Caravan Crawl

Continuing the article series from the last post, you can find the house rules I’m responding to here.

Magic-Users and Clerics (if I even decide to go with classes for my own system) always need to prepare spells. 

Before we begin, some ground rules:

There are no creation of food or water spells. No magic items that spawn infinite food, no infinite water spells in the desert, no feeding a caravan on the march with magic mumbo jumbo. 

There are no 5E ranger style “can’t get lost” spells. The Long Rim is a particularly easy place to navigate. It’s the habitable band of a tidally locked planet: the sun rises and sets in the West, you usually travel either north or south, there’s usually something ahead, like a city or a geographic location, and if you head too far east or west, you die. Anything more detailed than that, the day to day travel, relies on maps or scouts. 

This is a game about the caravan crawl, about logistics. Deeper, it’s a game about burning yourself up, grinding yourself to dust. The spells included in 5E are intended to be a fast forward button to that kind of content, which is why they’re in that kind of game. If your players don’t care about traveling to the dungeon, grab a ranger. (This is kind of counter-intuitive because the person who’s playing a ranger probably wants to be that wilderness scout, but all of their class features make wilderness travel moot. Like the old OSR saying about how Magic-Users solve magic problems, Fighters solve combat problems, and Thieves solve dungeon problems, Rangers would probably solve travel problems. If they were utilized correctly. Which they’re not.)

A spell is made up of two components: the ritual and the component. 

We’ll actually start with components. The first is material components: they’re measured by the sack and come in two flavors. The first is like an equipment kit, similar to the other kits that can be carried by other characters. Having a particular sack allows you to attempt to cast a spell or a small list of spells. If you have an “illusion spell sack”, you can freely cast simple illusion spells, with all the glass baubles and owl feathers and incense and black gloves and “blind gods eye” herbs… all the consumable and non-consumable components you need to cast those spells. The sack is not consumed, if you’ve got it mounted on a horse you’ve got what you need. Anything about the level of 5E’s Prestidigitation spell can be cast this way. Something with a bit more juice than that, like a first level 5E spell, requires the kit and an attribute check, usually a Routine (12) Aura check. Perhaps a failure means it becomes a consumable spell sack. 

However, this is small-time stuff. For more powerful magic, you need raw material and time. The second kind of “spell sacks” are consumed when used. Sometimes you need a crate full of blessed iron nails and a keg of martyr tears and an entire tree’s worth of smitten ash and all of that is going to be burned up to pull off some truly awe-inspiring stuff. These materials are spent when casting the spell, they’re one and done. You want an illusion spell that hides an entire army, that makes it look like a forest on the march? Be prepared to burn the carrying load of two horses worth of materials for it. 

There is another kind of component you can use, though: yourself. Just like you can burn attributes to gain an Advantage on checks, you can temporarily lose and burn attributes to create magic. This still requires the materials for the spell, but burning more attributes means you might need fewer materials, maybe down to half and quarter sacks for three or four points attribute points. This is a last resort kind of thing, spending your mind and body to act as an arcane conduit to get what you want in the universe to come true. If recovering temporarily lost attributes requires a week of rest, and burned attributes leveling up, casting spells this way, without the components to protect you from that spell burn, kills the stupid wizard that tries it too often. 

Now, the ritual. Rituals take hours, even days, to perform. Using 5E terminology, the ritual is the equivalent of knowing a spell as opposed to preparing the spell. This is probably more roleplay than hard mechanic, but each ritual needs to be taught (at least you learn something in those classes you’re in debt for) or found in the world. Even then, each ritual is different for the person casting it. A teacher might be able to get you seventy percent of the way there, but you have to push yourself the last thirty. As for the actual mechanics of the ritual, they can be flavored as needed: are you a cleric, praying to your god? A druid following the leylines and lifelines? A warlock who negotiated the spell licensing fees (an excellent place to insert some debts)? A sorcerer who can actually use her flesh and blood as spell components?

Finding new spells and inventing your own probably earns the wizard experience out in the Long Rim, another subsidized action in the game to make wizards act like wizards.

You might have noticed something. If it takes long periods of time and massive amounts of materials to cast high-level magic, you might ask, how does my wizard cast fireball in a dungeon? 

The inscription. 

