MEK OP Game Night: Xangold's Tower

On Saturday the regular group (with Vox sitting in as one of Peter's heroes) elected to run a short overland adventure into the wilderness in the Isigflod river valley north of Little Darply. This lasted for only about two hours, but provided enough time to demonstrate the daily movement cycle and allow for a few moments of excitement.

The party brought along a cart full of supplies, which is maybe something I should restrict in the future. The requirements of food and water get a bit trivial when you have 100 stones of capacity, and the rules also say that carts can't enter a forest (without trails) which isn't consistent with what happened later in the night. But maybe I'm the only person who likes extensively planning out the logistics of overland travel, and everyone else just wants to handwave provisioning and survival skills.

No battles despite the best efforts of the random encounter table, since apparently my players don't want to have their heroes turned into exquisite bits of stone statuary. (Wusses.) Anyway, here's the official account:

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February 14 to 29, Caudex Annales 71 AUP

Having heard rumors of hospitalities offered at the remote wilderness estate of the Wizard Xangold Spectregrasp, one called "Assassin's-Bane" by those thwarted by his extensive and costly mountainous defenses (and thus called "the Penniless" mostly by himself and in a rueful tone of voice), the heroes of the Isigwold rode forth to the fortress town of Highpoint in Warsden's domain beside the waters of Breslemere. They consisted of the same company which had entered the Balewood, as well as a gnomish trickster associate of Xangold's (named "Average Joe" for reasons that probably involve an excessively long gnomish shaggy-dog story with an unsatisfying punchline). There they traveled south along the road to the holy sisters' convent at Little Darply, and struck off north across the frozen surface of the Bresaway. Keeping to the frozen track of the stream's bed led them to the Isigflod, and they hurried north toward its headwaters, through the deeps of the vale.

Hills rose on the left, and farther to the east the westward spurs of the Great Barrier's spine stuck out of the forest as an ill omen, marking the countless abodes of unnatural creatures that crept in darkness and fed upon one another in the craggy mountain roots. The first week was uneventful due to prudent use of open terrain and the setting of a regular watch. The howls of old Mort the watchdog never turned to sharp barking, and everyone ate cheerfully from the many crates of supplies drawn by the caravan oxen.

Totally not a snake-haired chick.

At the start of the second week, a triad of peculiar herd animals were spotted several hundred yards away, lumbering along the river bed. None of them seemed to be flesh-beasts, but neither did they appear to bear the mark of any gnomish phantasms or dwarven engineering. Instead, they were wrought of finest steel plates and stood 8 feet at the shoulder, or 10 to their tossed horns and snorting muzzles. Experienced lore masters among the party quaked at the sight of these aberrations of nature, recognizing them as mythological beasts beyond the skill of any mortal to face without dread. Even those unfamiliar with the misnomer of "gorgon" understood that they were something best avoided, and diverted course to the forested eastern shore.

Unfortunately the beasts broken into a trot and set their course to intercept the entire team at a point well short of the forest line half a mile away. A brief and furious deliberation resulted in the general consensus that setting up the repeating crossbow in the back of the cart would simple goad them into greater fury, whereas they might be susceptible to subtler forms of deception.

Gnomish trickery was sufficient to construct a near duplicate of the beasts, which broke off in front of them pawing the ground and directing them furiously toward the farther shore to the west. Whether by curiosity or confusion, the gorgon patrol elected to follow their new phantom "scout" back to the river bed, while the party disappeared into the trees.

With the spur bearing Xangold's legendary tower now in view, the party continued without event through the woods and arrived at the tower-- but not alone. A similar party from the uncivilized northlands of the Isigflod valley had also arrived, intent on slaying the terrible monsters that Xangold was reputed to be collecting in the high terrace-labyrinths of his tower. Led by a barbarian in skins, himself attended by a guide and a surly dwarf in chainmail, the rivals sought the immediate surrender of Xangold and the destruction of his perverse collection. They furrowed their hairy brows suspiciously at the description of Xangold as a "friend", and scoffed at the explanation that he was gathering evil beasts solely to rid the world of them.

On loan from Westeros! (by Feralkyn)

Xangold himself descended with characteristic flair from the tower pinnacle with two bodyguards at his side, their feet resting on an enchanted carpet that levitated smoothly above the assembled throng. He greeted everyone warmly, and remained unalarmed by the accusation that he was a sorcerer of the black arts assembling an army of fiends. Asked to demonstrate his intention to ultimately slay the creatures he was collecting, he instead offered to allow the visitors to slay one for themselves, and conjured a great dire wolf from the dungeon. He also gallantly enhanced the barbarian leader with an enlargement spell.

