sword & sorcery

To New Frontiers

I started working on the Ancient Lands that eventually evolved into Kaendor around the same time as I was setting up this site nine years ago. Lately I’ve been trying several times to get back on that horse again and continue creating new material for the setting. But I just can’t find the spark that motivated and inspired me to make it, and in hindsight I notice that I haven’t really been that into it for well over a year now. Tinkering with space opera and toying around with ideas how I might do a post-apocalyptic campaign were mostly distractions to keep me creatively occupied, but my real love and passion is for Sword & Sorcery heroic fantasy. And now I feel that Kaendor has probably been done. I’ve been revising and overhauling it several times over the years and even tried to disassemble it and repurpose the pieces for the Shattered Empire to spice things up again. But while I think those ideas were pretty decent, it just never had the joy and excitement that I had in the past. I think now it’s time to start with something really new from scratch. A new fantasy setting tailored to a different type of campaign, with a different set of basic assumptions that serve as the foundations for a new type of world.

Some of the ideas for the new setting might sound very familiar to people who remember reading older stuff I wrote years ago. Mostly they are things that I really wanted to incorporate in the world of Kaendor, but they mostly remained things that I wanted to work in but never really became part of the existing whole. That setting originally began as an attempt to construct a version of the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms as it had been 4,000 years in the past, and I guess you just can’t get the DNA of the Fantasyland established by Tolkien and Gygax out after the fact. Which is why I think it really is important to start all over with something really new.

Style Ideas

This is probably were things are most familiar. This mostly is stuff that I’ve been loving for a long time, but which Kaendor never really managed to bring to life. This time I don’t want them to be grafted on, but be foundational elements from which everything else expands.

The new world is an alien and exotic forest moon around a blue gas planet. It is inhabited by numerous big prehistoric beasts like giant reptiles and large insects.

The original great civilization of the world were the naga, and the great empire of the serpentmen once covered much of the continent. But their power has greatly declined and they have been reduced to a permanent state of constant infighting between the serpent lords over the title of emperor.

The lands in the north fell to slave uprisings and barbarian attacks long ago and are now home to several humanoid Bronze Age civilizations. These take rough cultural and aesthetic influences from Indo-Iranian peoples for the main kingdoms and city states, and from Turkic and Baltic peoples for the more barbaric societies.

The humanoid kingdoms are ruled by various god-kings who claim to be immortal and have divine powers to repell naga invaders and force demons to obey their will, but their actual abilities are no different from extremely powerful sorcerers.

Gods are immaterial entities that are different manifestations of a supreme ultimate divine source that is beyond any mortal grasp or comprehension. The gods don’t hold special domain over specific aspects of the natural world or human life, but each of them has strong affinities to various elements. Each community worships a small number of gods who are associated with things that are most important to their lives, and no two temples in the world practice exactly the same religion. Everything supernatural that is not a manifestation of the divine power of the gods is seen as demons or demonic in nature. All demons are physical beings with a permanent body just like mortals, though many can communicate and control with their mind over great distances. Druidic cults among barbarian tribes believe that not all demons are hostile or all magic evil, but they still know that they can be extremely dangerous. Some demons have vague resemblances to wild beasts, but most are very alien in both appearance and minds.

Campaign Concept

I am a strong believer in worldbuilding deaigned specific to purpose. Before putting anything on a map or creating a single location or power, it is necessary to specify what kind of campaign is going to be set in the world and what kinds of things are intended to happen during play. Of course you can always just create a fantasy world according to whatever whims of your fancy at the moment, but this temds to results in settings were anything is possible and nothing is promoted over anything else. But when running a campaign, the group needs to be on the same page on what kind of story the characters are in so that they and the GM can work together instead of against each other. And having the right kind of setting for the campaign can shoulder a huge part of the burden of that job. A purposfully designed campaign setting has content that attracts the players to engage with certain themes and modes of play, and also sets up invisible soft barriers to not drift away too far from the campaign’s focus by not presenting much to interact with outside of its intended scope. A diplomacy and politics campaign doesn’t need much detail about the survival challenges in the wilderness, and it actually helps maintaining the focus when there isn’t really much of interest for the players to do in the forests and hills. So even when the players are free to “do anything”, a purposefully designed world will keep the campaign on focs without the players ever noticing barriers.

