KhorasForum

Three down, one to go. And then, Down with Dalmoran!

Good point. Get a large enough cavern, and concerns about temperature equalization become less significant.

Also, it sounds like Dave just confirmed steampunk dwarves. XD Arcanum, anyone?

I kid, but still, that's cool.

That's actually a good question. I hadn't thought about that until you pointed it out, but you're right, that does seem a bit strange.

Though, one of the nice things about fantasy as a setting is that we have the opportunity in this sort of situation to ignore concerns about plausibility, and come up with a cool explanation for how exactly this can work.

Maybe Dave can find a cool thing to add to Khoras, or dwarves, or whatever, now!

Happy Holidays, everyone, and I hope you've been having a wonderful time with your friends, families, animal companions, or whatever traveling companions you travel with on your adventures!

Wonderful! Looting a dragon's den is a big step up in Khoras (though, to be fair, they do have three of the Talismans of Anquar now).

I've been eagerly awaiting the next Session Summary, and I was far from disappointed.

Once again, it's nice to see a new session summary!

I'm looking forward to learning all about the new fauna, as well as the "City of the Dead".

Ooh, how Platonic.

But yeah, it's not, in principle, that different from someone like, say, Michelangelo talking about seeing the finished sculpture in the rough stone, and merely cutting it free of its concealment.

Agreed, though I have to say that's not a terrible idea, and I think it would add a lot of flavor to the race. It's a very Freudian interpretation that would make a lot of internal sense.

Though I admit I do prefer Jung. XD

Though, Jung gets most of the fun stuff in D&D and similar hobbies, what with archetypes, his conception of the self, and the mythological extension of his work by people like Joseph Campbell.

But yeah, if you ever try this out, let us know. I'd be interested to see how it affected your players' perception of orcs in your game.

I agree, and I'd rather play without much, or any, of the alignment system's components, but I do like that they were at least trying to get players thinking about the ethical views of their characters.

This is part of why I have such a love/hate relationship with D&D's morality system. It's certainly not the most adroit tool for describing character morality and motivation, and it leaves a lot to be desired when compared to something like a personality inventory or other, slightly more "academic" tool when it comes to granularity and complexity, but at the end of the day, it's not an utterly useless tool, and it's nice that there is SOME sort of morality mechanic in the game, even if the two-axis Lawful/Chaotic, Good/Evil system is often too simplistic to differentiate between distinct characters with different values who happen to act in generally similar ways.

Plus, it's fun to use it as shorthand for human morality, problematic as it may be. For the record, I'm definitely Neutral Good irl. XD

Slavery is certainly a rather unpleasant topic, but your assumption is fundamentally correct; up until the racially and religiously justified chattel slavery of the modern era of European colonization, slavery was, while certainly nothing to be wished for, not as bad as the later form of slavery. Chattel slavery is something altogether more horrendous than other forms of slavery, though, from a modern, liberal perspective, it's just the most obviously egregious form of a fundamentally heinous institution.

And, as an aside, I don't think it's too radical in the least to consider wage-slavery as slavery in a real sense. It still vastly reduces one's possibility space for making choices. And the US economy, for sure, is a debt-based economy at this point. Companies here (even multinational banking and investment organizations) buy up packages of unpaid debt from thousands or even millions of debtors on the cheap, and then make profit by being willing to bug people enough to collect some of it. It's obscene, really.

As for your comments about how players are incentivized to play RPGs in an optimal way based on accruing XP and doing "heroic" things, and perhaps making the worlds they inhabit somewhat banal, I think you're absolutely right, BUT...

The thing about zealots is that, while at their worst they can be really horrible people that do really evil things and feel they're morally justified in doing so, basically anyone who makes a significant impact on their world is a zealot in some sense or other. Unprincipled people don't often make waves unless, like Hermann Göring (a notable example of an amoral person), they're very skilled at manipulating events to their benefit. Any truly exceptional person, if they're to be effective, must have sufficient drive, ambition, or some other motivating factor to compel them to action. That doesn't mean that they might not be humble or have fallen into their circumstances through no acts of their own, merely that they'll adapt and make the most they can out of those circumstances. But no zealot is amoral.

