One of my favorite game mechanics in videogames in Insight from Bloodborne. You increase your character’s Insight by encountering weird alien shit for the first time, or by consuming the Madman’s Knowledge item. As your Insight increases, you gain the ability to see more supernatural stuff happening around you that would otherwise be invisible. But as you are pulled into the world of eldritch beings, you also become more vulnerable to their strange powers.
For a campaign in which the player character’s are on a journey to visit sacred shrines of supernatural power to gain greater wisdom and enlightenment from personal encounters with cosmic forces, an Insight mechanic would be just perfect.
In Dragonbane, this is a perfect case for introducing a secondary skill. That is, simply a skill that isn’t in the main rulebook for the game. Assuming the campaign begins with the PCs already having done a circuit of the regular pilgrim’s path but still craving for greater understanding from more out of the way and controversial sites of power, all PCs would start with Insight as a trained skill in addition to the starting skills of a new character. Which means it starts at a rank of 1 to 7, based on the character’s Willpower attribute, corresponding to a 5 to 35% chance at making a successful skill check.
Insight checks are rolled when touching a supernatural object, entering a supernatural area, or first interacting with a supernatural creature to gain a first impression of what’s going on. It might also be rolled in secret by the GM to become aware of a hidden presence. And in turn, an Insight roll might need to be failed or otherwise supernatural beings take notice of the PCs entering their vicinity and come to investigate. (That part is admittedly still very vague at this point.)
As with all skills, a roll of a 1 or a 20 marks the Insight skill for advancement at the end of the game. Once the game ends, players make a skill check, and if the check fails, the skill advances by one rank. The sacred shrines that the characters are seeking and visiting count as a teacher for for the Insight skill. Spending a full shift in a sacred shrine and contemplating the experience lets players make a skill advancement roll with a boon (roll twice, take the better result).
The main challenge for me in imagining fantasy adventure stories has always been the motivation of the adventuring heroes. Oldschool D&D was before anything else a tactical dungeon crawling game. It wasn’t even called a roleplaying game for some time. Just a fantasy adventure game, that had evolved out of wargaming. Characters were play pieces for the players. Both disposable and replaceable. The game is being played to have fun interacting with the challenges. It was not a game about experiencing the heroic journey of memorable characters. In that context, people just picking up a rusty sword to walk straight into monster-infested hellholes and to their pretty certain death was not an issue of narrative dissonance.
But very few roleplaying games that succeeded early D&D since the mid-80s are anything like that. They are not dungeon crawling tactical games. They are roleplaying games about characters with personalities, motivations, and ambitions. But in the typical fantasy adventure game, they are still walking straight into situations that should be certain and immediate death on a regular basis. Real people do significantly dangerous things as a job, even if the pay is poor, because they want to help people in danger and believe that this is worth the risks they are taking. But these people usually go to incredible length to mitigate all the possible risk to themselves and rely on extensive support structures to fund and equip them. And even then, there is regularly a point where they concede that there is nothing they can do because the risk of becoming additional victims that need saving is just too high.
Fantasy is fiction of the impossible and magical. But when it comes to the risk that characters take in fantasy adventure scenarios, and the possible gains they expect from that, my brain just can not believe that a person with a mind that works in similar ways to real humans, would make decisions like that. (Let’s not even touch on the whole genre of JRPGs and Shonen anime.)
We do have many fantasy protagonists who go on adventures outside of games, and many of them were the direct inspiration for dungeon crawling games in the first place. But old king Conan does not go on adventures. He rides out into battle to defend his country from invading armies. Ending up in dungeons and fighting demons was never his plan. Young man Conan does go dungeon crawling many times. But his motivation is that he thinks killing, stealing, and intimidating people are the most fun passtimes one can engage him. Not exactly a model for the typical fantasy game player to emulate.
Elric and Kane frequently find themselves in adventure situations, but adventuring is not what they set out to do. Most commonly they are on a journey to get a thing that is important to them or will be a valuable tool for their goals. And along the way, an adventure happens to happen by accident, and is something they would rather have avoided.
