Simple encounter maps for online play

A week ago I was talking about the problem of having tactical encounter maps for online games that are at the same time easy to make, having an atmospheric look, and also encourage the players to imagine the actual environment and not think of the encounter as moving miniatures around.

I think I found a solution that satisfies all three criteria. This is a quick mockup of the idea.

I’m not happy with either the textures for the background or the tokens and the dye job I did on those tokens looks pretty awful. It’s probably going to be a good idea to draw a transparent layer of the rooms in advance in Photoshop or GIMP and then simply drop them over the background texture in Roll20. The standard line drawing tool doesn’t look very pretty and it can take a minute or two to draw a room like this. But if you have to get a map instantly and have nothing prepared, it’s still a good way to make one on the spot that looks mostly consistent with the standard style.

While I used a parchment texture as the default background, I think I will also try to use granite or polished black marble backgrounds for some dungeons as a littl additional mood setting tool.

B/X spells don’t disrupt adventuring?

One often lamented thing about D&D is that many potential adventure situations can’t really be done because there’s a simple single spell that can solve the whole problem. And with 3rd Edition this is definitely the case. Continual Flame? Detect lies? Zone of truth? Teleport without error? What the hell were they thinking?! Any time you have an idea for a spell because “wouldn’t it be neat if you could do that?”, you really have to stop and think how this would affect the obstacle it deals with in the long term. Teleport without errormeans the party will never have to prepare for the return trip out of the dungeon or back to civilization. Any time they face real difficulties they can instantly go to a city or castle of their choice with a single spell. Are you looking for a traitor? Get all the suspects together and have them say “I am not a traitor” after the cleric rested and prepared detect lies. This is such a problem that seemingly every second high level dungeon has magical interference that blocks teleportation and every villain wears an amulet of mind shielding. It’s a ridiculous situation and probably contributed a good deal to 3rd Edition and Pathfinder adventures being overwhelmingly linear combat. And to make matters worse, these games let you very easily make scrolls of all spells you know and even wands with 50 charages. One knock spell isn’t a disaster. A wand that holds 50 knock spells is an entirely different story, though.

So this week I went through the spells in the Basic and Expert sets again to see at which character levels certain kinds of obstacles become easily negated with spells. And to my surprise, B/X is actually doing really well in this regard. There are a few spells that are really extremely useful but they are few in number and even those are not making obstacles completely redundant.

Read Languages

With this spell a 1st level wizard can read any unknown script and language. While it says “any code”, I assume this to mean that it can decode any cipher but still will give you only a literal decryption but not tell you the meaning of secret code words and phrases. While you can read any written texts it doesn’t give you the ability to write in languages unknow to you so you can’t use it to communicate across language barriers. Two wizards who both have the spell prepared could do it if they can make their intention to do so clear, but even then it lasts only for 20 minutes.

Detect Evil

This spell lets a 1st level cleric sense “evil intentions, or evilly enchanted objects”. Since there is no evil alignment in Basic it can not detect that. The spell only provides a feeling of evil but no specific thoughts and it’s explicitly stated that GM has to interprete what evil intentions means in the specific campaign. This spell is not “find the guilty one”.

Continual Light

This spell allows you to make a torch that lasts until dispelled. Or lost or stolen. I’m not really happy with parties not really having to bother with lamps or torches (or only keeping some as emergency backups) from 3rd level on if a wizard gets this spell but it’s not a real disruption of actual major obstacles.

Continue reading “B/X spells don’t disrupt adventuring?”

Know what you don’t want

Not much of a big revelation, but it feels like a somewhat important step of my own worldbuilding work.

My favorite design paradigm is “Perfection is not reached when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.” (My second favorite one is “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”) While it has led me to very good results so far and the Ancient Lands are now much tighter and sleeker, I still frequently find my mind wandering off into wrong directions when making up new details. And what I realize now is that many times I end up following the same paths that didn’t lead to anything satisfying before. There are many fantasy ideas that I really like but which are not fitting for this particular setting.

