Old Maps: Ehrn

In January, I found and posted some old, analog maps from a campaign I ran many, many years ago. A handful of folks expressed interest in seeing the notes - so I figured I'd type them up for you. The article here to follow is a set of things I for which I have concrete memory about the game meshed with what's written down on the discovered notes. A proper scan, itself, you can find here - as well - for anyone interested.

Ehrn - Dominion of Horse and Stone

Its population, concentrated along a rich central plane - mountains to the north and allies in trade to the west, the relative scarcity of wood long encouraged a pastoral culture. With the coming of the lizard warlocks to the south in the marshes, new enemies necessitate prudence, new bonds by necessity forged with the Dwarves of the mountains and relationships deepened with the wealthy Amanians to the east. Architecture is driven by necessity: turf roofing with brick or masonry supporting the walls. Many long houses are stables with a family or clan living in the upper chamber alongside the hayloft. Children are trained from a young age to ride and to shoot, but foremost: an allegiance is impressed upon them to kith and kin.

• To the north - the mountain Dwarves; to the south - the lizard warlocks (and residual Elves) of Marsh Haven.
  
• To the west and south, Azrah: a desert nation of traders - from whom wonders from far off lands are drawn.
• To the west and north, Hurshan: a fellow equestrian people, but one less settled - with hawk-like features, few permanent structures, and indiscernible demeanor.
• To the east, Amana: the center of civilization... according to the Amanians.

Cities and Towns Lordholme (33,056) Northway (26,445) Riverbend (18,512) Easthelm (15,736) Oln (11,802) Ghard (8,262) Benthel (5,784) Hune (4,628) Varhorn (3,009) Gelphenhaus (2,558) Thorn (1,919) Vane (1,248)

Points of Defense or Interest Net Area: 89,797 square miles Population: 6,465,384 Standing Guard: 21,552 Callable Population: 1,293,077   130 castles and fortifications 97 interior or manor 33 border guard

Ruins, Dungeons, and Points of Adventurea

• Break Island Two large rivers come together at this junction: and at the conjoining, a silt island has formed, on which a pack of beast men have built a stronghold.
   
• Aquifer Cavern A large underground complex: completely filled with water in most places. Bandits conspire with mer-folk, to use it to hide their treasures.
   
• Gray Orc City A tribe of desert orcs has isolated themselves here after being pushed back by Ehrnish expansion. Now, they raid the lands they once called home for sustenance.
   
• The Henge This ruined complex is thought to be of human origin, but it's architecture is not known to any who have seen it. Magic in this place is amplified.
   
• Einherjar Rubbish Heap Some of the fortresses of the Einherjar landed intact, disgorging the betrayer warriors unto the plain. This one did not. Large chunks of a celestial city are strewn about this site: each a labyrinth in its own right
   
• Look Out Rock A ruined, limestone fortress peeking above the spring and source of the long river. now watched by one of the border fortresses, the rock, and the semi natural caverns beneath it, draw adventure from across the plane.
   
• North Tribe Another group of gray orcs live here. They are bitter enemies of the first, but still despise the Ehrnish.
   
• Hanging Rocks This cave formation impossibly leans over a ledge into a shallow gorge. It appears to have been hollowed out by a forgotten people – but it's purpose and that people are long gone
   
• Goblin Camp A tribe of goblins man a wooden fortress built atop a stone complex of Dwarfish origin. The goblins have made it their own
   
• The Windy Crag This half cave / half valley houses carnivorous dire bats. It is said that the wind proceeding, singing from the crag is unnatural - the result of the beat of many thousands of wings.
   
• Insane Dwarves A citadel of Dwarves driven mad - incoherent, violent cannibals. Those which have been extracted from the citadel are oddly marred - organs out of place, features mutated - though the source of this contagion is unknown: presumably buried deep, deep in the ground.
   
• Sundered Mountain A mountain cleft in twain – with an abandoned Ddwarf citadel half-revealed by the break. Unnatural dangers lurk close to the surface, their home - normally deep underground - rudely exposed to the bright of the outside.
   
• Deep Drink Well A natural cistern so deep that, despite the crystal clear water, one cannot see the bottom. Stories say it connects to a deep crag in Amana - providing a conduit of hazards and wild things into its depths - but whenever one looks into it, one only sees the clear, cool water.
   

Campaign on, readers!

Public domain artwork retrieved from OldBookIllustrations.com and adapted for thematic use. Attribution in alt text.

