A Little TTRPG relief from this Crazy World

 TL;DR. I drew some maps that I think are neat, and I’ve added some text describing a low-key fantasy setting that could be used as a starting point for something like an OSR Dragonbane or Mythras game or could act as a center point for either a low-stakes politics or cozy fantasy campaign.

 

I’ve been kind of quiet for a while, so I wanted to show you one of the things I’ve been working on. It is the type of fantasy setting my friends and I would have played in in the late 1970s. Would would have used Runequest rules and would have had much worse maps. Enjoy.

Gevensthorp is a small, fantasy settlement located on the shore below some highlands at the end of a long, narrow bay. It is (at first glance) a peaceful place, but it is secretly brimming with low-key political, cozy, or even OSR fantasy adventure—depending on how you want to play it.

1. The Thorp

Along a road that connects the bustling village of Redworthy and the villages, castle, and mines on the northern headlands, there is a small settlement composed of a few stone houses built from the obvious remains of an old fortification.

A. The Blemished Boar. Run by Geven the Younger (who is now in his 40s) and his wife and children, this is a small inn/tavern/roadhouse that is always busier than it should be.

B. The Houses. Across the road, there is a row of stone houses. The northernmost house is the home and shop of Geven the Elder, an accomplished blacksmith.

 All the other homes are occupied by his children and their families and friends.

C. Farms. Geven’s oldest daughter and her family manage a small farm which doesn’t provide enough to feed the whole community, but it does well for its size.

D. The Old Bridge. At the south end of the settlement is an ancient stone bridge built in the style of the Old Empire with a small two-story toll booth and home built on one side. There hasn’t been a toll in generations, but the home is usually occupied.

Secrets.

1. The oldest, and best kept secret is that Geven the Elder was once the armorer to the King and his wife was the Captain of the Queen’s Guard. They eloped and ran off together and settled in this out of the way corner where they lived a peaceful life and raised their family. Their youngest daughter, Crystal, still lives at home and has no idea of her parents’ past.

Occasionally, strangers still come to call and once a year or so Geven the Elder will craft a sword for one of them. The family lives a rustic life, but they never seem to want for money.

2. Just south of the village there are trails which head up into the highlands. They go to some old ruins, but they also connect across the highlands to the Eastmark. Although there is currently no open hostilities with the Eastmark, they are not part of the kingdom and trade with them is regulated. None the less, every week or so, a small pack train of mules comes from the mines laden with ores. These travelers stay the night at the Blemished Boar, and in the morning head into the highlands. When they return, they are usually loaded with crates and barrels.

2. The Tower of Laricus the Wise. A crumbling old castle, with the great hall and main tower burnt, the thin, outer walls in ruins, is just of the highland trail. This is the home of two mysterious, old wizards and their apprentices.

3. Chestnut Springs. A magical hot spring, and ancient and sacred pool, and a small grove of spirit-infested oaks form an unusual temple at the headwaters of the stream.

Three possible sites of adventure are just north of the settlement.

4. The Long Barrow. Long before the arrival of the Old Empire, which itself was long ago, someone built a massive stone structure and covered it with earth. Why? And what is inside? Maybe a small dungeon. Maybe a necromancer’s lair.

5. The Sea Cave. A deep, sea cave is cut right at the waterline. Is it the home of a sea hag, or some other creature? Have pirates built a secret lair to hold their treasure?

6. The Abandoned Toll-Bridge. Although the bridge is crossed weekly by pack trains, and once or twice a day by legitimate foot traffic, it is possible that the abandoned toll-house has attracted visitors. Maybe brigands looking to lay low or maybe a goblin or orc looking for trouble.

 1A. The Blemished Boar.

To the trained eye, the barn of the Blemished Boar was once a royal long house. But those style of structures fell out of use at least a century ago. Now it is just a well-made stone barn. Likewise, the unusually strong outer wall is clearly the remnant of an even older fortification. Most evenings the Boar is crowded with locals and a few guests. It is rare that there are more than half a dozen people staying the night, but it is not uncommon for folks to travel the few miles from Redworthy just to enjoy a visiting entertainer or a good batch of local ale.

 2. Tower of Laricus the Wise.

Laricus the Wise and the School of Esoteric Magic. A short walk from Genensthorp is the burnt out remains of a castle. The structure was a lightly fortified house, perhaps as recently as a century ago, but now the partially destroyed building is the home of several eccentric spell casters.

