Fantasy settlements - part 2.5: Location, location, location!

People don't just throw a stick in the air and build a town where it lands - at least, those who do don't meet with enough long term success for your player party to encounter such a shambolic shanty.

What makes a good location?

A good location is one where the settlement can thrive. At its base level, the location provides something that other locations do not. That may be some physical resource, like water, or it might be a geographic resource, like a meeting of transport routes, or a social resource, like a holy site.

Here's a page where the topic is summarised nicely for high school level studies.

What can I add to that? Not a lot really - except some fantasy specific examples and possibilities.

Bridge point
The Twins - A Song of Ice and Fire
Osgiliath - The Lord of the Rings
 

Osgiliath by AbePapakhian (Deviantart)

Thandol Span / Dun Modr - Wetlands / Arathi Highlands, World of Warcraft

Nodal point
The Crossroads - Northern Barrens, World of Warcraft

Inter-dimensional and inter-planar portals - a town around the entrance to the Underworld


Dry point
Swamp Castle - Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Thousand Needles (post-Cataclysm) - mesas as islands in a now flooded valley, World of Warcraft

Atlantis (post sinking) - often depicted as an air bubble under the sea

Wet point
Ramkahen - Uldum, World of Warcraft

Ramkahen - Surrounded by desert

Defensive

Stormwind - fortified prominence, World of Warcraft
Minas Tirith - The Lord of the Rings

Minas Tirith guarding the narrow point between the mountains - Encyclopdeia of Arda

Aspect
Winterfell - hotsprings protect against the worst of winter, A Song of Ice and Fire

Shelter
Blackrock Mountain - a safe solid haven in a land of fire, Burning Steppes, World of Warcraft 
Light's Hope - a holy haven in a diseased land, Eastern Plaguelands, World of Warcraft

Resources
Nordrassil - magical resource - The World Tree of Mount Hyjal, World of Warcraft
Keep on the Borderlands, OD&D - a town supporting adventurers flocking to newly discovered dungeons or crypts

The growth point of a settlement will tend to set the form of that settlement: Aspect and Resource based settlements will often have dispersed buildings; Bridge and Nodal point settlements are frequently linear (clustered along one of the strips), and other settlement types tend toward the nuclear (closely gathered around  the central point).

As successful small settlements expand, their original purpose may be lost - they'll begin to attract people for the protection that comes from large numbers and the opportunities of towns and cities. These larger settlements become nuclear around the original centre.

EDIT - some additional examples:
From the various forums where I trawled for comments, a wealth of additional suggestions have popped up.

• To launch an offense - campaign headquarters may become permanent given a long enough conflict
• Military base - town supporting a military base, perhaps a training ground rather than a strategic point. This becomes significant with standing armies, rather than the predominant medieval muster of knights and militia.
• Religious - loads of examples. Probably fits the resource categor, under tourism. Pilgrims making devotional journeys to religiously significant sites were common in medieval times.
• Accidental / catastrophe survivors - refugee camps become permanent over time
• Victory / battle site - in the Excalibur movie, Camelot is founded on the site of a great victory
• Slave city for massive monument - the pyramids' construction was supported by a massive city of workers

• temples around the site of fissures that give off psychoactive fumes
• mage schools around areas where the boundaries between the planes grow thin
• mountaintop laboratories to catch the lighting
• village of vassals to a nearby dragon
• small settlements of people trying their luck at removing the sword from the stone
• summer/wintering grounds in the path of prey migratory paths
• boom towns/ghost towns - some enormously valuable resource has been discovered, and people are flocking to exploit it (boom), and the aftermath of the drying up of that resource (ghost town)
• outcast/leper colonies
• campsites for academic expeditions

We run

A suppodedly inspirational facebook post about how a "fatty" runner is inspirational has been rebuffed by the runner in question.

It makes good reading - both of the posts. Here they are with some commentary.

When I see another runner, all I think is "Go on!" - maybe a little "Can I catch them up?"

Both these posts talk about the journey - like self improvement is the only possible motivation to run.

