Outside of Targon, the forests died away again, consumed by the all-encompassing steppe. The sun shone weakly over the western mountains, illuminating the steppe in soft white light, though not hot enough to dry the mud.
Jeol was having a bad time with the wagon. Recent rains had washed out what little trail there was, making the ground hidden behind the tall grass a muddy bog that would’ve swallowed both horse hoofs and wagon wheels if he had been a worse wagonmaster. But Jeol was an old hand at the driver’s trade: a bad back, a scarred chest, and quite a pretty penny wasting away in some bank as evidence of the fact.
The outfit that had hired him consisted of four gunmen obsessed with some scrap of steel out close to Jawbreak Canyon. They had chittered both to him and to themselves about some great big score, some massive treasure that would pay out for lifetimes. Jeol always took payment upfront for that kind of talk. Too many fools who thought they could outsmart both the Obscured Goddess and her steppeland realm had died before paying him what they owed.
The sun tried to dry the land but failed. And the wind blows.
Guess who slammed into the semester like driving into a wall? Is it the siren call once again? “Johnny NoGames,” she cries, the sound wafting through the air like freshly baked bread…
Okay, I’ve been a bad boy, and I haven’t done any rooms for #Dungeon23. I got distracted with worldbuilding my setting and rulecrafting my system. I’ve been thinking about really buckling down on finishing my house rules and putting everything aside until I have a system to run at the table, especially with all of The Discourse at the moment. I think that’s going to be my gaming focus instead of my super cool dungeon idea that you can read here. “But Caravaneer,” I hear you say, “isn’t this like failing your New Year’s Resolution in January?” Well, the joke’s on you, I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants for the last two years and I’m not stopping now.
So, worldbuilding first. The Long Rim is the habitable band of an almost eyeball planet with no moon. (Maybe a moon, I’ve been thinking about that too.) The day is bright, the night is dark, and the sun both rises and sets in the sunbaked west. Following my inspiration, it’s still a steppe, though I got distracted with the idea of maybe making it a jungle, considering there is a hot and cold side of the planet and the band would be where the winds would meet so there might be a whole bunch of rain, similar to the monsoon season in India butting against the Hindu Kush and Tibet. However, I’m waved off on this by two things: first, the rivers that this would cause. If the party can travel by floating down rivers then it might trivialize the travel portion of the game. The second is the resource management element of the game. Jungles, unlike steppes, are flush with life. There’s no worry about dying from thirst on the river or running out of food. The concern shifts from finding food to the food eating you, the challenge of cutting through the jungle itself. Also, if I did go in this direction, it would be more akin to Pacific temperate rainforests or Japanese temperate rainforests, especially in the light of sawanobori from this blog post.
However, as I think about it, a riverrun would fit a point crawl really well. There could be points on the crawl where people could pick up goods and quests, and the fact that rivers always flow in one direction could gate progression to one direction, a constant inextricable movement towards the Black City and the end of the line. I’m thinking about the Dnieper Rapids and the Siberian River Routes in particular. Vikings traveling to Constantinople would ride their longships on the river and would have to brave the rocks and rapids of the river, sometimes even having to haul their ships overland to make it to the next river. Not to mention, as an American, all the fun that folks got up to on the Mississippi. In the same vein, instead of having everyone have a character sheet and the caravan has a group sheet like UVG, the ship that the party is using has a character ship and can be improved on, and each person in the party has a role on the boat: captain, carpenter, doctor, armsman. It makes more sense, and the boat can serve as a mobile base for the players. Also, for exploring, they could take the approved and mapped rivers, facing the tolls and civilization that come along with it, or they could brave unexplored waterways and sail their boat right off a waterfall. I’m digging this more and more as I think about it.
One of the hard parts about this project is wasting energy: this is all hard worldbuilding, figuring out geography to then figure out how people might respond to life in those geographic regions which then informs the way the world works. However, there are two problems with this approach: first, it discounts soft worldbuilding, where elements are included in the setting not because it makes sense literally, but it makes sense figuratively, and second, because this is not the way developing a tabletop game setting should work.
First, the work I’ve done on the Goddesses is kind of in the middle of this hard and soft worldbuilding. There are reasons people believe in the Radiant Goddess, but the reason I included it was that I love religion, especially the way people interact with religion. It’s one of the reasons that rolling what sect you’re a part of is part of the character creation. I haven’t been obsessed over religion in the same way. Or maybe I have. On the one hand, focusing too much on hard worldbuilding is a waste of energy because it’s not like players are going to ask why there’s a river here, they just see a river. On the other hand, as the DM and the arbiter of the setting, you have to make sure it makes sense to you unless you simply wash your hands of the work altogether which is arguably the better way of doing this.
Second, part of the joy of tabletop games is discovering the game together with friends. People make suggestions about the way things work and the arbitrator of the setting, the DM, says yes or no. I remember an OSR game where as a player the party discovered a desert of black sand where there were diamonds and obsidian in the dunes. I asked the DM if I could fashion rakes to make searching the dunes easier and with a smile, he said “Yes, that’s how it works, the orcs used these large rakes to sift the dunes.” With a question, the world was created. That’s the best part of OSR games: exploration that even the DM isn’t aware of.
So, game thoughts, how to begin to apply this: maybe start with a “short rim.” Find a random hex generator online that lists hexes by a single type of terrain (for this example I’m thinking desert planet), and then print off six pages of hex paper. Make sure the hexes are flush with the top and bottom of the page. Explain to the players that these pages are actually the bands on a planet, the west and east sides of the pages are inhospitable to life (too hot in this example). There are no landmarks on the pages, not yet. Then, just have a party just explore. As they find things, they mark them on the map. If they reach the top and bottom of the pages, move them to the next sheet. The top of sheet one links to the bottom of sheet six. When they’re done exploring, staple the top of the sheets to the bottoms: that’s the band, that’s how big the planet is. It would make a good exercise to see if what I’m thinking of for the Long Rim is fun.
As for rulescrafting, I wrote something about emphasizing culture over race in B/X classes, so that instead of dwarves and elves you have different groups of humans who partake in different roles of dungeon crawling because of what they value, but it kind of fell apart and I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, so this comment serves as its headstone. RIP in peace.
So yeah, week one of #Dungeon23 done! And I think that’s it. I’ve always been bad at internet challenges, I remember the days I could delude myself into thinking I could write a novel in a month, but I think my time is better spent elsewhere. And by “elsewhere,” I mean actually running games.