I thought this was going to be a quick blog post where I digest and recycle a few other fans’ recommendations, “What to watch before Ahsoka” and I’d have a nice little post out late Friday afternoon and a queue that I could catch up on over the weekend. Once I got started, though, it ended up being a much deeper dive into 2010’s era Star Wars on TV, and into the character. And I watched quite a few more episodes of both Clone Wars and Rebels than I expected I would, or would have to.

Before I dive too deep — if you just want a quick TL;DR on what you have to watch before Star Wars: Ahsoka the answer is:

Nah, you’re good. Just watch it.

Rosario Dawson has already shown she understands and can inhabit the character (in The Mandalorian Chapter 13: The Jedi and The Book of Boba Fett Chapter 6: From the Desert Comes a Stranger) and I think we can trust the writers on this one.

Questions like, “Well, who is she?” “Who trained her to be such a bad-ass?” “How did she escape Order 66?” “Wait, she says she’s not a Jedi?” are the sorts of things that are either not too terribly important to telling a new story, or points that will be addressed as she interacts with returning and new characters.

That’s where we’re at. Go. Watch. Don’t sweat the details like some obsessed grognard lore nerd.

[*cough*]

##

The sources I used for this guide include
Clone Wars Episodes in Chronological Order (from StarWars.com)
Tumblr user fullyfancyfan’s Clone Wars Skippable Guide
Murphy’s Multiverse with ‘The Ultimate List of What to Watch Before Ahsoka’
and Reddit’s r/StarWars thread on ‘What should I watch to prepare for Ahsoka?’

…which I found using the google searches “Which clone wars episodes can I skip?” and “What to watch before Ahsoka”

If you’ve seen Clone Wars and Rebels and just need some light reminders [spoilers] about the plots you might also find the Wikipedia pages for Star Wars: Clone Wars Episodes and Star Wars: Rebels Episodes to be handy, if only to read quick summaries of what I’m skipping.

Ahsoka is a creation of Clone Wars¹ so technically you don’t need to watch any of the movies, but I’ll assume you are broadly familiar with the films (any trilogy) and enough of a fan of the broader Star-Wars thing that you’re generally receptive to recommendations. The only two episodes you might want/need to watch of the Disney+ live action Star Wars are linked above.

I’m also going to assume that you want to get up to speed specifically with the story and character of Ahsoka and you don’t have a whole lot of time and also aren’t super into watching 10+ seasons of cgi animated Star Wars just to get there. So one goal is to cut more from the list, not necessarily to include every last appearance of Ahsoka in the shows.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a 2008 ‘film’, given an August theatrical release², but also debuting on Cartoon Network that October. It is probably best to think of it as the first three(-ish) episodes on the series (which began airing weekly on Cartoon Network immediate after, 3 Oct 2008). Ahsoka is voiced in the film & series by Ashley Eckstein.

One thing to note about the Clone Wars cartoon is that episodes weren’t originally presented in what might be called ‘story order’. The vibe is kind of like 1940s news reels from the war front (you’ll get that from the narration at the start of episodes) and for the first three seasons of Clone Wars we were getting bits of this war out of chronological order. It’s why one of the links above is to the watch order guide on StarWars.com; if you wanted to watch all of Clone Wars as a single story, ‘in order’, that resource is available to you. For an Ahsoka-focused list, we’ll be taking some pretty big steps³ but skipping whole story arcs and watching episodes ‘out of order’ is a whole “Clone Wars” thing, as valid as any other recommendation.

So let’s get started. For the Disney+ links below, you’ll need to be a subscriber.

2008 Film: [Stream on Disney+]

Eh, it’s OK. Fine enough if you want to watch it all but we really only need to see the Battle of Christophsis bits, which is a good (re-)introduction to the CW versions of Anakin, Kenobi, the Clones — and Ahsoka.

If you’re ready to keep going and don’t care about the kidnapped hutt kid, stop watching at 26:30

Clone Wars

Season 1, Episode 9 Cloak of Darkness [Stream on Disney+]
…confirming the early characterization of Ahsoka as young, impulsive, and a little snippy.

Season 1, Episode 13 Jedi Crash [Stream on Disney+]
“When Anakin is gravely injured, Ahsoka must take charge”

Season 1, Episode 19 Storm Over Ryloth [Stream on Disney+]
Character development! Storm Over Ryloth is the first of a three episode story arc, but the next two follow other Jedi, not Anakin and Ahsoka.

Season 2, Episode 1 Holocron Heist [Stream on Disney+]
More lessons for an impulsive padawan. Those who like the bounty-hunter and western vibes of the Mandalorian or just a good old-fashioned heist will enjoy this one. The next two episodes, Cargo of Doom [Stream on Disney+] and Children of the Force [Stream on Disney+] finish out the arc if the story hooks you, but those in a hurry can move on.

Season 2, Episode 6 Weapons Factory [Stream on Disney+]
Ahsoka gets paired with Luminara’s padawan Barriss on a mission to sneak into a droid factory and destroy it (while their masters take care of things above ground). A neat contrast here because obviously, Skywalker is not a conventional teacher, so we see how at least one other Jedi-padawan pair operate. Also Barriss is a peer, closer to Ahsoka in age and training, and we get to see that dynamic

Season 2, Episode 11 Lightsaber Lost [Stream on Disney+]
“When Ahsoka’s lightsaber is stolen by a pickpocket, she gets help from the seemingly feeble elder Jedi Tera Sinube as she tracks down the thief.” The Clone Wars writers enjoy pairing Ahsoka with many Jedi Masters, as we’ve seen at least three times already even in this short list. Often these are like Master Sinube, bordering on comedic relief but full of wisdom for our Ahsoka. It’s a recurring ‘bit’ but also good storytelling (and is building Ahsoka as a more complex character, not just Anakin’s 2nd).⁴

This is also a good point to insert some commentary.
How Filoni FIXED Ahsoka in 4 Episodes | Star Wars Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msgQ6WbIHyc
“how Dave Filloni intentionally crafted Ahsoka’s flaws to transform her from a hated newbie into a staple of the franchise.”

Season 2, Episode 22 Lethal Trackdown [Stream on Disney+]
Another pairing, this time with Master Plo Kloon. By this point, the ‘lesson I have to learn’ trope may feel a little overused, especially since we’re skipping around so much to find that particular beat, but I think the more important part is that Ahsoka is learning from so many Jedi, not just Anakin.