Some Old Maps

In a recent podcast, I had talked about finding older maps from long dead campaigns in the garage - while re-organizing my desk, I had found some more and thought it might be fun to share. It's not the dagger world I mentioned - but instead it's a middle map - one which represents both amazing amounts of prep but also actually did make it to the table - both in the form of players and of fiction prose.

I found this map deep in the back of a notebook I'm trying to repurpose for analog gaming going into 2024. The first thing I noticed was the label - "Middensphere" - which is a total lie: the original "Middensphere" looked more like a flooded North America: but the name was cool, and whenever you have a cool idea - take it with you to the next game! That said, I recognized the map immediately from the shape. Taken from a trace that I had made when coming across the concept of Pangaea Proxima for the first time (then Pangaea Ultima), it was an Earth-to-come, an Earth-after, and a really interesting map. Central ocean, mountain patterns, island chains, detached island continent - plenty to work with thinking about how to game with it.

"But what are those colors?" you ask. 

Well, see above.

After having traced it and flipped it (can't have it too recognizable by the players), I set to work defining where bands of latitude were. Knowing that, you can then think about where ocean currents flow - taking warm water into cold regions and cold water into warm ones - and identify climate bands.

On the interiors, in the shadow of massive mountains lining where the tectonic plates connected, deserts form - as well as in certain places where the current would take moisture away from the coast rather than inland from it.

Looking at it now - I kind of want to run a game in the southern reaches: the island to the south (the conglomeration of Antarctica and Australia in a far flung future) with its sea-capability, its multiple proximitous environments, and its obvious trade routes. But was that where I actually went, way back whenever this map was made?

Of course not.

You'll recognize this region from the North-East of the flipped supercontinent - an extrapolation of where bits of the US and Canada would have ended up, smashing into each other as the molten mantle conveyed them along an inexorable collision course.

Zooming in - I can see a dozen kingdoms: four of which are done in incredible detail. A long forgotten code of "x"s, dots, stars, and hatching coupled with colors and labels denote the wild lands and the settled, the adventure sites and the safehouses, and where cultures mixed or met.

In particular, my mind is drawn to "Alara" - a nation named after Alaric I, barbarian bane of Rome in its early decline - and the home of the tall, strong, warrior race that all fantasy settings seem to invariably crave. That's a name that has made its way into several campaign maps during my college period where I couldn't seem to settle on one world to just play games using.

And then to the north - some Aztec names. 

Arctic Aztec ancients, if I remember correctly, was the plan - though the campaign never went that far: so those lands, back in 200X through to the publication of this post - remain shrouded in unwritten mystery and half concepts, waiting for a party long graduated, diaspora from the old comic shop in new and allopatric hobby dens.

This map would go on to be forgotten as a young me put two and two together, noting that, in order for this continent to form, the pattern of separation across the Atlantic would have to cease and reverse - something that didn't sit quite right for me: going on to discover Novopangaea - which sat much better. But regardless of the eventual fate of the map, part of the reason I wanted to share: this one, I found along with page after page after page of hand written formatted notes identifying all the places marked on the map. It represented a veritable treasure trove of campaign material: easily enough to write a novel in - and obviously enough to have been influenced by a continual progression of play.

-- Update --

Some folks have expressed interest in the content of the old notes I pictured: which... admittedly, in retrospect does seem somewhat of a tease. So I've started the work of digitizing those pages into readable web format and posting them to the blog in a separate series of notes. The WIP list of posts that provide for this is here:

• Ehrn: the Domain of Horse and Stone

I'm not sure I would want to run a game exactly in this world again - the hexes are entirely too large, noted at 30 miles each on the key - but it has been a lot of fun looking through these notes: each page of which contains the name of the peoples, the populations, the distribution of that population among varied towns, the military capability of each area, striated across the breadth of settled space, and a list of ruins and adventure sites: calculated based on the length of the "castled age," but then detailed individually to drop into a living campaign.

I will attach a scan of the original trace - which I appear to have photocopied, over and over, onto hex paper when making nested maps - in case of someone else thinking this was a fun map, likewise.

I hope this has been as interesting to you - the reader - at least in passing as it has been to me, rediscovering this material hidden next to some floppy disks and mechanical pencils. In chatting about it on Discord or in other forums, I'd gotten some feedback and interest on the material - so I'll try to glean out the interesting and useful parts to post as the weeks roll on and time permits.

Either way - in the meantime - delve on!