I don’t think any of these characters and stories make for good models for player characters in roleplaying games. And that is probably at the heart of why all my campaigns in the last 10 years have felt to me like a compromise to just have something to play, rather than nothing. But the adventures as a whole never felt meaningful to me.
But thinking about the topic again over this weak did lead to an idea that could be interesting to pursue further and build a campaign around for the Iron Lands.
Characters on Pilgrimage
Why would people go on adventures? That does depend on what even is an adventure in the first place? In the context of Sword & Sorcery tales, it’s pretty much a given that it is about characters on a journey during which they enter at least one exceptional, and often supernatural, location and face off against a significant, and usually supernatural, threat. But why do they go to the place, and why do they risk facing the threat? And for a campaign, why do they keep doing that over and over?
Self-preservation and defense only works so many times. By the third time the heroes’ home gets attacked by demons, the believability breaks down. Seeking an opportunity to get rich quick or die trying does work structurally, but that just goes completely counter to any themes I find worthwhile to engage with. And traveling heroes for hire who ask around in every village they come through if they have any monsters they want to be freed from just doesn’t pass my personal checks for a plausible world.
But here is one new idea! What if adventuring is basically a religion?
The idea is that there are many kinds of mystic cults and societies that seek to gain understanding or enlightenment about the reality of existence and their own being through personal experiences of the supernatural or divine. Living a rural life in the natural world only lets you experience a small fragment of what reality in its entirety really is. Studying tomes and listening to the words of mystic teachers in great metropolitan cities will only get you so far. To truly gain enlightenment and real understanding of the world and being, people have to experience the supernatural as well. And to that purpose, followers of these religions go on pilgrimages to visit many holy sites, and experience the presence of supernatural phenomenons and beings for themselves.
For most people, these pilgrimages are just that. A year, or maybe two, visiting several revered shrines and sanctuaries, and returning to their former lives as a grown person with a greater appreciation for the world and life. But some pilgrims feel that there is still more for them to learn. Greater truths and more revelations that are just out of reach and prevent them from returning home just yet. Many great and most revered mystics continue their pilgrimages to more distant and remote sites for decades or their entire lives.
And off the regular pilgrimage routes, on rarely travelled paths deep into the wilderness, pilgrims can often find themselves in the presence of forces far from the serenity of the more famous sanctuaries. And on these journeys, some people discover that they have it in themselves to face the supernatural even when it is frightening and hostile, and to keep going forward into the unknown when most others would turn back. Warriors and mages who have stepped on the pilgrims’ path are often found among those who have both the courage and the compulsion of curiosity to push on on these darker paths. But they can also be found in the most unlikely people who have never considered themselves as being particularly brave or thirsting for knowledge. And it is these people that many remote settlements, that have no experienced priest or shaman of their own, put their hopes on when they are struggling with the dark forces from below and beyond. And in many cases, pleas to take a look into these strange and rare manifestations of the supernatural are too tempting to resist investigating.
In Dragonbane, professions for new player characters cover the typical fighter, hunter, mage, and thief. But they also include scholars, merchants, artisans, and mariners. People without any special martial skills or magical powers, who really would have no qualifications to leave their homes and clear out bandit lairs, goblin warrens, and haunted tombs. But going on a pilgrimage to visit holy shrines? Sure, why not. Lots of ordinary people do that. And as their journeys go on, asking other pilgrims if they can tag along to visit some of the more dodgier and out of place sites is not much of a stretch. The professions are also only a template to speed up character creation. Once play begins, character advancement is entirely by using skills and receiving skill training from instructors. Who your characters will become depends entirely on their experiences during the campaign. This seems a really nice mechanical fit for a world in which characters become adventurers during their journey, instead of chosing it before they set out.
This setup also provides a nice default action for sandbox campaigns, for when an adventure is wrapped up with nothing else for the characters to do. Just take out the map again and look if there’s any other pilgrimage sites in the area. And if that turns out uneventful, continue on to the next one until something extraordinary disrupts the quiet journey again.
