Month: June 2017

Pointcrawling in a Dungeon!

Formulating my thoughts on a subject always helps my putting my ideas into focus. And so after writing yesterday about the challenges of using a pointcrawl map for a large dungeon I came up with some new ideas for how this problem might be solved.

Pointcrawling really is all about navigation by landmarks or travel along marked paths. During overland travel this is usually the only way there is to pick where you are going. This makes is very easy to take a hex map and convert it into a point map by simply removing all the hexes that don’t have keyed sites or encounters or lie along a path that connects two of the keyed locations. And you can easily convert a point map back into a hexmap by simply overlaying a hex grid on the chart of sites and paths.

But with dungeons this is not the same. As people discovered very early on in the history of RPGs, dungeons are very different environments from outdoor landscapes. In a dungeon you don’t chose your path or destination, you can simply go forwards and backwards in a corridor and pick from a fixed number of other corridors at junctions. When you want to go dungeon crawling with a point map, you can’t just take any grid map dungeon and convert it to a point map. This doesn’t work and you only end up with nonsense that has the same complexity as you started with. Instead, you have to design the entire dungeon from the ground up with a point map in mind.

A dungeon that would be very easy to do with a point map is a ruined castle with an open courtyard. In fact, Chris Kutalik’s ruincrawl is really an attempt to explore cities, not buildings. With an open castle, you can have the first area be the gatehouse that has one entrance and one exit. Once the players reach the exit of this area they can overlook the courtyard and see the various buildings that make up the interior. There may be a keep, a chapple, stables, a tavern, a warehouse, an inner gatehouse, and lots of uninteresting small sheds. The sheds and the patrol corridors in the walls have nothing interesting in them so they can be ignored and are not getting mapped. The other buildings each get their own small map and are marked on the point map as distinct areas. From their position at the exit of the outer gatehouse the players have a clear path to the stables, warehouse, tavern, and inner gatehouse, and if they go through the inner gatehouse they can also walk over to the chapple and the keep. What the paths in the courtyards look like is irrelevant. That’s a basic and simple pointcrawl.

This doesn’t work in a dungeon that is entirely underground, though. Simply because you can’t see other areas from a distance. You can’t say “let’s go over there” when you can’t see “there” and don’t even know that “there” exists. Ina grid map dungeon this is not a problem since you simply follow the corridors and then see where they lead to. With navigation by landmark being out of the picture, following marked paths is the only remaining option. But the whole point of pointcrawling a dungeon is that you want to strip out all the empty halls and chambers that make up the majority of the place and only have the players interact with the most interesting areas. I think the solution to this conundrum is to design dungeons for a pointcrawl along a network of highways. Coridors that clearly stand out from the rest and serve as main connective routes between major prominent area of the dungeon. Dozens or hundreds of minor side passages branch off from these leading to living quarter and storerooms, but they are not included in the map and can not be actively explored by the players. To look at a part of the dungeon in detail there has to be something that visible stands out and draws the attention of the PCs to the fact that there might be something worth looking at.

This is of course a few steps removed from the complete hands off approach you can have with grid map dungeons where the GM really only tells the players what they see and what happens as consequence of their actions. By designing a dungeon like this the GM takes the previlege to tell the players that their characters are not interested into exploring certain corridors and rooms and that they simply continue on their exploration along the provided path, which might not sit completely well with everyone. But really, this is exactly what outdoor pointcrawls do too. It’s an aknowledging nod towards the fact that games are abstractions of adventures and not accurate simulations. It takes away player choice, but really only choices that the GM knows in advance to be completely irrelevant. I don’t think many players would feel sorry about not having to explore 80 empty rooms in a room before they find a room that has something in it. When you look at fiiction this happens all the time. If you take a book or movie at face value, characters are instantly teleporting around all the time between scenes. But everyone is in agreement that the characters did walk between locations and that they probably talked during that time and perhaps even had some encounters that are completely inconsequential to the story. This is the underlying idea here.

