TPK in the Scythian System: An ItO Campaign Retrospective

A black ops team organizes a monastic interfaith debate on a smugglers' space station...but it's really part of a covert operation against pirate traffickers! When the PC's patron arranges for a notorious militia leader to crash-land on an abandoned university world, the PCs move to arrest her...launching an intense firefight with snipers, grenades, psionic powers, and spear-wielding tribesmen in an abandoned academic department building! Finally, with 5 billion lives in the balance, our covert heroes launch a desperate bid to seal off a quantum prison vault leaking hideous psychic monsters; the showdown, in an ancient columned tower lying on its side, ends ... in a TPK. 

Uh oh.

My open-table, timed-session, twice-a-month short space opera campaign using hacked Into the Odd rules has now come and gone! In today's post, I sum up our final sessions, then I process the fact that I killed all my PCs and doomed an entire star system in our campaign finale.

+ In a later post, I may comment on various hacks and tweaks we made to the Into the Odd system, with thoughts on what worked well and what didn't; and set out some lessons learned about session design and table-play for time-limited, open table gaming.

HEROISM & HORROR IN THE SCYTHIAN SYSTEM: OUR FINAL SESSIONS

I've summed up earlier sessions from this campaign here, here, and here. In a nutshell, the PCs are ragtag 'combat archaeologists' in the middle of a civil war in humanity's "Second Ecumene," a space-opera empire. Because of the war, real military assets have been deployed away from the Scythian System toward the front - so the system's Prefect has to rely on covert semi-professionals (like our PCs) to try to maintain order. And order is getting hard to come by; an aggressive militia and a sinister cult are grabbing more and more turf. Early in the campaign, however, the PCs learned that that neo-gnostic cult - the Church of the Glorious Transcendence - is weakening the locks on an ancient alien quantum-vault where the mysterious beings known now as 'Olmecs' sealed away their criminals eons ago. Should the locks fail entirely, the cult's homeworld would be flooded with ancient, vengeful, psychic creatures. The cult thinks such creatures would help them transcend fleshly embodiment and reach enlightenment. The cult is wrong. Way back in Session 1, players learned that their characters' efforts would decide the fate of 5 billion lives on the cult's homeworld. 

Sessions 4 and 5, however, focused on efforts to restore public order on the System Prefect's behalf.

In Session 4, the Prefect's office deployed the party on an urgent mission to take out a group of pirates led by renegade special forces troopers - pirates running missions for the Rahak Mutual Defense League (RMDL), the aggressive militia contesting the Prefect's control over the system. RMDL, it turned out, had just sent a courier to instruct the pirates to assassinate the Prefect.

Want to read the pre-mission intelligence briefing? I like giving my players props.

This mission was a real delight to run. Setting up a complex situation rather than a plot led to player-driven investigation, social encounters with diverse npcs, wild problem-solving, and then finally a big shebang of a firefight. The PCs arrived at Plymouth Rock, a remote smugglers' space station, where intel placed the pirates and their RMDL contact. During a fair bit of snooping around, the players discovered that the pirates were not only meeting with their contact but were also offloading sedated prisoners in shipping containers, and selling them to an agent of the disgusting Count Gaston Gadareiks - the sadistic, torturing villain from one of their earlier missions. The players came up with an awesome plan to hack into the smugglers' station central computer and re-route the shipping order so that the containers full of smuggling victims would be delivered to a ship aligned with the heroes instead of to the bad guys. Unfortunately, the attempted hacking roll worked out ... horribly. Trying again would alert too many bad guys, so another plan was needed.

Also on the smugglers' station were the monastic crews of two Interstellar Christian Orthodox and Mahayana Buddhist missionary/humanitarian ships, working through back channels since the Transference cult wasn't letting them deliver supplies to war-torn settlements in the Outer System. The PCs explained the situation to these monks (the PC with 'criminal-clergy' backgrounds took the lead here) and the monks all agreed to stage an 'impromptu' religious debate right in front of the docking bay where the shipping containers holding prisoners were scheduled for offloading. While the monks blocked the trafficking attempt, the PCs stormed the dock with the pirate ship, which they'd managed to identify through conversation with a local brothel's madam. Half the crew was on board the target vessel; the fight was pretty intense (aerial drones...smoke grenades...a light machine gun...), but the PCs won, killed the pirate leaders, and then hijacked the pirate ship and flew away on it, after leaving instructions for a friendly cargo ship to carry the trafficked prisoners back to the System Prefect.

On their hijacked pirate vessel, the PCs found a bunch of really great nano-fitting powered armor suits that only took up half the normal # of encumbrance slots - and they learned that the late pirate captain had been a renegade member of the Ecumene's psionic secret police. In his stateroom, they found vials of a serum that could stimulate latent psionic abilities. All but one of the PCs decided to risk a sip.

The PCs' successful disruption of the RMDL-pirate assassination plot gave momentum back to System Prefect Yost, the party's patron. In Session 5, Yost sent the PCs on a secret mission to capitalize on that success by arresting Duchess Joiry Rahak, the cunning head of the RMDL militia that had sought to murder the Prefect. Turned out that Rahak's pilot was the secret source in the [redacted] intelligence briefing from the previous session...and the pilot would arrange for an "accidental crash landing" of the Duchess' shuttle on an abandoned university planet. The PCs would be waiting there to arrest her.

The party arrived early and explored the ruins of what was supposed to be a totally abandoned campus stretched across a small island chain. Instead, they discovered that the place was divided between feuding tribes, descended from low-class servants and employees that the powers-that-be had never bothered to evacuate when sector politics forced the university's closure generations earlier. Before encountering the tribes, however, the players explored various ruined academic departments, where they fought bizarre critters who'd escaped from the old xenobiology department, and took down a deranged AI/server bank that had used nano-probes to zombify some poor tribesmen (not to mention a handful of antique campus security droids). Eventually, the PCs teamed up with one tribal faction, who agreed that they would support the pending arrest after Rahak's scheduled 'crash' - if the PCs first helped them deal with their enemy...The Dark Lord, Simpson.

Simpson, it turned out, was a vicious, cannibalistic queen of the campus' rival faction, an evil woman obsessed with looting and using cybernetic enhancements from old university stockpiles, a steel-jawed monstrosity who liked to eat prisoners alive or use them as forced labor to build Dark Lord Simpson-shaped sculptures all over the university buildings in her little domain. As it turned out, however, our off-world covert operatives were way more than a match for anything she had; even flanked by mutant ape-men hybrids brandishing ancient defibrillator staves as weapons, Simpson proved all too vulnerable to the PCs' modern gear. All in good time, too; when Rahak's shuttle 'crashed' right on schedule that evening, the PCs (and a new warband of spearwielding tribal allies) were ready to go get her.

Rahak, unsurprisingly, wouldn't come quietly. Right after the 'forced landing' her security escort (of about platoon strength) cleared and garrisoned the old Xenobio department building, awaiting a relief flight the next morning. The PCs hit them there, and an immense tactical firefight ensued. Each side had at least one machine gunner, and there were snipers firing on the PCs out of upstairs windows. A PC sniper gradually took out the defenders upstairs while the other characters fought heroically to force entrance to the building's central hall. Seemingly countless smoke and frag grenades got lobbed back and forth...and players even experimented with their cool new psionic powers, moving clouds of flame and smoke around the hallways through mental exertion, or psychically causing massive gusts of wind to clear hallways. A PC planted a doorcharge on an outer wall, blowing entry to an interior office; the PCs' tribal spearman allies stormed through...and half of them were killed immediately by a frag grenade. But the PCs and their friends kept fighting, and used this side-entry to force a successful outflanking maneuver that wore down the last of Duchess Rahak's guards. The Duchess went into a compliance collar and the PCs left the planet, victorious.

