Design Case: Educational Philosophy of Danzuishan

Nirrum believes the school of Purity of thought to be a pale echo of Manaharamu's university

I, on the other hand, believe that Manaharamu's university is ultimately incomplete.

This post will be a bit different from usual. This is what many would consider "way too much fluff" and "lots of effort for nothing." but it is representative of what I consider when building my civilizations. The following text is written without  many design notes, or without much in the way of formulae. It is simply a post for content that can be taken and used in your campaigns, should you choose.

Danzuishan has always been "the other city" in my campaigns. Where Skalmirthon and Kholira are "the dwarves" and "the bad guys" respectively in the eyes of newcomers and Manaharamu stands out as "The only magic CostCo" Danzuishan hasn't ever been... Anything. In Preparing for my most recent campaign, I wanted to set Danzuishan Apart from Manaharamu on a fundamental level. I wanted to make this river kingdom an analog to my idea of places that are foreign to me, Places where people think differently. In Doing so, I came up with the Nine Schools of Thought. These fictional establishments are more than their walls, unlike the university of manaharamu. They are houses of a philosophy and places where people go to adopt an aspect of that philosophy to improve who they are. The danzuishanese are largely dragonborn and I wanted the subtle difference between them and the more human races to show. Every Dragonborn has a breath weapon that does 2d6 damage of a type that that dragonborn is resistant to. A mean of 7 damage. When taking into account that the average commoner has 3.5hp, you can get a feel for some of what I meant in my post on Context in Leveling. I wanted the fact that every single dragonborn was armed with the ability to kill as a natural consequence of their heritage, to be visible in their culture. To be Danzuishanese was to resist the desire to kill, to be capable and skilled enough to avoid war.  Their ability to kill so easily and their desire to bond with each other in spite of that ability not only lead to a war that lasted 2663 years, but a military that has gone undefeated since. At the end of this section I will have the Leader of the Danzsuishanese army's Character block so one can imagine how their society views itself.

The Danzuishanese Education System

To understand the Danzuishanese, you must understand that the Dragonborn of this region only just stopped their civil war. To say that every citizen is a soldier is false. To think that they would not kill for their home is also false. The hereditary warfare of the tribes gave rise to their own specialty schools, which eventually blended and separated, combined and refined, and underwent their own independent metamorphoses until they gave root to the Nine schools of Danzuishanese martial arts and life philosophy. Over the past millennia, the specialization of these schools has changed to be more distinct individually. Each of these schools has something to teach about fighting and warfare to anyone who attends them, as well as a skill they specialize in. Unlike the schools of the Manahararahi, or even the apprenticeships of the Lelumadil, the Danzuishanese schools specialize in a style of thinking rather than a specific skill or abstraction. As a result, students of each one of these schools will have vastly different ways of answering problems, even if they have the same solution in the end. Even over their extensive history of internal bloodshed, the Danzuishanese have managed to maintain the idea that the best ideas are born of a chaos, not a void.

Nirrum's note: A philosophy that only a few in the university seem to understand. Those Instructors who follow Danzuishanese teachings are those who are able to ensure their message is understood.

The Danzuishanese military therefore, is made not of these schools, divided and thus conquerable, but instead of the natural flow of their organizational ideology. While there is a formal and concrete hierarchy, the approach of this hierarchy to the organization and positioning of their forces is fluid and thus not to be underestimated. The schools are not disparate and indeed, their students frequently move from one to the other to improve an aspect of their training in the one they respect the most.

The school of Purity of Thought

This school is built on the idea of formal abstraction. They teach that in practicing anything, you must see what it is not. This leads their students to become capitious pedants of many sorts, but by extension it creates a mastery of lateral thinking and repurposing resources. Frequently the school produces tricky casters, Dazzling warriors, or more frequently, Transfers to Manaharamu. Apt to solve puzzles and investigations, The denizens here are always hard to impede. Their Quick-thinking has saved Gausui multiple times.

When faced with an adventuring party, the school of purity of thought will almost always be unpredictable, and will very seldom actually fight. Almost everything this school does has multiple uses or purposes, so at least expect spells like heat metal and prestidigitation to be used it confounding ways

The school of Presence of Mind

This school is built on the idea of the acknowledgement of sensory experience and perception. They teach their students to see, remember and observe. Aside from archival work, they often tend to focus on knowing what your resources and impediments are. A student of this school is seldom one to forget a name. They often see their students become Tacticians, quick-workers and saboteurs. More than one thief caught by the Brekoli Guard of Manaharmu has been of this school. Samurai, Warlords, Rangers, The sorts that need to pay attention all do well to heed this school's lessons. People often stop here on their way to the maze as they pass through Vehi.

When faced with an adventuring party, the school of presence of mind will ensure that their enemies are positioned such that they are in each other's way or that their resources are minimized.

The school of the Growing One

This school is built on the idea of the perfection of self. Their students are ruthlessly reminded of their mistakes and criticized harshly in all aspects of form. Through this, experienced instructors teach students to continually improve. The first test of this school it is worth noting is to talk back and defend ones self to an instructor. This school is not for the weak of heart of those who are not bold. Those who eventually leave this school are frequently those who only need to hit once, or who cannot be blocked, or whose actions are otherwise extremely decisive in achieving a goal. Those who intend to be archers might have it the easiest here, but Sorcerers and warlocks flourish in this school, their control of their powers often exceeding their wildest dreams. "Was it perfect? Why was it not perfect? What must you practice to fix the imperfection". The solitary Disconnect of buildings in Asulaka means that many people find a place to be themselves away from prying eyes, thus, the school of the Growing one is stationed here

Oft suited to producing adventurers itself, the school of the growing will ask for their opponent's blessing in battle. They frequently desire only to improve themselves and thus, their goals seldom coincide with the goals of others, but also seldom conflict.

