Brave Design Notes 6: Settlements

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Brave is a hack of Ben Milton's Knave, an old-school adventure game toolkit without classes and a lot more emphasis on equipment. The earliest changes I made were miscellaneous tweaks and houserules I added as I would run Knave, but at this point I've bolted on several advanced play procedures. While Knave is optimized for a DIY "rulings over rules" style of play, I still felt it was valuable to write down many of those rulings that I've made over the years and codify them. One of the best parts of the original Knave were the designer's notes, but I've taken them out because I needed to make room for new stuff and I assume that anyone playing my game would already be familiar with the original version anyway. Instead, you get my blog.

These notes are written for version 1.9, which you can find on the sidebar of this blog or by clicking here. These rules also make use of a resource called a "settlement info sheet," which you can find here, along with the player copy template here and the version adapted for villages here.

Brave Design Notes 5: Dungeons

Go to the master post

Art credit: Tony DiTerlizzi

Brave is a hack of Ben Milton's Knave, an old-school adventure game toolkit without classes and a lot more emphasis on equipment. The earliest changes I made were miscellaneous tweaks and houserules I added as I would run Knave, but at this point I've bolted on several advanced play procedures. While Knave is optimized for a DIY "rulings over rules" style of play, I still felt it was valuable to write down many of those rulings that I've made over the years and codify them. One of the best parts of the original Knave were the designer's notes, but I've taken them out because I needed to make room for new stuff and I assume that anyone playing my game would already be familiar with the original version anyway. Instead, you get my blog.

These notes are written for version 1.9, which you can find on the sidebar of this blog or by clicking here. These rules also make use of a resource called a "dungeon control panel," which you can find here.

People, Power, and Land

"The Procession to Cavalry" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I've been getting some different ideas about how I might want to procedurally design open-world sandbox campaigns. Most people will just make a big hex map of varying terrains and then make a random encounter table for each terrain type, and that seems all well and good to me. But while I like monsters and wildlife and whatnot, I'm also deeply interested in people. Especially the relationship between people, power, and land. I dunno, I just like politics and political D&D. So to me, the most interesting things you can encounter while traveling between settlements would be stuff like garrison patrols of a paranoid leader, folks making a pilgrimage, wealthy merchants in a jam, that sort of thing.

Back when I used to watch Game of Thrones (when it was still pretty good), a huge chunk of the "non political" parts were plots about characters traveling over land, often through the wilderness. And yet, those plots almost always still involved the characters running into people and factions. Tyrion runs into Catelyn Stark and her retinue, then they run into wildlings or something, then the knights of the Vale, then he leaves and him and Bronn run into some hill folk, etc. Jaime and Brienne traveled in the wilderness and met bands of brigands and mercenaries, employed by lords with agendas. Arya traveled in the wilderness and met the Brotherhood Without Banners, the Hound, Lannister soldiers, some peasantry, a knight errant on a quest (Brienne), etc.

So I would still of course have monster encounters, but I've been thinking more and more about the logic to determine what sorts of people you'd meet and where. Here's what I've got so far:

A Thorough Look at Urban Gameplay in D&D

The Free City of Greyhawk
Artist credit: Valerie Valusek

See, the title is like a Noah Caldwell-Gervais video. Get it? Because I'm about to spend a lot of words being pretentious but hopefully insightful.

I've spent a lot of time in the last year thinking about adventuring in cities. Part of it's because I really miss going outside and having an active life in an urban area. Part of it's because my D&D group spent the better part of 2020 in a campaign arc involving our party trapped in a hostile city, Escape From New York-style. And even when we broke from that for a few one-offs here and there, many of those involved adventure in the city. Or at least, like, in a town or neighborhood. And I've noticed what's worked and what hasn't and I've done so much darn reading and I want to get this right once and for all. I've run games in this setting with different approaches and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not. And I've tried to give feedback to my own DMs about how they might want to improve those sessions, and sometimes they take that advice and sometimes they don't. But the worst thing of all is that each of the really solid sessions my group has spent playing in an urban setting have largely relied on the strength of completely unrelated elements, like a fun combat encounter, social encounter, puzzle, or whatever. They always just skirted around the problems of answering those vital questions about city adventures, so even if the session was successful it was at least partially just luck.

Here's a brief table of contents for this post:

1. Bibliography for research I did, and further reading you may enjoy
2. An analysis of how most people seem to run urban settings
3. An explanation of my line of thinking that led to my version
4. My Brave settlement guidelines and examples, with a bit of elaboration on certain parts
5. Why I care so much about this

If you just want the goodies, you can skip down to the 4th part.