Here I will note Episodes 15, 16, & 17 of Season 3. Watch them if you want. I’ll link those at the end — or maybe just in the footnotes⁵ – At least until this arc is ret-conned, it’s Star Wars. For folks who just want to watch the new live action Ahsoka this is a HUGE distraction & not part of my watch list. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you”

Yes you can skip these. Please skip these.

You can also skip these, but they’re solid episodes, and is the two-parter that closed out season three.

Season 3, Episode 21 Padawan Lost [Stream on Disney+]
Season 3, Episode 22 Wookiee Hunt [Stream on Disney+]

Heck at this point we’re done.

You’re good. Watch the new show. There will be more background and backstory but I feel like these ten episodes from the first three seasons are enough to get to know Ahsoka as a character.

…There’s more. Quite a bit more.⁶ I’m trying to respect your time; we’re only four hours in. What’s left is going to take another eight or so hours, and there isn’t another good jumping off point.

Skipping ahead to season five, we have a four episode story arc that is all about Ahsoka and also a pivotal part about her character

Season 5, episode 17 Sabotage [Stream on Disney+]
“Sometimes even the smallest doubt can shake the greatest belief.”

After the events of S5E17, Ahsoka Tano is blamed for a murder, and forced to escape into the Coruscant underworld to prove her innocence. Definitely watch these next three as a block.

Season 5, Episode 18 The Jedi Who Knew Too Much [Stream on Disney+]
Season 5, Episode 19 To Catch a Jedi [Stream on Disney+]
Season 5, Episode 20 The Wrong Jedi [Stream on Disney+]

This arc ends season five. It also ends Clone Wars run on the Cartoon Network. Season six was released on Netflix (13 episodes as a batch, in 2014) and for a while that was thought to be all we’d get (of Clone Wars; Rebels was already in production). But we got a surprise in 2020, a seventh season was ordered to help launch the Disney Plus streaming service. For Ahsoka’s story [for reasons I won’t go into because Spoilers] we actually skip season six and the first four episodes of season seven. From there, though, you’ll want to watch the rest, episodes 5 through 12.

Season 7, Episode 5 Gone with a Trace [Stream on Disney+]
“If there is no path before you, create your own.”

Season 7, Episode 6 Deal No Deal [Stream on Disney+]
“Mistakes are valuable lessons often learned too late.”

Season 7, Episode 7 Dangerous Debt [Stream on Disney+]
“Who you were does not have to define who you are.”

Season 7, Episode 8 Together Again [Stream on Disney+]
“You can change who you are, but you cannot run from yourself.”

Season 7, Episode 9 Old Friends Not Forgotten [Stream on Disney+]
Season 7, Episode 10 The Phantom Apprentice [Stream on Disney+]
Season 7, Episode 11 Shattered [Stream on Disney+]
Season 7, Episode 12 Victory and Death [Stream on Disney+]

That last story arc is basically a movie. It’s impressive television. It is highly recommended and no, I won’t spoil anything in it for you.

Rebels

Clone Wars wasn’t the only show going, though. As season six of Clone Wars was wrapping up with a Netflix release, Rebels was gearing up to premiere on Disney XD. For those wondering about the chronology, the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney was finalized in October of 2012, right as season five of Clone Wars was airing. Corporate behind-the-scenes stuff and the nature of the Cartoon Network deal probably meant Clone Wars was (a least a little) doomed as soon as Disney took ownership, and probably also explains the fractured nature of Season Six [“The Lost Missions”]. But to be fair, Clone Wars was getting dark — it wasn’t a kids show anymore, and Disney no doubt thought a reboot to a new show, crew, and era would be more kid-friendly. Rebels isn’t entirely a kids show though, and wasn’t meant to be; I think their target audience was teens and tweens.⁷

Optional but recommended is Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2, Spark of Rebellion [Stream on Disney+, Part 1 and Part 2]. This two-parter will introduce you to the main cast of Rebels, and ground you well enough.

The new Ahsoka show includes several Rebels characters who are making the jump from CGI to live action. I’ve even heard it called ‘the next season of Rebels’. So there may be an argument for watching all four seasons of Rebels; if you should feel that urge later, with a whole week between episodes of Ahsoka, we should have plenty of time.

Ahsoka’s part in Rebels is mostly in Season Two — after a very brief appearance at the end of Season 1, Episode 15 Fire Across the Galaxy. Ahsoka is used very sparingly in Rebels, mostly as a background character.⁸

Ahsoka-related but not necessarily Ahsoka-focused, the first four episodes of season two can be skipped.

Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2 Siege of Lothal [Stream on Disney+, Part 1 and Part 2]
Season 2, Episode 3 The Lost Commanders [Stream on Disney+]
Season 2, Episode 4 Relics of the Old Republic [Stream on Disney+]

Even Season 2, Episode 18 Shroud of Darkness, a very Jedi-focused episode, doesn’t have a whole lot of Ahsoka’s story in it⁹, just a lot of foreshadowing. Worth a watch though and an excellent way to set up the season two finale.

Season 2, Episodes 21 and 22 Twilight of the Apprentice [Stream on Disney+, Part 1 and Part 2]

Because I’m sure you will have questions, I’d follow this immediately by Season 4, Episode 13 A World Between Worlds. We just skipped two whole seasons of story, and that kind of jump might bring up a different set of questions, but this is where we conclude the Malachor story.

The last time we see Ahsoka before her appearance in The Mandolorean is in Rebels Season 4, Episode 15 Family Reunion – and Farewell, in a end-of-series coda section [start watching at 42:00, mostly to skip SPOILERS that you might want to wait to see when you’re watching all of Rebels]. I’ll also note in 2022, Diz gave us two more bits (fine, three, whatever) featuring a Clone-Wars-era Ahsoka in Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi Episode 5, Practice Makes Perfect and Episode 6, Resolve.

I hope all those links work. I’ll be cleaning up this blog post for the rest of the day.

We’ve got word from Disney’s Twitter Account for Ahsoka that the show will premiere a day early, tomorrow at 6pm US Pacific Time.

New #Ahsoka inspired art by NickyBarkla</a> has arrived. <br><br>Don’t miss the two-episode premiere, streaming Tuesday, August 22 at 6PM PT on <a href="https://twitter.com/DisneyPlus?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/hynybbxg5B

— Ahsoka (@ahsokaofficial) August 19, 2023

It doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to catch up, but in a pinch just refer to my original tl;dr way up there at the top of the post before the break. And despite me spending three days and overworking my Disney+ account to write all this: try to just enjoy the new shows on their own merits; not everything has to carry the weight of five decades and the bloated expectations of an entitled fan base. Sometimes these are just fun sci-fi and/or space fantasy adventures, often for the kids.

