NPC Malleability Compass

For me, determining NPC reactions in pivotal moments is one of the hardest things about running an RPG.  Putting me on the spot like this feels like my players’ favourite thing to do. One minute, they're asking an NPC to jump into a mysterious pool, the next they're hugging an opponent in an attempt to end a battle. I guess this is essentially what RPGs are about, trying to prod and poke the world rather than ride along as a passive observer.

As I often have to work out NPC responses spontaneously, I worry about these feeling inconsistent or inauthentic. But an equal concern is laziness in resorting to a generic caricature of an NPC, which gets inserted into every scenario regardless of context. Seeking a method to anchor these decisions in something more systematic, I came across this Late Night Zen blog post on the Big Five Personality Traits.

The Big Five Personality Traits are a psychological framework that offers quantifiable metrics for predicting behaviour. Of the five traits, 'Openness to Experience' and 'Agreeableness' particularly stood out to me. These seem especially useful in providing clear and actionable insights into how NPCs might respond under specific circumstances. In this blog post, I'll delve into how leveraging these two traits can guide GMs in crafting more consistent and strategically engaging NPC interactions.

Factionalism and Tribalism

I find the way factions are talked about in RPGs a bit odd.  In normal usage, a faction is a small, dissenting group.   Sometimes, the hobby does use the term this way.  The problem is when every and any social group is described as a faction.  The peasantry for example, hardly seem to fit the bill.  

Perhaps it’s just that “faction” has a wider application in RPGs than normal usage.  By the term, people really just mean a social group, applicable to both a band of mercenaries and a global empire (as in this post).  The issue then becomes one of oversimplification, when you end up treating every social group the same way.  

For me, this isn’t just semantics because I find that a genuinely factional setting makes for interesting gameplay. But I’ve come to realise, despite the hobby’s talk of faction play, that many old school adventures don’t actually contain that many factions. To explain this requires a bit more clarity about what I think counts as a faction.

Class Conflict as Faction Play

Module B4 The Lost City contains a distinctive version of faction play. Here, the idea of “class conflict” takes on a peculiarly RPG connotation. Faction membership in this adventure is primarily related to your character class. The Magi of Usamigaras for example, are magic users, who look down their noses at fighters.

Talk of class conflict in any other context, you’re probably thinking more of workers vs the bourgeoisie. This dimension of conflict tends to poorly represented in Old School games, which are more concerned with conflict between small groups than between broad sweeps of society.

Despite this, I do think the B4 module offers important lessons for dealing with social classes in an RPG context. This is by providing an objective basis for grouping characters that cuts through factional allegiances. I’ll expand on this idea in what follows, first looking at alternative ways social classes can be treated in RPGs.

Adventurers On Strike!

This is a summary of a play test of my adventure Blood in the Cracks, using my hack of the Cairn RPG Beggar’s Choice. The adventure tries to practice some of the materialist principle I’ve preached in prior blog posts.  I’ll try to highlight some of these connections.

The adventure has some spicy themes around class conflict and striking workers. Here is how I pitched it to players:

Roll for your lunch, ale, former job and starting ailment. Workers at a cinnabar mine are going missing. Your job is to ensure that output rates are not adversely affected!

The PCs responded to a job advert for guards at a cinnabar mine, recently reopened after a mysterious disaster caused 16 miners to go missing. Blame for the disaster had been put on rumoured monsters in the mine known as the Smoke Devils. There’s potential here for PCs to get involved in some radical organising against the mine’s management, but maybe they’ll end up siding with the bosses instead.

Bringing the Town to the Dungeon

In recent posts, I’ve looked at orientating an RPG setting around a dominant social process, such as imperialist expansion or economic crisis. Something I want to avoid is repeating this exercise for the dungeon portion of a setting. I.e. I don’t want there being a separate and distinct set of “material conditions” applying to the underworld, in addition to those on the surface. 

In short, I want to bring the social conditions of the town to the dungeon.

Part of this is about efficiency. But it also undermines the whole idea of there being a dominant social process, if only a portion of the setting is influenced by it. If I’m exploring economic crisis as a driver of revolutionary upheaval, I don’t want a random clan of mushroom men skipping around oblivious to this.



