8 posts tagged “gaming”

Halloo. Tonight, as I sweat to the humidity behind me, I did something I had intended on doing for quite some time. I made a (first) list of the RPG products I have collected over the years and wish to now get rid of. Selling on eBay is silly as many are on there in vast numbers and seriously, I don't have the patience. So, they are available for a) the cost of sending them to you b) a gratuity (your choice but some suggestions are coffee, beer, gift certificates to the Silver Snail, etc.) or both a & b. It's first come first serve and considering the latest Gallup Poll showed that not many are reading here (well, i will crosspost to my Vox site as that is tres geek oriented... my site, not Vox) it should be a small small audience desiring such. Oh, and I have also sent the list to a small group of possibly interested parties.

Background? For over 30 years I have played RPGs, that is Pen & Paper RPGs. But within those 30 years I might have played consistently for 10. The inbetween years have left me amassing a vast amount of second hand (and some new) games from various systems that attracted me. But the last few years, they have become more dust collectors that collector's items not even being read for enjoyment. And there is that nagging voice for me to clean out my life. Once I have done a few of these lists (boxed sets were mostly ignored on this one), I will move into the D&D, AD&D and 3rd Ed. D&D. These last will be the hardest to part with as I have a great great, vast nay giganimous fondness for D&D in all it's various forms. It will be hard to convince myself to part with even the most cursory glanced at source books.

But these things have to be done. Leave a comment if you want the Word file for LIST 1.

I completed the first "article" in what hopefully will be the collections that make up Mohr Vesik.  While I am not sure what it accomplished as an article, I am sure what it served in the writing.  I am not one used to writing source material in wholes, I am used to writing dribs and drabs as they were needed for games, never finishing never formatting.  So despite my misgivings, this is a unique element of my creativity... an end.

What was I not satisfied with, beyond my own dislike for my lack of voice as of late?  I guess that is important, as I do mourn the lack of what I once liked about my writing style, when I once had a writing style.  I guess I have spent so much time trying to convert my haphazard stream of consciousness but still connected to a thread feel for writing that I lost that which I enjoyed about the writing, the wordsmithing.  I should have clung tenaciously to my pulp influences and enjoined them in my writing instead of purging.  But it was not only that, as I can say honestly, the article was boring.  The country of Hyrmdaal was a boring land and I did nothing to raise it above it's clean, friendly, productive nature.  It lacks character and so does the writing.  I write about the stuff of the land without really writing about the heart of the land.  I describe elements of the country like a prose laundrylist.  When I wanted to describe a land where hardworking farmers and noble folk work together to make a land that will someday rival the empires of the west and those in the legends of the Olde Worlde, I only describe building colours and the structure of the social strata.  Oh those details have their place but they should be tempered with the things that make a land interesting, its oddities and colourful folk.  There should have been more specifics, examples of people and places and events and locations. 

But as I said, I am not too broke up about it for now we have the new article, the neighbour and rival -- Can'Manaar, the land of ninjas and poison and xenophobia but more cities in three hundred miles of high coastal cliffs than in the entire east.  Can'Manaar's article will be the story of one elf's journey, an elf with hereditary ties to the land allowing him to go where most would be killed on site for doing.  It is definately going to attempt to have a voice.

I have been editing the first (completed) article for a few minutes before bed every night, so not writing so much new material.  It's amazing how much continuity I can lose between sections just because it's been a few days between writing.  But I have continued to make notes in my bag book and in the bedside book, as ideas come to me.  These notes are the epitome of fluff material when it comes to source material for my world.  They are the sidebars and those shaded books so often seen in published game books.

For example, I envisioned a common Kopaak dining style popular in taverns and inns that service the hard working cotters and farmers of the countryside.  It's such an old tradition that even without the need it has carried over into some city & town eating places, purely on popularity and nostalgia.  Also, a family & farm version of it will happen at farmstead kitchens where a cookhouse will be near the gate entrance and working folk will mingle in as the work in the fields comes to a day's end.

