Isgerd's Fury: A Sample Ship for the Black City

Spoken by Heidrek Palson, captain of the Isgerd's Fury:

Welcome to Thule!  We've made it across the whale-road, but before you run off half-aimed into the ruins, we'll set up a camp up the beach and unload the ship.  I'll give you some quick pointers about life on Thule so you don't end up feeding the ravens.

There to the north, where you see the rock wall and the weak smoke coming from a cluster of huts and wood halls - that's Trade Town.  It's run by a Jarl named Bergfinn, and his honor guard keeps the law.  Here on the beach, everyone is subject to Bergfinn's laws - and they're mainly in place to limit the feuds.  There's not much to the town, a mead hall and a smithy, and a place to barter and trade.  Bergfinn's crew arrives at the beginning of summer, same as us.  In return for safety and use of the beach, we give Bergfinn a cut of what we find.  There's a dusk-skinned wizard from the sun-scorched lands that lives in a tower up the cleft from Trade Town, and the wizard pays good silver for artifacts from the city.  They say he returns to his home in the hot lands each night, carried on the wind by a genie.

Look down the beach - you see another half dozen ships pulled ashore like us, making camps?  Most of them are Norwegians from Trondelag, but a few are from the south - Bergen, or the Vik.  From time to time you'll see some Swedes or Danes.  More ships may come as the summer waxes, and they'll start to leave as the captains lose people to the ruins, or run out of supplies.  Bergfinn's laws keep the peace out here on the beach, but it's different in the ruins.  Watch your backs or you'll feed the ravens.

The ruins are a few miles up the shore from Trade Town.  There aren't good places to beach the sea-steeds near the city, it's always misty, and there's always ice in the water, so we make camp down here.  Many folks head to the ruins with picks and shovels and try to excavate treasures right on the surface.  If you're brave, you might use the hole at the Well of Woe to climb down to the tunnels beneath the city, where the treasure is better.

Men that are clever and lucky are able to find sparkling gemstones, triangles of gold and platinum, and things with strange eldritch writings favored by the wizard of the tower.  Find stuff like that, and we'll all go home wealthier men.  But there are snow beasts in the ruins, and they say the dead come back to life in the tunnels under the city and hunt the living.  You'll have plenty of chances to prove you belong in Valhalla.  It's not any safer out here on the shore; the island is infested with the white bears, and they're not afraid of attacking a man.  Don't go anywhere without a good spear.

But first, we need to get camp set up, so we don't freeze to death and feed the ravens ourselves.  Pull the hide tents and wood off the boat, we'll build a covered shelter in one of these dugouts and start a fire.  It doesn't get much warmer all summer, so we bring enough wood and peat to keep a low fire burning the entire time we're on land.  We'll use the ship's hull as a wind-break.  Get a move on, you coal-chewers!

This is the type of background information that will show up in the player's guide for first time visitors to the Black City.  Isgerd's Fury is a default ship usable for one-shots, and Captain Palson makes for a good starter patron.  Either Palson or his first mate, Dag the Proud, are a sources of knowledge and rumors, as this is their second summer guiding a crew to the ruined city.

Below is a list of supplies brought along for a two-month stay on the island.  There's enough food for 16 weeks - 3-4 weeks there and back, and another 8-10 weeks for the summer exploration season.  For groups that are just interested in kicking open doors and bashing monsters, the DM can ignore the logistics and assume it's managed by the NPC's.  For groups that enjoy resource challenges, I'd take things a step further - it's necessary for someone to forage for local food at least once a week to stave off scurvy, as months of preserved rations are insufficient to stay healthy.  Foraging for fresh food includes fishing, hunting seals, walruses, whales, reindeer, and bears, and gathering sea bird eggs - eating fresh meats wards off scurvy.