The swollen barbarian smashed the wolf and then turned his gaze on the wizard, his rage kindled by the rush of blood to complete his mission against the tower's lord. He raised his axe to strike down Xangold's company, but found himself dazed by a swirling eruption of light. When his own enhancements had faded and he dwindled back to normal size, he discovered that he and his men had been disarmed (and for good measure, had their bootlaces tied together by the impetuous gnome).

Magus Spectregrasp then invited the more civil guests up into his tower for luncheon and conference. He identified the lair of the gorgons in a ravine to the south, as well as a sizable tunnel infestation of troglodytes to the northeast known for harassing traders, trappers, and explorers in the region. He also explained his strategy for purging the dungeon of evil beasts, for the sake of assembling a company of lawful but fantastical defenders for his realm (or any allies). Everyone was keen on the possibility of him committing storm giants and gold dragons to their future assaults.

Casualties: None
Treasure: None
Experience: I'd rule everyone can split up 3x1600 = 4800 into 8 shares of 600 xp each, for "defeating" the gorgons.

Video/Tabletop Hybrids: A Historical Perspective

Before explaining my latest grand idea, a little history. The first video game console system, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972. This was the "pre-Pong" era, characterized by games that were basically a single dot bouncing back and forth across a screen with players using paddles to direct its motion. Before Pong, there were no capabilities for games to track a score, and there were certainly no graphics beyond single large dots! The entire game had to be created around a single mechanic, and customized through non-electronic add-ons -- and the Odyssey had a lot of add-ons. Transparent overlay screens were laid on top of the screen to allow the moving dot to illuminate different parts of the image, creating the illusion of motion. Objective cards defined the operations that players were supposed to perform with their moving dots. Scorekeeping poker chips allowed for players to keep track of who was winning, an operation well beyond the capabilities of the console itself. A primitive light-gun could be used to shoot at the dot in various hunting games. The point is that early video games were necessarily a hybrid of physical and electronic components.

Magnavox maintained this philosophy with its later-generation consoles, culminating with the Odyssey2 in 1978. This was a true programmable console with the capability for swapping different cartridge games, rather than just playing the same "game" (some form of Pong) with varying overlays and control schemes. By the time this system was released, it was already being eclipsed by arcades and the Atari 2600, systems with much better graphics, fluid controls, and faster action. But the strategy it used to compete was by going high-brow and trying to boost the physical inserts provided along with the cartridge. This approach culminated in 1981 with the release of Quest for the Rings, the first video game I ever attempted to play.

QftR, in all its glory.

This is seriously the most overproduced game in pretty much all of history, and that includes a lot of collector's editions released today. You can see that it's a video game that has an entire board game wrapped around it. The board game has about 60 pieces, a gold-embossed game manual, a full-color map board, a keyboard overlay, and lots of Escher-esque concept art showing you the graphics the designers probably wished they could cram into the actual cartridge.

The video game itself consisted of several simple Pacman mazes with four different types of fantasy monsters, including a fire-breathing dragon. The game was designed to be a cooperative stealth game. Each player chose a character from one of four classes, and tried to use what we'd today call "aggro management" to steer at least one character to a ring at the opposite side of the maze. To mix things up, the maze walls would sometimes move and shift, and other times be made of lethal lava. It was unique in that era for being a two-player cooperative game and for having characters with totally unique skill sets: a warrior who could kill enemies, a wizard who could stun them, a phantom who could walk through walls to escape, and a changeling who could become invisible to dump aggro. The monsters were also better differentiated than the ghosts in Pacman, with different sizes, speeds, and movement patterns.

I never really succeeded in playing it, partially because the game was difficult even for two players, partially because the control paddles were hideously clunky, partly because I was six years old (!), and partially because it was at a friend's house and I only got to try it a few times. But the idea in abstract principle, a hybrid supergame with one foot in the physical world and another in the electronic one, has continued to be something I want someone to implement for me in a perfected modern form.

While I'm no programmer, one idea I've been contemplating is to merge two existing types of games: a high-level economic system played using an existing strategy game, and a tactical resolution system using an existing video game. For example, a board game like Civilization could be played out normally, but using the arena mode of a low-level strategy engine (like the SSI's Fantasy General) to resolve the outcome of battles. One of my projects a few years back was to unify the economic system from Starfire with the tactical battle system of Space Empires IV, allowing for a solo Starfire game -- a project that was basically superseded by the discovery of Aurora. (But not until after I had sunk a few dozen hours into modding SE4 to work with Starfire tech!)