Laricus the Wise is an ancient man and a master of arcane magic. He may have an identical twin brother Daricus, or he might have a personality disorder. Reports differ. Either way, they never physically leave their tower. Instead, they spend their time exploring the mysteries of the Ethereal plane and those existences that can be found beyond it.

They maintain a small compliment of students who are mostly self-teaching themselves magic, but they do receive an hour or two of instruction from the master’s every week or so. In exchange, they have access to some of the items the masters collected before retreating into their tower. Generally, the students like the arrangement and are loyal to their teacher (or teachers).

A. Wizards Tower. When the masters hold class, they do so on the lower floor of the tower. The upper two floors are windowless and unseen by anyone other than the wizards. The lower floor has a chained library, a permanent magic circle and other items useful for learning magic.

B. Guest Tower. The wizard’s advice is often sought by outsiders, and the base of a small tower survives and has been converted to a guest room.

C. Tall-Tower Cellar. The main structure was once a tall tower next to the great hall. Both structures burnt a long time ago, leaving the hollow, stone shell which extends several floors upward and the cellar or ground level which was made completely of stone. The base of the tall tower has the only surviving entrance and the heavily vaulted room has been converted to a meeting room. Since the Masters will only see people (typically) one morning a week, when visitors arrive, they are usually first met by the students. And this is the space where they meet them.

D. The Kitchen. Once the kitchen for the entire castle, this space is now the common area for the students. They prepare their own meals, manage their own supplies, and generally use this space as their common room.

E. The Museum. The wizards have a bunch of stuff that is stored in this central space. Nothing of epic-power, but lots of small items that are useful in understanding the nature of both the physical and magical worlds. The students call it the museum and are often in here searching for clues to understand this or that rune or arcane formula.

F. Student Space. Once specialized storage areas for the castle, these small, stone-vaulted chambers are now the sleeping and practicing spaces for the students. Typically there are three to eight people studying magic here and the level of harmony withing the student population often reflects how crowded these spaces are.

G. Kitchen Cellar. Under the kitchen there is a dark and cool cellar that was formerly used to store food for the castle. The first section is still used for this purpose, but the students have taken over the back sections to serve as additional practice space.

 

3. Chestnut Springs

Nestled on the slopes up to the highlands, in a small and sheltered valley, there is a grove of ancient oak trees partially surrounding a mystical hot spring and a sacred chestnut tree. The site was once popular for the healing properties of its spring water, but the scattered ruins nearby attest to the decline in visitors over the last few decades. There are typically one or two clerics who tend to this holy place and depending on their nature, they may also be students of the wizards just down the trail.

A. The Long House. Built of salvaged stone, but in a style usually reserved for the people of the north, the long house accommodates both the clerics and any guests.  It can easily accept seven guests but is seldom called upon to do so anymore.

B. The Chestnut Pool. An ancient chestnut tree sits on a small (likely artificial) island in the center of a pool feed by two aggressive hot springs and partially enclosed by the old oaks. The site is understood to connect directly to the divine, but only the most devout will enter the upper pool due to its heat.

C. The Pool. During the centuries that the Old Empire ruled, a large wading pool was built. Here, the water has cooled enough that it can be enjoyed by those seeking healing or spiritual growth.

D. Pixie Pool. Small, natural pools have formed from the out-flow of the main pool. Some people believe that this site attracts pixies who live in the oaks, but others disagree. Either way, they are called the Pixie Pools.

The remaining sites are left undefined so that GMs can customize the location for their own games.

As always, if you have read this far, I thank you for your time and welcome any comments or questions below.

Philosophy is actually really important!

 

An Assertion. I am going to make the following claim without evidence. If people have reason to believe I am wrong, I legit would love to hear it (leave a comment below, please).

Most people think the discipline of philosophy is silly or useless.

I am now going to try and convince you this is wrong.

An Aside. Before I start, I want to mention that I only have three (maybe four) memories of interacting with professional philosophers. And the only important one is the time I got to meet Eliot Sober after he gave a talk at Oregon State University. I was very familiar with his work, having studied under someone who had studied under him. And at the time I thought about asking him to sign my copy of “The Philosophy of Biology” but I didn’t because I thought it would be too nerdy. Nowadays I wish I had. His work is a great asset to science and the world.

