Private Worlds

While reading my 1977 copy of David Arneson's The First Fantasy Campaign, published by The Judges Guild, I began to notice that the author was suggesting that the entire fictional world that a Game Master was controlling should undergo periodic changes even if the players were not directly interacting with some of the unexplored or unknown regions. For example, let's imagine that the Player Characters in Arneson's world of Blackmoor were diligently exploring a dungeon on continent A. In this example the author proposes that there should be famine, social unrest, brutal wars, the signing of peace treaties, and much more on continent B even though no real person other than the Game Master is there to witness. Sometimes Dave indicates the referee should roll dice to determine these changes on a month to month basis, while other times the dice check should be made at the beginning of one of the four seasons of the year. The further I got into the pages of this sought after document the more I began to understand that Arneson was playing his own private game with the creation of the world of Blackmoor. Even now, I can imagine him sitting alone at a table for hours at a time, occasionally rolling dice and then making notes with a wry smile on his face. The time element is mentioned in several places but the part that made me think of it most as a private game was in the portion of the text from pages 36 to 41 entitled "Outdoors in Blackmoor". In this section he talks about creatures found in the wild and their habits as well as migration which occurs every spring based on a percentage chance when rolling dice. Dave also goes into detail in this section about the part of the book that has fascinated me most, "Drawing Your Own Map".

Now, Ive looked at role-playing game maps of all kinds and in all of those, including the larger world maps that were included with this publication, Ive never noticed that hexes, or sometimes squares, were each individually created and then stitched together as Arneson suggests in this subsection. Do you see that hex in that photocopy of page 41 above? Dave proposes that I should lay out all manner of terrain in those 88 plots based on dice rolls. Intriguing. He then suggests that creatures may live in a plot of the hex or migrate to this hex from another hex based on dice rolls.

As a matter of fact, its so fascinating to me that I will now attempt to draw my own map based on rules outlined in the text. I suppose I should start with an 88 plot hex and I'll design this first hex the way Dave intended, by "pen and paper". Actually, I'm going to cheat a bit and use a pencil because I'm not all that confident that I wont need an eraser. Here it goes:

Twelve squares across, ten squares high and although you can't see it, there is plenty of room for neighboring hexes. Let's just see how this goes, shall we?

     For each square (hex), roll for the following:

      1 or 2 The area is heavily wooded

      3 or 4 The area has hills in it

      5 or 6 The area has hills and woods in it

      7-8-9  The area is open country with few trees or hils

        0    The area has a gastly[sic] swamp in it

So, I'll be rolling 1d10, that's one 10 sided die for anyone who's not explicitly familiar with role-playing game terminology.

Well, it looks like this new world is going to be a very cheery place. It'll start off as a ghastly sick swamp!

  Swamp: Roll the percentage die[sic], reading left to right, for

      the percentage of area that is a swamp. Then roll for it's

      location for each subsection[sic???]. For the remaining open

      areas there is a 10% chance a one contour hill, 10% chance of

      a woods, and a 10% chance of both, there is a 70% chance that

      it is open. There is a 5% chance of a human habitation.

Okay, just hold your first fantasy campaign horses for a second! Several things need to be clarified and one part needs to be contemplated. (Remember my commentary in my last post about how there seemed to be no editor to this manual?) First, to my knowledge percentage or percentile dice (plural) have always been two dice and never one die (singular), which is probably what Arneson meant. In the early days of RPG's, people simply rolled 2d10 and read the numbers left to right as they fell, just like this:

 

To clarify the image, that roll would be read as 58, which means that 58% of this first hex is swampland. Now to part two of our teachers instruction and after much thought on the matter i think it will just require some creative interpretation.

      Then roll for it's location for each subsection.

David sort of tells us what to roll later on another page but not how to determine the results. On the last page of the "Drawing Your Own Map Section" he says 

      Roll percentile dice reading one as 'tens' and the other as
      'ones' (roll again on '89' or higher). 

Here's where I'll need to be creative. Instead of having rolled for percentage of swamp earlier, I'm going to say that I rolled for number of plots of swamp and I would have re-rolled on an 89 or higher. That saves me from the extra math of determining what 58% of 88 is. Now I'll have to determine where these 58 plots are located within the 88. Because of the way the plots are laid out by the original illustrator, if I were to simply roll for where the dead center of the swamp is, that would leave me two options for how the ghastly sick swamp spreads out from there. If spread out by strictly numbers 1 through 58, it would definitely leave our area in question scattered in different parts of the hex. If the swamp just spreads evenly outward from the center point it may have an unnatural look to it. I'm not sure so I guess I'll just have to try both ways. Now I'll roll 2d10 (re-rolling '89' and above) to find where the center of the swamp is and I'll use the same answer to plot both hexes.