With RMDL effectively neutralized and only the cult of the Glorious Transference still threatening the system's stability, it was time to return covertly to the Cult's homeworld and face the ultimate threat: the slow-leaking alien quantum vault. The players had come close to it once before, and almost died horribly for their efforts. Now, there was time left for one big push to return their MacGuffin (sorry, I mean their Olmec Control Orb!) to the quantum vault, locking the vault down forever. Otherwise, the vault would soon collapse, evil psychic monsters would flood the world, and 5 billion lives minimum would be lost.

I'm not going to spell out everything that happened in this last session, but will summarize some key events. The players met the psionically-active skeleton of an ancient Olmec warden, who noted that all the PCs needed to do to shut down the vault was to place their Control Orb (from Session 1) in the correct spot on a 6x6x2 energy grid. Naturally, placing it in the wrong spot would trigger the security defenses and detonate the planet, and naturally, the eons-old warden was near-senile AND his mind was being clouded by the escapees who'd already leaked from the weakening vault, so he couldn't remember the right spot on the grid. The PCs needed, he said, to find and touch his eyestones, which would help him reorder his memories and share the proper grid coordinates to lock down his prison.

The eyestones turned out to be glowing stones embedded in the foreheads of alien statues (I can neither confirm nor deny any AD&D PHB cover influence here) in a columned hall in an underground cavern tower below the warden. Unfortunately the tower was so old that it had collapsed sideways across an underground chasm. I like to design challenging 3D battle environments, and I really went for it here; the final fight, then, took place in a room of sideways pillars, where the doorway was halfway up the wall, the statues were across the room on another wall, and moving across the room would require jumping from horizontal pillar to pillar, trying not to slip and take falling damage.

I actually used a wooden wine-bottle-rack turned on its side as our 3D battlemat, and supplemented it with a cardboard cutout to show the entryway to the pillared hall. And some crude cardboard and string, plus tyranid 40k figures, helped me plot positions of the occupants. Oh yeah, because of course there were horrific alien monsters guarding the room too.

And yeah, apparently I foreshadowed nastiness so effectively that half the party hung back at first, several rounds' movement distance behind the party scout, so that when that 1 of 4 characters clearly announced his arrival by walking up to the door with a burning phosphorous flare in his hand, he stood there alone and got to experience the full wrath of everything waiting in the room, without any help from his friends.

Everything waiting in the room included: a massive frog-headed tentacled humanoid thing was hanging by its neck in the middle of the vault - hanged by gooey black cords dangling from a gooey, black mass spread across what now served as 'the ceiling' ... but it was still moving.  The black mass, the cords, and the critter itself were black as night, with specks of light, as if the whole thing was shaped from a field of vision across the night sky. As the first player stepped into the doorway, the tentacles moved and crackled with dark energy, and The Hanged One took action. The monstrosity's tentacles swept forward.

Using Into the Odd rules: 

STR 18

DEX 10

WIL 10 (or kind of N/A)

40 HP, Armor 0

Dmg: two attacks per turn (both tentacles), 1d12 tentacle slam; very clumsy but powerful, so only hits on roll of 6+. On a hit, target also must DEX Save to stay standing or be knocked down, taking fall damage if applicable. 

So let me just say now that sometimes the dice do crazy things. I wrote this critter as "very clumsy but powerful" with a built-in fail state, where it will really hurt if it hits, but also miss a lot - which is saying something in a rules-system where you always automatically hit! But I always rolled high enough to hit with this beast on every attack all night. Killer dice.

And there were other things in the room too - five Flea Hags; giant table-sized fleas with the faces of beautiful women, except their mouths dripped black goo and they had horrible fanged teeth. Just flea-versions of the evil cockroaches from the PCs' previous trip to this planet. Their stats:

---

5 Shadow Flea-Hags 

Grotesque flea/lizard-like things with pallid human female faces, sharp-fanged and dripping. Long leaping legs that can climb agilely. 

STR 15

DEX 15

WIL 18

10 hp, Armor 1

Damage: d8 psychic screech, direct WIL damage ; d6 bite (upon direct damage, to STR, causes infection of WIL - add 1 Fatigue to character inventory per instance of direct damage). 

Critical Damage: if a character falls incapacitated, the Shadow Fleas will turn to focus on the rest of the party. If the party leaves behind any members, the Shadow Fleas will kill and devour 1 fallen PC per round. 

Tactical abilities: can climb on any surface in the encounter area. Able to relocate by direct jump to any spot in current or adjacent ‘cell’ chambers (including diagonally adjacent). No fall damage if they are knocked down. Will play very smart, hiding behind cover, crawling upside down or on walls. Then will leap-rush vulnerable targets. 

A Flea-Hag may also make a ‘stunt’ jump-attack; in addition to rolling damage, a character jumped on by a flea-hag must make a DEX Save or be knocked down and fall, losing perch and taking fall damage as applicable (1d6 per cell level above the floor). 

---

So yeah, the first player in never stood a chance. He took two tentacles at once then got jumped by two Flea-Hags; he was incapacitated (not killed) before he ever got off a shot. By the time the other PCs finally arrived, together, he'd been further chewed on and then dropped from the doorway onto the floor below.

Well...it was a crazy fight. My players put up one heck of a battle and I'm pleased and proud with the shenanigans they attempted trying to pull victory from the jaws of death. There were dramatic jumps from column to column where falling would have caused 2d6 fall damage. There was machine gun fire at point-blank range (and even using a machine gun as an improvised club after it needed reloading). The gunner even shot through the black cords 'hanging' the tentacled beast, which plummeted to the 'floor' and landed on one of the flea-hags, damaging it (at this point I leaned forward with scissors into our 'battlemap' and cut the yarn holding up the toilet-paper-tube that was the Hanged One. It fell with a satisfying descent onto a plastic 40k Tyranid figure ;-) ) . One character jumped off a column, fell onto the top of a flea-hag, and attacked it with a defibrillator stick as he landed. Unfortunately, that player then succumbed to attacks from two flea-hags. In the end, only the machine-gunner was left, standing in the doorway to the pillared hall, with 0 HP and hardly any STR left...he decided to jump down one level to the 'floor' in order to revive an incapacitated companion with a trauma kit. It was a risky move, since the 1d6 fall damage might knock him out, but he was wearing swank power armor with damage reduction of 3. (For those not familiar with ItO, he had a 50% chance of not taking any damage at all from the fall, but if he rolled 4+, he would almost certainly get knocked out).

It was a risky but bold toss of the dice to bring back a friend and get help taking out the last two flea-hags. With a 1d6 roll of 1-3, he'd be able to spend an action jabbing a buddy with a trauma kit needle, restoring them to consciousness, full HP, and 1d6 restored STR.

The fall damage roll was: a 4.