A secondary issue I had been pondering is how to indicate the border of an area when each area consists of multiple rooms and is surrounded on all sides by more or less indentically looking rooms. What I think might be the best approach is to construct the whole dungeon not as one continous cluser of rooms but instead as multiple self-contained cells, which each cells having only two or three exits that lead to other cells. This is one of the things that makes it necessary to design a dungeon as a pointcrawl from the ground up. Grid map dungeons usually don’t have such clear cell structure and a great number of possible connections between thematically linked areas.

A system of self contained grid mapped cells connected by highways running through otherwise nondiscript cells is my solution to having huge dungeons that don’t involve long stretches of tedious searching through empty rooms or being implausibly cramme with treasures and monsters. Or at least my current attempt at a solution.

The Social Conflict of the Ancient Lands

Working on the Ancient Lands is always also a great process of learning for me. Even though it took me six years to get to this point, during which comperatively little content has been created, it doesn’t feel like wasted time as I don’t think I had anywhere close to the skill needed to make the world that I am refining now. But I still spot mistakes that were made and that hold considerable room for improvement.

While originality is overrated, I made some decisions early on about what fantasy stereotyps I don’t want in my setting because they are already everywhere (at least in the fantasy I was reading and playing back then): No Dark Lord, no demonic invasion, no lost golden age, no diminishing magic, and no default good PCs who kill default evil antagonists for no other reason than charity or to safe the world/kingdom. And I still really like those and mostly stick to them. Instead I came up with the idea that PCs are clan warriors who protect their village by fighting of monsters. But what first was a solution, and not a very well thought out one, gradually morphed in my head into a mandatory requirement. Not only do I now regard it as a dead end, it also made my pretty much completely ignore aspects of the setting that are actually pretty important. A major one of these is social conflicts and the main factions involved in it.

One thing I like so much about the Knights of the Old Republic series is their web of factions. In the Star Wars movies the Jedi and Sith are both actually really bland, but in KotOR they are more multi-faceted and you also get the Mandalorians as a third faction. And you don’t have that tunnel vision on the Skywalkers, which makes it all a lot more interesting. I know I want some of that. Other great examples of factions are the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, which really have them in the center of worldbuilding rather than the main stories, which serve more as framing devices to see the factions clashing.

I think that great conflicts are those that arise from specific circumstances unique to the world. Like the dark side of the Force in Star Wars, demonic possession in Dragon Age, or Defiling in Dark Sun. This results in conflicts that couldn’t take place in any other world as well and creates a real reason to play in this specific world rather than any of the dozens that are already around. If you want people to get invested in your setting, it needs to offer something that existing settings don’t. Again, you don’t need to be original in every element of the setting (which probably wouldn’t even work) but at the very least have one new thing, or new combination of existing things.

In the Ancient Lands, this original element is a natural world that is too powerful to be subjugated and makes large scale civilization impossible. Civilizations always stay small and are short lived, as agriculture is only sustainable with the blessing of the gods of the land. As there a few spirits that have both the power and inclination to create such havens where crops and herds are relatively safe from wild animals and the the severe elements, settlements always remain fractured and populations are unable to expand. How people are dealing with this situation is the basis for my current approach to the four main factions. Previously I had treated the factions as relatively small organizations, but I think the following ideas probably work best when almost all settlements can be associated with one of these factions, even if they have no unified hierarchies.

Druids are the mainstream group of shamans who serve as intermediaries between farming villages and the spirits of the land on which they live and work. (No longer the sorcerer hunters I treated them as previously.) In druid philosophy the current state of the world is the natural way of things and trying to fight nature can lead to no good and will always lead to premature destruction. Instead, the only way to find a life of peace and relative safety is to learn and understand the laws that govern nature and use them to your advantage instead of trying to work against them. In this regard druids are deeply conservative. This life is close to as good as it gets and any troubles are either the result of trying to defy nature or inevitable facts of the ways of the world. Accepting the limits of what mortal peoples can achive in a world in which they are not the masters and focusing on avoiding unnecessary clashes with the wilds and their spirits is the only way to a content life.

