Player Art - The Evolution of Jimbo Chirrup

Over the course of my GLOG Wizard City game, Josh Burnett has done several sketches of his character, Jimbo Chirrup, the grasshopperfolk garden-wizard.

Here's Jimbo before our first session. Poor little guy. He has no idea what grad school is going to do to him. Yeah, I was young and naive like that once too.

This is Jimbo after his second year as a master's student. Crippled by magical mental illnesses, afflicted with a drinking problem, bandaged around the thorax to stop his cracked exoskeleton from leaking hemo-fluid. That's the grad school we all remember.

Now we're really talking. This here is COLLEGE college!

Here we see Jimbo at the end of his third year. He's pretty much abandoned all his former ideals and morals and leaned in to the whole evil wizard thing. He has a badass Hell Gun, a demon hat, a pet cat, a soul condemned to Hell, (wait, what was that last one?), and his own evil apprentice, (no, before that-) Birdie Boombatz, the sparrowling biomancer wizard, a member of the Sisters of the Cell, the Omicron Delta Theta sorority (-the soul thing?)

His people sent him off to ag school to study farming, and he came back with plans to set up a special kind of lottery to help the harvest...

Actual Play - GLOG Wizard City - Junior Year

Wizard Grad School 3rd Year Dungeon Exams

This is the final leg of my GLOG campaign in Goodberry Monthly's ever-increasing Wizard City campaign setting.

After the events of the Freshman Year and Sophomore Year dungeon delves, Jimbo, Deeringer, and Lunai had settled on robbing the vault on the 3rd level as their primary goal for their Junior Year adventure. Jimbo and Deeringer had also endeared themselves to the sorority sisters of Omicron Delta Theta, the so-called "Sisters of the Cell", so we decided to start this year off with a couple of recently-graduated 1st level sorority sisters completing a quest of their own before joining the others on their final delve.

The party had realized that in order to open the vault to steal the Eleventh-Hour Glass (so they could give it to Monica Doom, so she could trade it for her lost ability to change back from being a cat to being human, in exchange for her offer to help fence stolen textbooks for a higher price) they would need the combination to the vault's lock. Fortunately, Monica Doom knew that the Professor of Ethics and Contract Law over at the nearby rival Wizard Liberal Arts College of Soul Studies knew the combination and would be willing to trade it for a favor.

Sooooo, hoping to impress their new mentors, Birdie and Spellweaver set off across town to go back to college (but like, a different college) just after graduating from Gallax University.

This is what a spiderling wizard and a sparrowling wizard team-up looks like, right?
image by Super Team Family

Birdie Boombatz, a sparrowling and 1st level biomancer wizard, played by Josh
Spellweaver, a spiderling and 1st level stalactomancer wizard, played by Peter

Session 9: Summer Break Summer School

Birdie and Spellweaver went to meet Monica Doom's contact in the Wealth & Hellness Office. Dr ZL Beebub the Infernal Professor of Ethics and Contract Law, was willing to trade them the combination to the vault deep under Gallax Hall in exchange for services rendered - specifically he wanted the pair to spoil his rival professor's demonstration of her new invention and humiliate her in front of their peers.

Dr Beebub explained that his rival, Dr BB Rosemary, the Liturgical Professor of Exorcism and Insorcism, would doubtless be rehearsing in the Chapel before giving her big presentation later that day in the Lecture Hall. He insisted on getting the agreement in writing, with the pair's souls held as collateral until the job was completed. (In retrospect, this would have been a great opportunity to sing "Poor Unfortunate Souls" from The Little Mermaid. Oh well.)

Wealth & Hellness was full of cheerful, if creepy, motivational posters: "Pay Your Debts - Or Else", "Broken Promises Cause Broken Knees", etc. Birdie was so impressed by how evil the place seemed that she signed an admissions contract to begin taking classes in the fall. Dr Beebub pointed out the door closest to the Chapel, and the pair set off on their mission.

They entered the Heart House, a great high-ceilinged chamber, with an enormous heart suspended from the ceiling, slowly beating and dripping bloody meat juice onto the floor. As a trained stalactomancer, Spellweaver eagerly crouched down to slurp some of the fluids off the floor, "Wow this is totally grody," and learning the mysterious secrets of electricity in the process! "Ew, that's like, really gross," opined Birdie, as she collected several vials of the same liquid to mix into her homemade polymorph potions.

They next entered the Chapel, carefully opening and closing the doors in time to the heartbeat. They saw Dr Rosemary standing behind the altar, facing away from them, animatedly rehearsing her lecture. It sounded like she had a machine that could remove the soul from one body and transfer it to another. Spellweaver and Birdie decided they could sabotage the machine. For good measure, they used their scrunchies to tie up the Chapel door-handles to try to delay Dr Rosemary from leaving.

The sisters retraced their steps back through the Heart House and Wealth & Hellness, and planned to approach the lecture hall by cutting through the Library. The shelves were stacked to the ceiling and seemed to loom and sway as they passed through. "Ugh, this place is really cramped!" An indignant librarian quickly honed in on the pair's whispers, so they rushed out the other side, arriving in the Bell Tower. They saw a rickety and railing-less staircase leading all the way to the top ... along with dozens of ghosts flying around the belfry. "I wonder whose office is up there? I guess we'll never know!"

Birdie and Spellweave next arrived in the Tutorial Laboratories, where they saw doors to three study rooms. Picking one, they found two badass wizard weapons, the Soul Gun and the Hell Gun, sitting out on a work bench. They also heard an ominous skittering sound coming through the air vents toward them, and so quickly retreated from the study rooms with their newfound weapons.

Finally they reached the Lecture Hall, only to be challenged by the small crowd of undergrads already filling the first several rows. "Hey, what are you two grad students doing in here? We're getting extra credit for attending this lecture. Don't do anything that would jeopardize our extra credit!" Thinking quickly, Birdie used a spell to disguise herself as Dr Rosemary, while Spellweaver used her newly (and deliciously!) acquired knowledge of electricity to tamper with the experimental device. "Like, I'm totally Dr Rosemary or whatever. What are you kids even doing here? There's like, no extra credit for this talk. Tell all your friends, okay? You get no credit for being here! I want you to learn to be like, intrinsically motivated, or some junk." The undergrads were aghast and when the sisters shut the door, they heard the students immediately erupt in a debate about how to continue.

Feeling confident that they'd held up their end of the bargain, Birdie and Spellweaver tried to head back to Wealth & Hellness without being seen by the real Dr Rosemay ... or facing whatever that skittering sound was again. They passed through the cafeteria, which was in an uproar over the issue of extra credit, and both heroines were pelted with food as they tried to rush through the crossfire. Spellweaver was hit with an exploding pie that blew off one of her legs! Birdie got struck by a "meat" loaf that hit like a brick.

By the time they reached Wealth & Hellness, Dr Beebub was already laughing to himself. He'd gotten the latest gossip from his staff. Only a handful of students attended, which flustered the poor woman, and made her look bad in front of her colleagues. Worse, when she called for a volunteer to help demonstrate her soul-swapping device, the machine didn't even steal the student's soul - instead it turned Dr Rosemary herself into a mindless zombie body. This certainly wouldn't look good on her tenure application! Pleased with the results, Dr Beebub gave Birdie and Spellweaver the combination to the vault, and the pair left with their new guns, knowledge of electricity, and giant-infused polymorph potions.

The Soul Gun and Hell Gun, seen here being wielded
by their original owners, Captain Soul and Hellwave

I ran the Winter Break using the "Stirring Up the Pot" table from the Wizard City Hex Crawl, and then having each character roll on the What Happened This Semester? table. Also, I believe I either had Josh make a saving throw or a Wisdom check to try to remove his last remaining mental mutation.

Jimbo Chirrup, a grasshopperfolk and 3rd level garden wizard and
Birdie Boombatz, a sparrowling and 1st level biomancer wizard, played by Josh

Deeringer, a deerling and 3rd level drowned wizard and
Spellweaver, a spiderling and 1st level stalactomancer wizard, played by Peter

Lunai Lovegood, a lunai and 3rd level orthodox wizard, played by me

Session 10: Winter Holiday and Spring Break

Jimbo, Birdie, Deeringer, Spellweaver, and Lunai went out on the town the very first night of the winter holiday, hoping to celebrate the end of their fall classes. Unfortunately, Lunai immediately noticed a problem. "Something's wrong with the moon," she said, "I'm from there, and it's not supposed to look like that!"

