Articles by Danny Rupp
Danny works professionally as an architect and serves as managing editor here at CH, which means he shares many of the duties of being an editor but without the fame and recognition. He also writes about RPGs, videogames, movies, and TV. He is married to Sucilaria, and has a personal blog at Incorrect Blitz Input. (Email Danny or follow him on Twitter).
The Architect DM: Abandonment & Re-population
As a DM that runs a tabletop RPG, it is your right and privilege to strike towns, lands, and whole continents with whatever form of catastrophe or disaster that strikes your fancy. Whether it is a terrible plague, massive tidal wave, or vicious invading army that sweeps through the area and all but wipes out the native inhabitants it is up to you to determine what happens with that location once the initial catastrophe has passed. These events could have happened hundreds of years before the characters were born or they could be the climatic event that finishes off a chapter of your game and opens up a new one. No matter when it happens, it is up to you as the DM to figure out how these events will effect your game world and how the players will experience the event and the aftermath.
Ask and You Shall Receive
This post comes as a response to a comment by Michelle on my last post, World Building by Process, in which she asked what an area that has been depopulated and then resettled might look like. At first you might think this topic doesn’t have all that much to do with your specific game world, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realized it really does apply to a large percentage of fantasy settings because of one simple trope. The fantasy trope in question is Ruins, or to be even more specific Ruins and Dungeons that are just as likely to be abandoned and populated by monsters than by their original inhabitants. Almost every fantasy setting that I can think of includes some kind of far reaching kingdom that has since fallen into ruin and its lands have been repopulated in various ways.
Start With The Basics
Before you can start seriously putting your abandoned and repopulated world together, you first have to determine the basic characteristics of the world for what I’ll call the “Before” and the “After.” Before refers to the world/location/kingdom that was abandoned. Did the kingdom succumb to a horrible plague that wiped out all living creatures across the lands except for those that could escape uninfected? Was the entire continent wracked by wars and all of the nations crumbled in the conflicts? How much of the population survived, and did certain animals or people survive unharmed somehow? What state are the buildings and landscape in? If a plague is the cause then perhaps the buildings are only suffering from neglect and are still mostly standing, whereas a war might result in buildings being knocked down and burned in the conflict or aftermath as a part of the pillaging. Answering these basic questions can help you immensely in planning the world that I’m calling the After. For example, if a war occurred and many people died on the lands, perhaps they are infected and poisoned for a few years by the decay but after a time they become the most fertile lands around.
At the same time you should be thinking about the basic attributes of the world you want the party to experience. Are they entering these lands shortly after everything has been abandoned or has it been centuries and the land has changed in many ways? If you know the basic details of the After world you want to portray, you can then also develop the previous questions about the Before area to mesh with what you want the world to be like. If you want it to feel like a ghost town, then you should develop the catastrophe from the Before time so that it leaves buildings intact but wipes out all of the residents like the aforementioned plague. It’s not against the rules to design backwards in this respect, because the players will experience it backwards to begin with and you want it to make as much sense as possible. If you want something to be deliberately nonsensical, you can easily turn it into a mystery that needs to be solved about the area they are adventuring. A great start to a spooky adventure can have the players wondering, “Where did all the people go?”
A Second Chance to Survive
When you are repopulating an area, the are becomes interesting because there is a history build into it and the natural expectation is that history will repeat itself. Perhaps the land is inherently dangerous and the people who are settling here again are at risk just like the first inhabitants. If a region has extremely harsh winters, a settlement could easily be wiped out and a year or two later more people will arrive to resettle that area – will they survive the winter any better than the first group? This approach works very well with plague infested lands or natural enemies such as barbarians / natives / bordering nations. No matter what the danger, the location itself is being given a second chance and that makes it seem like and inherently important area.
The pattern that the new settlements take should be a direct result of the basics you’ve determined beforehand. If all of the structures are still mostly intact, then the new inhabitants are much more likely to build on the existing framework and perhaps make a few important improvements so that they might have a better chance of survival. The length of time between the Before and After is a key factor also, because if it has been a short amount of time you may still see some remnants of the prior civilization or foreign entities like looters and scavengers that feed on the destruction. If more time has passed than most likely looters and scavengers will be gone, and perhaps wildlife has moved back into the region or it has remained completely devoid of life for a specific reason (again, the plague comes to mind). If you set your game shortly after the society has been abandoned, perhaps you want to emphasize the struggle and downward slope of the Before time and have a steady stream of settlers attempting (and most likely failing) at repopulating the area year after year. This strikes me as a more distinctly “Wild West” style of game, but if that’s what you want to play then this style of world building might help you further emphasize the daily struggle for survival so that the players really feel it when the are in the game world.
Your Effort Should be Thin but Visible
This is a developing philosophy I have about World Building in general, but it applies especially to the development of the past of your game world – Spread your effort out but keep it where the players will experience it. To illustrate I’ll use the basic D&D game world I talked about earlier, the odds are your players will come across a set of ruins or a dungeon sooner or later that is a remnant of a past civilization. If you put all of your effort into the past, then the dungeon won’t feel old and abandoned and it may not make sense why monsters are there or there may be no reason for the original inhabitants to have left. If you put all of your effort on the present, which I would bet is how the majority of D&D dungeons and ruins are designed, then some players might be left wondering what this building or dungeon was created for and who created it, or why it even exists in the first place. However, if you spread your effort out and focus on a few key points about the ruins/dungeon, you can hopefully create a more rich and believable world that will increase immersion for everyone involved.