He hit the ground, took the damage, couldn't pass a STR test, and was incapacitated. The last echoes of combat faded; all PCs were down, and two flea-hags were still standing. The flea-hags turned to feast. All PCs died, and because they died, the quantum vault failed and opened the next day. Thousands and thousands of monstrosities like the flea-hags swarmed the planet, killing its 5 billion inhabitants, then boarded shuttles and headed for the system's other worlds. By the time the civil war ended across the Ecumene and the military returned, they found the Scythian System a place of death and nightmare creatures, a place fit only for quarantine after the last survivors were desperately evacuated. But the evacuees spoke, in despairing whispers of what might-have-been, of a small band of heroes who had tried, at least, to hold back the apocalypse. That they had tried was still known, but even their names were lost forever.

Fade to black.

OK, LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT TOTAL PARTY KILL (TPK)

MY WORD, I had mixed feelings about that ending! I'm confident in how I played it out, and quite grateful and pleased by my players' gracious, mature reactions to what happened, but DANG IT - I really was a fan of my players and believed in their cause. I WANTED to see a different end to their story. (stomps feet, steps on 1d4...)

I know, however, that if I'd just fudged the numbers to get the ending we all wanted, I'd regret it now.

WHY the TPK happened is a mix of several factors, not the least being the raw variability of dice results. The PCs had the dice turn against them at a few critical junctures in the final battle, whereas I seemed to have magic fingers through the whole encounter; almost every time I rolled a d8 for damage, for example, it seemed to come up 6-8, and the Hanged One's clumsy tentacle attack (d12!) never missed, not once. Then there are tactical factors, like the party scout's initial solitary incapacitation, and the fact the players kept shooting and didn't go full-on to rescue and revive fallen comrades until it was almost too late for it to work. After mulling it over and talking with the players, I feel good about the way I designed the encounter; there was a meaningful chance of player success, even after the first casualty.

I think this was my first TPK as a GM, at least certainly since my return to RPGs in recent years. It's a sobering experience, made worse by the fact that it wasn't just "ok, you died, roll up new characters and come back to the dungeon." No, we quite explicitly set up this campaign as a fast, short-term, time-limited affair, with a meaningful chance of campaign failure. Ever since Session 1, I'd been reminding my players that they had until Sept. 15 2019 (in real time) to 'save the day' - or the bad guys would win the campaign. Failure was always on the table; 5 billion lives were always at stake in the campaign's narrative background. The whole thing was structured as a fun open-table experiment. It was, in fact, great fun (I may add a follow-up post with my lessons learned about designing and running for a time-limited open table environment).

In closing, let me just say this: I'm actually pretty bummed about our narrative outcome. But I feel as if I've also proven something to myself - I'm willing to kill a whole party, in a campaign finale, with epic stakes on the table, if the dice say that's what happens. And hey, I know that at the end of the day we're all just playing dice games about imaginary critters, heroes, and explosions. But in the private place where we recognize the emotional impact of these stories we tell, I'm shaking my head over what happened...but looking forward to what might happen in the future. Looking forward to times when the dice fall differently, when the PCs aim high and the dice roll that way, too...when, faced with overwhelming odds and high stakes, the last-minute gambits pay off, and the heroes save the day...

...and I can grin at them, and celebrate, and feel confident that we've all earned it.

Decline, Collapse, and Campaign Settings (even more Settings with Strata)

Ruined, fallen, or 'collapsed' civilizations have clear appeal for those designing fantasy campaign settings, as many have noted (e.g. Monsters and Manuals' post from earlier this summer). Whether because of a ruin-favoring aesthetic or simply to explain so many dungeons, many campaign worlds are built over the rubble of earlier, 'failed' societies. But what happened to those 'collapsed' kingdoms? I've gone there several times (especially here and here), and my resource BRAZEN BACKGROUNDS (aff) is custom-tailored to evoke a Bronze Age society teetering on the edge of just such a collapse. In real life, I'm a scholar specializing in the 'late antique' period, or - more provocatively - what one could call the era of the 'fall of the Roman Empire' (really, the political fragmentation of its western half, along with a hurricane of other problems). I even teach a university seminar course about historical-archaeological perspectives on social collapse, and I follow literature in the busy scholarly sub-field of 'collapse studies.' I'm a nerd for a living, and I particularly like reading about the end of the world as we know it (though stay tuned below - turns out 'collapse' is not so easy to define).

I've also blogged here about a 'Settings with Strata' project on game-able sandbox settings that don't take forever to design, but do have deep and coherent backstories (see here and here). In my most recent post on this topic, I suggested charting one faction's changing fortunes from age to age. I wrote:

Most simply, one could think of the transition between each period as either RISING/GROWING POWER/STABILITY, STASIS OR STAGNANT POWER/STABILITY, and DECLINE OR COLLAPSE IN POWER/STABILITY. Heck, you can even make that a die roll if you want to discover the history as you make it. If this seems useful then what I may do is for each of those three kinds of trajectories - up, sideways, down - present random-generation tables with commentary discussing real-world types of such processes, not as straightjackets, but as loose guides to the kinds of effects each type might have, and other dynamics that might go along with it...

Today, I'm going to tackle 'downward' movement - often defined, whether rightly or wrongly, as decline or even collapse - since it's so dear to the OSR and RPG world, and because I find it so interesting. But I'm going to be a little bit ornery first, opening with some caveats. If you stick with me, I'll hand you a tool below that will hopefully be useful for design - but please be clear that it also oversimplifies how these things seem to work in real life.

SHOULD WE DECLINE DECLINE? SHOULD WE BREAK DOWN COLLAPSE?

What does it mean for a society, let alone a civilization, to be 'in decline'? 'Decline' is a tricky and controversial concept. First, what exactly are we measuring, and how do we measure it? Second, to what extent do our answers depend on subjective philosophical or aesthetic judgments? And what other factors - maybe quite positive factors - might co-exist with alleged signs of 'decline'?

Today, most historians recognize that claims that a certain society 'was in decline' often rest on assumptions in hindsight rather than an objective measure of stability. I mean, if the Roman empire fell, then it obviously declined first, right? Not necessarily. Assuming that decline precedes collapse = assuming that collapse can't happen suddenly, unexpectedly (different scholars would argue both sides, but the point is worth raising). Moreover, conversations about 'decline' often veer into territory that is quite subjective. It was once customary for historians to talk about 'vulgar, barbarized' late Latin, as if the fact that the Latin of the later Roman period didn't measure up to the grammatical standards of the early Empire was a clear sign of cultural and literary decay. Now, think about this: if you're a native speaker of English, do you routinely speak like Shakespeare or the King James Bible? No, you don't? Ok, is that an obvious sign of the cultural decay of our civilization? Well, no, actually, it's just a sign of the normal development of a spoken language over time. Historians now recognize that organic changes in the Latin language should not be used as evidence that Roman culture was 'in decline.' To be clear, none of this means that aesthetic judgments are impossible or automatically off the table, but those making them need to be clear on their subjective nature even as they make them.

