A Brief History of Space

When I came up with the idea for Iridium Moons four years ago, the concept was to create a world that is a blend of Cyberpunk and Dune, with the only fantastical elements being hyperspace travel and artificial gravity. Other than that, everything was meant to remain plausible under conventionally understood physics, biology, demographics, and economics. But this year, I’ve really gotten invested in a much more space fantasy style, more similar to A Princess of Mars and early Star Wars. In that context, many of the planets and factions I had created for the Esekar Sector no longer really make much sense. And since I picked up 3D modelling and rendering in Blender as a new hobby, and very much entertaining the possibility of expanding from that into videogame development with Blender at a later point, focusing on a smaller number of planets with fewer different kind of aliens would be a significant reduction on the asset creation workload. So I created a new sector for Iridium Moons, that’s more in line with the new vision. Reusing many of the aliens and other concepts, but also replacing or throwing out others.

Starting with the history of the Foross Sector doesn’t feel like a particularly good way to introduce the new setting, but it still seems to make more sense to cover this background before going deeper into the description of the individual planets and factions.

The Start of the Interstellar Age

700 years ago, the first working hyperspace drive engine was constructed by the vhen. This marked the beginning of the Interstellar Age, and is conventionally treated as the start of interstellar history. Though for the first century, this history is the story of vhen space exploration alone. Traveling out into space, they explored hundreds of star system and established a number of small outposts on habitable planets, though most of these were constructed to primarily serve as supply stations for expeditions deeper into space.

After having previously encountered only a few very small populations of intelligent species with early stone age cultures, vhen explorers discovered the homeworld of the enkai in 104. The enkai were already a technologically very advanced species, but their planet was highly divided and at that time in the grip of several major conflicts. With no side having a technological or military edge over the others to risk a full out global war, the conflicts had been largely frozen for many decades. While the arrival of aliens in their star system did have a great cultural impact on all of enkai society, the possibility of interstellar expansion through hyperspace travel was primarily seen by many of the warring governments as an unprecedented opportunity to gain major economical and military advantages over their rivals. Several of the most powerful enkai states did have the technological and economical capacities to build shipyards for the production of hyperspace capable ships and begin construction within 20 years of gaining knowledge of the physics behind hyperspace drives from the vhen.

The Enkai Space Race

While the vhen had undertaken space exploration as a primarily as a scientific effort, for the larges enkai states, falling behind in the race to gain and secure access to valuable resource in other star systems was seen as an existential threat to their survival. Throwing their entire industrial might behind the effort to beat their military rivals, the enkai space race accelerated the exploration of new systems and the establishment of major colonies to a pace far beyond anything seen before.

Of the four largest enkai colonies, one would eventually be largely abandoned after 60 years, failing to become self-sustainable after being a huge drain on the state’s economy. The other three turned out to be extremely successful, and by the year 300 each had grown to population sizes over 100 million people, due to massive state-sponsored migration and very effective social policies to encourage high birth rates. However, the great war on the enkai homeworld never actually materialized. And with communication between the colonies and the homeworld being delayed by weeks, and the colonies having become economically fully self-sufficient, two of them gained full independence as sovereign states during the 4th century. While the last colony had become very successful, its establishment and very high support costs during the early decades had played a major part in ruining the government on the home world. With several regions breaking off to become independent minor nations, the colony eventually outpaced the state that had founded it both economically and in population, ultimately leading to the capital being moved to the colony. This effectively makes it sovereign state that has a colony on one of the homeworlds. A unique case in all of interstellar history.

Further Expansions

During the enkai space race of the 2nd and 3rd century, several other large civilizations were discovered in the exploration of habitable planets and became part of interstellar society. The enkai discovered the chosa in 197, who also had already developed limited space travel within their own system.

In 274, vhen explorers discovered the homeworld of the tubaki, who did have quite advanced steam power technology but no electrical infrastructure.

In 312, the vhen also discovered the mahir, who turned out to be the descendants of enkai who had been settled on a far away planet and genetically altered by an unknown lost civilization tens of thousands of years ago. Mahir technology was already quite similar to that of the vhen, except having never discovered the means to produce hyperspace drives.

