Make Your Calendars Interesting, Not Impenetrable

This post is inspired by Marsworms’ excellent post about Moon-men,in-universe calendars, and zodiac signs. It’s great. It got me thinking, which means it got me writing, and now I’m shouting lukewarm takes into the void. You know where to direct your complaints.

So, calendars. Time management.

Everybody at this point probably knows the Gygax quote about the importance of tracking in-game time. “Something, something, meaningful time records kept,” or whatever. I don’t know. Point is, tracking days is important for all sorts of little logistical reasons that are individually not terribly interesting or exciting but snowball into things that are – dungeon restocking, getting lost and starving in the wilderness, things like that.

The problem is, I am terrible at time management IRL. I hate calendaring dates and meetings and all that. So the idea of doing this in a game totally blows. That’s a me problem, not an everybody problem, but I sincerely doubt I am unique in this regard.

Some people dress it up by making it a part of their navel gazing world building. Coming up with baroque and esoteric ways of marking the passage of seasons in your setting is certainly an immersive detail because there’s quite a collection of baroque and esoteric ways of marking the passage of seasons in human history. The problem is, nobody except for the world builder gives a shit. Your blog readers probably will not be all that interested, and your players certainly will not.

Now you might think this is me serving up a critique of Marsworms’ excellent post. I’m not. I already told you it’s great. If you read it, you will immediately see why – the moon-men only appear on full moons; the calendar itself is packed with setting detail (including differences between how peasants and the nobility track time; we should all be doing little things like this more often), the zodiac signs tie a PC into this calendar system and incentivizes player engagement via mechanical benefit during said zodiac period.

This is the Way.

Give the players a reason to sit up and take notice. Otherwise, its just ink spilled about details which (once more, with feeling) nobody except for the world builder gives a shit. If you are world building because you like world building, go for it, you won’t catch me kink shaming, but if you are cooking up setting details because you want your players to be immersed or you want readers to, uh, actually read what you wrote, ask yourself:

• Why should they care?
• Does it affect the player character?
• How much mental bandwidth does it take to understand?
• Can jet fuel really melt steel beams?
• What do these details add to the game?
• Is there a player benefit to knowing these details?
• What game mechanics does this interact with?

If you don’t have an answer other than, “well it’s cool/unique/important because 7491 years ago, Ur-King Cumsock IX declared…” It’s joever. The VVest is lost.

So where does the calendar come in?

In-fiction calendars can be a neat little way to sneak setting details into your game because you are (ostensibly) tying it into a game mechanic (tracking time). But this is a fine line to tread. On one hand, you want the calendar to matter; you want the players to care because it affects their characters, and in the process, you want the players to say, “Wow how neat, you are such a creative GM and this feels so immersive and cool.” On the other hand, you don’t want the calendar to be incomprehensible; you don’t want the players to have to pull up your giant homework assignment lovingly-crafted setting bible to remember what they’re supposed to call Wednesdays, and in the process, you don’t want the players to say, “Wow I cannot be fucking bothered, I’m going to go play WoW instead.”

Story time!

I’ve learned the difference first hand. In my first big foray into OSR-land, I was hugely smitten by Chris K.’s Hill Cantons (and still am, for the record) and really liked the way he typed up little weekly news roundups of what was going on in the game world. He even wrote up instructions on how he did it. Also great; I’m not knocking it by any means. I gave it a shot but realized after like week three that none of the players were reading it. So I asked for feedback and what I got back was, “There’s too many proper nouns to remember.” Which, in hindsight, was absolutely true. It was an in-game document delivered out-of-game, a poorly-telegraphed list of hooks/rumors, with which no real way for the PCs to engage. It was a world building exercise which (say it with me) nobody except the world builder gave a shit.

Moral of the story: just because you think it is cool and clever and vital to the game doesn’t mean your players will. Lets take a look at some calendar examples.

Functionally Useless But Thematic – Star Trek/40k

Star dates are functionally just the timekeeping version of technobabble. It’s fine because Star Trek, as a serialized sci-fi morality play, is not a setting where it matters. If it was a setting where it matters, star dates would be a terrible pain in the ass system for everybody – players and GM alike – in which to track time.

