Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog

First off, you only use the INHABITATION table in… inhabited regions. Some of you will balk at this, but you really need to pull yourself together and think this through. Seriously, look at it:

And now look at the instructions on rolling outdoor encounters:

Inhabited areas have special encounter rules for patrols. Uninhabited areas have a chance for their encounters to be of the castle variety. If you are using the inhabitation table to stock an area and then using some kind of procedure for determining castle encounters in order to flesh out the location further… then you are not using these tables as intended. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

Furthermore, you do not check to see if the inhabitants of castles are something other than Character-types when you are stocking maps for an inhabited region. Those inhabitants results are clearly tailored to the uninhabited areas of your campaign map.

Now, you may be inclined to sperg out and go do an analysis of how the outdoor encounter differs between the inhabited and uninhabited areas. I probably wouldn’t bother. These are great tables. You can play them for years. However, the expectation here is that they are in fact merely a stopgap. You will only resort to the use of the tables in the appendix when you do not have an encounter table specially devised for the area you are playing in.

Yeah. The Isle of Dread has its own encounter tables. Man, it even has different encounter tables for different sections of the island. Pretty cool! You can make your own campaign be like that, too. No, really! I am not making that up! In fact… you should be making up your own encounter tables.

If you need some directive from Gygax indicating that it is not the intent of the game that players simply mine the wilderness encounter tables ad infinitum, there it is. They don’t keep springing up forever. In inhabited areas, many of the encounters are going to be patrols from powerful figures based in cities and castles. Meanwhile, the monsters are not necessarily just waiting around to be taken out piecemeal by enterprising player characters. They could be instead inimical forces that are rolling back the frontiers and sowing chaos in the inhabited regions by causing some of those castles to become deserted in real time!

But there is still more to this:

We have all pat ourselves on the back for being able to handle the full-on wilderness encounter tables which are completely and totally unconcerned with the general strength of the player characters’ party. But that is not the actual intent of AD&D’s design! It’s true we have a one-size-fits all encounter system for the wilderness. But the difficulty of the monsters should increase with the distance you get away from civilization.

So, there it is. AD&D’s implied setting is maybe not entirely like it’s been characterized to you. It is very much concerned with the contrast between wilderness and civilization. If your concept of the world is just a bunch of stuff which is rolled on those wilderness encounter tables and it’s all somehow just going to spontaneously make you rich, then I’ve got bad news for you.

You’ve been using Appendix B wrong.

Okay, I took a look at the Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain and I have to say… this is pretty stupid.

Now, I love this thing for what it is: a method for creating random terrain in the event that players go off the edge of the prepared maps. It’s brilliant for that. For everything else, common sense must prevail. And in this case, this means using these procedures only as a very loose sort of inspiration for adding something to the campaign.

Let’s talk about all of the stuff that is dumb about this system. This thing is supposed to work “with relative ease for a 1 space = 1 mile, or larger scale”. Poppycock! The wilderness travel and encounter rules presume that you are spending a day travelling through basically one type of terrain. How do you figure your movement rate across ten miles of travel on this map? If you have encounters on this map, what table do you use? DON’T KNOW. Good thing I have lots of common sense! I declare this entire map to be rough terrain. All of that time I spent filling in these hexes was wasted effort.

And another thing. How do you know what path to take on the map as you fill it in? If I were to spiral out from the center the results would be entirely different than if I zigzagged through all the hexes. When I circle back into some hexes that have been determined, does only the hex I just left matter or should the other hexes I have just run into also influence the result? DON’T KNOW. Good thing I have a lot of common sense! I declare this entire system to be useless for procedurally generating campaign material.

And I am glad this sucks. I don’t want to deal with people adding a crap ton of procedurally generated crap to my game and then insisting, “well, it is totally RAW.” Bro, there are so many places where you interpolated rules into this that don’t actually exist, you simply can’t say that at all.

THERE IS NO SYSTEM IN AD&D FOR DETERMINING WHAT IS IN A WILDERNESS HEX.

In the wilderness clearing section, Gygax does indeed say to have the player map out his 30-mile hex and then resolve wilderness encounters there normally. And he does say that when these monsters are driven out they don’t just automatically respawn. But we do not have a system for determining the terrain in the hex which means we don’t even know which encounter tables we will be drawing from. And if the map is stocked by conducting random encounters normally, well hello… if you do this on foot you will have many more monsters in your hex than if you did it on horseback.

AD&D IS OPTIMIZED FOR RUNNING SESSIONS BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS. IT IS NOT ENGINEERED FOR TOP DOWN WORLD BUILDING AT ALL.

