Hill Cantons

“When the Invoked Devastation came upon the Baklunish, their own magi brought down the Rain of Colorless Fire in a last terrible curse, and this so affected the Suloise Empire as to cause it to become the Sea of Dust.”

- World of Greyhawk (1980)

“And no bells tolled and nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death...And people said and believed, 'this is the end of the world.'”

- Agnolo Tura of Siena (mid-14th century)

I've circled around the margins of theme before—as have a few others—but there is a heady whiff of apocalypse in old school D&D. It's seen not just in the rather obvious stock elements--the countless ruins, the lost artifacts, the former sprawl of civilization lost to the wilds—but hard-coded throughout the rules proper whenever broad human society is involved.

The closer in I go with this AD&D exegesis the more I see this perspective reinforced in spades.

Let's get started by bouncing back to an unlikely place, the Encounters section of the DMG (Appendix C) to pick apart a peculiar section on outdoor encounters (pages 182-183).

Civilization: A Thin Red Line

For starters you get smacked over the head with how desperate life must be even inside the few “inhabited” zones of the implied world. For you see with every encounter rolled in such areas, there is a full 25% chance that the random encounter table should be utterly ignored and a patrol encountered instead.

And by patrol we are not talking about a small group of muddling watch or a handful of tax collectors/wardens, we are talking armed-to-the-teeth, recon in force. Such patrols are always lead by a fairly formidable leader, a fighter or ranger of a whopping 6-8^th level, who has a lieutenant of 4-5^th level and a sergeant of 2-3^rdlevel (and this doesn't add in the 40% chance of a 6-7^thlevel cleric and a 60% chance of a 5-8^th level magic user). Even the enlisted men are tough, three to four alone being 1^st level veterans sprinkled among a further 13-24 men-at-arms. All patrol fighters with levels have plate armor, mounts, and an arsenal of weapons. Even the grunts are humping chain (and scale at the worst).

The sheer frequency of meeting such heavily-powered up bands—hell even a mid-level party would find the standard issue patrol of normal men a tough go--inside the settled environs sends a strong message that this is a world right on the knife's edge.

Not only is civilization an obsessively-patrolled armed camp, it is also damn sparse.

The section counsels a DM who hasn't keyed out settlements to use the random terrain charts in Appendix B to do so. These speak wonders about how low the population density is: there's only a 16% chance per “area” (a mile is suggested) of a settlement of any kind. And 16 percent chance breaks down further with the highest chances being a single dwelling, a tiny thorpe/hamlet, or a ruin.

Compare that to 12^th century Britain--which even though it's population density was less than half France's of the time—was still around 40 people to each square mile.

Yet if it isn't the12^thcentury, it could be more the cataclysmic mid-14^thcentury. Much like the mass sorcerous devastations of Greyhawk, bubonic plague depopulated Europe to an unprecedented degree—and along with the long wars and other disruptions of that period--unlocked a massive social and political disintegration.

Foissart, a contemporary chronicler, famously said “a third of the world died.” Modern estimates of a 50-60% mortality rate in Europe incredibly make that an understatement.

Whatever the death count, the breakdown of the old order is (relatively) well-documented. Here's Tuchman's Distant Mirror again; “Hill farms and sections of poor soil were let go or turned to pasture for sheep which required less labor. Villages weakened by depopulation...were deserted in increasing numbers. Property boundaries vanished when fields reverted to wasteland. Landowners impoverished by these factors sank out of sight or let castles and manors decay while they entered the military brigandage that was to be the curse of the following decades.”

The Lost Edge

Ok so if the DMG establishes that post-breakdown civilization is sparsely-inhabited garrison states, the very next section in the DMG oddly implies that the wilderness seems to be reasonably stocked out with fortified outposts. For every encounter in the wilderness there is a 1 in 20 chance that each and every random encounter will be superseded by bumping into...a fortress of all things.

And all these fortresses are not rinky-dink little palisaded affairs on the whole. There is a full on 45% chance that they are at least stout stone-walled medium-sized castles (large shell keeps and small or medium walled castles with keeps) and a further 20% chance of it being a large fortress of some kind.

The Inhabitants sub-chart clears up the mystery, these scattered sites are the markers for where humanity lost the fight with entropy--or is barely holding the walls.

See now 45% of the all the small forts are completely deserted (30% for medium and 15% large). Monsters inhabit a further 15-25% of the time. “Humans” (social “monsters” again, bandits, beserkers, dervishes with a full 60% chance of them being brigands) are encountered 10-20%. Only in the remaining minority of the time is the fortress held by the ruling name-level characters we would expect.

While there is much here to mine again about AD&D's domain-play, I will rest that thread for another time, but I think you get a sense of what I am going for here.

AD&D's isn't just a hard-fought world that merely experienced the fall of great empires centuries before, it's one where humanity came close to the abyss in the recent past—and has stayed there. It's on that stage of pure chaos that player-character, the rootless opportunists knocked out of the fabric of society, find themselves adventuring in.

Almost a year ago, I asked the open question about whether Google Plus would overtake rpg blogs and forums in significance. I deliberately framed the question polemically—at the time I didn't think they would so much as supplement them.

But that was then this is now.

Do I think G+ will overtake forums and blogs for DIY rpg hobbyists? In some ways, it already has. This draft post has been sitting in around for over three months and it's quite clear witnessing recent threads like this that there is a shifting of the tectonic plates for a number of us.

To be sure there's a whole lot of old school (and just about any other school) gaming going on over there. I run the Hill Cantons there once a week for a group of 12 core players (idiosyncratically called the Nefarious Nine) and a larger floating group of “guest stars”. I've run numerous sessions of Empire of the Petal Throne, TSR Conan, Boot Hill and now even a (mostly) weekly Traveller mini-campaign. And importantly for a guy usually stuck being a GM, played in any number of other people's campaigns. Previously I had been playing with my home group about once a month, now I play roughly twice a week.

But it's the discussion—the over-arching conversation that shapes this side of our hobby—that strikes me as having shifted. Most obviously a certain range of discussion-focused or more casual topics has almost entirely ported over for a number of us—direct queries, half thoughts about the effects of house rules

So what's the balance sheet? Is this a good or bad trend? Unfortunately like most things in adult life it's not either/or but a mixed development. To wit from personal perspective:

Negatives

All That is Solid... Longtime readers will remember how much I bemoaned the content on a blog that just floats away into the ether. This is even more pronounced in G+ with it's lack of robust archiving and the nature of the conversation. With many people in your circles things will in a space of hours slip right off your feed.

I have, however, found that setting up discrete special pages on G+ for the Hill Cantons and the Space Cantons has helped ameliorate that somewhat by giving a space to share campaign news, special items, maps, and the rest of the content that a campaign builds up.

Home Group Blues. Adult life being what it is, it's been hard to keep my face-to-face group going. Frankly the supreme ease of the Hangout games which I can play at night during the week means disincentives me somewhat to stretch to make time. And that's a loss as the virtual gaming is at best 80 percent as satisfying as face-to-face and I miss my friends here in San Anto.

