Campaigns and Dungeons & Dragons

This is the fourth post in a series of post where I explore the subtitle of Dungeons & Dragons as a means of empowering hobbyists to start their own Medieval Fantasy wargames campaigns.

The previous post was on "Rules," this post is on "Campaigns," or, wargames campaigns.

Wargames Campaigns

Napoleon didn't just fight one battle. The Napoleonic wars were not won by one battle. In actual warfare, often, many battles are pitched as part of an overarching war to attain victory. And not until many battles are fought does a victor emerge. A general, or a king, goes on a war campaign. And this campaign consists of a series of battles that are strategically designed and carefully operated in order to gain victory.

This series of connected battles, towards the end of winning the war, is called a campaign or a war campaign. Likewise, wargamers who are interested in playing out historical wars also become interested not just in playing-out one given battle but in putting a series of related, connected battles together where the outcome of one battle affects the setup of the next battle. They're going to string these battles into a campaign. And this is what is called a wargames campaign.

The key feature of a wargames campaign is that more than one battle is set up and run as a game. But these separate games are connected to each other and the conclusion of one wargame has an affect on the setup of the next wargame much like how, in a real war, multiple battles are pitched before victory is clear.

Wargames campaigns can be done at very high levels of abstraction or at a very detailed level depending on the interest, time and energy of the wargaming group. But wargames campaigns require a different set of rules than those needed to resolve battles with miniatures on a table. You need one set of rules for how to determine the outcome of one given battle on a table of miniatures. But in order to connect the outcome of that battle with the next battle you need an overarching set of rules that logically and coherently connects disparate battles together. You need a set of campaign rules.

Map Campaign

There are many different ways to set up a campaign but I'm going to explain one particular kind called a "map campaign." Map campaigns are one of the first and earliest forms of wargames campaigns. In this kind of campaign you take your wargaming table and let's say that it is four feet wide and eight feet long. And you use it on, say, a scale of one inch for 10 or even 100 yards. Then you get out a very large sheet of paper, and a ruler, and you divide along the top every four inches. Then you divide along the side, every eight inches. So you’ve divided this very large piece of paper into separate rectangles, four inches by eight inches. Then each four by eight-inch rectangle represents one battle ground on which you could set up a wargame.

Now you take this sheet of paper, that has been divided into four by eight rectangles and you either overlap that on top of an actual historical map, to scale, or you invent your own situation and imagine an area and some terrain.

You might start one army in one town, and the other army in another town, and then the referee would ask the players for their orders. The players give very detailed written orders to the referee. This is a complex situation where ideally a given player is unaware of the other players’ orders until executed. This is a case where it not only helps but might possibly be necessary to have a referee. The referee reads the orders and determines for example, whether any two armies have sighted each other.

If two opposing forces have met, then you set up your game table for a miniature wargames battle and resolve the conflict using the rules for a wargame that your group had already been using. Upon the conclusion of the conflict you note the outcome of the battle and decide what that means going forward as the campaign continues. This map, then, becomes the means for piecing together all of these different possible battles that could be pitched on your gaming table.

Dungeons & Dragons as a Map Campaign

In Dungeons & Dragons, in the third Little Brown Book, “The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures,” Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson suggest that you need a map of the immediate terrain surrounding the entrance to the underworld. That map of the overall area would have suggested to fellow wargamers something like a map campaign.

Keeping this in mind helps us to remember what the subtitle meant when it said that these were rules for a wargames campaign. The word "campaign," has taken on new connotations in the on-going growth of Role Playing Games (RPGs). But the original sense of the word was that of logically connecting wargame battles into a single campaign. The rules for the resolution of combat were one game. The rules for connecting the wargames together and including things like supply chain, economics, population, recruitment, leadership, political powers, espionage, diplomacy, and the like, were a different game or even set of games. Remembering this clears up some confusion for folks that come to the original rules only familiar with RPGs that see themselves as a single unified rule-set.

