I’ve been wanting to get back into writing campaign settings and ideas down, so thought I would once more blow the dust off the blog. Yesterday I encountered some really interesting blog posts about trying new ways of writing D&D to avoid some of its western and colonial tropes. The general idea that has been kicked around for, well, pretty much forever at this point is that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, and that is generally a bad idea with a lot of really unfortunate parallels in real-world history; many much more well read people have already written about this, so I don’t think I need to go into that further. However, it is also true that killing things and taking their stuff and getting more powerful is one of the core attractions of D&D. In Playing at the World by Jon Peterson related that back in the first proto-D&D campaign, Blackmoor, the GM Dave Arnesson got frustrated with his players as they kept going down into the town’s dungeons to gain treasure (a side game) instead of engaging in the main wargame he had built.
Which brought me to thinking: What type of narrative would leave the players in a similar situation as to D&D? They can’t be working for an organized military, or they’d be issued weapons and uniforms and not have the freedom to choose what they’re doing. They can’t be in a situation where they can just go to the store and buy what they need; they need to either be out of money, or the weapons and armour they want to buy can’t be available in stores.
This all took me back to the Star Wars novels I read as a kid, where the rebellion had to raid Imperial convoys for weapons and supplies; to Skies of Arcadia where the (Spanish-inspired) Valuan Empire is raided by the Blue Rogue sky pirates, who live on hidden floating island bases and use the money to support their families and community; to Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor; to The Crimson Shadow trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, and to Daybreak 2250AD by Andre Norton (Also known as Star Man’s Son by Andrew North) where a lone explorer searches through a deserted city looking for books, tools, and other useful items he can take back to his community to help them.
I’m seeing a setting where an invading force, the Malonusian Empire, has pushed the heroes far from their original home and walk of life, forcing them to become part of a hidden community. Think of Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest settlement, a small ‘fishing’ community (pirate haven), or a small frontier town, just outside of the expansionist power’s sphere of influence (or just within it, so while it nominally pays taxes to them, they don’t have much actual influence).
The heroes break into dungeons not just to take money and seize weapons, but also to free the prisoners in that dungeon. They steal money and valuables that were stolen from their people originally, or to fund the war effort, or possibly even to pay the unfair taxes that the invaders have levied on their home. They steal weapons and magic items to turn them back on the invaders.
That also removes some of the more tried and boring moral cliches that have been injected into the hobby since the 70s: Why are there no orc children in the dungeon? They orcs are mercenaries brought along with the invading army; their children and non-combatants are back in their homeland, or at an encampment between there and here. Why are there a bunch of weird monsters in the dungeon? Because a sadistic noble brought his pets along with him, or maybe they’re guard animals for a military base. Why are you delving into an abandoned temple? Because your forces cached a bunch of weapons and magic items there as they retreated last time. Why are you looting that tomb? Because your great-grandfather fought the Malonusians in his day with a magic sword, and you are dead sure he would want you to bring it out and let it do it’s job again.
Now, this isn’t just going to be a blood-soaked romp through enemy forces; you’ve also got a community at home. That could be a poor district in a large city that is keeping its head down and hiding you between adventures, a camp in the woods, or any of the other options I mentioned above. That is where you keep your non-combatants, remnants of the army, or other bands doing the same thing. Some of the blog posts below have listed some cool ideas about how to model helping out a community like that; I’ve also thought that it would be cool to see the type of treasure you bring back helping the community. If you’ve brought back a bunch of weapons and armour you don’t need, perhaps the town doesn’t lose so much to bandits the following year, or you meet other groups of rebels using familiar-looking gear; a load of medicine causes the wise woman’s cough to clear up, letting her help more people; a load of lumber means a stronger palisade or new barns; and so on.
I’m thinking there will be convoys and ships of supplies going to the garrisons that you can raid for food and weapons, convoys of treasure headed back to the enemy homeland, corrupt sheriffs and tax collectors, armouries that can be raided, and even municipal offices full of records that can be burned to hide people or things from the authorities. I see rich nobles moving outwards, building mansions on stolen land, prime for raiding and burning. Also once those records are destroyed, I see mines and quarries full of prisoners of war and unjustly imprisoned common folk, ready to be raided and liberated and either sent home or taken to your hideout with you, depending on how hard it is for them to blend in once again. Perhaps you liberate such a group, then need to attack the local courthouse to burn the records so they can go home.
