Player Notes #1 - The Crown of Kings

I guess it is is going to get a little monotonous if all you read here are the fairly ordinary modelling and painting experiences as I work towards my DBA project. See here's something else. But don't worry if you wanted to see what I put together for a forest, or a road, or a Saxon village, etc. etc. You have all that to come!

But back to roleplaying, for a moment. As a referee, I enjoy watching players scribble down notes. Players committed to taking notes, are, I presume, engaging with the game in both the short and long term. Can a player sort one improbably named NPC/location/monster from another? If they can't, their experience of the game can only ever be superficial. But who expects either players or referees to hold all this in their head. The referee orders the world with piles of notes and index cards, unless the players adopt something fractionally similar, it will be difficult for them to make their decisions meaningful, and therefore, in one sense, make the game as arbitrary as Snakes and Ladders. Of course, not all players are into noting down NPC names, rumours, clues, etc., but unless they have a very good memory, those who are not taking notes need to understand, and accept, the limits this places on their ability to act in and engage with the game world. Roleplaying games are information games.

All that aside, the purpose of this post is to show off some pictures of the ways in which players in my games have made sense of the game world. The most ardent note-taker and mapmaker in our group is my wife. Here's some of her notes from our Advanced Fighting Fantasy Crown of Kings campaign.  

Addendum: A dense transcription of names, places, hint and clues. But because she was the only player taking notes, rather than having three players, each collecting and organising the information that they think is important, for all of the players the game was refracted through these notes. It is not so much of a problem in a linear 'quest' game, or even a 'straightforward' mystery, in which the decisions are mostly short term and the goal is shared by all the players/characters. But it occurred to me that this delegated approach to the 'information game' is very bad for a sandbox game, in which each player is expected to make short, medium and long term decisions that are not determined by the pursuit of a simple, predetermined collective goal.

Jolly Pirates We!

So, back to ‘YOUR Adventure Ends Here’, my project to play each of the Fighting Fantasy books in order, by the rules and rolls, no fingers in pages, no backsies, nothing. Seas of Blood is in dock.

Seas of Blood was one of my favourites, back in the day. And it still is, kind of. Unlike some ‘quest’ orientated gamebooks, in which a map actually merely an illustration of the route upon which your character was taken by the writer/GM, in Seas of Blood there is the illusion (at least) that the map is a sandbox of choices. There YOU are, in the pirate port of Tak, dicing away the evening with rival Abdul the Butcher, when some drunk idiot comes up with the idea of fifty days of robbery to prove which of you is the greatest pirate of the Inland Sea.

The opening paragraph tells you some bare details about Lagash, the seas around Enraki, and the caravans of the Scythera Desert, and then asks; where do YOU want to go?

I choose to send my ship, the Banshee, to ‘the Scythera Desert to plunder the rich western caravans’. After camping out for several days in the burning sun, my crew are eventually able to ambush a caravan of LIZARD MEN. The cost in blood was not really worth the treasure; 60 gold pieces and one Lizard Man slave. Nevertheless, the idea that the ‘rich western caravans’ might include (traditionally) evil humanoids is, to my mind, one of the great things about Titan as a fantasy gaming world.

And then the Banshee is sunk. Sailing south, I fail as a captain and neglect several opportunities to flee! from a KISHIAN WARSHIP. We had her outmanned, I swear; a whole point of Crew Strike and three points of Crew Strength. The battle, and her booty, was mine, I gambled. But the dice fell against the odds, my crew fell, and I slipped beneath the waves. Glug. Glug.

Not much of an adventure, but enough to remind me of the illusion of an open world that I have always liked about Seas of Blood. Okay, so it is not as open as Fabled Lands, but in the context of the early(ish) Fighting Fantasy books, Seas of Blood suggested the freedom (as well as the adventure and aesthetics) of fantasy roleplaying games.

BONUS: Free RPG with a potential for piracy: Worlds Apart, a Traveller ‘powered’ fantasy seafaring game.

Think Smaller for Big Rewards

Inspired by Ckutalik’s campaign map (and an adolescence soaked in fold-out Gazetteer maps), I began playing around with Hexographer, trying to knock together a first draft of a map suited to *gaming* rather than writing fiction or engaging in fantasy economics. Centred on a Port Blacksand-alike den of thieves, cutthroats, and sentient topiary, I placed a 20-mile band of settled farmland around the city before we got the adventuresome wilderlands; to the north, isolated, curiously-odd fishing villages (the Wicker Man / Innsmouth), before the land rises into moorland punctured by jagged teeth of slate, populated by hill tribes, Ogre shepherds, monastic hermits, as well as the odd Citadel of Chaos (and the ruins of previous megalomaniacs’ country retreats). To the west, mist shrouded woods, spider webs thick enough to entangle a strong man, spotted with villages full of superstitious yokels, who speak with frightened reverence about the Thin White Duke (Ravenloft / Mirkwood). To the south, beyond the Keep on the Borderlands, a broken land of limestone caves and white walled valleys, home to countless humanoid tribes and ways into the underdark. The streams and rivers that cut this monster-ridden land drain into the (Scorpion) swamp, which might well contain a Frog Man pyramid…

Wholly derivative, but then I’m not trying to be original, I’m trying to build a world in which the players can’t help but point their characters towards adventure. But then I read a post by noisms, which has the effect of pointing out that my map, using a nominal scale of 5/6 mile across a hex, might well be at a hopelessly large scale – at least to be used as an adventureful hexcrawler in a world of foot travel over moors and through woods. And then, to rub it in, I find this article, at the Hydra’s Grotto, which points out that the whole of Skyrim would fit inside a single hex at this scale!