Weird Writer has put out a helpful blog post along these lines. In their campaign, they are looking to eliminate faction play as something “naturalistic” to the dungeon environment. I take this to mean “natural” to the underworld, as something apart from the surface setting. Part of Weird Writer’s solution is to unify the social context of surface world and underworld, importing the former into the latter:

“The megadungeon factions are merely the factions of the external world, erasing distinction between modes of play and spaces”

As this approach seems a good fit for my campaign goals, I will look at Weird Writer’s advice on achieving this.

Notes from a Materialist Game Session

This is a report on a recent adventure I played in run by Panic Pillow, based on an empire toolkit The 2nd Age we created together. I’m calling it a “materialist session” of the dialectical sort, where social processes drive a lot of what happens in the game. I can’t vouch that Panic Pillow would label it similarly, but I can speak for having this type of thing in mind when designing The 2nd Age.

Panic Pillow ran the game on a HUDless basis, meaning players don’t have access to stats or dice rolls (you can read more about it in Panic Pillow’s write up here). The 2nd Age document is also very light on rules, mainly consisting of some institutional “classes” and qualitative abilities. I’ve not been part of a session with so few explicit mechanics, and was interested to learn from the experience.

Central to The 2nd Age is the idea of character advancement being tied up with the agendas of institutions, and ultimately that of an empire. Social processes operating through the empire, such as expansionism, come to have a direct bearing on the characters. That’s the theory anyway, but I was keen to see how it worked in practice.

Running a Materialist Campaign

My last post looked at historical materialism as an aid to campaign creation. It suggested orientating a campaign around a dominant social process, as the driver of change. Part of this is about adding a further level of depth to a generic fantasy setting, without a corresponding explosion in the mental load involved.

I’ve previously talked about imperialism as an example of such a process. Here I’ll outline how this worked in my last campaign, with a consideration of economics as a central driving force.

Tailoring the Setting

Historically, generations can go by in which social relations are comparatively stable. While there will be underlying tensions in such times, setting a campaign during a period of revolutionary upheaval can help bring this to the fore. I’ve also found that certain scenarios can facilitate social processes playing out in a more restricted location.

Materialist Campaign Creation

Jon Peterson’s book The Elusive Shift captures some of the discussions around campaign creation that took place in the early days of the hobby. This serves as interesting context to Gary Gygax’s influential 1975 article on the topic. Something that stood out to me is its account of Tim Waddell’s division of campaign creation into 4 levels, also written in 1975.

Achieving the first 3 levels of Waddell’s levels is surprisingly simple. In fact, the quick start Gygax ’75 method blasts through all of them. Level 1 is just a dungeon, level 2 consists of a few dungeons and wilderness hexes; level 3 is having at least 1 town on top of this. Level 4 though is certainly a steep jump, consisting of:

“several completely mapped towns, plenty of interesting townspeople, rumours, legends, history, etc. A total fantasy world”

In 1976, Dan Pierson in Alarms and Excursions #14 was seeking something similar (p133):

“A campaign: thousands or millions of square miles of mountain, forest, plains, and ocean; the conflict of empires, or slow attempts to put small states back together after a great war … your characters struggling in a vast setting for power, wealth, good, evil or whatever.”

Waddell describes himself as having only achieved 2/3rds of level 4, showing it to be a vastly more challenging undertaking than the first 3 levels. He acknowledged that a level 4 world would require “hours upon hours of work by a ref with a reasonably fertile imagination”.

My previous post looked at features of the Gygax ’75 method that minimise the workload of campaign creation. This is partly through a free mix of gonzo elements, with only weakly conceived “external” connections between these. In my own campaign, I’d like some of the depth that comes with a developed “4th level” world. But I also want to have my cake and eat it, avoiding the accompanying explosion in workload.

It's nearly 50 years since these issues were raised, so perhaps the task has been “solved” already. What I’m going look at specifically is how a materialist perspective can contribute to efficient campaign creation. I’m posting this as part April’s blog carnival - hosted by Codex Anathema on the topic of On creating elements for a setting.

Gygax 75' - Under the Microscope

The Gygax ’75 challenge is a quick-start method to get a campaign running from scratch, based on Gary Gygax’s famous 1975 article. The challenge is to follow Gary’s advice and complete its 5 stages in 5 weeks, although Gary’s original article claimed this can be done in a week. This blog post will consider features of Gary’s method that makes this kind of speed possible.