For this new setting, the main focus of mode of play that I am aiming for is establishing, expanding, and defending of strongholds in the wilderness. Forbidden Lands already exists as a game system for such campaigns, and the sandbox tools from Kevin Crawford’s Red Tide are also big inspirations to me for populating the surronding environment with various neighbors. A huge inspiration that really got me hooked on the whole idea is of course the videogame Kenshi, which really is very much the same thing in a post-apocalyptic desert.

What I see the campaign to mostly consist of is surviving the dangers and obstacles of the wilderness while trying to gain control over valuable resources and making alliances and deals with other inhabitants of the area for trade and defense against common enemies. Managing the stores of supplies and finances or governing over subjects are aspects of domain play that I find both not very interesting and not really suited for a group game. Conveniently, the mechanics of Forbidden Lands already have a similar focus.

Interactions with the leaders of neighboring settlements being such an importantt part of adventures, establishing different factions with different wants and needs becomes obviously a very important element of the worldbuilding. Players need to be able to quickly understand the demands and negotiating positions of other groups in the area, and easily figure out what kind of group they are dealing with when encountering new people. Of course, everyone having their own secrets and additinal agendas always makes things a lot more interesting. But for the players being able to be proactive in navigating their social environmwnt, the primary conflicts of the big picture should be really easy to grasp. No matter how straightforward and obvious things may seem to a GM who comes up with such things, they are always much less clear to players who only work with fragmentary information and can easily fill in blanks with completely wrong assumptions. When players encounter a new faction, they should immediately have a good picture of who and what they are dealing with, so that they know where to apply their leavers to accomplish something. Even when there are more hidden layers behind it that will become evident only much later. The goal is to make the players think they know what to do to change things to their benefit, and avoid them becoming paralyzed because they don’t understand how everything fits together.

With the focus on negotiating with neighbors, making friends through providing services, and neutralizing hostile leaders and monsters, the world does not need to provide a large number of big dungeons that somehow are still full of treasures that nobody else has looted yet over the centuries. This is probably the biggest difference to the worldbuilding of Kaendor, where the whole history and society was set up specifically to create such an environment. Dungeons and other ruins still have a place in the new frontier wilderness, but that would be primarily as lairs where the PCs confront a major creature, NPC, or supernatural phenomenon. These lairs don’t need to be big or have a large variety of puzzles and other obstacles, and they don’t need a lot of ancient treasure scattered all over the entire place. Huge labyrinths are actually to be avoided, as they will take a lot of time to explore and cause an interruption in the current events the players have been observing and engaged with. Player freedom is good, but it’s also highly desirable to avoid them loosing track of something they’ve been engaged with because they got distracted, and potentially struggling later to pick up where they left off months ago.

Going with the Forbidden Lands system, character advancement is unaffected not only by the discovering of treasures, but also the slaying of monsters. A consequence of this is that the setting does not require a large collection of different monsters with a wide range of power levels to keep fights from getting repetitive. A bestiary of just one or two dozen creatures should suffice and it can consist almost entirely of agressive animals and quite powerful demons with not much else in the middle. And with intelligent creatures, their design can focus strongly on creating interesting social situations than variety in combat. Hunting a monster can be a much bigger part of an adventure than finally cornering it. Which I think opens up some really interesting new possibilities with monster design and how to integrate them into the world.

Next Time

I already have a vague general outline for the environment of the campaign and the factions that inhabit it, which build on the principles I outlined above. But those will be an entire post of their own.

Dungeons & Swords & Sorcery

I’ve written about my thoughts on how to evoke the style of Sword & Sorcery in a fantasy adventure game before in the past. I’ve been thinking about it again recently while looking to find the spark again to continue work on my setting, and my thoughts have been revolving primarily around the role of dungeon crawling in a Sword & Sorcery campaign.

