Strip Maps

Few people of Fletnern use maps.  For the everyday person, even those who might be traveling from one place to another, will not use a map.  If they do not know where they are going, they can ask for directions or rely on road signs.  Every town that wants to be visited (engage in trade) makes certain that there are sufficient signs directing people to their town.

The main users of maps are the navigators, most commonly those on ships.  They need to be able to spot and recognize land marks, even if they are simply a stretch of coast.  Surveyors and other governmental officials use maps but most often in the collecting of taxes and not in exploration.  These maps are incredibly expensive.  Not only are they expensive to craft, but they are incredibly expensive to make accurately.

When travelers are looking to use a map, they most commonly buy a strip map.  Not only are these maps vastly cheaper to craft and develop but they don’t waste space showing a traveler a piece of land they will never see, most typically anything away from the road.  All a strip map shows is what the traveler should expect to see while following the road, river, or whatever established path the map explains.  Nearly every purchaser of this type of map understands that the map maker was paid by certain people along the way to make certain that their businesses are included on the map.  For instance, if you buy a particular strip map, you will be shown where the inns are that helped the map maker, but probably not see the ones that didn’t give him a little extra.  One would hope that the cartographer was steering you towards the best inns, but that is not necessarily the case.

September Setting Sale

So that you know - Board Enterprises' settings are on sale through the end of the month at RPG Now.  That means that you get 33% off Urban Developments and our other setting products.
Click here to participate, but you only have until the end of September.

Urban Adventures

If you have not game mastered urban adventures before, they tend to be far different than running a dungeon crawl.  For one thing, it is a lot harder to keep the party of characters together.  Quite often, they all have different priorities and tend to wander off to pursue them.  This is most likely because they feel safe; they feel they can wander off without fear of being killed within the city limits.

Especially in a campaign where battle can occur in the streets and alleys, having members of the party in different parts of the city can not only be confusing and difficult to administer, it can be downright dangerous.  But these choices need to be those of the players and the player characters.  If they insist on living dangerously, it is your job as the GM to punish them for it, possibly even killing them because of it.

One of the main benefits of a dungeon style adventure is that the GM can determine many of the parameters surrounding a fight.  The dungeon is mapped; the ceilings can be pre-determined; line of sight angles can only come in so many variations.  This is not true of an urban adventure.  Fights can break out in intersections or parks, and line of sight can be affected by everything from buildings to trees to moving horse drawn coaches.  This adds to the complexity for the game master.  You and the players have to have a prearranged agreement that you know more about the staging than you can describe and they simply have to go with it.  Any player who argues about there not being a clearly defined map that he can place his figure on needs to be counseled after the game session that he’s being a jerk and needs to knock it off.

One of the best things that urban adventures can bring is the concept of overlapping time lines.  It is likely that several different things are all going on at the same time in the same town.  The main “mission” could be rivalries between merchant houses, while at the same time some thieves are feuding over a magical weapon they have stolen from its rightful owner.  The point is that even substantial clues and activities might not belong to your mission, but instead to someone else’s.

Urban missions are great for not having that “end boss” (aka the big, nasty, evil guy at the end).  There are multiple factions in a city.  Some will oppose the party, while others may be possible allies.  With so many moving parts, the adventurers should be a little confused.  They should never be 100% certain of whom they can trust, and that will keep the suspense high.

Further, not everything should be spelled out for them up front.  They will need to find clues, talk to people and learn as they go.  Obviously not everything they learn will be accurate, but again, more suspense and more fun.  This need for investigation may be new to some of your players who have never been challenged like this in a role-playing game.  Hopefully they will find it more exciting due to the newness and challenge.  As GM, you should also expect that characters who had pre-defined roles in more combat intensive missions may find themselves in completely different roles here.  Warning - Big, dumb fighter is not all that useful, until combat breaks out, if it does at all.

This is just a warning; we do not want to discourage you from running urban adventures.  As you and your players mature, the idea of hundreds of underground complexes filled with monsters becomes too much for the willful suspension of disbelief.  When that happens, you will find yourself working on the urban missions and avoiding the crawls.

Happy Harpooners

Hey!  Another FREE edition of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites (or "Small Bites") has been posted.  Just click right here.

It says All About Sea Ports, so it's boring, right?  Just stupid stuff about how they make piers and what color the water is.  Of course not!  There's lots of stuff about whales and whalers.  I gotta tell you I think whaling has got to be one of the most intense professions possible in a fantasy world.  Yes, days of relative boredom followed by a huge chase, harpooning a whale and being dragged along, then trying to kill the whale before he overturns the boat.

But this is Small Bites.  We have characters, cool NPCs, cooler locations, missions, etc.  Oh, yeah, what would you do if you knew a sea monster powerful enough to destroy the port was steaming in towards the city?  Not just a sea monster, but a demonic sea monster.  Yeah - that's what the campaign starter kit is all about.  Demons, spirits, a haunted castle, this is high fantasy!  OK, but in fairness, that's all in the GM edition and not the free World Walker edition, but still, take a look at the free stuff and we hope you'll see that there's enough here that you're going to want the extra 32 pages!

Wiki Update

Through your support, our Fletnern wiki continues to grow.  We have reached another Patreon milestone and will be making sure we are publishing at least seven (7) wiki posts every month!  Thanks everyone!

