What Does your (Fantasy) World War Mean to Me?

Quite often, adventuring parties wind up saving the world from major threats.  They might stop a demon army invasion or close a portal trying to suck the entire world into some hellish dimension.  Quite often, these heroic efforts go without ever being noticed by the commoners of the lands that were just saved, but the lack of “fame” goes beyond that.

Let’s assume that a major war is raging in your world.  Four countries have formed two sides, and they are all mixed up in a massive war.  To the people of those regions, everything is horrible and topsy-turvy.  They don’t know if they will survive the war and if they do survive the war will there still be enough food and farmland left to sustain themselves?  It’s bad!

But go a couple of countries over.  They don’t care.  They aren’t noticing the war, because they’ve never been more than 20 miles away from home, and there are no battles within 20 miles of their house.  Maybe after the war, they will learn that food is scarce in that region and they might be able to make a few extra coins taking advantage of the shortage and selling their wares to the right merchants.  But they still won’t really “notice” the war.

Not until bedraggled soldiers begin marching past their homes and villages will they fully realize that something really is or more likely did go on.  So what might cause this?  Well, one side probably lost and one side won.  Were the losers able to retain their lands?  Not likely.  So the soldiers now need to find somewhere to live.  This was the common theme throughout the later parts of the Roman Empire.  Some barbarian horde would attack its neighbors and defeat them.  Those neighbors then needed to go somewhere in order to live, and being battle veterans (at least now they are) they attacked their neighbors in hopes of taking their lands.  And the dominoes fall.  So maybe they aren’t bedraggled soldiers, but instead raiding and war parties.

Now, the local commoners need to know about the war, because now they’re in it.  Those raiders aren’t just orcs out for a stroll, they are a people terrified of starving to death and willing to take what they need from others.  To the newly attacked, they are an evil horde of barbarians, but more truthful they are battle ready refugees.

The point is that no matter how big and important the war may seem to the people in it, it likely doesn’t matter to the average farmer who isn’t in it.  But it should, because there are always consequences.  The bigger the action, and war is a pretty big action, the bigger the consequences.  The ripples will spread out from the center of contact until they’ve touched a lot more people. 

If as a world builder and game master, you are assuming that a defeated army “vanishes” because it was defeated, you are missing major opportunities, and being unrealistic.  That defeated army may be vastly smaller than it was before, but some pockets of it still exist.  Do they become raiders as we’ve laid out?  Do they become mercenaries?  Do they form into a tiny rebel alliance looking to overthrow their oppressors and regain their homeland?  Well, that’s up to you, but they really don’t vanish.

If you like this post, you're going to like Small Bites, our monthly e-zine.  While the Secret Societies edition is not yet out, you can find the previous editions listed out on our Patreon page.

How to Retcon without Looking Like You’re Retconning

I started The World of Fletnern when I was brand new to gaming.  In those days you pretty much either played Greyhawk or you made up your own world, and we usually made up our own worlds (except for those guys who insisted they could GM Middle Earth - that never worked).

So I had no idea what I was doing.  I had adventuring parties fighting wars in my mid to late teens without the slightest idea of why anyone would ever retreat from battle.  It was grand!  It was exciting!  It was memorable!  But it made no sense!

As I became more mature and more experienced with both running campaigns and world building, I started to question numerous ideas I had used earlier.  I didn’t want to scrap the world I’d put so much time into, but there were things I just couldn’t explain away.  So I did explain them away - I retconned.

Before I get into how I did it, I do want to set a level playing field.  Some of you might have different definitions of retconning.  The internet definition is:  to retrospectively revise an aspect of a fictional work, typically by introducing a new piece of information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events.  What I mean is:  pretending you knew something back then that you just put in today.

And what was the best tool I ever had for retconning?  Secret societies.  Yep - when in doubt - blame it on the Illuminati.  Why?  Because the secret societies are really powerful, so they could influence events.  They’re really secretive, so they could do it without other people knowing what they did.  And they have motives that are never really understood, so even if it seems a bit out of character for them, it might have a deeper meaning that has not yet been discovered.

My best example is this:  The Battle at Rhum.  During the Conquering War, the city-state of Garnock (think Roman Legion) attacked the city of Rhum (think fantasy era Hamburg).  There was no reason the Latvich army of Garnock should have lost, but they did.  In reality, they did because the player characters were on the side of Rhum and they were throwing fireballs and fighting “level 0” soldiers, and things like that - stupid rules that allowed a tiny number of PCs to decimate huge numbers of soldiers.