Here's an inventory on what a Knarr might bring on a journey to Thule, to provision a crew of 16 for a summer-long stay on the islands:

Standard rations, 112 days
Preserved rations, 1680 days
Dry goods barrels, 36 barrels
Beverages - water, mead, beer, 1792 days
Fluid barrels, 36 barrels
Trade goods, 1 quarter ton
Lumber for ship repairs, 1 cord of ship lumber
Extra mast, 1 mast
Extra sail, 1 sail
Spears, 16 items
Axes, 10 items
Knives, 16 items
Blankets and bedrolls, 16 items
Wooden shields, 32 of them
Personal Armor (leather), 16 suits
Personal Gear, 16 backpacks
Winter Clothing, 16 sets
Sea Trunks, 16 trunks
Oars, 8 units
Rope, 10 50' lengths
Tents, 16-man capacity
Cooking Gear, 4 kits
Carpentry tools, 1 kit
Picks and Shovels, 16 tools
Block and Tackle, 1 unit
Wood/peat for fuel, 3 cords
Wooden dinghy, 1 boat

Excluding personal gear in the backpacks and sea trunks, a summer-long expedition would cost around 5,500 sp to outfit, using the silver standard, not counting the cost of the ship.  Once players are 3rd or 4th level, they're in a position to buy and outfit their own ship.  The cargo (including player gear) accounts for around 19 tons - a knarr could carry 25 tons, so there's even a little room to spare.

Isgerd's Fury is sponsored by a local lord back home, Hirsir Thorgeir Sigmundson, and he'll expect the ship's expenses to be paid, plus a share of the profits.  If the summer exploration of the ruins goes poorly, it's not unheard of to leave early and raid the coast of England for cattle and thralls to recoup some costs and build a reputation.

The crew consists of 14 sailors (player characters included), plus the captain and mate.  A knarr only needs a few rowers at any time to help the tiller keep the ship tacking properly, so most of the crew act as marines.  NPC sailors could also be mercenaries and hirelings.  The ship needs at least 4 sailors and a captain to survive to make it home; it's not unheard of for crews to band together late in the summer if their original ships have suffered heavy losses on the island.

One of the strategies the captain likes to use each year is to follow the Norwegian coast to Lappland, trading with the Lapps for fresh food, and then sailing for Bear Island (once again foraging for fresh food).  The stops along the Norwegian coast and at Bear Island allow for sleeping on land each night.  However, while the coastal route minimizes the amount of time on the open sea, it is fraught with pirates amongst the numerous fjords.

For campaign play, the trip along the coast to Lappland would take 10-15 days, depending on weather.  The captain's course to Bear Island takes 3-5 days, and then from Bear Island to Thule is another 4-6 days.

When My Blog Finally Grows Up…

I want it to be like Jeff's Game Blog.  I posted an AD&D poll about the most dubious AD&D rules a few months ago, and was delighted to get over a hundred votes.  Jeff posted a similar poll yesterday, and had over 250 votes in less than one day.  (I just checked back, and less than 24 hours it's at 320 votes).

I'm here to tell you, my friends, that is REAL ULTIMATE GAME BLOGGING POWER™!

This is not jealousy but outright admiration.  8 years of high quality, gonzo excellence - I can only hope the Lich House is even around 8 years from now.  That is an impressive run, man.  Jeff is the Iron Man of Game Blogging.  After just finishing only a year of blogging, I can appreciate the diligence of maintaining steady blog output for 8+ years.  I can think of handfuls of game blogs that popped up and crapped out just last year.  So I tip my hat off towards Jeff's place.

With that in mind, I'm thinking the Iron Man of the blogging world should have some Chuck Norris style facts… something like, "Jeff doesn't roll dice anymore, he snaps his fingers and they rearrange to the result he needs."  Or, " Jeff doesn't read game books to learn the rules, the texts read Jeff to learn Jeff's rules."

I'm dealing with a bad cold, hopped on the meds, and the work week is dragging on.  It would be delightful if any of you are inspired to add your own "Iron Man of Game Blogging" Facts in the comment's section.

I'm sure I'll see my way to a non-frivolous post shortly.

Vacationing at the Lake of Hali - A Carcosa Review

Carcosa is a 143 page PDF published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess; it's a setting that describes the forsaken planet of Carcosa and the Lake of Hali (the names of both locations hail from the Cthulhu Mythos and the Lovecraft circle of writers).  I had the chance to read the PDF version of Carcosa over the holidays.  The physical book is still on the way.