Nor should we assume that one kind of decline will always parallel other signs of weakness. Traditionally, Greece's cultural golden age is seen as the period before Alexander (late 300s BCE). After the Hellenistic period, which had its own glories, Rome conquered the Greek east piecemeal in the final two centuries BCE. One might expect that Greek culture would now be a goner, since Greek political autonomy at any high level was functionally stamped out by Roman rule. But nope; Rome, the great military power, was so taken with Greek culture that Roman aristocrats fell all over themselves to assimilate Greek culture into their own. One Roman poet went so far as to note that captive Greece was now taking captive her own fierce captor (Rome)! Thus, a period of total Greek political eclipsing was also a period in which Greek culture remained prominent and influential. In fact, Greek culture remained well-rooted enough that when the Roman west fell apart centuries later, it was Greek-speaking 'Byzantines' (as we call them) who carried on the torch of 'Roman' traditions. My point: don't think that 'decline' lets us make blanket statements about what societies experience in periods of weakness.

Instead of thinking about 'cultural decline' we are on firmer ground if we focus on something easier to measure, like a society's overall political, social, or economic complexity. That is the kind of thing one can actually track a bit more confidently. Compare a traditional Inuit hunter-gatherer band to the array of groups you'd find at noon in Manhattan. Any judgments about comparative 'cultural value' would be subjective, but no one should doubt that Manhattan possesses much more complex economic and social networks. We know today that between about 300 and 650, economic networks and political institutions lost reach and complexity everywhere across the former Roman world (whatever we also think about the massive cultural changes that occurred across that period). That gives us firmer ground than changes in art or language for debating the possibility of decline - or even collapse.

But collapse is generally less extreme and total than portrayed in popular media. Against popular conceptions of fallen civilzations with no legacy beyond wind-swept empty ruins, contrast the fact that despite Rome's 'collapse,' late Roman law, late Roman language, and late Roman religion have remained culturally influential ever since. If many Classic Maya cities fell into ruin around the 9th century CE, it is also true that the Maya remain today, living in the same region. It turns out that some form of continuity almost always (ok, maybe ALWAYS) has followed collapse, to an extent that some scholars want to do away with the whole idea of collapse. That goes too far, in my opinion - we can still track and try to explain those massive reductions in socio-economic-political complexity - but if you have a 'collapsed' society, that may just mean that a loss in overall population and an abandonment of certain settlements (or types of settlements and political systems) has severely changed that groups' way of life.

Collapse rarely has one, easy causal explanation. Why did so many Classic Maya cities (apparently) 'collapse'? Well, there's a strong case that climate change played a key role, but also that climate change alone wasn't adequate; change also seems to have involved the failure of old political ideologies, possibly exacerbated by climate change, but also a whole bunch of other factors, including the specifics of trade route locations, ground-water depth variance, etc., etc., etc. Whatever causes collapse, it is generally complex.

Collapse has winners as well as losers, whether outsiders or just the downtrodden and less privileged under the previous system. The fall of your empire is probably a big step up in the rise of somebody else's, and the collapse of your institutional system probably liberates a bunch of people on whose backs you built. Yet despite all of the above, collapse is real and sobering. It generally involves net increases in suffering, and can lead to degraded material quality of life, withered social and cultural networks, loss in local technological ability, increased political instability, and population loss. So it's hardly a thing to celebrate - though, again, if you're scraping by in a Roman salt mine, a little 'increased political instability' might be the best news in a long time. (My early post on the Late Bronze Age collapse highlights the tension between these top-down and bottom-up perspectives).

Having done some due diligence for those caveats, let's turn to...

D8 REASONS YOUR EMPIRE (or whatever) MAY HAVE DECLINED/COLLAPSED

It is perfectly viable to throw together a bunch of dungeons and ruins and NOT tell your players (or even yourself) why that old kingdom fell apart. That mystery can be part of the fun and is, after all, realistic in terms of adventurers encountering unknown ruins. But sometimes you want a better understanding of how things got there - or maybe you're using this to supplement my Settings with Strata quick-design method for settings!

Here are 1d8 broad problems that may have threatened a society in your campaign world. Again, 1d8; but if you want a more plausible and interesting crisis, then I suggest you roll twice, embracing how complex collapse tends to be. Create a toxic mess that combines not one but two or more major threats to your imagined society - like a plague that decimates your population but also unravels the trade networks on which your political order depends.

This list is not meant as comprehensive, but it gives you lots to play with.

1. Political change, external (conquest, forced regime change)!
2. Genocide! 
3. Political failure, internal (especially failed political ideology)!
4. Economic woes, internal!
5. Economic woes, external!
6. Plague/disease pandemic!
7. Pressure from gradual environmental change!
8. Environmental catastrophe! 

Now let's walk through these in more detail, thinking both about real examples and also applications for fantasy worlds. 

1. Political change, external...So, the Mongol hordes, or the Roman legions, or the armies of Sauron, or whoever, show up and politely inform you that:

This is pretty low-hanging fruit, a classic way to get rid of one faction and replace them with another in your campaign history. Keep in mind, however, that political-military conquest rarely stamps out any culture and usually involves significant continuities with what came before. When Alexander the Great snuffed out the Achaemenid Persians, that actually amounted to a coup at the top, in which Alexander forcibly replaced Persian leaders with Macedonian ones but held on to many existing Persian systems of rule. When Rome conquered Gaul, many elite Gauls died, but their descendants soon learned to marry Gallic and Roman identities, and got busy being fairly loyal Gallo-Romans. When Normans conquered Anglo-Saxon England, the end result was a language with a lot of French influence that we still call...English. When Mongols brutally conquered half of Eurasia, they tended either to stand off and delegate a lot of messy governance to locals (as in Russia) or they themselves got more or less assimilated to local culture (less in China, more in the Middle East).

2. Genocide! Uh, ok, but what if the newcomers kill everyone? Yeah, genocide is hideously ugly and also all too real. That being said, it is worth noting that genocide, although tragic, is also rarely if ever completely effective (thank goodness!). Massive depopulation has happened all too often across history, but the rule of thumb generally is some form of population continuity albeit with decreased numbers and/or cultural prominence. In a purely fantasy world, of course, one can imagine hideous sorcerous ways to snuff out entire peoples, so there might actually be more (terrible) room for empty, windswept ruins in a S&S world.

Worth noting; where some kind of depopulation and cultural apartheid has happened, the result may be that later generations think a genocide happened, when really the losers just interbred and culturally assimilated into a politically dominant group. In the early Middle Ages, some in France thought their Frankish ancestors had killed off all the Romans, when in fact the Gallo-Romans and Franks (and many others) mostly had merged culturally and biologically.

3. Political failure, internal...Sometimes a whole social-political system can collapse without outside help. Some scholarship on the Classic Maya collapse(s) suggests this was important in the 9th-century Yucatan. The particular nature of Mayan sacred kingship in that period typically emphasized rulers' role in guaranteeing divine provision of rain and fertility. When the helpful rains stopped coming, the kings' own propaganda worked against them, and there are archaeoogical signs of settlements that violently overthrew that kind of king and experimented with other forms of governance. In the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Mediterranean, as I've discussed before, the particular form of the dominant palatial system may have fallen apart under its own weight. Find the weak spots and the tension points in your setting's political systems, and you don't necessarily need a Sauron to spark a systemic collapse (though adding a Sauron in can't hurt, either...).