Content Depth. Linked to the flighty nature of the content on G+ I notice that my own posts there tend to lack the considered depth that they do here on the blog. For instance the longer, more considered analysis pieces like that of this week, simply do not come to me there.

Walled Garden. The G+ discussion is not a broadcast one. It is only semi-open and highly-selective. This can and does have positive effects as mutually-selective social organization often do but it is inherently a more inward-looking scene.

Positives

Dynamic conversations. I enjoy the back and forth between readers and me here, but there is a certain stilted quality about the discussion. It feels sometimes more like the question and answer session following a lecture than it does a real conversation. My discussions on G+ however do and as such they tend to generate way more discussion (commenting there even on links to blog posts is routinely 3-8 times more frequent in quantity there)--and the frequent, interesting tangents feel more like the zig zags of real conversation.

Tighter, trust-based community.Again while the medium is a walled garden, this does have advantages. I have built deeper relationships with people based in actual play and repeat content—and they are for the most part people with distinct, real discernable identities. This works wonders in weeding out the anonymous idiots and pathological elements that the Internet is infamous for (though it can still produce it's fair share of idiocy too).

More egalitarian and fluid. One doesn't have to be a first and second-tier blogger to have real voice in those discussions. I like the leveling on principle, but it also brings forth some voices that are truly interesting. I have also noticed that it tends to encourage new folks to write more themselves.

More cross-fertilization. I feel like I see and understand more about other people's campaigns and thought processes from discussions there—and this inspires and influences me. Likewise discussions on books have opened up all kind so new authors for me. Big plus.

Open World gaming. FLAILSNAILS and Constantcon more broadly have meant that many of our game worlds have become increasingly networked together in a larger multiverse, a virtual return to a an old, fascinating style of play—and a HolyGrail for me.

It's about the play, stupid. We write, breathe, and talk about gaming, so shouldn't this just be the ultimate metric? I play now not just more frequently but with a wider range of people scattered across the world.

So neither entirely positive nor negative, but I feel looking over the list that the positive outcomes tip the balance that way. The negatives ensure that I will continue to blog—if a bit less obsessively—to continue to develop content here on the blog.

How are you feeling about this? Do you see a similar trend? What's your balance sheet look like?

A little content follow-up (the first of several) to this post about my desire for some “Late Vancian” indirect magic.

Summon and Bind Minor Sandestin

Magic-User Level 2

Range: 10'

Duration: Special

“Yonder are the stones! I seized them while she bathed. I suggest that you send a sandestin to replace them with the false stones. If you hurry, there is still time; the Murthe dallies at her toilette.”

- Jack Vance, Rhialto the Marvellous

“Now I am more settled, and I no longer try to fathom fairy logic. Someday, if you like, I will explain the difference between fairy magic and sandestin magic, which is used by most magicians.”

- Jack Vance, Madouc

Sandestins of lesser-stature are summoned and bound by casting this spell formula as part of a ritual. Ritual materials fluctuate in cost at 1d4 x 100 gp. Only one sandestin can be bound into service for each five levels of the mage.

Once per day the sandestin can be called upon to act as Unseen Servant. Once a week it will also produce the effect of an extra first-level spell (this spell must be specified before the session begins). Once a month it will produce an extra second-level spell (again this must be specified beforehand).

As perennially lazy creatures sandestins are constantly seeking to "work to rule". At the beginning of a session the DM should secretly rolls 4d6 against the magic-users INT (this roll can be modified to reflect good/bad roleplaying by the player as it wheedles and negotiates with the sandestin). If the roll is above the INT score roll a d6 the following mishap chart:

1	Escapes. The sandestin finds a loophole in their contract and breaks free. The magic user must attempt to summon and bind a new sandestin.
2	Major Bending. The sandestin has managed to find a work around its spell obligations almost completely. No second-level spells can be cast. First level spells are ignored by the sandestin or on a roll of 1 on a d4 attempt be reversed in effect, double back on the caster, or ignored. As an Unseen Servant the sandestin may lie and not complete tasks if out of eye shot
3-6	Minor Bending. No second-level spells can be cast. As an Unseen Servant the sandestin may lie and not complete tasks if out of eye shot.

Classic Traveller homebrewing continues. Given my abiding love for using background charts to signal things about the tone and feel of a campaign it was inevitable that I would start tinkering with background charts in the game that inspired that mania in the first place. Pre-career childhood and adolescent charts were a natural full circle.

Crowdsourcing being the omnibenevolent Kirby space god that has never failed me, I would love to hear suggestions for more entries as I'd love to extend this list to a good old-fashioned d66 chart. Anything to add, brain trust?

“The People of My Homeworld Tend to Be...” Chart

Roll 3d6, 1d3 times (d6 divided by two and rounded up). If the same result is rolled double any mechanical effects that may apply, otherwise re-roll. Results dictating class background give the option to roll on one of the results of the player or Ref's choice. Re-roll contradictory results—if desired.

3	Maladjusted Space Reavers	Blade combat or Brawling 1. +1 to enlist in Other or Pirates. -1 SOC.
4	Spacefaring	+1 to enlist in Navy, Scouts, or Merchants. Pilot 0
5	Mercantile	+2 to enlist in Merchants. +1 INT, -1 SOC
6	Dirt-Farming Colonists	-1 EDU or -1 SOC, +1 STR
7	The “Undeserving” Poor	Streetwise 1, -2 SOC.
8	Fat and Wealthy	+1 SOC or +2000 CR. -1 DEX
9	Warlike Savages	+2 enlist Barbarians, +1 Army. Blade combat 1. EDU -2
10	Hollow-Boned, Zero-G lovers	-1 STR, -1 DEX. Vacc Suit 1
11	High-Gravity Dwarves	+1 STR or END. -1 DEX
12	Gun Nuts	Gun Combat 1. -1 INT
13	Learned/Cultured	+1 EDU, -1 END
14	Decadently Civilized	+1 SOC, -1 EDU
15	Crazed Religious Fanatics	- 1 INT, +1 END
16	Insane/Drug-Addled	- 1 random stat, +1 random stat.
17	Secret Psi-Lovers	+2 to a Psionic Strength roll
18	Tech Scavengers	Mech 1, -1 SOC

Our South Texas minicon, now stylishly renamed GuadaComaCon, is this Saturday, August 18 at the Convention Center in New Braunfels. The event is still free and most games have at least one seat open, so come on down (drop me an email at kutalik at the gmail dot com).

Below is the schedule (and expect there to be some rpg and boardgame takers on those open gaming slots):

MORNING: 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Mines of Moria: fantasy miniatures scenario

Clay-O-Rama: sculpt your own figure

Paranoia: dystopian sci-fi roleplaying

Open gaming

AFTERNOON: 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Cavemaster: prehistoric roleplaying game

5150: Star Army: sci-fi land combat

By This Axe I Rule: fantasy miniatures

Open gaming

EVENING: 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Bethorm: new Tekumel roleplaying game from Jeff Dee

5150: Star Navy: spaceship miniatures

Open gaming

I have written before about how my grandfather was a consummate storyteller, a real master of that oral art (leaving beside my own obvious bias).

