I can't hunt down who first said it-- it may just be unattributed wisdom-- but it's a common trope that "geography is destiny." Thinking about names and cultures yesterday reminded me of this. There's an argument to be made that your fantasy desert will develop a nomadic culture who wears lots of loose, flowing clothing and uses words like "djinn" and, well, "Al-Qadim." After all, there's a reason real-world desert dwellers don't wear furs and build huge stone castles (Dubai notwithstanding). They don't have the resources for such a lifestyle, nor would it help them survive.
Furthermore, a real linguist might be able to explain how the languages of the Middle East, with their easily recognizable phonemes from the Arabic and Persian languages, are a natural consequence of this way of life. I couldn't-- but it's possible.
But we have one thing they don't have. We have magic. I think this is really the point I'm trying to make. Fantasy world-building lets us break the rules that tie down real-world human cultures. Maybe instead of developing a nomadic culture that flits from oasis to oasis, our desert-dwellers quickly discovered that their magicians could dig deep to the pockets of water far below the sands. Maybe this led to a system of aqueducts that brought water from heavily-defended, highly-developed water castles to outlying towns. A feudal model develops in which the lord provides his vassals water, not just protection. Technology advances quickly, always seeking better ways of pumping water from underground and transporting it long distances (with a little magical help, of course). When desert kingdoms go to war, they tear down each other's aqueducts instead of razing cropland. Or maybe they don't war-- the water economy has brought wealth to the lords and kings, and so this desert land is peaceful and prosperous. Its inventors and mages dream of one day turning the barren desert into a lush, flowering land, and scholars from all over flock to this center of learning.
And maybe all these desert kings are dwarves named Jason Thompson. A guy can dream, right?
Friday, December 30, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Bonus Round: Place Names
I had another thought about place names in fantasy world-building after my lengthy post the other day. There's a fourth factor that goes into fantasy naming (there are probably lots more, but this one jumped out): most fantasy names are chosen for their phonic relationship to English.
Think about it. For all the work Tolkien did in creating the Elvish language, he based it, sound-wise at least, on Icelandic. Why? Because to English ears, Icelandic is a freaking beautiful, mysterious-sounding, musical language. I can't say if Icelandic people think their language is particularly beautiful-- it's entirely possible that they do-- but at a certain level, it just has to sound normal to them. When one Icelander says to the other, "Please don't forget to chop the heads off the fish before you weigh them. You overcharged me last time," the fishmonger probably isn't thinking, "My God, how lovely!"
Similarly, for our Dwarven names, we tend to pick up on Germanic sounds as being somehow heavy, serious, and humorless (even though everybody always roleplays dwarves as having Scottish accents). Orcish, too, tends to be heavy on the glottal consonant sounds that we think of as "ugly" in languages like German.
I think all this has to do with a certain Anglo-American chauvinism about being the center of culture. We hear certain languages in a certain way, so we replicate and amplify those opinions as fantastic names. This chauvinism isn't limited to names and languages, though; it extends to culture design when Western fantasists are world-building. The biggest offender here is Forgotten Realms. I adore the Realms, always have, but outside of the main parts of Faerun, which get really developed, every other nation is a thinly-veiled analogue of a real-world stereotype. The list is too long to recount, but some particular examples include Kozakura, an island empire full of honor-obsessed samurai, an animistic nature religion, and even a criminal empire called the yakuza; and Zakhara, a desert caliphate abounding in genies. The Western-fantasy Faerun gets some 20 countries, but everything else is boiled down to a one-nation-per-stereotype model.
This is going in a rantier direction than intended, but my point is basically this: think about the sounds you choose. There's an argument to be made for the accessibility of using an English-based phonic model, where elves get all the vowels and dwarves get all the consonants and everybody feels comfortable. You may recall that there's an entire appendix in The Return of the King where Tolkien explains how he changed every single name so it would have the aural resonance to an English speaker that it does in the original language (Lord of the Rings being a translation of the Red Book of Westmarch, of course). I can't tell you how upset I was at age 18 when I learned Frodo was really named Froda. Notice how "Froda" sounds like a woman's name to us. This is because 60% of English vocabulary is from Latin, and in Latin, -a was usually a feminine ending. Now, I'm sure the good professor Tolkien had an excellent etymological reason why hobbit names would have an -a ending, but he also knew that it would sound really weird to his readers to have a male hero named Froda. So he called him Frodo in the book and explained it all in a strangely alienating appendix. (Bonus Round: The worst movie I've ever seen, Where the Heart Is, features a main character who names her daughter "Americus," because apparently you should always name your daughter the masculine version of a feminine name.)
But it doesn't have to be this way. The same way that your desert nation doesn't have to feature nomadic camel-riders with harems of veiled belly dancers, your orc names don't all have to be harsh monosyllables. What if your orc were named Valariel Moondrop, your elf were named Arktos Battlehammer, and your dwarf were named Jason Thompson?
Upsetting, isn't it?
Think about it. For all the work Tolkien did in creating the Elvish language, he based it, sound-wise at least, on Icelandic. Why? Because to English ears, Icelandic is a freaking beautiful, mysterious-sounding, musical language. I can't say if Icelandic people think their language is particularly beautiful-- it's entirely possible that they do-- but at a certain level, it just has to sound normal to them. When one Icelander says to the other, "Please don't forget to chop the heads off the fish before you weigh them. You overcharged me last time," the fishmonger probably isn't thinking, "My God, how lovely!"