4. Economic woes, internal...unlikely to cause collapse on its own, but economies are never actually isolated from the rest of human experience. In pre-modern societies, overall wealth was closely tied to agricultural production, so environmental changes (see below) could ripple easily into economic problems. Being able to pay for food for the troops was a constant concern for the imperial Roman government. In addition to the food-supply problem, another problem involved the bullion supply of precious metals. In a society where money is tied to the actual (perceived) value of gold, silver, etc., the minting authority has limited ability to deal with fluctuations in metal supply, and limited ability to spread wealth around through devaluing the currency. In Roman history, some periods (most infamously the 3rd century CE) saw the official 'silver' coinage debased by replacing some of the silver with more and more lower-value metal, until the coins were almost black, and visibly worth hardly anything like the coin's nominal value. This bought a little breathing-room for government expenses, but they could only push people so far before they would refuse to accept such coin for payment. We have an increasingly good history of the money-supply of major European regimes during the medieval period, too; when the mines ran dry, states had little choice but to experiment with alternative sources for coin-bullion - or squeeze extant wealth-holders (the Church, nobles, etc.) to get more of their shiny stuff back into government hands. Such measures can exacerbate other tensions, helping erode the stability of an overall system.

5. Economic woes, external...all the same caveats apply here, but in this case the tension is lack of access to foreign goods that are important for a society or for its dominant system. The palatial system in the Late Bronze Age is a strong example - foreign luxury goods helped prop up rulers and foreign bronze components helped arm their troops. Loss of access to foreign goods - whether because a military defeat severed a trade route (see problem #1), or because a key river shifted its course (see problem #7), or because a foreign trading partner suffered its own collapse, could cause trouble to ripple internationally, with unpredictable consequences.

6. Plague/disease pandemic...Bring out your dead! Highly infectious disease has the potential to wreak massive, massive damage on a society. Or not; note that Y. pestis ravaged what was left of the Roman world in the 6th century, but a later form of the same disease (as 'the Black Death') killed off perhaps 1/3 or 1/2 of Europe's population in the 14th c. - but Europe bounced back and dominated the globe within a few centuries. So pandemics are not necessarily silver-bullet civilization killers. But they have potential to act with other factors to really tear things apart. Note that plagues will not be very serious unless they spread; and they will only spread widely if they touch a society that has fairly sophisticated transport networks linking dense concentrations of vulnerable human beings.

As with genocide, plague presents a uniquely dangerous threat in a fantastic world, where more-than-purely-epidemiological concerns might affect the spread of a disease/curse. The whole idea of 'a zombie plague' reflects this - imagine if those affected by a plague not only fall out of your society, but turn into enemies actively working against it...

7. Pressure from gradual environmental change...I think no book has shaped popular conceptions of collapse more than Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I also think that is unfortunate; Diamond's core idea, that 'ecocide' - self-destruction through environmental abuse - has been a key factor in historical collapses - turns out to be ... well, probably very wrong. (Diamond is so opposed by many professional archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, that you can even buy a counter-book of papers from a whole academic conference organized just to rebut his theories!). This is not to say that environmental change is unimportant historically for collapse - quite the contrary, in fact - but 'ecocide' as framed by Diamond and earlier scholars actually seems to clash with the available evidence almost wherever we look in detail [the issue is further complicated by present urgent concerns about environmental change: climate change, species extinction, pollution, etc., etc. etc. But saying that ecocide doesn't seem to have shaped past history doesn't actually get us off the hook today, because humanity never before has had the capacity to shape the earth's biosphere on the same scale that we have today. The future remains an undiscovered country].

Ok, but it looks more and more like some kind of environmental trouble - even if naturally caused, rather than manmade - has played key roles in many societies' collapses. Palaeoclimate data for the late Roman period now help us better understand what happened to one of history's greatest empires. As mentioned earlier, Classic Maya collapse looks very, very complex, but drought seems to have played some kind of central role. As noted above, in pre-modern societies economics was usually tied closely to food production, so any serious degradation in agricultural output meant bad news for those feeding the troops.

Thus, gradual deleterious changes over time can mean really bad news for your campaign setting's current masters. This might take many forms: climate change affecting heat and rainfall; the slow movement of rivers across the landscape (this is more likely to affect a single settlement than an entire society's wellbeing), silting up of important harbors, ice sheets advancing or retreating, etc., etc. In a fantasy setting, too, where the forces of nature may have very conscious agents or spokes-things, this could get really interesting.

8. Environmental catastrophe...BOOM! 'Vesuvius erupts, everyone dies' may not be a fair GM statement, but it certainly makes a dramatic way to change your setting. Here, again, we're likely dealing with crises that affect a locality more than an entire civilization, though the destruction of some key nodes might have wider ripple effects. Shift to something like (the popular understanding of) Noah's Flood, and you're talking a real society-killer. In a fantasy setting, the sky really is the limit for what you can throw at your world. But note that in real life, we humans are peskily resilient; even supervolcanoes turn out to be a part of the human experience.

I hope this has helped inspire some ideas about ways to cause trouble or 'downward change' for your campaign setting backstories. If this helps - or not really - please be vocal and let me know in the comments, along with thoughts on what could make this stuff more directly useful.

Best wishes, happy gaming, and watch out for plagues that weaken armies so foreign conquerors can sweep in, or maybe bullion shortages that prevent paid maintenance of key harbors, leading to regime collapse, or...well, it's your turn now.

A Pair of OSR Shout-Outs: 'Megadungeon 4' and 'Far Wanderer'

Today I just want to holler some appreciation at two others who've recently engaged with my Gundobad Games content in ways I found helfpul and cool.

First up: Courtney C, who runs the Hack & Slash OSR blog, has just released a new, fourth issue of the Megadungeon zine: "Megadungeon #4". This offers an assortment of articles and ideas on numerous cool ingredients for a running a megadungeon - or, for that matter, really, running any fantasy location. Writeups (statted for both B/X and 5e) for unique individual dragons; discussion of principles for secret doors and keys in fantasy gaming; illustrated/mapped dungeon areas that one could slot into a big dungeon or just use as their own stand-alone smaller dungeon, lots of illustration, etc. There's also a substantial section for game advertisements (Courtney mentioned a desire to evoke that old feeling of flipping through printed copies of Dragon magazine and wandering through the diverse ads printed within). And for this I'm particularly grateful: not only did Courtney include a full-page ad for my own BRAZEN BACKGROUNDS, character backgrounds for Bronze Age fantasy settings - but the ad space was generously free. Courtney invited content creators who weren't in a position to pay for the space to go ahead and send in ads anyway. I just want to give a big shout of thanks to Courtney for that generosity, and - only fair, in return - give some space here to Megadungeon #4, now available at DriveThruRpg and at Lulu! Thanks, Courtney! Happy gaming!

While I'm shouting some outward thanks: "Sir Paperweight the Third" of the blog Pride and Parchment just responded to one of my own early posts on the Late Bronze Age collapse by hacking the ideas there over for a space opera/sci-fi setting. And I must say that treatment does really cool things with those ideas in a different setting. "Sir P3" (if I may!!!!!!!) has included some nice random tables for system/planet generation (kind of like what you'd see in Stars without Number) but has also supplemented them with tables that particularly evoke the tense social dynamics I described in my own post. Looking at those tables is getting my juices flowing again for fleshing out more of the Bronze Age setting I described earlier this year. Thanks, Sir Paperweight III, for building with my ideas, which is a fun thing to see.
Happy gaming all! - Gundobad

In Space, no one can hear your soul getting sucked out by an exquisitely beautiful giant cockroach

So, we recently played Session 3 of our 'Space Oddpera,' a short sci-fi campaign using Into the Odd. And yes, after the game one of my players told his wife, "My soul was being sucked out by a really sexy cockroach." You know there's a story worth telling there...

