I hate it when this happens

This week my worldbuilding efforts for the Old World have been spend mostly on trying to develop the role and nature of demons and the Underworld. And the unfortunate conclusion that I’ve reached is that my original ideas really don’t work for the kind of setting the Old World has become.

Lovecraft Horror in the Bronze Age is a cool idea, but the focus of the Old World lies somewhere else, and it just doesn’t fit in. I really, really like the six types of Underworld creatures I had planned, but they are just way too much like space aliens. (Partly because five of them are straight up adaptations from sci-fi videogames.)

But it just doesn’t work. The Old World will be a much better setting without them confusing things. In such cases there really is no point in dragging along dead weight that will only be a burden. So they just have to go.

Perfection is not reached when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left that can be taken away.

But I think I might still be able to at least salvage the aboleth archetype. Instead of being some eldritch being from before time, it can still work as simple one big ass evil fish. This picture is just too cool not to do something with it.

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A simple mechanic to assemble a posse

The Old World is a setting in which money and treasure plays only a minor role as there just isn’t a lot you could buy with it. In a campaign, even the best types of armor are trivially cheap while magical objects are valuable beyond measure and not something that can be bought or sold. And since most trade takes the form of barter, there aren’t really many coins around to begin with. It’s a world that runs on obligations, favors, and debts. It makes little sense to track the contents of the PC’s purses in such a campaign.

However, there is one aspect of playing a B/X style campaign that I very much like, but which falls through the gaps when you have no money, and this is the hiring of mercenaries. When numbers and tactics matter much more than individual armor class, hit points, and attack bonus, being able to bring a bunch of archers and spearmen to a fight makes a huge difference. And I am a big fan of the Combat is War approach to battles in RPGs. It’s not about showing your personal abilities, but about making the fight as unfairly tipped in your favor as possible. Any good battle is won before the fighting even starts. (Of course this would be boring, but players always have limitless potential to plan really badly, which then makes it all the more exciting when they suddenly have to improvise.)

Hiring such reinforcements doesn’t really work in a game where there is no money. But you can still always assemble a posse.

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In anĀ Old World campaign, most adventures take place in villages or small towns where the PCs are staying in the home of the local chief to help reinforce his warriors for the protection of the community. These settlements are always very Wild West in character and all of them have numerous people who have weapons and know how to fight. If the players need additional manpower to drive bandits from the area or bring down a dangerous beast that has been seen nearby, there’s always a pool of potential helpers. The players might either ask the chief to give them some of his men as backup to protect the village, or they can make a call for volunteers in the great hall or the main square. Either way, the outcome is the same.

I am always a fan of making sub-systems as simple and easy to remember as possible and making them well integrated with the already existing rules. So this really isn’t anything particularly fancy or special beyond the initial idea.

To gather a posse, one character in the group rolls 2d6 and adds his Charisma modifier to the roll. Using the LotFP rules, I am also adding the character’s attack bonus to the roll, but for other systems you can add the character’s level for fighters and half the character’s level for any other class. This reflects that more people will be willing to go into combat behind a leader who knows what he’s doing when it comes to fighting.

The result of the roll is the number of level 0 NPCs who come forward as volunteers, or are ordered by their chief. If the posse is gathered to defend the community from an immenent attack, or to hunt down a particularly vicious criminal, the number might be doubled. However, the number should usually not exceed 10% of the total population of the community. (Any major NPC who has a personal interest in the PCs plan might also come along.)

The base Morale score for the posse is 7, modified by the Charisma modifier of the leading PC. If the warriors are fighting for the safety of their homes, Morale can be increased by +1 or +2. If the party leads the posse into seemingly suicidal situations or attempts a needlessly reckless plan, an apropriate penalty to Morale should apply.

The posse is gathered only for one specific task. Once the task has been acomplished or resulted in a failure, it will disband and the warriors return home. If at the end of the task the players want to continue to a new task, a new recruitment roll has to be made. (Obviously a higher result than the current number of warriors will not make the posse increase beyond its current size.)

