Religion on the Frontier

One of the areas in which KoK really shines is in its presentation of its gods. Granted, there are almost too many of them to keep track of, but by carefully selecting an area's locally-worshiped gods, you very quickly get a good idea of what the culture in that area is like, including holy days and rituals. For example, here's the write-up I just completed on the frontier area of Tokis that will be the starting place of my campaign:

Throughout this region, the most common faiths followed are those of Taladari, the Holy Mother; Regorike, the Raiser; and Dirasip, the Eternal Lantern, with due reverence given to the Bear (Belanar) and the Great Huntress (Kalenadil). The Old Man, Natirel, once had a powerful church in the area led by St. Gaxyg the Grey, and though they have died out, the stories of the King of the Battlefield live on, it being said that he battles the Storm Lord (Bilapi) during the winter storms. More disturbing are the cults of the Locust Lord (Alu), the Flaymaster (Pirabi, called Slen by his followers due to being a transplanted cult from the Wild Lands), the Prince of Terror (Goli) and the Confuser of Ways that are said to be growing in the countryside.

The following feast-days are commonly observed:

• The 25th of Declarations, the wedding-anniversary of King Adoku, in honor of the Mother. The people build bond-fires from scrap wood and dance around them; afterwards, the priests mix the ashes with holy water and use the ashes to bless new buildings and building materials.
• The first day of Spring (the 1st of Renewal), in honor of the Raiser, a day of feasting and joy in which seeds are brought out and blessed for planting.
• The first night of Harvest, the holiest night to the Raiser. Farmers bring bushels of grain to sacrifice, which are then distributed to the needy.
• The summer solstice, holy to the Eternal Lantern and the Bear. The people bring offerings of small white, yellow, or gold gems (or stones, for those too poor to offer gems), which are arranged in a perfect circle in preparation for full noon. Prayers are said, followed by songs of praise and feasting, and a tree seedling is planted in the center of the circle.
• On the night of the winter solstice, some plant tree seedlings at the borders of their property to placate the Bear.
• On nights of the full moon Veshemo, woodsmen, hunters, and rangers sacrifice an animal freshly hunted that day with a gold or silver arrow.
• Every year, on the 9th of Siege-Hold, a mandrake is ritually hewed with an axe and then burned in a fire. Nobody remembers why, but this is in celebration of St. Gaxyg’s victory over the shade of the mad elf-lord Sincarai, after which the forces of Chaos were driven into Urheim, and the Abby built over it.

The evil cults also observe the following days:

• Just before the month of Frosting, the Order of Agony kidnaps a strong, healthy individual to ritually torture for the whole month before finally staking their victim out on the snow.
• The House of Hunger gathers during the waning of the moon Diadolai, especially during the winter months. It is typical to find livestock slaughtered in such a way as to spoil the meat during these seasons—this is usually disguised as wolf attacks.
• The Prince of Terror’s holy days are secret, but always announced by pinning a shrunken head up in a public place to inspire fear.
• The Gathering of the Confuser of Ways is never known outside of the cult.

A little flavor and several conflicts, all set to go. I've got a calendar generating program that'll make it easy to track the phases of the moon and give me room to do day-to-day write-ups as well.

This continues to shape up very well.

Kalamar, Judges Guild-Style

I remarked last week that one of the Kingdoms of Kalamar's greatest assets was also one of its greatest weaknesses, that being the way the Atlas is set up. As I remarked then,

[T]he Atlas lacks those details that mean the most to referees and players: names for those ridges and other geographic features, small woods and bogs in out-of-the-way places, ruins and castles, and notes on local non-human (or non-civilized) populations. You can write them in with a felt-tip pen, but you'll hate to "ruin" the book.

Well, I've decided to bite the bullet and go ahead and "ruin" my Atlas in order to create something akin to the old Judges Guild Wilderlands sets.

For background, my first encounter with Judges Guild was sometime in the 90s, when I was browsing the dealers' room at Dragon Con--the best way to find wonderfully odd games and playing aids back in those days before the Intarweb. Anyway, I was rummaging through some old books, and I came across a couple of items from a company that I at that point in my life knew nothing about: The first was a notebook of hex paper, complete with numbered hexes and little tidbits of information about creating wilderness adventures, and the other was this strange bundle with two sets of maps titled The Elphand Lands. I bought them up on a lark and spent many an hour pouring over them for ideas for my own homebrew world.