Each of this mini-campaign's first three sessions has so far featured a different kind of play, which has been nice. The first saw a combination of investigation, tactical mass combat, and a horror-themed ruincrawl at the end. The second session was all heist. This third session was more of a traditional 'dungeoncrawl' (err...but...in space), and also heavily featured a borrowed travel-logistics encumbrance system in which fatigue and inventory really got a lot of attention (I used an overloaded encounter die which included Fatigue among the possible results. Fatigue added a line-item of the same name to all PCs' inventories, and could be cleared 1 line at a time by a short rest (which also required a roll of the encounter die) or all-at-once by a long/overnight rest (which required not only another die roll but also spending a ration). Those rules seemed to work well; the logistical stuff clearly became kind of a grind for players, though that was kind of the point and seemed ok for a limited appearance.

Previously, the party discovered that an Important MacGuffin (an alien 'control orb') needs to get applied to perma-shut an ancient alien quantum-locked vault prison, or soon an evil, well-armed neo-Gnostic cult is going to successfully crack the vault and free thousands of ancient alien shadow-worms who will probably kill, possess, etc. a world of 5 billion inhabitants. To make matters worse, the human space around the party has fallen into civil war, and brutal militias now all but run the system in which our PCs are stranded; the system's official Prefect has hired them to do covert law-and-order missions on his behalf, but his authority and reach are rapidly dwindling. Time is running out, and the PCs need to get that MacGuffin into Mount Doom - no, sorry, I mean into the alien quantum-locked vault. Yeah. That.

But that vault is at the bottom of a kilometers-deep sinkhole with a stout cult fortress at the top, and simply flying their ship up to the sinkhole and dropping in would probably get them vaporized; even with their ship's new electronic stealth package, they can't really avoid being seen by all those eyeballs. So the mission this time was to land covertly about 50 km away and follow an underground river that (per old geological charts) probably flows into the lake at the sinkhole's bottom. The point of the recon mission, then, was to find a repeatable and covert path that would allow a stronger strike force (in some future session) to hit the alien prison vault at the closest range possible. [Those of you who follow Michael Prescott's Trilemma Adventures maps may have seen the map that loosely inspired this sinkhole in my mind :-)].

The party started off by landing in a grotto where a river fell into an underground passage. Standing above the grotto were the shattered ruins of some old school-prison-medical facility (all 3, it turned out; judging by the limited remains, it appeared to have been the site of some kind of mutant-splicing farm, but the 'guests' had broken out. The PCs quickly got a further sense of how that relationship worked when they read the following, very faded, metallic sign near the grotto entrance:

As the PCs headed down the tunnel, they occasionally found traces of what looked like old camping parties' junk strewn across the tunnel. They explored a side-tunnel away from the stream, and got attacked by a small pack of giant frog-critters, which incapacitated and dragged off one of the players in the dark- but the other PCs were able to cut down the froggies and rescue their friend.

In Into the Odd terms, these were:

Omnivorous Cave Toad packs.

STR 12, DEX 15, WIL 5.

6 hp, Armor 1          

Damage d6+1 tongue-slap, up to 30’ away. 

CRITICAL DAMAGE: wraps tongue around prey and drags it away. Uncommitted frogs in range will also do the same, all trying to tug off body parts. d3 STR damage; at 0, body is ripped into pieces as prey dies.

Turned out that side-tunnel led to an old sealed metal vault door - sealed from the other direction - with a sign warning that this was an abandoned mine, corporate property, the Molver Inc. Yorithium Mine, yadda yadda. Since the angle of the side-tunnel and their broader intel suggested that any known mine opening inside the target sinkhole would only get them halfway down its shaft, the players decided not to risk blasting through the door and fighting whatever security gadgets might still be protecting the place. [Which means that I didn't get to deploy a few nasty GM surprises, heh heh...].

Heading back to the main tunnel with the rivercourse, however, the PCs ran into a party of bounty hunters returning from a 'successful' expedition (to judge by the gruesome mesh bag of severed mutant heads they were carrying). There were some tense negotiations, but the party's criminal-xenobiologist broke the ice and convinced the lead goon that 1) the PCs weren't part of a rival gang and 2) were amenable to being hired on (at least as a subterfuge to defuse the initial confrontation). Oh, good! the goon said, but then insisted that the PCs should demonstrate their competency before joining such an august membership. The goons chiefly wanted to test the PCs' marksmanship; there was some urging to blow up the anti-grav sled that was carrying most of the party's rations and operational gear. That eventually turned into the lead goon saying, "nah, just pick one of your teammates and shoot him, show me that you've got what it takes to hunt meat."

Uh-oh.

So...there was some hemming and hawing and lining up of shots (and a little hilarious miscommunication when the party's diplomat tried to set up a melee-focused friend for a potential closer charge if things got ugly, but made it look like he was trying to throw his friend into a potential crossfire) and there was more talking...and then one of the PCs took a shot at a bounty hunter and the whole place erupted in cacophonic thunder, accentuated by the party's LMG cutting down about half the bounty hunters in one go. The final bounty hunter, the one holding the bag of severed heads, dropped the bag and ran off into the tunnels. At this point the PCs decided to bring the bag along with them in case it could be used to fool other bounty hunters. The heads were a mix of fishy, baboony, doggy faces, etc. Ewww.

Eventually they descended further and found that the river dumped into an underground lake - but not the one they were looking for at the sinkhole's base. This lake was in a massive underground cavern dimly lit by a glowing fungal forest...across the cavern, another tunnel opening sloped up and away (toward the mine) while the river plunged further down through a lower opening across the chamber. Of more interest was the island in the middle of the lake, an island with a ramshackle fortified village visible on it. Far away, animal-headed mutants were visible moving about the village.

The PCs decided to avoid contact and headed for the river's exit. There, above a tall waterfall, they discovered a fishing party of mutants along the riverbank in their way. They ended up making contact and chatting up the mutants, who could only speak in exactly-four-word utterances. Things were going quite well ... until ... a player who clearly meant well decided to whip out the bag of severed heads and present it to the mutants (so they could bury what was left of their relatives). I decided that the sudden, unexplained sight of cousin Bob's head in a bag held by an armed stranger was enough to potentially derail any negotiation, and one failed WIL roll later, the mutants were attempting to take the PCs prisoner. Rather than fight them, the party agreed to come peacefully to the mutant village on the lake. There, they met the village elder (a fish-faced crone named Uufessica) and explained what was really going on. Finally accepting that the party were not bounty hunters but foes who had fought their hated persecutors, the mutants helped the PCs prepare for the next, final stage of their underground journey. Below the waterfall, they warned, waited death. The party was taken to a hut where a dying mutant scout lay raving about a beautiful face and a horror in his soul. Whatever had caused that was waiting for them downriver.