Me, I run because it's fun - but when I think back, I remember it didn't start as fun. It started as self-improvement, to work on my asthma, and shift some weight.

It's taken me three years to get to be a mediocre runner - the London Marathon elite come in with times faster than my half-marathon times - but I was even worse when I started. I was half walking, half running for the whole 2.5 miles of the flat track near where I work.

You have to start to get better, and then you have to stick at it.

UPDATE: The Self-consciousness Barrier

Talking about this post with some friendly people, I was reminded of the need to overcome self-consciousness.

No-one looks their best when they run: your clothes are sweaty, your face is red, bits of you wobble, you're probably pulling a strained face.
Some people find being in public view hard enough without all that.

The thing is, no-one is really going to be paying much attention to a runner who jogs or lumbers or glides past. Even if you're in some way especially remarkable, you'll only be noticed for a second.

Runners are just part of the landscape. No-one expects you to stick around - you are moving past by default.

And anyway, the more you run, the more natural you'll look - less sweat, less red in the face, less wobbly.

d02: Unlimited Power

Here's a fast and slightly silly role-playing game system I cobbled together this afternoon, for use in beer and pizza gaming sessions - or maybe even more serious, but less simulationist gaming than my usual d20 stuff.

It's based loosely on d02: Know No Limit, and its derived game REAL Ultimate Power d02.

I may expand on it sometime...

d02: Unlimited Power

• Bad guys have captured the Queen! Are you badass enough to defeat them and rescue Her Majesty?
• A zombie wizard has turned your brother into a monster! Are you brainy enough to save him and stop the wizard?
• Evil terrorists have kidnapped your family and are trying to make you kill the President! You get the picture.

These are just three amazing examples of the amazing episodes of d02: Unlimited Power that you can play. There are no limits - only your imagination! Anything can happen.

An episode of d02: Unlimited Power is played out by a group of one or more players, and a Games Master (GM).
During each episode, your character (we'll just call the character "you", most of the time) will take on bad guys and their mook hench-folk to win.

Character creation

What sort of hero do you want to play? Make up your character's focus, select skills, and play!

Your character's focus can be anything - from debating to wrestling, from kung-fu to wizardry. This will be the focus of your winning.

Skills

There are 5 skills, which range from 1 to 10.

• Brains (Bra)
• Chasing (Cha)
• Hotness (Hot)
• Winning (Win)
• Luck (Luk)

When you create a character, you have 20 points to spread around these skills.
A skill of zero means you can't use the skill at all. Zero brains means you can't have ideas. Zero chasing means you can't move. Zero Hotness means nobody fancies you in the slightest. Zero Winning means you lose every contest. Zero luck means bad things will always happen to you.

Winning focus
You must state what sort of winning your character is best at - for example: shooting, fighting, gadgets, magic. This is your Winning focus.

Winning tools
A Winning tool is some sort of thing that you use to be better at winning. It must be something to do with your Winning focus - so if you have a Winning focus of Magic, it might be "Spells", or if you have a Winning focus of "kung-fu" it might be "Kung-fu weapons".
For every point of Awesomeness you have, when you use your Winning tools to win at your Winning focus, you add that number of successes to your Winning roll.
When your Awesomeness is more than 1, your benefit for using Winning tools increases. This may be because you're better at using it, or because you get to use more Winning tools at once - you decide.

Awesomeness

As well as skills, you have Awesomeness. Your Awesomeness starts at 1, and may be increased as you get better.
You add your Awesomeness to all rolls. No matter how many penalties you get, you will always have at least as many dice as your Awesomeness.

Equipment

You start out with your Winning tool (unless the episode is all about getting it for the first time - your origin story!). You may have your Winning tool taken away if you are captured - be careful! But don't worry, getting it back will be awesome.
Other equipment you have is determined by your skills. When you want something, tell the GM you have it. The GM will either agree, or ask you to make a skill check to have brought it along.
You should also keep track of things you pick up during an episode.

