5x5 Listing

Because I just got a few new fonts, and am having fun creating new banners, here's a complete listing of my 5x5s that I've either partly (or completely, in one case) planned, or am thinking about doing in the next... I dunno, months or couple of years tops or so. I want to have more options than just the three I started with, especially as I've had more regions added to the orbit of The Three Realms since I came up with my original list. A few of them have slight renaming issues, or other things; Shadow Over Garenport sounds too much like The Shadow of Old Night, and it isn't really accurate that it's super focused on Garenport anyway. 

Cult of Undeath is literally the original campaign that I've worked on. It started as my attempt to adapt the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into something that I could use; taking some of the better elements from it and putting them into a different framework that didn't focus on so many fetchit macguffin quests, railroads, dungeon-crawls and other D&D nonsense. By the time I finished it (for generous definitions of finished) it resembled Carrion Crown very little, and only one or two story beats are even passingly familiar. Although of course all Old Night campaigns are going to be horror-like, this one is based on really classic Gothic horror, with vampires, ghosts, and stuff like that featuring prominently.

Curse of the Corsair Coast is what I'm going to call my Freeport-inspired adaptation. I don't know how much of Freeport modules that I intend to liberally raid for fun elements and ideas will still be left over when I'm done, but it should at least have a similar feel, and that's my starting point.

Originally developed under the title Chaos in Waychester, and later renamed Shadows Over Garenport, Darkness in the Hill Country is the final name of this campaign, and the first that was finished under the new 5x5 Front methodology. It's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, lacking perhaps the super-strong theming of most of the others, and just being focused on the relatively familiar Hill Country area of the setting. I consider this the most iconic campaign of Old Night.

I haven't yet given a lot of thought to this, but as I added more references to Hyperborea to the setting as I worked on it, I developed a strong desire to have a 5x5 Front (or maybe a smaller 3x5 or something; we'll see) set there, with a focus on Lovecraftian horrors and icy wilderness. A kind of fantasy At the Mountains of Madness if you will. I presume that it may well start in Lower Kurushat, and involve some stuff there too before taking off across the Wolfwood to reach Hyperborea.

My main inspiration for this is, believe it or not, The Hangover. The idea is that the PCs start this campaign by waking up in the desert a day or two journey from Simashki, surrounded by dead bodies and charred and broken wagons; what looks like the remains of a massacred caravan. But, they have no idea who any of these bodies are, why they themselves are here, or—and they notice this soon enough—how and why at least two weeks have passed since the last thing that any of them can remember.  Trying to unravel the mystery will have them galivant across the blasted, daemon-haunted deserts of the Daemon Wastes, naturally. Slightly more light-hearted than the other ones, as I intend to put as many awkward moments in based on stuff that happened that the PCs can't remember as I can. But it's still an Old Night campaign; it'll be dark and horror-themed, of course.

As Cult of Undeath started to migrate a little bit to the east, and now straddles the Hill Country and Timischburg, I thought I needed another campaign in the West. This started out as my first stab at a Corsair Coast 5x5, but it ends up spending time on the Timischburg coastline a lot, and even makes a stop at exotic Nizrekh. Just a high level outline for now, but what I have, I'll want to focus a little less on the Corsair Coast (since I now have a whole new campaign for that) and more on the Timischburg coastline.

Fronts vs the 5x5 method

Quite some time ago now, I came up with three campaign setting briefs that I could run in DH5, which is now Dark Fantasy X. It was my intention to use the "fronts" method from Dungeon World to further develop these briefs into something that I could run. Fronts are not really like a campaign or an adventure; there is very little pre-written, like a module or the newer 5e style campaigns. However, it posits challenges that the PCs should face, by creating antagonistic individuals or organizations with goals that the PCs would potentially challenge. If they don't challenge them, the individuals gradually start to accomplish their goals, and things get worse in the setting, at some point presumably sparking the PCs to intervene... although if they don't, it's not the end of the world, and they can further deal with other challenges that I suppose that they think are more interesting than the one that they've ignored. This is much more how I like to run than modules anyway. However, I've found that creating "fronts" is very fiddly and mechanical, and I dislike the method, even though it's not terribly different than methods that I use more intuitively and less mechanically. Dungeon World is, in general, a very jargony game that loves to create engineering-like flowcharts for what is fundamentally a less structured activity, and I found myself turned off by thinking of creating "dangers" and "grim portents" and all of that jazz. Even if, realistically, I'd have to create all of that material anyway, the way fronts as structured just kind of clashed with my brain in some fundamental way, so I never really got around to it.