Indeed it was not! The Dead Jane gang had finally put in motion their long-held plan to summon the Zombie Moon! Corpses rose from their graves! Various townsfolk failed their saving throws and were converted to the living dead! But what started as a zombie apocalypse quickly turned into a gang war, when the Wizard Police, rather than solving the problem themselves, outsourced the zombie killing to the rival Black Dragon gang. "Eh whatever, these'll be public service homicides for a change."

The grad school chums spent the break holed up inside the Wandering Monster bar. In fact, virtually everyone who wasn't a gang member of zombie spent the break holed up wherever they could find a locking door. They enjoyed a sumptuous Winter Solstice feast of the last of the bar nuts and a handful of pretzels, split five ways. Lunai also managed to purchase a discarded zombie arm at a steep discount, giving her just the prosthetic she needed after losing her original arm to a carnivorous hat the previous year. Spellweaver considered buying a zombie arm of her own, to replace the one she lost over the summer, but decided she could do better.

Over spring break, a rogue graduate committee managed to ambush Deeringer and force him into an empty conference room for a coerced but impromptu masters thesis defense. Fortunately, as one of the last surviving citizens of doomed Atlantis, Deeringer had spent his whole life preparing for this moment. He pulled out a rolled up poster, with hundreds of instructional images connected by a maze of diagonal red lines, and lectured the professors for 10 hours on his magnum opus, "The Ocean Is Coming: And You're Going to Hell", until they finally relented and awarded him a degree. Jimbo was astonished: "you don't even go to this school!"

Spellweaver was impressed with her mentor. Without her really meaning for it to happen, the student loan officer who'd been pursuing Deeringer ended up falling in love with her. "It must be my irresistible pheromones. We like, use them for subduing inferior mammals, and stuff." She tried to convince the poor kid to cut off his arm and give it to her as a courtship present, but his affections didn't extend quite that far. "Yet!"

Jimbo's visits to Student Health finally paid off, and the counselors there cured him of the drinking problem he'd gotten after wandering into one of the Department of Torture laboratories. "From now on, I'm straight edge," he said, drawing Xs on the back of his hands. With a clearer head, he was also able think back on his many trips between the University campus and the Wandering Monster bar ... and realize that there was a hidden alleyway connecting them. If only he had any use for that information!

Over the winter and spring, Jimbo made several attempts to figure out the workings of the Soul Gun and Hell Gun. When fired, the Soul Gun let out a beam of angelic blue light, and the Hell Gun burst forth with a swath of sulfurous hellfire. Jimbo tried out the Hell Gun against an advancing zombie during the winter, but the fire didn't seem to burn the lifeless creature. Later he took both guns out to the University garden to try firing them at tin cans set up on fence posts. Visually they were incredibly dramatic, but the unliving cans (and fence posts) suffered no obvious effects from the weapons. "I guess I'll have to test them on something living..." he finally acceded.

Birdie was able to find a special of The Walking Eye student newspaper. Her issue was all about the Black Dragons gang, and has advice for selling futures of zombie body parts. "Ohmygod, I'm like, a total entrepreneur!"

 

 

A new challenger grad student has appeared!

 

At this point, Josh's friend and writing-partner Leighton joined our group, adding one final member to the party:

Chordy teh Forg, a toadling and 3rd level geometer wizard, played by Leighton

At 3rd level, all the GLOG wizards in the party got to choose one spell and give it a positive spell mutation. I think Jimbo chose Magic Missile and got a more powerful version, and I honestly don't remember what happened with Deeringer. Chordy decided to mutate Control Iron and was required to give it "new flavor", turning it into Control Stone, which proved to be enormously useful down in the dungeon. 

Sessions 11-13: Third Year Final Exams

Before venturing into the dungeons for the last time, the group went over their plan. They had the combination to the vaults. They had a fake "hall pass" that had worked once before. They bought some rope to descend down the belltower, which they thought was too rickety to climb down before. They had a couple of badass hell weapons, even if they weren't totally sure how they worked. Was there anything else? "Uh, YE-ah," said Birdie, "we need, like, a human sacrifice!" Spellweaver agreed. "You know how, like, in undergrad, we would like, hire a really nerdy guy to our homework for us? We need that, but like, for the dungeon!"

Jimbo thought he knew just the guy for the job. He went into the student bookstore on a Saturday morning, when everyone else was still asleep from partying the night before, and sidled up to the only other person awake on campus - the poor chump stuck working the morning cashier shift. Jimbo stood near the checkout lane, his hands folded behind his back nonchalantly, staring up at the ceiling as though inspecting the tiles. 

"Psst, Chordy," he whispered.

"Is someone talking to me?!" the toadling cashier enthused.

"It's me Jimbo," said Jimbo. "Listen, you know all those textbooks my friends and I sold you?"
"Of course!" announced Chordy, "the bookstore is always happy to buy back legally acquired used textbooks!"
"Uh, yeah, 'legal' ", Jimbo agreed. "Anyway, Chordy, my friends and I are going someplace where there'll probably be a lot more textbooks, and we could use someone with your expertise to-"
"Wait!" cut in Chordy, "Friends?! Are you saying we're friends?!"
"Well, no, that's not exactly what I..." Jimbo paused to consider his option. "You know what? Yeah, sure, friends."
"Friends!" exclaimed an enraptured Chordy, who took off his bookstore apron, and followed Jimbo to the dungeon entrance.

The group passed through the now-familiar entrance to the dungeons under Gallax Hall. A quick peek into Dr Sitch's office revealed the professor staring forlornly at a photo of Arivaderchi Zeucchini, a single tear in the old man's eye. They headed straight for the belltower, wasting no time on detours or distractions. The custodians' sign warning of a "Grabby Floor" were still up, so the friends took a familiar path around it, passing by various statues to arrive at the boarded-up wall leading into the top of the belltower. They began hacking away at the wall with their weapons, only to be confronted by an angry custodian. "What the hell are you kids doing to that wall?!" the frustrated worker screamed at them. Jimbo cast a spell to calm the man's emotions. "With the overtime pay I'll earn from these repairs, I can rent that hat I've had my eye on. You kids are alright."

With the wall open, the group looked down the deep pit. The very top of the old belltower only reached here, to the basement bellow Gallax hall. The belltower passed down through the steam tunnels and (they hoped!) opened out into the ruins of the Old University. They secured their ropes and climbed carefully down. At the bottom, they discovered that all the old doors out of the belltower had been walled up. There was no obvious way out. "I know!" shouted Chordy, his already loud voice amplified by the acoustics of the tower. "I can control the stone to make a new way out!" The others winced in agreement. After some debate about which side of the square room to install an exit, Chordy faced the southern wall, and sent a tunnel through 10' of stone fill to create a new doorway into a hall. There was a closed door directly in front of them, to one side they could see the enormous room containing the statues of the founders and the (presumably) cursed Seal of the University. To the other side they saw a double-wide hallway. 

Jimbo remembered the guardians of the previous double-wide hall, got out the forged "hall pass", and strode confidently out to meet the robotic guard. Glancing to the south, he spotted a carving of a knight in armor, and walked up to it. He slowed as he began noticing dozens of charred corpses further to the south. The carving's visor began glowing red. "Present hall pass," it intoned. "Certainly, certainly," Jimbo dissembled. "I'm sure this is all in order." The charred bodies began to stir and rise to their feet. The visor's red glow became almost blinding. "Hallpass rejected. Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" Jimbo turned and tried to run back around the corner, but he was shot in the back by a powerful laser blast that could easily have killed him a few years ago. The charred corpses began slowly shambling northward toward Jimbo and the others, waiting just around the corner. The statues visor returned to a dull red glow, and appeared to be recharging. Spellweaver rushed out to sabotage its electronics, barely avoiding the zombie vanguard. The group hustled into the closed door directly across from Chordy's tunnel. They heard the whine of the recharging robot reach a fever pitch, then heard an explosion as red light momentarily poured between the door and jam.

