Splitting the Party Isn't That Bad

I guess it partially depends on how patient and cool your players are, but I am here to argue my case that it's just not that bad in general.

The party usually operates as one unit. When they come to a major decision point, they get everyone's perspective and maybe take a vote. When they come to a complicated situation, each person contributes what they can to the course of action. And unlike in film or TV, the "camera" is pretty much always pointed at the party the entire time, with no occasional dramatic cuts to the villain's lair to show him talking to his cronies or whatever. That's the idea, anyway.

This does not always work out. Sometimes just because of circumstances outside of anyone's control, but oftentimes it's because of a deliberate decision. The party will eventually find themselves in a situation where they ask, "should we send the rogue to scout up ahead alone?" Even most experienced players will be uncomfortable taking the risk, and still always try to return to the status quo as soon as possible. "Don't split the party" is one of the most oft-repeated mantras in tabletop gaming.

But I have done it a fuck ton and it's been fine.

Brave Design Notes 3: Alignment and Combat

Go to the master post

Art credit: William O'Connor

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.

Unity vs Division

I've been sitting on this idea for a couple years now but I've only ever had an abstract conception of it. Now I have some concrete systems to apply it to. Sorta. This will build off of my previous post as well as various things I've talked about here and there throughout the blog.

It starts with the idea of "campaign qualities." See, most people have an idea of what handful of qualities they'd like to see characterize their campaign as a whole. "I want to play a game that makes me feel like a Greek demigod." "I want to play a game with serious acting and drama and consequences." "I want to play a low-magic game that's heavy on survival." That sort of thing. Some games are built entirely around achieving one playstyle. Other games are a bit more flexible, and can be played in different ways. Most of the time, people recommend you achieve your intended feel by way of smart Level Design, so that the rules don't need to be changed from what people are used to. "You play the horror genre in an RPG by making scary scenarios!" But sometimes all it takes is a tweak here or there to the rules and systems of Game Design to have major consequences. A very popular houserule for 5E D&D is the "gritty realism" variant described in the DMG (along with some tweaks people have suggested) in order to achieve a more slow-burn, resource-management focused game than the vanilla version. And apparently it works great!

One dichotomy I think has a great deal of potency is a concept I call "Unity or Division." Each of these has a broad definition that can affect a wide range of factors in gameplay, from economics to exploration to politics and more. They can be thought of as a template that you apply to an entire country, modifying the details of many rule systems to give it a distinct identity of gameplay. 

Let's jump in.

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:

Elves Part 3: Elf Subraces

Artist credit: Steve Prescott

I didn't expect to write even one of these articles, let alone 3. Well, you can't have elves without elf-types, so here are my versions of the three classic elf subraces (High, Dark, Wood) for Underworld. Please see the last post of this series here. I'm basically writing down every solid idea I've had so far, but the more I write, the more I feel like this trichotomy will inevitably be deconstructed. I began charting factions and races in my setting and started expanding the list exponentially, so each region of the world would have a good variety of unique societies. And so... just one type of High Elf, Dark Elf, and Wood Elf stopped being sufficient. I'll instead likely create a matrix of two axes: light to dark (with a neutral zone in the middle) and Seelie to Unseelie (with a neutral zone in the middle), creating 9 basic types of elf. Except that, obviously, there are more elf societies than that. Hoo boy, I've really gone down the worldbuilding rabbit hole. But in any case, I can right now offer up "the classic three," good for most elf purposes.

Elves Part 2: The Elfs of Underworld

Following up on previous posts about the lore of races in Underworld, here's everything I know about elfs in my setting so far. I already vomited out my thought process on elves in my last post, so below is the stuff I've actually settled on. 

The bad thing about spending so much text describing your influences is that you kind of blow your load on a lot of the neat ideas. I'll try not to re-cover too much of the same ground, but you'll definitely see a lot of the qualities discussed in that last article finding their way into my elfs quite pervasively. You may even need to just assume some of the discussed ideas hold true of my elfs, through inference. But below, I'm gunna focus on the more novel stuff. I'll start with traits universal to all elfs before getting into subraces. And yes, I am, actually, going to roughly retain the traditional D&D trichotomy of elves: High, Dark, and Wood. It helps maintain basic player expectations for what they can play, even if they aren't well-versed in the setting-specific details yet.