The school of Two Hundred Hearts

This school is a bizarre duality unto itself. It posits that the greatest tool that one can wield is another person. Psychology is really the focus of this school some would argue. Students are taught how to interpret power economy, emotional investment, and how to understand the plight of others. The name and idea of thinking of others might label this school as a soft, caring place. It is in fact a school of manipulation, navigation, and achievement. Even Dal Trussari Tenkitagan of Manaharamu studied here. This school produces powerful enchanters, devious politicians, and effective doctors. Intimidation, Persuasion, Deception, and Insight. It is only the student who decides how this knowledge is used. The Government in Gassa makes use of their sages. 

When faced with an adventuring party, the school of two hundred hearts will almost never actually be facing the adventuring party. The more of a threat a party is, the more they wish to use them. The school of two hundred hearts when it does have to fight, fights in unison with its own and in discord of the opponent. Two hundred hearts are better than One hundred and Ninety-Nine. 

The school of Endurance of Spirit

This school focuses almost exclusively on discipline. It has simultaneously the oldest and youngest students. Those put their by their parents to stop being shits and those who recognize their imperfections at older ages. This school makes use of prudence and drive to teach its pupils that they can do more than they expect they can and that they should do more than they think they can. Rather, the school teaches that the limits the mind sets on itself are mostly in the mind itself and not of ones own constitution. The limits of reality are still to be respected or one will face dangerous forms of overexertion. They thus produce some of the most damaging evocators and the most patient assassins and spies. They produce the most stalwart of defenders, while also producing those who can go without food the longest. This school is particularly dangerous to fight against and is guaranteed one of the reasons Danzuishan has not only been at war with itself for so long but also why they have never lost a war to an external force since the schools conception. Sieges against these people are historically "a tax on militaries for poor education, rather than any form of victory". They lend well to the Defence of Keina against the Pirates of Grand Tortuga and Kriegcove.

When faced with an adventuring party, adherents of the school of Endurance of Spirit will always attempt to make it a slog and an uphill battle for their opponents. They do not go down easily.

The school of Echoing Immortality

Danzuishanese philosophy concerning their dead is often seen as strange in the eyes of foreigners, namely, they seldom believe in their dead. This is not to say that they lack an understanding of Mortality, that the concept of cessation of function is beyond them, or that they are not able to acknowledge a body on the road as lacking a soul. It is instead that the Danzuishanese do not see much of a difference between an object and its replacement in clerical terms or in terms of legacy. This method of thinking makes their lines of succession remarkably clean. The school of echoing immortality functions much like the library of the college of lore. It is a collection (The second largest on the plane) of the history, actions and thoughts of individuals. Through the guided study and contextual analysis of these documents, students endeavour to become the people they study about or under. For this reason, the Danzuishanese hero, Corryn of Shan, has over two hundred volumes written of his selfless and tireless adventures despite having died well over three hundred times. A blacksmith in Danzuishan might carry the name of a blacksmith from a hundred years ago, or a bakery might have been signed under the same name for twenty generations. The twist of this school is when the people of Danzuishan truly decide to let something die, it is as simple as not recognizing it, thus it fades into history. Through this method, the most belligerent fighters of the old war were those who were laid to rest the most reverently, the last of them immolated in dragonfire on their funeral pyre only 187 years ago. The instructors of this school have of course, developed many tricks for this custom, and often transitory students will use these tricks to their own ends, such as learning how to perfectly assume ones identity or to read another's thoughts, or perhaps intuit the steps of one long passed. This sits well with the death-fearing commoners of Turunga

When faced with an adventuring party, someone of the school of echoing immortality might fight them hundreds of times. Different colors, different weapons, same style, same anger, same reason, and in rare cases, the same memories.

The school of Irrevocable Death

A school built, probably by a member of the school of purity of thought, to counter the school of echoing immortality. Attendants of this school are those who challenge those who believe in the way of echoing immortality to follow their deeds. The cross-talk between this school and the school of the growing one is staggering, as members of this one are rarely not also in the other, though the reverse is not always true. There is one key difference between the growing one and the irrevocable death. The irrevocable death students will work towards a single irreplicable goal, frequently of monumental significance or such particular nuance that none that follow them will be able to truly capture their spirit. The truest culmination of this school is the Danzuishanese maze, which not even the most studious members of the University of Manaharamu have been able to begin to unravel the mysteries of. They make great use of the library of Echoing Immortality but also of the trade that comes in through Gossogi in the markets.

If you fight a member of the irrevocable death, you will only ever do so once. Provided they were a good student, you will remember it forever.

The school of Immediate Action

This is the newest, poorest and also most populous of the schools, This school teaches its students to recognize opportunity and recognize weakness. The school by extension teaches efficiency and teaches against overexertion. This school will turn out the most thieves and criminals as the poorest citizens take aim at opportunities without knowing the consequences. It also turns out some of the most efficient soldiers and politicians. It Echoes each of the other schools in what it teaches but also teaches the lowest effort to achieve a goal. Whether that means finding a weakness or exploiting those around you, this school will always produce those who achieve. The followers of the school of Immediate action will frequently try to seize immediate advantages rather than fighting drawn-out affairs. Furi prodigies also frequently attend this school, as it is the most accessible to them out in Gari.

If you fight someone who has attended the school of Immediate action, You'll find sand in your eyes, daggers in your back, and your own legs walking you off of a cliff.

