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G(a)M(e) Theory: The Big Picture

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Although I am by no means an expert on GMing, I have noticed something rather interesting. New campaigns often start with a simple ansatz, such as a small collection of ideas such as an interesting character, a concept for a setting or a plot twist. It can be a daunting task to turn these ideas into a fully-fledged campaign and many GMs begin doing so by simply starting to work on their initial ideas. There is a particular pitfall (new) GMs, myself included, have a tendency to step into when doing this, which is to focus solely on their ansatz and further develop the ideas contained therein within, leaving the rest of the campaign untouched until the ansatz is polished to a mirror shine.
To make this more concrete, many beginning GMs – again, myself included – tend to obsess over the world map of their first campaign, naming every lake, forest and mountain, drawing neat boundaries and filling the map with settlements; all this before doing almost anything else. This approach can lead to a number of problems.

First and foremost, the ansatz is just that, a rudimentary approach to tackling the bigger task of creating an entire campaign. You might start out with something setting-related like a pantheon or the world map mentioned earlier, it might be just a number of interesting characters or even a particular scene.
Now these sound like reasonable things to spend time on developing, and they are; having a world map and a number of well thought-out characters will make your campaign come alive. However the campaign itself is much broader than these individual elements, and this limited set of ideas is only part of a larger whole. The pantheon and world map are only aides for conveying an interesting setting, the characters and scenes merely vessels for the story; that is to say, they are given context by the campaign rather than the other way around. A pantheon and world map don’t constitute a setting, a handful of characters or events aren’t a story. If you don’t have some basic understanding of the big picture – the story and setting –, working on individual elements of your ansatz in a vacuum will not (in any hurry) bring you closer to answering the fundamental question “What is this campaign about?”

Secondly, finalizing any particular element of a campaign before having begun to develop any others will likely be a massive waste of time and ideas. As the various elements of a campaign are all interrelated in some fashion it is important to be flexible, especially in the earlier stages of development. As your work progresses you will regularly come up with new ideas you’d like to tie into the rest of the campaign, decide you need to discard some older ones, and find new connections between two previously separate elements; the result you end up with often only vaguely resembles what your started out with. This is a good thing, as work progresses you will get a better feel for the campaign, allowing you to make more educated decisions and come up with better ideas.
However, in refining any single element of a campaign, you will have to make design choices that affect (restrict) your future possibilities, sometimes even pinning you down on certain decisions. If you start by polishing a limited set of facets you are bound to run into inconsistencies or incompatibilities further down the road – the pieces you’ve just polished will no longer fit into the big puzzle.
You can try to shape each subsequent piece of the puzzle to fit in with the previous ones, but this often leads to contrived situations. This essentially means forcibly ramming the square rod into the round hole: it will fit eventually, but the end result is likely to be broken and full of holes. Alternatively, you can pull the overdeveloped facet(s) back into early development, but this is a very hard and painful thing to do after all the love and attention it has (they have) been given.
To return to the world map example, you might have spent several hours meticulously planning out a kingdom’s every castle, city and village, and naming them all according to a consistent scheme, only to come to the realisation that your campaign needs to take a sharp turn, making most of this kingdom entirely irrelevant to the plot. You can try to force the kingdom to be relevant, which, if done wrong, leaves you with a gaping plot hole and, if done right, will feel artificial; or simply repurpose it as a backdrop that cost you a lot of time to make and which adds little to the campaign.

This pitfall unfortunately mostly occurs where it can do the most amount of damage, the early stages of development. It can be very easy to lock yourself into a set of decisions early on that leave very little room for naturally incorporating new ideas. The underlying cause, then, is not so much a lack of creativity, but rather that too much of it spent in the wrong places at the wrong time. The beginning GMs head is full of ideas that s/he is really excited about, but has only a sketchy ideas of how the entire thing will pan out. The GM enthusiastically start with the more concrete ideas – the ansatz – and just sort of wings it from there.
My advice would be to avoid the urge of adding detail, take a step back and think about the big picture, hoe will everything fit together? That is not to say there is anything wrong with beginning development on a campaign without having a fully-fledged concept in mind. In fact, it is a good practice to just muck around with a couple of ideas until you come up with something you think can work. What I’m getting at is that it’s very tempting to go from mucking about to being very, very specific with minute details and that in the early stages of development; instead of trying to deepen your understanding of the campaign, you should try to broaden it.
At the same time, keep in mind building a campaign should be a fun experience in and of itself and don’t beat yourself over the head for heading down a path might not lead anywhere in any hurry. I’ve enjoyed myself tremendously building elaborate spreadsheets detailing the economy of all the “Fide sed qui Vide” settlements, calculating wealth distributions, profession distributions and the amount of money the local lord collects in taxed every month; then rolled up a complete set of statistics for generic villagers of certain professions. This never actually came up during any game so far and has yet to serve a useful purpose, but I had a lot of fun doing it and only marginally slowed down the preparations for the campaign.