I've often regretted that I've never actually played a game set in the Wilderlands. I thought about picking up the boxed set for D&D3.5, but found the price to be more than a bit steep. It's too bad, because the Wilderlands really are in many ways the perfect D&D world-in-a-box. Every other campaign on the market gives you the overview of a world, but leaves you to work out the nitty-gritty, low-level details that actually makes it possible to adventure there. The Forgotten Realms came closest to the JG ideal by focusing on a relatively small area from the Sword Coast to Raven's Bluff, but even there you had to come up with your own encounter tables and adventuring sites. With a JG product, on the other hand, you could literally open up the box, pick a random place to plob in the PCs, and just let them wander. Nearly every 5-mile hex had something interesting for them to stumble across, while leaving the descriptions bare-bones enough to force the referee to bring his own creativity to the fore.

In any case, I'm taking that approach with the KoK Atlas. My location-based notes about the world are being organized according to the Atlas' page numbers, and I'm scribing small numbers onto the pages to reference in my notes. So, for example:

The Old Watchtower of Rellas
Situated high on Rellas Hill, this ancient watchtower stood guard over the eastern border of the then-expanding Kalamar Empire, later falling into disuse and ruin as the frontier moved further east through modern O’Par. It has long been a meeting place for rangers and other adventurers, the nearly-bare hill that serves as its foundation giving a wide view of the land about. Now, however, it has become a watchtower for goblins in the employ of the Locust Lord, who use it to plan raids and ambushes.

Below that, I've noted the creatures that might be found there and what treasures might be found. As I get past the bare-bones level, I'll include maps of the various locales that might need them, but right now I'm just brainstorming a paragraph or two at a time. I've photocopied the map as well, which I'm using to draw encounter regions. As I've done so, the political situation has started to really take shape. It'll be interesting to see if the players decide to get involved in it at all, especially as they move into the natural endgame of building their own fiefdom--and it'll be even more interesting to see which side they take, or if they'll try to take on all comers.

It's been a while since I've been this focused and thrilled with campaign design. Before, I had a million ideas competing for attention, with a half-dozen uncompleted maps lying strewn across my floor. Now that I've settled on a world, the rest is flowing naturally from the world's details and the seed ideas that I started with.

Now, if James will just hurry up the details on Urheim . . .

Heh, Died Last Night

My instincts obviously broke a bit last night. We did all right against the obelisk that spawned will-o-wisps any time we were dumb enough to hit it, found the secret door and figured out how to get past it (actually, one of the relative newbs figured it out--good on her), and wandered down into a room with a festering pile of corpses. A quick detect magic revealed something apparently buried under the pile, so I went to try to shift some corpses with my spear.

I should've brought a 10' pole.

The pile animated and attacked--and I don't mean that the individual corpses in the pile animated and attacked, I mean the whole pile rose as a solid mass and attacked. So naturally, we decided to have at it.

I really should've taken the hint when I critted no less than three times, using a magical sword that crits at x3 vs. undead and abominations, and it kept on coming, but by that time, I was in full berzerker rage. It got its collective hands on me and I got in one more good blow before it snapped my barbarian/fighter in half and absorbed him into the mass.

The paladin was next to go.

Fortunately, we had weakened it enough by this point that the party was able to take it down by using our entire oil supply to set it on fire and repeatedly fireball it with a wand. It turns out that my character hadn't been completely absorbed, so the cleric was able to raise me with her staff of life.

We're a party of 8th or so level. This was an EL 13 monster. If the dice hadn't been wildly in my favor, I wouldn't have done enough damage before dying for the rest of the party to bring it down. A strangely lucky break, given the way the dice have been rolling for me of late.

Anyway, the xp we got from that encounter was enough to offset the level loss for resurrection, so I didn't actually have to rework my whole character sheet, but I did miss the chance to level up with the rest of the party. Ah, well, it's a light price to pay for my foolishness.

