A New Beginning

About two weeks ago, I shuttered development on the Sea of Shadows. Questions of cultural appropriation had hounded me from the beginning, but seeing JB's new project, I realized that 1) the Sea of Shadows was, no matter my care and attention to detail, an appropriative project and 2) there are some phenomenal designers already working on places and spaces like what I wanted the Sea of Shadows to be (Zedeck Siew's and Munkao's http://athousandthousandislands.com/ is an excellent example). I felt an ethical need to refocus my (colonizing) attention away from the Sea of Shadows. I'd love to return there with other, better qualified designers, but that is a dream for another time.

Instead, I have started work on a new region within the same world: Gelgelim, from the Hebrew word for wheels. As a Jew and a Pole, there is a vast treasury of Slavic, Ashkenazi, and Polish folklore that is weird and interesting and worth exploring. My players agreed to take the plunge with me and we created new characters and begun a new game within Gelgelim a couple of weeks ago.

The following is the description of the setting as it appears in the Core Book. I'll have posts on bears, birds, boginky, bells, and kabbala coming out in the next week or so (I'm on a half-vacation with WiFi, so I've the time to bang all of this out).

“Gelgelim channels Polish, Slavic, and Ashkenazi lifeways with a dollop of Irish and Welsh folklore into an area some 360,000 square miles large (about the size of Germany or Japan). To the north lie the toxic ruins of the Azintheen Empire, filled with bronze monstrosities and powerful magics. The rugged lands to the west resist exploration. And Chornilis, the black woods, blocks southward and eastward travel.

“The time is a century after the Scorching, a man-made cataclysm that destroyed the Azintheen Empire, boiling the land and souring the sea. In Gelgelim, the forest responded to the Scorching by expanding hundreds of hectares in a single day, consuming towns and cities and blocking passage east. The remaining towns and villages of Gelgelim have yet to fully recover. Toxic ashfalls and contaminated water have claimed many a would-be explorer, and the bears roaming wild have claimed many more.

“For money, fame, power, or the good of your village, you have decided to brave these dangers and explore the wilds. Good luck.”

Joining a Faction

Institutional support can be invaluable for new (and impoverished) adventurers. For example, in Alexis' Juvenis campaign, it is because we are acting as representatives of Stavanger that our current cave exploration has gone as smoothly as it has.

Players new to games that require a lot of logistical considerations (food tracking, encumbrance, etc.) often are overwhelmed with the responsibility of handling all of this on top of the more "normal" player responsibilities. In-game institutions can provide scaffolding for these players, providing support that diminishes as players become better at playing the game.

In Prodigy, I call these types of institutions "factions" since there are always several in an area, each vying for power. As part of character creation, players can choose a faction appropriate to their trade (class), joining that faction and gaining additional proficiency in a faction-specific skill.

Faction	Trades Offered	Skill	Goal
Abigail's Steadfast	Provisioner; Soldier	Thaumaturge (Azintheen)	Protect the vulnerable
Adept's College	Researcher	Any Mental	Study everything
Areinian Constabulary	Provisioner; Soldier	Orator	Keep the peace and their money
Avondown Associates	Soldier; Thief	Leader	Destroy the Tarluskani regime
Brass Orchids	Artist; Bard; Thief	Combatant (Dextrous)	Assassinate the Tarluskani leadership
Catacombs Machimoi	Ognemuo, Soldier	Athlete	Defend the Catacombs
Facetakers	Hinterlander; Soldier; Thief	Wildcrafter	Become a wild animal
Hunting Brigade	Hinterlander; Provisioner; Soldier	Pathfinder	Hunt the best prey
Jungle Explorers' Guild	Bard; Hinterlander; Provisioner; Soldier;	Orator	Bring back the best story
Knights of St. Valorie	Hinterlander; Provisioner; Soldier	Thaumaturge (Azintheen)	Restore the Church of the Azintheen
Minstrels' Guild	Artist; Bard	Artist (any)	Advance the state of Art
Night Consortium	Provisioner; Soldier; Thief	Grokist	Find money
Nithya Jongleurs	Bard; Thief	Pickpocket	Stun the crowd. Leave town
Nithya Sanraksaka	Hinterlander; Soldier; Thief	Combatant (Dextrous)	Protect the Nithya and  Saharjin
Order of St. Lussier	Provisioner; Researcher	Chemist	Heal the sick and wounded
Pirate Sovereigns of Korg	Hinterlander; Soldier; Thief	Sailor	Sail the seas and get plunder
Revelers of Kwerris the Fool	Bard; Soldier; Thief	Thaumaturge (Fiaja)	Get mystically drunk, then break things
Sojourners	Hinterlander	Scholar	Travel the world
Tarluskani Military	Hinterlander; Provisioner; Soldier	Leader	Conquer the world
University of Reyjadin	Researcher	Thaumaturge (Fiaja)	Advance military science
Yanera Custodes	Thief	Grokist	Manipulate as ordered
Yanera Guerreros	Hinterlander; Soldier	Athlete	Protect the Ten Tribes

Faction membership is only limited by geography (most factions exist only in specific areas of the world), culture (some factions only admit members from their associated culture) and trade.


To spell out the obvious, factions provide a number of built-in services for characters: they offer employment, training, lodging and food, and (perhaps most importantly) a default goal. As I've run games, I've noticed that my players are often hesitant to define their own goals, to set their own agenda. I've found that offering some vague direction, like the goals listed above, helps players develop their agency. Having multiple characters from the same faction provides an initial consensus that helps players get moving.