Essentially it comes down to a lack of appreciation or awareness of the structure and scope of the process. I’d like to devote the next post in the series to give my perspective on this. This is partly in hopes that it might be useful to someone else, in part to force myself to think about this and crystallize my thoughts into these posts. I’d like to repeat again that what I’m saying are my personal preferences; they seem to work for me and may not be applicable to everyone all the time. It isn’t necessary the best way to go about building a campaign and certainly the only way.

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SWB: Setting – The Neighbours, part 1

Saturday, December 10, 2011

A word of warning to anyone playing this campaign as a PLAYER:

Post on this Blog will contain spoilers, so read them at your own risk. Players using out-game information in the campaign will be subjected to HARSH AND UNFORGIVING PUNISHMENT.

This blog post is marked: Spoiler-free (nothing I wouldn’t tell you if asked)

Yikes… this is going to be a long one. Having briefly sketched the outlines of the Caliphate and the world surrounding the strait, I’m now going to zoom in and work on its immediate neighbourhood. This is the part the players are most likely to come into contact with directly (the journey layer, for those who have read my post on Campaign Layers) and, as I said, I want to have a very clearly developed notion of what this part of the world looks like. Since I haven’t come up with a particular plot yet, the size of this area is of course a bit arbitrary, but I’m got a lot of ideas that I’m tossing around in my head that I want to fit in somehow. The bigger I make this area, the more space I’ll have to work with in the plot stage of development; any part that ends up being largely irrelevant to the plot will at the very least still serve as a backdrop (the narrative layer, again for those who read my post on Campaign Layers). However if I make this area too large it’ll take forever before I can actually run the campaign – which I’m hoping I can do at least by next summer. Still, I think it best to err a bit on the large side, so this topic might well become a two- or three-parter.

Changing Things Around

I’m starting out with the rough draft of previous post. Its defining features are a simple strait from east to west with a landmass north and south. The Caliphate occupies a large portion of the northern coast and has control over the strait.

Third map

From the previous post... still kind of boring

Right away I feel there need to be some changes. The strait as it is now is essentially a linear and boring rectangular body of water; like on a river, the only directions to sail in are east and west. This doesn’t give room for a lot of interesting things I believe, so I decide to try to change things around. I doodle a bit until I come up with a design that piques my interest. I’ve narrowed the strait at its entrances and given in a bulge in the centre, it is now a lot more open and there more room for me to put points of interest.

Fourth map

Now we're talking

At this point it might be more accurate to refer to the entrances as straits and the central body of water as an inner sea. I decide to roll with this as the next idea comes to mind.

The Inner Sea

With the original theme of piracy in mind, I want to alter the above map to make room for such practices. A defining geographical feature of piracy in the Americas, particularly the West Indies (or Caribbean Sea if you like), was the presence of some 7000 islands criminals would use as hiding places, staging posts etcetera. The notion of a large amount of islands greatly appeals to me, so I decide to plant a pocket version of the Caribbean Isles right in the middle of the inner sea: the One-Thousand-And-One-Islands as a tongue-in-cheek way of referring to the literary work.

Fifth Map

I really like the islands.

I like the idea that the One-Thousand-And-One-Island (I’m going to get tired of writing that out real soon) belongs to the Caliphate historically, but that only a handful of the larger isles are directly governed. Doing so with all 1001 would be an immense task logistically and bureaucratically, a task the caliph does not deem worth the expenses and manpower. So the Caliphate is content to leave the majority of the islands alone and turn its attention elsewhere.

Some of the island states became vassals of the Caliphate. They are under the protection of the caliph and are of course granted several mercantile leniencies – inhabitant of these isles are recognised as citizens of the Caliphate and are thus not subjected to any of the tolls or tariffs that foreigners are. However, in return, they pay a rather hefty tribute annually.
Others remain sovereign states that enjoy none of the above benefits and are still required to acknowledge the Caliphate’s de facto dominion over the inner sea; but they are otherwise independent states that only pay lip service to the caliph.