Besides, I had a great time, and that's what it's all about when you get down to it.

Explaining Race

For some reason, modern fantasy literature and gaming seems to have a burning need to explain how the magic works. Most D&D worlds have one or more dieties of magic that make it work. Some form of magical "field" that envelops the world is common, as are "mind magics" which are simply psychic powers and thaumaturgy, having a lot of magical and/or spiritual beings on your rolodex. There's certainly nothing wrong with explaining the whys of the magic of one's world, but neither is it necessary: Tolkien certainly didn't need to explain to us why magic worked in Middle-earth; it simply did.

What is necessary to explain is why so many different intelligent races live together on one world and what exactly the demi-human races are. Referees who do not take the time to work out such details will invariably get the "humans with pointy ears" syndrome that plagues many a world. Those that do, those who can succinctly explain what makes elves, dwarves, and halflings different from humans in their world, will find their players far more ready to embrace the role of playing a truly non-human character.

There are four basic origins for human/demi-human mixtures on a world: Parallel evolution, gateways, fairyland, and magical mutation. As we look at each of these possibilities, we should note that they are not mutually exclusive. Middle-earth, for example, had elves, humans, ents, dwarves, and halflings individually created by Illuvatar and/or the Valar, but also saw Morgoth magically mutating elves into orcs, ents into trolls, etc. as he waged war on all that was good. There's no reason the referee should not do the same in his own world.

PARALLEL EVOLUTION
This entry could just as well be termed "parallel creation," since many fantasy worlds presume that the mortal races are the creation of the powers-that-be. This origin is the most common in pulp fantasy (with gateways coming in at a close second), which often features decadent remnants of a once-great species that ruled before man evolved from monkey. Howard's Hyborian Age was rife with such throwbacks, as are the stories of Michael Moorcock and Fritz Lieber, but as noted, Tolkien also had parallel creation as a central theme in his Middle-earth.

In such worlds, mankind tends to be the dominant species, with the elder races having passed their zenith and on their way to extinction, and the overall tone of such a world tends to be a bit bleak, either mourning the passage of an Age of Legends or taking for granted the eventual fall of Man and the rise of an inhuman successor. On the other hand, properly done, such a world impresses the reader/player with its yawning abyss of time, leaving a world littered with the corpses and ruins of many ages.

GATEWAYS
In some worlds, such as the Forgotten Realms, Planescape, or Andre Norton's Witchworld, the backstory includes an ancient race of powerful wizards (or technologists) who left behind a great network of gates linking the world to many other worlds, and through which the inhabitants, flora, and fauna of those worlds game to the main one of the story. In such a world, the original dominant species may have died out or moved on, or else their civilization may have fallen and their descendents may live on as just one of many races. These worlds tend to be wonderful hodgepoges, where a knight might ride his horse next to an elf riding a chocobo, and there's no reason for humans to be dominant except within their own kingdoms. In Katherine Kerr's Deverry novels, for example, humans dominate the titular kingdom and the island nation of Bardek, but the elves, dwarves, and other races all have their kingdoms in the surrounding lands where they can ignore the humans most of the time.

A "gateway" world makes for good gaming, since it becomes easy to explain the existence of so many strange monsters in close proximity to each other and offers pleny of opportunity for plane-hopping for groups that like that sort of thing. Interestingly, the Realm of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon was just such a world, with the unaired finale strongly suggesting that not only the kids, but everyone in that world had been pulled to it through a gate originally.

FAIRYLAND
Where a gateway world has numerous portals to many worlds (most of which are suggested to be just other planets like our own earth), a world with a realm of Faerie is chiefly defined by the dichotomy between the natural world and the faerie world. This kind of world is exemplified by Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, and in a modern twist, in Mercedes Lackey's Serrated Edge novels.

The World of Greyhawk was implied by the Dungeon Master himself to be somewhere between this and the gateway world. In Oerth, humankind is the natural and native race, with elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes coming from some other world, which is why they are restricted to small pockets around the edges of human civilization (e.g., around the Lortmill Mountains)--humanity has a few thousand years of head-start and the advantage of being on their native soil, so to speak.