Some of the key questions I would answer are: Who built this? Why did they build it? Who lives there now? What did the location provide to the original owner that it also gives the new inhabitants? What is one important event that happened within or to the location? Much like many of the campaign/adventure planning techniques, once you’ve answered these questions you should be able to start tying several of the aspects together to create a brief but believable history of the location that also informs how it looks at present and what the players will find or experience while they’re there.
A Few Small Decisions Can Shape Your Entire World
When it comes to World Building as a whole process, the topics of abandonment and re-population discussed in this post can be some of the most crucial things to consider. Even the absence of them can influence how parts of your world feel, if a population is the first group to have ever settled on a land that can tell you a lot about their civilization. Perhaps they’re making mistakes that are hurting how they develop, but the mistakes have to be made before they can learn how to survive in that specific location. The area and its inhabitants might have a pioneering nature and consist of a lot more experimentation with types of settlements and buildings.
In much the same way you can use these concepts to drive the technological developments of the cultures in your game world. To use a real world example, the Romans invented/discovered Concrete (even the ability to mix it so that it could cure underwater) but this technology was lost for hundreds and hundreds of years before it was rediscovered. Imagine if one specific culture had stumbled upon some Roman ruins and rediscovered it earlier and what kinds of changes that would have caused in the history of our world. Perhaps the fantasy setting of your world is shaken to the core when one culture discovers the lost secrets of steam technology, or hell even electricity, in the ruins of a long lost civilization. Next week I’ll be talking more about technological developments and how they can be used in World Building.
This post and next week’s post are both inspired by reader’s comments, so if you have something specific you’d like to see discussed with regards to World Building or any aspect of location design for RPGs please let me know!
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM Series.
The Architect DM: World Building By Process
If you think about the world around us and how it came to be the way it is, most things you’ll look at are the result of a process. Villages were created out of a need for shelter and then grew into towns and some eventually grew into cities, while natural formations like mountain ranges rise and fall due to the workings of plate tectonics. When we set out to create a world for an RPG, or even for videogames and fiction, we are attempting to create a world that is the result of a process that has never actually happened. Some worlds can certainly have mountains that don’t line up along a range and aren’t even created by plates of earth shifting and colliding, but my personal belief is that if you are creating a world the best foundation you can use is that of the real world that we see all around us.
Everyone that is going to experience the world your creating has a fundamental understanding of how our world works, the result of which is that any differences that appear in the world you create are going to stand out. This means, to me, that the things that are different about your game world should be important and serve a very definitive purpose in your game or the stories that you’re hoping to tell. What is one of the first things you notice about the planet Tatooine from Star Wars that is different from our own? It’s all desert, sure, but our planet has some very large deserts so that’s not totally out there…OH GOD IT HAS TWO SUNS! Not only does this hammer home the point that Luke Skywalker is very far away from our planet Earth, it also looks cool and when you think about it even more it provides a solid explanation for why the planet is much more hot and dry than what we are used to. George Lucas may not have come up with the idea because he wanted Tatooine to be a desert planet, he may have just thought it would be cool and alien to show two suns on a horizon (which it totally is), but the ideas work together and serve to enhance the world and the stories that are told on that world (okay maybe just the first three stories).
Start With What You Know
When designing a fantasy world (or sci-fi, or any fictional world, but I say fantasy for ease of use) my biggest suggestion is to start with what you know about the world we live in. If you’re designing a map then look at a local, regional, continental, or world map and steal things liberally. Take the map and turn it upside down or sideways, trace parts of it and then overlap those with other parts of it, but most of all if you find yourself wondering whether or not something is right try to find a similar case on a real map and if you do you’ll know what you’ve done is feasible and makes sense. Again I will state, this is a fantasy world so not everything has to be feasible or make sense, but as I stated above if it doesn’t make sense there should be an interesting and good explanation as to why it doesn’t. You may not know the explanation at the beginning, but you should be prepared to come up with one or else I guarantee your players will be disappointed in the end. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: World Building Basics
So far the Architect DM series has focused primarily on locations and building design, but today and over the next few weeks I’m going to take a look at the larger scale idea of world building and some factors that play into designing a realistic and believable world to play your games in. As with many of the design aspects I’ve talked about previously, designing a realistic world can feel like one of the most intimidating and daunting tasks to undertake but in reality if you apply principles correctly it can make your efforts easier and better at the same time.
For the most part this post will focus on the pseudo-medieval world building that goes along with most Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, but I will try to address modern, sci-fi, and other worlds as much as possible. As always I strongly encourage you to comment and ask questions if you have them, and if I see enough interest in other types of world design I will definitely do more posts in the future addressing non-D&D specific world building.