These One-Thousand-And-One-Islands belong to the Caliphate historically speaking, but only a handful of the larger isles are directly governed. Governing all 1001 would be an immense task logistically and bureaucratically, a task that is not worth the expenses and manpower. Therefore the Caliphate is content to leave the majority of the islands alone, preferring to turn its attention elsewhere. Some of the island states became vassals under the protection of the Caliphate and are granted several mercantile leniencies at the cost of a hefty yearly tax. Others remain sovereign states that enjoy none of the above benefits and are still required to acknowledge the Caliphate’s de facto dominion over the inner sea; but they are otherwise independent states that only pay lip service to the caliph.

Sixth Map

Green indicates vassal states, Yellow sovereign states

While the vassal islands are mostly similar to the Caliphate, the independent islands essentially belong to everyone and nobody; it is a place where every city is its own kingdom and men make their own laws. Lineage is mostly irrelevant: anyone with sufficient money or weapons at his disposal can become a king. Ships are as important in these waters as land, as the isles are dependant on trade for their survival. This dependence puts a lot of power into the hands of ship captains, who exploit this vulnerability to their own benefit. An appropriate name for the inner sea comes to mind: The Sea of Kings, for it is said that every man that captains a ship in these waters lives like a king.

These states are a mixing pot of folk from different cultures, ethnicities and origins. I imagine these islands are populated by all kinds of people: Simple native fishermen that make their living off the sea; slaves from all over the world employed as dockworkers, artisans or plantation workers; merchant kings that abandoned the Caliphate in search for more lucrative practices; exiled noblemen with a desire to found a dynasty; stranded travellers from the west or east unable to pay for a passage home; outlaws and fugitive hoping to escape the long arm of the law and start a new life; deserted westerling captains that offer their services as mercenaries; raiders from the south that pillage the coastline for plunder; and slavers that come to capture or sell their wares.

This colourful bunch should make the Sea of Kings an interesting place. It is by design a very versatile and malleable place that can play a role in almost any story at any point in time. There are enough people with interests in the region and an agenda of their own for conflicts to arise; and there are enough reasons for people – both PCs NPCs – to be on one of the isles. In fact, I think I could think of two or three ideas off the top of my head for story arcs or even entire campaigns that might take place among the One-Thousand-And-One-Islands.

The Westerlings

Remember when I told you other nations are jealous of the Caliphate’s ability to control and tax the trade flowing through its waters? In the last centuries, the ‘Europeans’ west of the Sea of Kings – referred to as Westerlings in the Caliphate – have been encroaching on the Caliphate’s territory. Slowly but surely these westerlings have crawled closer to the Caliphate’s borders, settling on coastal area and islands just west of the Sea of Kings. Many westerling traders use these islands as stepping stones where they resupply their food stocks to avoid the higher prices on provisions in the Caliphate. Bolder folk have even come to several of the westernmost of the One-Thousand-And-One Isles and the coast of the Sea of Kings. They smuggle goods overland to dodge the tolls the Caliphate levies on laden ships, and prefer to deal with potential pirates in a violent manner.

Once every so often the Caliphate deploys parts of its forces to drive these interlopers from what the state considers its territory. In the past century these scourges have been a precedent – yet not the sole reason – for at least two major westerling incursions from south-European cultures (Spanish and Italian). Such attempts have all ultimately failed one way or another, but these wars have left their mark on the Sea of Kings. When the Spanish and Italians lost their fleets, the westerlings in the Sea of Kings were abandoned. Two generations later these people, while still of the same ethnicity and culture, have cut off their ties to the homeland and founded their own sovereign states. Many westerling captains deserted from their service and vanished among the One-Thousand-And-One Isles. Several such captains now rule over an isle, offer their services as mercenaries or crowned themselves king – a euphemism for turning pirate.

Seventh map

Green indicates vassal states, Yellow sovereign states, Orange westerling states.

I feel I should point out here, for the sake of clarity, that these ‘westerlings’ are West-Europeans with a level of technology somewhere in the early years of the Age of Discovery – think 1500-1600. This is mainly because it is an interesting period in history for naval warfare, where European powers competed with each other for control over trading routes. However, many of the ideas and methods used in this period of time (navigation, for one) were brought to the West from the Middle-East during the crusaders several hundred years earlier. So what implications does this have for my setting? Does the Caliphate have a similar technology level? If not, where did the westerlings get their technology from and why didn’t they crush the Caliphate with their superior arms during their incursions? I will come back to the subject of technology some time in the future in greater detail than I will here, but the gist of the story is as follows.

A Note on Technology

Many of the technological advancements the crusaders brought from the Middle-East originally came from China through the Silk Road. This is the same trade route that made Arabia wealthy through trade and the same route I am mimicking in my campaign. I am rather reluctant to tamper with this part of history, so for gunpowder to be available in the west it has to have passed through the Sea of Kings. At the same time, however, I still want the Caliphate to feel roughly 10th century-ish, which doesn’t really leave room for lots of firearms. I had said earlier in my initial brainstorm post that I’m going to make the campaign relatively high-magic, which is exactly how I’m going to accomplish this.