Currently my latest idea is to combine a sandbox CRPG with the economic system in ACKS, creating a solo RPG with higher level domain management components. This could work with some of the old Gold Box games (or their FRUA reimplementations), as well as with the d20 indie title Knights of the Chalice. Most modern games have too many plot constraints to allow for integration with an outside system, but maybe there are some player-created Neverwinter Nights modules that might work. A major complication is the need for a character hex editor that can import elements (money, characters, magic items, spells) from the economic system back into the computer game. (The Gold Box Companion works OK for basic functions like creating gold or leveling up, but encounters some game breaking bugs with the item creation functions.)

Like all of my grand schemes, I hardly have enough time to implement this one. But I think I'll at least play with the idea in my mind and see where it goes.

MEK OP Game Night: Evangelism

The campus has a new student center, so we decided to camp out on a giant round table (cue Camelot jokes) and show off some of our board games. Josiah brought over a four-expansion Carcassonne set, basically the Big Box minus the Tower expansion. We methodically covered the table with tiles, despite the fact that most of us had only a vague idea of how the new expansion stuff was being scored.

After Carcassonne, we pulled out Shadows Over Camelot and played a no-traitor game with impressive success. No lost quests until after all three special items were claimed, and then we beat up on the catapults to make the victory as decisive-looking as possible.

Meanwhile in the Green Pass campaign, a solo foray by my wife into the caves resulted in a frantic retreat from some unexpectedly tough hobgoblins, as well as the more professional clearing of one of the two warbands of orcs. The orc sub-chieftain coughed up the following rather disconcerting communique:

It's in some kind of ersatz-Papyrus font, so you know it's serious business. Messengers were dispatched by ship to Durnovar to alert the king to the possibility of some kind of orcish offensive.

Curse You, Wyverns!

My first and second ironman playthroughs of the computer game Pool of Radiance ended in Total Party Kills from squads of typical humanoids due to my own poor preparation. The third playthrough, however, ended only after I had broken out of the city onto the world map and was happily poking around looking for that rumored lizardman city. I was in the wilderness when I get that cold chill up my spine from the random encounter text, and I realized before the combat screen had even loaded that I was already six feet in the grave. It was wyverns. Stinking wyverns.

Most older games have that one grossly unfair random encounter that seems wildly out of line with everything else around them. In this case it can't be blamed on an index overflow error or a cruel programmer. The presence of wyverns in wilderness encounters is a faithful adaptation of the PnP game tables, dating back (one supposes) to the archaic Gygax-era. Why are wyverns so uniquely horrible? Let us count the ways:

• Start with a spider, one of those "save or die" lethal poison kinds.
• Put it in plate armor.
• Give it wings and speed on par with a pegasus, so nothing can successfully run from it.
• Direct quote from the 1st edition Monster Manual: "They are rather stupid but very aggressive, and wyverns will always attack." So forget about making a reaction roll.
• Dragon-quality 2d8 bite attack, in a system where that can one-shot any mage it lands on.
• Swoop attack! Your marching order, it means nothing!
• 2nd edition buff: "The final approach of the dive is done in complete silence, imposing a -2 surprise modifier on the target."
• The 3.0 revisions nerfed their poison so they now need, maybe, two hits to insta-kill you with CON damage. And a Spot bonus so you can't hide, tasty little morsel.

The ACKS system, which usually tones down poison a bit by giving it an onset time, specifies that wyvern poison "instantly kills" a target, a trait shared only with the purple worm.  The 2d8 is now interpreted as two attacks, allowing for multiple special combat maneuvers at once. It also specifies double-damage with talons on a dive (4d8!), with a success allowing the wyvern to carry away its target to (presumably) sting and devour, or drop for amusement. I put a couple of wings of wyverns in the first Domains at War playtest we did, and they basically savaged the opposing army single-handedly. (Bonus: ACKS also features "Giant Killer Bees", which are kind of a disposable mini-me variation of wyverns, for when the GM basically just wants to throw 1d12 save-vs-deaths against a single player all at once.)