Do you want to have a say in which wiki posts we do first?  Please click the link here and go out to our Patreon page.  We are not yet challenged.  Seven?  Seven we can do in our sleep.  Challenge us!  I dare you.  (OK, that was just a cheap way of trying to manipulate you into patronizing us.  Did it work?  Would it have worked if we didn’t call out how obvious it was?)

What’s Money?

This is a nearly painful post for me to write.  Why?  Because I know what money is.  It is those small pieces of paper with dead presidents on it.  It is gold, silver and sometimes copper (though I refer to pennies as litter).  It is jewels, jewelry and sometimes watches (if they aren’t plastic or rubber).  So what’s the point?  Well, I think I already hit it.

Who are you asking the question?  To modern folks, money is paper currency and electronic signals.  To fantasy folks, it is precious metals and jewels.  While we will recognize and appreciate their money, they would think us complete morons for chasing our money.  There is no possible way a fantasy person could see the value in paper currency.

But it doesn’t stop there.  I was reminded of a rather interesting point recently.  The Zulus saw cattle as wealth.  Imagine the culture shock of a Zulu trying to talk to a British soldier or diplomat:  How many cattle do you have?  None.  Oh, so you’re poor.  No, I have a very nice home in London.  But no cattle. No, no cows.  Are you married?  Yes, and I have two sons.  How will you marry off your sons when you have no cattle with which to pay the brides’ fathers?  I don’t need any.  So you’re broke, a bum, a guy who will marry off his sons to the ugliest, most barren women in the city of London because you have no cattle with which to buy wives for them.

OK, I’ll stop that, but this seriously had to be culture shock, and it’s just one example.  There is an action movie I really enjoy due to its campiness where the hero says, “These are desert people.  They value water, not gold.”  OK, they probably valued both, but there is a point in there.  If water and food are really rare, you’ll pay anything for them.

This is the point of trade!  If I have food and you have silver, let’s trade.  If I have silk and you have emeralds, let’s trade.  The point is to move goods from where they are cheap to where they are valuable.

To make this worthwhile for the gold farmers - here’s an unexpected consequence to this cultural / role-playing concept:  A lot of games allow holy spell casters to cast summon water spells (or whatever you call it).  Imagine this:  You show up in a desert.  The desert raiders are willing to barter with you, and you set up your tents at one of their oases.  Then they see your cleric cast a bring water spell and you all drink it.  The desert raiders will now do whatever is necessary to buy or steal that cleric from you.  They will kill the entire rest of the party in order to get that cleric.  You have to see it from their perspective:  What would your characters do if they found an elf who actually pooped out diamonds?  Would they not kill everyone else allied with that elf and take him/her hostage?  From their perspective, it is basically the same thing (but without the pooping).

Let’s reverse this:  The party is trading with folks they know to be less than legit, and find they have a “slave” kept alone in a cave.  These guys have lots of slaves for sale, but this one is obviously different, and she’s not for sale.  Maybe they figure out that she is a cleric with summon water.  It usually doesn’t take much for a party of adventurers (aka murder hobos), to kill a band of desert raiders, especially if they can explain it away by saying they were bandits and therefore deserved to die.

Want to make it more than a simple combat?  How about this:  They are crossing a desert, and the only way across is to be led from oasis to oasis by someone who knows exactly where he’s going.  Along the way your guide leads you to one of his family’s main bases, where you find the slave cleric girl.  Now what?  If you fight the raiders, even if you win, you lose your guide and may not survive the desert (even with a girl who can summon water).  If you leave her in the hands of these “savages”, you are condemning her to a horrible fate (at least you imagine it as such).  Especially if you’re playing a game with alignments, you are in a bad spot!

It’s fun to mess with the players’ minds, and even more fun if you can mess with the characters’ minds as well!

The Pen & Paper RPG Renaissance

There seems to be a lot of discussion on the internet about the “rebirth” of pen and paper RPGs.  This especially centers around some of the groups that are filming their play sessions and posting them on youtube or the other video locations.  This is a good thing, and I’ll give you my reasoning:

When I was a kid I bought the white and blue box - the one that wasn’t “Basic” and wasn’t “Advanced”.  Inside was the rule book, an adventure module, and if I remember right “chits”.  Chits were little pieces of laminated paper with the numbers 1-20 written on them and used instead of dice.  Pretty cheap!  I know!

But what we all believed at that time, and what too often proved to be true, was that you couldn’t learn how to play the game from reading the book.  Typically someone who had played needed to teach you, or at least run a game so you could get a feel for it.  That is the beauty of these videos - they can show you how it’s done, so anyone (theoretically) can now learn to play. 

How impactful is this?  I’ve considered doing a video of a session where I teach a couple of young girls how to play Legend Quest.  Why?  Because I do believe it is a smooth and easy system - easy to learn and easy to teach.  I think a demo of how to play would make it easier for anyone thinking of playing LQ but perhaps a bit nervous about how it works.  Why haven’t I done it?  Because I have absolutely no idea how to edit video, and I am certain that I can’t just run a camera the whole time and come up with something that would be worth watching.

So are we loving this?  Not entirely.  Most of them are playing the main stream game that has been dumbed down.  It’s good if it brings more people into the hobby, and I do think it is doing that.  It could be bad if people start to think that that is the only way to play RPGs.  We’ll see how it all works out.

Rather than do a sales pitch right here, Legend Quest is a great game and you can learn more about it by clicking this link.  And if you know how to edit video - contact me at info@boardenterprises.com.  I could use some help!!