The date system for Warhammer 40k is a bit better, but not really, and the way it is used is again mostly as set dressing. It doesn’t really matter a whole lot if your campaign takes place in 420.069.M40 or 123.456.M41 when life is equally shitty and the setting doesn’t really change.

Gibberish – Tekumel

I’ve never played Empire of the Petal Throne or engaged with the setting of Tekumel and I never will because MAR Barker is a shithead nazi and Tekumel is the ur-example of the sort of world building wanking I’ve been whinging about in this post. I had a hunch it would annoy me; lo and behold, it did!

Not only does the start of the year begin on the spring equinox, the week divided into six days, and each day of the week and each month has a name in the Tekumel conlang that a player would assumedly need to know (and ideally, know how to pronounce). Ask yourself: what does this add to the game, other than utter frustration?

Just Different Enough – Elder Scrolls

I’m a huge Morrowind shill and will do my best to restrain myself here. One element of Elder Scrolls I do not, however, care for, is the calendar. It is just the Gregorian calendar (the one we estadounidenses use irl) but the days of the week and months of the year each have their own in-fiction names. How is this different than the odious Tekumel system, you ask?

Well you don’t have to learn an entirely different planet’s orbital period for one thing, but the other improvement is the fact the in-fiction names are “transliterated” into English. So instead of “Hasanpór/Shápru/Didóm” for the first three months of the year in Tekumel, ES has “Morning Star/Sun’s Dawn/First Seed” and in terms of days of the week, Tekumel has “Surúnra/Mugún/Zaqé/Rü’üsá/Tlakál/Daunél” while ES has “Morndas/Tirdas/Middas/Turdas/Fredas/Loredas/Sundas.” Yes, I know, those aren’t the names in English – but they are consistently close enough to the English days of the week that they aren’t a headscratcher.

So is this a happy medium? Sort of. It isn’t the worst, for sure, but it wouldn’t be my first choice. The days aren’t awful to understand at a glance, but the names of the month lack similar context clues. First Seed is March, Second Seed is May, August is Last Seed. The intervening months have entirely different names. While I can understand and pronounce these, I would have to look up on the ES wiki which month each corresponds with, and that again begs the question: what does this add to the game?

Quick And Easy – Middle-Earth

Yes yes, I know, I know – everyone (for good reason) wants to move away from jocking swag from Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien. But for all the incredibly specific lore details, decades of background, entire conlangs created, and everything else, Tolkien just used the Gregorian calendar. Part of this is probably due to him wanting the Hobbit/LotR to be the Anglo-Saxon mythology he desperately wished his mopey, seasoning-averse culture had. If I’m wrong on that point, I’m sure bigger LotR heads than I will descend to viciously correct my mistake.

I guess technically there are in-fiction names for the days and months, but the stroke of genius lies in not using them. Instead, as with everything in Middle-Earth, it is transliterated/given as its modern equivalent.

This is the boring and sort of lazy way to do it, but from a gameplay perspective, the least-bitter pill to swallow for a calendar to be table ready. If your players can’t understand how our irl calendar works, you have bigger problems. Does it add anything different or unique to your setting? No, not really. Does it detract from the game? Not at all, and there’s value in that.

The Trinity of Elder Scrolls

So Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was remastered and lo, did the fans rejoice. All the hype and buzz and memes have apparently done some numbers, because now I have been bitten once more by the Elder Scrolls bug. This is not to say I jumped feet first into making dropping a Ted Cruz clone into a timely dungeon encounter with Emperor Patrick Stewart shortly before Picard’s untimely demise. Because I have not (though my buddies have). Rather, I have jumped feet first into yet another nostalgia-trip: the weird and wonderful world of Morrowind. With a whole bunch of mods, of course. I am not an animal.

That’s not the reason for this post (though I promise it’s connected, and promise it is elf game relevant). I was texting a friend on my way home from work about Trench Crusade when, apropo of nothing:

“Is there ever any reasoning why there’s dwarf armor/dwarves ruins in the elder scrolls games but no dwarfs”

BrÖther.

You think I wouldn’t call and spend half an hour explaining the disappearance of the dwemer, and another 20 or so on how Pelinal Whitestrake is a cyborg from the future and also god? Because that, dear reader, is precisely what I did. Which, coming off the new restart in Morrowind, got me thinking about the Tribunal.

