A Turning Point with 5th Edition

I've been dubious about 5E.  I do not see eye to eye with modern adventure design and the expectations of modern players (post TSR players).  The story of my blog has become a search for a middle ground - running the system my friends all prefer (the 5th) while running a game that satisfies my own expecations, too.  However, I finally think we're getting there.

If you've read my game reports on Tomb of Annihilation (TOA) you know TOA is one of 5E's adventures I praise liberally.  It's flaws are modest, it's virtues are many.  It thrusts the players into an old school style hex crawl, requiring that they plan and manage resources.  The story isn't about an author's scene-based plot to follow, it's an emergent story built over time based on player actions.  Tomb of Annihilation checks off some good boxes.

We are in the capstone dungeon of the campaign, a grim place called the Tomb of the Nine Gods (the erstwhile Tomb of Annihilation itself, the namesake).  It means what it says on the cover.  Death lurks around every corner.

I've noticed a big change in the players.  Everyone has been leaning in a little more at the table.  They take their time discussing spell choices and preparations for the adventuring day.  Planning matters.  There's a nervous energy as I describe the next room. It's palpable.  The threat of instant death has a way of sharpening the mind.

It brings to mind a Flannery O'Connor quote, from a "A Good Man is Hard to Find":  "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

5E feels the most like D&D when there are real consequences behind every player choice.  Many of the hardback books are too "balanced" and forgiving.  I'm starting to see what it takes to deliver a good game of 5E (my definition of a good game, at least).

The Tomb of the Nine Gods is not unfair, and I'm not an adversarial DM.  Sure there are save-or-die effects, and massive damage traps, and literal death rooms that can kill the whole party.  It's an homage to Tomb of Horrors!  But there are clues, and high level characters are not without resources.  Mostly though, the players are surviving because they are planning well, making smart choices, and sometimes getting a little lucky.  They've cheered each other and high-fived each other and relished their hard won successes.  It's been real fun on both sides of the screen.  It's been D&D.

I wasn't sure how this bare-knuckled style was going to play out in a Fifth Edition setting, and it's going quite well.  My 5E "training period" is coming to a close.

PS:
Mandatory Corona-vacation will shift us online for our next game session - I'll come back with a report on what tools we used and how it went.  And I'll get a game report posted with some details of these "player victories" in the Tomb.

Kickstarter Alert - Flat Plastic Miniatures Hardbound Support

I'm a big fan of Flat Plastic Miniatures (FPM) and have been using them for a couple of years now.  I love the fact that I can store a thousand miniatures in a few small binders.

The idea behind this particular kickstarter campaign is pretty cool - it'll provide every miniature you'd need to run a published 5E adventure.  This is the first campaign, and it's for "Last Mine of Phandelver", the first adventure that appeared in the D&D Basic Set.  The main tier ($60) gets you 84 miniatures, bases, and a carrying case.  It's got 4 days to go at $29,700 and I'd love to see it hit $30k and unlock the extras.  I'm expecting this will be the first of many "hardbound support" campaigns, they've hinted next up could be Storm King's Thunder.  The link to the kickstarter is here:  Hardbound Support

Here are some pics of FPM in use last night (they've been regulars in my Chult campaign).  These are from a crypt on level tomb of the Tomb of the Nine Gods in Tomb of Annihilation:

And here's a picture of one of the carrying cases (a mini "Flexxfolio" from Ultimate Guard).  They are super easy to haul around in little binders:

Reflections on Westworld and Gaming

Tonight is the premiere of Westworld (Season 3).  I'll have plenty of time to keep up with it - we're shifting into "social distancing" on the east coast, schools are closed and companies are asking office workers to stay home while we weather the pandemic.  Westworld about a fantasy game world where people interact with lifelike robots, and elements that define the Westworld game experience overlap table top games.  I'll take a look at some of the overlaps down below.

