The Reach of Civilization

Hi there.  It's certainly been awhile since I've written a post.  Once the heavy lifting of the region was done it didn't seem worth it to just give either small posts or something akin to session notes.  Suffice it to say, the game has been going strong, mostly on the back of Doodle for helping 6 adults coordinate when they can play (mostly on weeknights after the dads have put their kids to bed).

But I had occassion to dig back into GIMP and I thought I would share.

The Problem

(I know I use this heading a bit, but it seems to be the nature of worldbuilding)

The original region map I made was a little too cramped.  Part of it is a combination of my own laziness: I didn't want to have to make a world map so I just made an extra large regional map.  Part of it was overcorrecting.  In my last ACKs campaign, I made the players journey for months just to find a Class III market.  Since they were going to be starting higher level, and since the initial conceit of the campaign was a cosmopolitan port city, I knew I wanted it to be Class II.

Everything was all fun and games, placing cities hither and yonder on the map, usually at points where rivers met or at likely portage sites.  Then it came time to figure out which hexes were civilized and which were borderlands.  This crashed pretty hard up against the rules, and I want to give you the minimum background possible to understand how I ended up with this map.

So, the core rules for mapping recommend a regional map and a world map.  The regional map is usually about 30 hexes by 40 hexes.  The hexmap I chose is a little bit bigger than that, it's the one that has 24 mile hexes overlayed on top of the 6 mile hexes.  It's like an extra large region map.  So when the base worldbuilding advice recommends ignoring class IV and smaller for the world map, and ignoring Class VI settlements for the region map, neither was a good fit.  I decided my map would compromise and include class IV settlements, but not V or VI  (if you're looking at the image too, be aware that some castles/forts are shown as well). 

Green is civilized. Red is borderlands

The issue, however, is that class VI markets are still considered sufficient to affect the civilization level of surrounding hexes.  every single settlement on my map would stretch out civilized area 8 hexes, and borderlands another 8 beyond that.  The end result is a very crowded map that's essentially already almost complete claimed by the existing powers. not much room for founding one's own realm if the time arrives.

You'll notice that I even cheated a little bit.  In order to have some semblance of interest, I blocked civilization from continuing into the mountains.  All that's really left is a block of desert and scrub beyond the mountains.

The Fix: Proportional Reach

Over on the main Autarch forums, people continue to react to the fairly lengthy Let's Read: ACKs Core over on RPGnet.

Over particular note to me was a suggestion Alex, the game's creator, came up with for this dilemma of cities having remarkably large reach.  Now, I'll start by saying the real problem is that I didn't fully think out my demographics and, this being a region that was substantially less inhabited until about 3 centuries ago, I probably should have just assumed there would be no large markets.  But this little tidbit proved to be the fix to save me from having to throw out a region we're already playing our campaign in:

Since Every Campaign is a Law Unto Itself, you can, of course, assume a smaller radius of civilized and borderlands territory if desired. An approximate downward limit of size that an urban settlement can control is a number of hexes equal to (urban population / 31), based on a 10:1 rural:urban ratio and an average population density of 310 families per 6-mile hex (50 per square mile). London would need 145 6-mile hexes or 4,500 square miles just to feed itself and the peasants who feed it, excluding any smaller towns in its orbit. Anything less than that and you get into bad simulation - where does the food come from?

With this suggestion of population creating proportional reach, I was off to the races.

I'll spare you the nitty gritty details and just hit the big points:

• Settlement sizes: 
• My largest settlement, Sapphire Bay, is a Class II market.
• 4 other cities: Emerald Crossing, Port Cerulean, and the capitals of the other two realms in the region, are Class III
• Every other settlement actually drawn on the map is class IV
• Size mapped to the new method.
• A the smallest possible class II is 5k to 10k, or between 161 and 322 hexes
• Class IIIs are 2500 to 5k, or 80 to 161 hexes
• Class IVs can range from 625 to 2500, about 20 to 80 hexes.
• Rings of hexes
• Most people are probably familiar with the single ring of hexes count 7, the original hex and all of it's sides.
• A few people might know a region of radius 2 in hexes would be 19 hexes.
• The pattern is roughly that a hexagon is surrounded by 6 lines of length N (equal to the radius in hexes).
• Converting area of hexes to radius of hexes
• Class II markets will have a radius between 7 and 10 hexes
• Class III markets will be from 5 to 7
• Class VI markets will be from 2 to 5

