Let's talk Setting and Genre, Folks (Design Post)

Happy New Year! Thought I'd do a "year in review" post or some such nonesense. It's just, there didn't happen a lot here, and I sort-a-kind-a already did one of those in November 2018. No need to repeat myself when I'm already low on content here on the blog. Instead I thought I'd try and open the new year with one of my design posts. People seem to enjoy them well enough.

Distinctions matter when writing games!

You could say they matter everywhere, but that's not what I'm about. What I'm aiming at is more in the line of thinking that you can not build meaningful tools for your game if the areas that need designing aren't properly defined.

Let me get into this a little bit more. That games have different areas with varying demands for design is plain obvious, I think.  That a gamemaster will need different tools than a player might be among the first to come to mind. Non-player characters can't be as detailed as player characters (in most games anyway). Or (something I had to learn the hard way just the other day) information design is a completely different animal than game design (there is a difference between writing rules and writing rules, goddammit).

Great example how things can be the same and still very distinct ... [source]

The distinction between setting and genre, on the other hand, is not among the main concerns mst of the time, although its a crucial one from a design point of view, as setting and genre do very different things in a game and therefor need different tools if they are to be utilized properly.

It might be overlooked easily because we don't often see it as clear in other media as we do in role playing games and there isn't much need to distinguish them in other media to begin with. They are used as authors see fit, be it for books, movies or computer games (I'll have to go deeper into that further below).

However, since the emerging stories of our games are in part due to the decisions the players make, in part due to the random results a game's engine may produce and in yet another part what the gamemaster makes of all that (or how), it seems imminent that the tools we use to achieve a satisfying result need to be properly designed specifically for the areas they are used in. For that they need to be recognized and distinguished first.

Proper distinctions make a narrative more powerful!

I had a discussion about this very distinction with a player once when we tried to get on the same page about what to play next. Had I known back then what I know now, I could have made a strong(er) case ... well, let's have the argument first: the proposition had been to play Castle Falkenstein (classic steampunk setting and tropes) in an America how the game it envisions (the idea was to use Sixguns & Sorcery). Now, Castle Falkenstein (from all I could remember) wasn't heavy on the crunch or the players. You could get away with playing a proper Holmes or Tesla, the game wouldn't kill you off easily.

What the player envisioned when he heard that proper Wild West was on the table, he wanted it to be gritty and deadly, Sergio Leone-style. He'd accept steampunk as decoration, but what he couldn't understand was that a game like that came with certain restrictions, one of them being that it ain't The Proposition (Australian Western written by Nick Cave, who also did the music score, very much worth seeing). I said back then (rightly so) that the game is not able to carry that kind of action, I just couldn't explain properly why that is. All I knew was that he wanted to play a different game.

You can see right away: not a romanticized version of the past [source]

Here is the thing: the system needs to support the emergence of the narrative at least to some extent, because if it doesn't or - even worse - if it contradicts the expectations people bring to the table, they'll feel the game lacking although it might not be the game's fault to begin with. You can have a Superhero campaign that is gritty, you just shouldn't use Marvel Super Heroes for it. At least not RAW, a hack might be able to fix a problem like that ... most of the time.

There is a point, though, where you have to change a game so much, that it ends up being another game. And that is because games are written with a specific genre in mind regarding the resolution of conflict. Setting is merely the stage and the requisites (which would be the gamemasters material and tools).

Done right and used as intended, role playing designs should lead to a satisfying gaming experience. Trying to get this right is one of the main motivations for me (and others, I'm sure) to write (or hack) games. It's why we tinker.

Genre is the pattern you want to see emerge ...

Definition-time! If you search for a definition of "genre" you'll find it intermingled with "setting". Interchangeably so, even. That goes back to the original meaning of the word, which is "kind" or "sort". One could say genre is a collection of abstract terms accumulating to a specific pattern that is recognizable. You don't need all the pieces to recognize it, but enough to make it click.

We have certain expectations when consuming other media like movies or books. If a movie is labelled "romantic comedy", it's what we want to see and if someone were to die an explicit and grizzly death in that movie, it'd feel wrong. This can get a bit more complicated when genres get mixed and when done well, it'll enhance all genres equally (Wes Anderson movies are like that). Either way, genres follow very general patterns we know and recognize to a degree that allows us to communicate them. We also know how to play with them or what variations of them might look like. The setting of a story is part of that, of course.

If your game needs to evoke a certain genre, you basically need to dismantle those patterns and find ways to let your rules dissolve in patterns that resemble the genre you want to emulate. It also needs to create room for the players to enforce those patterns themselves (since they are participants and not merely spectators).

Covers are good examples for showing characters interacting with their environment [source]

Here is an example: in the dystopian game I'm working on is a rule that will get the character in trouble if their dice come up with an 9 and an 1, even if the roll is a success. The rule helps supporting the drama that comes with living under an oppressive force. It's a pattern people expect to encounter regularly and it emerges from the system (of the game, ha!).

It needs more than that, obviously, but establishing those rules from the core will help you getting there step by step. How easy or fast should player characters die? Is there something else at stake? Something that is valued more? Their status, maybe, or their sanity? How powerful are characters in the beginning and how powerful can they get? Or: what scope of development is needed?

All of that describes rules tat are formulated around the player interaction with their surroundings. How you answer the questions above will influence the gaming experience. If you take "genre" into consideration when doing so, you have a good chance that the game will evoke those tropes just by playing it. Players will recognize a genre by playing the game and should also have tools to evoke it themselves.

However, "setting" needs to be distinguished ...

As described above, you usually wouldn't need to distinguish setting and genre that hard when dealing with other media like books, movies or even computer games*. The simple reason for that is found in the fact, that no other medium involves all participants in the emerging narrative as much as role playing games do. Fueling a narrative is as much part of playing the game as exploring its contents is.

Another reason is that role playing games entirely resolve around communication and "theater of the mind", the rules being merely a tool to enforce certain outcomes in the narrative while introducing a certain amount of chance (actually the distinct element that makes it a medium to begin with, but that's neither here nor there). 

In that sense it is very useful to treat "setting" as something that is to be distinguished from "genre". Its emergence is not as much manipulated by the players as it is explored and interacted with. Setting is the stage and the requisites and the only participant able to manipulate that is the gamemaster**.

That is a big distinction, in my opinion. With their character players can do what they want, the restriction only being the social rules established at the table, the system that is used to play and the limitations of language (or the ability to use language ...). What they can't do is introduce elements to the setting that way. They can't just decide that they wield laser guns in a fantasy setting, for instance. That is something they could discover as a possibility and (learn to) use (like requisites).

Morrowind: a great example of a sandbox! [source]

The concept of seeing settings as "sandboxes with toys" is the purest form of that distinction, in my opinion. It still has the gamemaster as the one "building" the stage and requisites and it ideally still - which is more important in the argument I'm about to make - has the designer providing the tools for the "build".

So this is the biggest distinct element I can see here: from a designing-perspective, you need to create different mechanics for creating a world with all its moving parts and for interacting with it. The focus there is very different to creating the "game engine" itself (if connected).

Going full circle, and then some

This is something I realized when writing Lost Songs of the Nibelungs and Ø2\\‘3|| @2091: GMs need tools and those tools need to match the game just as much as the other rules do. It's just not (as much) about the narrative emerging during the game when it's played as it is about creating the world and the interactive elements it can represent mechanically***. There is a special difficulty to make that work well (is my impression so far).

However, that isn't all there is to it. Knowing all this might not only help a designer getting an impression how role playing games can be structured, it will also help gamemasters (those buying and using the rules, one should add) evaluating games they read or already know. The benefit being that it gives you one more (valid) criteria to judge if a game has what it needs to work at your specific table. Or (maybe a bit more important) what kind of work you are expected to add to it to make it work.

Anyway, I hope it does.

