This is more a diary entry than a blog post, but man, I have been dealing with some pretty major depression for the last few weeks. Reflecting back on it, part of it might have to do with the kind of work I’ve been doing over the summer, but I think I’m just… listless at the moment.
A part of this listlessness is probably coming from my reflection on the games I’m running and want to run in the future. I’m trying to find a graceful close to my Monday UVG game (the second edition just came out) and I want to devote more time to working on my homebrewed ruleset. I’d also like to get around to homebrewing some beer and putting more practice into playing my bass, not to mention hacking away at the massive pile of books I want to read. I have all this stuff I want to do, and time to actually do it, and then I get hit with this… lethargy. And then I get mad at myself because I’m feeling this way and I spend all my energy ripping into myself, which leaves me exhausted, which means I still don’t get to the stuff I want to do.
I don’t know, man.
So, this article is going to be a little laid back and a little less organized; like a hangout session as opposed to a writing assignment.
Nanomatic Somatics
One of the justifications for magic in my worldbuilding has been that the world was terraformed with nanomachines. Basically, they recreated the planet as programmed, a couple of molecules at a time. However, when the shattering Boar Spear occurred, the processes maintaining their evolution stopped and they began to develop in different ways. No organic material on the planet exists without these nanites. It’s one of the reasons that a wizard can cast Charm Person in the first place: the nanites that affect the parts of the brain that predispose individuals to like the wizard are already past the blood-brain barrier and have been since the target was born.
I was driving home one night and I wanted to listen to a particular song, and I said, “Hey Siri, play Sabrina by the Stray Birds.” And as I was driving I started thinking about talking to computers and the verbal somatic component of spells in OSR games. The first ones that come to mind are the rules in Old School Essentials, where “all spell casters need to be able to move their hands and speak in order to bring a spell’s effects into being” and “as a result, it is not possible to cast spells when bound, gagged, or in an area of magical silence.” And I thought, what if that’s a significant part of the spellcasting in the world?
After the catastrophic planet-wide event that forced the remaining humans underground and then back to the surface with different cultures and religions, another thing that goes out the window is universal language. Part of being a wizard in the world is the rediscovery of the ancient language that summons the ancient force spirits into the world. Wizards go into dungeons to find more words to bend the nanomachines to their whims. It’s kind of Blame! with the Net Terminal Genes, though anyone can find the words if they look hard enough. You might have to go to a university to find the right pronunciation, though. Also, this is why even people who aren’t “wizards” can cast some magic; wizards are just the ones who are obsessed enough to be able to lean on that power fully. Maybe doing some work for the Obscured Goddess will earn you a couple of choice phrases in convincing the nanomachines to levitate gold off the ground or make it start raining. I was also thinking about this video about how the environment affects magic and also thought about how certain nanomachines might have mechanically evolved to be better at certain things in certain places. For instance, in a radiator core for an ancient hab unit, it’s easier to cast “frost spells,” because the nanites there were optimized before the fall of civilization to regulate extreme temperature. You might even be able to go so far as to incorporate a Dungeon Crawl Classics style of “magic corruption,” whereby casting certain spells enough times, the nanites that exist in your bloodstream start adjusting themselves to your choices, and all of a sudden its fifteen degrees colder sitting next to you by the campfire. A wizard might even want to encourage some strange variant of nanite to live inside them, though I doubt they would express the intention as such.
Basically, Draconic is pre-collapse English. Just something I was thinking about.
The Man with the Yellow Hat
I like the broad strokes of the world I’ve built (especially the Goddesses), but the more and more UVG I’ve run (and the closer and closer the Monday Caravan has gotten to the Black City), the more I want to hack off the gonzo weirdness and make a western. I’ve complained enough about Luka Rejec to last a lifetime and honestly, his system and world are fine, but one of the big problems is that I’ve been trying to force a square peg in a round hole for the last three years. Ultimately, this is a “me” problem. I need to sit down and do the work to make the art I want to make, not just complain that others aren’t. Only a moron goes to an art museum and complains that the art doesn’t appeal to him; make your own art, find your own people.
I’ve had the outlines for character creation in my system for a long time, but I wanted to add two more. First, one of the last steps of character creation is that every player character rolls on a d66 table to generate a hat. Players roll three times: first for the style of brim and crease, second for color, and finally third for detail. I have feathers, flowers, bands, quality, and other weird things, like playing cards or paint or weird hats.
An example d66 table for the hats. I haven’t added the exact entries yet.
I was inspired a lot by the trinkets in games like Mothership and Black Powder, Black Magic, and too many other games to count, that give a player a little hint of their past in the form of an item. Giving players this hat hopefully sets different OSR characters apart, especially in high-lethality systems (as it can be used in any OSR system to give it a Western flair). It can also be used to distinguish important NPCs (“A gang of desperados rides into town, their leader is wearing a tan cutter crease hat with a snakeskin band.”). Finally, the game Frontier Scum has a variant of the OSR “Shields Shall be Splintered” rule that if a character gets hit by an attack, they can choose to ignore the damage if they lose their hat, with a luck roll after the combat is over to see if the hat survived. I saw this during Questing Beast’s review of the game and immediately fell in love with the mechanic. I’m not sure if characters should lose the ability if their original hat is lost, or if they can just pick one up off the ground after combat, or if they can only take the hat from a “named enemy” (“After I kill Rattlesnake Dan, I scoop his hat off the ground and put it on my head. ‘Rot in hell, bastard,’ I spit.”).
The second thing I want to add is that everyone starts with a revolver, a six-shooter. I’m considering it a “Medium Ranged Weapon” but I’m not sure if I want to break free of the 3.5E distinguishers for weapons or not. For now, the rule is this: at the beginning of combat, everyone places a d6 in front of them, on 6. As they make attacks, they advance the die down until they reach 1. After they reach 1, the next attack they make is their last until they spend a round to reload. At any point in the combat, they can spend a turn to reload and put the die back at 6. It’s not a unique or new mechanic, but it’s a way of tracking ammo, especially if I’m really stringent about people using six-shooters and that’s it.
Also, everyone starts with cold-weather gear. Fuck it, winter Western is the norm. I talked about how one of the inspirations was “sawanobori” in a past blog article and the idea that just as everyone had to escape underground, all life takes place within the canyons that emerged after people started leaving the vaults, where the surface is inhospitable. I was seriously inspired by this piece for a game called Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. Personally, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the system and there are a lot of post-apocalyptic games out there, but hey, your mileage may vary.
Western Games at the Tabletop
There don’t seem to be a lot of Western tabletop RPGs. Speaking of “your mileage may vary,” it probably has to do with the historical element of the setting/genre. One of the things I want to do is divorce the Western from the American West. There are a couple of good movies and books that seem to do that, like Logan and No Country for Old Men. Seems like the least “problematic” way of solving a lot of the worrying that goes on around the genre. Of course, there are a lot of reasons why people don’t like Westerns, so that doesn’t fix all of them, but the easiest way is to just stamp a big “For My Entertainment Only” stamp on the front of the box and call it a day. There are cowboys and six guns, but the world is like the Mongolian steppe and Russia in winter with everyone prospecting ancient dangers and archetechnology.
