law and chaos

One of the things people like about Good and Evil is that it provides a space for a supernatural (maybe meta-natural) conflict between deities that personify these extremes and the world in which we play our games is a battleground for these forces. In general this is a potentially fun conceit to work with, giving you people with varying dedication to these divine forces and fulfilling their roles as champions of their divinity. All potentially awesome.

But, in addition to the problems alluded to earlier, there is practical trouble with this particular dichotomy: while many say that there needs to be a balance (and there does, practically, need to be a balance in order for this battle to work since otherwise there might be a winner), it’s perfectly clear that there is absolutely no need nor desire for a balance between Good and Evil. Any rational being would want a world of Good, full stop. So where would allies of Evil even come from? Who would want that shit?

Originally this was not the driving dichotomy in D&D. It was originally Moorcockian, an hilarious word I have just invented. In Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series (of which the Elric stories are just one facet) the divine dichotomy is between Law and Chaos. Now this is where it’s at: if you want a divine dichotomy, this is one you can work with.

First, there is no moral bias here. You can have good people on both sides. You can have awful people on both sides. In order to exploit the dichotomy for story purposes you don’t have to simplify anyone’s position and you don’t have to suppose that free-thinking individuals would credibly desire a world in which it was ordinary to get murdered.

More usefully, we can imagine people who would desire the extremes of course — perfect Law were everything is ordered and predictable and safe or perfect Chaos where individual desires reign and things are constantly new and unsafe but exciting. But we can also see that the middle ground, a balance, is in fact genuinely desirable. You don’t have to cart out the obviously specious claim that “good can’t exist without evil” and therefore that evil is somehow necessary. Even if Good has no interesting definition without the contrast of evil, that’s just fine! It’s still Good!

But Law and Chaos genuinely stress against each other in a fun fashion. Pushing more towards one has amusing possibilities for story without forcing a particular morality on anyone. And the gods themselves can be interesting now! Gods of Evil are inexplicable elemental things that make no intrinsic sense since they have no believable agenda. But Law and Chaos do! These are gods you definitely want to have a chat with. An audience with an Evil god is not going to go well. An audience with a Good god is going to be dull since their position is obviously good (it’s even called that). But an audience with a god of Law or Chaos, well that’s going to be interesting. It has no obvious arc. And their agenda is credible and either could be persuasive. But ultimately most people are going to want a little from column A and a little from column B.

I think the underlying concept of alignment is a compelling setting choice. That doesn’t mean every setting should have it, but it’s a choice that makes some sense. It makes a particular kind of world that’s fun to play games in. It’s the moral alignment that makes no sense and creates a dull (and, ultimately, racist and stupid) world. One agenda is obvious and the other is not credible. You can’t help but fight cardboard cut-out enemies since if you argued with the Evil ones you would have to conclude that they were either automata or insane.

If you imagine a plane of each extreme, a plane of Good and a plane of Evil, you find that the Good place is paralyzingly boring and the Evil place is perfectly undesirable (and unsustainable — the Evil places imagined in D&D have absolutely necessary non-Evil behaviour in order to persist: they cannot be “perfect” representations of Evil because Evil doesn’t function). But if you imagine a perfect plane of Law and a perfect place of Chaos you can imagine interesting (however undesirable) places where interaction still makes sense. You’re not murdered as soon as you show up and you still have something fun to do, beating down both Good and Evil planes for playability.

So it’s not alignment that a rail against (though I have little use for it, it’s because it’s just not a setting conceit in my games — don’t need a divine presence of this kind) but the insistence on using it for a moral dichotomy. A moral dichotomy is not a choice because one side is obviously, perfectly, inarguably, better. How’s that a fun way to run a universe?

look, mythology is crap

(A warning — my knowledge is mostly of “western” mythology, so Roman and Greek, and so one should read this with that in mind. But if you are an expert on other mythologies, I’d love to hear your thoughts as well, because the basis of the problem lies in technological facts of early human history and I would be excited to hear about exceptions.)

