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

Processes in The Toxic Wood by Lazy Litch

This post is going to talk about RPG sandbox design. Sandboxes often have themes that makes them more than just a collection of disparate encounters. Some go further, in having a consistent process that effects all those within in a similar way. A module that I think does this well is The Toxic Wood by Lazy Litch. I’m going to suggest a variation on the approach in this hexcrawl, drawing on two theatrical plays as examples.

HELM RPG Review

I’m only likely to review games that I get excited about on this blog. Discovering Helm made me scrap my next planned blog post and write this review instead, pausing my own game design work to fully absorb its influence.

Helm conjures a variety of ideas to me. Its resemblance to the Middle Ages is more historically grounded than most, with popelike figures prominent in its timeline. There is a smattering of Mork Borg in its sense of impending doom, but this seems more end of days as depicted in real world theology. There are Warhammer’s brutal limb-specific combat injuries. But the whole thing feels more anti-imperialist, than some sort of doom metal glorification of death and destruction.

RPG Origins: Brecht’s He Said Yes/He Said No

There are a few reasons this Brecht play stands out to me for a post on the connections between RPGs and theatre. Firstly, it’s an important transitional work in the development of participatory theatre – a form that has much in common with RPGs. Secondly, it’s very short and freely available on the web, so short that you could probably read it the time it takes to read this blog post.

It doesn’t stop there. He Said Yes/He Said No (HSY/HSN) was itself adapted from a fifteenth century work of Japanese Noh theatre. That play, The Valley-Hurling, is even shorter (about 1000 words, available here). So you could read both, and see how made Brecht made this very conservative spiritual play “participatory”. And then separately, you could consider how Brecht’s participatory form relates to RPGs.

Obviously, you may not want to read or think about any of this. But the possibility of reading about a play and the play itself in a similar timeframe seems fairly rare to me.

Foreground Growth and Dialectical Growth

I’ve been catching up with posts on foreground growth at Bastionland.com. Foreground growth is an alternative take on character development put to work in RPGs such as Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and Cairn. It’s a principle I'm finding dovetails nicely with a materialist approach to gaming, serving to ground character development within the gameworld.

Foreground growth seeks to subvert the abstract style of class advancement you get in D&D. Instead of a magical metamorphosis occurring in downtime, development of your character is based on events in-play. For any character ability, players should be able to relay a story from a game session that explains its origin.

There is a good illustration of this in Cairn’s FAQs, in an extended descriptive example of gameplay. An unexpected encounter with a patch of bioluminescent water leaves a character with a foot that glows in the dark. This somewhat dubious ability isn’t found in a shopping list at the back of Cairn’s rule book, but emerges in the context of an adventure.

Fear my glowing leg

The Inverse of Cairn – Rogues as an Anti-Class

Cairn is a game by Yochai Gal that takes some of the principles I like about Into the Odd (ItO) and cranks them up a notch. I've described ItO as a materialist game in so far as the game world, via objects, plays the main role in defining your character. Cairn expands on this, making objects the basis to replicate the type of character differentiation you get in D&D.

Watching Yochai Gal’s actual play of Barrow of the Elf King showed me their commitment to objects defining characters. The adventurer’s gear is the basis for unlocking their backstory. The players are prompted to think about how certain items define them. Far more attention is paid to this, than some particularly low attribute rolls (I’ve argued for getting rid of attribute scores to emphasise this focus).

Cairn is self-described as a classless game. There is more role differentiation though than you get in ItO, as characters can effectively become “wizards” by filling their inventory slots with spell books. Unlike D&D, this doesn’t lock you into any career path. Characters can change their role in the party simply by switching out their inventories.

What then is the inverse of Cairn? Here I am going to suggest a way to define your character based on what you don’t carry. It’s empty inventory slots that influence your party role, rather than what fills them. As not having things is a pretty low bar to entry, I refer to this system as Beggar’s Choice.

Soulslike Bastionlike/Cairnlike Games

Someone may have solved the Soulslike TTRPG already. I might have missed it due to the sheer amount out of games out there (March seeing 2 separate Soulslike jams). To narrow down my search, I’ve been looking at an overlapping subset of these games – the Soulslike Bastionlike/Cairnlike Hack. That is, games seeking to emulate Dark Souls using Into the Odd’s auto damage rules as their basis.

When a Character Class is not a Class, but is in Fact an Institution

When I was at school, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones. Sadly, things didn’t quite work out that way. It turned out there wasn’t much call for whip wielding tomb raiders in the wider world. 

From childhood to adulthood, there felt like a trend in my career options - a move from the abstract to the specific. At childhood, “what you want to be” was a vague notion of what I liked doing. Career guidance at school presented general categories of job, becoming more specific career paths at college. Then "shit gets real" with an actual job – and it doesn’t get much more specific than that.



In RPGs, there seems a similar spectrum between the abstract and specific in “what you can be”. Classically though, there is a tendency to stop at the final stage - where a character class becomes a concrete role in the game world, rather than just a career guidance template. This post ties in with a collaborative project I am undertaking with Panic Pillow, where we attempt to represent the last bit in an RPG context.