Similarly, for our Dwarven names, we tend to pick up on Germanic sounds as being somehow heavy, serious, and humorless (even though everybody always roleplays dwarves as having Scottish accents). Orcish, too, tends to be heavy on the glottal consonant sounds that we think of as "ugly" in languages like German.
I think all this has to do with a certain Anglo-American chauvinism about being the center of culture. We hear certain languages in a certain way, so we replicate and amplify those opinions as fantastic names. This chauvinism isn't limited to names and languages, though; it extends to culture design when Western fantasists are world-building. The biggest offender here is Forgotten Realms. I adore the Realms, always have, but outside of the main parts of Faerun, which get really developed, every other nation is a thinly-veiled analogue of a real-world stereotype. The list is too long to recount, but some particular examples include Kozakura, an island empire full of honor-obsessed samurai, an animistic nature religion, and even a criminal empire called the yakuza; and Zakhara, a desert caliphate abounding in genies. The Western-fantasy Faerun gets some 20 countries, but everything else is boiled down to a one-nation-per-stereotype model.
This is going in a rantier direction than intended, but my point is basically this: think about the sounds you choose. There's an argument to be made for the accessibility of using an English-based phonic model, where elves get all the vowels and dwarves get all the consonants and everybody feels comfortable. You may recall that there's an entire appendix in The Return of the King where Tolkien explains how he changed every single name so it would have the aural resonance to an English speaker that it does in the original language (Lord of the Rings being a translation of the Red Book of Westmarch, of course). I can't tell you how upset I was at age 18 when I learned Frodo was really named Froda. Notice how "Froda" sounds like a woman's name to us. This is because 60% of English vocabulary is from Latin, and in Latin, -a was usually a feminine ending. Now, I'm sure the good professor Tolkien had an excellent etymological reason why hobbit names would have an -a ending, but he also knew that it would sound really weird to his readers to have a male hero named Froda. So he called him Frodo in the book and explained it all in a strangely alienating appendix. (Bonus Round: The worst movie I've ever seen, Where the Heart Is, features a main character who names her daughter "Americus," because apparently you should always name your daughter the masculine version of a feminine name.)
But it doesn't have to be this way. The same way that your desert nation doesn't have to feature nomadic camel-riders with harems of veiled belly dancers, your orc names don't all have to be harsh monosyllables. What if your orc were named Valariel Moondrop, your elf were named Arktos Battlehammer, and your dwarf were named Jason Thompson?
Upsetting, isn't it?
Thursday, December 22, 2011
World-Building: Place Names
I'm a few hundred pages into A Feast for Crows, the fourth of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, and I've been thinking about place names. Martin has a great ability to come up with evocative, informative place names; the name always tells us something about the place, and sometimes something about the people who live there.
There are a few main ways in which places get their names, both in the real world and in fantasy worlds. Many places are named for their physical features: Martin's the Fingers, the Bay of Ice, the Frozen Shore, or the Trident-- or Long Island or the Green Mountains, to name two from around where I grew up. Other places are named for people and events: King's Landing and Torrhen's Square remind me of Washington Crossing and Martha's Vineyard. Finally, some place names remain from civilizations now gone. I honestly can't put my finger on an example from Martin at the moment but they abound in America, where we often memorialized the displaced Native Americans with names like Utah and South Dakota, and in Britain, places like Sussex, Wessex and Essex-- or even "England" itself.
Martin's Iron Islands remind me of the Calendar Islands in Casco Bay, Maine, where I spent summers as a kid-- or at least, how I imagine the islands of Maine are for year-rounders, a tough, harsh place peopled with leathery survivors for whom the ocean is both life and death. The place names have a bit in common: the Great Wyk and Old Wyk of the Iron Islands remind me of the Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague of my youth, and one can imagine that both island pairs were named by a no-nonsense folk.
Many names are like this: people took a look around and called 'em like they saw 'em. Martin's continent of Westeros is full of this, and looking out into Casco Bay from the porch, I'd see Long Island, Little Chebeague, Inner Green and Outer Green, Deer Point, Crow Island... Not one of the names holds any mystery as to where it came from, not even Junk-of-Pork: "Junk" is an old Maineism for a piece of something, a variation on "hunk". Presumably the little spit of rock looked like a hunk of meat to some old sea captain. Even the "Chebeague" that mystifies so many visitors' pronunciation organs is no mystery: it means "land of many springs" in the language of the Native Americans who used to live in the area. (My memory wants me to say it was the Abenaki tribe, but I'm not sure of that. And by the way, it's pronounced "shuh-BEEG" by we normals and "shuh-BIG" by true Mainers.)
"King's Landing" is probably my favorite of Martin's place names. The city stands on the spot where Aegon the Conqueror landed in Westeros and began kicking ass and taking kingdoms. Awesome? Yes. Fantastical? Nope. Up in Pennsylvania they have a little town called Washington Crossing, at the spot where George Washington crossed the Delaware River and began kicking Hessians and fathering nations.