This is a new idea I just started thinking about. But I think this could be something really interesting to use as the centerpiece to build a fantasy world around.
As far as I am able to tell, I started working on a concept for a fantasy setting that eventually developed into Kaendor in its current state at least 15 years ago. For most of these years, it’s been my primary hobby and I surely must have spend well over 10,000 hours on it by now. I’ve run five different campaigns in various versions of the world so far, but I always felt like the things that make the world so special to me did not really come through in the adventures that the player’s got to experience. From what I remember, I always fell back on well established, conventional D&D adventure setups, and the players probably did not see much of a difference.
I have come to think that one probable cause of this might be the fact that the mental images that I am dreaming up about Kaendor are not exactly gameable content. What I am seeing when I am thinking about what my perfect fantasy world would be like are primarily stunning environments, but also fantastic creatures and interesting cultures. But what I am not really seeing in my imagination are stories, characters, or events. Amazing lairs for great monsters or villains perhaps, and even really cool setups for exciting fight scenes. But I never really had any success coming up with interesting people, hidden plots, grand designs, or escalating conflicts.
The world that is emerging from my imagination and creativity is one that would be stunning to behold, and perhaps fascinating to read travel guides about. But that’s not exactly gameable content. Not if the kind of gameplay I am interested in is about descending into dark and dangerous places and facing off against strange and terrifying beasts. Gazing out over a magnificent landscape from the porch of your comfortable little hut is not a game or an adventure.
I think if I would ever get bored with this RPG stuff, I would make a much better fantasy painter than a fantasy writer.
This has been my desktop background for most of the last 20 years, on at least six different computers.
However, I’ve been thinking last week that perhaps there could be forms of fun and exciting adventure play that still draw upon those aesthetics and sensibilities that are fueling my imagination. And I was quite surprised by the amount of engagement that my idle thoughts on the subject got on Mastodon. And so here we are, with a more in depth explanation of the general ideas I have been entertaining.
A Campaign Aesthetic
The core sensibility that is underlying the entire worldbuilding for Kaendor is the idea of being in this vast world of barely explored and largely uninhabited wilderness, which is full of amazing and alien creatures that are different from the generic European and North American wildlife of typical fantasy worlds. The forests and mountains are covered in grand ancient ruins that hold great magical wonders and mysteries. The world is wild and rugged and dominated by powerful natural forces, but also quiet, timeless, and pleasant. I guess you could say, romantic. A fantasy of a world that is simultaneously exciting and peaceful.
This is not an aesthetic that lends itself to complex intrigues or sprawling conflicts that cover the world in war and threaten it with destruction. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be exploring treacherous ruins and battling with leathal monsters. Taking stupid risks to discover something magical, and to take on great tasks to establish a place of quiet comfort in the middle of a rugged wilderness are spot on for the core ideals of Romanticism.
And I have in fact come across at least two cases where people have managed successfully to create engaging games that are catering to these very sentiments. The survival sandbox videogames Conan Exiles and Kenshi. Yes, the world of Conan is hyper violent and filled with manly men doing manly things. And manly women doing manly things. And the planet Kenshi is violent post-apocalyptic wasteland. But even with all the blood and grime, Sword & Sorcery and Wasteland Fiction are still fundamentally expressions of Romanticism.
Now both of these games gain a lot of their aesthetic payout from their visual presentation. Even though their graphics aren’t anything special, their visual design can often be gorgeous. This is something that obviously doesn’t translate to the medium of roleplaying games. No matter how much GMs might want to indulge in flowery environmental descriptions. But I think one of the key gameplay elements of both Conan Exiles and Kenshi that appeals to the romantic ideal is the construction of completely custom build home bases in nearly any spot you might want to pick. It’s the fantasy of carving out your own little corner of the world where you can shape everything exactly to your personal ideal. But for that you first have to acquire the resources that are needed to construct those buildings, and to neutralize the threat of dangerous creatures and hostile neighbors that also roam the area. And it’s in these encounters with the other actors that stand in your way of having the house of your dreams and enjoying it in peace that you can have the most amazing adventures. Adventures that are not scripted stories about uncovering the cool things some of the GM’s NPCs have already done, but instead constantly evolving sequences of making choices and dealing with the consequences of those choices. The kind of emerging stories that RPGs are uniquely capable of telling. The kind of adventures where RPGs as a medium can really shine.
