Author: Yora

I got a Mastodon

I know, it’s a mammoth. Shuddup.
@Yora

So with everyone cheering at Elon Musk for finally doing something good for the world by sparing no expenses to shred Twitter, there’s been some recent hubbub about Mastodon. Any many people pointing out that Mastodon isn’t just open-source twitter.

I’ve only really seen Twitter in the Alexandrian page and often thought it looks like it could be a really useful tool for sites like mine, but never considered using it. Because it’s Twitter. Just like I won’t touch Apple, Facebook, or Google. But a similar open-source tool from a nonprofit? And now people seem to have a significant interest in it?

Small RPG sites like this one aren’t the kind of thing that they were 10 years ago. There’s a lot fewer than there used to be, though with new ones still coming up regularly, and many of them only have new posts every month or two, unlike the nearly daily or even multiple daily posts that you see in the early years of many older sites. (Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because most of them say nothing of much relevance.) It also used to be that pretty much all sites were on blogspot, but now there’s also substantial numbers of wordpress sites hosted on private servers. And unlike blogspot, there is, for some reason, no widget that lets you show a list of the sites you follow sorted by most recent updates in the sidebar. Which makes following what others are writing on their sites more laborious, and also more difficult to find new sites. There is of course RPG Planet, which aggregates RSS feeds for sites that are signed up, but I don’t find it to be a perfect solution since it always shows you all the sites that are signed up, even the ones you really might not care for but update pretty frequently. And the first two sentences of a post typically don’t tell you much about what a post is actually about. Also, lots of blogspot sites only allow comments with a google-account, and other people have told me that I am by far not the only one who refuses to use one on principle.

I think Mastodon could be a useful tool to help reaching new audiences for sites like these. As it stands, it seems to me like a pretty closed system that you don’t really are aware of unless you already know about it. I still somehow get pretty frequent comments on my posts even though the only way to find my site is through the link in my Giant In the Playground and Enworld signatures and RPG Planet. (Also Dragonsfoot, but if you hang out there you’re already in the in-group.)

What I want to try out is to put up messages on Mastodon every time I have a new post on my site, with a link and a short summary of what the post is about. (Like Justin Alexander does on Twitter.) I think it would also be useful to share messages of “I just saw this post on another site and thought it’s interesting”. Putting such short posts here on this site would make the whole place look cluttered up and I want to keep what is posted here to meaningful articles that are still worth reading if people browse the site some years later. For simple shoutouts like that, something like Mastodon seems a much more fitting tool. And I can put my opinion out on posts by other people who don’t accept comments without some account or registration, even though the odds of them seeing it is probably pretty low.

I think there is potential to boost the sphere of small private RPG sites with Mastodon, if it can get sufficient momentum. Quite possible that two months from now, everyone has forgotten about it again already, but this sudden surge in interest because of Twitter might be an opportunity.

This is why I have now made a Mastodon account where people can get updates about new posts on Spriggan’s Den. And why I want to encourage other site owners to also give it a try, as well as readers. Maybe this could be a new boost in interactions, which can also be conductive to more ideas worth writing about. And unlike Google+, there’s no significant risk that the service will be shut down in a year or two. :p

A short history of the world

In the ancient days, long before any mortal memories or records, the world was home to strange civilizations of mysterious inhuman elder beings. They may have ruled over the surface lands for many hundreds of thousands of years and raised great cities and empires, but nothing of them remains. Some 10,000 years ago, great glaciers moved south and buried the land to the shores of the sea under miles of ice and snow, anihilating everything in their path and grinding it into dust.

After several thousands of years, the age of ice and snow came to an end, with the glaciers retreating and the barren rubble slowly turning into new forests. As life returned to the northern lands, so expanded the reach of the serpentmen, who claimed much of them for their ascending empire. For over 2,000 years the serpentmen empire span across the lands on both sides of the sea, but even their time eventually came to an end.

Dark haired barbarians from the east settled on the borders of the empire, and as they saw the power and reach of the serpentmen decline with every generation, they eventually invaded the northernmost provinces, creating a mighty kingdom around the Great Lake. As the serpents retreated further and further south towards the coast, the power of the Lake Kingdom grew, and it became home to many great sorcerers. Though like the serpents before them, their time of greatness and power wouldn’t last forever, and their great cities and towers were abandoned and fell into ruins. The remaining people eventually mixed with other barbarians in the great Woodlands to the west and the mountains in the east, becoming the barbarian tribes of the Witchfens and the Plains.