That's it for now. To close on a more personal note: I wish you all a productive and interesting and engaging and fulfilling year 2019. Stay awesome, keep it polite and game the hell out of it. I'll take care that the blog keeps it's (admittadly low) pulse and if I play my cards right, I might get a couple of things published this year as well (just not Lost Songs, but I hope to get it done conceptually this year, which would be huge as well). Fingers crossed!

Btw: know your tropes ... then break them [source]

* Computer games are still too limiting to allow free expression of the participant in the emerging narratives they offer. Interaction with the gaming world is way to restricted to allow an exchange as complex as role playing games do.

** There are, of course, rules that give players more narrative controll about those things. It is a meaningful variant, but still just a variant and most of the time the input created that way will adher to the genre everyone agreed upon, the only difference being that it is closer to the understanding of "genre" in other media.

*** Which is where it connects with the emerging narrative and helps forming it in play, although within the parameters and variables established in preparation or offered by the system as part of the rules (think Random Encounter Reaction Rules, for instance) and entirely handled by the gamemaster.

Talking to myself: Culture vs. the Sandbox (June 2014)

Still quite busy and the blog has to take a hit for it. But I'm not or out of ideas. Just busy. Anyway, I had an idea that might be a fun exercise, doesn't mean much work (I hope) and will result in something that requires a cup of coffee and a bit of muse: I'll re-examine a two year old post of mine and add what my thoughts are about it now. Maybe it even starts a discussion. We'll see. The basic premise:

"A lack of story in a game is always derived from a lack of culture represented in a sandbox/setting/gaming world ..."

I'll c/p the original content here and write my current thoughts about it in between, marked as [Today: ...]. This being a post from two years ago should mean that most of my current readers might not be aware of it or totally forgot about it. That's a plus, I think :) Well, here we go:

Yggdrasil 1: Classic interpretation [source]

I've tried, you know [Today: Still trying ...]

All those random shenanigans I've tried, the tables I used to create content with in the last few games, the random maps and names, all this left me feeling, well, unprepared at the table. A strange feeling for a DM indeed and most unwelcome, to say the least. Although I had everything I needed (as far as content goes), I struggled with an apparent defect of connection between what was generated randomly and the interpretation of that content during the game. In other words: as soon as I had rolled what the players were encountering next (a specific creature or event with a motivation and reaction to the characters, etc. ... you all know what is possible), I started to feel the urge to make a story out of it, the result being not random at all but, in the contrary, totally my design, so to say. Exactly what I had tried to avoid in the first place and not even with the luxury to have a developed story arc at hand, but with the need to pull it all out of my arse as I needed it.

Usually I have no problem with generating connections, interpretations and new content as I need it on the table, but this felt different. This Tyranny of Randomness forced me to think about the people present in a tavern and there motivations at any possible given moment the characters might be entering the locale. It asked for weather and day-to-day routines of peoples, current politics and their effect and all those little nooks and crannies that are really really needed (and in a huge amount, no less) to produce the necessary amount of information that could result in a satisfying variety of adventure hooks needed in a "true" sandbox to make it work.

Because, if you just use a shortcut and make a table with all the funny things you think possible in a specific sandbox, you might as well admit that all this is not random at all, but a random assortment of exactly all the things that could possibly happen. There is a difference.

[Today: Yeah, Tyranny of Randomness, here we go. Main reason for this being so intimidating at the time had been that the tools I used back then were not ideal for what I was doing. You see, the classic D&D game (I used a heavily modified D&D Rules Cyclopedia at the time) completely relied on the DM being somehow prepared or using an official product, so it never intended to produce a random chain of events and instead a random chain of turns ...]

Take for example rumors of a bear attacking wood cutters near a settlement. A good enough adventure hook, I think. But where is that bear coming from, why did he leave? A bigger predator claiming his territory, maybe? Why is he attacking people? Is it for a lack of other prey? What's with all that, then?

So you see, every event has a chain of relevant causalities (of connected events, if you will) leading to it. The results of these events (if you dare going as far as producing that much information, that is) might be random, but you have to start somewhere. And that place is so totally unimportant and insignificant for what happens at the table, with so much small and moving pieces in between, that it doesn't seem worth to even try to figure out where to start.

But if you were looking for where to start with those chains of events, cultures would be the way to go. It might seem counter-intuitive, especially with the example of the bear above, but stay with me. I'll get there.

[Today: Funny, right now I'd say you have to go with stories instead. That being said, I'd like to stress that the way we tell stories is indeed derived from culture. So the bonus content here would be that if you try to emulate a certain culture, you should learn how they told their stories and use that in your game ... But on with the text.]

Causality goes both ways ...

It's a good thing that causality can go both ways from an established point, if that point is well chosen. Constants and varieties are the base criteria for such an endeavor and that's exactly what the term culture enfolds. Following that link to Wikipedia will only help in realizing how big a topic culture can be, this is the variety. On the other hand it shows very well how all those cultural variety is labeled, so there are your constants. That all cultures are a product of their specific surroundings is where causality comes into play. If you have a social group of sentient apes living on a shore, you'll have some fishing and legends and rituals connected to the sea, stuff like that.

So this might be a point from where an interpretation of causality easily goes both ways. The characters encounter a settlement at a shore and a DM just knows there will be forms of cultural representation regarding that fact. Going the other way would mean, if the surroundings change for the settlement (say, they were forced to leave, for instance), they will take some of their cultural achievements with them (maybe some legends and stories and names remain in their songs, stuff like that) so that at a later point it can be recognized and traced back again, etc..

As far as creating content for a role playing game is concerned, this means basically:

Every point of entry in a campaign is legit. It's either created up to the point of entry, from that point onward or somewhere in between.

[Today: What I'm saying here is that you can start wherever you want to create random content, as long as you keep straight what's established as fact and what is just known by the characters. As long as the construct you are ending up with retains credibility, it'll hold in a campaign. That's causality derived from constants and variety ... ] 

Yggdrasil 2: Esoteric interpretation [source]

Perception of a world, the players view (an intermission).

This occurred to me some time ago and maybe it's worth a post of it's own, but for this argument I deem it important to have it at least mentioned as food for thought: the flow of information in a fantasy setting (or in every setting, if you think about it) prevents a complete and true understanding of the world surrounding a player character. All characters can know is interpretations and stories, distance being one main factor regarding the accuracy of the information gathered, culture being another one.

So even if you start a campaign with nothing but an idea for a starting area and tell the players tall stories about what the world around them is filled with, nothing of this needs to be true and might be challenged entirely in the next village. Even if a DM did do all the work to create a complete world, the only chance for the characters to know it with some kind of certainty should be by exploring it, because it's not about what's a world comprised of, but about how a culture interprets and communicates it.

So the "true" sandbox is not the world/map itself (the board, if you will) but the amount of interpretations (or stories!) of said world. And that is the amount of cultures in a setting.

[Today: This really should be a post of its own. And I really can't exaggerate this enough: Nothing we tell our players needs to be true. It just needs to be connected. As they explore their surroundings they'll update their knowledge with what they think is the truth and so on. It's the classic "No one goes into this forest, there are demons in there!" and then it's just some creative savages or a curse with a tragic story. Or both and the players just find one aspect. The relation between what is known and what the story says is happening just needs to be nourished constantly. Stuff like "You thought that it was dark magic, but it just had been ..." or "The elders had been wrong about that foreign land to the east and that sea they talked about had just been a giant lake after all ...". As long as you are able to establish meaning and connections, it'll keep credibility. We rely far to much on the maps we use as being true and base our games on them, but that's a very young idea in history and an illusion on its own.]

It's evolution, baby (Creating a Sandbox 101)!

Let's get back to that bear again. What we like to perceive as culture is more often than not a direct result of our natural heritage. Opposing thumbs, courtship display, all that stuff. This is, again, about capabilities resulting in behavior in accordance to its surroundings. To phrase it another way, it's easier to create a possible pattern of what a bear might do than it is to do the same for a human being, but ultimately it's the same basics. Evolution allowed for the development of cultures with the intelligent apes, for the bear not so much, which leaves him with what evolution is capable of.