The above is not new or revolutionary information. Moving forward on this, I want to further develop how players can join factions after character creation as well as better outline how a faction's presence in an area manifests - how many personnel, distributed how, pursuing what goals.

Specificity

One of the key problems with the Settlement Campaign idea is that it is so broad. That broadness is also one of the core features that makes it such an appealing idea. However, while there are components common to many Settlement Campaigns, each such endeavor will be unique because of the differences in topography, climate, geology, hydrology, etc. I talked about creating a hyper-snowflake setting and ruleset, but in trying to represent the Settlement Campaign, I tried to reach too broadly, focusing more on universality than the specificity that I want to promote within game design.

So, in service of that specificity, I drew the (most of) the rest of the continent within which the Sea of Shadows is located. It currently lacks a name, but names are complicated beasts and I like to leave those to the end of the process. I do have some names, areas of my world that have been bouncing around in my brain for years but I've not wanted to develop (as I tried to focus on just the Sea of Shadows itself). While Guol, Panumbra, and the Wintry South will continue to occupy the furthest-back burner, it is nice to know where they are on the map, how they relate to each other topographically, and so on. It is also humbling to see that this world which has occupied my thoughts for 5ish years occupies just 40 squares of my sheet of graph paper - despite how much work I have put into this project, I have barely scratched the surface of all there is to accomplish. It is humbling, but it is also somewhat freeing; I am still beginning this endeavor - despite the progress on my game book, I have not come close to any sort of ending.

Additionally, and this was the original goal of the exercise, I now have places for my settlers to settle.

Conventional Wisdom

Susan McClary is one of the most prominent musicologists alive today, at the forefront of the turn of the discipline towards the postmodern. She has published on a variety of musicological topics, but one of her books strikes me as particularly D&D-relevant. Her book, Conventional Wisdom (from which I stole my title), chooses to study the conventions of musical practice, instead of the typical mode of inquiry which focuses upon the strange and inexplicable. Her argument for doing so is that the foundation of expectations from which scholarly inquiry proceeds requires discussion and analysis - if we are to judge something as "different", we need to have a very good and clear idea of what constitutes "normal".

This brings me to Joseph Manola's post from earlier today. Manola argues that RPG material with a price tag needs to be more creative material than a DM might produce on their own. He uses the term "conceptual density", by which he means how many "good" (i.e. useful and nonobvious) ideas exist per page. I can't imagine someone sanely opposing Manola's point, and that's not what I want to do today.

Instead, I want to talk about his criteria for "good" ideas - their utility and nonobviousness. Both depend quite strongly upon ideas of normality - i.e. convention. "Good" ideas challenge the expectations held by DM, who judges the information, and then player, to whom it is presented in play.

But if every event is unconventional, is the power of these ideas blunted? Or is it cyclical, that after a while a dwarf who enjoys mining is itself strange and exotic? Can we meaningfully differentiate between "good" ideas and novel ones?

Just as DMs induce the play they are willing to facilitate, so too do worlds (as presented by the DM) construct a horizon of expectations for the player. In a "vanilla" setting, one presumes that these expectations are pre-built. In a snowflake setting like Manola's or mine, part of the game experience lies in constructing that horizon of expectations, against which ideas are judged "odd" or "normal".

We find an interesting liminal space where the snowflake setting butts against the "vanilla" one - most commonly when a snowflake world uses "vanilla" concepts (like the word troll or dwarf) or a "vanilla" setting has thematically separate areas (the Frozen North functions very differently from Waterdeep). In these borderlands, expectations are all over the map, attempting to map the evidence presented into one or the other horizons of expectations.

What's important, ultimately, is that one of a DM's conscious responsibilities lies in constructing their players' horizons of expectations, whatever they are. Without a horizon of expectations, the odd seems banal and the commonplace, mysterious.

I'll finish this up with a short story about a game I ran a while ago. As part of Alexis' world-generation exercise, detailed in How to Run, I had prepared three different worlds and run my players through a one-shot in each. One of them was a version of my Prodigy setting, fast-forwarded several hundred years into a cyberpunk dystopia. I made many mistakes in that running, and the biggest of these was failing to construct a horizon of expectations. To get the game started with a bang, the session opened with my players at a rally run by one of the minor political parties. After a particularly anti-government speech, the government security drones (who had been monitoring the protest) attempted to kill everyone present. I had wanted the deaths of so many civilians after little perceived provocation to shock my players, to galvanize them against the government forces, but they just looked at me and asked, "is this normal?"

One of my strategies for first sessions is to jump into some kind of action as quickly as possible - to put my players into a situation where they have to start making choices, quickly (beginning the session usually immediately follows a great deal of exposition on my part to get everyone through the character creation process, so I want them to talk instead of me for a while). It usually works quite well, getting my players used to the idea of being in the driver's seat in the world. But trying to have this intrusive event shock my players, right off the bat, is an ineffective strategy - they have no conventions against which to measure the events transpiring.

In short, boring, conventional ideas do serve a purpose. They are crucially important in creating a world and running a game. Once everyone knows what's expected, you can start throwing the curveballs.

Ongoing Projects

With all of my medieval music research right now, I've been rolling the idea of the cantor class around for a while now.  It'll be done when it's done - as I commented earlier, classes/trades strongly contribute to player engagement with the world because it is a momentous choice made at character creation that directly draws upon the world's lore.  While I restrict first-time players in my world to a small subset (Researcher, Soldier, and Thief) of all of my trades, my experience has been that players will draw almost exclusively from the more specific trades for subsequent characters.  Changing that pool is a huge step - even Alexis, with an entire wiki of house-rules, has not really changed the class distribution (he's rewritten and revamped most of their abilities, but all of the AD&D classes are present in his world).  So I want to make sure that the cantor provides a meaningful, new way for players to engage with my world.

