In the Works...

 In hopes that moving these from dream to text might get them closer to completion; also in hopes of feedback or inspiration for others:

The Urban Politics Game

For some time I’ve wanted to use my experience in urban politics and community organizing to do something with domain-level play.  I want something that feels more strategic and satisfying than the spreadsheet play typical of the genre.

Others have done good work in this direction; Kevin Crawford’s system does 80% of what I want (popularized in Stars Without Number, but see An Echo Resounding for the fantasy version).  I also appreciate how Matt Colville’s Strongholds & Followers does a great job of connecting domain play with everyday adventuring.  Umberwell and Marlinko offer the kind of cities I want to run.  I love the claims in Blades in the Dark, although I want to do very different things with them.  Gathox Vertical Slum gets an honorable mention.

My contribution would be twofold:  First, I have particular ideas about the ways institutions and people work together to build a political/criminal/etc. organization in urban settings.  Second, I would draw a lot of mechanics from board games.  Look at Kevin Crawford’s spreadsheets, then imagine each of these is represented by something tangible – a space on a board, or a card.  Each card would have different ways they could be acquired and used.  Each card would unlock both opportunities and dangers. 

For example, imagine securing a church as part of your organization.  You could use it for passive income.  You could focus on outreach, building community support.  The charismatic pastor might be given the task of negotiating a business deal or truce.  Or you might choose to develop the institution itself, foregoing immediate gains for future power.  The key is that the actions you can take are limited, so there will always be meaningful decisions with significant tradeoffs.

As you build your hand of cards (deck), there are a lot of fun mechanics that can get bolted on.

I did a first run at this in the form of a one-page dungeon.  It is structured around a rock-paper-scissors game between money, force, and faith (the latter including ideology, culture, etc.). 

The Pilgrim Game

The Pilgrim game is my next campaign, inspired by Pilgrim’s Progress, the Voyage of St. Brendan, and the like.  It’s an attempt to use pilgrimage as a structure, including the episodic challenges and boons you find in the genre.

Among other things, it’s an attempt to have religion present in a more interesting way than the patronal polytheism that dominates the genre.  Patronage to power-hungry masters is much of the structure of everyday life, and it’s somewhat tragic that fantasy games fail to imagine anything beyond that.  Real-world religions generally have staying power precisely when they break this mold.

It would draw on the fabulous work of Emmy Allen’s depthcrawls (Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library) and Ben Milton’s Labyrinth RPG, mixing procedurally generated situations with pre-generated characters, objects, and places.

I love the idea of a mysterious end, how in the Gardens of Ynn there is a specific secret that structures the whole environment, leading to both the end of the adventure and the start of whatever’s next; or how in the Ultraviolet Grasslands the final city works as lure and promise.  The final destination of the Pilgrimage would be the same – an open question (“Does it even exist?  How do we know we’re on the right track?”). 

Return to Goblin Manor

I am endlessly torn between wanting to just (finally) get this published and pull up all the carpet in hopes of something better.  I think it would work better as a nodecrawl, as a traditional dungeon map fails to capture the feeling of Gormenghast’s labyrinthine halls.  If you’re new to this blog, there’s a virtually complete version available for free.

Mapping Goblin Manor

Goblin Manor, my goblin bureaucracy adventure now has jaunty isometric maps!  If you haven't already, you can pick it up here.

When I initially envisioned Goblin Manor, it was going to be a pointcrawl through an endless palace, with procedurally generated encounters between major nodes.  For better or worse, I got seduced by a map of the Biltmore Manor, and that became the template for the first journey through.

When I decided to put the adventure out there, the goal was always some kind of isometric map; they convey tons of information and I have found them unaccountably captivating ever since Bil Keane's Family Circus and Martin Hanford's Where's Waldo.

Some of the more immediate inspiration/aspiration includes the maps from the Brambly Hedge series by Jill Barklem:

Luka Rejec's luscious maps (if you don't have his UVG yet, stop and fix that now):

and Jason Thompson's amazing module summaries:

The hardest decision was the scale, the temptation was to simply draw everything, and while there's a certain beauty there I would never finish (I lack Jonathan Newell's focus and work ethic).  Once I figured out the right level of detail things fell into place.  There was a lot of information to convey, so I settled on a scheme where any inhabitants were coded red, and the walls and floors were light grey.  This made things a lot more comprehensible, and made what's going on in each room a lot clearer.

I broke the larger maps into smaller, contextual maps that would allow you to have the information close at hand as you read the module.  In most cases each area is broken up into a two-page spread with a minimap, putting everything right in front of you as you read.  A lot of adventures focused on usability have adopted this strategy.

Just as an experiment I started coloring in one of the maps, and it became clear this could be a next step.  Here's me tinkering: