On Published Settings

I abhor published settings. Or at least, that's how I phrased it when the subject came up in conversation. This, of course, was bound to provoke a bit of controversy.

"I can't understand that mindset. Like. Have you READ Deadlands?"

Alright. 'Abhor' may be too strong of a word. I can actually enjoy published settings for their fluff. A lot of settings I quite enjoy, especially when they come from an actual work of fiction, rather a campaign book. If we want to make my initial statement more accurate, I abhor running published settings. There's a handful of reasons for this, some more practical than others.

1. I'm huge on communal setting creation. I want to create something in the broad strokes and then fill in the details through play.  This was how I grew up playing these games in my early teens. We sketched out a map or a came up with a setting and then it just got filled as we played with it. New locations and things were introduced as a natural outgrowth of play, rather than as a concerted world-developing effort or referenced from a gazetteer. As a natural consequence, these worlds were always ours, unique to the people who shaped them and often colored by our own mythologies. Funny enough, this style of world-building seems to be popular both with the OSR crowd and the Burning Wheel/Apocalypse World/Story-Game crowd.
2. I'm a history nerd. I spend a lot of time memorizing the details of various cultures and eras in the real-world's history. As a result, I can pretty handily fill in the gaps of whatever broad-stroke setting I was running with bits from history without missing a beat. Even something as small as just nailing the material culture of a society or setting is something that I really enjoy. It helps flavor the thing and makes it stand out. To bring that same level of loving detail and attention to a published setting, I'm effectively going to have to study a whole new culture and history while trying to parse how much it leans on this or that historical period/culture and where it deviates and the specific bits that make it worthwhile on its own. Even settings I legitimately enjoy and am familiar with from fiction (Middle Earth, Star Trek, Star Wars, Westeros) would require me to go back and study them for a while before I'd be comfortable trying to represent them. This could simply be a hangup based on unchecked perfectionism, on my part, but I'd rather spend my time studying earth history than Westerosi. The former is far more interesting than most people would believe.
3. I enjoy GMing as an act of creation. Writing stuff and creating fluff is half my fun of doing it. The more details that are published for a setting, the less room I have to carve my own niches into it. This actually creates a weird double-edged sword for me. A setting too tightly constrained will lose my interest because I want to create for it, but a setting too loose will make me question why I'm bothering with a published setting in the first place. Does a sweet spot between the two exist? I'm not sure.
4. I don't want my players to know more about a setting than I do. There are a handful of reasons for this by itself. The most immediate is that I don't want to introduce my players to the governor of Waterdeep only for someone to inform me that Waterdeep is actually governed by a council of retired adventurer-nobles or some nonsense. The more popular a setting is, and the more stuff has been produced for it, the more likely my players are to have read it and the less likely I am. I simply don't have the patience to go through three hundred forgotten realms novels. Before one cries "get players that won't be assholes," this isn't because I'm afraid my narrative authority would be challenged (I have good players, and it's easy enough to say "not in this setting.") but because...
5. I mentioned before that I'm a big history nerd. My favorite settings are the "viking age" — northern Europe around 900AD — and various places/times in ancient Greece, classical and mythological, alike. Being a visual creature, I am naturally a big fan of movies set in these periods as well. Unfortunately, movies are absolutely terrible at actually representing history in any appreciable way. I've never seen a sword and sandals movie that bore anything more than a passing resemblance to ancient Greece. Viking movies get a little better, but even the Vikings show on the HISTORY channel is nothing close to the actual period. To enjoy any of these, I have to actively turn my history brain off and pretend that what I'm watching is actually a fantasy universe set in the flavor of the thing being represented, with all likenesses to places and characters a complete coincidence. Otherwise I'm like to point out that "We shall not interfere with the lives of mortals," is not only a stupid plot (Lookin at you, Immortals) but that Greek mythology is literally nothing but the Gods interfering with mortals. I don't want my players knowing more than I do because the whole point of playing that setting is to give them the experience of that setting. Every time I get it wrong or diverge significantly from canon, it's detracting from the reason I was using it in the first place.
6. It removes some of the mystery. I don't want my players having a Word of God absolute knowledge of the history of the setting. I want them to know basically what their characters know. It makes the history that much more interesting when we can be uncertain of it and surprised by it. Likewise, you lose all dramatic impact of any kind of Lovecraftian plot when the players read on page 47 that the council that governs Kingdom Y is actually a dark cabal trying to summon Shub Nuggath, the Toothstorm. 
7. Finally, settings are meant to be destroyed. I tend to make my players protagonists in the literary sense of the word. Within a few months of play, they're going to have shaken up the setting enough one way or another that they've overturned the most of the original status quo's anyway. Why put all the work into memorizing an establish setting and getting all of someone else's details right when there's a goodly chance the players will have burnt it down within the first campaign arc or two anyway?