In 381, enkai discovered the firax, who had just begun to develop electronics 50 years earlier.

In the early 5th century, the major enkai colonies had become significant powers in their own right and began to establish new permanent mining outposts on more resource rich planets that had been discovered after their own founding. During this time they discovered the genya in 442. The genya had discovered electricity, but due to their planet’s scarcity of coal and almost complete lack of oil had never been able to make use of it industrially. The introduction of fusion power by the enkai led to an incredibly fast industrialization that happened in all parts of the planet simultaneously, leading to an enormous population explosion.

Settlement of the Foross Sector

One of the regions of space that was of great interest to enkai colonies on Turik and Parakarat was the Foross Sector. The first Turikan outpost to be established in 478 was on Halon, an inhospitable and barren planet covered in near permanent haze and dust storms, but with breathable air and being home to several rich deposits of Iridium and Paladium from asteroid impacts, which made it very attractive for mining.

Parakarians founded a settlement on Kion in 503, which became the main food producer for the mining operations in the sector. By this time, the genya homeworld was reeling from a six times increase in global population numbers, and severe economic hardship for working class clans, leading to several hundred million people taking up offers for work in alien colonies, with large numbers of them ending up in the Foross Sector.

In 547, new rare metal sources were discovered on Sarhat. With the most abundant deposits on Halon having been mined decades ago, and the environment being much more hospitable, the main mining operations in the sector were almost entirely moved from Halon to Sarhat, leaving the first settled planet in the sector mostly abandoned.

At the same time, the vhen fuel refinery in orbit around the moon of Palan was greatly expanded, with extensive support structures and housing facilities being build on the surface of the habitable planet. In time, Palan became home to the main spaceport of the Feross Sector, with the Sarantal colony growing into a city of 9 million people. A majority of them being genya.

The Decline

By 7th century, mining on Sarhat declined significantly and had already mostly ended on Kion. The enkai colonies that had been funding the new settlements greatly reduced their budget for maintenance and upkeep and completely pulled out of the sector in 617 and 623. Palan followed in 635. Over a third of the sector’s population left in a span of 25 years, most of them taking up contracts in the new mining operations in neighboring sectors.

Whatever, by that point largely worn out and outdated, industrial equipment and infrastructure remained on the planet was quickly auctioned off to the highest bidders. As the vast majority of people in the Foross Sector had been government employees who received most of their wage in the form of housing, food, and social services, the only people rich in cash tended to be criminals. Who now in control of the remaining industry and infrastructure, became the new oligarch class.

Without the regular supply of subsidized advanced technological components, and largely limited to what could be manufactured locally with existing industrial capacity, the technological level of the Foross Sector declined significantly. Large parts of the population on Sarhat and Kion turned to farming, possessing only a few small electronic devices, and often relying extensively on work animals. The oligarchs still maintain access to many advanced technologies by trading the resources from the greatly decreased mining operations to interstellar trade companies from the homeworlds.

Despite the massive industrial decline of the Foross Sector, a new settlement was set up by the firax on Meruna in 631. While the planet is highly habitable with a fairly mild climate, its lack of valuable resources had left it unclaimed by the industrial operations of the enkai and vhen. The firax, whose homeworld lies in one of the most remote frontiers of known space, wanted to establish a presence closer to the vhen and mahir, that would allow them opportunities to open relationships with other peoples than only the enkai. Attracting a large number of genya settlers and workers from Kion and Palan, the new colony managed to become economically self-sufficient, but remains the smallest of the populations in the sector by a great margin.

Some insight into FitD Action Roll difficulty

With Blades in the Dark and the other Forged in the Dark games being so much more straightforward and conventional looking than Apocalypse World, I often forget how its entire internal logic is still very difficult from traditional and neo-trad game systems. While reading through Scum and Villainy again in preparation to finally taking it out for a campaign, one peculiar thing I realized only on the third or fourth pass is that getting circumstantial advantages, like optimal equipment for the task or great numerical superiority, can only improve your Effect for the Action Roll, but not affect the odds whether the roll will actually be a success or a failure.

