Musings on my home group and my DMing style

Last weekend, a member of my home group ran a one shot game using the final D&D Next playtest packet, and I have to say I was impressed.  I found the system general simple enough for me to like it and also that several things it did, such as backgrounds and the way profeciencies work, closely mirrored things I have been wanting to implement in my S&W games as part of an attempt to make them more like WFRP.  Naturally, I soon turned my thoughts towards how I would modify the system to run a Dark Country game for my home group.

But home groups are funny things.  The G+ group that I've been playing with for the past two years, aside from being very patient with my constant flitting from one setting to the next, has also really really dug the Dark Country.  This should come as no surprise as they're made up of people who saw my add for the Dark Country G+ game and went "that sounds awesome. Sign me up!"  My Hattiesburg group is, instead, made up of close friends I've had since high school.  Because the group is based around our friendship rather than our taste in particular kinds of fantasy games, this means there are some differences

Some players in my home group have never liked the Dark Country, and before last night I was never entirely sure why, even if I had inklings.  Sure, some did, but the ones that didn't often were the ones who were most invested in the idea of playing D&D, so if they aren't having a good time it kinda drags the whole thing down.  After discussing what I wanted to run with my players last night, I discovered the reasons that they don't like my Nightwick game.

The first, and this was primarily the complaint of a single player - though one who is, again, one of the ones who tends to get invested and thus his complaint is probably worth considering - is that my constant need to limit character options in an attempt to get a specific tone is damaging to game balance, since the game assumes that all options are in play.  I don't particularly agree with this, since I think that D&D was, is, and hopefully will always be set up as a tool box for individual groups.  Using all the tools in the toolbox is the quickest way to Boring Town imaginable, as it leads to the high fantasy nonsense one sees in post Forgotten Realms D&D.  What you leave out is, at least to my eye, just as important as what you put in.

The other complaint, which I think was more broadly held, is that the Dark Country was too shitty, and that there was little sense of progress in the Nightwick Abbey games I've run for them.  The most obvious reason for this is a problem I've noticed with my own DMing style over the last year or so: I treat the setting as a noose slowly tightening around the PCs' collective neck.  This might not sound like such a bad thing, but I noticed in my Cocanha playtests of Feudal Anarchy that it lead to the G+ group sometimes feeling like they could take nothing but missteps, and in my G+ Dark Country game it eventually led to my having to advance the timeline of the setting by several months in order to avoid all of the adventures suddenly becoming solely about procuring food for the village of Nightwick.  This is a problem, I realize its a problem, and I'm trying to figure out ways to fix it.

More importantly though, talking to my players helped me realize another issue they were having, and I think that certain G+ players such as Robert and Zak were having is that Nightwick Abbey's very nature means that one doesn't feel like any progress is happening.  In other megadungeons, the dungeon is mostly a static environment.  I don't mean that the monsters don't move or that there aren't active factions in the dungeon.  I mean the dungeon itself isn't alive.  Nightwick Abbey is.  So in Greyhawk or Dwimmermount or whatever, clearing an area might not be permanent, but you at least feel like you did something.  In Nightwick, on the other hand, the dungeon is still living and still mad at you and still vomiting up monsters, so there's little sense that anything got done, regardless of how much you mapped.

This is something I previously hadn't considered, and would explain my home group's general preference for Uz over Nightwick, even if it often contradicts the problem of limited player options I first identified.  There's more of a sense of progress in clearing out a level of the Uz undercity.

Last night I discussed a number of possible options with my players, noting that I would prefer to run something that I made because the thing that I enjoy about the classic D&D settings is that they were created through play.  The organizations and historical events in them are a combination of the creativity of the players and the DM, and that is super cool.

So initially I pitched the Wilderlands, since, for that group, there a large part of what I would be doing for that setting was created through play.  In my old 3e game, several of their characters are legends if not out and out (minor) gods, and my wife destroyed a giant robot that was rampaging through the CSIO (my co-DM used the stats for the Tarrasque) by rolling 3 20s in a row* while only level 6, ensuring both the immortality of her character and, by the collapsing of the giant robot, the destruction of large sections of that famous city.  So the changes made by player character action would, hypothetically loom large over any future Wilderlands campaigns.

But my tastes have changed since I ran the Wilderlands in college.  Back then I was primarily interested in Late Antiquity, my intellectual imagination fired by the works of Walter Goffart and Patrick Geary, not to mention Jordanes and Bede.  And while I do still clearly enjoy pre-medieval fantasy settings, my tastes, both intellectually and in terms of fantasy fiction, have turned more towards things related to the high to late Middle Ages.  I like knights and guilds and medieval depictions of the Devil and fortified manors and even the Church.  These are largely incompatible with both the Wilderlands as generally conceived, and, more importantly, the Wilderlands as it is likely remembered by my players.

