My Personal Style of Play
I recently watched Questing Beast’s video on “six cultures of play” in tabletop RPGs, as described in a blog post by The Retired Adventurer. It got me thinking: how would I describe my own style of play?
The six cultures described aren’t mutually exclusive buckets — they’re trends which inform the values of individual groups and tables. In that spirit, here are a few notes on how I’d describe my own preferences.
- I prefer game systems to be short, simple, and elegant. All else equal, I’d rather engage with the world than with the rules. This is a core feature of the Old-School Renaissance.
- That said, I think there’s a place for mechanics that provide structure for things too fiddly to roleplay. A good example might be The Hotline’s rules for debt in Mothership.
- Tactics games can be fun, but generally I’m not too interested in mechanically optimizing my character. Leveling up, picking new abilities, etc. — it’s not for me. This is part of why I soured on D&D 5e, and it’s why I’ve never played Pathfinder.
- My favorite games are driven by the actions of the player characters. The referee establishes the situation, but doesn’t plan a specific outcome or story arc. The story emerges from what happens at the table, and the players’ choices should have real in-world consequences. This is another core tenet of the OSR.
- Borrowing from the trad style, I appreciate a sense of referee “authorship” over the setting, if not the events of the game itself. I don’t like the very collaborative worldbuilding process common in the story-game scene. If I’m a player at your table, I want to inhabit your setting and leave a mark on the world you’ve built.
- Tonally, I prefer games where the characters aren’t too powerful, where the challenges are mostly human-scaled, and where magic is infrequent or poorly understood. In sci-fi, I prefer games that are more scientifically grounded. This tends to be more common in OSR circles, but it’s not universal.
Hacking Violence
Credit to Luke Gearing for creating Violence, a fast and nasty system for resolving violent encounters which I used to much success in a recent campaign. Here, I’ve adjusted the rules based on personal preference, aligning the dice logic with my rules for spaceship combat, and my players’ desire for more structure in situations outside of combat.
Characters have the following four Stats. Roll 3d6 for them, in order.
- Wits: Your cleverness, quick-thinking, and motor discipline.
- Smarts: Your capacity for abstract reasoning and problem-solving.
- Tough: Your physique, stamina, and pain tolerance.
- Fight: Your combat training and stomach for blood.
When the outcome of an action is uncertain and the stakes are high, roll 1d20 equal to or under your most relevant Stat.
Advantage and Disadvantage
Whenever circumstances make a check particularly easy or difficult, roll twice and take the better or worse result.
Aspects
Characters start with four points to spend on Aspects. Aspects represent the occupations, careers, experiences, and accomplishments that define a character’s history and grant them expertise.
A character can have any number of Aspects, chosen by them and agreed upon by the Referee, so long as their bonuses total up to four.
If when making a check, the player and Referee agree that a character’s Aspect provides them relevant expertise, the Aspect’s bonus is added to the Stat threshold. Only one Aspect can apply to a check, but Aspects are not tied to any specific Stat.
Some possible Aspects include: asteroid miner, atmospheric technician, bodyguard, bureaucrat, chemist, diplomat, engineer, lawyer, medical doctor, naval officer, psychologist, retail employee, space marine, union organizer, virologist, etc.
Initiative
Every player character involved in a combat makes a Wits check.
Everyone who succeeds acts before their opponents, and everyone who fails acts after.
Do this at the beginning of each round.
Shooting
To shoot someone, make a Fight check. If they are not in cover or moving, roll with Advantage.
If someone is shot, they make a Tough check.
- Subtract -2 from the threshold for each Injury they have.
- Rifle-calibers subtract -2.
- Automatic weapons subtract an additional -2.
- Shotguns subtract -4 at close ranges and -2 at medium.
If they fail this check, they go Down. Otherwise, they are Injured.
Melee
Both combatants make Fight checks.
- If both combatants succeed, the low-scorer is Injured. The high-scorer is Injured and goes Down.
- If one combatant succeeds and the other fails, the loser is Injured and goes Down.
- If both combatants fail the check, both are Injured and go Down.
Maneuvers
In a combat, characters can perform maneuvers — fire to suppress, restrain an opponent, use them as a zero-G springboard, etc.
To do this, make a Fight check. On a success, the opponent may choose to either let the maneuver happen, or resolve the attack as per usual (in melee, the opponent also makes a Fight check).
Down
When a character goes Down, they make a Tough check. Subtract -2 from the threshold for each Injury. If they fail, they are dead. Otherwise, they are critically injured and will die without swift medical attention.