Which coming from a traditional approach to RPGs just feels somehow wrong. Stacking the odds of success and failure in your own favor is the main objective in the gameplay loop of most games. But here it’s very important to understand that PbtA games are  fundamentally different in what the action resolution mechanic is supposed to accomplish in the first place.

In classic and traditional games, an adventure consists of a number of opposing NPCs and obstacles that the GM has put between the players and their goal. The regular action is one PC facing an NPC or environmental obstacle, and making a roll whose odds are based on the PCs abilities and equipment compared against the NPCs abilities and equipment, or the obstacles static difficulty. If the roll is a success, the NPC or obstacle is either removed from the player’s path, or partial progress is made towards removing it. Sometimes it takes two or three successful rolls to drain the NPCs health to zero, but it’s the same idea.

PbtA games don’t do anything like that. In FitD games, the players initiate an adventure by deciding what they want to ultimately accomplish. And instead of the players controlling their characters to remove the obstacles in the path to their goal, the players and the GM are taking turns in taking control of a story about the characters. Apocalypse World tried to make this very explicit by calling everything that a player or GM does a Move. Unfortunately, the very peculiar presentation of the game left a lot of people very confused. Blades in the Dark tried to make the text of the rules more accessible by using more conventional language, but for me personally, that makes it much easier to forget how fundamentally different the gameplay structure of the game is.

An FitD adventure starts by the GM describing the first obstacle that the PCs encounter on their way to their goal. Then one player takes control of the story by describing how one of the PCs is removing that obstacle. If the roll is a success (one 6) or critical success (two or more 6s), then the PCs removed that obstacle. If the roll is a partial success (4-5) or a failure (1-3), then the GM takes control of the story by introducing a new obstacle. Any scene in a PbtA game consists of the players removing obstacles from the scene, and the GM adding new obstacles to the scene. This loop continues until the players have removed all the obstacles. Then they move on to the next scene, and the whole process repeats again. Like a GM in a classic dungeon crawling adventure deciding on the number of rooms and floors in a dungeon, it is up to the GM in a PbtA game to decide how many scenes the players will have to go through before they reach the goal of their adventure. This is always an arbitrary judgement call by the GM, regardless of the style of game structure, based on a personal estimate of what would make a fun adventure for the players.

And this loop of removing obstacles from a scene and adding new ones to a scene, is the reason why the PCs having advantages or disadvantages in any given situation does not affect the probability whether any given Action Roll will be a success, partial success, or failure. If the players had the ability to stack up really big dice pools for any of their rolls, they would just keep getting successes and critical successes all the time, and most scenes would be resolved in just one or two action rolls. The whole point of the PbtA games is to enjoy the wild rollercoaster of things constantly escalating into more and more chaos and panic. We want scenes to go on for a good while, but we also don’t want them to drag on forever. That’s why the ways in which dies can be added or removed from the dice pool are very limited.

But players do still have other ways to stack things in their favor by establishing and setting up situational advantages for themselves. Trading Position for Effect becomes a critical mechanic here. Somehow establishing an advantage that give the PC Great Effect, or at least going from Lesser Effect to Standard Effect for the planned action is not that hard. That’s exactly what Flashbacks are for, and I think generally most GMs are quite generous when players want to have some kind of not yet mentioned environment feature that would help them. Or you can just Push Yourself to get +1 Effect for 2 Stress. (Though then you can’t push yourself to also get +1 die to the roll.) By Trading Effect for Position, players have the option to improve the position for their action to Risky or even Controlled. And in a Controlled Position, a failed action roll can’t really do any further harm. Even on a failure, you can always just accept that it didn’t work, and no new problems are added to the scene. If things are going terrible and you are getting tired and frustrated with the scene and your character is drowning in Stress and Harm, get that increased Effect and trade it for Controlled Position. Otherwise, enjoy the wild ride.

Where did I come from? Where do I go?

Part of the reason I went all in about videogame design and dropped RPGs entire was as always ADHD. But another big part was that I had been having some ambitious goals about what I wanted to do next with RPGs and never actually getting anywhere. As it turned out, after a few weeks of learning a lot about retro-style CRPG and ImSim design, and thinking about what kind of game I could be working on using either my Kaendor or Iridium Moons settings, I found myself back in pretty much the same circular loop.