The original Westworld was a movie back in the early 1970's.  It was a Michael Crichton story about a set of theme parks populated by robots that allowed park visitors to play out their fantasies in a fully realized space (and said fantasies could be violent and lustful).  The story centers around visitors to West World, the Wild West themed park, who pay exorbitant ticket prices to take on the roles of gunslingers or lawmen; there was also a Rome world and a Medieval world.  The movie invokes one of Crichton's popular themes, that whatever can go wrong with technology will go wrong, his fixation with chaos and entropy.  In the movie's context, that meant that robots programmed to follow their story-lines and not harm people violated their programming and went on a murderous rampage.  Yul Brenner was menacing as the evil gunslinger robot gone amok:

HBO took the original idea several years ago and re-imagined it with updated technology and a more sophisticated approach to the park and its operations, all with HBO's high production values, A-list actors, and thoughtful writing.  The show explored themes regarding consciousness, free will, agency, and then turned up the dial on the wish fulfillment -  showing people at their best and worst while interacting with the "hosts" that populated the park.

These Violent Delights have Violent Ends

This Shakespeare quote is repeated by a few robot characters, the euphemistically named "hosts", early in the series... a prophetic warning of what's to come.  Rich people come to the park to take on Wild West roles, free to explore violent or depraved power fantasies unfettered by conscience.

I just got a copy of Goodman Games Into the Borderlands, their 5E conversion of The Keep on the Borderlands and In Search of the Unknown.  It brings back some memories.  I'm not sure I've ever played in a game using the Keep where the players didn't treat the Keep like another dungeon.  "Why did they detail all the townspeople's hidden gold and money stashes if they didn't expect us to loot them?"  Heck, I've had TPK's practically happen just past the gatehouse when a bunch of high school aged players tried to rob the warehouses and the guards descended on them.  It'd be interesting to run the Keep nowadays with my middle aged friends and see if they approached it differently (maturely).  Discovering extreme agency is one of the early joys when first picking up a roleplaying game and its usually kids that tend to run a bit wild at first.  "You mean I can just punch that guy in the bar?"

It may not be as extreme as physically traveling to a simulated fantasy world, but agency on the tabletop shares a lot of Westworld's escapism - playing an usual nonhuman race, taking on a Chaotic or Evil alignment, wielding fantastic magic abilities.  (Potentially) treating NPC's like exploitable resources.

Agency Over Story

There's a bit in Westworld that amused me greatly.  There's a writer character in the story, the narrative director Sizemore, who falls in love with his plots and stories.  He's especially proud of the dialogue of Hector, the villain who violently enters town, kills the sheriff, and hauls a safe out of the Mariposa Saloon in an elaborate robbery.  Sizemore watches from the safety of the operations center as Hector and his violent gang ride up to the saloon, kill a bunch of citizens according to the script, and then Hector starts to lay down the impressive monologue Sizemore wrote for him.  But before Hector gets out more than a few words, BAM!, he gets shot by a rich guest (player character) who then breaks character and turns to his wife,"Look at that, I just shot him in the neck!  Quick, let's get a picture."  It's more extreme agency, power fantasy tourism.

I can't tell you how many times the villain during one of our sessions starts a monologue, only for a player to interrupt, "I shoot him when he starts talking..."  It seems to happen a lot with the Adventurer's League Crew and is always good for a table full of laughs.

Being a referee is not about being a writer and telling a story, the writer's story.  A referee is presenting a setting, and the story is what happens after the player's interact with the setting.  Giving them agency means sometimes the bad guy gets shot before he utters his monologue.  Sorry Sizemore, here's a tissue for your tears.  You know you've done a good job when the setting and context is interesting enough the players want to hear the end of the monologue and hold off on declaring "Roll for initiative".

Games Need Consequences

There's a "villain" in Westworld, a rich human called "The Man in Black", who's obsessed with trying to solve a deeper mystery in the game by finding a place he calls "the maze".  The Man in Black is tired of playing the stories built into the game, and sets out to create his own story.  He's bored with stories the writers put into the game world.  "The game's not worth playing if the opponent's programmed to lose."  I can't tell you how many times I've been running crappie written adventure paths and the players would rather "go over there" and follow up something more interesting than the author's badly plotted story-line.  (I'm looking at you, Descent into Avernus, the current disaster I'm running for Adventurer's League).