This post is not about the cantor.

I have mentioned several times that I am not really playing D&D anymore - it's a new RPG that I call Prodigy.  The first ongoing project (4 years and going strong) is the creation of a book that details all of my rules.  There are hundreds of RPG books on the market already, and I am aware of the perils of being a small RPG publisher trying to push a brand-new game into an already well-saturated market.  While I will sell it, the book's purpose right now is to give me a central rules Bible that I can give to players - my version of Alexis' wiki.

The second project is one that I have not mentioned before on the blog, but has been growing in importance over the past year.  To complement my source book, I am writing a Bestiary.  Sadly, good books of monsters are almost impossible to find, and most of them focus upon truly aberrant and weird creatures that are "original."  We are living in a postmodern age and valuing "originality" is quite the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm.  While I absolutely applaud "brand new" ideas, I don't think that they are necessarily better than "old" ones.

Part of the appeal, I think, is that there are perhaps a dozen monsters that are tragically over-used by most DMs, like goblins and orcs and vampires.  They have become troped to death, reinvigorated only by new paradigms (Paizo's depiction of goblins [initially expressed in Rise of the Runelords] is quite different from Wizard's 3rd edition view of them, and it has radically changed how goblins are perceived - they've appropriated a lot of traits historically associated with D&D kobolds).  Zak S. wrote about what he calls 'countertexts,' ways to take an existing idea and subvert it, producing a completely new way of experiencing that idea, and that is exactly what these paradigm shifts are with regard to hackneyed creature concepts.

Adventures require monsters that fit into a variety of types.  This is the root of the problem, I think - there will almost always be some sort of mook enemy, whether goblins or reskinned kobolds, or whatever.  There will always be a need for some kind of trick enemy, that requires special preparation and tactics to fight it effectively.  There are only so many entries in a given book of monsters, and the reuse of these creatures leads to monster apathy.

One of the solutions is to completely abandon these older creatures and use "original" monsters.  Of course, such an approach constantly needs new monsters coming down the pipeline, and while that works for some DMs, it doesn't work for all of them.

The other solution, the one I favor, is the reinvention of these creatures by paradigm shifts.  This builds upon the cultural capital of [goblins] and [orcs] but changes how players interact with them - Joseph Manola has done this by incentivizing his players to talk with "enemies," finding social solutions to conflict.

My goal is to do that for the entire monster hierarchy.  One of the more straight-forward ways to do this is by looking at the mythic history of creatures normally found in monster manuals - defining a kobold as not an artifice-driven dragonkin creature but as an earth elemental, or a ghoul as a shapeshifting creature that devours the recently-dead.  This led me to incorporate many creatures from folklore traditions all over the world - kappa, maenads, psychopomps, tanrrilla, chupacabras, and so on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Prodigy is the absence of active Heaven-like and Hell-like constructs.  The driving narrative of most planar arrangements (the use of alternate topologies populated by creatures drawn from a common theme) tends to be that of alignment conflict, either Good vs. Evil or Law vs. Chaos or whatever.  Arnold K. does a fantastic job problematizing and destabilizing this construct, but I wanted theistic culture clash as a central theme of my world and could not easily include such a place.  Instead of angels and demons/devils, I have Sidh and Yokai.  Sidh are fundamentally magical, sapient creatures that feed off of specific psychic emanations from other (non-Sidh) sapient life.  Nymphs consume love, Black Marauders despair, and so on.  Yokai physically consume a specific body part of sapient creatures.  Chullachaqui eat femurs, redcaps drink fresh blood, shabiri steal eyes, etc.

Another method is taking traits normally assigned to a specific creature (like a goblin's madcap glee, penchant for profanity, and inefficiency) and assigning it to another creature, creating a cognitive dissonance for players familiar with the original presentation of the creature.  I'll usually take this pair and give them a strong relationship so that both sets of traits are displayed in tandem, but separated.

Obviously, creating new paradigms does not 'solve' monster apathy as a problem.  No solution that focuses upon changing the monsters will fix it, because the problem does not stem from the actual monsters themselves - it stems from how the monsters are used.  By giving each creature a more detailed rundown of goals as well as talking about their interactions with other creatures, I hope to give DMs incentive to use their monsters better.

The other major goal of the Bestiary project is in changing how people perceive them.  Every monster manual I've seen presents its information as infallible, an ideal text from which DMs derive TRUTH.  As a musicologist, the idea of any text as an authoritative document, especially one professing no bias with regard to the information it purports to share, is laughable.  Bestiaries should include wrong information.  They should be incomplete or misleading, requiring DMs to fill in the gaps.  Just as we do not accept our rulebooks as written, we should not accept our bestiaries as written.  We do this already in adding new monsters or tweaking monsters here and there, but we treat this as exceptions to the text instead of a 'proper' way to interact with it.

To this end, I present the Bestiary as Finnola Finnsdotter's doctoral thesis for the University of Reyjadin, a document compiled from the work of three other authors with emendations and author notes.  I'm appending the Bestiary's Forward, which situates the book into its fictive context, as well as the table of contents to give a sense of the project's scope.