This is where the relevant data is, this is where stories are developed. You'll need the lay of the land, that is true (and easy enough achieved with a degree of difficulty open to the top), but it'll mainly produce constants with almost no variety. So if that's done, you'll just have a board for all the parties involved to leave a mark on.

Layers and layers and layers of true randomness!

Next is where the DM decides how vanilla it gets. It is basically the decision how much culture a DM is willing to invent or how many memes and tropes he is willing to use.  It is a very broad spectrum, ranging from, say, the elves, dwarfs and hobbits how Tolkien described them to a complete new set of races, invented from scratch. Or a world having no moon, one moon or 5. But whatever is decided, I believe it is important for a DM to make the decision where to start consciously and up to a point where the number of former decisions, random or not, produce a pattern complex enough to carry a narrative.

This means layers and layers of decisions if he wants to have a sandbox-setting or a world-engine with a totally random, but traceable history. A huge task.

[Today: It actually makes me a bit happy to read this, as I really managed to build something like this two times since I wrote it. The first is a Random Territory Generator I use for Lost Songs of the Nibelungs, the second is a Mission Generator for The Grind ... both produce very specific results for the stories they want to tell, just as described above.]

Culture, memes and the story ...

Alright, let's connect some dots and get back to the thesis at hand. I think it's conclusive that it's almost irrelevant were to start with the randomness or what kind of map is used, as long as there's enough to work with (a few encounter and reaction tables and a map worth exploring, maybe). The available cultures, on the other hand, might be what really matters when a DM creates/prepares a setting, because it is what the players get confronted with as soon as they start creating characters and in the game it's their tool to interact with the world. And it is how stories emanate.

Memes can come in handy in this in as far as if, for example, a player has a more or less clear picture of  what a dwarf is, he can easily enough play one. Some familiarity with a setting can go a long way in helping the players getting some immersion. Another argument for using memes is that to recognize variety you need to know the source. So it helps when describing a set of random cultures if the source is still recognizable.

In the end, if you want to know what the people do and why they react the way they react, you need a fair idea of the cultural context surrounding the encounter to make a story about it. If the players live in a matriarchy, for example, all the roles they know might be reversed and if those roles are inspired by a medieval society, you'll have women knights courting men in fancy dresses and so on. So everything a DM establishes for a culture helps him telling the stories the characters encounter. The more work he puts in that, the better will be the stories he's going to tell.

[Today: There are two things happening here. For one, it's important that the decisions a player has in a game are informed by what the setting needs and by that it will enter the story. It's an idea I incorporated (for instance) into the character generation for Lost Songs of the Nibelungs and I can say with some confidence right now that it does indeed work. The second part is how cultures manifest in a setting and how that informs NPC decisions. I still need to do this and it had been the main reason to read this old post to begin with.]

Yggrasil 3: Marvel interpretation [source]

What next?

Those are the basics so far. Maybe it's able to start a discussion, exploring those ideas a bit further or even challenge them. Maybe not. Anyway, in future posts I'll further examine how a DM could utilize the idea of culture as a tool to carry the narrative of the game and I should give some examples, maybe a system how to randomly generate a culture. Right now I think it might be useful to have an index for a culture how obscure their idea of the world surrounding them is. Something like, the lower the index, the closer are those interpretations to reality ...

[Today: Well, I thought I'd agree less with something I wrote 2 years ago. What changed from then to now, though, is that I believe I found (almost) all the tools I need to make this work for me. The last piece in this puzzle, at least for LSotN, would be the Random Story Seed Generator I wrote about a few months ago. I'm right now working at an updated version (which will be posted soon, I hope), but it already works great as it is. I'm still missing a culture generator that'll help me bringing the Dark Ages to life in the game. And that's it. I hope you guys enjoyed this little re-post and maybe we get to start a discussion here or you'd like to share some of your ideas about randomness with us. Comments are, as always, very welcome.]

XP for Treasure (sneaking up on Level Advancement in Lost Songs of the Nibelungs)

Level Advancement for Lost Songs of the Nibelungs is a monster to write. Who would have thought (my guess? everyone knew, nobody told me). Anyway. I could go for big-ass monster post with thousand different ideas and directions (as I do by default more often than not, I'm afraid) or sneak up on that bastard to get double damage on the final delivery ... Yeah, let's try that last one and start with something related and harmless like "xp for treasure". It's also something that could easily be swapped for D&D (and friends), so that's good. Right?

XP for treasure doesn't work

For me at least. The very idea that gaining wealth is somehow connected to getting more experienced in life somehow sits wrong with me. I know, I know, it's about what you had to do to get that treasure. I get that. Same difference. For me it's more about how to spend it and that's how I did it in my D&D games. Characters got xp for carousing. And if that meant economies breaking down and people getting fat and decadent wherever characters decided to leave thousands and thousands of gold coins, so be it. That's part of the fun.

Well, it doesn't work that way for Lost Songs. Mostly because it's a somewhat historical setting and you can't always expect to find huge amounts of gold and get the opportunity to spend it all without travelling thousands of kilometers to the next metropolis (like Rome or Constantinople) beforehand. No, it really doesn't work that way. Sure, they party and all that, but it's a community thing.

Characters also got obligations to their tribe. Imagine, your parents and other families just like them, settled where they are right now just a few years ago. They sure could use all the valuables they can get their hands on. And there are gods to honor, don't forget that. Never forget that, actually. They could really get pissed. And finally there are those that helped your tribe getting where they are to begin with: the leaders and warriors (and the gods, of course, just to be sure ...).

This was not about spending or giving, this was about balance. You honor your guests to be honored when you are a guest. You honor your gods and leaders and families to get honored by them in return. So you don't bought that sword you got, you either received it as a gift or as battle trophy. It's a very different kind of thinking, but I believe a game like Lost Songs will benefit from such little details a great deal (same should be true for most fantasy games, actually).

Honoring your host for fun and profit 

Presents can be anything from pelts to war trophies from Monsters, simply gold and jewelry (but, you know, that stuff is not just laying around, it all got a history and what not), fancy weaponry, even hostages or exotic animals! A Good Will Save will determine how well those presents are received. It's just one Save, the group needs to decide who has to do that role, but the effect will be on all characters. So if the Save fails, the whole group looses some Wyrd. The gift is still accepted for it's value, but it will affect the course of their stay. A table about it might look like this (early test material):

Open in new tab for a closer look ...

The worth players invest in their tribe and the honor the tribe feels for receiving it will influence everything else that happens between quests. Players will at least get what they invested in Gold as xp and will be able to advance, but if the reception is poor, it might lead to ill will that will further damage the groups ability scores one way or another.

The idea here is to allow the blooming of a narrative for their stay at home, without it taking too much time. They arrive and honor the host (Good Will Save), Carousing (random table to decide if oracle dice get involved and/or opportunities arise) and advancement takes place.

After that the characters are back on the road, fully equipped for their new quest by their tribe ...

A final word on "oracle dice" and D&D-ifying

This is mentioned in passing on the document and right now it's nothing more than a loose concept. But I found it needs a random dynamic for the DM to use actively in the game (most of it is dealt with by active/passive player rolls). Oracle dice will be a random tool for the DM to see how the machinations of the world gear towards (or against) the characters. So with Tasks and Saves influencing characters on the player-side (changing Qualities and so on), there'll be a third roll doing very much the same on the DM-side of things. It'll even be possible to directly attack/threaten Qualities beyond what Saves already do ... But that's a post on it own.

If you use this system with D&D (and friends) you basically use the same procedures: one player offers the gift (roll appropriate Ability Score, like Wisdom or Charisma), keep everything regarding xp and change the effects to penalties or boni for reaction rolls. I'd use -4 after a critical fail, -2 with a normal fail, nothing for a success and a +2 for a critical success. Please let me know if you try this at home ...