So I'm not really sure what to do.  My G+ players, particularly Michael, Huth, and Zzarchov, would likely prefer that I keep running the Dark Country (and to a lesser extent the Terran Directorate) until Christ in His glory comes to sit in judgement, and I greatly appreciate those players, but as Chris Kutalik has noted on several occasions, there is something about the experience of playing with a face to face group that is just better, even if G+ is a great deal better than other forms of digital gaming.

*I never remember if this was a houserule or an actual rule, but we always said in my group that 3 20s in a row meant that the thing was auto-dead regardless of other factors, much like the similar rule in EPT.

Making a Medieval Sandbox Campaign Part II

I've written and rewritten this post several times since January(!), Part of the reason for my finding this post difficult is that I'm discovering that I have not quite yet mastered the art of making this type of setting for my own game, and as I continue to work on Feudal Anarchy I'm figuring out new things that work and don't work (mostly don't work).  This is an attempt to distill all of that information in a way that is useful to others.

Most RPGs, and Feudal Anarchy is no exception, are action-adventure affairs.  This means that PCs tend to be violent people doing violent things, though campaign events, tone, genre, and player agency is ultimately the determiner of whether these actions are those of noble heroes or venal murderers.  In either event, it is best to make sure that the place you set your medieval campaign is one that will provide this kind of adventure.* Periods within the Middle Ages that are characterized by the consolidation of centralized power and improvements in administration - while not to be totally avoided - are less suited to this sort of game than those characterized by petty struggles.  For example, the Anarchy will provide more room for adventure than the reign of Henry II.  Other examples of places/periods that will produce this sort of environment are France under Louis the Fat, the Albigensian Crusade, and Iberia during the Reconquista.  It should be noted that more peaceful periods, such as the aforementioned reign of Henry II, may also be used as "peace" in medieval terms is considerably more violent than one would expect.

In addition to providing excitement systemic violence has another benefit: it creates a chaotic situation whose outcome is more easily affected by PC action.  The turmoil that politically characterized much of the 11th and 12th centuries means that a few people with sharp minds and sharp swords can do quite well for themselves.  One might think of the likes of Bohemond of Antioch, William Marshal, or Eustace the Monk to see what I'm talking about.

Feudal Anarchy is currently focused on representing fairly small sandboxes - typically no bigger than a county.  When designing one for your game, it is important to keep this scale in mind, and there are several advantages to keeping it small.  The most readily apparent to me while running the game has been that the players get to know their lieges, vassals, and other NPCs very well and that the interaction between them can easily be used to generate adventures with very little effort on the part of the GM.  The small scale allows these relationships to be manageable without the world feeling strangely sparse.

However, be careful not to make it too small, or to make the obstacles that exist in the setting to easy for the PCs to topple.  This was the problem I ran into with my Cocanha campaign.  For this type of campaign to really work, the aforementioned relationships with NPCs need to provide adventures for a long time.  If the villains are too easily disposed of, you start to run out of options very quickly.  Another thing to avoid is setting it on a small island.  What I found very quickly was that it was difficult for me to introduce new threats because I'd have to explain how they got on this tiny little island without anyone noticing.

This brings me to another point: you want the small sandbox to feel like it's part of a larger world.  Partly, this is to allow an influx of new adventure seeds once the campaign is already going, but an even larger part has to do with the genre.  If you're playing a "hardcore medievalist" RPG, you want to rub shoulders with the likes of Richard the Lionheart, Thomas de Marle, or Ermengarde of Narbonne.  That's part of the appeal.  If your setting is too small and isolated, it's difficult to explain why those kinds of historical celebrities to show up.

Border areas, while not the only type of place that works for this sort of thing, strike me as ideal.  They are almost always in turmoil, with at least a sort of light warfare in the form of raiding going on on both sides of the border.  They are typically politically important enough that famous people, particularly kings or magnates, will visit them, sometimes bringing war with them.  Most importantly of all, they provide a kind of porous gateway between cultures that can explain some rather strange party makeups, and allow for new adventures to be easily introduced.

I hope to do more posts in this series covering specific topics, like specific periods that would make good games or matching party themes with different regions, but that will have to come once I've gotten my head more fully around the issues involved.

*One could, of course, run an entire RPG without this sort of action-adventure nonsense, but that is not the intended goal of Feudal Anarchy.

EDIT: I forgot to mention someone played my game!

