Into the Darkness

I have been looking for a name for my campaign and I have finally settled on Into the Darkness. You would be surprised how many names have been taken for various dungeon crawl projects and how difficult is, at least for me, to actually wordsmith.

My last week has consisted of getting started on the new school year, and reading through the 5e Player's Handbook. I decided the easiest way to become familiar with the new rules, and decide on what homerules I want to include, is to type out the rulebook as I read through. This has basically turned into a project where I will have a somewhat custom ruleset, and an errata page to show what is different in specific.

Unfortunately, going back to wordsmithing, this lead me back to considering names for various custom races, and whether or not I should reuse names that other systems have already used. I am still not sure which direction I will go, but I have to admit if I had been the one who came up with the Aasimar race I would probably have a chuckle over the name, but having read it as someone else's creation I was less critical.

As with D&D 5e, I will be going with a few races/bloodlines, and each race gets two or more subtypes. An example of this would be the plane-touched bloodline, tentative called Soulborn, which give a core set of abilities, and then the Aasimar or Tiefling give different attribute modifiers and abilities.

To take an example directly from the 5e PHB lets look at elves. The base abilities you get from being an elf is +2 Dexterity, Darkvision, Keen Senses, Fey Ancestry, and a Trance you perform in place of sleeping. You can either be a High Elf, which gets +1 Intelligence and elven weapon training, a Wood Elf, which gets +1 Wisdom and some mobility related powers, or a Drow, which gets +1 Charisma and what we have come to see as the common suite of Drow magical powers alongside a weakness to sunlight.

Following this format gives the players, as it currently stands, ten different choices for racial abilities and ability score modification. This is more than an OSR retro-clone would have, which is what a lot of the recent dungeon crawl centric releases seem to focus around, but I see a lot of promise the the mechanics that exist in 5e, especially the bounded accuracy rules that are baked into the system.

Tactile Maps

 
Going through the older posts on various blogs I found two posts on Telecanter's Receding Rules and Aeons and Augauries about tactile maps. At its simplest a tactile map serves as a map, but as seen in the Aeons and Augauries post, the map could also be a key, and decoding the instructions on the tactile map could be a mission in and of itself.

I may very well use a tactile map as a seed for one or more of the adventuring parties headed into the megadungeon. It serves as another motivator for heading into the megadungeon beyond the rumors system that I gave as an example in the Rappan Athuk rules hi-light. It also allows for the tactile map to function as a treasure that has a delayed pay off.

West Marches Style Campaigns

Back in May I came upon an old post by Ben Robbins about a campaign he ran called West Marches. I was not aware other people had considered this type of set-up, but that is mostly due to having focused my RPG reading on World of Darkness related ideas rather than more traditional fantasy/dungeoneering sources.

 There are a few key rules that need to be adhered to when running a campaign in this way. First, the town should be safe and the wilds wild to help keep adventuring focused on exploration of the wilderness. Second, the DM should appear to be passive, giving the players a sandbox where they decide what they are going to do. Lastly, there is no set party and any players/characters can group up if they can get together.

Contrary to popular belief, the West Marches were not run as a hew crawl but instead used a vector based map. This front loads a lot of the development onto the DM requiring a high degree of detail when it comes to wilderness and dungeon sites. Especially when you consider that the players would be navigating via direction and landmarks. Personally, this mapping system would be too ambitious for me. As of now I feel more comfortable using a nested hex mapping system, starting off with a map consisting of 25-mile hexes, and then maps for more traveled or important areas consisting of 5-mile hexes, and if more detail is required maps consisting of 1-mile hexes.

Worldbuilding Day 18: The Day I Stopped

Today is decided to stop with the 30-day worldbuilding challenge. It would be great if I was focusing on writing a story, but role-playing is not about telling a story but instead about playing a cooperative game. It did help me make me consideration to the cultures found within the region, but I already had the seeds for those ideas before undertaking the challenge.

Worldbuilding Day 17: Moody Review

This exercise is to review decisions that have been made over the course of challenge and see if they still fit the moody that we are going for. I realize they do not as there are too many large settlements. The solution for this is simple: scale back the number of settlements. No division of imperial troops north of the interior mountains. A smaller settlement at the inlet. Just a railhead and the beginning of construction towards the interior mountain pass.

I lost sight of the fact that much more of the setting should be wilderness, and the infrastructure necessary to support such a large interior settlement would produce what would generally be considered the absence of wilderness. The effort does not need to be scrapped, but initial mining of magicite should be taking place in wildcat mines rather than large industrial pits.

Worldbulding Day 16: More Speculation

Today's exercise is to look at another speculative element and to establish limits and boundaries for it. Works of fantasy often have fantastic intangibles that we cannot dream of encountering in real life, and they should act in a consistent way, as if governed by imaginary rules of physics. Internal consistency is what makes or breaks willing suspension of disbelief.

 An obvious story element that needs examination is magic. Magic always comes at a price or otherwise it would be ubiquitous. Alchemical magic has the cost of components in addition to the proper education necessary to perform it. Theury as practiced by priests and clerics is limited by the faith that the practitioner has alongside whatever fickle limitations the granting entity decides upon. Device magic has the same limitations as alchemical magic. Inherent gift magic has fewer limitations, but it limited by the restrictive nature that grants the magic (ex: a magical bloodline). Magic that taps into ley lines is by nature geographically limited.

All parties involved will obviously attempt to use magic to their advantage, but magic using beings may also see advantage in restricting access to magic so as to increase their own value. Why spread arcane knowledge if that means you have a weaker bargaining position when it comes to the use of your magic.

Worldbuilding Day 15: Resources

Today is somewhat of a cheat day due to the exercise just focusing on reading other resources on world building, so I am off camping for the weekend to get first hand experience on camping with what you can bring in on your back.