Turning from that near disaster, as Birdie gently patted out the last smoldering flames on Jimbo's back, the friends surveyed the room, finding themselves in some sort of catering staging area. A gang of 4 mean looking undergrads in fraternity robes were in the middle of shaving strips of meat off a pair of mummified kebabs, molding the strips into little gingerbread-man-sized puppets, then bringing them magically to life. Birdie and Spellweaver recognized their fraternity gang-signs from their own sorority days. "Ugh, its the Black Magic Bros. They're like, totally our rivals and junk." The Bros didn't look very happy to see the adventurers either. "Girls and grad students? Gross. Do you lift even?" A couple of the Bros came at the group with their carving knives, and Jimbo attempted to use his calming magic again. Unfortunately, he suffered a mishap, and vomited hemolymph all over the floor at their feet. Spellweaver eyed the liquid longingly. The Bros were disgusted, and shooed everyone out through the back door into the kitchen so they could continue their magic ritual uninterrupted.

In the kitchen, the group saw a zombie (a non-burned-up one this time) gnawing on another spindle of mummified meat. Deeringer tried to sneak up behind it, but his antlers accidentally knocked over a dishrack, raising a terrible clatter. One of the Black Magic Bros came in. "Yo! Are you bros interrupting our magic on purpose?" Deeringer explained that it was just an accident while trying to attack the zombie, but he wasn't able to harm it. The Bro was disgusted, but magically destroyed the zombie and then returned next door. "Yo, you bros are genuinely weak and pathetic. You sicken me. You need to lift and get swole!"

With the Bros distracted and the zombie defeated, the group decided to take advantage of the momentary calm to eat some lunch in the old kitchen. Jimbo felt much better afterward! After eating, they searched the kitchen for valuables, and turned up fine china plates worth 88 gp, and some good silverware worth 15 gp. Rather than risk interrupting the Bros again, they left the kitchen via the back exit, which deposited them in a small crossway with three other possible routes. Peeking into each room in turn, they saw a refrigerated room where a dozen zombies were trying to open a locked freezer, a cafeteria where a dozen zombies were tearing apart the corpse of a Black Magic Bro, and a blocked door that they eventually forced open. It was a supply closet, filled with tables and chairs, most of which had been piled up to prevent anyone from getting in. After finally weaseling inside, they pushed the stacked furniture back into position to keep out any zombies.

The group then listened at the only other exit door, and heard whispering about budgets. They worried that this might be another administrative ghost, but decided that was still safer than trying to fight through a mob of zombies. They emerged into a dusty hallway connecting the giant University Seal room to the old front entrance to the original Gallax College building. The hall was dusty, but it was clear that a lot of foot traffic was coming north from the old entrance, so they headed in that direction. As they approached the foyer, they were accosted by more Black Magic Bros, "Yo, this is our turf, frat brothers only past this point!" Deeringer stepped forward, "Well what if we joined your fraternity?" The Bros seemed excited by this idea, "Bro, are you pledges?! This is great! Alright probie, you wanna join our gang, all you gotta do is commit an unforgivable sin."

Jimbo stepped forward with his Hell Gun, checked the group to identify the shortest and nerdiest looking Bro, and straight up wasted the guy with a torrent of hellfire. That Bro's soul was condemned to Hell, and Jimbo knew with a certainty that his own soul was damned in that instant as well. The other Bros took one look at the smoldering corpse, then at Jimbo, then cheered. "Bro! That was epic! You didn't tell me you dudes were hardcore!" A round of chest bumps, high fives, and keg stands followed. Spellweaver amused the Bros by trying to harvest a prosthetic from the corpse, but it was too badly burned. Jimbo seemed dazed, and kept looking at his hands. "My god, what have I done..." he mumbled to himself. "I used to be so nice... I was going to be a farmer..."

While partying, the Bros explain the layout of their turf, and the group made a plan to get to the vault. They entered a room that they believed had door opening to the north, but found their way blocked by some sort of arcane puzzle. The wall was carved with some sort of large circular rune, the indents were filled with dried blood, and key spots on the rune were adorned with teeth and ears. "I have some teeth!" Spellweaver cheerfully announced. "What? Why?" Jimbo was disgusted. "I got my boyfriend in the bursar's office to give them to me while I was building up to ask for his arm." Jimbo insisted that they get ears from the zombie remains they'd left in the kitchen. En route, they encountered a dungeon cat! Jimbo remembered he'd stolen a laser pointer from the Torture Department's lecture hall, and used it to entertain the cat, who proved to be very friendly. "Wow boss," said Birdie, impressed, "You're like a real evil wizard now. You've got an apprentice, a familiar, plus that Hell Gun." Jimbo mumbled to himself as they returned to the room with the mysterious seal, "No... supposed to be nice... farmer..."

Birdie and Spellweaver experimented with adding additional teeth and ears to the rune, but couldn't get it to activate. Deeringer tried wiping away some of the blood, and they realized that this was a Custodian's Seal ... which made them question whether the bodyparts were needed for the ritual, or some sort of negative consequence of performing it incorrectly. "I have an idea!" announced Chordy, and used his spell to control stone to open another doorway right next to the secret door being blocked by the seal.

In the next room, they found a bloodstained stone altar next to a pit filled with the skeletons of undergrads, still wearing a few mouldering scraps of their old robes. Another skeleton was reaching out toward the altar, obviously killed by a sword stuck through its back. Deeringer inspected this corpse. He thought it was Administrator Hargrave. " 'No escape, Hargrave,' indeed," he said. He found a slip of paper in the skeleton's hand with clues for figuring out the vault combination, but since they already knew the combination, they didn't bother trying to puzzle out the three riddles. Spellweaver took the sword and swung it around a few times, "Oh yeah, I could really chop some arms off with this!" Jimbo took the demon-faced wizard's hat the corpse was wearing, beginning to accept his new identity as an evil wizard.

Deeringer felt around the northern wall, looking for a way through into the vault. As he did, the skeletons in the pit began stirring. Chordy used a spell for packing things securely to slide the altar into the pit, crushing the skeletons to dust. (Meanwhile, upstairs, every other skeleton in the dungeon reanimated and went on an indiscriminate killing spree!) Administrator Hargrave's skeleton rose up to attack them, but Spellweaver used the magic sword to put Hargrave down for a second time. Eventually Deeringer was able to force open a door that was probably somehow tied to the altar's magic. And with that, they were in the vault!

Deeringer used the combination Birdie and Spellweaver had secured to open a locked safe. Inside the found the mythic Eleventh Hourglass! They weren't really sure what use it might have, beyond securing their good relationship with Monica Doom. The room was filled with other treasure chests, but they were mostly open and empty. In fact, only one was undisturbed. Deeringer feared a trap, and used his spell that commanded coins to open the chest from a distance. Nothing seemed to happen, and they found two heavy gold ingots inside. Birdie and Spellweaver each carried one.

To leave the dungeon and return upstairs, the group decided to take a different way back so the Bros wouldn't see them carrying the gold. They went down the hall past Chordy's entrance to the blood-sealed room, and found a closet for storing contraband that had been confiscated from unruly undergrads. There were storage areas for knives, swords, staves, crossbows, and wands, but only a handful of loose daggers were left lying on the floor; everything else had been taken.

In the next room, they found a walk-in closet with a lot of dusty old Administrator's robes, and a lot more empty hangers. Rounding a corner, they saw a dying undergrad slowly dragging himself toward a farther door. Inspecting him seemed to reveal that he wasn't a ghost, but maybe someone trapped in slow motion and a time-loop. They used the Soul Gun to disperse the soul from his body one segment at a time, until he was finally released from the prison he'd been trapped in for hundreds of years. Spellweaver drank some of the blood off the floor and learned a bit of history - the graduating class of 677 had all been killed and turned into zombies which still wandered these lower halls. This lead to a worsening of faculty-student relations, culminating in a rebellion led by the class of 702. That was probably the source of the various battlefields they'd seen, and the reason the old university was abandoned and built over, as well as the cause of this poor fellow's death.