The following weekend I'll post some more about Level Advancement and how to make a random character in Lost Songs. Also need to write a post about getting those xp :)

Final Fatal System Response - Lost Songs from the table 2 (still feat. Stonehell)

Two days in a row, eh? Sometimes I'm productive that way ... You can see right there what an optimistic person i am :-) Anyway, back to our last sessions of play testing Lost Songs of the Nibelungs with the Stonehell Dungeon Crawl! This series is called "fatal system response" for a reason: it's testing the game. We all agreed that the system is allowed to run amok to see where we end up and if it works as it should. There hadn't been much action in our first session, only atmosphere, encounter and reaction tables. But this is going to change as the group goes deeper into the dungeon (again, some minor level 1 spoilers ahead) ... I hope you brought some time, this is a long one (again).

This journey starts here.

Just not that deep, please

We are still in the first quarter of the first level of Stonehell. That encounter with the bandits I described in the first post actually happened at the very entrance. Kicking in doors is a noisy affair and those bandits tried to sneak up on the group as they were exploring some empty rooms nearby.

You'd have chosen that passage, too, right?
(Stonehell level 1, Ogreface passage) [source]

Here is an example how I handle these things: A Good Will save shows if the Gods are smiling unto the characters or not. Default difficulty is 20, making the save is good, not making it will have a negative result and reduce a character's Fate ability score (as it is a Fate save and every ability score has it's own save ...). So one player got a critical success, which means the bandits make themselves known. Result: the character gets some dust in his nose, sneezed and gets a "Bless you!" from a dark passage ...

You know the rest. So after the first empty set of rooms, the group decides to go north. I believe the passage with the best description will get the most traffic and this one even got a picture! First crossroads it's either left to a dragon (as some obscure sign in the middle of the crossroad says) straight ahead or turning right. Group decides to go right. First room: heaps of garbage and a hidden encounter (3 spitting cobras).

There's a good chance the encounter never happens, so there's a Good Will Save in order to find out if a character is unlucky. The ensuing fight is short and brutal for the snakes. As long as the players are careful and keep working together there's nothing on this level that is even remotely dangerous. They keep on keeping on ...

Lost Songs and the Dungeoncrawl (system update)

Stonehell kept being fun. Monster reaction rolls helped a lot to make this more about fighting than about killing. There had been, for instance, a curious kobold from a maintenance crew that stopped by to check out the group and one of the characters saw him (because of being at watch and actually paying attention ...). The reaction roll indicated friendly, so the kobold just waved a shy hello and went off again. I like stuff like that and the group kept building up on the initial encounter, accepting those kobolds as mostly harmless.

But the DM side of things is explained easy enough. How the game worked for the players and why the things that happened in the end had happened at all, needs some basic understanding of the mechanics I use in LSotN. What follows is a (very short!!) summary of the rules I use right now. So for the uninitiated (and those not remembering the specifics ...):

Core System

Think D&D, but: it's rare that characters fail at a task, but half of the time them making it means it came with a prize. The basic system of LSotN is quite easy. There are 6 ability scores (D&D, but: Muscle, Finesse, Grit, Wits, Nerve, Fate). Every ability score also has a save (Withstand, Reflexes, Stomach, Sanity, Stress, Good Will, values around 10, varies by level ...). There are now 2 types of tests, saves and ability checks (skill checks are basically ability checks with an additional bonus for the skill).

Saves are d20 + save value vs. 20 (standard) or 25 (hard). A success has the expected result. Failure will reduce the ability score for the difference needed to make the difficulty. The lower the ability scores are, the higher are penalties for everything else. I need to update the character sheets, for now it's resolved as "minus 1 for every ability score in the buffer, minus 2 for every a.s. in scarred and minus 4 for every a.s. in permanent, all cumulative". So a character with a particularly bad day with two ability scores in the buffer, one in scarred and one in permanent will have a minus 8 on all checks, saves and attacks.

Ability checks are d20 + ability score (+ skill, if available) vs. 20 (easy)/25 (normal)/30 (hard)/ 35 (really hard). Resolution is a bit different compared to the saves. For one, a player may decide that the character doesn't make it. If a check doesn't meet the difficulty, the DM asks the player if his character goes the extra mile to make it a success. If the player says no, the check is just failed. If he wants his character to succeed, he needs to spend Endurance to bridge the difference between result and difficulty (Endurance fronts Muscle, so if Endurance is "empty", Muscle is reduced instead).

As a final rule it is possible to reduce Fate instead of getting an ability score permanently damaged (so let's say you failed a Sanity check big time and your brain would get some permanent damage as a result, you might instead just reduce your Fate score by the amount of permanent damage the character would have received).

Ramifications

Other than being happy to be able to put the core system in no more than 4 short paragraphs, It's also quite interesting (to me, at least) how all that worked in a dungeon environment. In an ideal case all saves should be triggered at some point or another:

• Withstand is useful every time a character is subjected to some sort of force, like holding a door shut, for instance. Doesn't happen that often, BUT since Muscle is tested on a regular basis due to Endurance, that's actually a good thing.
• Reflex is really quite easy. Need to react fast because of something? Reflex is the way to go.
• Stomach goes well with all sorts of poisoning and disease, so that got some use (see below).
• Sanity was for the weird and magic stuff, so that's a no brainer (ba-da-tum).
• Stress is important in every stressful situation characters might encounter. Sneaking past some guard, balancing around a trap (or diffusing it), some irritating noise that won't stop, dungeon environment are ripe with stuff like that and I learned to love stress tests (see below)!
• Good Will finally helps you finding out how encounters react to a character or how lucky a character is in general. It, basically, tests the good will of the gods towards a character ...

This really worked quite well. It covers everything I think needs testing and grinds characters down slowly and simply by what they are experiencing and how they handle it. Stress really became a big thing for some characters, as it accumulated to at least two characters being nervous wracks at the end of one day (a good night's sleep would have cured most of it, though).

Checks also work fast and cover the complete range of actions a game needs. The simple tweak that it's not about "making it" but instead about "are you willing to pay to make it?" managed to speed up the game considerably. The characters want to kick in a door? Roll d20 plus muscle vs. difficulty for the door. If the result doesn't meet the difficulty, the player may decide to spend Endurance to make it and the door is open. Teamwork would reduce the difficulty one stage per character (but never lower than 20). Done. If the characters want a door open, it should be open. But there's lots of room for shenanigans (accidents do happen).

And as the characters progress through the dungeon and loose ability points, it gives lots of narrative room to raise the tension (like with stressed out characters, as described above, or by threatening their sanity and so on). Since all of it affects every character individually, it gets quite colorful. Characters get nervous, exhausted, sick, crazy, slow or loose the gods favor (you know those days where nothing seems to work? low fate score, I'd say ...). And if they are not careful, it's leave permanent marks or keeps keeps affected for several days. It's direct, it produces the right narrative, it's where I wanted this to end up. A DM gets quite the complex pattern to play with The rest is examples ...

Exploration turns Survival Horror

Lost Songs heavily relies on (human) resource management and team work. Players taking care of business will find the system supporting them. Every action, on the other hand, that'd be considered "bad behavior" at the table anyway (or just ill advised) will have a system response opposing the players*.

All right. Here's what happened. People had good rolls and bad rolls. On some characters stress started to show others had their Fate reduced and Endurance became rare all over the place. As one would expect after exploring as much as they did (about an 8th of the entire first level). So the characters needed some rest and soon decided for a small room with an intact door and a giant face on one wall.

A good night of sleep would mean at least 8 hours sleep per character (healing buffer damage), but real healing (scar level damage) would need 24 hours. So went for the eight hours as a start and assigned night guards. That night really wasn't quite. One encounter roll triggered after another. Mostly it just resulted in noises of creatures talking and passing the door. One time a group of kobolds encountered a group of orcs and a loud argument started. But the room the characters had been hiding in kept being unaffected, their door block untested.