The Sakaya are a cult that accepts the dominance of natur and the greater power of spirits and gods, but rejects them as masters over their lives. Sakaya do not worship the spirits and turn for them for guidance and protection and instead draw their strength from relying on the cooperation with other people. Nominally they are a unified society of equals, though in recent decades the warrior companies on the coasts have increasingly reduced ties to the monasteries in the mountains. Sakaya will make bargains with spirits and occasionally agree to paying regular tribute, but they offer no devotions to them. Their strength comes from winthin themselves and their mutual cooperation to overcome the hardships of life. Striving for excelence in one’s skills and sharing resources for the greater good is the best way to support the community and create a peaceful life for oneself.

Wilders are generally small and remote settlements that share the belief with the druids that mortal efforts can not overcome the indomitable forces of the natural world. But they refuse to remain content with lives of hardship and permanent struggle and instead seek solace in an even greater power. Wilder cults worship the primordial gods of the earth and the sea that still rule these vast realms below the surface world as they have done since the beginning of time. Druids regard this as a worship of demons and the calling of powers into the world whose corrupting influence can only lead to disaster and suffering. In the eyes of most people, wilders are little different from sorcerers in the threat they pose to the rest of the world.

Sorcerers are witches who deny that the laws of the natural and spiritual world are unshakeable and refuse to accept that mortals can never be more than they are. They have turned to sorcery as a source of magic that is not bound to the natural laws and has the powers of primordial chaos to reshape reality itself. Sorcerers regard wilders as superstitious cults that have no understanding of the powers that they worship. The primordial gods of the deeps are simply spirits whose powers are open to mortals just as well. Sorcerers are very rare, perhaps numbering only a few hundreds in the whole world. But their attempts to reshape the world around them to their whims makes them an extremely dangerous threat in the eyes of all the other groups. Even sorcerers who seem like kind people and mean no harm to anyone warp and corrupt the world around them and leave behind areas of toxic blight in their wakes. They are all seen as madmen who risk dooming the world forever.

None of the groups are outright good or evil. Sorcerers are always destructive and wilders regularly play with very dangerous forces, but this does not mean that players can simply kill all of them and be done with it. Wilders often live in whole villages and while they may be particularly odd people they do not always directly threaten anyone else. Druids seem predestined to be good guys, but of all the groups they are the least flexible and tollerant. In their eyes the other groups are only making things worse for everyone and the Sakaya are foolishly risking their own survival at best. The monastic Sakaya are probably the ones least interested in confronting others but can be particularly stubborn against cooperating with demands that have them submit to spirits. The warrior Sakaya on the other hand are clear troublemakers, constantly looking for opportunities to improve and display their martial skills. This puts them in conflict with pretty much everyone, regardless of ideology. A sixth major group would be the naga sorcerers, who are very much like mortal sorcerers but regard all of those as inferior ursupers of their races ancient powers. Naga sorcerers never cooperate with mortal sorcerers and only tolerate them as personal thralls who are deliberately kept at a weaker power.

Pointcrawling a Dungeons and Swamp?

This is a problem that has been bothering me for a week now.

A pointcrawl map is an excelent solution to dealing with navigation in two situations. When you want to go from one known point to another known point and there are only a few possible routes that make sense, and when there is only a limited number of possible paths you can take from your current location. Which is the majority of overland travel. However, while working on the first segment of my next sandbox campaign, I noticed that it’s really difficult to use this method for searching a hidden ruin in a swamp. You don’t know the destination and there are no preexisting paths. The original pointcrawl concept explicitly mentions that real wilderness travel is almosy never blindly going in one direction but always either following a path or heading for a landmark. And I agree with that, so that I have started to believe this is not the fault of the pointcrawl but the fault of the swamp. If I want to handle travel in my campaign as a hexcrawl, then I have to change my ideas of how the players get to the ruin in the swamp.

Another issue that’s even tougher is using pointcrawling inside a huge dungeon that is mostly empty and irrelevant rooms and tunnels. A pointcrawl seems like a good idea to only fully play out the interesting sections of the whole dungeon. The chapple, the lab, the monster pens, the gatehouse, and so on. In a somewhat open castle this is no problem. Players can see the keep, the chapple, the stables, and the gatehouse from afar and chose their destination as they leave one area. But in an underground dungeon that doesn’t work. You don’t know what’s behind a door or corner until you enter the new area. It’s a completely different way people are navigating such environments.