Which got me thinking about the Trinity in Christianity, and down the rabbit hole I went. It’s sort of an odd experience, to learn details of a thing you heard and repeated growing up without much thought about what that thing truly means. I was raised vaguely Protestant in a very loosey-goosey non-denominational church in which I was never confirmed. It is more than fair to say I have glaring gaps in my religious education. Maybe breaking down what is meant by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and learning about the interrelationship between the three is reserved for confirmation classes? Because I certainly do not remember that class in children’s Sunday school and we were too busy playing Halo:CE CTF on Blood Gulch at the youth group overnighters to notice any of the divine metaphysics lessons.

I, until pretty damn recently, thought that this line – and what was meant by the “trinity” – was just three names for God, or that “The Holy Spirit” is just a fancy title/honorific for God. The relationship between God and Jesus was always only explained to me in a father-son relationship in the literal sense, or that Jesus had a divine spark or whatever. It had never before occurred to me that those are all three separate aspects/personages.

I have always been an enormous fan of the OG lore in Morrowind, how the world is made to feel that much more real by the books in it, with all the symbolism and conflicting, unreliable author-narrators. What is going on in the Main Quest feels like it could be it’s own iceberg meme with how deep and obscure the cosmological significance of who you are/what you are doing. I know that Michael Kirkbride, one of the game’s writers, was a big Runequest fan, so it must have been quite the trip to work on the game with Ken Rolston, Avalon Hill editor of Runequest in the 90’s. I also know that Kirkbride (as the more esoteric contributor, though not the biggest on the team) was influenced by elements of Hinduism and other IRL religions.

Where is this going, you wonder? Good question!

Tiber Septim/Talos, the “9^th Divine,” forms a trinity himself – Hjalti Early-Beard, Zurin Arctus, and Ysmir Kingmaker. All three are variously individually described as having their own histories, sort of, but come together as one oversoul, or maybe because they did so, it has always been so, and so on. The entire concept of “mantling” – to “walk like them until they walk like you” – is basically just the Christian doctrine of Adoptionism. It is foolish of me to think that only interesting details, usable/gamable details, were only to be found in imagined videogame religions or faith systems from the parts of the world with which I am not familiar. Because it turns out there’s plenty of usable, weird shit in Christianity if you look hard enough!

A good ~700 or so words in, now we get to the elf games part of the blog post:

D&D gods are boring, overplayed, and having a big not-Catholic Church for a Classical Greek/Norse style pantheon doesn’t make much sense. I know, shockingly mundane opinion. But lets not throw the baby (Jesus) out with the bathwater, here – take the interesting parts of Christianity and toss the rest. Spoiler alert, the hierarchy/structure of the church is not the interesting part.

Rather than a bunch of individual gods with their own cringe little divine domains, make several of them into one god with a bunch of aspects (that hate each other?) or different interpretations of the one deity – Is the Reaper a god of harvests or a god of death? What if your pantheon is the same for several religions, but assigning different roles/relationships/domains in each denomination? Better yet, what if your pantheon is one god, with a bunch of different natures/aspects/avatars/etc?

But most of all, if you got this far and you take away one thing: make it messy. Think of all the blood and ink spilled over minor theological points, how much space in the margins of even a simple statement or description of divinity there is for whole branches of offshoots or heresies to develop. Make every culture see or interpret a god in a different light. Make them all correct, but also a little bit wrong. It creates room for interpretation, it creates tension, and it creates a more interesting world.

I am still prepping my Brutal Magic Desert Campaign, which is basically prep-finished at this point, sans actually, ya know, running the game. I took May off because I was pretty busy with travel nearly every weekend but the game was mentally cooking that whole time. I am not super happy with my encounter tables but that’s something that needs to be tested in play before I toss it out. Otherwise, I will end up redoing every little bit of this campaign and never get around to playing it.

But I digress: talking about the BMDC is not why I am here, for I have been thinking about ideas for other campaigns in other systems. Is that a form of procrastination? Yes. Will I let it stop me? Never.

Sometimes it is more fun to think about a campaign than it is to do the nitty gritty of prepping it, and sometimes probably more fun to think about the campaign than actually play it. Maybe some of these ideas would totally suck – but they sure do sound cool, at least to me.