His farm life in the Czech-belt of Central Texas during the Depression and his From Here to Eternitysoldiering in pre-war Hawaii loomed large and evocatively in full technicolor for me. With undulating sweeps of his wrinkled hands he'd conjure up the rugged green ridges of Oahu, a sudden thrust of his fist would paint an instant picture of the boar breaking out of the brush that knocked him off the trail.

Quite a few of those stories featured what apparently was a commonplace in hard scrabble America before WWII: a hustle. Part mortality story, part grudging marvel at the gumption or moxie of the grifter, there were countless variations of these con-men tales.

My eternal suspicion about being approached on the street or a knock on the door—even the more obvious and sincere attempts--instantly sends off the imminent-hustle warning bells. Still I have carried with me alongside that guardedness a lifelong fascination with picaros, mountebanks and other rogues that rely on wit and keen insight into the manipulable sides of the human character.

Of course, that's why a Mountebank class not only exists in my campaign, but have leading PCs in the G+ group playing them. And that's why I tend to encourage and enjoy the antics of the players working their various hustles and other bits of what we call the life of an Eternal Scumbag (a play on Moorcock's Eternal Champion including a vague, “racial” memory for player-characters who come in as replacements for slain previous characters).

This is a long windup to the sad news I heard about Harry Harrison's passing this morning. The Stainless Steel Rat stories--while not on par in my tastes with the picaresque scalawags of Cervantes, Vance, and Fraser (Flashman)--were a solid entry in my speculative fiction outlet for that fascination. I enjoyed the elaborate heists of his anti-hero James Bolivar diGriz , his confidence tricks—and the occasional and inevitable comeuppance by the stern hand of the Special Corps. That it all took place on a Space Opera stage (one cited as a source on Classical Traveller I hasten to add), was just pure icing.

A blurb copy on the first edition of the Stainless Steel Rat stories states the Eternal Scumbag credo just so perfectly:

“We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment.”

So goodbye Slippery Jim. May the Colonel and Manzafrain the Mirthful do justice to your memory.

Tomorrow I will be returning to more regular posting again by revving up a new series called "Deepening the D&D Sandbox" which will explore some ways I've been trying to supplement standard old school site-based exploration—without throwing out the non-linear baby.

Today as a lead-up (and catch up for out-of-the-loop players or voyeurs) to talking about the complicated urban adventure dance in the half-ruined southern metropolis of Kezmarok (current stomping grounds of the G+ crew in the Hill Cantons campaign world) I am presenting a number of color elements. (Trust me, the last section will be relevant in the series.)

Monarchist Mural on the Hall of the Restorationists

And now the news:

Tomorrow marks the Grand Petition, the annual, now-ritual presentation of an ever-growing list of particulars by the Turko-Fey to the governing council of the city, Kezmarok, so-long besieged by them. The list is headed by the demand of free access to the Rubicand Caverns of Oldest Lhoma and the Cerulean Vaults of To'yh said to exist in under the city. No Kezmaroki will speak to exactly why the access is denied, but the petition is expected to be met by the 504th annual veto by a sitting Decade-King.

Schmuul, a cloth trader and local lay-priest of the Silent God, is looking for help in divesting his townhouse of a “dibbuk” (an undead spirit). Compensation to be given on completion of the exorcism.

Meanwhile back in the Cantons, High Summer is being celebrated tonight on the shortest night of the year, Altnoc. Traditionally a turtle shell is placed inside a wagon wheel and rolled into an enormous bonfire while celebrants plait wreaths of nightshade and jump across the blazing logs in defiance of the demons who dwell Beyond the Veil.

Siege Camps of the Turko-Fey

The Stiffbind Circus, a traveling troupe of mummers, nipple-pierced bears, and performing freaks, will be running shows this week in the Plaza of World-Weary Sighs. Given last year's impalement of circus members, mimery will not be featured.

Lord Timorsz, Lord-Warden of the Outer Isle of Mirr (one of the few existent possessions of Kezmarok Beyond-the-Rock), has declared a week of mourning for his lost daughter, Jitka. Famed for her fair-haired beauty throughout the isles, Jitka went missing on a holiday junket in Kezmarok. The bereaved father promises a hefty reward for news of his daughter—and the bringing to a presumably rough justice of the culprits.

The near west side of High Kezmarok is aflame again with squatters league turf wars. A full on battle royale erupted yesterday between the Wereshark Band and the Ebon-Jets(a reference to a popular fountain). The skirmish left 23 dead.

Upper East Side

Denizens of mid-east High Kezmarok (few that they are these sad days) were shocked to discover yesterday morning to find that an enormous sinkhole had opened up at the end of the Scintillating Avenue of Strident Strumpetry. An entire city-block including the Malodorous Association of Reaving Boyars meeting-hall—much-beloved by architectural students of the VII Xenid era—now lies swallowed up in the 150-foot deep chasm. The remains of strange blueish stone structures can be glimpsed among the surface wreckage below.

A known Five-Banners leader, Jovo the Jocular, has been slain in a murder most foul. A local cobbler, Sakho vin Sette, has been arrested and put to the question. Kezmaroki military officers are declaring this day, an official Day of Mourning and under an implied threat of arms are making mandatory the wearing of mauve (the city color of grief). It was reported yesterday that Sakho died in a futile “attempt to escape” from the dungeons under the Palace of Affairs Urban.

Happy Labor Day. Tomorrow I am back and (finally) resuming regular posting.

Wobbly Giant

No. Enc.: 1

Alignment: Chaotic (Good)

Movement: 150’ (50’)

Armor Class: 3

Hit Dice: 14+1

Attacks: 1 (Giant Hammer)

Damage: 6d6

Save: F15

Morale: 11

Summoned by the mighty collective sorcerous will of the Illustrious Workers of Woad (Ostrovo Canton grand lodge), the Wobbly Giant wanders the four corners of the Weird in a massive wooden box car.

Red-skinned and broad of shoulder the giant seeks to rebuild a new world in the ashes of the old by wrecking mighty havoc among cities that gain too great of a reputation for avarice.

All possessing more than 10,000 gp must save versus magic or flee on first sighting. In his presence not a single wheel will turn. He carries no treasure with him other than the clothes on his back and the cudgel in his hand.

I think it's time we really had more thoughtful discussion on the crowdfunding model so rapidly multiplying like love-sick rabbits in our hobby. (Bully for David over at Dungeons Down Under raising his own concerns today in a reasonably even-handed post and getting me thinking about this again.)