I want the Caliphate to have a well-established and relatively successful magical tradition. This means that an otherwise cumbersome siege weapon that would slow down the speed of an army is replaced with a magus of some power. These magi know how to tear down walls with their magicks, create sand storms to buffet an enemy army and shield their own warriors from enemy fire. In terms of seafaring, I like to think that the Caliphate’s ships tend to avoid conflict if possible: a capable magus can summon favourable winds to hasten some ships and slow down others, or create a thick mist that shrouds the movements a fleet to the eyes of an enemy. If it does come down to a fight, this magus could ward friendly ships from (cannon) fire and conjure up large waves, fireballs or sea monsters to sink enemy ships.

In line with the scientific discoveries during the Islamic Golden Age, the Caliphate considers magic as highly academic. Traditionally, rulers or high-ranking government officials worth their salt in Arabia have been scholars of some kind, and I like to think that a prerequisite for such ranks in the Caliphate is to have some degree of magical ability and/or knowledge. So now I’ve got a magically-adept elite within the realm that commands the majority of the trained warriors, which means that their military power over the normal – non-spellcasting, non-warrior – populace is considerate. The acquisition and widespread use of firearms would balance the scales significantly and allow relatively untrained, but firearm-equipped, peasants to hold their own against their rulers. It is therefore in the best interest of the ruling elite to prevent firearms from becoming widely available.

I also like the idea that firearms have never entered the cultural identity of the Caliphate as much as they have in, say, contemporary America. The Caliphate has a strong martial tradition alongside its magical, and folk legends of great warriors always portray them as master archers or master swordsmen, rather than gunslingers. Martial ability is considered a virtue and exceptional displays of skill are widely admired. By contrast the gun (like the crossbow in Europe) is looked down upon as a weapon, requiring little skill to wield effectively and, with the ability to easily kill an armoured man from a distance, its use is considered to be dishonourable. This rhymes pretty well with Japanese views to as late as the Sengoku Jidai (ca. 15th – 17th century) and I like to think that this particular piece of culture was introduced from the Far East.

The surrounding nations have less successful magical traditions and lack the resources and know-how to develop and produce gunpowder-based weaponry on a large scale. On what instances soldiers or ships are deployed bearing such arms, these do not present a real threat to the Caliphate’s well-trained warriors and the magi that support them. As such, there was also never really a need for the Caliphate to develop gunpowder weapons of its own; and its military successfully continues using relatively outdated weaponry and tactics.

This is my explanation for the spread of gunpowder weapons to the west without their widespread adaptation in the Sea of Kings.  For the better part of the past (two) century(ies), the Caliphate’s military technology has been at a standstill, but has been improving on account of their magical progression; This has allowed the caliph to hold his own, most of the time, against the westerlings.

While this is not the end of this subject and I’ve yet to cover the specifics of these invasions and how technologies reached the west, I’m already well over 2000 words in this post. Since the topic ties directly into details of the westerling incursions and the founding of another sovereign state in the Sea of Kings, I’ll postpone the remainder of the discussion to the next post.

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SWB: Setting – Sketching

Friday, December 9, 2011

A word of warning to anyone playing this campaign as a PLAYER:

Post on this Blog will contain spoilers, so read them at your own risk. Players using out-game information in the campaign will be subjected to HARSH AND UNFORGIVING PUNISHMENT.

This blog post is marked: Spoiler-free (nothing I wouldn’t tell you if asked)

Concepts drifting in the void are meaningless to me unless I can put them into context, so I always need to know where things are in relation to one another before I can wrap my head around anything else. This is why it’s a personal preference of mine to start out with the setting since this defines such relations in a very tangible manner. This also allows me to set the tone of the campaign before I’ve actually started doing any prep work on sessions, and while working on the setting I tend to naturally come across possible conflicts for the plot – after all the setting describes many things worth having a conflict over.

Starting Anywhere

I begin by really just starting anywhere and literally drawing the rough outlines of the world, making things up as I go along. Remember, this should be a very fluid phase in development; I’m not looking to set things in stone, but I’m just trying to get a feel for the pieces I can play around with, and trying to come up with as much ideas as possible without fleshing them out or getting too attached to them. Now to get anywhere I will need to make a few design decisions, but I’ll try to make these as broad as I can.