If players are in the gatehouse and have the options to go from there to either the stables or the barracks, then the players have to know that these are the two things they can pick from. Otherwise it’s just randomness that takes them to the next area, not a meaningful choice. In a sci-fi setting this could be easy. Just have signs on the walls that tell you where you can go from here and how you get there. In a cave network or ancient ruin, that’s not a feasable approach, though.

Solutions? I don’t have any. I am still working on it, but so far I’ve made little progress beyond identifying the prolem. But my efforts will continue and maybe I’ll come up with something smart one day.

Calendar of the Ancient Lands

Yesterday I wrote about the gas dwarf companion of the forest planet on which the Ancient Lands are located. Today I am adding to that with the calendar that people of the region use to track time based on those astronomical observations. Since the gas dwarf is such a huge presence in sky and months are relatively short, the sun has relatively little symbolic significance in the setting so far, and the main use of the calendar is to track the phases of the moon, I am going with a lunar calendar instead of a solar calendar. Lunar calendars are a bit more complicated to use for long term record keeping than solar calendars, but as this is pretty much not a factor for the Ancient Lands, a lunar calendar is much more convenient.

A month has 16 days and begins on the first sunset after the new moon.
Nights of the full moon always fall on the night after the 8th day of the month.
A solar year has 381 days from one winter solstice to the next winter solstice.
A calendar year has 384 days, and each new year begins on the first sunset after the first new moon since the winter solstice.
Because the solar year is three days shorter than the calendar year, every 16th calendar year has only 23 months and ends on the day of the winter solstice.
In reality there would have to be occasional leap days as orbits are never perfectly synchronized in nature, but since for the purposes of an RPG time is measured in month and not in centuries, these are simply ignored for convenience.

In addition, solar eclipses are fairly regular things.

Solar eclipses only happen during new moons, so they always fall on the last day of the month (the 16th).
Because of axial tilt, eclipses only happen during spring and fall, never in summer or winter. This means the 4th to 7th and the 16th to 19th month.
This means the possible dates for a solar eclipse are 16.04., 16.05., 16.06., 16.07., and 16.16., 16.17., 16.18., 16.19. There is a 50% chance that it happens during daytime for any place in the world.
Since the apparent diameter of the gas dwarf is 8 times greater than that of the sun, eclipses will almost always be total. They last between 10 and 30 minutes (1d3 turns).

That’s no Moon

It’s a gas dwarf.

I never made any secrets about how much I love the worldbuilding of Morrowind. (It’s gameplay is a different matter.) And I never let an opportunity pass by to tell everyone how much I love Star Wars. I also liked the world of the old videogame Albion and the whole old Planetary Romance genre in general. When I wrote down my Project Forest Moon concept paper to spice up the Ancient Lands with more mythic and puply atmosphere, that title was just a name referencing the visual style of Endor in The Return of the Jedi. But that phrase stuck with me until I recently decided to have the Ancient Lands be set on an actual moon. I know a fair bit about astronomy and while I think scientific accuracy is vastly overrated in fantasy worldbuilding, I think no creator likes to create stuff they know to be wrong within the rules of their fictional world. So I sat down to figure out a configuration that is at least somewhat plausible if you’re not getting too specific about the exact numbers involved. Or in other words, I feel pretty confident that planets like this can exist if you just find the right numbers for masses and distances to keep everything in semi-stable balance.

Having an Earth-sized moon orbiting a gas giant (like the Rebel base on Yavin 4 in Star Wars) would have all kinds of “interesting” effects that would make any kind of Earth-like environment on it vastly implausible. And you’d also end up with all kinds of funkiness regarding day length and daily solar eclipses lasting for hours. To keep things much simpler and more familiar, I chose to make the big ball in the sky a gas dwarf instead.

So what is a gas dwarf?

