ruislip dissected

lol I did all this work for nothing, Luke already posted his hexfilling procedures on his blog go look at them and use them they're wonderful

I dissected the Ruislip demo of Luke Gearing's Wolves upon the Coast game to see what I could learn. I like the way the keys are written. It feels to me like it could have been generated using dice and random tables from something like OD&D, then fleshed out. I'm kind of enamored with the idea of randomly generating hexmap content, then going back and forming connection and loose reasons for things to be, and adding unstable situations for players to mess with.

the Ruislip map has about 46 hexes. Of that 27 are keyed (58.6%), 19 are empty (41.3%)

There's 9 towns (19.5%), 13 lairs (28.26%), and 5 set pieces (10.8%).

I'm counting a town as a mostly friendly place the players will come back to for rest, quests, equipment, resources. Lairs are places that are inhabited by enemies. Usually this means monsters, but I've included a few pagan settlements where they're acting like jerks and probably gonna be violent to the PCs. One of the lairs could also be used as a monster town if the PCs play their cards right. Set pieces are the other things - interesting locations with something to interact with that may or may not have treasure.

• You could get pretty close to those odds by by throwing a d6: 1 is a town, 2-3 is a lair, 4 is a set-piece, 5-6 is nothing (empty).

The Lairs are mostly one monster type. A few of them have 2 or 3 monster types. Some lairs have no treasure at all, but none of the sites have bullshit treasure (except the whale is a little bullshit, but it's a set-piece). None of the locations are really your typical dungeon delve where the players are crawling through a trap-infested pit, fighting different kinds of monsters and interacting with monster factions. The Orc and Goblin lairs come the closest to this, but those would be more heist-type or kill-em-all or deal-with-the-faction scenarios, not crawls. It's a classic 1975-style hexcrawl campaign, where the focus was on overland exploration and picaresque shenanigans Vs. traditional dungeon crawling.

of the 9 friendly human settlements 6 are villages (have less than 100 people) and 3 are towns (have people in the several hundreds). If you get a friendly settlement throw a d6, on 1-4 it's a village, 5-6 is a town.

It looks like village population was thrown on a d00 and town populations were d10x100.

Villages tended to have a higher combatant to villager ratio, around 24-30% of the population for each being soldiers.

Towns had comparatively smaller populations of combatants, about 12-15%, but they generally have fortifications.

Here's my notes on the hex keys:

02.05 Dunrick (set piece)
weird plant thing makes people sleep. turns them into wraiths

05.05 shoal (lair)
griffon nest, attacking griffon mama

01.16 burnt village (set piece)
a destroyed village with nothing

02.16 lair of sruthkin (lair)
dragon lair, treasure

03.07 ogre house (lair)
ogre lair, treasure

04.07 beached whale (set piece)
beached whale, some treasure

01.08 runestones (set piece)
fancy rocks with words

02.08 stamullen (town)
79 people, 15 skirmishers (18% combatants)
weird bee town with pagan influences. a situation to get involved in. a druid you could befriend and learn some spells from.

04.08 culemwardern (town)
600 houses, 40 footmen, 50 skirmishers, boats (15% combantants)
a situation involving griffons. druid influences, a few characters and their relationships

05.08 cloyne (town)
58 people, 19 skirmishers, 5 fishing boats (32% combatants)
pagan town, some situations

01.09 manticore cave (lair)
cool manticore lair and interesting situation, treasure

03.09 donenashoe (lair / monster town)
juggernaut, medusa, 198 goblins, some ruins and treasures.

05.09 belcarra (town / lair)
99 people, 80 footmen (80% combatants)
unpredictable pagan town

06.09 bitter druid (lair)
evil wizard lair, treasure

01.10 dorbog (town)
800 people, 50 armored foot, 50 skirmishers, boats (12% combatant)
some characters, leader, druids, situations, relations to other hexes, henchies

03.10 awoken king (lair)
mummy lair, a time-sensitive situation, treasure

05.10 stone circle (lair)
evil pagan wizard faction, spells and treasure to be had, a situation, a thread to some other hex and situation

06.10 pirates (lair)
pirates, a faction, some treasure

02.11 ogonnelloe (town)
80 people 24 skirmishers (24% combatant)
ruined fort, town, characters, a time-sensitive situation, a werewolf,

03.11 orc fort (lair)
80 orcs, orcs in vats, a fortification, treasure

01.12 st olham's monastary (town)
only monastary 96 monks, a faction, treasure, resource for PCs: sages / library

03.12 a dog (set piece)
cool a dog

05.12 blulach (town)
1000 people 20 armored foot 40 foot 60 skirmishers 20 horsemen boats (14% combatant)
fortification, market, alehouse, church, docks, characters with goals, relations to other hexes, quests, henchies, horse stables

06.12 barrows (lair)
ruined camp, hidden lair, wraith, zombies, treasure

02.13 nameless hemlet (lair)
abandoned town, merfolk, no treasure

04.13 gargoyles (lair)
gargoyles, no treasure, relations to other hexes

04.14 killucan (town)
43 people 5 foot 5 skirmishers 5 boats (23% combatant)
cattle town, fishing, a situation, relation to other hex, a mystery

Small games for small people

 

In a funk. Peeling all the onion layers back and discarding things that complicate my life. Taking a step back from OSR and d&d in general.