The rules for resolving an individual battle are different from the rules that connect particular battles to one another in a coherent campaign. If your group were conducting a wargames campaign, just as your group over time may have developed its own rules for resolving individual battles, so too over time your club might have developed rules for a campaign so clear and coherent and so seemingly realistic to the historical period you were trying to game, that you might think, "Hey, this is shareable too."

So sometimes wargamers would publish not just rules for resolving battles but they would also publish rules for how to set up a war games campaign. One of the most famous of these is by Donald Featherstone. Another good example is C. S. Grant’s Wargames Campaigns. One really famous set of rules for wargames campaigns relevant to the topic of Dungeons and Dragons is Tony Bath’s, "Setting Up Wargames Campaign." Tony Bath deliberately chose a fantastical medieval wargames setting for his campaigns for the simple reason of not having to worry about getting the history perfectly correct. Wargamers were used to these two aspects of their hobby, battle resolution and campaign organization, being published separately from one another.

Rules complete as rules for campaigning

This is what Gygax and Arneson were doing when they first published Dungeons & Dragons. They were not publishing a comprehensive rule-set that included both campaign rules and combat resolution rules. They were publishing what it would take to coordinate other rules together into a campaign.

The booklets themselves often refer the reader to other rules, like Chainmail, or the boardgame Outdoor Survival. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson understood that any rule-set for resolving medieval warfare would do the trick. What Gygax and Arneson were offering were not so much the rules for running individual wargames battles, although some outlines of how to do so were suggested. They assumed that your local group had rule-sets available for resolving given wargames, so, instead, they were offering rules for how to string together a series of wargames into a campaign. The rules are not incomplete for a wargames hobbyist. They give everything needed to start one's own medieval fantasy wargames campaign as an amateur hobbyist.

We now have everything in place to make sense of the subtitle: "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns." I hope I have shown how helpful understanding the subtitle is to understanding what Gygax and Arneson were up to, and towards understanding what the original publication called "Dungeons & Dragons" has to offer -- and what it does not. I my posts inspire some readers to use the guidelines suggested in Dungeons & Dragons to launch their own, unique, medieval fantasy wargames campaign. 

Now that I have concluder this reflection on the subtitle, I am set for a two  part series on how we have come by the supertitle itself: Why "Dungeons & Dragons"? Once we have this in place even more will start to make senes about the original published rules for medieval fantasy wargames campaigns.

Fight on!

Setting-up a Medieval Fantasy Wargames Campaign

In a previous post, I made the point that Dungeons & Dragons (original) is an approach to setting up medieval fantasy wargames campaigns. Back in the day, folks within the miniature war-gaming hobby would share their rules for how to resolve individual combats. In addition to that, they would also sometimes share rules for how to string together a series of table sessions into a coherent war campaign. In these documents, they would not focus on rules for the wargames themselves -- they assumed they were writing to wargamers who already knew such rules and probably already had their own house rules as a local, hobby, gaming group. Instead, the focus was on how to make the games link to each other, reasonably, in order to game a "realistic" war campaign, and not just individual, disparate battles.

As I thought about these things while writing that post, I began to imagine what their pamphlets might have read like if Gygax and Arneson had written them in a more colloquial style that showed very clearly that they were talking to other wargamers about what had worked for them, what they had found to be fun. Because that was in fact what they were doing. It is just that it can be lost on many of us when we come backwards to the pamphlets from complete-rules-style RPG books rather than forward from their actual wargame hobby context. I offer my imaginings, below. The actual work would be a bit more detailed, but still short enough. I leave a lot that would be fleshed out as parenthetical summaries of what I imagine they would include in the actual text. Who knows, maybe someday I'll write this whole thought experiment up?

________

Dungeons & Dragons, or
How to Set-up a Medieval Fantasy Wargames Campaign

These booklets are a set of ideas for how to turn an ordinary wargames campaign into a Sword and Sorcery wargames campaign! As with any suggestions for setting up a wargames campaign, these brief booklets give some ideas and descriptions of what has worked for us in our own campaigns. Experiment with it and have fun. Always make it work for your local group.