Gas dwarves are the most recently discovered type of planet that exists in other star system, which look very much like gas giants but are much smaller than those. In their center is a solid rocky core like a common terrestial planet which is then surrounded by a massive atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Planets like Earth or Venus have not enough gravity to hold on to these very light gases in significant quantities, but if you go just a little bigger in size gravity is strong enough to keep these huge balls of gas together. The total mass of gas dwarves is between 1.7 and 4 times the mass of the Earth and it appears that they are one of the most common types of planets in the universe. It’s just a random oddity of the solar system that we ended up not having any of these. Being so much smaller than a gas giant the gravitational effects and its magnetic field would be much smaller than what you have in a behemoth like Jupiter or even Neptune.

I recently got myself Universe Sandbox 2, which I’ve been fascinated about for a very long time, and made a quick simulation of what it might look like if you take Earth and switch the Moon for smallish gas dwarf. I started by taking Neptune and changing its mass to 2 Earth masses. The program then did the recalculation of it’s actual size automatically. As expected, two bodies of such similar size would actually form a binary planet, both orbiting about a point between them instead of one going around the other, with the world if the Ancient Lands not being actually a moon. But it’s close enough. The screenshot at the top of this post is taken directly from the simulation I made with everything being at actual scale, with the gas giant being the same distance away from Earth as the Moon. But it’s a lot bigger and the little black dot next to the bigger blue ball is what the Moon would look like from this perspective. At 8.5 times the radius of the moon the gas dwarf would take up an area in the sky 72 times bigger. Hydrogen clouds would also reflect light much better than moon rocks, so the light of a full moon would likely be hundreds of times brighter than what we get here on Earth. However, human eyes are actually really amazing at automatically adjusting to light levels to give the brain the appearance that everything is normally lit. We did measurements of light levels in greenhouses in school and rooms that seem to be evenly lit actually get several times the amount of light close the sun facing windows than at the opposite side. Sunlight is obviously brighter than the light of a full moon, but human eyes adjust so well that you probably wouldn not have suspected that it is actually 400.000 times brighter. So even with a full moon being 400 times brighter than on Earth, the nights wouldn’t actually look much brighter to the eyes of people.

This is the Earth and the gas dwarf seen side on at actual scale. This shows the actual relative sizes and distances of the two bodies.

Tidal effects would obviously be much more severe as those caused by the Moon. However in practice, the actual rise and fall of the water is influenced much more significantly by the shape of coastlines than the gravitational pull of the moon. While there would be some bays experiencing absolutely astonishing tides, it should not be too dramatic for most coasts to completely change life near the sea. The time between high tide and low tide remains roughly 6 hours since the day is 24 hours in length. The orbital speed of the gas dwarf is marginal compared to the rotation of the forest planet.

Sadly, one thing that Universe Sandbox can not simulate is tidal locking. Tidal locking is when a smaller body slows down its rotation to the point where it matches its orbit around the larger body, causing it to always show the same side to the larger body, while the larger body would remain stationary in the sky of the smaller one. I think this is boring and want my wandering gas moon, which is why I gave it such a low mass to reduce this effect. In reality, the effects that cause tidal locking are working on every smaller body orbiting a larger one. The only question is how long it will take for the rotation to slow down before a true lock is reached. For the Earth and the Sun, tidal locking actually takes longer to reach than the Sun is going to live. One number I’ve found is that the Earth actually had days of only 6 hours when it first formed. So the fate of my world is sealed and it will eventually tidally lock to the gas dwarf. But the gas dwarf has only twice the mass of the forest planet while in comparison the Earth has 80 times the mass of the Moon. So I see it as completely plausible that a after three billion years the forest planet still has a nice 24 hour day and is a very far way from getting locked and the gas giant keeps moving in the sky.

Another interesting number is the length of a month. That is time from one full moon to the next full moon. In this particular configuration of masses and distances that I uses this turned out to be almost exatly 16 days. That would be 4 days from new moon to half moon and from half moon to full moon, and the same back of course. 16 is a very attractive number, being a square of an even number, so I keep that for the days in a month. For the number of months in a year, 24 would also be a very attractive number, being a multiple of 12. If a month where exactly 16.0 days and a year exactly 24.0 months, it would lead to a year of 384 days. Very close to what we think of when we are talking about “a year” as a unit of time. But such a perfect synchronisation would seem vastly implausible to me, so in the tradition of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi I am setting the length of the year at roughly 381 days, with the occasional leap day now and then. And sometimes a year happens to have only 15 months. Since I am lazy with such things and calendars show up rarely in practice in campaign, I’m not making any names for months or days of the week. It’s simply the first day of the eleventh month. With each month beginning at the new moon.