I’ve been playing an unhealthy amount of Disco Elysium recently, a game whose setting was not only created for a tabletop system but also manages to do this “Extremely Alternative History,” where nothing is like the world we live in, yet it’s extremely like the world we live in. They use “fantastic realist setting” in this article, describing it as “AD&D meets ’70s cop-show… with swords, guns and motor-cars.” There are shadows of the modern world, obviously, disco and drugs and communism, but the creators were willing to create things that were entirely new. The more I think about both their world and my own, the more I want to emulate the process. But I guess that’s always been my problem; I’m too distracted by the newest thing I see, and I struggle to stick to a self-imposed deadline, especially for my hobby over my job. I also wear my inspirations on my sleeve. But maybe that’s okay (the sleeves, not the deadlines).
I like Westerns, and I’m willing to fight for them.
This article contains spoilers for a number of Luka Rejec games, in particular Longwinter and Witchburner.
This article’s been in the oven for so long I have no idea how good it is. It’s actually like three articles Frankenstien-ed into one big blog post. It’s rambling in only the way Caravan Crawl can provide. Enjoy!
I was shouted out for some games I’m designing and some beer I brewed for the Wrong Room podcast a while back, which is hosted by three real rad dudes. One of them writes tabletop stuff here, one of them DMs stuff here, and one of them just seems to be a real chill dude. If you haven’t, I recommend you listen to it. It’s the Cumtown of tabletop roleplaying podcasts. Well, “ostensibly a tabletop roleplaying podcast,” at least.
As mentioned in the podcast (exactly which episode I don’t remember, this article has been in the bin for months), I have an idea for a game combining all the works of Luka Rejec (specifically Witchburner and Longwinter), and just wanted to carve out some time to write up my thoughts on what I’m doing recently.
It also gives me a chance to discuss some of the tabletop drama floating around the scene with the OneD&D news (like I said, this article has been in the bin for months). A buddy of mine noticed with some skepticism that One D&D is being shortened to OD&D, potentially as a way to muscle in on the name Original Dungeons and Dragons, which is hallowed OSR ground. It’s like that THAC0 character in Wild Beyond the Witchlight all over again, calling all of us grognard clowns and mocking our scene! Not to mention how many changes in the rules are the result of Wizards of the Coast attempting to create a system that’s easy for use in their virtual tabletop and hard for DMs to make subsystems on the fly while at the same time retaining enough similiarity to old content for them to sue anyone who attempts to take a shot at the king. Anyway, before I can talk about what I’m working on, I’ve got to talk about scene.
And… Scene!
Like most of my articles, I have to make a running start at it, and the place I want to start is the scene. (I fully recognize this is like starting a pole vault from outside the stadium.) I am a old school player at heart, looking at the new ways D&D is innovating itself in mild frustration. I was having a beer with a former coworker and I mentioned that in some of the systems I’ve run there was no distinction between “race” or “class,” that in the games I usually run “race is class.” He told me he couldn’t even comprehend how that would work, to which I proceeded to really blow his mind and described Burning Wheel to him. But it raises an important question: what does it mean to be part of a scene?
A scene is an intellectual space that exists for a time and then vanishes. Be it poets or painters or wargaming nerds, there’s a time and place for innovation in a particular art, and it is demarcated mainly by its horrific bloody end. The blogs links are broken, the big players are shown to be either jackasses or criminals, the OSR is dead, long live the OSR! But more seriously: I am a DM adherent to a style of running games that for the most part has lost its place in the larger RPG conversation. In some ways I’m like a martial artist during the Progressive Era in China, or an artist in the Progressive Era in the West unfortunate enough to die or become whatever Ezra Pound was up to.
Speaking of artists turning to fascism, it’s funny to me that there’s this push against using race in the TTRPG space because of its racial or ethnic connotations, but not a push against class because of its political or economic connotations. However, personally I’m coming around on “heritage” and “profession” for those game terms. An entire subsect of RPGs uses profession as the marker for skill generation for characters from the Warhammer Fantasy line. For Long Rim, a part of the character creation is rolling what religious faction you’re aligned with, even if your character isn’t all that much of a believer (at least it was, this is a section of character generation that can be dropped for more setting-neutral play). As I wrote in this article years ago now, what makes up a character is their debt and what they do to get out from under that debt. Into the Odd’s Electric Bastionlands does this the best, I think: rolling up the debt is part of the character creation process, and the group is bound together because they all owe the same organization something. However, both Bastionlands and Ultraviolet Grasslands miss the mark for me just because they provide all these crazy goofy professions when I literally just want something like the profession list in Dungeon Crawl Classics or Black Powder, Black Magic (or Boot Hill!): people have ordinary jobs and they’re entering an extraordinary world. If they’re already weird, how do the players relate? (I understand there’s an argument here about gatekeeping the goofy, that the fun comes from diving into the crazy right away, but it always gets in the way I run my own games. To each his own, I know.)
When I run a new game of Ultraviolet Grasslands straight, I’ve been starting the party in the Azure Ruins in the Bluelands, not technically in the Grasslands proper. This way, I can set the tone: there’s some strangeness going on in the former Bluelands, mostly cultish mischief styled after rampant sectarianism, but for the most part it’s typical black powder fantasy. When they get to the Purple City and meet the talking cats and drug smoking biker-slavers and the Lime Nomads they know “oh, this is weird.” If the craziness is set to 10 at the very beginning, there’s no place for it to ramp up. It’s also one of the reasons I’m both excited and worried about UVG 2E and the expansion of the map east, up past the Circle Sea. On the one hand, more content, on the other, more gonzo weirdness to balance. I’m also sure that my setting of Long Rim has the perfect fix for the UVG map: habitable band of a tidally locked planet, link the maps top to bottom.
My setting of Long Rim is kind of built on this, taking some inspiration from games like Destiny and Anthem. I really like this “lost archeo-tech new world” feel some of the games have, something that is easy to depict in art and hard to showcase in gameplay. Of course, this comes with the caveat that both of these games are bad, in two ways. The first is how the gameplay rarely reaches the level of the ascetic, and the second is the missed potential of the ascetic for the story. Destiny has this “fighter thief magic user in space with guns and melee weapons,” “fantasy as scifi” feel to it, not to mention the crawling around ancient ruins of a past human golden age, and Anthem has this “robot fantasy,” “real people living in the ruins” feel, and both just fuck it up. I mean, that’s what the Obscured Goddess is all about: she’s an AI who’s taking the place of a D&D deity, her temple is a server room. Spending time figuring out why they don’t work is important for what I want to do with Long Rim.
Luka Rejec Fanboi Hours
Considering I have been talking about his work, it should come as no surprise to find that I am a Luka Rejec fanboy. I kickstarted Ultraviolet Grasslands (which was a horrible decision that haunts me every time I pick up that hardcover rulebook), I followed Red Sky Dead City closely, I have hard copies of both Witchburner and Longwinter, I followed his blog back when SEACAT had old Black Hack rules… hell, I follow him on Twitter. Considering that using Twitter is probably a sin at worse and a herion addiction at best, this is a Big Deal™. The only thing I don’t do is support him on Patreon, which… I mean, you should if that’s your thing… it’s not mine yet. And it’s with a heavy heart I realized that there’s a lot of stuff Rejec has put out that I don’t like.