Which, I think, I finally found a way out off this winter. With the realization that, *gasp*, I don’t actually like High Fantasy storytelling.

That stuff with the big monsters, the demons, and the evil wizards, and the heroes claiming ancient artifacts and casting magic spells. I don’t find the kinds of stories revolving around these things very interesting. I think I used to, 20 or maybe even still 10 years ago. But not anymore. And that’s why I never manged to turn Kaendor into a campaign that was living up to what I wished it could be. And why I could never come up with even a general outline for a Kaendor videogame. What I was still deeply in love with was the aesthetic idea of environments. I could always very clearly imagine what the world looks like, but never what’s actually happening in it. And correspondingly, what player characters would do in it. Resulting in campaigns and adventures that even when they were going really well, always felt rather generic to me.

In contrast, I have all kinds of storytelling ideas for Space Opera. Endless ideas for NPCs, great conflicts, and adventure hooks. But I never felt good about leaving those fantasy environment aesthetics behind.

For a very, very long time, I was always extremely averse to mixing sci-fi elements with fantasy, even though I have of course always been a giant Star Wars fan. But I only worked out recently that my problem really is with adding little pieces of sci-fi tech into an otherwise self-consistent High Fantasy world. An elf-wizard with a laser gun just feels wrong! They don’t fit together. But what I realized is that the reason magic and space tech work perfectly fine together in Star Wars is that this is a world where both are part of a single whole. The sword and the gun are not opposites in Star Wars. They are not the weapons of two normally fully separates worlds. They are part of the same arsenal used throughout the whole setting. Fairy tale princesses have their own space ships. People get out of the saddle of their taun-taun and jump onto a hoverbike. Without having any thought that they are transitioning between their familiar native world and an exotic alien world. This approach has always worked flawlessly for me in Star Wars, and I have realized I am totally fine with this way of mixing fantasy and sci-fi elements in my own work as well.

Funnily enough, I had noticed many years ago that my deeply cherished environmental aesthetic actually comes mostly from works with space settings rather than from High Fantasy Settings. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the 80s Dune movie, Albion, and Knights of the Old Republic. These are all works already set in this kind of Space Fantasy, but somehow it never occured to me to pursue worldbuilding in this direction as well.

When I came up with the first draft for Iridium Moons in 2021, my direct inspirations were the new Dune movie, Cyberpunk 2077, and Boardwalk Empire, with the specific worldbuilding guided by the Space Opera RPG standards and conventions of Traveller, Scum and Villainy, and Coriolis. But that original version of Iridium Moons was mostly a world of space ships, factories, big cities, and corporations. In a pen and paper RPGs, wilderness environments are not really that relevant unless the adventure is specifically about navigating natural obstacles. Almost everything important is happening in city streets or indoors. But in a videogame, particularly first person 3D games, elaborate landscapes are something that can really shine and contribute in a major way to setting the tone of the story. Which gave me the idea to slightly retool the Iridium Moons setting to something less Space Opera and more like Planetary Romance, by reducing the presence of space travel and instead put more work in having multiple important locations located on the same planet. With travel between them through the landscape. (Which would be just a two sentence scene transition in a campaign.) Trying to use all the 12 different original planets in a videogame would also have been a major problem, as they would need strong variations in architecture, vegetation, and wildlife. Which is a nonissue for a GM. Instead relocating all the locations and factions to only four planets makes everything much more technically feasible. In the spirit of fully embracing the space fantasy approach, and being a big fan of A Princess of Mars, I also decided to step away from the industrialists and factories theme I originally had in mind, and lean more towards nobles in old-fashioned palaces. But other than that, it’s still largely the same setting I came up with four years ago. Just in a different sector of space. Possibly a few centuries earlier.

My attempts to make an Iridium Moons game in the Godot engine remains my main focus, and further worldbuilding for the setting will continue to be in that context. But with a rules-light game system like Scum and Villainy, that is very much about making things up as you go and doesn’t require preparing any stats for NPCs, loot, and encounters, running a campaign at the side is much more easily done than with other games I’ve run in the past. And since I’m already doing the worldbuilding for my game, Iridium Moons is making for just the right setting to use in a campaign.

