Best of the Web: Meatshields, West Marches, 10 Monsters, Inverted Random Encounters, And Amazing Shifting Sands goes WW1

The Barrowmaze.com has a wonderful generator to create henchmen called Meatshields. Wonderful stuff, especially if the GM rolls a dozen beforehand and makes the players choose which to trust.

Ben Robbins at Ars Ludi has an amazing post about his West Marches campaign. This is the style of campaign I believe Gygax used when he first created the game. The style was never well documented, at least until the West Marches posts, and that seems a real shame as Ben has apparently had great success with this campaign style. Enough so that i'm going to have to add this sort of thing to my own Fantasy Heartbreaker.

3 Toadstools Publishing has a post called 10 Monsters that is about creating a mini-setting using only 10 monster types. I love the idea of mini-settings and really like this idea as the limited number of encounters provide a specific color to that setting. I'd take the idea and leave mundane beasts (lions and tigers and bears) and supernatural (Undead, demons) out of the limitation.

Methods & Madness has developed the idea of the Inverted Random Encounters Table. Instead of rolling each turn to determine yes or no he suggests rolling a die to determine how many turns until an encounter arrives. As long as the GM keeps track of time this idea this idea should work.

In addition if the GM also rolled what was encountered they could add spoor (footprint, sounds, dung) to foreshadow the encounter.

Swords and Stichery has written The Amazing Shifting Sands of The Beginning Of I3-5 Desert of Desolation By Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman, Philip Meyers, Peter L. Rice Part I which is about adapting the Desert of Desolation series of modules into a WW1 pulp setting. Eric, the blogger that runs the site also has similar posts on Dwellers of the Forbidden City and other classic adventures. The post has my head buzzing with the possibilities. Sort of Brendan Frasers The Mummy game-style.

And a new addition to my blogroll. Seems I've become addicted to Old School RPG Planet which is an agrigator that filters out OSR posts so that i don't have to poke around the web looking for them myself.

Best of the Web - Azgaar's Fantasy Maps

A random fantasy map

Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator - This program generates beautiful maps. I'm still getting used to it but so far every single map I've generated is amazing.

I haven't played with all the options yet but you can select naming schemes with a Roman or English feel as well. The default is German but the names on my sample map don't look German so I must have hit some other language.

A closure of the same map

Best of the Web - Settings to destroy, Wormy, Spellbooks, Globsphere, and Gnome Hall Dungeon

Lexi's Big Bag of GMs Tips from a Blasted, Cratered land is gold. I ran across it by accident while surfing around the net. Number 1. is what won me over:

"1. Build your settings to be destroyed. Players tend to wreck things, so create structures that your players will have fun obliterating, or at least trying to obliterate. Make the setting such that you will root for them when they do so. Give them oppressive regimes to topple, or enemy armies to incinerate, or ancient wonders to reduce to rubble. If you can't get them to feel wonder and pathos, at least get them to feel triumphant."

I can't say how eye opening this is. This unlocks the one problem at had with the misty isles of Harn that I could never put my finger on. Harn was so perfect, so beautiful, I really never considered having a war that ravaged the countryside and burned down a city. I never had that problem with other settings, by the way.

Grand events are memorable events. That is what adventure is all about. And the willingness to bust up the world really opens things up and if the players are responsible for starting or finishing that devastation all the better.


Old School DND - Has posted a link to someone that collected all of the old Wormy Comics from Dragon magazine. I loved the art in this strip but never really followed the story as I accumulated the earlier magazines bit by bit and out of order.

Dave Trampier was one of my favorite D&D artists back in the day. Apparently he had some kind of falling out with TSR and disappeared as far as the gaming world was concerned. Skyland games has put together a nice explanation of what little is known about Trampier after he disappeared from gaming.


Oubliette Magazine has photos of a neat Magic User spellbook project that I'd love to see more of. It would be really nice to see a Wizard provided with only the spell info they know in this sort of format instead of allowing them free reign on the various manuals. Let them take notes of different spells they've seen used so they can work on researching them later.


Oubliettemagazine - Has an old article about Games Workshop looking for a new CEO. They are still around so they must have sorted things out. The post got me wondering what I would do if made CEO of a company like Games Workshop.

First, I'd hire someone to create a simplified OSR rule-set) designed to be fast and easy to use, D&D Basic Set easy to sell to newbies. This is the free/cheap sample that introduces people to the Warhammer Old World. And also a very similar one for the 40K world. Then take existing Warhammer and 40K stuff and adapt it to those rules (and thus make it OSR compatible). Release it all using the OSR SRD hoping for sales as well as to entice others to join in Old World fun. The idea is to make all that existing stuff easily accessible to the rest of the game world. The Old World source books alone would probably garner a large number of sales.