While classic dungeon crawling is a very fascinating and fun form of gameplay in its own right, I think the archetypical dungeon crawl is not a good basis to build a Sword & Sorcery campaign around. The classic dungeon crawl, with its complex underground labyrinths, countless traps, secret doors, and numerous small hidden stashes of treasures all over the place naturally promotes a play style that is very cautious, methodical, and calculated. It encourages players to progress slowly and with care, to examine all the small and possibly insignificant details, and to take any precautions before following through with well thought through plans. In a well deaigned dungeon, this can be hugely exciting and thrilling. But it’s a kind of exitement and tension that is very different from the style of Sword & Sorcery. This is a style that is all about fearless and even reckless initiative, where fortune favors the bold. Heroes are certainly relying heavily on cunning and trickery to take down foes much stronger than themselves, but often these are things improvsed in the heat of the action and more of a gamble than much of a plan. In a Sword & Sorcery themes campaign, players spending a lot of time over maps and rummaging through large boxes of tools to disable a dangerous mechanism with a minimum of risk is something that you want to avoid, not to have as the default approach to playing the game. While a lot of useful things can be taken to create a great Sword & Sorcery campaign from oldschool roleplaying, the classic dungeon crawl probably isn’t one of them.

Still dungeons as a concept and an environment are really cool and absolutely have their place. But I think they need to be approached quite differently.

The first thing that I see is that dungeons should be relatively small in scope. Typically in a Sword & Sorcery adventure, a dungeon is only one chapter of a larger story. As such, I think dungeons of a size that the players can get through in two or three hours should be quite big enough. Heroes usually don’t enter a dungeon to explore its secrets, but to track down something or someone specific that they have good reason to believe to be somewhere inside. Going into a dungeon is usually more a kind of raid than an exploration. Get in fast and quietly if possible, grab what you came for, and get the hell out again fast. The dungeon is not a place to be mastered or conquered, but to be survived.

As I said above, in a Sword & Sorcery style campaign, we don’t typically want the players to stay in one place long and go through everything with a fine comb. There are two main ways to encourage that. The first one is to avoid having the players be weary of traps. If every floor tile could be a trap, things will slow down a lot. And most of the time, there won’t even be any actual danger in the first place. Environmental dangers and constucted defenses against intruders can totally work, but they should be announcing themselves to the players instead of being hidden. Be it obvious pits of spikes, moats with hungry crocodiles, a hallway with mummies in open coffins that line the wall, or two dramatic gargoyle statues on top of the gate. What we want to accomplish is to have the players understand that if a passage looks empty and perfectly safe, there is no point for them to stop and take all the time consuming precautions to make sure there really is no trap. And this has to be absolutely consistent. It might seem fun to have a completely unexpected trap jump at the players now and then, but when you do it once, the plaeyers learn that it could happen at any time when they don’t expect it, and then they will always expect it.

Similar to the placement of traps is the placement of treasure. Having some spare change hidden between the couch cushions to reward players who spend the time to check for there is a great way to encourage them to really search everything in an area they come through, and it can be quite a lot of fun for players to do this easter egg hunt. But just as wit traps, this is something that w don’t really want in Sword & Sorcery adventures. Instead of lots of small portions of valuables being hidden all over the place, I think having just one big hoard of all the treasure in one place works much better. Yes, it’s all the joy of discovering treasures crammed into a single scene instead of having it spread out evenly, but that also means to joy in that moment is more intense. This hoard can be placed right behind the greatest danger in the dungeon, but it doesn’t have to. Getting the whole haul out while the biggest threat is still on the prowl can be even more exciting. And the main pice of the loot could also be somwthing that might be a very powerful weapon against that threat when the players encounter it later.

A Tale of the Past

Feeling particularly fed up with the D&D Fantasyland cliches, I found the motivation to resume work on Planet Kaendor and go full out with the Sword & Sorcery treatment. I once again had Kenshi and Conan Exiles on my mind, and now Forbidden Lands. (Also Morrowind, because I always do.) When I last ran out of steam, the setting seemed a bit bland and stale, but I think a new backstory could do wonders to give it the spark it needs without reworking the geography and culture in significant ways.
Long in the distant past, the lands between the Sea in the West and the Mountains in the East was home to the northern civilization of the Rakshasa and the southern civilization of the Naga. Eventually the two rising powers came into conflict, which turned into centuries of warfare. As the wars dragged on, both sides unleashed incresingly devastating sorcery, turning the forests that made up the borderlands between the two powers were into a blasted wasteland. Even when armies managed to cross the burned plains to lay siege to the enemy’s cities, there was no way to possibly hold a city that was taken on the other side, and so the original plans for conquest gave way to a rage of blind destruction. As the desolation spread further into the two great woodlands and both sides exhausted their power, invasions became more difficult and less frequent, until eventually they simply stopped altogether, with nobody having any claim to victory.

