The Revenge of the Harn Weather Table (A ErieCon Tale)

In last monday's game session the party decided not to continue to push west to reach the adventure site. It was obvious they were walking into a warzone and that it would not be a good idea. So they decided to go directly north over the Barradine Mountains to reach the adventure site. The hazard of crossing mountain is the treacherous terrain and weather.

Sure enough the party ran into a blizzard. Almost immediately Dwayne and Tim started teasing me about using the Harn weather table as it was a major component of the Hunting the Cow incident. (The reason they had to hunt was the weather slowed them down causing them to run out of food). And yes I was using the Harn weather table using this site to generate a month worth of weather.

If you use this site the months are Spring (Nuzyeal, Peonu, Kelen), Summer (Nolus, Larane, Agrazhar), Autumn (Azura, Halane, Savor), Winter (Ilvin, Navek, Morgat).

Despite not having any campaign gear the party managed to get below the treeline before the worst of the storm hit and found shelter among the pine woods.

Well when I set out to goto ErieCon 2010 the weather at Meadville was pretty good with most of the road all blacktop and little snow. The weather report indicated a less severe day than the blizzards we got on Friday. But when I past Edinboro an OK day turned into a near blizzard. Since I was only 10 minutes away from the Erie I continued on.

ErieCon was pretty hard hit by the weather and there was only 50 to 60 folks there. Most of them playing videogames, Magic, or another card game. Both my panel and game session was a bust. But luckily for me Jason Sholtis and his crew were playing a S&W game in a module of his own design called Operation: Unfathomable. It is set in his version of the mythic underworld and Jason runs it very well. It was a creepy eerie play full of weirdness and other strange denizens.

What I like especially was the feel of plausibility as it was very clear the area was a wellspring born of chaos. I know that is a strange combination but the right amount of plausibility can do wonders to the suspension of disbelief and Jason did a good job of it.

Since I came late I got to play some of the hirelings, Flaunt an archer, and Cuthuk (sp?) a spearmen. I played Flaunt with a strong drawl and the personality of a hick. Cuthuk was always on the frontline ready to protect those who hired him. I suppose I did something right as I had table laughing at their antic several time. The adventure revolved around find a lost magic rod.

Later one of the players had to leave early and I picked up his mage Lashamar. It came handy near the end of the adventure where I was blasting robots from the future with magic missles, put a whole miniature civilization to sleep with a spell so we could retrieve the magic rod safely, and finally charming a bear man from the future who wanted the rod to go work on a spaceship to get him out of the way.

I really glad I took the plunge and played. Jason style is not something I normally do, I learned a lot in the few short hours I played. It one thing to read Jeff Rients and others about mythic underworlds and funhouse dungeons but nothing beats playing one. Again Jason's version is very well done.

After the game I talked with Jason and his friend John Larrey. It turned out they are both illustrators who have done comics on their own and had some stuff published in Knockspell (both art and adventures). I was ecstatic that I found some local artists that I can hire for future projects. The con was a bust for the plans I had. But in the end it worked out very well.

Off to ErieCon 2010

First off I apologize for not posting an ISO.When I started burning CDs I realized that I did not have all my normal tools installed as the result of a HD Crash several month ago. It will take me some time to reassemble them. However as for the CDs themselves I was able to get them burned with the default tools of Windows Vista.

I will be involved in a Old School Panel on Saturday Afternoon and then running a S&W + Majestic Wilderlands game Saturday Evening from 6pm to 10pm. Hope to see some of you there.

I want to say thanks to Jeff Rients of Jeff's Gameblog for contributing a PDF of the Miscellanea of Cinder. I am sure everybody who get these will enjoy them. Finally I appreciate everybody who contributed comments and links in the previous posts.

Work on the Old School CD continues

I didn't get as much done Thursday as I liked on the Old School CD but here is the webpage I am including. Please free to use the comment section of this post for any corrections and comments. I thank everybody who posted comments to the first post.

I stress this is represent my editorial judgment. One thing I noticed is that the Old School Renaissance has growing really really big as far one person. It is either at the point or just passed the point where one person can keep track of it all. Which is why the list has a fantasy orientation and certainly should not be considered definitive.
Feel free to use this as a starting point for your own lists. Hopefully between all of us we can get a comprehensive list going. That includes not just fantasy but all the retro stuff that going on.

Hopefully I will have a second post this evening with the ISO with contents of the CD.

Here is a preview of the CD Cover.

Yes I plan on including a free copy of the Majestic Wilderlands pdf in the CD.

Mapping, Pen Tablets, and Drawing by Hand

Recently I bought this a Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet. When browsing the various cartography and art forums I keep seeing references to using tablets and the Bamboo line is pretty affordable as these things go ($70 for this model).



The way it works is that the active area is inside the white lines. If I touch the lower left corner the cursor on the monitor jumps to the lower left corner. If I touch the center the cursor jump to the center. The pen has a nib that is pressure sensitive so it can sense how hard it is pressing on the tablet. The effect is that when I am using it draw it is like drawing on a piece of paper.

Note that you quickly learn that you don't have to stare at the tablet. Just holding the pen and looking at the monitor results in a pretty effective illusion that you are drawing on paper.

