Writing – Caravan Crawl

Maybe Like The Beach Episode of a Slice of Life Anime?

So I’ve had a couple of articles in the hopper for about a year, maybe about five thousand words over a couple of different essays in the last few months. Most of my writing has been focused on my academics recently; researching and writing about religious liberalism and the Protestant Mainline in the post-war world is my primary focus, though I’ll likely drill into a particular time and place before it’s all said and done. I’ve enjoyed it immensely but I always want to return to writing for the blog. Blog writing is much more low stakes, especially blog writing about elf games that isn’t read by anyone, and it lets you get the bad habits out while trying new things. In academic writing, you build up to a golden sentence, with each paragraph and sentence lining the way. For blog writing, you can attempt to make every sentence gold and if you fail, fuck it, again, who is even reading this? It’s like poetry: you get better at wielding words by using words, shuffling them around like a marked card in a magic trick. There’s also the additional tension of blog writing for me in that I still haven’t formed a group and rolled dice since I moved last year. How can I still have gaming thoughts if I’m not gaming?

As such, I want to start putting out smaller articles to get some of these words out into the open. I need to break the habit of writing a thousand words for an introduction and then never finishing the article. Some great game bloggers write like that (Angry GM being the first that comes to mind), but I’m a child of the OSR first: scrappy, DIY, make it work or die, run under fire… the Game Master as Bass Guitarist for the band to keep the groove going. A thousand words are good for your personal notes, but when it’s time to run at the table, you succeed or fail, and reading your players a novel isn’t successful.

So, if this blog was an anime, consider this a beach episode. I’m going to write, and then edit, and then post, and then I’m going to do it a couple more times until all these words are posted. I’m going to do it in WordPress as a way to prevent myself from spiraling off into tangents. And then I’m going to put “blog writing” on the project management board I use for all my other work and do this more constantly. And then I’m going to find a game group. Promise.

Stuck in the Wrong Room

So, before I get too far into it, I wanted to quickly say that I was on a podcast with some good friends, talking about RPGs, almost six months ago. You can listen to the episodes Girl Genius and Labestomy here. I say some naughty words, I think, and I pontificate about elf games with the best of them. Also, go buy Trackmarks: Dieselpunk Fantasy Adventure here and subscribe to the Wrong Room podcast here.

Stuck in Drama Hell

There’s drama in the Warhammer community again, with a lot of more right-leaning people abandoning ship for a game called Trench Crusade, only to find a bunch of left-leaning people already camped out. Culture War bullshit ensued.

You know, thinking back on my time as a tabletop gamer, it’s actually kind of sad. I was a huge Warhammer fan for such a long time, but I’ve really fallen out of love with the setting as I’ve gotten older. DCC artist Stefan Poag had an interview where he mentioned that usually at some point you fall out of love with superhero comics and you can never get back in. That’s happened to me with all the Marvel slop, but it’s kind of happened with Warhammer as well.

Like with so many franchises and mediums, there is this fatigue that so many commercial communities are suffering from nowadays that stems from the general cultural fatigue we’re all feeling at this point. Jacques Barzun introduces this idea in his book From Dawn to Decadence about how the loss people face in the modern world is that of “possibility.” “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted,” he writes, “the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.” Another author who talks about this is Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society: “The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.'”

“Oh God,” you’re thinking, “the academic is out of the cage! Someone get your gun!”

Well, I’m not really “out of love” with the setting. It’s more like what I love now is how I imagine the setting should be. As the official setting moves further and further from my internal picture of what Warhammer is really about, the less devoted I am to the official lore. There’s some cool stuff nowadays; I don’t hate the Leagues of Votann with a passion and actually think there’s some cool stuff there once you stop seeing them as Squats, and I’m glad the Horus Heresy is finally coming to an end considering it’s long overstayed its welcome. But those things aren’t what Warhammer really means to me. This is healthy, by the way. The point of “franchises” should be to inspire your own creativity, especially when you’re running games at the table. There is only one canon, and it is Christ’s. Everything else is negotiable.

So, to combat the drama, instead of bitching and moaning, I instead offer a small modicum of what I think Warhammer is about and the humble beginnings of a setting that might give fans a way out. I’m jumping to the end of the article here, but the takeaways are to just fucking make your own shit, stop consuming other’s work uncritically, and if you don’t like a community, make something so unapologetically you that everyone who would be interested can’t escape the magnetic pull of your own tastes.