This text is a compilation of key works detailing the creatures inhabiting the areas adjacent to the Sea of Shadows, including the Dunes, the Sahargeen jungle, Greatpines forest, the expansive Wildlands, and the Azintheen ruin of Sha’aryam. This is an attempt to synthesize prior research into a single reference document, distilled to an easily referenced size for future researchers and explorers. Primarily, this text uses Baraka al Tarluskani’s Collected Stories, Patrick MacAlan’s [sic] Jurnl Of A Jungl Explrer, and Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia’s A Concise Guide to the Flora and Fauna Surrounding the Sea of Shadows in 53 Volumes as sources.

The creatures within this text are grouped via apparent similarities in taxonomy and behavior, drawing from Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia’s extensive categorical system. While her methodology may seem pedantic, it is the organizational schema adopted by this text in lieu of any other categorical structures.

While the forwards to each section are my own insights into each category, the texts accompanying each entry are quotes from the authors indicated. In a very few instances, I found it necessary to emend their texts; such corrections are included in [brackets].  I also have appended a threat assessment, also in brackets, to the end of most species’ descriptions.  These values range from 1, least threatening, to 6, most threatening.

After the Bestiary, I have compiled a number of additional sections that are my own, independent research, including both a list of mythic figures discussed as well as some metadata analysis regarding the species of the Bestiary.

– Finnola Finnsdotter

This document has been submitted in partial completion of the requirements for a doctorate from the University of Reyjadin.

Refining the Trade System

I'm hard at work with classes as well as implementing Alexis' trade system right now and I wanted to document some of the ways I've needed to change the process in order to create the outcome I want.

The trade system depends upon references of goods bound to specific commercial locations (markets) where goods of that type are either produced or gathered from nearby, noncommercial areas (outlying farms, smaller towns, shipped downriver, etc.).  Following Alexis' suggestions, I plotted out regions of influence for each city, ranging in size from 4ish hexes for the smaller cities to 15 or 20 for the larger ones.  I initially used Welshpiper's medieval settlements calculator to determine how many cities I ought to have in regions of a given size and population density, which lead to more cities than I had reasonable room to place.  I did what I could - and I think the map has benefited from the density of locations in both the Southern Kingdoms and Confederacy (I scaled back the city counts intentionally for Arein because of its relatively young age (60 years)).  Obviously, the more closely packed the cities are, the fewer hexes each controls within a given area.

Each hex controlled by a market might produce resources, based upon its hydrology, elevation, and level of civilization.  While I haven't implemented Alexis' idea of infrastructure numbers yet, it is a future project.  As a rule of thumb, I decided that any hex more than two hexes away from the closest city was undeveloped and thus (for my two heavily-treed areas) still jungle/forest.  Hexes only 40 miles (2 hexes) from the closest city were also undeveloped, but if there was another city within 2 hexes from the are in question, the hex is settled instead.

It may be helpful to take a gander at the map I uploaded recently.

One of the early difficulties I encountered with the random determination is that Alexis' regions are based upon the kinds of terrain found in, say, Hexographer, rather than rooted in any kind of elevation or topological scheme, which is how I built my world.  While I absolutely understand the desire to be accessible, I had a little bit of work to do to adjust it.  My first approach was to classify any hex adjacent to another hex with an elevation difference of 400 or more counted as a hill (which graduated to mountain as soon as the hex's height breached 2000' above sea level).  This gave me no hills because the elevation change was smoother than I had anticipated.  My second approach banded hexes by color: hexes over 500' but under 2000' were hills, hexes over 2000' were mountains, and hexes between sea level and 500' were flat, either plains or scrublands (hexes between -50' and 0', found only at the coast, became marshes).  Alexis' plains designation really applies to land used for large-scale farming, whereas scrubland does not.  Thus, hexes 1 hex or closer to a city are plains, while those that I've ruled undeveloped are either scrub or forest/jungle.  Now, deciding between the two choices was tricky.  They are entirely different vegetation systems, and it was important that I get the resources from both.  I still don't have a satisfactory answer, but the answer I used had to do with distance from the forest's center, something for which I had a rough location.

The biggest change I needed to make was further differentiating the very generic labels of building stone, cereals, fruits (which replace grapes, since I'm in a tropical environment), gems, and vegetables.

My world's central distinguishing characteristic is the differences in both outlook and material culture between each of my societies.  Therefore, I need to be able to distinguish between the kinds of resources available to each people, as well as what specific foods is grown to determine diet and food culture.  I have a sedimentary ridge that separates the Confederacy and Southern Kingdoms, and so I used that to distinguish between the kinds of stone found: south of the ridge is sandstone, compressed sediment from the sea, while north of the ridge is limestone because of the karst topology (a choice I made to provide sinkholes to the area).  Across the Sea of Shadows to the south, I have granite mountains.

However, karst topology includes important things like dolomite and gypsum, which I wanted to produce as well, and this led me to the solution I employed for my other reference specifications.  I assigned probabilities to each type and rolled a die: 1 dolomite, 2 gypsum, 3-4 limestone.  The important thing is that I get different numbers for each resource, scattered throughout the regions.

I then specified different cereal categories, millet, rice, and wheat, fruit categories, bananas, coconuts, mangos, and pineapples, gem categories, ornamental, fancy, semiprecious, lesser precious, and greater precious, and vegetables, cassava, cotton, edibles (tubers and the like), jute, palm oil, and soybeans.  I determined these the same way, giving each a probability and then rolling for each individual reference - I tried applying a strict percentage on the overall reference to give me numbers, but the results were too clean.