Second, I'd probably close the least successful game shops and make the rest a line of RPG hobby shops that would *also* sell Warhammer miniatures (instead of being all about Warhammer miniatures and only about Warhammer miniatures). I'd be willing to sell franchises to help folks set up such shops if they were afraid to go independent as a hobby shop, or sell off our existing shops to folks willing to pay the franchise fee to keep whatever name we've created for the hobby shop lines and advertising.

I don't know if Game Workshops currently sells singular minis or if they just sell armies but if they don't sell them solo I'd ensure they did. A regular hobbyist isn't going to buy an army-load of figures but they'll buy them a la cart because Game Workshop miniatures are beautiful. If this is not economically feasible these days I'd work on having 3d printers print them on demand in the hobby stores, and every miniatures would have a name and statblocks.

I'd also bring back the idea of war-bands skirmishing rules or at least adapt some of those ideas as an expansion for the new RPG set. Sort of give the gamers a taste of the full Warhammer Fantasy Battles line.

DIY and Dragons - Has a post on the Glogosphere - I don't play Glog but I love the way they are forming a community known as the glogosphere. With the end of Google+ and the fracturing of the OSR this seems a nice way to build community. Tiny communities but communities none-the less. Although this creates factionalism it also means that there are smaller, closer, communities which I think would be beneficial. I'm not sure if such groups should align by game (the way the glogosphere did) or along some other lines, I'm not sure that distinction even needs to matter.


Elfmaids and Octopi - Has posted Gnome Hall Dungeon, a  wonderful one-page dungeon. It's a location based site that leaves the missions up to the GM.

It's a beautiful dungeon that includes a random encounters table called "After the Fall" which judging by the entries I'm assuming this means after the Gnomes no longer control the place. This simple table opens up the site for multiple uses, a GM can use as a patron as the Gnome King sends hte players to do something and then something else, or simple has a waystop, then at some point they return to find the Gnomes gone and the place overrun. Or, in reverse, an evil party could take out the Gnomes and later find it more comfortable with Goblins and Hobgoblins roaming about.

More location adventures should include this sort of thing, a simple table an a site is fresh again.

Personally I'd prefer to see the map be a two-page spread with the second page including the 6-mile hex around the gnome hall and Hills wandering encounters table, but I understand the desire to keep to the single page format.

Best of the Web: Artifacts, Toilets, & Festivals

Artifacts

Coins and Scrolls has some thoughts on refiguring artifacts. He makes a good point or two but in my mind doesn't go far enough. Magical Items should be redone so they feel more crafted and less assembly-line and the artifact rules are a great place to start.

• Each magic item is unique, that is there is only one "Boots of Elvenkind"
• Each magic item has an alignment (Chaos/Neutral/Law)
• Each item should have a personality and the ability to communicate with the possessor
• If the item is Law or Chaos it was created as part of the great war raging across the multiverse and it will try to recruit the possessor at every opportunity (through role playing and pestering, no game effects).
• The standard power of the item works for everyone no matter what alignment
• In addition to the standard power each item has a minor benign power and a minor malevolent effect
• Benign powers only work for those of the same alignment as the magic item.
• Malevolent effects work against everyone who is not the same alignment as the item.
• If an item has a corresponding 'cursed' version that is the malevolent effect. The GM will have to work out the conflict if any

So in effect every item is a cursed item if the wrong person tries to use it and nobody is wasting their time creating cursed items simply because. Also each item becomes an NPC, possibly a very annoying NPC, that only the possessor can hear.

If a gameworld doesn't use alignment the characters can be assumed to be neutral alignment as far as the magic item is concerned. You can not care about alignment but that doesn't mean alignments don't care about you.

The same rules can be done for 'artifacts' except they have major benign powers and major malevolent powers and they get a Side Effect. Attempts to convert should probably require a weekly saving throw or something I'm not prepared to think deeply about right now.

The GM should also consider giving Law and Chaos aligned magical item the ability to contact Priests of the same alignment so that it can draw them upon the possessor of thw wrong alignment as it tries to get back into the great war raging across the multiverse. Of course the item will avoid telling the possessor that it's calling in allies to take it away.

Privvys

Elf Maids & Octopi - Has an interesting post about dungeon privys. As one devoted to increasing realism within the fantasy in order to give the players a consistant background in order to make rational decisions I applaud this sort of thing.