The PCs rigged climbing gear to get down the tall waterfall and then descended the river. The tunnel gradually narrowed, and the water got deeper, and eventually the party was wading through a slender tunnel in chest-deep, cold water. At one point a mass of roaches scuttled past them on the ceiling. Then they started hearing voices...whispering voices echoing down the tunnel..."Does she frighten you? She should...she feeds on your fear..." These statements were suspiciously akin to those heard in Session 1 when the party first encountered one of the alien shadow worms...and it was known that some further of these beasts have been leaking out of the quantum vault due to cult coaxing.

Another wave of cockroaches clacked along overhead - this time the players could see that the little roaches had bloated, miniature human faces, and it was the roaches that were whispering to them...the disgusting vermin faded into the darkness. Water rippled quietly in the dark, claustrophobic tunnel, flooded to sternum level. And then they charged.

Four giant cockroaches, each the size of a dinner table, dashed forward along the tunnel's slimy walls and ceiling. But each giant roach had the face and hair of an exquisitely beautiful human woman - but as they charged, opening their mouths to scream, jagged razor-sharp teeth glinted between blackened gums. They charged in at close range and opened up with psychic screams that reverberated in the recon party's minds. Taken aback, the party struggled to combat these fiends in the cramped darkness. One roach dropped down and bit deeply into a scientist's shoulder...as he blacked out, incapacitated, he felt a freezing cold sensation spreading from the wound. Then, darkness.

We ended up with two of four PCs quickly getting incapacitated and bitten by the roach-hags by the time the party had killed one of the shadow creatures. At this point I realized I might be presiding over a TPK. An incredibly fortunate initiative roll (we re-roll each turn) allowed the last two players left on their feet to go again right after their previous actions. This probably saved the whole party, along with the good rolls they made at that do-or-die moment. In the end, the two were left standing and one roach-hag turned and went running upside down on the ceiling off into the darkness, cackling and repeating "she feeds on your fear!" One of the last standing players took a long shot at the retreating fiend - which, very luckily, killed her.

The fact that all the roach-hags died turned out to be a very good thing. As they revived their fallen comrades, they noticed that a web of noxious black tendrils had radiated from the wound sites, but these dark networks already were retracting and fading as they administered first aid. Once they were conscious again, the fallen felt like they were waking up from the worst nightmare they'd ever had, in which everything in the cosmos had gone wrong and would never be ok again. The downed players concluded that they'd met some kind of psychic parasite - or, as a player later explained, "my soul almost got sucked out by a really sexy cockroach."

Indeed. I won't post all the stats for these things since they and their kin may remain relevant for our mini-campaign, but I can confirm that without killing the biter the victim would have faced a long, slow, lingering journey through attribute loss until death, or until the players figured out some successful treatment.

Fortunately for the seriously beat-up party, not far after this ambush site, the players found an outlet that - just as hoped - flowed into the lake at the bottom of the great sinkhole. They had found a way to get a later team down to the sinkhole bottom without running past the cultist aerial defenses. Mission success!

We actually ended up finishing a bit early time-wise, though with a tense bang at the end again. Mechanically, the session was a way to test out some encounter and logistics mechanisms (and, to be fair, kind of a rushed bit on my part after a roadtrip out of town, but I think it worked out ok :-). I procedurally generated tunnel sections as they were needed whenever encounters happened, and I made sure to include at least some moderate 'Jaquaying' of my overall tunnel maps (i.e. including some loops and non-linear paths) but the players' choices quite legitimately ended up redirecting them through a fairly linear path anyway. Good lessons for me on how to make something work with less prep time, though it wasn't my favorite session design so far during this mini-campaign. Still, it was lots of fun.

Cheers - 'Gundobad'

Using Some Historical Theory: Another 'Settings with Strata' Post

As I threatened earlier this month, I'm turning my thoughts toward further development of April's "Settings with Strata: A Quick-Design Method for Historically Coherent Campaign Settings." As previously articulated, my "Settings with Strata" method boiled down to four core steps:

1 "In just a few sentences, articulate a main concept for your setting."
2 "Draw or sketch a rough map of a region that fits that concept."
3 "Write a very brief summary of your setting's history ... write a 1-3 sentence description of 3 or 4 eras leading up to the present."
4 "For each of those 3-4 periods, moving in order from past to present, mark approximately 3-5 locations that were most important for the history of that period on your map."

My earlier writing on this topic emphasized developments in Step 4, the point at which I find most of the fun and in fact many intriguing ways to surprise myself as I create a sandbox. I reflected that I find Step 3 pretty straightforward since, as a professional historian, I am accustomed to thinking in such terms and I carry a library of historical situations and dynamics around in my noggin. Realizing that this is simply not the case for many or most people, I decided that I want to flesh out a how-to approach for Step 3 (and to some extent, by extension, Step 1 as well). And here it is.

To get there, however, you'll need to be patient, as I want to set it up with a mini-plunge into some historical theory. Yet be of good cheer; if this works as I envision, a little initial theory will 1) help us avoid some pitfalls, 2) encourage any faint-hearted sandbox designers out there, and 3) suggest by analogy a structure for easy, straight-forward sandbox history-writing.

Good. Seatbelts on?

FACTS, HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION, AND EMPLOTMENT  

I think most professional historians today would be more or less comfortable saying that subjective interpretation is as important as facts for responsible history. That needs some unpacking. I'm not saying facts don't matter, and I'm not saying that historians are free to come up with whatever they want to say beyond or instead or against the facts. I am saying, again, that in the construction of a professional and responsible historical account of the past, subjective interpretations play just as important a role as do the underlying facts being interpreted.

Here's an example.

We all know how the history of the World Wars went down, right? Here's a quick recap:

"Not once but twice in the 20th century, America mobilized its armed forces, deployed them to Europe, and killed thousands and thousands of young Germans. Finally, in 1945, the Americans and their allies successfully invaded Germany, overthrew its government, and occupied its territory."

There we go: a nice, compact history of the World Wars - or at least of the European theater in those conflicts. Great, right? Uh...no. But why not? Is it because of factual inaccuracy? Nothing in those statements is factually false. That being said, I (and...I hope you too...) find it a thoroughly inadequate historical account - because of what it omits. As written, the short account above only includes a minority of content/events from the wars, and only presents material about American and Allied aggression. There was, most obviously, a very different side to the story, one in which Germany is not presented as a victim.

Ah, then perhaps constructing a proper history must instead require providing ALL the details so that the historian can't blind readers to a hidden agenda. Yes, then, let's re-imagine a history of WWII that includes ALL the details. Here's an (imaginary) excerpt:

April 4, 1941, 6:45 a.m.: "Bitte," Rommel said, gesturing toward the salt and pepper across the officer's mess tent table. He received the salt and pepper promptly, four seconds later. It took him seven seconds to complete the task of seasoning his eggs. Nine seconds later, he had returned the salt and pepper to their original place on the mess table.

Riiiiiight. Imagine trying to read through a hot mess like that; the history of WWII, now abridged in only 78,743 volumes...It would, of course, be utterly useless. On the one hand, no mortal really has access to all that kind of data. On the other, providing more and more raw data creates new problems; if I may paraphrase The Incredibles, when all the information is special...then none of it will be. It would have no order, no pattern...it would have no use - unless somebody could highlight which bits really mattered. Writing a good history, then, involves presenting the important information and leaving the less important aside. Great. So how do we know which pieces are more important?