The old school, 70s-era D&D murder hobos may have been inspired by reading Conan directly, but most characters I see played today, while certainly mercenary in their behavior, have very tangible values that they are literally willing to kill in accordance with. That's not the behavior of an amoral person. They might be inconsistently moral, but that's as human as it gets, honestly. Everyone's a hypocrite, the question is just about what things, in what ways, to what degree, and, do they recognize their flaws and try to improve upon them. But as long as the players roleplay their characters well, and everyone has fun, any juicy psychological or philosophical exploration or growth on the players' part is just added depth and potential to what is already essentially a deep and interesting experience.

I'd also like to mention something else, going back to Dave's comments on the Viking setting game he's playing. In Old Norse, viking isn't a noun, and it's certainly not a demonym or ethnonym. It's a verb, and it translates roughly to "raiding". In other words, when Norsemen said, "blah blah viking...", they were saying, "blah blah raiding...". Viking is something you went and did, and "a Viking" was a person who went and did that thing. You might say to your friend, "Oh, so I went viking recently, and look at all this shiny gold I got from those dumb Christian monks who keep all their shiny gold in undefended churches devoted to their silly (and, apparently, powerless and inferior) foreign god!"

The reason I'm pointing this out is that, for most of the Viking Age, actual vikings were effectively small-ish bands of pirates and raiders from a culture where such behavior was acceptable, especially if done to outsiders, rather than something that was done in a top-down fashion on the orders of a central authority. Well, mostly. The Viking Age actually coincided with a population boom in Scandinavia which was beginning to allow for more advanced forms of social organization, and was part of a complex process that would eventually see the foundation of the modern Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Eventually, Scandinavian kings WOULD build their power to a greater or lesser extent upon organized invasions, such as the Danish/Norwegian conquest of large portions of England, Scotland, and Ireland, or Rollo's siege of the Île de Paris, and subsequent receipt of a large ransom and control of the region of Normandy as an official vassal of the French king in return for stopping all this troublesome plundering and raiding, but this largely happened right towards the end of the Viking Age, and the Scandinavian kings pretty much gave up on going viking after the death of the last real Viking king, Harald Hardrada, after his failed attempt to reassert Norwegian rights to the English throne in 1066.

The truth is, the vikings just liked shiny things, and the Christian kingdoms of Northern Europe at the time had lots of juicy, poorly defended targets just lying around, because Christians hadn't been making a habit of pillaging churches and monasteries, so they started taking stuff. Then, as they saw how poorly prepared their victims were to defend against small bands of seaborne raiders, as opposed to proper armies, they got bolder and bolder until they got beaten, conquered places, or were approached for negotiations. Because they were a lot like other Germanic peoples of the time (including the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks), in behavior if not necessarily in religion and culture, and they really just wanted to improve their own material conditions. They just happened to be really good seafarers, and Northern European defenses were geared toward addressing threats from other European land powers (obviously, the British Isles were a bit different, but still).

Actually, while they did love fighting, and the ideal of dying gloriously in battle was a big part of their religion and culture, what they REALLY loved was trading with people, and that's what they mostly did as they became more organized and better acquainted with their neighbors.

So, I guess what I'm saying is... if you guys want to form your own band of vikings and do whatever makes you feel good, whether that means raiding villages on your own terms instead of under the orders of a king too ruthless for your tastes, or having one of them, as their leader, straight up just challenge him for control, then that would be perfectly acceptable behavior on the characters' parts. Though, if they went so far as to challenge their king, their leader's loss would certainly result, at least historically, in him (if not all of them) being made to suffer horribly as an example of what happens to failed usurpers (assuming he lived through the failed challenge in the first place), and if they won they might still have ruffled a lot of their new followers' feathers by doing so in such a manner, which could mean anything from breaking up the raiding party into multiple disassociated groups all the way to outright denial of authority and attack by the men (if they were fond enough of the defeated king/disdainful enough of the usurper, if they just didn't think the usurper could lead them to as much wealth and glory as their more ruthless predecessor, or if they felt their standing and authority under the new ruler would be reduced in favor of new lieutenants, such as the other party members). Either way, though, you have plenty of options in a Viking setting (and if it's actually a NORSE setting, rather than a specifically Viking setting, then even more so), and I think that you guys should be able to find ways to deal with those problems in an historically believable way.

