Iron Kaendor

Grant Us Eyes!

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 Pilgrimage

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.

The Iron Lands

Among all the GMs on the internet, I should be remembered as the guy who’s always been super excited about planning for big sandbox campaigns and Sword & Sorcery, and whose actual games never turned out as delivering either. After two years in the wilderness, the ancient call sounded again on the wind, and I am back to thinking, “Man, wouldn’t it be cool…?”

I now believe that probably the biggest thing that always got in my way was that I really wanted to make a beautiful world first, that is magnificent in itself, and then somehow adapt a game system to match the world, and create campaigns set in that world. And the world that I was dreaming up just wasn’t really well suited for Sword & Sorcery adventures and sandbox campaigns. No amount of retooling was actually helping with that.

But now, I am once again here thinking how could it would be to really take a proper shot at that kind of campaign I’ve seen people talk about over many years. And I feel that probably the best shot at making this actually work for once, is to start with a game system and campaign structure that have worked for many other people first, and then build a world around those. And the system I am thinking about is of course the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert Rules by Tom Moldvay and Zeb Cook. (Actually Old School Essentials Advanced Rules but that’s 98% the same thing.)

And instead of making the world some new take on the old concept with recycled places and cultures from Kaendor and the Ancient Lands, the plan here and now is to really start with something new from scratch, going all the way back to the original references and sources.

Sword & Sorcery & Sandbox

The starting point for this campaign idea is to take the Basic and especially the Expert Rules as they are, and not make any attempts at improvements and streamlining, like retooling the saving throw categories, modifying the experience point reward system, or changing the spell lists to fit a different image of what magic is in the world. It should be just B/X with a few additional custom classes. (And the modern way to calculate attack hits after the d20 is rolled, because it’s just so much objectively better!)

But what is very important to make clear is that I have no intention of planning the campaign and populating the world to be a hexcrawl. The players picking one of the five unexplored hexes around their current location and with luck finding a hole in the ground in an area of forest covering five Central Parks, and maybe killing a dozen goblins for 3 copper coins sounds as dull to me as it is to apparently a very large number of players. My idea of sandbox campaigns is to have the players get involved in conspiracies against some minor king, find the hidden temple of a high priest kidnapping princesses, destroy the pirates sinking merchant ships and following them to their volcano lair on skull island. With the players making the choice which of the rumors they encounter on their travels they want to follow, and what sides they want to pick, and what kind of ultimate outcome they want to see. (This is one of the reasons why B/X is such an attractive pick, as it’s a system that allows preparing NPC leaders and their minions, or maps for lairs and ancient ruins very quickly to be ready to play within five days.)

The main works I am drawing ideas from for the game world are the classic 80s Sword & Sorcery movies Conan the Barbarian and Fire and Ice. But also the interpretation of the Young Kingdoms in the Elric RPG Stormbringer, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and Planet Algol, and the post-post-Apocalyptic sandbox game Kenshi. Given the classic depictions of Sword & Sorcery scenes by the most famous artists of the genre and the highly fragmented state of civilization I want to go for, I would roughly place the cultural state of the setting in the mid-Iron Age. That’s the time where Greek city states were starting to make their comeback and the Phoenicians and Etruscans were doing quite well for themselves, but still a considerable time before the Romans and Achaemenids became major players in the cultural and political landscape.

The Iron Lands

As a start, I grabbed this map from the internet to have a first reference for the geography of the setting.

But in particular this area.

This area here covers roughly the size of Asia Minor, Greece, and Mesopotamia. That’s more than enough room for a decently sized Iron Age population, with a vast interior remaining for numerous nomadic tribes and all kinds of great and strange beasts.

The world of the Iron Lands is very much not planet Earth. The mountains, forests, and islands are recognizable enough, but the wild beasts and even domesticated creatures are more like prehistoric creatures from hundreds of millions of years ago, and the the monsters have only very little overlap with the generic D&D creatures.

In the very ancient past, some 10,000 years ago, the continent was home to strange inhuman civilizations. These Ancients have been long gone, and little has been left of their empires other than a few overgrown ziggurats made from strange green stone or purple glass, hidden deep in the jungles and mountains.

Long after the Ancients were gone came the age of the serpentmen, who build numerous large kingdoms across the coastal lands, ruling over great populations of human slaves. Their civilization eventually fell as well a thousand years ago, but a few half-abandoned cities still are clinging on in the jungles to the east.

After the serpentmen were gone from the Iron Lands, most of their human slaves dispersed into the highlands and forests, but eventually some clans began to rebuild abandoned cities or build new ones of their own. 300 years ago, a powerful sorcerer king conquered most of the city states of the Iron Lands. But even with his magic, he eventually died, and his 100 year long empire fell soon after, as his governors were overthrown by the people one by one. The rivalry between the many petty kings has diminished trade and education noticeably since the time of the Empire, and their individual power rarely extends for more than a three days march around their cities. The hills and many of the smaller islands are home to countless minor lords who are often little more than mercenary captains who moved into border forts abandoned by the Empire or the Serpentmen.