Background. So, I took a couple of Evolutionary Biology seminars and some more formal coursework in graduate school. People who want to understand biological evolution spend a lot of time thinking about what we know, and how we know it. And one of the professors had a cool way of thinking about the field of Philosophy and that is what I’m going to be writing about now.

Let’s start with two words, epistemology and metaphysics. First off, we should recognize that different people use these words differently. If you use them some other way than what I present here, groovy. But it is left to use to come up with some new word that matches the meanings of the usage I was taught. English be like that.

Epistemology is the study of the sets of rules different people use to decide what is or is not true.  If you believe that the only way to know truth is to read it in your magic book, then “reading it in your magic book” is your epistemology.

Most scientists have an epistemology that includes two things, empirical observation, and logical inference. You can be a scientist who accepts empirical observation, logical inference, and reading it in a magic book. But in the last half century, most of those people  are starting to have profound issues with cognitive dissonance, as most of the magical books make assertions that don’t literally hold up to the first two.

Metaphysics is, under this system, the list of things that you accept to be true. These are the things that you have found, or accept, based on your epistemology.

Different groups have different epistemologies and metaphysics. Some overlap between different groups. Some are reasonably unique.

Another short aside. Recently, I was involved with a Humanist forum here in Manitoba and I presented this approach to understanding people’s beliefs. In our presentations, the group would take breaks and have discussions around questions raised by the speaker.

I asked the attendees to talk about their own epistemology and metaphysics and one of the attendees made an interesting comment. Upon reflection, they asserted that they basically just believe what the people around them believe.

The core of my point. It is my considered opinion that humans are more of a perceiving and responding organism than we are a logical reasoning organism. We do both. But there are people who never really think about thinking. They don’t question “why” they accept something as true. They certainly don’t dive into critical thinking and the various types of logical fallacies (like my opening strawman) and they tend to just accept assertions made by the people they follow.

It's bad, even just among scientists. I tell my students I’m a professional cynic. I don’t believe anything “just ‘cause”.

“But Richard, it is in a peer-reviewed paper.”

“Yeah, but 20% to 50% of all peer-reviewed papers have non-trivial errors in them. Maybe up to a third have structural problems that invalidate one or more of their findings. Before I believe it, I need to do a little digging.”

Imagine how bad it is trying to understand what is true among the people who don’t have a rigorous epistemology.

So, let’s bring back the basics of philosophy. People need to understand how to approach thinking about things they don’t understand.

I honestly think that before people can understand what science is, or the dynamic relationships between and within various religions, they first need to understand the basics of how to think about thinking. And traditionally, that’s the realm of philosophy.

Secret Motivations. I actually have a secret motivation for writing about this. I want to introduce the idea of Philosophical Engineering which is an emerging approach to solving complex problems in biology and physics. Something that I have been spending the bulk of my day-job work hours on since last February. It’s really interesting, and I think it is a very promising approach to understanding, and correcting, all sorts of problems in complex, dynamic systems, but we can’t even start talking about it without first covering epistemology and metaphysics.

As always, thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Team Work makes the Game Work (?)

 

or Why I love the Fantasy Trip.

TL;DR. I’ve figured out that one of the reasons I run games is that I like to see groups of players working together to solve problems. And when a group is clicking, they will work at multiple levels, including the challenge in front of them and the story arc. And the story emerges from the individual character journeys.

Doom comes to the Monday Night game. Two weeks ago, I completely lost interest in my Monday night game. I’ve been running it for several months. I put a lot of effort into developing a setting that interested me—I like sandbox games where the players are free to develop the adventure according to their character’s interests and goals. I crafted a world that contained two classic OSR adventures, B2 Keep on the Borderland and B5 Horror on the Hill. I merged them with some really cool material from Raging Swan, and I ported everything to my favorite mechanics, D100 (I went with Mongoose Legend.) Then I added on the Sinister Secret of Saltmarch. The group did the haunted house, and we started the Caves of Chaos.

Along the way I realized I wasn’t enjoying running the game. Players were struggling with what I thought was a simple setting. No one wanted to play a character that was motivated for simple money, but no one could advance because they were always poor. We were just struggling.

And very few players had anything they wanted their characters to do.

And the fights were just boring.

