Fantasy Faction:
The Lodge

Quick Sketch:

Many who have fled the wars have found a new haven, an old frontier province: up until a few years ago home to only a very few, the remnants of the original settlers, who now live in isolated villages and hamlets. Well away from Capitol—and even further from the Front—there are many abandoned homesteads here just waiting for the daring, or the desperate, to again till the land and repair the crofts and rebuild long tumbled walls and fences. This frontier borders The Deep Wood, a remnant of the Old Forest (or perhaps just its civilization-facing edge), green and thriving, though in other places dark and dense and overgrown; full of ancient mysteries green and damp and dank and foreboding. There are many tales among the villagers here about what lurks there, and proscriptions about where to build, where to gather fallen branches, and how far one can go into The Deep Wood

This chunk of Old Forest can be anywhere (file the serial numbers off, change the details to suit) but I might add at least one restriction: This wood has been avoided by any Elf or other woodland sentient species that Civilization (as understood by players and their characters) currently knows. There may be Elves in there somewhere (at GM discretion) but they are going to be different™.

With whole new towns springing up, and more refugees coming and settling closer and closer to the woodlands’ edge, there have been Incidents. Rumors of huge beasts (or huge somethings) coming out of the woods on moonless nights or in the dead of winter. Farmers and families disappearing, the homesteads found wrecked again and seemingly abandoned. People who go into the wood for firewood or to hunt game, and just… not coming back.

With the bulk of the armies away on various fronts, and with nothing like a local militia established given how few lived here up until recently, the only ones available to protect the settlers, investigate the mystery, find what riles the Green-Dark powers of the Old Forest, and perhaps save the towns and people of the newly re-established province, is The Lodge

The hunters and rangers who established The Lodge come from all over – some were already woodsmen, some are skilled warriors but just now discovering the difference between fighting on the plains and hunting in the woods, some come seeking answers and to take revenge—if revenge is to be had. A few have come to study The Green, for the sake of knowledge itself, or love of nature, or for personal power. Nearly all are welcome, if they swear to protect The Lodge, and each other, and the people outside the wood.

The Lodge, the building from which the band takes its name, is actually *in* the wood, a morning’s ride or a day’s hike away from the nearest town. It is now a huge undertaking, more keep than lodge (though still under construction), a combination inn and fortress, the four wings surrounding the courtyard, forge, and stable. With a foundation and a bottom story made of stone, the completed wings have two stories and an attic built in timber above. The forest around has been cleared to 75 yards on three of four sides, a little closer perhaps on the back where trees are still being felled (for that defensive perimeter, and construction materials both).

As a GM, you can choose to have your players encounter The Deep Wood, the frontier, and The Lodge at any point in the last 25 years – from its establishment on an actual hunting lodge, a single story building for perhaps 20 to eat and sleep, to the small keep it will eventually become. Your party can be the founders, literally coming to confront the unknown, or as new recruits to an established band, where the Captain and the officers are there to assign patrols and quests, with the support of a blacksmith, bowyer, fletcher, and quartermaster to keep the party supplied and in fighting trim.

The Secret of The Deep Wood is probably going to be the seed of a whole campaign, though one-off adventures might still take place here, if a call goes out for Heroes to hunt and kill a huge beast (and that’s it, XP GP here have a shiny bow thanks byeeee). Or the objective of our party might be to get through the wood, to chunk a bracelet into a chasm or whatever that eventual goal is, and so they stop by The Lodge to pick up an NPC ranger guide and take a long rest.

General Background:

For all party members, our base assumption is they are among the refugees fleeing the war who have now found themselves in this long-forgotten province on the forest’s edge. Some few might have backstories that originate here (growing up on a local farm before becoming an orphan is popular) but for nearly everyone else, any occupation or background should work. The characters might not even have a motive, or objective in coming here. This is very close to the stereotypical, “So you all meet in a tavern…”, but in this case it works. You could even start at the front door to The Lodge, everyone a new recruit, but it might be good to have an introductory adventure at the nearest town first, and a fight/encounter that leads to the party learning about The Lodge, and then making their way there

Our Associates:

[Player types, by class; suggestions for play – or for notable NPCs]

Ranger – The rank and file of The Lodge would be woodsmen, of course: Wardens, scouts, trackers, Strider from LotR and the Hunter class from WoW. You can play the class right out of the core rulebooks or d20/SRD pdf exactly as written. A creative player might have different specializations or a great background story or a new take on the class that will be fun to play or role-play, but a party of Oops All Rangers with no rogues, no pure fighters, and no other spellcasters except maybe a druid is a valid composition here.

Druid – Like rangers, druids are an obvious fit; though being so close to nature might present some internal conflicts, either within the player or within the party. Is our druid here to help us heal a wrongness that perverts the nature of The Deep Wood? Or are they more in tune with the wild gods and old spirits of this place, and find what The Lodge is doing to the wood to be, in itself, just as perverse? A lot of good options here. To keep a little of the mystery from even your most nature-connected character, one option might be to have the druid arrive from woods far away, with a deep connection to nature but little knowledge of whatever-it-is that lurks in The Deep Wood.