  • Stone Age Fantasy: The Ancient Lands are a world in which civilization is small and short lived, which is mostly wilderness and ruled by spirits. This is a setup that lends itself very much to Stone Age cultures and I frequently find myself thinking of cultures and settlements in a Stone Age context when trying to define them more sharply. But now I realize this is really not what I want. The original concept was of a time where elves and dwarves rule and are at war with dragons and giants. That would be much more like small Bronze Age kingdoms. While it’s tempting to go that route to distinguish the setting, I don’t want to do a Stone Age hunters game. No need to explore this direction any further. What I want is more Morrowind and Kalimdor.
  • Weird Horror: I’ve found myself coming back to pour over Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventures and Patrick Stuart stuff many times and most of them are great. And there’s a good number of ideas in them that I think will be of great use to me, but I don’t want my campaigns to be like them. There’s a lot of great images and effects to be found, but the setting doesn’t really have a place for bleak dispair.
  • Classic Demons: I love demons in D&D. They are one of the greatest parts of the whole generic D&D mythology. I am also quite intrigues by the demons from Dragon Age. But my setting doesn’t really have a place for such embodiments of evil. What I a, going for is something much more like Daedra or Quori, with a lot more weird and less obsession with destruction. If I find myself thinking about evil destruction spirits, I should get myself to stop and instead work on something that’s more on the point.

Creativity isn’t something to just turn on and off as needed but more of a bubbling of ideas that for some reason feel right. But good design needs focus and direction. Knowing what you want is great, but knowing what you don’t want, even though it’s a great idea in general, also might help quite a bit.

Dungeon Mapping in Online Campaigns

Last time I was talking about giving an XP bonus to players who write session reports to encourage them to keep other players who weren’t present up to date with the campaign. Another important aspect of tracking important information that other players will know is the making of maps.

I am not a fan of miniatures in RPGs as I find them to get players into a chess game mode in which they think mostly about moving pieces around and less of actual people and monsters being in wondrous place. (One of the big reasons I quit d20 games.) But when playing online, and especially with changing groups and many people who aren’t native English speakers (or speak quite different variants of English) I find having a map that shows the layout of the area and the position of characters a necessity. It just would get too confusing.

I did make some huge dungeon maps for roll20 using lots of different textures and adding light effects, but while these provide some nice visual cues about the environment it still feels a lot like a miniature game. And from a practical perspective making these maps is a huge pain in the ass. I think in a sandbox game where preparation of dungeons will often happen just between sessions,it just won’t be possible to use such a work intensive method. Last summer I experimented with making premade tiles drawn in the style of Dyson Logos, but that also turned out really fiddly and again you’re drawing attention to the map. So I think what I’ll be doing instead is using simple sketches of black lines that indicate where walls and floor obstacles are and not attempt to show any details on the map. Players will have to remember the description of the room to know what objects they could make use of. But instead of the ugly plain white background of Roll 20 I will try to find some nice parchment or stone face textures onto which the floor plans will be scribbled.

Looks great enough in Thief.

Also, I will disable the square grid. When you knew nothing but d20 games for twelve years it might seem an obvious necessity, but I don’t think even in those a grid is really needed. If you really need to know exactly the distance a character can move in roll20 you can just use the ruler tool and don’t need to count squares. I think using a grid is a big factor that makes players eyes glued to the map and think of combat as a math problem and it’s one that is easily removed.

Now a fun sounding element in oldschool dungeon crawls is players making their own maps as they are progressing through a dungeon, which might be not too accurate. And when the party loses the map or has to flee taking a shortcut through unmapped terrain based on what they assume their current path is leading them back to should be quite exciting. But if you upload a regular dungeon map into roll20, there is no need for the players to make maps, unless you are always covering the map up again when the players move on to the next area. Which doesn’t really seem ideal. I think what might be a good approach is to do what old videogames did and cut the whole map into small areas divided by doors. When the party moves through a door the view changes to a different map. Roll20 can do that without real problem. As the GM you keep a complete map of the dungeon level with clear identification of each area so you always know which map you have to make visible to the players. The only problem is when fights happen to move between areas. But with a simple sketch map you should be able to just draw a few lines that show the rooms beyond the edge of the current map without it looking completely crappy.