Commentary
I added Aspects and Maneuvers for the same reason — to avoid making lists.
For Aspects, I wanted a way to reward a character’s specific training and expertise. At first, I thought I’d write a formal list of skills or careers, but gave up about 30 entries into a d100 table of backgrounds. I wanted to foreground the fiction and let my players’ creativity guide the mechanics, not the other way around. Traverse Fantasy, taking a page from 13th Age, had a much better take on how to do backgrounds in her game, FIVEY.
As for Maneuvers, I borrowed from Odd Skull’s classic blog post on the subject, taking an “I cut, you choose” route and giving your opponent the decision whether to pay in blood to stop you. And since this is Violence, that’s a steep price to pay.
I got rid of tracking individual bullets because it felt too granular for me. And since my setting presumes the widespread use of automatic firearms, there are a lot more bullets flying around in general. I’d rather keep the focus on “did you hit or miss?”
For initiative and (dis)advantage I just swapped in some clean, elegant rules I like.
Further Reading
Labor Unions in the Solar System
I failed Dungeon23 pretty early last year, unfortunately. I like the idea of a daily, low-stakes RPG writing ritual, but I ran into a creative block pretty early on. So this year, I’m trying Lore24, which gives me more leeway to follow my creativity wherever it leads, rather than forcing myself to just write dungeon rooms. I’m using the opportunity to add details to my sci-fi world.
I’m giving myself permission to allow a daily entry to be just a name and a brief, one-sentence description. But a few weeks back, I put in the work to detail the Solar System’s most prominent labor unions, and I wanted to share that here.
Mineworkers Industrial Union (MIU)
An old and once-powerful labor union, founded in 2219, with a heavy presence on Luna and in the Asteroid Belt. The MIU not only represents blue-collar industrial workers, but also skilled roboticists, engineers, cargo technicians, and various white-collar workers who support the heavily-automated mining industry.
The 2308 Lunar Rising devastated the Mineworkers, who were at the forefront of anti-Restitutionary resistance in the wake of Operation Hawkeye. The External Bureau of Intelligence arrested thousands of members and executed hundreds of organizers. Any informal arrangements that had existed between union and company were severed, and the remnants of the union’s leadership fled into exile.
Today, the MIU is the most heavily suppressed of all the Spacer labor unions. It’s recovered somewhat from its post-Rising nadir, but still doesn’t have the membership or bargaining position it once had. The MIU is affiliated with the All-System Alliance of Labor Unions. The current president is Gabriel Shala (they/them).
United Gas & Refinery Workers (UGRW)
A relatively small but rapidly-growing labor union, concentrated in the Outer Planets. Founded in 2282 from a collection of local refiners’ unions, the UGRW is organized in key industrial centers around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The union is generally understood to be militant, strike-prone, radically left-wing, and hostile to spacer nomads who bear a reputation as dishonorable scabs. The UGRW is a founding affiliate of the Industrial Democratic Congress. The current president is Maysoun Sasaki (she/her).
Interplanetary Shipbuilders Association (ISA)
One of the oldest and largest labor unions in the Solar System, founded on Luna in 2207. Despite an early history of combative strike activity, the founding of the External Service and the system-wide repression of labor activity drove the ISA underground. Today, the Shipbuilders act as off-the-books negotiating partners, promising not to lead strikes or slowdowns in exchange for modest concessions. The Shipbuilders are generally seen as conciliatory toward the External Service. The ISA is affiliated with the All-System Alliance of Labor Unions. The current president is Pau Prem Khin (he/him).
Spacefarers and Teamsters Interplanetary Union (STIU)
Another of the largest labor unions in the Solar System, covering crews on all commercial passenger and cargo spacecraft. Due to their unique bargaining position out in space for potentially weeks at a time, STIU crews are noted for their frequent conflict with both corporate flight commanders and independent owner-operators. The STIU is also associated with organized crime, corruption, and religious heterodoxy. Corrupt locals are known for bribery, embezzlement, extortion, and violence in order to protect their interests and muscle out non-union crew. The STIU is affiliated with the All-System Alliance of Labor Unions. The current president is Rahman Chen Chieh (he/him).
Space Station Operations Union (SSOU)
Originally a firefighters’ union, now a broad umbrella of workers who maintain critical infrastructure aboard space stations. Founded in 2235 as the Interplanetary Union of Station Firefighters (IUSF), the union renamed itself in 2290 to recognize its increasingly diversified membership. The SSOU has been affiliated with the Industrial Democratic Congress since 2314, and is the IDC’s largest union. The current president is Nahia-Maria Sante (she/her).