Old Hammers, Rusted Nails

I was playing Darktide and they released a new cosmetic for Psyker and it caused me to have a (1) thought, something unusual when anyone is playing Darktide. (By the way, Darktide itself also had a whole bunch of drama when it was originally released. Maybe Warhammer and drama really are just inseparable?) And I had this image that was interesting enough for me to devote some time writing about it. But first, (here we go), I have to explain what I think Warhammer is about. I’m going to try and be brief.

I think there are two elements to answer what Warhammer is. The first is simple and springs from the ‘87 to ‘98 editions: heavy metal ascetics. Many gamers are now flocking to what is affectionately called “Oldhammer:” the old art, the old models, the old lore. There’s something “SOVL”-ful about the game from this era, and there are bits and pieces of art and lore that don’t neatly fit together like they do now. There were Space Marine half-elves and butt tattoos and weirdly named Inquisitors and everything felt a little more gonzo and goofy. It was grim and dark, but not so grim and dark that you couldn’t go “hell yeah, that’s metal.” To put it another way, it was not so grim and dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The Chaos Marines of the era fucking rock, with just enough long hair and helmet horns to make you want to headbang. There’s no long and tragic backstory; they’re the bad guys because they’re bad guys. You can hate them or love them, do what you want, I’m not a cop. There’s motion and character and color. God, is there color. And there’s something missing from the lore now because it takes itself so seriously. Much of this is likely nostalgia-bait, to be honest, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with a little nostalgia, like putting honey in your tea in the mornings.

The second element comes from the more serious lore of the ‘04 and ‘08 editions of the game. The Imperium of Man is a shitty place to live. It’s a fascist, authoritarian hellscape of a society that literally feeds people to a dead machine god on life support. It’s a bad place to live. But the tension and the horror of the setting isn’t that the Imperium is a shitty place to live (and it sure as hell isn’t saying that fascism and authoritarianism are cool and people should seek to recreate it in their everyday lives), it’s that the alternative is worse. The Chaos Marines get more Hellraiser-y because yeah, you live in a factory where the foreman gets to beat you to fight against the Forces of Darkness and if you fight back they scoop your brains and make you a servitor, but living in a factory is worse than if the Forces of Darkness win. It asks the question “What if you lived in a world where this shitty way to live was actually justified? What if this actually was better than the alternative? How would people react?” It’s not a deep question and it’s handled inelegantly at times, but it’s an interesting enough question to stop and think for a bit about. It’s kind of like reminding yourself that you would be just as shitty as you are now in the 1960s, or the 1930s, or whatever era in the past you imagine yourself to be in and that you should be better now.

I could throw a couple hundred words here about moralism in art, the loss of media literacy, and the rise of the New Puritans, but I’m trying to be brief. So let me just say that the first element was lost as the franchise needed more and more artists and creatives to maintain its market cap and the second was lost as people tried to tell new stories in the setting and to carve off the weird angles of old stories. It changed, and considering that the franchise of Warhammer has been around for almost forty years, it was bound to.

What If The Victorians Were Right?

Okay, so if those are the two elements of a Warhammer game, what’s a good idea for a new setting? Some quick inspirations. First, I recently watched VaatiVidya’s five-hour breakdown of the entire lore of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, my preferred way of receiving FromSoftware games. Spoilers, by the way, but apparently the energy resource MacGuffin that all the factions are fighting over, Coral, is made up of people who died in the inciting incident, the Fires of Ibis, and people can use enough of it to start hearing the voices of the people in the Coral and experience some kind of ascension… I guess? Just go watch the video, I’m sure the game is even more esoteric and weird. I couldn’t help but compare it to Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Human Instrumentality Project, where a secret organization is trying to force humanity to evolve under its control. SEELE in Evangelion and Overseer in Armored Core share a lot of similarities from what I can see. Another inspiration is from the World of Darkness game Vampire: The Masquerade. In OWoD, vampires struggled against their Beast, which was the primal urge to just say fuck it, fangs rule humans drool, and just start drinking everyone’s blood. The Beast was the dark part of you that lets you be as vindictive and petty and cruel and downright beastly to everyone around you. If vampires in the Old World of Darkness were worried that they lost their salvation, then the Beast is their sin holding them back from throwing themselves into the sun. And obviously, Warhammer itself, its Psykers, and that cosmetic from earlier.