I could talk for hours about my earliest adventures in Kenshi, which are some of the greatest experiences I ever had in any kinds of games. How two of my guys got separated from the rest in a bandit ambush and were spending the entire night hiding in a ditch with broken legs, only meters away from where the bandits had set up their campfires, blocking the narrow mountain pass to the stronghold where their friends had found safety. Or how the gang was desperately trying to finish the wall around their first compound before a group of approaching raiders reached them, only for the concrete mixer refusing to work because the previously constant winds had completely died down and the lone wind turbine refused to spin. Or how the compound later changed hands between my gang and bandits seven times, as each side was able to kick out the current occupants and chase them into the desert, but then was too beaten up to hold it when the next assault came.
And those are just the ones that happened from random encounters with the lowest level enemy type in the game, still within site of the starting town.
Dungeons & Dragons has toyed many times throughout its history with the idea of higher level PCs establishing their own stronghold in the wilderness. While a very cool sounding idea, from what I heard from people who played a lot when this mode of play was featured prominently in the rulebooks, this apprently saw only very little actual play. Many reasons have been hypothesized for this, but the most compelling sounding ones focus on the fact that the idea was to switch play from dungeon crawling to domain management, and that this was a switch that would be rather sudden, but also only very late in a campaign. And I think it wasn’t helped either by the rules for running a domain being a single player undertaking rather than a group activity as the dungeon crawling play.
A Campaign Structure
A good home base system should become part of the gameplay fairly early on in the campaign. It should supplement rather than replace the expeditions into the strange and dangerous wilderness, and it shouldn’t mean the end of the players playing together as a party. But I also think that the idea of becoming a ruler and dealing with government work and managing taxes doesn’t really appeal to the romantic fantasy of establishing your personal dream house overlooking the landscape.
So I am proposing a different kind of campaign structure that might work better to accomodate and evoke the themes I outlined above:
The PCs are individuals who for one reason or another chose to leave behind their old homes to seek their fortune in the borderlands, on the very edges of the lands that are explored and settled. These borderlands are a fairly conventional sandbox with a lot of old ruins and monster lairs scattered around. Theres both gold and silver to be found and ancient magic items and forgotten spells. New magic items can be made, but the process is complicated, slow, and expensive, which makes the dangerous activity of recovering lost items a worthwhile undertaking. Searching for magic items should be the main premise of the campaign, and the default activity for players to engage in if they don’t have anything else that is demanding their attention right now.
So far, so ordinary. But what I am thinking is to set things up in a way that establishing a permanent home base, and perhaps aditional base camps, somewhere in the sandbox would make the searches much more efficient. Places to store supplies. To safely lock away your money. Where you can produce the tools and other equipment that you’ll be using on your expedition. Where you can stable your pack animals and house your hirelings.
Exploring ruins in the wilderness is the main hook. But establishing a base should become a highly attractive measure to pursue that primary goal. Typically, that base is assumed to be a small castle staffed by the PCs’ hirelings. With settlers being recruited to set up farms nearby, whose tax payments will support the castle’s expenses. But you can really only have one lord who rules the domain, and theb you’re also required to deal with administration.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, the home base could also be a village. Potentially a quite dispersed one. Simply by making the surrounding area more secure, the players could make the village more attractive to new settlers. And as the settlement grows in size, new services become available that the players can use. Animal breeders to increase the amount of pack animals that can be bought in any given time period. Potion makers who sell potions. Sages who can help deciphering clues about undiscovered treasure hoards. And of course an increasing stream of hirelings that can be recruited. Players can then each pick individually if they want their PCs to build some grand villa, or instead live in a shack half an hour away from the village square.