Places named for famous people are more common, though. There are tons of US states named for people; Wikipedia does a better job with this than I ever could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_name_etymologies
The US states example reminds us of an important fact: it's usually the powerful who do the naming. Just as history is written by the victors, so are names. Apparently King Charles II named a lot of our states. Why? He was king when England was exploring the New World, so he got to name everything. It's good to be the king.
Some of the most evocative names come from those who went before. Fully half of US states (25, sez Wikipedia) have names derived from Native American languages (counting Hawaiian). To pick a few, Massachusetts comes from the Algonquian for "at the great hill," Kentucky from the Iroquoian for "on the prairie," and Mississippi from the Ojibwe for "great river." Of course, back in the day these were just physical description names, but now they're remnants of a culture all but destroyed. Similarly, in England we have Essex, Wessex, and Sussex, which basically mean East Saxon, West Saxon, and South Saxon, for the Germanic invaders who ruled during the Dark Ages. "England" itself means "land of the Angles," the dudes who shared invading duties with the Saxons.
In America, we get double-duty names-- Essex, Connecticut is named for the English county. Westchester County, New York is named for Chester, England (as New York is from the town of York)-- but "chester," a common part of place names in England, comes from "castra," a Latin word meaning "camp." Back and back we go. Names repeat. You can even hike the Green Mountains of Vermont, which is French for "green mountain."
So what has this to do with roleplaying games? I think it's obvious, but if not: you can do a lot with names. You can show us how your townsfolk view the world, tell us whom an old king wished to honor, or give us glimpses of an ancient language. Names are an extremely important tool of world-building, and should always be crafted to give depth to your campaign setting.
There are a few main ways in which places get their names, both in the real world and in fantasy worlds. Many places are named for their physical features: Martin's the Fingers, the Bay of Ice, the Frozen Shore, or the Trident-- or Long Island or the Green Mountains, to name two from around where I grew up. Other places are named for people and events: King's Landing and Torrhen's Square remind me of Washington Crossing and Martha's Vineyard. Finally, some place names remain from civilizations now gone. I honestly can't put my finger on an example from Martin at the moment but they abound in America, where we often memorialized the displaced Native Americans with names like Utah and South Dakota, and in Britain, places like Sussex, Wessex and Essex-- or even "England" itself.
Martin's Iron Islands remind me of the Calendar Islands in Casco Bay, Maine, where I spent summers as a kid-- or at least, how I imagine the islands of Maine are for year-rounders, a tough, harsh place peopled with leathery survivors for whom the ocean is both life and death. The place names have a bit in common: the Great Wyk and Old Wyk of the Iron Islands remind me of the Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague of my youth, and one can imagine that both island pairs were named by a no-nonsense folk.
Many names are like this: people took a look around and called 'em like they saw 'em. Martin's continent of Westeros is full of this, and looking out into Casco Bay from the porch, I'd see Long Island, Little Chebeague, Inner Green and Outer Green, Deer Point, Crow Island... Not one of the names holds any mystery as to where it came from, not even Junk-of-Pork: "Junk" is an old Maineism for a piece of something, a variation on "hunk". Presumably the little spit of rock looked like a hunk of meat to some old sea captain. Even the "Chebeague" that mystifies so many visitors' pronunciation organs is no mystery: it means "land of many springs" in the language of the Native Americans who used to live in the area. (My memory wants me to say it was the Abenaki tribe, but I'm not sure of that. And by the way, it's pronounced "shuh-BEEG" by we normals and "shuh-BIG" by true Mainers.)
"King's Landing" is probably my favorite of Martin's place names. The city stands on the spot where Aegon the Conqueror landed in Westeros and began kicking ass and taking kingdoms. Awesome? Yes. Fantastical? Nope. Up in Pennsylvania they have a little town called Washington Crossing, at the spot where George Washington crossed the Delaware River and began kicking Hessians and fathering nations.
Places named for famous people are more common, though. There are tons of US states named for people; Wikipedia does a better job with this than I ever could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_name_etymologies
The US states example reminds us of an important fact: it's usually the powerful who do the naming. Just as history is written by the victors, so are names. Apparently King Charles II named a lot of our states. Why? He was king when England was exploring the New World, so he got to name everything. It's good to be the king.
Some of the most evocative names come from those who went before. Fully half of US states (25, sez Wikipedia) have names derived from Native American languages (counting Hawaiian). To pick a few, Massachusetts comes from the Algonquian for "at the great hill," Kentucky from the Iroquoian for "on the prairie," and Mississippi from the Ojibwe for "great river." Of course, back in the day these were just physical description names, but now they're remnants of a culture all but destroyed. Similarly, in England we have Essex, Wessex, and Sussex, which basically mean East Saxon, West Saxon, and South Saxon, for the Germanic invaders who ruled during the Dark Ages. "England" itself means "land of the Angles," the dudes who shared invading duties with the Saxons.
In America, we get double-duty names-- Essex, Connecticut is named for the English county. Westchester County, New York is named for Chester, England (as New York is from the town of York)-- but "chester," a common part of place names in England, comes from "castra," a Latin word meaning "camp." Back and back we go. Names repeat. You can even hike the Green Mountains of Vermont, which is French for "green mountain."