Extraction Shooters Are Really Just West Marches For FPS Games

I said what I said.

If you’re lost, an extraction shooter (or looter shooter, as they are sometimes called) refers to a subgenre of FPS video games where generally, you get dropped into a map to scavenge loot, PVP, fight NPC bosses, and ultimately survive long enough to leave the map with your ill-gotten gains before a long-ish match timer runs out. Usually, if you die your body – with all the gear you brought into the map + all your loot – can be looted by other players while you get ejected from the session back to your hub/main lobby/whatever.

With me so far? Great. If not, boo hoo I tried. Google it. If I am speaking in too vague of generalities, it’s because there’s a handful of these games with variations of the base formula but it nearly always boils down to:

1. Get in
2. Get loot
3. Get out
4. ???
5. Profit

What does that sound like? A West Marches game? Wow reader, you’re so right! I was thinking the same thing.

A friend of mine sent me a youtube video of some normie explaining to brainrotted 5E stans what a West Marches campaign is and how it works. Being based and OSR pilled I of course already knew what it was, but the point of my friend sending it to me was it came up on his feed and he was like, “wow this sounds like it would work for our group, you should put your own spin on this and run it.” So now I feel obligated to do just that, but it also got the gears turning, and this friend of mine is a big extraction shooter fan and I guess I had a Jimmy Neutron brain blast connecting the dots.

I’ve played several of these extraction shooters, to wit:

Escape From Tarkov – the OG extraction shooter, set in modern day not-Russia featuring gritty, relatively realistic combat and autistic levels of detail in gun customization. It’s a shitty game made by shitty people but nobody has dethroned the king. Janky, frustrating, and addicting in equal measure.

Hunt: Showdown – Supernatural bounty hunting in zombie-filled Bayou circa 1895. More arcade-y combat, focused more on finding the location of big monster bosses and extracting with their bounty tokens than scavenging loot. Think Jonah Hex meets Resident Evil. I love the vibes, love the “cowboy guns” which I grew up shooting irl, and love the tighter focus.

Marauders – Dieselpunk space pirates duking it out in flying submarines on the way to loot space stations. Far less popular after the initial launch, but has a cool vibe and bonus points for having space ships (and several very obscure 20th century weapons).

The Cycle: Frontier – Generic scifi. Not very interesting visually, writing was cringe, and the gunplay didn’t feel good so my friends and I didn’t stick with this one very long. Included here for completeness’ sake.

I Bet You Thought This Was About RPGs Not My Half-Assed Review Of Video Games

And you’d be right. So to get back on track, let’s see how we could turn one of these extraction shooters into a West Marches RPG – or at the very least, what mechanics we steal from these games.

I have actually done some work at some point of actually adapting EFT and am cannibalizing some of that for this writeup. Hopefully what is below makes some sort of sense. It’s an adaptation of elements of the video game to tabletop/p&p mechanics in a way that clicks, I think, and could be used in a general sense.

So how would we expect the EFT mechanics adapted RPG to look?

• Goal is to venture out from home base to scavenge goods to survive in wreck of a city
• Stars Without Number/Traveller/Cyperpunk 2020 as mechanical base
• Household goods as treasure, with inventory slot management being important
• Google Earth maps of whatever city you’re setting your game in as dungeon/encounter maps
• PC “reputation” scores for NPCs/factions affecting how they treat you/services offered
• A stash/hideout that is upgradable by using specific scavenged goods to unlock services/bonuses
• Survival mechanics (food/water, encumbrance, fatigue)
• Pointcrawl of different districts/specific buildings in the city of varying risk/reward
• Different loot pools for different places (nails & tools at hardware store point, food at market, etc)

What about Hunt: Showdown?

• Goal is to fight your way through several points of interest to hunt for undead bosses & collect bounties
• Boot Hill as mechanical base
• Fairly-weak “mob” enemies with specific debilitating abilities (slow, poison, blind, choke, etc)
• Bosses with specific attacks/resistances/strategies to beat them; take back proof of bounty
• Pointcrawl web of small dungeons, containing either a boss or a clue to which dungeon they’re in
• Level up gives perk points used to either heal lost max health or buy perks
• Max level lets you retire PC for meta currency (lame, instead unlocks classes/bonuses for new PC?)