Okay it’s not. There is poetry, there are ancient ideas that are embedded in cultures. There are even cross-cultural motifs that echo something deeper within us (perhaps) than just the pre-Christian near-Eastern fantasies. But it’s also crap. So is history. The past is crap.

These stories are entrenched in a world where:

• women cannot practically and safely avoid pregnancy, a reduced physical state without modern medicine, hygiene, and technology
• rapid reproduction is essential to a population’s growth because of the high mortality rate in both children and mothers and consequently women become a resource rather than a human
• slavery is the petroleum that fuels productivity — until we can burn oil, this is the technological accelerant of the day and the pure utility of it eclipses the inhumanity of it
• warfare centers on the destruction or enslavement of whole civilian populations, sometimes just as revenge
• warfare is entirely thinkable (something nuclear weapons, for a while, half solved for us but is now back on the table)

And so these stories embody these horrors. At their best they present exceptions to these horrors as wild fantasies. Imagine a society where women had power! Weird! Strange! What magic and puissance would be needed to make this a reality?

Our gaming should be fantasy (even when it’s cyberpunk or whatever) — it should be about us wondering what could be (for good or ill) in the context of some imagined alternate world. It’s a creative process that I find very exciting. It’s where the fun is.

But mythology is not that. Mythology is the fantasizing of people who were stuck in the world I previously described. Co-opting those mythologies uncritically is placing yourself back inside those assumed horrors in order to imagine wonders that, frankly, either could or do actually exist now. This doesn’t strike me as interesting nor valuable. And so the worst possible defense of a game or its setting would be, to me, “but this is how the myth goes” or, more obviously indefensible, “this is how history says it was”. Even when it embodies deep truths about ourselves it warrants critical examination, because it really embodies deep truths about who we were 2500 years ago, and some of those truths might not be true any more. The assumption that these revelations are both universal and transcend time is lazy.

I would much prefer a fantasy that extends from now. It doesn’t have to be set in the modern age nor in the future; that misses the point. Thematically, it must be a fantasy of how things could be better than they are now. It can also be worse (maybe much worse) but ideally in ways that spawn from the new fantastical context and not just rowing backwards into some BCE backwater.

Most mythological presentation of women, especially as avatars for concepts, is pretty dismal. Women are idealized based on the ways they are of use to others. Or are amazing exceptions when they are not mothers and caregivers. This should not be amazing now, and I very much want to be amazed. We have maidens and mothers and literally wombs. We have muses, which are basically the uncredited authors of men’s art. We have goddesses that dote on boy heroes and tolerate husbands who don’t just cheat on them but casually rape. I want the rare show of autonomy and strength to be common. It is no longer amazing.

Of course mythology contains things worth mining. The stories are ones you can bet almost anyone has heard and that kind of commonality, those touchstones, make story telling much easier. We can speak few words and be sure that the audience knows all the missing ones. They contain images that are similarly entrenched. They contain powerful concepts such as the concrete realizations of abstractions like The Furies and that kind of realized metaphor is awesome. There’s a reason I always dug the D&D monsters, The Inevitables, the forces of elemental Law. That is an amazing opportunity for fantasy.

But that commonality is also a drawback. I’ve heard the story before. It’s the fantasy of people stuck in a world that doesn’t need to exist any more. I want fantasies for my world. What if something other than capitalism drove the motives of societies? What if there was no more oil? If magic worked, what would we really do with it beside solve ancient problems we’ve already solved? What if we encountered beings who were not like as at all — not palimpsests of known beings, but something entirely new?

Our stunted fantasies often revolve around the realization of deities — they are certainly concretely real. You can talk with them and they answer. What if there was a world with the similarly practical and perfect knowledge that there were no deities, that mortal consciousness is the ultimate consciousness?

What if power was free?

What if we were free?

So please, feel free to cloak your work in the imagery of mythology, but let’s not mire ourselves in ancient fantasies about escaping a world we already escaped. Let’s write (and perform) some genuinely new myths. Let’s take for granted the things we know we can do (even if we haven’t yet) and wonder harder about what else could change. Let’s make new things.