Another cool subject is solar eclipses. Because with a diameter 8 times larger than the Moon, the gas dwarf has a really easy time completely covering up the sun. In reality the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun once every month during the new moon. However in most months it will pass actually above or below the sun in the sky since all orbits are not perfectly flat. How often you get solar eclipses depends on the tilt of the orbit, the size of the moon compared to the sun, and the length of a month, but they will be most common during spring and fall. There are 16 opportunities for an eclipse every year and a 50% chance for any place on the planet to be on the sun facing side when it happens, resulting in a total maximum of 8 if the orbits where perfectly flat. I really don’t want to worry about the exact math of this, so I am just arbitrarily setting the number of total eclipses a place experiences in a year at 1 or 2. However, I am pretty sure there is an orbital tilt that would lead to this result. I just don’t want to calculate that number as it will never come up in a game. On Earth a solar eclipse can last up to eight minutes. With the gas giant being eight times wider but it going around the planet at double the speed, this gives us eclipses of up to 30 minutes. So to streamline the numbers for practical use, a total eclipse lasts for 10 to 30 minutes.

So that’s the sky and the resulting calendar in the Ancient Lands. I actually tried to simulate each of the two planets having a small moon of their own, adding Deimos and Phobos to the system. When I ran the simulation, the Earth immediately flung its moon on a course to the sun while the gas dwarf threw its moon straight at Earth, leaving a huge crater lake in Morocco. I am pretty sure it should be possible to have two minor moons in the sky as well, but I am not going to include these into the simulation. They are just there in the sky looking pretty and not having any noticable effect on the planet below.

Dark Sun Sandbox

No, this is not a pun.

I wrote about sandboxes and taking the idea of default goals from megadungeons on monday, and how it finally made sandbox campaigns click for me.

And it finally made me understand how I would properly run a Dark Sun campaign. A sandbox is a perfect match for it. One issue with the setting as described is that all the interesting possible oponents are fabulously powerful. If you want to engage in the current public affairs of Athas, you’re facing immortal sorcerer kings with limitless resources and whole armies of seriously dangerous minions. Yet doing regular bandit killing and caravan guarding would be just way too bland for a setting like this. Even being an ordinary adventurer looking for gold in dungeons would be kinda meh.

But as a sandbox it all makes so much more sense. The default action in a Dark Sun campaign is “don’t die”. When you’re in a city, then the templars of the sorcerer-kings are everywhere and looking to kill or enslave you for the slightest reason. If you’re not in a city, then it’s a constant fight to not be killed by the desert. Sitting around idle is never an option, you are always facing a threat. If you don’t have any specific goal for now, then simply staying alive and free will always keep you occupied. It’s a world that really comes to life through random encounters. Random encounters are not the hand GM nuding the players to do certain things. They are the setting itself being hostile to the players, which really is one of the big selling points of Dark Sun as a setting.

And going on more specific adventures with a defined goal can always be treated as a means to accomplishing the default goal of staying alive. Helping others is not something you do out of kindness, but because they will give you resources and assistance in return, which then can help you to survive the deserts and stay ahead of the templars for a little longer. And in the long term, the players can make allies and gain the friendship of slave tribes or bands of elves, or can call in a debt from thri-kreen. Or even somehow get the gratitude of a clan of halflings. Lunatic canibal halflings who live in the one forest in a desert world that everybody else stays way clear of. As they grow in personal power and gain allies, players can eventually get into a position where they can mean actual trouble for any of the sorcerer-kings. Whichever one of them the players decide to hate the most.

The Tyr Region is perfect for a sandbox, and not just because it’s full of sand. However, given that the setting was created for AD&D 2nd edition and that the really cool concept was quickly turned into garbage by a heavy handed metaplot that had NPCs do all the things that would have been cool for players to do, I very much doubt that this was the intention. But that’s clearly how I would run it.