The Problem. Now back in the day I could run games that were exciting, and everyone was on board with the action. A few players would drive the direction of the game and others would follow along because game play was always fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is constrained story telling. We’re not just sitting around building a group story. There are constraints imposed by the game system. In movie making there is something called cinematography. It has to do with what and how the visual images are presented on the screen. We might do a slow pan in on a pistol sitting on a desk. We draw the viewer’s attention to the pistol. Why? It must be important. At some point that pistol must play a role in the unfolding story.

In the same way, game mechanics—the physical rules of the game—act as cinematography for our unfolding story. They are a mathematical model that constrains what characters can do. I have 5 hit points. That’s not many. Will that be important to our story? The mechanics draw our attention to certain elements of the story and hide others.

If I used to be able to run games that interested me, but now I can’t, there are only a few places that things could have changed, the players, the GM, or the mechanics.

My players are as fine a group of players as I’ve ever had. So, they are not my problem.

I could have just lost whatever talent I had for GMing. It is possible. But I did put effort into this game, so I opted to focus on mechanics.  On where we focus the player’s attention. The first thing I did was look at reward structure for play. (But to be honest, at the end of a session, I was always so rushed that I didn’t do this well.)

Then I looked internally. I thought about what used to make my combats interesting and I realized that what had changed was the nature of fighting. The games that I play these days are built around the idea of heroic, or really super heroic, characters. Combat runs like a superhero movie. We focus on one character while they do a lot of things. Then we focus on the next character while they do their bit. Etc. But when your character is not in focus, everything is kind of boring.

So, I answered that with reintroducing interleaved combat. In this model of combat, everything is happening at the same time. No one gets the focus. Every character gets an action on each phase. What actions you can pick depend on the nature of your character, but everyone is potentially taking action at all times.

This worked great. It took a few weeks for the players to get the hang of it, but everyone agreed that combat was more fun. And I could clearly see that players were more engaged with the action.

So why did my interest suddenly die?

Realization. The answer was obvious. Once I recovered interesting combat, I realized that the game I had constructed focused on the wrong thing. The focus was on a series of combats—and we could pretty much map out what they would be. And at the end there will be a big, bad fight and the player characters will win or fail based on their preparation, luck, and die rolls.

And to me this was completely boring. It was missing a critical element, player character interactions...

Teamwork. I realized that once I had fixed the issue I was having with combat, suddenly I wanted characters that worked as a team. And I knew exactly how to do that. Basically, since I’ve been thinking about old school, Left-coast gaming so much recently (see for example here and here and here), suddenly I wanted that old-style of play were not only were characters constantly engaged with the action on the table, but all the characters had to act as a team in order to win. Characters have roles in the team, and the players need to build their characters to fit their role.

The Answer was in the labyrinth. Literally. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than play that old, Steve Jackson classic, The Fantasy Trip. In this game there are no random elements in character creation. You make the character you are going to play. But there are powerful constraints on what the characters can do. You can build a character to fit one role, front line fighter, ranged fighter, polearm-wielding second-rank fighter, support thief, sage, illusion-based wizard, and the like. If you are thoughtful, the character will be pretty good at their role, and if you really work at it, they can double in a second role.

But player characters are easy to make, and players are expected to keep a pool of characters around. For a given evening of play, they will pick the characters that they want to bring. They might want to build this fighter up, and they might feel that they need a scholar to tackle a specific problem, so for this game the player picks those two characters.

And in this game, all the players need to make characters that work together to accomplish the party’s goal. Failure to make a useful character is no one’s fault but yours. Experimenting is to be encouraged, but you made your character. If they are not working, make a new one.

For my campaign, I started with something simple. Everyone is on the island capital of the old empire, full of adventure. The empire was destroyed by powerful magic and outsiders are finally getting a chance to return. There is limited government and lots of opportunities to explore and gain wealth and power.

For each game session, the players get to pick one of three or so goals. There will be a known XP reward for each goal. Over time, I hope the players will propose their own goals. But to start with, the players can explore the edge of the mushroom forest for 100 XP, find a path to that castle over there for 125 XP, or explore what is behind that strange door for 50 XP + treasure.

Stories Emerge from the Actions of the Teams. Just as in other OSR games, the story will emerge from the series of actions that the group undertakes. It will not be something that I, as the GM, predetermined. Instead, certain players will like certain characters. They will pick adventures that those characters are good at. Overtime, the list of options for a given sessions adventures will come to be focused on what characters the players like to play, and a story will emerge.