The PDF is nice looking and functional; the two-facing pages read very well on an iPad and the hyperlinks let you zoom all over the place.  As a publisher, LOTFP is distancing itself from the hobbyist side of the OSR by turning out progressively more polished products.

The artwork in Carcosa is amazing and it's a joy leafing through and soaking up the pictures.  Every piece is done by the same artist and he did a great job with all of the Lovecraftian horrors and scenes of high tech carnage.

So what is Carcosa like?  It's a singular piece of fevered imagination that brings me back to flipping through Heavy Metal magazine and gazing at Omni covers at my cousin's place down the street when I was a kid.  Carcosa is what happens when your Call of Cthulhu investigators fail to stop the return of the Great Old Ones, and the world is plunged into horror and madness.  Failure is an option, and that option looks like Carcosa.

The setting describes a distant planet ruled by the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos, where humanity is the bottom of a food chain that includes alien horrors, ancient serpent men, elder gods, mad robots, and cyborgs.  Humanity is hopelessly fractured into different colored races of man, and the monstrous sorcery used by the inhuman sorcerers of Carcosa uses men as components in horrible rituals.  It's a bleak setting ideal for horror gaming or adventure gaming with lots of horror elements.

What I Liked
Carcosa thrusts difficult ethical choices into the foreground, and if your table enjoys mature discussions on that level, you'll enjoy Carcosa.  Standard D&D type gaming allows players to happily stab the orcs, goblins, and kobolds in the face and loot the bodies;  moral dilemmas in the dungeon can be minimized by distinctions of race and alignment.  Carcosa removes the distinctions; there are two types of opponents - other humans, on the one hand, and all the inhuman aliens and Great Old Ones on the other.  Carcosa's approach to humanity reminds me of ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroborus, where the different races of humans are called Goblins, Demons, Ghouls, and so on, living in Demonland or Goblinland, but they're all people nonetheless.  The names are just labels.  I could probably write a lengthy post on how Carcosa's use of color generates such interesting questions - it's like the Trek episode with the black and white faced guys who hate each other irrationally - only on Carcosa, it's the whole planet.

The other element that creates ethical  problems on Carcosa is the sorcery.  The recommended magic system for the setting uses ritual magic to conjure, bind, banish, imprison, or torment various eldritch entities.  It's reminiscent of the magic system of Call of Cthulhu, where a player needs to think long and hard before choosing to learn and use magic because of the costs.  On Carcosa, all rituals require human sacrifice.  If you enjoy the high drama of Faustian bargains and deciding when the ends justify the means, this is for you.

Beyond those two points, there are lots of neat little mechanical items to recommend Carcosa.  There's a hex crawl that covers 400 hexes (2 encounters per hex) - 800 encounters.  That's a lot of coverage.  There are tons of new monsters, stats for all the Great Old Ones, rules for psionics, robots, cyborgs, and plenty of artifacts.  I can see many of the artifacts making it into my own campaigns immediately.

Issues
I have some issues with the material that I'd likely change if I were to use Carcosa as a complete setting.  First, there are a series of suggested rules that require rerolling various hit dice and damage dice at the start of each combat; even psionic talents vary from day to day.  I haven't play tested those rules, but my sense is they would create a lot of swing and reduce the player's ability to calculate and plan; a difficult foe could roll badly on their hit dice and be within the player's range, or roll well and be far tougher to beat; you wouldn't know until combat started, and that's too late to plan.

The randomness applies to players as well - the beat stick fighter could suddenly find himself with d4 hit dice.  This system would work  for horror gaming by keeping things uncertain and nerve wracking, but I'm cautious whether it's actually fun for D&D style play.  Enabling planning and calculation of resources is an important part of how I approach old school gaming.  It certainly creates a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty in a visceral, physical way, and might be okay for short forays into Carcosa.