Of course they need bathrooms in the dungeon, and the type of bathroom says a lot about the inhabitants so I've made a little table.

Table 1: Privvy table

1d10	Items
01	Locals have surprisingly little waste or the waste has minimal smell
02	Locals live in their waste as the nasty monsters they are
03	Locals live in their waste but allow animals such as dung beatles (or worse) free access to deal with it.
04	Locals use chamberpots and dump said pots into a deep pit somewhere
05	They use chamberpots and toss the results out at the faction borders, or make raids into enemy areas to discard the stuff
06	Locals dry their waste and use it as fuel for fires. Their area has a particularly bad stench but not as bad as an open guardrobe would be
07	Locals dry their waste and form bricks out of it. The walls and floors of some areas of the dungeon are flaky and nasty if you scrap them with your finger, but a nice coating of mud or plaster seals in the smell nicely
08	Locals use chamberpots and use the waste as fertilizer on their crops (mushrooms most likely but who knows)
09	Locals have built their gardrobes over deep pits or open water to take the waste away
10	Locals use Zap Crap teleportation guardrobes guaranteed to teleport the waste cleanly and silently to a distant and unknown location without muss or fuss (the privvy possibly serving as a nasty escape hatch as well) from Drow Industries, of course

Festivals

Blog of Holding - Has a useful article on city festivals including a list of 20 unique festivals to add to your game. I don't think we see enough of this type of stuff. What folks celebrate is a good way to define them. This applies to culture but mostly I'm thinking cults and religions. The old Deities & Demigods would have been petter served if they'd scrapped the stat blocks and included a lot of info on each pantheons religious festivals.

While polking around Blog of Holding I also found a fun Fantasy Map of the Bronx. I wish there was more of this sort of thing out there.

Population Density

Population density

The image shows population density per square mile according to the Poll-tax of 1377. Since Lords love their taxes we can assume it's pretty accurate.
Dark = 60
Grey = 40-60
White = below 40

Few villages are more than about a mile or two from their nearest neighbour. In regions of better farmland, the villages are closer (similar sized fields but less heath and waste filling out the manor).

A market village is a large village with a market (possibly illegal). A market village will be roughly 4 miles or less (1 hour walk) from any other market village and 12 miles (4 hour walk) or less from a proper market town. Larger towns might be a 3 day walk away. You don't go to the larger town very often.

Markets typically happen once a week, with different villages having markets on different days to avoid conflicts. Typically a shepard or farmer living in a village or thorpe would sell their excess goods (wool, eggs, etc) to a merchant who would take them to market at the market village or market town for re-sell. This way the peasants earn a little money and don't have to sit all day selling stuff. Also this way the town has food.

I imagine they probably had folks (I call them peddlers on the rural encounters charts) who would buy up goods in the nearest market town, pile them into the wagon, and hit up a village market each day making a marginal living in this way. They might also buy up produce for sale in the town markets since few villagers have the time or money to haul their goods to market and sit in a stall all day trying to sell it.

I figure a ratio of 9 villages for each town and 9 towns for each city.

Culture level can be used to help determine how many inhabitants are in a settled region. The GM can determine how many villages are in each 'settled' 6-mile hex using table 1.

Table 1: Population Density

1d100	Culture	Families in 6-mile hex	People sqr mile
01-05	Primitive	62-300	10-50
06-10	Desert (Nomad)	--	--
11-15	Oriental Horse (Nomad)	--	--
16-30	Classical (Civilized)	300-500	50-80
31-40	Dark Ages (Barbarian)	62-370	10-40
41-50	Medieval (Civilized)	370-550	40-90
51-80	Late Medieval (Civilized)	550-744	90-120
81-00	Oriental or Renaissance (Civilized)	745-1426	120-230

So for example the settled areas in England of 1377 above would be Medieval (Civilized) and have roughly 370-550 families in a 6-mile Hex. Since villages range in size from 20-1,000 families that means the hex might contain 1 village of 550 families or two of 250 each, etc. The closer to a Town or City the larger the individual villages are likely to be.

The lightly populated areas might be considered Dark Ages (Barbarian) which primarily indicates the size of the settlements and the availability of craftsmen and such there more than anything else.

About Ruprecht Part 2

I grew up drawing and writing a lot. The drawing led me to a graphic designer degree in University. The sad economy of the early 90s led me to taking jobs outside my field and I used the writing talents to become a technical writer.