That's enough rambling for one afternoon. I don't have any problems with other people running published settings, nor would I particularly mind being a player in one. As a GM, though, the effort/reward ratio is way off and in some ways it actually runs contrary to what I actually enjoy about GMing.

Am I crazy? How do you feel about published settings?

The Tyrant's Crew - Big Iron (an Episode 1 Interlude)

Last night I opened up photoshop with the intention to do a bit of doodling, maybe knock out a portrait of Moraine. I'm an alright illustrator. If I actually put in the effort, I might eventually become good enough to do something with it. Instead, I spend my time reading RPG systems and tinkering with my own.

I got a decent ways into the portrait before I started thinking about his seemingly now-signature Big Iron. If you're playing a western character, of course you want a good revolver, and the way I've been playing with him so far his anachronistic gear has been something that distinguishes him from the world around him (I wouldn't be surprised if the nav computer on The Tyrant was analog), so I obviously wanted something that looked old and chunky. Not at all a modern thing. Being something of a western gun nut (it's almost as bad as my medieval arms & armor fetish), my mind went wandering.

Originally I had imagined him to carry something like a Griswold & Gunnison that was somehow chambered in .44 Magnum. The Griswold is one of the iconic "confederate guns," during the war. The sort of thing that if you saw someone carry it after the war, you could wager good money which side they fought on. I have a weird relationship with gear in games. I like it to make statements about the character. We already know that because he (ridiculously enough) fires a big single-action revolver he comes from a frontier world, probably is very old-fashioned about a lot of things. Clearly either stubborn or sentimental (why not both?) because he hasn't swapped the gun out for something modern and more useful. No, I imagine the gun he carries is the gun that got him through the war. Having something as identifiable to his former allegiance as the Griswold was in the south? Perfect.

Griswold & Gunnison cap and ball revolver

Of course, I'm also too much of a fetishist for my own good. Sure, you could maybe rig a Griswold to accept a cartridge (conversion kits were made for the Colt Navy), but I can't imagine it'd be very convenient even by the standards that I'm going for. Plus, we're wasting a perfectly good opportunity to have something bigger and chunkier as the big iron.

My next thought went to something slightly newer. Well. A few years newer. The Smith & Wesson New Model No 3 in 44 Russian.

Smith & Wesson New Model No 3 in 44 Russian.

I have a serious love of this gun for purely aesthetic reasons. It started production in ..1877ish? I'm on the internet, I could look it up, but you'll have to take my word for it. Something about the oversized build makes me happy inside and there's nothing quite so satisfying as watching spent brass fly out the back of a top-break revolver when you slam it open. Despite being a relatively modern gun, it has some very distinctive lines that make it almost hearken back to much older firearms than its contemporaries. This is exactly the sort of thing I could see Moraine carrying.

This was about the time I was struck with another dumber but somehow even greater idea. If I wanted something that screamed "confederate" while being striking and unusual... I clearly needed to pattern it off of the LeMat revolver.

LeMat "Grapeshot" Revolver

The LeMat was a giant beast of an old horse pistol. It was a pistol meant for cavalry and in some ways was a mirror in use to the more well known Colt Dragoon. Only instead of 6 rounds of 44, the LeMat could load an impressive nine rounds of .42 or .36 caliber ball. The real surprise was that it also had a secondary barrel below the first that ran through the cylinder that fired a single 20 gauge shotgun round. Thus the LeMat earned its nickname "The Grapeshot Revolver."

Only around a hundred of them were made in the States, including the 25 or so prototypes. Another thousand or so were manufactured overseas and smuggled into the south with blockade runners from Belgium and France.

So. Clearly if I wanted something that would be unique enough to have a bit of mystique and be strange enough to warrant "signature weapon" status (important, given that my sentimental character will probably never trade in the side-arm that got him through the war), the LeMat was a good way to go. Did I say Le Mat? I clearly meant  La Grange. Two hours later, the La Grange Special was born.

The La Grange Special. That's right, I made a thing.

Funny how I started this trying to make a portrait of a character and instead end up a piece of homebrew gear. I definitely like the look of the result though. Something I find interesting is that even though the bits are all more or less historical (compare with the images above), the end result looks just shy of steampunk. I'd like to have one in real-life, though maybe in some lighter calibers. I don't have the benefit of space metal to keep a .44 break-top revolver from blowing itself to pieces.