All-System Alliance of Labor Unions (ASALU)
The largest trade union confederation in the Solar System, founded in 2256 to present a united front to the newly-created External Service. While labor organizing has always been illegal under Restitutionary law, ASALU and its unions maintain an unofficial relationship with corporate authorities and the External Service. This relationship has been variously combative or conciliatory, depending on circumstance, but tends toward cooperation in exchange for limited, begrudging acceptance.
This détente suffered a grievous wound following the election of Cyril Brook as president of the Executive Council. From the left, ASALU’s decision not to publicly oppose Operation Hawkeye incited a membership revolt, which in 2301 led several unions to split and form the Industrial Democratic Congress. From the right, the EBI led a system-wide repression of labor activity, and companies were pressured not to make the sort of informal deals that were once common.
ASALU eventually followed the IDC into a more militant stance against the External Service, but this did little to improve its fortunes. The Lunar Rising nearly destroyed the Mineworkers, and the ensuing crackdown implicated ASALU leaders in all sorts of anti-Restitutionary activity. ASALU reversed course again to try and repair its situation, but its bargaining position was severely weakened, and the unions were unable to extract the concessions they once could. In 2314, the SSOU ditched ASALU to affiliate with the IDC, instantly becoming the latter federations’ largest member union.
Today, ASALU is still the larger of the two big labor confederations in the Solar System, but its power has been severely weakened after decades of rudderless leadership and an inability to adapt to an increasingly polarized political situation. The leadership of ASALU is traditionally supportive of planetary restitution in abstract, but advocates for the accountability and democratization of the External Service.
Unions affiliated with ASALU include:
- Mineworkers Industrial Union (MIU)
- Interplanetary Shipbuilders Association (ISA)
- Spacefarers and Teamsters Interplanetary Union (STIU)
Industrial Democratic Congress (IDC)
A trade union confederation founded in 2301 after the All-System Alliance of Labor Unions split in a dispute over Operation Hawkeye. The IDC is generally considered to be more militant than ASALU, and unlike ASALU officially endorses a program of Spacer independence and socialist reorganization of the interplanetary economy.
The IDC initially consisted of the UGRW and a handful of smaller unions, united by a willingness to directly challenge the External Service even if it risked losing the short-term gains of conciliation. This stance grew exponentially more popular as Operation Hawkeye wore on, so much so that even ASALU was pressured to adopt a more combative posture.
Capitalizing on this newfound labor radicalism, the IDC spent the postwar recession years pressing for strikes and protests throughout the Solar System. In particular, the IDC and allied unions actively recruited unemployed war veterans, taking advantage of their expertise to fight the External Service. The Lunar Rising further emboldened the militant unionists of the IDC, as did ASALU’s decision to reverse course and renew its attempts at conciliation. With the admission of the SSOU, the IDC now represents a significant fraction of the Solar System’s unionized workers.
Unions affiliated with the IDC include:
- United Gas & Refinery Workers (UGRW)
- Space Station Operations Union (SSOU)
- Agri-Food and Commercial Services Union (AFCSU)
- Independent Electrical Workers (IEW)
The Kuiper Belt and The Art of Not Being Governed
I recently started reading The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott. The basic thesis of the book is that, rather than being unrefined barbarians or “our living ancestors,” the people of marginal regions like Upland Southeast Asia (or the cossacks and Romani in Europe, Berbers in North Africa, maroons in the Americas, etc.) actively shape their lives in such a way as to avoid absorption into a nearby state. They are, in other words, “barbarians by design.”
The first few chapters, however, are dedicated to the internal logic of statecraft in preindustrial Southeast Asia. Consider the following passages from the beginning of chapter 3:
“The concentration of manpower was the key to political power in premodern Southeast Asia. It was the first principle of statecraft and the mantra of virtually every history of precolonial kingdoms in the region. Creating such space was easiest where there was a substantial expanse of flat, fertile land, watered by perennial streams and rivers, and, better yet, not far from a navigable waterway. Tracing the far-reaching logic of state spaces will help distinguish the fundamental differences between manpower-poor, land-rich political systems on the one hand and land-poor, manpower-rich systems on the other.”
