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.