The school of the True Void

This school is the smallest, most esoteric and I would argue, the least helpful. The students of this school are aescetics, Monks who meditate in poverty. It has been argued that the true void is simultaneously all other schools while also being none. They believe ostensibly in reducing suffering. Students of this school will be found with the masters of all other schools in efforts to learn what they need to know to reduce suffering. This is the only results-oriented school of the Nine, but the esotericism of the different-level thinking ends up completing the theme of process-oriented thought. The connection that people make with their own mind, not disimilar from the growing one in many ways, lends itself exceptionally well to warlocks, clerics, and paladins, who need to channel power through them, rather than control it. They tend to also be exceptional at fighting against Illusion or Enchantment. They keep their numbers up by being easily accessible to the large populations in Myri. They also double as a place for people to learn to handle their emotions. In many forms, it was this school that was necessary for ending the long war.

If faced with an adventuring party, the adherents of the true void usually simply accept their fate or get out of the way.

The Beating Heart, Lord General Paj Remorhari (INTP)(Endurance of Spirit)(Paladin 20 Oath Of Ancients)

A Quiet gold dragonborn whose plots keep his people safe

Age: 46
Height: 6'4
Weight: 290

Paj is a quiet man, considering his position, his class, and his methods. Paj spent a lot of time in the schools of Two hundred hearts and Purity of Thought, though he was a natural in the school of Immediate action. He wears Adamantine Armor of Invulnerability, decorated with the symbols of the Vined Trout and Flashpike on each breast and with the words "Follow me Forward, The River's Rush" in Draconic on the back. He wields an Adamantine Holy Avenger, An Oakeshott XI with the hilt inlaid with the symbol of St. Cuthbert, and carries a kite shield with the symbol of Danzuishan upon it. Despite his "Strong arm, Strong Tongue" archetype, Paj is an exceptional Tactician. Any fight against Paj is a war of attrition. There have been no less than nine Attempted assassinations that he has brushed off or ended personally. Outwardly, Paj looks sleepy, his eyes focusing mostly on puzzles in front of him. He is lazy in many personal respects but in manners of state, he is extremely forward-thinking. He is not spectacularly approachable but has a few close friends. Paj was and is a Maze-runner, and will frequently Dash into the maze and come out with new citizens and treasure.

A Retrospective Context

These descriptions are riddled with indecipherable lore, for now, I hope you made it up yourself, because I can almost guarantee you that it's different from what I imagined. Who are these Furi? What is this Mysterious Danzuishanese Maze? What is the real relationship between Manaharamu and Danzuishan? What are these... Districts like Vehi and Gari and what makes them different?

Where Manaharamu teaches like many western schools do, Physics, Chemistry, Language, Culture, Math, Economy, and then later, should one choose, they offer the opportunity to study magic organized and sorted to Match each of the Full-caster archetypes  in D&D 5e, Danzuishan ignores those boundaries and focuses on what the person wants to do, and then guides them in learning how to accomplish it. Their lack of specialization puts them on a lower economic tier than Manaharamu ultimately, but their population is just as happy and reports higher levels of fulfillment than Manaharamu. This makes them more effective as citizens as a whole, despite higher economic disparity, poorer healthcare, and lower literacy rates. The Danzuishanese are not to be thought of as less intelligent, but as more process-oriented than the Manahararahi, the people of Manaharamu. A Danzuishanese worker will always be a good worker, but a Danzuishanese neighbour isn't necessarily as good as having a Manahararahi neighbour. The Danzuishanese expect people to solve their own problems, the Manahararahi expect to help and to get help.

The Ultimate theme here that I'm trying to accomplish is to look at how one might go about differentiating culture in a way that can be expressed to an audience without needing to list superficial preferences. 

If you talk to someone from Danzuishan, it is easy to know they are from Danzuishan. They are driven, an amalgam of how I view the people of my home, Newfoundland, combined with influences from the Japanese, The Indians, and in a smaller way, the Chinese. Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, and smaller parts of many other traditions in the regions have influenced the process that made these schools. 

 Mishlia kotsi'u kaolat kotsi Ra'ti,

- Dal Kaolat Manaharamu, Lyssarvilraha "Dal Kaolok Nirrum"

Civilizations Part 3: Re-re-resource

Nirrum's Civilization's main export is Magic Items and Magic Services

I, on the other hand, live in a country that focuses on Oil and Cars

When considering why your people decided to settle where they did, you might just want to look up on Wikipedia what sort of resources they'd be able to find, but you might run into a bit of trouble when looking at some of our own civilizations and trying to figure out what resource they could possibly find there. It is worth noting that the historicity of this list isn't exactly...Linear. Skilled came before ground-based, manufacture was simultaneous with ground-base in its tier but also ubiquitous throughout history. 

Resource Tech Tier Tree Trial.

So the five general tiers of economy might be described something like this

• Ground-based economy. Things such as Mining, Sustenance farming, or gathering. These tend to be the poorest for the average person
• Skilled cultivation based economy. Management of resources begins to matter. Industrial farming, herding, and the beginnings of mass food production.
• Skilled manufacture based economy. This is where people get Professions that range from habberdasher and whitesmith to smelter and tanner. The steps between material and product are where the vast majority of the workers will find themselves.
• Service-based economy. This is the place where getting things done is where most people will make their money.Suddenly, making sure that other economies have what they need and maintaining those needs comes to the front. This is one of the signs of a healthy global economy
• Information-based economy. With just about everything being done, usually automated, the biggest currency is information. Not tremendously dissimilar from a ground-based economy in the disparity between the rich and everyone else, 

Each one of these tiers represents increasing levels of technological and economic prowess. Hypothetically, there exist tiers beyond, and economists, economical historians, sociologists, and other anthropological fields might be able to add more or add more complexity to these. For our purposes, this will do.