“The need to concentrate population and, at the same time, the difficulty of doing so was inscribed in the demographic given that Southeast Asia’s land mass was only one-seventh as populated as was that of China in 1600. As a consequence, in Southeast Asia control over people conferred control over land, while in China control over land increasingly conferred control over people. The abundance of arable land in Southeast Asia favored shifting cultivation, a pattern of farming that often yielded higher returns for less labor and produced a substantial surplus for the families practicing it. What constituted an advantage for the cultivators, however, was profoundly prejudicial to the ambitions of would-be state-makers. Shifting cultivation requires far more land than irrigated rice and therefore disperses population; where it prevails, it appears to ‘impose an upper limit of population density of about 20-30 per square kilometer.’ Once again, concentration is the key. It matters little how wealthy a kingdom is if its potential surplus of manpower and grain is dispersed across a landscape that makes its collection difficult and costly. ‘Effective strength often came down to a polity’s core, not the realm’s total size or wealth,’ as Richard O’Connor has put it. “Irrigated wet-rice created stronger heartlands… It not only supported a denser population, but grain-supported villages would have been easier to mobilize.’ The very name of the northern Thai kingdom — Lanna, ‘one million padi fields’ — amply reflects this fiscal and manpower obsession.”
So, that’s a lot, but it got me thinking about the logic of statecraft in the Solar System.
(Wikipedia) A chart of the relative distances between planets in our Solar System. The sizes of the Sun and planets are not scaled to their distances.
Space is big. This is sort of obvious, but it’s worth repeating. Space is big. The circumference around Earth at its equator is 40,075.017 kilometers. That’s a long way — literally all the way around the planet — but you’d have to go more than nine and a half times that distance to get to the Moon. Thirty Earth-sized planets could fit in between.
Seems like a long way, right?
You’d have to travel almost 3,733 times around the Earth to equal one astronomical unit, roughly the distance from here to the Sun. You could line up more than 11,000 Earth-sized planets in that area.
It gets bigger from there. The average distance from the Sun to Mars is a bit over 1.5 AU, or one-and-a-half times the distance from the Sun to Earth. For Jupiter it’s 5.2 AU, for Saturn it’s 9.6 AU, for Uranus it’s 19.2 AU, and for Neptune it’s 30.1 AU. I could recite numbers at you all day, but I hope you get the point. The Solar System is so incomprehensibly vast that light itself takes hours to reach its farthest reaches.
What does that mean for a state centered around planet Earth, especially one interested in extracting material wealth from the rest of the system?
For the Restitution Project and its corporate allies, the mission of restoring Earth’s biosphere depends on maintaining the flow of commerce. For that, they need people and machinery in locations around the Solar System where material wealth can be found. Artificial intelligence can lower the minimum human population necessary to support a colony, but not fully.
Therefore, it’s essential to concentrate human settlement in places optimal for resource extraction and industrial manufacturing. There, the supply chain can be accurately monitored and taxed, and manpower can be effectively counted and mobilized. This is what Scott terms “state-accessible product” — not the entire wealth of a country, but only that which can be identified, monitored, and accessed by the state.
“It profits the ruler not at all if his nominal subjects flourish, say, by foraging, hunting, or shifting agriculture at too great a distance from the court. It similarly profits the ruler little if his subjects grow a diverse suite of crops of different maturation or crops that spoil quickly and are therefore hard to assess, collect, and store. Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.”
For the Restitution Project, state-accessible product is maximized when large populations live in central city-stations located at optimal points along the interplanetary supply chain. But for those who actually live in those city-stations, life can be hard. They are the people most subject to Restitutionary laws and corporate regulations. They are the people drawn up for service in the External Navy, and subject to punishment if they fail to meet their obligations. If soldiers, settlers, or workers are needed, then both state and company reach for the pool of people most easily accessible.
According to Scott, in a precolonial Southeast Asian padi-state, this power dynamic leads to a sort of systemic vulnerability: the state presses hardest on its core population, which flees or rebels if the burden is too great. The core population shrinks, and the state must press even harder on those who remain to extract the same wealth and manpower. This accelerates the population decline, and the state contracts in power until it either recovers or collapses.
Here, the Restitution Project is different. Unlike the padi-state, the Restitution Project has Earth: the home of over 99% of the human population, and a near-infinite supply of state-accessible wealth and manpower. But in the 24th century, Earth is not enough. What the mother planet needs for the health of its biosphere, it can only find elsewhere in the Solar System.
In this way, the Restitution Project also operates like a colonial empire: badly-needed resources flow from the frontier to the metropole, where the state’s core population uses the wealth for its own purposes. And this population is reluctant to move out to some rock millions of kilometers from home. That’s not to say that none do — job opportunities in the External Service are lucrative, and there wouldn’t be Spacers in the first place if at least some Earthers didn’t relocate offworld for one reason or another. But the population of outer space is limited for a reason.