A Matter of Scale and Approach
The way I see it there are two distinct ways to design a world for your campaign, with a possible third approach that dances somewhere in the middle. The first approach is what most people think of doing when they run a D&D game which is drawing a complete world map and filling in as much information as possible, then running the game and letting the players explore that world – we’ll call this the Large Scale approach. The other is designing a specific town/city and starting the party out within it, then as they explore designing and introducing more and more of the game world to them as they explore. You can even start the party out in a more confined location such as a specific district of that town/city, a tavern within the town, or even a single room within a building inside of that town and branch outwards from there – we’ll call this the Small Scale approach.
The obvious disadvantage to Large Scale world building is that it takes an insane amount of effort from the DM beforehand, and you’re probably never going to satisfy yourself or the players with the amount of information you can put into any specific area of the world. Thus, the appeal of running something in Forgotten Realms or other campaign settings because all of the beginning work has been done for the DM. The obvious disadvantage to Small Scale world building is that if you haven’t designed or prepared a location then the players either can’t go there or will have an improvised and most likely less interesting adventure if they choose to go where the DM hasn’t planned things out yet.
The Middle Ground
The shady middle ground between these two approaches is most likely what I would suggest for any DM attempting to create a world for any RPG. The first step is to decide what the basic scale of your game will be, and I very much recommend talking to the players first. Some examples of basic scale are a game that focuses on local happenings and is based mostly around a single town and the areas close by, or a game that focuses on a kingdom and a series of villages within it, or even a game that encompasses a smaller continent and its interaction with other nearby islands and continents. All of these are acceptable scales for a game to begin with and can dictate the entire feel of the game – if you and the players decide you want to focus on kingdoms or continents then the specific details of the towns and cities are not as important and you don’t have to plan for them. [Read the rest of this article]
Review: “Legend of the 5 Rings” 4th Edition RPG
I discovered Legend of the Five Rings several years ago, but in the past I have never had a chance to play the RPG system itself and instead have ended up playing Oriental Adventures version of D&D or other systems with strong Asian influences. That’s why I’m very thankful that Alderac Entertainment Group has provided us with the 4th Edition of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game core book, which is right off the bat one of the most beautiful RPG books I’ve ever seen. I’m an artist and a designer, so that’s always the first thing I notice and from front to back this book is exceedingly well designed and produced compared to everything else that’s out there on the market. The writing for both flavor and mechanics is well done and exudes the setting of Rokugan (the world that L5R is set in) at every turn of the page. I have been waiting to write this review until we were able to actually sit down and play the game, and thankfully two weeks ago we finally managed to get a group together to do just that.
Contest: Win the L5R Core Book!
Contest is closed and results are posted over at our Roll! tumblog, but if you didn’t win the contest you can still go there before January 5th, 2011 to get 20% off the PDF from DriveThruRPG!
First and foremost, however, I am happy to say that Alderac has provided us with a copy of the L5R core book to give away as part of a contest! The book itself is hardcover and 400 pages long, and you can pick it up at your local gaming store for $59.99 – or you can win one right now! All you have to do for a chance to win the core book is leave a comment on this post and tell me you’d like to be entered into the contest (please make sure you give a valid e-mail address as that is how I will be contacting the winner). The contest will run until the end of next Friday, December 3rd (Midnight EST) at which point I will roll a die or use some form of random number generator to determine who the winner is, then we’ll ship the L5R Core Book to that person so they can begin their adventures in Rokugan for the holidays. While you’re leaving a comment I’d love to hear your thoughts about L5R and this review! [Read the rest of this article]
Review: Essentials D&D “Heroes” Books
If you’re a 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons player then the two Essentials books that you most want to look at are Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms. Each book is presented in a similar style to a stand alone Player’s Handbook with Heroes of the Fallen Lands introducing new builds for the classic D&D classes (Clerics, Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards) while Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms introduces new builds for Druids, Paladins, Rangers, and Warlocks. Each of these books stands on its own perfectly well and you don’t need to buy both if you’re only interested in the classes presented in one of them.
As the primary offering of Essentials D&D material for players, these books serve two very important and very different purposes. The first is that they present new and reworked builds for existing 4th Edition classes that change some of the fundamental ways the player interacts with the mechanics of the game. The second purpose they serve is in updating some of the key components of the game such as feats and the magic item system, both of which have been changed for the better in my opinion. If you’re a 4th Edition player and are looking for something new or different for your favorite class, I highly recommend looking through the book that contains that class and giving it a shot. If you’re new to 4th Edition and want a good place to start, the new Martial class builds (the Fighter and Rogue specifically) in Heroes of the Fallen Lands are a great place to start!
About the Books
Both of the Essentials Heroes books are presented in the 6 inch by 9 inch softcover format and are both contain exactly 365 pages of content (plus new and cleaner 4e character sheets at the end). Though I prefer the more glossy cover that the Monster Vault book comes with, these books are still good quality and the smaller size makes them perfect for having at your game table and still having space on the table for the important things like snacks and drinks. As I suggested above, if you’re not interested in the classes presented in one of these books then there is really no need to get it, in fact the first 72 pages of both books are almost exactly the same with the only exception that I could find that Forgotten Kingdoms includes rules for summoning because the Warlock class is the first of Essentials to use it. Also the later parts of the two books are almost exactly the same as well, including chapters about Skills plus Gear and Weapons.
It’s much easier to talk about what is different in each book aside from just the classes presented. Each book presents a different Epic Destiny, both of which appear to be slightly tweaked versions of the Demigod Epic Destiny from the first Player’s Handbook. Heroes of the Fallen Lands introduces the following races – Dwarf, Eladrin, Elf, Halfling, and Human. Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms introduces the Dragonborn, Drow, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Tiefling races and has the Human race reprinted as well. Both books contain the same feats, except that Forgotten Kingdoms adds a handful of additi0nal feats that appear to be mostly flavored for the classes that are presented in it such as Wilderness and Primal feats for Druids and Rangers. The weird thing is that there are also a few Battle feats and Underdark feats that seem like they would be equally valid in both books, but are only presented in Forgotten Kingdoms. For the most part I like all of the content provided in both of the books, but the inclusion of a very small number of additional feats in Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms seems to go against the rest of the decisions made that appeal to the idea of only needing to buy one of the books.
What’s So Essential About Them?
I’ll start with the first book, Heroes of the Fallen Lands, and its new presentation of the Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard classes. The basic presentation of each class is still very similar to other classes in 4th Edition, except that each class is given its own chart for level progression with several class specific powers gained along that progression. It’s very reminiscent of how 3rd Edition D&D presented its classes, but the rules and underlying structure of the classes (especially the Cleric and Wizard) are still mostly unchanged from their previous 4e builds. The first important distinction of these builds is that they feel much more rigid and focused than previous 4e class builds. In non-Essentials builds players often chose a class feature/focus that defined their character’s “build” and abilities, but were still given a list of 3-4 powers to choose from and it was left largely up to the player if they wanted to choose the optimal powers for that build or to branch out. This is probably one of the biggest factors contributing to the length of time it often takes to create 4e characters. With the Essentials Cleric and Wizard builds, the player selects either their domain (warpriest) or school of magic (mage) and that more rigidly defines many of the powers that your character has access to.
With the Cleric Warpriest build, you still gain Healing Word at 1st level and you still choose from a selection of daily powers or utility powers at the same levels as other Cleric builds, but the domain that you pick (Storm or Sun in this book) determines which at-will and encounter powers you have, gives you a bonus level 1 utility power, and also determines which type of benefits you get from the Devout Warpriest paragon path. On the other hand the Wizard Mage build presented in this book still gives you a choice from a larger list of at-will, encounter, daily and utility powers but the school of magic (Enchantment, Evocation, or Illusion) determines your starting class features as well as the features of the Enigmatic Mage paragon path. For these two classes, the spell casters of the book, all of their encounter powers now include either effects (Cleric) or miss damage (Wizard) that prevent the feeling of disappointment and waste when you keep missing with encounter powers. Both of these builds are fairly straight forward and simple modifications of the base 4E character system, with these Essentials builds filling a role somewhere between creating your character based on a class build or template and having free reign of creating your character from a complete list of powers and paragon paths. [Read the rest of this article]
D&D Essentials and the 4.5 Edition Issue
It’s Monday and as of last week the Wizards Premiere stores have been selling Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms and Monster Vault, which means for most intents and purposes the entirety of the D&D Essentials line is now out there for people to play and read. As people absorb and utilize the material we should be able to gain a general sense of exactly what Essentials really is and what it means for the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. That said, one of the biggest concerns/complaints/or whatever you choose to call it that I’ve heard raised about D&D Essentials is whether or not it is D&D Edition 4.5.
After considering the idea briefly, I came up with an answer that satisfies me and I believe settles the issue pretty soundly. Is D&D Essentials a 4.5 Edition? The answer: Yes and No, simultaneously.
Before you jump the gun that this is a cop-out answer, allow me to explain it a bit. With every previous edition of Dungeons & Dragons that I’ve played we have bought several books and begun playing, and shortly afterward the game was decently house-ruled as our group saw fit to change things to make the game more fun, balanced, or what have you. This trend changed with 3rd Edition when 3.5 was released. D&D 3.5 to us was basically a large batch of errata that greatly improved how the game played and resolved many of the issues that we had dealt with for years or that had emerged over time and many of which we’d implemented house rules to mitigate or avoid already. It sucked to have to pretty much have to re-buy an edition of the game, but that was something that had happened before in the history of D&D it simply wasn’t as transparent. People react different to buying “Advanced” rules than they do buying the same edition they already owned simply with a .5 upgrade. [Read the rest of this article]
Review: L5R “Enemies of the Empire”
The new edition of Legend of the Five Rings (4th Edition, no relation to D&D) published by Alderac Entertainment Group has been out for a few months now and though I’ve been working pretty hard on planning a series of one-shot adventures to run I still haven’t gotten a chance to play it.
As much as I enjoy D&D, one of the niche settings that it doesn’t cover that well for me is the oriental/samurai/ninja setting that, if you know me at all, is something I absolutely love to play in. Despite having not played the game yet, I wanted to take a look at Enemies of the Empire, the first supplement book for the new edition that nearly doubles the amount of content you can use in your adventures. While the core book introduces the main samurai clans and a handful of enemies your samurai might encounter including goblins, oni, and white-masked zombies, Enemies of the Empire is nearly 300 pages full of cultists, monsters, spirits, ancient races, and ronin that your samurai can face off against or even in some cases play as one of those ancient races.
Overview
The 4th Edition books for Legend of the Five Rings display the highest level of production, design, and presentation that RPG books of today should be compared to. I had this opinion of the core book and it has been continued with Enemies of the Empire. Though you might expect it from the book’s title and description, it does not come off as a “Monster Manual” but instead it feels more like an encyclopedia detailing a collection of different races rather than monsters. Some of those detailed include a bestiary of ordinary animals (horses, elephants, etc), a cult called the Bloodspeakers, a secretive conspiracy group called the Kolat, serpent warriors known as Naga, the Nezumi rat-people, shadowspawn and spirits known simply as The Nothing, Oni, Kenku, Ronin, a slew of new Shadowlands Beasts, Spirits, and Undead.
The book contains 282 beautifully colored and designed pages that while you read through them practically teleport you to the world of Rokugan. The only downside I can see to either of the new L5R books is the price, with this supplement’s retail price being $39.99 it costs the same or more than most core books for other RPGs, however with the absolute quality of these books I’m not surprised and I have to say if you are a fan of Rokugan or of roleplaying as samurai you absolutely must check out these books.
The Nitty-Gritty
For me this book has just the right amount of fluff, the opening chapter starts with an engaging in-character story and there are tons of quotes from people of Rokugan throughout each chapter that add unique perspectives to each topic. More interesting than that is that almost every word in Enemies of the Empire is written in such a way that you can easily see it from the perspective of a GM reading about the game world but much of it feels like something written by someone within the game world describing the world that they see. To me this book is an essential piece for planning, running, and playing in Rokugan, while the core book laid a solid foundation of the world Enemies of the Empire takes that world and populates it with a much wider variety of interesting creatures and characters that really makes the world eat, sleep, and breath the themes that permeate L5R.
The first chapter is the Bestiary and introduces nearly every type of natural animal that you’ll need for your game. A very nice addition is for players to be able to gain the advantage to have a trained falcon, which is cool enough for any RPG character but just think about it – a Samurai with a trained falcon! Badass. The animals described in this chapter range from Ape, Badger, Bat, and Bear to Octopus, Shark, Snake, Stag, and Tiger. The next chapter introduces the cult known as the Bloodspeakers, who not surprisingly focus on the use of blood in their magic. There is a lot of history presented for the cult including two of the biggest battles of good vs. evil known to Rokugan, a sample cult cell for use in your game (or to modify as you see fit), a new technique for casting spells in the Bloodspeaker style, and several pages of new spells usable with that technique. Though this is presented mainly for the GM, it is given in a fashion that I can easily see it being used by a PC if they really wanted to dabble in the more sinister style of spell casting. The end of the chapter gives us a handful of monster stat blocks to represent the cult, which is the typical format for this book.
The next chapter gives us the Kolat, a mysterious and very secretive conspiracy/syndicate that most of the populace is either unaware of or refuses to believe that it exists. The group is split into numerous sects (Jade, Lotus, Silk, Tiger, etc) that each have a main focus and describes what to expect of the typical agent of that sect. This is a very interesting concept presented in Rokugan because it is a group of people who favor power over honor, which goes against many of the main assumptions that come with the society of Rokugan. This is not a section of the book that presents strictly monstrous or evil adversaries, but rather a group of people whose goals simply come at odds with those of a group of PC samurai every now and then. The book mentions that using the Kolat can easily give your game an X-Files feel and add some conspiracy into the mix. The chapter ends with not only several stat blocks for Kolat agents but also new mechanics and spells for spies, asssasins, and other agents of the Kolat.
The Lost are something that I can only describe as infected demon-ghost samurai, but even that doesn’t do them real justice. You’ll have to pick up the book to find out exactly what they are, but I’ll summarize it as they are a very easy way to add a very strong horror element into your games in the land of Rokugan. The Naga chapter of the book is the first that introduces an entirely new race; these are half-human half-snake naga that have lived for centuries and put a strong emphasis on martial prowess. The chapter provides excellent background for the race and then describes how they can work as adversaries in your game, but it also presents a large section on campaign and PC options for if you have a player or an entire party that wants to play as a naga themselves. I absolutely love this part, because I’m so used to D&D where races are an inherent part of the game and presented in the Player’s Handbook but in L5R the base game is that everyone plays a human. As a result, when the option to play something other than a human is presented it feels extremely special. This leads me perfectly into the next chapter, introducing the Nezumi.
I’m not going to lie, one of the reasons I’m so excited about this book is because rules for playing Nezumi fit perfectly into my L5R-Dark Sun-Mouse Guard mash up campaign idea. That said, this chapter follows the same structure as the Naga chapter and does an excellent job of providing plenty of background for the race as well as detailing both how they can be used as adversaries in your game and as a potential PC race. The next chapter introduces shadowspawn creatures that are known simply as The Nothing. These creatures are the perfect other-worldly ninjas or stalking shadows that when combined with The Lost mentioned above allows you to very easily create a Cthluhu-style campaign of Legend of the 5 Rings.
Everything that I’ve described above is roughly HALF of this book. The following chapters expand upon and introduce a wide range of new Oni and introduce the Five Ancient Races including the Kenku (bird-people), the Ningyo (mermaid-ish creatures), the Trolls, the Kitsu/Tsuno (shapeshifters cursed into demon-like forms), and the Zokujin (goblin/kobold-like creatures). After those there is a full chapter each for Ronin, Shadowlands Beasts (including goblins, ogres, and demons), Spirits, and Undead. These last chapters seem to include more stat blocks for a wider variety of creatures than the early chapters, which I find creates a perfect balance to the book between providing interesting campaign ideas and a slew of new opponents for your samurai to face off against.
Enemies of the Empire is a book that cannot easily be categorized into the typical RPG supplement archetypes because it provides a wide variety of fluff and crunch for numerous different races, organizations, and locations that you will encounter around Rokugan as well as several new mechanics and spells that players will want to use to survive against those threats. Perhaps the best way to summarize it is that when combined with the Legend of the 5 Rings core book, Enemies of the Empire provides you with enough information to run interesting and exciting campaigns for as long as your characters care to stay in the world of Rokugan.
The Architect DM: Give It Some Structure
Many of the requests I’ve received for this series have pertained to the application of real world architectural elements to fantasy settings and dungeons in particular. While I may do some posts in the future that talk about specific elements and how they can be used in your D&D game, today I’m going to focus on what could be considered the biggest and most important architectural element that anyone could use. As things go, this element may also be one of the most overlooked when it comes to dungeon design for home games or even in published adventures. I’m talking about structure, and not the kind that makes sure your adventure has a beginning, middle, and end (though it can help with that with surprising ways) but the kind that if it were simplified to its most common element: you could just call it columns and walls.
Sure, nearly every single dungeon is going to have walls and maybe its fair share of columns, but the odds are that most of them have not considered structure beyond how it might be interacted with by the creatures or how it might effect the progress of the game. That is basic environmental design in the exact opposite sequence of actions from how it should be. The average DM places walls in a dungeon to stop the PCs from moving in a certain direction, while the average person or creature who builds dungeons would be placing walls to make sure the ceiling / roof stays up. While either of these methods may be perfectly feasible for a DM, you might find that designing a dungeon with realistic concerns and principles may lead to some more interesting environments than you’d have created on your own. As you get better at designing dungeons, those more interesting locations can lead to more interesting interactions and can ultimately lead to better gaming!
The 10′ x 10′ Room
The classic trope is that a dungeon is mostly built up of 10 foot by 10 foot rooms, so that seems as good a place to start as any. However, for the sake of scale and symmetry my drawings show a 20 foot by 20 foot room (if you use 5 ft. squares as your scale). Assuming your basic dungeon is made up of stone, brick, or dirt then a square room of this size is pretty simple and there are no real structural concerns. Even a large doorway in each wall is only going to take up half of the wall space, so you can easily have one door on each wall that gives this kind of room the versatility to be either the focus of an encounter or a crossroads between several different areas.
The great thing about structure is that if your dungeon ceiling can span the width of a small room like those above, then it can easily span that distance across an even longer rectangular room so long as that distance stays constant. Basically the weight is only spanning the shorter distance and the length of the room is not really a concern. In this way, if you want to make the simplest of believable dungeons then you can stick to small square rooms and longer rectangular rooms with any number of corridors between them and everything should be fine. However, that can also get pretty boring quite fast, can’t it? [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: The Inverse Office Dungeon
I’d like to share an experiment with you, it’s something I’ve done to a minor extent and I believe it might be helpful to other people out there as well. Let’s say you find yourself in the situation where you need to design a dungeon and can’t think of how to do it, whether it’s a spur-of-the-moment situation or you’re just stumped while planning for next week’s game, you need a dungeon and can’t seem to figure out what to do. My first suggestion to solve this situation may seem like an obvious one at first, but the depth that it can go to is probably not as clear. My suggestion is to take a modern day structure that is very well known, and refined over many years for increased efficiency and functionality, the modern office building.
The odds are that most of you either currently work in an office building or have worked in one for some period of your life. To start designing your dungeon simply envision a typical office building that you know relatively well, and then inverse it. At the core of almost every office building is the aptly named “core”, which consists of elevators, stairwells, and sometimes an open space or tall atrium that can span between the first two floors to all the way up through the building. Applied to a dungeon, this can simply translate to a cave or crevice opening into the ground with either natural slopes or carved stone/wooden plank stairs leading down into the depths. If you want to make the analogy even more direct, you can have this be an abandoned dwarven mining colony and include a rope & pulley wood lift that was used to hoist minerals, tools, and workers out of the depths. Now that you have the core extending as deep as you like into the ground, continue to envision an upside down office building around that core.
Public Spaces for Public Places
More often than not the first floor of an office building contains at least one public or retail function, usually a deli or bank that services the workers in the building as well as many people from nearby but outside of the building. This is a direct result of the building’s inevitable meeting with the ground, which inherently makes that space more public than the upper levels. In the same way, the upper-most areas of a dungeon are the most exposed and are likely explored or accidentally stumbled into far more often than the depths. This doesn’t mean you should put a restaurant in your dungeon, but perhaps an often used traveler’s shelter camp can be found in one of the upper caves or if you’re playing in a more high-fantasy game this would be the perfect location for an underground market or trading post set up for trade between the surface and the Underdark.
Another great use for these “public” places in the upper-level of your dungeon could be an area ripe with traps and dangers set up entirely because these are the areas that are most often accidentally discovered by those on the surface. Either way, most likely these upper areas are not going to be the main locations of your dungeon and they provide a good buffer between the surface world and the dungeon. This technique also allows your dungeon to feel a bit more organic, as it becomes clear that the interaction of the surface world and the underground world has a unique impact on the inhabitants of both worlds. One important aspect to remember is the core that was discussed above provides a very clear method of travel not only to the top most places in the dungeon, but it may also provide an efficient way for most characters and creatures to by pass the surface locations if they choose to do so. The core may also be trapped as a result, but no matter what it is important to provide your players with a way of getting beyond these surface locations and into the deeper sections of the dungeon.
Where the Workers…um, “Work”
The upper levels of the typical office building are split up in many different configurations between varying numbers of different companies and offices, so translating this part to a dungeon is really not that difficult at all. Your dungeon can be entirely inhabited by one big “company” of orcs or even just one level of the dungeon can be split between orcs, gnolls, and Microsoft. Hell, many of you have probably even experienced interoffice tensions so this office-to-dungeon analogy can be as direct or indirect as you like! If you refer back to some of the previous Architect DM articles, you’ll know that I’m a fan of designing based on real world influences and I’m not about to stop that with this experiment. The workers in most of our modern office buildings do not live there, but they commute to the building to work and then commute home. If we’re designing what was once a dwarven mining colony, this can work perfectly as you design something that has no naturally built living spaces. After a certain amount of time neglect and disrepair will have set in; monsters have no doubt moved into the mining colony and have now adapted those spaces no matter how uncomfortable they may be to become their makeshift homes.
Some of the basic keys to designing the lower parts of your dungeon can be taken directly from typical office design. Each of your “offices” should have their own direct connection back to the core, whether it was built from the beginning or added in by the new inhabitants, a connection to the surface (or to the depths) will be key for many of the inhabitants survival. The core can also serve to bring fresh air and even some light into the deeper parts of the dungeon, depending on how deep you’ve decided to make the core, which could actually lead to a relatively comfortable form of shelter deep within the ground for some of your less-monstrous denizens. Perhaps some of your dungeon offices exist on multiple floors and have secret or interior means of traveling between floors independent of the core, but sooner or later your party should come back to that core that should hopefully create a sense of coherence between the different levels of the dungeon.
An Openly Designed Dungeon
I doubt that any of your players would play through this dungeon and be able to put together that it was designed based on an office building, but somewhere deeper in their design-subconscious they will recognize the similar themes and may even buy into the dungeon a bit more because of their familiarity with the concepts. Though if they get too familiar, you can always drop a dragon on their heads to remind them what the world of D&D is all about – fantasy. The basics of this experiment, at least how I see it playing out, are that your dungeon has a more organized plan to it and is less random in its structure. The mechanic of designing a core through the center of the dungeon can be very helpful because when you hit a roadblock with the design of the dungeon, or even if you hit one mid-adventure, you have an element that you can take the dungeon or the party back to that can hopefully refresh things and get them moving again. It may also really tie the room together (NSFW).
Now that you’ve read a bit about the experiment, I encourage you to try it out and please let me know if you do and how it works! Also, as you continue to design dungeons, I very much recommend applying this concept to other types of buildings you see and experience to create interesting and new dungeons for your players to explore. Just imagine translating your local public library or the local team’s stadium into a dungeon and the interesting kinds of locations that you could end up creating as a result.
The Architect DM Series
Part 1: Building Foundations
Part 2: Function & Playability
Part 3: Environment and Interaction
Part 4: Fantasy Buildings 101
The Architect DM: Fantasy Buildings 101
When it comes to designing locations and buildings, the DM/GM has a much more daunting task ahead of them than most players or even the DMs themselves realize. Thankfully in most of the RPGs we play and run it is far from crucial that the design of the world is 100% accurate and entirely believable. Most players are willing to suspend their disbelief to an incredible level and almost all DMs don’t really have the time to make sure every location they put into their game is believable. However, creating an environment that is believable can actually make your players lives easier because they will buy into the game on a more unconscious level. This added level of believability just might turn out to be the whole new layer of depth that your game needs.
What I hope to cover in this post (or series of posts if I think of enough examples and there is a demand) is how to design many of the basic building types that you might find in a fantasy setting. Thanks again to Andy for asking questions and suggesting this idea for a post!
Town Hall
Pretty much every modern city or town has one, and they are often at or very close to the center of the town, so the classic town hall seems like a good place to start. The basic town hall concept is nothing more than a place for gathering, and especially in medieval societies they can be as simple as a roof over top of a very large room. Tools, technology, and materials are some of the main influences in the design of medieval buildings and as a result if it is just one room it will be an elongated rectangle. Any guesses why that is? The answer is in the distance the roof can span, if you attempt to make a larger and larger square the distance you have to span increases quite a bit, but if you make it a rectangle you can span the shorter distance but enclose more space as it gets longer.
When you start to look beyond the one room town hall, as you advance your fantasy cultures the town halls increase in complexity and the number of rooms within them. Often these will include a kitchen, numerous smaller gathering rooms (including exterior porches), offices/residences for rulers or public officials, space to accommodate soldiers/law enforcement, and even in some cases theaters or other typically exterior public functions. The interesting development is that as a society progresses they will often eliminate the larger gathering spaces within a town hall and instead use the building for smaller interior functions and leave larger gatherings to take place elsewhere. As a place of gathering, town halls share many traits with churches and temples because their primary functions are almost identical.
Churches & Temples
Though places of worship or reverence have a lot in common with town halls, they will often be much more obvious in their reflection of the culture they were built by and particularly the specific beliefs of those people. Almost always a church will be designed with a foot print that is a significant shape to the builder’s religion. European Gothic churches have plans like a christian cross, while a Greek christian church will generally be a cross with all arms equal because that is a more meaningful shape to their faith. What this means for you when you design a church or temple in your game is that the basic layout can be very easy to come up with. If the building is dedicated to one deity, simply make the plan a derivative of that deity or religion’s holy symbol. A church dedicated to Pelor (the 4E god of the sun among other things) would very likely be circular in nature with radiating “spoke-like” wings going out in every direction. Even beyond that, have the entire building exude the themes of the religion. Stained glass windows common in many churches glow with a particular radiance, but they also block out direct light so our church of Pelor might instead have clear glass windows to allow the sun to come through and shine on those within.
If you’re looking to design a more general temple or church, perhaps one that is dedicated to no specific entity or to more than one deity, then taking the approach above could be quite difficult. In that case, much like the town hall above, you will generally start with a large gathering space but the difference comes in the developing societies churches and temples typically maintain the larger gathering spaces and simply add on additional, smaller spaces at the back or edges of the gathering area. My main suggestion for a temple like this would be to give it a round plan (and even a dome for a ceiling) or a multi-sided design depending on the number of gods it is dedicated to (8 gods? make it an octagon!) so that there can be a statue or shrine dedicated to each one spaced evenly around the building. The general design of these types of buildings can imply a lot about the cultures they represent, if all of the gods are treated equally then you get an impression of what they might be like versus a culture where there are many gods but one is clearly dominant and even sometimes overshadows/oppresses the other deities present.
Walls & Guard Posts
Even in the real world, many medieval towns were walled in and designed for protecting its citizens, and these people didn’t have monsters like trolls and dragons to worry about! Depending on the time period and society that constructs them, defensive buildings can enclose an entire city with a wall or simply be built around the center of town and designed so that the rest of the population can retreat inside when a threat presents itself. Many times you will see a castle or manor atop a large stone outcropping with walls and defenses built close by and a larger town of undefended houses and buildings spreading out from there. I’ve heard a few times that Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings was not designed properly because it only consisted of the fortified portion, the farmers and larger areas of housing that most likely would have been there were missing. Again, that’s comparing these things to real life where we don’t have some of the more dangerous wild creatures that are present in D&D and Middle Earth.
If I haven’t made it clear enough, one of the main guiding factors with designing defenses is rooted in what they’re defending against. In this way many common D&D towns are probably badly designed due to the sources of threat they often face. Walls and guard towers look different when they’re designed to withstand arrows versus later walls that had to deflect or withstand cannon balls and bullets. In the same way, a town that exists in the known territory of several different dragons might not have more than a handful of buildings above ground and be nearly undetectable from the air. A town that has to deal with a local infestation of Kruthiks might build their walls as much above ground as below, or else have large moats in front of those walls to try and catch the creatures coming out of the ground unexpectedly. Let me take this moment to dispel one of the great myths about medieval and fantasy construction – many moats didn’t contain water. That’s right, they were effectively just a large ditch dug outside of walls, but it makes a lot of sense when you can do that and turn a 10 ft. high wall into a 15 ft. high obstacle from up close.
Guard posts or towers are a very important part of most walls constructed, because they provide lateral stability that can help fortify the wall from tipping over either forward or backward. In addition, they often provide the means for accessing walkways along defensive walls or if there are no walkways the guard towers will be even more common so that the entire length of the wall can be covered by at least one guard tower. Sometimes a guard tower will be connected on the inside to a barracks or quarters so that the larger group has quick and easy access to their defenses. In other cases a guard tower might have small rooms set up as uncomfortable quarters for the on duty guards so that they are never far from their posts.
When you’re designing a city or town and want to add some defenses around it, think about the reason that the people of that city are defending themselves and try to make the defenses a reflection of those concerns. It is rare that the wall will just be a straight line with a few guard towers along it, so try to change the direction of the wall at each tower. In real life those changes in direction usually conform to the natural terrain they’re built on because you are rarely going to find a stretch of European land that is completely flat! When it comes to later, colonial style walls they are typically in diamond or star shapes so that the cannons have trouble finding a flat surface of wall to shoot at (where cannon balls can do the most damage).
A Series Within a Series
Depending on how you guys like this initial look into some basic Fantasy buildings, I can see this becoming an ongoing part of the Architect DM series. Already I have a handful of other buildings I almost always use in D&D (Tavern / Inn, anyone?) that should be some of the first ones discussed along with those I’ve already talked about here. If you think of any others that you always use or come across in your games, or any types of buildings in particular that you have had trouble designing or using in your games, please let me know and I’ll most likely address them soon!