The true origin of alignment?

I never made a secret of my opinion that the introduction of alignment in Dungeons & Dragons was one of the biggest mistakes ever made in the history of RPGs and that we’re all suffering from it to this day.

A few years ago I made an attempt to find out what alignment was originally meant to represent, since you probably won’t find any two rulebooks that agree on this rather important question. In the Original D&D game, alignment is just there without any comment or information what it means and what it is for. Holmes Basic and Moldvay Basic remained very fuzzy about what it means and AD&D didn’t really clear up anything either. This is where my research ended, assuming that alignment had just been thrown in at an afterthought because Michael Moorcock had it in his stories and it was cool. But as far as the evidence went, there had never been a clear concept of alignment. Only the interpretation of people who were just as baffled by the terms as all the other players.

But today I came across this interesting quote, which was apparently written by Dave Arneson himself.

We began without the multitude of character classes and three alignments that exists today. I felt that as a team working towards common goals there would be it was all pretty straight forward. Wrong!

“Give me my sword back!” “Nah your old character is dead, it’s mine now!”

Well I couldn’t really make him give it to the new character. But then came the treasure question. The Thieves question. Finally there were the two new guys. One decided that there was no reason to share the goodies. Since there was no one else around and a +3 for rear attacks . . .. well . . Of course everyone actually KNEW what had happened, especially the target.

After a great deal of discussion . . . yes let us call it “discussion” the culprit promised to make amends. He, and his associate did. The next time the orcs attacked the two opened the door and let the Orcs in. They shared the loot and fled North to the lands of the EGG OF COOT. (Sigh)

We now had alignment. Spells to detect alignment, and rules forbidding actions not allowed by ones alignment. Actually not as much fun as not knowing. Chuck and John had a great time being the ‘official’ evil players. They would draw up adventures to trap the others (under my supervision) and otherwise make trouble.

Finally, finally! there appears to be an explanation of what alignment was supposed to be and what it was created for. A very simple “stop fighting each other and play as a team!” It didn’t work and the creator himself admits that it was a mistake.

Why it ended up in the eventually published product anyway, I really do not know. But we’re still having regular “Should the Paladin fall Mondays” all over the internet to this very day.

Thinking about NPC levels in an Old World campaign

So here I am again, writing about RPGs. Even though I am creating the Old World as a fiction setting, I can’t shake the constant thought that it also would make for a really great campaign setting. And once more I am finding myself getting back to B/X, specifically LotFP. Yes, I know: Oh, the irony! Aside from the magic system (for which I have a complete replacement almost ready) I just really love the game in all its simplicity. Combat, character advancement, and monsters are just exactly the way I really want it.

With my experiences in fiction worldbuilding, my look on preparing a campaign setting for an RPG also changed a lot. In the past I used to attempt to emulate the structure of settings like Forgotten Realms, Eberron, and Golarion, and for a long while really didn’t know what to make of things like Red Tide, Yoon-Suin, or the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. But having learned a lot about Sword & Sorcery worldbuilding in fiction, this very much changed and I am seeing what’s the deal with the later and how it fits my own purposes. Often less is more, and in this case it is much more less that is so much more. I am no longer interested in precise maps, borders, or population numbers for cities and countries. Making up new villages and dungeons as I go will be good enough.

But even when you have a setting that is defined by culture and environments and not by specific places and organizations, to have a campaign in which the players have real agency is that you know who the movers and shakers in the campaign area will be. And one topic that none of the many guides and introductions for running unscripted campaigns ever touch upon is the creation of NPCs. What class level should the major NPCs in the campaign have?