Another method which I liked better and used a bit early on in the CULT OF UNDEATH project was the 5x5 method. You can find this online, at the original blog where it was written, but the best version of the method is described in Dragon Magazine #429, which is available here via Scribd if you don't have it. I didn't keep using this method, because like pre-written adventures everywhere, even if it was a looser format, it proscribed what the PCs were supposed to do, which misses the point. I do like the method, though, for structuring outlines, it's just that I wouldn't ever want to structure an adventure outline like that anymore.

But wait! I thought. What if—instead of using the 5x5 model to try and plot out the actions of the PCs—I used it to plot out the actions of the NPCs, specifically the villains and antagonists that the PCs would be expected to confront? I don't know why this didn't click with me before, but that is a structure that I can use better than the weird, mechanistic and creativity and soul sucking fronts system, which I like much more in theory than in practice.

Now, I still need to come up with a bit of structure for my antagonists and villains; which isn't much different than coming up with the "dangers" of Dungeon World, and I also need to think of clues that the PCs will be able to find that will clue them in that the villains are progressing through their steps. But I actually don't think committing those to words is important... yet. I'll also point out that there's nothing magical about the number 5 in the 5x5. I think it's a good number of rows to have, because those correspond to steps in the antagonists plans, and five is a reasonable number for a plan that is reasonable to run the PCs against. But the number of columns can be more fluid. I actually think three overarching campaign "plots" is my preferred method, but I also like to have marginally smaller (at least in terms of stakes and "screen time", if you will) columns for each PC that I get. And I can't actually even start working on those until I get my PCs. So, we'll start with the basic 3-5 plots and put them in place for each of my three setting briefs: CULT OF UNDEATH, CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER and MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND and then see what next steps I go with after that. I'm actually thinking... that I may use this same structure as a story outline, and then write some fiction about my own characters, since gaming in the short-term seems unlikely. But we'll see. That's a bit of a wild idea right now, and certainly not a commitment.

Not 100% sure what Frank Frazetta's artwork of a werewolf and a vampire fighting has to do with that other than that it fits thematically—more or less—with the CULT OF UNDEATH brief, but what-the-heck. It's a cool picture.

A mapmaker's nightmare

After spending most of an evening drawing a map only to ink in a couple of features that look terrible, out of scale, or otherwise not pretty. Sigh. And then apply liquid paper to it, only to find out that your liquid paper is a bit old and clumpy rather than smooth, not to mention blueish and discolored compared to the paper that it's sitting on. I was ~85% or so finished with this map, and now I'm wondering if I should just go ahead knowing that I can fix it in post (i.e. digitally) but I'll always hate the paper version, or start over (what's a few hours?) knowing that I've learned my lesson about sketching in pencil first?

The map in question was a re-doing of the Baal Hamazi region of my map; i.e., about a third in the northwest of the main map. I was pretty happy with it, although to be honest with you, the Gorgelands wasn't turning out ideal either. I'm just not good at those canyons yet. Maybe I should bust out some scratch paper and practice more, and do the whole thing over again. Sigh.

That said, I was quite happy with the forests. I'd returned to a less belabored version of them, more like how I drew them years ago on the big posterboard Dark•Heritage Mk. IV map. But a few minor tweaks to the process were added, mostly because with the varied width tips of the Pixma Micron pen set, I could. In fact, I need to really remember to only use the Pixma pens; I had used my gel pen for some of it, gotten an icon that I'd drawn transferred to the side of my little finger because the gel pens bleed, and then retransferred that same icon back on the map at a place I didn't want it! That was easily enough fixed; I guess I'm just adding another ruins site or something. But again, I think I want to just start over. Kind of a shame; I spend a good three-four hours on this, and the only reason that I didn't spend more was because I already knew the layout of the map, mostly. Sigh again.