So now that I’m older and wiser, I needed to explain all of that away.  I don’t play that game anymore, so I no longer need to worry about those same stupid rules, no matter what version they happen to be on.  And here’s how I did it.  First, the mundane - The Latvich army really had been split into four.  One quarter remained at home guarding their home city; one quarter had taken the city of Nanerette, one quarter was occupying the recently taken city of Parnania, and only the remaining quarter was at Rhum.

The army of Rhum was made up mainly of ex-adventurers.  This has always been part of their history.  So these ex-adventurers were far better guerrilla fighters than the legionaries.  I like to equate it to the American minute men firing Kentucky long rifles from sniper posts and picking off officers instead of standing in long lines and musketing away at each other.  Plus, there were supposed to have been allies there that I never really accounted for when I was a kid, so numbers could be jacked up reasonably.

But what I really think makes the difference is having one of the secret societies upset that one of their rivals was profiting off the war machine built by the Lats.  Now, even just the hint of a secret society being involved can give question to what people thought they knew.  What did they do, this secret society?

Well, honestly, I wanted to credit them for poisoning the Lat officers, either giving them dysentery or poisoning them to look like they had dysentery.  Admittedly, this came during a discussion of whether the French knights really lost to English longbowmen, or whether dysentery was the real issue that brought down armies.  The fact that the Lats had been in the field for months made it entirely possible.  Did a secret society get involved or was it natural?  The world may never know.

If you like this post, you're going to like Small Bites, our monthly e-zine.  While the Secret Societies edition is not yet out, you can find the previous editions listed out on our Patreon page.

When it Really is that Dangerous

Adventurers typically fear nothing.  They strongly believe that their armor and healing spells will prevent them from dying every time.  Or maybe it is that they trust their GM not to kill them off, not to put them up against something that they really cannot handle.  That needs to end!

But what if you really can’t kill them?  What if playing by the rules means that you cannot kill the PCs unless you unleash some massive dragon on them or a full out army of super ninjas?  What if your game rules really have made the party the most powerful folks in the world?  How do you give them pause?

You threaten their family and friends.  If the party is the most powerful people in the world, then they must have some ties to others.  Even if they started the campaign as orphans, they will have developed contacts and friends along the way.  Who have they done missions for?  Who have they saved?  Who supplied them with weapons, spells, healing, shelter?  Who do they care about?

Hopefully if you bring back a young “princess” that they saved earlier in their careers and put her in danger again, they are going to have an appropriate reaction.  If their first question after hearing, “Help me, you’re my only hope” is “How much?”, well then your players and their characters are evil sociopaths and you should flee the room and the building.  (No, really, get them help!)  But normal people will feel a sense of attachment, even if it is “We saved this girl once before and no one is going to undo the safety we gave her.”

Hopefully in the playing of the campaign, the party has built up contacts, at least the bartender at their favorite bar.  If you as GM really haven’t fleshed out their activities outside of combat, you can fake it.  You can tell them that the person coming to them for help is their favorite bartender or waiter or blacksmith.  Better yet, if you know who trains them - Well, that’s an instant “family” for the PCs.

But who is the enemy?  This is where the secret societies as permanent enemies become so valuable.  If Joe the Evil Wizard threatens your family and friends, the party will go kill him.  If the Evil Family Who Has Been Here Since the Dawn of Civilization threatens someone, the party will never be able to be everywhere at once.  They cannot defend mom, Bob the Bartender, Milli the maid, Mayor William, and the little sister all at the same time.  And the secret group has multiple assassins, able to strike without warning.

But why?  Why do you need to threaten the party’s friends?  I think there are two really good (mission and role-play driving) reasons.  Role-play first:  What happens when telling your significant other about a secret society puts them in harm’s way?  If the secret society is going to try to kill everyone who knows about them, then telling a loved one about them puts them directly in harm’s way.  So now you have to lie to that loved one, at least by omission.  That is the kind of thing that destroys relationships, and yet you would be doing it for their own good.  That’s real drama!

But for missions:  If the super secret group threatens friends and demands that the heroes do something for them, then the super secret group can force the party to do missions for them.  If you’re going to do this, use this as an opportunity to let the party learn more about the super secret group.  There must be something about them that isn’t all horrible evil / destroy the world, right?  Very few groups are able to survive to become real threats if the mission is as boring as greed.  The heroes may not agree that killing every poor person in the world is going to make the world a better place, but at least they would know that the “evil” group is hoping to wipe out poverty, famine and even plague; they’re just doing it through a horrific means.