Lately I've been sort of working on two video games. Both of them take heavy cues from the original Legend of Zelda.

The first one is a first person dungeon crawler made in RPG maker. You make a party of 4 characters (two classes: fighter and mage). Open world. Explore around, talk to people, trade treasure for EXP. There's no "point" to the game, no storyline. Considering adding some basic win condition like "find princess Ophelia and ask her to come back home".

The second game is a first person walking simulator made in Unity where you sometimes fight creatures. Again, no point, no story. It's more like King's Field for the PS1 but more open ended and less fighting.

Basically I'm tired of things needing to be polished, needing to eat up your time, demanding money and attention. I feel like the OSR does a lot of that stuff. I'm more interested in searching out meaningless liminal freeware crap.

I want a game that feels like being a tiny beetle with a sword checking out stuff in a garden world, like an old log surrounded with wildflowers but zoomed in microscopically. Maybe you fight a centipede or a sparrow, but the game is really just "cool a flower" "here's a piece of paper with a poem" "sweet, a blueberry +1 hp"

When I was a kid I liked to lift up rocks and gaze with wonder at the sub-world I found there. A toad, a termite and an ant nest that share a few tunnels, rolly-polies, a few sprays of purslanes.

There's magic in smallness, modesty, and quiet wonder. No need to save dragons, fight kingdoms, or rescue wizards. When you get a magic sword +1 that's the best sword in the game. Max level is 5. Your hero is adventuring not because they're a social outcast but because they're curious.

As for tabletop RPGs I'm not playing anything at the moment, but I re-read the rules for Knave and I'm enthralled all over with the idea of a game that takes 1 minute to set up a character, is so pared down that next to zero explanation is required, and still has mechanics for getting better at stuff, and has no classes. Get the boring stuff out of the way so we can crawl around in holes and sometimes get a +1 thing.

Oh yeah, I'm fine with non-descript +1 swords and gaining a level means nothing more than a few more HP and +1 stat increase. 

Instead of d100 spells what if you had like d20 spells and in order to cast them you had to collect WHISPERS. What is a whisper? It's just a bit of lore or an interesting experience. You spend a whisper to cast a spell.

You learn a new spell/knack by being taught it by someone magical (a wizard, gnome, fox, midwife)

1. Heal d6+2 HP, or heal illness.

2. Cause.d6+2 damage.

3. Create an illusion.

4. Make somebody fall asleep.

5. Hide in shadows.

6. Foil a lock.

7. Find your way.

8. Make somebody else get lost.

9. Produce a day's worth of food.

10. Talk to an animal.

11. Mend something broken.

12. Calm fear or anger.

13. Change the weather.

14. Assume a terrifying aspect.

15. Be invulnerable for a few minutes.

16. Float.

17. Breathe underwater.

18. Create a wall of stone.

19. Generate a bright light.

20. Make an enemy into a friend.

on a small island with a fragile ecosystem

I don't get the crooked signs and things that look like people but really aren't. It's frustrating if I try to swim against the currents, thinking I have to swim in my own direction, but if I just let go and let myself be carried down river it frees up a large portion of my brain to do other things.

 Where is it gonna carry me if I just let go? It won't be right in this spot, it'll be in some different spot.
If I try to struggle and make the path, who am I struggling against?  Reality? Other people? Myself?
It never feels right, if I hold some idea in my head of where I want to go, then try to make a path that leads there. The parts never meet up. I end up with a bunch of places I wanna plug things, but no wires. The ropes don't stretch all the way. The pieces don't fit together. There's all these gaps where the juices leak out.

Sleeping outside is easy, in parks, in forests, among the rocks and dirt. In the trees on the side of the highway with lights and low rumbles tumbling by ever couple seconds, swollen clouds spitting now and then. Stumbling exhausted into bushes near a park, kicking all the shit and trash out of the way so I can have room to throw out my tarp and sleeping bag. Listening to some tweaked out homebum screaming while I fall asleep.

I enjoy having nothing to do, or getting around to the shit that needs done on my own time. I like having no expectations, not needing to worry about anything. Worrying and struggling seem like a waste of effort, when you can just wait around until its time to do stuff instead.

Calling strangers on the phone to discuss made up stuff like bills or credit or interviews, with its maze of invisible rules, is agony. I get so tired of it that I just decide to crash through the walls blindly not even thinking what the next step might be, let the chips fall where they may, and usually things turn out better that way. I have to fool myself to get there, though. Distract my mind for a second then jump.