Ode to '74

There has been a bit of hubbub - and thus, presumably, a bit of interest - in the social spheres through which I find myself floating in recent vintage regarding the original edition and its wargame roots. As such, I'm pressured a bit to share a pet project I'd been working on - one that I'd hoped would get me back to the table - that presents just that: an integration of 0e and Chainmail mechanics, presented together and seamless, as RAW as possible - allowing for clarifications that I'd run into at the table to date.

Player's Reference

Referee's Folio

The books are not finished. They are a jumble of rules, written legibly, but wrought with typos induced by the use of voice to text in the generation of descriptive paragraphs. However they are usable - and they present the spirit of the original rules in their entirety (including rules for griffon riders darting around dragons hundreds of feet in the air; including rules for catapult fire, mounted atop the aft-castle of naval war galleons; and for, of course, delving deeply into the mystic underneath below) as they would have been on original release.

But about WW&W? As returning readers will know, I had been working on my own twist of the original edition - Weapons, Wits, & Wizardry - which I had been working towards as an actual play last year. I will continue to work on WW&W - it is after all my own complete-genius heartbreaker - but in play, I found that my own preconceptions from future editions were polluting my judgements. I was integrating 1e elements, B/X elements, on the fly - I was instinctively incorporating mechanics from other games in the same genre to fit into niches while also experimenting with other resolution practices - e.g. "proficiency dice" - with wanton abandon.

This project was an attempt to, realizing the accidental inclusions (specifically stocking: stocking dungeon treasure is totally different in B/X than 0e!), understand the rules of their own accord, to enter into them with a clean slate, and to assimilate the spirit of the game - as it was in its first incarnation. Once I understood the foundation - only then would I be safe to build upon it and recapture the zeitgeist.

So here it is.

These are the rules I'm going to spin the Ash Coast game back up with - tweak, as needed - and ideally, re-release with art, readable layout, and a fancy license. I hope they help - if nothing else, showing off exactly how much was packed into those four booklets - three brown, one blue and spiral bound. 

And now the only question is... what do I call it?

Delve on, readers!

Alternative Alternative Combat: 2d6 on 1d20

In considering how to integrate Chainmail combat into an OSR campaign, two prevailing theories presented themselves: first, the most common, was the use of the d6-driven dice pool from troop combat in lieu of d20 rolls; second was the use of the 2d6 man-to-man table in lieu of the d20 roll: retaining attack progression and damage dice of the preferred edition. But - if attempting to engage with a concurrent mechanism - as detailed in the Hero entry - why not both?

So I took an afternoon to compare the probability curve of 2d6 target values and translate them over to 1d20 - rounding for closeness - including an easy-reference calculation for bonuses and penalties: what +1 on 2d6 meant for the 1d20 target, retaining the same curve. Originally included as almost an appendix in the WW&W Players' Guide alpha, I present it below for easy access for anyone interested:

2d6 on 1d20

With Penalty			Original Target		With Bonus
-3	-2	-1			+1	+2	+3
4	3	2*	2	(1)	1	1	1
7	4	3	3	(2*)	1	1	1
9	7	4	4	(3)	2*	1	1
13	9	7	5	(4)	3	2*	1
15	13	9	6	(7)	4	3	2*
18	15	13	7	(9)	7	4	3
19	18	15	8	(13)	9	7	4
20^	19	18	9	(15)	13	9	7
~	20^	19	10	(18)	15	13	9
~	~	20^	11	(19)	18	15	13
~	~	~	12	(20^)	19	18	15

In order to more closely (albeit not perfectly) align with the probability of success on 2d6:

• Target numbers marked with an asterisk (*) allow, on failure, a follow up re-roll against a target number of 9. If the roll against 9 succeeds, the roll succeeds.
• Target numbers marked with a carat (^) require, on success, a follow up confirmation roll against a target number of 9. If the roll against 9 fails, the roll fails.
  

To arrive at these numbers, I did a simple tabulation for the probability of success to meet or beat a number on 2d6 for each of the possible results: 2 through 12. For example, in order to hit an 8 or higher - the requirement to hit a man with a shield when using a sword - there are 15 different combinations of dice: 15 out of 36 total results in a 41.6% chance of success - rounding to 40%, this lines up with a 13 or better on 1d20: rinse, wash, repeat. The 2 and the 12 - specifically - have a follow up roll, representing the 2.7%, 1-in-36 chance of not rounding "fairly" to either 0 or 5%.