And now doing Marauders…

• Goal is to dogfight your crew’s pirate ship to raid & loot mining/military/civvie space stations
• Stars Without Number/Traveller as mechanical base
• Lots of spaceship combat in vicinity of PoIs
• 1-man escape/boarding pods, used for ship boarding & looting wrecks/disabled ships/PoIs
• Space stations, derelict ships, asteroid colonies as dungeons & are PoIs on pointcrawl
• Loot is building materials, food/med supplies, intel/war plans, bullion, weapons & ammo, parts
• Faction standing for trading/donating to war effort/doing missions

So There We Have It, I Guess

How workable do these seem? Are there mechanics or elements that would adapt well to other West Marches campaigns? Did this even make sense?

Brutal Magic Desert Campaign: Currency

 

The OSR grindset is all about “disregard danger, acquire currency” and that is certainly gonna be true for my game. But what do you do when your Bronze Age-Mesoamerican-Dying Earth desert crawl is deeply metal-poor, and all metal items are incredibly ancient and inherently magical?

 

You reject the Gold/Silver/Copper economy and substitute your own. Obviously, I am ripping off Dark Sun pretty heavy – so how did it work there?

 

In Athas (Dark Sun world) metal coins exist but are much more valuable. For the record, I’m talking about the currency system from the OSE Dark Sun adaptation by Lixu. There, the standard coin value is expanded with the inclusion of bronze and ceramic pieces, along with ceramic “bits” worth 1/10 a ceramic piece. So the conversion is as follows:

1 Gold Piece = 10 Silver Pieces = 20 Bronze Pieces = 100 Ceramic Pieces = 1,000 Bits

PCs start at 3^rd level with 3d6 x 20 CP and the XP system is CP = XP, rather than gold.

 

I could (and probably will, at least initially) just copy this wholesale but my setting is even more metal poor than Athas. I would like barter to be a bigger deal, coins to be rare, and different cultures to have very different currencies worth very different amounts.

 

Here’s what I am currently considering:

• The city-dwelling humans of the starting river valley use ceramic coins of the standard denominations as an easing-in point for the players

• The dwarves who live in cliff dwellings and mesa top pueblos use turquoise beads and shards of obsidian as money, but in different denominations than the standard 100/10/1

• Elves, as desert nomads (totally just Fremen), have an economic system centered on water and animal husbandry – thinking of a “water-ring” being worth a person’s daily water ration

• Halflings I envision as small family bands of hunter-gatherers who solely use barter

 

The idea is that money should be a cultural signifier that tells the players something about the world they’re playing in, rather than just a numerical indicator of purchasing power on their character sheet. Is it more unwieldly to use and track different currencies? Yes. Is it more interesting than just ___ GP in my pocket? Yes. Is that worth the trade? Time will tell.

Brutal Magic Desert Campaign -- The Setup

Hu Nhu

I’ve been mulling over what kind of campaign I want to run, what I want in it, and what system I’m going to use to make it happen. Many things to consider, many choices to make, and yet…

 

In the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly (may he rot): Fuck it, we do it live.

 

Murderhobo, B/X-style, GP = XP, hex crawl is the M O V E.

 

I really took to heart a comment from Arnold K of Goblin Punch on my last post:

 

“Another question for yourself: what's the minimum amount of rules you need to have prepped for session one? Because you can always add more rules as the need arises to flesh out the rest of the system, but session 1 can be pretty small.

 

I'm a fan of smallest-viable-system for session 1. Let's you focus on the important stuff.”

 

I got a lot of great comments on the OSR discord, too, about systems and Dark Sun adaptations and the long and short of it is this: I’m gonna run OSE.

 

Why?

 

I told my friends we were going to play old school-style D&D and I want to stay true to that. I have a bunch of B/X compatible materials and OSE seems to me to be the least conversion-heavy. It’s rules-light and easy enough for noobs to understand. I like the idea of the simplicity of the OG classes, and I think I’ll steal the (Chris Kutalik’s of Hill Cantons fame) idea of the players “unlocking” more classes through play.

 

So to circle back to what Arnold K was saying – what do I need for session 1? A non-exhaustive list:

• Rules – check. I have the free OSE Basic rules, which is enough as-is, but I think I may just link the players to the OSE SRD and use that. Or maybe both.