Inscriptions

It costs the same amount of time and material to cast a spell as it does to inscribe the spell onto an item, usually a staff or stave. If you want to cast a fireball, without the drawing of the circle and the focus on the Rites of Fire and the pound of ash, the ritual of the thing, you do all of that in your off time and inscribe it to your boomstick… literally. You can also burn attributes to inscribe them into equipment: this is where magic items come from. You transfer a part of yourself, your strength, your intelligence, into an item to boost the person using it. It means that while there’s no change for you until you level up, for someone else, they might be modified, changed by it.

I haven’t decided if you can burn attributes from items, breaking them in the process for an Advantage on a roll.

Cursed Items

What about being an evil piece of shit and kidnapping people to make into magic items? That’s how you get cursed items. Magic items that consume a person who was an unwilling participant of the ritual are more powerful, having more attributes added to them, but are cursed by the sacrifice’s personality and memories. These items gain Bans and Banes. A Ban is a thing an owner of a cursed item cannot do, and Bane is a mission an owner of a cursed weapon must undertake to break the curse. 

For example, let’s say Benjamin has found a sword in a dungeon. The wizard in his party says it’s magic. As he grasps the hilt, he feels the force of the void grip his hand and spread up his arm: the sword is cursed. The DM asks Benjamin to make an Extreme (20) Aura check. If he passes, Benjamin would be able to throw the sword down. Unfortunately, he fails, and the DM informs Benjamin that he is now under the curse of the sword. The ban of the sword is that Benjamin can no longer willingly give up gold, even when buying supplies. The bane of the sword is the destruction of the Red Monkey Trading Company, the same company that sold the person sacrificed to the sword up the river. 

All of this to say a wizard’s off time during the caravan travel is important: there are some people fishing, or hunting, or foraging, or taking care of the horses or managing supplies, but the wizard is working on their rituals so that if you go into a dungeon, they’re ready to cast spells to save lives. 

This also makes wizards kind of strange and insular. They’re always by themselves, praying to their gods or walking in the woods or reading dusty tomes or tattooing themselves.  

In the future, I’ll spend some time cleaning these up into actual rules, and incorporating other game ideas into them. I have an entire section on where magic comes from.

So, to give some context on what I’m playing currently, this blog belongs to my DM and these are the house rules he’s using for our Old School Essentials game. There’s a lot I could say about the interactions around a table, but instead of staring out a window for six hours thinking about the deep dark intricacies of the gaming void, I’ll just say that every table has a different dynamic between players, and every table should be using its own ruleset. I wanted to take each bullet and write a little someone on each. It quickly blossomed out of control. So, I’m going to go in order and write each of them into articles about my own little fantasy rule system. This is the most “the Discourse” and “the Tea” series of articles I expect to write. 

Aging

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how old you were when you start or how old you are when you end: this is bull riding. The only time that matters is the seconds between when you cowboy up and get on the bull and when you meet the dirt. It doesn’t matter how old you are when you stop: if you retire early, you’re old beyond your time, your eyes have that thousand-yard stare. A character should be ground down to dust, or retire. A five-year stent is impressive, a fifteen-year stint is unheard of, the death penalty is expected. 

Torchbearer probably does this best: an adventure a season, three to a year, winter you take off and drink and tell stories and prepare for next campaign season. Mark a year older and a year wiser… or slower. 

The first part of this for my own game system is a long and elaborate wound table for both physical and mental injuries, the second is semi-forced retirement. When a character loses all of the points in a pool and it hits zero, they roll on the wounds table. There are two, one for physical, one for mental, exactly the same way the character sheet is divided. Steal liberally from Dark Heresy 2nd Edition (especially the insanity table), Dungeon Crawl Classics, Call of Cthulhu, other blogs, real-life injuries, and movies. Smash fingers, start twitching, break ribs, get a compulsion, snap spines, start hearing voices, lose an eye, jump at loud noises, start dying… These are adventurers, entering damned tombs for blood money to pay back past wrongs. Make them suffer…

…but not too much, mind. This is just a game, and there are people that if their character loses too much, they don’t want to play anymore. I remember a story from another DM who had a player whose character lost an arm. He didn’t want to play them anymore, not because of any story reason, but because they wouldn’t be able to take any feats requiring two hands. It’s dumb, but there should be a built-in escape hatch. Likewise, this isn’t a race. Lots of fun and horrible things on the table, but only have one or two dominate a character’s session. Draw it out slowly, and give players ample chances to retire characters. If the central idea of this system is “you are your weapon“, then there has to be a chance to put the weapon down.