So, here’s the pitch: what if everyone woke up and realized that some shadowy organization had completed their secret goal and now everyone had psychic powers? Sure, everyone could throw boulders with their minds and cast firebolt, but it goes much further than that. Everyone could feel everyone else’s strongest-felt and innermost thoughts and feelings, every errant thought and emotion. Everyone is up in everyone’s business, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Think Denise Mina’s run of Hellblazer (spoilers, obviously). Of course, there are a couple of decades of the ole ultra-violence before society manages to reunite together without everyone going insane. The shadowy old white dudes who started this mess are either dead or will never face the consequences of their actions, obviously. But society has to figure out a way to come back together, and that’s where the Victorians come in. Everyone decides that yeah, maybe being buttoned-up prudes who just constantly write about sex instead of talking to a woman might be the way to go. Kind of like the Vulcans from Star Trek, only instead of being super emotional because you’re naturally super emotional, you’re emotional because some kid down the street lost his dog and you both can toss around psychic might like the goddamn Phoenix Force. Of course, the horror and tension of the setting is that just because you’ve got a howitzer behind your eyes and an entire society on your shoulders telling you what you can and can’t do, you’re still a person. People still need to love and hate and be happy and scared and mad, all the things that make humans human. This Space Victorian society fukken blows, but it’s the best we got going for us, and tall poppies will be cut.

Ascetically, think heavy metal Pride and Prejudice with sci-fi spaceship and personal combat being even more buttoned up Master and Commander. Think of lots of black formfitting skinsuits with collars up to the ears and crazy-colored eyes. Also think of lots of Dune-style house politics, with different factions that emphasize different ways of looking at the Big Event, religiously or practically or whatever else. Personality is king, with people being hollowed out by those who are the most emotionally powerful but everyone has to pretend everyone is acting reasonably. Not logically. In my fake sci-fi future, everyone has disabused themselves of the illusion that you can act totally rationally. Good table manners keep you and the people around you sane.

Wrap It Up, Chuck

Well, this isn’t even like the beginnings of a setting, but I was less interested in offering something useable at the table and more interested in what I said earlier: when you get mad at something on the internet, especially something related to a commercial intellectual property, please stop. Steal the parts you like, preferably from a dozen different places, and mash them together until you can see yourself or what you want to see in the shapes. Clean it up, send it to an editor, and then sell the PDF for pay-what-you-want or $6.66, the only legitimate options for selling PDFs. But getting mad that people you disagree with are in a particular scene is dumb. As I said, if you don’t want to share something with people you don’t like, then make something so unapologetically you that everyone who would be interested in it can’t escape the fact that they have to like you first.

I set out to edit the thousands of words I’d already written, and ended up writing a couple thousand words I had not already written for a blog post. I’ve got to start getting better at this. I really want to talk about the stuff I’ve been writing for The Long Rim and Most Wicked Man in Texas, and I can’t do that unless I have a better turnaround on posts.

I guess this is just a taste of my own medicine. Hopefully you can’t read this without seeing the stuff I love in it. Make cool stuff.

Ice Hell, or UVG Fan Hours

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: 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.

An Addendum of an Addendum, or Three Ways East, or Trapped Again in No Games Hell

The Snow-Storm

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.

Little Johnny NoGames Finally Loses the Epithet

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

She had lied.

It was not unusual, of course. The Obscured Goddess often did. The elders, unafraid of the simple rank heresy laid out by the neophytes, had once said her mind was muddled, is still muddled. She could not account for every one of her decisions, they would say, their hands heavy with their thick gray beards huddled around the fire, but for Jalick clarity had come, in this moment and no sooner. She had lied.

He was bleeding out. His lungs, probably. Sacks filled with liquid, like trying to carry water across the steppe in a bag. His life mixed with the dust and made some thick black viscous concoction as it spread across the floor. It would not last for the next crew of cutthroats that entered this particular dungeon, of course. By then it would be indiscernible, all but dried to the iron floor. But for now, for some odd reason, the pool comforted him. It was some small sign that he had been here and he had been alive, once.