Barbarian – Barbarians are another class that can be played as written, with few if any modifications. It might be interesting if the origin and backstory of the Barbarian in the party is “some *other* remnant of the Old Forest, just Up North or Away South” so they can crack jokes about how, sure, that wolf was tough but back home they used to target womprats at least that size in their T16

Bard – ‘City Bard out in the woods’ is a fish-out of water setup with a lot of roleplay options but if we look at myth/literature for call backs we can easily find one good role model for Bards: Alan-a-dale, of Robin Hood/Merry Men stereotypes. (Be cautious or your party may end up as just a pastiche of the Merry Men, with Alan-bard and a Little John barbarian and a Friar Tuck cleric and… or you know what? lean into it. If the players are into it, you can see what a Robin Hood story looks like with Feral Wildgod Wolf Packs and Corrupted Entkind) – At least one Bard in the The Lodge makes sense, though [PC or NPC], as one is no doubt there to collect stories

Cleric – A healing cleric might have been sent by their bishop to tend to The Lodge, perhaps by request of a (distant) nobleman who gives money to both Church and Lodge, or via a divine dropping-a-hint-on-the-bishop mechanism. A cleric of a Nature god/goddess is also a natural fit, as would be a cleric of any fertility god/goddess, answering the prayers of provincial farmers just outside the woods. Even militant orders might find common cause, because there are huge beasts to fight and hey, they like to fight. In building a cleric for a campaign, the player could pick just about any origin, background, and devotion, who then arrives as a refugee (perhaps leading a small group to this haven away from the front) who then finds common cause with either Lodge or party.

Fighter – The only reason to play a fighter as opposed to a ranger (in this particular context) is for flavor reasons—as a better fit for a particular background story—or to be a min-maxing munchkin weapon specialist where the bonuses the fighter gets outweigh all the woodsy nonsense and random spell slots of the ranger class. Here are a few examples:

Fighter – The Tip of the Spear – The Lodge no doubt has a handful of beefy fighters with training in the long two-handed Boar Spear, a massive hunk of weapon that includes a cross-bar three feet from the blade to keep the boar (or warg, or dirething) from charging up the weapon while still impaled. When the patrols come back and report that A Hunt must be called, else this thing is going to eat a farm or bollocks up The Lodge itself, the ones in the front are the elite, the Tip of the Spear

Fighter – Shieldguard – When 85% of your troup composition is plinkers who use bows or dual-wielding swashers who dance and weave and occasionally forget about the friendlies behind them, having a few stout compatriots to get in there and tank the mobs and just generally give us all some cover are kinda necessary while also being underappreciated. Lodge Shieldguards are better trained in tactics than woodcraft and also form the core of the lodge defences, when every day (or even for days at a time) most of The Lodge is out on patrols.

Fighter – The Sniper – “While you were studying tracks and spoor, I studied the Bow. While you learned woodcraft and weather sign, I studied the Bow. While you learned stealth and spells and dueling and defense, I studied the Bow.” You know there’s at least one NPC at the lodge who practices 300 yard shots and blindfolded bulls-eyes and behind-the-back quickshots and splitting one arrow with the next, also in the bulls-eye, and probably also blindfolded. Feel free to make his comeuppance a minor plot point.

Monk – “You must go to The Deep Woods, there you will learn from the jedi mas- I mean the ki master who taught me” – A monk character would likely be a visitor to The Lodge, but perhaps one with reasons to stay. As a GM, I’d work with a player asking to play a monk in this type of campaign to develop a new class kit, “The Way of the Falling Leaf” or “The Green Ki” or “The Force”, with a strong preference for class abilities and bonuses that rely on the elements, some (but not all) of the animal forms, and the idea that the energies that flow through our bodies is the same that flows through all of nature. A monk of this disposition might even be drawn to The Deep Wood, to learn its secrets and to eventually found their own Way and Path and School.

Paladin – The Green Knight – The Nature Goddess had never needed a Paladin before, but the heart of the wood is unbalanced past her remit now, and the deep rot must be rooted out. Our knight was just another of many, fighting in the long war, one who fell in battle: a senseless, random encounter in a woodland near the front, left for dead but found by the Goddess. Long after the fighting had moved on, they awake, rising from a blanket of fallen leaves, to take up now-rusted arms and moss-covered armor, their shield boss entangled with vines that seem to form the branches-trunk-and-roots of a Tree of Life symbol. Our Green Knight emerges from the wood, and spends many weeks in recovery, tended at first by sympathetic farmers and later by clerics at a Temple of Life, who clean the weapons and armor, though both are now stained a green that cannot be removed. When the Knight has recovered, after many nights spent healing and dreaming and communing with the Goddess, a huge Elk with algae-tinged fur and mossy antlers arrives, and the Knight knows: now that their mount is here, it is time to depart. The clerics of Life bestow additional blessings upon them, and the Green Knight rides for the border province, The Lodge, and The Deep Woods