Hell, Harald Hardrada's story is pretty telling: he spent years of his adolescence and early manhood in exile in Kievan Rus' under the protection, and in the service of, Yaroslav the Wise; then moved to Constantinople, became the commander of the Varangian Guard, fought a ton for the Byzantines, and made a fortune in the process; and finally went home and regained the throne of Norway, and spent the rest of his life centralizing the administration of Norway, minting coins, and trying to conquer Denmark, and failing that, England. Also, just a note about Harald, his death at Stamford Bridge in 1066 is considered the end of the Viking Age, and just to show how much things had changed some three hundred-odd years after the beginning of that era, Harald was a Christian; his twenty-year reign was one of peace, stability, and prosperity for Norway; and most of his raiding was of Denmark, as part of his attempts to gain the Danish throne, rather than of somewhere outside of Scandinavia.

Anyway, I don't know that any of this will actually be helpful (or new information) to you, Dave, or even still relevant this long after your initial comment, but I enjoyed talking about one of my favorite historical periods (and as a history major, among other subjects, that means something ), and maybe you'll find something useful in my ramblings on the topic of Vikings.

As a separate note, I'd be really interested in any thoughts you have on all of the other things Drul and I have discussed here, if you get the time and happen to have anything to say on the subject.

I neglected to mention this initially, because I got distracted by all the other things I wanted to discuss at the time in response to the relevant comment you had posted, but I did want to circle back to your comment on presenting your players with two different interpretations of the same village.

While I think you're right that players would probably be much less surprised by, and better able to reconcile with their preconceptions, a chicken-thief being publically flogged to death (historically that would actually have been a BIT harsh, but not unthinkable under a really strict regime) in a run-down, dirty, and smoky village, the thought occurred to me as I was reading about the fat, happily grazing cattle of the perfectly manicured and generally pleasant village that it might say something about how that village had gotten that way.

I think a nice parallel might be Singapore. A friend of mine lived there for some years with his wife and young daughter, teaching philosophy at a university (if I recall correctly), and he had some interesting things to say about the experience. While Singapore has famously strict laws, and is even arguably an outright fascist nation (though not, of course, associated with European-style fascism), he quite liked living there, and he couldn't deny that there simply wasn't much crime. In a city of millions, he regularly allowed his pre-teen daughter to go to the mall alone and go entertain herself, whether with shopping or whatever else, and never once felt insecure about her safety in doing so.

So perhaps a consideration that might be fruitful is: is the public flogging of chicken-thieves one of the necessary conditions for these people having and maintaining the nice, orderly, and generally agreeable society that allows for so much general prosperity and such a high standard-of-living? And if so, is the alternative becoming that run-down, dirty, smoky, and extremely impoverished and unhealthy village to which they're being compared? Does that justify their harshness? And if these people are happy, and their happiness is dependent on being ruthless in their enforcement of laws, can the party justify robbing these people of their prosperity, security, and happiness simply to assuage their own personal discomfort?

It might even make for a nice experiment on the part of a GM: give the party this exact situation, or an equivalent one, and let the party impose their own morality on the village. Then give the party reason to go back some time later, only to find that their actions directly undermined the happiness and security in the villagers' lives, make them see that their actions, though noble in intention, have had an unambiguously negative impact on these people, and see how they react to being forced to question how well-advised their actions were, and whether they ultimately rethink how they act in such situations. Do they try to better understand such scenarios before making decisions? Do they reverse position entirely, actively seeking to maximize security at the cost of barbarism? Do they simply incorporate the events, and justify their actions as right on principle, viewing the unfortunate results as and unpleasant outcome of a world where fundamentally right actions don't always lead to optimal outcomes, nonetheless arguing that reorienting their moral decision-making wouldn't guarantee better outcomes, but rather simply lead them to make less virtuous choices in the hopes that in so doing they could ensure their preferred outcome, even if it was then built on a vicious foundation?

In effect, you'd be getting your players to think more deeply about their moral outlooks; are they deontologists? Utilitarians? Virtue/Aretaic (Aretaic as in arete, the Greek word for excellence, which in Latin is virtus) ethicists? It might be a really good opportunity to learn directly about your players, and perhaps even for them to learn a bit about themselves.

