Prodigy Cultures

So, after choosing their race and rolling their aptitudes (essentially ability scores), my players look at the following table:

Human
Areinian	You are from the home of freedom and free enterprise.	Notches in Coercion, Elocution
Confederate	You were a Tarluskani slave.	Notches in Fortitude, Resilience
Korg	The sea is in your veins – you grew up in the lawless pirate capitol.	Notches in any Fighting Style, Sailing
Southerner	Hard work is no stranger to you.	Notches in Fortitude, Piety
Tarluskani	You are descended from the nomads of the Forbidding Waste.	Notches in one Tarluskani Fighting Style, Gymnastics
Archivist Trikosmos
Laborer	You were born to grow and nurture other beings.	Notches in Alchemy, Beastspeeech
Maker	Craftsmanship is your heritage.	Notches in Alchemy, Device Lore,
Thinker	Abstract thinking comes as easily as breathing.	Notches in Academics, Elocution
Bairnedred
Troubadour	You were a member of a traveling troupe of entertainers.	Notches in Gymnastics, Legerdemain
Nithya	You are a member of the friendlier Nithya tribe	Notches in two of: a Bairnedred Fighting Style, Beastspeech, Hunting, Alchemy, Sorcery
Equimeni	You spent your childhood in the Wildlands with your tribe.	Notches in one Equimeni Fighting Style, Stealth

Currently, these cultures are grouped by race, but as I look at how the different groups have meshed together (Yrsh, for example, is a swamp populated by humans, Bairnedred, and Equimeni, but I don't have a write-up for that culture/region yet) I'll retabulate all of this in a more neutral format.

As you can see, we have a name for each distinct culture, a snippet describing the culture, and then the practical benefits of hailing from that culture.  I make a note in the actual book that a character doesn't have to choose one of the cultures affiliated with their race - the race descriptor merely lists the dominant race in the culture - so a human baby adopted by the Bairnedred would probably choose either the Troubadour or Nithya culture.

In Prodigy, characters gain skill training from their culture - most Confederates, as Tarluskani slaves, are resistant to physical and mental abuse, so they are better at Fortitude and Resilience tasks.

Why do this? As a GM, you've needed to do all of this prep work to make the world ready for your players.  This is a way to bring your players in on it -  except for actual genetic advantages (ability score mods, etc.) everything else is determined by culture.

On Culture

Something that has always bothered me about D&D (especially the D&D 3.x that I grew up with) is that the game is hugely racist.  All elves are proficient in the longsword, rapier, shortbow, and longbow.  All dwarves and gnomes have combat training against giants and goblinoids.  No matter where your character comes from, no matter their life experience, all elves can use 'elven' weapons and all dwarves/gnomes have extensive combat training against a couple specific enemy groups.

This is ridiculous. Elves from the Wakaka forest where metal is scarce ought not to be proficient in the longsword and rapier but in the cudgel and katar. Dwarves from the Hillside clan who fend off human bandit raids every spring ought to be very good at killing humans, not the goblinoids who never stray near their hills.

Unfortunately, with my lack of experience with OD&D and AD&D, I don't know if either edition addressed this. I know that 3.x addressed it by adding 'racial variants': Sun elves and Hill dwarves and deep gnomes and a whole lot of nonsense. Somehow, differences in culture were turned into speciation. The root of the problem is that all of these new variants, these subspecies, are predicated on the idea that there is a monolithic model of what a DWARF is (I'm picking on dwarves here because I like them and think they can be better).

What is the model of a human? What is the representative symbol of humanity - which one person can represent all the diversity and variation of the human race? It's an impossible task. You can't pick just one person. You can't pick just two. Given any number of people, I can probably find you someone not represented there. So we can't use a person as a model for humanity, and therefore we can't use a single dwarf as a model for all dwarf-dom. What can we do instead? We talk about culture.  Culture can be broad enough to group a large number of people together but be granular enough that by quantifying cultural properties we don't do a disservice to swathes of group members.

Now, some might say that it is the diversity of culture that makes humans distinctive from dwarves, elves, gnomes, and the like.  I think that is laziness talking.  Why do you want dwarves everywhere to share the same cultural norms regardless of their specific circumstances?  Because it is really easy to say "that is a dwarf".  Tolkien had several different elf cultures - the Mirkwood elves differ rather significantly from the elves of Rivendell and Lothlorien, and that difference causes them to play, as a group of elves, a nonexistent role in the Lord of the Rings (yes, I know Legolas is of Mirkwood, but I'm talking about culture and groups).  Why isn't that standard for each race?