UPDATE: The La Grange Special has been GM approved and retconned in as Moraine's sidearm of choice. I erased the shotgun I had on my list and we just assumed that the pistol costed as much as the shotgun and revolver combined. The upper barrel just uses the standard Revolver stats, the lower uses the standard shotgun profile with only 1 shot. The detachable cylinder works identically to a magazine for reloading purposes, save that I can crack it open at any time to replace an individual shell. 

I can't wait for Saturday. The next session is going to be great.

History is Not Boring: Cool Stories That..

Something that I posted on the GH Forums, but I thought I'd mirror it here as it's kinda cool:

History is not Boring: Cool Stories That Actually Happened (Probably)

A common argument I hear in favor of fantasy literature and games is that real history is boring. I will here defend that not only is history not boring, but it is actually more interesting than anything we could come up with. One need only look at A Song of Ice and Fire to pick out the historical inspirations - Hadrian's Wall, the Protestant Reformation, the Angles conquest (really? he called them Andals, of all things), even the landscape of Westeros is basically the British isles with Ireland turned sideways. The list goes on.

So here I will begin posting really cool people and events from history, either to inspire your own game as a historical pursuit or to take the ideas, stories, and elements for use in your own fantasy adaptations.

To get us started, some cool stuff from more or less own period:

Cesare Borgia
(1498-1507)
A Spaniard and an Italian, son of a Pope, ex-cardinal (first person to ever resign the office!) who becomes a condottieri (soldier), commands the papal armies, eventually carves out his own state and is ultimately cast from power by a series of betrayals and political machinations. An excellent tale of passion, ambition, assassination, and political intrigue. The Showtime Borgias isn't terrible either, even if it starts quite slowly.

Hernán Cortés
(1485-1547)
Another Spaniard who goes from being a relative nobody (born of lesser nobility) to carve a bloody mark in the history books. Explorer, soldier, military captain. Brilliant politician that successfully forges alliances among natives in order to bring down an empire.

Sir Kenelm Digby
(1603-1665)
English courtier, diplomat, natural philosopher, alchemist, fencer. Born not only Catholic, but the son of one of the Gunpowder Plotters, he still manages to gain enough favor at court to land a seat in the Royal Academy, later becomes a privateer, captures spanish, dutch, and flemish ships. Gets involved in the civil war, fights quite a few duels.. guy is absolutely fascinating.

Johannes Liechtenauer
Mysterious fight-master who was active sometime in the 14th century. Most of the later fight-masters trace their own "school" back to him in some way. Even with the limited information we have, he's worth reading on. The mind immediately wants to cast this wandering yoda-like elderly sword-saint traveling through the German countryside.

Hans Talhoffer
(1410-1482)
Professional swordsman turned Fight-master that eventually founds and becomes grandmaster of an entire German school of fencing. True renaissance man who was also studied a number of academic subjects throughout his life.

Swordsmen Cultures and Organizations
Brotherhood of St. Mark
15th century German fencing guild. Talhoffer may have actually founded it. Some really cool information on the way fencing guilds functioned. The article also mentions rivalry with other fencing guilds - the Lukasbruder (Brotherhood of Saint Luke) and the Federfechter. Immediately, I want to run a game about rival fencing guilds and the bloody conflicts between students vying for position within their own guild, and defending the honor and prowess of their guild through battle with its rivals.

Rodeleros
Spanish Sword and Buckler men, originally a troop type invented by the Italians. High risk, high reward troop types that become popular as adventurers and mercenaries, including following Cortes into the New World.

Landsknecht
Arguably some of the most famous mercenaries from the Renaissance period, known for their colorful clothing and - perhaps most famously - their massive two-handed swords.

Tercio
Also known as the "Spanish Third," they were the first modern, professional volunteer army. While Landsknecht certainly get a lot of attention, the culture and lifestyle of the Tercio is fascinating.

"Soldiers serving in the tercios were proud and extremely cautious men when it came to their personal honour. So much so, that they would die before staining their reputation as soldiers."

"Such an obsession for matters of honour and reputation would provoke numerous duels, which, added to the soldiers' fierceness on the battlefield, earned the tercios a quarrelsome reputation. When fighting together with allies or tercios from different nationalities, it was common that the Spanish ones demanded the most decisive, dangerous or important positions in combat, in order to defend their reputation. In fact, the Spanish army was the only one at the time which had to include punishments for those who dared to break formation due to eagerness for fighting or to distinguish themselves in the face of the enemy."

I will come back and add more over time, but seriously - history is fascinating. 