The following is a crude map drawn up using the tablet. I used a combination of colored pencils and pens.




Where it is weakest on is lettering. But everything else pretty much felt like when I did my hand drawn maps. There is probably a ton I could do to make this a better handdrawn map but I just doing a quick example.

I also used in Monday's Swords & Wizardry game with Fantasy Grounds. I had much better control over unmasking hidden areas and drawing lines. I suspect with this I could use a blank square or hex temple map and just treat like I do my dry erase plexiglass gameboard. I need to read up on Fantasy Ground drawing tools and practice a bit.

Here is the wikipedia article on Wacom which explains their line of tablet. I have the Bamboo Pen.

Mapping, Manors vs Farms

One setting noted for it's detailed mapping of locales is Harn. Unfortunately it is a snapshot in to specific period of time where manorialism was the dominant form of rural organization. Manorialism means that the countryside is divided into dozens of small manors each with a small village of 20 to 50 families attached to the estate. Other time periods had vaguely similar rural organization like the latifundia of Rome and the plantations of the antebellum south.

I pretty much accepted this style for when I do detailed maps for my Majestic Wilderlands. But recently a question by Dwayne of Gamer's Closet got me thinking about this. What would the countryside look like if dominated by farms not manor/estates.

To play around with this idea I drew this base map. Each of the small hexes is 2.5 miles and roughly 3,000 acres in area. The large hexes are 12.5 miles across. The reason I chose this scale is that it take one hour over level terrain to cross one of the small hexes.

Below are the settlements common to both types of rural settlements. There is a castle (solid circle) by the large river and a two keeps (open circle) one on the west side of the map and the other on the east side. The yellowish striped terrain is cropland. The dotted terrain are hills, the green are forested areas with over 50% tree coverage. The light green are woodlands with <50% tree coverage. There are two swamps represent with an off green overlaid with a fill of swamp symbols.

A countryside dominated by manorialism looks like the below. Each diamond represents an manor with 20 to 60 families working 1,800 to 3,000 acres. Roughly one manor per full hex of cropland. Note I omitted the roads here. The two keeps and Castles serve as market centers for the surrounding manor up to 4 to 5 hexes away. Roughly 1/2 day travel.


A farmed countryside looks vastly different. There are few distinct settlements. The villages are rather large (think Hommlet size) with probably 80 to 150 families living there. All the farm within a 1/4 day (2 to 3 hexes) travel will use these villages for their day to day market needs. The two keeps and castles will serve as major market probably travelled to once a week.

Each full hex of cropland will have anywhere between 6 to 15 families each owning an individual farm. Farms range from 200 to 500 acres. There are a few large estates with small hamlets of 5 to 20 families likely attached in a sharecropping arrangement. These are marked by the triangles.


I am intrigued by the farming arrangement as this seem more like the world that the village of Hommlett existed in. A farm oriented setting avoids the grinding grittiness that the medieval manor exemplifies. While I like gritty fantasy it is nice to have an alternative when I need it and still be able to generate the numbers if I want to run a campaign where the players are raising troops.

A Request for Help, OSR Links and lots of them.

I am giving a panel presentation on Swords & Wizardry and the OSR in general at ErieCon 2010 this Saturday. I am going to hand out a CD filled with various OSR rulesets (those that are free to distribute), and other freebies (S&W Quick Start, etc).

What I like to also include a html page with a comprehensive set of links to all things OSR (blogs, websites, etc). The OSR has grown just large enough that I will miss something if I just do it myself. So in the comment section post any links you got and I will compile them into the HTML file. I will post the page on Wednesday for a final look over by the general readership and start burning CDs on Thrusday. I probably will take two dozen or so with me.

I will see about upload an iso of the CD along with the cover I create so if anybody else has an opportunity for distributing free handouts they can grab it and burn a couple of copies.

Thanks
Rob

Spartacus Blood and Sand

I been following Spartacus Blood and Sands, a new Starz show on Netflix. I am finding that I really like it. Tim of Gothridge Manor already beat me to a post recommending this.

What I will add is that this is a show where so many thing "could" have gone wrong. The cinematography echoes that of 300 and Gladiator. It is very minimalist. There lots of blood, lots of nudity, lots of explicit sex.

However they do an excellent job with the basic plot of Spartacus' life. They interject interesting new elements and more importantly follow up on them. For example in an early episode we learn that the trainer Doctore was noted for facing Death and survived. In the latest we learn what that was all about and it was well executed.

But coupled with the plot are the actors and they really make the show. It is a brutal world that the Romans live in and this show doesn't pull any punches. But despite that the actors turn in some surprising performances and begin to draw you into their world. In some cases make you care about what happens to them.

I am looking forward to future episodes of this shows. My personal bet it is that it will be 4 season. The first will be Spartacus at the gladiator school ending with the initial revolt and escape. The second will be about the growing revolt and end with the initial victory against the local Romans on Mount Vesuvius. The third revolt will see Spartacus army come into it's own defeating all comers including a Praetorian army followed by a climax where not one but two Consular armies are destroyed by Spartacus and his men. The final season will be Spartacus downfall at the hands of Crassus.