The Great Old Ones are fairly bland in description; the barest mechanics and damage are provided, but not much about their cults or how they interact with the world.  Folks with a background in the source literature wouldn't have a problem filling in the gaps.  I'm loathe to criticize statistics for literary creations, because so much of it is taste and interpretation; I see enough of that fanboy grief in the Heroclix world (I can't believe Superman can beat the Hulk!).  I didn't agree with a lot of the stats in Realms of Crawling Chaos, either.

Will I Use Carcosa?
Absolutely!  I can say with total certainty that Carcosa becomes one of those places a party can accidentally end up by going through the wrong dimensional gate, and be forced to trek around the hex map trying to figure out a way back to their world.  Carcosa is that doomed dimension, just out of phase with our world, a sign of things to come if the Old Ones aren't stopped from gaining a foothold here, and plunging the world into madness.  There's too much awesome stuff in the book.  But I find the setting a bit too bleak to imagine running a campaign 100% start and finish in Carcosa.

Despite some quibbles, it's a 5 out of 5 on the Beedometer - the scope is far beyond anything I'd home brew, and the presentation, art, and quality of the PDF advances the state of OSR publishing.  Looking forward to seeing the actual book.

Now that the holidays are behind us, the finances should level out and I can make some more gaming purchases.  I'll be doing some upcoming reviews of Anomalous Subsurface Environment, and Book of War, and hope to pick up Weird Adventures and some of the latest S&W/Frog God stuff in the coming weeks.

Hello 2012. Best of the Lich House, 2011

I learned a lot in a year of blogging.  The discipline of writing about your games forces introspection and reflection.  Beliefs are held up and examined, the underlying thought structures are tested.  Criticism is more constructive out here on the blogs; there's more of a spirit of gamers helping each other to run better games.  It was a fun year.

Here's a quick look at five of my favorite posts, and then the five most popular posts in terms of internet traffic.  I picked these five mainly because they embody themes I returned to at various times on the blog, and which I'll likely continue developing next year.

Some of My Favorites
Horror in Dungeons & Dragons
I love the horror genre; it tests the DM's skills to create horror situation, and horror moments usually involve challenges on multiple levels for the players.  This post listed ideas on incorporating horror into your D&D game by borrowing common horror themes.

Winter is Coming, and so is Gamer ADD
I frequently suffer from the Gamer ADD - my past is littered with campaigns ditched when something new and "better" came along.  This post laid out strategies (culled from project risk management) on managing your gamer ADD so you don't blow up your campaign every time a new idea comes along.

Say Yes - Skill Checks in a Rules Lite Game
A challenge in running old school games is adjudicating all those situations not covered by the rules; this post promotes a collaborative/cooperative style of DMing to maximize player engagement in skill rulings and avoiding being an arbitrary DM.

The Sandbox Triangle
I am keenly interested in player-driven games and structuring my campaigns as a sandbox; the challenge in the sandbox is balancing player freedom, with the amount of detail and effort required by the DM.

The Drowning Fairy
I read a lot of myth and folklore and like to pull inspiration for monsters from real world sources.  Faeries and ghosts are often indistinguishable in folklore, and this monster involved combining the drowning fairy motif - Peg Powler or Jenny Greenteeth - with the Ringu type of ghost.

Most Popular
You can't take post-counts too seriously; if one thing is clear, it's that odd ball traffic through the Google can spike traffic to a minor post.  Most of these "popular" posts have racked up hits from non-gaming sources looking for something else.

The Demon Azazel
Unclean Spirits of the Wilderness
Ape Men of the Black City
Monsters as Plastic Army Men

Azazel and The Exorcist are the two most popular searches from non-gamers - people love googling the demonic possession.  The Black City picks up visits from folks looking for white apes.  And I'm always getting hits from people looking for stuff about plastic army men.  They should play some D&D instead!

I bet there are a few blogs out there where "hot elf chicks" is their top post.

I Just Nuked Gothic Greyhawk
Die, Strahd, Die!

These are the two most popular gaming posts; I'm glad they get a lot of traffic because they demonstrate key points about my DMing philosophy.  Player choices matter, I'm not going to fudge the dice, and I'm not afraid to let things rip - for good or ill.  NPCs are meant to die, there are no Mary Sues in my campaigns, and the players need to earn their successes without any dice fudging by me, too.