The working folk come in at midday or at the end of a long day in the fields.  They walk through the main door stopping by the big wicker baskets at the door.  Inside are wooden spoons and forks, as well as bread & cheese.  Each work grabs some utensils and the bread & cheese.  They then make their way over to the fireplace or hearth which is dotted with pigeon holes either side of the fire itself. These shelves are open to the back of the hearth letting them be heated by ambient all day long heat.  In each is an earthenware bowel with wooden handles and a cover.  The worker grabs and pushes his way to a trestle table, elbowing in among familiar faces.

In each bowl is a simple meal, pre cooked and portioned into the bowl earlier.  It could be a chicken leg with onions and root vegetables.  It could be a stew of beef and seasonal vegetables.  It could be a mash mixed with chicken & lamb.  It will always be a hearty food that goes well with the bread & cheese and a small ale they can grab from a keg or bartender.  At the end of the meal they bring up the utensils and bowl, and if it's a public place, then they pay their coin and be on their way. 

This is the kind of fluff that I want to populate my world with.  Sure I envision my world articles as gaming material but for the most part that will be incidental.  There will be little crunch.  There will be no prestige classes, no racial feats and no new spells.  I might end up adding a new monster or two or mention new style weapons, but these will be more fluff oriented, added as flavour.  That is the blessing of writing it for myself and for Marmy -- the crunch will happen when it has to happen.

I have also decided to take this philosophy with gaming 3.5 D&D as well.  I was making another character to see if I could get over the feel of how much drudgery it is.  The Old Skool feel of joy when putting together a character is just not there in this tradition.  I always feel I am too uncomfortable with it.  I always feel I have to look back at the beginning of the player's guide and see what I missed.  I am always looking at the empty spots on character sheets and wondering if I want to fill them in. So, I am going to resurrect my personal D&D sheet and take cues from what I leave empty on a sheet after I consider him done.  Leave that all out and I should have a fun and quickly put together sheet for making characters in my games.

I will leave my crunch to cookie baking.

Reading the ENWorld Wiki reminded me of my favourite self-created campaign world -- Weffenruga.   Weffenruga, or The Woven Rug was a rectangular world hanging from four chains of the heavens.  Literally the land was woven from the threads of fate & destiny by the gods themselves that dwelled in the stars & sky above the rug.  Two of the chains had suffered ill-fates with one rusting and having to be shortened by a single link, which caused the lands of that corner to slide together, creating massive mountain ranges, open volcanoes and a dangerous land in general.  One chain had broken all together weighing down and spilling off the contents of one corner.  This was an extremely dangerous area where the oceans and rivers around it flowed into a maelstrom and off the literal edge of the world.  The other major aspect of the world was that it was divided into fabric patches, small squares with natural land mass dividers, each a distinct people.  Crossing over the boundaries was not difficult but it did require an effort usually left to the hardy and the trader.  Weffenruga was a mysterious and odd world.

Yes, I took a piece of graph paper and defined this as the world.  It was a flat world, a world with an edge.  You could literally walk or sail off the edge of the world.  There was a sky above with a small sun that travelled the length of the world in a repeating metronome fashion.  Those lands at the edges had strange repeating sunlit days while those nearer the center had long periods of night.  The sun shone down on the land in a vertical pattern running north to south but appeared to those below as a ball of light.  When the sun was not in the sky, the star pattern of the heavens was above.  The gods lived above this pattern.  Below the woven rug were the tatters and the mistakes of weaving and this was the underworld.  Evil creatures clung in reverse gravity beneath the rug, in a tormented land of endless night.  horrible mountain ranges, massive ravines, crevasses with no bottom, open lava pools and every other tormented geographic features made up the underside of the rug, as well as a few unique features that were considered unworthy of the light, such as the Crystal Range, a small mountain range of perfectly formed crystals with a massive glowing castle at it's center. 

The campaign was very basic.  The characters represented those interested in crossing the borders of the patches.  They were curious folk, restless adventuring types all drawn together because they had heard rumours of changes in the land.  Was another chain about to break?  Was an area becoming thread bare and unravelling?  Something was a stir and they were to travel from patch to patch gathering clues.

It came about because I tired of the typical "earth like" D&D world.  This was early university and really, none of my worlds had gone beyound a massive world map and a few months of play.  No campaign bible ever was created and all notes were in my head.  I used to be a very spontaneously creative person able to adlib things endlessly.  Or at least I was secure in my personal knowledge that I was good in it, instead of wrapped in self doubt.  I never had a blank page like I am plagued with now. I didn't require notes because I created them as I went.  I desperately would love that feel back but creating on word processor and paper is a good second.  Every created D&D world took place on a ball of mud in space, on a planet a bit bigger or a bit smaller than earth.  Usually one side of the planet would be covered by the maps with room for creation later in the age of the creation.  Modern understanding of geography, climate, ocean activity, etc. would all apply creating a world with a "real feel".  Unfortunately this does not lend itself very well to anything fantastical.  There really isn't any land of open lava pools, scorched earth Mordor-style land masses on our earth -- at least not country-sized.  It's fun to take liberties with science.  This is what fantasy is all about.

I have found another interesting thread on one of those boards, this time being about the differences of design approach.  Macro approach of game world design starts with the area map and begins to fill down with geography, countries, features, towns, encounter spots, etc.  Micro approach starts with the Inn where the adventurers start, goes up to the village, county, country, world, etc.  Macro is easier but Micro is more fun.  I think most worlds created for games need to be macro just so material is already prepared for the players to actually encounter.  But I do know that many, as I used to myself, start in Micro mode.  Ad Lib gaming immediately starts in Micro with you creating as you need it, as you encounter it, as it comes into your head.  I am no longer the free-form thinker I once was, no longer as creative as I used to be, no longer as inspired.

I once had a (at least personally) successful game start by tossing the main character into a snow drift naked only to be intimidated by two elves that matched her almost 7' height.  I added to the cold, frigid arctic border world as I needed it and it was one of the most memorable "worlds" I created in recent history.  It began to fall apart as I went to Macro and created too much else.  The cohesive feel of the world got lost as more details were added.

I believe, once a few ground breaking articles have been completed, I will choose an unmapped area of Mohr Vesik and do my original intent at Micro.  I will introduce my (low level commoner) cotter leaving a countryside farmstead and making his way to the nearest village.  What he sees, experiences and encounters will define the way this country works.

I have been worked on about a dozen Fantasy RPG worlds in the past 20 years. I have abandoned all of them. I never got very far on any of them, beyond a large scale map and a few sketchy notes. With Mohr Vesik, I am telling myself I am creating this world because I want to create, not because a game with Marmy depends on it. I want to do my own Campaign Bible (often depicted as a three-ring binder full of notes) for my own creativity's sake.

I started by just writing notes everywhere, having a pink notebook beside the bed, a virtual folder on my traveldrive (mirrored on PC) and a small notebook in my bag -- they always say that you should take notes whenever they come to you. I looked at this scattered pile of notes and decided I needed some continuity, some thread of Law in the Chaos. I came up with the idea of Articles -- where I write a topic with a cohesive beginning and end, broken down with a basic outline. For example, the first article I am writing is the full description of the central breadbasket nation, Hyrmdaal. This will be an exercise in too much or too little. It's not about writing only what you need, as is often considered sacrosanct in campaign design, it's about being completionist. I want my world to have it all covered, not right at the beginning but as it progresses. Follow-up articles about Hyrmdaal might include focuses on the capital city of Genrovi or a breakdown of the two pantheons that make up religion in the country. I also get to play with layout & design by making it readable when printed.

More focused on the actual game that is playing out in Mohr Vesik, I am writing thoughts and ideas on my VoxBlog, over at passerby.vox.com. In fact, I will mirror this there. That is where I write out of context, where I write not with the Voice of the World in mind but with me in mind, as if to an audience -- most likely an audience of me. Marmy can choose to read or not too read; I doubt it will be very spoilerific.