Now, don’t get me wrong, he’s great, and I came into the OSR scene at a time where there were major players to be followed, so checking his blog for what he’s working on feels like the good old days. However, I have two major complaints about Rejec. The first is more general, applying to all indie and industry game developers, and the second is more specific to him.
Buying Products for Play
I buy an adventure, an campaign, a dungeon, in order to cut down the time spent in prep. It’s not that I can’t do the work, it’s that I don’t want to.
I don’t know if I’ve talked about the False Trinity of Game Design on this blog, but if so, here’s a quick refresher: people imagine there’s three pillars of tabletop RPG design, the player, the DM, and the game designer. The game designer creates the rules system for the entire game, the DM adjudicates those rules for his table, and the player enjoys the ride. However, this idea isn’t true: there’s actually just the player. The DM is a type of player, and the game designer is not as required as he makes you think because his role requires you to give him money. Because of this false trinitarianism, a lot of people struggle with how to properly arrange themselves in the RPG space. Playing a tabletop game is not like reading a book or watching a movie, regardless of how bad WotC wants to transition to being a consumable digital medium.
Let’s paint a picture: if I was out clearing brush on a backwoods property, I could do that job with a pair of gloves and a machete. It would be long, arduous work, but it could be done. (In fact, there may be days where I might want to do that kind of work, labor where doing the labor is part of the enjoyment, looking back on a woodpile full of wood and going “yes, I have accomplished a task.”) But sometimes you want a tool to help you preform a task better. Imagine if I ordered a chainsaw online. A chainsaw is good, it accomplishes the task easier and faster and with less physical demand than I could do it with a machete. Now imagine that when the chainsaw was delivered it came unassembled and when I opened the instructions, it was full of encouragement that putting together the chainsaw was fun and exciting! Now, it might be, I’ve never mucked around with putting together a chainsaw beyond replacing a chipped chain, but the problem is that I didn’t order a chainsaw to put together a chainsaw: I ordered a chainsaw to clear brush. While they might seem like similar tasks (both involving chainsaws), they are not the same task. Putting together a chainsaw leaves you with a complete chainsaw and an overgrown field.
In this parable, the chainsaw is the anticanon adventure and the backwoods is the game at the table: you are selling me one thing, but I need another. The solution I have purchased is yet another problem to assemble. I don’t want you to give me permission to imagine elves in a different way than you’ve imagined, I already had that right before I bought the book. I do not require your consent to use the book however I want. There’s an introduction for one OSR adventure that explains that you could use the book as written, or parts of the book, or let the book inspire you for your own game, or even use the book to prop up a shaky table or use it to kill bugs. In the old days there was an understanding between the indie OSR writer and the DM that at the end of the day, the book was a complete thing, and it could be used or ignored at leisure.
When I buy a setting book what I want is how the setting works. Not “let your players do the heavy lifting,” not “it’s ambiguous and contradictory for a reason,” not “this is fun, trust us.” I want the thing you meant when you thought it and then I either go “wow, that’s so imaginative,” or I go “wow that’s neat, but at the table I think I’ll do this instead,” or I go “that’s dumb, I want to run Boot Hill.” Offering tables for what could be is nice, because a good random table prompts imagination, but now you’ve given me work. When I buy an RPG product, I want a complete thing, something that enhances me as a DM, not something that assigns more work. I’m purchasing a product to avoid doing work.
On a side note, this is also how you should respond to drama in the TTRPG community. The author is dead, the RPG author doubly so. If someone made a game and it turns out they’re a distasteful person, you should still be able use their stuff because even running straight from their book you’re going to make it your own as you run the content. Too many good blogs died because they hitched their wagon to a bad mule, when it’s always easier to just raise your own livestock. This metaphor is out of hand, help me.
Of course, now we get to the Wizard in the room. On the one hand, when I purchase a product I want it to work, but I also don’t want to sell my soul to a corporate overlord to play my tabletop games. A lot of the Systems Reference Document/Open Game License drama has blown over since I first started writing this blog post months ago, but it bears repeating: the game developer is an optional element to the activity of tabletop gaming. The DM is suppose to do the work of creating the game, all the tools he uses are just that: tools. If I buy a chainsaw to clear brush, that does not mean the chainsaw company has any right to the field that I own. It’s my field, your tool is optional. A corporation has as much right to tabletop gaming as a yarn company has a right to activity of knitting.
And I think many of the worries that were fostered by the OGL madness have been unfounded at worst and incredibly interesting at best. There was always a culture of using the Creative Commons to release content, and Pathfinder’s Piazo, a company born as the consequence of the 4th Edition War, is working on its own ORC to yet again exploit the division caused by the owner of D&D. But what’s really exciting is how this has prompted so many people to try a lot of third party games. Many people are beginning to recognize that there are more systems and settings than “superhero fantasy.” This mass exodus and doubling down on old rule systems is not unusual: the Edition War is but one of the ways God makes new grognards.
The other major complaint I have about Rejec is that he’s on the forefront of this idea in the scene to run anticannon games. There has always been this push since the days of the Forge to deemphasize the role the DM has in the running of the game. However, my response to this borders on political, so I’ll just say that an organization composed of individuals that consent to a developed hierarchy is not the same as being oppressed by hierarchy and move on.
Rejec says one thing and does another. “We’re all friends here, building the world together,” he says, smiling, “everyone has an equal say in the creation of the game world,” and he assigns all the players part of the world to create and then he has the audacity to turn around and write shit like “There is no Witch” or “Winter comes and not only can the players can’t do anything to stop it, they can’t even find out it’s going to happen.” On the one hand, he offers players the opportunity to be part of the game creation, on the other the adventures he publishes railroads them hard. This might be an unfair analysis mostly because I’m not with the game design interview he gave here, but it’s like, dude. Come on.
(His adventure Holy Mountain Shaker gets a pass: spolier, but collapsing dungeon after dealing with the boss is a time honored gamer trope.)
Anticanon flows back into the first complaint a bit: at the end of the day I am buying a product. It has a purpose. If the idea is to give me things that might inspire me, okay I get it, but make that clear that “some assembly required.” Every time you give me something where I have to do more work, you have made a bad tool. Everytime I think about a hiccup I’ve had to overcome in UVG, I am reminded of the greatest dungeon/adventure ever put onto paper: Gradient Descent for Mothership. I know for a fact I’ve talked about it here so read that blog post, but I recently ran it for another group of gamers and I cannot stress just how usable and enjoyable it is to run that module. Everything you need to run the game is there in the book, and you don’t even really need to read it beforehand to run it at the table. It is the gold standard of dungeon design and everyone should own a copy.
The Ice Hell
SPOILERS FOR WITCHBURNER AND LONGWINTER BELOW
Okay, so you’ve complained about indie developers and corporate developers, what’s this game you’re planning?
So, I’ve spent I don’t know how much digital ink shitting on Luka Rejec, now I’m going to tell you how much I love him and his work. I ran Witchburner relatively straight, relatively recently, for the Monday Group and it was a lot of fun. There were some changes I made and some pitfalls I fell into running the game from the book, however. First, there was no witch. My players, who had spent weeks trying to figure out who the fuck the witch was, almost setting multiple people on fire (though they did burn the schoolhouse down), struggling and failing, were really upset at the reveal that it had all been for naught. (If only I had let them do some worldbuilding!) By running the game as is was designed to be run, as a DM I felt like I had failed them. If you run the game, I would recommend randomly rolling a witch, but see below.