As with any wargames campaign, you will need to assign sides. In simple fantasy, it is usually good enough just to have "good guys" and "bad guys." But, following Anderson and Moorcock, and hints at such in Tolkien, we have named our major sides "Law" and "Chaos." Monsters, fantasy figures and characters in general fall along such lines. Of course, brute beasts don't fall along any particular line and characters may choose to "opt out" and remain neutral. (Here would follow the list of fantasy creatures by line up, or what would come to be called "alignment.")

Choose rules for resolving combat and figure out a way to factor in the fantastic. We recommend Chainmail, especially with its fantasy supplement and man-to-man rules. We tried to make combat rules and fantasy creatures match up by having monsters and characters act equivalent to a certain number of figures in a typical wargame battle. We talk in terms of "hit dice," to make sense of this. Since we assume that you are already an experienced wargammer (since you are interested in reading pamphlets about setting up an entire campaign), we trust that you are familiar with this way of thinking of these things, so you get the point. But, real quick, here is an Alternative Combat resolution to consider (here they present the "Target-20" method they introduce by means of the "Alternative Combat" tables and the concept of "Armor Class" borrowed from naval wargaming).

Okay, now here is a fun new idea: what if players not only played as "generals" over armies, but actually played individual characters within the game-world? Characters can fall into different "classes," much like then different classes of troops in a typical wargame. Make sure they are different from each other, with clear cooperative properties, so that they can work well together as a Sword and Sorcery style adventuring party.

Here are some ideas for character classes: Start with the proverbial fighting-man. Next would be magic-users. Gygax doesn't much like the idea of magic-users being playing characters, since they are usually the bad-guy in Sword and Sorcery. However, some players may want to play chaos. And you could have "good" magic-users in your campaign. So you may want them to be a character class as well. Also, we had someone who wanted to play a "Van Helsing" type character, so we introduced the "cleric." They are kind of like a crusader. They can force undead to check morale (usually, as they are "undead," they would not check morale). We call this "turning." Clerics also have some of their own kind of spells that are a bit more religiously miraculous, like healing.

Don't forget standard fantasy races such as elves, dwarves and hobbits. Give them descriptions that match what you like from fantasy you have read and that you would like to incorporate into your campaign. Here is what we've done. (Here would follow race descriptions.)

Here is another cool idea: when you play as a general of armies, you usually start with a point-buy system for hiring your starting armies. Then, through play, you can gain more points to buy more troops, thus increasing your army, etc. Well, we thought of a cool way to make this work with players playing characters at a one-to-one scale. We call it "experience" and we measure it in "experience points." Just as armies have tactical goals, Sword and Sorcery characters have the goal of treasure extraction and "looting." So we have developed a way of matching the value of a treasure safely extracted by a character to a character's "experience points." Successful victories also grant some experience. These experience points then accumulate and grant the character advancement in the game-world. We use the term "level" to describe this game-world advancement. Each time a character gains a level they gain in the respective capacities and advantages of their particular class, just like armies growing more powerful in a regular wargames campaign. Here are some ideas. (Here would follow the tables for advancement, XP, HD, spells, etc.)

Now here are some ideas about how to incorporate magic-users and their spell-casting abilities into a wargame context that keeps things fair but still "wonderful." You will find your own way to work this stuff out for your campaign. (Here is where spell lists and descriptions would go.)

Oh, and to make sense of non-combat related eventualities, Arneson borrowed from Naval Wargaming the mechanic of "saving throws." Much like determining how much hull-damage a ship has taken from, say, an underwater mine, you can use saving throws for resolving how much damage a character takes from, say, falling down, drinking poison, or being hit by a magic-user's fireball! We have also found it useful for determining if a character or creature has been affected by a spell or not. As characters advance in level, eventually their chance to save increases as well.

Another thing that we discovered to be really fun is what came to be an emphasis on the more exploratory aspect of the game. Since we have allowed a 1:1 correspondence between player and in-game character, we can set up scenarios where characters explore an unknown, usually interior and often underworld environment. Think of this in terms of Stratego or Battleship, but even more complex and fascinating as the players will need to map a potentially elaborate underworld setting. This could be maze-like or labyrinthine. Or you could have secret spaces only discovered when they have circumnavigated it.