(Saw this morning that KatieQuixotic is talking about similar things on Twitter today. So thanks for sharing my brain a bit!)

orcs and evil

I recently was involved in a twitter discussion in which I concluded that a rational and natural evil was nonsensical. The path to there is a little convoluted, but it hinges on motivation: what is the objective of evil? Most rational objectives I can think of are pretty bad but not really what we think of as Evil. Maybe evil but not Evil if you follow.

Say, for example, orcs really hate humans. They kill all humans and destroy all human things. But if they are natural and rational, then they have an end-game, a perfect world. They have an agenda that is not just external to them (kill everything) but internal: something they want and strive for. Clearly this is just a world without humans but otherwise kind of nice — everyone rational wants things to be kind of nice, at least for them. This is extreme and aggressive but, depending on the backstory for their hatred, not necessarily evil and not innate so certainly not Evil. Maybe their human-free world is awesome. Too bad for us but more power to them.

But if evil is rational and supernatural we can kind of get our teeth into something meaty. Perhaps our Evil is a deity that despises this reality and wants to destroy it to replace it with their own (whatever that looks like doesn’t matter since it doesn’t have us in it). A kind of failed god like Morgoth in The Silmarillion — they hate the existing reality and are jealous of the power of creation. Their dedication to the destruction of everything is rational but supernatural: they want their own vision realised. That’s their rational end game.

There we go, a hate elemental maybe. Or a failed god.

Or perhaps it’s supernatural but irrational — it’s just a kind of hate elemental, a realization of pure nihilism that only destroys. Maybe that’s not even Evil but it’s a neighbour. It is interesting however simple its agenda is. It will be content in its end-game to rule over ashes. But it has to be irrational: there is no constructive agenda, no genuine plan for the future. Just wreckage and horror.

But where do orcs go? It seems to me there are few places for orcs and evil. One is that they are an autonomous species with their own culture and a complex agenda (not Evil intrinsically) but they are unwillingly or unwittingly under the command of our hate elemental or jealous near-deity. They will ultimately be consumed as well. These orcs have a complex relationship with the world and are, to my mind, very interesting now. They can be saved or, much better, save themselves. They don’t really need a variation in shape, though — they could as easily be humans. Again, their evil is situational and not innate. They can and would likely prefer to find a different path.

Another way to read them would be as beings that do not have a culture, that do not exist as normal biological organisms do. That is, they bear no children and have no relationships but are fabricated by our Evil entity with only enough autonomy to serve as soldiers. Not even that, but really as just appendages of this Evil entity. These orcs cannot be saved because they are just semi-detached tentacles of the Evil. They are not “like” people beyond the fact that they sort of look like people. They are the best our hateful and destructive demigod of the ashes can do as far as creation goes and they will be expended in the end. Since they are basically automatons they can’t really be Evil themselves — they are an expression of our hate monster’s evil.

But I don’t see a way that rational, natural beings can be intrinsically evil (or Evil really) because there’s no end game to a philosophy of pure hate and destruction. They have no agenda that makes any sense. Anything you try to make them want requires either supernatural power (re-create the world as something functional for them), lack of rationality (a pure hate for everything), or not being actually evil (a complex and destructive relationship with the status quo).

Thanks Levi, I didn’t need to sleep anyway.

players making shit up

The further your game world drifts from the real, modern world the more you have to let players make shit up.

Here’s my logic.

Universes are crazy big. Douglas Adams tried to tell us how big and didn’t come remotely close. Universes, however, that obey our physical laws at least have a set of truths that you can draw on. A set of premises. How gravity works, how fast light goes, what’s in the periodic table of elements, and stuff like that. And so, as a player, there is a significant fraction of the universe that you can manipulate safely (game-safe I mean). If I see a plausible orbital maneuver in the way the ref has laid out a space, well, I can probably do it. There are touchstones and they are myriad.

I think sometimes we forget just how much shared knowledge we have.

I used to play a lot of games set in my home town of Vancouver. One of the chief advantages to this was the touchstones — you could hide in that place you know, the culvert under the highway up near Kelly’s place — and you weren’t making that up as a player: that place exists. Most of us knew it. Many of us secretly drank there on Friday nights. So most of the play space is known and does not require mediation. It’s just real.