In considering what resources a town or a civilization exists on, you set a valuable anchor for what people travelling through here are going to encounter in the form of

• Available equipment
• Education
• Governmental structure
• Social Infrastructure
• General living conditions
• Phyiscal infrastructure
• Impact of Destruction as a function of work-hours to replace

In most cases, the higher up the tier list, the greater the value of each of these topics. In an information-based economy, a minimum of resources are needed to ensure a maximum of productivity, but a maximum number of people are needed to be productive. In a ground-based economy, a few able bodies are enough to get by and there's no need for most safety nets.

Ground-Based.

Mining does not take much skill. There are those who can do it exceptionally well and those who can prevent it from failing catastrophically better than others, but for the average worker, an able body is all that is really required. In the presence of automation, those workers can even be replaced and this would mean that the people here live in squalor. A particularly foward-thinking government would not rely exclusively on this source of income, but all governments require it. When planning your civilization, make sure you know where they get their raw materials from and know what the quality of life is like for those people. If a Civilization maxes out as a Ground-based economy, then you will likely encounter:

• Minimum available equipment, only local or extremely cheaply imported clothing, 
• Largely ignorant local populous
• Singularly powerful individual governments or small councils at best. If the fruits of other economies are available then the powerful alone will be able to access those goods and services, while exploiting the lesser citizens for their labor. This disparity increases depending on the difference between the two civilizations. A civilization with minimum contact and nothing to export might show next to no disparity between its leaders and its constituent citizens
• Minimum if any social infrastructure, though, in the particular case of humans, there will always be central meeting areas without exception. In my eyes this speaks to our socially oriented nature, and is a good indicator of our intent to find benefit in others. 
• Poor conditions, often to a minimum of livable. A single technological boon of any kind will often increase the livelihood of everyone in this civilization until it fails. A single windmill, a single tractor, A single glass bottle might change their lives, often for the better.
• Next to no physical infrastructure. A dam to form a reservoir, communal nets, and frequently a garbage dump are all these towns need to have, though other improvements are not hard to make and the older a village is, the more likely they are to have big upgrades such as a mill, sawmill, aqueduct, or a church, which we'll go into further down
• Repairs for most things might only be measured in days, so long as they are not compared to larger infrastructure, which really depends on how clever these citizens are

Skilled Cultivation-based

Farming, as old of a tradtion as it is,  is still fairly easy to screw up. through millenia of selective breeding has eased that burden. Farmers of diffferent types will end up with expertise in that type. In this tier you begin to see specialization facilitated by trade, which is why farming is on a higher tier than Mining, despite mining being a historically later development. This will be explained in depth later.

• Minimum Available equipment, There is always a smith
• Largely ignorant population with expertise in certain aspect that the other citizens do not have
• Small organizational structure, mostly just powerful individuals or exclusive councils that extort people lower on the power hierarchy
• Some social infrastructure, Festivals are guaranteed
• Minimum livable conditions unless on open land, in which case it is up to the people living in an area to improve their own structures
• Mills and water-distribution are more likely to be available by necessity. This means the populace will have some access to easy labor.
• Destruction of a large piece of infrastructure is likely going to take weeks to repair, but the people should be able to live without it.

Skilled manufacture-based economy

Instead of needing to farm, people have the time to specialize into a single form of tool use, Not just the local blacksmith or mason, but now professional weavers, ropers, painters and charcoal-burners! People save huge amounts of time because they no longer need to make their own nails, cloth, bread, really, they only need to do the job that other people need from them!

• Myriad general equipment becomes available. The specificity of the work done in the past has allowed the citizens here to spread into more markets, ensuring more productivity. 
• Trades apprentices suddenly become abundant. Education becomes a normalized part of life, record-keeping becomes more important, reading isn't an essential skill but it is beneficial
• Established governments are bound to avoid uprisings, as with the ability to manufacture, power can easily transfer to the people if not handled correctly.
• Laws! Enforcement! Unemployable beggars whose families oversaturate their trade! Bandits! Taxes!
• Conditions begin to become a bit more comfortable as advanced goods are readily available, like shoe lasts, langets, and paint!
• Jails! Walls! Trade Caravans! Maybe even basic plumbing!
• Destruction of property can take weeks to months depending on the labor that went into

Service-based economy

Skilled Manufacture was obviously the right idea, All you need to do to live is get the right things to the right people. Trade and trades are where all of the best money is. Do the one thing, fix the one thing for people and they'll pay you for the one job they don't have the time to do. This marks the downhill for a lot of civilizations. Time, instead of being the space whence you do things, has now become money. Traders who trade faster, people who fix more, translators who translate more, Anyone who can work longer can get more. Happiness begins to decline even though access to comfort has never been higher. Much of our modern world depends on a service-based economy.

