In order to not be too cute and/or precious about this space, I ought to post something to admit my position.
I've been driven by recent obsessive surfing to start a blog as a response or reflection on role-playing games, game design, development, world-building and story-writing. This is to more directly engage with an ongoing (and wonderful) discussion going on on the Internet, with, specifically, the OSR Community.
Having recently been brought to bear on a new campaign for family, my own itch and search to become a better DM/GM has prompted long YouTube benders through the following: Matt Colville's Running the Game content, Questing Beast's review content, Kevin Crawford's AMA's on Reddit, and Her Christmas Knight's three available interviews, two with Patrick Stuart and one with David McGrogan. This has been my intake.
The ouptut has mostly been the greedy smackings of my hands, searching eBay for lots of out-of-print books I can't afford, meeting with a man in red Mustang in a Lowe's parking lot to buy Ravenloft's "Realm of Terror" box-set at a price I dually can't afford, making long-lists of content to acquire and content to peruse, with the growing realization that it is not enough to simply take in without beginning to feel a bit like Augustus Gloop of Wonkian fame.
Thus, Augury in Mud, which hopefully won't dissolve as quickly as visions of the future might in such a murky substrate, but being of a particular mind, I don't place huge vested interest in laying claim to digital land and holding it forever.
I'm just here, right now, to make some stuff.
Of course, sitting down to 'make some stuff' results in a spiderwebbing effect, wherein the mind says go and the hands say which way. Especially as regards publicizing things. What would be best for anyone? Well, frankly, there's no one here yet, so if I address the room (me), asking the question is simpler: what is best for me?
Best to admit where I am right now, and what I'm working on. Then things can deviate from there as time and attention permit.
I have just finished a four-session campaign introduction called "Only Sand for Shelter", which is set in a port town called Harray d'Ib Oday. Harray (as the players quickly had to start calling it), easiest and most Americanly pronounced 'Hurray!' is ... small-town cosmopolitan. It is at the northern edge of the country of Yaddack, a country of deserts.
As players will slowly discover, the country of Yaddack is, eons later, built over the bones of the southern US and Mexico, built in such a way that excursions under the sand lead through the tops of skyscrapers, down.
I'm going to post a small country descriptor below as its the first I wrote in response to Matt Colville's encouragement about finding central tension in a campaign. I'll be using the upcoming #dungeon23 challenge to build out one of these subterranean buildings down through which the PC's can burrow.
That project will be called CTV9, named after the building itself.
I've made myself a small advent journal, with each section of the building covered up until the appropriate week for multiple reasons.
- I don't have the cash to buy a new pad (recall: Ravenloft)
- By hiding upcoming parts of the project, I avoid intimidating myself.
- By hiding previous parts of the project, I regain my sense of surprise at what I've done.
- By hiding previous parts of the project, I avoid intimidating myself with what's come before.
- By making small lists instead of one big list, I incrementalize my labor
- By making lists at all, I give myself something fun to do besides the labor itself (check)
Yaddack
The country of Yaddack is split in power structure between its religious caste and its merchant class. This is as much a split between the spiritual and the natural as it is the past and the future. Though many societies have seen the spiritual caste as keepers of the old ways, and purveyors of business as bringers of innovation and progress, in Yaddack it is the opposite. The Gods of the spiritual caste—there are four, one each for the rings that spin slowly around the planet passing their bands of shade across the surface the way they do. Each ring belongs to a God—Nephew, Pilot, House, and Hold—and each of these Gods communicates the same message at fundament to their clergy and flock—prepare, the time is coming for change—bring us metals and hark to our creed. Each is unique too, so not expressly the same message, but there is a concord between the four, arbitrated on Yurth by the Council of Rings, a council of three members of each clergy who arbitrate and discuss the God’s messages in the Plebas Mons, a sand-colored tribunal in the Heart of Tuth. They count the tithings, and make decisions for their Miners, for the Miners are those who do the God’s work and prepare for what’s coming.
Here lies the trouble, or the tension between the past and the future, or the spiritual and the body—the tithing of the miners who sap under the sands, exploring the sand-drowned ruins of Old Yurth—is a surrender. Great gralah pools or altars are constructed—were gifts, perhaps—of the Yaddish past. There is one at each of the temples, great smelting pools through into which the findings of the Miners and the givings of lesser worshippers are placed, unformed, and dissipated.
Quite simply the tension is as follows: these are the resources of the people here, those who suffer the wasteland of Yaddack, claim the secular merchant class—a powerful hierarchical structure driven by the institutions of learning, the traders and capital makers, many of the elite nobility who claim heritage from generations and generations of survival in this world who are backed in tremendous numbers by the dark currency of slavery. The is institution has no formal name—these are the people of Yaddack, after all, who would rather see the often-marvelous discoveries of older worlds found and used to maintain life for those who struggle here and now, who would keep their history to remember, who do not believe in the prophecies of Plebas Mons. This is the central tension that the citizens of Yaddack rotate around, and while the tension often erupts in individual spats between extractors and savers, both of whom are simply trying to make do and make right for their respective cause, the tension is kept in large part thanks to one woman and her black-robed court—Chimban Kodecki, commonly called The Gale, who guards the the country’s streets and maintains a sense of neutrality and armistice with her weaponless army of monks, the Just.
The principal of The Just is simply that a balance can be struck between spiritual surrender to what comes and bodily preservation and memory, that fanatical keeping and fanatical release both create identical problems or comprable concerns. They patrol and station, they guard the walls—silent and steady, full of anti-magic baubles and capturing methods—and so we have lived for the last thirty years. However Chimban Kodecki has perished, found with a livid purple throat and the dark skin testament to the worst of dehydrations, dead in a grotto three days from Tuth, and so the peace is crumbling. The priests blame the slavers and the slavers the priests; the Just, unmoored and without leadership suspend mining, exploring, sapping of any kind in the interim and wells of energy, magic and divine, dry up, commerce slows to a rolling dry pause, and in that pregnancy, we can all sense the sort of infant rumblings suggestive of war.