Whether Faerie is actually another world or is a natural part of the game world that just happens to only manifest where the Law of civilization doesn't reach is a matter for the referee to decide.

MAGICAL MUTATION
At first glance, this would seem to be just another form of parallel evolution, but where the former sees the various races as having been created by the powers-that-be from the ground up or having evolved naturally over eons, creatures shaped by magical mutation were transformed very suddenly either by some magical chaos or by the deliberate experimentation of some powerful being. We've already cited the creation of orcs from elves in Middle-earth; the creation of trollocs and myrdrall in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series would be another example (this time by a mad scientist rather than by a god).

Not all such mutations result in evil beings, however. In Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar novels, many good as well as evil or just dangerous beings were transformed in the magical cataclysm that nearly destroyed the world in the series' backstory. In one trilogy, we meet a young woman who was transformed by magic into a cat-girl for the pleasure of a powerful and evil adept--but she herself is by no means evil. Jack Chalker's Changewinds trilogy shows just such a magical cataclysm and its effects on those caught up in it in action.

MY OWN CAMPAIGN
My original concept for the campaign world was based heavily on the Faerie concept, and I'm importing a modified form of that into the Kingdoms of Kalamar. Officially, KoK presents a world of parallel evolution, with the elves, dwarves, and other races having all had their day in the sun and now having retreated before the onslaught of the nations of men--and with the very strong possibility that man will be replaced by the hobgoblins in time. In my campaign, however, elves aren't just long-lived humanoid beings, but creatures of Faerie and Chaos who are subject to strange moods and stranger motives. Dwarves aren't just short men with beards, but anthropomorphic personifications of the roots of the world. Gnomes and halflings have never had empires of their own, but are deeply connected to the Fey, who live in hidden dells and beneath the roots of the great forests that still remain.

The PCs will have to decide for themselves whether they are aligned with the Law of Man, pushing back the wilderness; whether they will ally themselves with Chaos, trying to tear down the Kalamaran Empire; whether they seek some kind of balance; or whether they are simply unaligned and out for personal fortune.

Whichever side they choose, those playing demi-humans won't be allowed to play humans with pointy ears, but will have to stretch themselves into looking at the world in a new and alien way.

The Thief

The thief, for all of its long history in D&D (having first been introduced in the Greyhawk supplement), is not the best-loved class among grognards. The most common complaint is that it "open[s] the door to a more generalized skill system, which I see as a large nail in the coffin of old school play," as James Maliszewski points out. Philotomy expands on this common objection:

Over time, I've come to prefer the game without the Thief class (i.e. using only the original three classes). The role the thief usually plays (scout/sneaky-guy) is easily filled by the other classes; everyone can attempt to be stealthy, search for traps, et cetera. Also, without the Thief and his special abilities, these activities are often performed by the player describing how he goes about it, rather than rolling against a skill, which I think is a lot of fun.

[Quoting Mike Mearls]:As others have mentioned, the thief is a self-justifying class. More importantly, I'd rather the players use critical thinking and deduction to figure out traps, unlock doors, and so on. I'd prefer to allow any player of sufficient creativity and wits to figure a way past an obstacle. To me, that's the appeal of original D&D.

I obviously don't have a problem with a generalized skills system, provided that it simply improves a character's chance of doing something, rather than restricing other characters' ability to make the attempt. However, the thief skills, having no parallel in the other classes, do pose a problem for the players conceptually if nothing else: If they look at the chart and see that their thief has only a 25% chance of disarming a trap (for example), they will naturally conclude that nobody else would have so much as a snowcone's chance in Gehenna. This is compounded by a statement in the Moldavy Basic rules that "[t]hieves are the only characters that can open locks and find traps without using magic" (p. 45, emphasis original).

But we needn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a lot of appeal in playing a character who lacks magic or the strength to be a great warrior, but who lives by his wits and can simply sneak, perceive, climb, and make opportunistic attacks better than anyone else, like the Batman when he works with Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, etc. (And Batman is widely considered to be the most dangerous of the group.)