Hard to do something single-handedly with no hands, but YNWIM

The mere existence of something like this suggests that the game you're playing is meant to be approached from the combat-as-war paradigm. It's basically exempt from all the usual evasion and diplomacy mechanics, so you have to fight it. But you can't fight something fair when it's made of this many dirty tricks. In a computer game, you basically just reload (or in ironman mode, reroll) after hitting this kind of nonsense. In a free-form tabletop environment, you need to improvise.

Wyvern-slaying ideas:

Seriously? You want to ride me against that? I'm outta here.

1. Nets or a web spell might be able to keep them grounded. Or tie a rope to a tree and snag with a grappling hook. Once immobile, they can be picked apart with arrows.
2. Ride an elephant and hide in a tower on its back. At least you'll be too big to carry away.
3. Wand of Paralyzation, the ideal bane of any flying creatures. (I've placed one in a dungeon, but so far it remains unfound.) Note that the 3.0 version of the wyvern explicitly makes them immune, so apparently Skip Williams is hip to your tricks.
4. In ACKS, I would rule that fixing polearms against a charge will work against dive attacks too.
5. Lots of archer mercenaries. No, not that many. Way more than that.
6. Cast an illusion that resembles the wyvern's natural enemy, the... er... "*ahem* The wyvern has no natural enemies". You just shut up, 2nd edition MM!
7. Write an angry blog post about them after they TPK you. That'll show the bastards, eh?

Pool Of Radiance Retrospective

It was just over 25 years ago that the first "real" electronic implementation of a pen and paper RPG arrived. Pool of Radiance was a joint project by a number of legendary TSR developers, including Jim Ward, Steve Winter, Zeb Cook, and Mike Breault. It inspired a lot of sequels, which themselves indirectly inspired next-generation RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

I recently hauled out the game and played through the opening scenarios. As is often my approach to CRPGs, I added a set of self-assigned "conducts" to play in a pseudo-ironman mode to make the game harder. (There are plenty of ways to cheat and make it easier, too!) After 25 years it's apparent how many of the user interface decisions from the era are painful in ways that I never appreciated at the time. Healing a wounded party sometimes requires dozens of keystrokes, and plenty of important information (like saving throws and buff spells) is hidden from the player without the use of unofficial third-party add-ons. Most of the spells are frankly useless, and thieves are an ignorable class due to having no stealth abilities. But I still regard this as one of the best RPGs ever made, and I figure it helps me understand my own creative process (as a game designer and referee) to think about why I like it so much.

Here's a list of all the things it does well -- in many cases, better than any game created since:

1. Random encounters to give a sense of peril: At every stage of the game, there are always random monsters waiting to jump you on the way back from a successful expedition. This creates a standard dilemma where you have a party struggling with the encumbrance a load of hard-fought loot, but it doesn't matter if you can't bundle it home across the forbidding wilderness or treacherous mazes. There's something deeply iconic about greedy adventurers clinging to their prizes even as they beat off pursuing foes. It makes the world feel more organic than being able to just walk back into town unmolested and then return to pick up where you left off, as if clearing dungeons were the same thing as picking fruit from an orchard.
   
   Better yet, encounters can hit you even when resting, in proportion to the time you spend in camp. So there's a constant tension between trying to re-memorize all your spells, or just the handful of essential ones you need to survive.
   


2. A robust morale system: All the Gold Box games had this, but many later games have mostly ignored morale. Morale is essential for allowing a game to have huge epic battles without becoming tedious. One the one hand, there's something awe-inspiring about walking into a room and finding not 5 orcs, but 50! On the other hand, who actually wants to hunt down and kill them all? In this game as in the original D&D rules every battle has a natural break point where the monsters start running (often triggering a cheer, or at least a sigh of relief).





Good news: We have the archers flanked! Bad news: That's a lot of archers...

Side note: The "morale" rules are a logical counterpart to the "turning" rules for undead (which themselves have no morale). The "surrender" effect mirrors the "destroyed" result for turning, and the "flee" effect mirrors the "turned" result. It's a peculiarity that, in later editions of D&D and its ilk, the undead-turning mechanic remains even as morale has been lost. This makes clerics feel weirdly overpowered against undead. In historical context, though, the undead themselves were originally weirdly overpowered due to their lack of morale checks. Clerics were just restoring them back to parity with other monsters.

Alas, due to poor pathfinding in these early games, morale sometimes just resulted in enemies cowering in corners while you had to slowly pick them off with arrows. So the system didn't always work as advertised. But when it did, and 12 kobolds unexpected surrendered to your sole surviving priest, it was a glorious thing.