The Gothic Greyhawk post got a ton of traffic after it was linked from James's LOTFP blog, when my group unleashed 13,000 hungry dead on our campaign world while I was running Death Frost Doom.  It wrecked their homeland, but made the campaign way more interesting.

Die, Strahd, Die became an OSR rallying post - it illustrated that letting the players develop their own plans and strategies, and playing it straight with the dice, will lead to a more interesting result than forcing a scripted story line to fit a sense of drama.  Besides, unless you're Al Pacino, players know when you're fudging.

Goals for this Year
I expect in 2012 to continue to discuss ways to build player driven games and run sandboxes.  Other goals this year are pretty simple - I'm hoping to read another 10 Appendix N type books, continue running a weekly D&D campaign, publish the Black City, and incorporate regular blogging about Call of Cthulhu and its siblings to this year's mix of stuff.  I should be able to get in some Cthulhu one-shots along the way as well.

Choosing the Lesser Evil

Horrible Choices in Call of Cthulhu, and Carcosa

Ever have one of those soapbox posts, you get on your high horse and blah, blah, blah and rant, rant, rant?  I sat down to write a Carcosa review, and then it morphed into a long post about violence and morality  and stabbing goblins in the face.  I re-read that awful bitch-fest and decided to go in another direction.  You'll thank me later.  I still talk about Carcosa a bit in the wrap, but this post mostly became about the difficult ethical choices you often see in Call of Cthulhu.

I've heard Ken Hite speak a few times on the podcasts, and he frequently identifies Call of Cthulhu as the only moral role playing game.  There are no alignments in the game, so it's not like you can label yourself Lawful Good.  Where would this idea come from?

It's fairly simple; characters in Call of Cthulhu are investigators trying to stop ancient horrors from entering the world, but the act of investigation in Call of Cthulhu destroys your character.  Playing the game (successfully) is essentially a selfless, moral act.  As characters investigate situations involving the eldritch horrors, they accrete sanity damage.  The more they fight against the horrors of the Mythos, the more sanity they lose, and the easier it becomes to keep losing sanity.  It's the sanity death spiral.  Character death or forced retirement is inevitable...  the only question is how long can your character keep up the good fight?

While the "sanity death spiral" is a death of a thousand cuts, a frequent horror theme requires a much more explicit form of sacrifice.  Back in my "horror in dungeons & dragons" post, I called this theme The Monstrous Choice: Is the group willing to do whatever it takes to stop an even greater evil?

I spend a fair amount of time forced to read subjects like "decision theory" as part of the corporate gig.  I'm familiar with the theoretical problems around outcomes and expected value calculations, and how they should influence decisions in a business setting.  Yawn...  It's remarkable how quickly the theories get tossed out the window when faced with a real world situation, when your pulse is racing and everyone is watching and Monty Haul is asking if you want to keep your prize or see what's behind door number three.

It's the same with the ethical constructs - folks can have their well thought positions on "the ends justifies the means" or "two wrongs don't make a right" (simplifying consequentialism versus deontology) - but there's nothing like putting a face-to-face table top group right in the middle of a deep ethical crisis during a gaming session, then sitting back to watch how they work through the problem when they've got actual skin in the game (so to speak).

Spoiler Alerts!  Spoilers for Beyond the Mountains of Madness and The Black Drop, forthcoming.

I've had some unforgettable Cthulhu games that stared unblinkingly at difficult ethical choices, and I would say all the participants came out of those games with memorable experiences.  Here are a couple of war stories demonstrating The Monstrous Choice theme to illustrate the idea.

Beyond the Mountains of Madness
BTMOM is Chaosium's epic campaign (440 something pages) that puts the players in the role of Antarctic explorers following in the footsteps of the ill-fated Lake Expedition that discovered the Mountains of Madness and the city of the Elder Things.