¹ specifically of Dave Feloni, supervising director — and earlier in his film career both a conceptual artist and storyboard artist.

² The theatrical release was probably both to raise the profile of the show, give it a splashy premiere, but also to make some money back as the development costs for a full CGI show (esp. in 2008) was a chunk of change.

³ though from all the resources I have at hand, what is presented is in chronological order. yay consistency.

⁴ Also I’m pretty sure this episode is one of the references Respawn Games used for Coruscant when making Jedi: Survivor. There’s a big cross-Coruscant parkour chase scene in this ep.

⁵ For a long time, the whole damn burden of Star Wars was being carried by this one Cartoon Network series, back when they didn’t know Diz would buy them out. No movies were on the horizon, even the release of tie-in novels had slowed down, and tv cartoons were the whole damn franchise. In this context you can watch [Overlords], [Altar of Mortis], and [Ghosts of Mortis] . A story had to be built. But it’s not her story, necessarily, just more myth (and probably straight from George Lucas, so it’s “canon”, as much as anything is).

⁶ We’re skipping a block of episodes that starts with Season 3, Episode 10 Heroes on Both Sides [Stream on Disney+],
Season 4, Episode 14 A Friend in Need [Stream on Disney+], and finishes with a four-episode arc early in season 5: A War on Two Fronts [Stream on Disney+], Front Runners [Stream on Disney+] , The Soft War [Stream on Disney+], and Tipping Points [Stream on Disney+]. The first two introduce Ahsoka to Separatist politics and to a young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri. Lux and his planet of Onderon, are featured in the later arc as Ahsoka and other Jedi support a rebel faction on Onderon in their effort to free their world from the Separatist-friendly government that controls it. Despite also featuring (a young) Saw Guerra and having the twist that the Jedi are supposed to be merely advisors, not combatants, when re-watching these I realized it’s a good Star Wars story but these arcs don’t feel like her story.

⁷ Diz was looking to mint a few more Star Wars fans among Millennials and Gen Z while putting some gloss on the XD channel, which is like the ESPN-8 of Disney’s cable offerings.

⁸ I’m guessing here, but there is the fact that she’s a little overpowered compared to the rest, comes with her own story/baggage that the show’s writers didn’t feel like addressing on a week-in week-out basis and she actual works really well as a behind-the-scenes quest-giver type.

⁹ not a lot of Ahsoka’s story. Plenty for the new guys. It is their show after all.

Let’s just ignore that I haven’t written anything for the blog in two weeks & we can skip the apology/excuses/justifications and get back to a topic.

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” per Robert Frost, and he also described it as playing handball without a wall. Most of us don’t play either sport but handball, I’m guessing, is even rarer which is why the front half of the quote is the bit we remember.

I like the handball analogy better because sometimes I don’t get really creative until I literally¹ bounce off a wall. Or until I find the right kind of person to bounce ideas off of. The tennis net always seemed more arbitrary, and when a ball hits the net, it stops. And then you have to reset and go through all the motions to get the ball back in play, which is why players avoid it.

Anyway, the point of Frost was that without some structure and a few rules², you’re not really writing Poetry™, at least as he preferred it. But just like a couple of kids can have fun with two rackets and a tennis ball without having to keep score, free verse is still poetry³.

In designing games, particularly board games where many of the rules will be given both representation and often physical form in the printed board and components, we have all kinds of structure to work within. Our game is the board is the structure is the rules. Folks can ignore the rules⁴ but since we’re using the same pieces, even variations tend to be pretty close to form. Italian sonnets and English sonnets are not the same but 14 lines is 14 lines. Board games are fun, but playthroughs of Monopoly and Risk all tend to look the same – and while both are now traditions in some families, the tradition is also usually to play them just once a year.

Card games, particularly those that use the now-standard deck of 52, in four suits, are probably the closest we get to a “Frostian Poetic” genre of games: there is structure, there are rules. But there is also a lot of creativity in the variations. A single deck but ‘according to Hoyle’ we have a couple hundred variations of play. Within the limits of 10 + 3 times 4 we get Poker, Bridge, Rummy, Cribbage, Blackjack, Solitaire, and War, with all kinds of ways to match, count, or rank cards and just as many ways to ‘take tricks’ and keep score. Eventually we hit limits, and we add a joker — or we get variations like Pinochle, or the UNO deck. We keep the vocabulary (draws, hands, playing out of the hand face up on the table) but use new alphabets.

And eventually we get things like Mille Bornes [1906 or 1955] and Magic: The Gathering [1993]. Is MtG still playing by the same design rules as Poker?⁵ There is a very distant family resemblance. MF Doom and Robert Frost stand a century apart but Doom and other rappers are most assuredly still using rhyme and meter.

And with that, I think I have stretched the analogy just about as far as it’ll stand.

##

RPGs have rules, obviously. And many, many available accessories, minis, and tokens that can make some sessions play more like board games or war games, at least in part.

But RPGs, at least those played on table tops⁶, are more like a free-form collaborative story-telling game. The rules we start with give that story some structure, and also help shape the course of play, but over time we’ll change the rules, too, to get closer to the kinds of stories we want to tell.

Maybe more importantly than the rules of an RPG is the vibe of the RPG. And I specifically chose vibe to describe this because I am Gen X and cringe and trying too hard to sound cool, but also because the Vibe of a Game is a mix of things: quite a bit comes in the published settings or ‘worlds’ of the game, some in the rules-as-written, some from other media including the sources used for inspiration by the game designers, and some from roughly 50 years of playing these games and the 20 years of mid-century sci-fi and fantasy that came before them.

Mork Borg is a Vibe. Apocalypse World is a Vibe. Blades in the Dark is a Vibe.

Pathfinder has a lot of overlap with D&D but the settings of Golarion and Forgotten Realms have very different vibes. [Even within D&D: Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and OG Greyhawk are all very different games to play though technically they share a common rule set — if we fudge a bit. Different D&D settings came out for different editions, and 2nd isn’t 4th isn’t 5th.]

