. The grave accent on the final a is only there to distinguish among homophones in translitteration, but it looks nice for teh name of my fantasy city so I'm keeping it).

Next up: character creation, wherein I will show how Runequest 6 character creation works and how making my character defined more of the setting.

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.