3. A detailed adventurer's journal with an emphasis on tactile elements: Back in the 64K days, games couldn't squeeze much text into the game engine itself, so they resorted to including any long text-blocks in a separate booklet. This was often a blessing rather than a curse, since it allowed for materials that wouldn't be compatible with the primitive interface. That could include fragments of handdrawn maps, notes from some anonymous sage, and the ubiquitous "code wheel", a primitive copy-protection method that PoR actually appropriated as a way to translate various dwarven and elven rune languages in the game. Oh, and a lengthy history of the geography and politics of the region, which lots of players probably would skip today, but which I read extensively. All of this on faux-aged paper with custom script fonts. Unlike other computer games of the era (and too many games today) this one was made out of wood.





A map within a map within a map...

4. Legacy features from the early golden age of RPGs: In Pool of Radiance, you can wander around a random map and discover procedurally generated lairs full of the classic "Type X" minor treasure troves with gems, minor magic items, scrolls, and potions. If the encounters felt too hard you could hire a nameless mook or two as your henchman -- if you didn't mind them swiping some of your hard-earned gold after every fight. Time was strictly regulated as a game resource, and searching a room put you in danger of more of those random encounters. Party members could be swapped in and out of your party to create a motley group of level 7, 5, and 2 characters of any flavor you wanted, making it a matter of dumb luck whether the next encounter would be at all "balanced". (I'm facing skeletons... and all my mages have sleep spells, gah!)
   
   For that matter, large chunks of the game were horribly unbalanced, starting with the notorious room full of trolls the designers tossed at any new party wandering into the game's "newbie zone", the slums. (I guess you were just supposed to run away, and praise the valor of the fallen companions who perished as they were pursued...) Lethal poison, level draining undead, and instant-death traps were constantly lurking around every corner. None of this "poison slows you down a little for ten seconds and then wears off automatically" nonsense; a 500 pound spider sinks its fangs into you, and you're going down, kid. That's what spiders actually do. We're simulating reality here, not giving you the illusion of being a hero with some fun park ride.

All of this is in contrast to modern games which often feel too carefully designed to be part of an organic world. Monsters are neatly segregated by level into zones flagged with huge neon challenge-level signs, where they are just barely sufficient to cause you to break a light sweat but no more. Those brutally unfair trolls? I remember them well, 25 years later.


5. A turn-based tactical engine: I'm sorry, but turn-based combat is just better for RPGs. No amount of trying to cram the square peg of D&D into the round hole of real-time combat will convince me otherwise. There's nothing more depressing than realizing that the only necessary tactic in a modern RPG is to put one dude in optimally enchanted plate armor and have him run in circles while the rest of the party snipes away from range at the monsters stupidly chasing him. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.) Tension doesn't come from how fast the game forces you to play, but how slowly it makes you want to play as you agonize over each decision during a nasty ambush.

This isn't to say that PoR is actually a playable game today, at least by most consumer standards. The graphics are antiquated Atari-era stuff. The interface is all paging through block menus. And there are huge gaps in the documentation that make it unclear what aspects of the PnP rules were actually ported over. (Does Wisdom actually grant any saving throw bonuses? I have no idea how to even tell...)

But a modern game that tried to emulate some of these attributes would be greatly appreciated, at least by me.

Religion In Proxima (And For Fantasy In General)

One serious complication in setting the tone for any bog-standard fantasy world is the tendency of designers to mix setting elements from the medieval world -- dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and its rivals in the Orthodox and Islamic world -- and polytheistic religious views more suitable to the ancient Greco-Roman world. I think (following JMal and Delta) that this is a potential philosophical defect in the Default Fantasy Setting. Real polytheists shouldn't be creating societies that resemble medieval Europe or its Tolkienesque pastiche. Instead of simply writing out clerics entirely or leaving their religious views undefined, I see some merit in making the implicit Christianity of early gaming a little more explicit -- and making it a source of in-setting philosophical tension. This is easier when the "monotheistic" mace-wielding clerics of D&D have to contend against imported pagans and cultists.