A really neat thing about RPGs is that the rules almost don’t matter. Characters can be defined in different ways, the labels can change. A paladin could be called a Holy Warder, Realm Guardian, Templar, or Lightbound but if a player wants to play a character with that paladin vibe, we find a way for it to fit the overall vibe of the game world and we give that character Smite, because paladins, even if the rest of the class kit and power set are wildly different. I can build a paladin by rolling 4d6 multiple times to generate stats or I can start with 100 points and break out some of the GURPS manuals. I can search online and find the appropriate PbtA Playbook [edit to add: Dungeon World’s Paladin. there ya go.]. I can grab my copy of Band of Blades (it’s in my to-be-read pile) and see what the deal is with Chosen [edit to add: It’s a whole different Vibe].

When even whole rule sets are optional and swappable (to an extent) what is the limitation we put on our RPGs? What’s the rhyme scheme and meter?

When your game can technically be played across an entire whole world, it’s often necessary to drop two sets of parallel lines down and make ourselves a board. Starter village, dungeon, quest hub, capital. Quite a few early sessions fall back on the familiar so we can ground ourselves and figure out the Vibe, both of the game and setting, and also what this particular table, this set of players with with this GM, how that’s going to feel as we play 3-5 hours at a time.

That’s our ‘board’, I think. And across many different genres, I find the parallels. It could be horror-survival on a sci-fi space station but we’ll have a Safe Starting Area, a Dungeon equivalent, eventually a quest hub, and probably a goal, destination or end game — in a fantasy context, the ‘Capital’ — whether that means impressing the monarch or taking their throne. A wild west setting will have some sleepy frontier town, Canyons and Badlands and the things in ‘em, and maybe eventually some sort of slowly simmering plot that leads the story to the Big City, or even Back East. The road there and back again starts in the Shire but eventually takes us to Minas Tirith, and as a “road movie” it’s more about hitting the landmarks than bouncing around a quest hub but there’s comparable story structure there.

Twisting expectations, and (as a GM) finding whole new ways to make a “starter village” and “dungeon”, that’s what keeps the game fresh⁷. And of course: with the biggest dungeons, the whole campaign can just be town and vaults, back and forth but always exploring deeper or farther, until we find the story in it and the eventual endgame.

A lot of us have stuck with D&D (various editions with various additions and often a lot of homebrew) but only because that’s where we started. The basics of D&D have proven to be pretty adaptable, and folks have done some wild things with just 12 classes and a handful of character backgrounds. But the tropes of D&D and our expectations going in are also ‘grounding’ in a way – and grounding in a couple of senses: a foundation underneath us, and a sort of electrical ground for the rules to keep things from short-circuiting.

So to answer my own question, yeah, the tennis net is kind of necessary. Arguably, the rules we agree to, at the table, keep the game ‘on the rails’ just as surely as the clockwise track around Monopoly, and the limits of the setting (fantasy or otherwise) are also the edges of this (huge, imaginary, but still contained) game board. RPGs don’t have to be limited, but we accept the limits. That’s the vibe we like and the type of stories we’re looking to tell.

Just like no one is actually playing Monopoly by the official rules, no two GMs run their table the same way, and no two groups are playing the exact same game either. Everyone adapts something. Every GM has had a player who wanted to do something that required either a creative interpretation of the rules or some sort of exception (hopefully minor) from them. This flexibility is core to RPGs; not unique to RPGs but much more common among them.

So you might disagree with me. The poetry of what you’re making is maybe more spoken word than dactylic hexameter or alliterative Old English or strict quatrains and couplets.⁸ But I feel like some limits are probably necessary, especially when the boundaries of what we can imagine are basically limitless.

##

The image at the top of the post is only tenuously, tangentially related. Though I needed some starting point for thinking about the post today, & I took the literal boundary drawn on an otherwise completely open-ended map. It’s the latest version of the template I’ve been working on for making hex World Maps (for fantasy settings or other things that work well on hexagonal grids) – you can see the last couple of posts for more on the scale for the map, and what the rectangular overlay is for.

Eventually I’ll find a final template I like and work up a couple of samples that use it and put together a packet, a pdf, & make that available on Itch.io

¹ “literally” in its modern meaning, not literally literally.

² Like the Pirate’s Code, rules for poetry is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules

³ Frost was using a version of the tennis-and-net analogy as far back as 1933, Ginsberg wrote Howl in ’55. So whatever trend Frost was responding to, it wasn’t specifically the Beats or Ginsberg. And arguably the use of repetition in Howl gives it a structure and, especially when performed, the spoken word cadence is just as effective as a strict poetic meter would have been. But enough commentary on poetry I am way out of my depth here.

⁴ Everyone is playing Monopoly wrong, for example.

⁵ Magic should probably be compared to games like Rummy instead of Poker, in that a bunch of cards are played in front of each player and you can react to what your opponent played on your own board, albeit in a limited fashion

⁶ Table tops, real or virtual. A lot of people play the game on screens these days, so we can’t differentiate just based on ‘is it software?’ anymore. But for MMOs, JRPGs, and other computer RPGs the game world is kind of a fixed thing, and you interact through your PC (both your Player Character and your personal computer) and your options are strictly limited to those of the interface. For “table top” RPGs, we’re playing as the PCs and we interact with each other. The options are close to being unlimited, so long as we agree to keep telling this particular story to each other, even if we do occasionally let the dice decide some outcomes. There may eventually be some sort of hybrid, certainly some companies keep working toward that as a goal. But the original sort of game, played in person in living rooms, dens, and at kitchen tables, with or without a lot of battlemaps and minis, will always be an option available to us.

⁷ …plus new options for character fantasies: classes, subclasses, ancestries, backgrounds — we’ve been building this kit for decades.

⁸ makin’ that analogy work.

For most tabletop RPGs, where players and the referee alike enjoy a fair amount of simulation and crunch¹ maps can be an important part of the game. Sometimes maps are just flavor, or props, and that is perfectly fine. In the front cover of many fantasy novels, there’s a basic map to give you the names of the various locations and how they relate to each other, but the author probably wasn’t thinking of exact scales or GPS precision accurate to 5 meters.² In many games though, we do include a scale, and a grid (for anything bigger than a village: a hex grid, almost always)³, and with some depiction of terrain, either artistically rendered or abstracted a bit, to colors and icons. A lot of gamers who came up the same time I did will remember the gorgeous two-piece four color 34”×44” wall map of Greyhawk⁴, from either the 1981 ‘folio’ or 1983 box set.

Map scales are arbitrary⁵ and generally come down to just two things: how big of a thing (province, kingdom, region, continent, world) did we want to represent on what is typically just a sheet or two of paper, and how do we ‘play’ the map.