And I like it like that. Honestly, I think all those solitaire play videos have rotted away most of y’all’s brains. Half you act like you couldn’t just make something up for the fun of it anymore. Seriously, bro. What happened to you? I remember when people that played this game would pat themselves on the back for how imaginative they were. You guys? You act like you can delegate this stuff to procedures and not just get complete garbage back.

But hey, let’s keep going with this.

0201 City (40,000)
0303 Ruins (Tomb)
0304 Single Dwelling (5)
0309 Castle — Med. (Large Shell Keep) 14th Level Assassin
0501 Single Dwelling (2)
0502 Castle — Large (Large walled castle with keep) Totally Deserted
0509 Single Dwelling (6)
0510 Ruins (Tomb)
0601 Single Dwelling (6)
0609 Single Dwelling (2)
0710 Single Dwelling (6)
0804 Ruins (Village)

Now the next thing I am supposed to do is have an imaginary party walk through this map and I am supposed to roll encounters normally and then if the monsters maker their “% in lair” roll, they go on the map, and then maybe the ones that don’t go on a random encounter table or something. Who knows. You’re just making it up at that point anyway and you might as well lean into that. For the record, here are the incredibly boring results I got by rolling a bunch of stupid dice:

0186 (marsh) Shambling Mound
0509 (marsh) Lizard, giant
0307 (rough) Bear, brown

Wow, that sure is a yawn fest. Did Gygax make a note somewhere saying that I could ignore a crap ton of die rolls if the results are boring and stupid and I don’t care about them? I sure hope so!

At this point I can’t even remember what I was trying to do with all this. I think maybe I was going to be make some point about AD&D esoterica or something. Honestly, I don’t really care about that any more. All I can think about is how much I hate all of the random crap that other referees dumped onto my beautiful Appendix N fueled original milieu. All I can think about is how much of my stuff they wiped off the map. All I can think about is the stupid amount of magic items that were introduced into the game by people farming the random encounter tables in solitaire play.

And I think about that and I think… I know these people. A 14th level Assassin in a shell keep is not enough to challenge them. It’s not enough to inspire them. The guys in Trollopulous would not even blink at that. Besides. It’s been done. His name was John Wick. This new Assassin guy will not even register as a character unless he has a really choice set of magic items in his possession. As well he should.

So then I look at that city. I look over at that city and somewhere, Jack Nicholson begins nodding his head at me. Yes! Jack Nicholson is nodding!

Because there are 40,000 people there. And they have bird heads. And antlers! Their skin is wrinkled and seamed as if they have been sewn together. They have these crazy large ears like an elephant. And hypnotic orange-red eyes. But they are huge and flat! Huge, flat orange-red eyes. Their beaks hook down and are twisted and sharp. Fangs jut out at odd angles. The rest of their bodies are crab-like… and they have poisoned tails like a scorpion. Their chiton is of a purplish color. Their backs, brilliant green like a Japanese beetle. Their arms? Writing tentacles of horror! And their hands are like giant lobster claws.

There’s your 40,000 “people”.

What to do with those Single Dwellings, though? Oh, probably make them something cool. Witches. Medusa. Giants. Heck, they are probably bona fide lairs, though. The Ruined Tombs are clearly one page dungeons. We’ll stock something in them and then stock a book of lore somewhere else that highlights what secret room is liable to still contain something awesome.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. This area is not uninhabited. We started off trying to map out a wilderness area as if we were going to clear it and… this place is just not uninhabited! (Note for D&D esoterica people: the instructions on page 182 of the DMG seem to indicate that you do NOT use the Inhabitation table in an uninhabited region. Uninhabited regions ONLY have the one-in-twenty chance for castle encounters… where the game does not actually define how many encounter checks to perform for a given area.)

If you come within five miles of either the City or the Shell Keep, though, 5-in-20 of your encounters are with patrols. By the same token, if you come within a mile or two of these Single Dwellings aka “Lairs”, I bet you have a chance to encounter somebody from there as well… or at least be sighted.

Anyway, I have some more work here but it doesn’t involve rolling up a bunch of crap on a table.

• What weird magic items are in possession of the Assassin?
• What horrible thing happened to the completely deserted castle with a keep?
• What could I stock in the tomb complexes to make it worth it for people to attempt to travel to this location?
• What are the assassin’s feelings about being located near freak central?
• What does it mean when I roll a depression inside a mountain hex?

One thing I will say here, though.

I have rolled up totally random Traveller worlds and then felt like, “gosh… we just have to play this.” At this stage, I am not feeling that with this pile of stuff.

Something’s missing.