The map was capable of standing in for either a regional focus on the Baal Hamazi (+ Boneyard  + the edge of Kurushat up there at the far north) or for the MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND campaign either one. The replacement will as well, I presume. I'd also added a few new features to the Boneyard specifically. While I said earlier that the majority of it would be represented by a rough pinyon-juniper woodland biome—a relatively high altitude semi-desert semi-forest eocsystem with loads of red rock formations—that's pretty difficult to represent in this kind of map, so I'm mostly just putting in my "rolling terrain" hash marks with a few Monument Valley style rock formations. I did, however, have the forest actually turn into a legitimate, thick forest for part of the map. This forest was going to be filled with bandits and cannibals. In my mind it was Cannibal Forest, although that's just the first thought that came to me, not exactly what I expected to end up with. Maneater Forest? Long Pork Forest? I dunno. Do I really need to make this forest so unfriendly? The DH5 setting doesn't have any lack of forests that are seriously bad news. The Bitterwood further south in Timischburg is famous for xenophobic woses and even werewolves, the Thursewood further east is obviously full of maneating thurses. The Haunted Forest has angry Skraelings, Lovecraftian horrors and necromancers and other undead. The Wolfwood further north is the closest thing to a friendly forest; it "only" has bandits and loads of natural predators like wolves, bears, sabertooths and giant red-furred lions. Yeah, well. Land of adventure, right? I'm also thinking of putting a society of intelligent apes and baboons in this forest. It'll be a little cooler than their habitat normally is, but they'll manage. After all, they're intelligent; they can wear additional furs in the winter months or something.

I had also added a thin, snaky mountain range I was going to call the Dragon's Spine or maybe the Serpent's Spine (after I checked to see if that totally obvious name had already been used somewhere or not first.) It is meant to be less like a normal mountain range and more like an enormous and curiously curving dike that stretches for many leagues. And I thought a big solo mountain somewhere in that region, like a Mount Shasta or Mount Hood or something like that (or a Lonely Mountain, for that matter)

Campaign planning, part II

OK, after a bit of a chaotic part one where I came up with no fewer than three campaign briefs and new tags while trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I figured it was time to take a step back, slow down just a bit, and figure out how to do this with a little bit more planning. Luckily, this is all theoretical right now rather than real, although doing stuff theoretically makes me wish it was real; maybe I'll stretch out my stiff, unused GM muscles and try to round up a group again. I doubt it'll be the people I used to play with; we're just too scattered to the four winds in more ways than just geography, so I'll have to reach out and find new players. Which isn't an impossible task; I do know a handful of other friends that I know game, although we've never gamed together, and I know where to go to meet potential new players too. I'll worry about that at some point a bit further down the line, though—for now, I'll continue to go through this exercise as if I were writing a column about planning campaigns rather than as if I'm actually planning a campaign. If that makes any sense.

Because I like all three of the campaign briefs, I will probably actually develop all three of them. After all, my campaign development is a format that doesn't require tons of extraneous work; most of what I develop for one could, if necessary, be easily adopted to another campaign if it comes down to it. Plus, I want to do so anyway. But I've got these three campaign briefs; let's assume that I'd pitch all three of them as options to a group, and let them discuss among themselves and decide which one they would want to do. What else would they need to make an informed decision and be ready—upon deciding—to show up, make characters, and start playing?

