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.

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