TK-421, do you copy?

Has been quite a while since I’ve done anything RPG related.

For the last year, I’ve been learning about videogame design and using Godot and Blender. Something that is still ongoing and I expect for a long while, but no, there is nothing I have to show yet.

Last week I started playing in Geoffrey’s Old School Star Wars campaign on Grenzland, because I was only going to be a player and it’s a rules light system, so nothing was required of me other than show up for a few hours. Which is a very different kind of activity than preparing and running a campaign in a game like modern D&D. It was an immediate blast. Even though my only die roll was a single shot at a stormtrooper. (Which missed.)

And of course it had me right away thinking that running a rules-light system in an open-ended swashbuckling campaign wouldn’t actually be much more work and a time commitment. For the last months, I’ve been more or less settling on working on a small videogame set in a new incarnation of my Iridium Moons space opera setting, and happened to be browsing the Scum and Villainy rulebook for ideas and inspirations. Right now, a Scum and Villainy campaign in the new Iridium Moons in the not so distant future might be a real possibility, as it wouldn’t really conflict with my videogame hobby.

While cleaning out the spam comments that had build up over the last year (most were tracksbacks that didn’t get caught by Antispam-Bee), I also saw that there’s been 19 actual comments here on older posts since the last time I wrote something. Really cool.

I also noticed that I never actually updated the link to my Mastodon profile. I’ve not been using the old for a year now. It’s fixed now.

The Economy Engine, v0.2

I made a thing.

For D&D 3rd edition, so it might not be that interesting to a lot of people. But I made it and I think it’s cool.

The 3rd edition Dungeon Masters Guides has a system to determine various traits of any randomly generated town or village. The rules for making a list of all NPCs that live in a city by class and level are pretty silly, as they easily produce considerable numbers of level 20 commoners in every major city. But the guidelines for what kind of equipment and other things are available for sale in a random village that the party might come through, and how much of their treasure hauls they will be able to sell there always seemed like an interesting idea to me. You can’t sell off a dragon’s hoard in some remote village, and you won’t be able to quickly recruit a hundred mercenaries and have them decked out with plate armor in a small town, even if you have the money to pay for all of that.

I am currently working on a West Marches inspired campaign concept in which the players would grow the local frontier economy with the treasures they haul up from ancient ruins, and in the process more rare and specialized items and services would become available in the growing villages in the area. Since the plan is to make it a D&D 3rd edition campaign, using the DMG’s guidelines is as good a start as any. To make tracking of how much of the local stocks of various items the players have already bought up, and how much of their treasures they will be able to sell before they might have to make a trip to the big city where the major buyers are, I put together a spreadsheet that automatically does all the calculations that the DMG suggests.

Economy Engine v0.2 (.0ds)

Economy Engine v0.2 (.xlsx)

The only thing you have to do to get the entire store inventory list for any settlement is to enter the population size at the top. It then automatically sets the correct gp limit and calculates the asset values, and then uses those to determine which items are available for sale and how many of them are in stock.

Because I want to use this for an open table campaign where players might have several characters and there might be a number of different parties going on their separate adventures at different times, which might have very different uses for certain items, I made the Economy Engine with an option to keep track of how many items of a type are currently on stock, based on what players have bought, as well as what they have sold. And the sheet also calculates how this makes the cash reserves of the local businesses go up and down.

I’ve put all the equipment lists from the Player’s Handbook into the sheet, but I would recommend to either delete or just hide all the rows with items that are not produced in the setting of a campaign. New rows can be added to the list and nothing should be caused to break from this. You just have to enter the name of the item and its price in gp. The other rows look empty, but will automatically be filled in once you have the price typed into the B column. The formatting goes down to row 1000, and even with just the most very basic spreadsheet skills you can extend the formatting further down as much as you want if you should need it.

I really don’t know if anyone still has any use for this tool 17 years after the game ceased publication. But I made it for myself, it’s really easy to use, and it doesn’t take up space. So have it.

I updated the files to v0.2 because the code for tracking current stock was completely borked. This is also now properly attributed with a Creative Commons Do Whatever You Want License.

The Game of my Imagination

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.