Rogue – Any rogue decent enough with two weapons, plus a little stealth, the ‘surefooted’ feat or ability, and a bent toward deceit could probably fake being a ranger. Especially in a community where every other NPC is an actual ranger and psfh who the hell needs to track anything or whatever five other guys do that. *WHY*, then becomes the question, but I’ll leave that to individual GMs, players, and parties to figure out. Though The Lodge probably has at least two types of rogues who aren’t hiding in their ranks:

Rogue – Trappers – an ability to detect traps and disarm them implies enough familiarity to also set any traps, and an expert along these lines would certainly be welcome; at higher levels these could supplement the defences but at lower levels: it probably means dinner. Or perhaps furs for trade, as The Lodge as both ‘keep’ and band sound kind of expensive to maintain. When drawn into a surprise encounter in the field or forced to defend The Lodge in extremis, the Trappers are still scrappers; a creative GM might give Trappers a “Cast Snare” weapon proficiency with any available rope, analogous to whips or lassos, allowing 1d4-2 damage and either a “distract” or “bind weapon” special action as a called shot, depending on if the shot is aimed at a the face, or the weapon hand.

Rogue – The Closer – Chasing down the prey, cornering it, bringing it to bay, even immobilizing it: for the largest of beasts, even all this might not be enough, and it is only a matter of time before the beast breaks from our temporary constraints and throws us aside. However, if we have someone crazy enough to direct engage the monster (from behind, but still: crazy to get that close) and dispatch it, bully for us and also probably someone good to have on staff. The “Closer” would be more of an assassin rogue build, with backstab bonuses and things like Death Strike at higher level, but context is important. Assassins are good actually, if they are team players and we need someone to close the deal on this encounter

Sorcerer – A wild mage might feel called to The Deep Wood, depending on the nature of their own chaos magic and whatever the GM determines might be behind the Green-Dark of the wood. Creative players and GMs might also lean into the “wild nature” of a Green Sorcerer kit and pull in druid and nature spells that might not otherwise be available to the class. It is also possible for a sorcerer to be “fae” touched (a parallel to other bloodlines) and that is the source of their magic (and also of the constraints that might be placed on it)

Warlock – If there is something deep in the Green-Dark of The Deep Wood it wouldn’t be too far out of line to think that power would reach out, and make a bargain. Or perhaps (at GM discretion) a player-character might be a researcher looking to make that bargain, perhaps with a thought to ‘tame’ the power, or at least to divert it from the innocents of the province beyond and toward some other purpose. Alternate warlock backgrounds might include powers seeking to contain the raw nature of The Deep Wood on either philosophical grounds or just to eliminate some local competition, or to control-subsume-merge with it.

Wizard – As always, if there is some mystery out in the world that can be described as vaguely magical, most assuredly there is some sort of magical researcher who is out there poking at it. That said: similar to many classes above, and in keeping with the general setting, a Wizard from any background might find themselves stuck here who will either find common cause with the provincials and The Lodge — or who will find individual motives that align with the party at least through this campaign. In an extreme case a GM might be forced to breadcrumb a lost mage tower somewhere in the woods, with scrolls and loot, to tempt this character out — but that’s par for the D&D course and nothing special

Other Encounters:

The Lodge is a coherent NPC faction with a strong theme, obvious place & time to encounter them, and a generic enough backstory (huge woodland aside) that they could be found in just about any campaign setting that has a similar mix of war, refugees, and a frontier to flee to. A party of PCs could need the help of The Lodge to get through the Deep Woods, could be helping The Lodge in a particularly hairy hunt, or could find themselves in opposition to The Lodge if the party’s interpretation of how to support and defend nature came into conflict.

In a combat encounter with The Lodge, first you have all the arrows, then the front line of a Shieldguard and Barbarian at minimum, then more arrows, then spell support from at least two casters, and more arrows, The Green Knight is slowly striding toward your position to eff you up, more arrows, at least one Rogue Closer already in the shadows behind you, and more arrows, and finally: they have at least one spell caster in reserve but they didn’t need it because More Arrows.

Last Time: Street Rats
Fantasy Faction: Up Next -
The Cabinet

Fantasy Faction:
Street Rats

Quick Sketch:
There is the city; it could be any city. OK, not just any city, this is a stereotypical RPG-flavored fantasy city that is vaguely Europeanish and has things like a city wall surrounding an Old City and a river and some docks and a market town (called Newmarket) just outside the city walls. The bad guys are either an occupying military force, the corrupt henchmen of a local power, or just the usual city watch: in this example I’ll call them the Guard. Our good guys are the poor and working class of the old city, living in a run-down neglected neighborhood I’ll call The Warren – not quite a slum, but not any good part of town either. There was an “Incident”, and now the street rats and toughs of The Warren are fighting the Guard.

You can change the details to suit either an existing setting, or use my quick thumbnail sketch as a launching point of your own. File the serial numbers off etc.