• Almost all equipment in the world is available, and depending on how long the civilization has been around, it's progressively more ubiquitous
• Education becomes progressively more ubiquitous as well, Industrialization is the tipping point that forces people to become educated, both out of necessity for being able to work in those factories and plants, as well as to find other jobs if they can't
• Complex political alliances are now needed to be maintained, Social well-being becomes more important as the productivity of the citizens becomes tied to tax revenue, Governments that diversify their keys to power will see less power but a more successful country, 
• Healthcare matters, Taxes are heavily enforced, roads are maintained, most of the things people use, they will contribute to indirectly. Libraries are cherished, Universities are invested in.
• Depending on the level of technology, Living conditions could barely be more comfortable. Plumbing is almost certain at this stage.
• Paved roads, Government buildings, Plumbing (oh god, sweet plumbing), Marketplaces! 
• Impact of Destruction as a function of work-hours to replace

Information-based Economy

Only recently a factor in todays society, I'll be honest, I'm not quite smart enough or educated enough to fully comprehend this tier. It represents a return-to-form in that there's a brand new crop being made. Data and Discovery are the two prime products of this bracket. This is where you find the most complex politics, the most inefficient changes, and the most grueling grind. Despite this, comfort is as high as it can be, hypothetically, Even the poor see kickbacks from the wealth of the powerful, provided a sufficient tax system. 

• If it exists on the planet, it is available for the right price with a decent amount of surety
• Government mandated education to start, Highly encouraged education beyond that. Living without education almost guarantees a place in a menial job if one hasn't been automated, or if any exist.
• Complex bureaucracy headed by a thin veneer of actual political agency, The enacting of legislation and the proposal of new policy can take years, corruption dependant, before being put into place. 
• Likely well-filled social infrastructure. Soup kitchens for the poor, welfare, healthcare, roads, utilities, well-maintained taxes and law. Large gathering places, entertainment venues, services generated specifically to navigate the infrastructure available
• Even the poor seem rich because if any one of them becomes productive, they begin paying their own weight, and if they advance past that, they begin paying the weight of others.
• Post-industrial services become so ubiquitous that no one really needs much outside of roads and utility available to the public.
• The impact of destruction on an information-based society is strange. Destruction of anything becomes hard as redundancy and protections are built around the facilitation of an idea that any one of its citizens can carry. For the Physical though, The destruction of a dam may take years to rebuild, some buildings will take months, and in many cases, it might be not worth the effort to repair, but instead, a replacement might be made.

Changing from tier to tier is hard. Old cultures die rapidly in the presence of the uselessness of their traditions and the presence of new technology. Cultural vestiges last longer depending on the size of the population. Change is like a hot cup of water. The stuff touching the edges will cool the fastest but will be kept warm by the stuff further in. Eventually, the whole cup cools, or, if the cup is big enough, the room is warmer, as sometimes, customs survive and even flourish in new tiers. In our setting, our winter-season holiday has survived in one form of another for millennia through all of these tiers

Mix'n'Match:Multi-tier civilization

Anyone who lives in a civilization and is reading this (without the use of magic) is living in a tiered Civilization! This means you live in a world that has tremendous economic disparity, and possibly the ever looming threat of automation! Robots can do just about anything that a human can do provided it's any bit repetitive! Lawyering, Doctoring, Mining, weaving, farming, smithing, jewelling, you name it, robots can probably do it and probably more accurate than humans can! For now, humans hold on as a slightly more economic source of labor and prudence than robots. The people who stand at the top of their local economy get to breeze by as best as one can in life, not having to worry about such things. But not everyone gets to experience the wealth of their labors, nor do most people actually encounter anything outside their tier. 

These basic, oversimplified tiers all exist beside each other. Masters of countries that might only export as a Ground-based or Cultivation-based society might still live as though they were just as rich in an information-based one while their people live on the minimum they need to for their tier.

Often, Civilizations will remain separate so that the masters of lower tiers are the only point that higher tiers need to deal with. Despots of mining and Landlords of farming, Bossess and CEOs of Manufacture and service

What this means for your Civs

This isn't even a guideline, it's things to consider when making your Civilization, because there are exceptions at every step and that's where you can make passive narrative tension. Why do the miners have access to AI? Why are the Scientists harvesting their own food? Why are the dragonborns of Danzuishan living so well when their primary export is treasure extracted from their extremely dangerous magical maze? What's a shoe last? What's important that no matter what tier your civ is, it touches the tiers below it. Your Jewellers get Jewels from miners. Your Clothiers get fibre from farmers of sheep, cotton, flax or rarely, silk-producers. 

The descriptions of your civilizations, in describing their successes, should describe where they get the goods for those successes, the services they depend on, and their relationship with the purveyor of those goods and services. You don't need to go into much more, provided the answer for the question exists. 

Pinralysraha ra'u'lo  mishliatalo

-Nirrum

Context in Leveling

Nirrum is a Max-level bard with some permanent magic enhancements.

I, on the other hand have a few networking certificates.

This installment is a context and perspective blog on the value of a level, again focusing mostly on Fifth Edition, and lacks any mechanical input. 

When a person of exceptional calibur decides to set out from their village and undertake the life of a protagonist, it is well known that they stand head and shoulders above their peers. They are on a New level. Level ONE.  It's an achievement. Roughly double the toughness, roughly 5% better at everything depending on what universe they live in, They might even have..... class features. Incredible isn't it? In 5e specifically, some of these people can kill people with their bare hands in as little as one strike. I once saw a man kill two others with a single punch each. Bear in mind the average peasant has 10ac and 3.5hp. Stepping on three caltrops, Getting beat with a baseball bat, getting stabbed with a knife are all more than enough to put the average person out of a fight, if not kill them. Four "I actually need to care about this" punches should be enough to drop someone, a crit might knock them out if someone has a extra point in their strength mod. But level one? Even the Wizard at level one requires a bit more to take them down, though, not by much. So what is a level?

Everything can kill you: Don't die.