For my purposes, and because my stated goal was to increase the amount of unclaimed land, I decided to go with 7, 5, and 3, and then assumed borderlands stretched the same number of hexes away from the civilized land.

Ok, whew! With all those calculations out of the way, I went to meticulously counting and filling in hexes in GIMP.  I was hoping by now Worldographer would be in a better state, but before doing this in gimp I tried to work in what they are calling their release candidate and it did not go well.  GIMP may not be specifically geared towards working with hexes, but I may have to learn to make do when I end up needing to expand.

Without further ado, here's the final map with the new method.

There's so much more room for activities!

Note: I made a few mistakes down by New Turath, but most of the activity in the campaign has been around Sapphire bay so we'll be ok for now.

These Generators Suck!

The region so far, all decked out in hexes and roads

Ok, actually they're great (which is why I care in the first place), but they're just a bit off theme for me.

The Problem

Whenever possible I try to offload my content generation to the irresponsible number of PDFs I've bought.  There's a couple in particular that I like.  Besides giving some rather unusual names, the extra details generated by Vornheim (and to a lesser extent with respect to generating random NPCs, A Red & Pleasant Land ).  Unfortunately, both of those are a little too weird for my tastes, and the names have a bit of a germanic/nordic and eastern european streak, respectively.  But I do love how the names sound a certain way but aren't actually names from there. Also, my end goal is to have a series of interlocking tables to generate quests or other on-the-fly content like AR&PL, and so that necessitates starting with my own NPC tables.

You may recall (it's been a while since I blogged) that the region I built for my ACKs game has a vaguely south american feel.  Thus it stands to reason I might want some spanish-sounding (sounding, not actual) names.  As we discussed, I have an RPG pdf problem, and I bought two small PDFs with a list of 100 Spanish names (one set male, the other female).  Unfortunately, a lot of them are a little too on the nose.  Anne Pilar, Lucila Lombardo.  I need some way to bridge the gap between sounding LIKE these kinds of names, but being as unusual sounding as Chloris Choke or Izaster Turnspine.

Markov Chains

Fortunately, every DM's best friend, donjon.bin.sh happens to have a Fantasy Name Generator that is powered by giving it a set of names which it then spits out random Markov Chains of.  With a little patience, I'm hoping I can put the normal sounding spanish names into the source, and re-roll a bit until I get some good sounding names.  

Challenge number one is splitting out first and last names, which the PDF with these names oh-so-incoveniently put in the same row.  For added fun, I'll be doing this data cleanup in OpenOffice Calc instead of Excel because this is my home computer and the money I could have spent on Excel for myself I spent on more RPGs!

A quick glance suggests that only a few last names like Del Toro and Del Sol have an extra space, so popping the list into notepad and replacing space with tab should be a good start. 

once the replace is done, we can paste the tab separated names into Calc and now the first names are in one column but the last names are in another.  Now we've got something that's going to be a little bit easier to work with when it comes to pasting into donjon.

Fun pro tip: Unlike Excel, if you try to select an entire column, Calc will select not merely your 100 rows with actual text, but so many blank newlines that it will actually cause donjon to crash, all while it says to itself "Yeah, seems about right".  Anyway, if you do this, be sure to just select the 100 or however many rows of source material you have.

