d100 Social Contracts

d100 Social Contracts and their Antagonists - No Background (for B&W printing)

d100 Social Contracts and their Antagonists - Printable

 d100 Social Contracts and their Antagonists - Spread (for Screens)

Most of what I need to say about the origins of this post are said on the pdf but, tldr; elmcat wrote a post about making bustling cities with neighborhoods that have character and I made a table to help codify that aspect of their post.

I got caught up thinking about the various communities I've been a part of, the way they've agreed to be communities intrinsically or expressly; the ways that's been good and the ways that's been bad, and how homogeny tends to exist for awhile until people get bored or people get greedy or some other permutation of prolonged stasis, and then the agreement falls apart, drift, disintegration, exodus, etc.

Which, if Idea is to make a civilization or a settlement that's like a character, I like Idea, and I like the idea of clearly identifying aspects that make a body a body, which to me means boiling down beliefs and cultures into little snippets, exaggerating them, and when a DM, sticking to it. 

This town believes that Labor is Lord.

Well that's a town, then, and that'll affect how they feel about adventurers walking in, or how they cast blame, or who is touted as the local hero and walks out to confront the Raki stickbug making a territorial display in the central plaza.

Anyway: mixed aim here. I want to get some TTRPG spread design practice as the Corrhéo campaign goes on so that when it comes time to design the book, I'm not sitting in front of inDesign wondering how to make my table borders thicker. 

I also want to design tools and see if other people can use 'em.

Hopefully these links work for you.

Extra reading: Ann Leckie's Ancillary series are exceptional community studies. EO Wilson's On Human Nature was fresh on my mind too.

SESSION 1 - Playlog - Corrhéo

 

Don't zoom in yet. I'll zoom in eventually. 

Here's my tables. I took five of my hours and two Micron pens and a ruler and this fancy journal my cousin gave me and re-drew all of my prep-work for the first session in Corrhéo. 

For your sake, I'm going to assume you've never heard of it. I know you may have. Look around you briefly and recognize that you are not the only one here. Or at least there are other footprints in the dust. 

Corrhéo, for the unitiated, and to initiate the country to this blog is neatly summarized as follows:

a swamped land whose wellsprings once cared for by the alien Popolos have become plugged;— aristocracy has fallen off and toy with undeath as an alternative to cultural dominance; the heraldric knights grapple with their own being supplanted through insane devotion to cleanliness and order, but are pressed by a past steeped in brutal civil war. Periodic slaving forays are made into the country by colonies of ant peoples from the desert; a growing immigrant population of the thick-skinned frog-like berrylmen relish in the newer hard-leaf foliage and muck, worshipping seaweed elementals and farming slime; and a faction of druid-led justiciars who seem more like the barb-hook madmen of Mad Max than any staff-wielding tree-lovers from modern fantasy lore are out to hang whoever is causing all the Rot.

 Okay, it's not a neat summary when I read it aloud. 

Trying again:

a peat-bog province whose natural wellsprings have become clogged with rot; whose nobles have turned to mummification; whose knights grapple with the results of their civil war; whose peasants are thick-skinned slime farmers with froggy features; whose justice system is run by a mis-directed druid far from balanced; who are regularly visited by great elemental powers of an older age; and whose sea, once a fountain of economic resource, was replaced with a roiling ocean of silt and salt that moves like water and is populated by things which can survive in such harsh atmosphere.

Neater. Better?

Doesn't matter: we move on. 

Corrhéo is no tome. It is a sprawling series of web-documents and hyperlinks. But in my mind, and as I'll spell up for you here, it will be. First it will be a series of ZINES if Clane has his way, which he will. Then it will be a tome. 

System neutral. Or rather: taking each ginger step forward in the footsteps of Hot Springs Island. 

Big footsteps. 

Let's zoom in.

I decided to play Corrhéo to edit it, rather than simply edit it without playing. I wanted the vibrancy of player action in each of the hex landmarks Clane and I developed. I wanted the webs tested. I wanted to roll on tables I'd produced. I am inspired by the notion that as a game designer, not only do we provide a game for a player to play, we provide a game for a DM to play. That game is:

What will I roll on this table? And what will I do with what I roll?

And I want to play that game.

I think any number of DM's have admitted to the satisfaction they get from reading through the 'sample plays' in any number of handbooks throughout the years. As a young reader, it is undoubtedly what coupled me to the occupation for life. Reading about an anonymous DM rolling their own dice and then fabricating story from those rolls was liquid honey. Reading Hot Springs Island, I felt that same thing again. It was in the encounter charts. It was in the satisfaction of probability. A chart that can be populated so that certain things happen more often than others makes the DM in me read to the edges of that chart, looking for what the IMPLAUSIBLE actions are. Thinking, my god, what would I do if 3d6 black dragons were rolled, with the motivation performing a ritual?—because I trust the dice, so I'd have to play them as they lay, level one characters or not.

I hear you. Get to it, Hugh.

Let's Talk Session Prep

So Corrhéo the country is fifty-two hexes. I decided I wanted to do explore it with something I've been itching to try— a West Marches campaign. 

This scared me.

I also wanted to offer players the opportunity to start in any hex.

This scared me too. 

I didn't write but 1/3 of these hex entries, if that. 

I know the world. I've read it, edited it, thought through things with Clane. I've lived in it. But I didn't write all of it. I certainly didn't (see: don't) know how every hex interacts. 

But I sent out a semi-cryptic email to every person I trusted with my writing and anyone I'd think to roleplay with, about thirty five anonymous bcc's in total.

Fifteen are now in a Discord together.  