While I'm personally fine with the six projects I have backed in the last year or so (I am in no rush to get product and generally like the idea of “paying it forward” to blogging comrades who have been shelling out free content for years), a growing trend in the model is starting to worry me. As a journalist who spent a good chunk of the last decade covering workplace issues--and the strange, byzantine world of finance that colors it--the red flags are just a flapping a wee bit too much for me to be entirely comfortable.

Increasingly, it's hard not to get the feeling that the original microloan-to-support-artists orientation of Kickstarter and Indiegogo is being supplanted by the proliferation of a new model of large-scale projects—many now generating millions of dollars--where essentially backers' donations are viewed either as pre-purchasing products or floating no-equity investments in larger commercial products. Kickstarter has been crowing recently about how it's raised over a quarter of a billion dollars ($275 million) since 2009--that's how big a pot we are talking about.

(By the way, the JOBS bill here in the U.S. will allow crowdfunders to start dabbling in equity next year, though Kickstarter has already stated it will not do so. This will certainly change the field, though whether is better or worse is still to be seen.)

That a number of the more enthusiastic in our hobby are taking a “buyer beware”, “your investment is risky and can disappear” tack of argument just compounds those concerns—it was the same rhetoric you would hear investment analysts using before the sub-prime market went supernova.

To date there have not been any trainwrecks of that magnitude in our hobby (others may take exception to that) but I see a number of problematic things in that expectation shift:

No Refunds. While currently Kickstarter has a stated policy that backers must show “due diligence” in producing the products/services promised, it has no refund policy itself. Remember that it takes a 5 percent cut off of each drive—and it's partner Amazon takes a further cut of 3-5 percent to process the transaction. Further it admits it has no real enforcement mechanism to ensure that projects match their backing.

Accountability/Transparency.Though woefully uneven, investment activity in this country is forced to jump through the hoops of the SEC. Not only are you not getting a piece of the financial ownership with your “investment” you are not getting reports and oversight privileges that accompany investing in most financial instruments. Again outside of the goodwill of the particular project there is no real requirement to let you the backer know exactly what the pace of development is.

Product Timeliness and Quality.When backers morph into consumers their expectations become different. Though clearly some backers have some sour bad faith or sulky expectations, it's not an irrational bar-raising given the clear shift in expectations from the projects themselves. In a traditional pre-purchase often at the least traded the floating of what is essentially a zero-interest loan and the chance to “vote with their feet” after poor reviews for a discount. Strangely many projects still give backers the products at the same—or even higher—price point of someone who buys it when it goes live.

I know well that we in the DIY rpg hobby have a wide diversity of views about commercialization and crowdfunding, so I'm curious if others are seeing it this way too. I'm not interested in taking potshots—or tearing down someone's success--but in exploring the ways that we can salvage the good pieces of the original model and figuring out at least a rough consensus of what constitutes “ethical crowdfunding” (or whether that's even possible).

How do we realign expectations? How do we protect “consumers” and most of all how do we keep the gold rush atmosphere for swamping out the vital aspect of imaging the shit out of our fantasy games?

I will likely continue to back projects coming out of our milieu, but you better believe that the larger the boom goes without a larger community rethinking the more I will be doing so extremely selectively. How about you?

Running a West Marches-like campaign was something of a mini-trend in old school D&D circles at the tail end of the last decade. I should know because the eponymous campaign this spawned this blog was itself explicitly modeled around the concept in the early spring of 2008. At that time there was a beautiful array of much-blogged about campaigns running based on most if not all of the principles of the WM.

For those unfamiliar with the West Marches it was an “experimental” wilderness-oriented sandbox campaign run by Ben Robbins (the scare quotes denoting the fact that it was something very close to the kinds of campaigns of yore). The major features according to Robbins were:

1) There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly.

2) There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from a pool of around 10-14 people.

3) There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.

Other major defining features were a ban on “town” adventures; hexless, vector-based wilderness trekking (West Marches has often erroneously assumed to have been a “hex-crawl”); an encouragement of player-driven goal/self-organization; and a high degree of developed micro-detail when it came to wilderness and dungeon sites (each small region had a highly-tailored encounter table, landmarks and other often glossed over features had more emphasis, etc).

That it became a fad of old schoolers isn't a great mystery, Robbins' clear, articulate, widely-read dissection of what made his campaign work happened to coincide with a number of key assertions of the old school play style. That he ran it with 3.5 didn't matter, it was about the the literal meaning of “radicalism”--the paring back to get at roots--that held such great appeal. Such a precision focus on site-based, player-driven exploration was a winning concept.

But looking around today at all those related experiments I am struck by the fact that 3-5 years later all of the ones I am familiar with are gone. While the Hill Cantons campaign is still in fighting form, thriving even thanks to Google Plus, it has certainly evolved way beyond many of the defining boundaries of the WM. Over-aching plots, great mysteries, and urban adventuring—hell, the last two months of the campaign have been inside the confines of a single city—have become more and more the order of the day.

So where did all the West Marches go? Victims to the demands of adult life? Did the format feel too constraining? Or did they just simply evolve (as it did here) as the sands of the box lapped into other spheres?

Curious, thoughts?

“Humankind is fragmented into isolationist realms, indifferent nations, evil lands, and states striving for good...Nomads, bandits, and barbarians raid southwards every spring and summer. Humanoid enclaves are strongly established and scattered throughout the continent, and wicked insanity rules in the Great Kingdom.”

- World of Greyhawk (folio)

It's often been said that the Grande Dame of D&D published settings, the World of Greyhawk, was a world of “howling emptiness.”

The much-repeated statement refers to the scale of the hex map, at 30 miles a hex containing a whopping 779.42 square miles that's a zoomed-out perspective that doesn't show much there there. But if you are one of those eminently nerdy and obsessive types that give a hoot about the demographics of an imaginary land, that howling emptiness may be more than just a map abstraction.

If you actually sit down take all the distances and stated populations at face value and start crunching numbers, your immediate impression will be that the lands of Flanaess aren't just stable, if embattled faux medieval nations, but far more like the edge-of-oblivion points of light societies of a post-apocalyptic world.

(Oh how, I have been holding off publishing this post in a futile attempt to hold the lie of maintaining some level of the hipness of my twenties and thirties)

Let's take a closer look. I picked out of the one of the more well-known lands as a test case, the Archclericy of Veluna. Looking at the folio-edition gazetteer it is said to have a total population of 250,000 humans, 10,000 elves, and 7,000 gnomes for a total of 267,000.

Figuring out exactly what constitutes the land area of the domain is a bit tricky, there are no printed boundaries. I make a few assumptions like only counting “clear” hexes as farmland and pretty much stick to the rivers as boundary markers. I count out 70 hexes or 54,544 square miles. Comparing that to the total population I come out with 4.89 humans and demihumans per square mile.

Whoa.