Alright! Time for some Generating!  Let's see our first batch:

Edos

Íñicio

Serostoro

Eleó

Albrnoro

Herilanta

Ispelv

Jertondr

Sarteroma

Elilanco

right off the bat, I love this.  Obviously it's a little rough around the edges and we'll have to clean up a bit, but I'm very satisfied.  Since I'm making male names, I'll probably change Herilanta to Herilanto, and to stay consistent i'll change Jertondr into either Jertondro or Jertondo.  Other than that I'll probably do some massaging in the vein of limiting myself to 2 names of each letter (for a total of 50 male names) to keep things easier to remember.  But overall I'm actually quite pleased with this.

Other things I'll be looking for while filling my way to 50: a mix of long and short names (single syllable to multi-syllable).  

Wrapping Up

Well, eventually the well started to run a bit dry as we got closer to 50 names that could reasonably be pronounced by humans.  Just male first names for now.  Hopefully female names will be a little bit easier, and for last names I'll hopefully do a bit more "intelligent design" by throwing in surnames based on places already named.  anyway, for those in need of "vaguely spanish sounding male names", It's only fair I share my work:

Albrnoro

Andortic

Bastioq

Blas

Bentomó

Celeo

Caner

Dicon

Donch

Eleó

Elianco

Falaromo

Faror

Gafradá

Galiober

Garado

Gidor

Hendio

Herilanto

Íñicio

Inor

Jesto

Jertondro

Luergo

Lustio

Maro

Miodo

Niasento

Niolentí

Óstio

Panto

Parlober

Ponce

Profanco

Quaupo

Ranodu

Ruiomó

Sanino

Senton

Sergio

Serostoro

Sios

Telal

Tonde

Vianto

Vicald

Vaniro

Yali

Yaromondi

Progress and thoughts

The Map So Far

The regional map so far

It's taken a surprising amount of work to get this far, but here we are.  This is the result of drawing a map roughly with gimp, following a few tutorials for drawing coastlines and rivers, tracing it in hexographer, and then reimporting it back into gimp for finer details.

Not shown in this map are the breakdowns of "Civilized" vs. "Borderlands" vs. "Wilderness" Hexes, but going by the recommendations in the back of the book, almost all of this part of the map is civilized.

ACKs breaks market classes down into 6 categories, from I to VI, with I being the largest.  I got burned being too sparse in my last campaign, so I promised my players they would have access to bigger cities.  The capitol of the purple region is a Class II, the capitols of the yellow and blue regions are Class III, and every other named town is Class IV.  The book recommends ignoring Class IV and smaller on the campaign map and class VI in a regional map.  Unfortunately, this particular map is a bit of an inbetweener, it's about the size of what ACKs would consider 4 regional maps.  This felt like the right size since the players would be starting at "Adventurer Tier" which is the first tier higher than level 1.  There will necessarily be a greater degree of mobility, so a bigger map felt right.

That being said, the rules (even the updated ones from Axioms Magazine Issue III) say that anything within 48 miles (aka 8 6 mile hexes) of a city or large town town is civilized.  The core rulebook puts a large town at Class IV, therefore everything within 8 hexes of a town drawn on the map is civilized.  Everything 6 6 mile hexes away from a civilized hex will be borderlands.  Technically this only applies to settled territory, so I may use that to my advantage to make the mountains, forests, and the plains to the east hotbeds of monster activity.  It may be possible that I planned out my regions poorly, but for now I'm rolling with it and hoping it will turn out ok.Fortunately I used layers aggressively, so if I need to change the market classes to have an actual adventurable region, I can.

Naming Conundrum Solved

You may recall from my last post that I was struggling to come up with a decent name.  Ultimately while trying to find inspiration from naming conventions in the real world, I found something that resonated.  Saudi is a subdivision of the Arabia region known for their ruling patriarchs, the Sauds.  Since I knew I wanted this region to be strongly defined by their ruling family, I decided to pursue the convention of <Family Name> <Region>.  The family name quickly shook out to Halveni, but naming the region itself required a bit more thought.  Ultimately, because I had drawn the region with both jungle and grassland, on the border with forest, I decided the region was defined by many shades of green.  From there it was a few permutations out of Verde and Viridian to get to Veralia.