Here then is my own attempt to house-rule the thief's abilities in a fashion that melds with the skills system that I've created. Those who wish an "old school" thief that gets away from using the percentage die but which also does not presume any kind of systematized skills rules should check out James' house-ruled thief class. The following is designed to be compatible with Labyrinth Lords, OSRIC, and Swords & Wizardry (for which it was designed), and falls under the Open Game License:

The Thief

The thief is a man who lives by his wits rather than force of arms or eldritch might. This is not to say that the thief cannot fight when the need arises, but his real strength is the numerous skills he picks up in his travels. The thief has numerous skills that he brings to a party, especially stealth and detecting and bypassing traps and secret doors. Despite the name, not all thieves are out to steal; some are scouts in the employ of some lord, while others are simply rogues given to wanderlust, who travel the world to sate their curiosity. A thief is a welcome addition to the adventuring party, provided that he does not steal from his companions.

Hit Die Type: 1d6. After 9th level, a thief gains 1 hp per level (Constitution bonuses do not apply)
Armor/Shield Permitted: A thief can only wear light armor, and cannot use a shield.
Weapons Permitted: A thief may use any light blade, a longsword, a club, a quarterstaff, or any missile weapon.
Prime Attribute: Dexterity.
Special Abilities:
Backstab: When attacking an unaware opponent (e.g., after winning the surprise roll) or flanking an opponent with an ally, a thief may roll two dice for damage. At fifth level, he may roll three dice and keep the two highest results. At ninth level, he may roll four dice and keep the three highest results.

Extraordinary Climbing: A thief can climb sheer surfaces without the need for special equipment. His chances of success are 1-17 on 1D20. This chance increases to 1-18 at fifth level and 1-19 at ninth level.

Sneaky: Beginning at first level, a thief uses a d8 to surprise or sneak past an opponent when alone or operating with thieves of similar experience. Otherwise, a thief's surprise chance is equal to that of the least sneaky character in the group. This die increases to a d10 at 5th level and a d12 at 9th level. The thief may apply his Dex modifier when actively sneaking past.

Tools of the Trade: When possessed of appropriate tools, a thief can open locks and disable small mechanical traps on a roll of 6 or better on a d8. This increases to a d10 at fifth level and a d12 at ninth level. Note that especially well-crafted locks and traps may require a higher roll to successfully pick/disable.

Observant: At first level, a thief uses a d8 to detect secret doors and hear noises (needs a 6 or better in each case).

Wary: A thief can only be surprised on a roll of 6 or better on the surprise die.

Master Thief: A thief of 9th level or higher who constructs a hideout will attract 2d6 thieves of 1st level who will come to learn from him. Each of these thiefs will bring in 2d10 gp in guild dues and tithes a month, in addition to accepting missions from their master.

A quick note on the surprise die: In my house rules, a given person or group is surprised on a roll of five or better on the surprise die, not a roll of 1-2. This allows me to incorporate the surprise die right into my skills system.

Is it perfect? Probably not. Is it balanced and compatible with the ethos that a fighter should have a chance at hiding and stalking, or that a wizard should be able to try to climb that wall? I think so. Ultimately, we'll have to see it tested in-game.

Why (Commercial) Worlds Fail

When you've been playing D&D since the mid-80s, you see a lot of published campaign worlds come and go. Some, like Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms, become icons of the game. Others, like the Judge's Guild Wilderlands, Arduin, and Kingdoms of Kalamar, fill solid niches, even if they never reach the same level of popularity. And a great many disappear altogether from the published world, kept alive only by shadowy cults who worship in the dark corners of the internet.

Ahem. Sorry, romanticizing a bit here.

In the 90s, TSR engaged in a number of grand attempts to create unique, non-European worlds for fun and profit. Two in particular stand out in my mind: Darksun and Taladas (the lost continent of Krynn). Taladas has a very special place in my heart, in no small part because the authors clearly had a great love for culture, and spent a great many pages detailing what the lives of people who lived on a continent that still bled a sea of lava at its center were like. They also took great joy in subverting, spindling, and mutilating every cliche we had grown comfortable with in Dragonlance: Kender weren't just ADHD and annoying, they were paranoid and stole your stuff to keep you from using it against them. The most civilized nation on the continent was an early-Roman pastache ruled by minotaurs. Many of the elves were plainsmen in the north. Etc. I'll have to do a retrospective one of these days.