Using skills

Describe your action. The GM will give you a bonus for how interesting, cool and amazing your action is - and a penalty for any dull actions. Remember, no matter how many penalties you get, you will always have at least as many dice as your Awesomeness.
Roll as many dice as you have skill points, plus your Awesomeness, plus any bonus or penalty your GM gave you. This fistful of dice is called a "dice pool". Sometimes you add dice to it, sometimes you take dice away.
For every die that comes up high (that is, more than half the biggest number on that die), you score one success.
Sometimes you only need one success - like when you want to break a door down.
Sometimes you'll need more than one - like when you want to defuse a bomb, and there are booby traps on it: you'll need one success per booby trap, and one for the bomb fuse itself.

Luck
The Luck skill is a bit different.
You use Luck in two ways: to avoid bad things (explosions, poisons, stay conscious, resist spells, and so on); and to add to other rolls.
When your GM asks you to "Test your Luck", you roll your current Luck skill. Each success you get reduces the bad thing that you're trying to avoid.
When you use Luck to add to other rolls, you reduce your Luck skill by one, and get one extra die for that skill roll only.

Winning

Each time you get into a fight, argument, dance-off or rap-battle, or any other kind of contest, you need to win. No matter what kind of battle your trying to win, we call it a contest.

Roll your winning skill, just like described in Using skill above. Remember, describing cool moves will get you bonuses, being dull will get you penalties.

Winning against mooks
When your in a contest with mooks (that is, anyone who doesn't have proper skills), you defeat as many mooks as you have successes. You can decide whether they are killed, unconscious, running away, or whatever you like.
If you get less successes than the number of mooks fighting you, that means that while you were taking out their mates, one of them got a hit in! Your Winning skill is damaged by one - you lose one die from that dice pool.

Winning against Bad guys
When in a contest with a Bad guy (that is, anyone who has proper skills, like you), you make your Winning rolls against each other - whoever got the most successes wins that round.
you check who has the highest Winning skill. If yours is equal or higher, then each success you get counts as damage to the Bad guy's Winning skill. If theirs is higher, then you only damage their Winning skill by 1 point, no matter how many successes you got.

Running out of Win
When you have no more points left in Winning, you must Test your Luck.
If you succeed, you can carry on fighting, using your Awesomeness, or you can use this chance to escape.
If you fail, then you have lost the contest! You are knocked out, captured, or paralysed - or whatever else is right for the scene.


Using your Winning focus
If the contest is the kind of thing you've written down as your Winning focus, then you use the whole dice pool. If it's anything else, you use one less die.
Example: Brad Sex's Winning focus is Wrestling. A Bad guy is shooting at him. Brad has to use his Winning skill at -1 if he tries to shoot back, so Brad decides it'd be better to climb up on the ropes and double-drop kick the Bad guy instead - he gets all his Winning skill dice (and probably a bonus for being cool).

Winning together
You can help your allies out by acting together. One of you gets to be the main contestant, and the others make Winning skill checks. The main contestant gets to add one die for each success that the other get.

Recovering

All skills recover one point per your level of Awesomeness, each scene.
So after a big fight, it might be a good idea to have a scene or two of planning and training, or something, to get everyone back up to strength.
You can also use the Brains skill to do first aid, and revive a knocked out ally.

Chasing

When a Chase happens, the GM decides how many successes you need to catch up. The GM may give you bonuses or penalties depending on what kind of transport you want to use: a push bike is not as fast a rocket plane.
Every success you get that is more than the Bad guy you're chasing means you are gaining on him. Each success above yours that the bad guy gets means that he is getting away.

Getting better

Improving skills

Your skills increase as you defeat bad guys and mooks. Defeating bad guys give you Improvement Points (IP), which you use to get better - but it gets harder to improve skills as you get better.
To improve a skill by one point, it costs the same IP as the current skill. To improve it by more than one, add up all the steps.
Example: Brad Sex has 4 points in Hotness. If he wants to improve his Hotness, he has to spend 4 IP - this will get him to 5 Hotness. If he wants to improve it to 6 Hotness, it'll cost him 4 + 5: 9 IP.