There are a lot of possibilities here. You can set up standard things from Sword and Sorcery that often fall outside the purview of standard wargames. For example, you can have tricks and traps and puzzles that the players can solve by means of their characters interacting with the environment. Really the sky is the limit here.

We have found that the combination of the 1:1 scale and an emphasis on underworld exploration has been absolutely amazing in giving our campaigns a real Sword and Sorcery feel!

Here are some ideas for monsters. We take advantage of the use of Hit Dice to represent relative fighting power and ferocity. Other natural and magical capacities can then be factored in. We describe below what we have developed for ourselves. Again, look at our examples and then work out what would work best for you in your campaign. (Here would follow the monster list and descriptions.)

Here are some ideas for treasure. Look to our examples and work out things for your campaign. (Here would be the tables for deterring treasure, magic items and their descriptions.)

Many wargames campaigns are "map campaigns," and that is what we suggest here. The scope of the game is infinite, but just for starting out we recommend a map of a local area with several opportunities for treasure hunting in dangerous and "underworld" environs, perhaps with one big dungeon nearby. This dungeon would comprise many subterranean levels that the players can easily begin exploring before branching out into the wider world.

Start with at least three levels to this main dungeon (in case they decide to go pretty deep from the start). As they explore, you can continue to add more levels to the dungeon and expand your map to include wider kingdoms and wildernesses -- even a whole fantasy world, eventually, if you want to.

Oh, and if you find your players suddenly want to strike out into the wilderness for an off-hand adventure, Arneson has found it really fun and easy to use the Outdoor Survival board (Avalon Hill). Here are some ideas for random encounters and what to do with some of the symbols on the board in order to render them a bit more like exploring in a medieval fantasy wilderness. (Here follows the suggestions for castles, random encounters, jousting, etc.)

Be sure to keep things fresh. This is fantasy so go crazy! For example, players might think that they have "cleared" an area only to see that a bunch of orcs or goblins have made their home there -- perhaps, very thankful for their newly cleared-out digs!

Most importantly, keep it fun and make it your own. Let us know what you come up with! We always improve as referees by hearing about what other referees are doing with their local clubs.

Fight on!
_________

If you have a medieval fantasy wargames campaign that sounds like something inspired by the above -- no matter what mechanics you are using for resolving encounters -- you are playing "original" Dungeons & Dragons. So, again, I will say:

Fight on!

Perilous Realms Campaign World Map

Above is my campaign-world map for the Perilous Realms medieval fantasy wargames campaign.

The Perilous Realms are my name for my own amalgamation of what I, in my limited knowledge, can amalgamate of various civilizations abstracted and anachronistically represented at their various heights but frozen somewhere between about 500 and 1,000 A.D. So, there is Aegyptus, but also the Holy Empire (Byzantium). There is Parthia (Persian), the great Central Kingdom (China), the Empire of the Sun (Japan), Shangri-La, Wudang, Old Araby, the Paladin Duchies of Westernesse, Logres, Libya, Nubia, Nod, and various wildernesses - even the Land of the Lost.

I base the map on some of the old Mappe Mundi of the ancient world, such as the following.

These were more detailed and "realistic" versions of the more abstract and theological Mappe Mundi that represented the three known continents in geometric and cosmographic relationship to each other. Note that these maps are "oriented": east is at the top of the map, as it is where the Sun rises.

Fight on!

Temple of Zaphron, Goddess of Frogs

Encounter Table d6

1-3    Kobolds      1d6

4-5    Skeletons    2d6

6       Merak

Merak the Unexpected

MU4 AC9 MV9

Sleep

Polymorph

Lightning

Phantasmal Forces

Kobolds

HD1/2 AC7 MV6

Formation: Shields, Spears, Darts

Skeletons

HD1/2 AC7 MV6

Shields, helmets, spears

Reassemble unless burned / crushed

1 Treasure Chamber

Pit trap, 10' immediately before the door

Treasury

Chest, Treasure, Small, poison-needle on latch

1,500gp steel ring with adamant stone; weight 100pcs

2 Medium Diamonds 100 each (200 total); 4 Small Diamonds 50 each (200 total); 6 Small Rubies 50 each (300 total); 2 Small Pearls 50 each (100 total); 4 Small Sapphires 50 each (200 total); 2 Small Opals 50 each (100 total); gems total value 1Kgp; weight 200pcs