My development started very concretely with a sketch I made while waiting my turn in the waiting room of my general practitioner. Since I wanted seafaring to play a role of some significance, I thought I had best shape the world to accommodate this. What easier way to do this than to situate the general area of the campaign around some important naval trading route? So I drew a northern coastline and a dotted line representing this route. To improve on this relatively boring idea, I added an island south of the coast, which turns the trading route into straits representing a short-cut for ships passing between east and west.

First map

Rather boring, isn't it?

Second map

A little better.

Three opportunities immediately struck me:

  • As a nexus of trade this strait is a target-rich environment for piracy, which gives me a legitimate reason for there to be pirates in this area. Of course, the strait must be safe enough for merchants to consider this route instead of the long way around; so I’ll need to balance this by imposing some measure of security in the strait or making the alternative similarly dangerous.
  • Since settlements tend to spring up and thrive along trading routes, I can imagine some kind of nation having emerged in this strait and grown wealthy because of the sheer amount of merchants passing through the area.  Perhaps this nation – preserving trade being in its best interests – can serve as some kind of counterweight to the pirates. However, I don’t want this crackdown to totally eliminate piracy in the region to keep things interesting.
  • If anyone were to gain full control of the strait, they could determine who would be allowed to pass though and who would no. Fees might be levied on travellers pass through, which would bring in a hefty amount of money. This makes control of the strait of strategic and economic importance, not to mention a point of great contention. I sense possibilities for political conflict here.

At this point I felt like I might just have my cake and eat it, so I decided to go ahead and try to grab all of these three opportunities. I had already given myself the liberty of cherry-picking interesting bits and pieces from history and throwing them on a world map, so that is exactly what I’m going to do. I had already done some research on the history of the Middle-East (by which I mean, read Wikipedia and clicked the links cited at the bottom) and had run across the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Abbasid Caliphate

The Abbasid Caliphate represents one of the high points of Middle-Eastern history. Its existence stretched form halfway through the 8th century to the 13th century, and at its largest spanned from Spain and Morocco, across the North-African coastline and some parts of Italy and Greece, over to the Arabian Peninsula and half of Anatolia, all the way to Iran on its eastern border. Under Harun Al-Rashid (Harun the Just), Baghdad became an intellectual centre for culture, science and commerce. This period of blossoming is often referred to as the Islamic Golden Age. During this age, great advances were made in (among others) architecture, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, navigation, optics, philosophy; the list just goes on and on. Knowledge came from different cultures and religions all over the world and a huge contributing factor to this was the caliphate’s location in between two main branches of the Silk Route. I believe this makes the Abbasid Caliphate an excellent candidate for the nation mentioned in the second bullet point above.

Sinbad

Sinbad

Ali Baba

Ali Baba

On top of that, the Abbasid Caliphate is the ‘Arabia’ westerners are familiar with from fiction. Stories such as Sinbad the Sailor are explicitly set in this period, as are many tales form the One-Thousand-and-One-Nights (such as Ali Baba and Aladdin), a work that originates from this period. This makes the nation a familiar starting point for the players, which lets me ease them into the setting.

The setting as I envision it now is mostly restricted to the strait and has a large Arabic nation at its centre, which I’ll suggestively call The Caliphate until I manage to come up with a better name. The Caliphate uses its impressive fleet to stay in control the strait and enforces some degree of security from the pirates that prey on ships in the strait. Native vessels may use the straits freely (although an armed escort will cost them), but tolls are explicitly demanded of foreigners passing through the Caliphate’s waters. Extra tariffs are also levied on provisions sold to foreigners and on the goods foreigners sell in the Caliphate’s many bazaars, which fills the caliph’s coffers with riches.
To make things a bit more interesting, I decide to make the straits relatively long. I don’t want it to be like the Strait of Gibraltar, where it’s just a matter of sailing through the door; it should be a long journey to clear the straits, where pirates might strike at time if no patrolling ship is nearby.

The Rest of the World

If I now place the Caliphate on the northern shore and potential pirates on the southern, ironically what I’ve created is the Red sea a millennium ago if the Suez Canal already existed, where the trading route is the southern (naval) branch of the Silk Route and pirates prey on shipping in a way that is eerily reminiscent of contemporary Somali pirates.

Third map

Now it's getting interesting

I decide to just roll with it and keep the rest of the world consistent with the real Earth for familiarity’s sake: European cultures lies west of the straits, Eastern cultures east of the straits; I make the southern island slightly larger to accommodate Sub-Saharan Africa and put Anatolia, Eastern Europe and the steppes of Mongolia north of the Caliphate.