Beyond the bounds of Earth’s hill sphere, the Restitutionary political system is very much manpower-poor and land-rich. Therefore, the External Service uses control over people to gain control over asteroids, moons, and planets. The particulars are hugely different between a premodern padi-state and a planetary industrial empire, but the political dynamics are similar in key ways.
So if you’re a Spacer interested in fleeing the burdens of hard labor in service of planetary reconstruction and corporate profit, where can you go?
(NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) A diagram of the New Horizons spacecraft’s journey through the Outer Solar System, with the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto shown, as well as the Kuiper Belt. Seriously, I can’t express how big the Solar System is.
The furthest outposts of the External Service are in orbit around Uranus and Neptune — atmospheric gas refineries generating helium-3 fuel for fusion-powered spaceships. Beyond Neptune, some 30-50 AU from the Sun, there are hundreds of millions of objects, asteroids and comets and dwarf planets. This incomprehensibly vast region of space is known as the Kuiper Belt.
The Kuiper Belt has little economic value for the Restitution Project. Those small objects are composed primarily of icy volatiles rather than rock or metal — useful for sure, but it’s nothing that can’t be found closer to the Sun. Furthermore, it’s all dispersed in small bodies at enormous distances, hard to concentrate into a central supply chain. And with such little sunlight, energy production at scale would be a huge problem.
All of that makes the Kuiper Belt unsuitable for mass settlement and industrial manufacturing, but it does make it ideal as a zone of refuge away from the External Service. Small communities can build a parabolic dish to capture sunlight and concentrate it on a town-sized settlement. Other communities might opt for fusion- or fission-powered habitats, depending on what they can mine or steal. All those icy volatiles like water, ammonia, and methane can be used to create climate-controlled biospheres for agriculture.
You might find your next-door neighbor only a few days or weeks away. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not bad given that it might take a month or more to head back toward the Sun. That journey may be worth it, though — all those concentrated centers of production and population make juicy targets for pillage. Cargo ships can be intercepted and robbed, settlements can be forced to provide tribute at gunpoint, and entire stations of people can be uprooted and carried back to the Kuiper Belt.
Indeed, this rampant piracy is the primary raison d’être for the External Navy. There are no state competitors to the External Service, so the only threat comes from raiders. Of course, this intermittent conflict creates even more pressure on the urban population of the Solar System, as the External Service must levy higher taxes and draw up more soldiers to defend its supply chain.
There’s lots more I can say about the actual lifeways of those who live in the Kuiper Belt, but I’ll leave it here for now. For this post, I wanted to draw out the comparison between the Kuiper Belt and highland Southeast Asia as described in The Art of Not Being Governed. They’re both marginal regions from the perspective of state authorities, home to less “developed” populations who have yet to come to “civilization.” They’re also regions of refuge for those fleeing the burdens of life under state domination, pockets of freedom made possible through a geography hostile to the ambitions of state-builders.
I really strongly recommend The Art of Not Being Governed. I’ve stuck sticky notes all through my copy to keep track of everything I’ve learned. It’s a great and informative work that’ll teach you a lot about power, statecraft, and the makeup of the premodern world.
Musings About Citycrawling
So, your players show up to the big city. They plan on spending a lot of time here — doing jobs, unraveling mysteries, acquiring gear, the works. Along the way, they’ll build up a network of friends and enemies, explore many different neighborhoods, and eventually come to know the city the way you might know the actual city you live in. If all goes well, it’ll be just as much a character in your game as the PCs themselves.
But how do you design a place as big as, say, New York City? That’s a huge commitment in prep work, all frontloaded. You could get stuck doing prep forever and never actually sit down and play.
You could do worse than starting the same way you’d start a hexcrawl or a megadungeon: one step at a time.
I’m not a huge fan of megadungeons, personally. Nothing against them, they’re just not my cup of tea. I prefer the vibe of crisscrossing a whole country visiting different environments and locales. For some reason it just feels more grounded to me. The exception is Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent, which I’m itching to run at some point. Maybe it’s because the Deep feels like an actual place that could exist in the world, and not a contrivance that would only exist in the context of a D&D game.
There’s a lot of good advice out there for designing both dungeons and hexcrawls. I think we can combine the structures of both to build an interesting, dynamic city.
What do I mean by this?