The flip side of extreme agency is that the player's choices need to have real consequences.  Failure needs to be an option.  The Man in Black rides roughshod over Westworld's stories and narratives, exploiting the fact that the hosts can't actually kill him, until just about the final scene.  Season 1 ends with them transcending their limitations, including gaining the ability to inflict real harm on the guests.  The park is suddenly populated by robots programmed to be hardened Wild West killers, and now they're free to actually hurt their oppressors.  There's a massacre at a glitzy party in the final episode of Season 1 where all the corporate types are in the park to celebrate the start of a gruesome new story-line.  The Man in Black is shot and injured by real weapons, and barely escapes with his life.  The game is finally real for him.  And he smiles.  Game on.

It's a reminder to us as referees - don't fudge the dice, failure is an option, player characters can die, and choices must have consequences - for good or bad.  It's the chance of failure that makes winning meaningful.  The Man in Black would be right at home in a game refereed with old school values and perspectives.

In my 5E home game, Tomb of Annihilation, the players have been exploring the actual Tomb of the Nine Gods - an homage to S1 Tomb of Horrors from AD&D.  We've had several near deaths, which is unusual for 5E.  Their victories have been real and meaningful.  They say it's the best 5E gaming they've experienced.  The defense rests - at least for me and mine.

Happy gaming!


*All the pictures are from HBO's Westworld 2016. It's been a good series!

Revisiting Points of Light as a Setting Ideal

My crew jumped into 4th Edition hard when it came out.  While the best thing that came out of our 4E experience was a greater appreciation for Classic D&D (BX), 1E AD&D, and the OSR movement, the non-mechanical aspects of 4E were actually well-executed, particularly the world-building.  My favorite conceit from the 4E time period was the metaphor "points of light" as a descriptor for the default type of campaign setting the designers envisioned.

4E introduced a new world (eventually called Nerath) and a default starting area called the Nentir Vale.  The premise of a points of light setting is that the world is fallen; civilized people now live in small, isolated settlements (the points of light) scattered across a dark and dangerous world.  The areas between the points of light involve dangerous stretches of wilderness, marauded by humanoids, bandits, and monsters.  Scattered ruins of prior civilizations and failed attempts to quell the wilds dot the landscape.  It's a far cry from the heavily civilized settings like Forgotten Realms or Eberron.

In fact, "points of light" as a setting metaphor has more in common with Middle Earth.  Tolkien's world is sparsely populated, there are very few settlements on the map, and journeys consist of leaving a sheltered area like the Shire or Rivendell and covering huge expanses of wilderness to reach the next settlement.

The other aspect of points of light that resonates with me is it's embrace of "the American West" as a paradigm for society and mobility.  Small groups of heroes traveling vast landscapes, dishing out frontier justice and following a loose code of honor, is part of 19th century gunslinger folklore or the ideals of the knight-errant from Medieval romances.  D&D embraces social mobility through heroic action (and recovering vast sums of gold) which aligns with the ideals of the Western and American mythology, unlike a historical game or European feudal simulator.

With that in mind, here are a pair of area maps for the setting I've been working on, The Midlands.  I still have to name mountain ranges and some natural features, but they're pretty far along.  (You can see the development of the underlying world and larger area maps from last week's posts). The Midlands consists of 7 or so small "kingdoms" dotted up and down a large valley between two sets of highlands.  To the North, the Scandians and Greats have invaded, carving out their own frontier settlements at places like Slaghold, or Jernrike.  Each hex on the map is 24 miles, so there are many days of travel between major settlements, going for that sparsely populated "Middle Earth" feel.  Original Greyhawk was similarly presented, with sparse settlements depicted with giant hexes (30 miles per hex).

The Midlands, no hexes

The Midlands, 24 miles per hex

Now that all of the broader foundations are in place (the world, the continent, the region maps) I'm going to zoom in to the area of Bernia and Harrowdale and build out a smaller scale hex map (maybe 6 or 8 miles per hex) ready for use as a sandbox.  Will be back soon.