East India Companies and the Far East

While deciding this I ask myself who exactly would be passing through this strait to trade and, because of the historical parallel I’ve drawn, invariable end up thinking about the East India Companies – the first western organisations to organise trade with the Far East on a grand scale. Wouldn’t it just be awesome incorporate that? Apart from the possibility of crusades in the past, this would present a whole new spectrum of possible conflicts between Europeans and the Caliphate over control of the strait. Although by the Age of Sail European warships basically dominated the seas, I think I can find a believable way to make it happen.

As I ponder this possibility I wiki-walk myself over to this picture:

Zheng He vs Columbus

Zheng He's treasure ship alongside Columbus' Santa Maria

The little carrack in front is a scale model of the Santa Maria Columbus used to sail to America. The monster behind it is a so-called treasure ship commanded by Zheng He, a Chinese admiral, on exploration voyages. While its actual size is a point of contention among scholars, this picture and its story really spoke to my imagination and I want to see if I can work it into the setting.

Historically speaking the Far East had some maritime contact with the rest of the world through people like He, but their trading exploits were often limited and concentrated more locally. Countries like China (shortly after He) and Japan even went so far as to purposefully isolate themselves from the west due to a cultural disdain toward mercantilism and an aversion to ‘barbaric’ foreigners. However, as I have said in my brainstorm, I am not looking to build a historically correct setting; I am merely trying to build one that feels thematically correct and that is – perhaps more importantly – interesting to explore. Having Eastern cultures pass by the straits, being more accepting of strangers and actively participating in international trade I think can serve that purpose if I implement them correctly.

Wrapping Up

Right, I think this is a good point to stop for now. As it stands I’ve defined, in broad terms, the rest of the world outside of the straits and I feel I don’t need to put a lot more thought into that. As it pans out the strait will be the central… ‘thing’ of this campaign, whether or not it will actually play a role in whatever conflict is at the core of the plot. Therefore I think I should spend the majority of my time working on this strait and on how things outside of the strait interact with the strait. I’ve already planted the Caliphate as the central authority but there’s still a lot more work to do with regards to pirates and technology, and it would be boring to have just one political power inside the straits. But these will have to wait until later.

I like what I’ve got going for a couple of reasons.

  • First off, the Caliphate is a nexus where various cultures collide or pass alongside each other. The sight of foreign faces will be a common one (at least in coastal cities); this means that players can choose from a wide range of backgrounds – even foreign ones – and still blend in fairly well with the setting.
  • Secondly, the current construction allows for an age akin to the Islamic Golden Age to take place. With many strangers passing through its waters, the Caliphate will be exposed to the ideas and knowledge of other cultures. With trade bringing prosperity to the area and with sufficient open-mindedness, these lay the foundation for such a golden age.
  • Thirdly, the strategic location of the Caliphate is both a blessing and a curse. Obviously it brings in a lot of wealth, but others will be jealous of this. They may wish to wrest control of the straits from the caliph, but must stay on friendly terms with the caliph lest s/he deny them access to his/her waters. There is a lot of potential for both overt and covert international conflict solely because of this, which can only by fulled further by religious and cultural differences.

Up next: The Neighbours!

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SWB: Initial Brainstorm

Thursday, December 8, 2011

A word of warning to anyone playing this campaign as a PLAYER:

Post on this Blog will contain spoilers, so read them at your own risk. Players using out-game information in the campaign will be subjected to HARSH AND UNFORGIVING PUNISHMENT.

This blog post is marked: moderate spoiler content (mainly thematic spoilers)

Some time ago I was hit by the urge to develop a roleplaying campaign with a swashbuckler theme. I envisioned a Caribbean-esque region riddled with islands among which pirates, merchants, explorers, mercenaries and soldiers roamed. The high concept I toyed with was light-hearted: put the players in command of a fully crewed ship, draw them a map of the surrounding area, and give them rumours of hidden treasure A, B and C hidden on island X, Y, Z. I’d give the players freedom to do as they wish and after a game or two introduce the main narrative based on what they had done so far.

With any luck and a bit of encouragement, they’d engage in a bit of piracy, extortion, plundering, treasure hunting and the sort; with the environment being trope-heavy and reacting in a rather comical fashion. Treasure coves would contain several stereotypical traps (room that floods with sand if the treasure is taken, giant rolling boulder corridors) and features McGuffin-heavy puzzles reminiscent of PC adventure games; the crazy cat lady that sold them magical items would go on about a bunch of prophecies and was absolutely convinced that each player was a chosen one; and an old boot I’d trick the players into taking with them would turn out to be one of the six lost treasures of whathaveyou.