Improving Awesomeness

Like Skills, it gets harder to improve Awesomeness as you get more awesome. To improve Awesomeness by one point, it cost 10 times your current Awesomeness level.

Bad guy gallery

Bad guy Skills & Awesomeness
Bad guys have skills and awesomeness just like the players' characters.
The skills given here are typical - as GM, you can change them.
Set the Bad guy's Awesomeness to whatever level seems challenging to the players for the episode you're planning.

Winning tools and bad guys
A Bad guy's winning tool should nearly always be an actual thing, so that the players can take it away - or try.

Zombie wizard
Bra 7; Cha 1; Hot 0; Win (magic) 7; Luck 5
Awesomeness ??
Winning tool - Skull staff

Terrorist boss
Bra 4; Cha 4; Hot 4; Win (bombs) 6; Luck 2
Awesomeness ??
Winning tool - Detonator

Mega monster
Bra 2; Cha 6; Hot 0; Win (biting) 10; Luck 2
Awesomeness ?? (at least 5)
Winning tool - Hugeness

Alien queen
Bra 3; Cha 6; Hot 0; Win (fighting) 8; Luck 3
Awesomeness ??
Winning tool - Laser claws 

Ankle weights

There aren't many big hills round here in the Midlands - at least, there are few long steep hills, like I'll have to cope with in Wales in May - so I do repetitions of the tallest steep hill round here, and makes sure I include a few steep gradients in my runs in general.

But I've been looking at those Welsh hills, and realising that no matter how many reps I do, I just don't have access to the gradients that Wales has.

So I've been running with ankle weights on. The ones I've been using at just under half a kilo each and have been getting lighter as they leak the iron sand that gives them their weight - they're old, see.


Now I've decided that the combination of those weights being light, and shedding their load gradually, means that I should use some new, heavier ones - and today was my first run with the new 2 kilo weights.

Bloody hell, that was hard going!

For the first time in ages, I came home exhausted - both out of breath and with tired legs. It was just a 7 km run, over the local big hill and back. Usually, that gets me a little out of breath, but it hardly fatigues me.

But when I started out, that hill used to be the most daunting thing on my routine. It's taken a lot of running to make it a relatively casual event.
By adding an extra kilo to each leg, and dragging that up and down and up and down that hill, I'm forcing myself to recondition my legs.

In time, it'll be easy.

In praise of one-off sessions

Throwing together a one-off game for an evening is something that the group I used play with used to do a lot.
Or rather, Tim used to do it a lot. I used to do it a bit. Other players used to do it sometimes. Tim was our hero GM, really. Hail Tim!

But I digress - making up a one-off game, that would last just one night, is what I want to blog about here.

I've got an ulterior motive here - I've become Tim. I'd like to get to play now and then, but I seem to be the only person in my gaming group who runs games.
Just like with Tim, I suspect that's because I volunteer to do so, and other GMs don't feel the need to step up.

Low investment

If your one-off game goes a bit wrong, who cares? You only spent an evening on it, and you still got to muck about with your mates.

You only have one evening, so the game needs to be quite simple, too. Don't try to have a complex plot, cause it'll be harder to show it in just a few hours of play. Keep the number of encounters to a minimum. Have just one villain, and a few minions. Don't have too many puzzles.

Cut to the chase

Get the game into the action as soon as you can. I've already blogged on where I got it wrong with one of my own one-off sessions. Here's what I learned

Maybe start in media res

Don't get bogged down in details - move on quickly, jump to the end of the journey

Don't use challenging encounters as a warm up

Also, my desire to start with the action has led me to a way of doing things that works quite well if you have a day or so of notice: tell the players up front what the adventure set up is going to be, and ask them why their character is going to be there.
For example: The adventure will be taking place in the castle of Baron Vileness, who is hated by the locals for his harsh taxes and bad behaviour. He often abducts pretty young folk and abuses them. He is said to have vast reserves of treasure and magical artefacts.
Why does your character want to break into the castle, and what are they planning to do there?
This lets the players think up their own characters' motives, which may only overlap with the other characters' motives in that they're both trying to get into Castle Vileness and get something from it.
Armed with the players input, I then tweak the adventure to give them what they want.
You get to steer the players into your adventure, but they control their characters' motivations.