Finally, one other thing it made me think of, and which I suggest you read if you can, is the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin, the author of the Earthsea series. It's a polemic against utilitarian ethics, and it's only two or three pages long, so it's a really quick read, and a really interesting story that would contrast really nicely with my previous comments about Singapore.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful to you.

That sounds really interesting, and it sounds to me like explaining things like the cause of the motion of the caves/bubbles/islands, explaining the apparent day/night cycle, and answering the question of where Farlanghan and his followers went, why exactly they chose to do so, and what they've been getting up to will all be really fertile territory to make interesting worldbuilding decisions.

As an aside, I thought I'd share an anecdote I picked up recently from a YouTube video I watched relevant to our discussion of worldbuilding. Warning, if you're not familiar with the world of BattleTech/MechWarrior, then what follows may be complete gibberish to you, but hopefully you'll still be able to grasp the general insights, even if the specifics are foreign to you.

Harebrained Schemes is a video game company that Jordan Weisman (the creator of such games as Shadowrun, BattleTech/MechWarrior, and Crimson Skies, to name a few) started a while back which primarily relies on Kickstarter backing to fund both video game iterations of classic Weisman IPs, as well as a few new ones, and they're currently working on a Classic BattleTech game (titled, unsurprisingly, BattleTech) that I'm eagerly following. As part of the process of Kickstarting projects, they do a monthly, hour-long video update consisting of interviews and Q&A about things related to the game, and the most recent video included a 30 minute interview with Jordan Weisman himself. He mentioned that, despite the idea of the Clan Invasion by former followers of General Kerensky being lauded by players as a stroke of genius worldbuilding set up by Weisman ten years before the payoff became apparent to players, he hadn't actually planned it. Rather, it was the result of a number of unrelated solutions to specific problems happening to come together in a serendipitous way.

First, some context: the setting of Classic BattleTech is one of a drastic loss of technology compared to a preceding era of peak technological advancement for the human race as the result of warfare-related attrition, and it was based on the various successors to the Roman Empire after the fall of the Western portion of the Empire.

Having said that, the first thing Weisman needed to do was drastically reduce the size and number of military units in play in the world to levels that players of a tabletop wargame could reasonably be expected to manage, so he came up with the in-game solution of General Kerensky leading roughly 80% of the military beyond known space so that their might couldn't be used in the political squabbling of the various Inner Sphere (IS for short) noble houses over who would succeed the former rulers of the united Inner Sphere. The next problem that arose was simultaneously an interesting choice and a major mistake on Weisman's part; by politically uniting the most powerful IS noble house with another similarly prominent house through a dynastic marriage, he had put himself in a box by drastically reducing the possibility space of the world going forward, and setting things up for a very deterministic future which would effectively obviate the sandbox he had created for his playerbase.

Then it occurred to him: if the Successor States of the Inner Sphere were modeled on the various successor states to Rome, and if the world of early 31st Century BattleTech was modeled on the state of affairs in medieval Europe circa the early 13th Century, then the solution for the box he had put himself in was obvious; if you have the increasingly stable Europe of the High Middle Ages, what comes next? The answer: the Mongol invasions. And where could such an overwhelming outside force be procured in a universe predicated on human interstellar colonization and giant 100 ton walking tanks? Why, General Kerensky, of course. Unaffected by the attrition which resulted in the rapid loss of pre-Succession Wars technology, and having been pretty much completely forgotten after centuries without contact, the descendants of the Star League Defense Force under General Kerensky, radically reorganized into a number of militaristic clans, provided the perfect solution to a problem largely caused by Weisman's own game design blunder. And thus, a decision made purely as a practical approach to a specific game design problem sowed the seeds for another solution to an entirely different game design problem, and (ironically) earned the widespread admiration of players, unaware of the true motivation for those game design decisions, in the process. 

Ah, yeah, who needs a squishy meatbag cleric when you've got Artifact-level magic on hand, amirite? XD

I'm glad to hear Nassan's doing something noble, though, and isn't dead. I mean, his nickname doesn't exactly imply he was much fun, but still, once a party "member", always a party member, right?