The last way I've changed the references is adding a new one: warcraft, which governs the making of arms and armor for a given culture.  The Tarluskani use a khanda while the Southerners use a longsword.  While they are similar in many ways, the techniques to use it are different, as are the concerns and problems when forging it.  This also lets me price weapons and armor from different cultures like the exotic or commonplace items they are, even though the skills involved are the same.  I get my Warcraft value for each market from the sum of the leathercraft, metalcraft, and woodcraft references, since they are highly related industries.

My last change to the overall system was in using the reference numbers to populate information about the cities themselves.  It follows that cities with higher references are more economically powerful than those with a lower count -  they have more resources and can bring more to bear to any economic dispute.  So, since the urban population of the late Middle Ages was something like 25% of the total population, I have calculated the total population for each area based on population density (usually between 10-20 people per square mile), multiplied it by .25 and the multiplied it by the ratio of the market's reference total compared with the region's reference total to get the final population.

For example, Reyjadin is the capital city of the Southern Kingdoms.  Being a capital city, I've doubled its population because of that added importance.  The total population for the Southern Kingdoms is approximately 683,000 people.  Reyjadin controls 6 references while the Southern Kingdoms as a whole controls 291 references.  So, Reyjadin's popullation is 683,000*.25*2*(6/291)=7,041 people.  Population then defines a city's physical size (population/38850 square miles) and the strength of its guard (population/150 employed guards).  While obviously these latter two measures are adjustable, it gives me a systematic way to approach any city.

While there's a lot to refine about this process (like using the total local references rather than references controlled by the market), it's definitely progress.

Also, a helpful resource to intrepid worldbuilders.

Fame and Renown

Processing through some of the excellent material Alexis handed me,  I wanted to turn my attention to finding a way to document player renown, a fame mechanic.  Looking at what was accessible on the pfsrd and D&D 5's 'faction' system, I concluded that it was a bunch of crock and decided to write my own.

The 'faction' system's problems are numerous, but the core issue is that their use is only for people playing in Wizards' group play thing - parties playing the same modules at the same time.  There aren't any real choices involved - either you are in a faction or you aren't, and since you can only hold rank in any one faction at a time, the most factional conflict one might see is between players who are members of different factions and have been assigned conflicting 'secret tasks' in a given prefabricated scenario (but I think Wizards' would probably have predicted that and made sure that no faction tasks conflict).

The Pathfinder fame system actually has some nice components to it, if you like disassociated mechanics. The DM ad hoc rewards players with fame points for completing CR-appropriate challenges (i.e. level-appropriate challenges, for those who stopped playing D&D before 3rd edition).  At specified amounts of fame points, new fame tiers are unlocked, and these grant players different ways to spend Prestige Points, a consumable resource awarded alongside fame.  These let players call in favors they have somehow earned by being famous, talk their way out of trouble more easily, and so on.  However, there are some problems, too - for example, heinous actions somehow make characters less famous as opposed to giving them a larger reputation for being villainous.

Let's talk about some solutions.  One of the things I like most about the Pathfinder system is its idea of Sphere of Influence - a character's effective fame is wholly dependent upon where they are - if they are only famous within a specific kingdom, then venturing outside it will reduce them to being indistinguishable from Jo Adventurer.  However, in Pathfinder, the sphere of influence is fairly static.  Let's fix that.

Fame should be accrued whenever the party accomplishes a task that the local community (i.e. the community in which the task is completed) finds notable, either in a good way or a bad way.  This could be clearing out the goblins plaguing the town, emptying the dungeon nearby that was discouraging trade, exposing the corrupt city official, whatever.  Depending upon whether the party is remembered favorably or disfavorably, the affected community's view of the party will be increased or decreased.

Now, after the party has finished this task, the affected community will start spreading the stories of how they achieved this mighty deed, spreading their fame along the roads and paths (because fame is fundamentally a construct of civilization).  When these stories meet (two different significant actions in different areas yielding two different stories about the same individuals, their generated fame is added together.

This begs the very important question of how to measure Fame.  Having recently played through Fallout: New Vegas, the game features a very workable reputation mechanic that I think adapts very well to what I'm proposing here.  To summarize, each faction has two ways to track your deeds: Fame and Infamy.

	Helpful Reputation ("Fame")
		Range 1	Range 2	Range 3	Range 4
Harmful Reputation ("Infamy")	Range 1	Neutral	Accepted	Liked	Idolized
	Range 2	Shunned	Mixed	Smiling Troublemaker	Good-Natured Rascal
	Range 3	Hated	Sneering Punk	Unpredictable	Dark Hero
	Range 4	Vilified	Merciful Thug	Soft-Hearted Devil	Wild Child

Depending upon how those interact, your reputation with a faction (and therefore how they will treat you) will change - black for neutral response, green for positive, and red for negative.

I propose having one's fame and infamy progress through specific actions taken by the party.  If the action taken by the party is one that would be doable by common folk, no reputation change is required.  An action that could be successfully accomplished by the local town militia or bandit crews would necessitate one step increase, and a task beyond the capabilities of anyone the community would know constitutes a two step increase.  The highest of a party's fame and infamy would determine the number of cities that would hear of it - a party Idolized in a community would be known two cities away (with a one step decrease in fame at each city)

What this means, then, is that as players journey around a given environment, their deeds will ripple over it and make a network of stories cementing their status.  Bards and storytellers could be hired to expand the party's reputation, or increase it in a given area.

The last thing to talk about beyond reputation is recognition - how much the local governments recognize the achievements of the party and award them perks (or issue bounties for their heads), and that would be largely up to the DM's discretion.

What does D&D do?