Making a Medieval Sandbox Campaign Part I: The Importance of a Party Concept

 

This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, since I'm working on Feudal Anarchy.  I've run a surprisingly high number of sessions in my fictionalized version of the Languedoc and its accompanying island of Cocanha, and I think I've started to get a handle on what works and what doesn't.  For the purposes of this post, I'm going to focus on what Chris calls a local sandbox, since that's the kind of game that I've been running and the one I'm most likely to run with this system.

One thing that I think is very important is making sure that the group has a sort of "party concept."  This needs to be something that can tie the player characters together and that allows them to either move within feudal society or sets them outside of it.  Examples include a group of closely allied nobles, a company of mercenaries, a family of nobles and the mesnie, a group of roving outlaws, or even the inhabitants of a particular village.

The party in the Cocanha game is primarily composed of a group of knights and mercenaries who operate a keep and a number of small manors in the eastern part of the island.  I've found this to be a remarkably broad concept, since characters that don't otherwise seem to fit are usually explained as members of the mesnie of one of the knightly characters.  I could see other group concepts being similarly broad.  Even something as apparently narrow as the inhabitants of a Cistercian abbey might be broadened by including characters who did any number of things before becoming tonsured, characters who are wards of the abbey, or even inhabitants of a nearby village or manor belonging to the abbot.

The reason that party concept is important - more important than it is in other types of adventure games - is that the medieval world is a great deal more rigid than most fantasy settings.  While there was probably a larger degree of social mobility than one might expect, there was a far stricter sense of hierarchy, and if the players and referee want to maintain a "hardcore medievalist" tone, it is useful to explain why their characters are associating with each other.

More importantly, the party concept can help motivate the PCs to seek adventure and make it easier for the referee to construct scenarios.  For example, knights and nobles are likely to want to improve their station and win more territory, and this may motivate the group to be more belligerent and the referee can then focus on either presenting opportunities to gain land or status or on presenting threats to the PCs' holdings.  Outlaws will, obviously, be interested in precious lucre, and so the group will constantly be looking for tax collectors to rob and other such sources of coin, and the referee knows those are the sorts of thing he or she should be presenting to the players.

In the next installments of this series, I hope to talk more about constructing the campaign region, creating and running the political struggles of that region, and the other sorts of adventures one can have in a heavily medieval setting.

Cocanha: The Story So Far

A more accurate Cocanha map.

A few of the participants in my Feudal Anarchy (née Medieval Hack) playtest campaign have commented that it is a bit difficult to get one's legs because of the number of NPCs and factions running around, so I've decided to do a recap of events so far in the mini-campaign.  Between my home group and the G+ game I've run nine games set in my fictionalized version of the Languedoc, but this will only cover the exploits of the G+ group.

I'll start with the adventure of the Onachus since the first session was more or less a series of combats in order to test out our wound mechanics.  The Onachus was a terrible monster that laired in a swamp north of Narbona.  Many believed this immense, fire-breathing bull was none other than the creature that sired the infamous Tarrasque.  The party* took it upon themselves to slay this monster, but when they road off with a mere two men-at-arms following they found that they bit off more than they could chew.  The creature was almost 30 feet in length, and managed to slay both the men at arms and all of their horses.

Beaten and badly bloodied, they returned to Narbona and waited out the winter of 1192 healing, purchasing new horses, studying about various saints, and hiring men to operate a ballista.  In the early spring of 1193 they set off to fight the creature once again, this time with the blessing of Archishop Ramon Berengar and with men given to them by Ermengarde herself.  They decided to lure the monster to castle of Gruissan, where they quickly surrounded and defeated it.  For their valor, they were granted a keep on the island of Cocanha.

A map of their keep

There was just one problem - it was currently controlled by the bastard son of Ramon de Calanha.  If the party was going to claim its prize, it would first have to wrest it from this robber knight and his band of Yaon mercenaries.  The sailed for the island and arrived at the port city of Alcazar.  There they met the Bishop of Alcazar, and two of the party members swore a public oath to join his Brotherhood of God in order to fight heresy on the island.  Before proceeding on to their new keep, they decided to stay with a young knight who owned a market in town.

He, it turns out, was Folquet the Younger, son of the lord of the manor of Sangriu.  He was an aspiring troubadour whose clearly autobiographical songs left much to be desired.  Later they would come to believe that he once had an affair with the wife of Baron Bernatz, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  He gave them a good deal, but through their conversation they soon learned that he had some dealings with the Yaones.  After this he grew cold and retired to his chambers.