Making the party question why they are doing missions or if they should do them at all is a real turning point for a gaming group.  This is role-playing - what they claimed they were doing.  It forces them to truly consider what their character is all about.  Even if you think your players are only there for the slaughter of monsters, this type of event can really hook them on their characters and on your game!

If you like this post, you're going to like Small Bites, our monthly e-zine.  While the Secret Societies edition is not yet out, you can find the previous editions listed out on our Patreon page.

Artist Spotlight - Catou

It has been a while since Board Enterprises partnered with a new and upcoming artist, but we wanted to introduce the gaming world to Catou.  Catou is a wonderful artist from Russia, and she did some great pieces for our latest Small Bites edition:  The Yugsalanti Fortune Tellers of the Roads aka All About Fortune Tellers.  You will see her work on the cover, within the book and on the Artist Spotlight page.

As many of you know - artists that we’ve “discovered” have gone on to work for Wizards of the Coast and many other companies, both in the gaming industry and outside of it.  We know Catou is likewise destined for success - the fortune tellers told us so!

Check out her gallery directly at:  https://catou15.deviantart.com/

The World of Prophesy

The latest edition of Small Bites is out, and yes, it’s FREE!

The Yugsalanti Fortune Tellers of the Roads aka All About Fortune Tellers is well, it’s all about fortune tellers.  But while these people are mystic and have all their magical abilities, they are also infamous for being some of the biggest con artists in the world.  So both sides of this passionate culture are on display.

Do you need nomadic fortune tellers and con artists?  Need is a strong word, but the Yugsalantis and their gaudy wagons serve as the spark of so many different missions and wild adventures that even the most experienced game masters are going to be loving the ideas this helps generate in their heads.  And we guarantee this!  Anyone who doesn’t find mission and quest ideas in this book that they have never considered before is entitled to their money back!  (Yeah, it’s free!)

So give it a try!  You’ve got nothing to lose.  Check out Board Enterprises and the whole Small Bites line.  We’re not for everybody; we know.  That’s why we want to give you a free peak at what we’re doing and see if we can lure you into our world!

Free on RPG Now

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It’s Bigger Than You (Parties)

Nearly every FRPG game organizes the players / player characters into parties - groups of adventurers that work together, typically each bringing different abilities.  This is a standard “trope” of RPGs.

There are a huge number of role-playing plots that can be used if you put the party into something bigger than the party.  The main one that jumps out at me is the traitor.  How many really cool movies have you seen where the true action of the movie was about finding the traitor within an organization?  But if you try to do that with just the party, then you force the players to work against each other.  I have never seen that work out.  So if you want to have a traitor hunt, but the party won’t work, what do you do?  You make it bigger than the party.

By having the party work within a bigger organization, you can activate a traitor while still keeping the party together and working as a team.  This can be great for a murder mystery plot.  If you make one of the PCs the bad guy (even if he has good reasons) you will never get the trust back within the party.  Worse yet, you may never get the trust back with that entire group of players (friends).  They may claim to be adults and be able to work through it, but you can never fully separate player knowledge from character knowledge.

But what organizations?  It can be simple:  an adventurers’ guild, a school or university, an army unit, or a secret society.  Secret societies make the perfect choices for stuff like this because they are secret.  It’s tougher for another member of the adventurers’ guild to “betray” the guild, because there really isn’t anything there.  With a secret society, there are almost always rivals.  This gives something meaty to betray. 

Why push this line?  Because with a secret society, it is worthwhile to make up enough NPCs that could be traitors to the organization.  I like this as a first mission within the organization - You guys are not the traitors because you weren’t here / members when the first bad thing happened.  Therefore, we need you to find out who the traitor is.  Then when they succeed - they know everybody who is in the secret organization and those NPCs you wrote up are still of value to the campaign (other than the traitor who is likely dead).

That plan / plot works, but then the players don’t get the emotional hit of actually being betrayed, because they haven’t worked with these people before.  You know how to do that?  You roll it up like this, first mission and all.  The party finds and exposes the traitor.  But they don’t realize that the traitor they found was the underling.  The boss traitor is still active in the organization, and it will take a whole bunch more missions before they are able to realize that the mole is still active and then go find that one.  Now, they can run through the same group of NPCs but this time hopefully find the boss - someone who has been their “friend” for months.

There are countless traitor scenarios as well as others that require the party to have friends that are not PCs but instead NPCs.  If the PCs’ whole world is the party, then there is so much that gets left behind.  By making it bigger than them, you give yourself so many more plots to work with.