The rough draft rules would probably something like this: 

At any time, you can have a character declare that this is it, the last job, the final foray into the dungeon. (“There’s got to be a safer way to pay off this debt than this!”) Immediately level up or refresh them, but when the chance arises to settle down, the character retires, kaput. They won’t venture out into the Long Rim again. This might also fire during a fight: if your character would die, roll an Extreme (20) Luck check. On a success, as above. The Luck check runs against my gut how Luck should work, but more on that another day.

Maybe something like Fiasco (which is not a game) or Apocalypse World where depending on how much of your Debt you’ve paid off, the better your post adventuring life is. You get that little tavern or that penthouse suite and the job with the Company. The former player of that character can’t access it, of course, but let the party treat them as an asset: someone to watch the investments back in the City.

They know they’re not welcome in the Long Rim again.

Okay, so this post is a bit of a doozy. It’s a big article, talking about a lot of fiddly mechanics and vague gestures of setting without actually providing anything usable. Some of it is cobbled together from things in my “game doc”, a 100-page pseudo-journal with all my thoughts of tabletop-ing written down. I want to transfer a lot of what I wrote there to this blog here. However, I’m also trying to be as clear as possible. I promise some kind of version 0.1 of all of this is coming.

Put your gold for EXP away boys, I’ve found the solution. 

The standard piece of treasure is the horse. 

Oh, the mighty horse! The horse is important mechanically because the horse is the base element of the resource-driven caravan crawl game: it gives you the time to move across the map (faster than walking), it allows you to transport sacks of treasure from dungeons to cities to turn into experience, it can transport supplies into the wild, it can be killed and eaten for extra food, it provides both bonuses in combat and the opportunity to escape combat entirely in terms of speed or sacrifice, it allows you to carry enough to actually use ranged weapons or magic… It is required for interacting with the trackless steppe in any meaningful way. This is no simple city crawl with noodle shops on every corner, this is a Caravan Crawl. 

When thinking about unified mechanics, and how all the elements of the crawl should work, from the sacks of supplies and the movement from area to area to the hauling of treasure and the amount a piece of treasure should be worth, know that the base should always be the horse. 

To really drive this home, though, we have to consider something about the way I want character creation to work for this kind of game. When players first roll up their characters, they start with Debt. Something that has been around for a while, but brought back to prominence with Electric Bastionland.

A player rolls 1d6*4 for how many thousands of dollars their character is in debt. There should probably be a table of who you might be in debt to, but regardless: you’ve got obligations to pay this back to banks or merchants or the University or the lizardman yakuza or whatever strangeness exists in the City. Fortunately for you, you’ve scrounged up about an 8th of what you owe. If you owe $4,000 by rolling a 1, you’ve probably got about $500 bucks left in your accounts. If you roll a 6, you start with an impressive $3,000 to buy your initial kit, but you owe $24,000 back.

Unfortunately for you, you have to spend money to make money.

It might be one of the reasons all you adventurers and mercenaries are here together in the first place: if you combine your resources, and you get very lucky, maybe you can go out into all that vast emptiness and make enough cash to pay your debts all off together. Maybe the one who was unfortunate enough to roll the 6 on the Debt Die is willing to almost pay off the debt of the lucky son of a gun who rolled a 1, and now they’re indebted to one another. It might make an interesting group dynamic: you’ve banded together to pay off the debt of one character, someone who can now go into all that civilization and negotiate for the other bond-jumping degenerates.

In the City… any city or town or village across the Long Rim, civilization, you are constantly harassed by your debtors: banks, merchants, university administrators, lizardmen mafiosos, and usually the Law. They want what you have. And if it’s not them, it’s priests and social activists and politicians who want you to grow up and get a real job. It’s safe, but it’s not free. 