That's one amazingly sparsely-inhabited land. How sparse? Well let's take some historical comparisons from 13^th century Europe: France had 100 people per square mile, Germany and Italy had 90 people per square mile, and one of the most howling empty places of that time the British Isles weighs in with 40 people per square mile. (I believe that Russia of that time which was a land of great stretches of wild forest and wetlands punctuated with islands of urban concentration was around 20 but I am too lazy to hunt for it right now).

In other words, even the wildest places of Europe at the time are orders of magnitude more settled and prosperous than Veluna. Those wide light green clearings on the Darlene map turn out not to be dull vast tracts of farmland peopled by plump, happy yeoman, but barely held little bastions.

It's hard not to conjure up images of isolated little hamlets clustered around a grim watchtower or small castle with miles of wasteland and bramble-grown lost settlements filling the miles between. Even inside these “settled” lands armed-to-the-teeth patrols are making the rounds and a monster or two is not an uncommon daily nuisance.

Again I understand this exercise is a bit silly. I highly doubt that Gygax and others sat down and figured out how the population numbers lined up density wise with the map. But when the introduction paints such a vivid picture of an exceedingly tough and contested place there must have been a rough sense that they wanted to portray a world on the razor's edge demographically.

Yesterday's post set off a rather longish discussion and thought train—oh we are a nerdy crew. A few more points before I let go of this.

Greyhawk's nations are big suckas. In comparison to other lands in this part of Oerik, Veluna is a small-to-mid-sized land with its 44,544 square miles (and that's only counting the presumably-cultivated clear hexes). Compared to small-to-midsized European nations though it's pretty large even with that reduced count. Ireland is almost half that size at 27,135 square miles for instance.

There's very little actual farmland.Here's an interesting backward calculation. My conservative estimate (based on disputable medieval crop yields) for the amount of land you'd need under cultivation to support populations is about 1 sq mile per 180.

So just to support the population existing for Veluna you'd only need 1,488.33 square miles of that 54000+ square miles. That would be only a little over two out of those 70 clear hexes (assuming it was all clumped together) for sustainability and maybe twice that if it was growing a lot of surplus.

The 1983 boxed set gazetteer (I was only using the folio as a source yesterday) says that's the majority of the population is clustered around the capital city and the large urban areas and around the middle of the country, so again I'm conjuring up mental pictures of a pretty desolate countryside with rare palisaded villages and fortified manors surrounded by light woods and wasteland for the most part when you get outside those denser belts.

The rural to urban populations are pretty close to actual historical precedents. Having picked up one of my books from a Penguin series on English medieval history I was about to write the opposite. That book had a long list of towns over 2,000 in population (Greyhawk's maps only cover towns over 1,500). A whopping 42 in fact which made Veluna with its measly three seem incredibly rural in comparison.

But then I looked at Britain's population at that time and it stood around 5 million—which is neatly 20 times the population of Veluna (again wow that's how tiny and far-flung these countries are). Allowing for that twenty-fold difference the number of towns seem totally on.

There is a huge population jump from first edition's Greyhawk to 3.5's. I'm not the first to point this out but later editions increased the Flanaess nations populations from 200-800 percent. I would have never known if I hadn't seen the numbers on Wiki (tangentially it's funny that Wiki has the 3.5 stats down as “facts”) but Veluna is given in 668,000 as compared to the folio's 250,000.

The big shift—and I would be curious to hear more about the reasoning behind it—points out how such a seemingly uninteresting thing like demographics can subtly influence the tone and feeling of a setting. Later Veluna is a place more akin to the relatively more stable and prosperous medieval Britain than the razor's edge I was presenting yesterday.

I suppose that's my point with all this. Honestly I could care less about what's canonical or not, that's a pointless and silly thing to get worked up about. But I am interested in what the implications of fantasy world building, what changes when you alter this “fact” or that “dynamic” and how it all stacks up to the only thing we really have for empirical comparison: the history (however spotty and inaccurate) of our own world.

“...the Alliance constructed a fortress north of the base constructed to accommodate the large bodied elder scientists (later to be called the City State of the Invincible Overlord when nomadic barbarians settled amongst the ruins thousands of years later)...Completing the dismantling and demolishing of all tools and machines not worth transporting, the Alliance star cruiser filled up with the colonists going off-planet and the Markrabs began the Uttermost War by destroying the cruiser, all satellite probes, and the Alliance space station. The planet itself was spared devastation as neither side wished to disrupt or destroy the unique ecological cauldron of immense scientific interest.”

- Bob Bledsaw on the origins of the Wilderlands

Because I have lots of life activity with things better to do, I doggedly continue to plug away on matters that are silly, obsessional and fantastical. Still trying to wrap my brain about how demographics subtly shape the feel and tone of a campaign world I started to shift into comparative mode.

The easiest target was Judges Guild's old warhorse of a setting, the Wilderlands. Easy because unlike many other old published D&D settings, the Guild folks thought and published a good deal more (and more rigorously) about the in-game implications of all this.

Sandwiched between the terse descriptions of hexes and settlements are these solid gold guidelines and sub-systems covering everything from population density to prospecting to semi-realistic cave systems. Helpfully a lot of that work has continued to recently (see here and here).

(Really the compilation of such little nuggets found in the Ready Ref sheets are one of the best—if worst presented—examples ever produced in classic D&D of how you can pull all the game elements together into an interesting “domain game”--but that's a matter for another post).

So let's do some number crunching. Again I'm going to focus on one area for my analysis, in this case I'm picking on Map 1, the area that covers the much-famed City State (and the most-densely inhabited place in that great stretch of wilderness.)

Trying to figure out what the square mileage of that map is a bit of a headache—with the smaller 5-mile hexes and poster-size you get a whopping 1768 hexes. I toss out all the full ocean hexes (244) and count partial water and small islands as half. That gives 1519 land hexes at 32,866.35 square miles (which incidentally makes it the size of Austria or Maine). Now because I am lazy I use a much more liberal count and countthe total land areas (remember I only counted clear hexes in Veluna, a count that included the smallish wilderness areas inside its borders would decrease the population density even further by roughly 10 percent.)

Skipping to the chase (so as not to induce eye glazing):

City State area: 8.56 people/square mile, 281,667 total population.

Veluna (Folio): 4.89 people/square mile, 267,000 total population.

Veluna (3.5 ed): 12.24 people/square mile, 668,000 total population.

British Isles (circa 1300): 40 people/square mile.

France (circa 1300): 100 people/square mile.

Punchline is that the City State area is twice as densely settled as the old Veluna and not even that far off from the tripling revision of 3.5 edition (which I more and more think is likely closer to the original authorial intent).

Wilderlands though in my twisted, little mind owns up to the implications of being such a howlingly wild, post-apocalyptic place in a more explicit manner. The fallout from the Uttermost War and following calamities that happened to the former space colony of Ghenrek IV feel so much deeper and more cataclysmic when you eyeball those many maps and see the little pockets of civilizations.

The explicit variation of technology levels from the neolithic up to late Renaissance-seeming technologies reinforces this feeling. And with the smaller scale (six times smaller than the Darlene maps remember) how fragile civilization feels all the more obvious as you see how much bigger and closer in those large swaths of forest are.