Science, if it works in your game, is like that contextual touchstone but writ large. We all know (and can expect and therefore manipulate) how gravity works, what air pressure does, how things behave at very low or very high temperatures. I don’t need the ref to fabricate any of it and imagine the burden if I did!

Now as you drift from real places in a real universe the amount of information needed to manipulate the environment increases and very very rapidly. There are millions of pages of material written about how this world works. Maybe billions. Your fantasy world, however, has only the tiniest fraction of that content: a practically non-existent amount of material. Frankly no one, even the originator of the fantasy world, knows much of anything about it compared to the content available from the real world.

But you should know. Your character lives in this world and is aware of a similar volume of data that you have by living in the real world. Your character knows about the equivalent of that culvert under the highway and thousands of other truths that know one has every thought to write down or map out. It would be an impossible task.

We mediate this by putting a ref in the hot seat. The fewer the touchstones, however, the more of a burden this becomes on the ref. And the less reasonable it is for them to mediate it — they don’t know either, we’ve just given them the authority to invent it.

I’ll suggest then, that the more your world deviates from reality the more benefit you’ll get from letting players make up their own details. As ref just nod and follow along. If you can’t pre-fabricate all of the details of the world then this will give you two significant advantages: you’ll get a world that’s the product of four or five peoples’ creativity rather than one (it’s nowhere near what went into the real world but it’s five times better than investing the whole problem in one person) and your players will be able to smoothly “recall” facts and even manipulate them without the awkward “was there some place we used to hide as children maybe” — useless roll — “yup there was a culvert under the highway” exchange.

Once you get used to that you can let them manipulate. For example, games rarely if ever examine exactly how magic works (mostly because it always results in contradictions in detail and so it’s best glossed over — magic basically can’t work so don’t look too close). If I’m playing an ancient wizard who’s researched it forever, though, then I expect to have some detailed hypotheses about the underpinnings of magic and a good deal of experimental evidence for it. And I will want to bring that to bear.

When I do, I want to imply vast knowledge I don’t actually have. Consequently it’s probably best if I just make it up. “I’ve studied fire magic all my life and I am certain that it is not simply brought into being as that would violate the third law of thaumaturgodynamics. Magical fire must therefore come from somewhere. I postulate that it comes from the plane of Elemental Fire and that therefore it must create a path. I think we should try to track this Efreet by trying to identify this path.” Now I’m not narrating my success, but I am saying a lot of facts about the world that no one ever ever wrote down in advance. Those facts should not be subject to mediation. The ref should greedily note them and start crafting complicated implications. And yet there is resistance to this kind of player participation in world building.

The map of your fantasy world is basically completely empty other than the gross geography. I highly recommend inviting anyone who’s found a blank spot to fill it the fuck out.

deriving the hex crawl

The hex crawl is a classic supporting structure for role-playing games. Many of my most memorable early experiences with Dungeons & Dragons were hex crawls, and the crawl was probably a bigger factor in their success than the D&D part. But let’s look at what a hex crawl ought to do by (like with the ranger) starting with some suppositions and deriving the technology.

So a few interesting things are true about the hex crawl: there are hexes (no more about this), the player side of the game doesn’t know what’s in those hexes until they enter or get adjacent to them, and something is interesting about each hex even if it’s just the terrain.

Let’s start with the “not knowing part”. This seems essential to me and I think it ought to play a part in defining the kind of adventure that takes place in a hex crawl. Let’s say I want to get from point A to point B in order to accomplish something at B. Obviously what I do is buy a map or a guide. I am not going to strike blindly into the wilderness if I have any other options. And I’m probably going to take a road which also implies the presence of maps or at least good directions. So this is not that.

Why would I strike out without a map?

There is no map.

Why no map? Why are we in this predicament?

Why not? Here are some possibilities:

No one has been there in a thousand years. There are stories about very roughly what is where but no one really knows. This is new territory.