He had seen Yalid die this way, once. Of course, that time it had been in the light of the sun, far from any black-damned tomb, a bullet from a scavman’s gun. Jalick remembered holding the boy as blood oozed from the line on his face that carried his smile and the light disappeared from his eyes. Big and blue, his mother had told him. Something “worth loving,” she had said. Jalick wondered if there was some special magic, some element of remembrance, in his own brown eyes. The Goddess had not blessed him with blue eyes. She had just killed him.

It had come from the ceiling. Not a blade or a trap. He’d have seen a trap. No, this was simply wrong place, wrong time. Pipes and cords burst loose from their long-held resting places by a bunch of dumb tribesmen traipsing the place in search of long-forgotten treasure. A luckier looter might have escaped with power burns and a story to tell at the tavern. Not Jalick, though. Jalick just had to take a wild electrified cord through the chest like a man. Jalick just had to die here. As the Goddess willed.

For a moment, he thought of his crew. One of them must have at least leap to his aid. Someone must have shoved a silk yellow bandage into his bleeding chest. But even from here, he felt the lie. No one had saved him. No one could have saved him. They had lied to him in that brightly lit tavern, just as his Goddess had lied to him here. But not for long. The world was starting to turn.

At some point, long beyond the confines of his perception, he fell. His mind slipped past its material bonds as he lay on the floor, down, down, down, seeping like grease between the tight metal panels. He was going somewhere, and by the Goddess, he hoped it was somewhere better. He doubted it.

Damn. She had lied.

Man, it’s been a hot minute.

I recently ran The Hole In The Oak by Gavin Norman in Old School Essentials over three sessions for my usual group. I really enjoyed it, especially because I didn’t make too many crazy adjustments, and I think they liked it as well. This is my first play report thing on the blog, though it’s a lot more freeform than “and then my party entered Room 2.” I focus more on lessons I can take away and how I can improve my DMing for the future

Spoilers for The Hole In The Oak ahead.

So to inspire adventure, I told the party that a wizard was looking for three magical chess pieces and had hired them to find in the titular Hole. It forced exploration, and it naturally fell off as characters died and were introduced. At the very end of the dungeon (their time in the dungeon, not the physical end), they discovered Hazrad the Unholy, a wandering wizard with Skyrim style skull face paint who I played as just a pissed-off dude after he found out that they had smashed all the little niknaks in his hidden closet in Room 37. “Uh, I’m Hazrad the Unholy, man that was my stuff what the fuck.” They traded the chess pieces they had collected as an apology and also because they were already loaded with treasure and it was an easy way for them to ditch the quest that got them there. Lesson: Play fast and loose. If this was a longer adventure (and it could be if they decide to venture into the Incandescent Grottoes, see below), I might have that action have consequences, but for the beer and pretzel game I was running, it worked out just fine for me.

At the end of the adventure, I had everyone pile up all the gold and treasure they had collected and total it out. Because there was a table with all the treasure in it along with the total of the dungeon, I was able to give a video game-style complete percentage (“67%!”) at the end that I just loved doing. Lesson: Stock treasure in your dungeon beforehand and give players a score on how well they did. At the very least, keep a running tally on how much treasure you’re stocking if you’re rolling it randomly as characters in the room. A good rule of thumb would be finding out how much a particular goal of theirs is and modulating so that they are almost there. If they want a tavern, make sure you only include enough for like, 70% of a tavern. I believe it was a piece of Apocalypse World GMing advice that you should give the party “almost enough.”

Also, the treasure is important! There’s no point delving into dangerous tombs if there’s no reward! It’s always better to get a magic item from solving a puzzle than buying it in town or just having it!

I attempted to use THAC0 at the beginning as OSE intended, and I don’t know what my problem was, but I just couldn’t grok it. I’ve used THAC0 in the past but trying to run the dungeon and keep things moving just bogged me down too much. Maybe I was just out of practice. I returned to a lot of 5E style mechanics the longer the dungeon crawl went for. I don’t think the players minded, but it just means the Lesson: Finish my house-ruled system. Have a rule space where everyone understands the rules and everyone feels comfortable suggesting changes.

I love anytime I can be a creepy motherfucker as a DM, and the Faces of the Deep in Room 4 was a great opportunity to do that. Discordant overlapping voices are always a fun gimmick, especially when you use them to bring up backstory and explain to players how to interact with the dungeon. I had each player roll a rumor when they started a new character, and that also helped with pushing them forward. The Faces were a place where more rumors could be generated. As for roleplay, I remember running an ancient ruin once overrun with giant undead snake monsters with human faces crying black tears who were looking for their long-dead loved ones, moaning and screaming in the darkness. Had a lot of players uncomfortable that night. Lesson: Know when to tone it back.

Speaking of “creepy motherfucker,” at the Altar of the Stump in Room 60, I gave the evil stump god the heretic gnomes worshiped this stupid “heh heh heh” evil villain laugh, solely because I liked doing it. I did it at completely inappropriate times, which made the combat a bit more goofy and comical, but this is OSR, there are places for seriousness and it’s in the total party wipe, which my players almost suffered in that fight. Speaking of the gnomes, I had a picture in the Faun’s house be a drawing done by the gnomes with “remember what they took from us” scrawled on the back, and I rolled a random encounter where the heretic gnomes had kidnapped a forest gnome that the party saved, so the gnomes took on this sectarian violence angle I enjoyed playing up.

The Fauns I reskinned for a twist. Instead of fauns, they were Chaotic goatmen masquerading as Lawful sheepmen. I left lots of clues that they weren’t the original owners of the house, like how there were only three of them despite there being eleven sheepmen in all the photos on the walls (no one questioned how they could have photos in a medieval land, and it comes up later in Room 54 with all the pictures on the wall). When the goatmen threw off their literal sheepskins and attacked the players they all freaked. Two characters died before they could get away, but going back and getting revenge on them was very important close to the end of the dungeon.

My players never encountered two really big elements of the dungeon: the Hunter in Room 13 and the troglodytes in Room 16. Might have just been part of not playing it more up considering they are a full faction (though the ghouls were also a “faction” and there was no option to dialog with them), but I don’t think I suffered for it. Lesson: A good faction is one with goals that can be communicated beyond violence, preferably with words. Violence is scary for people who don’t get to simply pick a new pregen when they die.

Likewise, for the Hunter, I’ve run the LotFP module The God that Crawls before, so I know how much fun it can be to have a monster that spurs exploration because you’re constantly running away from it. If it had been a more central part of the module, I could imagine adding more triggers for it to activate, but I don’t think my experience suffered because it wasn’t. Lesson: Sometimes a lot of elements of a dungeon mesh together, sometimes they don’t. Having a quest and a monster chasing and no map and rumors all might be too many cooks in the kitchen for a dungeon crawl, and it might raise the tension when it doesn’t need to be raised.

Actually, make that three things my players never encountered: they never made it to the last third of the dungeon, with all the forest and vegetation rooms that lead to the tombs. I don’t have much to say on that, save that one of the rooms is on the map in such a way that it might be difficult for the player mapper to record it accurately. Lesson: Always have a player mapping and be open and honest about where doorways and entries/exits are. I still think that Google Sheets is the best mapping software/dungeon generator out there, it just requires a little know-how in macros to pull it off.

My players found the Reptile Cultist’s giant altar in Room 46 just as I randomly rolled the Ogre to show up from Room 25, which was a hectic fight but the party won without getting too messed up by the Orge’s mutagenic breath. After that, they decided to dedicate themselves to who they thought was the god of the dungeon, the Lizard God Kezek. I’m a sucker for religious stuff in roleplay, so I let them have their fun, sacrificing gnomes to the Scaled God, with Kezek bordering on the consciousness of his new followers.

There’s a control room, Room 24, that turns the giant stone statues in The Hall of Kings, Room 22, into solid gold. The shine in my player’s eyes was worth the trapped first lever, as was the disappointment when the statues turned back to stone. I also like how rooms in a dungeon can affect rooms in another part of the dungeon, but I think there have to be more explicit rumors or info about what changed because sometimes you pull a lever and nothing happens and you go “oh, don’t know if that was good”.