Of those, six created a player sheet. And five of them signed up for one of the time slots I set out three weeks in advance. Three of these people knew each other, two were strangers to all. I asked everyone to change their names to their character's name. The three who knew each other didn't know they were playing together. This was a happy result of simple rules. 

They picked hex C-11 'for its proximity to a diversity of biomes and probably to Drek's Landing'. 

Players assuming here that the building depicted in C-12 is a city. Drek's Landing is one of two major cities in Corrhéo. 

C-12 is not where Drek's Landing is, but this was a happy result of poor map symbolism. Drek's Landing is in fact across the Silt-Salt Sea in C-24. It is described as 'the Venice of Corrhéo'. 

Then I had to figure out what they were doing in Corrhéo as a mercenary company. 

I'm going to give you this to read. It should describe everything you need about the world and its final page will detail how I ended up delivering a West Marches introduction. If you don't want to read it, the players are in a mercenary group whose rent is due.

Now you're caught up. 

Here I am, the day before the scheduled first day of play at a climbing gym whose windows I cleaned for a free punch pass. I have my notebook, I have 76 Patrons because of Luke Gearing, I have a PDF of Hot Springs Island,  I have Kemp's Dungeon Checklist, I have Marcia B's Bite-Sized Dungeons , and I have the wildly inefficient back-end of a World Anvil campaign setting to search through.

Characters are playing two fighters, two rogues and a priest. 

You want know them?

In their own words:

Maddeson, Clothchilde and Envoy of Genemene; 

Zugg Brunswick-Dax, adopted of the Brunswick farm collect; 
Taamog Peets, a rather young goblin;
Godfrey, a human fighter with long black greasy hair; &
Zahir, a tall, scrawny, half-orc priest

 

 Let's talk for a second about prep.

So far, all I have for player motivations and direction are as follows (when asked: what do you want to do, know, or are interested in?): 

• —what is Genenene & where;
• —inklings bout What's Due;
• —inklings bout Yaddish;
• —discreet info bout 'Hood;
• —big cats;  
• —why Godfrey look so bloody.

- zugg

And:

—take advantage of my time in Corrheo to find new herbs, and knowledge in herbalism

—learn the trade routes in and out of the country, and to find how they might be exploited

—making contact with The Corrheonic Stand

—also the Clinchin Fold, learning to ward off their death-ways and generally keep them at arm's length

            - maddeson 

Then I have a location. C-11. 

So I start outlinining each of the hexes around them:

Zooming in again

C-15

C-10

You get the picture. Clane and I have written ... 400 words on each place, but I'm grabbing the barest details as fast as I can. Remember I'm at a climbing gym and it's a day before. The Bellwright's Quarry: right, there's a bellwright and there are saboteurs. If they go there, I'll grab the rest. The Cistern at the town of Lodger: right. It has a Festival. Grab that. Table it.

I'm finding myself just hauling ass through these entries we have and making massive edits to what I need to read. 

I realize one fundamental fact: there's no way I can do this for every hex in one day. So I need to make some sort of net that can catch them if they decide to try to play out in deeper water. After all, I'm planning to use Hurst mechanics for exploration: one watch, one poker chip, explore or travel, boom. 

(By the way, Jacob: I stole my poker chips, which felt very in-line with Hot Springs' attitude. It was from a flea market. Two red, two black, two white. )

I lay my adjacent hexes out as I have here:

I decide my net will be a roleplay net. I will create an NPC encounter list and each NPC will in some way engage with one of the existing landmarks, in a dire effort to draw PCs somewhere that I've actually studied, rather than somewhere I haven't.

First major mistake: there is no reason for this list to be a probability list, for multiple reasons.

1. I didn't organize it so that the rarity of any particular event was important
2. The NPCs match particular locations: the lovers Bells and Charliene wouldn't be at the Eisenharz Factory for any reason, for instance

But I am glad I've made the list. Suddenly I have tools, toys. I have bodies, and interesting ones. Lord Wygmy's mineralists might tie PC's to Wygmy's Siltstone Jet Vein in C-06. The blood salesman might induce them to go to to the Urlgraff Theatre in C-05. 

That's it. 

Well. Hold tight. I have those things and I filled out the remainder of the encounter charts that Clane and I drummed up. 

Again, credit where credit's due: the framework is entirely Hot Springs Island. The beasts & factions are ours. Some of the motivations we mixed around. We worked in some from Justin Alexander's book on Gamemastering so that we weren't just tracing HSI word-for-word.

And I have no monster stat blocks. 

And Now Let's Talk About Session Play

Everyone got there before me. To Discord. 

I set up my microphone and laid out Treacherous Traps, 76 Patrons, two sets of dice, my printed map, and a scrappy piece of paper with a rough draft of the above tables. 

Then I said hi, and everyone said hi, and I said I'd just like to say a few words about what this is, which is both a game session and a playtesting session, so please bear with me if I need to step into a separate channel to prepare something on the fly. I apologized in advance, let everyone speak if they needed to, and let them play from the prompt I already shared with you: you're in the warehouse, it's morning. Sup? 

Zugg the Paladin-Wannabe immediately prompted everyone that they ought to visit A RESPECTABLE'S HOUSE, VILLA CHI (C-11) to have a word with the landlord.

This was one of the night's happy synchronicities. The presupposition of the playstyle is that the party uses a common space for mapping and storytelling, and happened to pick a hex with a landlord in it. Villa Chi was a landmark I wrote. 

Two above-ground coffins sit in fenced gardens, iron grid fences. Each coffin is 12' wide and gloss-finished. sand around each. The house behind the coffins is two long rectangles, with aspects of furniture visible all the way back. No walls, only columns, and one courtyard with a lone ash implanted in dirt. 