300gp; 400sp; total pcs value 500gp; weight 700pcs

Total value: 3Kgp

Total weight: 1Kpcs

Armory

Shield +1

Chainmail +1

Helmet +1

Sword +1: Windbiter (Common)

    Lawful

    Int: 8 Ego: 3, Empathy

    Detect Magic

    Detect Metal & What Kind

Dagger +1

Bow +1

Potion of Heroism

Potion of Invisibility

Scroll Protection Undead

2 Trick Exit Room

Two levers to left of large locked double doors

Lever Left Up: Green

Lever Right Up: Blue

Left  Down / Right Up: Green Lightning bolt

Left up / Right Down: Door open + Green Lightning bolt

Left Down / Right Down: Door open (no lightning)

3 Hidden Treasure Vault

Bucket, Acid, above secret door: avoidable if look up before entry

Chest, Treasure, Locked, Large

5K Brass Urn Studded with Tiger’s Eyes; weight 100pcs

Large Emerald 500gp; 4 Medium Diamonds 100each (400gp total); 2 Medium Topaz 50each (100gp total); total gems value: 1Kgp; weight 70pcs

1Kgp; 2Ksp; 4Kcp; total pcs value: 3Kgp; weight 7Kpcs

Total value: 9Kgp

Total weight: 7,170pcs

4 Connection

Empty: straw, mud

Merak flees through this room, gone by the time PCs unstick the door.

5 Tapestry Hall

Tapestry of Frog God Zaphron shooting green lightning bolts.

Unknown language says poem about Zaphron.

6 Merak’s Study

Merak (see above) attacks (if party noisy, Protection, from scroll, before arrival):

Sleep; Polymorph; Lightning; Phantasmal Forces

Leaves immediately upon taking damage: skips to phantasmal force as distraction; door stuck behind him.

Desk, chair, chez lounge, ash tray with cigar, side table with brandy snifter and glass; on Desk:

Parchment, ink-well, quill

lvl1 spell book, complete

Scroll Protection Magic

Scroll, Arcane: Detect Evil, Wizard Lock, Dispell Magic

Books, 3: Astrologous Minor, Herbiary Infernum, Amphibicon

Map to treasure: 3. Hidden Vault

7 Sanctuary of Zaphron

Door behind idol, stuck

Idol of hollow clay painted gold with two emerald eyes:

1K; 1K “The Eyes of Zaphron;” Magnetically attracted to one another; weight 100pcs each, 200pcs total

Pedestal triggers successive portcullises if treasure disturbed

Treasure chest with giant emerald latch serves as contribution basin

1K emerald latch (part of cask)

3K Frog Crown: Green Gold with Aquamarines; weight 100pcs

300gp; 300sp; 300cp; total pcs value: 525gp; weight 900pcs

Total value: 6,525gp

Total weight: 1,200pcs

Brazier of green fire

Doors, double, stuck

Portcullises left and right, two

Top left: empty; Bottom left: kobolds; Top right: skeletons; bottom right: empty

Note:

Just ran this for a middle school D&D club. I started them off in the main sanctuary, having already triggered the trap with kobolds bearing down. Instant combat. Had their attention! We rolled character information as we needed it! (I'll post how I did that in next post.) Next session: they explored and found the treasures / tricks. Final session: extraction with encumbrance issues (lucky kids had no random encounters!) Then we discussed character creation.

So, I went "backwards," and now they are hooked!

Next up: referees Workshop: Part I. Presenting; Part II. Preparing.

Fight on!

A Dungeon a Day Challenge

I found these great composition notebooks. They have graph paper on the top half of each page and lines on the bottom half. These beg to be used for dungeons, levels and lairs: map on top, key on bottom!