I'm fine growing my own food, I'm fine pulling food out of dumpsters, fermenting veggies, salting meat, baking sourdough bread, cooking over a fire, I'm fine stealing food.
I'm happy begging, I'm okay sometimes working if the work doesn't demand too much of my brain function. I'd rather be cooking or sewing or building for friends and trade, but you make due with what you can get.

There's nothing wrong with being lazy. People are supposed to be lazy. Ancient man goofed off and did whatever seemed like the thing they should do all day and it worked out for them. Doing that in the real world works out too. You end up getting exactly as much as you need and no extra. If you don't need much then it doesn't take much effort and you might even be able to put a little away for down the road. If you store up a bunch of biosurvival things (money, friends, favors etc) then you have surplus you can coast on. If everybody still lived this way we probably wouldn't have all the excess technology stress and diseases we do.

There's forces that pressurize every system, and things usually want to stabilize at a place of equal pressure. Think of osmosis in cells, or magnetism, or gravity, thermodynamics, or population ecology, or lift on an airplane wing. You can spend energy to push yourself up that hill, but then coast down. If you put in a little energy on that coast down you can manipulate it so that you don't have to spend as much energy coasting up into that next hill. You can find a groove and surf on your input/outputs. Balancing work and play until they become synonymous, like halves of the same whole, ya dig?

People's names fly through one ear and out the other the minute they say them. Probably because I'm too busy being anxious and trying to make all the right gestures and facial expressions to not appear like a robot. Knowing this about myself I usually tell people my name several times during an introductory conversation, and then again at the end. I don't know if it works, but I feel like they don't usually forget my name.

I still can't shit

The days drift by in both agonizing slowness, and with bewildering speed. My waking life seems one long stretch of empty corridors, while the past recedes in piles of lost years. The mind is a maze without end, furious piles of stares and locked windows painted black, and jammed doors that must be forced and only open onto more stairs and frantic nests of empty rooms.

I can't escape from it. When I'm alone, I'm lonesome. Around people, I'm practically paralyzed in the fear of making social faux pas. Or else I dare to make a fool of myself, only to end up regretting it.

I'm disappointed every day I wake up. By noon I feel totally reborn and powerful, ready to take on the world in all its challenges and ring every drop from life. By 3:30 PM the crushing weight is back.

If everything is doomed to death then life itself is an absurdity. Anything can be done because we're free from consequences. This logic works in the world of fantasy, but not in the world of flesh and blood. Adventures are filled with mostly waiting. The worker is the victim of a vampire, whether he knows it or not. The difference is that the ignorant one isn't aware of his pain. The worker who can feel his blood being drained but is powerless to stop it is at a much worse place.

Unless he can find a way to rebel, and stay there. Or otherwise weaken the vampire's grasp.

I don't know how to do that. I tried living without a house, traveling the country. I tried making friends and building something. Each endeavor burns and crashes with no satisfying resolution.

++++++

Upon writing all this out I can even devise arguments against each and every statement. I've grown and developed into a totally different person in the few years I've been on the road. I've learned social skills, I've developed a form of self-esteem, I've destroyed and replaced just about every barricade to my development. I've learned to survive on nothing, how to manage money, how to let go of painful emotions.

The insidious power of depression is that it makes you forget the times you weren't depressed. It never leaves, though. It's always waiting around the corner, to catch you alone. I need a bell and a hammer to crash away it's intrusions. Maybe that's what art & writing is for. Just clench and squeeze and fuck out all the words, all the feelings, all the terror and useless crap and wad it all up and burn it.

There's a fine balance to be struck between effort and no effort. If you push too hard or try to force it the whole thing stops up. This goes for everything. If you let your eyes kind of cross and loosen your grip a bit and steer intuitively, using your peripherals to guide you, it becomes easier.

You have to push gently.

My lungs hurt.

++++++

The biggest predicament is that I struggle with what it means to feel. I want to be able to feel with my whole body, to know deep in my bones a resonating vibration. I want to smile uncontrollably, to laugh until it hurts, to have my skin crawl, a cool breeze on a warm evening to bristle my hair. I want fear to strike like a bolt from the blue. I want icy chills, and grumbles, and triumphs, and passion, and fervor, and humility, and idolatry. I want to be stunned senseless, struck speechless, enraptured, nurtured. I want the world to be real, to affect me as I effect it.

How do I find feeling? Inside me there is only cold dull grey static, loud as the pounding of the ocean, that drives away life. There is a bruised and swollen ache which isn't so much a feeling as a smothering voidness. I can feel the lack of feeling, a clenching in my guts, the sinking of my shoulders, an ache in my neck, the shortness of my breath. I can feel my body full of cysts and tumors, my spirit malignant and infected, my soul shriveled and fearful. I can awaken to the feeling of an exposed insect in the bright light of god's damning gaze.

The nerves are dead.