Where the burned wastelands slowly recovered over time to turn into a great plain of grass and shrubland, the two battered civilizations did not. When the shared enemy from the outside faded into the distance, cities turned against each other, further reducing both realms into hollow husks of their former selves.

Eventually, human barbarians from the Mountains in the East came down into the depopulated plains. First to hunt the abundant grazing beasts, but then to settle the fertile banks of the great rivers. Three shaman kings managed to defeat the last rakshasa lord ruling in the plains and somehow gained immortality for themselves in the process. Each of them claimed one of the former rakshasa cities for themselves as conquerors, though two of the cities had already been abandoned long ago at that point.

While human civilization grew in the plains, they always stayed clear of the great ancient woodlands to the North and the South, as the Rakshasa and Naga that continued to live beneath the trees were still terrible foes to face. But over the last generations, hunters and explorers have dared venturing deeper and deeper into the northern woodlands, and rumors spread that the Rakshasa seem to be gone. Many have doubts that these ancient beings have truly disappeared for good, but to many people in the western plains, possibility of a life beyond the reach of the sorcerer kings is very much worth such a risk. The northern woodlands are not just calling to those who wish to escape the grasp of the sorcerer kings. Abandoned rakshasa castles and towers promise powerful magical artifacts that might have been left behind and forgotten, and whose value could be beyond measure.

That is not dead what can eternal lie

…and with strange aeons even my Kaendor setting may be finished.

As far as I am able to trace back, I first started working on Kaendor in February 2011. It’s undergone so many overhauls and revisions in the 11 years since then that I don’t even recognize many of the things I wrote about back then. Some elements I had discarded at some point but then had come back again in a later version. But overall, the general broad strokes concept has remained very much the same. A low-ish level D&D setting set on a forest world with small Bronze Age populations, abandoned by the ancient fey, and with sorcery being a demonic power that corrupts the people it touches and the lands around it.

There’s been many times I started to get tired of always working on the same concept, and it never turning out quite as I wanted, and so after some months of not really doing much with it, I sat down to start working on something completely new from scratch. But always I keep bringing back old ideas for places and creatures from Kaendor, until the whole place starts to look just like the one I just left behind.

I think I’ve now accepted that I am destined to keep coming back and working on this world forever.

And that is fine.

Because it’s a really cool concept.

Doing Drugs, for Fun and Profit

After having started with metaphysics, philosophy, and the undead, I’m continuing the introduction to Planet Kaendor with drugs. Perhaps a somewhat unconventional way to open with, but perhaps this might be indicative of the kind of setting this world is morphing into.

Skok

Skok is a thick black liquid that looks and smells like burned plum jam and has a faint but burning taste of bitter roots. It’s often mixed with water to make it possible to drink without sticking to your mouth for the next half hour.

Skok keeps people marching when they would otherwise collapse from exhaustion and there are many stories of people crawling half-dead from the wilderness who would never have made it nearly as far without their bottle of skok. The extra boost that it gives the body has to be paid back later though, and the lingering exhaustion can last for weeks.

Drinking skok immediately recovers two points of System Strain, but at the cost of one point of Constitution, which reduces the character’s maximum System Strain by one. Characters who have lost Constitution this way can recover one point of Constitution when resting instead of one point of System Strain (player’s choice).

Characters about to die from suffering System Stain beyond their maximum can save their lives with skok, but their recovery back to full health will take longer.

Blue Juice

Blue juice is really more like a very dark red, though when mixed with goat milk or staining cotton or hemp cloth, it turns into a slightly bluish purple color giving it its name. Blue juice comes from the tiny fruit of a swamp plant and tastes like unripe berries which is quite revolting to drink, which is why it’s often mixed with goat milk and a bit of kesk honey. It’s quite a potent painkiller and in larger amounts causes severe drowsiness to the point of making people nod off while having severe injuries getting treated.