Lars Andersen and Historical Archery

There is a video floating around that has gotten a good deal of attention lately. In addition to 22 million views, I've gotten a couple questions about it myself. One of which on the Grand Heresy Forums. I responded some there, but I thought I would elaborate and provide a more thoughtful answer here.

I'll start off with the same disclaimer I've made before. The video is very interesting to watch. Lars Andersen is an extremely talented archer, and nothing I say here is to discredit that skill. The issue I take is passing off extremely impressive trick shooting as battlefield archery. He can do some very cool things, but not necessarily things that are of practical martial application.

I'll say up front that I'm not a fan of the tone the video takes. The thing pitches itself like an infomercial, making sensationalist claims about "uncovered secrets" and playing along the "myths debunked! everything you know is wrong!!!@!1" kind of nonsense. This is complete with the exaggerated incompetence you expect from a 4am infomercial. I half expected a transition to black and white film wherein a woman would unsuccessfully try to cut a banana by mashing it with the flat of a kitchen knife. With dramatic music, a voice-over would shout "BANANAS GOT YOU DOWN?"

"WELL WORRY NO MORE! WITH THE BANAMATIC™ HOME BANANA SLICING SYSTEM, YOUR BANANA SLICING TROUBLES ARE OVER!"

There some important things to realize when dealing with the claims made in the video. First, despite the imagery used, archery is no more monolithic and uniform an art than is swordsmanship. Every culture has developed its own weapons and means to use them, and this includes archery. The Egyptians were using different bows and techniques than the mounted Huns were, or the Mary Rose era longbow archers. This is no different than the way the Norse broadsword, Japanese katana, and Italian rapier were each different in their use. They were different weapons, with different purposes, taught by different cultures for use in overcoming the different challenges they would face.

Much of what he is demonstrating is out of the Arabic tradition, which used the smaller bows that were used throughout the east, developing out of horseback archery. Horseback archery in the east had a very specific character, often riding into relatively close ranges, launching a series of arrows and getting back out. Their bows were compact, nimble, and relatively moderate draw weight. The opponents they fought were usually very lightly armored.

In the west, military archery is a long range affair with thousands of archers in block formation firing on other block formations at 300 yards or more with heavy powered bows. Mike Loades has credited the Mary Rose era bows as being 100-120lbs or more. I believe one gentleman on Weapons that Made Britain was actually demonstrated loosing a massive 150lbs draw weight bow. This is no small feat. These were weapons firing heavy projectiles at extremely long range to overcome thick maille and plate armor. The bows were often too long to comfortably use on horseback, and the higher poundage bows required a full-body exertion to draw properly.

Seriously. We can identify the bodies of English longbowman by their deformed spines and enlarged left arms.

This isn't to say that western archers never fought while mobile or skirmished. Robin Hood has a lot of basis in fact, as it turns out. Mounted archers of a sort also existed in the west, but in the manner of later mounted infantry, not fighting mounted but instead using the horse only for mobility to get into (and retreat from) a position.

We are talking about different weapons systems, different purposes, with different methods of deployment.


Aside from the historical issues, there is a secondary claim that is a theme throughout the video. Much is made about the speed with which he looses his arrows, even going so far as to show footage of his drawing juxtaposed to the drawing of other archers. What he fails to mention is that he achieves this speed by not drawing the bow back more than a few inches. If you watch closely, he very rarely draws the bow back more than a quarter of the way at any point in the video. This makes for impressive speed, and can probably put a lot of arrows on target, but you make major sacrifices in range and power in doing so.

He does some really cool stuff with it, but I would be extremely surprised if it would deliver anything approaching the kind of force you would need to put someone down through even a padded jack at 50 yards.

I'll state it again. It's an awesome video, and he does some really impressive trick shooting. You could even argue that the trick shots have some basis in history, in that professional archers even then probably developed the ability to do similar feats to show off to their friends. Some things never change. But the claims he can make and apply to his trick shooting don't really apply to any kind of martial archery.

Until next time, 

History and Religion in RPG Settings

I think we have all encountered this somewhere in our experience with Roleplaying games. You thumb through the pages of what promises to be an interesting setting, but among the first things to greet you is an extremely lengthy and detailed "history of the world." In addition to being something of a dry read (timelines are never, never fun to read) it's interesting that these generally present theological elements as well. Together, these form two things that tend to annoy me in prewritten settings.