And as the GM I will be able to watch this happen.

And that is what I like about running games. Not the banter between super powered characters, but rather the way a group of my friends drive the creation of a story, based on what elements of the setting they prefer to engage with the most.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Old-School, Left Coast Gaming Magic Systems

 

TL;DR. Back in the day, in Northern California, my friends and I not only viewed TSR as a corporate bully, but we gravitated towards TTRPGs with well researched magic systems. Not well balance, but well researcher. And it occurs to me that many of these games were heavily influenced by the SCA.

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s the people I gamed with in Northern California were not too fond of D&D. We loved TTRPGs but we had already moved on. For this post, at first I was going to only focus on Animism and the early days of Runequest. But I needed to look at my old copy of Chivalry and Sorcery in reference to my current gaming WIP, and when did, II noticed something which I had long ago forgotten. Something that strengthened my point but also broadened this post.

Background. Let’s remind ourselves about Chivalry and Sorcery. This game was first published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977. It is a remarkably complex game, with prints of hand-typed pages. Tiny type, hard to read and full of endless charts and tables. I, of course, loved it!

This is an early game that tries to catch the look-and-feel of the real Middle Ages. Knights and Fiefdoms and Castles and all that. The game is what we would now days call “simulations”. It is trying to model somewhat realistically (through a somewhat Arthurian lens) the high Middle Ages. The cover image is a knight in full plate on horseback tilting with a dragon.

And inside, on the title page, is the text, “Dedicated to the Society for Creative Anachronisms (the S.C.A.)”.

The SCA. Once upon a time, there was a very large overlap, at least in Northern California, between TTRPG players and SCA members. Founded in 1966, in Berkly California, the SCA was a constant element of my early life. Almost all my friends were members. The SCA is still around. It is a Medieval reenactment group with a twist. Most reenactment groups put on public-facing “shows” that aim to be as accurate as possible. (I had a buddy once who was big into French and Indian War reenacting who would call the American Civil War reenactors “button counters” because they were always concerned with having the exactly correct number of brass buttons for the uniform they wore.) SCA people don’t have this problem—at least not at the time when I hung out with them. Instead, each person would research a time and place over an incredibly large space – if memory serves, it was from the year 500 to 1500 and any culture in Europe or that interacted with Europe. You would pick a time and place of interest and research the heck out of it. And then you’d start teaching all your friends about it.

For the record, this was all within a certain cultural framework. There would be “events” which had a regular structure and there was “fighting” which also had a different structure. But in general, the folks I knew spent a lot of time learning about history and teaching it to others—frequently through crafts and music and the like. There is a lot more that can be said about the SCA, but the key point is the SCA was never an outward-facing performance, instead it was an inward-facing educational opportunity. And it came out of Berkley.

And where did Runequest come from? Same place. (Well, Oakland and Alameda—the next BART stop south.) Runequest combat is a very good simulation of SCA combat. 

Researched games. I was going to write this post about animism as a magic system—and I will likely write such a post soon. Runequest was written by a cultural anthropologist with a history of interest in animism. And he built that into his game. Runequest has shamans and ancestor spirits and everyday battle magic and polytheistic religions with different cults being fundamentally different.

And the reason I was looking through my 1977 edition of Chivalry and Sorcery was to reference the historically based information about Western European magical beliefs of the Middle Ages.

Back in the day, we didn’t “make up” combat systems. We thought about what human conflict is actually like and tried to capture that in our games. Likewise, we didn’t always make up magic systems, but frequently we would ask, “What do the people who believe in magic believe it can do?”

Magic Systems in SCA-influenced Games. Chivalry and Sorcery came up with one answer. In this book they did things like divide magicians into a huge number of religious traditions. And these traditions were structured. There were Natural Magic Users which included drug-trace induced casters, those who evoked magic with dances and chants, mediums, and shamen. The Minor Arcane with the alchemists, artificers (who build magic items), astrologists, diviners, wizards and witches, evil priests, and covens. And then the Major Arcane with conjurers, enchanters (who use chants and song to create magic), necromancers, thaumaturgists, mystic cabbalism with their magic symbols, those who know the words of power words, and the numerologists. 