Why is this good for one-session games? Because we start the session at Castle Vileness, with everyone already knowing why they want to be there and what they have to do.

Building on short games

One-off adventures are the best start. When you've never GMed before, or if you don't GM very often (hint, hint), it's far less daunting to run a game for a few hours, than it is to think about how a game will last weeks of multiple sessions and need an interlocking story and game-world and so on.
A short story is far easier to write than a novel - and a novel is easier to write than a whole game multiverse.

The setting that I use for my games is actually the result of a couple of decades idle thought, and collaberation from the other GMs.
What I actually have written down is tiny compared to the time it's taken. I'm actually very lazy - it just looks like I've done loads of work.

I've been watching Star Trek's original series - and it's really clear that each episode is adding to a galaxy that was rather sketchy to start off with. Ideas change and mutate over the course of the first season - but it doesn't matter! Each episode is self-contained.

So if you feel the urge to make up a whole complex multiverse, then don't try to do that before you start playing - the short games will build that game world as you go along.

Making and breaking the game

This blog about free-to-play computer games got me thinking about the business of pen'n'paper RPGs.

Usually, with a role-playing game, you buy the rules, maybe some dice, and then you play. You need not ever buy another thing to continue playing that game forever.
When I joined the hobby, in the 80s, the rules of the most popular role-playing game explicitly told you how to make your own content, and repeatedly to you that the whole game was up to you.
They also provided some standard content, scenarios, campaign setting and so on - but that first instruction to invent my own material stuck, and I never bought into the whole "buy our published content" behaviour.

The trouble with that as a business is that your customers never need to come back.

Marketing "must-have" accessories

Commonly, major games manufacturers will look to sell accessories after the main rule set.
Here are some common ways to eek more money out of a game after the rule book:

• miniatures, branded to the game - several manufacturers have produced lines of minis that are modelled after the rule-book art. If the rules are written with an assumption that minis are going to be used (talking about distances and areas in terms of squares, for exmaple), then you encourage the purchase of your miniatures;
• adventure modules - in the 80s, it was common for publishers to churn out lots of adventures of varying quality, but individually, these aren't great moneyspinners. Of a group of players, only one needs to buy the adventure for all to play it (the GM). More common now is for adventures to be larger books, packed with new rules, new monsters, new spells and technology and so on;
• campaign settings - whole countries, continents, worlds, and planes of existence can be detailed in tomes, maps, and so on. Again, nowadays, these often come with their own new monsters, playable species, player classes and other material - partly to set them apart, but partly to pull the gamer in: if you don't have the setting book, then you can't play a Baal-n'groth Toothsome Axe Totem Barbarian Lord;
• new rulebooks - an honest and straight up new set of rules, often for a particular element of play that isn't covered by the core rule books, like sea-going adventures, or extraplanar sci-fi/fantasy heroics. The line between rule books and campaing settings can be blurry, but a campaign setting is usually specific to one setting, whereas a rule book will be more generic.

You'll see that three out of four of those are products that add rules and features to games. New rulebooks are the most obvious examples, but they all do it. Some game manufacturers even add new rules in with their minis...

A quick glance around the RPG forums of the world will tell you that picking and chosing from these many different rules within a game will allow you to make some extremely high powered characters and monsters and spell combinations. Often a cunning selection of powers allows the canny player to bring a legal character to the game that is far beyond the power levels of those made without access to the same rules. That Toothsome Axe-Totem Barbarian Lord that Jack has brought to the game is far better than the basic Barbarian that Jill wants to play.
When this is permitted in games, it clearly drives people to buy the source books for those powerful new rules. Jill is going to rush out to buy Secrets of Baal-N'Groth as soon as she's seen what Jack's Barbarian Lord can do.
The d20 rules published for Dungeons and Dragons are probably the clearest example, but you'll also find it in other games where there are many rule books for one core game.