In the Wilderlands there are no overarching large-scale polities with boundaries pushed up against each other. It's a place where an overgrown city-state (nay THE city-state) lead by a Lord Humungus-sounding “overlord” is one of the most organized bastions of civilization existent.

So what does that do to our view of the World of Greyhawk?

I have a small laundry list of failings of the fantasy genre that drive me absolutely bonkers. Sitting right near the top of that list—right after the big-tickets like cardboard, Tolkein-rip-off—is that way too-common one of characters whose world view drip with the mundane and modern. Motivations and dialogue that are so jarringly familiar and pedestrian—minus great compensation in other areas—that they invariably yank me right out of that feeling of being somewhere else entirely (one of the great points of fantasy)

What I find it so deeply disappointing about that drek is that fair-to-good novels in another genre routinely succeed in shifting that feeling of being in a different world despite it's painstakingly real-world orientation: historical fiction.

It has passed into cliché, but it's worth repeating the old L.P. Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” And that's what I love, the same ability--like the best fantasy--to walk around in the shoes of characters that have values, perspectives and motivations mostly different from my own.

Skipping to the chase, here's a list of historical fiction that spans the pre-industrial era that I found particularly inspiring for me as a GM:

Knight in Anarchy by George Shipway

Brutal and vivid this short novel centers on the life of Humphrey Visdelou, a Anglo-Norman small fiefholder in the Anarchy (the 12^th-century period of civil war that serves as the backdrop for Jeff Rients's famous Wessex campaign).

It hovers close to the ground (though Humphrey becomes involved with many of the big-ticket events of the day) and is painstakingly researched with a character and period detail that surpasses the “alien test” for me.

Sadly out-of-print and difficult/expensive to find in the U.S. outside of libraries. (I lucked out and fished one of out the dollar bin of a used bookstore).

The Warlord and Saxon Chronicles, Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell

The novels of the insanely-prolific Cornwell, best known for his Napoleonic-era Sharpe books, are somewhat predictable in their choice of protagonist--invariably a rough, but honorable military man who bucks authority and religion (almost to the point of being an “Eternal Champion” of sorts). Nevertheless he writes some great adventure novels.

Worth checking out in particular are the Warlord books set in historical Arthurian Britain (with some agnostic, believable whiffs of druidic magic), the Saxon chronicles of 9^th century England and the stand-alone, recent Agincourt novel.

The King Must Die and The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault

Renault's attempt to reconcile a more historical Theseus with the assumptions of the Golden Bough. The first book goes through his sojourn in the Labyrinth palace of Minoan Crete, the second with the argonauts attempts to capture the “golden fleece.”

It's also worth picking up her other novels oriented around the Hellenic world.

Q by Luther Blisset

Opening up with a bang in the heat and turmoil of the Peasant Wars and Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire, this sprawling “thinking persons' thriller” follows an obsessional Inquistor and his quarry, a radical Anabaptist, through several decades and cities in western 16th-century Europe. Interestingly Luther Blisset is a coded pseudonym for a (talented) collective of anonymous Italian writers.

Gentleman of the Road by Michael Chabon

Pultizer-winner Chabon's excellent 10^th century-adventurer tale of two Jewish swordsmen/scalawags traveling to the distant Central Asian land of the Khazars. Explicitly dedicated to Leiber's Lankhmar duo.

Shadows of the Pomegranate Treeby Tariq Ali

Ultimately depressing but captivating, this novel tells the story of an Andalusian Muslim noble family immediately after the fall of Granada. Good balance to the heavy Christian-center of most medieval historical fiction.

His novel about Saladin is also good if a bit drier.

The Walking Drum by Louis L'Amour

Yep you read that right Louis “the hoary old western novelist” L'Amour. He just so happened to also write a good, if not great early medieval adventure tale that takes a slave and pirate from the coast of the Frankish empire to the splendors of Caliphate Cordoba and points east.

Name of the Rose and Baudlinoby Umberto Eco

You've likely heard of the first (or seen the movie with Sean Connery), Eco does a stand up job of bringing to life the details of real life and the social/intellectual trends of medieval Europe.

Baudlino is nowhere as accessible and gripping as Name of the Rose, but worth picking up if you have an interest in Constantinople around the time of its capture in the Fourth Crusade.

Also worth checking out:

The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett

With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe by Henryk Sienkiewicz

I, Claudius, Claudius the God, and Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

Whale Road by Robert Low

So how about you? Any lovely old favorite historical novels of interest to us fellow fantasy gamer

A round-up of things particular to the Hill Cantons campaign proper.

And now the news...

A bizarre riot of pugilism near the Gate of 900 Eyes last Sagday night has municipal issues in a state of almost concern. A bo stick-armed delegation from The Ring-Tailed Circle of Kezmarokies for Prosperity and Weal, a rumored front for Wellsprings of the Crowd, marched on the Municipal Palace yesterday demanding immediate suppression of the “fight cult.” The High-Marshal has stated that a round-up of the “usual suspects is already underway.”

Dromons and cogs pulling in from the waters of the Cantons are spreading word of a slow and massive accumulation of storm clouds in the seas of the northwest. The stormheads have been eerily piling up for weeks now, occasionally looking like they will burst though into a gigantic squall—only to dry up inexplicably. Some say that the supernatural storm-to-be is the Celestial Lady beating the Sun Lord with her silver chains again, others around the chaotic cult of Storm Child whisper of the birth of a “One Other”.

Steelpike the Younger, purveyor of secrets and climber of social ladders, has made a great show of wanting to sell a second map of “great and valuable material worth.” Interested parties should inquire at the great hostel of Finestra.

Another round of cryptic wall posters have been appearing throughout Kezmarok (penned in a different hand from last week's fight cult ones). The posters all bear the same lines:

The World Turtle Upended

If buttercups buzz'd after the wozzle bee

If cogs were on land, sun-domes on sea

If steppe-ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows

And pelegranes should be chased into holes by the mouse

If the mamas sold their babies

To the Silent God for an aparicity crown

If summer were spring

And the other way 'round

Then the world-turtle would be upside down!

The World of the Hill Cantons. Crappy Players' Map

The travails of academic life in Kezmarok. The Great Seminar of the HCLK bubbles over into vigorous dispute over the nature of Gematria (the proper assignment of numerological significance) in Therosh's 18th Examination of the Pericyclical Evolution of the Dome of the Heavens.

Kezmarok and the Southlands.
The Weird is marked in purple.

Like most of my fool gaming projects, it started so casually. Restless on leave, I threw out on Google Plus the idle thought that I was suffering through a perverse, masochistic urge to play a hardcore medievalist rpg like first edition Chivalry & Sorcery or Harnmaster.