Quick Map Update - A Globe for Erda

I figured there would be a straightforward way to apply naturalistic looking textures to a fractal world (including applying a cloud overlay with some wispy "NASA style" clouds).  The versions from the previous post (Maps Galore) prioritize bright colors to support shaping the land and altitudes.

Here is an update of the globe with a bit of this "naturalistic" treatment:

Overall I'm happy with the results for a first foray into fractal mapping and this style of building the physical world.  Next up is creating a large area map for the Midlands area, and then a smaller area hex map for adventuring purposes.

Maps Galore - Fractals and World Maps

Most holidays I poke fun at my wife for making hosting guests harder than it needs to be.  She'll demand to do things "the right way", which usually means cooking gigantic dishes from scratch.  Not quite growing your own wheat in the backyard for a season and milling it to make your own homemade flour, but it's usually close to that; we've grown our own pumpkins in the garden for pumpkin pies.  There were many years of trying to make pumpernickel rolls from scratch.  We discovered a nearby Amish market last year and holiday cooking has never been better.  The Amish are spectacular bakers.

So it is with some chagrin I must to confess how I became distracted when I sat down to make a map for Erda.  Somehow "sketching an area map for my new campaign" devolved into "Gee, I should learn various fractal mapping softwares and create a full fractal world, with climate, wind patterns, ocean currents, and naturalistic erosion".  So that's where I've been hiding out a couple of weeks.

I've owned a piece of fractal mapping software for a while, "Fractal Terrains" (FT3) that's part of the Campaign Cartographer suite (CC3).  I hadn't used Campaign Cartographer in a few years, so I needed to dust it off and re-acclimate - it's a powerful CAD-style drawing platform, but the learning curve is real.  My mapping journey took me into fractal world building, leveraging a free fractal tool called "Wilbur" to apply naturalistic erosion and generating rivers on a fractal world, and ultimately importing maps back into CC3 for finishing.  (There are tutorials out there, and the various online cartographer groups with the pros are filled with helpful folks, so it's not like I could've done this without the wisdom of actual experts).

Onward to the maps.  First up, here's the actual fractal world itself after development in Fractal Terrains, erosion in Wilbur, and then brought back into Fractal Terrains to add rivers:

Erda in Fractal Terrains

Here's the same map but switched from an equidistant rectangular projection to a globe, shifted to view the main continent that's acting as my equivalent to fantasy Europe.  (I love the globe view, I should do a version with "earth-like" coloring and some wispy clouds).

Erda Globe View

Below is the same map after some treatment in Campaign Cartographer.  This is very much a working version, as I still need to name the continents and oceans, make sure the rivers carry over, add arrows for currents and prevailing winds, that kind of stuff.  The jpg export isn't a good resolution.  Anyway, I'll be working on the CC3 version during the week to add those elements (names, currents, winds).

Work in progress - the Fractal Map in Campaign Cartographer

Here is a zoom on the starting continent in the northwest corner (created in Fractal Terrains).

Northwest Erda

...And below is an actual "fantasy version" of this section that I could use as a world map to start writing about the game world.  I'd have to check scale, but the continent is fairly massive - probably 50 miles to the hex like the original World of Greyhawk.  This would be akin to a parchment world map the players could have as a starting handout about their "Known World".  As I add notes about the places, I'll circle back to the map and put in major cities.  The starting area will be a zoomed in version of the area called the Midlands, at a reasonable hex scale (6 or 8 miles per hex or thereabouts).

Erda - The Known World

The Midlands are a chaotic collection of small holds and warring kingdoms, something like Dark Ages Britain at or before the time of Alfred the Great - Mercia, Wessex, Anglia, Northumbria - the area map will have all those types of small kingdoms mapped out.  There have been Northmen invasions, and areas carved out from the coast reminiscent of the Danelaw from real-world history.  Seems like a cool area and time period to give the D&D treatment, add lots of fantasy and magic, with plenty of strife and threats of invasion.  The megadungeon, Harrowdale, is on the western moors of the Midlands.  Beyond the western hills is the Gloaming, a region of misty highlands and kings of the old folk.  The Gloaming is Celtic / Irish / Gaelic in flavor - a place of druids and faiths that predate the church.