So you might keep a map as you go in order to get back safely. You might use it as a predictive tool (if the ref’s map is rational enough) to find rivers and mountains based on gradually revealed changes in terrain. But mostly, since no one’s been here, you might be doing classic explorer stuff: making a map so others can make this trip more safely in future. When you find Point B, you will have one possible route there.

This last is pretty fun: if you find a very difficult and shitty route, you will be motivated to improve it, to find a better path. Otherwise the next person with the same idea might make a more valuable map.

For this to work, the map has to be fairly rational. If I hit plains and then hills, I should rationally predict mountains. If I move from dry to wet, I should expect a river. If I’m in the plains I can probably see cities and mountains on the horizon. If I find a road, it’s probably on territory much easier to build a road on than surrounding territory. I want players to be able to make rational predictions based on what they’ve found since they are trying to map an exploitable route without just randomly walking it.

Maps are illegal. Someone has maps but they are very protective of them and sell them for outrageous prices. Copies are dangerously imperfect and worse than no map at all.

Most of the above applies except now what you’re doing is probably illegal — not only are you lost in the wilds but two other things are true: some people aren’t lost (they bought maps) and someone probably wants you to stop mapping.

The land has recently changed. You might have a map but it’s wrong. What happened? I’m not here for that — you can already think of a thousand zany things.

You could be mapping this newly changed place in order to find routes through it, as though it were virgin territory, but really this problem demands another kind of adventure: figuring out why it changed. And you’ll have to cope with the fact that huge magical changes to the landscape don’t necessarily follow geological logic since it didn’t take place over geological time periods using natural processes. The terrain can lie to you here.

Now, I don’t the the ref needs to go into this knowing why the land changed — they might be interested to discover this as well. But whether or not they know, the landscape itself is going to have to provide some clues. Each new revealed terrain is not just a choice to follow or divert, as with exploration, but also a potential insight into the why of the changed terrain. Randomness can be your friend here with the very contents of each hex acting as an oracle for you to riff off of.

You don’t know where point A is. You’re already lost and mapless. Someone out there might have a great idea about the topography but you’re not that person and they aren’t handy.

Again, this is like exploring a route, except that at some point you should be able to put the puzzle together and recognize where you are. This territory not only needs to be rational, but it also has to be consistent with a (maybe shitty) map you DO have.

So fine, that’s how a map needs to deliver a theme, but there’s another question.

Why do I care what’s in each hex?

This is only partly obvious. If I’m mapping a route, I care what’s in a hex so I can make decisions about the next direction to travel in. But we are going to reveal each hex in turn so we want each hex to have more impact than that, otherwise we might be tempted to shortcut it, and say things like “I follow the ridgeline until we reach water or flatter terrain”. But the very nature of the hex “crawl” is to reveal each hex for some reason. What reason?

Usually it’s Random Encounters. Fine, sometimes, but seriously that’s the lowest common denominator. Maybe the old Risks list has some power here. What if each hex is not just one kind of risk, but one of those?

Cost. Something in this hex requires payment. Maybe it’s a monster extracting a toll to pass the only way through. Maybe you need special equipment to get through and you don’t have it. Maybe bandits steal from you. But passing through this hex risks a Cost.

Harm. Okay fine, here’s your random encounter. Or maybe a risky chunk of terrain that could break your leg.

Delay. Risking delay is only interesting if you have a deadline to meet. I recommend that — you should have a deadline. There should be a point at which you run out of rations or your competitor finishes their map first. Or you will arrive to late to stop the wedding. Something! A delay could be a washed out bridge or terrible weather or even just incredibly dense undergrowth. Something threatens to slow you up unless you find a away to cope.

Spillover. This one at first seems a little hard to handle, but suppose your intrusion on this unsullied wilderness is having a side-effect on the locals? Maybe you are bringing attention and banditry to an otherwise peaceful people. Maybe your presence wrecks the local magic flux that is such delicate balance. Maybe you scare off the delicious unicorns. Whatever it is, entering this hex does unanticipated harm to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Ineffectiveness. Fuck this risk. Maybe you just can’t enter this hex, period. For sure if you tell players that they will try ALL NIGHT to do it anyway though.