I've stalled out on my mini module project to do the paralysis that goes with perfectionism.

So I've decided to challenge myself. I am going to draw and key a dungeon (level or lair) a day! I already did yesterday and it was a lot of fun.

I really do not enjoy mapping (I do love keying, though!). So this is a challenge to build my chops and perhaps break through a barrier that is keeping me from enjoying something fairly essential to the game. Again, I think it is my perfectionism that keeps me from just doodling at maps. 200 sheets of paper in a cheap composition notebook should help!

I will share what I want to, when I want to, without any blog performance pressure! But I will update every now and then to let you know I am still going on this.

Perhaps this will get me closer to what I meant by the mini modules. And it may help me get back to that project.

Anyone care to join me?

Perilous Realms: Where the Mythic Underworld Meets Demon Haunted Lands

Image of Map by Dyson Logos, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

One of the directions my refereeing thinking has been traveling recently (and assumed in my proposal for "mini-modules" over at the Ruins of Murkhill forum) is something like the following for a setting:

I want to combine Wayne Rossi's account of the "Original D&D Setting" of The Outdoor Survival Board (or some equivalent wilderness) as a "Demon Haunted Land" with Philotomy's Musings about the "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld." I imagine doing so by filling up the wilderness with lairs and "dungeons." So, if literally using the OS board, the difference would be between standing deer (lairs = 20) and crouching deer (dungeons = 9).

The lairs and first levels of these dungeons would be "mini-modules" of 1 to 3, but preferably only 1 "level." Clear a lair, and they are cleansed. They are irruptions of chaos in what should be lawful, fay lands.

The "dungeons," on the other hand, would be a lair that also served as a portal to other dungeons and lairs - perhaps even rolled randomly at the table! (So there would need to be a lot of prep for all the different lairs - hence my desire to "crowd source" this one, see above.)

If one departed the entrance/exists of a deeper lair or dungeon one would exit at its actual location in the wilderness. If it were a lair, there would be no way back to that particular magical configuration of levels. If it were a dungeon, upon entrance, the ref would roll randomly again, giving another, more than likely quite different configuration of "levels." So long as one stayed in the dungeon, the current "stack" would remain intact. Dungeons could not be so easily cleared as independent lairs. Dungeons are irruptions of the underworld. The only way to "clear" a dungeon hot-spot would be after each possible random lair was cleansed. Then cleansing each dungeon. So there is a kind of "end-game" per wilderness: complete cleansing and restoration to wonder, fay and law.

The "mythic underworld" itself usually represents some odd, enchanted, diabolic "subsuming" of the various lairs and dungeons throughout the wilderness. Going on this, I would also assume that each dungeon and lair was really the chaotic corruption of some previously lawful or at least wonderful thing. So, for example, an orcan lair would probably be the defile of a previously beautiful elven stronghold. Goblins subsume something dwarven. Trolls something Entish, etc. This would explain why so many powerful and good lawful items are down in the underworld. Chaos herself is "eating up" all these good items in a mad babbling attempt at domination. The adventurers purge the bowels of the earth and reclaim the buried antiquities.

I love the way this contributes to a more fantastical dream-like encounter. Just as in dreams where you can walk from one familiar place and suddenly find yourself somewhere completely different. Imagine a "haunted house" level where, out the windows, one saw a grey-blue dim-lit land of wandering specters and forlorn ghosts. If the windows are opened or one walks out the doors - you are suddenly in the wilderness - somewhere else!

So I also feel motivated to key each lair or dungeon for normal, heroic and super heroic levels. That way one is ready to go for your given party, even if randomly rolling the next "level."

You could do this lots of different ways. I think I would put a limit on any given "stack." No more than 3 lairs. But I would probably just stick to the entrance and one other random lair or dungeon lining up beneath it.

But under any given dungeon configuration the "third level" would be a cavernous mushroom forest of clean-up crew and purple worms.