At some point you just make a town and dungeon and then go. Gygax gives so much top-down type advice on how to set up the campaign, it’s true. But there is so much involved in getting a game off the ground and even more involved in keeping it going, it is very easy to charge on ahead without ever really assimilating a great many things that Gygax thought needful.

Gygax did brilliant work on laying out how to determine which monsters are on a given dungeon level. The mix of larger numbers of low hit dice creatures with occasional encounters with smaller numbers of more formidable monsters… this is just chef’s kiss level of work. Yet by his own admission, his magic item tables leave something to be desired. Magic should be placed very carefully to maintain a very specific risk/reward ratio. It was never Gygax’s intent that an artifact should be found in a random wilderness lair or else on the second level of a dungeon, though Tolkien’s rich lore is predicated upon just such an occurrence.

I don’t think Gygax intended that it should be possible for players to simply mine riches from the wilderness encounter tables. But there is some implied setting baked into them. I think it is reasonable to set up your overworld in such a way that it is consistent with what those tables can produce in the event that you start using them to fill in the blank spots on the map.

In the wilderness clearing rules, Gygax suggests using 200 yard hexes such that a span of nine hexes equals a mile. The hex does not become developed until 30-miles of terrain is subdued in every direction from the new stronghold. This is a massive amount of terrain! What is in this vast region? Oddly enough… it depends on how you explore it. If you map it out on foot you will run into many more random encounters than you would on foot. Similarly, there will be more encounters in the marsh and forest hexes than in other terrain types. The AD&D random tables are in fact predicated on referees using them on the fly… they don’t actually support setting up the campaign in advance in the manner of a Traveller referee building out a subsector map!

But hey, no one wants to randomly generate seven 30-mile hexes broken down into 200-yard hexes. I know I sure don’t. I mean it’s nice to be able to fill things in in a pinch, but I think I would rather use a little imagination and set things up in such a way that problems I have faced previously are headed off at the beginning.

Base chance of encounter in the wilderness is 1-in-10. There are three checks per day for travel in Plain or Hills terrain. A party on foot will travel ten miles per day on rugged terrain. The one mile hex will have I think 61 200-yard hexes in it. Such a party could easily meander through the entirety of such a hex in a day… with some room to account for getting lost on occasion. Yes, sorting all this out is a nightmare!

As a rough rule of thumb, then… a referee could check for encounters at the one-mile hex level of resolution… making a number of checks per the terrain type. This is not entirely precise. Remember, though, the point of this is to have an initial campaign state that is consistent enough with the random tables that the random terrain generation system COULD be used to extend the mapped area as needed. This is like being able to roll up a new subsector in Traveller when the players go off the map edge. The worlds that we invent on a subsector map should be compatible with potentially random worlds that are added to the game on the spur of the moment.

Now, one effect of this system is that monster lairs will be more dense in forest and marsh and less likely to appear in plain and hills and desert. This is nice. Weirdly, though… 1-in-20 of the encounters will be a stronghold. This means that the strongholds on the map are more likely to turn up in the more gnarly types of terrain. This maybe does not make sense from a sort of Poindexter type top-down worldbuilding approach. But from a fairy tale standpoint, this makes perfect sense.

Now… using these results you are going to get three types of encounters. Strongholds, lairs, and a big pile of monsters that are simply moving around. Now… here’s the question: just what is going on here?

The first thing you need to realize is that you have half of the strongholds are deserted. The next thing you need to realize is that the NPC strongholds are not undertaking an effort to clear the hex. Further, the monsters which do not have lairs… are they passing through from a neighboring wilderness hex or are they making forays from some kind of dungeon location. Don’t know! But the last thing you need to realize is that nobody is going to just walk into the middle of this and start farming the lairs at will. You have a 9-point alignment system. These strongholds and lairs are going to have alliances.

I would not simply accept a completely random placement for all of this stuff. I might start with something like that… but I would swap things around so that the various alliances form slightly more sensible geographic regions.

Even so, this is weirder than what we tend to play. Granted, some of my friends have looked into this sort of setup to varying degrees. Some have called this sort of set up post-apocalyptic. Others have contrasted the supposedly more normal overworld with the more weird and chaotic mythic underworld. If something like this is the backdrop for a game setting, I am not entirely sure of just what all is going on here. Can you even conceivably travel across 30-mile hexes which are stocked in this manner? How exactly does this sort of setup fit with what Gygax advises for general campaign setup up? And do I even want to play this?!

I couldn’t say. I will have to ponder this some more. And maybe roll a bunch of dice.