How to Choose Your Enemies

When you need to create an organization, especially an organization that will function as a “permanent enemy”, start with just a general concept.  Pick something that appeals to you, because you don’t want to use something over and over if you hate it.  (One shot organizations can be things that don’t appeal to you, but nothing with longevity.)  The big concept should be easy enough:  a military, a school, a guild, a cult, a tribe, a cartel, whatever.  Now, what are the divisions within that organization, and what are the divisions within the divisions.  The bigger the organization, the more divisions there will be.

Example:  A modern military might have an air force, an army, a navy with or without marines, and a coast guard.  Within each of these groups are units which have component units within them, down to the squad level.  A fantasy military might separate the army from the cavalry from the militia.  The army might have archers and footmen, while the cavalry has heavy horse and patrollers (skirmishers).

Try to keep it real.  A terrorist organization that can field hundreds of planes and tanks would not be allowed to exist within the boundaries of a major country, unless the country was supporting that terrorist organization.  A cartel that ran sixty ships and forty caravans would likely be the most powerful economic organization in the world.  They would not operate in secret.  Of course, these are just games, but you don’t want your players to completely check their brains at the door.

How is the group of player characters going to butt heads with the organization?  This is where you can plan strategy.  Let’s go to an example:  The organization is a slave cartel, standard fantasy enemy.  But the leader of the slave cartel is a dragon who secretly runs the organization through intermediaries.  (The dragon is also crazy, which adds flavor later.)  She (the dragon) is a mage and has been teaching a group of treacherous dark elves some of her ancient magics.  This cadre forms her personal bodyguard, though in the right circumstances they would happily betray her.  So much for the headquarters.

The organization has two distinct limbs, plus ancillary organizations.  The one side of the cartel is the slavers selling slaves in markets where slavery is acceptable.  This is actually a fairly legitimate business, though they do rely on powerful bounty hunters/slave catchers.  This organization is mainly made up of warrior types, though few of them are straight melee types - more range and non-lethal types.  The other side of the organization is made up of pirates that raid the coastlines, burning villages and capturing peasants as slaves.  These pirates are more frequently rogue types.  They rely on their fearsome reputations and the fact that no one really knows that their raids are cover for capturing slaves.

OK - does this make sense?  An organization that actively sells slaves being supplied by a “brother” organization that captures slaves illegally overseen by a dragon ready to take action against anyone messing with her subsidiaries.  Seems believable in a fantasy setting.  You also have humans (the pirates), just about any race (the slavers), dark elves and a dragon.  Seemingly a good mix.  If the pirates capture someone, and a party needs to rescue them, they will have to fight the pirates and force them to tell who they gave the slave to.  Then the party goes and fights the slavers, only to find that the dragon is either coming after them for revenge or the dragon chose to take that slave as her own.  That should be at least three good solid missions, all from one organization.  Later on, after the party defeats the dragon, any dark elf mages that escaped might be able to rebuild the organization, allowing the party to go after them again. 

It might be cool to have the new head of the organization known as “the dragon” because she skinned the last head and now uses her hide as armor.  That way as the party begins to investigate, they will think the head of the organization is the same dragon (or a child or something) and will be unprepared to fight a powerful dark elf mage.

An organization does not need to be made of completely different entities as described in this example, but different can make things more exciting.  If all members of an organization are exactly the same, things can get dull quickly, and the players can come up with ways to defeat them more quickly.  Sometimes a little bit of different can be all that’s necessary.  Let’s take an evil snake cult example, another standard in fantasy games.  In one town, the cult is completely underground, both literally and figuratively.  They operate in secret and meet in secret.  The party will need to investigate to find them and then attack.  In the next town, the cult is seen as a perfectly normal religion and they meet openly, but keep their sinister side hidden.  Here, the party knows where the enemy is, but they cannot outright attack for fear of coming under fire from the legitimate factions in the town.  In the third town, the snake cult controls the town, so the characters will be outlaws if they are detected.  Now the characters need to operate as the secret organization in hopes of getting past the snake cult guards.  In each of these cases, the snake cult operatives will likely be very similar, but their public presence is completely different, making for three distinctive missions.

This is after all the main reason to use an organization - to link missions.  If the missions are linked, you only need to motivate the characters once, plus it adds a sense of continuity to the campaign.  Hopefully it will help you as well, because if the organization makes sense to you, you will have an easier time of developing it.