The next morning they made their way to the Castle d'Ezorre, home of Baron Bernatz the Wolf - their new liege lord. They were greeted by the baron's wormy chaplain and steward, Father Perrin.  This clearly paranoid clergyman led them to Baron Bernatz who fed them a good meal at the expense of one of his peasants, whom Bernatz asserted was the best cook out of all the ones that he owned.  The baron agreed to lend them a number of men to capture the keep and allowed them to stay at his castle and make ready.

That night, they were approached by the baron's wife who desired that they should kill the Bastard of Calanha because he had kidnapped her daughter.  She specifically desired for his head to be brought to her. The party reluctantly agreed and set out in the morning to take the keep.  They planned to have their archers and ballista fire on the keep while the cavalry would dismount and go with the infantry down a secret escape tunnel known to several of the men-at-arms. 

This plan seemed to be going well, with several of the Yaones manning the walls dying under a hail of arrows and ballista bolts; however, once the party arrived at the end of the secret passage they found only a pot of boiling oil waiting for them.  They fought their way into the court yard of the keep only to be hit by a stray ballista bolt, taking them out of the fight and killing one of them.  Luckily, the rest of their men were able to take the keep from the Yaones and to capture the Bastard of Calanha.  They found that all of the Yaones they had killed bore a strange, stylized tattoo of a snake on their left arm.

The siege of the Keep of Ervesa by Peter Robbins

Now the party had a problem before them: should the kill the bastard or ransom him back to his father?  Eventually it was decided that they would send him to Bernatz in hopes of gaining a reward.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be the worst course of action because it allowed Bernatz to gain all the money from the ransom and it served to make the Lady d'Ezorre furious with the party.

While several of the knights who captured the keep were nursing the wounds, a few of the healthier knights and a few mercenaries went to slay the legendary giant Boamundus.  This involved a lot of skulking around as they needed to enter Baron Ramon's land but were afraid at how he might react to the capture of his son. While passing through some of the hills on the southern part of the island they were ambushed by a party of Yaones that they quickly routed.  The few men they were able to kill bore the same snake tattoo as the men from the keep.

Boamundus (deceased) as rendered by Jeremy Duncan

Eventually they were able to find the hut in which the giant lived, but he was away from his home.  They left a number of javelins burried in his straw bedding and when he returned he impaled himself upon them.  Angered and bloody, he arose to try and find them only to be peppered with more javelins and arrows and stampeded by cows.  In this manor the party gained 25 head of cattle and a debate about the size of giants started on G+ that has lasted until the time of this writing.

The party sent the giant's head to Baron Ramon, and both of his hands to Bishop Uc and Baron Bernatz.  Shortly thereafter, they received an invitation from Baron Ramon to join him at a feast in Castel d'Ezorre.  The party was wary of a plot against them and declined, but offered to host the baron themselves in a fortnight.  They then decided it would be good if they "left town for a while" and went off in search of the infamous outlaw Xabier the snake.

This lead them to the land of Folquet the Elder, lord of Sangriu.  In the forest due south of his holdings they found a recently abandoned Yaon village.  They believed that the villagers had fled south into the mountains at the site of their party - which included the PCs and an additional 20 serjeants, footmen, and archers.   In the village they found a wicker hut containing a strange idol in the shape of a snake.  One of the party members who was a Hospitaller and a member of the Brotherhood of God destroyed this idol with a mallet normally reserved for driving tent pegs.  From the idol came a vaporous, curdled luminescence that flew up into the sky and eventually merged with the Sun.  After seeing this, the party burned down the village.

The idol

They turned back north to meet with Folquet the Elder, but were greeted by his steward, whom they quickly surmised was an asshole.  He informed them that the lord was ill and quarted them in one of the nicer peasant houses.  He also played music of his own composition for him, and they quickly learned that he was of the same abysmal school as Folquet the Younger.  Finally, the steward retired and the party went to sleep...

Only to be awoken a few hours later when by a commotion outside.  Several of their men-at-arms had discovered strange, albino vipers in their bedrolls.  These they hacked apart with various bladed instruments. The members of the party still within the peasants' hut soon found that a number of the serpents had burst up from the ashes of the cook fire in the center of the hut.  They immediately fled and burned the house down - much to the dismay of the peasants.

The party decided this must be the work of a warlock angry at them for the destruction of the village.  They immediately suspected Folquet's steward, but decided they should also check in with the parish priest in order to make sure he wasn't saying prayers to Simon Magus or anything weird like that.  He saw one of their badges marking them as members of the Brotherhood of God and asked that they come see him during the night.

He revealed to them that many of the peasants whisper dark things about Folquet the Younger and believe him to have dealings with both the Yaones and the Devil himself.  They asked him if he suspected the steward of anything, but he did not.  He did inform them that the steward was a former clerk - a group well known for producing necromancers - and that Folquet the Elder took ill around the same time the steward arrived.