The Guard might be too far away from home to easily summon reinforcements (if occupiers) or not official enough to ask for help from The Crown (is there a crown? Maybe there isn’t an outside ‘national’ force to call for backup), or The-Perhaps-Nonexistent-Crown might have most of the ‘real’ army away fighting a war. For whatever reason, it’s an even fight, a temporary stalemate where the two sides face each other over barricades.

Our Heroes, the party, grew up in The Warren but now have to find ways to get food & supplies through the Guards’ blockade, need to find allies, and must discover a weakness or strategy to eventually win. Maybe they can call on the Crown? Like the old (but still serviceable) Robin-Hood-Prince-John-King-Richard setup – Or they just need to hold out long enough for the ‘siege’ to be lifted – Or maybe they grow and learn and skill up until they can win by guile or force of arms.

It might also work out that the party can “win” but then have to leave the city, the only world they know, and get launched out into the wide mysterious unknown of the rest of the continent, depending on what kind of campaign you’re looking for.

General Background:

For all party members, our base assumption is they grew up in the city and live and work there. They can be any age or occupation that vaguely fits that baseline, or your players can get creative with backstories (growing up on a farm before becoming an orphan is popular) that might allow other gameplay options.

Our Associates:

[Player types, by class; suggestions for play – or for notable NPCs]

Rogues – In this time of unrest and trouble, the rouges are our frontline skirmishers and brawlers, fighting with a dagger or less – not members of the illustrious guild, those folks have real skill (and a certain amount of status). A rogue of this party is just a street rat, though they might aspire to being an actual thief & member of the guild in good standing.

All of our street “fighters” are just rogues and young punks and the sort of small-time petty criminals that, if circumstances were different, would be fighting each other over turf and scraps. None are really fighters, never having the training even the rawest military recruit gets. [Three options for PC/NPC Fighters are given below; see also Barbarian, next:]

Barbarian – Brute Squad Street Tough – (Yes I am specifically thinking of Fessik from The Princess Bride) A lot of people are fighting in the streets now, but just a few take to it with such… gusto. Brute Squad members will fill the role of a berserker, but only when driven to it by extreme circumstances. Until the odds are really against them, they put the tough in “street tough” and use their unarmored defense bonus and uncanny battle senses to act as literally muscular shields for the other, less beefy fighters and all the innocent bystanders

Bard – Trash-talking Rap Battler – The Street Bard can use cutting words to not just distract or confuse, but to literally taunt opponents into blind fury attacks, ignoring any odds (and the Bard’s allies) lowering their effective armor class and giving any strike an attack advantage. The ‘College’ for street bards is The School of Hard Knocks; some of the Lore is different and there may be more weapon proficiencies, feats of acrobatics, dance, and evasion than spells, but a Bard is a Bard even if their chosen instrument is voice and rhyme.

Cleric – Street Medic – Once just a bystander, perhaps a barmaid or apprentice, who jumped in to drag away the wounded from the fray, the medic has been called to Serve. While completely unschooled and untrained, at least so far, they serve as a direct conduit and can channel healing spells they don’t even know the name of yet. [GM Note: taking into consideration the lack of weapon skills and actual priest training, you might work with the player of the Street Medic and allow them to start two levels above the rest of the party, but with the understanding ahead of time that the bonus levels will need to be “relearned” (or as role-played: actually learned for the first time) so additional leveling will be much slower]

Druid – The Rat King – the Rat King has never left the city, he doesn’t know the secret languages or druid signs; he might not even recognize himself as a druid. He used to be a “mudlark”, one of the orphans who picked the exposed river banks at low tide for a dropped copper or some other bit that might have value. Through that he got to know the rhythms of nature (even inside these city walls) and eventually came to understand what Wild there was here, in alleys and sewers and walled-off gardens. His Wild Shape is a giant ratform – one he uses so seldom it is an urban myth – but his friends the rats are everywhere. Sometimes it seems like he can even speak with them. Not just rats, but snakes and birds, and he is also unusually good with ponies, cart mules, and livestock, though the huge horses of the Guard just snort and paw the ground at him

Fighter – “Here Comes Our General” – She rose above the crowd very early in the fighting, through a mix of luck and a few key shrewd decisions, in one of the very first clashes. She survived, and saved a few others besides; several of those now loyally follow her lead. Somewhere she found a heavy knife long enough it might pass for a short sword, and uses a stout walking stick in her off hand mostly to block, but also as a way to rally the toughs and point to objectives, over the din and noise. A colorful scarf was soon added, as a “banner”, and she wears a matching one around her head. Relying more on raw charisma and natural talent, with a gift for tactics, Our General is untrained in arms but is being given many opportunities to practice.