The group dressed in Administrator's robes and used a couple of spares to hide their gold ingots. Confident in their new attire, they found their way to one of the double-wide halls, where a knight statue greeted them in its robotic voice, "Greetings, administrators." They had no further trouble returning to the surface.

With the Eleventh Hourglass to use as a bargaining chip, Monica Doom was able to buy back her ability to return to human form. And with their gold bars, new magic items, and purloined dinnerware, the group was financially well set up to leave the University and start up their own wizarding gang.

Fin

Let's Read Barbarian Prince - part 1 Map and Layout

I recently read a really glowing review of the boardgame Barbarian Prince that got me curious about the game - both what it's like to play it, and also at a more basic level, how it works.

You may have noticed I have an interest in using procedural instructions to generate a game experience, and learning from other games that use instructions, like the roguelike genre of computer games, and the Choose Your Own Adventure series of game books.

So consider my interest in Barbarian Prince to be part of a broader interest in how to use game rules to create a certain kind of experience, either in the absence of a gamemaster, or with a gamemaster who's more like an interpretive guide than someone actually directing the action of the game.

Fortunately, since 2003, the Reaper Miniatures company made six games originally published by Dwarfstar Games available as free downloads, including Barbarian Prince, so it's very easy for us to experience, despite the game being out of print from something like 30-40 years at this point.

Barbarian Prince map by Cynthia Sims Millan, copyright Reaper Miniatures

Let's start by looking at the map. It's really gorgeous, and it's fair to say that the beautiful map is the only reason I ever heard of Barbarian Prince before reading that review.

The Dwarfstar games were a bit before my time. Same with Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival and Magic Realm and TSR's Divine Right. But the maps are so evocative that people still post about them from time to time. Like many of you, my first knowledge of the existence of those games was seeing one of their maps online.

The first Dwarfstar game I ever saw was actually Demonlord. I learned about it, roughly at the same time, from People Them With Monsters (where it was being used as the map for his Outland campaign) and from Dungeon Skull Mountain (where it was being used for his Demon Verge campaign). Following the link to learn about Demonlord first introduced me to Barbarian Prince, although at the time, the map was the only part of the game I was interested in.

In thumbnail, the thing I notice most about the map are the colors, the soft lovely shades of green and purple that help distinguish the terrain types. If you look at the enlarged version though, there are details I didn't initially see. The cross-hatched fields of the farmland, the numerous towns, temples, castles, and ruins. This isn't, as I thought at first glance, particularly a wilderness map, like in Outdoor Survival, it's a map of a settled and interconnected region.

The dimensions of the map are unusual, 23 hexes down by 20 across. Its scale reminds me of Save vs Total Party Kill's repository of crowd-sourced hex maps, but the most common size there is 20 by 20. Outdoor Survival has a big map made of 6 smaller ones, and each of those is 17 by 14. Divine Right's map is oriented the other way, and it's 31 by 34. The Land of Nod's maps of, well, the land of Nod are even bigger. Even the Demonlord map is 22 by 23. I would say that 20 by 23 is a size that never caught on, but I think the fairer assessment is that there simply is no standard size for large hexmaps.

original layout, copyright Reaper Miniatures

   

layout by jumbit, copyright Reaper Miniatures

While the map is beautiful and informative, the appearance and layout of the rules is ... not. I'm not going to throw stones at what was - for all I know - the cutting edge of information design in gaming in 1981, but I will note that by contemporary standards, it is maddeningly poorly laid out, and that's just my reaction as a reader. I have to suspect that these problems would be amplified in play. If ever there were a document that cried out for the loving touch of a skilled layout artist, this would be it.

The rules of Barbarian Prince are divided into two booklets. e000 - e199 are events and covered in the Events Booklet, and r200 - r399 are rules and covered in the Rules Booklet. No, I don't know why the rules come second. These numbers correspond to sections rather than pages (they could as easily be labeled §000 - §399, like you see in some works of philosophy) and their purpose is to facilitate easy lookup. That's how the Choose Your Own Adventure books work too, (though with page numbers instead of sections) but what it really reminds me of is computer programming using the BASIC language. All that's missing are the GOTO statements.

(I spent a couple years in high school learning to program in BASIC on Apple IIE computers. This was some time around the turn of the millennium. My high school was ... not good. In college, I gave up on computer programming in favor of finally learning to understand other people, a decision that has unquestionably enriched my life ever since. I did have one accomplishment to show for my computer classes though. Some of my classmates had copies of Drugwars on their TI-83 calculators. I was never cool enough to have a copy on my calculator, but I did write my own game of trading stocks and avoiding the SEC and IRS that had the same interface and, as closely as I could guess, the same price fluctuations and kinds of random events. The Barbarian Prince rules remind me so much of the dot-matrix printouts of my game code. As I'll discuss in a future post, there's actually a very similar logic at work. You start each day on the "main menu", then select an action, which takes you to new submenus to resolve the consequences of your selection.)

I think I know why Barbarian Prince is written this way, or at least I have a couple guesses. I suspect the primary purpose was to minimize the space required to print the booklets. By never giving more than the 4-digit code number to look up another instruction, and never retyping any text that could simply be referred to by referring to its code number, the game probably minimized the number of lines and pages they needed to print the instruction books - and thus maximized the amount of game content that would fit in that number of lines and pages.

If the designer, Arnold Hendrick, was familiar with computer programming, he might also have felt more comfortable replicating the logic of reference and look-up to organize the game he was writing. In fact, one good question is, why isn't Barbarian Prince a video game? either instead of or in addition to being a board game. I feel fairly certain the Commodore 64 or Apple IIE could have run this program, perhaps with a short chiptune MIDI soundtrack and some rudimentary on-screen graphics to show your position on the map, or the appearance of the nearby village or temple, like you see in Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego. A computer would also do a bang-up job of tracking your money, food, and time. I suppose the answer might be as simple as the fact that Dwarfstar wasn't a video game company, but it still feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe an enterprising retrogame emulator will some day fill in the gap.

Aside from the eye strain of trying to scan through so many pages of undifferentiated text though, there are a couple down sides to this organizational approach. The first is that there are some rules that are more important than others, that serve as primary references that do most of the work of directing you to the other sections you need to read. Because you need to look at these rules to play the game, it's something of a problem that playing the game also requires you to continually turn the page away from them.

It would be enormously helpful to have key rules and reminders printed out on separate reference sheets, perhaps page-sized or half-page for certain tables, playing-card-sized for monsters and NPC allies. The top "Travel Events" sheet shown above, I think, was printed on a separate sheet of paper, but a bit more of that would have gone a long was. As would some color, variations in font size, table formatting ...

To give only the simplest example, compare the original layout above to one fan's attempt at an improved layout right below it. The second layout does take up more space, it's true, but look at how much easier it is to read, and how the addition of section titles alongside the section numbers already helps to orient you to what's coming next. Notice also the way the sample hex illustration and larger title fonts helps guide you to the correct terrain type, and how the inclusion of the rules for getting lost, for triggering an event, for hunting, and for finding animal fodder actually reduces the amount of flipping around you'll have to do, even though you will have to turn a page to find the correct table.

Another problem with using references and look-ups instead of repeating text is that it makes it that much easier to run into the "infinite regress" problem that can strike any game that uses procedural generation tables. Basically this is a problem where you look up a rule or event, and it has you roll on a table, that then directs you to another rule or event, which has you roll on another table, that then takes you ... and on and on and on.

Infinite regress can be difficult enough to cope with in a really well-organized document, but the additional page-flipping and booklet-switching here seems like it has the potential to really get you lost. Short of never having one table refer to another, you probably can't completely avoid the risk of too-much-page-turning in any game that uses procedural generation, but I think the takeaway for anyone wanting to design such a thing is that these cross-references can add up quickly, and that the total will always be more than the sum of the parts. I can't know without playing it (which I will!) just how much Barbarian Prince suffers from infinite regress, but the way it's written certainly appears to create a risk.

This time I focused mostly on appearances, but I'll start diving into the actual rules next time.