Deep into the module, there's the strong likelihood the group will be faced with a terrible choice.  The ancient Elder Things had built a god-trap that keeps a world-breaking entity imprisoned just outside our space and time, and the god-trap requires the brain of a hominid to function.  Earlier in the adventure, the reawakened Elder Things kidnap a key NPC in the expedition and carry him off to their tower as replacement parts for the machine.  When the party finally learns his fate, they see his decapitated head powering the machine, and it's quite likely they cripple it when they pull his head out of the machinery.  As things fall apart, they learn the true function of the machine and its earth-saving importance as a key piece of the god-trap.  Where can they get a still-living brain to insert back into the neural matrix?  :Gulp:

In hindsight, it's easy to see that section of the adventure is a screw-job, but it is effective in presenting the group with a terrible choice - either watch the god-trap fail, releasing The Prisoner, or sacrifice a party member or NPC to the machine.

The group didn’t have much time to struggle with this one… they were tossing out some half-hearted ideas such as drawing straws for a volunteer when Deb took the helm.  She calmly took out her revolver and gut-shot "Cole the Cook", who was played by Dennis, and then coolly informed everyone, "There, I've made our selection.  I suggest you get Cole into the preparation tank before he bleeds out and I need to shoot someone else".

The sudden violence snapped everyone out of their paralysis, and they reacted by dragging Cole off to the acid bath where his head would be prepared for insertion into the machine.  Cole screamed and cursed while he was carried off, but no one bothered to question the morality of what they were doing; they were too busy saving the planet.

That's only a small section in Beyond the Mountains of Madness; it's a massive adventure and a true magnum opus for Chaosium and the authors.  I keep hearing that a second edition is in the works (a German second edition was released last year) so I'll keep my fingers crossed - I'd love to have that one in hard cover.

The Black Drop
The Black Drop is a Trail of Cthulhu scenario put out by Pelgrane Press; it's hard to believe it came out all the way back in 2010!  It's a short adventure, suitable to two nights of play, or a single epic session.  It involves a remote outpost of the French government on the far southern Kerguelen Islands in the years prior to World War 2.  At the same time the players arrive to bring supplies to the small group of French colonists, a party of four or five Nazis arrives for their own nefarious purpose, heading into the mountainous interior.

Over the course of the scenario, we learn that the Kerguelen plateau was once part of ancient Lemuria; Lemurian artifacts have been recovered on the island; the Lemurians kept a sleeping god in a state of torpor beneath a basalt temple on the side of a mountain there.  Every thirty years or so, when an astrological event happens, the transit of Venus, the god creeps towards wakefulness.

The twist in the scenario is that the Nazis, whom everyone expects are the villains, are actually a group of occultists that know the island's horrible truths, and their secret society sacrifices its members to keep the evil god asleep, by performing a gruesome bloody ritual as the god stirs.  It's quite likely the players don't figure this out until they've knocked off a number of the Nazi scientists, eliminating necessary members required for the final ritual and creating some tough choices for themselves.  Meanwhile, the small group of French colonists are all cultists that have fallen under the power of the god as it creeps towards consciousness; they cause no end of trouble running and gunning across the mountainous interior.

I ran this one as a one-shot with my D&D group that summer, and they were off guard when the straight-up hunt for cultists pivoted into the difficult ethical choice of teaming up with the Nazis for the sacrificial ritual.  One of the characters, Adam, abandoned the expedition at that point, making the Kantian choice - "Let justice be done, though the world perish"; he'd rather perish and let the world be destroyed than team up with Nazis.  The others accompanied the surviving Nazis to the ritual site and helped entomb the gargantuan god-thing back in torpor as Venus made its solar transit, but it involved a lot of squick.  A bunch of dudes were drugged and more or less fed to the god to keep it immotile, while one character masqueraded as the high priest, and returned it to its slumber beneath the earth, using the Lemurian artifact.  Only one PC survived, but it was a "team effort" to succeed.

Carcosa
As I was reading through Carcosa, and considered the previous Carcosa controversy that roiled through D&D discussion boards a few years ago, it struck me the root cause is one of perception; people are looking at the setting through the wrong lens.  Carcosa is a horror setting with a D&D label.  Carcosa brings The Monstrous Choice, so common in horror gaming, and thrusts it into the forefront of D&D, challenging the players to survive in a hostile, evil world.

