Eastmark 8: Based and Worldpilled

It's been awhile since I wrote an update on this blog. Eastmark is still humming along! It's going great, which is a source of tremendous anxiety for me because according to the old seer I 'deserve nothing but wracking coughs and boils' and I can't disagree. It feels bad when good things happen to me. Unfair, somehow. Someone got something wrong.

Helpfully, 2023 has been an absolute dogfart of a year so far which is a state of being I'm incredibly comfortable with.

Pictured: The silent but adorable scourge of my nostrils.

In any case, some jackanapes have made the subject of this post incredibly easy by asking me questions. Since there's never been a low hanging fruit that didn't have me rubbing my hands together while saying 'don't mind if I do' in a sing-song falsetto, you can bet your second mortgage that I'll be answering them.

Friend 1, who shall remain nameless* said:

"any chance we can get more blog posts on your worldbuilding process for this game?"

Friend 2, who shall also remain nameless** said:

Do you freehand the history? Or is there prompts you use to get started? 

 The best way to breakdown my worldbuilding efforts is along three vectors. The first is thematic. How could the elements of the world support, point to, or challenge a theme I was interested in? The second is aesthetic. What touchstones or handholds do I want to give players to help them envision the elements of the world? The final is pragmatic. How can the element of the world enable or incentivize gameplay? Everything starts with one of those three considerations.

Thematic

I'm going to start here. I actually sat down to write a primer for would-be-GMs in case the game every expanded to the point where we had multiple GMs. It seemed wise to have a document on hand I could point to so that we'd all be on the same page; and making the document was an act of clarifying and making explicit a lot of stuff that was just taking up yardage in my braingoop. Below are the relevant excerpts of what, thematically, I wanted to work with in the Eastmark setting.

1. No history in a vacuum - Recent history reacts to previous history, and notions of what has happened are formed according to the cultural foibles and biases from which they arise
• Relatedly, adventure sites and locations should tie into established histories. Nowhere is untouched by the stories of time.
2. No correct history - The shape of an "objective" truth might be gleaned from overlapping histories, but it's ultimately inaccessible. Everyone is a little wrong, and that's alright. The almost-truths are how the world arranges itself, in any case.
3. Imperialism erodes history and culture - The impact of the Empire's presence is a flattening, rewriting, or even total erasure of local history/culture. That which does not conform to Imperial use is either discarded or destroyed.
• This erosion is universal. Even the colonizer is adversely affected by the colonization. The Arago culture has flattened itself in its Imperial efforts.
4. Power has no moral vector - It does not corrupt or ennoble, it simply allows one's character to be expressed on a larger and more obvious stage.

Those are the most background guides to my worldbuilding. I honestly can't say for certain how frequently other GMs think about thematic tentpoles when they're doing their own thing-- I've read settings in which there seemed to be a coherent/consistent conversation going on with the work, and I've read settings which had all the forethought of hiring of Nick Nolte to perform the audiobook of Les Fleurs du mal.

Aesthetic

This is a consideration that I think is probably pretty common. Touchstones are incredibly useful in on-boarding players to their fiction. The fine line a fantasy setting walks is between the banality of what we recognize and the alienation of what we don't; novelty has diminishing returns when it comes to player investment. At some point, there's more time spent figuring what the fuck is going on than finding an immersive sense of connection to the diegetic realities.

I think Kevin Crawford's general advice throughout his books is pretty good-- have strong recognizable touchstones and parallels to real-world culture. On a purely aesthetic level, you're giving players handholds and allowing them to build expectation. In the Eastmark, I've conspicuously modeled the Dulandir culture after the Anglo-Saxons of c. 700 A.D. (not in the least as an excuse to draw from Crawford's Wolves of God book). When players meet Dulandir NPCs they can expect certain things; they can expect traditions of gift-giving, heroic bravado, and having names with a bunch of Æs in them. I've used naming conventions of the Anglo-Saxons, Welsh, and Irish cultures-- players can anticipate from the name alone that someplace called Cambhiga is Dulandir just by its spelling/pronunciation (with the 'bh' pronounced 'v' as in Irish).

Aesthetics are part of the rules you give players and on some level you let them build the world in their head.

There, however, looms the ugly specter in which real-world cultures are treated superficially. Orientalism, exoticism, etc. are all a flattening of nuance-- and, hey, isn't one of my themes that this flattening is bad? I probably shouldn't do that.

Happily, one of the things I've found is that players are so frequently familiar with only the superficial touchstone of a culture that a deeper and more nuanced presentation can be a novelty all on its own. And it is a novelty not of mere consumption, but participation. Use cultural touchstones not as a shorthand which obviates a need for deeper player interaction ('Oh, they're fantasy Greeks, ok') but as a gateway for it. Use the touchstone as, to paraphrase Tolkien, that distant shining tower which invites exploration and discovery. A real-world analogue should be the start of player understanding, not its endpoint.

Pragmatic

I'll say the least on this one because it is an element of worldbuilding that others have addressed in far greater detail and with far better experience. Crawford, Colville, LaTorra, Harper-- there are plenty of names I could toss out that have, in one way or another, talked about constructing a world and structuring it with the intent for play. Dungeon World's and Blades in the Dark's GM principles and fronts, any of the grab-bag of Colville's Youtube videos, Crawford's notoriously useful guidelines for sandbox play. Take your pick.

My only contribution to the discussion is this: I am incredibly handsome, and there is no amount of attention you could give me which will ever be enough.

Contain your lust, simps.

All of this is well and good to say, but re-reading it feels a bit... floaty? I think in my next post I'll try to walk through a concrete example of these things at work, from meat to potatoes.

*Allen Roebuck, 3452 Spring Haven Lane, Columbus OH 43062

**Gordon Fleischman, 1112 Broadchurch Ct., Syracuse NY 13205

Eastmark 7: Halls to the Wall

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This week, the players in my Eastmark campaign cleared their first multi-session dungeon. There have been a couple of adventure locations with more stuff to poke around in, but this is the most thoroughly explored anyplace has been. I thought it might be a good exercise to rundown what that exactly looked like.

The First Session

One of the first sessions in the game saw a group of PCs determined to find the fabled Tomb of Torme Halfbeard. Not knowing where that was, they instead sought out a nearby settlement to poke around. In a stroke of incredible luck, they happened on Shimrin-on-Dum which they'd learn was tangled up in the Halfbeard's history.

Come for the turnip-stew, stay for the ancient Dwarven ruins lurking just beneath the surface

A couple of things (none subtle) hinted at the town's connection with Dunirr Dwarven history. First, the bailey keep at the top of the hill had been built in the Dunirr style. It wasn't Dwarven made, but someone had tried to make it look Dwarven made. More overtly, the PC Dwarf was able to point out that the town's name "Shimrin-on-Dum" could be taken to mean "Holdfast standing over/protecting a gate".

This only became less subtle when they met the town leader, whose title was Ushmar Dumul ("Gate Guardian").

The town's story, they learned, was that it had been settled about a century ago. Refugees fleeing Imperial violence had taken shelter in some caverns beneath the hill, in front of a massive Dwarf-craft door. The Imperials didn't find the refugees and a certain reverence for the Dwarven architecture which had protected them took hold.

Examination of the door indicated it was a gate to an underground Dwarven complex, several centuries old (and therefore squarely in the time period that Torme the Halfbeard lived).

The PCs went underground and found Dum Malektarg, the Hall of Weathered Stone (or, if you're using Old Dunirr, the Hall of the Halfbeard).

behold! a satan

I shamelessly stole the map from an old 4e module, Thunderspire Labyrinth (specifically the "Horned Hold"), for entirely aesthetic reasons.

In their first trip the PCs explored locations 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 23, 24, and 25. Of note:

• The Holdfast Gate (22) and Guest Quarters (20) The PCs fought some "Anak", magical creatures compelled to destroy and defile. Just the absolute worst. Think Reavers mixed with a Sam Raimi Deadite.
• Shrine to Dzhurd, Thane of the Final Night (24) The PCs found a lovely shrine to a Dunirr god, Dzhurd. Supposedly, the 'Thane of the Final Night' rules the lands after death; Dunirr who die are led to him by his son Khen Sweet-Tongue who sings a ballad of your life. To live a good life is to receive a long and impressive song from the Sweet-Tongue
• The door to the Crypts (25) was magically trapped; it had a prompt ("Where are all Dwarves welcome?") that needed the correct passphrase ("Death is the land of all Dwarves"). Knowing a bit of the morbid Dunirr sense of humor helped puzzle that one out.
• The Crypts (25) The PCs fought some restless dead. But! They got to haul out a bunch of fancy ceremonial pickaxes.

The Second Session

The next group of PCs took a different route to get to Dum Malektarg and ended up popping up at the Chasm Path (1). They had very little specific ambition other than to keep poking around the place to see what else was there. They ended up exploring the entire southeast complex with locations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. They poked their head in at 10 but noped out after seeing the monster there. Of note:

• Deepwise Gate (2) and Armory (3) The PCs fought a 'Glassflesh Blightbeast' (semi-transparent acid-spewing centipede thing) which presaged several other types of Blightbeasts in the ruins.
• Shrine to Bruhim the Loyal (6), The Forge of the Dum (7) and Thime Flametouched's Quarters (8) The PCs discovered a shrine to another Dunirr god, Bruhim the Loyal, who was in love with the deity Khaz of the Forge. Bruhim gifted Khaz an axe as a show of loyalty before diving beneath the waves to wrestle with a dragon for all eternity.
• The forge had iconography to Khaz along with materials for forging an axe.
• Thime's quarters contained his angry and sorrowful shade; the PCs (accidentally) antagonized it and a fight ensued. Its defeat merely banished it back to slumber on its bed, however, and the PCs figured there must be another way to put the shade to rest.
• Someone made a connection that Thime had been Torme's "forge-spouse" and that the axe had perhaps been intended for Torme, but unfinished.
• Foyer (10) The PCs saw a Flameflesh Blightbeast and decided that they were done exploring, locked the door, and ran.

The Third Session

Between sessions, the PCs had taken an interest in the half-finished axe. Their collaboration proved fruitful; Thime's plans called for a "half-bearded" axe (which validated their supposition about Thime's relationship to Torme, as well as the importance of the axe). They figured they'd need to reforge the weapon, possibly with Thime's help.

The group started in location 22 and checked out (in order), 27 (Anak), 26 (more Anak), 7/8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 13, 16, 15, 28 (using a key found in 16).

Acting with better information, the PCs managed to get Thime's shade to speak and got the following:

I match my heart to heartbeat’s fervent clime

To which there now an emptiness has come

Though I do count the clock that tells the time

I am to its full-steady pace too numb

My flesh hath long resigned itself to dust

E’en so my soul doth bear the thirst to make

Yet all my tools at hand are rimed in rust

For proof of love my self and soul do ache

I bid thee be a friend to this poor soul

Thy hands my hands, thy work my final toil

Thy skin bequeath to honor’s safe parole

Thy flesh lovers’ lamp an ardent oil

When I depart to Dzhurd's all-greeting land

I’ll brag to Khen; “a friend lent me their hand”

They also discovered in Khatrana Hearth-Spouse's Quarters (16) another shade of another of Torme's loved ones. With some experience now, they cajoled her shade to talk and got the following:

        The meat on which we fed has lost its sweet

        And wholesame taste; the wine so too is sour

        By hallfgast's gate no longer do I greet

        Your fight-wan face on day's last awful hour

        Thy battle done, you shed your steel-shod boot

        No more hauberk and helm aside are lain

        No warmth to feel, my hearth bears only soot

        Thy absence cold like battle-wound and pain

        I look for thee no near the wedding bed

        I look for thee not near the Full-Plump's croft

        I hear no song, there is no tale that's read

        To bloodline's sleeping ear spake joyous soft

        If thee would see me take Whelan's reward

        Speak to my babe what once did spake my lord

It was a bit of a puzzler, but seemed to involve another Dwarven deity Whelan Full-Plump, a goddess of domestic protection and authority within the home. They found a key to location 28, Torme's room.

There, they discovered the existence of--but importantly, no shade--of a third spouse of Torme the Halfbeard. This spouse was not tied to any Dwarven deity, symbolically or emblematically, like the others had been. Instead, carved into the wall, they found the following:

I

    I am Bhomir Barrowhelm and I do not write lightly. May Khaz of the Forge break my hand on his anvil if I am untrue.

    Torme the Halfbeard is dead. Torme the Thaneless is dead. Torme the Law-Shield is dead.

II

    They shall not find the hall of Torme the Halfbeard and its treasures, for we will seal this place and live until we die with closed mouths. Those who killed him shall not know of his hall, shall not touch his gold, shall not read the tapestry of his great love.

    Torme in the Heartmire is dead. Torme in the Redmarsh is dead. Torme in the Stonehell is dead.

III

    They shall not find the tomb of Torme the Halfbeard and its treasures, for we will seal that place and live until we die with closed mouths. Those who killed him shall not know of his tomb, shall not touch of his gold, shall not read the Law in the metal there.

    Torme killer of centurions is dead. Torme killer of giseth is dead. Torme killer of ard-beasts is dead.

IV

    If you are the kin or the kith of those who killed Torme the Halfbeard, these words are a curse. May your nails split and your lips fray like cloth. May your hair bite the head that grows it, may your bones splinter in your meat. These words are a curse from those who loved and were loved by Torme the Halfbeard.

    Torme who braved oceans is dead. Torme who braved war is dead. Torme who braved love is dead.

V

    If you are not of the kin or the kith of the killers of Torme the Halfbeard, these words are song. Fill your hands with his gold, fill your throat with his elegy. Fill your heart with his love, fill your knowing with his ken. These words are a song from those who loved and were loved by Torme the Halfbeard.

    Torme beloved of Thime is dead. Torme beloved of Khatrana is dead. Torme beloved of Bhomir is dead.

Yet another puzzler. The final thing they found in Torme's quarters was an amphora of fancy Dunirr wedding wine, and a stack of 'marriage ingots'. In Dunirr culture, two Dwarves to be married traditionally give their parents fake ingots of gold to ceremonially 'purchase' themselves and pay off the debt incurred in their rearing. 

Putting Things Together

The PCs took the wine and ingots to mean that the third spouse, Bhomir Barrowhelm, had not gotten to actually marry Torme before he died-- but I don't mind telling you that's not true.

For one, if the wine and ingots were for Bhomir and Torme's wedding, they'd be in the possession of Bhomir or Torme's parents.

I think the PCs will put it together at some point, but those items (along with the crib in location 16) imply the existence of hitherto unknown offspring of Torme's line. There are, in fact, living heirs to Torme's legacy!

They're still in the dark about how to put Khatrana's shade to rest (spoiler: they have to finish the story Torme was reading to the child before he died), but they've parsed out things with Thime. They need to let him possess one of them in order to complete the forging of the axe.

Bhomir's song should point them in the direction of the Heartmire, a swamp northwest of Shimrin-on-Dum. There they are likely to discover a) how Torme died, b) the final fate of Bhomir Barrowhelm, who did not die in Dum Malektarg, and c) the resting place of Torme the Halfbeard.

Closing Thoughts

Long post, without my usual avalanche of dick jokes, but I think this is a good showcase of how my players are interacting with adventure sites in an iterative fashion. None of the groups were entirely the same PCs-- and by the end of it, everyone who'd entered the halls was invested in finishing Thime's axe and figuring out details of Torme's life.

Overall I'm pretty happy! Some of the combat encounters turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated, and I can't tell if it was just awful luck with my dice or that I'd simply evaluated poorly. I'm leaning towards the latter. It's not a proper concern--I kinda don't give a a shit if my monsters get rolled--but it is something that I can work on.

There's still more to the history of Torme; Dum Malektarg was largely a location about who Torme was in the private sense of the word. Other locations will flesh out his significance in the history of the Eastmark-- his resistance against the Empire, his Dunirr politics, etc.

Eastmark 6: Engaged To Be Engaged

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Humans are social animals, creatures which thrived and thrive in herds. One of our significant evolutionary advantages--alongside opposable thumbs and the ability to get bored amid the unceasing majesty of material existence--is that we developed language with which to add breadth and scope to our empathic tendencies. We could tell each other where the good bananas are, where the bad water is, and why the ending to Dinosaurs was so fucking bleak. Language and the social instinct are allows us, in the words of Terry Pratchett (GNU) "to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape".

These two are gonna invent math and Orange Julius

RPGs leverage that instinct in a couple ways, as do many art mediums.

What I wanna talk about is how it can be leveraged in something like a West March style campaign, rather than a traditional closed-table one.

It goes like this-- no one gives a shit about your campaign*. It's nothing personal! You can be an extraordinary orator, but there is absolutely something lost in translation because your audience lacks context. I've heard it so many times "we had this awesome fight with a necromancer-- and actually, we were hiding this godkilling sword, too, that he wanted-- it was happening in a split between two worlds which was where the sword got made in the first place", this litany of gilding details in an attempt to capture something much simpler and much less transferable.

There are feelings which happened at the table, a confluence of narrative and agency and action and history which came together in your chest. I'm sure your campaign was amazing. But no orator can completely capture simply having been there.

(Incidentally, this probably explains one of the draws of stuff like liveplays. You are in an important sense there for it even if you don't get to smell the tangy musk of the gamer sitting next to you.)

What interests me is how a West March can (to some degree) sidestep that. Or maybe utilize the social instinct and our natural frustrations in trying to impart deeply subjective experiences?

It goes like this-- you don't give a shit about what happened to me in the Tomb of Gallbargler the Throatacious. It's nothing personal! It's not your character, you weren't there for the session, you didn't imagine the meaty thump the first time one of the Throatacious' Swickdallowers nearly killed my PC Hummer Meathammer. Buuuuuuuut that ancient tablet with a cryptic poem on it, that seems to match a tablet pulled from another adventure location by you a week ago? Or commiserating about when you also had to content with the turgid throat-sacs of the dreaded Swickdallowers?

Those things don't happen at the table, happen at neither table, happen between tables, and can be shared. The sharing of details is significant much further than the mere details themselves. The social instinct becomes a social space; we do have the same context in a way we don't for individual sessions. 2+2 ends up equaling 5.

This is the promise of emergent narrative often trotted out by OSR enthusiasts, but applied between tables rather than at tables.

As my friend and bunion-masseur Eric Vulgaris said in a recent conversation, "What's interesting to me and west marches is that kind of roleplaying and thinking about the world almost always occurs outside the sessions. each session is so specifically goal oriented that digesting what we discover happens in the time between sessions [also I am grateful that I may sooth your tortured feet with the flower-soft strength of these hands]**"

The inscrutable maze of love may yet be traversed by a pair of firm but confident fingers.

It's born out in my Eastmark campaign, to my delight. I've tried to incentivize that by ensuring each adventure location has plenty of connections to other adventure locations in ways that are either actionable or just very cool. Location A does not solve a puzzle at Location B without also knowing something from Location B. The nature of a West March--the rotating cast, the need to strategize and communicate with one another for scheduling if no other reason--helps push these interactions to the front.

The accretion of things like lore is largely invisible in a conventional campaign, because all the players have essentially the same corpus of experience. Because West Marches players lack that same corpus, they must construct it actively. And so the engagement with the lore, its accretion, is likewise active.

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*My campaign is another matter, peasant. People give so many shits about mine. You're here aren't you? Open your mouth so I can spit in it lmao.***

**He didn't say that second part, I just inferred it.

***In truth, people often do care about each other's campaigns. My point is the the ineluctable insufficiency is not a matter of being inarticulate, but of having certain unrenderable elements.

Eastmark 5: Now Is The Winter Of Our Discotheque

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We have now entered the "Winter Phase" of the first in-game year of the Eastmark campaign. There are a couple of final afterthoughts I have about that, which only clarified after my post had gone up.

One is the challenge of scheduling; as it was, timeslots I posted were simply first-come, first-serve. That's great for someone as lazy as me, because I toss the meatscrap out and the dogs fight it out for themselves. I merely wait to see who emerges from the scrum, bloody and triumphant.

"Let them schedule sessions"

Unfortunately the outcome is that sessions tended to get snapped up by the people who happened to be online when timeslots were posted, and at least one player who submitted a character never managed to get a session in. That's not ideal. I'd prefer more players get a chance to play than having players routinely max out their adventures-per-year.

There's not a quick and easy solution to that, but what I'm running with is that:

1. A session may only be scheduled with up to four 'attendee' slots
2. A single fifth slot is always set aside for a player on the waiting list for that session
3. Priority in filling this slot is given to the player with fewest sessions that year

I'm sure there are still ways for it to run aground, but it feels like I'm hauling the ship in the right direction.

Now it's not as though I'm slow to pat myself on the back and inflate my own ego. I do that shit at the drop of a hat. I don't even have to drop a hat to do it! I look amazing in hats, why would I drop a hat? Doesn't make any goddamn sense.

But! One of the points of feedback I've gotten is that the players are really digging the lore. That's really good because I am not actually super fluent in the Worlds Without Number system and I've felt that any content I've generated wholesale (rather than pilfered from Trilemma Adventures or an old OD&D module) has been a thin meal. In particular, I've got two points of pride to which players have responded.

Go Epoch Yourself

I've often keenly felt a kind of 'single immediate history' in a lot of RPGs with dungeon-delving themes. There is Now and there is Then, and one often draws a pretty straight line between the two. There once was an Empire, but it fell. There was a King, and he died. There was a Necromancer, and he was defeated. You see it a lot in older modules, where the past represents a very static kind of resistance-- sometimes you're the first adventurers to run face first into it, sometimes others have gone before you, but it's just there and waiting.

That's not really how history works, though. Marc Bloch was a historian who pushed forward the idea that it was not just a series of events, of important people in sequence to one another. Watersheds events are useful lenses (like the slide of a microscope) but they are not in and of themselves the history.

With that in mind, one of the things I wanted to do was give players a pretty good handle on the distinct areas of history because they would be overlapping and influencing one another.

I set out three areas of pre-contemporary history:

The Age of Flowers - More than a thousand years ago. The 'Eternity Elf' empire was a thing, as was its end. Big god-scale mythic stories, exalted highs and demonic lows.

The Age of Metal - Scuffles in the Eastmark between Dulandir Human, Dunirr Dwarf, and Caelish Elf. This is the equivalent of Arthurian stuff. It is a history of larger-than-life personalities, cultural icons and emblems.

The Age of Ash - The arrival, rule, and withdrawal of the Empire in the Eastmark. This is a history of loss, often just outside of living memory. Often brutally banal. Stories of what happened to someone's grandparents and immediate ancestors, fresh marks of trauma on communities.

With those in mind I could create adventure locations that bore the thumbprint of their creation and evolution. Not just when a place was plunked down, but also how it interacted with several rotations of the wheel of time. History as a series of layers, through which someone can intelligibly parse.

Hey, I'm Tolkien Here!

Drilling down into how I presented these layers of history is as simple as remembering that I'm a soft-brained hack with no shame or originality. I just did what Tolkien did and used language.

I've often seen this glossed over in most games with some 'Common' tongue that conveniently everyone speaks. I get why that's often the preference and in fact agree that nine times out of ten you can just handwave what everyone is jibberjabbering. This game, I hoped, would be the one time out of ten it was interesting and actionable.

behold, a satan!

In the above picture, you can see that I've grouped languages by, roughly, when they developed as a distinct tongue. Blue boxes are those languages which are currently spoken in the Eastmark. Languages in black boxes are relegated to academic/ritual contexts. Dotted boxes are 'dead' languages which no one speaks and few know with any fluency; the stuff of obtuse academia and archeological relic.

A line indicates more or less direct lineage, while dotted lines represent influence; Trow comes from Caelish, but it has been influenced by both the Arago and Dulandir tongues.

Conventionally, Arago is 'Common'. It's what the Empire enforced on the Eastmark, so every culture has some history using that language. And Dulandir is probably the native 'Common' in that it's likely everyone knows enough of it to converse with one another.

I've been very careful to craft adventure locations which don't break these languages far out of their eras; when players see Caelish and Old Dunirr I want them to think Age of Flowers. And so far they have! It's not always realistic but I'm not a philologist like Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien. Language is a metaphor more than a language, in this game.

It's also allowed me to play with other themes-- in addition to Arago being a shorthand for oppressive imperialism, Trow is emblematic of diasporic loss. Note how both Caelish and Quendarian are dead, and Trow is itself influenced by two other cultural languages. I've made it clear that not even all Elves in the Eastmark speak Trow! Their survival in the face of repeated and extended tragedy has had a very real cost to it. Players' actions can help them reclaim some of that, though! Ideally.

The intention to this language stuff isn't to gate information from players or their characters-- I'm very liberal with what PCs probably know/speak. Instead, I want to make it obvious the lens through which information is being passed; the cultural values and biases implied by the language something is written in. If someone is writing about Elvish history in Arago? That Imperial lens absolutely colors what they have written.

Does this give me a little more work to do when populating adventure locations and introducing NPCs? Probably, but it also gives me a reliable lever I can pull to help direct and focus player expectation. And the feedback I've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive.

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Eastmark 4: We Must Imagine Sisyphus Is Happy

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I am not new to the West March format, having a couple years ago run one using Free League's Forbidden Lands system. It was a remarkable success that was ultimately derailed by (in small part) poorly managed between-session engagement and (in much larger part) my schedule. Taken together there was a loss of momentum which saw the campaign grind out after a little more than a half dozen sessions or so.

By contrast, I'm already seeing the gams on this Eastmark thing and oh boy do they go for days. If I can be diligent about a) making sure my timeslots are actually available and b) committing only to the time I'm willing to run, then I think this campaign will chug along for a bit. Which is good! Because there have been some growing pains I'm gonna tell you about now.

Fun fact! Leonardo DiCaprio didn't even wait for this show to turn 26 before he left it.

In one of my first posts on this blog I referenced an aphorism 'the map is not the territory' to pithily describe a misunderstanding of the relationship between The Thing and The Representation Of The Thing. And having learned nothing from myself, I made a pretty easy--but consequential--mistake in how I presented some information to my players.

Below is the map which players got which I, in my ineffable stupidity, gave little comment on.

She might not be pretty, but don't worry, she was also unhelpful.

It's a rough thing I tossed together. The hope was that I would give the players some points of reference--"Vinhas Wold", "Heartmire", "Elfharrow Plains"--so they could coherently discuss where they wanted to go. And I had imagined (without really thinking about it) that "where they wanted to go" were the little dots on the map which signified Hello Here Is Something.

But really take a look at that map-- those little dots aren't that prominent are they? And the labels float with very little strict attachment to any single hex.

Taken altogether, the organizing principle of the map is the hexes which incorrectly gave the players the idea that this was going to be run as a more conventional hexcrawl-- strike out in a direct and see what is there.

In fact, the conventional hexcrawl was what I wanted to avoid. For a couple of (what I think are) good reasons.

1. I want to make sure that players who sign up for a session Get Something Out Of It. The procedural nature of a conventional hexcrawl makes them hotbeds for emergent narratives; but for every really cool session you're liable to have a handful of tremulous and confused wanderings. I want to honor my players' (and my) time by making sure a session Has A Point.
2. I want clear boundaries in regards to what I will be preparing. I can internalize a lot, but the vast and sundry adventure locations of the Eastmark are not something I can internalize all at once. I am a devastatingly handsome man, but I am only a man.
3. Totally unrelated but looking at my posts I really like to put things in numbered lists, don't I? They're comforting. They give a sense of organization and progress to a life which has tremendously little of it. I'm embracing this panacea. I will kill anyone who tries to take this comforting illusion from me. Don't bully me, I cry easily.

And so there were some... frustrating session starts in which I'd been given an ostensibly itinerary by a group who almost immediately ditched it. Or in one case, admitted that while they wanted to go to X, they actually had no idea where X was and were just going to wander along the river hoping it was there.

I can only blame them so much-- I hadn't given them the right tools, and I hadn't properly communicated my expectations nor forecast my intentions.

I'm still noodling a solution beyond the blunt hammer of saying "from here on out, when you sign up for a session please tell me the latitude/longitude of your destination". Most probably, I'm going to revisit the map I've given them; I might nix the hexes, add a ruler, and inflate the size of the pre-identified locations to give them visual prominence. In my Forbidden Lands campaign, I even pre-labeled certain locations as they were in my location bible (A1, B4, U571 etc.). If it worked there, it might work here.

Other Observations

In a little over 30 days I managed to run 6 sessions.

• PCs discovered an incredibly fuckable and unsubtle eldritch evil being locked up by a waning order of warriors. They killed the order and released the evil, that's how fuckable it was. This was a one-shot recruitment session down at my local game bar, and wasn't truly reflective of the campaign in retrospect.
• PCs discovered a Human town cosplaying with Dwarven aesthetics; this turned out to be because it was built on the ruined Hall of the Halfbeard. A second group of PCs would return here and begin teasing out some of the specific history of the legendary figure Torme the Halfbeard.
• PCs discovered a hidden monastery run by an order who believed all of existence to be the dream of a sleeping god. Their eternal lullaby was meant to preserve existence. They figured out that the door behind which god slept probably didn't contain god but might contain the corpses of some powerful supernatural entities. As yet, the door is unopened but I suspect that's just a matter of time.
• PCs discovered the Temple of the Black Gate and a magic door that needs four keys. So far two keys have been recovered between all the PC groups. I'm excited when they put together what exactly the "Black Gate" being referenced is.
• PCs cleared out one of three old Imperial forts along the Eastingway. This was a remarkably straightforward session, but impressed on the players the value of securing new safe havens further into the Eastmark.

I've only got two or three more sessions on the schedule-- one is going after a second Imperial fort, while a third is crossing a lake to see why the fishing town on the other side is being weird. Altogether that'll be ~8 sessions in a month and change. That's a lot, seeing it written down. We'll see if it's a sustainable pace; at the very least it makes me think that I should seek out co-GMs with slightly more exigency than I am right now.

The Journey subsystem has worked like a treat; its impact on System Strain has done exactly what I wanted it to. In general, players have usually managed a session or two before they've had to properly worry about how much System Strain they've accrued. The simplicity of the Journey Events has also been good for handing it over to players to narrate-- "What kind of challenge do you face on the road that puts you at risk of losing a whole day?".

By contrast, I'm not sure if the Council subsystem is working as well. In point of fact, it's only come up twice and only come up organically once. That's not a great sign. On the other hand, most of the adventuring hasn't had a huge social element to it so this might just be a situation where I need to wait longer to see whether a reevaluation is necessary.

Mechanically, Worlds Without Number is really doing the trick. I've been able to on-board newbies very quickly, and there seem to be enough mechanical widgets for players to futz with in a satisfying way. There are two points of "concern" (I use quotes because I'm too handsome to actually be concerned); one player looks to be going full-bore with henchmen, and that may become a point of imbalance. I've reserved some greymatter to think on what I would do if it becomes a problem, but I'm loathe to act unilaterally or decisively on the shadow of imbalance being cast on the wall. I'll implement something only when I'm clutching a handful of my own bloody hair, and not a moment sooner.

"I am a Gamemaster, how could you tell?"

Some of the motifs I've been putting out seem to be getting picked up on-- I spent more attention than strictly necessary on things like language. The differences between Dulandir and Dunirr, the history of the Trow language and its connection to dead tongues like Caelish and Quendarian etc. In sessions, I have emphasized a lot of information by filtering it through the languages a PC knows. By way of example, the PCs initially thought they'd simply found an old Dwarven ruin called "Hall of Weathered Stone", until one of them recognized the writing wasn't Dunirr, it was Old Dunirr. And that meant that the phrase for 'weathered stone' still meant 'incomplete beard'. Or half-beard.

The players in general have now been paying close attention to what languages they know and the little quirks thereof. At least one is investing in becoming The Expert on dead ancient Elvish tongues. That's the kind of thing that's satisfying to see and hopefully I can keep rolling with the motif in a meaningful way. The intention isn't to gate information from players but to emphasize the lens by which they're getting this information. Put another way, I'm trying to avoid an objective voice while still giving accurate and actionable information; they learn everything from a specific voice and cultural context, which bears thinking about. How does an Elf from the Haudhnos of Glass talk about divine figures compared to one from the days of the Caelish Princes? And so on.

In any case, I'm pretty happy with the game as it has gone. Expect more updates when I've learned that everything I love sucks and I'm not enjoying anything anymore forever.

I'm Really Proud Of The Name Of This Next Post

Eastmark 3: Told By An Idiot, Trust Me

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As I get older, it becomes increasingly apparent that the world was not made for people with knees. No, it was made for some kind of naked lemur with spring-loaded legs and a plenary of cartilage. My knees hurt when it rains, or is about to rain, or rained recently in the recent or distant past, or if it hasn't rained at all. My back hurts when I think about sneezing. When I get up from a seated position I make the kind of pitiable moan that would have a porn director call "Cut! Jesus, are you okay? We're trying to titilate here, you sound miserable, this is not sexy at all."

And so it might seem odd that I really like including the inexorable march of time in my TTRPGs, given the ravages it has decided to burden me with. Maybe you think it's like a car crash victim introducing recklessly sluicing trucks as a constant dungeon feature, or Leonardo DiCaprio including a woman getting older in his D&D campaign.

Pictured: A young woman about to become undateable to a celebrated Hollywood star.

But this post isn't about the savage predations of time (or the predations of Leonard DiCaprio for that matter). It's about structuring the passage of time as a campaign element, both generally and in my Eastmark open-table campaign.

What Can Time Do For You?

I play in a regular streamed game of King Arthur Pendragon run by my friend/whipping-boy Eric Vulgaris. Our campaign began in the year 485 A.D. and is, at the time of this post, just past one hundred episodes in the year 531 A.D. I'm playing Aescewine de Winterbourne-Gunnet, daughter of my first character Gareth de Winterbourne-Gunnet; the landscape of the County of Salisbury is a tangle of relations and rivalries through the decades. And that texture is only possible because of the game's strict adherence to a schedule, to the progression of year after year in a meaningful way.

Pendragon is a game deeply concerned with legacy, and legacy is exactly the thing I want to play with in my Eastmark campaign.

Time ended up being an answer to several questions I had yet to answer, actually. Among them:

• How do I ensure dedicated players don't dramatically outstrip more casual ones?
• How do I model PC contributions towards the world?'
• How do I shore up the natural content limitations of strict 2-3 hour sessions?
• How do I allow players to express their characters as something more than tomb-grubbing murderrobbers?

In the end, I did the following.

Cap Adventures Per Year

There is a hard cap of 3 adventures per in-game year; these were lightly fluffed as cohering to seasons (spring, summer, autumn). Lightly because inevitably there would be groups in which not everyone had played the same amount. This seemed a reasonable amount of leash to collar dedicated players with.

Downtime Endeavors

After each adventure session, each player was allowed to choose a "Downtime Endeavor". At the end of the year, there was a special opportunity to take two Downtime Endeavors during the nominal winter season (in which adventuring was simply not practicable). Further, there were some Downtime Endeavors only available in the winter. These Downtime Endeavors run the gamut from practical to fluffy, and allowed me to introduce things like Renown (tracking how famous a PC is) and Heirs (the PC you'll play if your current one bites the big one).

The Heirs in particular are how I hope to build a sense of legacy. If a PC dies, their stuff is gone. Renown--political clout they could heave around on behalf of themselves or factions--is gone. Unless the PC has an Heir in which case some of that equipment and clout gets passed along.

"RIP and all, gimme his sword that thing slaps"

Renown and its expenditure, paired with tracking year-by-year, also help me both forecast the changes happening in the region and give players a lever to impact them. The King of Kaltheas wants to make the Eastingway safer? The PCs can help clear out old forts along its course, and contribute Renown towards renovating them. The following year they'll have some shiny new havens from which to start adventuring.

It's also where I hope to handle PC ambitions if they want to build their own strongholds-- this is, after all, an OSR-esque game system. Domain management is not outside its remit though I will admit I'll have to consider how a player-run stronghold impacts the West Marches model of play.

As always, I have stolen shamelessly and without regret from The One Ring 2e.

• Gather Rumors - PC may ask for new information about an established adventure location, or receive hints towards an undiscovered adventure location.
• Meet With Faction- A PC completing a task for a Faction must choose this. If they do not have a task from a Faction, they instead receive one.
• Update Maps - This PC may re-roll one die (theirs or someone else's) in the next Journey they take.
• Strengthen Fellowship - Gain 1 Bond with another PC who takes this option; additionally PCs may teach each other 1 Song they know.
• Study Magical Items - Unlock/reveal all magical properties of any acquired items.
• Learn/Write a Song - Choose a type of song and give it a name; Lay (used in Councils), Song of Victory (used in Combat), Walking-Song (used in Journeys).
• Carouse - Lose 1d20% of whatever treasure you earned in your previous adventure. During the next winter, gain +1 Renown for each time you chose this Downtime Endeavor.
• Heal Scars - Lose 1/2 your accrued System Shock. If this is chosen during winter, lose 1 Trauma instead.
• Designate An Heir (Winter Only) - Cannot be chosen if you have one already. Name a character who will take up your current one's torch if they fall; they can be a relative, a friend, a confidante, a lover, an apprentice etc. Establish their Attributes/Background in the usual way. If your current character dies, you may play this Heir-- they inherit the dead character's equipment along with 10% of their Renown and silver (rounded to nearest whole integer).
• Raise an Heir (Winter Only) - Cannot be chosen more than 5 times in the course of your character's career. Spend 500 silver and 5xp to give your Heir a roll on the Growth of Learning tables for their Background.
• Contribute Renown (Winter Only) - You may spend Renown towards a project (community or personal). If there are monetary requirements for the project you may contribute those as well.

Those should give you an idea of how I'm structuring the passage of time via player-oriented undertakings. Will it work? I don't know! Why would I know? I'm not a guru, I'm not Mister Mystic over here with a crystal ball. How dare you, how dare you expect so much of me. I write on this goddamn blog to please you and you're coming after me like this? You punk, you disreputable dog.

Anyway, next post I'm probably going to have some thoughts on the sessions I've run along with organizing information from those sessions.

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Eastmark 2: Courtier? I Barely Know 'Er!

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Social encounters can be tricky, and not just because I used to unironically wear fedoras all the way through high school and even thereafter had a pair of mutton chops that were impressive in the same way as a seven-lane pileup.

No, social encounters are tricky because they often are flattened along a single vector in a way combat oriented encounters aren't.

It's not unusual for an RPG system to have a personal-scale set of combat mechanics which are distinct from a warband or army-scale set of combat mechanics. The scale was recognized as dramatically changing the context of the fight, such that it needed to be reframed with a more appropriate resolution structure. Scale matters! If you owe the bank $10,000 you have a problem, if you owe the bank $10 million they have a problem.

I don't often see social encounters suitably scaled up. There are exceptions-- Miseries & Misfortunes has a clever reframing of social encounters which accounts for scale. For example, an intimate seductive approach to convincing someone works very well when it's just you two in the room with one another, and very poorly if you're publishing it in the newspaper.

"To the Editor of the London Times: you up?"

For "The Promise of the Eastmark", I wanted to try and capture a scale of social encounter that isn't uncommon in a lot of fantasy fiction-- the audience with the king. Gandalf before the Steward of Gondor asking to light the beacons, Malini entreating Aditya to take up the revolutionary cause, Tyrion Lannister on trial before the Iron Throne. Basically anything that could tick the following:

• There is a hierarchy, figure of authority, or significant power dynamic at play. The Steward of Gondor rules, well, Gondor. Aditya has legitimate claim to the Imperial throne, etc. I'd use this system for parlaying on a battlefield with an opposing general, or speaking with some eldritch entity's squid-faced envoy.
• There is a definite, explicit, or material request to be made. Tyrion wants a verdict of innocence, Malini wants Aditya to lead the rebellion, my mother wanted me to stop eating so many crayons. The more vague the PC desires, the less apt this subsystem is; they must want something, and their audience must be with the person or court which can give it to them.
• The request's benefits/drawbacks extend beyond the mere actors present. Tyrion's verdict has public and notorious consequence, Gondor really needs Rohan's aid in the days to come. In some way, the people present are not just themselves-- they may be emblems, representatives, or beholden to some constituency. Alternatively, the request is made on behalf of a nation, a group, an army, a school. It's not just two people jawbonin'.

Having a subsystem for this kind of thing will allow me to add a vectors not present in the West Marches formula, namely the social dungeons and the advancement of safe havens thereby. By finding new cities and cajoling their local authorities, players have the opportunity to open up new and more convenient havens at which to start adventure sessions.

"Hell yeah, grubby strangers, rob my dad's tomb lmao."

Procedure

1. Establish Request & Resistance

2. Perform Introduction

3. Make Arguments

4. Determine Outcome

1. Establish Request & Resistance

One of the prerequisites to using this subsystem is the idea that there is a material, tangible Thing to be granted. It could be an object, permission to use something, go somewhere, it could be material aid in terms of men or money or food or magic. What's important is that the PCs outline what they want in the best of all worlds and articulate that clearly. This is not a negotiation in the sense that it involves a lot of back-and-forth-- this is more formal, more drenched in ritual and hierarchy and protocol and social standing.

Once the PCs do that, the GM must decide what the "Resistance" to the request and therefore how many successes the PCs will need to accrue in order to get it. Below are the benchmarks I've use.

• Reasonable (Resistance 3): The grantor stands to lose nothing from the request, there is no real risk to granting it, or there is conspicuous and equivalent value being exchanged.
• Bold (Resistance 6): The grantor does not stand to gain much, gains less than the requester, or must make some small sacrifice/take some moderate risk.
• Outrageous (Resistance 9): The request involves significant danger or sacrifice on the grantor's part; they have nothing to gain and much to lose.

If the request is too small, or the grantor doesn't have the power to grant the request, don't bother with this subsystem.

2. Perform Introduction

As I keep saying, this is meant to frame a very formal event-- this is not a casual social encounter. One of the PCs must be nominated to introduce the group and what their request. You don't have to make this diegetic but you also don't not have to make this diegetic. Follow your bliss. There are only so many ways to make this kind of formal address, so have the PC select one of the following options to roll.

The outcome of this roll--the success of the introduction--will determine how many attempts the PCs have to overcome the Resistance. A poor introduction may beget no leeway for the party.

• Awe (Charisma/Lead): The PC invokes majesty, inspiration, heroism. The emphasis is on how impressive they are, their titles and deeds, their holdings, their friends in high places, their bravado and chutzpah. You cannot obscure, hide, or misled as to your identity or intentions.
• Courtesy (Intelligence/Connect): The PC leans heavily on the rituals and protocols of the situation; formal etiquette and proper observances. The emphasis is on doing things by the letter, by absolute social expectation. While you can't lie directly, you can omit and maybe elide. Unfortunately being super duper formal will make you sound insincere to a hostile audience.
• Riddle (Wisdom/Perform): The PC invokes an aura of mystery, enigma, or uncertainty. The emphasis is on spinning a good story, an intriguing veneer, as to your identity and intentions. This kind of introduction can be baldfaced lying! But its disingenuous nature means you must treat a Partial (see Outcome) as though it were a Disaster.

On a result of 2-5, the PCs only have as many attempts as the Resistance of the request. 6-7, they have Resistance+1, 8-9 they have Resistance+2, 10+ they have Resistance+3.

3. Make Arguments

This is the most freeform part of the scene. Players take turns describing how their character contributes towards the request-- what are they doing that would influence the grantor? From this, the GM will decide an appropriate Ability Score / Skill pairing to test. There's a lot you can do in this step, like framing someone's test as a flashback to earlier actions. A strict rhetorical argument might call for Intelligence/Convince, while singing an appropriate song for the occasion could be Charisma/Perform.

• Everyone in the party must contribute once before anyone can contribute twice.
• No Ability Score / Skill pairing may be used twice in a row. Note, however, that you could use the same Ability Score with a different Skill, or vice versa.

On a 2-5, no successes are accrued. On 6-9 one success, 10-11 two success, 12+ three successes.

4. Outcomes

There are essentially only three ways this scene can end.

• Full - Players scored successes equal or higher than the Resistance - The grantor gives the PCs what they requested, largely in the manner they requested it. Give yourself some wiggle room if you need to either temper expectations or reward particularly clever play.
• Partial - Players scored at least half Resistance in successes - The grantor imposes conditions on the request, or counter-offers with a mitigated version of the request. Alternatively, the grantor gracefully declines the request, allowing the PCs to attempt again when some circumstance has changed or time has passed.
• Disaster - Players did not even manage half Resistance - The grantor tells them to pound sand, suck eggs, eat dirt, make like a tree, or fuck off. No counter-offer, no grace, full prejudice.

Something important to note is that you should resist a back-and-forth negotiation in the case of a Partial. Remember that no one in this scene is just themselves-- they are authorities, proxies, envoys, or emblems of something larger. At the end of the day, PCs need to either take the counter-offer or leave it. It would be entirely inappropriate to try to wheedle and weasel the King after they've made up their mind.

And that's that! Next post I'm going to tackle how I'm structuring Downtime, between-session activity, and the passage of time in my West March.

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