Intercultural Miscellany - World in Motion, First Contact, Cultural Appropriation, Indian House, Migration Museum

A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion
Jason Farago
New York Times

"During Hokusai’s lifetime, Japanese were barred from leaving the country, on pain of death. But the country was not totally closed. Some foreign goods could come in. And some foreign techniques, too. Do you see, here, how the traveler in the back is so much smaller than the woman who’s lost her papers? And how sharply the landscape slopes up? A hallmark of Renaissance image-making. Hokusai was among the first Japanese artists to employ Western perspective, though he used it playfully. Hokusai would have picked up this perspectival technique from Dutch prints circulating in Edo, even as elsewhere, in the same image, Hokusai employs a perspectival technique common in Asian painting, with similarly sized figures positioned along diagonal sightlines. That, too, was imported knowledge, absorbed from Chinese examples into earlier Japanese painting."

"In 1867, the World’s Fair took place in Paris. Japan participated for the first time, and displayed coats of armor, swords, statues - and woodblock prints. The French went wild. A critic at the fair singled out Hokusai. What these young moderns loved were the prints. Hokusai’s example would soon influence the work of Paris’s modern artists. Mary Cassatt, for instance. She learned from Japanese printmakers to create spaces of blocky color, with hard transitions from tone to tone. Or her friend Edgar Degas, whose flat and asymmetrical spaces channel the Japanese model into the opera house and the ballet studio. These Parisians understood the prints they were looking at only in part. They made foolish, patronizing generalizations."

"Like most fantasies, 'Japonisme' said more about the fantasizer than the fantasized. These Parisians, defeated in war and rocketing through industrialization, saw themselves in landscapes that were both ageless and adrift. And Hokusai, who’d already metabolized Western technique into his images of Japan, was the perfect vessel for their dreaming."

First Contact
David Olusoga
BBC

"In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. Art was always on the frontline. Each cultural contact at this time left a mark on both sides: the magnificent Benin bronzes record the meeting of an ancient West African kingdom and Portuguese voyagers in a spirit of mutual respect and exchange. By contrast we think Spain's conquest of Central America in the 16th century as decimating the Aztecs and eviscerating their culture. But even in Mexico rare surviving Aztec artworks recall a more nuanced story."

"The Tokugawa Shogunate, after an initial embrace, became so wary of outside interference that they sought to cut ties with the outside world. But in their art, as in their trade, they could never truly isolate themselves from foreign influences. By contrast the Protestant Dutch Republic was itself an entirely new kind of creature: a market driven nation-state. It was a system that created new freedoms and opportunities. The British in India: at first the British were as open to foreign influence as the Dutch. But by the 1800s they became more aggressive and the era of encounters gave way to the era of muscular empire, that was dismissive of India's arts and cultures."

How to Change Your Conversations about Cultural Appropriation
James Mendez Hodes
Mndz

"A cultural practice or cultural expression is a mode of behavior, communication, or self-assertion with origins or close associations with a certain culture. Either internal factors or external factors may form those associations. Cultural exchange is one culture’s adoption of cultural practices or expressions originating with another culture. We’ll call the former culture the adopters, the latter the originators. Cultural appropriation is an instance of cultural exchange which aggravates, entrenches, trivializes, or mocks a power imbalance between an enfranchised adopter and a systemically oppressed originator. An instance of cultural appropriation may also have positive or benign effects - for the originator, the adopter, or third parties - which exist in parallel to the appropriative dynamic."

"What’s the context? What does it look like without that context? What power dynamics differentiate adopters and originators? What’s the connection between adopter and originator? What’s the tone? Who feels hurt, and why? Where I hope this analytical strategy takes us is the complicated places. Where expressions are simultaneously racist and anti-racist. Where different subaltern groups borrow from each other along intersectional gradients of power that leave each group empowered over the other in a different way. Where there’s contradiction, harm and help given and taken simultaneously, or long histories of borrowed expressions becoming the adopter’s cultural signifiers. The most complex, challenging questions of cultural appropriation concern marginalized groups exchanging culture with one another."

This is an Indian House, According to One Architect
Aatish Taseer
New York Times

"Indian architecture was effortlessly palimpsestic, a place on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. India's oldest stone buildings are stupas and rock-cut caves of Buddhist origin. These were preceded by an older tradition of building in wood. When Buddhism declined in India, and resurgent Hindu faith rose, it was the ghost of Buddhist architecture, visible in both the apsidal shape of certain temples and in the use of stone-latticed windows, that was resurrected in a new tradition of Hindu temple architecture."

"With the coming of Islam, many features of Indian building, such as screens, carved brackets, corbeled arches and deep eaves projecting hard black shadows, became part of Indo-Islamic architecture. Dynasties rose and fell, the religious makeup of India changed, but Indian architecture, like Indian food, music and literature, was able to absorb the new influences."

"The English writer Robert Byron makes an important distinction between what he describes as 'fusion' and 'allusion'. The first is the use of diverse architectural inventions and ornamental themes, whatever their dates or racial origins, simply for their practical value in creating and artistic unity and in giving effect to the values of mass, space, line and coherence in the whole design. The second is the use of these same inventions and themes in a mood of reminiscence regardless of their relevance to mass, space, line and coherence."
  
  

 
A New Type of Museum for an Age of Migration
Jason Farago
New York Times

"A whole new order is proposed, one that does not care about an artwork’s uniqueness, a dress’s elegance, or an artifact’s fine condition. What matters here is movement - how objects and forms circulate through time and across the globe."

"Here’s an example: Two pieces of blue-and-white pottery are on display - a vase ringed with Persian script and a porcelain dish decorated with Chinese characters. They both date from around the late 16th century. But it turns out that the 'Persian' one was made in China, while the 'Chinese' one comes from Iran, and on both of them the characters are nonsense. Their meaning lies not in the gobbledygook written on their surfaces, but on the trade routes they map and the relationships they signify."

Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words

Steven Moore's history of the novel opens with a defense of difficult literature. The type of books he praises, books with stylized prose and experimental plot structures, are unquestionably books I want to read. The pleasure I feel when reading a love story told via a museum catalog of artifacts of a failed relationship, or a chronicle of academic failure inferred only through letters of recommendation, reminds me of the feeling I got as a child, reading the key to a dungeon and assembling a narrative of the place in my mind as I went. And really, several of the tricks Moore mentions sound like they'd make good organizing principles for dungeons.

"Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words, lashed with purple prose and black humor; novels patterned after myths, the Tarot, the Stations of the Cross, a chessboard, a dictionary, an almanac, the genetic code, a game of golf, a night at the movies; novels with unusual layouts, paginated backward, or with sentences running off the edges, or printed in different colors, a novel on yellow paper, a wordless novel in woodcuts, a novel of first chapters, a novel in the form of an anthology, Internet postings, or an auction catalog; huge novels that occupy a single day, slim novels that cover a lifetime; novels with footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, star charts, fold-out maps, or with a reading comprehension test or Q&A supplement at the end; novels peppered with songs, poems, lists, excommunications; novels whose chapters can be read in different sequences, or that have 150 possible endings; novels that are all dialogue, all footnotes, all contributors' notes, or one long paragraph; novels that begin and end midsentence, novels in fragments, novels with stories within stories; towers of babble, slang, shoptalk, technical terms, sweet nothings; give me many-layered novels that erect a great wall of words for protection against the demons of delusion and irrationality loose in the world."

DCC Occupations for the Occupationist's Female Relative

A recent comment on my post about the trend of naming books for "the occuaptionist's female relative" gave me the idea that it might be fun to use these as 0th-level occupations for Dungeon Crawl Classics. The result is a varied and interesting list, different from anything I would have written myself, in a way that I find appealing.

Roll 1d20 to determine your relative's occupation. This provides your trained skill, your starting weapon, and one piece of equipment. Roll 1d6 to determine your relationship to them. This provides your Lucky Sign and a single-use magic item.