The first issue I tend to take is that history is always so complete, and written from such an absolute standpoint. We have exact dates for everything of importance for everything that has ever happened in the setting, which itself strikes me as weird, as our own history is one in which knowledge is repeatedly discovered, recorded, lost, and rediscovered. As someone who gets really into history in real life, I find it a bit jarring how exact and specific - how good - the record keeping is for all of time for essentially the entire planet is since the dawn of time. Adding to that, it's rarely written in character, from the perspective of any given group of people. 

In real life, history has a massive bias depending on who you talk to and when, who won and who lost. What we remember as a crusade for the holy land, the east remembers as "the Frankish invasion" and paints in much the way we painted the norse raids on churches and monasteries. Rome and the celts are another wonderful example, with history remembering the celts and Gauls as a barbarian rabble and a threat to "civilization," whereas archeology is forced to paint them as having a fully developed and complex society of their own - albeit one with the misfortune to stand between Rome and a substantial amount of silver. 

Clever role players can try to analyze the timeline and try to come up with alternate views based on their characters individual culture, but such attempts always seem forced. Having an official time line both presented and confirmed out of character can take a lot of the perspective out of the game. Which brings me to my next issue: religion. 

Religion in role-playing games is often handled so poorly. This isn't such a problem when the main religion in the game is NotCatholicism as most writers in the western world are at least familiar enough to fake it. However, the further one gets from this basic model the worse it becomes. I can't count how many settings I've come across that present the culture as some kind of paganesq polytheism, but the writers don't seem to understand the basics of how polytheism works as a world view.

In real world polytheisms, there are a whole mess of gods and goddesses, each with their own domains. Individuals within that culture may have an affinity to one god or another in particular, usually based on their vocation (warriors like war gods, farmers like whomever will bless the harvest) but as a whole it is a service-based religion. You go to whomever offers the thing you need at the time. I don't care how much you love Ares, when you're having lady troubles you go to Aphrodite or Hera. The trouble in many RPGs is that rather than treating the gods like a pantheon belonging to the same culture, you wind up with a setup where the various gods have competing churches. This is particularly bad in Forgotten Realms, where in third edition at least, failure to "dedicate" oneself to a specific god meant that you would spend eternity in a kind of purgatory, your soul becoming part of kelemvor's wall. Apparently, if I am a farmer in the realms, it isn't just my vocation - it must also be my religion. 

This setup gets even weirder when the authors begin attributing other monotheistic traits to polytheisms. Very often, you will find a hard push for a given deity to espouse a certain dogma, with different gods within the same pantheon often having contradictory or directly oppositional codes of ethics and dogmas, demands from their followers. Real polytheisms in history don't do this. The overwhelming majority of polytheisms are votive religions. This is the simplest relationship one can have with divinity. I leave you this nice offering in exchange for you either blessing me, or in some cases simply not wrecking my shit. The codes of ethics and values in these societies come from the society as a whole. There may be a mythological basis for it, but that comes from the mythology as a whole. If you're writing a polytheism, you're writing a single coherent religion. Catholicism would have never worked if the idea was that each part of the trinity and every angel and saint had different and contradictory expectations and demands. 

This isn't to say there can't be specific cults with different or contradictory teachings, there are always mystery cults and fringe sects. You simply need to be aware or this when writing and indicate that group B is different than the population at large. 

Much like with the above absolute nature of history, I personally dislike when games mechanically or out of character confirm things about the settings religion. When our out of character official history tells us that the god Zeno created the world, you have directly told the players that the Zenites are right, and that anyone who doesn't acknowledge Zeno is mechanically, objectively wrong. 

Weirder still, when you have a setting that features direct divine intervention and literally god powered divine spells (as opposed to powered by the faith of the caster) you miss a lot of opportunities for interesting role playing. You can't have discussions of faith when deity is a proven and objective fact. You can't disbelieve, or remain a skeptic of a priests claims when they can summon deity at will. You can't have questions about dogma or theological debates, heresies and reformations. The mystery and wonder of religion and the nature and power of faith fundamentally change when you can pick up a phone and get god on the line when need be. 

I honestly understand why many settings are written in exactly the above way. I think a lot of people find the real world so murky and ambiguous that a setting where everything is laid out, clear-cut and definitive is somewhat comforting. There are no grey areas. This is the good guy country because they are backed by the god of good guys and their enemies are the bad guys who were created by the bad god. There are no questions that need to be asked, no ethical quandaries. Just pure heroics. 

And that's absolutely fine. I can understand the appeal. I just find it .. Boring. For me, leaving things ambiguous, up for debate, means giving my character free reign to decide how he relates to the world, what these things mean to him and ultimately what his values are when put to the test. Whenever something is confirmed out of character by the setting, that opportunity feels diminished. 

Just my thoughts on the matter. 

Until next time,