Talking about an Analogue Goblin-Tribe Simulator 2.5: Putting a Map on the Tribe-Sheet (pre-beta single-player version)

There was more meet on the menu in Part 2 than I did deliver: I totally hand-waved how the dice on the sheet also are the beginning of a map! Well, the main idea of posting about the process of building this game is to see which parts need more exploration. Alright, what information could be gathered from 4 dice lying on a piece of paper:

Random distribution, but, as of yet,
meaningless for the dungeon!

The numbers shown by the dice are already used to establish the tribe to some extent. To load them any more impact would be overdoing it, in my opinion. What might work, though, is using the numbers on the side of the dice for our purpose here. It is maybe an unusual choice, but I believe it has some merit. Let's see ...

1. Passages leading to the lair

One corner per die indicates a passage leading away from the lair, the numbers on the sides closing to that corner are the points a player might use to buy features of that passage:

So we have  4 passages with 4, 6, 8 and 11
points to distribute ...

Problem and solution

The only problem I'm aware of, so far, is that the dice may land in a way that makes it hard to decide which corners are pointing away from the lair. One solution might be to allow a player to move each die 2 cm in one cardinal direction until the result is satisfactory, or he decides arbitrarily which corners should lead (which would give him more flexibility in creating a final form).

What are those points for?

This is were I'm about to chicken out again. The basic idea here is to assign costs to several features a cave could and should have (it needs at least one exit to the surroundings, for instance). Yesterdays post gave some indications what exactly I had in mind with this. Beneficial features (like high ceilings with alcoves or very low ceilings, water might be interesting, too) will cost a lot, additional but not rudimentary features (intersections, holes in the ground) will have medium costs and the most basic features will be quite cheap (long passages with normal height, etc.). Here is an (for now) incomplete and unsorted list:

• An exit costs 1 point (needs to be bought at least once).
• 10 yards of passage (length) cost 1 point and is called a section (with a base height of 3 yards and a base width of 3 yards, if you chose 20 yards of passage, you have 2 sections ...).
• Manipulating height and width per section costs 2 points per yard .
• Alcoves cost 1 point each (better for the defense).
• Steep slopes (up or down) cost 1 point per yard (will influence the AC).
• Slopes (up or down) cost 1 point per 3 yards.
• Break slope (up or down) cost 1 point per yard (will influence AC).
• Boulders or stalagmites cost 1 point per section (will influence the AC).
• A branch-off costs 2 points (will get important for further exploration).
• Small body of water costs 2 points (will help with the Nosh).
• Medium body of water (fills half a section) costs 4 points (will help with the Nosh).
• Big body of water (blocks passage) costs 6 points (will help with Nosh, further exploration is somewhat difficult).
• Flowstones, bedding plain flake or fissures would be 1 point (will make mining easier later on?).
• Natural hole in the ground costs 4 points (makes for a good trap later on ...).
• Twists and turns cost 2 points per section (may be taken more than once per section, will influence visibility for defense).

That's it so far. Maybe it's a bit too much. I don't know. But with this it is more or less possible to make some useful decisions when distributing the points. In the end, every decision should influence something on the tribe-sheet one way or another (it's still a bit vague, but I believe it'll connect quite well to the rest) and should transfer quite easy into any role playing game.

2. The Lair

Measurements for this is in 10 foot cubes (for now, but either way, should translate easy enough between yards and feet). The number of Goblins a die indicates is the lowest possible number that needs to be spend on the cave, the sides not yet used will be added and used as the points available per cave (for room-size, features and connections):

The distribution would be: 10 (at least 5 for the room);
8 (at least 4 for the room); 6 (at least 4 for the room) and
6 points (at least 1 point needs to be spend for the room)

Distribution

This is all in 10 ft. cubes. One cube stands for a more or less even surface, but that doesn't mean that the whole surface of a cavern/room is flat! On the contrary, even without spending further points, these cubes may share the same room, but don't connect to one flat surface. Add features like above to it, and you'll have a unique complex of caverns:

• A cube costs 1 point and should be used to build connection between rooms (at least one cube needs to be spend to connect rooms) and to manipulate a rooms height or depth (one goblin per cube, so planning a little for the future might help).
• To manipulate connecting passages on a smaller scale, use the rules above (10 = 3 yards, costs two points per change).
• Alcoves cost 1 point each (better for the defense).
• Steep slopes (up or down) cost 1 point per yard (will influence the AC).
• Slopes (up or down) cost 1 point per 3 yards.
• Break slope (up or down) cost 1 point per yard (will influence AC).
• Boulders or stalagmites cost 1 point per section (will influence the AC).
• Flowstones, bedding plain flake or fissures would be 1 point (will make mining easier later on?).
• Natural hole in the ground costs 4 points (makes for a good trap later on ...).