So what has this to do with roleplaying games? I think it's obvious, but if not: you can do a lot with names. You can show us how your townsfolk view the world, tell us whom an old king wished to honor, or give us glimpses of an ancient language. Names are an extremely important tool of world-building, and should always be crafted to give depth to your campaign setting.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
On the Fly: Two-Line Taverns
As pirates, my players spend a large amount of time in dockside taverns. They're constantly saying things like "Is there a tavern nearby?" and "Where's the nearest tavern?" and "As far as taverns go, when ranked in terms nearness, is there a particular stand-out winner of which we are aware?" Combine this with their predilection for making enemies and I have to constantly be on my toes about making up new bars, inns, pubs, winesinks, and boozeholes.
When we started the campaign, I'd come up with two, a nicer one and a seedier one, both in Freeport, the pirate city. (Note that all my Freeport shares with the published campaign setting is a name. This is a coincidence brought on by the fact that "Freeport" is clearly the best name for a pirate city ever.) They quickly got into a fight at the first, then left the city for a while and headed to Monmouth, the nearest port on the mainland. Then they went looking for taverns in Monmouth.
Anyway, I'm a strong believer that for setting stuff like this, give everything-- a place, an item, an NPC-- one defining feature to make it somewhat memorable. My players are generally of the sort that don't care to spend a lot of time learning an NPC's family history or examining the carvings on an inn's walls, so I just don't bother. I'll give you the brief descriptions I've come up with for four taverns; each one really has just one defining feature, maybe two. Thus we get the two-line tavern: a name and a feature, and not much else. If any of these places become regular haunts, I'll flesh them out, but if not, no time was wasted!
If you feel inspired, post your own two-line taverns in the comments. Or just steal mine-- goodness knows I just steal everything from George R.R. Martin and my older brother anyway.
The Drunk Apprentice
The most famous tavern in town, the Drunk Apprentice is so much a Freeport institution that unlike the other local watering holes, it was around before Freeport was formed. In fact, it’s been around for two hundred years, run by the same man, a now-aged eladrin named Aramil.
I wanted to give the sense of this tavern as a real institution. It started back when Freeport was still an Exonian town, before the collapse of Exonia, but was so beloved that it remained even when Freeport became a lawless pirate haven. Naturally, my players didn't care, and immediately made Aramil kick them out and went looking for a seedier place to drink.
The Grinning Goblin
A seedy tavern run by one Mork, the Grinning Goblin is known for its barfights, which often provide opportunities for betting by those who aren’t fighting. Ale is served by the waitress/prostitute Myndi.
Yeah, Mork and Myndi. I know. I had to come up with a gobliny name on the fly, and my players immediately seized upon "Mork" and started asking where Mindy was. What's a guy to do? Anyway, the "Grinning Goblin" of the bar's name is Mork himself. He's an ugly human, and he has a huge sword cut across his face that gives him a big, permanent grin, a la the Joker. Myndi, meanwhile, is a young elven woman, but is remarkably homely for an elf. It's rumored that she moved to Freeport after coming in last at an Illuvian beauty pageant.
The Twisted Wrist
A Monmouth tavern famous as a hangout for magic-users. Its sign is a hand contorted into a painful-looking shape of the sort necessary for casting spells. It's usually populated by hedge wizards and sea witches showing off cantrips and talking trash. Since everybody knows that mages pick fights with each other when they get drunk, the Twisted Wrist has a large open dirt yard out back where drunken mages can duel without burning the place down (again).
The party picked up two new mages in the last session, so I figured I'd make it easy for them. One of the new characters was replacing an artificer that the player wasn't happy with, and he wanted his new character to kill the old one in a mage's duel, so the dirt yard out back was born.
The Happy Kraken
A fairly respectable dockside tavern in Monmouth, the Happy Kraken is famous for its sign, which is magically animated to show a kraken eating a sailor then grinning.
Not much to say about this one except that my players thought it was a great name for a tavern.
BONUS ROUND: STEAL FROM MY BROTHER LIKE I DO
The Lifted Gate Tavern
The Lifted Gate Tavern is run by a retired dragonborn adventurer named Galbord Bender-of-Bars.
My brother is awesome, and loves old-school D&D.
When we started the campaign, I'd come up with two, a nicer one and a seedier one, both in Freeport, the pirate city. (Note that all my Freeport shares with the published campaign setting is a name. This is a coincidence brought on by the fact that "Freeport" is clearly the best name for a pirate city ever.) They quickly got into a fight at the first, then left the city for a while and headed to Monmouth, the nearest port on the mainland. Then they went looking for taverns in Monmouth.
Anyway, I'm a strong believer that for setting stuff like this, give everything-- a place, an item, an NPC-- one defining feature to make it somewhat memorable. My players are generally of the sort that don't care to spend a lot of time learning an NPC's family history or examining the carvings on an inn's walls, so I just don't bother. I'll give you the brief descriptions I've come up with for four taverns; each one really has just one defining feature, maybe two. Thus we get the two-line tavern: a name and a feature, and not much else. If any of these places become regular haunts, I'll flesh them out, but if not, no time was wasted!
If you feel inspired, post your own two-line taverns in the comments. Or just steal mine-- goodness knows I just steal everything from George R.R. Martin and my older brother anyway.
The Drunk Apprentice
The most famous tavern in town, the Drunk Apprentice is so much a Freeport institution that unlike the other local watering holes, it was around before Freeport was formed. In fact, it’s been around for two hundred years, run by the same man, a now-aged eladrin named Aramil.