The first thing I note is that I've migrated a bit away from requiring my group to read the rules. Because the game is 1) of my own authorship anyway, and 2) quick and easy, I think it'd be a lot easier if I didn't require them to read it, and only made it available in the "endnotes" if you will of the pitch, for those who really want to dig into the details. I wouldn't have any expectation that anyone necessarily would, though. Because of this, I think I need another one pager, that describes at a very high level the game and the setting, and gives them enough information to at least pick a race and class and know what it means in the context of the setting. This 1-pager would be a setting and game 1-pager, and would not come in different versions, but would rather be the same regardless of which of the campaign briefs the group favored. 

I also think that I need to provide the smaller maps for each of the campaign proposals. I'll need it anyway to play, and why not let the players see it, so they can have some basic geographical context that their characters should have? Plus, I know different people get excited about different things, but there really don't seem to be a lot of fantasy fans who don't think a good map is fun to look at, as well as something that stirs the imagination and gets them excited wondering what the names and images and icons would be like "on the ground."

An easy way to keep this stuff organized would be to create a wiki or website. Luckily, I have a Google Sites page that I'm not using for anything really that would fit the bill perfectly. I know; the name isn't perfect; I named it a bit on the early side, but still—it was always meant to do basically what I would be using it for now anyway; I just never got around to it. I'll go ahead and add the link, with the caveat that it doesn't have any new content on it yet at all, and the content that it does have is a bit out of date. But still; here's the link. If nothing else, it'll remind me to go update it if I see it linked here: https://sites.google.com/site/timischburg

So, I'll update the wiki; for now, it'll be a quick and dirty introduction to the setting and the game, offer links to the game rules, and offer links to the campaign briefs and (once they're available) the maps. From a player-facing perspective, that's probably all that I want for now, although once campaigns were to ever start, I'd want to add links to the characters, and quick and dirty session summaries. I'd turn it in to a proper setting wiki. 

One this is done, I can regroup again and start doing fronts and planning adversaries for the various campaigns, as well as a few bullet points on what I think are likely events that would happen later down the road in each campaign, assuming that I have the ability to predict any of that. This material wouldn't really be player facing, at least not yet until they've uncovered enough information in play that they would know it. 

EDIT: For whatever it's worth, I've updated the rules to a new rev level, by adding a brief rule for using combat advantage, as I've discussed here, as well as cleaning up a number of other little minor details that were either rambling and unnecessary (especially in the opening words) or out of date, or unclear. I've also made minor tweaks to the campaign briefs by not having any of them use hardcore mode after all. And, I've updated the front page for the wiki, although right now that's all it is: an introductory one-pager to the setting and game. I'll add links to the campaign briefs too, and that's probably all I need to do for now; it'll be updated sometime in the future once it's actually being used for a real game instead of a theoretical one.

Quick notes

Three quick notes, neither of much serious consequence. So I'll throw this cool although randomly non sequitur image in too, just so the post isn't totally useless. Neal Adams' famous cover art for the version of Tarzan of the Apes that I own. Neal Adams and Boris Vallejo illustrated the entire series if I remember correctly, mostly alternating between titles. Vallejo is OK, and he did some good art for some other series here and there, but I always greatly preferred Adams for Tarzan. Curiously, Frazetta did covers for most other Burroughs works, but his Tarzan stuff was only sketchy stuff that he did that never graced any cover, was mostly line art, and he was always personally disappointed in it. 

Anyway, the three notes: I've decided to do an unusual thing with my mapmaking future for Dark Heritage. I'm not going to redraw the entire map after all (flip-flop again, I know.) Rather, I'm going to draw smaller area maps of portions of the map, that would be appropriate for a single campaign rather than showing the whole shebang. I'm also as I do this, and this is the part that will probably sound strange and unusual to most, not going to worry overmuch about getting the details exactly the same. In fact, I'll deliberately distort some elements. Thinking about the epilogue or reboot, if you will, of CULT OF UNDEATH that I'm currently working on, I can see that drawing a map for that campaign specifically would be one that is abnormally long and thin. Not like a piece of paper turned landscape, but two or three pages turned landscape and laid end to end. A 5x1 ratio map, or something else ridiculously long and low. So rather than maintain the same proportions as the original map, I'll distort it so that it fits landscape on a smaller yet normally ratioed piece of paper. Rather than worry overly much about which is "right", I'll say that whatever the version I'm using for my campaign is right for that campaign, but the original map (or original maps; I have three that aren't even the same as each other, fer cryin' out loud) will always be the ones that I turn to for reference when creating a campaign specific map. And any changes that need to be made to accommodate that campaign will be in a kind of quantum, Schrödinger's canon interpretation, where what is and isn't in the "canonical" DH5 setting isn't defined, and doesn't ever need to be defined. The changes for any given campaign vs the original map could be just as canonical as the original, but I have no interest in addressing the paradox or clarifying which is more "canonical" than the other. 