All my life I have wanted to write a designer’s notes article the way that Steve Jackson did in Space Gamer and Scott Haring did in ADQ. Well the day finally arrived when Joel Peterson sent some interview questions my way for an article he was writing. What a moment! This has been a long time coming. Find below my interview excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing over on Joel’s substack here.

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How long was BROZER mulling around the think tank before you fellas decided to publish it, and was it a reaction to the vague legal threats of calling your games “a Braunstein”, or was it coincidence that it came out around the same time that dirt was being kicked up?

Brozer happened very quickly because the time was right. We had been experimenting with these ideas for five years. We had a dozen people run session braunsteins in their own campaigns this spring which replicated our results in a wide range of play groups. Interest in this new direction compounded dramatically during the “summer of Stein” with more Braunstein events going than anyone could keep up with anymore. Most importantly, I explored Bdubs’s controversial idea of the ineffable Total Nonstop Braunstein in a series of Traveller sessions. Basically, I ran a different type of Braunstein game every week or two an then placed them all in the same continuity. A lot of people had said that that couldn’t be done. Well, after I’d done it I was sure I finally understood how Braunsteins really worked.

Now, I am not sure of the exact chain of events. Griff had been calling us names and saying we were all doing this wrong for many months. This was really annoying. But I didn’t really get the idea to do something like Brozer until Rob Kuntz had challenged me to a module writing contest. When he chickened out from actually following through on that, I was really disappointed. It might never happened at all had not Griff suggested that he would like to make a play to somehow control the concept of Braunstein as if it were a trademark or some kind of intellectual property. Of course, he was so rude and so insulting to so many people, this galvanized everyone within the scene to come together for a prank. We figured he was making a big deal over the Braunstein thing because we had already demonstrated conclusively that it was fundamental to roleplaying games in addition to being a great deal of fun. We didn’t think he understood this stuff at all and that we could easily beat him in a race to get the definitive Braunstein product out the door. So everyone in the BrOSR came together like some sort of fantasy Amish-style barnraising and just got it done.

It was amazing! We were ready to go in something like five or six weeks. In retrospect, making it a group project was the objectively correct move. Not only could we put together a sort of greatest hits collection of the BrOSR’s best factions, but we could also give referees a truly authentic gaming experience. When you run intense, longrunning campaigns with heavy Braunstein elements, you end up having to make games out of whatever it is that the players have come up with and gotten excited about. It’s not going to be a perfectly consistent fantasy milieu! It’s just always going to be a weird mishmash that grows on you the more you play with it. With Brozer, though, you not only get to turn players loose with just that sort of weird mishmash– but you also get to hand them the best Braunstein factions created by the the very best players in the BrOSR have come up with. It’s a gold mine of gaming greatness!

Do you consider BROZER a complete and encompassing manual explaining the Braunstein and how to run one, or is it a companion piece to the Blackmoor film/your own writing where it is expected people will have some familiarity with Braunstein before picking BROZER up?

If you want to want to know the real story on the history of the game, then yes, you will want to view the David Wesely segment of the Blackmoor film. I didn’t really understand the significance of Braunstein until I myself viewed that back in 2020. If you want a very persuasive argument outlining what Real D&D is and why Braunstein is fundamental to it and why it is intrinsically different from what we call “roleplaying games” today, then yes… you don’t want to miss my own hard hitting pamphlet “How to Win at D&D”. But I have to tell you… nobody cares about any of that stuff. Most people that dig into it come away wanting to run Braunsteins or exciting campaigns like the ones Dave Arneson did… but they have no idea where to begin. And it is not just us. There is even a forum thread from a few years ago where some guy was back from playing Braunstein at a con with David Wesely. He wanted to run games like that himself! But neither he nor anyone else on the forum had any idea of where to begin or how such games worked.

It turns out that this is a very challenging problem if you haven’t spent five years tinkering with this stuff. But Brozer not only gives all of the best advice and direction from countless hours of great gaming, it also explains how to skip right to the good parts without making any of the errors that we made along the way. There really isn’t anything else like it in gaming history!

Was there a consideration for having an “example of play” in BROZER to more clearly outline what game masters should generally expect when they first run one? Do you have any specific recommendations for such an example on video or otherwise for people to reference if they want to see a Braunstein in action?

Okay, no, we never talked about writing up an example of play. One reason is that it would be boring. Another reason is that it would be hard to follow. What are you going to do? Write up five conversations that happen concurrently? Bruh. I don’t even want to think about how to lay this out.

My personal opinion of this is that people that think they want this don’t actually exist. Or else including something like this won’t solve the problem that these people actually have, which is that they need to put their rpg books away, sign up for some dance lessons and then spend a great deal of time outdoors and at the gym.