And that’s about all that I got so far. Not terribly much yet, but I think it’s a direction that might be interesting to explore.
I decided to put my Lore 24 entries up on a neocities site. I won’t be posting everything here, as I think that would get really messy, but you will be able to read everything here.
I decided that for Lore 24, I will be going with my Kaendor setting again. While I’ve been working with it for years and even ran a few short campaigns in it, the vast majority of that campaign setting exist only as very short mental notes in my head. Barely anything is actually spelled out about its current incarnation, and the parts that do exist are mostly rather vague and remaining at the stage of an idea outline. Lore 24 seems to be the perfect opportunity to turn those ideas and impressions in my mind into actual, concrete setting material.
While my current vision of Kaendor has a surface appearance that is deliberately a fairly generic elfgame Fantasyland, it also has some pretty major divergences. Whose gradual discovery by the PCs as they leave the familiar grounds of civilization is meant to be the central theme and core concept of the campaign setting. I feel that many of the things I want to write down for Lore 24 won’t be able to be really appreciated without any context for the world that they are meant to exist in. And so I want to use this post to provide a general, top level overview of the world, covering the main parameter that are already fairly set in stone.
Since I got a lot of ideas for a new campaign set in Kandor from several D&D 3rd edition books, it seems the most sensible approach to me to simply plan this out as a 3rd edition campaign. A large number of things I want to have in this world already exist in game terms for this system, and it is a game that I am very familiar with and feel very confident with for creating new creature abilities, spells, and unique mechanics.
Shadows of Kaendor is written as a setting for a D&D 3rd edition campaign covering 1st to 10th level, that also is home to a few NPCs up to 12th level. It uses the following books for character creation and advancement options, and for optional rules and mechanics:
Player’s Handbook
Expanded Psionics Handbook
Manual of the Planes
Monster Manual
Monsters of Faerun
Lords of Madness
Other influences and inspirations are taken from the AD&D adventure The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, and from Bloodborne, Thief, and Hollow Knight, which should become apparent further below.
The continent of Kaendor is populated by the following peoples, using the creature stats in the brackets (PC options in bold):
Snow People (high elf)
Fog People (wood elf)
Forest People (high elf)
Mountain People (goliath)
Coast People (gray elf)
Sea People (aquatic elf)
Plains People (half-elf)
Chitines
Gnolls
Goblins
Grimlocks
Locathah (amphibious)
Ogers
Quaggoths
Wind People (avariel)
Player characters and NPCs can be of the following classes:
Barbarian
Cleric
Cloistered Cleric
Druid
Fighter
Psion (psionic)
Ranger
Rogue
Wilder (psionic)
Wizard
There will be no prestige classes in the campaign.
Unlike most D&D settings, the world consists of only a small number of planes:
Material Plane.
Plane of Faerie, the realm of fey and elementals.
Plane of Shadow. (Also covers all the functions of the Ethereal Plane.)
Unknown Planes beyond the Shadow, the realms of aberrations.
Kaendor is a large coastal region that ranges from Mediterranean climate in the south to sub-arctic in the north. Its civilization is fairly young and accordingly only very sparsely populated. The society and technology is roughly oriented towards the very early Middle Ages. at the end of the Migrtation Period in the 6th and 7th century. Weapons and armor are dominated by one handed swords and axes, spears, bows, chainmail shirts, simple helmets, and round wooden shields. Architecture is very Romanesque in style. In many ways, society has much more resemblance with the images of Celtic and Viking culture than the large kingdoms of the High Middle Ages, though there are a number of fairly powerful and sophisticated coastal city states.
Most larger towns have a low level adept as their priest or shaman, with clerics mostly found in the great temples of the major cities. Wizards are not exactly common, but in most places the locals will be able to give directions to at least one wizard within two or three days’ walk that they have heard of. The vast majority of NPCs are 1st to 6th level, with those of higher level invariably being people of some fame beyond their immediate community.