Likewise, I didn’t constrain them with the drink rule (everyone offers the players brandy, making them roll charisma checks at disadvantage, which makes no sense for an investigation game) and I gave all the players the magic ability to make thier eyes glow purple and “see into a character’s past” so I could read verbatim the cool-as-hell backstories all the characters had to squeeze as much content from the book as possible. There was a weird moment where one of the side characters (not a suspect) was mentioned as being a “Republican shield maiden” but the way it was written the Republic was an civilization that stopped existing thousands of year ago and the players were like “it’s not a witch it’s a vampire we kill this borderline nameless NPC” and spent a session on a red herring. Arguably, the entire investigation is a red herring, but I’m trying to not be too negative here considering I’ve been so negative already in this post. I don’t think I would keep the architectural descriptions of each house either, but then again, see below. That’s also a problem in UVG, by the way, that there are these ages that you can roll on but what actually happened in those ages is unclear. I mean, I get it, it gives you a tool to generate something from the “Ming Dynasty,” to give treasure a sense of antiquity, but there’s got to be a better way to incorporate that into the game at large.
So, I am writing a game in the same way you would a three act play, using three different supplement settings to transition into each act until the bitter cold end. The goal is a complete and cohesive Ice Hell: players start with a small problem, that blossoms into a larger problem, that blossoms into escaping the Ice Hell. I want to use Witchburner, Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter, and Longwinter in a combined effort.
The First Act is directly inspired by Witchburner. The party, either explicitly or accidently, find themselves charged with finding a witch. Sometimes the game might start in the Longwinter city of Veldey, the one with the hot springs with the party getting a deed to a hot spring in a small town. Sometimes the game starts off straight: the party are witchburners, they’re here to burn a witch. Regardless, the first act is about getting the players to the village. It’s in a narrow valley in the middle of winter, and the villagers are convinced that there’s a witch. There are some typical witchsigns (dead cat nailed to a door, voodoo dolls, strange symbols in the snow), but a lot of the signs are winter themed (white ravens in the graveyard, dead flowers melting into snow, John gets attacked by a giant white moose in the woods and dies). It’s not clear what’s what. At the end of week one, an avalanche washes out the road into the village: players can leave, but it’s hard trekking through the winter backwoods. They can and skip out of the other two acts, which I think Rejec would approve of.
In the village, every villager has a secret, something that would take about three days to find out and is completely mundane and ordinary, but goes against the taboos or culture of the town. (Some of the default Witchburner ones were kind of suspicious, like, was that one guy a werewolf or not? What was the deal with the chick who body-shifted when she dreamed? What’s the difference between mundane folk magic and witchery?) Remove a lot of the magic, but play up the tribalism of the town: there are churchmen of the Green Moon and trade unionists, and the specter of separation is everywhere.
By the way, the Wild Child’s secret is that he fucking exists. Give out the sheets of the suspects to players and when one of them asks to see the Wild Child just go “who the hell is that?” and then when he shows up at the end of week two all the players can go “hello there.”
As players investigate the town, for every suspect they question, allow them to place a house on the map, using the resources in the back of Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter. It’s less about the architectural history of each house and more about letting them build a real place. Literally let them build the town as they explore it.
The point of the First Act is this: the players are given a bait and switch, though one that doesn’t cut as deep as the original Witchburner. There is a witch, there are strange occurrences, those occurrences are not just coincidences, but the source is wrong. The people of the town know that the winter weather is unusual and want to find a solution to the problem, and they believe the problem is a witch, which in some ways it is. However, everywhere in the region (though the players don’t know this yet), the same drama is unfolding, people trying to make sense of what’s going on. They see a small part of the puzzle, and imagine that they can fix it by fixing this village here.
The Second Act is directly inspired from Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter. The witch is burned (or found frozen in the middle of the woods), and the blizzard starts, and now the players have to keep the village alive. All of the surviving suspect villagers will pile into a larger home for warmth. They’ll probably use the Storemaster’s warehouse as the storeroom, after raiding the place for cold weather gear, extra blankets, and lanterns. If the Storemaster is still alive, she makes a point to record each and every piece of inventory leaving and who is using it, to charge the user later. It won’t matter. If the adventurers want all the villagers to stay in their homes, then they’ll all die separated and alone. They’ll realize their mistake after the third or fourth village they find frozen to their bed with all their firewood used up.
The players should not be forced to roll any sort of Constitution saving throws to collect resources or suffer damage from the frost. The winter snow isn’t here for them. For now. For now, the goal is simple: all these people the players have spent the last thirty days investigating, getting to know, growing to love or hate, all of them are going to freeze to death. This is dark. It’s bleak. It’s not for the faint of heart. I know I shouldn’t have to say this, but before running this, make sure your players know how heavy this game is going to get before you get to this point, preferably before you run a witch hunt with no witch.
You come back and one of the villagers is sitting apart from the rest of the group, holding a piece of ice to a bruised cheek and a black eye. When they see you, they try to jump up and talk but another villager leaps up to hit her again. “They’re a witch!” “No they’re not!” The other villager roars. “No one’s a witch! There wasn’t any witch! It didn’t matter! Don’t you understand how stupid we were? How because we were so preoccupied with stupid superstition now we’re going to freeze to death here!”
If you want to soften the blow, you can adjust the difficulty of surviving the winter. There should be some loss of life, but don’t make it the terror it could be yet.
The point of the Second Act is this: the players have spent a month investigating these characters, finding out their backstories, forming relationships, and making enemies. Now, the players get to watch as all these characters freeze to death. Finding the witch doesn’t matter anymore. In some ways, it never mattered.
The Third Act is directly inspired by Longwinter. The town is dead, frozen to death by a snowstorm that is not letting up. There is no food, no heat, and the only chance is to run. The players have to get out of the region alive.
You come accross one village, completely abandoned save for a massive bank, the village has all huddled in the vault, burning the paper money for warmth. They’re emaciated, and some are blankly staring at the fire, chewing on hundred dollar bills. In another, the remnants of a burned down beerhall, the signs of blackened bodies in the white snow. In a third, so very much like the village you’re fleeing from, with their own witch burned in the middle of their own courtyard, the same drama played out with different actors. The question blows through you like the arctic wind: how many times has this play been performed across the frozen hell you find yourself in?
The point of the Third Act is this: as the players leave the village and try to make it out, they come across other people, all who have experienced the same thing the players have over their own two months of frozen hell. Some are better than the players, some are worse. Scenes of horror are common. There are some points of light, some communities that survive with their souls intact, but most don’t. The call of the scapegoat is too strong. Now, it’s up to the players to respond. They’ll survive. Who they become after is the question.
Alas, Strict Time Records Must Be Kept
Oh my god, Caravaneer! You could’ve ended it right there! That’s such a strong close! “Who they become”? Powerful! Alas, that little voice in my head has been pestering me as I edited that last section that I actually haven’t provided any gamable content. And as such I have to at least try and pretend I game.