So why wasn't Taladas a commercial success? I could blame the lack of support (e.g., novels, modules, advertising), but there's a deeper issue at work: Too much fantastic (yes, I'm using that as a noun) all at once is like too much spice in your food.

D&D works because it taps into the Western collective unconcious, combining the familiar elements of myth and fairy tale with our self-perception that we are natural explorers. A good D&D setting has its own familiar tropes which make it easy for anyone who has played the game, or who has simply been exposed to a bit of fantasy to drop right in and feel at home. Changing a few assumptions around--say, making your elves exiles from the woods who now live on the plains, as Katherine Kerr has done in her Deverry cycle--is like adding a pinch of spice to that old standby meal of beef stew. But changing too much at once makes it more difficult for a person to digest what you're setting before them.

Veteran players, temporarily bored with faux-English countryside and woodland elves, may find delight in such settings, but in the long run, we all return to the comfortable and familiar.

It's better to start the PCs off in an area where they can make an instant connection and then introduce new elements as they range father about than to require them to read three single-spaced pages just to get an idea what their native culture is supposed to be like. They want to kill things and take their stuff, not take a course in anthropology.

Campaign Starting Premises

I spent a few hours last night going over my Kingdoms of Kalamar stuff and brainstorming, trying to decide whether to continue with developing my homebrew or starting KoK back up. I finally decided to run a game in KoK again--why reinvent the wheel?

(That's not to say that my earlier work was wasted; I intend to shamelessly import it into KoK.)

So I've worked up a pair of starting situations/adventures for the game. The one that I use will depend entirely on whether it looks like we'll have a stable group or not.

The first adventure idea is the one used in the old module Treasure Hunt, in which the PCs, a bunch of ordinary, 0-level commoners, start off as slaves on a ship that wrecks on a not-quite-deserted island, and in the course of the quest to escape the island rise to 1st or 2nd level classed characters. In my original KoK campaign, the PCs then set out to cross half the continent to return to their homelands, and in the process began discovering hints that their kidnapping wasn't just the result of random slave-raiding . . .

Because of the amount of travel the PCs had to do to get back home, this premise will work best with a stable gaming group, so that we don't constantly have to handwave people dropping in and out.

The second idea can work with either a stable gaming group or a series of ad hoc groups: The PCs are commoners from a small village on the outskirts of Tokis, a province of the Kalamaran Empire which has been suffering economic collapse due to a combination of war and a locust swarm. Things are desperate, and made more so by the fact that all of the "classed" NPCs have been conscripted for the war effort against neighboring Pekal. Into the middle of this situation, a band of monks arrive bearing relief supplies--but as events unfold, they discover that the monks are clerics of the Locust Lord, determined to destroy their village as a sacrifice to their dark god, as they have already done with the village up the road. Furthermore, the evil clerics have uncovered the dungeons beneath the ruins of an ancient monestary (I'd cheerfully steal the Grognard's megadungeon project for that), so even after dealing with the bulk of the clerics, the PCs would have a dangerous entry to the underworld nearby that needed to be dealt with--or not, if something else caught their eye.

This scenario would lend itself to a modified West Marches-style campaign, but with the PCs having a definite tie to the home area. Once they've accumulated a bit of wealth, they might find themselves trying to smuggle food supplies across the border from "enemy" states, dealing with confiscatory taxes and tarriffs set by lords desperate for cash, or even viewed as a threat by the local power structure. I'd have to avoid the temptation to create plots, but there would be situations a-plenty to throw at the players and see how they react.

Of course, it's quite possible to combine the two scenarios: Just have the island the PCs crash onto be a lot closer to home and then have them wander into town in the middle of the above situation and have to save what remains of their friends and family. In fact, the Locust Lord adventure that I outlined above was developed during our original KoK campaign for just this purpose.

I'm not quite sure which way I'm going yet, but I suspect it'll be the Locust Lord option. Even if it isn't, Treasure Hunt comes with its own module, so I don't have to do much prep work there. That means that detailing the PC's hometown and surrounding area is going to be my focus while I wait for my turn behind the screen. I'm enjoying it already.