Fighter – “I used to be an adventurer, before I took an arrow to the knee”. Some folks in The Warren most assuredly used to be something else before settling here, and (at GM’s discretion) an actual Fighter might be part of the party, a wounded veteran or a codger well past being called back to active duty. [Similar to our Street Medic, the GM might grant two levels over the rest of the party but in exchange for a negative attribute modifier, due to age or scars, and a slower base movement speed, perhaps an “old wound” that can be overcome with some sort of willpower check in dire need but at a hit point & endurance cost]

Fighter – The Defector – Maybe a younger, rookie member, new to the Guard and given no reason for either personal or professional loyalty, decides to leave the Guard and join the rats. He has had training; he is probably much more proficient with weapons than any street tough, but even if he could bring his gear with him when leaving, he probably can’t wear any of the armor or use the shield, for fear of being mistaken for the Guard-he-was and stabbed in the back. Oops. Sorry bro, my mistake. The defector would need a really good reason™ to switch sides (it’s usually the romantic subplot) and even with good reasons, will be met with suspicion and distrust. As an NPC, this might be solved by finding a way for the defector to safely leave town (with their love, assuming that was a mutual thing). As a PC option, this might work as a way to bring in a new player who joins the campaign a few sessions after it started.

Monk – The “Holy Beggars” are by tradition restricted to the plaza between the Council House and Temple Row, though many practice outside the city walls among the many markets and the caravaners’ tent bazaar. They are not “holy” in the sense of feeling either divine favor or a call to serve, but because in seeking alms they perform ‘miracles’, like fire-eating, or handling snakes, or lying on a bed of nails, or contorting themselves into all sorts of shapes. Their skin is tough, they are flexible to the point of seeming unjointed, they seem impervious to fire and poison, and they are pissed off. It is unknown what the Guard did to rile the bottled fury of the entire “Order” of Holy Beggars but they are a force unmatched in the rioting. Literally vaulting over the heads of others to tangle and engage the Guard as flying balls of limbs and fists and striking feet, spinning on the ground or flipping backwards or seemingly drunk, but always hitting from an unforeseen angle and seemingly always out of reach for any counterattack.

Paladin – Sign-carrying Street Prophet – before The Incident, he was just another crank, another beggar, living off alms and spending daylight hours banging a stick against a pot, intoning “The End is Nigh” while slowly walking a circuit around the city, or occasionally (as penance, he says) walking the entire outside perimeter of both the Old Walled City and Newmarket. Since the rioting started, he has changed aspect almost entirely (when did he get so tall? did he used to just always walk hunched over?) and he wears the pot-as-helmet on his head. His stick he traded for a stout cudgel, and he will be found leaping barricades while shouting his new battlecry “Your End Is Here!”

The Rangers – Sling Urchins – There are so many orphans, since the war, and not enough to care for them. They form packs, almost feral, looking out for each other and taking care of the youngest. Some get by as mudlarks, gleaning the banks at low tide. Others pick over trash tips and discarded junk outside the markets and caravan wagons, or steal bits of food to survive. They must be careful, and quick: orphans have been snatched up by the Guard, to be sold as an apprentice or farmhand, forced to “honest” work (at least until they can escape again). Or worse. The orphans do not say why, but one particular gang hates the Guard, their natural enemy, more than most. One or two of these are always trailing groups of Guard, unseen, to find opportunities for tricks, or theft, or injury – and sending runners to Our General to let her know always what the Guard are up to. What used to be a game for bored kids, slinging stones at birds or rats, has become a harassment technique now: stones and well-shaped shards of broken pottery are being flung with force and accuracy, often finding the gaps in helms or the exposed throat of those unwary.

Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard: A wild magic user suddenly appearing among our roguish skirmishers, or an otherwise weak street fighter given a chance at real power through an otherworldly bargain, would not be too out of place, but talking to you as one GM to another: I would be careful. At this level, of unorganized brawls in an urban setting, anyone bringing real magic to this fight is likely going to shift the balance to the point where there is no balance anymore. Any escalation would likely quickly be met by the Guard (would have to be matched, from a storyteller’s perspective) and we could quickly burn down the whole city.

[GM note inside the GM note: All plans gone awry, the city on fire, a person who must be found in the chaos, a magic mcguffin AND innocents who must be protected – that sounds like a fantastic capstone adventure to this low-level urban mini-campaign and you should find a cliffhanger in it and split it over at least two sessions]

If a player wanted to bring a magic user of just about any flavor, you might ask if they would take the role-play opportunity of a dual-class character, leveling once or twice as a rogue before The Event (sidequest!) that leads to them becoming a Sorcerer or Warlock. The scholarly, wizardly option might be effectively closed as a path, if we assume our urchins and street rats are illiterate. (An old Wizard NPC who must be found/rescued/persuaded to help for some special circumstance the party can’t otherwise overcome would probably be a nice mini-quest too, maybe good for two or three sessions)

Other Encounters:

The street rats are a coherent NPC faction with a strong theme, obvious place & time to encounter them, and a generic enough backstory that they could be found in just about any smallish city that has a similar conflict in place. A party of PCs could be mercenaries brought in to reinforce the Guard, adventurers passing though who just happened to be using the city and a tavern in The Warren as their base of operations, or agents of (did-we-decide-there-was-a-Crown-or-not-I-forget) the Crown who are sent to find facts and restore order.