Say that each neighborhood is like a wilderness hex. It’s a small space, only a few blocks across at most. Give it a handful of NPCs, a paragraph description, a little d6 encounter table, and maybe a secret or two. What’s unique about it? You don’t have to go overboard, just one good idea is enough to make it stand out.
After that, build the second neighborhood, adjacent to the first. It’s got its own landmark, its own group of NPCs, its own set of encounters. Then build another, and another, and another. Mark how they relate to each other spatially, but don’t get hung up on mapping every street. Like the hex in wilderness travel, the neighborhood is your basic building block. You don’t need to get any more granular than that.
Once you have a few neighborhoods, you’ve got a borough or ward. Like the dungeon level, the borough is a collection of neighborhoods with a common set of themes, aesthetics, and challenges. This is where you start building factions. And I think factions are really important — like a dungeon or hexcrawl, you want players to be able to make informed decisions about where to go and how to get there. And with fewer “natural” barriers like rivers or walls, the social landscape of the city needs to do more work in creating interesting choices in exploration.
Sure, you could take the train across town — but the corporation running the train has a bounty on your head. You could walk there, but the direct route runs through a district locked down by cops after a terrorist attack. Next door there’s a confrontation between strikebreakers and union workers. The sewers below are infested with members of a mysterious and violent cult. You get the idea?
The great thing about this is that the whole thing tessellates. You could spend a dozen sessions exploring just one borough, with local conflicts contained to a handful of neighborhoods. Then, events take the players to the borough next door, and the stakes get higher. The players start running into bigger factions with loftier ambitions. Like dungeon levels, city boroughs can be self-contained locales, but they can also connect with other boroughs as the situation demands.
I don’t think any of this is really new. All I’m doing here is applying the friction of wilderness or dungeon exploration to the city. Constrain the players’ navigation options, impose costs and risks to various modes of travel, and give yourself permission to start small and build as you go.
Further Reading
Settings with Strata: Building a Fantasy Campaign Setting
I don’t have a fantasy world.
You know, a world — a setting that’s persistent across multiple adventures and campaigns. The kind of place with a unique tone and feel, different from what you get from stock D&D Euro-fantasyland.
I don’t need to have a world, I know. “There are goblins in that cave, and you’re the local tough guys” works fine. I’ve run that before.
But man, I’d really love to have a world with its own history and culture. A place that feels alive. But that’s such a daunting task! Where do I start? How do I get the most bang for my buck, in terms of creating gameable content in as little time as possible?
One of my favorite RPG blogs is Gundobad Games, written by an ancient/medieval historian. One of my favorite posts of Gundobad’s is Settings with Strata: A Quick-Design Method for Historically Coherent Campaign Settings. The advice is pretty simple — come up with a broad overview of your setting’s history before plopping all the adventure locations onto your map — but its value is immediately obvious. It imbues every landmark with in-setting historical context, and serves as a jumping-off point for the game master to flesh places out as the player characters visit them. It’s really solid advice.
So I’m doing a little worldbuilding exercise — follow the steps to making a campaign setting in Settings with Strata, in hopes of creating a little sandbox filled to the brim with factional conflict for players to get enmeshed in.
The steps are as follows:
- In just a few sentences, articulate a basic main concept for your setting.
- Get or sketch a regional map that fits with that concept.
- Next, write a very brief summary of your setting’s history; in particular, write a 1-3 sentence description of 3 or 4 eras/periods leading up to the present.
- Now, for each of those 3-4 periods, and moving in order from the past to the present (this is important), mark on your map approximately 3-5 locations that were most significant for the history of that period. You can even push it about 7 locations if you want, but don’t think of this as a comprehensive map of all features from that period; just identify the main places of most interest. They can be new sites just built in this era, or there may be continuity of some important sites across periods - but they should make coherent sense in the developing story of your setting. As you do all this, take brief notes narrating the history as you add locations to the map.
Step One: Come up with an Overall Concept
The borderland province of a resplendent yet disunited empire is under threat. Tribes of “barbarians” from beyond the frontier have recently united into a confederation led by a charismatic military leader. This leader brings to bear not only a wholesale reorganization of the “barbarian” social order, but a new religion and a zeal to spread the faith further afield.
Step Two: Get a Regional Map
Honestly, this was the hardest part. I’m still not totally satisfied with the way I’ve designed the map, but it’ll do for now. I’m using Hex Kit with Zeshio’s pixel hex tilesets. I recommend both, they’re great!