Until I rolled those orcs again and they ended up testing the door and finding it closed. I gave it a reaction roll to see if they'd leave it or if they went for forcing it open and finding out what's behind it. The roll indicated aggression.

By that time the character keeping guard already started waking the others as quite as he could. Two of the waking characters already had low Nerves because of the stressful day they've had. Now they are shook out of their deserved sleep into a completely dark room and both still a bit groggy when the first orc shoulder meets the door with a loud BAM! Of course they need to make a stress save. One fails and squeals in terror as her nerves are very much shot by now ...

Without light and the doors closed the wizard got no target for his sleep spell (it has to have some limits, at least). Ramming the door didn't have the right result and the orcs are eager now to enter, so they start hacking the door down with an ax ...

My first thought ... [source]

Half the group didn't know Kubrick's Shining, btw. Didn't know what to say to that, either. But I showed them the relevant theme to get them into the right mood :-)

The fight was a bit hectic, but short and noisy. Also triggered the next random encounter: 3 giant centipedes! Those beasties are more or less harmless and easy enough to kill (unless you got bitten, of course). But they are no threat anyway, as they just go for some orc corpses and that's that. Until some of the players decide to disturb them for loot and those centipedes react really pissed (again: monster reaction roll).

Fatal System Response (finally ..)

It's the second time they encounter those and while the first time had just been squishing some bugs, they ended up with two poisoned characters this time. Staying back in the dungeon is not an option anymore, as the centipede's poison leaves a character useless for a couple of days. So out they go. Here's where they made their first big mistake: they didn't leave the canyon in front of the entrance to Stonehell, but went for the one ruin they'd explored on their way in.

There'd been half the roof, a strange statue and half the walls had been down or on their way there. The weather roll came up with heavy rain** and it was really not comfortable in that ruin. Failed stomach saves kept making it worse for the poisoned characters and a fire had been out of the question (although it would have made those stomach saves a lot easier ...).

The weather kept being shitty for three days (at least 10 bad rolls on my side) with a heavy thunderstorm being the high point of this bad weather front. There were less encounters than in the dungeon, but still way more than they'd have had in the swamps half a days travel away from the dungeon. They waited with making a fire until one of the characters had been at death's doors already. Only a natural twenty would have kept her alive for another 12 hours when the thunderstorm hit the canyon (she made that save ...).

The storm forced once more the players hand. Getting the sick characters somewhere dry and save enough for a fire would have been important days ago. Now it became a last desperate gamble ...

As I already hinted to in the first post, the group didn't take the time to explore the canyon but went straight in to the dungeon. Now they started exploring a nearby cave. One of the wizards, no less, climbed the mountain face to the cave entrance only visible when lightning lit up the sky. One of the warriors took one of the sick and waited for the okay to bring her up.

Yeah, him again ...

The wizard would have had several possible ways to explore that cave. He could have sent his pixie familiar, for instance. But no, he went there himself and it was a cave lions den. I gave it a 50 percent chance that the lion was at home (due to the weather) and of course the beast was there and pissed (monster reaction roll ...). The wizard decided to ... fight (yeah, I know). Mirror image saved him round one, but the second round was his end. The term "minced meat" doesn't quite give it justice.

The fighter below had seen him going into the cave, sword in hand, and decided to climb after him. She arrived just in time to see her friend be torn to bloody pieces, looked at me and said: "I'm outta here ..." Good call.

The cave became off limits, but the sick girls survived the night  and the new day started bright and shiny after the storm (it's amazing how all of that was the result of rolling the dice ...), so the second wizard of the group went towards the swamps to gather some herbs that might help the sick characters. The fighter went to gather some food, the one sick girl made her SECOND NATURAL 20 in a row to live another 12 hours (!) and I rolled for random encounters. Of course a 1 came up and (naturally) it was the mountain lion stretching his legs after the storm ...

I get extra random on occasions like those. It had been a random encounter in the canyon, so the wizard was out. Left the food gathering fighter or the sick girls, so I checked (as I'd do regularly with encounters) this drop die sheet I made some time ago:

Download of the pdf is under "Free Stuff" above ...

It was a low roll (2 or 3), but worse was that it resulted in the mountain "lion belligerently invading another territory for survival". So it had been the sick girls and they had no chance what so ever. It was a horror scene right out of The Ghost and the Darkness. The fighter returned and only found blood trails leading to the cave. With three out of 5 characters dead, the remaining two characters made a run for it and never looked back ...

Recap Part 2

There had been some really bad decisions in the end, but I loved how it all came together through random results. The bad weather, the encounter and reaction rolls, the bad saves, it all came together to make that last part feel like survival horror. There was always a chance to make thing better. They could have called that wizard from the beginning, they could have gone for those haunted trees (which would have disguised them effectively).

But the best option, in my opinion, would have been to go as far as possible out of that canyon, as this simple action alone would have reduced the encounter possibility from "1 in 6 every two turns" to "1 to 3 in 6 per day"). They didn't and 60% of the group died because of, well, all of that.

It's just one of those things that happen every so often. The players don't pay attention, make a few mistakes or bad rolls and characters start dropping dead a lot. That's not to criticize them or shed a wrong light on them. It's a great group and it's been the play test of a game they are not yet familiar with. They get a better handle on how ability scores work in the game and situations like this end completely different ...

I hope this little two post update of how Lost Songs rolls right now helped a bit showing where the game is and where it's heading. With us moving to Leipzig it'll take a bit longer, since we have to find a new group of willing gamers over there. It's also becoming a beast of a game that, while it has all the things I want/need in a game, grows every day in depths.

And one final note: this definitely was not our last visit to Stonehell. This megadungeon is brilliant and is highly recommended. Good show!

Now back to BASTARD! ...


* You see, dear reader, this post is finally talking about the titled "fatal system response" ... I'm sorry if this comes over like a Tarantino joke without the sophisticated skill usually attached to a joke like that.

** Just a d20. 1 means clear and good weather, 10 means cloudy, but no rain, 11 to 19 means light to heavy rain, 20 is a full blown thunderstorm. I constantly rolled over ten, with a twenty in the mix to make it worse.

What's a DM to do?! (about the DIY-ethos and game design)

I'm doing a lot right now (with intent to do even more the next few weeks) and it's arguably all DIY. The more I do stuff like that, the more I love it, actually. Tinkering with games, taking them apart to see how they work, talking about it, writing my own games, it's all part of the same fun package. One thing I encounter every so often is that I always seem to find a new construction site once I'm done with what I originally was doing. It goes on and on, but I'm starting to think there is a pattern. So this is a (incomplete, I'm sure) list of things I tinker with and my thoughts on their value for my own games. Maybe you guys find something of interest ...

What am I talking about?

As much as everybody and their grandmother might try to make you believe otherwise, to provide a group with the world they are to explore is entirely the DM's duty. Sure, you might use something made by someone else, a setting, an adventure, an idea, there is some great stuff floating around worth using. The thing is, while it's totally okay to use stuff like that, it's equally important to give a DM at least the possibility to build his own thing from a very basic level of a game.

So this is a collection of some of the things a DM could (should?) do to improve his game the DIY way.

1. Relabeling

I'm not (yet) talking about customizing classes or skills and giving equipment a cultural touch and whatnot. What I'm talking about for now is easier, but going deeper than that. Like, rewriting the game terminology:

same/difference [thoughts]

In an ideal case an exercise like that won't only make a DM very familiar with the terminology he's using, but also helps customizing the very feel of the game solely by talking about it. It doesn't change the rules and it's done easy enough.

As you see, DMing a game is not only about knowing the rules and being able to interpret how they should be used in certain situation occurring in the game. It's also about language. So by keeping the division I presented above and using the terminology I deem best for the game of my choosing, I'll be able to control and contrast the elements I think important for the game. It produces tension.