An actual review of Carcosa is still forthcoming from me.  It's a cool book, with some whacked out ideas, and it deserves it's own post.  I'm reminded of something I wrote some 6-7 months ago: defending the horror.  Back then, brouhahas were brewing over gruesome D&D art.  My answer now is the same as it was back then, and speaks to why players like to challenge themselves against such things; the darker the world or setting, the brighter the light cast by even a single candle, and there's great satisfaction in success when so much is on the line.

*About the Watchmen scan:  I only lightly studied ethics in high school, but the first time I can remember having long discussions with friends about ethical quandaries involved Moore's Watchmen.  Who was right, Ozymandias or Rorschach?  I still love that book.

In my CoC experiences shared in this post, Deb was an Ozymandias and Adam was a Rorschach - a funny way of looking at them!

Lazy Map Day - Thule Island

I worked on some maps over the holidays - relaxing stuff.  First, I want my maps closer to black and white, for easy printing down the road.  And since The Black City is using more real world geography for inspiration, I updated the archipelago map:

Here's a faded version with a hex overlay I'll use for island stocking.  The scale is 1 hex = 24 miles.

The peninsula ridge where the ruined city and Viking camp is located gets lost at that scale, so I'll be building an area map (maybe 1 hex = 1 mile or 3 miles) that blows up the circled area in great detail for forays near the ruins:

All these maps were done in just a few hours with Campaign Cartographer; I'm not terribly good at it (yet) but it's a pretty powerful tool - I may start doing traditional hex maps and dungeons using it as well.

Answering the Sinking Ship Challenge

Spectacular view of northern Svalbard*

First off, thanks all for the many responses yesterday.  The themes that emerged in the comments reflected similar approaches to what I decided to use.  Folks astutely pointed out, if the idea of the campaign is to explore a megadungeon on a frozen northern island, just start the group there already.   Eliminate any initial chance at a shipwreck, and assume they're some of the adventurers that made it to the island successfully.

Here was my problem:  I do prefer that PC's and NPC's follow the same set of rules.  If there's a chance that NPC ships sink on the way to the island, there needs to be a chance for the PC ships to sink as well - otherwise I'm treating players like the special unique snowflakes in a world built just for them to exploit.  It minimizes player achievement; "winning on the easy setting" is unsatisfying.  So I needed a way to put some risk back into the journey.

My own way of reconciling these two competing positions is like this:  new groups will *always* begin adventuring right on the island of Thule, at the Viking base camp (Trade Town).  However, during campaign play, once they return home at the end of the adventuring season, all bets are off.  When/if they plan a return trip the following year, they'll need to account for the same risks as everyone else voyaging to the island.

When the group plans a return trip the following year, there will be choices to make to mitigate the dangers of the journey.  They could sign on with an experienced captain (and offer back shares of their loot), or buy their own ship and hire their own captain and navigator.  They can make riskier choices, leaving early in the season to get a jump on the competition, risking more dangerous sea ice, or play it safe and wait for warmer weather.  The amount of cargo will be a factor as well.  I'm sure resourceful players would come up with ways to use the spell lists to reduce risks of weather or ship damage.  If you're going to have an element of "courageous seagoing exploration" in the game, you owe it to the genre to give the players a chance to make both bold and safe choices.

A number of comments involved switching the discussion from "make it safe to the island/ or die" to "make it safe to the island/ or deal with complications/ or die" - in other words, stop thinking about sinking as an either/or proposition, and add some degrees of failure to the mix - maybe supplies are lost, the ship arrives but is damaged, resources and hit points are gone, that kind of stuff.  Great ideas, and it's given me a lot to develop.

Campaign play for the Black City is something I'm putting in the appendix.  After these discussions, I'll be adding a section on navigational hazards and complications to cover rules for making it back and forth to the island safely when it's used in an ongoing campaign - thanks for the help!


*The picture is another spectacular view of Svalbard, this one in the northern part of the archipelago in high summer - the photographer's full set is here, creative commons: Kenyai's Svalbard photos.