MIDLANDS CHARACTER GENERATION

Character development (of Player via imagined formative experiences) in my dog in DMing. Placyer character development is a huge part of my sandbox. I use Players Option Combat and Tactics, and say at level 5, charcater has to journey across the world to find renowned fencing teachers to grow as warriors. If a Thief joins the guild, he must select carefully, for the Guild will require allegiance, loyalty, services in exchange for the secrets they they may teach some will attempt to trap and enslave the entire party by making them Outlaws.

I let the players choose whatever character class they want, furthermore they get to choose from among the schools of magic and warrior cultures I have in my sandbox, I give players the choice of a coin - either they go by culture, and get the skills associated with it, sort of logical (You can be of peasant stock living near the center of the barony or you can be from the River People living along its edge). OR Players can opt for specific skills / schools (fencing, spell casting) and they get stuck in a setting that provides that.

If a player wants to get a hard to roll character class, he has a choice, player can roll 3d6 or 4d6 vs ability until they get it 150 rolled sets later. OR, they can ask for the DM to help them. I have them roll up stats, 3d6 or 4d6 pick highest 3 as they choose, then if any of their rolls fails to qualify them, I reroll those using percentile dice and a specially designed distribution table that shows what qualifying score they get.

There are in game consequences of how they roll their character. 4d6 versus ability is the default, and it assumed the Medieval equivalent of the "Middle Class", the AD&D default, which you must realize, is not the ***average person *** in the D&D world. If they choose to roll 3d6 vs ability, they grew up Medieval Average. There were wars, famines, servitude, they may not have gotten schooling or nutrition or love, hence the low stats generated by having to accept 3d6 vs ability. Of course, they had to have had some help in childhood survival. The illusion that you are an individual separate from other people is bought by sufficient wealth, power and social status to where you can afford privacy and your own room to go hide in. If your family lives in a single room and your privacy is on the street corner and you have to wear hand me downs and share boots during bad weather, you will be less a free agent and part of the Community.

In my game, if you roll 3d6, you are part of some community, and if you run into hard times later in the game, you can always go back to your community, that will shelter and take care of you. Inn Keeper will feed you, someone will give you a pace to stay, If you join the guild, they will treat you like one of their own and sacrifice some maladjusted rich kid with issues running away and slumming with the gang er... I mean, thieves guild... That is the reason you might consider rolling 3d6 vs ability in my AD&D MIdlands Campaign.

Now, what of those who asked for and received DM's help in becoming Monks, Paladins and Bards? If you HAD to be created for a prestige class, then Prestige Class OWNS your character. You were being raised by wolves, when a community of Rangers adopted you. You were dying in village, because you were too sickly to plow the field and the Abbot at the local monastery took pity on you and took you in to save your life. You were really and pretty and the Leading Genius at the Bard College (unnaturally old and beautiful) seduced you and pulled you away from home to become a part of the Bard Scene, hell, with you talent and the Man who made you, you ARE the scene!

If the DM intervention places the player in a hard to get character class and that player character tries to leave just to become a regular adventurer, that will be perceived as an act of treason and selfishness, and parent organization will go after the player character and the group. Chased by assassins or groups of outraged Rangers, Paladin Inquisitors, Monks or Bards creating nasty scenes whenever they run into that player character and making that person famous in an embarrassing ways.

In game consequences that provide the sound and fury to a sand-box and the multiple obligations of the members of the player character party will put them in harm's way without signposting or railroading. If the mind-flayers are taking over the realm, then every organization will want to know what's going on and will be sending the player characters in harm's way.

There is a natural question of a character with guild obligations associating with other characters from other guilds. This was actually historically actually. PC/NPC Parties was how the nobles traveled in MIddle Ages, except they were cal;led retinues. To borrow Gary Gygax's example of who becomes an adventurer, let's take a knight (Fighter), a younger son of a landed nobility, whether he joins a crusade, goes to the Free City of Milan to get fitted for the new breast plate for his armor or goes to what is now Germany to learn the new (for 1300's) fencing school, he is traveling with his retinue - his one or more squires (fighters), lovers (any class), an artist, minstrel or a musician whom the knight is sponsoring, his Priest (cleric), his Doctor (cleric), his banker (handles finances and keeps in touch with the Parent Estate, the one Adult in the group), his teacher (Magic User). Historically speaking, members Retinues were often from lower classes, and could not survive physically or economically without their friend/lover/protector/benefactor. These people were kept for their whole lives if they were lucky, and became his Court, should the nobleman become a large enough vassal. If their Patron died or threw them out, the retinue member risked poverty, degradation, and ridicule and humiliation if they went back to plowing the field. Prostitution was a viable option to maintain lifestyle if looks allowed. In a way, historical retinues WERE the adventuring parties, since they traveled the known world, met wealthy and creative people in their travels and partied with them. Knights trained, gave fencing lessons, and performed in non-lethal (still dangerous) Jousting matches, They were the first professional athletes in Western Europe. Professional Warrior class in the Incan Empire actually evolved contemporaneously, and their real job was to oversee slaves on road construction projects and to govern the conquered people. Historically, Inca Warriors were the first group of people to realize that they had Leisure time on their hands and to use that time to recreationally get involved in art, writing religion and philosophy. Mayans had their own blood sport and they warriors became players who reaped the social status of modern professional athletes.

Anyway, retinue lifestyles still exist. In the D&D world, in my game, the payer adventuring party is considered a retinue of the wealthiest or most noble player in the group. I have a Social Status Roll in my game and you get a chance if being born to a couple of slaves or outlaws, or to be legitimately born into a Royal family. You have to roll pretty hard but not impossibly to be born into a family Coat of Arms.