Though the empire of the serpentmen had survived the rivals that had driven them from the northern provinces, they had lost much of the great power they onces possessed. So when new barbaric peoples appear on their borders, led by four powerful sorcerers who had united the tribes under them, the serpents stood little chance to resist them, though the wars of conquest ranged for many decades. The invaders conquered all of the great Grasslands and much of the coastal lands north of the sea, driving the empire from the north.

Greatly weakened by the decades of fighting a losing war, the serpentmen eventually suffered a great revolt by their mortal slaves in the provinces most directly affected by the fighting, which ultimately led to the creation of the new kingdom of tbe Southlands.

With the hated serpents now no longer on their borders, the sorcerer lords turned towards securing their own hold over the lands they had conquered, and soon came to be elevated to be worshiped as living god kings. They also became each others greatest enemies, competing over the most valuable farm and graze lands along the large rivers that run through the great valley of the Grasslands.

After the death of one of the god kings and the conquest of his land, and the usurpation of another by his closest lieutenant, the three remaining realms have been at war with each other every few decades. The increasing taxes, endless conscription of soldiers, and ruthless pursuit of dissenters by the templars during these wars have frequently driven farmers and deserting soldiers to flee into the densely forested hills that surround the Grasslands on the west and east. The mixing of the refugees with the local barbarian tribes has led to new unique societies that follow their own rules and customs.

Over the last ten years, the fighting between the god kings has become excessively fierce and destructive, causing peasants, merchants, and even some nobles who have fallen out of favor to flee into the wilderness in numbers rarely seen before. Instead of integrating with the people who have lived in the hills and valleys for many generations and adopting their customs, the recent newcomers outnumber the native villagers in many places or even set up entire new towns of their own.

Ay, where all the Secret Societies at?

Just wrote this to revive an old discussion on Enworld and thought it actually fits really well to post here:

I’ve been thinking about possible new Forgotten Realms campaigns several times this year. And while I often get quite excited about seeing adventures in many of these interesting places and with these interesting organizations, I’ve typically run very quickly into the same problem that I can’t really think of anything interesting for the players to do.

Say you have a group of PCs arrive in Daggerford or step of the boat in Telflamm, what’s next? Going into some nearby dungeons to get their footing is of course always an option. The very first Forgotten Realms adventure Under Illefarn does exactly that. Classic Dungeon Crawling to hunt for treasure works as a campaign, but when you look at a world like Forgotten Realms with these huge fancy maps and all the colorful cities on it, I think that would feel underwhelming and like not making proper use of the setting.

Another option that became very popular especially during the 90s is the now also classic approach of “Local mayor/sage/priest calls for heroes to fight a dangerous evil and sends the PCs to an increasingly dangerous series of dungeons until they get to the main villain’s lair”. Again, this works. And I think 20 years ago, that would have been absolutely perfect for me as either a GM or a player.

But now I find such campaigns insufficient and unsatisfying. A campaign should be about the PCs dealing with the consequences of their successes and failures, giving meaning to their wise decisions and wrong calls. Taking the players by the hand to get them introduced to the starting area is not a bad thing, and often actually much better than dropping them off in a tavern to fend for themselves. But very soon, the players should be able to decide on their own what things they want to pursue, which NPCs to pursue for closer cooperation, and which NPCs’ activities they want to interfere with. And it seems to me that of all the available material that exists for the setting, there is very little that is directly useful in this regard.

Thinking about this again today, I was having the thought that perhaps the issue here lies in the fact that pretty much all the organizations and factions that would gladly do harm to the good people of civilization happen to be secret societies with fairly nebulous goals. The vast majority of threats are conspiracies, and the whole point of conspiring is to not only keep the plan secret from outsiders, but to also hide the fact that there is any kind of plan in the works to begin with.

To be aware that something shifty is going on, you already have to be in the game. And the generic aspiring adventurers who just stepped off the proverbial boat happen to be completely oblivious to the local power structures and unspoken rules, and have no connections who trust them with sensitive information. I think that’s exactly the issue that has made the Forgotten Realms such a difficult beast to tackle since I started looking for more than Elminster Fetch Quests and Kill The Orcs Because They Are Orcs. There is a mismatch of what the PCs are supposed to be and what is the most interesting feature of the setting. Which isn’t unique to Forgotten Realms, of course. The exact same thing has always been plaguing Vampire: The Masquerade, and it is quite similar to why Planescape is way more fun to read than creating adventures for it.