Play is maybe more important: with that G in RPG, I’m still talking about games. But another pillar of RPGs is the idea that we are collectively telling a story, so sometimes we’ll make a map that is important for narrative (or for sparking imaginations) and not just because our board game needs a game board. I think we’ll cover both bases with this collection of scales, but there’s also a general trend in that as the scale gets bigger, our maps are more about story and less about simulation. Enough intro? That feels like enough intro.

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Scale One: 5 feet.

One inch = five feet and if you’ve played the game with 25mm or 28mm miniatures you are probably already very familiar with the game at this scale. This is how many of us set up and resolve combat (minis, and a few dice rolls) and as a D&D or Pathfinder player you’re probably also familiar with something like a 24”×36” vinyl mat with a square grid and your GM breaking out the dry-erase (or back in the day, wet-erase) markers. You can also buy a lot of professionally produced color maps at this scale — many sold in packs or as map tiles, intended to be used several at a time and shuffled around as needed. The latest in tech, Virtual Table Tops, also utilize maps at this scale that are either shared with players online via a video conferencing setup, or for those with the means, via a monitor or projector that brings the virtual back around again to a physical gaming table.

Five feet is melee range. Your move speed is most often listed as some multiple. Not everyone thinks of a battle mat or miniatures setup with cardboard and stand-in tokens as a map per se, but this is our smallest map scale.

Five feet may also be the first and last map scale nearly everyone agrees on. From here, I’m listing my preferences, and probably goes without saying but your mileage may vary⁶

Scale Two: Villages.

A village map usually isn’t a tactical map but nearly every starting adventure has one. The Village of Hommlet [AD&D Module T1] is one example that uses a square grid and a scale of one square = 20ft. (in most printings this adds up to 80ft. to the inch). The village of Phandalin from the D&D 5E Starter Set isn’t on a square grid but includes a map scale that’s roughly the same.

Village maps are typically, but not always, props for use at the table, to give players an idea of where they’re at and some of the relationships between buildings, locations, and NPCs. For this purpose, the Phandalin map is probably a better example than Hommlet. As a story-telling aid, a village map can be handy to show that the dour, loner NPC does in fact keep his distance from the rest of the village, or that a nearby abandoned shrine is probably somehow related to the village but definitely apart from it. I don’t think I’ve seen a village map broken down tactically to 5-foot scale so we can simulate street-by-street combat in an invasion or bandit raid scenario but now that I’ve typed that sentence I kind of want to play it? So I’ll probably be making that at some point.

There may be other examples that would be handy to map at this ‘village’ scale – for example, something like a full legion on the march and your players need a map of their encampment at the forest edge and river ford, so they can figure out how to infiltrate the camp. Or a castle siege. Or a small part of much larger city. But the purposes are usually going to be narrative over tactical, and involve a lot of gameplay and character actions that aren’t turn-by-turn combat.

In my own design space, I’d say anything still on graph paper instead of hexes and from 20 feet to 25 yards to a square fits as “village” scale.

Scale Three: Battlefield.

It is rare (in my experience) that a table-top RPG campaign gets to the point where two armies will meet on the battlefield and the players will want to wargame it – my bias is perhaps apparent in my choice of verb there, ‘war games’ are a different genre. TL;DR It’s 100 yards, and I’ll see you in the footnotes.⁷

Scale Four: Local Travel

Keeping with that TL;DR spirit, let’s lead with the lede: 6000 yards. That’s three miles — we have redefined our fantasy mile to be exactly 2000 yards, because we can, and because that other number (1760) is stupid.⁸ With a base walking speed of 3 miles an hour, a hex at this scale takes one hour to cross – that’s if it’s flat, level, not too muddy, & has a decent trail or basic road on it. You can take that and run with it.

Defining One Hex as being One League (3 miles) and taking One Hour works pretty well.

The basic measure to consider here isn’t any particular unit of distance but instead that unit of time. “How long do we have to walk to get to the Dungeon” has an impact over gameplay greater than knowing exactly how many furlongs, cubits, or Scandinavian miles that happens to be. Even when we handwave away a lot of exact details of travel, knowing the travel time will matter — how often will the party need to make camp, will there be random encounters, how likely is the party to get lost?

For local travel, especially low-level play that often takes place in a single small region around a starter town or other quest hub, being no more than a couple of days away from each dungeon-delve seems about right. One or two nights to camp, one or two days to roll for random encounters.

On an 8½ x 11 or A4 sheet of paper, and hexes in the neighborhood of 1cm in size, your party of adventurers could travel from the center of the map to any corner in one to two days of in-game time, maybe a week over really rough terrain, and then back again. This seems to work well for many starting campaigns with a ‘home base’ in an outpost, a fortress, a village, or a stargate/portal back home – mysteries and adventures await! …but mostly we’re back home in time for dinner.

I’m going to skip two, but we’ll come back to them. Scale Five is regional travel, Scale Six is that “wall map” I referenced in the intro and the footnotes. But I’m going to stick with 2000 yard miles for a minute and go all the way up to global scale.

Scale Seven: Global

One very handy unit of measure at global scale is the Nautical Mile, which is defined as one minute of latitude⁹ — 60 minutes to a degree so one degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. A nautical mile is also really damn close to 2000 yards, which is handy because someone already redefined our fantasy land miles to be 2000 yards.

Using nautical miles and latitude is also handy at the global scale because latitude gives us a lot of information about average temperature, prevailing winds, and prevalent biomes – you know, for the world-building nerds who like that kind of thing. Scaling up to a map that has nice divisions at something like 10° is handy because those are also usually the lines on (real world) globes and world maps. So our global scale could be a Hex 10° or 600 miles tall. How we get from 3 miles to 600 to go from Local to Global is the question, and one where you might need more than one answer or option.

One that I’ve considered is 15s. I’ve worked up my own template, which you can download for free from mdotblind.itch.io/mdotblind-dungeon23

These are nesting scales. Building up from a local map, 3 mile scale, 15 hexes tall, each local map becomes a unit hex at Scale Five: Regional where hexes are 45 miles in scale and the whole map (15 hexes tall) is 675 miles.

At Scale Six: Wall Map we switch from printing at 8½ x 11 to poster size. And these would stich together as many of the roughly 8”×8” regional maps as might fit on our poster, while keeping that one hex = 15 league (45mi) scale. Something like the Greyhawk double wall map, 33” × 44”, would fit 18-20 regional maps, 80 by 100 hexes if those hexes are still 1cm or so in size¹⁰

Scaling by 15s is a compromise. But the Regional maps still span roughly 10° latitude, north to south. And a secondary design consideration was having a set of maps that nest, a way to zoom in and out.