Then, once the hidden entrance was discovered, one would finally come, one more level down, to Hell itself: "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here." The "Hell" level would be the main lair of Chaos' henchmen doing all the subversion of law and eruption of chaos throughout the good fay wilderlands. Some kind of giant's hall, like Dyson Logos has made, would be perfect. Here the highest level baddies would be met! This may be the best way finally to purge the dungeons themselves - clearing this local hell. The key or a very important campaign artifact may be necessary to bring down there and shut down operations - all foretold in some ancient, riddle-like oracle.

This would be a vast project. But it seems to me immensely rewarding both for the referee and the players.

Fight on!

Fantasy Maps (B2 Players Map!)

Well, things have changed and developed much since my last post. In time I will return and attempt a little catch up. In the main, I post and discuss things on the various fora out there, because I get more immediate and helpful feedback. Blogging is a pretty silent thing. Find me and talk with me on these two fora:

Finarvyn's Original D&D Discussion

&

ThePerilousDreamer's OD&D Campaigns and House Rules Discussion

But I want to share some pictures with my forum buddies and I can't upload them to the fora unless they are somewhere on the inter webs: so here goes!

My players have found, so far, three treasure maps. So I decided to make good on it and deliver. I found some cool map paper at my FLGS. I also found this cool book online, "How to Create Great Fantasy Maps," from Draken Games. So I decided to put it to use!

This is my fantasy map version of B2, the Keep on the Borderlands. Because if is fantasy in style, with very little detail, it felt appropriate to share with players. They still have to find everything!

This is the version I gave my players. I call the K on the B, "Agnor Keep and Town," and the borderland is "Agnor March."

Here is the wilderness to the east of Agnor March. It is the Fay Wild of Dun Kells! (My main developed campaign wilderness setting.) I made a detailed hex map for myself. Again, this is the fantasy one for sharing with players. (Special thanks to the Mrs. for her fabulous elven-like hand writing!)

And, finally, here is the map I gave them for the entire "campaign world." It is an ancient medieval mappe mundi. Dun Kells is somewhere in Europe!

Share and enjoy!

Risk, house ruled, for a Dun Kells campaign war

I am getting ready to run a play-by-post game over at "ThePerilousDreamer's" new forum that discusses Campaigns and House Rules for OD&D.

I am psyched. It will be at the highest level, "campaign level warfare." The players will act in the persons of the characters who will be the monarchs of each major kingdom: Byzantia, Germania, Iberica, Gallica, Logres and Slavia. I will be working on rolling up around level 10 characters for each of those roles and sharing them with the players soon. Above is my "map" for this game. I designed it in a more abstract, "London Underground Map" style to make connections clear and because I am no artist. I think it is usable.

The main game mechanic will be that of Risk combined with a kind of Diplomacy-style of play. Players will publicly announce publicity and "spin" from their monarchs on the public boards. They will negotiate treaties and trades by PMs (that include me as ref). They will issue orders for each of the main phases of play to me, simultaneously, by PM.

So, the main play phases will be:
1. Negotiate and trade
2. Reinforce
3. Attack
4. Fortify

They will only know what their armies immediately hold and immediately neighbor. They will have to trust what their fellow players tell them or send out spies for any other knowledge. I will keep campaign level accounts vague for that reason.

For reinforements, they will get one army for every two realms they control, rounded down, never less than two. They will get "kingdom" bonuses when they control every realm in a given kingdom: 2 for Iberica, 4 for Byzantia, 3 for the rest. I will call "territory cards," "trophies." The trophies for victories will be three different resources: wisdom, power and wealth. They can turn these in for 1 more army the first time, and these will increase by one each time resources are turned in. They may trade these during the negotiation phase.

I still have to work out how attacks will need to be worded, as they will be resolved, simultaneous, by me as referee. I still need to work out fortification, but I will allow formal allies to fortify one another.

I am getting excited about this!

Maps and plans from my children

"Preparation for the campaign: The referee bears the entire burden here, but if care and thought are used, the reward will more than repay him." (M&M p. 5)

"At any time a player/character wishes he may select a portion of land (or a city lot) upon which to build his castle, tower, or whatever . . . Each player who builds should draw an extra set of plans and specifics for the referee." (U&WA p. 20).