How Do You Handle the "Inside" of a Hex?

I have noticed an unspoken disparity in the way people seem to uses hexes in the context of a hexcrawl, and I think it deserves some attention. That is: do you bother with precision in the movement that takes place within a hex OR do you treat the space within them as fairly nebulous and concern yourself only with the movement between hexes? I'll explain the difference, and I'll also talk a bit about "sub-hexes" later. And if anyone has seen discussion of this somewhere already, then please point me in that direction.

On Dungeon Size

In the most recent Questing Beast Q&A he and his guests gave their thoughts of "ideal dungeon size" and it got me thinking. Here's a link to the part of the video where they discuss it. After some consideration, I want to propose 4 basic size classes of dungeon, divided partially by number of rooms but, more importantly, by the affect they have on the core gameplay loop of your campaign.

An Incomplete History of Mazes in RPGs

Mazes and labyrinths are a staple of fantasy fiction, so it makes sense that you might want to see one in D&D. In many ways, the Greek Labyrinth was the original dungeon, so it seems like a perfect fit, right? Except that it's notoriously tricky to run a maze in D&D without it sucking, and there's no standardized solution. So in this article, I'm going to review a list of instances I've found in various gaming products where a unique attempt was made and then explain their method. If you've never personally encountered this problem before, it may not be obvious what's so difficult about it. But I bet that once you start seeing some of the following examples, you'll begin to understand.

This will ultimately lead to, at some point in the future, a set of rules I've made based on what I've learned. I'll include those in my RPG Brave when it's released, but whenever I make a first draft I'll probably post it on my blog as a standalone procedure. If you find any other unique takes on mazes in RPGs I'd love to read them, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive.

Campaign-Level Play Part 3: Tools for Campaign Systems

So I've described a level of gameplay where the PCs are in a position to do all kinds of ambitious activities that can be resolved without needing to spend time walking through each step, moment-by-moment on a small scale. That you can safely assume the player can accomplish these tasks without needing to throw them into a dungeoncrawl first. There can definitely be obstacles, for sure. You don't have to just say, "yes, that works exactly as you wanted it to" for everything they ask to do. But recognizing a level of decision-making that tends to happen on the scale of days, weeks, or months is something that players can greatly enjoy taking advantage of.

Many groups dabble with this in some forms. For example, here are some subjects of gameplay that lend themselves well to this: economics, politics, war, and maybe espionage. Notice that these are the types of things you do in board games a lot. But you could totally have something like construction, conservation projects, running a business but focusing on the non-financial parts (e.g. running an opera house and managing the actors, the playwright, the stage production, etc.), going through religious rituals and sacraments, forming relationships, and so on.

While plenty of people have made downtime mechanics, and plenty of others recognize the fun of this sort of thing, it’s very rare that I find games that actually equip the DM to run this. There have been resources and websites like Obsidian Portal or World Anvil that cover a lot of what I'm about to describe, but most groups don't realize how to take advantage of the potential. All too often, these are treated as resources for the DM rather than the party. So I'm sorry 5th Edition, it's not enough to create an inflexible minigame for every specific "downtime activity" that occurs to you. The only way you'll ever achieve a true player-driven sandbox campaign is by letting their imaginations drive the car and merely providing the fuel and tools to guide that. 

So lets talk about the fuel and tools.

Medieval City Sizes

Paris in the year 1300. At 150,000 people, it was the largest city
on the continent, rivaled only by Constantinople. It was also about
1.5 miles across. Compare to Paris in 2020, closer to 6 or 7 miles
across. But a typical "city" in 1300 would really have had a
 population closer to 10,000. Think just how small that must be.

Medieval cities were very small. Like, even the really big ones were small. Something that makes it tricky to research is that "size" of urban areas is almost universally measured in population (which for the vast majority of anyone's purposes is a lot more useful) but I am deeply interested in "size" as measured by actual physical area. I think it's important to making maps, and I like using maps when running adventures in urban areas. Not for most activities. It doesn't matter for shopping or carousing or even investigating, for the most part. Or it doesn't have to. But what if you have a battle happening in the city? It's being attacked, raided, besieged, whatever. Mapping out the specific parts that have been taken is useful. And even those other activities can be enhanced by map elements. I like using tables of random encounters and locations the PCs would run into, but being able to divide them by district or neighborhood or whatever would break it up some and give the city as a whole a better sense of identity.