No matter the set-up, telling your party they face two beggars, three kids, and a wiry teen dressed in what are those, rat pelts? and then being taken down by a hail of sling bullets, a Holy MMA Beggar, a swarm of rats, and the Zealot Pothelm Paladin braining your lead fighter with a stick while shouting “Your End Is Here!” will probably teach them something about underestimating opponents – or make them paranoid in every “innocent” city encounter from that session on. Either way: Win!

Next Week’s Fantasy Faction
The Lodge

“A scale of one to ten, or scale from one to ten, is a general and largely vernacular concept used for rating things, people, places, ideas, and so on. The scale has 10 as a maximum score, as a denotation of exceptionally high quality or of another attribute, usually accompanying 1 as its minimum, although some common variants have a minimum of 0.” — Wikipedia entry for ‘Scale of one to ten’

Simple, common, intuitive, perhaps pervasive, perhaps universal(?)¹ and widely applicable: a scale from one to 10. Or zero to ten (but we’ll get there).

You may have been asked to rate your pain on a one to ten scale in an ER or doctor’s office, and there are many common systems, like gymnastics and ‘perfect’ 10.00 scores² and informal usage, including the “on a scale from 1 to x” memes, “These go to 11”, “Listen up fives, a ten is speaking”, and even gems like “On a scale from 1 to 10, your mama’s so fat she’s a 747-300”

So one aspect of a commonly-known, commonly-used linear numeric scale like “1 to 10” is that we’re all aware of what it is, what’s best, what’s worst, where it maxes out, and have a mental picture (if not a precise mental Gaussian probability distribution curve) of what the scale spans and how a difference of one—up or down—looks, feels, and works. Except…

There is another commonly-known, commonly-used ordinal-based convention with a whole lot of overlap on 1-to-10 and that’s the top 10 list. The top 10 list is probably more common (is certainly more common every December) and now we have an issue of ‘perfect ten’ vs ‘number one’ — is being a 2 an almost-great thing or a terribly bad thing? This is why, on questionnaires, any prompt to rate something on 1-10 nearly always specifies “with 1 being the worst and 10 being best”³

The easiest way to short-circuit this particular automatic pathway, “1 means ranked number one”, is to add a different lower base value:
zero.

There are other reasons to add a zero⁴, but the main one is that you almost never have to qualify that zero is worst and ten is best, and after an appropriate introduction (one shorter than this blog post) readers rapidly adapt and the numerical values allow for easy comparisons and the underlying questions (e.g. “how Strong is my character?”) can be left unstated entirely.

This system seems like it might be an improvement [The blog post title, above, is a teaser-in-three-parts, so you know at least one more part is coming] but there’s an additional gloss I picked up from a roleplaying system called FUDGE, written by Stephen O’Sullivan⁵ — and that is the use of comparative terms, on an ascending adjective scale. We bolster the ok-maybe-it’s-not-as-intuitive-as-I-thought zero to 10 scale by pairing (and pinning) the numbers with common adjectives. Broadly speaking, things that are ‘good’ are better than things that are ‘fair’, and if asked to pick between something ‘good’ and something ‘great’, of course you pick the merely good one⁶

The Fudge scale only uses 7 adjectives for this, but with a zero to ten scale, we’re going to need a total of 11⁷:

0. fatal (or near fatal)
1. terrible
2. awful
3. poor
4. meh.
5. fair
6. good
7. great
8. rare
9. epic
10. legend

“Meh.”, at 4, has some pushback from my early testers (roughly half)⁸ but isn’t carved in stone; if a term like ‘mediocre’ or ‘meagre’ has more fantasy flair and you’d prefer it to the more recent coinage (my editorial on that is also the term under discussion: meh.) then by all means change it for your own use. And while I like the Rare-Epic-Legend ladder for the top end of the scale, again, that’s my preference and you’re welcome to check as many thesauruses as you like to find alternates (I couldn’t find any I liked better).⁹

In my proposed system, the zero-to-ten scale balances at the midpoint, 5, though you might think of 4 as being the stock-NPC default baseline.

Because here’s the thing: all our characters are above average.

Part of that is part-and-parcel of playing a role playing game; we take on the role of an adventurer or hero (of whatever type) and we play through that fantasy. Of course we’re nothing special at the start and we have to grow and learn and gank monsters that are basically piñatas made of loot and that sweet, sweet XP — but no PC, even at level one is (ugh) ordinary . It’s an unspoken rule at the table. Even our flaws rarely have gameplay consequences and while barbarian Barbomight Stumpswinger of the Great Northern Woods may be about as sharp as a sack of oatmeal (Intelligence 3, poor) he is creative and improvisational in a fight (his namesake weapon is a stump! which he picked up as the only thing to hand to swing in one of his earliest adventures) and is not, as played, dumb.

There are role-play reasons and character ‘flavor’ reasons to take an low attribute, trait, skill, or ‘flaw’ but these are usually balanced (and over-balanced) by the role-play and ‘flavor’ of a character’s background and heritage, and their chosen class or skill set.