The Political Landscape So Far

This might have warranted it's own post, but I don't want to go overboard with details so I'm hoping cramming it all into one post will force me to be succinct.

Halvani Veralia

This is the main region.  It's independant, and it's culture is presumed to support the players desires to have access to any and every class.  The capital at least is cosmopolitan even if the region itself is predominantly human.

The Ruling Family

There were two ideas I wanted to chew on with the ruling family, the Halvenis.  First, I thought the idea of nobility of humans taking elven spouses in order for their family to live longer but still be able to rule humans was interesting, hence why I made them half elves.  There are no half elves in ACKs, so a half elf is simply either an elf class or a human class, possibly with the elven heritage proficiency, depending on whether they are more human or more elf.  The second idea was in a worldbuilding article about different ways succession and inheritance could be done.  History is rife with tales of bastards, illegitimate children, and uncertain parentage, around which an obsession with chastity and loyalty emerged.  The Halveni family skirts this with matrilineal succession: they are always certain that their daughter is of the royal bloodline.  They are the only group to do that, further adding to the realm's status as a place of outsiders.

Factions

In addition to factions representing influences from neighboring realms, there are two internal factions opposed to each other despite both wanting an independent Veralia.  The Azurists are loyal to the royal family and want the princess to remain powerful and independant. The Statists believe the princess as a singular powerful entity makes the entire realm vulnerable to overtures from foreign powers, and want her to concede some powers to an elected governing body.  Clever observers will have probably figured out by now that I play a good deal of Europa Universalis IV.  I found the interplay of the Dutch Republic mechanic, where a republic and a monarchy coexist while vying for power, very interesting.

The Holy Imperial League

A successor state to the empire that first saw the appearance of the Deva (Nobirans in core ACKs), a powerful Tarkaun (emperor) is elected by several prince electors after each emperor's death.  The Emperor then acts with wide lattitude but is still at least nominally beholden to a senate.  If the players decide they wish to meddle in senate politics like those described in Axioms Issue 3, this will be where they'll do it.  The league is at least partly responsible for a faction operating in Halveni Veralia calling themselves The Federalists.  After several failed campaigns to annex Veralia, the league is attempting to persuade the princess to accept a position as a princess-elector and join the league.  The yellow region on the map is merely a colony of theirs.   The main region is much larger on a continent to the east.

Bael Turath

I hope I don't get in trouble for this one, I have shamelessly stolen the name of the tiefling kingdom from an empire of the same name from 4th edition sourcebooks.  I use the Zaharan race from ACKs as a way to represent Tieflings in my campaign setting and this is their kingdom.  Like The Holy Imperial League, the region is blue is merely a colony of a larger realm elsewhere.  They also have designs on Veralia.  The tiefling king wants the ruling princess to marry him, and abolish their old succession rules, ensuring that any offspring would inherit both realms.

Wrap Up

that's all for now!

A Brief Interlude

I was fortunate enough to start sniffing around Dungeon Crawl Classics right as they were having their 2nd edition kickstarter.  Having none of their books previous, I decided to get the "Newbie" package and man oh man, what a haul!

To Name A Kingdom

Well, technically a principality.

What we have so far

No Names yet, just shapes
and some rough locations

So far we have a region that will be the starting area for my players.  They're going to be starting slightly higher level.  Initial attempts to get them to pick a list of classes to define the region failed miserably, so this is a region where you can be literally any class. Two of them are half-angels, one of them is a lizardman gladiator.  Only one player chose to be a plain old human fighter.  The main capitol of this city is going to be extremely cosmopolitan, a place where anyone could meet anyone.  That city was a punt with Sapphire Bay, but the region it resides in needs some work.