Of course, the producers have to make money, otherwise they'd stop producing. We don't want our games' inventors to go bust - but it'd be nice if they kept a tight rein on new product.

Poor quality control as a design goal

Here's where I'm going to go out on a limb. I used to work in the toy industry, and I met many people who worked in the hobby industry - some of whom worked for major producers of RPGs and other hobby games.

In conversation with one senior manager of the marketing of such a major RPG producer - who I will not name as I believe they are still associated with the industry - I discussed the proliferation of new rules and broken combinations.
I worked in quality control, so I was railing against the fact that the quality control (checking that new rules were properly compatible with the old) appeared to be poor - hence all those threads on forums about "broken" combinations.
They pointed out that there was no attempt to control new rules as a whole - just some base guidelines on how to format the rules, and the core set of rules to use as a reference.
They told me that it was a deliberate ploy to make rules in which someone would spot an amazing exploitable hole, in order to sell the associated books.

Okay - that's not too controversial. System mastery is a part of some rule-heavy hobbies. For the reasons I outlined above, it's obvious that producers want us to buy new rule books - and power creep is one way to do that.
What my industry colleague told me next, though, was at the time, shocking.

Game producers like the one they worked for deliberately avoid tight quality control so that over time, with the introduction of ever more powerful combinations, the game becomes unplayable.

Once the game is clearly broken by the weight of new rules, a new edition is designed.

...And each time, the new edition will be swamped with new rules until it, in turn, breaks - and a new edition is required.

What to do?

As I've played over the years, and seen new editions of my favourite games appear and get surplanted, I've found out a few things.

I used to buy into new rules because I was happily plundering the most amazing things, looking for new exciting shiny spells and technology and characters.
Then I found that there was little need to do so - you can standardise the rules while supporting the variety of imagination: there's no need to have a rules difference between two kinds of sword or blaster pistol, anymore than there's a need to have a rules difference between men and women.
All those different types of elf don't need special rules - just notes on their different cultures. We don't need dozens of different goblinish monsters - just a few, and a bit of an imagination.

Of course, sometimes it's nice to see what a professional designer has done to make rules for a situation, culture, environment or whatever that you want to use in your game. Not all rules expansions are bad - and with sensible selection, almost any RPG supplement will contain something useful.

But as those first D&D rule books told me: it's your game!
You don't need to buy into this proliferation of brokenness. Make your own content, hack your own rules.

Cardio for endurance

If I run slowly and steadily, I can keep going for a long time. I don't break any records, but I get there.

On the other hand, if I don't also train to run short fast distances, my ability to run half-decent times over distance is gone.
I can plod it out, but it's little more than a half-hearted jog - no sense of achievement, no sense of effort. I feel like I might as well be walking.

After all the distance running I've done, my legs are fairly well toughened up to the point where they'll stand up to any distance - only starting to hurt when the sheer repetitive plodding of the distance have inflamed the joints. I only seem to need sporadic long distance runs - say once a week - to maintain this ability.

Over the holidays, I took a break. My cardio fitness has dropped off in that short time, and I'm finding myself slow and my chest tight. It's not good for me to run with a tight chest - if I force the air in and out of my lungs, I run the risk of popping one. (Everyone runs that risk, but asthma makes it worse.)

Also, the bane of lactic acid is inversely connected to the efficiency of your oxygen intake and circulation. If you can't get the oxygen into your muscles quickly, anaerobic action takes over and makes lactic acid. (As I've commented before, fuel is important too.) A good circulation also helps to take away the waste lactic acid.

So, my new regime for the time being - plenty of high intensity training, to get my heart and lungs back into shape.

The HIT that I've prescribed myself is 3 sets of 20 second blasts, either on the static bike, or boxing. I warm up with a minute of easy activity - slowly pedalling the bike, or slow punches on the heavy bag - then 20 seconds of the fastest action I can manage. On the bike, I stand up for that fast action, too (strengthening my knees in the process). Then a slow couple of minutes, before another 20 second bust, and again for the 3rd burst.
The whole HIT process takes just about ten minutes, and one hardly breaks a sweat in the cold.