There are three basic schools of thought in fantasy gaming:

1. Muted monotheism: This is some thinly disguised variant of medieval Catholicism, with a muted version of the Abrahamic depiction of god designed to be minimally offensive (aka Crystal Dragon Jesus).
2. Baroque polytheism: The "Forgotten Realms" approach of having lots of deities with highly specialized portfolios, all squabbling with one another in the absence of any apparent ringmaster to keep them in line. If there is a "king of the Gods" around, he's probably an absentee divinity with no real worshipers (see Eru Iluvatar, Lord Ao, etc)
3. Nihilistic apatheism: In most sword and sorcery settings, the gods are not particularly involved the affairs of mortals at all. They exist mostly to give heroes the opportunity to use more colorful curses. Conan's Crom is the archetypical example of a god that might not even exist at all, as far as the setting is concerned. On the other hand, evil cults (and the dark spirits and demons they worship) are quite active in the world. Out of the TSR settings, Dark Sun comes closest to implementing this model.

Since Proxima is a refugee world populated by outsiders who have escaped from calamities in their original worlds, I figure it makes less sense to enforce one of those models to the exclusion of the others. Instead they'll just be forced to coexist alongside one another, with predictably violent results.

I also see some advantages in using existing and easily identifiable gods, like Howard did for Conan's Hyborian age. Tell your players that they're dealing with a cult of <random fantasy name>, and they'll be a lot less impressed than if they're dealing with a cult of Dagon, with all the historical and literary baggage attached to that name.

Religions of Proxima

Civilizations in Proxima were sometimes founded by those escaping from a distant era of antediluvian history (Atlanteans, Hyperboreans, etc), but sometimes also by dwindling populations of demihumans (elves, dwarves, etc) seeking to begin a new life in a different world where their magic would endure rather than fade, or by human explorers who actually navigated into curious vortices like the Bermuda Triangle and couldn't find their way back out, or by dabbling amateur magicians who accidentally transported themselves out of their own worlds. As a result, Proxima has religious traditions dating from a variety of periods in human history.

The Church of Durnovar

The Sea-Kingdom of Durnovar (and the greater coastal empire it has more lately founded) was originally settled by Celtic, Scandanavian, and Icelandic explorers from the early medieval period, some of them military raiders and others wandering pilgrims like St Brendan or St Amaro. With no bishops to sustain a formal Catholic hierarchy, the Church of Durnovar reorganized itself as an autocephalic jurisdiction of the faith, appointed its own patriarch, and declared Durnovar to be a spiritual successor to Rome.

While devotional prayers to various saints continued to produce only minor and questionable miracles of the traditional sort, prayers to angels and archangels began to produce spectacular results. This resulted in serious introspection and refinement of theological views, with a stronger understanding of the idea of angelic authorities exercising authority across multiple worlds. When the first Archbishop of Durnovar (Patriach Brannag) died, he was proclaimed a saint and prayers made to him (and to later saints born after migration to Durnovar) also produced similarly dramatic outcomes.

Raphael

While formally monotheists who worship a single God in the Abrahamic model, most Durnovaric congregations also select a specific patron from the archangels (Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Remiel and Sariel) or from their own roster of new saints. Prayers for spiritual welfare or forgiveness from personal sins are typically made directly to God, but prayers for temporal or material welfare are made to the patron. Certain patrons tend to be associated with certain types of miraculous power (and thus with certain character classes): for example, the messenger Gabriel with scholarly ascetics (as Wonderworkers), the warrior Michael with companies of militant war priests (as standard Clerics), the healer Raphael with the hospitals run by nuns at various convents (as Priestesses), the guide Uriel with consecrated orders of holy virgins (who in time of distress will take up arms as Bladedancers), the avenger Raguel with crusader knights (as Paladins), the seer Ramiel with prophets (as Mystics), and the angel of death Sariel with ruthless enforcers (as Assassins). (Custom divine classes would be created by creating a new "saint" to match the associated spell list and special abilities of the class.)

Most Durnovaric communities trend toward Lawful alignment. The various angels (and the consensus implementation of God's purposes that they represent) are often described collectively as Heaven, and many larger Durnovaric armies with mixed forces fight in the name of "Heaven" rather than any specific patron. They grudgingly tolerate (but seek to convert) adherents of the Atlantean or Hyperborean pantheons, regarding them as flawed depictions of the purity and unity of Heaven; they seek only to eradicate the cults of the Boreal Basin.

Exiles of Atlantis

The lost cities of legendary Atlantis lie somewhere beneath the Panthalassic Ocean, but a few survivors were able to escape and relocate to Chukchi or Durnovar, or to found their own small settlements with new local followers (both human and elven). Most Atlanteans are proto-Hellenic polytheists, worshiping various popular deities of the early Greek world. Virtually any Mycenaean deity might be found in a population influenced by Atlantean exiles.