We once played a campaign for a full year at 1st level. This setting even had guns, specifically those that could have been potentially available in England during the year 1868. I will dispel myths now that you need to level to have fun. Once we got over out Level-up withdrawals, we made abundant use of every single feature we had. We had no magic, we had only guns, wits, and character. And when A Sharpes' 45-70 government rimfire does 2d10+dex mod damage and you only have 10 or 12 health, you keep your head down. Nearly everyone you meet has the power to end you in a single shot. It was Dramatic, every fight had to be well-timed, every character interaction was measured and valuable. Every political interaction was held with the knowledge that we weren't capable of getting out of their alive unless we were fantastically lucky. Every description of every room became critical (and one DM flub came about with almost a TPK and several unsatisfying deaths from not describing the room well enough. I've never quite recovered from losing that character). At this level, a short sword was a dangerous proposition, and a greatsword? A greatsword is intent to kill. Firebolt does 1d10 damage at this level, Think about that. That's an average of 5.5 damage. Against 3.5 health. or a not infreqent 9 on an adventurer. The commoner is screwed, the adventurer, threatened.

The power that we had was that of being Slightly more powerful than the average chump. The most standout features were The barbarian's Rage, which would take dear Roscoe from 14hp to a whopping functional 28 hp, meaning he could tank a shotgun blast and come back swinging with enough damage to kill the average man nearly four times over; or the crossb-I mean... Pistol expert feat, allowing a character to effectively double their ranged output. This went on for a year and we were continually floored with challenges that were seemingly impossible.

 And then we hit level two. By definition, we were twice the people we had been, and damn, it showed. 

All of a sudden we felt like titans. Fisher, a rogue by definition, had picked up a level in bard. It took him two weeks to do it but he found (and commissioned the construction of) the ingredients he needed to get a familiar. Emma, my character, got action surge, making her capable of firing three shots from her starrs revolvers in one turn, and with the arch- I MEAN... marksman fighting style, She became an absolute terror of a gunslinger. When she got her powder wet, she was useless, and felt insignificant still, until fisher cast a spell to dry the powder, Prestadigitation. You have never felt awe and amazement in an rpg until someone pulls a miracle with a trick like that

The Sheer consequence of  a second level was lost on no one in the party. Suddenly we could take two, maybe even three bullets before going down. While no one managed to pick up healing, we were still terrifying forces of nature compared to the common folk. We were... On a whole 'nother level.  

And this is what it means to go even further beyond.

We never hit Level 3 in that campaign, but in others, we've gone as far as 14. In an earlier blog, I mentioned King Lazarus Honore Dorian Tibeaux-Avisen. He ended his journey at 14, as he was now not only a king, an admiral, a husband, and untouchable by nearly all physical and most forms of political attack. Comparing Tibeaux and his immediate crew with the heroes of the other campaign, the sheer dissonance in ability is staggering. The entire party from the one campaign would struggle to defeat any one from the other. Each level is a massive philosophical enhancement. Every step is the equivalent of gaining the power of an extra person. Albiet, with the action economy of one, depending on your feats and features. In 5th edition, the breakdown sounds like this

• A level 1 Adventurer is a trained and powerful person, not the sort you want to get into a bar fight with, but you might stand a chance.
• A second Level adventurer is the sort of person who exceeds the expectations you'd place on a normal person, capable of staying up long after they should have been defeated
• Third level is where we find Actual professionals. People who can access what some might consider mystical tiers of power.
• The fourth level carries an ability score increase, a measurable boost in the skill with which your character can lord over other people. Sometimes people will have trained up for a feat, and it is hard to quantify how much more powerful they are, But be aware. They are.
• Fifth level. This is where you find your wandering champion swordsman, your kingdom-class wizards, extreme masters of their arts. Their attacks always seem to hit, their spells are extremely powerful, their abilities and skill are the news.
• Historical figures with at least one volume on their deeds might be found around Sixth level. Does their strength and vitality know no bounds? Sneaking up on the mindbogglingly potent fighter at this level and trying to attack them with a dagger would need about ten well-made attacks to exhaust them to the point that they can be slain. They're too used to those tactics, their reflexes too honed, their gods paying too close attention, their very presence too potent for you to reliably think you could kill one.
• Seventh Level? These people are fairy tales. They are myths, they are legends. They never existed... did they?
• No no, 8th level can't possibly exist
• Past 8th, things aren't really comparable in terms of what a commoner sees. A few legends and myths or even historical figures might go up to 11, but their potency blends together. Anything above this walking toward a commoner that knows what it is, is the sort of thing that you tell your great grandkids... if  you survive. 

Two 9th level fighters can take on an ancient red dragon if they're  really lucky.

In other game systems a second level might not mean anything, and that cheapens the experience to me. In some systems you don't get levels, but you only get the things that you worked for. What I want to stress to those Curators that are reading this is that you should always keep in mind the context that comes with a level. Know what the commoner, the average person has going for them, and after you have that You'll get a feeling for what makes your party exceptional

Mishlia kwatsi'u kwatsi oosha.

-Nirrum

Puzzles and how they work

Nirrum builds puzzles that only affect people that try to cheat

I, on the other hand, build puzzles that can't be cheated on... technically

This is actually a repost of a reddit post I wrote a while back, but I feel it belongs here.

So I've been doing a lot of research on this lately and there's not really a clear cut answer on how puzzles should be done.