I imagine this to be a region of mostly grassland — a transition between desert and steppe to the north, and humid forestland to the south. To the west is a large freshwater lake, and to the east is an imposing mountain range.
Step Three: Very Brief Outline of the Setting’s History in 3-4 Periods
Period 1: The imperial army expands into this region from the south, upending an indigenous monarchy. The imperial conquerors appoint a noble family to rule as dukes from a central fortress-city. As trade flourishes, the region grows in population and wealth, while the remnants of the old monarchy are kept divided and pacified.
Period 2: The empire enters a period of decline and fragmentation, during which a succession crisis tips into civil war. When the dukes of this region back a losing claimant, they’re deposed and replaced by a house more loyal to the new regime. Meanwhile beyond the frontier, a charismatic “barbarian” chieftain unites the horse-tribes into a powerful confederation.
Period 3: The new regime’s shaky peace lasts for only a short time before civil war breaks out again. Peasant rebellion and indigenous revolt threaten imperial authority, while rival dynasties assert competing claims to the ducal throne. From the north, the steppe confederation prepares for a campaign of conquest.
Period 4/Present Day: Decades of civil war have led to faltering trade, widespread famine, and vicious sectarian conflict. The indigenous population is in revolt to restore the pre-imperial monarchy, while a new power in the north threatens to devour the whole region.
Step Four: Add 3-7 Locations to the Map for Each Historical Period
Period 1
The glory days of the empire are nearing their end. Her Illustrious Majesty, the last great empress of her dynasty, has one thousand husbands and her wealth is legend. Under her watch, the empire has expanded north to Kiyaye, where tropical grasslands press against steppe and desert.
A. An ancient city on the southern river serves as capital of a thriving regional state (let’s call this culture the Kipya). The imperial invasion is swift and brutal, slaughtering the overmatched defenders and razing their city to ashes. Further south along the river, a new city is built in imperial style. There, a noble house is appointed to rule Duchy Kiyaye, overseeing a profitable trade in textiles, dyes, horses, salt, and gold.
B. In exchange for submission to imperial authority and service in its armies, the remaining Kipya clans in the north and east are allowed to retain their ancestral lands. These princelings wage intermittent warfare with each other, even as they pledge fealty to the imperial duchess.
B(i). A man named Iyin, soldier in the imperial army and heir to a Kipya clan, returns home after a rival princeling murders his father. Vowing revenge, he demands that the duchess intervene to hand over the princeling. When she refuses, he goes to war. In a rapid campaign, Iyin defeats his rival in battle, executes him, and subsumes his territory.
B(ii). With Iyin’s power rising, other clans band together to cut him down to size — with tacit support from the imperial dynasty. Facing impossible odds, Iyin and his supporters flee north into the steppe. The imperial administration allows this crossing, happy to be rid of a potential threat.
C. A military canton outside the capital is home to an insular society of warriors bound in service to the ducal lineage. They possess a reputation for terrifying martial prowess and sharp-witted poetry.
D. The imperial duchesses maintain a fortified caravanserai at the main bridge across the northern river. Here, imperial officers collect dues on trade flowing south.
E. In the south and west, imperial towns are established over old Kipya settlements, and a road is built connecting the capital with the northern caravanserai.
F. The duchess, seeing herself as a supporter of sorcerous institutions, provides land and funding to found a monastic community in southwestern Kiyaye. The monastics here belong to an innovative sect, adopting ideas from various different traditions.
Period 2
Her Majesty lies dead, replaced by a run of corrupt and neglectful successors. Imperial splendor buckles under the strain of ceaseless conflict and courtly intrigue. When a clique of palace viziers depose the sitting child-empress, those tensions erupt into civil war. The Kiyaye duchesses throw their weight behind one of the leading claimants, but her assassination exposes them to vicious retribution.
A. A powerful general leads a campaign into Kiyaye to conquer the province for his wife, a claimant to the imperial throne. He meets the duchess’ forces — led by her eldest husband — outside the southernmost town. After a furious battle, the conquering general emerges victorious, slaying the duchess’ husband and opening the road to the provincial capital.
B. After a lengthy siege, the general’s army seizes the city and executes the sitting duchess. In her place, he appoints a new house to govern Duchy Kiyaye, and insists on leaving a garrison in the old warrior society’s canton.
C. The new regime brings with it a different, more conservative sect of sorcery that rejects what it sees as foreign heterodoxy from the existing monastics. The new dynasty sponsors the construction of a separate monastery, closer to the capital, which adheres to this traditionalist interpretation. A road is built to facilitate travel to this monastery.