Revelation. Something is in this hex that reveals something unexpected (ideally even for the ref) and not necessarily good. High ground reveals that you are no where close to your objective. A magical storm reveals that the land is still changing and your map may not be helpful for getting home. The partial map you stole from goblins is not just wrong, it’s a trap.

Confusion. You risk getting lost. You can’t find north. Your next move might be in a random direction. Try not to be a pain in the ass about this: making players build a map that is wrong or useless is not actually as fun for the players as the ref. But forcing them to occasionally move in a random direction and calling that “lost” is not a bad compromise.

Waste. You can get through this hex but the horses won’t make it. Or you’re out of water and need to find some as a priority. Something you had in plenty is eaten up in this hex.

Why hexes?

Because hex kit.

 

Thanks to patrons for the pressure and the energy.

Games are at Lulu, DTRPG, and itch.io.

deriving the ranger

I saw a bunch of traffic on Twitter lately about the ranger. What is the ranger? How best to represent the ranger? Why does the ranger seem so dull sometimes? So what I thought I’d do is write down who I think the ranger is and then derive the rest from that. If we stay true to concept, the idea goes, we get mechanisms that match their context.

I bolded the bits that are ready to mechanize. You do that. I don’t know what system you love.

The Ranger

You live your life in the wilds and mostly alone. Maybe you don’t like people or they don’t like you. Maybe you made some mistakes in the past and they are still hunting you. Maybe you just like the wilds better than you like people. But you do love people. You see yourself as their first line of defense — when things are going wrong in the wilds, soon enough the impact will be felt by people. You are always on patrol, always looking for those problems, and solving them if you can. And if you can’t you, reluctantly (because it means you have to return to civilization, however temporarily), raise the alarm.

Your core principle is self-sufficiency. Your equipment is at least repairable if not creatable, by you alone in your wilderness home. You know how to find food and shelter, since you’re always on the move. You naturally heal quickly and are resistant to natural toxins, and when that doesn’t serve you, you are adept at administering first aid to yourself. You don’t need anyone, or at least that’s what you tell yourself and what you trained yourself for.

You’re wary of making friends with wildlife since animals are often essential to making and repairing your kit. But who could resist the companionship and skills of a good dog or trained wolf? If you have a pet, it’s probably a predator and it probably sees you the same way you see it: a friend, a companion, and someone to be respected. It’s not going to be any more loyal to you than you are to it. So you make careful choices about that loyalty.

Equipment

You prefer equipment you can make yourself and you can live with equipment you can maintain yourself. Anything else is useless to you. And if your gear has more than one use then that’s fewer things you need to carry.

Consequently you like bows. You can hunt with it and you can fight with it, though in your head these are much the same thing. Crossbows have fiddly bits, typically metal, that are just not worth your attention to keep, maintain, and (worst of all) go into town to replace. You can make a bow yourself in a couple of hours. Arrows too, though metal arrowheads are a treasure: you hoard them, keep them dry, and recover them whenever possible. And you keep them very, very sharp. In a pinch you can make stone or bone arrowheads that are almost as good.

You are proficient with all bows.

Swords are just not worth it. They are not the best weapon in the first place and then they are not useful for much other than fighting. And that fighting is mostly duels, which you think is profoundly stupid: the idea of engaging in a fair fight just makes no sense to you: that’s not how one survives a hostile world. You avoid unnecessary fights and when you have to fight you make it on your terms. And your terms are very good for you and very bad for them. You probably carry some knives which you keep as carefully as your arrowheads. You may carry an axe or two since they have a thousand uses, many of which you come across every day. Or maybe just one but you have some spare axeheads. You can make the shaft any old time, but the axe head is scarce (unless you enter a town) and your time is too valuable to be swanning around a village. You don’t dress fancy enough anyway. And, if it’s to your taste, you probably have a spear. It’s a walking stick and a weapon. You can throw it and you can thrust with it. You can kill and you can just keep enemies at a distance. And you can make every part of it but the metal tip.