Ronja, the (12) Robber's (2) Daughter

WHO IS YOUR RELATIVE? (roll 1d20)

1   Antelope - antelope's horns (1d6, use crit table M) - bottle of antelope milk

2   Bonesetter - bone saw (as short-sword) - bandage and batch of plaster

3   Clockmaker - clockmaker's tools (as dagger, usable as thieves' tools) - clock missing 1d4 parts

4   Hangman - length of executioners's rope (as garrote, wielder can Backstab as Thief) - 2 gold coins

5   Heretic - cruciform dagger - apocryphal illuminated manuscript missing 1d4 pages

6   Hummingbird - rapier (as short sword) - green feathered cloak

7   Kitchen God - fireplace iron (as mace) - 12 small cakes with silver coins baked inside

8   Liar - club - deck of marked cards and set of weighted dice

9   Lighthouse Keeper - lamplighter's pole (as staff) - lantern and flask of lamp oil

10 Memory Keeper - shepherd's crook (as staff) - handwritten chronicle of your village's history

11 Orphan Master - willow switch (as club) - large gunny sack

12 Robber - shortbow - climbing rope and key to the city jail

13 Stargazer - sling - telescope and hand-drawn celestial map

14 Taxidermist - flensing knife (as dagger) - glass jar of formaldehyde and pair of glass eyes

15 Tiger - tiger's teeth (1d8, use crit table M) - children's book of jungle animal stories

16 Time Traveler - deer-hunting bow (as shortbow) - pocketwatch that runs backward

17 Traitor - backstabbing knife (as dagger, wielder can Backstab as Thief) - letter of marque

18 Witch - broom (as staff) - talking cat (AC 11, 1 hp, MV 20' or climb 10', SV +0, AL  N)

19 Witchfinder - witch-pricking needle (as dagger) - flask of holy water

20 Zookeeper - catch pole (no damage, but add +1d6 to grappling roll) - giraffe calf (as pony)


HOW ARE YOU RELATED TO THEM? (roll 1d6)

1  Daughter - hp/level and Deity Disapproval - saint's medallion (use in prayer to heal 1d4 hp)

2  Daughter - Initiative and Thief skills - magic arrow (+1 to attack and damage, ignore resistance, can be wielded as dagger)

3  Daughter - Reflex saves and Grappling checks - rag doll (use to change fumble to miss)

4  Sister - Armor Class, ability checks, and occupational skill checks - jade amulet (1 point of Luck to spend)

5  Wife - Fortitude saves and damage rolls - manticore's tooth (use to change hit to critical hit)

6  Wife - Willpower saves and spellcasting checks - oracle bones (consult to learn if planned action is weal or woe, 75% accurate)


Thank you to mudfish for the inspiration!

XP for Exploration - Maps, Monster Drawings, and More!

In a game about traveling, it makes sense that experience might primarily come from travel itself rather than from finding treasures or defeating monsters.

In Ryuutama, players earn a single XP award each time they finish a "leg" of their journey, based on the most difficult terrain they passed through on that part of their trip. You can earn 100-500 experience per trip, depending on the terrain and weather, plus a possible bonus for the most difficult combat, typically another 30-60. The XP totals needed to level up are comparable to 5e.

Players are encouraged to keep travelogues about their journeys, but I don't think there's a mechanical benefit to doing so. There is one other possible reward though - once per section of the trip, a Minstrel character can write a song about either the weather or the terrain, then sing it later under similar conditions to help out the other party members.

One consequence of this system is that it's more rewarding to take trips with short legs and frequent stopovers than to travel long stretches without visiting a town. It's an experience system that is well-suited to a game where you're traveling through settled lands, and where you're interested in staying awhile in each settlement. It would work less well in a campaign where you're exploring trackless wilderness, or where you pause at waystations so briefly that they're little different from any other campsite. It's also an experience system that's better suited to maps where players have some freedom to decide both where they'll travel and how they'll get there. It would work less well on map with only a single fixed route.


In Neoclassical Geek Revival, Zzarchov also awards XP directly for travel and exploration. Zzarchov's system is intended to reward and encourage longer journeys. Each session, each new room visited within a dungeon is worth more XP than the previous room - but if the players leave the dungeon, the reward resets to zero. The goal is to tempt players, perhaps against their better judgment, to press on further each delve than they might go otherwise.

"Experience points for a dungeon are granted based on how many rooms you had previously explored for the first time in this delve. The first new room might be worth 0xp, the second 10xp, the third an additional 30, the fourth an additional 60. This leads characters to constantly risk defeat by wanting one more room since leaving the dungeon to rest will reset the XP clock as it were. Trying to make it through that 13th room (which may be empty) is worth 780xp now or 0 if they return to the surface to rest. "

If we applied this system to overland travel, the specific unit of exploration that replaces "room" would depend on the kind of map you draw, whether hexes, grids, points, or something else. The most important thing to notice is that this system discourages the players from stopping in town. The longer they can remain out in the field, the more each discovery will be worth. This encourages an entirely different playstyle than Ryuutama's experience system.

The Dwimmermount megadungeon includes supplemental rules for earning experience (and money!) by selling maps of the dungeon and by selling clues that help answer key questions about the dungeon's history. I first learned about these mechanics from Dreams in the Lich House's review of Dwimmermount. In any game where players earn experience for finding treasure, setting our rules to assign prices to maps and clues creates a way for players to earn experience for exploration that fits within the existing framework of gp = XP.

The review suggests some basic considerations for anyone designing rules for assigning values to maps. "The book provides guidelines on the value of player maps based on the number of doors and rooms, and these scale with the depth of the dungeon level from hundreds to thousands of gold pieces in value." I suspect this works best when the players actually draw out a map. You could probably come up with a similar framework for assigning monetary values (and experience!) to player-written session reports, if you wanted to make an incentive for keeping diaries as well as for drawing maps.

One decision you would need to make would be whether to have the value of the map increase with its size in such a way that players get more for making several small maps or more for producing a single larger map. It initially seems to me more appropriate to make a single large map worth more than the sum of its smaller parts, but there is one reason to set the prices so that several small maps are worth more than the single collected version.

Players could face an interesting decision-making dilemma if selling maps creates a risk where rival adventurers might use the maps to swoop in and snatch up treasures the players hadn't collected yet. This dilemma is more severe if small maps are worth more than large ones. If the multi-session map is worth more, then there's little incentive to sell the map until after all the exploration is complete and all the treasures collected. If single-session maps are worth more, then the players will have to decide if the predictable depreciation of the map price is worth more than the potential, unpredictable loss of unclaimed treasures to rival adventurers.

Deciding on prices for clues to campaign setting mysteries seems like it might require the game master knowing what the all the mysteries and their solutions are. Without knowing those things, it might be hard to decide what counts as a clue, and when the players have accumulated enough clues to sell off their accumulated evidence.

Unlike with the maps, there doesn't seem to be any trade-off holding on to clues until you can sell a complete answer - aside from the general financial dilemma of whether you need money right now so badly that you're willing to accept less money overall to get some of it right away. My inclination is to say that complete answers should be worth quite a bit more than the individual clues that lead up to them.

The review provides a glimpse of what the maximum level of game master pre-planning and organization might look like. "Players can monetize exploration by recovering the secret history of Dwimmermount. There's a thorough discussion of the secret history, organized numerically, and these key facts can be gleaned throughout the dungeon from a range of sources. There are over 80 of them! Bringing evidence corroborating the secret history facts back to the surface allows the players to sell this information for exorbitant amounts of money when they accumulate enough facts to answer key questions about the world."


Travel and collecting clues about campaign mysteries are both types of exploration. Mapping and note-taking are both ways that players document what they've explored. Melancholies and Mirth has a guide to awarding experience for both exploration and combat. The key idea here seems to be running a campaign where the players still earn XP for treasure, but where the primary source of treasure is bringing documents and objects to interested organizations within the game world, rather than treasure hunting per say.

As with Dwimmermont, earning any of these rewards requires the players to find an NPC who wants to buy what they're selling. In Dwimmermount though, I think the conceit is that basically everyone is interested in maps and clues about the megadungeon - so the players can sell to whoever they like, and might use these sales to improve their relationship with key NPC factions. In these rules, certain organizations exist in every town, and serve more as generic quest-givers than as well-developed NPCs. There's nothing actually preventing giving those buyers names and personalities though, so if your players seem to prefer some quests more than others, it might be worth developing the NPCs on the other side of those transactions a bit more.