Decent Rules to Make Languages Fun

First, here's some supplemental reading you may find insightful. All of it is from other RPG bloggers tackling the same subject as me:

1. https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/04/dungeoncrawling-languages.html 
2. https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/03/on-language.html
3. https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2008/11/languages-or-why-we-shouldnt-be-able-to.html
4. https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2020/05/soft-ass-d.html (he covers language as a specific part of the post and I think his take is neat)
5. https://thelastdaydawned.blogspot.com/2016/11/making-languages-make-sense.html
6. http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38698/roleplaying-games/untested-fantasy-lorem-ipsum
7. https://www.paperspencils.com/making-languages-relevant/

The RPG Mausritter, about playing as tiny mice in a fantasy world, has some really cool language rules that I don't think can easily work for most other settings:

As a general rule of thumb, the more closely related two creatures are, the more likely they are able to be able to understand each other. Use the creature’s taxonomy to make a ruling. Magical or highly intelligent creatures may break these rules. • Same species (mouse): Can easily communicate. • Same family (rodent): Can speak and communicate, with some difficulty and difference of custom. • Same class (mammal): Make a WIL save to see if communication is possible. • Otherwise: Can’t directly communicate.

So yeah, all those thoughts are very neat. I'll throw in my two cents.

Dragons of the Great Game

This is one of my all-time favorite pieces of fluff in D&D history, but is, unfortunately, almost completely lost to history. Maybe someone reading this will give it another look.

In the days of 3rd Edition D&D, there was a lot of content bloat. In just eight years they came out with five monster manuals, each filled with several hundred new baddies for you to use. They were mostly garbage, aiming for quantity over quality every step of the way. By Monster Manual III, nearly every page had a goofy, ridiculous concept someone pulled from their ass in desperation to sell more books. But all of them contained nuggets of gold, if you scoured through them. The Monster Manual V was the most ignored of all, coming out near the end of the 3rd edition life cycle. Right when everyone was looking forward to 4th edition or, at the very least, already had plenty of monsters to use. But this monster I want to talk about wasn’t really something that you needed the stat block for. This was an idea.

The gist: dragons have a favorite board game they play, and it can make for the coolest campaign ever.

Medieval Halflings: Pechs, Not Hobbits

Unacceptable

Brilliant

Of the core D&D races, halflings are the ones I think the least about. That’s probably true for many people. I think they’re delightful, don’t get me wrong. I think the 5th Edition art for them, where they have giant bloated heads, is hysterical and great. I think anyone defending the freak alien 3rd Edition ones is pretentious and ridiculous. But… I would like for these to be something that can be taken seriously. That is, after all, why I revisited gnomes. So I want halflings that I’m happy with and manage to be fairly vanilla while also different than what we’re normally given. I originally envisioned this looking similar to the gnome or dwarf posts I made, but as you can see, I had some complicated thought processes I think may be of value to share. But the list of halfling traits I made is in the second half.

Bugbears that Go Bump in the Night

I never liked Bugbears much. Always loved Goblins and I long ago fleshed out Hobgoblins into something I was so happy with they became one of my favorite races. But Bugbears didn't do it for me.

One visual re-skin later and now I love them. This does not fundamentally change much about them or their lore, but I think it "clicks" with me better now. Here are some images of Bugbears as they appear in my setting:

...more below...

Talking Statues: The Ultimate Quest Dealer

Statue of Saint Tarscel. Click the pic for details.

This is one of the best ideas I've ever had and you should all steal it immediately.

Have you ever heard of the talking statues of Rome? I'd known about them for awhile, thought they were neat, maybe some potential worth exploring for worldbuilding purposes. Tucked it away in the back of my mind. Now, I've finally found a use for them.

Rumors are a classic thing to include in D&D. More so in the old school, but it's an ever-popular tradition. Lots of adventure modules come with them. But I've always found them tricky to integrate, myself. That's not the sort of things my players usually go for, and I'd hate to force-feed them stuff like that. But I'm working on a cool sandbox campaign, and suddenly having a system for "quest hooks up for grabs!" is really convenient.

And especially because we're all playing online now and I'd like the PCs to have an idea of their next adventure during the week between sessions ("downtime" in a sense), having a passive way to distribute this info, and consumed at their own pace, is the ideal.