My training as a graphic designer has led me to love good design. Good design, in my eyes means  the design should be understated and simple. It should not draw attention to itself but should serve the text. Common fonts should be used because there is nothing worse than a PDF bloated with extra fonts except a PDF without rare fonts that have to be downloaded by the user for things to display correct. I hate watermarked art on every page, art should serve as a mental bookmarks and shouldn't use up all the ink in your printer. Also art should have something to do with the accompanying text and should never cross over the text. When I see bad design in game books it makes me a little sad.

I would have provided graphic design work for free when I graduated and needed a job. Anything for the portfolio. I'm pretty sure there are designers out there now that would do the same. Yet bad design is everywhere. At some point I'll make a post with examples, but not here.

My day job as a technical writer is to take complicated information and format it and rearrange it to make it easy to follow.  That is another issue that role playing games seem to be somewhat poor at. Not just within a book but in deciding how to divide information into multiple books. Many games are beautiful but not organized well, others are organized very well but are horribly ugly. Again, some folks should hire a designer, and others should judge design on readability, not on cool, as cool fades with use and actually becomes annoying if it gets between you and what you need to find in the book.

Hopefully my training as a Graphic Designer and a Technical Writer will enable my fantasy heart breaker to clean and easy to use.

About Ruprecht Part 1

If anyone finds this blog sooner or later they may wonder who the hell is putting up all this amazing content. In that light...

I started role playing back in the early 80s when I was in middle school. My friend, we'll call him Simon, put together a simple dungeon and I was hooked. Before long we shared dungeon master duties but it wasn't long before I was doing most of the DMing. I was hooked.

We started off like idiots with a horrible monty haul campaign, we treated Deities & Demigods like a high powered Monster Manual. It was dumb fun. Then a friend of my brothers, we'll call him the Colonel, saw us playing and told us the game was better at low level (he wasn't a Colonel at the time by the way).

The Colonel joined our little merry band and we started over with 1st level characters fighting to progress. Then I discovered the glories of Harn, and RuneQuest, and eventually in University I started using HarnMaster for awhile as our game continued and I looked for a bit more gritty realism (a level of realism I no longer care for).

Along the way we shifted from dungeons to political adventures (the detailed Harnic Kingdoms seemed to excel at that). I re-skinned everything I could think of to create new and interesting adventures, I used novels, movies, comic books, whatever. I don't know if the players ever realized the origins of some of the re-skinning but I doubt it. It was all great fun.

I remember while at University a friend had a bunch of 2nd Edition games. I read through them and they didn't sit well. The big improvement was ascending AC but beyond that it seemed, well, bland. We'd moved on to RuneQuest and Harnmaster by then which probably colored my opinions more than a little.

Sometime after graduation the gang all went their separate ways and we stopped role playing while we scrambled for work in the sketchy economy of the early 90s.

I was unaware of 3E until I wandered into a Hobby Shop out of curiosity and saw Pathfinder which was freaking beautiful and caused a number of internet searches as I caught up to the history of the game and learned about the OSR and the SRD and to DrivethruRPG and all that, which led me to researching what happened to RuneQuest while I was gone and my discovery of Legend and OpenQuest and a full return into the hobby again.

3-Bay Hall House

The 3-bay hall house can be thought of as the poor mans hall house. It is similar in almost all ways to the Open Hall house except it is more compact, having three bays instead of four. The result is the parlour is gone from the ground floor and the service is gone from the upper floor.

Open Hall House

The Open Hall House or Wealden Hall house began as a manor house during the Saxon era but gradually as things progressed yeoman started to build them, although somewhat smaller in scale.


Roof
The roof was commonly thatch but in wealthier areas and later times the thatch might be replaced by clay or slate tiles. Since the supporting structure were generally two feet apart it probably wasn't very safe to walk up on a thatch roof. Somewhere near the middle the roof would have a smoke hole or vents to allow the smoke from the hearth to exit. In later days this would be replaced by a chimney.

First Floor

The house had four equal-sized 'bays' created by the framing skeleton.  The First Floor (1) has two areas that did not connect to each other. On one side we have the service area where servants slept, and the other side we have the Solar where the master of the house and family slept. The Solar took up two bays, so it hung over part of the hall below. Between the two was an area open to the Hall below which created a grand room and allowed smoke from the hearth to rise instead of choking everyone while it worked its way out of the smoke hole. The First floor was accessed by a ladder or steep stairs until late in the medieval period.

Ground Floor

The bay beneath where the servant slept was the buttery (for storing food) and the pantry (for storing drink). These are intentionally unheated to help preserve things a bit. On the bay on the far side you had the Parlour (2), which was where the owners of the house worked and stored gear.