Shadows of Kaendor does not use sorcerers (or bards). Instead the role of these spellcasters is being filled by Wilders. These are rare people with a special gift that allows them to peer through the surface of the world and gaze at the true nature of reality, enabling them to master doing, seeing, and knowing certain things that should be impossible. To most people these powers seem like magic, but the truth is far more complex and far reaching than that. Psions are scholars who have learned of these occult truth, and through study and meditation have gained access and far greater understanding of these powers that come to wilders naturally. While wilders, and also psions, have been around for a very long time, most people who encounter their powers are mistaken them for magic spells, including even many wizards.
Instead of the much more common sorcerers and demons from a hellish realm of fire that take the role of the supernatural forces of evil, this aspect of Kaendor is occupied by eldritch aberrations that have long been forgotten in the eternal darkness beyond the borders of this world. Exploring these aspects of the setting will obviously lead into the dark and creepy, but Shadows of Kaendor is not meant to turn into a gory horror campaign of bleak despair. It’s still meant to be a world where adventuring heroes can drive back the strange terrors they face off against and emerge from the darkness victories.
Maybe I should just make peace with being that map guy who keeps excitedly posting about new map doodles that I’ll mostly never be using for any campaigns?
I was, once again, feeling unhappy with the latest maps for Kaendor that I made over the last week since the coast lines look too square and there’s too many big blank areas that are just forest with no further detail. So I went looking again for very large maps of the natural geography of the Earth to see if I find any regions with an interesting topography that I could use as references. And I realized that a map of the world looks really weird and barely recognizable when you simply mirror it.
I really like that look (even with the heavy stretching at the poles) and think that this would make a great global map for Kaendor. Zooming in on East (now West) Asia, I noticed that the overall layout of the coastlines already has a very similar general arrangement and my various sketches for Kaendor maps have had for the last two years or so now.
Southeast Asia happens to be where I always placed the huge jungles of Kemesh where the remnants of the ancient naga empires are barely holding on. But making all the small seas between the Indonesian island into dry land (which was once the case), there’s now just precisely the vast jungles that I wanted in that place. The cool thing about this is that I can still use all the mountain ranges in that region as a fast method to have a perfectly plausible topography.
I also decided to greatly simplify the islands of the First Island Chain because I think those would stand out too obviously as being just a mirrored map of Asia. And it also will save me a lot of work with very fiddly details.
A map at the scale above is way too big for any practical uses in any single campaign, and even covering that area on a 30-mile hex map would be ridiculously huge. As a map for Kaendor, I already changed the scale to 75% the lengths of distances (which means 56% the total area), just so that I can fit more interesting squiggly coastlines on the cool A2, 30-mile hex sheets I made. For the Kaendor ’24 campaign, I instead want to focus just on the central area shown below. But having that large, zoomed out map with little detail at hand as a reference will surely come super handy when it comes to adding mentions about distant lands and peoples beyond the known world to the setting. And if at some point in the future I might want to fully map out some of those areas in the same higher detail, it will all already be geographically consistent with whatever mentions and references I had used before.
And this is the area that I plan to turn into a fully worked out 30-mile hex map. Having all the mountain ranges and rivers already in place, and being able to look up images of the real landscapes, really helps a lot with inspiring ideas to what details I could fill this map with. I even can look up climate data if I want to, though with the map now flipped, wind directions and the corresponding rain patterns would not match up perfectly. But I think the climate of Europa and East Asia happens to be similar enough that it doesn’t even bother this one geography mega-nerd who surely is the only person to pay a single thought to this.
I’m having a lot of fun with this, and I am feeling really good (though I always do that) about this maybe being the final geography layout for Kaendor. With the arrangement being so similar to what I already established about the geography in the past, it should be really easy to copy all the locations over on this map without much breaking.
One of my favorite game mechanics in videogames in Insight from Bloodborne. You increase your character’s Insight by encountering weird alien shit for the first time, or by consuming the Madman’s Knowledge item. As your Insight increases, you gain the ability to see more supernatural stuff happening around you that would otherwise be invisible. But as you are pulled into the world of eldritch beings, you also become more vulnerable to their strange powers.