This needs to be a bit more structured and streamlined to allow faster access, but so far it shows what direction this is going.

Final Thoughts and Preview

Next up is an example how a set-up could turn out (with the symbols needed to get the map started!). I just don't have that time today or the next 7 days (we'll go trekking for the next couple of days ...).

All in all I believe this is a lot of raw data taken from only one roll of 4D6. You get a complete tribe (including warriors, women, children and some weak) and a lair with some features, an exit and some passages to go deeper into a cavern. As it is, it could be used in every fantasy game with almost no preparation. That's where I wanted to end up for now.

Taking Spelunking Seriously since 2013

Ever since I went down into a real dungeon in the beginning of 2013 I'm trying to figure out how such a random chaos of tunnels, slopes and rooms might be expressed in a game of D&D. Basic geology, where do natural caverns develop and how, what entrances occur naturally, what vegetation, how much water, all that stuff. And it's a lot. Here are some of my findings:

• Here is a nice pdf that summarizes the topic in a way that's easy to access (it's teaching material).
• This is an interesting page about the various classifications of caves and caverns. 
• And here is even more information about the science called speleology.

But the most inspiring thing is a map drawn by somebody that actually went down into a huge underground cave. Check this out:

It's basically ready to be used in a game ... [source]

Ain't she a beauty? And it gives a fair impression of what spelunking is really about (heights and depths, slopes, areas to climb), adding a variety of features that would upgrade most rpg-material I know. This is how it's done, in my opinion.

What else to use in a game?

How to get into those caves and caverns is another interesting topic. If you got a classic solution cave (that means, it's a cave where chemical reactions dissolved whole streaks of soluble rocks ...). There are several ways possible to get into caves like this:

• Small fissures (might be big enough for a kobold, but the human fighter in full plate might get stuck ...).
• Wherever a spring erupts (lots of water, sure way to get an encounter).
• Cave-ins (might be an easy way in, but it might also require some climbing ...).
• Man-made (might be because of some mining, or just an extension of a fissure; will be well hidden, if still active).

And they are most of the time difficult to find and/or to reach.

Sentient creatures living at such places should have huge advantages: they know fragile passages and places to hide (there should be thousands of those), they know where a little diving could get you to safety and where it might lead to certain doom. 

Resources are really important for wild passages, I get that now. Use lights and climbing gear, have enough food with you. If you enter it's not guarantied that you come out again (at least not the same way) or how long it will take (camping in the Underdark should not be fun, either).

It might rain in  caverns and there might be floods at times. Huge bodies of water blocking the way are no uncommon thing. How to get across those is a whole new problem (and there might be predators in the water ...).

Sound will carry far in caverns and warn those living there about intruders.

Everything is much more complicated than one would like it to have. No tunnels 10 feet wide and ten feet high. Footing is a problem almost everywhere. It's also full of small tunnels and grottos on every height level: perfect for ambushes, almost impossible to map.

Magic and Monsters make this a much more crowded space and allow for much more complex environments (huge mushroom forests, unique predators and unique prey,etc.). But that's no new insight.

Anyway, I need to make underground expeditions way more more difficult to access and to navigate than I did before.

But enough for now. Next up are some ideas how to implement this into the Goblin-Tribe Simulator ... 

There are Square Meters on my Chart! (Sanctuaries and Believers Edition)

Did you know that a hexagon with a 10 km flat-to-flat distance covers a surface area of round about 866 square km? Yeah, it's an odd number. But on the other hand, if you were to take a number easier to the eye, you'd end up with strange numbers for the distances on the maps we use, right? But do we need distances on our D&D maps? Is there a, well, let's say pseudo-realistic approach worth using other then the plain old idea of using hex maps with a fixed distance of ... yeah, of what of exactly, to be honest? Flat-to-flat distance? Corner-to-corner distance? And what does that mean again? Where is it helpful? Where is the altitude? And how does it affect the distances on a map, for that matter?