Anywayz, the start of this post was to link to a couple of threads going on in the Game Design Forums. The original topic was, "What do you consider 'Traditional' GM prep?" and it led into "The Abyssal Guide: Create A Bog-Standard Dungeony Fantasy Campaign With Dungeons. My favourite comment was the reference to "fairly caveman stuff" which is basically saying, "This is the stuff that has existed for ages and everybody knows how to do it." But not everybody does and not everybody does it the same way. I like reading other people's methods because I don't really have any. It's nice to get basic hints and suggestions.

The first fully mapped area of Mohr Vesik was the breadbasket country of Hyrmdaal.  This was designed to be the safe English countryside image of my fantasy world.  Quaint little villages and hamlets dot the patchworked rolling hills and sparse copses of hardwood trees.  It's Shakespeare's Italy, it's Tolkien's The Shire and has far as D&D Worlds are concerned, it's as safe as safe can get.  But what does safe mean in a fantasy world?  Well to me, it mainly means that there are not tribes of evil humanoids living around every corner, there are not wandering monsters and dragons camped out in every wilderness and there are not a dozen and a half spots on the map that are marked as DO NOT GO HERE.  A cotter can pick up his gear, walk cross country through some fields gone fallow, over a gentle brook, through a windbreak that has grown thick in the last hundred years and into the next county without having to worry about goblins, orcs and kobolds interrupting his journey with an untimely death.  The roads are well travelled and the Queen's Riders take care of most of the bandits.  What monsters that are left are in out of the way places and usually they are just nasty beasts that leave men alone as long as men leave them alone.

But this doesn't leave much room for adventure outside political intrigues and crime stories.  But I have never been happy with D&D being about gritty, human-centric tales.  D&D is chock full of monsters and monsters should dominate the enemies of the characters.  How do I introduce monsters into a land that is supposed to know none? 

One typical way is to use the Rising Evil plotline.  We already know that The End is only twenty five years away, that Mohr Vesik is going to experience the same apocalypse that plagued the people in the Olde Worlde.  The people brought this apocalypse with them.  So, it has to start somewhere and what better place than in the seat of good, quiet and peace.  Perhaps corruption is being seeded into the nobles, especially those involved in intrigues against the Queen.  Perhaps outside forces, those that want to depose the current nobility and restore the Theocracy, are being influenced by true demons from below the ground.  For in Mohr Vesik, like Eberron, those beings from Hell called Demons and Devils truly do come from below the ground, deep in caverns boiling with fire and lava.  Perhaps ancient crypts, those that sealed in great evils from kingdoms long gone to dust, are being cracked open letting loose undead and even stranger evils.  But if so, it has to be introduced gradually so as to allow her to experience what is good and safe about the country while realizing that it is becoming not so much.

Or, Hyrmdaal can stay the safe country for now.  Let the journey out of this safe, and basically boring, countryside be relatively safe and only have a few mild encounters of no consequence. But once the borders to the plains of the north are reached, things can change.  This is a land not all that populated by men & demihumans, but barely tamed in a few towns and villages.  The catfolk dominate as the demihuman race of the plains.  But creatures monstrous and strange do frequent the area such as Ogre riding Goblins from the northern end of the plains.  And the cold blooded naga that keeps to rocky areas avoided by strong folk.    And once pathways are made out of Hyrmdaal, more dangerous activities and encounters are presented until the treasure trove is found at the end of the journey.

How safe she is completely depends on her though...

I have been coming to Vox on and off and not really doing anything with the site.  It really lends itself to the "more than a blurb" style of blogging.  I am not really about the article style of blogging, nor can I think about dedicating it to reviewing.  So, what do I dedicate this sub-set of my blogdom to because I really do not want to abandon it.

Well, another focus I have had in the last few years, when I started noticing that as I pushed more into my brain, I was losing focus on other things.  Too much mass consumerism. With the use of Bit Torrent over the years, I can consume pop culture in an unending stream.  But I feel this need to export it as well, as in, "If I am enjoying it then I must SHARE my enjoyment."  Thus, I feel this site will become such.

Welcome to the Geekitude.  Soon will come not so much as reviews but ponderings, revelations, sharing and thoughts about all the aspects of geeky pop-culture consumerism.