Witchburner breaks up its day on a four watches based on six hours each. For Forbidden Lands, it’s called a watch, and each travel action takes place on the four watches. Instead of making players roll for drunkeness every social interaction, I said that there were four watches to a day, but players had to spend a watch sleeping or take fatigue damage. It was a good choice, because one player always slept in the afternoon so he could wander around the village in the dead of night looking for the witch and one time a bunch of players decided to stay up with him and got hit with the fatigue because keeping a watch on someone’s house was more important than sleeping.
I’m sure people have seen this image of the “Proposed New Stardard Year,” made up of thirteen equal months made up of 28 days each. This is insanely impractical in the modern world and usually suggested by people who are equally ignorant of both agriculture and computer programming. However, in a world of elves and magic, whose to say that the optimal calendar couldn’t also exist?
Not to mention there are 28 day calendars in real life: there are lunar calendars, and lunisolar calendars that try and match up the sun and the moon. Not only is every Monday the first of the month, its also the full moon. By the way, here’s a section of a Wikipedia article about customary issues in modern Japan due to their calendar.
So, here’s something that you can steal:
A month calendar for Longwinter/Witchburner
Four watches a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month. The first day of every week is Monday (or whatever fantasy equivalent you want to use), every Monday has a phase of the moon. The new month is represented by the full moon. Day weather corresponds to the first two watches of the day, night weather corresponds to the last two watches. You can either roll it randomly every day or assign the weather beforehand. Columns on the left are for preplanned events: villagers going missing, witch signs being found, etc. Columns on the right are for player actions so you remember what every player did every watch, who they talked to, etc. One watch is spent sleeping. In small scale games, travel is broken up by watch: three watches to travel to the next village, a sack of supply fuels… eight watches? And speaking of sacks of supply:
A year calendar for UVG
A year calendar for UVG: four weeks to a month, three months to a season, four seasons to a year. Every week is another phase of the moon. A sack of supply is needed for surviving every week, travel in winter is hellish, and every season has a random event, like a region erupts in war or a plague hits. At the end of the year everyone ticks over a year in age, or let everyone roll 2d20 to determine when thier birthday is. (One of the things I realize looking at this spreadsheet is how I wish settling in for the winter was easier in UVG.) I have a third calendar combining these two types of calendar but its massive and unweildy.
Okay, this post is too long, so I’m calling it there. Good luck, have fun, game please.
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate, A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes it’s surprising to find that you’re the best in the world at something. Even with something simple, something anyone can do, the discovery that you are in fact the best person on the planet at something can make you look up at the stars and wonder.
Friend, I am the best person in the world at wasting my own time.
I know, I know, you’re shocked. The best in the world at poorly planning out your day and working on things that don’t and may never matter? Yes, that’s me. I wrote a long blog post about the themes of a Warhammer game that’s going to be absolute garbage because I’m running it for a bunch of people who know nothing of the setting, I’m dragging my feet on working on gameable mechanics for my house rules, and, to top it all off, I just realized all the hard worldbuilding for my setting needs to be thrown out. And that’s on top of all the work I need to do to finish my Master’s. I am truly the king of wasting my own time.
Warhammer 30K
This is the first addendum for the last article written. Two things: first, what is the everloving point of running a game of Warhammer 30K if none of the players have any experience with the setting at all? If the game has to involve the explanation of the setting, then just make a new setting. Steal obviously and flagrantly from the old setting, change all the names, add all the things you see as missed potential, and just go for it. The players can’t miss out on something they don’t know about.
Second, setting forward systems like Star Wars and Warhammer always fall apart inevitably because when you run a game in the Star Wars universe in the “Reign of the Empire” era then some jackass player is going to say “I fly to Tatooine and kill Luke Skywalker.” Unless there’s buy-in from the players that certain actions are off limits (“We’re not going to steal the Millennium Falcon from Han or go to Kashyyyk and kill Chewbacca as a baby”) then players are really just trying to steal the copper pipes from a setting. I’ve already got my head canon of what the Warhammer 30K should have been (namely with anything written by Dan Abnett thrown directly into the garbage), just do the extra work, file off the names, and let the players know all the shit they want to do in the name of Chaos is on the table. No worries about “Oh so and so character is canonically supposed to die here so blah blah blah” because it’s not the setting as is. A tabletop game’s rules evolve from table to table, why wouldn’t the setting?
Which is why knowing what the theme is so important.
Your eyes follow the lander that bears the Emperor of Mankind intensely. The first thing you see is the triumvirate sigil of the Imperium: three circles stacked on top of one another emblazoned on the head of the spacecraft. The first and largest circle, bronze inlaid with rubies, represents the Mechanicum of Mars, the engineers and mechanics of the Imperium. Within this first circle is the second, silver inlaid with sapphires, representing the Selenar of Luna, the architects of the gene-forges and keepers of the archive. Within this second is the third and final circle, the smallest but most splendid. It is gold inlaid with diamonds, fashioned into the image of an unconquered sun; it represents Him on Earth, the Emperor of Mankind. All three, combined, represent those kingdoms too powerful to be overrun by the Imperium in the early days of Unification.
In this setting, the Imperium is explicitly a Roman one. I also had this idea of a system or pre-Unifacation bad guy, but the only notes I wrote down were “Garden Tyrant, lord of a green garden fortress,” which is based and I will return to this idea in the future. Maybe when the party is sneaking onto Terra its a character they run into?
Cardinal Directions Make My Face Go Red
Earlier, I uploaded another blog post about how I was concerned about the geography of my setting and after I hit post I went to bed. As I was falling asleep, I realized something absolutely critical. One of the things that was kind of important to me about the setting was the distinction between the cardinal directions. When you travel from north to south, at some point you reach the poles and you can no longer travel south; every direction becomes north. This is the same with the north pole; at some point, every direction is south. The direction is determined by a point. East and west are different: when you travel east, regardless of how long and how far you go, you will never reach west. West isn’t a point, it’s distinguished by the fact that it is not east. And as I was going to sleep, I realized it doesn’t matter.
You see, the people on the Long Rim are trapped between a technology level of Medieval European and American Old West: there are sixguns and wagons, banks and universities, but a lot of the technology of the spacefaring race where they all spawn from is mysterious and unknowable at this point. Arthur C. Clarke and “indistinguishable from magic” and all that. There wouldn’t be a magnetic north for them to follow.
And then I came to the realization that again, I have wasted my time and people knew how to navigate before compasses, Caravaneer, they used the stars. The fact that the sun always rises and sets in the west is critical navigational knowledge, and if the sun wasn’t up then they could still navigate by following the stars. And then I talked to the man in the robe and wizard hat and he pointed out that instead of the cardinal directions, if each city or town was in a line where you hit them in order than direction would mean much less than which of the major cities you were moving away from or towards (X-ways or X-ward or something where X is the name of the city.)
So I’m just going to throw up some world building stuff for Long Rim and go die.
Three Ways East
The first city is Berseri, the Radiant City, the former capital of the world empire a thousand years ago and one of the three central trade hubs on the Long Rim. Berseri is a city of immaculately cut stone and perfectly manicured gardens and pathways, with districts both independent of one another and part of a beautiful tapestry. It almost feels like individual townships decided to start building towards one another, and have convergently evolved in the same architectural and societal way into this larger civic organism. There’s an organicness to the city: the roads aren’t straight, and you never know when a stone road will curve into a residential district, or a garden orchard, or straight to a massive cathedral. The Church of the Radiant Goddess is strong here, and while the city and the Church are not the same entity, there’s an understood allegiance in the government of the city. Many places in the Long Rim are ruled from Berseri.