Listen. The idea of Braunstein is very simple. All of the players are able to do whatever they want independently of everyone else. The referee talks to the players one at a time to find out what they are doing. While the referee is busy, everyone else is talking to each other hatching plots and setting up schemes. When conflict occurs, the referee resolves it just as it is done in any roleplaying game that you would care to mention. In subsequent player conferences, the referee informs players of any gameplay results which they would have knowledge of. Play continues to evolve from there– and more than likely will become volatile, chaotic, and dramatic. So now I have told you everything. All you need to do is just go do it.

But you might object then, “Oh! I have never done this before! I don’t know where to begin and I haven’t the faintest notion of what the best practices are for this new type of game!” Well, okay. The factions we put in Brozer are the ones that were the most fun in our group after five years of gaming across a half dozen tables. Even better, we tuned them up in order to help you sidestep things which were problems in our games. And even better than that we included a great deal of advice and direction from the most thoughtful and cogent guys in our scene to help get you pumped up enough that you can find the courage to dive into this utterly compelling form of gaming. You really can’t miss with this! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!

Jump on the team and come in for the big win. Get your copy of Brozer: Island of War and Winter here.

The feedback from Brozer continues to trickle in– and this report in particular is especially heartening:

I ran my own Braunstein last weekend. Discord, eight players. None of us had ever done anything like this before, except that I’d played in an in-person Braunstein. There was significant trepidation.

And everything you said in your Brozer essays was absolutely RIGHT. It was complete chaos (for me) but everyone loved it. They can’t stop talking about it. They want to run their own. Someone even told their family.

Very exciting! But also… completely predictable. You’re seeing here a replication of the exact same excitement we saw back when Scutifer Mike was confirming that my Battle Braunstein proof of concept really was a sound template for us to move forward on.

Meanwhile, the author of the superb Brozers & Braunsteins article has this to say about some of my older and more tried and true gaming ideas:

Jeffro, since implementing 1:1 time into my game it has grown from 4 to 8 players in just a few weeks. It’s not only a good way to manage game time, but people are really excited and interested by the “always on” nature of it.

That’s right. The stuff I developed back in 2021 still works just as brilliantly as it ever did.

Take these two ideas and put them together and you get real life gaming groups that grow over time rather than consistently fall apart after six sessions. Even better, the type of games that develop from these ideas can not only entertain whoever happens to show up, but they can also scale up to host as many people as arrive as well. These ideas not only were pioneered in the sort of environment that Bradford Walker terms as “the clubhouse”… but they also in a very real sense cause such social entities to spring into existence.

Now, while we are all celebrating this profound shift that is transpiring within gaming, there is something that I feel ought to be pointed out about it.

• When I first proposed using AD&D’s 1:1 time and training and time jail rules, the players of my Trollopulous campaign complained about it bitterly.
• When I told the BrOSR that there was something seriously off about how they were running their campaigns back in January of 2023, they were so angry and insubordinate they could only just barely serve as players in the requisite exploratory gaming I needed to do in order to nail down a solution.
• When inspiration struck in November of 2023 and I finally had answers to the problems that had bedeviled us for years, the very same people that championed my work on Appendix N and 1:1 time argued against me relentlessly and even demanded receipts before the first proof of concept session could be set up.
• And finally, when Brozer was on the verge of being dropped and we were all about to take our victory lap, people within the BrOSR and on its fringes elected to choose that moment to launch their tackiest and most vehement attacks against Bdubs and me.

I described this precise dynamic in exquisite detail back on my notorious appearance on Harmony Ginger’s debut show. At this point, you’d really have to be retarded not to realize that if I am taking serious flak from within the BrOSR, it is a sure sign that we are on the verge of taking the state of the art a quantum leap forward yet again.

And so we were.

I quipped last year that I was the third most important person in D&D due to the fact that you couldn’t play the game correctly without using ideas that I had recovered and championed. Today we have moved well beyond that. I have now expressed a set of phenomenal ideas in a way that many more people can replicate than ever. This is something that gaming pioneers like David Wesely, Dave Arneson, and Gary Gygax were unable to do within a fifty year timespan. I have solved what was the most difficult open problem in gaming. I am therefore now the most important person in rpg history.

And though it is true that I could not have accomplished this without the BrOSR. It is also very much the case that I had to pull this off in spite of them as well. And it is clear that it is only because of my persistence, my brilliance, my intuition, and my leadership that we are crossing the finish line today with the amount of elan that we are.

You should thank me.