A while back the Angry GM wrote about a nice system to make mapmaking not a chore for the players while still keeping the dungeon layout and architecture interesting. At it’s core it comes down to each area having only one exit in each direction and no branching paths unless the intersection is its own separate area on the map. This way the players really only need to make an annotated flowchart of which doors connect to which areas. This is many times simpler and more convenient than having the players translate verbal descriptions of measurements and directions into squares on a grid.

The biggest practical challenge is that the players would not be able to just give the map they made to someone else. This requires scanning or photographing the scribbled map,uploading it,and then sharing the link with the other players. Though by this point this isn’t a huge obstacle anymore. However, if other players are to continue the mapping they still have to transfer the whole map from the image to their own paper. I think this should be managable.

But how do you get players to diligently upload their map after each game so the party can still use it if the player isn’t there the next time? I think I just use the same incentive again: +10% XP bonus for every player who does. Just like writin reports of their expeditions, drawing maps is part of the explorer’s profession. Some very engaged players might regularly get a +20% boost, but using the B/X level progression this is still not going to give them much of a noticeable advantage over other players.

Session Reports and Incentives

Because technical reasons are probably going to delay the start of my (now long) planned Ancient Lands sandbox campaign until early summer, I still spend a lot o time on refining ideas and getting better prepared to running such a thing myself.

One special consideration  when running a game online with changing players is to keep everyone updated on what’s been happening so far. I could write a summary of each session myself, but that wouldn’t be very fun and it’s always difficult to get players to read anything between games. Having the players write the reports makes it easier for me and should be more fun to read for the other players.

How do you motivate players to write such reports when they are notoriously lazy about doing homework for the game? In this particular case I have the situation where the PCs are going to be explorers who are searching for knowledge about the supernatural. Collecting information and sharing them with other explorers of the (hopefully) constantly changing party is at the center of the campaign. And as such it feels not just justified but also really appropriate to give additional experience points to players when they write reports about their adventures and make their discoveries accessible to others. Fighters don’t get XP for fighting and witches don’t get XP for casting spells. Through the system of XP for treasure, everyone gets XP for being successful finders and retrievers of treasure. And compiling and organizing their discoveries on paper is certainly an activity that should increase  characters ability to find and secure treasures.

I think I will go with giving a bonus of +10% of the last session’s XP to every player who posts a report of that game. Doesn’t matter if there’s multiple accounts or how good those reports are. I believe once you get players to write about their exciting adventures to tell other players who weren’t there, they are not going to half-arse it just for a few XP. The only difficulty is to get them motivated to start, and if there’s one thing that motivates players it’s XP. Not free XP, but earned XP! And the way XP and level advancement works in Basic, 10% extra is not actually going to make much of a difference. Every now and then a player who always writes reports will reach the next level one session before the other players but the next two or three times it might very well again be at the same time. But still, +10% is +10% percent and players are greedy.

Time is an Illusion, and so are Pants

While I’ve been thinking about Morrowind, Planescape, Glorantha, and Tekumel (and why Dark Sun doesn’t seem to feel fully right as being in the same category) I came to the conclusion that beyond Asian and pre-medieval stylistic influences they all share a considerable amount of metaphysics and religion and have some esoteric aspects that are a big part of their appeal. (Dark Sun doesn’t, which is what sets it apart.) It’s something that I frequently pondered and has always been in the back of my head since I first wrote about the subject two years back. And while thinking about what elements with philosophical and metaphysical aspects I already have, I came up with a pretty decent list.

Most of these things started with me wanting to hav certain aesthetic and narrative elements that turned out to be conflicting with each other. Attempting to solve these conflicts by making various small changes and adaptations led to the discovery of numerous new ideas that are all not entirely original but make everything come together in a distinctive way that gives the world a unique character and opens interesting venues for exploration.