 

Private spaces are the curtain of surrounding bush that magically parts and closes at arrival. 

 

Deeper: "This sense of timeliness is not universal, just relative to me." This is inscribed on the two over-long coffins. Access to the sleeping space is free and open through a swinging door, but if A. Respectful is abed, they are trapped and locked.

 

This is the tomb and home of A. Respectful. He lives in two halves, lower and upper. As wide as a street with great bowed legs, but skinny. There is nothing pretty about A. Respectful, but oddly enough, it has never bothered him.

 

A. Respectful responds quickly, nourishes relationships, makes others feel valued. He is awake in the morning, remains dressed in the sharp, white lordly attire of his life, and involves himself with various crews who are constantly maintaining or visiting the grounds of his villa.

 

2d4 crews

• 2 two sculptors who hate each other, Prienaut & Bill Daggins
• 3 d4 scourge wraiths, serving as cleaners
• 4 Earth cultivators shaping the privacy garden
• 5 Morgan Binstone and her lawyers
• 6 Pack of elders from Drek's Landing, discussing mercantilism
• 7 a pair of First Popolos visiting First Popolos Bausian, topics art or entertainment
• 8 Carga has come to call and pay respects

 

A small personal depression is dug in the central courtyard and left as dirt, wherein A. Respectful goes at the end of his days to drink the blood of deer. He becomes introspective and careless for an hour, then takes long steps back to his coffin, divides into top and bottom, and slides inside to rest.

 

Except for this time, A. Respectful holds a dry court in his open-air home, serving as business developing consultant, political maven, and storyteller. He has been alive since the departure of the Silt-Salt Sea. The First Popolos Buasian lives here as his consort but has grown very old and thus even more elusive.

 

She will ignore all things, or if she pays attention, will rationalize without reason why things said to her are more important than others. She holds veto power on any of A. Respectful's rulings for clients. A. Respectful does not show her enough respect.

 

He can be heard wandering the halls apologizing to her, "If I'm going to care for people and be more careful, then I also need to be more respectful" or some variation thereof.

 

2d4 renditions of A. Respectful's apology 

• 2 (just lays down on the ground in front of her)
• 3 I do care! You're my most respected .. what?
• 4 If I'm watching you, you feel full, but I need to show I'm watching you?
• 5 To be full of care is to show respect, yes, yes, yes yes yes.
• 6 You are taken care of, but that is not the same as being cared for.
• 7 How long have we been together?
• 8 (wraps himself around her and lifts her and squeezes)

You'll probably notice that, once again: we've entirely ripped Hot Springs Island for landmark formatting: short blurb with a 'deeper' section (HSI uses the dark as their DM curtain) for DM's (one of which you now are; sorry if you're a player and stumbled across my blog. I'm trying to avoid that but who knows).

Regardless: I got lucky. The Company agreed with Zugg. Let's go have a chat and figure. 

They tended to believe, right off the bat, that their employer, 'HOOD', had either bailed on them and left them in the lurch, or had been maligned in some way. 

A. RESPECTABLE was at home. It was daytime. He happens to be an open-faced practicing member of the Clinchin Fold. I wrote him that way and I like having a few 'good aristocrats' among the usual shitpack. 

Plus he's a big ugly coffin sleeper who splits himself in half to sleep who wants to treat his wife well and can't. And she's a Popolos, which is basically our 'elder race'. There's not many of them and they're being forced further underground by the usual shortsightedness of the 'newer peoples'. I won't go too deep here but it goes deep.

Players approached. DM's note: I had no map of this place. In my mind it's just a big Greek private-public space. Columns, places to lounge and do political things. I rolled on my own table. He was holding conversation with "6 — Pack of elders from Drek's Landing, discussing mercantilism".

Peets the Goblin gave a listen. Got some of the mercantilism, the voices. Zahir the Orc Priest immediately knocked where there was no door. 

Conversation stopped. 

RESPECTABLE stepped over, the 'magistrates' moved away, still conferring. (Great, now I have magistrates. I didn't have magistrates in Corrhéo! I thought.) 

Shorthand:

AR: What can I do for you?

Party: We apparently owe you money?

AR: Sure, leave it in the sleeve.

DM: (What sleeve, idiot? A rent sleeve?)

Party: Well our boss disappeared.

AR: K?

Party: Do you know anything about that?

AR: Why would I? Should I?

Party: (get suspicious)

Party: Well we don't have any money.

AR; Really.

Party: Yeah whaddaya say to that?

AR: Um

Party: Do you know where we could get some money?

Party: (seem more suspicious, start trying to case the grounds)

DM: (Damnit I didn't draw a map of the place. All I know is he sucks deer blood at night to stay alive forever and has a wife who he can't figure out how to be nice to)

AR: Let me think for a sec.

AR: Hold that thought. I'll talk to my wife.

Party confers.

DM happily listens.

I was rabidly scanning my notes for a way for PCs to make money. I ran my finger across two things I could think of. I'd been wanting to try to flash-build a Bite-Sized Dungeon and I figured if I had a small break, I could pull it off at either option:

Party reaches a consensus of some kind on how they feel about AR.

AR returns.

AR: Okay.

Party: Okay

AR: My suggestions are as follows. One is my wife's, not mine. 

AR: Are any of you geologists? —

Party real mum. Peets the Goblin holds up his knives because they're made of obsidian like that's an answer.

AR: Okay, well then I'll suggest the other. 

AR: My wife thinks that you might make quick money at Bero's Boon, the trapper's camp to the south-west. 