To talk about culture, we have to know what it is. There are several definitions of culture floating around. I'll use this one because it suits my gaming purposes: Culture is a stereotype about a group of people based upon shared customs and beliefs. And it is a stereotype, with all of the positive and negative baggage affiliated with that term. Some examples, filtered from my own personal experience.  Seattleites wear North Face jackets, scorn umbrella use, knowingly drink coffee that is too expensive, are unfailingly polite, often disinterested, think that environmental sustainability is important, and patronize the arts (all of them). New Yorkers usually dress in layers, are proud of knowing the New York the tourists don't know, are often gruff but kind, and prefer functional art (art that is communicative of a narrative rather than purely decorative stuff).   That is not to say that all Seattleites do this, nor all New Yorkers. But someone raised in Seattle culture would say, "yes, these are some things that people do here" and someone who identifies as a New Yorker would say "yes, many of us make those choices".

I'm getting off-topic. From a game perspective, from a world-generation perspective, culture is the practices and beliefs of a geographic region of people.  At the level I apply it, it is quite broad and generic (thinking of American vs. European vs. Asian cultures), but once we have these broad trends we can then zoom in (Seattle vs. New York).  People acting according to these cultural norms will differentiate, say, Arein from the Southern Kingdoms.  That difference in feel is the GM's responsibility.

Here's how it shakes down to the players.  After they choose their race (and roll aptitudes) players choose the culture in which their characters were raised.  This choice gives them skills and determines what fighting styles they can learn.  It can provide naming guidelines, hometowns, and connections to organizations already existing in the world of Prodigy.

We'll get to some examples next post.

The Sidh

Some of the most prominent figures in Irish mythology are the Sidh (now spelled S [i-fadha]).  They are powerful and mystic creatures to be feared and respected.

When the British conquered Ireland and began to translate Irish into English, they oppressed the natives in just about every possible way.  As part of this, they translated the word Sidh into the English word Fairies, so that when an Irishman or Irishwoman explained that they were afraid of the Sidh, their English audience heard that these folk were terrified of Tinkerbell, rather than the banshee - the death-wailing "fairy woman" - or pooka.

The dark side of the Fairies, Faeries, or Fey comes, in part, from these Irish stories (although the tradition owes much to the Scottish, Welsh, York, etc. traditions as well).

This hybrid tradition means that in a roleplaying game context, Sidh becomes a catch-all term for powerful, capricious creatures that exist, for the most part, beyond the ken of most folk.  In the world of Prodigy, the Tarluskani culture is influenced by old Arabic and Mesopotamian traditions while the Southern Kingdoms is inspired by the Irish and Scottish cultures pre-English invasion.  The fusion of these two mythologies give us our Sidh.

So our Sidh include redcaps, djinn, shabiri, maenads, pookas, naiads, dryads, and (of course) the all-powerful elves, about whom I'll talk later and in greater depth.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Good wandering monster tables come paired with a motivation table which might look like this:

1. Food
2. Mates
3. Loot
4. Fleeing from (roll again on encounter table)
5. Pursuing (roll again...)
6. Enslaved by (roll again)

And while that works really well, I was wondering if we could do better.  So, I thought I'd bring out Marlow's Hierarchy of Needs:

This pyramid summarizes all of the needs of a single human being, increasing in complexity.  The physiological needs must be met before the safety needs can matter, and the safety needs must be satisfied before the love/belonging needs can be addressed, and so on.  What if we turned this into a motivation table for a wandering monster?

1-7: Physiological
8-12: Safety
13-16: Love/belonging
17-19: Esteem
20: Self-Actualization

And then had a subtable for each category:

Roll	Physiological	Safety	Love/Belonging	Esteem
1	Food	Shelter	Mating displays	Accomplishing a great work
2	Getting mates	Shelter	Dealing with children	Accomplishing a great work
3	Getting resources	Getting treasure	Intergroup conflict	Inspiring fear in the enemy
4	Sleep	Destroying enemies	Intergroup conflict	Converting the infidel

So try this on for size, and see how it goes.

Moving Around in a City (Pt II)

When you are walking around in a city, especially within the urbancrawl structure, there are two levels of geographic importance: your position relative to the rest of the city (i.e. which district are you currently exploring) and your immediate physical location (i.e. what does this street look like).

To me, this implies that a pointcrawl map and a random table for immediate urban environments is all you need to plot locations in the city.

d6 for environment
1. Blind alley (-1 to d4 roll)
2. Side street
3. Y-intersection
4. 4-way intersection
5. Green (traffic roundabout with an open space in the center)
6. Boulevard (big street, adds +1 to the d4 roll)

And d4 for passers-by, modified by +/-1 based on time of day and city size
0-. No one
1. d6 people
2. d10 people
3. 2d10
4. 4d20
5+. Huge crowd (think Black Friday shopping mall)
This lets you know how many people generally pass by the area at any one time.  For added granularity, roll on your district encounter table (or on Zak S.'s excellent random city inhabitants table here) to find out what kinds of people pass by this area.

If your PCs are looking for a specific location, just write down its features and popularity just in case they want to return there (although, because Gumei is always changing, I'll just reroll on this table every time the PCs want to go there).

This method won't give you a map of the city, but it will give you an increasing list of locations within each district which, to me, is more useful.  Hopefully this is useful to you, too.