The original intent of the matrix was to provide quick reference and allow for dice-pooling the d20 in tandem with a 0e character's fighting capability: so, a Hero who fights as 4 men would roll 4d20, comparing their chance of success against the success chance defined above rather than against the Alternative Combat System matrix. This made weapon choice much more significant, mathematically - a Hero on Hero action in troop combat, "Armored" versus "Armored", could be reduced from an almost impossible 1-in-1,296 chance to roll four simultaneous sixes to a rare, but possible 9% chance, rolling four 9s or better on 4d20 with a two-handed sword. Still a far cry from the 41.6% chance - a roll in excess of 7 (so, 8 or above - coincidentally the same as our sword against shield example) on 2d6 - presented for a Hero to defeat a Hero on the Fantasy Combat table - but still feasible.

Having delved deeper into the game and come to understand Fantasy Combat, I had not proceeded with the d20-dice-pool solution by default: however the math here remains - and hopefully it can find a use in your home brewing.

Delve on!

Open license artwork taken from Pixabay. Public domain art taken from OldBookIllustrations.com. Attribution in alt text.

Mazes in the Mountains: Hex Exploration as a Dungeon

Map campaigns.

Anyone who is familiar with war-band level skirmish gaming (Mordheim, Frostgrave, ...), legion level tactical campaigning (Risk, Small World, ...), or even some board gaming as familiar as Catan or Archipelago will be familiar with the movement of resources around a map. Dungeons & Dragons, in modern iterations, has left this concept largely behind - and even in OSR circles, sometimes map campaigns fall victim to the predations of "point-crawling" - the abstraction of travel and exploration to simple "point A to point B" such that the game focuses on the destination over the journey.

Why is that?

Dungeons - viewed as maps - are mazes. Challenges. They invite the players to draw maps of their own to see how well they are able to navigate the hazards and labyrinthine corridors within. It's focused, enticing: an open solicitation for players to find secrets, to chart looping routes to destinations within, and to claim the underground as their own.

But isn't this the point behind the wilderness? To explore, to discover, and to claim?

The problem - then - may be rooted in the perceived purpose of the map in a map-driven RPG campaign: a mechanism to separate singular points of interest. When wargaming, the map is essential: terrain determines speeds of movement and changes the dynamic of armies interactions based on composition of force. But for an adventuring party - one which can be as small as 4 to 8 characters, including retainers, at lower level - this concern is ... not.

Why not, then, treat the wilderness as a dungeon? That all - treasures, traps, deadfalls, locations, factions, everything - that all the elements making a dungeon fun to explore should also be included in the wilderness: including map considerations - jaquaysing, alternate entrances and exits, secrets and "specials"? By bringing the elements of the dungeon - within the realm of believably - into the map campaign, could the attention of those players, the interest of habitual dungeon crawlers, be piqued?

So here's what I did.

The above is a region in a part of my home setting labeled in my map folder as "The Land Beyond the Sunset." In an older incarnation of the world map, it was a place far to the west, where the sun literally set by sinking into a massive caldera near the center of a mountain range - the land beyond which never saw sunlight - except in dim twilight for the minutes of the day wherein the sun completed its daily round and went to rest in the center of the earth. Since then, the map has changed - but the concept, I kept, because the wonder and weirdness was too fun for me in contemplation to truly discard - so I kept this map too. I'd been spending some time - here and there - detailing the map of this sunset continent just for fun: and styling the geography as a challenge for the player party.

For this section - a north-west portion of the map, there is a rugged, wooded area modeled in part off of Zhangjiajie Forest in south-central China. Jagged, vertical pillars and ridges rise from the floor, creating a maze of nigh-impassable climbs. Between these ridges are gentle lowlands, forested heavily (in the Land Beyond the Sunset, to clarify) with great aged conifers. Everything is green - as everything is trees - however the demarcations as "broken ground" represent these crags; and the areas marked as forest show flatlands between.

Mountainous, Rocky

Wooded, Flat

But how does this translate into a maze akin to a dungeon layout? Well. Consider - a party can only move so many hexes in a day (in the original LBBs, this was three five mile hexes on foot) though I tend to base it, personally, on a more generous B/X interpretation - where your capacity is based on your movement speed, as modified by armor and encumbrance. Then - as we further recall from both original and basic editions - movement is slowed based on the nature of terrain encountered. Thus, one could incur a "miles per mile" rate, moving through different types of terrain. In addition, you could then incur different hazards - diseases in swamps, vehicular limitations in rocky ground, water concerns in deserts, and so on - to taste: each challenge posing a different choice for the players and each solution offering a different cost. Regarding B/X:

A party's daily mileage, as assumed from the movement rate of the slowest member, is as follows (abridged for brevity):

Then, accounting for terrain type, guidance is given to reduce that rate by a fraction.