This is where subjective interpretation comes in and becomes inescapable. On the one hand, choosing which data to emphasize is subjective even on somewhat neutral analytical ground; two researchers who share the same intellectual and ideological perspectives may still disagree about the relative importance of this vs. that piece of information. On the other hand, people who favor different perspectives or different 'sides' in the relevant history will select 'important bits' very differently. Just think about a court trial and the struggle to control what information the jury gets to see. Our modern court system very clearly recognizes that access to 'all the information' is not a neutral right for the jury, but a contested legal battleground with enormous potential consequences for swaying opinions.

This is why most historians now take it for granted that their own subjective interpretations are as important as the facts - the data - with which they work. No serious historian feels free to make up or to willfully hide relevant 'facts,' but they all differ in which facts they consider most important, and what kind of overall pattern or message they draw out of the collected facts under consideration. This is why the great bogeyman of 'revisionist history' that some in the public fear should be such a non-issue; if it involves making up fake information and presenting it as accurate data, then that isn't history at all, it's just a fraud. But if it involves presenting accurate information and making an analytical case for its meaning that differs from the previous generation's understanding, then that is just what every professional historian does for a living, and must be subject to the discipline's standard norms of evidence, argumentation, and informed community discourse in order to be taken seriously.

One of the more influential scholarly approaches to historians' inherent subjectivity came from the work of the late Hayden V. White, a prominent academic historian and literary theorist.  This is no place for a full discussion of White's work or its potential pitfalls (but, OSR metal-heads; check this one out). In short though, I'll note that White argued that what historians do as they identify what info is most important and how to frame a meaningful narrative out of a sea of data is pretty similar to what authors do as they write fictional literature: they use emplotment. They end up writing in a genre (for White, historians write Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire) that orders the account and reflects the historian's understanding of the meaning of the story being told.

GREAT, THANKS SMARTIEPANTS! NOW SHUT UP OR TALK ABOUT GAMES!

Ok, you Philistines, I will. But only because you insisted. How is anything in this nerd-fest relevant for writing history in a purely fictional setting, where the GM's word can be law and the stakes are a bit lower than figuring out who to blame for an international war? I propose that the theory presented above may help us game in at least three ways:

1: Because it urges us NOT even to try to lay down all truth, or all the information about a setting, in advance. If you're crafting a new setting, then adopting the when-did-Rommel-salt-his-eggs approach to your backstory may feel like a labor of love for your world, but it's a pipe dream. On the one hand, the RPG blogosphere is already full of effective, articulate guidance on the reasons for painting in broad strokes as you begin a campaign. That makes sense for pragmatic reasons in play. But it also makes sense (sniff) in light of historical theory. No matter how much time you pour into your beloved setting, you will never set down ALL its data. No matter what you do, no matter whether you admit it or not, you still have to make decisions about which data is worth inventing, or at least inventing next. So why not just embrace that fact? Embrace the liberation of knowing that you don't need, and can't have, a fully-documented setting.

2: Because it allows, welcomes even, alternate points of view and alternate emplotments of the same history. Imagine a history of Middle Earth written by Elrond. Now imagine a history of the same events, but written by the Witch-King. Even if nobody willfully lies, you're going to find radically different, maybe even un-recognizably different, accounts of the past. This means that when you create a backstory for a campaign, you are tying your own creative hands much less firmly than you may think. You don't even need to include misinformation or inaccuracies to present radically different histories of your setting. If the Fourteen Princes' tragic downfall before the Hobgoblin Horde set the stage for your current Age, you can be sure that there's a pretty upbeat Hobgoblin narrative out there waiting to be written! This also means that you can create a campaign backstory with a certain emplotted lens (a tragic story of rise and fall, for example) but remain free to develop a very different tone in actual play. Even in collapsed societies, PCs might write perfectly meaningful stories of joyful triumph and victory.

Musing on this, it occurred to me that Middle Earth and the setting of the post-apoc Fallout games are...pretty similar, in terms of their narrative backstories. Once upon a time, there was a golden age in the past, a time of higher craft and skill, of extensive, stable geopolitical influence...and then 'our side' meddled with weapon(s) they thought could save them but which, in fact, ended up breaking everything...now political boundaries -where they exist - are much smaller, and the world is full of wild wastes and crossed by bands of violent marauders, many of which would happily eat you.

There it is. If we were using my Settings with Strata system, you could use the previous paragraph as your overall concept, and you could flesh it out to end up honestly with Middle Earth or with Fallout world. The massive difference between them is that Fallout offers a much more dismal and tragic (or even farcical) meaning to the whole, whereas Tolkien's vision emphasized the capability for heroism and goodness to triumph even in such a broken world.

3: Finally, if we embrace our freedom to not establish everything in advance, and if we embrace the existence of overlapping or even contradictory narratives, but choose just one as a backbone for our emerging narrative, and if we focus our thinking (a la Hayden White) on what kind of story we end up with through that one perspective...then we have the makings of an actionable procedural-generation system for setting histories.

Ok, probably, that was a lot more preamble than really needed to get us here, but oh well, here we are anyway. Back at long last to my Settings with Strata process and its Step 3, writing a short summary of 3-4 periods, with a sentence or two for each period. To be clear, what I'm going to propose and hope to develop in future posts may be secondary and possibly unhelpful. If you begin with a clear concept and/or already have or come up with a compelling narrative summary for your historical periods, there is no reason one must go through the steps below. They are intended, instead, either to make such narratives feasible for folks who aren't there right now, OR to stimulate creativity by coming up with ideas you hadn't already (kind of like how the Tome of Adventure Design uses randomness to stimulate but not replace your own creativity).

Pick ONE faction or other controlling central point of view (but this isn't all reality in your setting, remember? This is just a technique for now to help us design, it doesn't tie your hands for in-game ethical or factional alignment). You're going to plot the changing fortunes of this faction from its own point of view.

It will probably be helpful to pick one kind of 'fortune' to plot throughout this process; a good default would be 'military-political dominance' or maybe 'political stability' but you could quite easily retool this for other dynamics.

Next one might pick the kind of story one will be telling 'across the ages' - which in turn will be fleshed out in much more (still simple) detail in Step Four. Will this be a tragic tale of rise and fall, or just the more triumphant tale of 'how we ended up on top' - or something else? Most simply, one could think of the transition between each period as either RISING/GROWING POWER/STABILITY, STASIS OR STAGNANT POWER/STABILITY, and DECLINE OR COLLAPSE IN POWER/STABILITY. Heck, you can even make that a die roll if you want to discover the history as you make it.

If this seems useful then what I may do is for each of those three kinds of trajectories - up, sideways, down - present random-generation tables with commentary discussing real-world types of such processes, not as straightjackets, but as loose guides to the kinds of effects each type might have, and other dynamics that might go along with it (cultural or economic effects that might be typical, ways such a development might affect neighbors' perspectives, etc.).

Apologies to any who really didn't want a theory-dump, but I wanted to get this out of the way, partly to emphasize that what we are looking at creating AT BEST are really narrow, limited perspectives on a campaign world - but that's ok.

Cheers. 'Gundobad'