What I'm trying to say is that I understand the appeal, but never understood the value of "old-school" maps. Frankly, in my opinion it's utter bullshit crap a relic.

Maps are lies!

Every cartographer will tell you this, maps never reflect reality. They might help you navigating an area, but often enough they'll just betray and mislead you. Nothing to do about that but to accept it, I guess. But what does it mean for the game? For our understanding of how it's to be played and presented? My answer to that would be that if a DM were to fully understand the system, if he is to make it his own, he'll (A) either ignore the discrepancies (which is a time-honoured tradition) or (B) he'll try to get to the bottom of this and develop his own system from scratch (which is a crazy huge amount of work ...).

Let's not ignore this and go for (B)?

Any solution to this problem would be, as anything in this game, an individual one. And it'd go far back into the early mechanics of the game: the war gaming roots. As so many other rules that just got copied and pasted from edition to edition of the game, the idea of moving pieces over a map (and all the baggage it brings forth, like movement rates and flat 2d dungeons or 5-foot-steps, you name it) is, in my opinion, one of the great annoyances of D&D that just can't die out, but instead spawns ever so many new ideas, expanding that nonsense.

To counter this one would have to go back even further and think about what a role playing game is and what it tries to accomplish. This is, of course, where it gets tricky. Arguably, what back in the day inspired the idea to have single characters instead of army units, was the desire to experience individual story lines. The game emerging from there on used as tools what ever was available, that's where the wargaming heritage gained some mileage.

I think one of the reasons why those rules still exist and keep on trucking is the false assumption that the illusion of accuracy - as far as measurements go - an essential part of a fair game is. Anyway, far more expedient would be to see what happens if those parts of the rules are dismissed that have their origin in the idea of anything related to rules regarding distances in D&D.

What the DM needs to know ...

Any role playing game lives from the information available to the players. Not the truth of that information or it's accuracy, but it's usability is what makes it spin a narrative at the table. Let's say the players want to travel north through a wilderness and ask for the way. A local ranger tells them the easiest way to go by using local landmarks and how much time they'd need in his experience to get there. As easy as that. The players won't need more information than that. If anything, more would only cloud their judgement.

The DM, on the other hand, should make sure that his data of a gaming world is as much as possible derived from actual game mechanics, not from arbitrary assumptions and decisions. He'll need some house rules for that ...

So why are there square meters in yesterdays post?!

Cutting a long story short, to be true to my assumptions and produce yesterdays chart (which, I now realize, needs to be updated, because I didn't get the numbers right ...) I'd have to make some rather unorthodox decisions. Or better yet, connect some old ideas I had since I started writing this here blog.

As far as those square meters are concerned, my main inspiration was a post I wrote about monster territory back in  May 2013. Mainly this chart:

So for the area of influence I'd go as per the above formulated rules and add all the radii in correspondence with all the levels associated with a specific shrine (the smallest shrine is level 1 (2 meter radius) and has a level 6 cleric caring for it (plus 60 meter radius), resulting in  the (now correct) 12.076 square meters (pi times (62 x 62)) or approximately the area of a Manhattan City Block according to The Measurement of Things or, taking a tenth of that before going for the area, 120 rooms in a dungeon environment.  Sounds about right. Right?

True believers

The next hurdle was to find a ratio for how many true believers should be expected for a cult. Main source of ideas for the result was a post I wrote about settlements back in July 2013. I decided to go for the sum of all the levels of clergy and shrine a cult had to offer as the number of D6* (D8) rolled (level 1 holy site (shrine) and a level 6 cleric means 7d6 true believers).