I love the river. Having the ability to traverse into different rooms by throwing your big dumb body into ice-cold, fast running water, I love it. Fishing, clean water, a good place to camp on the shore… Every time I make a dungeon, I have to include a river. Not to mention waterfalls and sumps ensure that as players navigate via a river levels of the dungeon can be locked off and they have to find alternate routes to return to the surface. The river in Hole in the Oak is especially good because it is connected to the Incandescent Grottoes, another dungeon you can run in tandem. I think they’re a little tonally different, but more content is more content. I had two players float down the river at the end of the dungeon and I tried my best to play up the Satania vibes. Lesson: If you haven’t yet, buy Veins of the Earth. You don’t have to use anything, but I can’t think of a product that gets you more in the headspace of darkness and caving more.

That’s pretty much it. I’ve been working on the Masters so I haven’t had the flexibility to get behind the screen as often as I’d like, but I’m still trying to finish my house rules and post a copy of them here. Likewise, I’m working on getting a podcast set up with a gaming buddy of mine and posting it here. All in all, good stuff.

Strong recommend on The Hole in the Oak.

House-Ruled: Lingering Injuries

More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week, and patrolled about it with Bren-gun carriers and light armoured vehicles. When you made contact with the enemy you maneuvered about him for a place to strike much as two fleets will steam into position for action. There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. Actually these patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing. They were simply designed to obtain information from personal observation and the capture of prisoners. And they had a certain value in keeping the enemy nervous. But always the essential governing principle was that desert forces must be mobile: they were seeking not the conquest of territory or positions but combat with the enemy. We hunted men, not land, as a warship will hunt another warship, and care nothing for the sea on which the action is fought. And as a ship submits to the sea by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanized soldiers were submitting to the desert. They found weaknesses in the ruthless hostility of the desert and ways to circumvent its worst moods. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert offered colours in browns, yellows and greys. The army accordingly took these colours for its camouflage. There were practically no roads. The army shod its vehicles with huge balloon tyres and did without roads. Nothing except an occasional bird moved quickly in the desert. The army for ordinary purposes accepted a pace of five or six miles an hour. The desert gave water reluctantly, and often then it was brackish. The army cut its men- generals and privates- down to a gallon of water a day when they were in forward positions. There was no food in the desert. The soldier learned to exist almost entirely on tinned foods, and contrary to popular belief remained healthy on it. Mirages came that confused the gunner, and the gunner developed precision-firing to a finer art and learned new methods of establishing observation-posts close to targets. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no new roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert liveable, nor did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war.

Alan Moorehead, The March to Tunis: The North African War, 1940-1943

It took less than an hour for them to get lost. They had ridden north from Halfa’s tribe towards the Iron Vein he had been going on about for the last three days. No one wanted to go with him, partly because he was more irritating than a swarm of blister beetles and partly because he had a notorious sense of direction. Salama had finally been chosen to go with the boy because she was a stronger navigator than him. The fact that she wielded a makeshift carbine and that she actually still had bullets for the thing made the decision inevitable.

The grass, long and strong and sickly green, swayed in the breeze, and you could see the waves of wind dance in the blades. The sun had begun its descent, but the night would not fall for hours at the least. If Salama could see the stars, she could plot a course to the tribe, or a scrapper camp to the northwest. Until then, the ocean of blue overhead threatened to swallow both of the travelers up.

“I said a prayer to it.”

“What?”

“The Blade in the Vein, the… shiny thing. The expensive looking shiny thing, I said a prayer to it. I asked it to still be there when I got back. I left it an offering.”

Salama was silent, so Halfa continued.

“I offered it a ration. Like the way grandpa and the shaman do when they talk to the Purple Lady. I know she’s different, she talks and all, but maybe it’ll listen to me the same way the Purple Lady listens to grandpa.”

Salama gently pulls the reins and her horse slows down just enough for her to launch a kick from the saddle into the rear of Halfa’s horse: with a start, the horse rears up. Had Halfa been a better horseman, he might have been able to get a hold of the reins in time, but he wasn’t. He tumbled across the horse’s backside as it bolted into the long prairie. He hit the ground hard, harder than Salama expected him to, but not hard enough for her to regret it.

He struggled through an “ohh gods eyes” on the ground before Salama began.

“I am bound by oath and honor to the Obscured Goddess. You do not give worship to every rusted bit of metal someone scrounges out of the veins of this earth.”