I wanted to give the sense of this tavern as a real institution. It started back when Freeport was still an Exonian town, before the collapse of Exonia, but was so beloved that it remained even when Freeport became a lawless pirate haven. Naturally, my players didn't care, and immediately made Aramil kick them out and went looking for a seedier place to drink.
The Grinning Goblin
A seedy tavern run by one Mork, the Grinning Goblin is known for its barfights, which often provide opportunities for betting by those who aren’t fighting. Ale is served by the waitress/prostitute Myndi.
Yeah, Mork and Myndi. I know. I had to come up with a gobliny name on the fly, and my players immediately seized upon "Mork" and started asking where Mindy was. What's a guy to do? Anyway, the "Grinning Goblin" of the bar's name is Mork himself. He's an ugly human, and he has a huge sword cut across his face that gives him a big, permanent grin, a la the Joker. Myndi, meanwhile, is a young elven woman, but is remarkably homely for an elf. It's rumored that she moved to Freeport after coming in last at an Illuvian beauty pageant.
The Twisted Wrist
A Monmouth tavern famous as a hangout for magic-users. Its sign is a hand contorted into a painful-looking shape of the sort necessary for casting spells. It's usually populated by hedge wizards and sea witches showing off cantrips and talking trash. Since everybody knows that mages pick fights with each other when they get drunk, the Twisted Wrist has a large open dirt yard out back where drunken mages can duel without burning the place down (again).
The party picked up two new mages in the last session, so I figured I'd make it easy for them. One of the new characters was replacing an artificer that the player wasn't happy with, and he wanted his new character to kill the old one in a mage's duel, so the dirt yard out back was born.
The Happy Kraken
A fairly respectable dockside tavern in Monmouth, the Happy Kraken is famous for its sign, which is magically animated to show a kraken eating a sailor then grinning.
Not much to say about this one except that my players thought it was a great name for a tavern.
BONUS ROUND: STEAL FROM MY BROTHER LIKE I DO
The Lifted Gate Tavern
The Lifted Gate Tavern is run by a retired dragonborn adventurer named Galbord Bender-of-Bars.
My brother is awesome, and loves old-school D&D.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Six Sessions Deep: Part 3
What the Players Want
I've already touched on this in the last two posts, but I'll lay it out here. The players clearly came into the campaign with a different idea of how it would run than I did. For me, the pirate theme was something of a fluff reskin by which I could run a West Marches campaign without being a total thief. I figured I'd give them a ship and a sea, but otherwise they'd spend their time exploring, dungeon-delving, and so on. This is not what they want to do. At all. As I mentioned, there was much good-natured bitching about being in the sewers for so long.
Much of the players' plans so far involve taking ships and stealing from merchants. I've given them two clues about where they could explore-- once in the first session, saying that the local holiday, the Feast of Fools, was a time when everybody gets drunk and spills secrets and rumors; and again in the second session, when I pretty much gave them a treasure map with three X's. Both sallies were ignored, so I stopped trying. If they want to explore, the eleven encounter sites I spent countless hours creating are out there. If they just want to sail up and down the coast seeing what the random encounter tables throw at them, that's cool too.
We'll have to see where the players want to go in terms of actual plot. They can ignore plot hooks and stick to random encounters, that's fine, but I'm going to keep throwing them out there to see if anyone bites. They sold off the Bloodstone of Morgai, for example, but that doesn't mean it's just disappeared from the universe. The Most Honorable Guild of Wealth Redistribution still wants it back-- the same Guild who sent them into the sewers, whose Lieutenant Morgrim the cleric attacked, and whose ship they stole.
My players certainly love making enemies, that's for damn sure.
I've already touched on this in the last two posts, but I'll lay it out here. The players clearly came into the campaign with a different idea of how it would run than I did. For me, the pirate theme was something of a fluff reskin by which I could run a West Marches campaign without being a total thief. I figured I'd give them a ship and a sea, but otherwise they'd spend their time exploring, dungeon-delving, and so on. This is not what they want to do. At all. As I mentioned, there was much good-natured bitching about being in the sewers for so long.
Much of the players' plans so far involve taking ships and stealing from merchants. I've given them two clues about where they could explore-- once in the first session, saying that the local holiday, the Feast of Fools, was a time when everybody gets drunk and spills secrets and rumors; and again in the second session, when I pretty much gave them a treasure map with three X's. Both sallies were ignored, so I stopped trying. If they want to explore, the eleven encounter sites I spent countless hours creating are out there. If they just want to sail up and down the coast seeing what the random encounter tables throw at them, that's cool too.
We'll have to see where the players want to go in terms of actual plot. They can ignore plot hooks and stick to random encounters, that's fine, but I'm going to keep throwing them out there to see if anyone bites. They sold off the Bloodstone of Morgai, for example, but that doesn't mean it's just disappeared from the universe. The Most Honorable Guild of Wealth Redistribution still wants it back-- the same Guild who sent them into the sewers, whose Lieutenant Morgrim the cleric attacked, and whose ship they stole.
My players certainly love making enemies, that's for damn sure.