2. Translating/In die eigene Sprache übersetzen - oder not?

In Germany Dungeons & Dragons is called ... Dungeons & Dragons. The brand is too strong to use a translation. Maybe they'd even been forced to use it that way. I don't know and it's not important. What they did for sure is translating the terms of the game. Random Character Sheet:

Original German D&D Rules Cyclopedia Character Sheet ...

My English speaking readers can consider themselves pretty lucky about this, as most mainstream rpgs (and many in the fringes of the hobby) are already available in English. For all others it's either going for the native rpg scene (not my favorite thing in Germany and, in my opinion, pretty commercial and elitist about it ...), hoping for a translation, reading and using the original - or translating your own version.

Sure, making your own translation needs skill and dedication, not every DM will has the abilities and/or inclination to do so. But it's worth considering, at least for the key terms (doesn't need to be whole thing) and even if there's already a translation available. Just like in the first point above, it gives a DM the chance to alter and change the game he offers on a very basic level, individualizing the whole thing as he thinks appropriate.

Alternatively you could take a game written in your native tongue and translate it into another language. It doesn't even matter if you are familiar with that language or just like the sound of it. I mean, why not take the D&D terminology, for instance, and translate it into Latin. If it helps your game, why not go there?

3. Setting means restricting some system availability ...

There you go, defining a setting means cutting down the options of a rpg. Even if you start with the setting and write the rules afterwards, you'll still have to make decisions what you want to happen in your game because of the setting. Either way, setting will have this effect, so why not use it to your advantage? Just google "obscure D20", for example (since D20 was notoriously exuberant with third party publications of that sort ...), and get some ideas:

Weird, right? But actually got some good reviews ... [source]

So could you imagine a beholder in a setting like that? Or a fireball slinging wizard? Me neither. And that's a good thing. Actually, the more obvious a change like this is, the more likely it is that it'll have an impact in your game. Just say "There is no Magic in Just-Imagined-Landia anymore" and you'll have a totally different (D&D) game.

Where ever you start, system or setting, building it from scratch or looting your way through your library, it's a great chance to have the nuance you want in your game. You don't like a rule in a book you bought? Test it anyway, make yourself familiar with it and if it still doesn't do anything for you, toss it. The idea behind DIY is not to do it all yourself (you still might, but that's not the point), but to do, learn from it, then do more.

4. Just don't see it as restriction, it's more of a focus, really

Instead of only focusing on what a DM doesn't want in his game and how it restricts a system, we should take a very close look at what's left and how to improve and expand on that. You want lots of car chases in your game? Write/steal/get detailed rules for it and make sure the system provides enough connections for the characters. Maybe a Driver class, letting characters have cars as starting equipment (with a huge list to choose from) or even whole skill sets about handling cars, from tuning to stunt driving.

So yes, a setting can't have all of it, but what it has should count. Emphasize and detail it where ever possible. In it's extreme form that's what most Indie RPGs are doing (as I understand it): they build an extremely detailed focus on one or two themes and ditch the rest to emphasize what's left even more.

You'll get exactly what it says on the cover. Nothing more,
nothing less. [source]

The lesson here is that all the little parts you want to work in your game, should ideally work as a mini game of their own. Again, lots of room here to get creative, steal, buy or borrow from other systems.

That's it, folks

Or is it? As I stated in the beginning, I always find new construction sites, but right there is the pattern I see when tinkering with games since I constantly:

• change/play with the terminology,
• translate it, use my native tongue or another language entirely alien to me,
• define a setting by restricting the system I use to only what I'll need and
• emphasize what is left even further by adding subsystems and more detail 

You can't go wrong with any of that. Just try it. In a worst case scenario you get the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and will therefore get better results the next time around. Over time you'll collect enough house rules and alternatives to make writing your own personal rpg heartbreaker just a formality because that's what you did the whole time.

But this is not about writing your own games, it's about making what you've decided to work with your own. Not every one is a game designer and doesn't have to be, either. But as a DM you start where the designers left. Devising a campaign is, after all, nothing else but individualizing the available content. It's just a matter of taste how far a DM is willing to go. The sky is the limit and all that ...

So how far do you all go with this at your tables? "Rules as Written" or "Write new Game for new Campaign"? Are you somewhere in between and if so what's the first thing you do when tackling a new campaign? Comments and observations are, as always, very welcome.

Example Random Territory 01 (method and first results)

I was very curious to find out how that Basic Random Terrain Generator (Part 0, Part 1, Part 2) I've been talking about turned out, so here is a complete test run with all the funny ideas I had about it in one place. Well, at least it's a start and something to expand on. Please try this at home ...

A number of rolls ...

All right, let's do this properly and start from the very beginning. You'll need a paper with hex-fields on it (for now just google "blank hex maps", if need be ... I'll provide something like this soon, though). Start somewhere in the center with your first roll of 2d10. This is your center piece. It gives the basic directions to all your future rolls.

The next roll is with 3d10 (A, B and C) with the new die (A, from now on) giving the direction of the development.

1 to 6 are directions, 4 to 10 are layers (see below)

You won't need to write down the numbers for directions, but keep the numbers for layers. Every result has a specific meaning in regard of the terrain and what might already live there:

But for now just note the relevant numbers as described above ...

Layers are always added to the last developed terrain piece and make this field a natural border. There will be no new field generated in that direction. Instead go clockwise to the next free hex field from there. Same goes for Natural Borders coming up on (B). The third option to end development is a normal field framed by natural borders (see next example below).

This way you'll generate a somewhat organic map with all sorts of borders and some free space:

Started at yellow, red are layers, blue is a natural border ...

Up until now it was just collecting numbers. What happens next is giving those numbers meaning. Just collect the results first:

• 1d (59): Labyrinthine hills (lots of trees)

• 1f (66/029): Hills, Cliffsides and Streams (lots of trees)/Border Territory: a community living under the old faith, is hostile towards tribe and attacks on sight

• 1h (51): Cliffsides and Plains (no trees)

• 2c (37/061): Hills and Rivers (lots of trees)/Border Territory: a community under patriarchal rule, campaigning for an alliance

• 2e (89): Labyrinthine Mountainscape

• 2g (60): Dormant Vulcano (special)

• 2i (61/998/850): Plateau (no trees)/Land Beyond The Mist: Place of Training for the court of Giants/The Darkness: Tainted by Weird Dark Rites

• 3b (56/037): Hills and Streams (lots of trees)/hostile community under new faith, trade possible

• 3d (43): Big River through rolling Plain (trees by river and some trees)

• 3f (51): Cliffsides and Plains (no trees)

• 3h (22/768/863): Giant Lakes/Roman Relics: actively Roman city/The Darkness: Sinister magic corrupting combat (some legionnaires tainted by evil, maybe)/the tribe settles here, because this is where the map started ...

• 3j (29/001): Swamp (lots of trees)/Border Territory: Strange Community campaigning for alliance

• 4a (01): Impassable Mountainface

• 4c (23): A few Big Lakes (lots of trees)

• 4e (89): Labyrinthine Mountainscape

• 4g (74/968/944): Hills and Streams (some crippled trees)/Land Beyond the Mist: Place of Training for the court of Pixies/Land Beyond the Mist: Place of Magic for the court of Nymphs and Trolls

• 4i (22): Giant Lakes

• 4k (49): Labyrinthine hilly Riverscape (lots of trees)

• 5b (25/035/853): Lakescape (lots of trees)/Border Territory: an unfriendly and cautious community living under the new faith/The Darkness: Dark Rites corrupting Combat (unholy warriors of God?)

• 5d (39/898): Labyrinthine Riverscape (lots of trees)/The Darkness: Powers from Beyond out for Revenge

• 5h (40/004): Underground River (special)/Border Territory: neutral but very strange community

• 5i (96/843): Snow and stone/The Darkness: a curse thriving by combat

Giving it all some meaning

This is shaping up good, I think. We have some strange swamp people, a Roman city with some sinister war magic, hostile neighbors following an old faith, others campaigning for an alliance, training grounds of Giants (including weird evil rituals) and Pixies, plus a magic place of the nymphs and trolls.