Melancholies and Mirths assigns prices to both dungeon maps and maps of the countryside, to secrets and pieces of history, to proof-of-death for both monsters and human NPC criminals, and to a few other things, including rare materials, presumably the type that can be used to make magic items. Again, the main difference between this and any other campaign is that most of the money and XP the players earn will come from exploration and collecting non-monetary treasures rather than from finding hordes of coins; and none of the XP rewards are automatic, but only occur after the players bring the desired objects to their respective NPC admirers.

A couple other bloggers have suggested creating rewards like this, but they've built the chance to earn additional experience into specific new character classes, rather than writing them up as opportunities that any character might participate in. I suppose this has the benefit of letting interested players portray particular archetypes (with their game master's permission, presumably) while leaving the primary game rules untouched.

One possible downside though would be if this turned into "my character gets extra treasure and levels up faster for doing the same kinds of things as everyone else". So if you did introduce rules that award XP for exploration to some characters and not others, I think you'd want to be vigilant to the possibility of conflict arising over perceptions of unfairness. (Although I haven't tried that, so I might be worrying about a possibility that doesn't arise often in practice.)

Cavegirl presents an Artist character class who can spend an hour of game time to paint "an unusual or impressive sight - which might be a strange landscape, monster, magnificent chamber in a dungeon, supernatural phenomenon, or something else". Paintings are worth 500 in cash and XP. The Artist's other abilities are pretty negligible, they're like a Thief with no thief skills, or a Wizard with no spells, so maybe leveling up really fast is fair compensation? I like the idea of roleplaying a character who's an artist, but I feel like the Artist would be a more interesting class if they were more like the Ryuutama Minstel or Goblin Punch's Bug Collector class, where the reward for identifying and studying an impressive site is to gain a new special ability that can only be acquired this way.

Monsters and Manuals suggests an Adventurer Sage class who earns money and XP for selling drawings of monsters, specimens of monsters, and of course, maps of dungeons and wilderness sites. The sizable rewards for bringing back complete monster corpses and capturing living monsters might even be enough to prompt players to approach combat differently than they usually would. This isn't far off from Melancholies and Mirth's alternate experience system, except that the Sage is the only character who benefits from it. Again, I like the idea of portraying a botanist or zoologist who's more interested in collecting natural specimens than in hunting for monetary treasure. It sounds fun. But beyond that concept, I'm not sure that being able to earn XP in an unusual way is very interesting as a character class's only special ability.

When I first saved the links to both these classes, I expected I'd be praising them, but on reflection, I think it would be better to make the cash and experience rewards for painting landscapes and studying monsters into general rules that could apply to any character. Aside from a class name that can provide a jumping off point for roleplaying a fussy aesthete or a nerdy scientist, neither the Artist or Adventurer Sage can actually do anything that other characters can't. They're like fighters with smaller Hit Dice, less armor, and lower XP requirements to gain levels.

In Final Fantasy VI, Relm is an artist who can sketch monsters and then summon magical monster drawings to fight on her behalf, Strago is a magician who can study monsters' magical abilities and then cast them as spells himself, and Gau is a feral child who can observe monsters' natural behavior and enter a rage where he imitates their physical attacks. Something like that interests me, personally, far more than class-specific experience bonuses.

So if I think that XP for exploration should be universal rather than character specific, what kinds of rewards do I think should be available to character classes that are especially exploration focused? I mentioned Ryuutama's Minstrel back at the beginning. Like most other bard-like characters, they can inspire others to do better on certain rolls, but with an added mini-game of learning songs while you travel that can only inspire under certain terrain and weather conditions. In some sense, the Minstrel is worse than other bards, since they can't sing their songs just any time, but somehow the mental challenge of deciding which songs to learn, and the emotional reward you experience when your planning pays off later seems to make up for that limitation. It's an ability that's less useful, but more fun. (It's also unlikely to ever be use-less, unlike some other "Goldilocks" abilities. You don't have to pick your songs in advance, unlike a ranger selecting their Favored Enemy or Favored Terrain, so you'll never be disappointed to discover that you can't sing Song of the Snowstorm because it turns out the campaign is actually set in the tropics.)

Goblin Punch's Bug Collector is a bit like a wizard who gets terrain-specific spells each day. Every morning before breaking camp, the Bug Collector finds a random assortment of local bugs, and can capture a certain number of them. The bugs live for 1 day in captivity, and each bug can perform a single trick, once, so mechanically this is very much like casting any other spell in D&D. But there's something kind of joyful about the presentation, and the fact that your spells are random each day, but the spell list they're drawn from is tied to the local landscape, provides a nice mix of surprise and player choice.

Pathfinder Ultimate Wilderness offers a similar ability in the Geomancer archetype for Occultists. The Geomancer can learn a set number of spells of the player's choice each level, but they also know bonus spells based on whatever kind of terrain they're currently inhabiting. These aren't chosen randomly like they for the Bug Collector, and they can change mid-day if the character passes from one terrain type to another. It still seems like it would add a fun bit of variety to the character, and would make decisions about where to travel matter in a fairly concrete way.

The Cartographer archetype for Investigators provides a mechanical reward for map-drawing that's pretty similar to the Minstrel's songwriting. Instead of inspiring others, the Cartographer can benefit themselves by studying the map they just drew of their current location. The only flaw here, ironically, is that you would never not be able to use this ability, so it lacks some of the charm of the Minstrel's  matching-terrain requirement. (Potentially you could re-introduce the charming sense of limitation by only allows maps to be useful on a return visit to a previously mapped spot.) For a game master wanting to add exploration-based abilities to their game, the Cartographer and Minstrel do have one other upside. Unlike the Geomancer or the Bug Collector, this sort of simple bonus-granting ability doesn't require an extensive list of possible spell effects before you can introduce it at your table.

Bon Mots - Porchie vs Pouchy

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The Crown asks us to believe the impossible
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"Porchie's father is also Porchie"

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But Orphan Black knows the truth

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"There are not two Pouchies, darling"

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Learning from Boardgames - Tokaido and Things to do on a Journey

My Friday night group recently started playing Ryuutama, which got me thinking about the kinds of things you can do on a long journey. Which, in turn, got me thinking about the boardgame Tokaido.

The Tokaido game is named after a feudal-era Tokaido road between Kytoto and Edo. (Hiroshige also made a series of woodblock prints about traveling along the Tokaido road.) 

In the game, you take on the role of a traveler walking the road by foot. Your goal is to have the most satisfying journey possible. When boardgamers review Tokaido, they usually talk about how it's unusually non-competitive; there's not all that much any player can do to interfere with another's vacation. But as a roleplayer, what sticks out to me is that Tokaido is like a resource that can be referenced for ideas for things that player characters can do on a journey, like the kind you take in Ryuutama.

So what is there to do on a journey?

Leaving Edo from the second printing of Hiroshiga's The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido

Stopping in a village - In the Tokaido game, stopping in a village is synonymous with shopping at the local marketplace. And visiting the bazaar to see the unique wares each town has to offer is certainly one possible joy of traveling. It's easy to imagine giving each village its own specialty ware - this town sells nice hats, that one makes excellent pottery, etc.


Collecting souvenirs - Collecting mementos of your travels is a pretty common practice. But beyond picking up postcards or guidebooks or miniatures of the local landmarks, Tokaido rewards you for collecting different kinds of souvenirs on your trip. You get the most points for collecting equal numbers of clothes, art objects, small gifts, and local food and drinks.

Old school D&D gives experience for acquiring gold, and some OSR referees award experience for spending it, either in addition or instead. If each souvenir acted like a minor magical item, most players would happily buy them up, even if there was no XP reward for the purchase.


Working on a farm - Several activities in Tokaido cost money, but almost the only way to get more of it is to stop in at a local farm beside the road and do chores.

The British travel show Race Across the World has opportunities for the contestants to earn extra spending money by helping out farmers, working in restaurants, assisting the staff at tourist attractions, and doing various kinds of cleaning, from buses and boats to horses and elephants.