Six Sessions Deep: Part 2
What Isn't Working
There isn't really anything that's been a total failure, which is a great feeling given how much I made up out of whole cloth as I prepped for the campaign. There are, however, plenty of things that need tweaking.
1. The random encounter tables might be a little too exciting. The party is already joking that there's never good weather in the Ruby Sea, and the "you're caught in a storm" skill challenges are already getting a bit old. I'll probably tweak the table to reduce the incidence of bad weather. We've had two random monster attacks, one per session, which feels decent to me. The random ship encounters table might need to be cut down a bit as well, although the party has stayed in coastal waters where ships are more common.
2. The big dungeons aren't a big hit. The party spent about two and a half sessions in the sewers beneath Freeport, and I had one player, a big RPer, say he was glad he missed session 3, which was all sewer, so he could skip that boring dungeon stuff and get back to the good parts. Granted, the players just happened to get stuck in the sewers at the end of their first session there, which by no means had to happen-- it was just bad luck on their part. But there was a feeling that they were traipsing through room after room of slimes and rats, and when the guy who sent them down there asked for his cut of treasure, they immediately gave up the three mysterious keys they found in the sewers, which says to me "WE ARE NEVER GOING DOWN THERE AGAIN." Less dungeoncrawling-- no prob. Also, my dream of making the players map the dungeons on graph paper died pretty quickly. I resorted to handwaving over the long, twisty corridors (except where they had choices of direction) and emailing out a map showing what they had explored so far after each session. I love mapping enormous dungeons more than a dwarven miner with OCD, but most people don't, I guess.
3. Treasure distribution is a little hazy right now. The tricky thing is that we have a core of people at almost every game, a few who make about half the games, and a few who've only played one session for various reasons. Much to their credit, the players independently decided that all treasure would go to a single pot, which anyone could use as long as their decision was approved by all at the table. (In game, this is a big chest aboard their ship with five locks, and each player at the table has one key, so all the PCs have to agree to open the chest.) The trouble is that any table of players can make choices that other players might not like. For example, at the last session, a small table of only three players sold off everything but the party's new ship. One player who wasn't at the game was incredulous when he heard about this later on our email listserv. This method also means that I may rethink my treasure distribution methods. Having an open pot means that more players are using the treasure than just those who earned it, which to me suggests giving out a bit more treasure to keep all the players about equal, since I'm now giving treasure that can be used by ten PCs, not just whoever's at that session. However, I want to keep the magic item count low, so I may continue giving treasure at the current rate and let that be its own mechanic by which no one PC can buy too much magic crap.
4. I'm still working on getting inspired by the random tables, though I'm definitely improving at it. The first time I rolled for a day at sea, I went step by step: "Okay, you're getting attacked by frogs... there's a storm... and a fishing boat." My players immediately lit into me: "Are they saltwater frogs? Are they deep-sea fishermen?" Not exactly an inspiring way to get them the information. I tried to backtrack a bit, but this is what I should have done.
Nat makes three secret rolls, then pauses a moment to think.
"Okay, the sun goes down, and as night falls a storm blows up. (Skill Challenge to weather the storm.) You get your sails down and stowed before the stormy winds can tear them loose, and all seems safe for a moment. But then you hear a strange bumping sound from the port side of your ship. ... As you peer down, you see a little fishing boat, clearly blown far out to sea by the storm. You can barely make out a few corpses lying in the bottom of the boat. Before you can wonder what could have killed these fishermen, the question is answered as four giant frogs leap out of the shadows and begin climbing the side of your ship!"
In other words, get all the info for myself, quickly decide how I want to put it together, then let the scene play out naturally. This should have involved a little mood-setting on my part, a little chatter from the players, some Perception checks, and so on before the combat began. "You're attacked by frogs" is lame.
There isn't really anything that's been a total failure, which is a great feeling given how much I made up out of whole cloth as I prepped for the campaign. There are, however, plenty of things that need tweaking.
1. The random encounter tables might be a little too exciting. The party is already joking that there's never good weather in the Ruby Sea, and the "you're caught in a storm" skill challenges are already getting a bit old. I'll probably tweak the table to reduce the incidence of bad weather. We've had two random monster attacks, one per session, which feels decent to me. The random ship encounters table might need to be cut down a bit as well, although the party has stayed in coastal waters where ships are more common.
2. The big dungeons aren't a big hit. The party spent about two and a half sessions in the sewers beneath Freeport, and I had one player, a big RPer, say he was glad he missed session 3, which was all sewer, so he could skip that boring dungeon stuff and get back to the good parts. Granted, the players just happened to get stuck in the sewers at the end of their first session there, which by no means had to happen-- it was just bad luck on their part. But there was a feeling that they were traipsing through room after room of slimes and rats, and when the guy who sent them down there asked for his cut of treasure, they immediately gave up the three mysterious keys they found in the sewers, which says to me "WE ARE NEVER GOING DOWN THERE AGAIN." Less dungeoncrawling-- no prob. Also, my dream of making the players map the dungeons on graph paper died pretty quickly. I resorted to handwaving over the long, twisty corridors (except where they had choices of direction) and emailing out a map showing what they had explored so far after each session. I love mapping enormous dungeons more than a dwarven miner with OCD, but most people don't, I guess.