The Mythic Otherworld

This is an extension of Philotomy’s concept of the Mythic Underworld, which treats dungeons as places outside of the regular laws of nature and working by their own unfathomable supernatural rules. In the Mythic Otherworld this idea is extended to entire lands, or in case of the Ancient Lands the Spiritworld. The wilderness is a place of mostly mundane dangers that simply try to eat you. But the Spiritworld and its native creatures are not bound by the normal rules that make the civilized lands and wilderness make sense. Being inherently supernatural, the Spiritworld is a realm where things can seem illogical or outright impossible. There are castles and landscapes that defy gravity, fires that burn forever, underground labyrinths that never run out of breathable air, and creatures encountered in places they couldn’t have possibly reached. There are rules that govern the Spiritworld, but they are often quite different from those of the physical world and rarely make sense to mortal minds.

(This concept started as an attempt to make sense of the illogical layup and keying of many early dungeons, but actually turns out to be a really good paradigm for designing fantastic places with a mythical atmosphere and making spirits alien.)

Life Energy

Anything that exist is infused by energy. Energy allows living creatures to move and think, gives spirits their powers, and is also what makes fire burn and even seemingly unliving stones roll down cliffs and crush things underneath it. Energy is everywhere and while it appears in different looking forms it is ultimately all of the same essence. This life energy of nature has no boundaries and all things and everything that happens is part of the same whole. But within this universal energy is a vast multiplicity of wills, and each will has seemingly complete control over different bodies. But all the wills of each animal and plant within a landscape also make up the spirit of the land and this spirit can manifest a body of its own, even though it simultaneously exists in all the other beings within its realms.

To great spirits it comes naturally to share control over all the things in its domain with the individual wills of each being. People and animals are not normally aware of this touching and merging of wills. But it can be learned to extend the will beyond the own body into other things and other beings, which is then known as magic. Once control is released, things again follow their own natural behavior, which is why all mortal magic is impermanent.

(This originally started by thinking about the actual mechanics by which the Force makes things happen, but it ended as something that also very well explains spirits and divination.)

The Wyrd

Time is always flowing and things constantly changing, so it is impossible to accurately foresee the future before it happens, even with the most powerful magic of ancient spirits. But things never happen without a reason and all beings behave according to their nature, which makes many things that happen predictable. As the life energies of nature and magic flow through everything, great spirits and powerful magical beings have the ability to see what is hidden to the eyes and sense the paths that all creatures are following. This infinite network of paths is the Wyrd, and it is always in motion as creatures make choices and accident happen. But while paths are constantly changing, they rarely change by much and can be highly predictable to those who are experienced in watching them and knowledgeable in the hearts of men and beasts. Divination is the art of reading the everchanging wyrd and recognizing where paths are about to cross. Since all beings tend to follow their nature, great spirits and old shamans can tell which future encounters are fated to happen. They also can make predictions what choices people will make, but these become more unreliable the more unusual their circumstances are, and no power in the world can foresee the great differences that can be made by a loose stone or a serpent in the grass.

(Divination magic is always limited to predicting encounters and obstacles that are likely to happen, but can make no accurate statement of how they will play out. Telling the future without negating player agency and dice results lets me eat my cake and have it too.)

Drifting Time

Time is something that seems simple and straightforward in everyday life, with things changing and moving forward. But this is only because people are mortal and always only see short stretches of time and the physical world is followed by seemingly regular cycles of the seasons. But spirits have a much different perspective that allows them to see mountains rising and lands sink beneath the sea, yet at the same time nothing ever really changes and all the efforts of mortals are never getting them anywhere. On sufficient scales time is not a straight river that runs from the mountains to the sea but endlessly meandering without source or destination. Within the Spiritworld even the passing of seasons and years loses most of its meaning and both the weather as well as preservation and erosion are ultimately depending on the moods of the spirits of the land.

Whether days have passed or centuries makes very little difference in the Spiritworld. Ancient castles can be found in pristine states while solid castles may have crumbled to rubble after returning to them a month later. And while spirits may forgive, they rarely forget, and will honor both ancient agreements and avenge slights that happened generations past.

(The benefit here lies in having a good explanation of why there are so many ruins but little current civilization without having to rely on a Tolkienian decline of magic. It also justifies how magical creatures seem to be waiting fo centuries in inhospitable lairs for adventurers to find them. From their own perspective they and their lairs simply exist in a temporal limbo until outsiders interact with them.)