Puzzles in videogames or in real life revolve around a few different concepts that apply differently to D&D  than a lot of people expect. The mindset you approach these aspects with will determine how successful and fun the puzzle is. Those Factors are:

• Key Mechanics
• Can and Can't
• The Catch
• The Reasons for being

So let's start off with Key mechanics by nature of it being the least helpful and most complex one. In videogames, you always get a set of things you can do to interact with the world and expanding this allows you to expand and recontextualize that world. See a ladder? Maybe you can climb it, maybe you can't. Do you have a sword? You can probably swing it and it can probably cut things. Does the door have a big blue A over it? You can probably press that button to open or at least learn about the door. In Dungeons & Dragons this isn't the case. The key mechanic is "You're at least roughly human" and all the context that goes with it, followed troublingly by "Magic exists." Your puzzles are built of things that are by necessity malleable, destructible and shapeable, unless the universe was created in such a way that these things always existed. By extension, with time and effort, they can be undone. What happens when the PC tunnels into the throne room through the wall, the full army in tow behind him? Puzzles interacting with the PCs run the problem that the key mechanic is hello, person, you can do person things, like break things or climb things or set things on fire. Unlike Zelda games where you unlock the ability to make fire, PCs just walk in with a flint and some tinder and set one themselves, or worse, they use magic. Consider the following spells:

• Detect thoughts
• Knock
• Identify
• Nystul's Magic Aura
• Prestidigitation
• Mending
• Feather fall
• Find Traps
• Locate Literally anything
• Gaseous form
• Banishment
• Fabricate

and many more. All of these spells are spells that undo puzzles in ways that you don't really realize until you try to DM a game with a puzzle that's undone by this.


One of these two people only tells lies while the other only tells the tru- I cast detect thoughts

or


Bars block your way down the hall and the leader of the cult esca- gaseous form, Drop it, run after him, Fucker's not getting away

With nearly any spell that's not a regular combat spell, a caster is able to recontextualize their space at all times. Building around this is hard to say the least. The problem is that Magic as a key mechanic allows for a lot of weird shit at early levels. This leads into our second factor

Can and Can't are related to Key mechanics in that a key mechanic tells you what you can and can't do in terms of interactability, but it's far from the whole story. Can and Can't are the largest pillars of puzzle design because once you know the cans, you can figure out the can'ts. Normally you can't walk through walls, you can't open locked doors, and you can't survive fiery-pit-death. You can use keys, you can figure out mechanisms and you can probably just not go into the pit. Puzzles take this to the extreme. To be able to do something, you need to do something else to turn can't into can. The scope of abilities your players have however is usually only limited to their capability and your ability to plan. As a DM of over five years now, it is only rarely worth your time to invest in that plan. The only real answer is to know your player's capabilities by heart and unfortunately, that's an extreme task. An obstacle that, by any means other than your puzzle or planned mechanics, should be impossible, becomes trivial in the face of say, teleport. Constantly denying such ability to remove the challenge means you are punishing player choice, infinitely robbing those players of their spotlight. I play in a campaign where recently, I had to retcon Identify out of my spellbook because the DM would not let it function, having used it ten times, it worked fully once. My can was turned into a can't and I was punished for trying. So when building your puzzle, make sure that you actually know everything that your players are capable of, or at least don't be surprised when five people turn out to be more creative than one.
Moving into our third category we reach actual puzzle making philosophy. The catch, as --> Mark brown <-- defines it in his gamemaker's toolkit and bosskeys series, Is when two or more goals directly conflict with each other. Opening a door hides the treasure, Keeping the treasure visible keeps the door locked, as an example. This is the true heart of a puzzle and what makes it fun. A jigsaw is just "I have a picture, BUT it's in pieces, and when I try to put the pieces together they aren't in the right order or shape! The goal of putting pieces together is at odds with the goal of having the complete picture unless you solve the puzzle by doing it in the right order, that is, putting the right pieces together. In a Dungeon, that might be that the water that's holding a boulder against the exit and flooding the room is also what's stopping the same room from filling with snakes. Move the boulder first, then drown the snakes, provided your players can't just teleport through a wall as with Dimension door. A good way to design this is through basic logic gates, with AND being the simplest one.

Switch 1	Switch 2	Result
On	Off	IMPASSIBILITY
Off	On	DENIAL
Off	Off	REJECTION
On	On	Victory

Switching victory around for any of these states constitutes a different logic gate, and these are only the ones you get with two switches. Minecraft's redstone logic has an excellent tutorial on it, and douglas hoffstatder's GEB gives you some clever ideas for self-referencing and self-changing puzzles. This is a clever way to make a catch but not the only one, Definitely check out that video for a better idea. But once you have a puzzle, even before you have a puzzle, you should probably think about the next aspect.

All things have a Reason for Being, and let me tell you, as a professional

Mad Wizard, or bard, at least,

if I wish for you to not enter my tower, I'm using traps. You will be a mess of astrally oriented ash. Not puzzles. Puzzles in terms of intentional design are matters of communication. You are communicating that you wish to proceed and they are testing or asking for an evaluation of your ability to solve that puzzle, for one reason or another. Puzzles are not about slowing people down. That's what traps are for. Puzzles that occur naturally are harder to make but if you're clever enough to make them, then understand that most natural puzzles get defeated with say, flight. Or fire. Having a reason for being is what creates verisimilitude and ultimately ties the others together. If you build a room whose purpose is to test the player's ability to figure out portal puzzles, then ask, did the wizard really fortify every wall with lead, inlayed with gold anti-teleportation runes, made of adamantine covered in a wall of force that has Eighty nine layers of "counterspell" glyphs of warding triggered for "dispel magic" in this room when they could have, Iunno, just used detect thoughts?

I'm not saying there aren't ways to make puzzles work, I'm working on one right now. But do not go into it with the idea that they must be solved a certain way. In my experience, that never happens.