3. Treasure distribution is a little hazy right now. The tricky thing is that we have a core of people at almost every game, a few who make about half the games, and a few who've only played one session for various reasons. Much to their credit, the players independently decided that all treasure would go to a single pot, which anyone could use as long as their decision was approved by all at the table. (In game, this is a big chest aboard their ship with five locks, and each player at the table has one key, so all the PCs have to agree to open the chest.) The trouble is that any table of players can make choices that other players might not like. For example, at the last session, a small table of only three players sold off everything but the party's new ship. One player who wasn't at the game was incredulous when he heard about this later on our email listserv. This method also means that I may rethink my treasure distribution methods. Having an open pot means that more players are using the treasure than just those who earned it, which to me suggests giving out a bit more treasure to keep all the players about equal, since I'm now giving treasure that can be used by ten PCs, not just whoever's at that session. However, I want to keep the magic item count low, so I may continue giving treasure at the current rate and let that be its own mechanic by which no one PC can buy too much magic crap.
4. I'm still working on getting inspired by the random tables, though I'm definitely improving at it. The first time I rolled for a day at sea, I went step by step: "Okay, you're getting attacked by frogs... there's a storm... and a fishing boat." My players immediately lit into me: "Are they saltwater frogs? Are they deep-sea fishermen?" Not exactly an inspiring way to get them the information. I tried to backtrack a bit, but this is what I should have done.
Nat makes three secret rolls, then pauses a moment to think.
"Okay, the sun goes down, and as night falls a storm blows up. (Skill Challenge to weather the storm.) You get your sails down and stowed before the stormy winds can tear them loose, and all seems safe for a moment. But then you hear a strange bumping sound from the port side of your ship. ... As you peer down, you see a little fishing boat, clearly blown far out to sea by the storm. You can barely make out a few corpses lying in the bottom of the boat. Before you can wonder what could have killed these fishermen, the question is answered as four giant frogs leap out of the shadows and begin climbing the side of your ship!"
In other words, get all the info for myself, quickly decide how I want to put it together, then let the scene play out naturally. This should have involved a little mood-setting on my part, a little chatter from the players, some Perception checks, and so on before the combat began. "You're attacked by frogs" is lame.
Six Sessions Deep
Well, I've finally gotten some time actually playing Kings of the Endless Sea-- six sessions, to be exact. I've already learned quite a bit about what's working, what's broken, and what my players want. Let's do a rundown.
What's Working
Generally speaking, I'm really enjoying the sandbox ethos. There's simply no need to prepare a plot beforehand: I can always count on my players to come up with plenty to do, when you combine their expectations, assumptions, and misunderstandings into a big stew of "I meant it like that." For example, I pretty much handed the party a small ship at the start of the first session so they could get down to the work of exploration. They immediately decided their primary goal was to get a better ship. In session four, they got that ship (stealing it, perhaps a little too easily, but again, I wanted to get them out into the world) and decided that they needed a better ship (since the one they stole was still undergoing repairs). They took a third ship on the high seas, and I'm just hoping they'll be content with it for a while...
What I really love about this style of play is that I can let my imagination go wild, and by pre-planning almost nothing, I can let the mechanics inspire the plot and not the other way around. My favorite example involves the fabled Bloodstone of Morgai. In session five, the players (somewhat stupidly) assaulted a ship belonging to an enemy pirate gang, going up against a crew of twelve on the enemy ship. In mechanical terms, this meant a party of five level-one characters was taking on a level 8 encounter. By all rights they should have been TPK'ed, but thanks to some bum rolls on my part they stuck around long enough to have whittled the opposition down to two level 3 soldiers. At this point one PC was dead, two were unconscious, one was still on the party's ship (the Filth Fever, which is my favorite ship name of all time, and was suggested by a guy who just walked into our game store, sat down at our table for his first D&D session in twenty years, and is now a regular) and one, Bronn the Bold, was facing down the two remaining enemy pirates aboard their ship. One of them put a crossbow bolt through Bronn's neck, dropping him, but his turn was next, and lo and behold he did what nobody else had done through many turns of unconsciousness: roll a 20 on his death saving throw. So of course I ruled that these two pirates, having seen their crew (including their captain, a level 4 elite) mostly butchered, having now seen the towering slayer immediately stand up from what should have been a killing blow, peed their pants in their hurry to surrender (it was also midnight and a raging storm-- thanks, weather table!).
Fast forward to later that night, as I rolled on the Essentials treasure table for a level 8 encounter. My first roll came up with absolutely no treasure except for a gem worth 500 gp. This immediately fired my imagination-- what sort of gem would twelve men be willing to die to safeguard? What sort of pirate ship would be returning home with only one item in its hold? So I decided that it wasn't just a gem, it was the Bloodstone of Morgai, a fabled blood-red ruby from deep in the heart of the jungle, carved with strange depictions of animal gods and human sacrifice. The Bloodstone is widely said to be cursed, and so of course the two pirates who surrendered were convinced that their ship was just the latest in a long line of keepers of the Bloodstone who were struck down by its curse. Surely the theft of such an item wouldn't go unnoticed, making the PCs targets for a retributive strike by those who want it back...
And then the party sold it.