AR: The other option is that Lord Wygmy—

AR looks over his shoulder at the 'magistrates' who now include Lord Wygmy

AR: Lord Wygmy is having trouble getting access to a vein of jet he owns on some property. But it seems you probably... ? ... don't have the credentials?

Party get wicked grins. Blood seems to drip from their blades already. 

AR: (in an effort to coax some of the suspicion) I can give you a couple extra weeks? But only that, and please understand that you'll still owe rent two weeks after that, just like in the real world. I know it sucks, but this is a good place to practice.

Party: DEAL!

Everybody was pumped. They could go into the swamp and hunt something and get money.

This one Clane wrote:

Mudraig Swamp is a vast, muddy wetland filled with thick roots and stagnant water. The swamp is dense with undergrowth and towering, moss-covered trees, making it hard to see far ahead. The air is humid, with the constant drone of insects and hidden creatures. Narrow paths of firmer ground lead through the swamp, barely visible beneath the foliage, and are lined with traps set by local trappers.

 

Deeper: Haguklah (ha-GOO-klah), a seasoned Berrylman trapper, runs the Muddyhen Pickets where trappers lease trails through the area to trap mud otters and swamp coypo for pelts and meat.

 

His camp, Bero's Boon, set on the northwesternmost bank of the swamp boasts the longest and most profitable picket lines in the region. It's common for adventurers to find work as exterminators here, keeping the trap pickets safe from predators and pests. A bustling camp, an assortment of a dozen score frontiersmen of all trades and occupations call Bero's Boon home at any time.

 

The Muddyhen Pickets has become a contested area, with rival trappers and poachers moving into Haguklah's territory. These rivals have been sabotaging traps, leaving strange symbols carved into trees and stones near the picket line—possibly warnings or signs of disputes. Haguklah believes a rival trapper, or perhaps a group of poachers, is behind the sabotage and would pay handsomely for evidence identifying the culprits.

 

In addition, rumors are beginning to circulate that the swamp is cursed. While navigating the Muddyhen Pickets can be treacherous, old-timers have begun to report seeing strange firepits throughout the darker parts of the bog. Those who wander too far from the picket lines after dark sometimes vanish, leaving only remnants of their gear scattered among the roots and stagnant waters.

 

Valrik Mulgav, a notorious poacher, has been sabotaging Haguklah’s traps and setting his own along the picket lines. Valrik is cunning and uses the swamp’s natural cover to hide traps, laying snares and spike pits. If adventurers get too close to identifying him as the poacher, Valrik attempts to lure adventurers into his traps and ambush them from the shadows. He prefers hit-and-run tactics, making use of the swamp’s thick foliage and hidden dangers to outmaneuver opponents.

This is where I made my stupidest DM moment of 'keep control'. 

The party wanted to head back to camp, re-gear (they were fully geared) and then head out. A moment of unnecessary simulation.

I said of course. They went back. I said: but will you want to head south-west without a map? Without a map you will be heading into the wilderness without direction. 

There was no need for this. The PCs had a direction. They knew where they wanted to go. They'd found out roughly where it was, and in all likelihood, RESPECTABLE would've given them some idea how to get there. I just didn't roleplay it. I didnt want the PCs to wander. I wanted them to go where they wanted to go. I had nothing prepped for wandering and I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the idea of just throwing a random encounter at them in an ambiguous space. I'm not eager for violence. I want them to explore the world. Sure, I want to use all the damn tables I've made, but, Hugh, bro—just take them to the adventure. You haven't even even written it yet... why add in...

Whatever: you get the idea.

I called a break. Went, peed. Popped into a private audio channel for whatever reason, and pulled up the shorthand I had for Bite-Sized Dungeon. 

Look: I've never done this kind of dungeon design, but it was so handy. All I had were connection points. 

PCs rolled in. I had Clane's ideas about a trapper (Haguklah) who was getting his snares tampered with by a saboteur. I renamed the saboteur from Valrik Mulgav to Veel Mulgav because Valrik is too fantasy for me. I need a little slither in my names. The proximity to veal appealed to me. I liked Mulgav. Plus the fact that both Haguklah and Veel Mulgav have 3 syllables gives me a nice mirror between 'villain' and 'protagonist'. 

Anyway: H wants to catch swamp coypu and otter and VM keeps cutting his snares and stealing his catches. Who knows why. Doesn't matter. Though I did write up this little VM motivation chart:

And yeah, it's mostly basic bitch reasoning, but it's nice to have a table for it. I haven't rolled on it yet because PCs haven't met Veel yet.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

PCs roll into Bero's Boon! 

Party: You Bero?

H: Ha!

H: No. Haguklah.

Haguklah laughs at all their bug bites. Convinces them to roll around in the mud. Classic Apocalypto reference. Maddeson the Clothchilde won't do it. 

Party: Love to help you, H.

H: Sure! Night around here is scary. Catch coypu! Catch otter, give you gold. (He's got a sort of jamaican/dutch accent and for whatever reason I describe him as having incredibly thick teeth)

Party: Oh?

H: Yes.

Party confers—they talk about splitting up, some of them running night shift, some running day shift. 

H: Yes.

Party: we'll go into the Pickets and have a look around, okay?

H: Yes. I will cook steaks.

H goes in and cooks coypu steak.

Party confers. Lots of planning about how to approach a swamp. They're far more.. intimidated? than I expect. 

Party enters mess tent with H.

Peets the Goblin heads up a tree to scout.

H is cooking somehow. It's a magic pan heater! 

H: You've got a plan.

Party: We've got a plan.

H: Okay, go for it.

Party: Do you like our plan?

H: I have some ideas? But I'd rather just see how you do with your plan.

Party: Cool magic pan heater. 