So, just embrace it, your stock-NPC defaults to 4, meh. Anything better is fair, or fair to good, and for most player characters we’re working in the 7-10 range anyway^10&11

Coming back around to the first third of the blog subject:

ZTT. Zero-to-ten. As defined above. It will be a whole lot easier to just say “ZTT” and link to that — or actually, link to this¹² —which is not only a brief intro to the idea but some behind-the-curtain thought process and also a definition of terms.¹³

##

¹ at least for sophants with 10 total digits on their manipulation limbs

² the International Gymnastics Federation uses a system of points, not a rating scale, that coincidentally maxes out at 10, or at least did so before 2006. Under the revised code, scores can theoretically exceed 10, based on difficulty and event, but you’d probably still need the Russian judge in your pocket to even think about that

³ on a scale of 1 to Michael Bay, one being no explosion and 10 being Michael Bay, is 10 a good thing or a bad thing?

⁴ I’d read the articles at waypointgroup.org/why-a-0-10-scale-is-your-best-option/ and www.primary-intel.com/blog/the-magic-in-a-0-to-10-rating-scale/ for some good discussion and non-meme, non-RPG based context

⁵ links to additional resources, the open licenses available for other creators, and a general discussion of O’Sullivan’s FUDGE are about half-way down this page

⁶ oh no, I don’t want to be a bother, no no you take the bigger piece I’m not that hungry. please, no, I insist

⁷ having eleven terms is different from “These Go to Eleven” but “These Go to Eleven” is in fact a game mechanic that I have considered and am iterating on.

⁸ though everyone immediately understood the meaning

⁹ One design consideration was finding a clear, strong, monosyllable (whenever possible) for each, 0-to-10. This constraint is why ‘meh.’ is a clear winner at no. 4, though even in my own use I’ll likely use ‘meagre’ if it comes up

¹⁰ with muchkins and min-maxers already looking at my proposal and thinking about how to get 7-out-of-10 stats at 11 or better, and their primary at 14 or 15. If you’re a DM looking to homebrew a system or just with a robust set of house rules, the idea of a “working range” for skills and attributes is probably more helpful than the mechanics and terms anyway. What is our “working range” for a 3d6,d20 D&D-like system? 10 to 20, functionally, with bonuses for those scores ranging from +1 to +5. So really, arguably, just a five point scale, at least for the player just looking at those plus-ones. Or maybe a six-point scale, with the occasional bad roll (or PC choice) putting a score at 8-9, -1. Coming around to my zero-to-ten scale, we start at 4 and go to 10, legendary, with the occasional 3 and a working range of 5-6-7-8-9, hopefully. Enough for meaningful gradations and for each point/step/plus-one to feel weighty.

¹¹ building on that, you could easily add half points to the ten point scale (e.g. 7.5) which sets the new legend, max value at 20. This hack gives you some more direct correspondence between 3d6 and a zero-to-ten, and I may have to explicitly say that in whatever final version of the system (one page ‘lite’ versions, even) rather than hide it in an endnote. Here, I’ll walk you further down the path: 7, great, is a 14 on a 3d6, and a +2. 7.5, still great, is a 15; get up to 8, rare, though and we’re looking at 16 on a 3d6 and a +3.

¹² or put it in the endnotes, as applicable

¹³ On a scale from zero to ten, overall, I give this a 9, epic, for asides and endnotes; an 8, rare, for introduction of new ideas to TTPRGs; and a 4, meh., for readability, perhaps trending down to 3, poor, for virality or share-ablity of the post itself.

Tabletop RPGs [/stylebookinsistsIspellthisout] or “Role Playing Games” [/stylebook] are a popular format of ‘board’ game that one plays with pencil, paper, and dice. Or sometimes cards and dice. Or sometimes on an actual board, though that is rarer; though much less rare is a gridded game mat one sketches on with erasable markers, for make-do terrain, or a set of dungeon rooms and corridors, and usually populated with snack crumbs and small cast figures representing players & “monsters”. The miniatures are optional, as is most of the rest, dice included. There are a lot of variations, which only makes sense because Tabletop RPGs are 50 years old at this point, and draw from various wargaming traditions (simulating battles using representational miniatures) that can be dated to the 1780s and popular (within its niche) through the 19th century, along with “role play” parlor games that date back to at least the 1930s, if not further.

The basics that you absolutely need are one player to take the role of group facilitator and arbiter (a “Game Master”, also stylized “Dungeon Master”, as it is in perhaps the oldest and most popular RPG, Dungeons & Dragons), enough other players to take on the roles of the story characters (I recommend at least two, but no more than seven), and play sessions where these Player Characters join the Game Master in telling a developing narrative, over the course of a single session or several sessions.

Am I done with exposition yet? Has the stylebook been appeased? Y’all know what RPGs are, right?

I’ve been collecting rule books for various RPG systems since my teens. Other than D&D, I didn’t actually play many of them, though I was always the DM for my groups through middle school and high school, so I’d run several campaigns and knew 2nd edition inside & out. The group I started to DM during our freshman year at Tech played a half dozen or so sessions, then decided to migrate to a lab in the College of Computing basement where we’d telnet into Arctic MUD [wikipedia entry; see also mud.arctic.org] on amber-screened IBM terminals—which is still the best way to play an MMO, honestly, sitting in the same room with your friends while you do it (text-only and CRTs totally optional; some things are better now).