Characters drinking a good amount of blue juice roll twice for all Mental saving throws to resist manipulation for the next hour (6 turns), but also treat any skill checks as untrained, suffering the usual -1 penalty to the roll instead of their skill level. At the end of the duration, the characters have to succeed on a Physical saving throw or fall asleep, though they can be woken up by others as usual.

Row, row, row your boat, bravely up the stream

So, if you have a setting idea that is not centered around kingdoms and cities, what other reference frames can you use to give structure to the peoples and societies of a vast wilderness setting? How about rivers? All the earliest civilizations of the Bronze Age first appeared along the largest rivers in the old world because big rivers are really really useful. They provide a steady source of water, which in the sub-tropical zones where you find these civilizations can otherwise be quite a problem. But they are also extremely useful for transportation. Rivers allow you to transport large quantities of cargo just as easily as by rail. Load all the stuff on a boat, add a sail or go with the current, and wait until you’ve reached your destination. If you have goods to move, rivers are the way to go. Or to float. While water isn’t as much a problem in Central Europe, the region between Germany and France has been constantly contested for many centuries because it’s the origin of the Rhine, the Seine, and the Rhone, having easy access to the North Sea, Atlantic, and Mediterranean.

It’s been one of the design elements for Planet Kaendor very early on that all civilization has to be on rivers or the coast, with the deeper forests being more or less inaccessible for heavy cargos. When I was thinking of city states, I was mostly thinking about the coasts and large ports, but that’s not where the adventure is. Adventure is deep in the forests where the ancient ruins are hard to get to. I am now thinking about moving all the pieces on the map to correspond to three huge river systems and one archipelago of islands of the coast. I really like ocean beaches, but Planet Kaendor is meant to be a forest world foremost. While there won’t be any along the major rivers, there’s more than enough in the islands region. While I have plans for a sub-arctic and a tropical forest set in Kaendor, for practical reasons it makes the most sense to only go with the temperate-subtropical one for now. I think any single campaign is best served by being based entirely on a single river.

The Setting

Since this first river is located in what I used to call the Dainiva forest, I’m going to call it the Dainiva river here for convenience. And since nothing is a permanent as a temporary fix, that’s probably now going to be its name forever. The great Dainiva river has been the home to many great civilizations over the ages. Cyclopean castles of the giant Rock Carvers overlook the river from cliffs towering over the meandering courses of the upper rivers, with the lower river being home to many old Naga cities. Ruins of the sorcerous Tower Builders rise above the dense trees flanking the river banks, as well as the magnificent living citadels of the Tree Weavers. All these civilizations have long ago faded from history, and it was many centuries after the Naga retreated to the jungles of the south that mortal peoples began settling on the lower banks, gradually but cautiously moving into the abandoned palaces of the serpentmen. Among the ruins they discovered the arts of casting bronze and mastering the secrets of alchemy, leading to the rise of the first mortal civilization. Over many centuries and generations, explorers ventured further up the waters, but even a thousand miles upstream, there were still no signs of the headwaters of the major branches. Only more water and trees, and the wrecks of explorers who had gone before them. And more ruins and monsters.

The Map

A setting of this type is perfectly suited for pointcrawls. Since travel is basically linear along the river branches or their banks, and ruins have to be visible from the river for characters to have any chance to find them, using a hexmap would not provide any actual benefits. Instead, a map showing the various main branches can show the distance between any fork, settlement, and ruin right next to them, and you can also use color to mark different types of water. For example, the common speed for rowing a canoe with no current is given in most places as 3 miles per hour. Currents of 1 or 2 miles per hour also don’t appear to be anything unusual, and while many rivers are much faster, the current generally is slower when you stick close to the shores where it’s more shallow. So you can mark the river conditions in three colors. Dark blue for the slowest water, in which rowers go 2 mph upstream and 4 mph downstream; medium blue for faster water, in which rowers go 1 mph upstream and 5 mph downstream; and light blue for waters too rapid to paddle against, that require continuing on foot. But you could still build a single-use raft from trees and go downstream at 6 mph. If you want to, you can also convert straight from miles per hour to miles per day, if hourly precision isn’t desired, but if you don’t have to deal with things like traveling 2.33 hexes in a day, I think tracking distances by the mile isn’t really any nuisance. On the major branches of a river of this size, there is easily more than enough room to navigate large cargo ships like a junk. With a slightly more sophisticated sail than just a plain square cloth, it is possible to sail up a river against the current, even with quite moderate wind coming from the sides. Merchant ships like these would replace the trade caravans seen in many land-based settings.