Movement	Mileage		Plains, Trails	Forests, Hills	Mountains	Roads
60'	12 miles		12 miles	8 miles	6 miles	18 miles
90'	18 miles		18 miles	12 miles	9 miles	27 miles
120'	24 miles		24 miles	16 miles	12 miles	36 miles
240'	48 miles		48 miles	32 miles	24 miles	72 miles

The general guidance is that - if you have sufficient miles remaining to enter a hex, you may. Otherwise, you end your adventuring day in the hex you're in. This is well and good when moving through homogeneous terrain, but breaks down a tad when considering different terrains. That said - you can infer the mileage cost to enter a hex based on the assumed number of hexes you'd go through in that terrain, which - assuming a six mile hex - breaks down somewhat simply as follows:

Mile Cost to Enter
Plains, Trails	Forests, Hills	Mountains	Roads
6	9	12	4

So, a party with a movement rate of 18 miles per day would be able to move into three six-mile hexes of plains, two hexes of forests, four hexes of roads, or one hex of mountains over the course of a single normal travel day.

To expand, let's apply this (with some embellishment) to our Zhangjiajie homage region:

•	Wooded Flat Lands	Entry Cost: 9 Chance of getting lost: 2-in-6 Vehicles slowed.
•	Wooded Mountains	Entry Cost: 16 Chance of getting lost: 3-in-6 Cavalry, vehicles, and beasts of burden slowed.
•	Wooded High Mountains	Entry Cost as Wooded Mountains along the ridge (moving from one high mountains into another high mountains); Entry Cost 24 to cross (moving into high mountains from another terrain). Chance of getting lost: 2-in-6 Cavalry, vehicles, and beasts of burden may not enter.
•	Wooded Crags	Entry Cost: 12 Chance of Getting Lost: 3-in-6 Vehicles slowed.
•	Hilly Grassland	Entry Cost: 6 Chance of getting lost: 1-in-6
•	Wooded Grassland	Entry Cost: 12 Chance of getting lost: 1-in-6
•	Open Water	Entry Cost: 6 Chance of getting lost: 2-in-6 Requires watercraft.

Parties moving more slowly than the cost of entry would, of course, simply enter the hex on a subsequent day - so, a hex requiring 24 miles of movement to enter (a large hex, or particularly inhospitable) would - for a party moving at a 90' or 60' clip - permit entry on the second day of movement rather than the first.

Now, zooming in on the region, consider the cost of moving across the peninsula. Perhaps a town on the northern side is booming, but slowly starving and in need of reliable contact with agriculturalists who set up shop on the interior. Or - more akin to our Sword & Sorcery theme: perhaps hidden gemstones of impressive value can be found along the crags of the inner bay - but savage ape men guard the woods, heaving boulders from the mountaintops, and hungry squid capable of capsizing a schooner prowl the waters just as they gain depth, rounding the horn. Hundreds of avenues appear, moving between one side of the map and the other - but which one is the best one, minimizing costs and risks during the voyage?

A major difference - immediately evident - is that there are few "walls" in the wilderness. In a dungeon, you have defined rooms and corridors - where in the wild, perhaps a crag or body of deep water will hem you in, but those are few and far between: granting a larger sense of freedom on the over-map. How is mapping different - how is exploration different - when the players have the ability to climb over the "walls"? It adds an automatic degree of verticality - it adds another layer of consideration for resources to manage in terms of how long it takes to get where. It makes a game of exploration into a game of trailblazing.

This is something the players will discover - and, if they don't know what's on the interior, it's something they will have to map along the way! Mapping as they explore, creating a representation of the wilderness, and then poring over their own creations to weigh the distances, terrain, and hazards in order to capitalize on that information.

Domain players? They may seek to become cartels themselves, owning the routes directly, keeping the darkness at bay, and holding a toll.

Explorers and delvers who prefer to retire at name level? They can sell the maps they make to the highest bidder!

Them's My Two Coppers

So that's what I've been thinking about these last couple weeks - and something I'm fiddling with in terms of fleshing out the larger hex map of the Ash Coast region: so the players have something waiting once they get to the point where they are more able to foray into the interior. Seems like a curious idea - and I'll be curious to run it.