Artemis

As with the patrons of the Durnovaric church, different Atlantean deities are associated with specific types of supernatural gifts. Some examples include: the earth-mover Poseidon responsible for sinking Atlantis with priests commanding the raw elemental forces of nature (as Shamans), the harvest goddess Demeter with village wise women (as Antiquarian Witches), or the goddess of mountains Artemis with sacred virgins trained in hunting and riding (as Bladedancers).

Most Atlanean-influenced communities tend toward Neutral alignment. Atlanteans and their followers respect all Atlantean deities, but see them as having a gently adversarial rivalry with one another. They deny that their deities answer to any single High God, unlike the Church of Durnovar, and regard this as a pleasant but naive fiction that glosses over the moral ambiguity of the struggle between imperfect spiritual forces.

Exiles of Hyperborea

Woden

The Hyperborean cities of Thule and Nerigos were more unified in their defiance of the gods, and few of them still worship any deity at all. Originally the Hyperborean pantheon had a similar organization to the Atlantean one, with different proto-Germanic names for essentially the same gods (i.e., Thunraz/Thor for Ares, or Woden/Odin for Hermes). It might be possible to still find some non-human followers of these deities among dwarves in the mountain strongholds around the perimeter of the Boreal Basin, but otherwise they are mostly forgotten. Instead, the surviving human lords of Hyperborea have set themselves up as new aspiring gods devoted to their own self-interests, creating their own twisted races of followers in addition to enslaving various human populations to use unwillingly in ceremonies.

The ultimate objective of every campaign: Kill Orcus

Some Hyperboreans have made alliances of convenience with various outcasts from Heaven -- corrupted angels who are now classified as devils and demonic princes in the underworld. Typically both partners to such an alliance regard the other as a pawn to be used for a time and then later discarded. The various rulers of the underworld are again associated with specific followers (but drawn from a mixed variety of classes like cthonic witches, warlocks and anti-paladins): the demon-lord Orcus with necromantic cults that raise the dead, the prince of darkness Demogorgon with cults that seek to restore the power of pre-human elder races of reptile-men, and the king of wind-demons Pazuzu who guards and conceals the desert ruins of Nerigos and Thule against discovery.

Hyperborean rulers who have rejected their own gods are typically Chaotic and breed chaotic followers, even though their original pantheon was Neutral. Any remaining worshipers of that pantheon will actively work to oppose the impiety of the Hyperborean lords in the name of those spurned gods.

House Rules: Targeted Investment

The ACKS rules-as-written have a minimalist economic investments system that involves spending 1000 gp and getting a 1d10 population growth roll in return, representing the ability to attract more immigrants by improving infrastructure. This applies for both domains and for urban settlements.

Since adding some house rules for generating a domain map and deriving land value from the features of the map (instead of the default random 3d3 method), I've noticed some interest in rebuilding the various randomly-generated "ruins" sites to perform more specific functions than population growth. While I'm reluctant to introduce a complicated model that involves having to actually design a city layout with specific buildings, I think it would be appealing to have a way to distinguish different player settlements from one another and to give them economic specializations.

For inspiration, let's look at the original economic development rules given in the "0th" edition of Dungeons and Dragons back in the 70s, the "little brown book" edition, quoting here from Volume III: Underworld and Wilderness Adventures:

"Relition" suggests that Gygax was typing a bit too fast...

As is often the case with OD&D, this is less a rule itself than a suggestion to referees to invent their own rules! But we can see a general guideline: investments have a baseline effect of increasing population, and also have some other unique effect based on "area potential".

To clarify the types of investments available, it might help to break them down into categories:

• Natural Resource Investments (Hunting, Farming, Fishing, Trapping)
• Transportation Investments (Canals, Roads)
• Urban Investments (Inns, Religion, Armories, Animal Breeding, Ship Building, Land Trade, Sea Trade)

It's easy to imagine other items that could belong in each category. Any city would probably benefit from Housing, and perhaps also potion-brewing Apothecaries. And a domain with hills and mountains might naturally focus on Mining instead of agricultural goods.

The baseline expansion mechanism in ACKS ("pay 1000 gp, get 1d10 population") is probably best understood as an investment in Farming at the domain level, or an investment in Housing for a particular settlement. Since the primary motivation for building a city is usually to develop its market, it probably makes sense to have the secondary effect of most other investments be an improvement in the availability of market goods. The exception is transportation investments, which involve adding actual features to the domain's hex map; these have obvious effects of allowing better land or water movement.