In the Long Rim… you’re alone. It’s peaceful and quiet and eerily beautiful and you can figure out what you’re going to do about this Debt. It’s also filled with old quiet tombs of long-dead kings and queens who don’t really need all that money they were buried with anymore. It takes weeks to get there and it takes logistics and luck to haul everything back, not to mention avoiding the diseases and the wildlife and the starvation, but a good run earns a lot of money. Not enough to actually change all those people in the City once you pay off the debt, but enough where you don’t have to listen to them when you get home.

The City and the Long Rim are both dangerous but in different ways. In the Long Rim, you might get mauled by a mountain lion, or get lost in the woods, or starve, but no one’s going to shun you for not fitting into the culture, for being a “bad citizen”, for failing to ingratiate yourself to High Society. In the City, the rulers think you owe them something, and while they won’t maul and eat you, they will imprison you and force you to work menial labor off your debt, real or perceived. Another reason to be an adventurer, I guess: the choice between living like a peasant, to be the village blacksmith just like your da, and his da, and his da, forever and ever amen, or to risk it all in one big foolish endeavor out there and change your stars.

What happens if you don’t pay your debt off? Someone comes and breaks your kneecaps, probably. If you decide to live out in the mountains of the Long Rim, they might come to you, sending census takers and bounty hunters after you. But they’re not prepared like you are.

Ultimately, you’re running against the clock. If you reach $24,000 cash debt, that’s when the bounty hunters start showing up. If you start with a $24,000 cash debt, they’re probably already looking for you. 

Well then, asks the player, “How do I level up?” You pay off your debt. Each dollar you pay off is a point of experience. This helps differentiate what kind of money counts in this Gold for Experience game: yeah, you found the dungeon, and you found the gold, and you got the sacks of gold back into town, but the dollars don’t become donuts until you put it in the mail toward that massive debt of yours. Oh, and while you were gone, you roll an extra 1d6 thousand when you get back to town, that’s how much the debt has gone up. Fees and adjustments and interest and all the little things that piled up while you were gone. Not by a lot, but enough to keep that end total growing. The hope is it takes a party maybe six good dungeon delves to get it all under control, and by the time debt isn’t a problem, hopefully, something else in the world has sparked their interest.

All of this to say, if people are randomly rolling for their initial starting debt, you have to make sure that you think about the horse. My knee jerk reaction is to make a good, healthy horse about $200. That means that the person least in debt can buy two, which means 4 sacks of movement and $100 leftover for supplies. Looking it up, it doesn’t seem like $200 for a horse is too unreasonable, both by comparing it to what a good horse would cost during the American Civil War and the fact that we’re not looking at the pieces of saddles or bridles or training or anything else you would need to actually ride the thing. From a more medieval standpoint, a properly trained warhorse was the technological equivalent of personally owning an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. It’s the reason things like chivalry and bushido and yoga existed: to keep the people in a society who had the military experience to overthrow the society in check.

Also, if a horse is worth $200, that means a herd of 120 horses can be driven cowboy-style into town to pay off the most indebted person’s dues. 

I mean, doing the quick math, if we said that cattle were $25 a head, it means that a cattle drive is 960 head to pay off the debt: that isn’t unheard of in cattle drives in the Wild West. Also, just because the good horses are $200, doesn’t mean that you can’t buy sad, broken horses for $100, or have merchants low-balling you $50 a head once you wrangle wild ones into town to see if they can’t get a good deal. Not to mention you can also start playing with the idea of certain breeds of horses giving certain benefits to riding, hauling, etc.

Rewatching the fantastic western Unforgiven, seven horses was the cost for the two cowpunchers for cutting up that girl’s face in the brothel. A $700 dollar fine (since they probably weren’t the best horses, and one of the cowboys specifies that those horses weren’t as good as one specific horse for the girl) for armed assault and grievous bodily harm sounds about right, if a little lower than actually hanging those boys. 

A horse can move 2 sacks, which means it costs $100 to move 1 sack. One sack can hold $2,000 coins. There’s a return on investment of $1,900 coins. That seems a little high, but I can live with it. As more complex forms of transportation are discovered, adding bonuses and penalties (wagons, special kinds of horses, camels, porters, zombies, motorcycles, converted battle tank-convertibles, etc), I’ll try and keep this conversion in mind. 

So, I have two more articles in the pipes, one about unifying dungeon and travel turns, and one about creating a space for yourself in the world. I’m going to try and get them out as soon as I can. 