• Starting Dungeon – check. Prison of the Hated Pretender, Tomb of the Serpent King, and Dyson’s Delve are all on the menu. Which one the PCs go for is up to them.

• Starting Area – check. I stumbled upon the Welsh Piper hex crawl generation method (though I used Noisms from Monsters & Manuals simplification) generated an area, hated it, and decided instead to just do a rough hexmap of the Tucson area. I followed the procedures for generating sites, though.

• Starting Hooks – WIP. I like the Elder Scrolls trope of the player starting as a prisoner, and the Dark Sun intro adventure can be mined for ideas. I’m thinking the PCs start as slaves being transported in a caravan that comes under attack and the rest is up to them.

• Player Gazeteer – WIP. Not strictly necessary, I suppose, but nice to have to introduce the players to both the bespoke setting and the house rules I plan on using.

• House Rules – check, sorta? Right out of the gate I want to steal the OSE Dark Sun weapon materials/breakage, currency, and survival mechanics.

 

What else am I missing?

What I Want In A Game Pt. 1: BRUTAL MAGIC DESERT CAMPAIGN

When I was in undergrad I read some bullshit article in WSJ or BI or FT or some other Wall Street circlejerk publication about how to pick a job that was right for you. They interviewed some president or C-Suite guy about how he came to pick the job he had (lol, I know). The advice? List what you want in a job, or features or aspects you liked in jobs past, and find a position that checks as many of those boxes.

 

Shit advice if you’re a teenager who has only ever worked in fast food, but the idea (and the utter hubris the article represented) stuck with me. I have been thinking about spinning up a new campaign and have a couple setting ideas. By applying the shit WSJ job search advice to RPGs, I hope to come to a decision point on what I want this new campaign to be.

 

I wrote a little in the previous post about how I haven’t run a traditional D&D game before and am sorta looking to do that now. Let’s see if by the end of this process, it will be a setting in which to run an already-written ruleset or a setting + rules hack. Historically everything I’ve done has been the latter. Can I exercise some restraint this time around? Time will tell, but without further ado:

On Writing

I need to be a better, faster, writer.

 

It is important for my job and in some sense, important for my mental health. I am a serial procrastinator and the inability to just sit down and get shit done bothers me to the point of very deep self-doubt. Golden boy’s in bad shape, and all that.

 

The other reason I would like to be a better, faster, writer is for RPGs.

 

Being a GM can be a lot of writing, or at least it is for me. Why? It isn’t prep, really, because I’m a seat of the pants prepper. I like the improv aspect of being a GM and lean into that pretty heavily because I feel like it’s a GM strength of mine. Probably because writing prep isn’t. But when it comes to settings and putting together hacks of systems, I start to procrastinate, get frustrated with myself, and the doom spiral begins. I have a bunch of mostly-written systems and hacks sitting in a folder which for the most part were never played.

 Logging back into Blogger to post this forced me to confront my list of posts for this blog. I started this blog in Spring of 2022, wrote a little bit, then went dark. I started up again in Spring of 2023 because I was starting my Star Wars D6 campaign which lasted through the end of summer, roughly. It is now Spring of 2024. It is weird to see a pattern of my writing -- what is it about this time of year that gets me thinking about RPGs and inspires me to start writing? Why have I consistently stopped around the same time? 

It's time to fix that!

 

The way I will do that is to just force myself to write more. Pure and simple, this is a skill that must be built by repetition. It’s funny that in grade school, you write often; in college, you often write more (or at least I did, as a journalism major); and in law school, you basically stop writing altogether. I had few essays to write and they were few and far between. As an attorney now, I am forced to write more but am out of practice. Time to get back into it.

I have been playing in a very excellent campaign run by the inestimable @RetiredAdventurer and feel inspired to myself take up the mantle of GM once more. Dune (and the slow march of the seasons towards the hellscape of Arizona summer) makes me want to run something like Dark Sun. On the other hand, Planescape a la Homeward Bounders calls my name.

 

An astute reader would see that 2E rears its ugly head. I have never played 2E, and the other night came to a realization: I have never actually run D&D. I have never actually run a traditional high-fantasy game. Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 sorta makes me want to, and I think I have a couple buddies who are interested.

 

Decisions, decisions.