A huge part of my system is consequences, and a large part of those consequences are scars. When you take direct damage to your Soul stat, you gain a scar. At first, the scars were very abstract. Oh, you lose a hand, or you go insane, roleplay that, have fun nerd. However, as I started getting things a little more concrete in my house rules, I realized that I had the opportunity to make a system that helps other DMs wean themselves off of the modern-day RPG bad habit of just letting players get what they want physically with no consequences. And trust me, I’m also someone who needs a spoonful of the sugar.

Not my players, mind you, my mere presence inflicts harm upon the boys.

I think people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences on the players because they don’t want to appear to be mean. You’re the DM, responsible for the entire world: with a snap of your fingers, rocks fall everyone dies. If you want an army to march over the hill and decimate these pesky player characters, you can. However, as the DM you want to represent a world that is real, and real worlds have consequences. Or maybe people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences because they’ve had to deal with that guy, that one player who is way too invested in Gigachad Thundercock the Master of Magic and Getting Girls to Notice Him and any threat against him is a threat against the emotional and psychological well being of the player. In which case another solution may be required. Regardless, as I’m writing rules I’m thinking of how I can wean myself off feeling bad for inflicting tragedy and how to wean other DMs off it too.

I’ve got like ten different pages all with different tables for variant rules for Lingering Injuries. I’m still putting them together, but I’m mocking something up like this:

Roll	Minor Injury	Major Injury	Description and Effect
1	Blurred Vision	Lose an Eye	Reduce your Maximum Dex, Con, or Str score.
2	Broken Finger/Hand	Lose a Finger/Hand
3	Limp	Lose a Foot
4	“Got the wind knocked out of you”	Punctured Lung
5	Broken Rib	Internal Injury
6	Ringing Ears	Lose an Ear

This just includes physical maladies: Soul damage from magical effects or mind-breaking stuff I still need to write up. I can hear you now, “Oh, thanks, John Caravan of CaravanCrawl.com, a useless table. How so very usable at my own table.” Hey, man, I’m trying my best. One of the things this table informs is the kind of game I want my system to emulate. For example, in one of my favorite games Dark Heresy, characters have a Courption and an Insanity stat, one that continues to go up until the character is no longer playable. This mechanic informs something about the game, that while you are investigating monsters from beyond the stars, you are going to see things, and those things are going to screw you up to a point that you’re not going to be sane or innocent anymore. Likewise, my own Soul stat implies the opposite: you have one number always going down, and there reaches a point where you’re spent, there’s nothing left in the tank and you’re all scars and sad stories.

When your players take soul damage, roll on the table. In a low lethality game, a game where the retirement rules are highly encouraged, just stick to minor injuries. In a larger scope game, or perhaps a game that’s been running for a while, be a little more willing to use a major injury. Veins of the Earth and a lot of other LotFP games have tables where if you roll an entry a second time, you ignore it and remove it for future rolls (mostly having to do with searching the body). Maybe something like that here, where if you roll a broken hand two times, on the third you lose a hand. This allows for a lot of injuries to pile up across the party before things get serious. However, mechanically, it’s all very similar: you get a limiter on how high your stats can go until you heal up. No pumping all your stats into Str for this one hit if you’re suffering from a bunch of puncture wounds and broken bones.

I also want to build out conditions in my system more. I recently picked up the Torchbearer 2nd Edition books. I love the way that it does the downward spiral of adventuring, even though Luke Crane’s game design is just Burning Wheel carcinization. The question is how many times can he remake Burning Wheel. Having these conditions gives players a heads-up that things are turning for the worse, and gives them info to try and change that. Ultimately, that’s what I’m trying to avoid in my own house rules: making sure everyone knows that that rocks are falling, and they need to get out of the way.

I’m also thinking of writing up the rules for when you take soul damage from an obviously nonviolent force. Let’s say you’re beaten, you’re tired, you’ve slain the dragon and you come back to the Duke’s hall for your reward and he just starts straight up bullying you. Instead of dying, maybe you suffer a condition called Demoralized, where you have to take a break and figure out just what the hell you’re fighting for. I think Dogs in the Vineyard (one of my most favorite games of all time and boy could I say some shit about Vincent Baker but I am not) had a mechanic for this, where if you lose an argument you take a negative modifier and have to stew for a while.