I don’t know who came up with this classification of real-world magical beliefs (I kind of think they grabbed it from existing occult works—maybe the Golden Bough, but I will confess, it is still my default way of classifying magic to this day. When I encounter people who believe in magic, I usually find they fall into one of these groups.

And Runequest found another answer. Buried in the Natural Magic of C&S were the dance / chant and shaman traditions. Both of these (and a few others in the Minor Arcane) reflect an ancient, real-world tradition frequently called Animism. One of the key influencers of Runequest was Greg Stafford (who I never met) and his interest was cultural anthropology.

Stafford was trying to create his own bronze-age cultures. And if the world had magic, then the magic should be a real part of the world, not just a set of random powers strapped on for a few lucky casters. So, he started from the assumption that the world worked the way that surviving religious traditions that were present in the bronze age believed it did.

Spirits were real. Shaman were people who could interact with them. Spells were gifts from the spirits (or maybe treasures wrestled away from them). Gods were powerful spirit-like entities that interacted with people. They had spirits of retribution for those that crossed them. They had gifts for those that worshiped them. And they had limits on their powers.

Limitations. The drawback to this approach is that we were frequently constrained in the types of stories we would tell. Powerful wizards were rare. Because most cultures don’t actually believe in powerful wizards.

Even when we would cut loose from the real world, we would play games like The Fantasy Trip and GURPS Fantasy. Two related games that do not have massive, Earth-shattering wizard types.

Advantages. The flipside is that you end up with a really good understanding of human cultures and religious beliefs. I live in Canada now and I am frequently near animistic rituals and enchantments. I find it easy to understand them and respectfully stay out of their way.

As a person who grew up in the shadow of the SCA and who played RPGs heavily influenced by their tradition of research, understanding, and teaching, I have a very different approach to magic in my worlds. In my worlds, if there really is magic, then the magic is real. It affects everything. If diseases are caused by spirits then they are not spread by microorganisms.

I wrote Rubble and Ruin to be a world that plays like a cannon fantasy game, but which doesn’t have real magic. Instead, I replaced it with science and technology. I’m currently working on a fantasy game that tries to capture the feeling of my old SCA-influenced RPG experience. It has real magic—and in that world it is real.

As always, thank you for reading this reflection on my early gaming experience. I always welcome comments and questions below.

p.s. A little true-confession at the end. I haven’t played Chivalry and Sorcery since forever, but I use it as a historical reference. I was looking at the current edition on Drivethrurpg and noticed that I own it. I must have gotten it in an early bundle or something—maybe I used some Rubble and Ruin money to pick it up. So, I start flipping through the pdf. Oh, they have cleaned it up. I bet they’ve fixed lots of bits and improved lots of others. But it is 583 pages long! That tells me just how much was crammed into the original work.

Remembering when Illinois was a slave state?

Trigger warning. This is a nasty piece of history that slipped into a song intended to be lighthearted and for children. It centers on American slavery.

I have a peculiar little story about a piece of mostly overlooked American history. It’s tragic, and forgotten, and I think it shouldn’t be.

Back in the day I was a direct  report to a fellow who happened to have a PhD in History – great guy—we’re still friends on social media even though we haven’t worked together since the late 1990s. So anyway, one day when we were working together somehow the conversation got around to slavery and Illinois, and I mentioned that there was some kind of exemption back in the early 1800s for two counties in Illinois, Saline and Gallatin. They had legal slavery. Well, he said “No way”, and quoted line and verse about how certain laws prohibited that, and I said, “That may be, but I’ve toured the Old Slave House.”

He didn’t believe me, but that was okay, and life went on. I knew what I had seen. The shackles and the beds the slaves would be chained to is what has stuck with me all these years.

A decade later, long after we had both moved on, I got an email from him with the subject line “Mia Coupa”. It turns out he was going through some old archives and found a document which referenced slavery in Southern Illinois. (The internet tells me it was an exemption written into the Illinois State Constitution—but I didn’t learn that until I started writing this post.)

What they said at the Old Slave House was that there had been salt mines in Saline and Gallatin Counties, along the Saline River—first clue was in the name. Apparently, the river was full of dissolved salt, which was easy to get and very valuable on the frontier, but the water needed to be boiled until the salt crystalized and this was such hard, hot, nasty work that they couldn’t pay people to do it. So, they made an exemption to allow slaves just for processing the salt.