The guilds are tolerant of their members belonging to adventuring parties, since Player Characters pay tribute and they spare the Guild they additional members hey would have to provide their PC to help with the mission. Adventuring Retinues are okay for the possessive guilds.

Retinues still exist in modern world. A word demimonde denotes a lover kept by a wealthy Patron who sits on the edge of respectability and for that reason is not called a whore or a prostitute. A number of semi-celebrity artists and actors are still demimonde. Very good looking and youthful crew members of modern billionaires yachts are not called anything.

TOPOGRAPHY 101 FOR DUNGEON MASTERS

When Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game evolved the Dungeon Crawl dynamic, it became extremely popular. We are talking about the Map & Room key format for writing adventures, also known as Site Adventures, and the game mechanic of Dungeon Exploration. It became so natural with Game Masters, that they took it for granted, running other games as if they were running D&D, ruining some games in the process. The reason for this widespread acceptance of the Dungeon Crawl is because the map of the labyrinth in which the adventure takes place - the layout of the rooms containing monsters, traps, treasure and secret doors, connected by corridors – also serves another purpose – it is the Flow Chart for the adventure, or the story which the players are exploring. Events of the story are contained in the rooms connected by corridors linking it with next events.

Dungeon crawl evolved so ubiquitously and no other form of fantasy role playing gaming had proved as successful. Look at many books written on urban adventuring, wilderness design etc., and none reach the elegance of generating a Dungeon, outlined above. That’s because as we saw, a D&D dungeon has more than one function. There is another concept similar in elegance to Dungeon Crawl, that can be useful to GM’s running outdoors tactical encounters. That concept is Terrain and Terrain based Topography. You can use this to represent almost any tactical encounter in the Outdoors, and it may be just as functional as the Dungeon Map.

Concept of terrain was a military invention paralleling the development of military engineering, which replaced castles and walls with the Casement and Breastwork in the new age of artillery. It is not what fantasy gamers think of terrain. A gamer, military or fantasy, might consider things like Plains, Mountains, and Forest to be terrain types, but that would be incorrect within the confines of this discussion. Plains and Mountains are Land Forms. Terrain features number few, specific and are self-exclusionary. One can be one and only one type of terrain, and not other. One can use them as building blocks to build outdoors encounter maps that will really be functional in the game.

This system assumes a flat terrain as default. Terrain types can best be viewed as obstacles to crossing clear terrain. I will not include topographic symbols here, you can google or better yet, figure them out to your liking. You DO NOT need topographic contour lines to mark elevation. Keep it simple, especially for a fantasy role playing game. The classic and the most ancient terrain concept is a PASS, as in a MOUNTAIN PASS, followed by the main terrain types: HILL, RIDGE, SPUR, and RAVINE. The lesser and more specific terrain types are as follows: SADDLE, DEFILADE, and BERM.

A MOUNTAIN PASS is simply a relatively level ground through a mountain range, where you can march a column of men or drive a wagon. A pass can be a simple gap between two gnarly hills that you can walk around, or it can be a trail hundreds of miles long, where to get off it means risking plunging off cliffs and crossing mountain glaciers. Mountain passes have historically become strategic military objectives because of their values to trade and communications. It is not really a terrain type, but it shows how military topography developed. You do not need a terrain symbol for it, since your characters are essentially following a road. You can describe the Passes for gaming in terms of locations and encounter tables, drawing it on your large-scale campaign map as a road.

HILL is self-explanatory – a summit point of a high ground. You draw it as a dot at the high point of a shape representing your hill from above. Some kind of a circle, contour lines to taste if you can read them easily and visualize the shape. High ground has obvious tactical implications.

RIDGE a ridge is a line in the high ground where you stop climbing up and start walking down. Your view of surrounding areas is cut off by ridges. You defend a hill with a defensive position, you defend a ridge with a defensive line. Topographical symbol for a ridge is a line. Hilly terrain on your map will be represented by a series of circles representing hills and lines representing ridges. Different lines will represent any roads and passes.

SPUR a spur is simply a shorter ridge running off a longer ridge. Required when mapping real world Mountains.

RAVINE is a natural trench cut into the ground. You have to bridge them for your troops to cross them. You can also sneak up and down a ravine to cover the ground unseen. You can draw a ravine as two dark lines running together or as a wider channel on small scale map, showing steepness of the walls of the ravines and ground features.

SADDLE is a feature consisting of two adjacent hills with a passable gap between them (“The Saddle”). In this case a hill can be a two-story pile of dirt on a small scale adventure map or a gap between two mountains that would qualify as a full scale Mountain Pass.

DEFILADE is a Pass or Ravine that is so narrow, that your troops can only get through them by walking in a single file. Topography was largely develop to move a battalion sized column of your troops from one location to another.

BERM – Great wall of China, Adrian’s Wall. A man-made feature separating open ground into two. Specifically refers to a two a three-story pile of earth around a military camp in the desert, of to block off one territory from the other or to make a grade crossing for the train tracks. Breastworks is a type of a Berm fortified with concrete and bricks to stop cannon-balls and further fortified to stop charging men.

You can represent any kind of an outdoor tactical encounter or an adventure using the system of symbols described above. These symbols can be used on large or small scale. Terrain describes the relief of the surface applied to troop deployment and to troop movement. You can set up a wide variety of tactical scenarios using these symbols. If you want to add the forest setting, you can add it as cover and describe the forested area in terms of Cover and Concealment that they provide. In case of Mountains, a mountain can be as complex as a dungeon adventure. You can best describe a mountain in terms of Land Forms which it consists of. Your mountain will have a Summit, a number of Ridges, various valleys between the ridges, glaciers, caves, settlements and various specific geological features such as Cirques and Washes, which will present additional challenges to players. You can do a key to a Mountain, or any other major geographic feature, just as you would do a dungeon room key.