Moving Around in a City

Inspired by Justin Alexander's series on urbancrawls and my gaming group wanting to run a Numenera campaign, I decided to add my own city to the Numenera landscape to try some of this stuff out.

Gumei [IPA 'gume] is actually a partially intact city from the previous civilization.  It is surrounded by mile high sticky pink walls.  About 12 years ago, a section of the wall spontaneously opened, allowing people to enter the city.  Explorers and wastrels flocked to discover and harness fully functioning artifacts from the previous age and were disappointed to find that most of the city lay ruined.  Some of the buildings near the open gate were still sturdy and were settled and slowly humans have migrated deeper into the city.

As people have explored Gumei, they have discovered that the city moves around.  Shops will be reordered on the block overnight, and entire blocks will vanish and reappear elsewhere nearby.  This makes traveling anywhere rather difficult as even the most seasoned explorers can get lost when all the landmarks switch around and invert themselves.  Curiously, the children born in Gumei are never disoriented by the changes and many seem to delight in the disorientation of the adults around them.

As per Justin's suggestions, I thought about what kinds of things one might find in a medieval town dropped on top of a modern metropolis and I got 6+2 districts.

1. Threshold is the cluster of buildings surrounding the gate.  The Pink Wardens guard the gate and demand a toll from all who seek to enter Gumei.  They are puritanical and corrupt.  The buildings are concrete bunkers with slits for windows and the streets.

2. Emergence is a mostly underground complex of broad halls and twisting passageways.  Think Grand Central Station in New York or King's Cross Station in London with levels of shops and accessways sitting above tunnels that run everywhere in the city.  The lights work in the shop levels.  The tunnels sometimes have light and sometimes don't.  There are dark things that live in the tunnels and those foolish enough to venture into the dark don't come back.  The protected environment has made Emergence a haven for engineers, merchants, and scholars and is the local headquarters for the Order of Truth.  It is also the home for a mysterious group called the Tailors, who like to harvest the skins of other people and masquerade as them for a while.  Those who lose their skins sometimes break out of crates and closets in Emergence and cause havoc for a while before being put down.  The Wool Merchants, the local thieves guild, also makes their home in Emergence.

3. The Street of Blue Lamps is the entertainment, residential, and red light district in Gumei.  Every street is lined with golden stalks crowned by blue bulbs which glow with all kinds of light during the night.  While there are places to stay in the other districts, the best and worst are found on the Street of Blue Lamps.  The Knobbleheads act as protectors for the innkeepers, pimps, and prostitutes.  They are crude but have unimpeachable honor.  They are vying for control of Emergence and are chiefly opposed by the Pink Wardens and the Wool Merchants.

4. Radiance is under about 10 feet of water, some of which is actually acid and some of which is highly electrified.  Rising from the water in the middle of the district is an old carnival with rides that sometimes work, mirror houses that are actually gateways to subdimensions, and houses of horror that are very hungry.  Gangs of rabid urchins monkey around the carnival grounds as do robot mimes and hungry magician's boxes.

5. Watermill is where a river enters into Gumei and is channeled through a number of byzantine machines into small pipes and thence everywhere in Gumei.  The Engineers, a small enclave of nanos and engineer/scholar types reside in Watermill, studying how all of the machines work.  Dargrim's Institute of Technology, a school for nanos, is also housed in Watermill.

6. The last district is Statuary, a huge park in the center of a ruined urban center (like New York's Central Park or, well, all of the gardens in London).  It is filled with tall trees and plants of every possible kind.  It is also decorated by an uncountable number of grimacing statues.  People who enter Statuary at night don't come out again, and some say there is a terrifying tribe living in the trees armed with petrification guns.

The 6 districts are the safe areas of Gumei.  The +2 refer to the rest of the city - the ruined portion and Bulwark, a fully intact series of spires cordoned off from the rest of the world by a disintegration field.  The ruins are inhabited by squat yellow creatures with sharp teeth and a love of toppling buildings on top of would-be explorers, sentient red mold that replaces organic materials with inert metals, and green mold-spiders that lurk and wait in the dark corners for prey to come along.

I tried several different ways to map out Gumei, starting with Zak S's slacker urbancrawl rules (here) but my lack of colored pens made keeping track of which district went where and how it all connected in a meaningful way difficult.  Then I realized that I could abstract the connections even more, using a pointcrawl.  So, I started with Threshold, which is the only district that has any kind of a fixed location with regard to the outside world, rolled a d6 for the number of connections and then rolled a d8 to see to which district each connection leads (ignoring repeats).  I ended up with something like this:

 

After cleaning up the drawing and changing one of the links so that I didn't have crossing pathways, I ended up with a pointcrawl map that looks like this:

Each of the notches on a route corresponds to an hour of travel and a random encounter check drawn from a generic Gumei table.  Each district will have its own encounter table for rolling encounters within the district, and I'll probably post those later.

The tunnel system (and using child-guides) would allow players to bypass this system and get places faster, but with a chance of ending up in an unexpected and probably worse place.

Thoughts?