In the center the two bays are connected to form a large, "Open Hall" where the hearth was for cooking and general warmth. Half of the hall was open to the first floor above (3) to allow the smoke to rise out of everyone's way. The hall had two doors to allow a breeze to feed the fire as necessary. The master and family would generally sit on the parlour-side of the hall (away from the doors and high roof), where it would be warmest. The household would cook, eat, and drink in the hall and guests probably slept there.  Frequently there was a screen between the hearth and the buttery/pantry areas to reflect heat back into the main hall and to keep those too rooms as chill as possible.

Common design modifications to the basic Open Hall House:

• Wooden slatted windows, with glazed windows in later years
• Jettied first floor end bays and possibly jettied upstairs toilet
• Corridor linking the front and rear doors
• Brick chimney place and stack, usually positioned between the front and rear doors, usually combined with the corridor listed above
• Floor over the Open Hall to increase space on the First Floor, generally combined with the chimney as the hearth smoke needs to go somewhere
• Jettied central bay inline with the end bays, this could be to accommodate a walkway between the two separate ends of the first floor, or it could be associated with the floor over the Open Hall above
• Jettied first floor areas filled in from below to increase space on the ground floor
• Window extensions and bay windows
• Stairs instead of ladders, may serve the solar only
• Second story, often jettied further out than the first floor

These modifications could be made to an existing house or during the design phase of a new house. Certain modifications such as the second story will appear far more often in urban buildings than in open hall houses in a village

(1)  I'm using the British terminology of first floor being the floor above the ground floor, second floor is above the first floor, what Americans call the second story and third story. I decided to use the British term because I'm talking about British buildings and it seems appropriate.

(2) English spelling, why not.

(3) Presumably why it is named an Open Hall house.

Best of the Web: Medieval Demographics Made Easy

Rob Conley is one of many that are hosting Medieval Demographics Made Easy. A brilliant little bit of accessible research that everyone who plays in any kind of medieval environment should take a look at. I've linked to the landing page instead of the PDF itself so anyone looking for more info on the pdf can find it there.

Saxon Hovel

This image comes from A Handbook of Pictorial History by Henry W. Donald, available through Project Gutenberg. The image is actually from the "BERGER" Handwork cards advertised in the rear of the book. It's a nice little floorplan. I don't know how accurate but it's suitable as far as I care.

I've cleaned up some of the unnecessary clutter and added a door. The lines indicate 2x2 yard(?) squares. The dark bits at the corner and center appear to be support columns. I'm not sure what the small box on the right is, perhaps that represents the chimney hole.

On the drawing it's clear the thing is a waddle & daube construction although I've read the Saxons used regular wood plank walls as wood was plentiful at the time.

The roof is thatched and would be replaced yearly. In hilly areas the building might be built up next to a small cliff allowing one to walk right ontop of the house. I've seen images of scottish houses with live grass on there roof being trimmed by sheep. Also in hilly areas you might have a basement, or partial basement as it would probably be easier to make one half the house two stories high than to dig everything out to lay a flat foundation.

Saxon Farming

From A Handbook of Pictorial History by Henry W. Donald, available through Project Gutenberg. These two figures show Saxon farming but they may as well show any medieval farming as I don't think major gains were made during the period.


(Fig. 1): January. This month was called by the English, when heathen, “Wolf-monath,” because the wolves were most troublesome at this period of the year. When the English became Christians it was called “Aefter-Yule,” i.e., After-Christmas. Here there is a ploughing scene. Four oxen yoked together in couples are drawing a plough of a very solid-looking type. (In those days horses were not employed in farm work.) A farm-hand, bare-headed, bare-footed, and wearing only a single garment, is goading the oxen with a sharp-pointed ox-goad, similar to a long spear in appearance. A man in superior attire is guiding the plough, while another is scattering seed as the plough passes. A good representation of the plough of that period is shown here. 



(Fig. 2): August. This month was called by the English “Arn-moneth” or “Barn-moneth,” i.e., “harvest-month.” This drawing gives a representation of a farm wagon of good construction, and of the costumes of the workers, who appear to be of at least two grades—some bare-footed, wearing a single garment, while others have better-cut garments, and wear shoes and stockings in addition. At the head of a party is a man with a spear in his right hand, blowing a horn, who may be either superintending the work or may be the “advance guard” of a hunting party entering the field. The implements, sickles, and forks appear to be very similar to those in use at the present time.