Have you done this kind of thing before? Have you thought about it and needed a nudge to attempt the execution? Would you be interested to play in something like this? Let me know! I have a dozen ways to hit me up - and I'm keen to hear your story.

Thanks - in the meantime - for reading, everyone: and delve on!

Public domain art retrieved from OldBookIllustrations.com and the National Gallery of Art and adapted for thematic use.

Hex map and hex tiles derived using Worldographer Pro.

The Rule of Thirds

Plot hooks. Mysterious locations. Old maps.

A sandbox style game is not - as a physical sandbox - simply a blank slate on which players mold the world to their liking. Instead, there are adventure sites, factions, towns, landmarks, and wilderness for the party to experience and explore. The sand, so to speak, has been formed - it has an existing state - which the party can expect to discover at the table. Whether they re-form it or not will depend on how successful they are over the campaign - but in order to kick-start the adventure, in order to inspire the group to move out of the tavern and into the adventure, hints - incentives - have to drop.

One doesn't give the players a blank sheet, 3d6 down the line, and ask them where they are going: instead, they have to have leads - they have to have ideas which may guide them into the unknown. 

And this article talks about one of my favorite aspects of doing just that.

An Unreliable Narrator

Acne during pregnancy does not indicate a female child - though that doesn't stop certain relatives from telling you as much. Consider - not all rumors are true; not all maps are accurate. If that is true in real life, why wouldn't it be true in your campaign world as well? Some of the things that your party hears - be it carousing at the tavern, be it scrawled on the wall of a shallow crypt - will be valid information: but some of it will not.

Key word some.

What you don't want to do is to destroy the trust, to instill an instinct of unbelief, in your players whenever they come across information. If the bartender is always evil - the party will never trust the bartender; if the map is always inaccurate, the party will leave it where they found it in the hidden library. As such - you want to have some of the rumors and hooks lead true - bring the party where the party expects them to go - while other rumors and hooks do not. Of the hooks that do not lead where they say they will, it's also important to ground them: some of them will be total hogwash - perhaps intentionally perpetuated by other adventurers to throw off rival parties from the trail of a find; perhaps seeded by malign NPCs (living or long passed) who were seeking a particular end - but some of them will be based on truth. Some of them will have a hint at what was found before, only to have been lost in a game of telephone, ear to ear and embellishment to embellishment as the tale is passed around varied campfires. 

And it's up to you - the referee - to determine which is which so that the party can thereafter root out what's what.

One Third / One Third / One Third

When preparing rumors and hooks, I like to break out a table - typically 1d12 - to contain and randomize which ones the party finds or hears. These are divided into three, even in number, among the degree of their veracity:

1. True - True rumors are hooks which are correct. The map says it goes through a cavern of scorpions and terminates in a well, at the bottom of which is a magic sword - and the party, following the map, finds a cavern, scorpions, and beyond that, a well containing a magic sword. Simple, easy, for a ref.
   
   
2. Partially True - The partially true rumor is the tale inspired by a seed of fact germinating into a sprig of maybe. Fishermen tell tales of a cave visible at low tide where pirates and outlaws once stowed their gold - but upon arrival, the party may find a cave: but instead of pirate gold, a skeletal guard keeps watch over an ancient weapons cache from a fallen and advanced civilization (a dead pirate near the entrance, perhaps, as they may have not gotten as far as the fishermen thought).
   
   These can be the most fun to come up with, as they will throw the party a curve ball: test their skill at the game both from a resource planning and execution perspective but also from an adaptation perspective: or they can be used to introduce other elements of campaign lore or lead to more adventure.
   
   
3. False - Lastly, a false rumor is one which has no basis on fact. The drunken veteran claims you should expect a pyramid on the far side of the vine-choked hills - but no pyramid looms. The sages say that a race of white apes inhabits the low pass but can be appeased with spiced fruits: but their tomes and records are old and the apes have been hunted to extinction by an insect species whose tastes have developed a fondness for flesh. There is an adventure to be had - surely - however it will not be the adventure that the party expects!
   