For those with a weak understanding of US geography, the Ohio river was the boundary between free and slave states, and the Saline River is a small tributary of the Ohio, just on the wrong side. Well, wrong for the moneyed elites that needed slaves.

And Lincoln is said to have visited there before taking office. Just saying.

Fast forward to last week. My kid liked sea chanties before they were cool, and we’ve listened to a lot of them on YouTube. One of my favorite groups is The Longest Johns. Now just to be clear, I don’t think these fellows have the slightest idea about this upcoming connection. They are folk musicians from the UK, and they perform a large number of folk songs and sea chanties.

Here is a link to Shawneetown, by the Longest Johns.

Last week the algorithm thought I would like to listen to “Shawneetown”. Well, right away I recognized that the song is about Shawneetown Illinois—the ancient (by American standards) town in Little Egypt, near the southern tip of the state of Illinois. A region that holds a special place in my heart. If for no other reason than it is the best place in the world to set a Call of Cthulhu campaign. And, my wife is from Southern Illinois, and I’ve spent a lot of time there.

According to this fan site, the song Shawneetown is a 1970’s folk song written around some fragments of song preserved from the keelboat era of the early 1800s.

So, I’m listening to the song, for the first time, and yes, it is about Southern Illinois—or at least traveling down the Ohio River. In the song, the travelers are going to Shawneetown to sell produce and buy rock salt.

Where did the Shawneetown rock salt come from?

Remember those salt mines?  There is a route from the mines to the nearby Ohio River and Shawneetown. (Actually, now it’s Old Shawneetown. They moved the town after some flooding during the Great Depression.)

Here’s a picture of the Bank in Old Shawneetown from when I visited about ten years ago. There is not much left in town, but this building is still standing. It was built before the American Civil War and stored money associated with the salt trade.

In the early 1800s, the sale of rock salt was filling the Shawneetown Bank vaults with money. This trade was still being referenced in folk songs 150-years-later. And half-a-century on the song is sung by a popular band in Great Britain. And through all of this, people don’t mention that the rock salt was boiled out of the water of the Saline River by Illinois slaves.

I don’t think this requires any action on the part of the reader. I just feel that people should be aware of Illinois slavery. We should remember that people with money can write for themselves exceptions in just about any rule or law. This has been happening for a very long time, and unless continuous action and vigilance is taken, it will continue happening in the future.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and your comments and questions are always welcome.

Rustic Roleplaying: Runequest before Glorantha

Tl;DR. An old guy writes a bit about playing Runequest in the late 1970s,early 1980s. He describes the game as having “organic character growth”.

 

People seem to be interested in reading about what my friends and I were doing with our RPGs “back in the day”, so I thought I would write a few words about a game we liked, and about what we played while others were in being “old school”.

Call of Cthulhu was first published in 1981 and by 1982 my mother was dying of cancer, I was a nerdy teenager, my social life and gaming world was shifting and everything in my life around then can be broken into “before mom passed” and “after she passed”. And one of the last things before mom passed was “Will’s Runequest game”.  

There were a few stores in the next town over that would have a rack or two of roleplaying books, and whenever I could I’d head over to one or the other and search out new and exciting things. This was before the advent of the information age. There was no way for me to know what games were coming, or even what games already existed, except what was on these racks. I was only occasionally able to afford gaming magazines, and it would be another few years before I discovered Berkley Games down in the Bay Area—which I might get to once a year if I was lucky. So I just discovered games on these racks.

And I still have a flash memory of discovering Runequest. There was a short-lived hobby store in Old Town (the tourist part of the city of Eureka) and it was a beautiful sunny day—so it must have been summer—it only rains once a year in Humboldt County, starting in October and ending in April—so if it was sunny, it was summer. In one of those old, rotating magazine racks, just below a sealed plastic bag containing White Bear and Red Moon, which was a military board game and therefore definitely of no interest to teenaged me, was the original, staple-bound Runequest.

I remember it took me a while to save up/acquire enough money to buy it. My memory was that it took forever, so realistically it was probable only a week or two. But I got it. Still have most of it. Here’s a picture of what is left.