There is an opinion that has thankfully become a lot more common in campaign setting creation circles in recent years that a good campaign setting begins with identifying the kind of adventures that are going to take place in actual campaigns that are being played. Once you have figured out what the PCs will be doing you can define what PCs in this world will be. And then you can develop all the content regarding factions, cultures, history, and so on tailored to be in support of that play style. I don’t want to give Forgotten Realms too much crap on this as a big failure in worldbuilding. The setting was officially released as a D&D setting in 1987, just three years after Dragonlance had completely rewritten the entire paradigm for what a great D&D campaign is meant to be. Go to dungeons and kill villains while every step is directed to you by a powerful NPC who explains what’s going on probably was just what people wanted to see.

As was the style at the time.

Unforgotten Realms

Over the last couple of years, I’ve come around to the opinion that Forgotten Realms was actually a good setting. Back in 1st edition. Things clearly took a wrong turn with 2nd edition when it went all ultra-twee, and the setting got brutally mangled in the general D&D design overhaul of 3.5e. And then it got all blown to gory chunks in 4th edition and only continues to exist as the background for big adventure books without ever having gotten a new update through setting books.

Now, obviously, there is absolutely nothing at all to indicate that the next edition of D&D will somehow include a revision of the Forgotten Realms that salvages what was originally great about it.

But if I were to make the decisions for future Forgotten Realms sourcebooks…

This is what I think should be done:

Since generic default D&D has pretty much been Forgotten Realms for the last 35 years, there really isn’t any need to have a player book that covers the setting specific races, classes, and magic types of the setting. Just use the PHB content as is. Setting specific material should be covered in three regional books: “Sword Coast”, “Heartlands”, and “Unapproachable East”.  I think this would cover everything that 98% of all Forgotten Realms fans would care for. I am not saying that nobody has ever played a campaign set in Tethyr or Mulhorand, and in some four decades it surely must have happened once or twice. And while I would actually predict a big outcry that there need to be two or three more books to cover the rest of Faerûn and that those books might even sell somewhat, I would think that barely anyone would ever actually use them to run campaigns. Just have a page in the Sword Coast book dedicated to “Lands of the South” with information on how to make and run NPC merchants from Amn or Calimshan that are visiting ports in Baldur’s Gate or Waterdeep.

I personally think the three books should also describe the regions as they were before the Times of Troubles, but I have no clue how I would try to pitch that to the bosses to get an okay for it. It absolutely would hurt sales. But it really should not be set any later than the point described in the 3rd edition FRCS. The metaplot just got really dumb after that.

Priests and Mystics

The gods and the Divine are mysterious forces whose influence is present everywhere in the world, but whose own presence remains always hidden from the perception of ordinary mortals. To bring together the worlds of mortals and the Divine is the role of priests and mystics. The two are widely seen as more or less the same thing by most common people, but their backgrounds and abilities are vastly different.

Priests, and their acolyte assistants, are servants of the gods who maintain their temple, teach their followers, and perform the many rites to communicate between the gods and their worshippers. Priests do not have any magical abilities or special powers that make them different from other people. They perform rituals to plead the gods of their cult for guidance and help and protection for their villages and towns. The gods will react to these pleas in whatever way they deem appropriate, or they may not, and they do not speak their will to their priests directly. Sometimes priests receive visions that they attribute to their gods, but these are always vague and require a great deal of interpretation.

Many temples are build on special holy sites that have unique divine powers of their own and are revered by the local cults as miracles send from specific gods, which are typically the chief god or even only god worshipped in the temple. Some are in possession of holy relics that possess similar powers. To manifest the powers of a holy spring, sacred tree, or divine relic usually requires a simple and short rite, which typically is known only by a small number of priests. Performing these rites is like using a magic item, but require no special abilities other than knowledge of the rite.

In contrast to that, mystics are rare and special holy men and women who have reached a form of enlightenment that has revealed to them a deep comprehension of the Divine Source and its presence and working within all things. This understanding and awareness allows them to practice a rare form of magic that draws directly on the Divine itself and grants powers that have always been impossible to achieve for even the most powerful sorcerers. Most mystics have been devout worshippers of various gods before their enlightenment, and remain faithful to the teachings and valuesf their cults. However, they have a much deeper awareness that all the gods are still only different reflections of a much greater divine truth, and the distinctions between specific gods are typically much less important to them than to the priests of the many different temples. Many mystics regard the gods and their myth as powerful symbols and examples for living in harmony with the Divine that unites all things, and so large numbers of them continue to wear the robes and symbols of their cults and spread their teachings. But mystics are typically seen as somewhat removed from the temples by priests and sometimes even outright heretical, so they rarely have close associations with major powerful temples of the greater cities. They are however typically held in high regard by common people, especially in more remote areas where people are used to numerous small temples practicing somewhat different rites in every village with no central authorities on religious matters. Mystics are much more rare than priests and many people never are wittness to their miracle powers in their whole life.