Why a 1d12 table? For me - it's easy to roll on the table and provide quickly what the party encounters without allowing myself a bias. If it's up to the dice, it's not going to be influenced by how pressed I am for time this month and want to get the adventure moving; it's not going to be changed because I happened to watch The 13th Warrior this week and feel the need to plagiarize the Horns of Power twist. Similarly - when I remove a false rumor, I can replace it with another false one for next time; or when I remove a true rumor, I can replace it with another true. This will keep it varied and - by law of averages - prevent a pattern from developing. Over time, the group will encounter a mix, they will not mistrust the rumors (or trust them blindly) because of me - the delivering ref - and thus, the group will see more role play. They will spend time investigating - they will interact with more elements of the world to help them figure out the likelihood of whether it's true, false, or somewhere in between. And then, planning accordingly, they can set off with the best possible odds their skill can stack. 

Can I have my players roll on the table? Absolutely. Players love rolling dice. In so doing, however, it's important to change things up. You don't want them to see a 3 and think, "Well, this hook is going to be a lie - I keep carousing for another." Change up the numbers - maybe structure the table a bit differently - or maybe have three tables and you, the ref, determine which one is true/false/mixed in secret. It's good to have the players roll - when the players roll, they tend to own the result a lot more readily than if the result is "assigned" to them by the referee - however it's also important to reject the pattern: don't allow them to figure out the mechanism, the nature of the rumor, from the dice result: only give them the information that they receive. It will be up to them to pry for more in character.

What not to do: Regardless of rumor, regardless of hook - and I've been saying "rumor", but this same principle can be applied to anything you tell the players, any information that they find - regardless of the nature of the rumor encountered, it should always lead to adventure. A false rumor should never dump your players in a desert only to feel the fool for having followed a lead that led them astray. The point of the game is the adventure - and having lost one will leave a sour taste in the mouths of everyone at the table - you, the ref, included. No one benefits from a bad session. Thus - it's important to remember, all roads lead to adventure: it's simply the expectations of the party that are up in the air. A false rumor may take longer to reach, a false rumor may end up entangling the party in a web they did not intend, or a false rumor may end up empty: providing nothing more than a seed to another adventure - but whatever it does: it should do so with style: it should do so with encounters, maps, problems, and exploration. It should reinforce the experience the game is designed to produce, even if it expressly doesn't provide what the players were expecting.

And Them's My Two Coppers

Thank you for reading - and I hope it finds application to your game.

Delve on!

Public domain art retrieved from OldBookIllustrations.com and the National Gallery of Art and adapted for thematic use. Attribution in alt text.

How I Make Waveform Podcast Videos

I've been asked a couple times by podcasters aspiring to jump to YouTube about the waveform videos I make. Trying to be helpful - a while back - I'd taken some screenshots while making one and sent them alongside my current process for making them. From there, I figured I'd share those same screenshots here - in the event that I run into someone who likewise wants to start doing waveform companion videos to podcast episodes.

Bit of a break from the normal RPG supplemental stuff I post - but I hope it helps: and for next week, I'm working on a new B/X small dungeon. Thanks for reading!

Assumptions

I use OpenShot to make videos: an open source video editing program for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I have not particular fondness or attachment to OpenShot - it was simply the highest rated free or open source program at the time when I started making videos. The reason I bring it up, because that's what I'm using, that's where the screen captures will come from and that's the program I can give (limited) advice on fiddling with, as it's the only one I've really used.

Additionally, I use (presently, at least) the Anchor platform to host and to record while on the road, afterward downloading segments from the Anchor web site and using Audacity to introduce sound effects, equalize the volume, and tie the segments together: exporting the final product as a single MP3 file. Again, no attachment to to software - it was what my friends were using and (again) free: so I ran with it. The reason I bring it up - part of my process is to produce the audio first: and from there, having the file, I can load that directly into the OpenShot project rather than using OpenShot, itself, to edit or produce the recording.

I do use OpenShot on the actual play and panel/interview style podcast episodes on the CWR YouTube channel - however, that's outside the scope of what I'm trying to accomplish with this guide.

Process

1. Launch OpenShot and Load Files

Launch the OpenShot editor and, in the Project Files tab, load up (associate, truthfully - it creates a pointer to the assets on disk rather than cloning them: but that's not important right now) the audio file to be wave-formed and any supporting icons or images (legalese, screen captures, icons and logos, ...) you want to include.

2. Drag the Audio File onto a Track

Drag and drop the audio file to be wave-formed onto a track of your choosing. If you have icons, logos, or other overlays, I recommend putting the audio track on the bottom, Track 1 - so that the icons, logos, etc. display above it. However - don't worry too much - you can drag and drop to a new at any time.