H: Yes. It's mine.

Party: We'd like it. 

H: Yes. It's mine. 

Party: Very good.

Peets meanwhile scouts. Not very well. One of two checks I've had them make so far. Only because he's really trying to pick something animal, so I want him to pick something animal, so that climbing the tree wasn't just to get this rather useless map:

(Admittedly Haguklah does keep pointing at the rodent line and saying coypu anytime someone says 'Coypu?' to him because no one has Google in the swamp so it's nice to know where it is) 

But! I get to pull out my BEAST ENCOUNTER CHARTS at last, because Peets the Goblin is looking for animal trails. He gets an 8 on an intelligence check. High enough for me to point out two big nests up, maybe a half mile south through the swamp, well passed the Muddyhen Pickets. 

Why?

Because I rolled a '16: dusksong harpy' on the Wetlands Beast Encounter Roll. Cool! I'm actually playing my own game.

But I don't have a harpy factored into the Pickets themselves. I already made my Bite-Size.

Anyway. I log it. And tell Peets about man-sized nests.

And in they go. 

Now: Clane wrote in the landmark description that Bero's Boon is a camp where more than one trapper works. So I figure: there's gotta be a little team of trappers working with H. I invent 'the Mado family' and look over at my NPC's WHO KEEP THE PC'S IN THE AREA chart, grab up these "12 - farmers who have lost their cattle to creatures in the WITHERED HOLLOW (C-10)". Nice: poor farmers, now much poorer, just trying to get by, doing what they're not good at (catching coypu).

Plus, hoping maybe PCs get to chatting, find out that there's more issues in the world than just coypu and otter and whatever is setting off Haguklah's snares. 

They dash off together into the Picket. Totally imaginatively lost. I might as well be describing a corn-maze. They make it three nodes in, land at the 'black pond' as they call it (unguarded treasure in there, boys!), fall into conversation with the Mado's who are out setting snares, and when they pull up from dialogue, they've got duck whistles from Haguklah, some extra snares from the farmers, and have zero idea where they are. 

I did write in the campaign brief that they ought to have someone map where they're going. And I'm describing with pure cardinal directions (and a few descriptors). But still: everyone's getting a little freaked out. Ready to blow their whistles. They left Godfrey the Greasy-Haired back at camp to make it. (He's supposed to blow a whistle when it's time to come home). 

Then they split up again. Zugg the Wannabe-Paladin and Maddeson the Mudless head north into a mangrove clearing and Peets the Goblin and Zahir the Priest head south to the dark mirror mangrove clearing which is totally spike pit trapped.

Zugg the Wannabe-Paladin and Maddeson the Mudless get 'homey, lurking vibes' from the mangrove clearing. It's where they can snare mad coypu pelt if they'd like, but they just turn around: this is only a scouting mission they say.

Meanwhile, Peets the Goblin and Zahir Orc Priest leap cypress rootball to cypress rootball, take one look at the 'deep swamp', freak out at the fact that another path leads west (admittedly to Mulgav's Blind and through traps), and despite the chicken that gets emoji'd into the Discord chat by Godfrey the Greasy-Haired, turn around and head back. I had 2d6 laid out to check if anybody ended up tripping a spike pit and things would've been rolling.

Just a scouting mission, they said.

Godfrey the Greasy-Haired blows his whistle three times. All reconvene at camp. Discuss what they found. Not much, it turns out. Everyone's a little shoulder slumped. They prepare to make it a long camp instead of just going right into action.

I can feel the spell fading.

Then Godfrey's like: hey guys, I'd like to volunteer for a stake-out to figure out what's cutting Haguklah's snares.

And for awhile everyone's arguing with him, saying its stupid. Saying how it doesn't seem safe. How easy it would be to get lost.

But then Zugg the Wannabe-Paladin catches the bug. 

And suddenly there's Stake-out Crew and Get-Information-in-Camp Crew. And as I close it down for the night, Godfrey the Greasy-Haired is getting taken back into the Pickets by Maddeson the Mudless, and no one can hear the quiet song of the harpy quite yet.

Now Things I've Thought Since Playing

• It's crazy how easy it is to forget names. I forgot the name of the swamp. I renamed it Muareg, and that stuck. I think it was Mudraig or something? in the original descriptor.
• I forgot Haguklah's name almost. But then I wrote it HUGE on my paper so I wouldn't forget. Hilariously everyone else called him different names. Huklah. Yuguklah. I think from a designer perspective, making a wordcloud where you get REALLY BIG WORDS that you use often that aren't perfectly normal might be a good idea. But I just made a small QUICKWORD table for myself as a temporary solution.
  
  
  
  
• Scrambling to come up with treasures to fill a Bite-Sized dungeon with was not that fun. I went to Shadowdark's 1-3 treasure chart and just grabbed 'boot with 60sp' and 'rotted cloak with 12gp' but was never happy with them. I was glad they ended up in the black pond and that characters never even thought about fishing them out, but I made a little d6 treasure chart that included some of Kemp's treasure ideas. He suggest treasures can also be knowledge, friendship, trade goods, territory and useful adventuring gear. And if it's shiny,  don't make it coins. So I added: an extra hot string that fell into the swamp (useful adventuring gear), 3lbs of sealed rooibos tea (trade goods), knowledge of gilfern boon (somehow PCs learn of gilfern's healing qualities, knowledge),  and then I kept the boot and the cloak. I stole the two undersized pearls off of Mulgav as a sixth item. 
• I did find that not having a 'wandering encounter chart' made empty rooms seem... like pure suspense moments? .. but suspenseful even for me? I was really trying to avoid any 'we just keep going' but Node 2, I got one and I noted it. I added a 2d4 chart to remedy
  