I am typically not a fan of cleric type characters, but I had briefly been thinking about what something with a similar role to psionic powers could look like in my setting. With the other supernatural stuff going on already, the simple cleric framework seems like a pretty fitting match with just the right presentation and integration into the gameworld. The idea for priests controlling the miraculous powers of holy sites is directly from the D&D Companion Rules, which introduced them as alternative sources for divine magic for elf and dwarf villages under a rules system where only human characters have access to different classes, like clerics. I always thought that was a really cool idea since I first saw it, and much more interesting for worldbuilding than having a spellcasting cleric as priest for every village chapple. By customizing the specific spells that a holy site can produce to match the god that is seen as the creator of the site, making visits to a temple for services becomes a lot more interesting. Instead of every service being available in every generic temple, customized spells mean that players have to consider whose god’s temple in the area might be most likely to be able to help them. This makes different gods actually relevant to how things could play out during the game.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal

So let my show you my loot haul.

I am never able to restrain my gushing over the worldbuilding of Morrowind. While the gameplay of that game is of somewhat dubious quality and characters and quests leave a lot to be desired, the kind of very unique world it presents always had a huge influence on my perception of fantasy world, similar to Star Wars for space settings. There is a lot of the world of Morrowind, and to a small extend also Skyrim, that I am just blatantly ripping off for the new setting. The dominant civilization are strongly bases on the Dunmer and their three living gods, Almalexia, Sotha Sil, and Vivec. Except that in my setting, they are not a tribunal ruling over one kingdom, but three bitter enemies that go to war with each other on a near regular basis. The Camonna Tong and Morag Tong are very interesting templates for criminal organizations, and I like the way the Ashlanders represent the idea of barbarians who have escaped to the edges of civilization because they oppose the changes in traditions enforced by the god-kings.

I also think that the Redguard and Orsimer are quite interesting as well, at least as they are represented in Skyrim. I think I can use them for another urbanized kingdom to the south near the lands of the naga, and for the highland barbarians.

I also really like the way the Daedra fulfill the role of demons in the setting, though I want to take that idea and make it much more actually alien and weird. More Hermaeous Mora than Sheogorath. And of course, Morrowind is where I got the idea of the wildlife consisting primarily of various dinosaur-like reptiles and insectoid monsters instead of the typical familiar dogs, horses, cows, and pigs. I’ll definitely be reviving the honey caves ideas that was based on the kwama egg mines. I used them once and it was really fun.

While I love the Dark Sun campaign setting for AD&D, the things that I see as worth stealing basically just mirror things that I’m already taking from Morrowind. The sorcerer kings are like the Tribunal, the Templars as their warrior-priest enforcerers are just like the Ordinators, and the approach to slavery is very much the same. I feel you can’t really evoke the style of a Bronze Age society that is different from a medieval one without large parts of the population and economy being slaves.

Various ideas with a similar style come from Kenshi. This weird little game is actually a lot like Dark Sun, except that before the world turned into a desert wasteland, it wasn’t a magical fantasy world but a technological sci-fi world. But in the state that it is now, life turns out to be very similar. My two favorite idea from this setting are the Shek and the Hivers. The Shek are a take on something not too different from orcs, and one of the main inspiration for the highland barbarians. The Hivers already served as the main inspiration for my take on slightly insectoid goblins. Which were one of the last things I created for Kaendor, but I think will be a much better fit here. One of the two main powers on Kenshi is the Holy Nation under their Phoenix King, who rules over a nation of slaves with the help of his elite Paladins. Yeah, basically the same points as covered by the Tribunal and Ordinators of Morrowind and the Sorcerer Kings and Templars of Dark Sun. The other one are the United Cities. Who are despotic slavers in their own right, but still come out looking much better from the Holy Nation. They gave me the idea to have a fourth nation of the dominant culture consisting of loosely allied city states in the coast that have banded together to stay out of the grasp of any of the god-kings.