I have a long list of blogs that I read - most of them are linked on the side of this blog.  I discovered that people talked about D&D on the internets when my tabletop friends in college talked to me about class tiers in 3.5, and I discovered the D&D blogosphere after that.  The most recent addition is the Critical Hits blog, which occasionally features articles applying contemporary economics to a theoretical 'typical' D&D world with an emphasis on murderhobos and murderhobo-related industries.

The most recent post, talks about the process through which one transforms an idea for a game into a game.  While the game described is interesting, I was realizing as I read the post that I didn't begin the process of making Prodigy with any kind of explicit design goals - I didn't have anything like

"Project Brief: Valkyries is a tabletop RPG about group of all-women/trans/NB/agender mercenaries who take jobs raiding planets left for dead by the Galactic Empire.
System: Hack of the Demon Hunters RPG, with heavy card-based elements for easy swapping of weapons, shields, class mods, etc.
Inspirations: Borderlands, Destiny, Dead Iron, Warhammer 40k
Necessities of Presentation: No white dudes in the art, strong cultural representation, possibly afro-futurism.
Practical Concerns: Representation vs appropriation, Norse themes with PoC representation and cultures (more research might be needed, because Norse largely  = white, and we want to be careful there).
Feel During Play: Quick decision-making, weapons/items as abilities to add to die pool, dark humor + hope, badass PCs, feelings of capability, even in the face of incredible odds, large-scale enemies (quantity and size), over-arching theme of fuck the establishment/patriarchy." (same)

At the forefront of my game book or OneNote folder.

And the initial thought was, well, shit.  I've been working on this project for over three years, and I'm only thinking about this now?

This, of course, leads me into thinking about why I didn't have any design goals or desired 'feel during play'.  And my initial, gut-response was that I wanted to make a game that felt like D&D but fixed many of the problems that I had experienced playing in several of its incarnations (for example, the inability of characters to develop organically (outside the level structure), the role rigidity (coded as 'niche protection' in some circles).

As I'm thinking about this, the last thing I wanted to do was to create a game where the setting was tightly integrated with the rules of the game - I felt that one of the problems in many RPGs, and one of the causes for the system agnosticism/game-swapping tendencies of players I've had and people I've read, is that they are almost hyper-general.  GURPS is the obvious example of this, but D&D, in every incarnation with which I've had exposure, makes no demands of its setting other than a general pre-industrial, (and often pre-firearm) timeframe - so we can have D&D games set in 1650, or feudal Japan, and the rules are the same.  I'll come back to this a little later, I think.

OK, so I have a couple components from which I can draw my design specs: I want a D&Dish-type game that allows for character progression without 'leveling up', enables characters to pick up entirely new skillsets not related to their character's original 'class' without penalizing them, and that intimately connects the setting with the mechanics.

Everything except for that first condition is a fairly operational design goal - if you look at the spec and the game, you can determine whether or not the spec has been met.  That first one, though - what is a D&Dish-type game?

And the more I think about it, the more I come to, who's D&Dish-type game?  Because, every gaming group plays something a little different.  And this is true, even among games that harken back to the good old days when D&D was young - one of them tracks the characters' progression from adventurer to conqueror to king while another chronicles fundamentally broken individuals trying to survive in a incomprehensible world that is indifferent to their existence.  A third focuses exclusively on subterranean exploration and looting.

Yet, all three label themselves D&D-type games.  All three are considered, at least, in my small corner of the D&D blogosphere, equally well-regarded as D&D-type games.  When I compare the experiences offered with these three games with the immersive world oft-discussed by Alexis, I find a very different type of game, different than the game that Zak S runs.

Well, that was a helpful exercise.  It's pretty clear that D&D-type games are just that - they are a genre of game, rather than a singular gaming entity.  Anyone who has ever played with more than one group of people could have told you that.  With that out of the way, there are a couple ways we can try to define a D&D-type game: we can look for commonalities between all games that call themselves D&D-type, or we can look for very broad generalization that encompasses everything we see.

This is not uncharted territory; people have done things like this before.  However, this kind of ontological discussion gets troublesome very quickly, and so the only research on the topic that I think has any merit is one that avoids the question entirely (it's available for free here).

In conclusion, then, the question of whether or not a game is D&Dish-type cannot be operationalized.  And even if it were an acceptable game specification, I don't want the same inconsistency of experience clearly available in the wide, wide world of D&Dish-type games.

So, what do I mean when I talk about D&D?  What is my D&D?

The problem with answering this question, at least, lies not in the vagaries of ontology but in the fact that I as a DM and world designer have grown and changed immensely over the course of this project.  My D&D experience began with Neverwinter Nights, which defaults to the hack 'n' slash railroad.  I learned about sandbox-style games when I discovered the D&D blogosphere maybe 5 years ago.  As I've played in them and run them, I've learned a great deal about what they have to offer, to the point where I have trouble playing through video games that so blatantly offer them (like here.  I stopped playing right after writing the review.).

So, while I'll outline the kinds of activities in which I want my players to partake below, I do so knowing that I am still growing as a DM and designer and that much of what I discuss will change over time.

Primarily, I want my players to have two things which may seem paradoxical.  I want them to feel deeply attached to the world - invested in NPCs and locations such that their concern motivates and demotivates character action (investing their gold into building a mill for their farming community, not defaulting on a public contract because they know that the authorities will take it out on their families in town, etc.).  I also want player skill and player knowledge to take center stage - the personality and characteristics of their characters should not take up table time - and so gameplay will be the intersection of the players' collective knowledge with what the characters can physically achieve in the game world (with character knowledge used to frame the situations in which the players and their characters find themselves).