This is what I’m using currently using for my own designs, and the 2023 world building project. I should have more to share once that work is done. I encourage you to build on this for your own projects. The one take-away I hope you do keep is to ignore the map scale advice in WotC’s Dungeon Master’s Guide and adopt 6000 yards: one hex, one hour, three sensible fantasy miles.

¹ “Crunch” is a common, and perhaps overly casual, way to refer to deep rulesets that try to cover as many eventualities of play as possible. Crunchy can be considered the opposite of “rules light” in some ways but it’s not a directly opposed design philosophy. “Simulation” in games is perhaps best illustrated by the use of miniatures and battle maps on the table. A lot of things are abstracted [e.g. hit points instead of specific wounds] but things like movement, positioning, cover, and ranges are simulated. This is the legacy of Chainmail and other proto-RPG war games, and reflected in combat mechanics especially. But “simulation” can also be the GM creating the geography, rivers, roads, and settlements and mapping them to scale, when things like travel can also be abstracted & just as easily handled by some narration and random encounter rolls. If I get around to a series of posts on game design I might dive deeper into both concepts. All that said: I do love me some Fantasy Maps.

² Tolkien’s map may be an outlier in this, given that so much of the actual plot of both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings is about travel. Both are literal road trip stories, ‘there and back again’. So his distances (probably) aren’t going to be exact but when it takes weeks to walk even part-way across his continent you definitely see that and feel that in his map. Tolkien also gets due props for the hand-drawn aesthetic and how his maps feel like in-world artifacts — arguably they’re also why we encounter so many maps in every fantasy novel that followed, and why we love to include them with our games.

³ Hex maps are another legacy from tabletop war games, with the earliest examples (probably) being a pair of Civil War simulations from Avalon Hill in 1961: Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, both designed by Charles S. Roberts. The 1961 version of Gettysburg updated a 1958 release and changed its maps from a square grid to hexes.

⁴ The “Darlene” map, from the artist of the same name [she professionally goes by the single name]. At the top of the post you’ll see a ‘thumbnail’ version of the wall map. And honestly, producing a map like this for a world of my own is a game design goal I’ve been chasing for a very long time.

⁵ our units of measure are just as arbitrary, but that’s a different rant/discussion.

⁶ yes, pun fully intended and of course I had to pull that phrase in somewhere in this post.

⁷ So we might consider a battlefield scale, with squads or companies or cohorts or maniples instead of individual combatants as a “missing middle” scale for RPGs. Not that we can’t make battlefield maps, it’s just that we usually don’t. In an RPG campaign, if a huge battle is coming up, the heroes are often off on a quest or sidequest, doing their usual D&D things, while the armies prepare off-screen in the background. The outcome of the battle no doubt hangs on what the party does behind the scenes (mcguffin found, allies raised, BBEG defeated in their lair) but the players and their characters aren’t taking up a battlefield command. But. To pick a scale, I’d think about how fast ‘units’ can move – 30ft per round, times 10 rounds per minute, and we’re at 300ft or 100 yards. 100 yards is a fairly intuitive distance for most, being roughly the length of a football field (US) or football pitch (everywhere else). Without getting too “crunchy” in writing some quick ad hoc rules in the footnotes of a blog post, units of roughly 100 taking a minute to move one square or hex, 100 yards, meeting along ‘fronts’ which are the borders between squares/hexes, and choosing actions like Push, Hold, Entrench, Charge, and then rolling dice.

⁸ I picked 2000 yard ‘miles’ for at least two other reasons, one of them making the math easier when scaling maps down and a second reason that we’ll get to soon when looking at maps at ‘world’ scale. However, if you’re a stickler for rules-as-written we can also get there a 3rd way: with a basic move speed of 30ft per six-second round, a character would walk 18,000 feet or 6000 yards (3.4 miles) in one hour. I’m perfectly happy to call a distance of 6000 yards a league and to redefine our fantasy miles to be exactly 2000 yards each – but (please forgive the 2nd invocation of the pun) your mileage may vary.

⁹ Latitude uses angular measures, degree-minute-second, where one degree is equal to one-360th of the circle measurement and that circle is the distance round the earth. Degrees are divided into 60 minutes, which are then also divided into 60 seconds. Longitude uses similar divisions but the meridians of longitude are not parallel — they all run through the poles and intersect there — so the degrees of longitude aren’t a consistent measure. Lines of latitude run parallel to each other (and are, in fact, called Parallels) and while each parallel of latitude gets smaller as you head north (or south) of the equator, they are always the same distance apart — 60 nautical miles per degree. The actual measure of the nautical mile is 2025.37 yards but again, using the magic of fantasy cartography, I hereby define it for my use as being exactly 2000. I guess the yards are 1% bigger or the whole fantasy planet is 1% smaller due to the prevalence of handwavium in the molten core, either excuse works.

¹⁰ The Greyhawk map has a scale of one hex = 10 leagues, 30 miles, for comparison. And I’m sure my approximation for what a wall map would look like is off because this is all just back-of-the-envelope math

I have bitten off more than I can chew. In fact, what I have bitten is chewing back and may be bigger than me.

The Unnamed 2022 Project is still an on-going, living breathing beast of a thing. But (yeah there’s a qualifier) — I haven’t risen to the self-imposed challenge and I’m about to blow past my first self-imposed deadline. I would have preferred to announce today that the first “drop” of 2022 was ready and that you’d be able to download PDFs of this first content pack for free (or pay-what-you-want, if you felt like tipping) from at least two digital stores including… um… Gumroad.¹

There isn’t a release this week. So let’s talk about what I *have* been doing for these last 16 weeks—including a selected sampling of the diversions and dead-ends encountered so far—and where the 2022 Project is at.

I have a name, and a website, and that website is running a Wikipedia-like software implementation², which will be the home of the always-free parts of what I’m working on. The working title for the project was “System15” [riffing on the xkcd comic, Standards] and is now called Plinth·RPG

https://plinthrpg.com/

Plinth·RPG, properly, is the game: a rules-light tabletop fantasy storytelling RPG that I’m still working on. When I’m finally done with the mechanics of it and have wrung it through several additional future drafts, it’ll probably be at least 16 pages³ but not more than 64, with art, and available as a slickly formatted PDF⁴. Since the objective is to write a rules-light game, the overwhelming majority of the content (the rest of plinthrpg.com) will be a whole new fantasy setting, more or less as I write it. That’s one reason, though not the only reason, that I went with wiki software rather than a blog format for the Plinth site.