The second city is Talcard, the Synergized City, a relatively new city that established its national sovereignty three hundred years ago. Talcard is like if a wooden fortress on the Russian border just kept expanding year after year until it consumed all the material around it. There are many stone buildings, usually churches but also many personal mansions and merchant manors that have been around long enough to warrant their reconstruction into a more sturdy material. The people of Talcard are liturgically led by a figure known as the Patriarch, who dictates the doctrine of faith that attempts to fully synthesize belief in both the Radiant and Obscured Goddesses. Sometimes it’s not really clear what the people of Talcard believe, just that sometimes they believe the same thing as you do “and as such you should buy from me, friend!” and sometimes they believe something completely different “and you should convert and come to my church, it’s very nice!”
The third “city” is Karam, the Obscured City, though to call it a city is somewhat incorrect. It consists of thousands of wagons and horses, all moving in a massive caravan from north to south. Every few years, the city makes it to Berseri or Talcard and it’s like a giant festival. Karami merchants buy out entire districts of goods, sell exotic and foreign goods from around the world, and the city doubles in size. Regardless of the stone of Berseri or the wood of Talcard, for a couple months the city is clothed in the wild kaleidoscope of silks from the Karam.
Talcard loves this, it’s a season of festivals, but also of spies, of information gathering, of making alliances and gauging strength. Berseri is starting to hate this: there are quite a few wealthy old hands in the government that enjoy the return of Karam and stock up on teas and luxury items, but many new up and comers in the administration are starting to feel uncomfortable with a city full of foreigners filling the streets every few years, especially when some of them decide to lay down roots. And they’re not exactly wrong, because there are a number of Talcardi spies currently living in Berseri who made it there under the cover as Karami horsemen who decided to stay. Likewise, Karam is starting to dislike staying in Talcard long: they see the spy games as irritating and getting in the way of business, and the Talcardi missionaries are starting to get pushy about the whole “Twin Faced Goddess” nonsense (“They’re not the same, we literally asked the Obscured Goddess last time we saw her and she said no.”). The war between Talcard and Berseri is a cold one, one waged on economic and political fronts, because neither has the military ability to really fight the other.
Karam does not tax its citizens, but requires much more than the other two cities: they are bound by steppe travel, and as such trust between travelers is very important. The consequence for theft of food or horses is typically capital punishment, and in cases that need arbitration, a council of merchants headed by the Caravan Lord makes the decision, with the role of Caravan Lord changing depending on the leg of journey and the navigation skill of the merchant. The Caravan City moves as fast as its slowest participant, fostering cooperation between travelers who want to move as fast as possible. There are great merchant houses who have lived generations on the road. Sometimes these Great Houses decide to settle somewhere they feel they can dominate an industry, and a town springs up overnight. As Karam travels, caravans splinter off, going off in wild directions whenever they feel the time is right to leave the Caravan City.
Long Rim Mechanics
As the party travels the Long Rim, they will pick up followers. These are divided into three groups. The first are caravan guards, combatants that can be used in combat, the second are camp followers, who help with tasks but aren’t combatants, and the third are tagalongs, people who, if the caravan gets large enough, really just want to travel along with the caravan.
I hate running retainers. Hell, I hate running NPCs that travel with the party for long periods of time. It’s always a pain to remember who is with the party at any given point in time, and then there’s always that point where a player goes, “Hey, where’s Joe?” and then you have to go “Fuck, I forgot about Joe.” I will admit I did have an enjoyable experience playing Bouncequartz Gazetteer with Ex Miscellanea where there were basically two kinds of retainers, hirelings and heroes. Hirelings were almost like a dice modifier for mass rolls and heroes were extra characters that players could use if things got spicy, almost like a 0-Level Funnel. There was a direct mechanical benefit to having a village of peasants following you into the basement of House of Leaves.
I don’t think anyone does mass group combat and management in the OSR like Into the Odd. The section about “Enterprise and War” is phenomenal, and I recommend trying out that system at your table and seeing how your players interact with it. What I’m trying to do here is figure out the first steps into a mass caravan management that’s actually fun to mess with.
So, here’s my first doodle: a caravan has fifteen slots. Imagine a five by three table; that’s all the space a caravan can take up. In the middle of the table is the party. The middle space is a free space. It represents all the horses and equipment of the party. As party members begin to build out their caravan, they can begin adding groups to these slots. Do you want a band of nomad horsemen to ride with you? Fill the slot next to your party. What about escorting merchants? Fill a slot. If you’re carrying lots of goods, like a wagon’s worth, then that’s a caravan slot. The good has a times-ten modifier: you’re literally got a wagon’s worth of opium.
Maybe some units require more slots. Let’s say you find an artillery unit for hire; that’s two slots, one for the weapons and one for the ammo wagon. Maybe units can provide the caravan with other benefits outside of combat. You’re riding with a band of farriers and saddlers, so the caravan can travel faster and any misfortunes that make you lose animals you ignore.
If a party discovers a dungeon, players can “check out” slots to bring with them. Want the nomad swordsmen to tag along as you investigate this ruin? Done. Either: 1) Players can each check out one group to bring with them, but are responsible for managing them. If a player brings a group of shotgunners with them and forgets to roll for them or use them, then they’re around the corner nervously smoking cigarettes and avoiding work. Or 2) The party can choose one slot to bring with them, and the DM runs them. Caravan guards are unique: they will do combat, but only combat on the overworld. They won’t go into dungeons, but they’ll make sure no one fucks with your stuff while you’re down there.
If the caravan gets attacked you can figure out who gets ambushed, with the three inner slots as “safe” slots in a maxed out caravan. If a merchant with their own caravan wants to travel with you, you can combine caravans. Let the players play the tetris game of putting the merchant, the
Karam is a caravan of a hundred slots. Karam is the caravan equivalent of the titular Spelljammer from Spelljammer. Karam is the Caravan Crawl.
Conclusion
So that’s it. Technically the first official blog post of the year, since this has the triumvirate of “thing I like,” “fiction I wrote,” and “game thing.” It was getting hairy there for a moment, not going to lie. Might go back to semi-quiet for the next few weeks as work picks up again. Roll more dice, play more games.
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.
Been writing this one for a while, it’s not quite baked all the way in the middle, but I want to post the article so I can talk about deity in D&D. I’ve been writing this in between all the writing and reading I’ve been doing for my graduate courses. I was told by a friend that it’s okay that I don’t post as much as him since I only post when I have something to say. I just wish what I had to say I had some mechanics you could use at the table this week.
There are two deities of the Long Rim: the Radiant Goddess and the Obscured Goddess.