Supply isn’t a measure of time or distance, it’s a measure of difficulty.

Sometimes gamemasters get bogged down in the details: how many miles could you travel in a day, or how many supplies would you exhaust in a week. This kind of bookkeeping isn’t bad; understanding how the world operates is critical to creating a place that feels real, but if the threshold for bookkeeping is too high, most players won’t engage (or will only engage if given a meta-currency, like inspiration or rerolls). Likewise, I’m still in the process of creating a system that unifies mechanics, and one of those golden calves for me is unifying the dungeon turn and the travel turn. 

I have this idea that a sack of supply, to borrow a term, should feed into the dungeon exploration: a sack of supply to a point on the crawl should be something to the effect of ten turns of exploration in the dungeon itself. This idea (the use of sacks of supply) is shamelessly stolen from the UVG, but even in that great lofty tome, there was something about the tracking and usage of supplies in the wild that rubbed me the wrong way. I felt it as I ran the game for the first time: my players were getting into heated arguments about how many supplies they should have for how long they would be out for, but the tracking of the days and weeks and the changes in weather still frustrated me as I tried to run the game “rules as written”. I recognize that this runs counter to THE WISDOM. Not to mention UVG’s lack of delineation between an area (like Potsherd Crater) and a location (like the Porcelain Citadel). See for yourself.

In the Old Days™, a dungeon was only as big as its rooms, and the pride of each Dungeon Master was his Dungeon, a sprawling complex of hundreds of rooms and dozens of factions and treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. Hell, I think it was the person who writes the Hack & Slash blog that said that a person only has so many mega-dungeons inside them because it’s such a reflection of the internal emotional state of its creator (in this interview, I think?). However, for my games, I want the travel to the location to be part of the journey, not just a handwave to the “fun part”. Likewise, I’d like the quantum style of supplies to be applied to the dungeoneering kit that gets broken out once you do reach the location. You get a sack of supplies to the dungeon, you get to specify exactly what’s in the sack, as needed. (This is also a choice: leaving it in its quantum state means it’s still food to eat, actually looking in the bag means you now have a tool to use specifically.) I also want my players a little more focused on the travel to the place than completely focused on the destination. 

The most you could squeeze out of one supply sack is probably about seven days of easy traveling in beautiful country. You could travel about 48 miles on that single supply sack, and the only encounter you might expect is miles away, easily avoidable. The travel time would be spent just laying in the back of the company wagon, or sleeping, or reading, or working on your own book, or riding ahead of the caravan to pick produce from the blossoming fruit trees or watching the herds of wild horses in the distance.

The harshest use of supply sacks would be something like five sacks of supply per person for something like a single day or two of travel: faced with a deep gorge a half-mile wide and a hundred miles long, with the only way of getting across being climbing and hauling your wagon with rope down to the bottom, carefully floating across a wide river full of rapids, and then waiting for the rogue to climb up the other side, hammering pitons into place for the ropes and having the barbarian pull the rest of the supplies up to the other side. Everyone is tired and spent. The sack of supply represents it all (in the quantum state): the extra rope, the hammer, the pitons, the tar in the seams so you can caulk your wagon. However, it’s not the single day that’s the worry, the time and the distance is the flavor. The sack is the important part and the ability to carry sacks (especially big sacks of treasure) is why it matters. 

Or maybe five sacks to cross a particularly flat steppe with no real difficulty in controlling the wagon: the extra sacks of supply are to bribe your way through fantasy Comancheria with your scalps on your heads and your balls not sown into your mouth. This example is interesting because it points to the other aspect I like: the sacks of supplies are negotiable. You can’t argue that a place can be closer, or that time won’t flow while you travel there, but you can argue that it wouldn’t take as many supplies to get there. Maybe you roll well on a Charisma check and can convince the Comanche/Mongols/Cossacks that you don’t have to pay as much. Or maybe a skilled scout might knock a two supply trek down to one with a good Wisdom check. Or maybe you already have the rope, not part of a supply sack, something you bought specifically, that you would use in place of the quantum use supply sacks needed to get to the bottom of that gorge. 

These are all just ideas at the moment, and the big hurdle is tying them into wounds and the ability check.