This is in strict contrast to how Tolkien did it. He messed around with all kinds of details with his setting, up to his death, even, but once something was committed to print, he felt bound to honor it as "correct." An interesting example of this is his origin of orcs. Now, granted, the Silmarillion wasn't actually published until after his death, but the Silmarillion had a very specific and definite origin of the orcs spelled out in it. However, Christopher Tolkien himself was later unhappy with having defined that (among many other details). We can see from The Peoples of Middle-earth that Tolkien had actually changed his mind and did not necessarily favor the interpretation that he had written in his notes for The Silmarillion after all. Although he passed away before completing the change, so the Silmarillion was published with the older origin story included. Had that happened while Tolkien was still alive, he'd have felt stuck with it, even though he no longer actually favored that approach.

Meanwhile, I'm deliberately suggesting that I reject hard and fast canon for my own setting, and whatever I feel is correct in that moment is correct... in that moment. But it may not be in another moment in the future.

Second note: I'm going to do one more campaign brief. In fact, I already know most of what it will have, so maybe I should have taken the time to just write it up rather than post about how I'm going to, but I'll have that ready soon. Why three campaign briefs? I actually kind of like the idea that if I were on the verge of running soon, which I'm not so it's an academic, theoretical discussion for now, then I'd like to have three different campaign proposals ready to pitch, and the group could pick together which concept sounds most interesting to them. Now, granted—they're all still in the same setting, and will have mostly the same tone and themes—albeit with subtle variations and tweaks. This third one will, if anything, be the least dark and potentially more gonzo and absurd of the bunch, as I'm getting the main theme of the campaign itself by riffing off the main theme of the movie The Hangover and proposing that the characters are missing a week of their lives, and they don't know what happened, but it's clear that they did a whole bunch of really crazy and out of character stuff that they now need to reconcile to. This will be challenging, because they have no idea what it was until someone confronts them about something that happened while their memory was gone, so they'll be bouncing back and forth from one bizarre surprise after another. UPDATE: Here it is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gj81zwHv6lqvi9Ym2eNpwKrODS7UHUv4/view?usp=sharing

If I'm calling my reworking of CULT OF UNDEATH by it's original name; just reworked for a new vision of how it should have been done all along anyway, then I probably need labels for these other two campaign précis too, and I'll go through the same exercise with them eventually. The original campaign brief should be called CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER and this third one can be MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTELAND. Those actually make Cult of Undeath sound kind of tame in comparison. Well, whatever. I can always rename it if I ever actually run it and want a more gratuitously exciting pulpy title.

Third note: I've spent the last few days, after blogging about the three main influences and best descriptions of my GMing style, re-reading the Ray Winninger run of the Dungeoncraft column. And reading it again now, I realize that while he had some great ideas that resonated with me because I did those things too, and liked having them specifically articulated rather than intuitively felt, that there's much more that I don't like about how he describes his running style too. I still think that it's a good run, with some good advice, but I guess I'd filtered it more than I remembered; I found it somewhat less compelling to re-read again after not having done so for quite a few years. Fer the heckuvit, I'm going to re-read the Chris Perkins column too. It's not nearly so prescriptive or organized; it just talks about a whole bunch of random ideas. I never considered myself a follower of his "discipline" because I have no idea exactly what it is, but I sure like an awful lot of his specific ideas. Let's see if after a number of years I still agree.