Also, after hearing tales of their success, a ship of thickly-accented wannabe pirates would attempt to board them an try to steal their TREASJARRGH; a hilariously clueless and incompetent commodore of the British East-India Company would track them down and repeatedly mistake them for some other group of pirates; I’d shipwreck them on a quintessential cannibal-infested island and, of course, the main bad guys of the story would turn out to be the fathers of the players taking turns captaining The Flying Dutchman, and each time the players encountered them, a newly rotated captain would loudly declare “I AM YOUR FATHER!” in the middle of a swordfight.

All this was to be set in a world where the magical is commonplace and where many of this world’s legends and superstitions are true. Dead people with unresolved business wander around as ghosts – I was going to give the players their own sarcastic ship-bound ghost –; weird sea creature such as giant sea turtles, massive whales and the Kraken are occasionally encountered; Fate and Luck are fundamental forces of the cosmos; and Karma really is a bitch.

However, there was a peculiar detail about the images I conjured up in my mind: it really wasn’t the Americas I was thinking of when I came up with this concept. I was imagining silk caravans rather than a silver fleet, travelling scholars rather than conquistadores, scimitars rather than sabres, janissaries rather than redcoats and Barbary corsairs rather than European buccaneers. In short, the setting I envisioned was an Arabic one, rather than the New World.

When I realised this, I felt I needed to push the campaign in a totally different direction: no more of the light-hearted silliness that I had originally intended – although I would like to revisit the concept for a 2- or 3-off campaign. With the Arabic setting comes the Arabic culture, which brings with itself a whole bunch of cultural concepts and societal values. Notions such as politeness, hospitality, family, honour, loyalty and piety encourage serious behaviour, which clashes tremendously with the concept described above.

In Arab society these values typically enforce a very strong group structure and create a sense of group identity, but they do so at the loss of individual freedoms and individual identity: a man without a family is not a man. This forms a stark contrast with the romanticized ideals of total freedom of pirate life that encourage a very egocentric outlook on life.

I feel I cannot simply ignore these differences without cheapening or somehow selling short the Arabic theme of the campaign. However, rather than fully discarding either idea, I think it might be possible to simply dispense with most of the tropes and silliness and merge the notion swashbuckling and seafaring with an Arabic setting. For this, I think exploring this contrast between individuality and group-centricity, between independence and mutual dependence is a promising theme for the campaign to take off on a more serious note.

 So, to keep all of this in mind, I’ve drawn up a lost of… well, targets… goals?

  • Create a narrative that explores balancing the interests of the collective versus that of the individual. On the one end, a society whose norms and values restrain individual freedoms in favour of the collective will tend to have stronger social cohesion and will be more tenacious in harsh times. On the other hand, blindly clinging to traditional values will halt progression and any complex system of such values lends itself to potential abuse.
    I intend to confront the players with requests to help others at no immediate benefit to themselves in honour of bonds of friendship and family. This is a two-edged sword to some modern minds: declining would lead to a loss of face and reputation, while accepting would require an investment of time and resources without gain; loyalty is not always a two-way street and the favour might not be returned. But this kind of thinking is missing the big picture. The purpose is not to score brownie points with others that can be cashed for favours; the underlying idea is that assisting each other helps support the collective. The payoff for supporting the collective comes not from those ‘indebted’ to one’s favours, but rather from everyone in the collective being willing to help you.
    I think I can come up with a couple of scenarios and I can sufficiently play around with what the players do to make for an interesting arch. Of course the world will respond to the players’ choices in these dilemmas. Returning to the ‘karma is a bitch’ note I mentioned earlier, I really like the idea that the players’ decisions significantly shape how they are perceived by others and will determine their potential allies (and enemies) in whatever conflict is to come.
  • In line with these considerations, I want to have a story that takes itself seriously and I’m doing away with the originally intended silliness. Exactly what the plot will involve is something I’ll figure out in the later stages of development, but the setting that I build needs to account for this.
  •  Want to present the Arabic setting in a compelling manner. This not only in terms of mechanical flavour, where players write scimitar on their sheet instead of longsword, but also present the Arabic way of life, its culture, history and mythologies through the setting. However, despite my Egyptian lineage, I actually know bugger all about Arabic culture beyond what I’ve picked up from the internet, RPG sourcebooks and visiting Egypt a couple of times.
    So rather than attempt to build a ‘historically correct’ Arabic setting, I’m aiming to build one that feels Arabic. In this, I think I’m just going to go ahead and simply cherry-pick interesting cultures of Middle-Eastern history and arrange them on a map. This will require me to do some work figuring out why technologically inferior cultures have not acquired knowledge or haven’t been conquered yet by more advanced cultures, but I’ll figure it out.
  •  I still want the campaign to be relatively high-magic. This is entirely in-line with the Arabic theme, as its mythology is riddled with the supernatural. I can also use this as part a way to justify having multiple cultures that are several thousand years apart historically – and therefore, technologically –, yet manage to coexist. It seems to be that a less advanced civilization is necessarily more magically able, which compensates for its technological deficiency.
  •  While religion – and specifically Islam – is basically the groundwork of the values of Arabic culture I feel rather uncomfortable with directly grafting this modern religion onto my campaign setting, mostly because I don’t actually know a great deal about it. Regardless, it is an issue I will have to address, but I don’t want religion to play a major role in the campaign’s central conflict.
  •  Last, but not least, I still want to retain travelling, seafaring, piracy and naval combat as major themes in the campaign. Again, exactly how this plays out is something I’ll devise in later stages of development, but I’m keeping this in the back of my mind as I go along.

Well, that’s it for now.

Up next: the setting.

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SWB: Campaign Introduction

Thursday, December 8, 2011

As an avid reader of the Twenty-Sided Blog run by fellow geek and roleplayer Shamus young, I’ve enjoyed myself tremendously with his D&D campaign series, which is the series that he started his blog with in the first place. It is essentially a record of a D&D campaign he ran way back in 2005, but written in a novelised fashion to make the story more engaging to read. If you are in any way interested in this kind of thing, I’d highly recommend you to read through it.

Reading about his and his players’ experiences inspired me to up my level of gamemastering and, in time, got me interested in sharing my own experiences. This brings me, in a sort of following in the master’s footsteps, kind of way to my reason for starting the Magichanics blog. I have two series in the works, of which the first is titled “Swashbuckling campaign” (SWB for short) for reasons that will become apparent later. The goal of this series is to document the entire lifespan of a campaign, development process to playing it and eventually finishing it, all the way from conception to the epilogue after the last session.

The format for the development process will take the form of a design journal, so to speak. I’ll write down the considerations I’m making and what I’m thinking about, but then intended to be read by anyone that is not me. If you are familiar with the Giant in the Playground website, I’ll essentially be copying Richard Burlew with his series on creating a world. For the campaign part I suspect it’ll look a lot like Shamus Young’s series: I’ll make audio recordings of the sessions and do a write-up after the fact where I turn the events into a story-like form, occasionally broken up by blocks of yellow out-of-game information or commentary.

Development gradually started in fall 2011 and I hope to start playing the campaign by summer 2012. The campaign itself will be run using the Pathfinder Roleplaying system, although I will add, remove and change rules at it suits the needs of the campaign. I’ve already got a few ideas in the back of my head for mechanics that I’d like to see, but I will address those when they actually become relevant. The rest – plot, characters, setting, etcetera – will be entirely custom-built.

I’m changing things around a bit from my traditional tabletop RPG upbringing in that I’m going to actively involve the players in the creation of the campaign. This is an idea I picked up from the Fear the Boot podcast (which you might also be interested in) and, seeing as I intend for the campaign to involve the PCs in a personal manner, seemed to fit pretty well with what I had in mind.

To start this off I’ve tasked the players with filling in a group template (courtesy of Fear the Boot) in order to create a group dynamic and figure out their goals, values, shared past, etcetera. This serve the purpose of avoiding the sometimes awkward first-session jitters and ensures that the players always have some common ground for their characters to fall back on should things get dicey internally. In drawing up this group template they’re giving me a lot of information on how to motivate both the group as a whole and the individual characters on a personal level.

At the same time, I’m hoping they’ll think of interesting character or story arcs they might be interested in experiencing, themes they may want to explore and so on. Even if they’re fine with giving me a carte-blanche to do as I please, I at the very least expect a number of long-term goals that the characters are personally interested in pursuing. Exactly what they give me will directly shape the plot and narrative of the campaign that I will design.

Ideally, we’ll start out with the players having some personal or shared goal in mind and with the agency to pursue it from the very beginning. Then as we go along I’ll introduce the central conflict and – hopefully – get the players interested in playing a role in this on a personal level. To make this work, I’ll start developing the campaign with the setting and try to keep everything fairly broad and inclusive, so as not to rule out potentially interesting ideas the players might have.

Now there are two more things I’d like to address, first of all a word to the players.

Post on this Blog will contain spoilers, so read them at your own risk. Players using out-game information in the campaign will be subjected to HARSH AND UNFORGIVING PUNISHMENT.

That said, I will mark individual posts with a tag at the top that details the spoiler level so you can distinguish between posts you might not want to read and those that are safe to read.

Lastly, a word to any reader that is not a player, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the stuff I come up with and please feel free to share your opinion or any suggestions. I hope you will enjoy yourself!

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