In the post about my ideas on magic and demons, I already mentioned Demon’s Souls. While the design styles of the setting is completely different from what I am going for, I find the supernatural concepts of the game very inspiring. The ideas that humans can become demons if they consume their energy opens very interesting possibilities, and the idea that regions can become shrouded in permanent fog while demons rampage inside of it is also really cool. The lands of Boletaria have little in common with what I am working on now, but conceptual ideas like these are pretty big in my mind.

A very similar case is Thief. Another game I’ve been gushing about many times in the past. Again, the type of city that the series is set in looks nothing like the kind of cities that will be found in the new setting. But everything that has to do with the Pagans is just pure gold for what I have in mind. The Pagans are a reclusive cult that exists somewhere between druidism and rural demon worship. Exactly the kind of interactions I am going for with my spirit worshiping barbarians. I am actually pretty sure that this game is where I came across the idea originally. The Trickster demon-god and his leafy lieutenant are great spirits, and I totally love the witch that is the main antagonist in the third game as a villain that might work wonderfully in my campaign. I also think that the organization of the Keepers is a really cool archetype for a cabal of arcane scholars who have much more benevolent intentions than the demonic cults they oppose, but are far from being clear cut good guys either.

Something I remembered only a few days after I’ve already been tinkering with ideas for a coherent setting concept was my experiences with diving deep into the published setting material for the Unapproachable East region of the Forgotten Realms. When I decided that I want to make a new setting from scratch that better represents the ideas I am interested now than organically grown tangle that Kaendor had become after close to a decade of trial and error, I made a decision to stay away from any Dungeons & Dragons or Middle-Earth material. But as I did mention in my post about reading through the various sourcebooks, there actually is fairly little of the typical Fantasyland™ stereotypes in that section of the Forgotten Realms. There’s no orcs, dwarves, drow, mind flayers, or beholders to be found anywhere, or mentions of trivial teleportation or magic item shops. It is quite strongly inspired by medieval Eastern Europe, but scratch a bit away at the paint and there’s actually a lot of stuff that I think can go straight into my new setting. My final thoughts had been that the setting material that existed for the region was full of great ideas, but at such a surface level of detail that you would still basically have to create your own content that is inspired by those prompts to run a great campaign. And in that case I could just make a new world myself. And now seems like a perfect time to completely carve up that setting and scavenge it for its most interesting parts!

The barbarians and witches of Rashemen look like a great starting point for my forest barbarians. I planned for them to have a Baltic style anyway, so the weird mix of Slavic and Germanic elements should be pretty easy to switch out. The Red Wizards of Thay in their original incarnation are just what I need for one of the three god-king nations. Blend them together with House Telvanni from Morrowind and you got a great magical oligarchy. The barbarians of Narfell are more steppe nomads as presented, but I think I can still take a good amount of stuff from them for my highland barbarians. I think I also want to have something like the ancient demon summoners of the Nar Empire whose ruins are still slumbering under the ground, many still haunted by summoned demons. I’ve long been fascinated by what snippets I had read about the independent city Telflamm and its Shadowmasters thieves guild. As it turned out those snippets were really all there is about them, and this is now a great opportunity to have some fun with expanding them. And finally there’s the kingdom of Impiltur, which is really more an alliance of city states than a centralized nation. And as such the second inspiration for the alliance of city states that oppose the god-kings, together with the United Cities of Kenshi.

While outside of this specific region, the biggest disappointment for me when reading the classic Forgotten Realms material was the city Westgate and its Night Masks thieves guild. I thought these were something big like Baldur’s Gate or Silverymoon, but the actual content is severely underwhelming. I want to make the port city of crime and vampire assassins that I envisioned a reality.

Finally, another important resource that I added to my pile is Red Tide. When this resource on running sandbox campaigns came out in 2011, it made quite a splash, and when you read it for the first time without much knowledge about running sandboxes, it’s really quite amazing. The setting that is presented is quite interesting, but there’s not a lot worldbuilding ideas that I find useful to copy. Much more important are its thoughts on how you set up and expand a sandbox campaign. The tools provided in the book where later overhauled in Spears of the Dawn and then more recently in World Without Number, but I actually really like the version in this one a lot more. The most interesting to me is the system for creating courts with just a very small number of NPCs and conflicts and complications between them. With the way that I envision the new campaign to play in practice, dealing with the important leaders of other strongholds, villages, clans, cults, and gangs will probably be a primary driver of the action. The tables for creating villages with interesting local problems might also come in very handy at a later point. And while I don’t expect there to be an awful lot of dungeons in the campaign, the ruins sites tables might also turn out a quite useful tool when the antics of the players require new content to be welded together on very short notice.