 

Hex "1a"  starts at plot 54 and encompasses 29 thru 86 (58 plots total). 

My initial thought about how this ended up is that it's too boxy and I'm not thrilled with that tiny two-plot triangle on the right side. What if the dice determine there is a hill there? Since each plot represents 1 mile, I suppose a triangle shaped 1 mile long hill would be okay.

Hex 1b starts at plot 54 and then spreads out as evenly as i can manage for a total 58 plots total. 

I like the way this one looks much better than the other but I'm still not crazy about how the bottom and right sides of the swamp land will appear brutally straight on a map. Again though, keeping in mind that each plot represents one mile, I suppose the South and East boundaries of the swamp could vary a half mile either way of center of the lines on the map. Would this sort of straight line nitpicking affect anything other than aesthetics? I guess not.

To uphold the true spirit of what Dave wrote:

      For the remaining open areas...

Our instructor seems to indicate multiple areas. With this in mind, I should probably stick with 1a or a variation of it to allow for more than one remaining area to populate with possible trees, hills, etc. 

By this point, I have interpreted and created new rules for previous steps in this creative process. Why couldn't I do that now to arrive at a swamp position that I'm pleased with? Here is my solution which I'll apply to hex "1c".

To create this new hex, I began filling in plots around 54 until I encountered a plot touching the edge, at which point I would roll 1d6. On a roll of 1 to 3 the swamp was not in that plot but if 4 thru 6 was rolled I designated it a swamp. It's a little more work, but I think it makes for a more natural looking geological occurrence and also creates more than one open area as Dave seems to have intended in the original text. As a bonus, if any adjacent hexes to the south, southeast, or northeast are also swamps I will still have the option of connecting to these border occupying swamp plots to make a multi hex swamp.

      For the remaining open areas there is a 10% chance a one

      contour hill, 10% chance of a woods, and a 10% chance of both,

      there is a 70% chance that it is open. There is a 5% chance of

      a human habitation.

It looks as if there are only two open areas. To clarify, I'll rolling the blue and red dice with 1-10% being a one contour hill, 11-20% woods, 21-30% both a one contour hill and a woods, or 31-100% being "open" which is probably grassland. Also, there will be a second roll for each area and I'll use the double green dice where 1-5%  indicates that it has a human habitation and 6-100% meaning no humans. I'll do the larger area first:

The results indicate 40% or open and 8% or no human habitation (so close!). Now for the smaller area:

These numbers are 20% indicating woods and 9% or NO HUMAN HABITATION (what the hell?).

There are actually rules for open areas and woods both are similar to how the swamp is determined. However blogging this exercise is becoming far more detailed than I originally envisioned. I'm going to complete the rest of the hex independently and then probably do surrounding hexes just to get a feel for the new world. I have the best intentions of making a follow-up blog post showing the completed map.

As I'm finishing up this blog post I'm actually realizing that it has gotten away from what I originally wanted. For future posts, I think I'll shoot for a short and to the point approach, because I'm less interested in writing and more interested in learning. Thanks for reading and feel free to comment.

Lots to Learn

As stated in my last post, I've been reading a vintage book written by Dave Arneson, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons. The book is entitled The First Fantasy Campaign and was published by The Judges Guild in 1977 which was three years after original D&D was published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Surprisingly, by the third page in, I had already begun to have some difficulty deciphering the information. As the pages rolled by I began asking myself if there could possibly have been an editor involved before publication and a quick glance at the title page confirmed my suspicions. There was not.

I don't want to imply that I'm not grateful for the efforts of everyone listed on that page but there have been moments in these past days where I was desperate for clarification and organization. With that in mind, let me now attempt to pull what RPG information I can from this work that exemplifies the creative genius of Mr. Arneson because I assure you, it is present.