Background Research

I was immediately compelled to search google for why countries are named the way they are and found a very handy wikipedia article. From here I tried to pick out some primary themes.  I am especially interested in south american name origins because I am trying to borrow somewhat from south america for a number of in game reasons.  Here's what I noted down:

• Named for some distinct feature (brazil = brasa/red ember wood)
• Name for the people that live there (Algeria = land of the algiers, Afghanistan = land of the afghans)
• Named for the conqueror/discover (columbia = columbus, bolivia = bolivar)
• Named for geographical feature (Honduras = depths, Haiti = mountainous lands. India = land of the indus river)
• Named for qualities (Costa Rica = rich coast)

Applying it to my region

Once I saw what things were likely to prompt the source of a name, I tried to list out some of the things that might define it:

• Half-elves that conquered/settled the area from the "old world"
• Major geographic features:
• The main river (as yet unnamed)
• jungles
• floodplains
• a lake
• Types of people
• any kind of people, even lizardmen and half-devils and half-angels
• regardless, a singular people under a single, half-elf monarch
• maybe a free people? not sure if that's an angle I want to pursue.

So I'm not sure I have enough to go with on the geographical features, so I'm going to really try and hammer on the half-elves ruling over anyone and everyone. Ideally, whichever name I pick, I should be able to tell someone "Ah, it's just a derivation/deterioration of The Land of Concordant Friends of Half Elves"

Word Salad

Ok, without further ado, here's all the names I've spat out so far:

• Halfelfland, Halland? Halfefenia? Halvenia? Hellania? The riverlands? Riverlandia? Ravenna? Rivenna?
• Unia? Totalia? Holan? Summeria? Concordia? Harmonia? Consonancia? Congrunia?
• Halvenia, Harmonia, Concordia… The Halvenia Concord? The Halmenia Concord? Halvencord? Halvencordia? Halvenhamonia? Halmonia? Halvenia vs. Halvencord vs. Halvencordia… Vencordia? Vencoria? Velcordia? Vermonia? Velmonia? Velmond? Velmondia? Vellondia? Vellond? Velland? Vecland? Vemland? Havenland? Havaland? Halvaland? Vahland? Vahlia? Vahlond? Varlond? Harlond? Harmond? Halvond? Halvondia? Vahlondia? Halvoria? Valoria? Lavoria?

Balance and fulfilling many needs

This is a tough one. The name I ultimately decide on needs to:

• Feel distinct. Boring names like Concordia sound like they belong in Final Fantasy 1
• Be actually pronounceable/spellable by my players. Halvenharmonia sounds kind of cool, but I feel like my players will never get that one.
• Be something I can say over and over again. will I be excited to say Vahlia for the 500th time? Will my players start calling it Valhalla?
• some names from other games that I liked: in ACKs there are believable sounding names like The Auran Empire, Khemesh, and Turos Tem. 4th edition had names like Nerath and Bael Turath.

Wrapping up and not getting stuck

That's all I have for now. Ultimately I may have to pick something and go with it for a bit until it starts to feel good. It may come to be that filling in other details will strike me with some inspiration. I just need a name that I can find+replace later if the mood strikes me.

Introduction

Introduction

Hi there!  I like to play D&D with my friends.  The current version of D&D that we play is called Adventurer Conqueror King.  It takes a slightly houseruled version of B/X D&D and adds a bottom-to-top economic system, upon which a robust domain management system for high level characters can rest.

The last time this group of players and I played, they formed a mercenary company that they called The Book and Bow, and I'm not creative so I called my blog that.

World Building

World building is really freaking hard.  There are so many decisions you have to make, and so many considerations.  It may seem meaningless, but if you don't think about how things work, you might accidentally create hard-to-believe settings.  Sometimes you can get away with just the small stuff.  For the game we are about to run, I've tried to avoid designing an entire world so I don't have to worry about things like tectonic plates.  I started with a rough idea of where in the real world I wanted to imitate: South America, and drew some mountains slightly differently in a way that I thought might create a slightly greater variety in biomes.

This blog is my attempt to document my thought process.  I'll be able to go back and refer to what I was trying to do, and perhaps I can also get feedback from more expert worldbuilders.  If someone finds this blog and gets useful hints for designing a world too, all the better.  More to come later.