Settlements are all either directly on the river or at least have an accessible pier that connects to the actual village by a short path. Since they would want to be visited by traders, such piers would be clearly visible. But you could also have lairs of rivers pirates or secret cults hiding in barely visible side branches much too small for larger merchant ships. With civilization being based along the lower river near the coast, settlements become more scattered and smaller in size as one travels upstream. This can be used as a great indicator for players about the dangers they can expect to encounter. In civilized areas on the lower river, big monsters have long been driven out, but all the best ruins have been picked completely clean generations ago. But on the upper river, few mortals have ever set foot and there are both more dangerous monsters and much greater treasures to be found.

Since traveling on water is relatively simple and allows for the transport of great loads with little effort, I think a campaign of this type works best if you make it really big. Make it a river as big as the Volga, the Mekong, or the Columbia, where characters can go exploring for months between the end of the spring floods and the onset of winter. With the help of rafts, parties will be able to return with huge hauls of treasure, so the journey back to civilization should be a long one to compensate. Bigger hauls should translate to fewer hauls.

Basing a sandbox around a river system is also really convenient for a GM. By its nature, its close to a fractal, allowing you to just keep expanding it with more and more side branches as the party continues exploring upstream. A river map does not have to bother with mountains or elevation, and generally there’s no need to be exact about the width and depth of the water. And if you should end up with a branch that gotten too narrow and shallow to continue on, the party can always go back downstream a couple of miles and go up another branch. Now for the lower river, I think the players should have a map of the main branches and major side branches, as those are areas frequented by river merchants making their regular round. But once you leave civilization behind, there’s no limit for how far you can continue.

Similarly, it’s very easy to create villages and ruins in a vacuum and just plop them down on the map wherever the players decide to go. That goes a bit against the common ethos that players should have control over where they go by making informed choices, but I think in a setting like this, there really are not a lot of choices to make. Check it out or continue up the river? And given how many branches a river system of this size has, I don’t think working with fixed locations would actually be feasible. You’d end up with a lot of “this branch gets too narrow to continue and you’ve not seen any signs of a ruin”. That’s not player agency either. You could very well establish some facts about a ruin when the party stops at a village or trade post and gets a tip from the locals. But there wouldn’t be any need to establish any of this before the party arrives at this part of the river.

Encounters and Sites

I think for a campaign of this type, random encounters might actually the bread and butter of many adventures. Ruins are cool, but when slowly travel up a river for hundreds of miles, you’ll be doing a lot of encounter checks.

In a world with river merchants, you’d also get river pirates. Those pirates would know not to bother explorers going up the river in the spring, unless they are desperate for supplies, but be waiting to pounce at any explorers coming back down the river in the fall with their big hauls of loot. Merchants might invite the party to get a free ride with no paddling on their ships in exchange for protection against pirates while they have the same route. On the upper river, you can have encounters with aquatic and semi-aquatic humanoids, who could either be friendly or hostile to rare visitors from downriver with goods to trade. There can be the wrecks of failed expeditions, which might even be salvageable and be sold for a huge profit if floated down the river without sinking. Or repaired and used for further expeditions the next year. Or there could be ancient crumbling dams from the old civilization that threaten settlements downstream with disastrous floods, allowing for some variation between dungeon crawls.

And then there’s of course the river creatures. Obviously crocodiles and big snakes, but I’m really giddy at the idea of giving players a paralyzing phobia of hippos. Someone suggested to me adding dire beaver dams to block of some rivers and require hauling boats over land to continue. I also really like the idea of creatures in the trees following the players in their boats from shore, waiting for an opportunity to attack.

It really is a fairly simple concept for a sandbox setting, but one I think has huge potential, while looking very manageable at the same time.