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Now one very easy solution would be to not set a level for NPCs until the players run into them for a fight. But that causes a pretty major problem. The decision of the players to fight an NPC or not is based on whether they think they can win such a fight or not. Chosing to start a private war with a powerful local leader is as big a choice as players are going to make, and it can only be an informed and meaningful decision if the strength of the NPC is fixed before the decision is made. If you create stats for an NPC only once you know that the players are looking for a fight, their choice will have been meaningless. When you decide to make the NPC beatable or unbeatable for the party at its current strength, the players are completely without power to influence the survival and victory of their characters. Over the years there has been a lot of talking over what makes the differences between the videogames Morrowind and Oblivion (and now Skyrim as well), and one thing that really changed how the games play is the adjustment of enemies to the level of the player, or the lack of it. In Oblivion and Skyrim it has become irrelevant what places you chose to visit and what quests to try, because the difficulty will always be the same. When you discover an area that seems too dangerous for your character, you might choose to leave and go somewhere safer for now. When you then return a long time later, after lots of great adventures and getting many powerful new weapons, and it’s still just as hard as it was the last time, then it really feels like you didn’t make any progress at all and didn’t become more powerful in any way either. What’s the point of reaching higher levels and gaining better weapons and armor if it doesn’t make any difference? In Morrowind monsters and NPCs are always the same strength, regardless of how powerful your character is. While this does mean that you will occasionally have to admit defeat and retreat, it really makes a huge difference to the sense of accomplishment and progress, that is an important part of unscripted videogames and RPG campaigns alike. Losing is good, because it tells you that any victory you gain has been earned.

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My Old World Music

I am always very strongly influenced by sights and sounds and music always helps me a lot at focusing on a mood and aesthetic when working on my worldbuilding. I got a big collection of fantasy and sci-fi soundtracks from movies and videogames, and these are the ones I like the most for getting into the right mindset when writing for the Old World.

  • Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal: Baldur’s Gate was my introduction to Fantasy as a wider world of fiction (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had been isolated one-off things for me) and was a huge influence on me (hence I am writing stuff like this today), and when the second game came out it was even greater. But it’s particularly the expansion Throne of Bhaal that greatly inspired my vision for the Old World and the new music thar came with it is a great match. (Somehow, as a compulsory completionist who always plays a full series in order instead of just individual games, I never actually played this one since my first playthrough after its release in 2001.)
  • Berserk: Short, but nicely dark.
  • Bound by Flame: This is a game that is little known and was rather poorly received, though I think it was mostly just well overpriced. But for perhaps half the price it’s a very nice little Sword & Sorcery game about a world that has been overrun by ice mages and their undead armies, with a few surviving mercenaries and sages attempting to prevent the complete extinction of humans and elves. The presentation of this fantasy postapocalypse is very nicely done and the music does a great part of it.
  • Diablo III:: The world of the Diablo series has almost nothing in common with the Old World and I never even played the third game. But the music is very nice.
  • Dune: The one from the 80s. Saw only pieces of it when I was 8 or so and Dune is nothing like the Old World. The music is very nice and fitting, though.
  • Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2: While this series is all out sci-fi (or is it?!), the adventures of Shepard and her crew are exactly the kind of tales I care about. Possibly the single most important influence on the Old World and the reason I am interested in writing stories in the first place. Not sure if the music is that great a fit for the Old World by itself, but after having easily played 200 hours in the series it has all the right associations for me. It’s dark, mysterious, but also bold.
  • The Empire Strikes Back: Of course it’s here. It’s in everything where I am talking about aesthetics and atmosphere, being the best movie of all time and apparently the blueprint for the art design of Mass Effect. The Bespin and Dagobah pieces are all perfect for the Old World. In fact, the whole aestetic of the Old World is based on the presentation of these two planets.
  • WarCraft III: Another big fantasy game of my early youth and one that influenced the style of the Old World almost as much as The Empire Strikes Back and Mass Effect In particular the orc and night elf campaigns set in Kalimdor, a continent quite different from any other I’ve seen in fantasy and without any of the generic stuff from the rest of the series. The orc and night elf music is the sound of the Old World.