Sanctuaries

What is needed to get a temple build is a level 9 cleric and lots of gold (like in that other post about careers I wrote back in July 2013. And you'd have to start somewhere to build it, say, with a shrine. A shrine could become an altar, an altar might become a temple, which could become a cathedral with time and, given the gold to achieve this is paid, could end up becoming an extremely popular holy site (like Mecca). Some of those ideas started a few months back and I wrote about it here

All those ideas and assumptions together result in the following table (it also gives an impression where I aim to go with the 2d6 part of that idea ...):

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Sanctuaries and Believers

Level         XP     Status     # of d6* believers with 2 to 9 HD (or level)**
                                  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 ...
  1            0     Shrine       0
  2        2.000     Shrine       0
  3        4.000     Shrine       1
  4        8.000     Altar        2
  5       16.000     Altar        2   1
  6       30.000     Altar        2   2
  7       60.000     Altar        2   2   1
  8      120.000     Altar        3   2   2
  9      240.000     Temple       3   3   2   1
 10      360.000     Temple       3   3   3   2
 11      480.000     Temple       3   3   3   2   1
 12      600.000     Temple       4   4   3   2   1
 13      720.000     Temple       4   4   3   2   2
 14      840.000     Temple       4   4   4   3   2
 15      960.000     Temple       4   4   4   3   2   1
 16    1.080.000     Temple       5   5   4   3   2   2
 17    1.200.000     Temple       5   5   4   4   3   2
 18    1.320.000     Temple       5   5   4   4   3   2   1
 19    1.440.000     Temple       5   5   5   4   3   2   2
 20    1.560.000     Cathedral    5   5   5   4   4   3   2
 21    1.680.000     Cathedral    5   5   5   4   4   3   2   1 ...
 22    1.800.000     Cathedral    6   5   5   5   4   3   2   2 ...
 23    1.920.000     Cathedral    6   6   6   5   4   3   3   2 ...
 24    2.040.000     Cathedral    7   6   6   5   5   4   3   2 ...
 25    2.160.000     Cathedral    7   6   6   5   5   4   4   3 ...
 26    2.280.000     Cathedral    7   7   6   6   5   5   4   3 ...
 27    2.400.000     Cathedral    7   7   6   6   5   5   5   4 ...
 28    2.520.000     Cathedral    8   7   6   6   6   6   5   4 ...
 29    2.640.000     Cathedral    8   7   7   7   6   6   5   5 ...
 30    2.760.000     Holy Site    8   8   7   7   7   6   6   5 ...
 31    2.880.000                  8   8   7   7   7   7   6   6 ...
 32    3.000.000                  8   8   8   8   7   7   7   6 ...
 33    3.120.000                  9   9   8   8   8   7   7   7 ...
 34    3.240.000                  9   9   9   8   8   8   8   7 ...
 35    3.360.000                  9   9   9   9   9   8   8   8 ...
 36    3.480.000                 10   9   9   9   9   9   9   9 ...

*D6 for shrines, D8 for altars, d10 for temples, D12 for cathedrals and D20 for Holy Sites.
**Sum of all levels of a Church's active clergy plus the sites level as the number of dice, use a die according to the status of the site (as described above). Part of the result might be NPC with more HD than 1. The listing above shows how many of those higher level NPC are part of a faith and how they are distributed among that number (inspiration for this was the number of spells available per level for magic users ...).

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This should be enough for now.

So all the above needed to be done to produce yesterdays post. And then some. I'm still struggling with some of those ideas and I'm far from finished. But I hope I managed to gave those interested enough to read all this up to here a somewhat comprehensive and understandable impression of what I'm trying to do here and how I came to the decisions I made so far to get there.

I'll expand on those ideas as soon as I have the time to do so :)

Monster Territories (Proof of Concept)

How much space does a monster need to live from it's surroundings? What use is in knowing? I guess that depends on a DM's approach to the game. You might have a number of hexes with some features and a Random Encounter Table and that's all you need to know. And that's totally fine. What I need for an encounter to make it work, though, is enough subtext to avoid arbitrary decisions. Ideally, encountering something produces a believable background to explain it in the context. Or, to put it less abstract, if you encounter a dire bear, it's behaviour depends strongly on it's individual situation at that moment. The season, is it hungry or in it's territory, does it struggle with other predators in the area, etc.. If the encounter happens because of a Random Encounter roll, I'd be bound to forget taking those things into account. So in order to make it a deeper experience for my players, I need a different way of establishing encounters, without slowing down the process.