The Blight

The magic used by spirits, shamans, and witches utilizes the natural life energies within the environment and all the things in it and as such is limited to doing things that are naturally possible. But there is a space beyond the borders of reality which is filled with the energies of raw Chaos. Chaos energy has the potential to change the fabric of reality and through this allows sorcerers to do things that are impossible. This makes sorcery an extremely potent force that can be used for both great works and terrible destruction. But Chaos can never be fully controlled by mortals and every use of sorcery or the mere presence of demons weakens reality around them. This Blight warps and poisons the natural world and all living things touched by it. First it causes weakness and feelings of supernatural dread, but long exposure leads to deteriorating health and eventually turns living things into twisted monstrosities. Sorcerers learn to adapt to the changes of the Blight and consider it a price worth the unlimited potential sorcery offers. But most people see them as madmen who are laying the world into ruin in their thirsting for power. Druids and Demon Hunters stop at nothing to destroy sorcerers and demons wherever they can and while their methods are often extreme most people welcome their continual battle against further spreading of the Blight.

(This one started with my fascination of the idea that heroes fighting dark magic accept that this effort is exposing them to its power and eventually changing them. The Dark Side from Star Wars and the Darkspawn Blight and demonic possession from Dragon Age were both big influences on this.)

Red and Black Hearts

The peoples of the Ancient Lands do not think in the concepts of Good and Evil, or even such dualities as Order and Chaos. When judging people’s character, they distinguish between those whose actions bring peace and those whose actions bring suffering. Those who bring peace are usually higher regarded than those who bring suffering and are regarded as better or worse people accordingly. But there is no such thing as a concept of cosmic divine law which people can live in accordance with or violate. Not everyone who brings suffering needs to be despised or be made to stand justice, but they are all dangerous and often feared.

Most people who spread suffering are regarded as having a Red Heart. They are prone to anger, rage, hatred, and violence. While courage and strength are greatly admired by most peoples, those who have no control over their fury and lash out against others without thinking or restraint are seen as very dangerous people. While many redhearted people are regarded as thugs, this quality is also often found in those who have many other admirable traits. Their rages are often seen with sadness by those close to them, but if they prove to be to violent and unpredictable they need to be taken care of, one way or another.

People with a Black Heart are quite different in character and are much more unpredictable. They are not driven by rage, nor do they seek any satisfaction in the suffering of other. Rather, blackhearted people do not concern themselves with the suffering of others at all. They simply worry about their own goals and needs with no considerations about the wellbeing of others. They don’t go out of their way to spite or harm others but don’t hesitate when their plans will made others to suffer. For those who are more foresighted consider the social consequences of harmful actions on their longterm goals, but when they think they can get away with it there’s little that keeps them from sacrificing anyone.

Some people are seen as having both a red and a black heart and most of them are quickly regarded as monsters in humanoid form or being possessed by demons. Many of them are madmen who soon find an end at the hands of vengeful pursuers, but some end up among the most feared warlords and bandit leaders.

(Calling something evil is an ancient shortcut in western culture to not having reflect on an opponents motivation and reasons and get an instant moral justification to destroy them without further questions asked. Anytime I come across fiction that avoids this lazy simplification (usually Japanese but often also European) I really enjoy it a lot, and it makes interactions with supernatural and inhuman beings much more fascinating. So eventually I found this solution to have people “who just need killing” without giving the players an instant excuse to enjoy it. This is also why there are no orcs, goblins, or gnolls in this setting.)

Honor

While honor is an endlessly complex field, it’s role in the Ancient Lands primarily manifests itself in the two concepts of hospitality and vengeance.

Hospitality is the idea common in most cultures that everyone is obligated to offer food and shelter to travelers within the means of the host and according to the station of the guest. In a world with few travelers there are no places where one could rent a room outside the handful of major trade cities and there are no other places to stay the night or winter indoors than in the homes of locals. While the forests and mountain valleys are not as deadly as the open sea, it has become accepted that offering hospitality to travelers is an adequate price for seeing the same kindness extended to oneself or your relatives when similarly in need of shelter. There are limits to hospitality though and the guest is expected to offer a gift of gratitude in exchange, which again is according to the means of the guest and the station of the host. Overstaying ones welcome or not presenting sufficient gifts, let alone abusing the kindness of the host, is as much a violation of hospitality as not offering travelers a place for the night and just as much damaging to ones honor and reputation.

In a world where visitors from outside are rare, hosting guests is often much more of an honor than a burden to the host. Hosting esteemed guests is a great boost to ones reputation and in most places it is understood that only the mosy powerful families will get this honor. While refusing hospitality when requested is highly dishonorable, offering it freely to travelers can make the lesser families of a village very powerful enemies. Since the most powerful families are usually also the richest who ca best afford hosting guests in considerable comfort for extended time, this is an arrangement that mostly suits everyone involved just fine. Traveling adventurers coming to a new village will usually stay at the hall of the chief or another of the great families.

When conflicts happen, Vengeance is the most common institution to maintain stability. While there often is a desire to see an offender punished, avenging an offense is primarily a means to ensure that nothing of that kind will happen to the offended family or clan again. By getting revenge, a familiy is showing its strength and the severe consequences to anyone who might want to try attacking them. The point is not to get even but to make everyone afraid to cross the familiy again and because of this it is often impossible to let an attack go unpunished, even if the family has no desire for blood. To let an offense pass shows that the family is weak and an easy target for further attacks. Most of the time vengeance can be satisfied by payments of reparations. Paying reparations is safer for both sides and allows the conflict to become forgotten much faster than if someone got killed or maimed. If the reparation is sufficiently high, it means a significant loss for the offending family and it has been established that the attack has cost them. If the offer of reparation is considered insufficient or the crime too grave, the offended family will be after blood. In any such feud both sides come out much worse than they were before and it’s not uncommon that the offended family ends up losing more people and wealth than they inflict in damage on their enemies. Killing is not always necessary and in some cases causing injury will be regarded as acceptable if both sides aren’t eager for a long and deadly feud. But deaths can always happen and sometimes an injured member dying from wounds weeks later can reignite a stalled or solved feud. Feuds can continue for week or months until both sides are too exhausted from the constant state of warfare to continue. If the offended family believes it has shown that anyone attacking them will pay dearly for it, a truce will usually be negotiated though neutral mediators.

Vengeance is almost never between individuals but between families or clans. In tribal societies nobody is ever acting alone and any offense that is being commited is usually done in the presence or at least with the knowledge of a relative. These relatives also share responsibility for the offense, but part of the blame also lies with the elder siblings and older relatives who are responsible for properly raising the children of the family. The responsibility for every offense lies with the whole family. Most people own little personal items and most wealth in the form of land and animals is shared by the whole family,so any reparations automatically affect the family as a whole. The same goes when crops and buildings are destroyed or animals stolen or killed. When an offense is avenged with blood, there are also other practical considerations to attack relatives of the original offender. It is often easy for a family to protect a single member inside their home indefinitely, making it impossible to get at him. In theory all members of a family are valid targets, but many families hesitate to attack children or old women unless the other sides starts doing it first. But when arrows and torches are flying accidents happen and this escalation is not uncommon. Also, even if an offender manages to survive a feud unharmed until a truce is agreed his family will have suffered greatly and they know exactly who was responsible for bringing this suffering upon them. Even if they feel obliged to protect the offender, they will often see that he sees punishment for his offense themselves.

(I’ve long been intrigued at how vengeance and hospitality really worked in practice as their portrayal in fiction always seemed just as dodgy as that of warfare (which is mostly sensationalist nonsense). I’ve spend years researching social organization and public order in pre-civilization societies as a cultural studies student and it’s a very fascinating alternative to the typical medieval fantasy approach. While it’s a highly complex subject I think breaking it down to these two key concepts lets the players gets the most out of it while being pretty easy to grasp.)

I think nothing here is really new and ha been seen in one way or another several times before. But I doubt that all these elements and ideas have been used in this particular configuration and I am feeling very happy with the setting getting my own unique stamp because of it.