The result of this is that D&D, to me, is a problem-solving game.  I set out a challenge (my go-to is how does the small group of players acquire the documents held in the keep?), the players then decide how to accomplish that task (or whether to accomplish that task, as the case may be), we see how effective that plan was (usually, it's determining how well they have shot themselves in the foot), and the players improvise.  All four of those stages are equally important to me.

I also don't like dungeons, particularly.  The kind of extensive labyrinths found in 'classic' D&D never made much sense - while I dutifully drew complex after complex in my foundling days, I always wanted the dungeons to be functional spaces, and it is incredibly difficult to make a large, functional dungeon (especially if you start factoring in labor costs, time required for construction, and the like).  Architecture is purpose-built, and saying that wizards demand weird dungeon hallways with no signs or understandable floor plan is a cop-out answer.  If a wizard is organized enough to design their own lair and have the money to build it in a reasonable time frame, then that lair is going to be fairly well-organized; the alchemical lab will be near the stillroom, the barracks will be near the entrance, the wizard's bedchambers will be near the laboratory, and it will be fairly convenient to get from the barracks to the mess hall and back again.  If they are insane or poorly-organized, then they won't have the wherewithal to design and oversee its construction (even if they have the funds, they'll need to hire an architect who will absolutely be well-organized).

This bleeds into a philosophy that the world will have an internal logic that is understandable and will become reliable for the players.  One of a player's primary tools is that of prediction, and those predictions should be come more and more accurate as the player gains more experience with the world - if all of the Sluagh the party has faced have been some sort of skeletal being covered in a translucent goo, pretty soon, anytime the party finds group of skeletal corpses, one of their first moves should be to determine whether or not any of that goop is on/in/near the remains.

I've seen worlds and games where that is not the case, where the DM handwaves everything or gleefully admits that the world is organized according to their whims.  In such an environment, there is no point in trying to learn about the world, because that knowledge serves no purpose.  What this means, then, is that the players' engagement will only ever be surface-level.  Because there is no structure underlying the game world, the setting's only function is to contain the sites of adventure, rather than actually motivate their existence.

Coming back from that, then, I want this game to provide tools that will nurture the players' relationships with the world without promoting the kind of acting and character-driven nonsense that is best left to LARPing (which I enjoy but don't want in my tabletop), a setting that rewards players gaining knowledge about it, and allows them to do anything they wish within the setting (from piracy and pirate-hunting, merchanting, exploring the frontier and ancient cities, to inciting revolution, among others).

I'd been feeling a little stuck in writing the Prodigy book for a while, I think due to the fact that I had only a partial set of design goals.  With those goals detailed a little more, I now have a clearer idea of all the work I have to do for it.

The Seven Deadly Sins (Review, sort of)

While this will start as a review, there are some insights that I think can directly apply to roleplaying games, in particular with adapting someone else's work (a module, for instance?) for your (gaming) purposes.  One of the reasons I enjoy both anime and manga (in the action/fantasy genres) are often more about the world in which these stories happen than the stories or characters.  That makes them excellent foundations for thinking about designing your own world (or adapting someone else's).

The Seven Deadly Sins is an anime, published by Kodansha, based on a manga currently serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, one of the premier manga magazines in Japan.  What that boils down to is that the story Seven Deadly Sins is one of the most popular ones in Japan (at least, for this age bracket and set of genres) to the point where Kodansha felt it reasonable to adapt it for the television.

For those who are not habitual consumers of Japanese popular culture, anime and manga have a very strange relationship.  Usually, a mangaka (manga author) will see their work serialized in a weekly or monthly manga periodical, and each periodical has a very specific demographic.  At the back of each periodical is a review sheet whereby readers pick their favorite stories each issue.  If your work fails to garner enough approval ratings, it is dropped for someone else's work.  This creates intense pressure to keep building and mounting tensions within the story - while a couple chapters of your characters at rest, featuring character development or laying the groundwork for a later plot arc might serve your overall narrative and help you tell a better story, it will prove hellish for your ratings and so most authors don't do it.  What that means is that the storytelling in a manga is, usually, broken up into very distinct dramatic arcs with very little page time in between, but in-story time is compressed and expanded at will to heighten the drama (sound familiar?).  In order for something interesting to happen every chapter, a lot of spurious gags and inconsistencies will clog up most manga, especially if it is one that has been running for a while.  Also, because a manga can be cancelled at any time, mangakas have little control over how their story unfolds - if they start with a single epic story arc, they may have the opportunity to finish it the way they would like, they may need to compress it into three chapters (I can provide examples.  It's rough.), or they may need to suddenly find a new one when they finish telling it and must then produce more chapters.

What it also means is that exposition necessary to understand who new characters are or why a conflict was resolved in a specific way (manga and anime both love their Deus ex Machina) is saved until the last possible moment, when it is delivered with a flashback that transports the viewer completely out of the context of the very real, engaging conflict to some other point in the narrative, delivers the crucial information, and then returns to the fight.  Naruto, with one of the most popular manga and anime series' is especially prone to this.  In the manga format, because of the need to keep high ratings publishing after publishing, I can understand this strategy - as a reader, even if I'm less engaged with the flashback, I am invested enough in the outcome of the larger framing conflict to not downvote it until afterwards, at which point a new conflict or form of intrigue has begun that keeps me engaged.

That is not to say that all manga suffers from these problems - several series (I am especially thinking of Fullmetal Alchemist) are able to lay the exposition in small tidbits throughout the work, requiring very awkward, late-stage reveals, and are willing to end their story when it is over, instead of endlessly dragging it out. 