Something's in the area...

It still starts with the chance to encounter something. But as soon, as an encounter occurs, it does not mean the players stumble upon it. It just means the players get the chance to realize something is around. This kicks of a scenario and every additional roll should specify it further. An example:

• The group travels in a forest. The dice indicate a dire bear near them.
• Next I'd roll on the Random Encounter Status Table (download is here) to see what the bear is up to and if he is aware of the group.
• For the players I'd describe the area now, giving some hints what might be around. If the bear is in his territory, they might find some markings on a tree or something like that. If not, it could be some distant noises or a flock of surprised birds.
• If the bear is aware of them, he might engage them or avoid them depending on the result of the Status Table. 
• If he's not aware of them, Id go and use this idea to get some indications how possible it is to get noticed from that point on.
• If the goup travels cautious, they might be able to avoid the encounter entirely.
• If they gather informations, they might find out that the bear is around. A ranger (or someone with some knowledge about animals) might even find out what the bear is up to.
• And finally, if the groups meets the bear, I'd use this concept to describe the scene and go from there.

With all that I'm able to simulate the players surroundings almost without arbitrary decisions, giving the travel experience some depth in the process. But there is still something missing. Not necessarily for the players, but as a DM I'd like to have some consistency in an area. Like, for example, what happens to the areas power structure if the players decide the hide of that bear would make a nice trophy or is worth enough money to attack the bear. For that, the informations at hand could use some further exploration.

The bear is not alone, is he?

Every Random Encounter Table shows what lives in an area. But I'd go beyond that and assume that a Random Encounter Table states what coexists or even struggles for dominance in an area. This is mainly interesting, because it leaves more traces for the players to discover or informations to gather before they travel somewhere. Even if they are out to search a specific location, those territorial struggles/specifics might give indications if they are on the right track (so they could find out that some ruins are near a dire bears hunting grounds, for example).

A DM could invent those connections on the fly, but I'd like to see if it is possible to generate this kind of consistent content as random as possible without producing to many subsystems and just by interpreting the available data (that is: monster stats and area description).

It would help to have some numbers for the size of a monsters territory, I guess. Let's see:

HD indicate size of territory (this is a test...)

An easy solution (propably) to achieve this would be to correlate the size of the territory to a creatures HD, modifying it by size, speed, season and area. I'd propose something like this:

Maybe too much?

Again, those are just pregame assumptions to estimate the influence a creature or a group of creatures might have on an area. Let's take the Dire Bear in the example. It's a 12 HD large quadruped, so he'd consider a 9.000 m radius around his home base as his territory. This means his territory is round about 254.5 square kilometers, which equals the size of Honolulu* and that sounds about right for such a big creature.

I'd go and say the numbers indicate a maximum (if you'd want to go the extra mile, the actual size of a territory in a given season is 1d80+20 %). Just check out this study about tracked movement and territories of grizzly bears to see what I'm aiming for.

I need to give this a test drive. It sure got a bit more complex than I was aiming for. But it should be interesting to see what a (more or less) realistic approach like this would mean for a setting. But that's for another post.

Feedback would be very welcome, of course!


*The Measure of Things is an awesome site I discovered doing research for this post. It's "a search engine for finding comparative or relative measurements of physical quantities". Very usefull for a DM preparing a setting (or people with strange minds like mine...).

Dungeoncrawl Reality Check

A nearby town from where I live is reestablishing it's historic underground for tourism. I thought it's worth checking out and we were not disappointed. Taking pictures was not allowed inside the dungeon, but I'll share what I can.

A little history

The guide told us they can say that parts of the dungeon existed already 600 years ago. At that time it was a small trading town with a port and circa 4.000 inhabitants. It was used for storage, as a last defense or escape, as a meeting place and even as a place to live. The town is build an a slope and the soil is very suitable for tunneling. And tunneling they did. A lot. As of this writing they've rediscovered 600 rooms and they believe there are up to 600 rooms still to be rediscovered. They started doing so because this had happened:

It went 4 meters down from there on... [Photographer: Martin Kaemper]

More beer in dungeons and other interesting facts

All in all we saw about 600 meters and maybe 10 rooms of the underground, ranging from the 14th century up to as early as 1940. Here are a few of my observations and knowledge I could gather:

• They had pieces of slate incorporated into the ceiling, because they leave splinters on the floor as soon as they break. It's what you'd want to know when the earth moved and passage isn't save anymore. I thought that was clever...
• The temperature down there was somewhere between 15° and 17° Celsius and it's really damp, so it feels actually colder. Forget storing books or fabrics down there for a longer time.
• We were told there is something like underground weather. For instance you can tell it had rained on the surface, because the walls start to glisten as soon as the water gets down there.
• They stored all kinds of stuff in the dungeon, but mainly beer. That's because alcohol kills germs and it was healthier than drinking water.
• It was very easy to distinguish different tunneling phases alone by the materials used. Parts of the dungeon even got sealed between centuries just to get rid of waste. A dungeon is always changing if somebody is living in it.
• No even or straight passages. The ceilings in the tunnels never had the same height, with very low ceilings being the standard. Rooms, though, had always higher ceilings and came in a lot of different shapes.
• We were between 6 and 10 meters below the surface, at times with up to 4 tunnels over our heads.
• They had discovered very low tunnels (about 1 meter high) and one of the theories about that is, that they used those to send message dogs through.
• We had to wear building-site helmets and it was an interesting experience to see how that alone narrows the perception.
• Orientation and navigation were really difficult. There never was a clear line of sight, too. Mapping would take forever.

That's about it. We'll go there again, into a private part of the dungeon. 1.5 kilometers and for 2 hours. Maybe I'll be able to take pictures then. Two pictures I was allowed to take to give you but a small impression of it. They are from the tourist information and public:

It's a very small portion of the dungeon!

Sorry about the flashlight...

I'm really looking forward to see more of this enormous underground labyrinth. I'll keep you posted.

Wilderness Descriptions and Travel (now in 3D and Dolby Surround)

Making use of leftovers

While thinking about the 3d mapping method (see here for the basics and here for an example), I remembered this post over at Hill Cantons about wilderness descriptions in rpgs and how problematic they are. I think I got an idea how to give this a slightly different perspective.

It's all about the scenery

As a DM you might have something like this:

Part of a Mystara Map in the Rules Cyclopedia

It's all nice and dandy. For overland travel, give them a little bit about the weather and the scenery and it's working. But then a Random Encounter occurs and suddenly a DM might need something like this:

"Felsenmeer" in Germny (source)

Here it gets problematic. For me at least. It isn't that I'm not able to make something out of it, but, using words only, it will never be as complex as the picture above. Or random, at that. But to get a random encounter into position, just take the group as point of origin and roll the coordinates* with a die appropriate for the distance. Let me illustrate:

With knowing the height difference, direction and distance, a DM can now improvise the surroundings from there (even if it's only a reminder, it is also random and fast). Same goes for interesting features the group might discover.

Landmarks and travel

I should do a post about 3D hexmapping in the near future (I got a few ideas while thinking about this, but anyway). For now let's just say, if one changes the dice for the coordinates to 1d100 yards (or more), one could place nearly anything, hidden or visible, when the group is exploring an area.

They are in a very dense forest and might get lost? A DM could use the same method as described under Navigation in my last post, only with the characters moving, not the ground. So the DM rolls for the movement and the leading characters wilderness survival check (or whatever) modifies the result into the direction the characters want to travel.

Negative results (moving downhill or backwards)

Here are different solutions possible. One is to take only half the result for every negative y and z result, another one would be to treat them just as positive results. In realtime travel, negative results might, for instance, mean complications, like "The trail ahead looks difficult, you might have to reroute...".

For Mountains, add a fixed number to y and ignore negative results everytime you roll it (if the group is going up, of course). And everytime the maximum for y comes up, roll a die with a smaller scale to indicate they are travelling downhill for a short period.

Edit: I lied about the Dolby surround, you'll have to run around the table and improvise...

* x, y, z and the direction get a die. 1D8 for directions: 1 x, y, z = +; 2 x, y = +, z = -; 3 x, z = +, y = -; 4 y, z = +, x = -; 5 x, y, z = -; 6 x, y = -, z = +; 7 x, z = -, y = +; 4 y, z = -, x = +.