I’ll try and work on getting a more fleshed-out table for injuries together in January. I’ve gotten through my second semester of graduate school, and I have a lot of family obligations over the holidays before the third semester starts. I’m trying to stay ahead of the reading I have to do, but I feel confident I’m still moving in the right direction. Like generally in life and more specifically in my personal rule system.

Radiant and Obscured: Homebrewed Deity

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.

Caravanis Personae

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?”

Your Game Needs More SMGs, Patches, and Graffiti

This is a scrap of setting that might be useful in the future.

There was a Great War. Who the antagonist was, or who was at fault, or who the leaders were are all lost, and all the Great Colleges have small departments of harried historians who argue what they think are facts from the past, one they cannot even begin to explain.

But the detritus of this Great War remains.

Imagine if one day all the gasoline on earth simply evaporated. And every effort to refine oil to make gasoline was of no avail, it would simply turn into vapor and escape the atmosphere. Every car on the highway simply rolled to a gentle stop. There would be frustration, a focus on fixing things, a mad rush for electric cars, but eventually, people would move on. Imagine living in that world a couple generations after that. You’re somewhat aware of what these big rusting lines of shells were supposed to be, but what do you make of a car air freshener? Or a tire iron? Or a tire? Or a drive-in movie theater? Or a car wash? Or a race track? Or these long trails of no longer maintained asphalt?

The Great War might have been between two forces of equally equipped nations, maybe even a civil war, that fractured into more and more different factions. Like if during WWI the French army actually succeeded in mutinying against the government, and the German Army went “yeah us too”, and those mutinies had mutinies, and some squads and companies just left and became bandits or joined the other side, until whatever killed all the technology happened and the conflict was over because all of the tech that ran the weapons was gone, along with any idea of why anyone was fighting in the first place. Like a society ruled by the guillotine until the day people realized they could just stop feeding the guillotine.

Detritus remains, never in the way it was originally used. You might see a small urchin child wearing a black ballistic helmet too big for him, but you’re just as likely to see them used as decoration or soup pots. A laser rifle has the optic lenses pulled out to make a wind chime that scatters the light in a beautiful way. Almost everyone carries a Ka-Bar style combat knife. Books of ciphers and return calls have the codes ripped out to be used as journals. For every husk of a tank dotted in the fields and towns, maybe one in a thousand has a working turret with enough charge for a couple of shots. Every one in ten thousand has enough in the charge battery for a cross country journey. But there are thousands for you to try, abandoned, shoot-through throughout the land. You throw CDs.

The war used lasers and batteries, but there’s something missing to make it work, a compound or element no longer found in nature. Maybe it disappeared naturally, or maybe some doomsday device removed all traces from the world. Batteries still hold their charge, but can’t be charged again. Tearing apart the devices to reverse engineer them reveals nothing (so far).

That’s what it’s like for the people who live in the Long Rim: they understand what a knife is, and they understand they’re putting helmets to a different use, but explaining mass combat of thousands of men maneuvering in tanks with cannons and close quarter laser rifle combat in massive cities where millions of people used to live? That’s out of the scope for most of these people living nowadays.

The only exception to the rule is submachine guns. These ancient factions were worried that some kind of EMP device or some other catastrophic event would destroy their laser weapons. That they needed to have backups in case everything went dark. They were right. In abandoned outposts and underground armories all over this Long Rim, there are bunkers with rows and rows and rows of short black carbines. They’re calibered in something in between .22 and 9mm: something not big enough to kill with one shot (unless unlucky) but not something so small that recoil isn’t an issue. They were old fashioned, almost antiques to these Great War factions. They’re space age to the locals, who are still enjoying horses and bows. Everyone knows where you can find some guns, ammo is a little more scarce, with most commonly bought ammo usually reloaded with a different style of chemical compound. Never used bullets are almost a currency unto themself, but are somewhat hard to find outside of cracking an old armory.

As for patches and jackets to put them on, I’m sure there were enough left after the war. Like, a gang of bikers all using a logician company patch as their sigil, or someone wearing a vest made up of the same patch, over and over and over, or a historian collecting patches and putting them in tiny boxes for his research. People sewing bootleg patches, and new custom made patches, ways to identify and individualize.

Just a little writing to keep the blog moving.