There is also a broad spectrum of landscapes. We have a silent Volcano, hills, rivers and mountains, some underground rivers and a swamp, all of it sprinkled with with big lakes ... There's already a lot going on, what we need now is a map and the flavor text to make it all fit ...

But since I spend most of my day bashing my head against google to find a descend mapping software and produce a map for you all to look at and came up with nothing, I'll leave it at that for today. It should be enough to give you all an impression how this is shaping up and even only with what's written here and a raw sketch of the map a DM should be able to go a long way. Add some Random encounter tables to that and you got a game going.

More on this as soon as I'm able to produce a descent map ...

Part 2 of Expanding on the Basic Random Terrain Generator (with Fairies), Communications in the Dark Ages (on the side) and Complexity in Game Design (because this title isn't long enough ...)

Here we are again. In Part 1 I brought you all back up to speed about that Basic Random Terrain Generator I wrote about in June. That was a big one, so a re-cap was necessary. And since everything is connected, I used the opportunity to talk a little bit about communication in the Dark Ages and complexity in game design. Either way I turned it, it all wanted to be in the same post. So here we are with the second part that's basically expanding on the ideas developed in the first (and on the B.R.T.G.), so feel free to check those out before reading this one. But I'll provide all necessary tables of the original post here, too (updated versions, even!)**, so you'll only miss out on some great lunacy :-)

Without further ado: Variety and Technique

A high level of variety usually results in some complexity, but often enough also comes with difficult and extensive procedures to realize it. I believe the system described for the Basic Random Terrain Generator is somewhere in the middle, as it allows for some variety, is easy enough expanded on and easy enough to use. Basically you roll 3d10 per hex-field* (let's call them A, B and C). The first digit (A) gives the direction, the other two are interpreted as a d100 for this and give indications about the terrain of the hex-field.

As you see, the numbers 1 to 6 on (A) give the direction, every higher number indicates a layer added to the initial hex-field. The very first hex-field is always the base for direction and if a direction points towards an established border, move clock wise and add the new hex-field at the next possible position, like so:

Example 2: Terrain starts developing with the red field. Numbers in
italics had been the one with a direction, straight numbers are layers.

Numbers 7 to 10 on (A) describe layers and borders:

I had kept it vague in the original post about the values of those layers and what they mean. I'm able to expand on that now, so here is how some of this manifests in a hex-field:

Fairies playing in the sun.

Land of the Mist (A = 9)

Realm of magic and the fairy folk. Magic is strong in those areas and they count as the centers of the ley lines that move through the land. It's also a thin veil between reality and the other side. The numbers rolled indicate which fairy race is dominant in this hex field (B), why they are there (C) and where they are specifically from (interpret BC as d100 just like terrain, but in a smaller scale). This way you get some quick ideas what's going on in an area:

Column (B): The "Court of"

1. Deep Elves
2. Waterfolk
3. Goblinoids
4. Nymphs and Trolls
5. Wood Elves
6. Pixies
7. Wee Folk
8. Dwarves
9. Giants
10. Dragonkin

Column (C): The "Why"

1. Place of Legend
2. Place of War
3. Place of Worship
4. Place of Magic
5. Place of Resource
6. Place of Commerce
7. Place of Rest
8. Place of Training
9. Place of Creation
10. Place of Tragedy/Ruins

So in example 2 above we got, for instance, the numbers 9 (A), 1 (B), 1 (C), which translates as:

• Layer: Land of the Mist

• Who: Deep Elves

• Why: Place of Legend

• Source: Underground (as 11 is far below the hex-fields main 63)

So it's a legendary underground complex of the Deep Elves that's the reason for all the fairy activity in the area. Maybe something like The Magnificent Fungus Gardens of TeiLyen or some such thing. I could do all kind of shenanigans with such a thing. Quests for herbs with legendary magical properties, exploring this Underdark in general is promising. You get the idea ...

An evil lurks below ...

The Darkness (A = 8)

The Darkness is evil and evil spreads as long as it can feed on something. A hex-field with this layer is completely contaminated, only isolation (stories of something stirring in the dark, like I described in Part 1) kept it from spreading further. Every evil manifests differently. There is the "what" (B) (a specific kind of evil, if you will) and there is the corruption (C) (the theme this evil strives on). If there are other layers in the same hex, they are tainted by evil (as they all affect each other, of course).

Column (B): The "What"

1. Ancient/Pure Evil
2. Prehistoric Evil
3. Undead
4. Curses
5. Dark Rites
6. Sinister Magic
7. Tragedy
8. Demonic
9. Powers Beyond
10. Terror from Space

Column (C): The "Corruption"

1. Greed
2. Transformation
3. Combat (Muscle)
4. Refuge (Finesse)
5. Life (Grit)
6. Sanity (Wits)
7. Disruption (Nerve)
8. Revenge (Fate)
9. Power
10. Weird

I'm still going with Example 2 above and here we got a layer of evil corrupting a legendary place of the Court of the Deep Elves (and everything else ...). The number is 8 (A), 3 (B), 5 (C) and it reads like this:

• Layer: The Darkness

• What: Undead

• Corruption: Life

• Source: Underground (as 35 is below the hex-fields main 63)

So the source of this evil is also underground, but not as deep as the place of legend is. It's somewhere in between. Undead corrupting life itself is a great thing to have. The dead won't rest here. Classic Zombie Apocalypse scenario (get bitten by a Zombie and become a Zombie, I'd say, but there's room for interpretation). No wonder people avoid this place. Also: undead fairies (deep elves)!

Roman Relics (A = 7)

Roman presence should still be felt in parts of a setting in Lost Songs. A high culture has the tendency of putting it's stamp on an area, be it roads and ruins of towns or knowledge and habits. But what exactly remains and is kept alive or intact, is a matter of chance, really, so those two table give (B) indications of what is left and (C) how strong it's influence is in an area.

Column (B): The "What"

1. Historical Significance
2. Resources
3. Military
4. Village
5. Town
6. City
7. Bureaucracy
8. Politics
9. Knowledge
10. Slavery

Column (C): The "Influence"

1. Just some rumors and shadows
2. Only ruins remain
3. Some of it is still in good shape 
4. As if left yesterday
5. Interpreted and formed by other cultures
6. A decadent version of the past
7. Conserved from time (secluded)
8. Actively Roman
9. Evolving Roman
10. Expanding Roman

Again with Example 2 above, in this case it's the numbers 7 (A), 5 (B), 8 (C), which results in:

• Layer: Roman Relics

• What: Town

• Influence: Actively Roman

• Source: Deep in the Forest (as 58 is just below the hex-fields main 63)

That's the last layer for this specific hex-field and it's a small Roman community somewhere deep in the woods that goes on as if the Roman Empire never went down. "Actively Roman" would mean that they still have some trade with their surrounding communities going. The Darkness that taints everything will have it's claws in this community, too. My first impulse when reading this was undead Roman nobility, draining the life out of everything, maybe with an army of always "recruiting" undead Roman soldiers (which would be cool). And since they settled in fairy territory, they'll have an ancient feud (maybe eternal now) with the court of the Deep Elves going, which manifests in various stories and legends about those encounters and some very good ideas where one shouldn't sleep in a cave or go too deep into the forest. So that's that.

Entering hostile territory ...

Border Territory (A = 10)

A Border Territory is just that, a political border. The numbers will give a DM some ideas what community is living behind the border (B) and how they interact with the characters' tribe (C). This is necessarily vague at the moment, since at that time everything that wasn't Roman was constantly changing. Cultures moved and mixed, there's an old faith and a new one (with at least two important trends, no less) and several new or old or individual or forgotten ways of live that are possible. The important part is to have some strong distinction between the tribe the characters are from and the tribe behind the border. 