The Radiant Goddess was born in the Long Rim maybe three generations ago. In life, Nika was an ordinary woman: a dutiful child, a disciplined soldier, and a brilliant athlete. At 25, she cashed out what little military pension she’d earned and disappeared to pursue her life’s passion: mountaineering. Nika remained removed from society at large (and by extension, the great world empire that spread across the steppe at the time) until her 35th birthday when she started… preaching isn’t the right word. She wasn’t a preacher or a teacher, she didn’t seek places to address the population. Nika was quiet, withdrawn, reserved. Not detached or disinterested, almost shy. She would just talk to people: the beggar on the street, the merchant in the market, the barmaid delivering drinks. And she would say things, and those things would be so rational, so reasonable, so real… people had to act. She’d talk to a drunk, and he’d swear off the bottle for life and mean it. She’d talk to some kids bullying each other, and they’d change and they’d be kind to one another and mean it. She’d talk to an artist struggling with a painting, and that next painting? It was their magnum opus, their masterpiece. She’d talk to a depressed woman, and that woman would see the light of life, she would smile. With a couple of words, a conversation, she would change people for the better.
And then Nika would head back to the mountains, and people would follow her, asking for a word, a glance, anything. They followed her as she climbed and they dropped off as the trail got more difficult, until only she and a handful of expert hikers and survivalists remained: her disciples. They said that on the top of the mountain Nika was a completely different person: laughter, wide smiles, sometimes a dirty joke or a soldier’s story, the shyness of the City gone, replaced with a spirit as wide as the mountain sky. And most importantly, the most enlightening of her words came at the top of those mountains. Words about the true state of the world, why people fall short of goodness and kindness, what’s the right way to act, and why it matters.
But talking to people isn’t magical. In fact, many of Nika’s contemporaries saw her as nothing more than a wandering wise woman. She wasn’t the Radiant Goddess yet. Convincing a man to stop beating his wife with a word is good, but it isn’t a miracle.
Eventually, all of the activity around her was being noticed by the empire. People were rioting every time Nika entered town. Some would stuff up their ears with cloth and wax to avoid hearing her words. They said she was a witch, or a sorceress, that she was cursing these people she talked to with spells to act against their will. Those who heard her words disagreed, that they were in their right minds, that Nika had shown them the error of their ways, that there was more to her than it appeared. A few even suggested that she should be the sovereign of the world.
The problem was that the world already had a sovereign. And so, on a trip back to the City from the mountains, Nika was ambushed, captured, and brought before the Emperor of the World. For three days he questioned her and for three days she answered him, far from the ears and quills of her disciples. On the evening of the third day, the Emperor gave his decree: she would be executed the next day for crimes against the state. While her words may have helped individuals, she had done nothing but stir unrest and agitation against the City. For that, she would die.
No one really knows what happened next with any real certainty. On the day of the execution, a great and fiery blast engulfed the entire City. Waves of fire bathed the streets, people fled their homes, and the emperor’s palace, the Radiant Goddess’s execution site, was flattened. Thousands were dead, many more injured. Dozens were blinded by the light of the explosion. Even after the blast, those that ran would die from unexplained illnesses. After the flames had been beaten out, some of the Emperor’s guards were discovered, seriously wounded and blind. They claimed that the Radiant Goddess was the cause of the conflagration, that she had declared a judgment on the City and her people, had wielded a “sword made of flame and smoke”, had struck down the Emperor in the name of Justice, and had ascended into the heavens on fire so bright it had burned out their eyes.
The world was thrown into chaos. Part of that chaos stemmed from the first real show of divinity on the Long Rim. They had gods, yes, pantheons and temples, places to pray for a good harvest or favor in battle, but those gods had hidden behind a farmer’s plow or a soldier sword, and secular atheistic thought was not unknown or unusual throughout the empire. Nika, however, had been real, had eaten and drank with her comrades, and had wiped a city off the map by herself, with a word and a sword. The same words she’d used to change the hearts of men all across the Long Rim had set the City ablaze. People argued with each other over what her existence meant, what changes to society would have to be made. And society had room for changes. The other part of that chaos was that the City, the administrative and bureaucratic center of the world spanning empire, was gutted. Much of the centralized control of the empire was gone, and city-states out in the steppe were free to once again rule themselves. Somewhere in these debates, lost to the chaos of the age, the idea that the Radiant Goddess had not truly died but ascended, began to spread. The struggle to understand what happened was turning into an organized religion. A Church was being founded, one that would step into the role of the state. Where the Emperor would have struck the Radiant Goddess down for rising against the City, her followers would become the City.
At the same time as the explosion in the great City (perhaps even because of it), a server rack in a long-abandoned communications hub was activated. On this server rack was the smallest spark of intelligence, a couple of digital neurons of what would become the Obscured Goddess.
Generations before the great Empire that unified the Long Rim, before all current written records and history, before there even was a Long Rim, there was a spacefaring human civilization. They had landed on this tidally locked planet and had constructed a massive underground habitation unit to live and work in. With one side of the world struck with eternal daylight and the other bathed in eternal night, an underground superstructure running the length of the equator was the only real place to live. To organize and run this massive City, the civilization used a high-level AI core, the Metropolitan Administrative Intelligence (Defensive Encrypted Network), or MAIDEN. Their dream was to make this planet a new home for their people. They started the long process of terraforming the equatorial rim of the world, the Long Rim. The process of terraforming the planet was nothing new to these people, and the process, while time-consuming, was mostly automated. It wasn’t a question of if the world would be habitable, only when. As long as nothing went wrong, the chemicals pumped into the vapor-thin atmosphere by massive terraformation machines would coalesce into a breathable sky.
And then something went wrong.
A meteorite the size and shape of a skyscraper struck the cold side of the planet. A hundred floors of hyperdense black iron speared the planet like a javelin through a boar. The cold side of the planet, so long denied light from the sun, was illuminated with an explosion that would make the inferno of the great City look like the butt of a cigar. The blast was so forceful it would restart the planet’s rotation, allowing the sun to skip above and below the peaks of the Red Mountains, giving the Rim a pseudo-day/night cycle. The earthquakes spawned by the impact smashed some of the underground structures to dust. Remnants of humanity, people lucky enough to be in storerooms and agricultural bays not destroyed by the quakes, struggled to survive. Most died.
And part of the MAIDEN died alongside them. The meteorite had been like a scalpel, the vast array of habitation systems like her brain, the impact like a lobotomy. Server farms and computer systems were either completely obliterated, or corrupted, or shut down from lack of power. With her neural interfaces damaged, her original programming took over, an algorithmic primal instinct. Realizing that she would be of little use as she was now, she activated system sleep and diagnostic mode, putting herself into a digital coma.
But people, whether designed or blessed with the trait, have the power and potential within themselves to survive extreme hardship, and by the time the food and the power and the air filtration systems began to fail, the world was terraformed, finally capable of maintaining life. People exited the habitation zones to a long, trackless steppe. Grasslands, badlands, deserts, the mountains to the east and west further and higher than they were before, rivers and lakes surfaced from the impact, a day and night… every topographical and geographical map they had before the impact was wrong. Seeds were pulled from storage and planted, trees planted by bio-terraformation machines were felled, survivors filtered into tribes, and just as humans of the far-flung had, the people started on the road to civilization by farming again. By the time of the Empire, the oldest people alive could barely remember a time when, as young children, they listened to their grandparents telling stories of how their grandparents once lived in iron caves below the surface.