I love this kind of rhapsodizing, weaving a story from the elements I'm given. I like taking player suggestions, as well, to the extent that I sometimes have to stop myself from changing my own plans when a player suggests something that seems cooler. (For example, one player was convinced that the pirate gang lieutenant who sent them to do a mission in the sewers was a lying scoundrel who'd sent them down there to kill them. Convinced. To the extent that his PC attacked the guy when they finally got out of the sewers. I loved this idea, but I didn't want to change my plans too drastically on the fly.)
Other things that have worked: the trip from Freeport (the pirate city) to Monmouth (the nearest port, on the coast of the nation of Exonia) took the better part of two sessions. I really miss the feeling of travel being an integral part of an adventure, or even being the adventure itself. Getting there is half the fun, and my random encounter tables are making getting there a hell of a lot of fun. It was an eight-day journey in game time (six days of travel, one day stuck in the doldrums thanks to a natural 1 on the weather table, one day spent transferring supplies from Filth Fever to the newly-captured ship because one of my players said "We should probably take a day to move the supplies over") and it really felt like a journey. No handwaving "You sail to Monmouth" at my table, dammit. Oh, and I don't even really know why the players decided they needed to go to Monmouth. I think they felt that after attacking a high-up in one of Freeport's five pirate gangs, they should get out of town for a while.
Next post: what isn't working!
What's Working
Generally speaking, I'm really enjoying the sandbox ethos. There's simply no need to prepare a plot beforehand: I can always count on my players to come up with plenty to do, when you combine their expectations, assumptions, and misunderstandings into a big stew of "I meant it like that." For example, I pretty much handed the party a small ship at the start of the first session so they could get down to the work of exploration. They immediately decided their primary goal was to get a better ship. In session four, they got that ship (stealing it, perhaps a little too easily, but again, I wanted to get them out into the world) and decided that they needed a better ship (since the one they stole was still undergoing repairs). They took a third ship on the high seas, and I'm just hoping they'll be content with it for a while...
What I really love about this style of play is that I can let my imagination go wild, and by pre-planning almost nothing, I can let the mechanics inspire the plot and not the other way around. My favorite example involves the fabled Bloodstone of Morgai. In session five, the players (somewhat stupidly) assaulted a ship belonging to an enemy pirate gang, going up against a crew of twelve on the enemy ship. In mechanical terms, this meant a party of five level-one characters was taking on a level 8 encounter. By all rights they should have been TPK'ed, but thanks to some bum rolls on my part they stuck around long enough to have whittled the opposition down to two level 3 soldiers. At this point one PC was dead, two were unconscious, one was still on the party's ship (the Filth Fever, which is my favorite ship name of all time, and was suggested by a guy who just walked into our game store, sat down at our table for his first D&D session in twenty years, and is now a regular) and one, Bronn the Bold, was facing down the two remaining enemy pirates aboard their ship. One of them put a crossbow bolt through Bronn's neck, dropping him, but his turn was next, and lo and behold he did what nobody else had done through many turns of unconsciousness: roll a 20 on his death saving throw. So of course I ruled that these two pirates, having seen their crew (including their captain, a level 4 elite) mostly butchered, having now seen the towering slayer immediately stand up from what should have been a killing blow, peed their pants in their hurry to surrender (it was also midnight and a raging storm-- thanks, weather table!).
Fast forward to later that night, as I rolled on the Essentials treasure table for a level 8 encounter. My first roll came up with absolutely no treasure except for a gem worth 500 gp. This immediately fired my imagination-- what sort of gem would twelve men be willing to die to safeguard? What sort of pirate ship would be returning home with only one item in its hold? So I decided that it wasn't just a gem, it was the Bloodstone of Morgai, a fabled blood-red ruby from deep in the heart of the jungle, carved with strange depictions of animal gods and human sacrifice. The Bloodstone is widely said to be cursed, and so of course the two pirates who surrendered were convinced that their ship was just the latest in a long line of keepers of the Bloodstone who were struck down by its curse. Surely the theft of such an item wouldn't go unnoticed, making the PCs targets for a retributive strike by those who want it back...
And then the party sold it.
I love this kind of rhapsodizing, weaving a story from the elements I'm given. I like taking player suggestions, as well, to the extent that I sometimes have to stop myself from changing my own plans when a player suggests something that seems cooler. (For example, one player was convinced that the pirate gang lieutenant who sent them to do a mission in the sewers was a lying scoundrel who'd sent them down there to kill them. Convinced. To the extent that his PC attacked the guy when they finally got out of the sewers. I loved this idea, but I didn't want to change my plans too drastically on the fly.)
Other things that have worked: the trip from Freeport (the pirate city) to Monmouth (the nearest port, on the coast of the nation of Exonia) took the better part of two sessions. I really miss the feeling of travel being an integral part of an adventure, or even being the adventure itself. Getting there is half the fun, and my random encounter tables are making getting there a hell of a lot of fun. It was an eight-day journey in game time (six days of travel, one day stuck in the doldrums thanks to a natural 1 on the weather table, one day spent transferring supplies from Filth Fever to the newly-captured ship because one of my players said "We should probably take a day to move the supplies over") and it really felt like a journey. No handwaving "You sail to Monmouth" at my table, dammit. Oh, and I don't even really know why the players decided they needed to go to Monmouth. I think they felt that after attacking a high-up in one of Freeport's five pirate gangs, they should get out of town for a while.
Next post: what isn't working!
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