That fantasy world will probably need its own name at some point. Though I’m fine with moving forward under the really-is-that-what-you’re-calling-it, the-name-just-seems-generic-to-the-point-of-obfuscation brand of “Plinth” in that Plinth has at least two things going for it: no one else is using it, or anything close to it, and also (as you might have noticed) I registered the dot-com.

Today is, was, my first deadline, as I noted in the last blog post. This announcement, and the reveal of the still-skeletal website, was not what I intended to release.

##

My goal for the Untitled 2022 Project was to prepare and release a “content drop” every six weeks: digital files available for download and containing, well, something like an old school D&D adventure – some maps, some descriptions, a few notable NPCs and perhaps a new faction (to add to my collection), and if appropriate, some monsters or creatures or critters to go along with.

This was a good first impulse and is still a decent idea. I never got anywhere close, though, because I rapidly careened off that course on onto a different track.

My idea for a simple adventure map was sabotaged when I asked, “Well if I’m making a map anyway why not make it part of the world we’re building?” and that led me down a rabbit hole of medieval and renaissance travel modes and travel times and appropriate map scale and wait, how many kilometers is the Earth’s equator again and what about the distance to the poles, and say has anyone done a world map projection that works with hex maps⁵, and now I have a lot of notes and some fun things sketched — but I’m not really closer to that first Pack drop and I still don’t have a format or template that I can iterate on and drop things into.

[Image caption: you can maybe see how things like this became a distraction]

So I don’t have the neat, initial adventure model that I thought I would have ready at this point. I’m not at the finish line; I am only just now getting ready to run this thing and enter the starting gate. It sucks, and it’s not where I want to be, not where I planned to be, but I know whose fault it is⁶ and all I can do is keep going.

My next self-imposed deadline is six weeks from now, Week 12 of 2022, and Friday 25 March;
I’m already anticipating that I’ll miss that deadline too.

##

One of the blacksmiths I follow on YouTube⁷ has a neat saying that I’m going to borrow for this, “Need a tool, make a tool”. The concise version is memorable and I can’t improve on it, but I’ll expand on it just a bit so you know what I mean by it: If you know what you need for your end goal but you can’t find the exactly right tool to get there, go ahead and make the tool (or tools) first. Which he literally does in many of his early videos, making hammers, tongs, drifts, dies, all kinds of tools.

For what I’m working on, I need a couple of tools first. I need to get up to speed on Scribus and build the PDF template. Of course, it’ll probably be a two-column layout that looks like every other RPG rulebook but even just saying that assumes a lot – font choices for headers, body text, tables, sidebars—oh yeah we’ll need to figure out formatting for tables and sidebars, and we’ll also need allowances for spot art. The goal is to have something that looks familiar to the target audience but in the ‘house style’⁸ that stands out a little bit from everything else. I haven’t done layout since 1990 and that was on the school Macs and I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember what the program was called, and many intervening years of banging my head against CSS hasn’t honed those skills any. But once those decisions are made, the template is a tool, and I can just (hopefully) drop the words into it.

The other tool I need is for maps, and surprisingly, the best tool that’s available may just be Clip Studio Paint. But that’s more software for me to learn and another template to build. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do both in twelve weeks, let alone six.

But that’s fine. And I have two tools that already online and working: The new Plinth·RPG wiki, and this blog. I can keep the lines of communication open, certainly, for anyone who is following me on this weird new adventure, and I can describe the process of learning how to build new tools and also the tools themselves, if they’d be of use to anyone.

That’s where I’m at. It’s a new starting line. And I’ve got a six week sprint ahead of me.

##

¹ if you’re not on twitter or not following enough artists & content creators on twitter you missed the drama: The CEO of Gumroad (a smaller but once a decently well regarded e-commerce platform where you could sell, among other things, PDFs and digital files) was caught out trying to mint his own batch of NFTs. Twitter, at least the twitter I’m following, was collectively not amused. Ko-Fi and Itch.io have been the most commonly recommended alternatives.

² for those who must know, either to suit their own similar needs or just to be nosy: DokuWiki, https://www.dokuwiki.org/, which is available under the GNU General Public License (so: free) and which was both easy to install and easy to get started with

³ If I’m a good editor and manage to reign in all my usual bad impulses, like including footnotes for everything, then I might be able to keep things down to a taut, efficient 16 pages. I anticipate it’ll be more like 32.

⁴ and maybe also print-on-demand, if I barrel past the upper page limit I just set and project bloat inevitably sets in and the whole thing is closer to book size than not.

⁵ the answer is yes, but figuring out how many times it was answered yes and the ins-and-outs of each is a whole week shot, I tell you.

⁶ I’m going to blame ADHD of course

⁷ Yes there is more than one. Alec Steele in this case, and I’ll just note that’s a fantastic name for a blacksmith

⁸ Graphic design is my passion

⁹ I’m not sure why I started leaning so heavily on footnotes for jokes and asides but I think it’s too late to stop now. And that probably means I’ll have to include some sort of allowance for footnotes in the PDF template, dammit.

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

##

¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.

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

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.

Dineus
Free City, minor trade port
Location: eastern coast of Altis, on the north-east ‘corner’
population: rank 5 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Dionysus, Greek god of wine, and numerous places named after him.
Model: nothing specific? This may end up being my starting point (Or, in a gaming frame: if not the starting town for the party, then the first ‘big’ city and base camp for the campaign after a couple of sessions) so I left myself a lot of wiggle.
Flavor Text:

Led by their fiercely independent Count and a like minded council, the free traders of Dineus are holding their own, refusing to join any power group in the region and just as contemptuous of the Capel Merchant League as they are of the Prince in Pontis.

Dineus is a logical acquisition for the Capel, but serious diplomatic missteps have closed that door, perhaps forever. The Count here felt personally insulted by the behavior of the first Capel House Master, in an act that was witnessed by all the council and most of the other city elite, as the house master not only treated the Count like a butler at dinner (without realizing who it was he insulted) but finishing up his short evening by grabbing the Count’s daughter and ‘whispering’ some very foul suggestions to her on his way out. The man missed being killed by the count by a very slim margin, but rumor says that the Capel finished up the job later when the true extent of his bungling was found out. An unofficial state of war exists, with the count covertly supporting several privateers in Nectene as his own devious revenge, preying only on the ships owned by Admiral Varin and other members of the Capel executive council.