Now we come to some old advice from a column in Dragon magazine I read many, many years ago: An altered D&D, not an altered setting. What needs altering will of course be rather different between GURPS, OD&D (and it’s various retroclones), D&D3e (3.5, Pathfinder, etc), Alternity, and so on, but I can think of a few general things. First of all: Scrying has to go. It is going to be really hard to be dashing rebels if the enemy can just cast a spell to find you. You could do this by removing those spells from the game, limiting how many enemy spellcasters are powerful enough to cast those spells, or restricting the use of those spells. If you have a lot of powerful, secretive nobles and politicians stabbing one another in the back, it could be they’ve restricted research into those spells or even outlawed them. Yes, it hampers their own military and occupation efforts, but that is less important then getting away with assassinating the Minster of Trade so that someone’s failson can take up the post.
The other thing I would suggest altering for this setting, or have an in-world reason for, is city and military base construction. What I’ve seen in a few cases is DMs altering the world around player powers, as if these things are really common, so they don’t put open courtyards on castles, they have military facilities mix metal and stone and glass shards into the foundation to prevent earth elementals and spellcasters from using their abilities on it, and so on. Pretty soon, everything looks like a modern military camp or industrial facility more then a fantasy castle or such, and this kind of change in tactics can restrict player creativity if it looks like the enemy has accounted for everything the party can do.
Instead, develop the enemy in ways that force players to keep being creative. Give enemies cultural or political reasons to not be ready for the players’ basic tactics, and then let them react and adapt to what the players do. One place to start is limiting the number of high-level casters in the military: that could start as a cultural blind spot with spellcasters mostly being upper class, making them more likely to be officers than sappers or engineers. There’s plenty of historical examples to draw on for reasonable blind spots: sure, not letting enemy flying cavalry units swoop down on you seems obvious, but given that multiple highly successful empires (Rome, China) had to have training manuals telling their generals not to attack across rivers, as it was a good way to lose an army, it isn’t at all unrealistic that they would miss a few things. Remember that historically, lots of civilizations’ military leaders weren’t full-time, career officers. They were rich men and politicians who’d paid to command an army as a chance to make even more money, or to get a better job after the campaign was over, and a lot of the enlisted officers would be 3rd and 4th sons of rich families. But there’s always room in the command structure to add someone who actually knows what they’re doing, who can develop countermeasures to spells and tactics the party use repeatedly, and make players keep thinking of new ways to accomplish their goals.
Anyway, that is all I can think of for now; I’d love suggestions of other adventure ideas, or additional sources of inspiration.
Influences and further reading:
- An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari
- The Ava Islam quote about the Jungle Book was very inspiring (I don’t think it was this article, but another one I can’t find now, that adapted it: You can’t take the killing things and taking their stuff out of D&D, that is the fun. Really the whole rest of the blog post came from there.
- Occupy Greyhawk
- I wrote most of this setting in my head, and then while trying to find that Ava Islam quote found this, which is basically the same idea, but done before I was born.
- A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR
- I have been thinking about a TTRPG about building up a small, isolated town for a while, with my inspiration being Daybreak 2250 AD by Andre Norton. In it, the person scavenging a lost city isn’t looking for weapons or treasure, but is excited to find a stationary store with good quality paper and books he can take back to his town, and a bookstore with old textbooks in it. This has a system I might try that out for; I might return to this in a future post.
- Marx & Monsters: A Radical Leftist Fantasy Sandbox
- I really like the XP ideas in this one, where you get XP for helping the community and lessening the burden on others.
- Also “The world is ruled by the corrupt and powerful./We can’t possibly destroy all of the corrupt power structures./But if we destroy enough, we might lessen the burden of the proletariat or inspire a broader revolution.” is a really good basis for a campaign.
Thank you all for reading, and I think I’m going to go take The Crimson Shadow trilogy out of the library and reread them; It has been a lot of years, and I think it would go with my mood right now.
Ruminations of a Canadian Geek 