An aside about my other copy. Greg Stafford is said to have bought the first copy of D&D directly from Gary Gygax, don’t know if it is true or not, but I’ve heard that. But Chaosium was definitely an early player in the RPG world and is an old and major company. But Ken St. Andre did publish the second ever RPG, Tunnels and Trolls. And when he was downsizing his life a few years ago, he sold a lot of old things. He was sharing parts of his collection of memorabilia from the origins of this hobby. And I bought Ken St. Andre’s original copy of Runequest. And I think that is a neat little piece of gaming history.

Here is a picture of the inside. I asked, and he graciously agreed to sign it for me. (Thanks again Trollfather—for everything you have done.)

Will’s Runequest Game. Chaosium has re-released this version as Runequest Classic, so if you want, you can pick up your own copy cheap. By modern standards it’s not a complete game and a lot of what it is lacking is what made Will’s game so much fun. Will Handrich was my best friend for several years there (I was basically his nerdy side kick). He was a classic working-class intellectual. Studied languages, read the classics, and played classical music on both piano and recorders. He passed too early a few years ago. Eventually he became deeply involved in the Society for Creative Anachronisms and move on from being an avid TTRPG player, but not before this one campaign.

The first edition of Runequest missed one thing. One important thing. There was no pre-game character development. It had a great combat system, very nicely reflecting SCA combat—the Society for Creative Anachronisms was developing just walking distance from Chaosium down in Berkley and Oakland. It had a metaphysics based on “real world” animism. Characters could become priests or priestesses, shaman, Runelords, all sorts of wonderful things. But characters started as, what we would today call, “new adults”. You had your attributes, your base skills, but nothing more.

Further, although it was implied, Staford’s famous world of Glorantha wasn’t explicitly in the book. It was generic. As a GM you were to create your own Bronze Age world. Later, I would run mine, Telemeta, for several years. If Will named his, I don’t remember.

Organic Character Progression. Runequest is a skills-based game. No classes. No races. Just roll up a person, note their starting skill percentages and drop into the world.

“Hey, there are bandits camped down by the river. We’re going to attack their camp and drive them off before then rob the town.” And off your characters go.

The skills you used in play were the skills that you rolled to improve at the end of the session. And as they improved, you were more likely to use them in the next session. Characters didn’t start as fighters or thieves; they evolved into them. I wanted a sneaky thief but just couldn’t get one. I would miss my sneaking rolls and get into fights. My characters became pretty competent fighters, but never sneaky.

In D&D I always tried to play Magic Users (the old name for wizards). In Runequest I could never get there. My best character eventually learned a little Battle Magic from a spirit, but never any deep magical secrets, but she got wicked-good with a staff.

Characters over Roles. For me, this was where characters started taking over from roles. (A wrote about roles before characters here.) This character wants to become a magic user, so whenever there is anything happening that might help me down that path, the character is up in front leading the way.

“Let’s try and figure out what these old scrolls say.”

“Let’s investigate this ancient magical site.”

If you had a role you wanted your character to develop into, and since skills mostly only improved by using them, you had to drive your character’s story towards doing things that would allow your character to become the person you want them to be.

It was great fun in-play. Given that we were all “new adults” at the time, it was easy for us to accept untrained characters. And I think “driving your story towards doing things that allow you to improve the skills you want to become good at” is actually solid life advice here in the real world.

As always thank you for taking the time to read this, and I always invite you to leave any comments or questions below.

 

 

Enigma Scout is on its way

The Sphere is made of five million domains completely enclosing the sun — each with the area of a planet and ringed by a microgravity void. A millennium ago, something destroyed its internal communication and conditions are deteriorating.

And now there is a war with battle lines over thirty million kilometers long.

A young woman, Rebbic, was created to help the war effort and is thrown into the conflict. Trained as both a trauma physician and an Enigma Healer, she is taken from the comfort of her unorthodox community of sisters and conscripted into the landnavy -- but soon her skills and compassion take her farther than she ever imagined…

…into the infrastructure of the sphere,

…and the mysterious eri that control it.

Enigma Scout, my debut novel, will be published mid-next year by Nova. It was a winner of the defunct SciFidea contest and is set in my idea for a Dyson Sphere, which I outlined over three earlier posts.

1. Let’s Talk about Niven’s Ringworld

2. From Stapledon to Dyson

3. My Dyson Sphere Conjecture: This one is how my Dyson Sphere would put gravity on the inner surface of a sphere.

I'll be putting out more information as it becomes available. As always, questions or comments are welcome below.