In the brief introduction, Dave eludes to how I may already be in over my head. He makes reference to his days "running conventional Napoleonic wargames" which I know from the documentary that I've mentioned before, were sometimes epic battles involving dozens of players and stretching out over months or possibly longer. Then the author quickly follows up with references to a pre- Dungeons & Dragons publication called Chainmail by Gary Gygax and David Perren which I have never read and therefore have no context to understand the terminology he's using. Finally, Mr. Arneson stuns me with a revelation from actual play that "the locals decided some taxes should be collected to provide for the common defense". So, the players collected taxes on a regular basis from a large province or territory? These game sessions were evolving to encompass governance of territories or empires by the player characters.

The image above is of the page directly following the Introduction. The bottom half entitled The Great Invasion has columns labeled Army Pts. and Income for evil, good, and neutral forces. Never have I ever participated in a role playing game where the player characters raised armies and took those armies to battle on such a scale as is eluded to on this page. I was immediately in awe that Arneson and his friends were roleplaying medievil fantasy wars of 1000's of troops, civilians, and leaders. The author goes on in the following pages to provide price lists for all manner of armaments including troops, siege weapons, naval ships, and more. It was during these moments of reading that I realized I would need to read books and rules that influenced David Arneson prior to the creation of this Blackmoor campaign if I were to completely understand the game mechanics he was laying out.

Arneson and his friends got their start modifying and writing rules for strategic wargamming by reading Strategos: A Series of American Games of War Based Upon Military Principles and Designed for the Assistance of Both Beginners and Advanced In Prosecuting the Whole Study of Tactics, Grand Tactics, Strategy, Military History, and the Various Operations of War by Charles Totten. What a mouthful! I have a dead tree copy of this on order from Amazon and intend to read it but I wish I would have had the presence of mind to simply check for a free PDF somewhere because after all, the book was published in 1880. By this point the book should be in the public domain.

Reading straight, unfiltered, 1880 Totten may prove somewhat daunting so my next reading selection will be slightly more current and probably easier to pallet. It's a book of game rules called Don't Give Up the Ship! or DGUTS! by Arneson, Gygax and Carr. This particular game is supposed to be a naval distillation of David Wesley's Strategos N which is a Napoleonic era distillation of Tottens Strategos et al.

Speaking of David Wesley, according to the documentary The Secrets of Blackmoor by The Fellowship of the Thing LTD., Wesley is the grandfather of all role playing games. However, neither of his publications of Braunstein, the first RPG, or Strategos N can be found for purchase or download. So, I'm left with a free copy of Barons of Braunstein, a direct descendent of Braunstein, and of course DGUTS! which is already referenced above.

Last by not least on this quickly escalating reading list is Chainmail by Gary Gygax & Jeff Perren. This gem is the predecessor to the rule set for original Dungeons & Dragons. Arneson admits openly in several parts of this book to cannibalizing portions of Chainmail for his "first fantasy campaign". There are terms halfway through Arneson's instructions that must be taken from it or possibly the original D&D white box. I'm not sure but I'm going to find out one way or another.

Will you hang with me? I'm going to get answers. I'm going to evolve. I'm certain of it. Next time, I'll move deeper into the First Fantasy text and highlight Dave's skill of making game changes according to the passage of time. I also want to move into the map sections of the book because I'm eager to try an experiment with information contained there. Maybe you'll be down to read it.

A New Beginning

I've never blogged before but it seems appropriate for the new efforts that I'm undertaking. I'm a role playing game enthusiast. In addition to attending a local convention named Tsunamicon for the last three years, I also collect RPG books and aides and until recently was a player in a local Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition weekly game. About a month ago, my good friend Nathan Deer, who also happened to be the Dungeon Master of the weekly game, announced that he and his family were moving to another state for a more lucrative career. My first reaction was that I should find another group to play in. I was in the process of doing that when I watched a documentary on Vimeo.

The Secrets of Blackmoor  is a documentary by The Fellowship of the Thing Ltd. about the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in the late 1960's and early 70's. Viewing the documentary and realizing Dave Arneson's role in the origination of role playing games made me realize that I want to pursue my own research of the man and his contributions and also any other RPG related topics that I might find interesting while on this journey.

I've already ordered and received several older Dungeons and Dragons publications  and also Dave Arneson's- The First Fantasy Campaign published by The Judges Guild in 1977. I have begun reading the latter and my next post will begin with my evaluation of parts of it and experimentation with the practical applications of its contents.

As a final note, I'm not much of a typist and probably not always as wordy as I should be. Please bare with me as I take my first baby steps in this blog and also if you happen to read this, feedback and commentary are always welcome. Thanks.