But even after moving largely to computer MMORPGs and sticking with those on and off (mostly off) ever since, I was still buying the core rules and various source books for a lot of different systems, and reading these RPG source books as what amounted to a small, but fun, game-adjacent hobby. I don’t think I’m the only person that does this, just based on how many books are sold vs how many people actually GM for a group on a somewhat regular basis.

The thing about reading a bunch of rule books, though, is that your game-brain gets stretched in a lot of different directions and you start meta-gaming the games. Thinking about similarities and differences, and even backfilling from computer RPGs, and you start to get ideas. If you already have “house rules” and homebrew parts of your preferred ruleset to suit player preference (or to “fix” “glaring errors” in the original) you’re halfway there already. At some point, dissatisfaction with available alternatives—or the need for a specific feature or mechanic that won’t quite fit otherwise—will lead many game enthusiasts to develop their own game system from scratch. Though I hadn’t really thought along these lines in a decade or more, or touched a rule book, quarantine gave me a lot of time to think—and to fill. I found myself feeling a pull, to get back to gaming, and while I was playing WoW Classic and enjoying that, it also didn’t quite scratch that specific gaming itch. So I dug up the old books (and bought more recent editions) and read and re-read and opened up a new folder and file on my computer and started writing down the ideas.

I have notes for a lightweight tabletop RPG system that uses intuitive things like a zero-to-10 scale and descriptive comparative terms (borrowed from FUDGE) to borrow/play well with source materials from a lot of different games. I'll probably start blogging it

— m · blind (@mdotblind) March 31, 2020

More than anything else, my initial seed for the system started with the idea that you shouldn’t have to rebuild everything if there were systems or settings you could just borrow wholesale. So it wasn’t so much about how to play any one type of RPG under a specific set of rules, but how to get different systems to talk to each other and play nice, or nicer, with each other. And that would be a very lightweight ruleset, basically defining one actual system mechanic with some sample translation tables (from 3d6,d20 to the “in-between” descriptive system, for example) to show how other games could all “talk” to each other. So if you like one character creation regime, but wanted to use a different combat resolution schema, and a world setting from a 3rd source, you could frankenstein those parts together using the ideas presented in what could probably be boiled down into a single page RPG “ruleset”[sic].

But then I thought, “Well OK but what if you wanted use this mechanic as is, without borrowing — what’s the minimum viable game look like?” and of course down that path lies madness

SO. My 'lightweight' system is feeding well and puts on additional pounds every day. That said:

One base mechanic [Describing 'rpg things' like stats, attributes, quality, and skill with a I-hope-it's-intuitive zero to ten scale] will be pealed off to fit on a single sheet https://t.co/IyrqyoFVlN

— m · blind (@mdotblind) July 26, 2020

I am not sure where this will end up. The game system that started as a “lightweight” or even single-page idea is still in there somewhere but I have a whole system developing now. The worldbuilding bug decided to take a bite, too, while I had my whole ass hanging out, so now that Game System has it’s own World Setting (at least, the draft of one) and I’ll be working on things like character classes (or alternatives to classes) and character heritage & backgrounds (we prefer “background” to things like the classical fantasy “races”, because who’s to say a Elf raised by Dwarves wouldn’t be a whiskey-swilling blacksmith with a Why-Is-Scotland-in-Middle-Earth accent, a two-bit two-handed battleaxe they like to use called “Trollstumper”, and a perpetual hangup over not being able to grow a decent beard like a proper member of their people).

My fantasy world setting probably won’t have Elves or Dwarves anyway. I’m not even sure if there will be analogues for either, though I’ll include allowances. Though the rule set, separate from the setting, will have Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and whatever else lives in the public domain as backgrounds, both for the sake of being kind-of-generically-complete but also as the best way to introduce the game concepts to players (and new-to-this-setting GMs). We’ll start with what is familiar and ground things before taking off over the far horizons.

So that’s the scope of work for what will be likely months-to-years(?) of me fiddling with this thing and piling on and whittling away and whatever other metaphorically-used verbs can be applied to outlining, drafting, and writing. As for what it’s called?

I’m recycling “Amphithael” as the name of the fantasy world setting. I’m also recycling most of the world already built under that name as well, though that map will likely change and comprises only a fourth or so of what will be my new fantasy globe.

And: The rule set. I’m calling it “System15”—this is a placeholder name, and I borrowed that general idea and the numeral 15 from Randall Munroe and XKCD, “Standards”. We all know there are too many competing RPG systems already, we do not need another no matter what the author claims about the system being “comprehensive” “flexible” “genre neutral” “universal” and probably tasting minty fresh while leaving your kitchen surfaces gleaming. So System15.

I suppose I should start throwing things up on this wall and we’ll see what sticks.