Scala
Pontesian Holding
Location: a peninsula in the Tigal Sea, near the southeastern tip of Altis
Population: rank 3 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Scylla, monster of the Odyssey. There’s also the one opera house, in Milan..
Model: Caribbean free ports c. 1700 CE
Flavor Text:

Scala is held by Pontis in one of the most restrictive trade agreements ever drafted. While Demos is also held by a similar ‘treaty’, the Merchants of the Dem have found loopholes to exploit. Scala, on the other hand, is becoming a dead city. The port is closed, many citizens have left, most leaving for Pontis itself. (Many individuals there have worked their way up into areas of minor but vital importance — on the waterfront, clerks in merchant houses and in the government, soldiers and even officers in both the guard and navy…)

Those left behind are ‘just’ fishermen and the so-called dregs. There are a few keeping the old traditions, but most of the “fishing fleet” are just pirates now, casting nets for bounty other than fish

With the main port closed, nearly all ships land on the islands east and west of the city. Some of these ‘pirate coves’ are looking more and more like actual ports, with their own warehouses and banks, space permitting of course. Some are little more than strips of beach you can anchor a (smaller) ship on. But at least three can claim to be more than just an anchorage; Scala is a ‘ghost town’ but manages because she’s surrounded & enlivened by pirates.

Eventually some power in the region will have to rein in this activity but their base is small (for now) and the losses acceptable (for now). Also, piracy is largely accepted in the region – within limits; there is a tradition of licensed “privateers” in both times of war and the occasional undeclared but vigorous “trade dispute”. (Privateers typically both pay for a license and share the spoils. Some even get commissions in whichever city’s navy. But this, desperate, piracy is new.)

Demos
Pontesian Holding
Location: close to the Southeastern tip of the island of Altis, on a strait between the Sea of Circhos and the Sea of Tigal
Population: rank 4 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Greek, for ‘population’
Model: Trucking company
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Two seaports of Altis on the Sea of Tigal, Demos and Scala, have been pulled into the Pontesian sphere of influence, though not necessarily of their own choice. Both Demos and Scala are east of Pontis, closer to the north coast cities on the Somaris mainland, and potentially competitors to the vast east-to-west sea trade flowing to the Old Capital.

Pontis got there first, however, and—after several naval actions and two short wars that concreted the commercial consensus—forced these seaports to close, to enhance the trade coming to her own port. Currently, Pontis pays both Demos and Scala to keep their harbors closed and warehouses empty. (Though the amount paid is barely sufficient to keep these ports ‘closed’) (and of course, things that are ‘illegal’ are not necessarily impossible; trade in the Sea of Tigal is getting, as they say, interesting)

The payments aren’t quite enough to cover the loss of trade—but given a choice between military or economic warfare—the Dem have chosen the path that doesn’t involve fleets and invading soldiers. The enterprising merchants of Demos, restricted by treaty from trading by ship, instead run teams of wagons to ply the roads. This novel approach is actually working and the Teamsters of the Dem may soon corner the market on the agricultural trade on the island. …And on nearby islands, oddly enough: exploiting a loophole in the treaty originally intended to only cover private coaches of the nobility, wagons are loaded whole onto barges and not unloaded dockside, but only inland.

The Dem are in negotiations to bring in the barges elsewhere—technically in compliance with Pontis but enabling a resumption, at least in part, of their past trade. An agreement between the teamsters and the port city of Siritha may not be too far away. For now, fear of a Pontesian reaction has kept anything official from being set down, though un-officially: there is a whole lot of barge traffic headed east

Avensis
Pontesian Ally
Location: On the southern coast of the island of Rauvos close to its southeastern tip, on the north shores of the Amphithael
Population: rank 4 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Aventicum, (modern Avenches) roman post in what is now Switzerland.
Model: Any ‘second city’ content to be such. Quiet. Peaceful. Certainly free of any old god cults lurking unseen in the background requiring regular sacrifices of curious but clueless outsiders.
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Avensis is ruled by a prince, like its close ally Pontis, and in fact the two princes claim some kinship, though three generations removed the family tie isn’t so much to hold them. The prince and his advisors are content with the alliance however, and happily follow the lead of his “cousin” in foreign and military matters. The alliance does provide Avensis with much of its trade, however. While off the direct sea route from Pontis to the Old Capital, Avensis is a friendly (& tax free, for ships from Pontis) port of call for smaller vessels who need to hug the coasts. And even for more sturdy craft that could take the direct path, a friendly port mid-week on the voyage is usually worth taking an extra day or two.

It is likely that without these ties Avensis would fall back, somewhat happily, into a quiet mostly ignored existence. It has been said that the main products of Avensis are noble old families [old families] and comfortable estates.

Pontis
Principality, with a loose hegemony over 3 client cities.
Location: On the island of Altis, commanding an excellent bay on the Sea of Tigal, just east of a strait leading into the larger Amphithael
Population: rank 8 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Greek word for ‘sea’, Latin word for ‘bridge’
Model: Kinda Venice, kinda Athens.
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Pontis is the closest thing to a major power the region can boast of, not because of its area of influence (the Capel Merchants League would get the nod here) or because of its military power or population, or even the magic Academy that operates here. Pontis is, quite simply, the largest port and most important trade city between the north coast cities on the Somaris mainland and the Old Capital. Everything, from commodities to finished goods to contraband makes its way through the warehouses and wharves (or back alleys and black markets) of Pontis.

Pontis has only one major ally: Avensis, ruled by the cousin of the Prince of Pontis, though Avensis is hardly a help militarily (it isn’t even on the same island). Two other seaports along the strategic trade route, Demos and Scala, have been pulled into the Pontesian sphere of influence, though these are not allies, being subject to involuntary ‘trade agreements’. Pontis essentially pays these cities to keep their harbors closed and warehouses empty, outside of small fishing fleets. The enterprising merchants of Demos, restricted from trading by ship, are a common sight on the roads of Altis, with several guilds running long trains of wagons (and hiring mercenaries, both for protection and ‘Protection’). The Teamsters of the Dem may soon corner the market on the agricultural trade of the island, which might give them the leverage they need to renegotiate their relationship with Pontis. Scala is mounting a different resistance, pushing the limits of what a “small” fishing boat is and resorting to (or perhaps, gleefully embracing) piracy.

Pontis, as a large trade and cultural center, is home to one of the major schools of magic, naturally.