An anime adaptation of a manga (and not all anime are manga adaptations) is a different matter entirely.  Anime are purchased in approximately 12-episode chunks, which comprise a single season on Japanese television (many series opt for a 24-episode 'long season').  Unlike American television shows, where poor ratings can kill a new show before it really begins, the anime is bought and paid for and will show all of its episodes.  One of the complications of an anime adaptation is that it is supposed to tell the same story as the manga, embellishing the comic form with voice acting and animation, but it can't just retell the story the same way as the manga - the anime and manga will have roughly the same audience, and anime watchers are likely to be familiar with how the manga handled things.  Thus, at once the anime must both recreate the key moments from the manga yet also be distinct enough to garner fans who are not familiar with the manga.

Now, this contradictory function combined with the very different format means that anime adaptations vary widely in their faithfulness to the original product - the Fruits Basket anime features a much stronger supernatural element and includes the ancillary characters far more than the anime and the Escaflowne anime, mangas, and films are dissimilar enough that one wouldn't know they are telling the same story except that the titles and character names are the same (mostly), but the Naruto manga and anime are virtually identical, shot-for-shot.

What I think the best anime adaptations do is they use the advantages of the 24-episode format to massage the clunky exposition of their manga forebear and actually craft a story (as opposed to haphazardly slopping one together as mangakas typically do).

This, finally, brings me to my thoughts on Seven Deadly Sins.  I watched the series end-to-end after getting home from work Friday evening.  I finished around 5am.  For me, marathoning episodes like this helps emphasize whatever themes the work features (whether in character gags, writing choices, visual motifs, etc.) and prevents refrigerator logic from setting in and collapsing whatever trumped-up obstacles appear in the story to lengthen the overall conflict.

This was not enough for Seven Deadly Sins.  Normally, when I find an anime that is this poorly constructed (in editing, animation quality, and structure) I give up and find something better to watch.  The reason why I stuck with it is because the story, had it not been hindered by these problems, would have been very good.  The setting is excellent, albeit poorly explicated to the viewer.

It does not serve my purpose to go through the anime and point out where it went astray.  I do want to address a couple very common flaws the writing consistently exposed.

The first, and perhaps most egregious flaw of the series is that the world, as presented, is full of mysteries that are unexplained (good) and rendered, via the storytelling, completely unimportant.  The setting, familiar to most tabletop players, is a mythical Brittania before magic left the world (although geography is not a strong suit of anyone involved in this production), where there are multiple countries (indeterminately placed) whose strength comes from Holy Knights - martially-skilled individuals each with a unique magical power.  There are a number of different races - humans, fairies, demons, giants and goddess-somethings (which we find out later are somehow druids?).  Hundreds of years before, after the last demon invasion, the other races worked together to banish them from the world, which also led to the decline of the fairies and the practical extinction of the goddess-druid-things.  There are secret agendas, forbidden experiments with excavated demon corpses, more traditional magic, curses, and a band of quirky heroes who have been framed with treason and exiled.  In other words, a world very similar to the standard D&D setting with a couple of unique institutions (the various Holy Knight Orders), and plot hooks ready to go.  It is something that can be taken almost directly to your tabletop.

However, the mysteries of the world and of the characters (how did our chief hero gain the secret key no one knows about, who are our female lead's parents and why is she a princess, what happened to the druids/goddess people, why don't we get backstory on more than 1.5 characters, why does this character keep appearing to die and yet no one cares, etc.) are never answered.  What's more, despite their importance to the story, the narrative spends actually zero time discussing or considering any of them (also, for a group called the Seven Deadly Sins, Sin number 7 never appears in the story.  Ever.  The very last episode makes fun of it as the characters all realize that they've been talking about the Seven Deadly Sins the entire series, there have never been seven of them.).

What is perhaps more damning is that despite featuring very few reveals, only one of them is handled well - a well-placed flashback near the first climactic peak at the end of the story reveals a character, about whom we've received very mixed messages the entire time, has been secretly signaling our heroes that they are cursed.  It is one of the few mid-conflict breakaway sequences that I think has been worth it.  The others are delivered less well.  When enemy characters suddenly appear with powers that dwarf our heroes', the source of that power is revealed later in the same episode.  It is an anticlimactic reveal that, because our heroes are unaware of it, doesn't affect the story except to reiterate that the bad guys are, in fact, the bad guys.

In short, summarizing both of these problems together, the writers of this anime do not seem to understand how suspense works.  In my mind, and this is directly applicable to tabletop games, suspense (in a story context, not a dramatic ones), can work by presenting the audience/players with evidence that conflicts with how they understand the world - drawing an example from the anime, how does the pipsqueak one character knocked out with a single hit suddenly reappear and defeat the whole party?  The answer, this character drank demon blood and gained great power with a cost to be paid later, is then discovered, piecemeal as the players investigate.  In other words, the worldview of the players is shaken, creating cognitive dissonance and tension, and it is then resolved as the players learn new information and expand that worldview.

This became a great deal longer than I anticipated, so I'll call it for now.  I think what I'll do next is pull apart the story of Seven Sins and talk about how I might structure it as an anime (keeping the medium the same) and then taking the same story and translating it into a sequence of events happening in a tabletop world (I hesitate to call a linear narrative as a campaign because I run sandbox games.  But the events in this story can play out, and the action or inaction of my players would affect that.).  This is purely hypothetical, since the world presented in Seven Deadly Sins is very different from my world, but I think the exercise will do me some good at long-term structuring (something I definitely need to work on) and may prove useful to people running more standard D&D worlds.