Column (B): The "Community living ..."

1. the old Germanic ways
2. under the old faith
3. under the new faith
4. under a strange faith
5. under matriarchal rule
6. under patriarchal rule
7. like Romans
8. for a new start (Immigrants)
9. for a new start (Former citizens and slaves of the Roman Empire)
10. in very strange ways

Column (C): The "State of Affairs"

1. Campaigning for an alliance
2. Friendly and open
3. Friendly but cautious 
4. Neutral
5. Unfriendly and cautious
6. Unfriendly and full of prejudice
7. Hostile, trade possible
8. Hostile, no trade
9. Hostile, attack on sight
10. Campaigning to invade

No example, but lets roll a random example and see ... 10 (A), 4 (B), 1 (C), which results in:

• Layer: Border Territory

• Community living: under a strange faith

• State of affairs: Campaigning for an alliance

• Source: Here I'd not go as literal as taking the 41 as indication for a specific area in the hex-field. The whole hex is considered border territory. But high or low could indicate how long this border exists, with low meaning old (as far as ancient) and high as new (as far as being a new idea/concept right now). A 41 would mean that this border had been established just before the characters tribe settled where they did ...

In this case we got some friendly neighbors with a strange faith who are campaigning for an alliance (active trade and politics, I imagine some strange cultists are abound, too). There is still a border, but free travel (just different jurisdiction and customs). Put some other layers in there and the dynamics might change (drastically, even), but as it is, it's a nice border.

The big picture and what happens next

There you go, that's the whole thing (you'll find the one missing table below in the footnotes ...). It's not yet a world engine, but it's a sandbox/storybox generator. By rolling 3d10 you establish a tribes known terrain as long as possible. Natural and unnatural borders will eliminate you choices until there's just one field left and that's where your tribe came from.

How big or small this territory is, will be a matter of chance. That's a good thing, since the game is about exploration and expansion. In an ideal case, characters will form their own tribes at the fringes of their old clans territory (at level 10, after exploring and "opening up" the whole thing). It's all open to change. Find the source of evil, destroy it and get rid of one layer in the process (in the example above it would get rid of the undead menace, allowing safe access to that legendary elven place and better trade with the Roman town ...)

The landscape will be up to chance, too, which is also a good thing, since creating a territory random and from scratch will need making decisions how all of it fits together, which I believe to be a great tool for a DM to get very familiar with the lay of the land (at least that's how my brain works).

The next step in this must be for me to make one of these territories to see what's what. At this point I'm quite confident that it'll all work and it'll need just minor tweaking, if at all (there's lots of room for interpretation beyond the random results, so freak results are more like a benefit, if handled right).

Since this is part of the game is complete now, I might as well put it all into a pdf to have it in one place and for the general public to use and play with. Yay!

Comments and questions are very welcome, of course. I know this is a lot to digest, but if you read it all up to this point, you very well deserve all questions you might have answered.

Thank you all for tagging along!

* All rolls, but not the first (since the first roll needs no expansion, as explained later in the text). The first roll is just 2d10 (B,C).

** As an additional rule "unrealistic" results are treated as local phenomena. So if  a result puts a low natural border and a high natural border side by side, take the middle ground as if  time and natural forces had taken their toll. So the result had still been accurate, but for something that had happened a long time ago. adds some history to a setting ...  Here is a (slightly updated) version of the table in the original post:

Results d100 (BC):

Mountains (natural border)

01. Impassable Mountainface

02. Steep Mountainface

03. Wrinkled Steep Mountain face

04. Wrinkled Mountainface

05. Wrinkled Mountainside

06. Wrinkled Mountainside

07. Hills to Mountain

08. Fractured Mountainside

09. Labyrinthine Fractured Mountainside

10. Chasm (special)

Sea (natural border)

11. The Sea

12. Shelfed Sea

13. Coastline with Islands (some trees)

14. Fractured Coast (some trees)

15. Flat Delta (some trees)

16. Flat Delta (some trees)

17. Undulating Delta (lots of trees)

18. Ragged Delta (lots of trees)

19. Labyrinthine Fractured Coastline (lots of trees)

20. Misty Valley (special)

Lakes and Moors

21. Fjord

22. Giant Lakes

23. A few Big Lakes (lots of trees)

24. Some Small Lakes (lots of trees)

25. Lakescape (lots of trees)

26. Lakescape (lots of trees)

27. Bog (lots of trees)

28. Moor (lots of trees)

29. Swamp (lots of trees)

30. Underground Lake (special)

Rivers and Plains

31. Plain (no trees)

32. Rolling Plain (some trees)

33. Big River through Plain (trees by river)

34. Big River through Rolling plain (trees by river

      and some trees)

35. Small Hills and Rivers (lots of trees)

36. Small Hills and Rivers (lots of trees)

37. Hills and Rivers (lots of trees)

38. Great Meandering River (some trees)

39. Labyrinthine Riverscape (lots of trees)

40. Underground River (special)

41. Cliffsides and Plains (no trees)

42. Rolling Plain (some trees)

43. Big River through rolling Plain (trees by river

      and some trees)

44. Rivers through Rolling plain (trees by river

      and some trees)

45. Hills and Rivers (lots of trees)

46. Hills and Rivers (lots of trees)

47. Cliffsides and Rivers (lots of trees)

48. Great Meandering River in hills (lots of trees)

49. Labyrinthine hilly Riverscape (lots of trees)

50. Caves (special)

Meadows

51. Cliffsides and Plains (no trees)

52. Rolling Plain (some trees)

53. River through rolling Hillscape (lots of trees)

54. Streams through rolling Hillscape (lots of trees)

55. Hills and Streams (lots of trees)

56. Hills and Streams (lots of trees)

57. Cliffsides and wild Streams (lots of trees)

58. Meadows and steep hills (lots of trees)

59. Labyrinthine hills (lots of trees)

60. Dormant Vulcano (special)

Uplands

61. Plateau (no trees)

62. Rolling Plain (some trees)

63. Rolling Plain and Streams (trees by river)

64. Hills and Streams (lots of trees)

65. Hills, Cliffsides and Streams (lots of trees)

66. Hills, Cliffsides and Streams (lots of trees)

67. Hills, Valleys, Cliffsides and wild Streams (lots of trees)

68. Hills, Valleys, Cliffsides, Caves and wild Streams (lots of trees)

69. Labyrinthine Hills, Valleys, Cliffsides,

     Caves, cascading Lakes and wild Streams (lots of trees)

70.  Open Cave in Cliffside (special)

Highlands

71. Plateau

72. Rolling Plain (some crippled trees)

73. Rolling Plain and Streams (some crippled trees)

74. Hills and Streams (some crippled trees)

75. Hills, Cliffsides and Streams (some crippled trees)

76. Hills, Cliffsides and Streams (some crippled trees)

77. Hills, Valleys, Cliffsides and wild Streams (some crippled trees)

78. Hills, Valleys, Cliffsides, Caves and wild Streams (some trees)

79. Labyrinthine Hills, Valleys, Cliffsides,

     Caves, cascading Lakes and wild Streams (some trees)

80. Hot Springs (special)

Mountain Landscape

81. Plateau

82. Steep Plain

83. Stream through rolling Plain

84. Stream through rolling hills

85. Cliffsides, hills and streams

86. Cliffsides, hills and streams

87. Hills and wild streams

88. Vast meandering rockformations and waterfalls

89. Labyrinthine Mountainscape

90. Canyon (special)

High Mountain Landscapes

91. Cliffsides

92. Steep plain

93. Glacier through rolling plain

94. Glacier through rolling plain

95. Snow and stone

96. Snow and stone

97. Snowy cavernous mountain landscape

98. Fractured snowy cavernous mountain landscape

99. Labyrinthine snowy cavernous mountain landscape 

100. Deep Caverns (special)