Note the position of the blue cursor on the track panel, or possibly the position of a little green cursor on the selected content. It's important that you're at the beginning of the selected segment - as if you're in the middle, there is a chance OpenShot will think the changes you're making should take effect at that point instead of the beginning - so, if you change colors, change widths, etc. - as I'm about to mention, it will do it (and the preview will show it) but then if you watch the video, it will fade to the default color, shrink to the default width, and so on, because it thought the thing you did was only for the place the cursor is. It automatically inserts a transition effect between the previous control point and the current one instead of applying the change to the whole element.

There is likely more science behind this - and someone more versed with the UI can speak to it more intelligibly - but I, being a rank amateur, have found a workaround - which I'm now telling you about: hoping that you may avoid the same hiccups I experienced.

3. Set Visual Properties of Audio Segment

Having dragged/dropped the audio segment, the left menu will - typically - automatically show properties of that segment. If it does not, you can right click the segment and select "properties" to bring it up. The three properties that I set are as follow:

1. Set Scale to "Stretch" This will make the waveform take up the whole screen rather than boxing itself in with margins.
2. Set Wave Color to taste. This is the color of the waveform that will generate. I use orange to run with the theme that the blog uses.
3. Set Waveform to "Yes". This actually generates the waveform and inserts it onto the studio deck.

Waveform created! You can now move on with other stuff you want to include.

When You Export

A note to make - and this is somewhat outside the scope of the current document, but something that is very very important - when editing audio: make sure you're exporting at a quality appropriate to your target media.

To export the file, once editing is complete, you select File, then Export Project, then Export Video.

This will bring up the "Export Video" dialog. On this dialog are two tabs: Simple and Advanced - representing properties and profile for the video. 

On the Simple properties, I always pick "Web" and "YouTube-HD." There are other options - BlueRay, Flikr, and so on - but I know I'm loading to YouTube: so YouTube-HD should be enough for me. The default value in the Profile drop down is "All" - do not use this. OpenShot will generate multiple files of multiple types destined to multiple players.

If you are releasing your podcast to DVD? Do it. Go right ahead.

But for most of us - a web profile optimized for the environment we're aiming to use as our destination consumer is a better bet.

Then, on the Advanced properties, you will need to scroll down and configure the Video Settings accordion. The video format will have been determined by your choice of destination on the Simple tab. For web videos, it tends to aim for MP4. This - or whatever the app decides - is fine: however, you're going to want to consider the Bit Rate / Quality value of the export you're making.

Note - like I have already said - I am a rank amateur.

While I understand what "bit rate" means and I know what the unit of measure represents - I am not a videographer, I am not a cinephile - so the impact of one bit rate over another, I don't know what it implies or entails for the experience of the end viewer. What I can tell you - the default value for YouTube-HD is 8 Mb/s - 8 Mb/s is entirely too high for a simple wave form - and will result in a multi-gigabyte file which will take literally half a day to export and another half a day to upload if you don't change it.

The same video file for the Warlock Tower: Part II actual play: exported as 8 Mb/s vs 2.

So: what is the right bit rate for me? If you have actual video in your video - set the Bit Rate / Quality to the greatest bit rate (usually available in the file properties of the segment you've included: same place as where you'd find the file name, file size, date created, and so on) among these. So, if you have three video segments - one at 1.5 Mb/s (which is about what OBS usually exports when I use it), one at 4 Mb/s, and one at 2.25 Mb/s - you would want to set this value to 4 Mb/s so as to prevent loss of quality on the larger segment. If you're good with quality loss on child segments? You're welcome to set it lower.

What about if I'm all audio all the time? Or maybe just audio with some images and minimal transitions? This use case is 90% of my use cases. To that end - I've found that 2 Mb/s maintains the crispness of the images and motion involved with transitions and moving waveform.

You Now Have a Companion Waveform Video!

Load 'er up and you're ready to go.

Hopefully this helps - hopefully it was as interesting as I had intended for it to be informative - and, if you're out there and you know better than I am what any of this all means, please pipe up and correct the errors and omissions that I've made. Alternatively, if there are other guides - more succinct or more verbose; more inclusive or more focused - feel free to link those too! I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing in the video universe and am open to learn!

Similarly - if there's something I've missed that you want to know - feel free to ask! I read all the comments - sometimes it takes a while to reply, but I will not forget to reply - and I'll do my best to swing back by, tell you what I know or look up what I don't, and keep things moving for anyone who is interested.

Thank you for reading - and delve on!