Natural Resource Investments will have the effect of altering demand modifiers for related merchandise. Investment should also alter the quantity of such goods available. Each 1000 gp investment will add an addition die rolled to determine the number of loads available from a given merchant. The improvement should be capped by the number of hexes with appropriate terrain types. The maximum improvement for fishing, for example, would be given by the total number of controlled hexes with rivers or lakes in the domain. Fully investing enough gold to reach this cap should produce a downward demand modifier of -1 to all markets in the domain.

Example: A domain with 8 controlled river hexes can support 8000 gp of investment in Fishing. With this full investment, the demand modifier for fish will be -1, and any fish merchants at a Class III market in that domain will have (3+8)d4 = 11d4 loads of preserved fish instead of just 3d4. That's a lot of fish!

Urban Investments will modify the number of related goods or hirelings available at a particular city's market (not the entire domain!), as a percentage bonus. Investing in smaller markets will have a proportionally larger effect, and will also shape the further development of that settlement long into the future. To reflect this, the total number or the percent chance of available goods in any table is increased by a bonus percentage equal to (1%)*(market class) per 1000 gp of investment. This bonus is not capped, and can be over 100%. Some goods might be affected by more than one bonus, in which case the bonuses are added.

Example: An investment of 5000 gp in Apothecaries is made for a Class IV market. The bonus was previously 15% (from previous investments), and now increases by another 5*4% = 20%, for a total bonus of 35%. Ordinarily the chance of finding a alchemist to recruit at a Class IV market is only 33% per month, but in this city it is 67% instead. The chance of finding a healing potion is similarly increased from 25% to 57%. The amount of military-grade oil (a non-magical good which alchemists can produce) would ordinarily be 65 pints at a Class IV market, but here it is 65+65*0.35 = 87.75 = 88 pints.

Transportation Investments simply add either a road or a canal (artificial river) connecting into a new hex for 1000 gp. A road must connect to an existing road hex, or to a settlement. A road allows a 50% bonus to any movement that entirely follows that road (for every 2 hexes along a road, move a third hex for free). A canal must connect to an existing river, canal, or other body of water, and must go through level ground (not hills or mountains). A canal functions as a river for all purposes, but cannot allow the passage of large sailing ships, large transport ships, or war galleys (or any other ship over 120 structural points). Note also that (using my house rules for land value), the addition of a canal might improve the land value of a domain by creating new river and river-adjacent hexes.

All targeted investments (anything but Farming or Housing) are less efficient at attracting population, and will only roll 1d6 for population gain instead of 1d10. The exceptions to this are Hunting and Trapping, which don't attract any new permanent population at all (...because Gary Gygax says so!)

Access to related types of ruins will reduce the cost of targeted urban investments by 50% until markets have grown at least one size class (that is, for any city with a Class VI market or below), so long as the settlement is build around that ruin. For example, a settlement founded at the site of a ruined temple can receive investments in religion for 500 gp each, instead of 1000, until it reaches Class V size. This represents restoring the temple to some portion of its former glory. Any type of ruins can be used to support Housing investments, which can claim stone from the ruins as building material.

Finally, here's a list of some plausible market item categories that could be affected by different investment types. Domain-wide merchandise bonuses based on Resource Investments:

• Hunting: Any meat, monster parts (animal only - any extra loads of monster parts roll off the Animals subtable)
• Trapping: Any furs (common or rare), ivory (in jungle or tundra terrain), monster parts (animal only, can stack with hunting bonus)
• Fishing: Preserved fish, monster parts (aquatic only)
• Mining: Metals (common or precious), Gems

And the bonus to goods/services available at settlement markets based on Urban Investments:

• Inns: Any recruiting of personnel (hirelings or henchman, can combine with other bonuses)
• Religion: Divine spellcasting services (healing, etc), Any magic item a cleric could create
• Armories: Any mundane or magical weapon or armor
• Animal Breeding: Riding/pack animals, Mounted troops
• Ship Building: Ships and boats
• Apothecaries: Alchemists, Potions
• Land Trade: Monster parts or any exotic goods (anything exclusive to world map terrain in any other specified Class I or Class II market accessible by land, roll bonus goods as if they were being purchased in that market)
• Sea Trade: Monster parts or any exotic goods (native to world map terrain in any specified Class I market by sea)