  

  
  
  

  I'm particularly fond of the harpy moments, which are not encounters per se, in that it's not 'you're in the room with a harpy' but instead, here's something that will draw you in a direction. This is new to me, maybe not to you. I also wanted the NPC's to have a good chance to keep operating around the PCs, so following them or coming in from other rooms. They were fairly stationary in-game. 
• Ultimately I was very happy with the play, for how much I had to prepare for a first session, and I don't think I'll need as much next time since I made so many longer range summaries to work with. I do like the approach I took to getting nearby hexes 'reined in' with potential NPC ties. 
• I also adore what happened with Peets the Goblin's scouting mission. Seeing those harpy nests makes it so that suddenly, instead of a bite-sized dungeon that ends Bero's Boon, I've opened up a second six-node layout after this one called Dusksong Corridor, which involves the harpy nests. It also makes me recognize how modular and flexible the methodology is to adding on the fly.

Now, Final Thoughts on Game Design

Taking my DM hat off, I thank you for stopping by. 

One of the things I really had flowering in my mind after working on this, and one of the things that I really want to encourage in this editing phase, is how I can make these landmarks work for longer than just a single session of play, or in different hands than mine. I want to create interesting tables that multiply or fractalize the simpler structures. 

As such I've added two additional tables that I think will become a foundational quality to the hexes that my players visit. 

The first is a light thickener:     

NPC Trappers are also:

This assumes that 'NPC trappers' are a constant, but that they can be variable in what they are. You'll see 'The Mado Family' who I made up and used in my own game (which involve a nearby hex) at the center of the probability. But then there are links to the crew of the Grimalkin (the skiff is a burial mound in C-12) and blood merchants who've gone a bit too far and are hiding from the law and catching otters in the short term (the blood auction is an active happening in C-05). 

I think making this group variable adds dynamo to camp activities, and potentially snarls the plot-line that's generated when PCs land at Bero's Boon too.

The second is even broader however, almost changing the base of the soup:

Permutations

Permutations can go as far as flipping the plot on its head. The Pickets remains extant. It's a six-node space with a simple geography. But what's happening in the Pickets can be a variable.

Let's assume the trapper and the poacher who is cutting his snares is the fundamental storyline, mas o menos.

But let's permute, if you'll permit:

You'll see, again, at the center of the probability, the two surprise harpy nests added, the 'game mode' my players played in. But then, we quickly shift out from there: a proliferation of exotic herbs makes the collector happy; the malic flies from Pilkin Creek (C-5) are infesting, oh no!; all the far-fetched (and low probability) way out to Haguklah is actually Veel's doppleganger! 

(We have a lot of doppleganger usage throughout Corrhéo, as I hope you'll come to find out). 

Obviously these table items would require additional resources, monster stat blocks, determinations as to where things go, probably some level scaling to match players, so they are DM-dependent items, but I tried as much as possible to make them tie closer to the other aspects of Corrhéo in the interest of wending the landscape deeper into itself, giving PCs a chance to encounter fun things from other hexes.

It's a sandbox, and in a sandbox, sand gets everywhere. 

Session 2 is, so far, planned for March 26th. 

Back to the climbing gym then.

And now is also a good (and the only) time to drop How & Why Hot Springs Island Works, a short study I did for myself back when Corrhéo was a baby.

Adios,

- Hugh

 

I Read Part of FALSE MACHINE

 

 

It's fairly easy as a new old comer* to any hobby to be delighted when you enter a group and find there are people just like you. As passionate, as curious, as seeking. I imagine there's similar glee in moving overseas and fifty years later discovering that one of the other members of your graduating class lives in the same town as you, working as a pharmacist— and you like them.

That's how I feel about Patrick Stuart. I just think: yes—somebody else kept going.

I bought Gackling Moon and I just asked my wife if I could start saving for the seemingly forthcoming repeat of Veins of the Earth. She did say no but she also just got pregnant so things can literally change overnight.

But really what I want to say here is that if you are thinking about buying any of the books that Stuart's written, I like the ones I have and you have my blessing in purchasing them.

But I also want to take my experience reading the first hundred or so pages of False Machine 2010-2020, to think about why I put its lovely blue ribbon into the crack of Pg 121 and said I'll come back to this.

I want to do that for his sake because it's nice as a writer to know when your work hits and when it doesn't. 

So, P, for you, fella:

•

I read your physical blog manifestation at nights most often, tucked in the upper shelf of my trailer with yes a red purple lava lamp on. I usually took in about a blog entry or perhaps two and then fell asleep with the tome on my chest. A perfect weight. I could prop the book on my chest and tuck my chin so as not to not lift anything, nada, nothing; lazy reader, night time reader, lay-down reader, baby boy.

Important to note that entering this blog, your book, your mind, I was not trying to learn anything. In that way I was most prone to read with the sacrificial knees of fiction which is: run fast at this field and with as much abandon as you can, and whatever happens to your knees, so be it. Come what may. Run.

Until you stop. out of breath, hit a root—who knows, thank God, again, for that lovely blue ribbon.

Entering this book was like coming in stride with someone dipping a cup to a well while running, filling it up, and at a fairly brisk pace, trying to pour it into your bowl-shaped hands. Naturally this lazy reader then tried to gulp, satisfy a thirst he's been cursed with forever, forever, anon.