Heading east is the sprawling empire of Caronia.  I've had it titled this way in one of my notebooks since last year - but I may need to rename it depending on what happens with this scary carona virus!  As it stands now, Caronia is a sprawling homage to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire.  The Great March is a military zone manned by border nobles of Caronia and mercenaries of The Folk, the barbarians and woodmen of the southeastern vales (including Grossval).

The southern coast of the continent is home to the principalities of Aurum and the theocracy of Topaz, inheritors to civilization after old Valorum fell in the magical apocalypse that reconnected the magic worlds and allowed fresh invasions from Jotunheim and Niflheim, creating the current dark age.  Beyond Valorum (and off the map to the south) the lands turn dry and desert and we find the ruins of antiquity.

Above the whale road are Scandia and Greatland, the two nordic realms of the setting.  Invasions of giants and dragons from the west have made the northern cultures tough and fatalistic in the face of ever colder winters and darker nights.  A culture of "vikings" has developed, with sea-faring reavers attacking softer targets from Aurum all the way along the whale road to Caronia.  North of the Calden Sea is Thule, where I'll place the Black City when I work on a 5E update to that one.  So far my kids have been pushing me to build out Harrowdale rather than revisiting the Black City first, but we'll see what the rest of the player group says.

Anyway, this what I've been doing instead of writing blog posts for a week or two.  I've been on a map-bender!

Open World Building - Arbitrate Your Sandbox

Last year I picked up a kindle book written by Alexander Macris called Arbiter of Worlds, a general collection of essays on how to build and run an old school campaign, and why this is the most satisfying and memorable approach to adventure gaming due to emergent story.  Honestly, if you're still out here reading OSR blogs, even that of a 5E adopter like myself, it's stuff you probably already know (albeit collected into a handy guide and presented in a conversational tone).  A lot of it's right there in the 1E Dungeon Master's Guide, nestled among all the purple prose and Gygaxian expository.  Alex, incidentally, is the developer of the Adventurer, Conqueror, King system (ACKS), a BX-style retro-clone with the campaign and worldbuilding elements dialed up to 11, with an especial focus on economics, domains, and warfare.

Both ACKS and Arbiter of Worlds suggest a campaign building approach called "top down, zoom in" that mirrors how I like to approach campaign building, so I'm going to give the methodology a try as I start working on "Erda".  Like it says in the name, you start with the world concept, develop a large area map, establish some broad brushstrokes around the history of the setting, and craft some notes on culture.  Then switch to the local area where adventures will start for the "zoom in" portion, creating a small area hex map, points of interest, settlements, dungeons - the detailed sandbox area.

It's a rational model and mirrors how I think about world-building.  I like to start with the big picture, but it's important to shift gears quickly into the pragmatic stuff that's actually going to matter at the table in the first few game sessions.  Following a constrained methodology will help stay on a plan.  With than in mind, as I develop the campaign setting and megadungeon for the Harrowdale campaign, I'm going to test-drive this "top down, zoom in" system and post the progress here.

As for the rest of Arbiter of Worlds, the essays are good.  I'll pull it out to refresh and see which ones warrant discussion out here on the interwebs.  I read it on the iPad during some air travel last year in a 3-4 hour burst - I get in most of my pleasure reading on work trips.  (I'm currently working on Ovid's Metamorphoses, a gap in my classics knowledge).  Arbiter of Worlds is a $5 kindle book over at Amazon (link here).  However, if you already own ACKS, much of the top down/zoom in approach is already laid out in the campaign building chapter (Secrets).

I'll be back soon with more notes on the Erda campaign, and updates on my Adventurer's League gaming: Descent into Avernus - blech, and the start of Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign - two thumbs up!!  Plus my home game has started their exploration of Acererak's "Tomb of Annihilation" in Chult.  We'll have stories.