For some reason the resulting discussion just clicked something in my head and low and somewhere in there it morphed into “let's make a game.” I trotted out a wish list of design goals for a dream game:
1. Low-to-no magic rpg. Magic and fantasy elements are rare and wondrous or terrifying.
2. Set roughly from 1190-1250 in a Northwestern Europe, but can support low fantasy or semi-historical fictional settings that are similar.
3. BRP-like percentile game as a baseline but with simple mechanics that are custom fit for the period.
4. Game feel inspirations: real world history, Averoigne/Jurgen weirdness and a splash of Howard Pyle-like romanticism.
5. Indirect "magic" (saintly, alchemy, sorcery/summoning, and herbal) that is well-researched and fits into the workings of the medieval mind.
6. Folklore and legends are often "real". Prester John may well live at the edge of the world in a land filled with strange wonders. The black hound may indeed hunt the moors and Woodwoses in the deep dark recesses of the forest. Faith and folklore have real weight.
7. Background, institutions and social class matter, but opportunity through social chaos/adventuring.
8. Interesting, painless chargen (career based with clear easy choices).

A mad writing rush of two weeks opened up with heavy-lifting help from Evan from In Places Deep and Mike from Sword+1 and other mensch in our DIY corner or the hobby. Forty manuscript pages later and “Medieval Hack” (a working title) was a-born.

A good many ideas I've been long harboring for character generation minigames were sharped and found a home, you can guide a character through a large range of childhood class backgrounds along a vocation path of almost 50 different realistic vocations (with lots of strange events and related character development along the way). Long-tinkered, beancounting-minimal domain-level rules are finding a place too.

While we have a lot more tightening up and thinking out to for our evolving-bottom game, the punchline is we already had enough in place to start the real fun: hot-housing in several play-test mini-campaigns on Google Plus hangouts.

Evan is running one such game in the Languedouc region in the late-12^th century. I'm running two sessions a week now of a mini-campaign that ports elements of 13^thcentury Brittany into the strife-torn South Ulfland setting dress of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy (see here for the full campaign description).

If you are interested in the game—and more importantly want to drop in and swing a virtual sword in one of the playtests--drop me a line. Half the fun is building a game organically from the bottom up with the discerning and devious minds of our wee hobby.

Yesterday I pulled back the current on my recent medievalist game project. I mentioned that I was running a mini-campaign that "ports elements of 13^th century Brittany into the strife-torn South Ulfland setting dress of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy."

For spectators and those interested in getting into the playing pool for one of the Google Plus playtest slots (or face-to-face if you fancy a drive to San Antonio), here's the background run down and starting situation on my little barony.

Ulfland Mini-Campaign Notes

The mini-campaign is centered on Fian Gosse, a petty barony on the marches that divide South and North Ulfland. The region is a somewhat remote and wild place of rugged, grassy hills punctuated by wood-choked vales, lush river-bottom meadows, heather-covered moorlands, weathered megaliths and ancient, time-worn ruins. Arable plots are small and divided by dense bocage (hedgerows often overgrowing a crude stone wall) and herds of lean, rangy cattle and wooly mountain sheep dominate the wider open pastures.

Local Male Names
Local Female Names
Medieval Nicknames (note such wonderful entries as “Catherine de' Medici Jezebel, the Barren Wife, the Black Queen, the Eclipsed Consort, the Italian Duchess Without a Duchy, the Maggot from Italy's Tomb, the Merchant's Daughter, the Monstrous Regiment of Women, the Mother of the Modern High-Heeled Shoe”)

News
Hoel, Lord Bodwy’s last remaining son was found a fortnight ago nailed to the old Roman watchtower two hundred paces from the boundary stones of Lord Govran’s demense. His corpse was so riddled with arrows that it was difficult to identify the teen heir. Lord Bodwy remains bedridden and despondent to this day. Sir Paol, Bodwy’s castellan, is looking for “rough men” to help revenge the honor of the baron.

The Hot Fair of Maure will begin next week. Already the village is packing in wine merchants, harlots, pedlars, vinters, thieves and other ne'er do wells.

Sir Gralon and Sir Taran, twin nephews of Bodwy’s currently serving in the court of King Gax in Xouges are said to be on the road to Fian Gosse. Their mutually-contested status as heirs to the barony surely is prompting their sudden sense of homesickness.

Sir Paol has offered a one Libra (240d) reward for the slaying of the dreaded Hound of Blacken Moor. A shepherd had his throat torn out near the moors just a night ago.

Sir Kavan, the more martial of Bodwy’s bannerets, is looking for the fleet of foot and stout of arm to help in a return of his prize bull from a local banneret. Interested parties should seek him at Three-Pines Hall.

Jakez the Woodward has been breathlessly spreading in the village a chilling tale of coming upon a black rock altar deep in the center of Kaugh Forest. The blood staining in it was hot and fresh to the touch and he could hear the howls of Hell itself when he lifted his hand. The tale grows in the telling.

NPCs of Note
Lord Bodwy, the petty baron. Bed-ridden and despondent since the deaths of his three sons

Sir Kavan “Rooster”. Strutting proud banneret of Bodwy’s.

Sir Ranulf “the Cuckolded” (weak chinned and fat) and his wife Ysabel of Konche, raven-haired beauty of an “amazon”. Bodwy’s other banneret.

Sir Paol, Bodwy's Castellan. Old lean and a bit myopic.

Sir Tristan, knight bachelor holding a small manor two miles NE of Maure Keep. Two household knights and mercenary leader are PCs.

Surrounding Baronies:
Lord Govran, sadistic fucker who holds the barony of Caroth to the northwest.

Lady Mebille of Gelsme. Stewarding the barony to the south for her son. Eerily depopulated fief with bramble-covered ruined villages and wood-choked fields. Dark rumors abound about the lady.

Four “Founder” Saints of Ulfland (each grants specific powers under our divine magic system):
St. Tudwal
St. Christopher the Lesser
St. Padarn
St. Kaourintin

Click to Enlarge

Places
Barony of Fian Gosse
920 Serfs (15 square miles of cultivated land)
110 Freemen (2 square miles)

Maure Keep
An old pink-granite Shell Keep with 25-foot walls. Seat of Lord Bodwy. Currently houses five knights (including the Castellan), 14 sergeants, and 47 footmen. The demense is also backed by the two fortified manors of Bodwy’s vassals, Sir Kavan and Sir Ranulf.

Maure
Large village of around 750 that holds a royal market charter (and is thus growing into a town). Three mills, a smithy, two weavers, a tannery and most recently Kernun’s Antler, an inn.

Three Pine Hall
Venerable oak-trunk manor house known for the three massive ancient pines in its courtyard thought to have once been used in the worship of a pagan god.

Abbey of St. Christopher the Lesser.
Premonstratensian abbey run by the Abbot Fransez the Fat, a venal and grasping man.

Avessec
Village of 238.

Ruminail
Village of 258.

Molac
Sinister little hamlet of around 50 herdsmen near Bracken Moor.

Teach tac Teach
Mountain range, three closest peaks are called the Cloudcutters.