In this post, I am going to lean into an atomistic interpretation of Gary’s method. Essentially, this means building up a setting from individual “atoms” which have only a weak, external relationship to each other (as discussed in this prior post). I’m not suggesting that this is the “correct” interpretation, or that a single, correct interpretation even exists. But it might be the most efficient way to follow the method.

Atomism in Old School Gaming

Travis Miller at Grumpy Wizard recently posted a summary of his article for the Gary’s Appendix II zine on Gary Gygax's principles for campaign creation. Travis refers to this as a bottom up sandbox approach:

A bottom up sandbox campaign is a structure where a referee creates a starting location with a homebase for adventuring and places for the characters to explore, fight monsters and get loot.

This is a principle that can be seen at work in the Gygax ’75 challenge, based on Gary’s famous 1975 advice for campaign creation. The “bottom” here is the starting dungeon level, intended as the starting point from which the campaign emerges.

Travis’s article got me thinking about the design process required to make a bottom-up campaign work. It’s not just that you start at the bottom, by creating low level encounters suitable for starting adventurers. The starting point is essentially a small individual “atom” of the game world, considered in isolation from the wider campaign setting.

Atomism was something I studied quite a while back in philosophy. As soon as I made this connection to RPGs, I started seeing atomism everywhere in “Old School” gaming.

What is Atomism?

Atomism is the principle that you can divide a whole into individual units and consider any one in isolation from the other units. At its extreme, any “atom” could be removed or replaced without affecting any other unit. Any relation it does bear to other atoms are entirely external to its identity.

An example is probably helpful here. For a husband to be a husband, they need to have a spouse. Taking their spouse away has a fundamental impact on their identity. But whether or not they wear brown shoes seems neither here nor there; they could just easily be in green shoes. It’s “external” relationships of this latter sort that characterise atomism.

What Kind of Folk Activity are RPGs?

A recent Questing Beast video has drawn a line in sand with respect to WOTC’s One Game Licence. A colloquial folk conception of D&D is contrasted with a corporately controlled singular vision of the hobby. When viewed as a folk activity, Ben Milton places RPGs in the same box as pass times such as knitting or painting.

Luka’s Wizard Thief Fighter blog has taken this thought further, considering the type of folk activity RPGs most resemble. Their answer is one I’d agree with, identifying RPGs as a type of folk performance art:

Some uncanny cross between improv theater, campfire ghost stories, literary jazz, and—in its heroic tropes—epic poetry and fairy tales

In this post, I wanted to flesh this out a bit more, and look at some parallels between RPGs and folk theatre. What I hadn’t expected was quite how close the connection between these forms can be in some instances.

Folk Theatre

Folk theatre is a very broad category. It can be frequently bawdy, crude and naïve, with a good number of fart jokes – qualities shared with some of the best RPG sessions.  Further superficial similarities with D&D are evident in this video, which could easily be mistaken for a LARP game.

The Worst Jobs in the Weird

I’ve been catching up online with the early 2000s UK TV series The Worst Jobs in History. It’s been useful inspiration for coming up with a character’s former job in a fantasy RPG setting. The presenter Tony Robinson tries out the jobs, showing that many had revolting or dangerous aspects that aren’t always obvious. 

I imagine many RPG creators use this or similar sources in compiling lists of background careers for character creation. This is judging by the regularity with which gong farmer turns up anyway. Most lists are rooted in factual examples from history, which inevitably leads to a quite vanilla flavour. Lists often only provide a job’s title, offering little opportunity to embellish on this.

A Dungeon Delver's Weird Packed Lunch

It seems a good idea for the first step of character creation to set the tone for what an RPG is about. In my game, I’ve made this a weird meal and ale generator, to determine your character’s packed lunch for dungeon delving. It’s system neutral, so maybe of use to others too. 

1	Turnip	Stew
2	Coral	Flesh
3	Runt	Custard
4	Whelk	Pasty
5	Roach	Cake
6	Bean	Scrape
7	Eel	Mush
8	Pond	Paste
9	Mutton	Pie
10	Toad	Flan
11	Tendril	Sandwich
12	Tongue	Steak
13	Pike	Soup
14	Pumpkin	Tack
15	Boar	Pottage
16	Wyrm	Cubes
17	Vine	Shavings
18	Bat	Jerky
19	Swamp	Biscuits
20	Mushroom	Curd