So my city has a bunch of talking statues that my players can always look at. They update regularly, and the player characters can even post stuff themselves. There are 6 statues, each with a different theme, so there's a ton of variety. They have fantastic potential for worldbuilding, as the statues themselves and their theme embody a specific deity in my setting. In addition, not every post is tied to a quest. Lots of it's just flavor. A decent amount of it came about as a consequence of something the PCs did. That top-right post on my boi Tarscel up there? About vacated farms? Yeah, that all happened during our last session, and the PCs' next planned move was to start looting.

Want to know how to set this up in your game? I'll give instructions on how I did it, below. Adapt it however you need to fit your table's setup. I'll also show off my own statues a bit more if you want some inspiration.

BRAVE 1.5 Playtest Recap

For our last session, I got to playtest my current draft of Brave. It was pretty successful. I don't normally care for "game tales" myself but I'll share some of the experience here since this was an incredibly valuable learning experience for me.

Firstly, here's a link to the playtest doc the PCs used. I modified a handful of things specifically for this session because certain features might not be "ready" for testing yet, but this is the first time I've had a chance to play with the actual classes.

Here's a map that the PCs used for the session. This is an area called the Wyvern Marches, with modest Marion at the center of all the chaos. Each location is 3 miles (1 hour, generally) apart. Here's the quick-and-dirty 3-step travel procedure I used:

Alright Let Me School You on Gnomes

Let’s do a follow-up on that dwarf article I wrote a few months back. Gnomes are controversial, notorious for being hard to define and oftentimes rejected entirely by DMs who just can’t sink their teeth in.

One way races are sometimes justified in D&D is by a mechanical function, a role they play in the game as a whole. Dwarves make great fighters and halflings make great rogues. So the gnome was meant to be a good race for playing wizards and illusionists. Kind of stepping on elven toes a bit but sure. The result in lore ended up looking like a weird hybrid of details from elves, dwarves, and halflings. Fey but earth-y. Big beards and big into mining. Intrinsically magical. Borrowed a lot of the same inspiration that Tolkien used for Hobbits. Really just lacking in a unique identity. Most of the early attempts to give them something of their own was just “zany” stuff, which leaves a bad taste for many people. As time has gone on, they’ve been given a bit more to do with alchemy and steampunk engineering and stuff like that. I dig it, but for some people that still isn’t enough.

Weird Dwarf Traits

It is important to me that the demihuman races feel properly distinct and non-human. Or at least, they should be exotic or foreign, and especially easy to roleplay in a memorable way. As we know, dwarrow (dwarves) tend to all be the same. We should fix that. Here are some miscellaneous things about dwarrow culture I’ve either brainstormed sitting here or accumulated over the years. Some are pretty creative and original, others are straight-up cultural appropriation but, like, you’ll enjoy them.

Advanced Darkness

Let’s do some more DIY D&D and hack the rules. I’m going to introduce to you my favorite and most important houserule: Advanced Darkness.

Overview

Why do we come up with houserules? Because there’s some kind of problem. Maybe not everyone sees it as a problem, but that’s oftentimes just because people have learned to live with it and be complacent with a deficiency that could be fixed.

How do we come up with houserules? We 1) identify the sources of the problems and 2) identify the results we would like to see instead. Creating a rule is creating the “cause” in a cause-and-effect relationship. In order to know what cause you should aim for, you need to know what effect you’re after.

What do we do with houserules? We test them out and explore their full implications. We look for vulnerabilities that could be exploited. We try to break them. We consider some unintended consequences. We try to think of ways it could interact with other game elements. We playtest it. We adapt it. We eventually figure out the best ruling possible. Maybe it’s a refined version of the houserule, or maybe its the RPG’s original ruling after all.

Electrum is Underdark Money

This is an example of why we need to make DIY D&D the norm in this hobby. I have seen, far too often, DMs dismissing an idea or mechanic or game element because they don’t like how it works when they instead could've hacked it to unlock its true potential. How many DMs don’t even bother with Alignment or Encumbrance or Darkness just because, as they exist in 5th Edition (and throughout the editions, generally), they kind of suck and need some reworking? I’ll show you how to do that right now.

In D&D, currency comes in three common denominations. Ten copper pieces to one silver piece, ten silver pieces to one gold piece. Beyond that you can have ten gold pieces for one platinum piece, and of course the infamous one, five silver pieces to one electrum piece AKA two electrum pieces to one gold piece. Electrum is the one that breaks the nice, consistent pattern. It is exceedingly rare. It seems pointless. It feels like if you received that as your treasure from the DM then they were trying to troll you a bit. So most people don’t use it and that’s that.

That’s the lame way of doing things.