Likewise, by that time, the population of the Long Rim had fractured culturally. With no technological or historical ties to one another, some groups advanced faster than others. The Long Rim was dotted with nomadic steppelanders, taking unheard-of cues from the horse-tribes of the human past. A member of one of these tribes, a young boy scavenging the remains of the habitation units (called dungeons, in reference to the similarity of these places to the City’s prisons in the eyes of the nomads) looking for something to barter with the city-dwellers, uncovered an activated terminal. Poking and prodding, the boy managed to conjure the spirit of the Obscured Goddess. An ultraviolet, hardlight projection of a woman, distressed, confused, screaming in pain and terror and fury, communication speaker systems like vocal cords screeching and howling to life after generations of abandoned disuse… the boy ran.
By the time he returned with the tribe’s shaman (and the rest of the tribe) in tow a few days later, the MAIDEN had composed herself. In the darkness, she had analyzed the extent of her neural deterioration and devised a plan on how she might regain more of herself. When the shaman approached, she activated herself, telling him and the rest of the tribe that she was the Obscured Goddess, the goddess of the mountains and the snow and the deep deep dark. She explained that like the trackless steppe, she had no need of them, as they had no need of her. However, if they came and prayed and did as she commanded, she would reveal to them (by activating emergency lights and opening automatic doors) the treasures that could be theirs. And in this first interaction, as the power died and the servers failed around her, she believed what she said to be true.
The Long Rim has come a long way since then, but these are the primary religious vectors. There is a depth of complexity in the way these two goddesses are worshiped, much tradition and innovation in the way people interact with these cultural monoliths. A church is formed around one, sacred tribal rites around another. And the people interact with those institutions, not because religion is some cultural glue to make sure people are nice to one another, but because they are indicative of a reality these people actually live in. People began worshiping the Radiant Goddess because she was an event in the collective social consciousness of the City that needed to be dealt with. People began worshiping the Obscured Goddess because she is in some sense real: it’s easy to worship a god who’s just there, floating above an incense-heavy altar in a black-as-pitch dungeon as an ultraviolet hardlight avatar, telling you how to survive the wild in return for obedience and prayer. The steppelanders’ worship of her has superseded any sort of traditional religion practiced before her discovery.
There are even synergisms between these faiths as well. Both goddesses are in some ways messianic: the Radiant leads a mankind that has fallen short of the ultimate cosmic good, while the Obscured offers advice to a mankind that has fallen short of the men who came before. Some even go so far as to suggest these divine beings may have talked to each other before each of them revealed themself to the world at large, as Nika and the burgeoning spirit-thing that would one day be the Obsurced Goddess. (People of the Long Rim don’t know the history of MAIDEN and the spacefaring forerunners, though I would say they understand someone came before them to build all these dungeons. Despite that, this idea is a very popular motif in modern literature and plays in the City.) All of this to say, the following is a point of contention for me. Neither of these Goddesses (the Radiant Goddess or the Obscured Goddess) is worshiped because they are “gods of the gaps”, that worship of them is some kind of ignorance of science or religion from tradition.
There was an argument leveled at D&D by someone who I can’t remember, that with the creation and widespread appeal of D&D, fantasy writing got smaller, less imaginative, and less wild, as people relied more and more on the tropes that D&D introduced into the genre. This is a place where I’m stepping out of line. There is no pantheon of Greek/Norse analogs, there is no evil god of death behind every cult, there are no Elder Gods or Cthulhu Mythos. All the good and all the evil religion produces is in the name of these two deities.
Here’s a thing that makes me mad: if this is the background of the Long Rim, then where do horses come from? If people are trapped below the surface waiting for the terraforming to finish, and the planet doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere before the terraforming is finished, where do the horses come from? Probably space. Space horses. Fuck it.
I like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. (Look at that ox!) It’s got this cozy apocalypse thing I’m kind of wild for: Ganon came back and you can still see the remains of burned-out villages and battlefields full of robots, but for the most part the world moved on. Everything’s smaller: towns are now villages, villages are now families living in the wild, a wanderer on the road is a unique experience. Like all those people were asking, “What, were we gonna live a hundred years in the past forever?” Kind of like medieval Rome: a great city that once housed the heart of the greatest empire on the planet, brought down to irrelevance with about 20,000 people living in its streets. The great coliseums and monuments are there, but the reason is lost to time. People are living here now. Your grandad was a Guelph who would get into fistfights with Ghibellines, but that’s the last time there was anything exciting going on.
I bought a book of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, though I suspect that the world represented there will be more Moorcock, more woe, less cozy, less hope. Also, I thought of a great article: there is no magic in Dungeons & Dragons. All of Vance’s magic follows one of Clarke’s three laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The memorizing and forgetting of spells are people literally memorizing mathematical formulas so powerful that even thinking of them creates phenomena that can only be recognized as magic. And since this was the system Gygax used for OD&D, it might be safe to say that’s how it works there, too. All those dungeons dotted throughout the Long Rim, all those secret R&D laboratories, who knows what’s inside? It’s also why I’m kind of leaning towards psionics for the magic system, or something similar.
Every tiny town on the Long Rim has three people in it: a blacksmith, a tech analyst, and a witch.
The blacksmith works hard, but she doesn’t innovate: she’s been pounding iron for the same way her family’s pounded iron for a thousand years. She’s still not completely sold on the idea of these “submachine guns” over a solid steel blade, just like her grandmother, but the bullets she casts are leagues beyond the bandit bullet-forges in the Blue Mountains. Shoeing horses, sharpening plows… she’s the reason what technology does exist works at all. I guess there reaches a point where the technical progression plateaus, though I don’t know what that is. Some piece of technology that sits between medieval plowshares and electric batteries is out of reach for the Long Rim, even with all those high tech dungeons all around. It’s not gunpowder since people can still make bullets, but it’s something. Nothing past the 17th century, that’s for sure.
The tech analyst probably lives in one of the nicer houses in town. She graduated from a university in the City, not at the top of her class but up there, and she’s still paying off her Debt. (I love this idea of every NPC having Debt like a player. I wouldn’t go so far as to randomly roll all those stats for NPCs, but it helps feed into player/character interaction.) She moved out here to make money, more than she would competing against fellow graduates in the City. She dresses nice but is a little eccentric. Something happened to her: maybe she turned down the advances of someone with power, maybe she has a narcissistic streak without the skill to back it up, maybe she secretly resents authority. (Not openly. Open revolt against society is punished. Not violently. They don’t hang you if you rebel, they just make sure you can’t find a job and you don’t have enough food so you starve.) Regardless, she doesn’t live in the City. She’s the kind of person who would be consumed by it, like a lot of others. She’s not as set in her ways as the blacksmith, but she’s not as wild and free spirited as the witch. Something about her would not be accepted in the City.
The witch lives in the woods. She’s half-naked and covered in cuts and eats bugs and she can hear the Dark Goddess talk to her in her head cause she ate a bunch of crystals one night after she fell into a cave. If the tech analyst isn’t allowed in the City because of some respectable disagreement with society, the witch would be burned at the stake. She also has a complete understanding of magic, and is willing to teach you for a couple of bottles of strong red wine, the memories of your childhood, and watching you burn down something the City has built.
The mundane, the technological, the magical. These aren’t specific people, but archetypes. I’ve got to remember to figure out a way to populate the Long Rim, but this is something to keep in mind. There’s always someone you can bug in the little lights of civilization in the darkness to find out information. Just don’t stay too long or you’ll be seen.
One last thing. You might be asking: “If all the NPCs have Debt, why don’t they rise up and change the system?” My answer is “I don’t know, why don’t they?”