In a game like D&D or Ryuutama, its easy to imagine a job board somewhere in town asking for help slaying various monsters, or retrieving small treasures from nearby dungeons. There could even be wanted posters offering bounties on specific criminal NPCs. In my Friday night game, Josh also hit on the rather clever idea of the locals taking advantage of the travelers' itinerant status, by posting jobs like delivering packages or retrieving purchases at various other stopping points along the way.


Admiring the view - The Tokaido game has several scenic overlooks where you can enjoy taking in what the game calls a "panorama".  Stopping at an observation point to admire the scenery is a pretty classic thing to do on any kind long journey, whether a hike or a cross-country drive. You get the most points from enjoying the same panorama from several different vantage points.

Besides just looking, you could photograph the view, or draw a sketch or make a painting. In turn, you could photo, sketch, or paint a plant or animal, or I suppose, collect biological specimens - picking berries, gathering flowers, and of course, going fishing. The other thing you could do, at a particularly lovely natural trailhead or outdoor garden, would be go on a hike-within-your-hike to take in the whole site.


Bathing in a hot spring - Stop by a natural hot spring and enjoy a relaxing bath. This one is kind of culturally specific. Some parts of the world have natural hot springs, or some other tradition of collective bathing; others don't.

What else might be equivalent to going to a bathhouse? The characteristics that seem relevant here are that it's recreational and communal, possibly a bit intimate. When I think of communal relaxation, personally, I think of something like a picnic, brunch, high tea, or happy hour. Something where the ceremony of eating is at least as important as the food consumed.

Visiting some other sort of spa might fulfill the requirements I laid out; something like going for massages, or manicures, or for makeovers. For that matter, something like trying on dresses for a wedding or costumes for a celebration could work too.

Thinking of spas also makes me think of swimming pools and gymnasiums. In turn, that brings to mind participating in some sort of local sporting event. This could be something that tests each individuals against all others (like a race), or a tournament of one-on-one contests (like tennis or dueling), or even a team sport  I can think of a dozen examples, and you probably can too. Participating in a festival, stage play, or religious ceremony could also fulfill a similar function.


Praying at a temple - Stopping in at a temple and making a cash donation is another way to earn points in Tokaido. Panoramas and hot springs are free, but temples cost money, just like souvenirs and meals. The difference here is that you get to decide how much to donate. When shopping, different goods have different prices, but you also might be able to buy the cheapest item and still have it help you most (or you could get unlucky, and have the thing you really need by the pricey one). Mealtimes are similar. But at the temple, how much you spend is entirely up to you, though obviously more is better.

It's not hard to imagine pretty direct equivalents. If religious services don't quite fit the mood of your countryside, you could substitute in tossing coins into fountains or wishing wells (perhaps with a very small chance of being rewarded for the donation?) Anything that costs money, and that calls on you to be more of an audience than a participant, could fulfill a similar role as well. Touring a museum or art gallery, watching a concert or play, attending a reading or recital, watching a sport instead of playing one, witnessing some natural phenomenon.

These are all opportunities to earn experience by spending money, and to watch some local color rather than taking part in it. These entertainments are likely to be briefer. Helping to throw a local festival could take up an entire session, simply watching a parade go by should probably be much quicker for the players.


Meeting locals and fellow travelers - To my mind, this is one of the most interesting possibilities of travel in an RPG. In Tokaido, choosing to have an "encounter" is a bit like choosing to receive the effect of one of the other sites at random. You might get a souvenir, a piece of the view, some cash, even just victory points added to your score. But in a game like D&D or Ryuutama, you could, you know, actually talk to the people you meet. Instead of just archetypes - traveling merchant, shinto priest, guide, noble, samurai - you could meet individual NPCs.

In Tokaido, you only have encounters along the road. In D&D or Ryuutama, traveling encounters are still possible, but you'd expect to have more of them in villages or at the inn. (In Tokaido, the only people you meet at the inn are the other players.) I think there could also be a useful distinction between meeting locals and meeting fellow travelers. Locals are, by definition, only going to show up at a single site, and if you want to see one of them again, you probably have to go back to that town. Fellow travelers are more unpredictable; you could meet them along the road or at any site you stop by. You never know quite when to expect them.

D&D has its rival adventuring parties, but fellow travelers are different - not so much wandering monsters as wandering allies. At their worst, they're more like annoyances or nuisances. If they're "rivals" it's more in the sense of them wanting to be better at traveling than you are. They want to get to the next town before you, or be the first ones to spot all the rare birds along the way, or show off their latest purchase that you didn't get. But most fellow travelers won't be rivals. Some will be friends, some will simply have some eccentricity that makes them interesting or memorable. Sometimes circumstances might force you to cooperate, or pool your resources, or spend time in close proximity, perhaps sharing stories to pass the time. Sometimes you'll simply be passing through at the same time.


Staying at an inn - In Tokaido, every player has to stop at every inn. In D&D or Ryuutama, it probably won't take much convincing for most players to want some time in a hotel after several nights of camping by the side of the road, especially if the hotel avoids any hazards, or permits a better quality of sleep or healing. Any kind of checkpoint or waystation, any place where tolls are collected or papers are presented could serve a similar function as well, albeit with a less friendly atmosphere. Tokaido rewards the player who arrives at the inn last, on top of the rewards that you probably accrue in the process of taking the slowest path and having the most stops along the way.


Eating a good meal - Whenever I think of Tokaido, I think of a vacation my grad school roommate once told me about, where she and her aunt planned to spend a couple weeks visiting different villages around her prefecture, trying out the local udon specialty. Apparently every village has its own traditional style, just a bit different from its neighbors.  

(Later, in a different grad program, I learned about the idea of folk culture, where some way of doing things started out the same or very similar within a region, but then the people who do that thing in each particular place start handing down minor changes to the original way, from teacher to student, generation after generation, so that the traditions of each place slowly drift apart, a process that reminds me a little of island biology.)

The idea of enjoying food from other places is pretty well accepted as one of the benefits of traveling. There are entire series about it on the Food Network, the Travel Channel, even NPR. Describing the unique flavor of the local cuisine is a simple but visceral way to make a place feel different and special. There might not be any mechanical benefit, within your game, to eating at a restaurant instead of by a campfire, but this is still an opportunity to communicate about what kind of people live in each place, what sort of hospitality they offer. And the emotional connections we all have to both food and the sharing of food means that a well-described meal really is its own reward.

Tokaido board game logo

Traveling in the Tokaido game is about following a road dotted with landmarks and deciding which ones to visit. With one exception, there is no hierarchy, and each landmark is as important as the next. This is in contrast to both D&D and Ryuutama, where towns and dungeons tend to be much more important than other sites you can pass alone the way.

I think this is because each landmark has precisely one purpose in Tokaido, while in D&D and Ryuutama, the "size" of each site is variable. We could think of size here as the number of rooms in a dungeon or major buildings in a town - or as the number of potential encounters to be had at each site. Either way, in both D&D and Ryuutama, players spend much more time at some locations than others. Some spots along the road will be like a single room to explore, or a single encounter with a monster or NPC, but others will be both larger and more time consuming. A small town or dungeon might involve far more rooms and encounters than all the singletons put together; a megadungeon or city might be larger than all the other sites of any size combined.

The closest anyone can come to interfering with another players' agenda in Tokaido is to stop at a spot they might like, forcing them to pass it by and go on to the next one, making them arrive at the inn a little faster. Inns in Tokaido are a bit like the various "safe havens" that appear in various roleplaying games, but they still have only a single purpose (enjoying a meal), rather than allowing a full range of downtime activities.

The result of each landmark having only one interaction is that this keeps you moving along the road. There's no temptation to stay at a single site, exploring all the possibilities it contains. Instead, each stop is brief, and the journey continues.

I'm not sure it's possible (or even desirable) to partition things quite so strictly in a roleplaying game, but I think it is worth trying to emulate the idea that there are many possible pleasures, each stop contains only a few of them, and greater fulfillment will come from continuing onward to further sites than from delving deeper into the offerings of a single location.