They contrived to have the steward attend a mass given by the priest and hoped that he would be unable to eat the body of Christ, thus revealing himself to be a warlock.  In what must have been one of the tensest masses in history, the party appeared with five of their armed men and met the steward with five of his armed men in the church.  They all took communion, much to the shock of the local peasants who had assembled themselves in the church.  Unfortunately for the party, the steward seemed capable of eating the Eucharist and now it's back to the drawing board for them.

It is currently the middle of the summer of 1193.

*I should note that the party composition has varied over these sessions, but there are a few core members.  The occasional influx of new people is why I wrote this post.

Cocanha Playtest Campaign

I've obviously stolen the format from Chris Kutalik, but here are the notes for the setting I'll be using for my playtests of our medievalist game.

This map is a rough draft.

Cocanha
This campaign is centered around the Cocanha, a fictional island in the Mediterranean off the coast of France.  Much of the island is covered in a mix of farm and scrubland, though its southern portion is home to both a mountain range and a dense forest.  Cocanha is strongly tied to both Occitania and Catalonia, though it also possesses a Muslim past and a small tribe of Basque-like people known as the Yaones.  The people of Cocanha speak a dialect of Occitan known as Cocanhat.

PCs are likely to be members of the same knightly household.

Local Names
Medieval Nicknames

News
Bishop Uc has formed a militia known as the Brotherhood of God with the express purpose of enforcing the Peace of God and eliminating heresy.  He has asked both of the barons to join him, but neither seems interested in stopping their petty squabbles or rooting out Cathars.

Sangriu has been the site of a number of raids by Xabier the Snake in recent weeks.  Folquet is looking for mercenaries to help reinforce his own forces and for stout men willing to find Xabier’s camp.  The knight believes that the infamous bandit is testing the border for weaknesses.

A man claiming to be the bastard son of Baron Ramon has captured the village of Ervesa with the aid of a band of Yaon mercenaries.  It seems they have slaughtered the manor’s holder and captured the maiden Anor, daughter of Baron Bernatz.  The Wolf has offered a large purse and a small manor to anyone able to rescue his daughter.

Father Perrin, chaplin to Baron Bernatz, seeks pious men to investigate the death of his brother.  Many claim that the man was slain by God on High - or one of His saints - but the priest is convinced that his death is the work of the Devil.

Boamundus, a legendary giant said to live in the mountains on the southern side of the island, has been sighted again for the first time in one hundred years.  He has reportedly been stealing cattle from the villages closest to Castel de Calanha.  Several of the manor lords seek champions to win the cattle back.

NPCs
Baron Bernatz The Wolf is the lord of Ezorre.  It is well known that he has ambitions on the continent, and he has left the island at several points to fight on behalf of his liege lord, the count of Toulouse.  

Baron Ramon is the lord of Calanha.  He is the scion of a cadet branch of the Trencavel family, and like the Trencavels of the continent he is an ally of the King of Aragon.  Ramon fancies himself a troubadour of some skill.

Bishop Uc d’Alcazar is the head of the diocese of Cochana.  He is officious, petty, and fiercely anti-Cathar.

Xabier the Snake is the leader of a small group of Yaones that act as bandits operating out of the forests and mountains in the southern part of the island.

Sir Folquet of Sangriu is a banneret to Baron Bernatz and the man usually tasked with leading any of the baron’s forces left on the island while the Wolf is fighting his wars on the continent.

Father Perrin is Baron Bernatz’s chaplin and also serves as secular ruler of the barony while his lord is away.  

Saints of Cocanha
St. Cecilia
St. Foy
St. Martha
St. Sergius Paulus
St. Sebastian

Places

The Barony of Ezorre
Castel d’Ezorre
The seat of Baron Bernatz and the center of government for the entire barony, Castel d’Ezorre is a stone castle of modest sized on the northernmost tip of the island.  Ezorre was originally a timber castle built in the ruins of an old Roman fort, Bernatz’s father had it rebuilt and incorporate much of the Roman architecture into the new structure.

Banneret Manors
Sangriu
Andaro
Ervesa

The Barony of Calanha
Castel de Calanha
This keep acts as the center of the Barony of Calanha.  It is of fairly recent construction, having been built to protect against raids by Mediterranean pirates.

Banneret Manors
Fabero
Nabiras 







 


The Bishopric of Cocanha

Alcazar

Alcazar was the center of government on the island during its occupation by the Moors.  It still acts as both the commercial and religious center, and is the easiest place to find passage to the continent or to the island monastery of Lampisors.

Monasteries
Egleisia
Lampisors