Hopping around the ether today I found some wonderful maps of Vance's Lyonesse on French fan sits. (Apparently like Jerry Lewis, that trilogy plays well in Francophone countries having produced the one and only rpg in the setting and several quality fan sites.)

This beauty of a South Ulfland map, naturally, had me a-twitter. Interestingly it places Fian Gosse (the barony I'm using for the Medieval Hack mini-campaign) almost exactly where I did working from the Lyonesse novel map. Scale fits too.

Click to enlarge.

And here's North Ulfland ruled by the good King Gax (Gygax reference?)

Here's a nice one placing the Elder Isles in their European context.

Vance lovers be sure to check out the rest of the maps and the site in general. Google Translate actually does some semi-passable work with the translations.

Campaign news for the Medieval Hack playtest.

Lord Bodwy's tragic woes continue, Sir Taranwas foully murdered in an ambuscade on the new bridge fording Norde Creek. Some say that this is the work of brigands, cooler minds doubt that outlaws could work with such impunity in the middle of the day and on the old Roman road during fair time no less. Sir Gralon, his twin brother is offering a substantial bounty for the heads of the culprits and Taran's boon companions, Sir Menguy the Blueballed and Sir Jos the Fairbearded, are in a froth of wrath. Bodwy's banneret Kavan asserts that this is the work of Lord Govran and vows “war with mercy” on that foul baron.

The Hot Fair of Maure begins. The muddy streets of Maure are choked with fair goers from all over Ulfland and Lyonesse. The cloth-hall and pavilions are bustling with the shouts of the booth vendors.

A kaleidoscope of colors greet browsers of cloth bolts. Though mostly local wool dyed in rich vermillions, scarlets and greens, there are dye-stuffs and cotton from Flanders and silks from far Lucca. The rich smell of Cordovan leather mixes with the piney scent of resin. Locals oh and ah over the exotic goods, sugar from Syria and even rare spices like cinnamon (which is well known to come from the nesting material of a bird in dusty Arabia).

Two cowherds have gone missing from Lammon's Meadow. The pair, sons of prosperous villiens on the manor of *Sir Morvan*, were not known to be prone to flight and their fathers worry.

Three in the A.M. thoughts continue to rule my head as we pound out playtests—and pages--of Medieval Hack. Many of the sleep-deprived thoughts seem to cluster around the broader game design questions. Long box-car thoughts like: “we chose a relatively narrow period/place/literary tone so we could focus a bit more on period feel and little details...but we love DIY gaming...so what is the range we think it can support conceptually before it becomes something else entirely?”

While I find myself feeling that sliders and other schemes are a bit mechanistic (and confining when a game starts growing organically in play), they do allow you to think about the broad parameters are of the game. What follows are some idle, “non-official” thoughts on some campaign dials.

Campaign Dials
Medieval Hack is designed to be flexible enough to incorporate a range of campaign types and settings while maintaining its coherence as a focused mostly historical, yet-fantastical and weird game. Gamemasters should think about what feels right to your play group and choose accordingly. (My own Ulfland playtest campaign is a nice even 2,2,2 in setting while Evan's Languedoc is a 2,1,3).

Fantasy Element Dial
1. Magic and the supernatural as open mystery. The existence of Magic and the supernatural is an open question. Does witchcraft exist or is it trickery? PCs are typically not allowed access to magical skills. Supernatural effects may exist but are shrouded in mystery.

2. The Medieval Mind is “right”. The world view of much of this period is assumed to be mostly accurate. Witches sometimes work “black magic”, sometimes just folkloric “low magic”. Prester John's kingdom and its strange monsters and stranger denizens likely does exist somewhere at the end of the earth. Still for the majority of people in Christendom these matters are mostly unknown and unencountered in daily life—and greatly feared. The game has mostly been designed and playtested to support this approach and while it can be readily played on the other settings, we feel this gives the broadest play experience of the game's vision.

3. Low Magic Fantasy. The setting is assumed to something more akin to what is called a “low magic” setting in a D&D or fantasty novel context. Magic practitioners, while still rare are not as feared and shunned, and have an open existence in civilized areas. Supernatural beings and goings on are more readily acknowledged and encountered. The game Ars Magica, the fantasy Earth of Runequest 3 and other games come to mind.

Setting Historicity Dial
1. Historical World, Realistic. The campaign setting is based in historical Europe. Major settlements are actual historically-existing places. Small-scale settlements and areas (such as villages and manors) may, however, be semi-or entirely fictional. Important personages are typically found in historical accounts. (Fantasy elements can still exist in this dial setting.)

2. Historical World, Fictional. The campaign setting is based in historical Europe but has regional areas that may be fictional. The fictional area could be an entire county-sized area such as Averoigne or a mythical set of islands such Jack Vance's Elder Isles. The rest of the world is more or less historical. Some important personages will be entirely fictional.

3. Fantasy World, Quasi-Historical. The setting world is entirely fictional, but the culture is a thinly-skinned Northwestern Europe of this period. Important historic parallels will exist such as a (mostly) universal monotheistic church. The setting may even blend in thinly-skinned personages from real world history.

Player Restrictions Dial
1. Players restricted to certain roles. Character generation in MH will often produce a wide range of backgrounds and vocations for players. Some GMs may desire a more focused campaign with a specified range of characters. A GM for instance shooting for a more knight-based chivalric game may ask players to only roll characters under the Second Estate table or one seeking to have a bandit-like Robin Hood game could give a range of likely vocations such as bandit or forester as open options.

2. Broad but bounded. This is the default of character generation as written. Character types are drawn not as a statistical snapshot of life in that period, but as the classes and backgrounds more likely to lead to an adventuring life in the bounds of Northwestern Europe of that time (or its fictional mirror). Use of the Alternate Table can slant players to be more likely to members of the nobility while maintaining both the diversity and bounds of the game as intended.

3. Wide open. Players can either freely choose from character backgrounds or are allowed to play roles that may have been more difficult. Playing Islamic characters or Joan of Arc-like warrior women (not historic impossibilities but rare) for example is allowed.

AD&D's Apocalypse and Hereafter

The Google Plus Epicenter Shift

A "Late Vancian" Spell for Your Old School Game

Classic Traveller Childhood Charts

GuadaComaCon Schedule August 18

Stealthy as Rats in the Wainscoting of their Society

News of Kezmarok

Beast of the Week: The Wobbly Giant

Hard Questions about the RPG Kickstarter Revolution

Whither the West Marches?

The Howling Emptiness of the World of Greyhawk

Postscript on Greyhawk's “Howling Emptiness”

Post-Apocalyptic D&D: Greyhawk vs. Wilderlands

Historical Fiction for Fantasy Readers

News and Ephemera from Kezmarok

A Hardcore Medievalist RPG of Our Own

The Ulfland Playtest Mini-Campaign

Lyonesse Maps

News of Ulfland

Campaign Dials and Medieval Hack