You are proficient with knives, axes, and spears. In some Regions you might have other proficiencies related to the survival needs of the area (a mattock or pick in stony territory, for example).

If you could get away with it you probably wouldn’t bother with armour, but most of the threats to people on the edge of the wilderness wear armour and you will need to handle them face-to-whatever if need be. But it’s armour you can maintain yourself, it’s armour you can get on (quickly) yourself, and ideally it’s not something else to carry awkwardly. So no shields, no big metal plates. Mail is handy and you can probably make some repairs, but it’s not ideal. It gets ragged pretty fast and time spent with special tools and a lot of squinting is better spent sleeping or eating. So you prefer cloth with metal plates sewn in, or good leather with lot of padding. If you’re in the mood to make it you might make a cuir bouillee breastplate or (more likely) some vambraces to protect your arms from thorns and your rugged fletching.

You are proficient with leather, cloth, and mail. If you wear mail it’s probably not very good quality.

You would not be caught dead without rope and you know how to make it with any one of a dozen local sources, whether plant or animal. You know where flint is found naturally but you can whip up a fire with dry sticks and your bow if need be. And while the dark is dangerous, you probably don’t like travelling with a torch or (worse) a lantern — it’s an invitation to trouble. Instead you sleep when it’s dark.

If you need a particular piece of equipment while in your Region and you could reasonably be carrying it, then you have it when you need it or you can swiftly make it.

You’ve no need for money. It just adds to your load, both physically and metaphorically. You might keep a few coins or gems for emergencies, but that’s exactly what you feel commerce is: an occasional emergency that you hate. But you prepare for.

If your system has an XP for gold scheme, consider changing it up for the ranger: you only get XP for you gold share that you give away.

Behaviour

You hunt to survive and consequently you are an expert at tracking prey. You’d starve otherwise.

In your region you can follow any trail made by any being not magically protected from being detected. Except maybe another ranger.

You always create an environment that is advantageous to you and you don’t trust others. So whether or not you’re in a party sleeping in shifts, you have certainly prepared a campsite with alarms if not deadly traps.

In your region any site you have prepared has traps and alarms around it.

Your approach to a fight is more procedural than most: you reconnoiter, you prepare, you trigger your encounter, and you leave when you have to. And you set yourself realistic goals from the outset: no one wants to fight to the death, least of all you.

You have great stealth in your region.

You have great observation skills.

You can make traps in your region.

You attack by surprise.

You effortlessly escape by prepared routes.

If you must travel in a party you must have a really good reason. And you’re probably very dedicated to that — if you make yourself part of a party then they become a tiny village that you hate that you love. You are now their protector. But know why.

You have a reason for being in the party. Declare it. Why do you love these people this much?

Region

You prefer a particular region. It might have many kinds of terrain but it probably has one dominant climate. You know all the animals in this region and all of the plants — you know what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what’s edible, what’s medicinal, what’s a potential weapon, and what’s better to avoid altogether.

You are never poisoned and never go hungry in your region.

You can heal yourself in your region on par with magical abilities.

You can heal others in your region to a lesser degree.

You never get lost in your region.

You move faster than normal in your region.

You know the special abilities of anything native to your region.

Outside your region you may have only limited abilities — if the wood’s unfamiliar and the animals are unfamiliar then you will start to have trouble maintaining your equipment and even surviving unassisted. You are very much a creature of your place, and though it may contain mountains and forests and lakes and swamps, it doesn’t extend forever. But you can learn, especially from other rangers.

You can learn a region by acting as a ranger in that region for an extended period of time or through multiple advancements. If you are mentored by another ranger, this happens faster.

Enemies

Your region has existing trouble and you specialize in guerilla warfare against that trouble. It might be people or it might be monsters or it might even just be weather or fire. Whatever it is, you have trained and equipped yourself especially to deal with this threat. You know everything you need to know about it and value new information very highly. And you will go out of your way to do it harm.

You have bonuses to all your abilities when facing your enemy.

You will want to divert from a task to kill or hinder your enemy if the original task has nothing to do with them. There is no bonus or penalty for this, you just want it. No need to be a dick about it in a party.

 

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