And so many 'coming alongsides' were so fun. It's surprisingly—it's surprising, period, that reading an essentially digital document on paper, references deprived of anything but a lanyard of exotic syllables or suggestion to 'follow this up with a Google' was so liberating, a surprise that the experience was as delightful as reading good correspondence. I came to take the nightly reads as conversation between you and me. And again, I stopped at 121, but more because (I recognize now) that having those conversations felt like enough and that the way you'd presented the work made me feel confident that if we resumed the conversation two years hence, overstuffed with turkey under a new, warm lamp, that we'd just pick up right where we left off.

I think that's kudos to your writing for one: that each post felt like you wrote until your torch guttered on whichever particular topic. It is also perhaps testament to how good it felt to be reading it alone, away from the everspreading www, where the only directions I could turn were either one more page, or let the text fall on my snoring face.

So it's good. I really enjoyed really reading your work and not just intending to read it. Sure, a bit of fanboying as, again, new to the scene, here's the guy everybody is pointing to at the party, but truly: there's a reason for it. You attack ideas, explode concepts. I loved the Djinni adventure, read DTF Wizard aloud to my wife to mutual bellyfuls of humor, finely caught up on the Zak S stuff which is as fascinating to a generic outsider as finding a stack of People magazines at your feet at Grandma's with nothing to do but lounge.

And a hundred smaller moments.

Again: I didn't go in expecting to learn anything, but I did come out feeling way connected, much less alone. Tickled to let my inner crystal palace explode bright into its myriad rooms, which is what I ask for in the books I read, so good on.

See you down the road for the next one.

-Hugh

 

 

*as in, not new to role-playing, but new to the notion that there’s a digital pool of people who hobby it. Stepping in the store door, so to speak, to find that the chatter of your mind is reflected in the chatter of this horde of people bent over their tables and dice.

Week Six — The Crake & Gridslop Farm, and a Dark End

My maps have grown inscrutable. (I'm moving them below. They distract me). 

As ever, the dungeon provides something. Similarly garbled, similarly chaotic. Surprisingly satisfying. 

I maintain something like the pace of an undead pirate who's been shot by a musket in the shins, bone splintered, as pointed and plural as the sea urchin it steps across to reach the shore. 

In short, still here, still wondering as I walk slowly forward against a current, what is this thing I am, undersea.

And who will I eat when I reach land.

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs or things needing definition beyond the provided

2/8 The Gridslop Farm — Gridslop is funny stuff. It grows in cubes of clay, run through with an electrified lattice, something like a 3-dimensional version of the hatch-comb in modern concrete. Typically the stuff arises in estuary beds where the gridslop can have the necessary moisture, salts, and substrate that nurture it, but it's diasporatic—it spreads out across vast sections of territory as a single organism, hungry for the faint pulse of energy found in change, in delta, in the waves, currents, heat and cooling, all that exist quite naturally at the boundary climes. 

But no two gridslop can bound one another. Massive gridslop miles wide were found in clay basins off the Chaguare River, and meter-thin strips just as readily. But the moment they were moved adjacent, an incredible conflict ensued, one gridslop would overtake the other (usually the smaller overtaking the larger), the clay or wet stone substrate would often brittle as explosive consumption of nutrient and water would occur and the victorious gridslop would enter the space fully and spread out, other creathers therein (as well as vegetal life) suffering much as modern human civilians (collateral?) might in any war.

So the 8' x 8' cubes of gridslop here in CTV9 are electrified in blocks of clay to keep them fed. They are moved by mechanical pokers operated by the crakes, which spin them for watering.

The pokers (arms) are not robotic, only mechanical, while the currents are drawn from several huge lithium batteries brought up from the car facility on level 11. 

•

2/9 The How of Gridslop — Knowing that gridslop is done up in these electrified cubes, to be kept separate, how does it square up against CTV9's existing superstructure? 

The old agency newsroom—long partitioned desks, screens, the mounted risers up to the newscaster's dais and desk are all down in the open pit of the third floor, but here in 2/8 and /9, one can stroll around a walkway that looks down into the newsroom. 

Of course it's easy to get in the way of the diligent crakes whose forewoman and matriarch Krim Inodo-Gye will liaison any social engagement as a matter of clan culture. 

The great mechanical two-prong forks that turn or spin the gridslop cubes have mounts and controls in three adjacent rooms detailed ahead in 2/11. When a gridslop cube has reached full maturity, it is lowered to the flensing tank in 3/18 where it is pressed to a control cube containing a secondary culture of gridslop; the two engage, destroying the large cube's tenant, the cube is raked of the now-dead tenant's matter, a new control cube packed and set aside, and the bulk of the clay passed through fresh-water sluices to the rinsing tubs in 3/19. The cube is reconstituted over the course of two weeks, re-sewn with nutrient and bathed in the periodic dumps of salt-water from the overhead buckets until a new gridslop colony is introduced to its form. 

At any time, 7 great clay cubes are being nourished and an 8th is being reformed. PCs walking around this production ought to be concerned with interrupting the crakes manipulating the forks, and to a lesser extent, the forks themselves, which are relatively sedate but huge. The crakes possess a base psionic telekenesis that makes it possible to manipulate the forks and the heavy matter of the cubes with ease. Similarly, pushing a PC to a second-story fall or similar in self-defense would not be demonised in any local court. 

Treasure — a hallway, really, so the most is perhaps a cavern wrench and pipe lock left on a ledge built into one of the walls (of several).

Exits —

• to 3/18 (Newsroom) (vaulting the half-wall, climbing the forks, and scaling the farm structure) 
• to 2/11 (Fork Mounts and Controls)

NPCs —

• Krim Inodo-Gye, crake forewoman (if called for)
• 4 crake, working overhead buckets and the forks here and in 2/11

•

2/10 - Huge Gridslop Storage — the way the old newsroom has been trifurcated is new construction in the last hundred years, walls made as much by the stuff they're storing as containing the stuff they're storing—gridslop by the pallet, kept in rollable casks that vent the (initially boggish scented) off-gassing via the bornwax lids (a semi-porous hide-like filament kept in rolls in/near the casking room in 3/20). 