D. The remaining members of the old dynasty flee northwest, building a fortress not far from the monastery they sponsored. The two factions become allies, forming a semi-independent power base in opposition to the new regime. Towns to the north tend to align with the old dynasty, while towns to the south ally with the new.
E. The warrior society is spared from annihilation, but faces exile into the northern steppes. There they meet Iyin and his followers, join forces, and adapt quickly to being a nation on horseback. With Iyin at their head, they absorb tribe after tribe into a growing empire. Uniting them is a mix of local customs with several foreign traditions, rapidly maturing into a potent religious force. The confederation sends a war party to set up camp on the lakeshore, scouting out imperial defenses.
F. With imperial rule degrading in the region, Kipya princelings in the east declare their independence. They build three fortified strongholds in their villages in the hill country and launch raids and attacks to the west.
Period 3
A. The new empress’ ascension to the throne leads to only a few short years of peace before her death plunges the empire back into civil war. Decades of imperial mismanagement, internal conflict, and foreign incursion take their toll on Kiyaye and the broader empire. Agricultural yields decline, famine takes hold, and epidemics spread. In the midst of this chaos, a new power arrives from the north.
B. The reigning duchess wages a violent campaign to pacify the eastern Kipya princelings. Her forces seize one of their strongholds, tearing it down as they advance.
C. The battered-but-resistant eastern Kipya fall under the sway of a singular prince, who declares the restoration of the pre-imperial monarchy. He establishes his capital in the eastern highlands, and begins reorganizing the various petty warbands into a centralized army. The steppe confederation grows quickly, driving its enemies further and further afield. One tribe presses against the imperial border, offering themselves as vassals to the sitting duchess. When they’re refused, they ford the river in desperation and sack the fortified caravanserai. With few options, the sitting duchess relents and allows the tribe to resettle across the river.
D. In response to onerous taxes levied at a moment of particular want, peasants across central Kiyaye take up arms against the local nobility. This force snowballs into a massive army, seizing a fortified town in west-central Kiyaye. Ducal forces, spread thin fighting in the east and north, are unable to effectively counter this new threat. The peasant rebels’ leader has a sort of “robin hood” reputation, famed for showing compassion to the poor and only hurting government officials.
E. Iyin leads his forces against the Kipya towns along the northern river, bringing them under his confederation’s rule. He then issues a document listing his grievances with imperial rule — including the murder of his father, the support of the Kipya coalition against him, and the exile of his clan into the steppe. He prepares his armies to cross the river and fall upon the disunited province of Kiyaye.
Today
Kiyaye is a region at war. The Kipya tenuously stand together in their struggle against imperial domination, but who knows how long their unity will last? The ducal administration is split between two families with competing claims, while a peasant revolt rocks the countryside. All the while, the threat to the north grows increasingly prevalent. Ruins of old fortresses and pillaged towns dot the landscape, and warbands of various factions prowl the countryside.
Debriefing
So I think it’s fair to say that I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the basic plot structure of Fallout: New Vegas. There’s a conquering “tribal” society led by a charismatic military reformer butting up against a more established but deeply flawed “civilized” political order. The locals here are caught in the middle, and it’s the players’ job to make decisions that’ll decide the fate of the whole region.
But I’ve made some changes, too. For one, this is a firmly pre-modern fantasy setting, so firearms and electricity and such are out the window, while magic is in. Instead of a bunch of fascists cosplaying as Roman legionnaires, I have a steppe confederation that adheres to a strange new faith. Instead of a corrupt, overextended liberal democracy, I have an unstable feudal monarchy beset by civil war.
There are plenty of places for player characters to explore, from the imperial city to the two monasteries to the eastern Kipya strongholds. Say the players want to go check out that ruined caravanserai up north? Great: it was founded as an imperial trading post, but was since sacked by a nomadic nation fleeing Iyin and his confederation. Those nomads will probably still be around, and the PCs will have to contend with them. But the old ducal lineage is also strong in this area, and Iyin surely has raiding parties scouring for loot. This hex map has a sort of potential energy that I really like in RPG settings — factional conflict that could pull the PCs in all sorts of different directions, with hard choices and opportunities for fame and fortune.
The next step, now that I have the rough outline of this region’s history, is to start putting names to the various people and factions I’ve described above, and coming up with more details about them. What do the two sorcerers’ monasteries disagree on, exactly? What’s this new religion from the north? What are the contours of this empire-wide civil war?