Individual crakes can move the hefty 50-65kg casks by themselves via the butterfly strands roped on hooks below. 

Several pump risers allow a 2nd hand to lift the carrying crake as high as the ceiling (some 10-12m) to deposit the casks higher up in the stores. As needed a cask can be dispensed via lever to be rolled from its containing turret, righted, and carried off to the dry, final room in 2/7. 

PCs might find uses for the butterfly strands which with two characters strapped on either side can be laced under heavy objects to carry triple or quadruple the combined PC weight. Too, this room does connect (and share purpose) with 3/19, via the pit. (We are still above and around the gridslop farm which is baked into two levels, much like a basketball court will be below, under, but a part of a running track). 

The gridslop too is a pliant element for magic users (rare to get any of the wormy mash so close to 'raw') and would aid or amplify any spells having to do with pliability, malleability, or flex. Take that loosely—polymorph self is a malleability of form; feather fall is a stretching of density.

•

2/11 Fork Mounts and Controls — Attached to the gridslop farm, three rooms (a pair of conference rooms and an HR rep's office on the north end (a wide office with plural doors (glass things)) have been dug into and reformed so that three seismically large brass prongs—thousands of pounds of metal—extendx either in the conference room's case, 30-50 feet, telescoping, or in the case of the much more substantive fork on the north end, nearly the entire length of the room—and that one able to rack back and forth via a long wheeled track so that it can manipulate either column of gridslop cubes.

The controls aren't unfathomable—a wheel for rotation, and a wheel for telescopy and a lever for tilt. Who knows why a PC would want to use the things but it's not beyond PCs to touch everything. 1 in 6 chance there'll be a crake at the controls and you'll see some action. And give credit to the crake's psionic powers—using the wheels would require at least two characters of above average strength.

The rooms are kept quite spare, otherwise the forks being bolted by their immense brass rolling joints to a wall within each doesn't leave room for much. 

In the case of the wider room with the tracking prong, a diligent search of the cabinetry will turn up a dusty manual on human relationships, a book on growing old that is itself suffering the same fate, and a carefully wrapped spindle of plastic cord, about 120m worth, thin gauge stuff.

Notes on the Day: Thinking, after seeing something Mr. Kemp put up about 'time to read a book vs. whats gained' that a small productive table would be worth formulating to determine value gained, time spent, difficulty of text, plus intelligence modifiers. Title of creation: Make Any Book Worth Reading and Any Shelf Worth Searching.

•

2/12 The Elevator Shafts — familiar to travelers from Floor 1, the silver sealed doors of the three deep-diving elevator shafts stand in fixed harmony, guts closed off. 

Prying them open through many means possible would find in bays 1 and 2, black gaping abyss, and in bay 3, the suspended loops hanging from the elevator car above. 

A service ladder offers a way down all three, or, a bolder PC might make the clamber to the underside entrance to the elevator above. Of course, it's possible the Milk Queen's Tread remains in the car, and would not make any effort to slip past PCs down through the hatch. Instead, there would be an undeniable pressure put upon them as soon as they entered the car, for release. (Equivalent in potency to a mid-level charm person or compulsion, likely). 

Her soft foosteps pacing might be heard by a cautious ear. 

Otherwise, a rather long fall. Take it as they might.

•

2/13 Once Bathrooms, Now Not Exactly — One of the most profound discoveries of my life as a visitor to buildings is that one can, fairly easily, determine where a bathroom is on the other floor of any building if one knows where the previous one was on other floors, because plumbers like straight lines. Also, why waste too much money on a bathroom's design or decor unless running a sauna or high-end restaurant, but even then. 

However in our case, there is a long window between the pragmatic design of CTV9 and its current inhabitants and their needs, so while the fundamental shape and structure of this bathroom might be identical to that of the bathrooms on floor 12 (or floor 1, however you're looking at it), the fact that the crakes have converted this set of 'fountains' and 'hoses' into a minor bathing palace has the possibility of surprising the predictive PC, who yes, will still pick up on the white tile and grout, but without the ceramic sinks and standard toilets of the top floor, the room may even have something of an alien delicate relaxation to it. 

Don't be surprised to find an off-duty crake scrubbing their damaged hands or peeling back molt in the ur-glass basin baths which are formed up like jelly sacs nearly to the ceiling (so offering complete immersion for the water-loving workers), and only expect to find their local treasures and pay set in simple cubbies of a fixed and sandy clay—but with a wall torn down between what were once gender-segregated restrooms, a capacious tiled room of bubbling pipes feeding the water clearly in, and somewhat less so out. 

No sign of Tessa Horn.

•

2/14 The Black Rejection — A black wall covers one half of Level 2 from the other. Polished black metal that has a glassy sheen. A thin gold stud of light is embedded every 6m, letting off apricot hues. These are screw'd in and can be removed. Something in shape and weight of a corncob, spherical, but twenty five pounds of dense liquid materia.

The wall is unscratchable. There are no obvious entrances.

A lot like graduate school.

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Odd notes and Inspirations from the Week

• intaglial glyph
• phlogistive
• "Richard Cory"
• soft, fungating tumor deposits
• Deceptive Alignment - what a powerful fundamental tension
• Eric Hoel suggests 'the purpose of the human brain is to minimize surprise', so to be a game designer is to provide maximum surprise to drive a player's brain's sense of purpose.

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