And never use riddles. They're either horrendously easy or misconstrued and the players will have said the right answer half an hour ago but still debate about using it.

Lirano
 -Nirrum

Core Mechanics to consider during design

Nirrum powergames real life

I, on the other hand, only powergame tabletop game NPCs

The largest part of making a game of any kind is understanding your core mechanics. As a game designer you have the exclusive power to decide what action leads to what reaction, but what does it mean to design when your constituents have mechanics that you didn't design? This post's title is actually quite deceiving, it's about getting ready for the core mechanics that you don't know about during design.

The big oof: Uncontrolled mechanical agency

In the 1990's, a game came out called Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Many people played this game and wanted to emulate its tone. The sense of recontextualization when you revisted an area after going backward and forward in time was fantastically well conveyed. All of the temples you had to visit as an adult had been present the entire time a child, you could see their entrances but not get to them. The dungeons were large labyrinths leading you on a path of puzzle-solving and discovery. Many people will point out other games that did much of what this game did better, but this one in particular highlights the dissonance between game design and game mastering. In the game, a lot of the puzzles were dependent on being able to keep your character, officially named "link" within the confines of a room or setting. Tall walls, ledges too high to climb, locked doors, item-dependent puzzles.  The design of these individual rooms or places is easy, sometimes formulaic. Many DMs will try to emulate the design of this game, trying to capture its essence, its ability to convey tone.

But link never had the "knock" spell. 

With the toolsets offered to players in most tabletop games, there are few contexts that can actively constrain them to a path. Being short on time is the last remaining bastion for many Maestros when their Patients suddenly have the ability to fly, walk through walls, teleport, magically unlock doors, light fires, or bring in a few hundred soldiers with pickaxes. I assure you the water temple loses its potency when someone just burrows into the side. Time and economy break many tabletop RPGs. Adventurers, by nature of being actively out looking for trouble both simultaneously come into vasts amounts of economic advantage while always remaining short on time.

Formulaic efficiency

When designing an area that is supposed to be constrained by any measure, you should always ask questions about those constraints.

• What is the intent of the area? Why is there a block puzzle to get inside this castle? Who in their right mind sets up water-level puzzles... at all? What ass expects me to fool around with these levers when I could just...break down the door? There are answers to all of those questions, but they're special context, and almost always trying to get people to prove their "worthiness." In most cases, the way to get in to the castle is through the door. No puzzles needed, you might offend the southern nobles with that. The cave complex was made naturally, and only used by the trolls for its convenience. Having obstructions where they don't belong can really screw with a narrative.

• What are these constraints made to defeat? Most houses have a door with a lock. The lock, as any lockpicker will tell you is mostly security theatre as most houses nowadays have easily picked locks and more conveniently, an abundance of windows. It is the more common, low-skilled burglar that a lock defeats and your average neighbourhood cat or rat colony that a door truly is built for. Walls mostly just block the wind. In castles, these walls defeat footmen but are ill-equipped to stop, say, dragons. A fort or fortress built with a dragon in mind might not be able to handle a wizard, and very very very few things that can handle all of these things can handle a poorly-thought-out macguffin.
• Would the person who built this place have access to the spells, materials, and time needed to make this place as impenetrable as they'd like? 'cause there's no way your local baron has access to anti-teleportation runes. Your average magical lock isn't spectacularly resistant to disenchantment, and few people have the means to make them (usually). Instead, people make walls thick and designs obscure. They hide and guard their treasure and have most of their power in liquid assets -alliances and the like- so that they cannot be stolen. But time and economy strike again. An adventurer with a few gold in their pocket for some rations at the nearest inn and a pick can Undermine eheh the most sturdy of castles.
• What happens when people break out of these constraints? If the area was not built with the expectation that people would dare tunnel through its walls, then surprise, nothing really is going to happen, unless going through the trials as they were intended was the only way to reach the goal. Will they run out of time? Will they be discovered? Will absolutely nothing negative happen? Consider these things when you build each area.

A lot of the time your charges will be able to break through the intended drama with some ability or clever plan or some advanced machination. To say "you cannot try" is to fail, and while you needn't be ashamed of failure, you must always try to learn from it. To tell them and know beforehand why it fails or succeeds is a success.

Damage, Movement, and The hands of a murderer

The most common things to consider when designing an area specifically to challenge people is to look at their damage output, how fast they can move and what you can do to slow that advance. My brother took my loose DM style and tested it to the limit. Xundrin Ry'lendar was a drow assassin, built in 5e with the sole purpose of doing as much damage as he could. At peak build, his average first turn damage was Nine hundred and Ninety Nine. For comparison, the Tarrasque has 676hp. A Warship only has 500. Turns out there are higher damage builds too. He was stealthy enough that he'd be able to reliably get his most potent abilities off silently, and this trivialized a lot of drama and combat constraints that I would have wanted to place in front of the party. What I realized when dealing with Xundrin was that, as mentioned in previous posts, it didn't matter. His damage didn't really matter when he was faced with an open room and more than 30ft between him and his target. Or against more than six people. Building places to allow others to shine in spite of this gross abuse of multiclassing wasn't terribly hard, and this was proved well enough when he retired the character in the next module, a bright desert town filled with wizards.

The next post is going to look more at Puzzle design

 Taparmish'u'lo Mishlia
- Nirrum

The Tibeaux Effect: Sailor's Stories and High Charisma.

Nirrum views Grand Tortuga's Recent Monarch as a Madman and Political landmine
I, on the other hand, see him as a fitting end to such a complex governmental structure

 "Really? It wasn't so hard to cross the Dragon Coast after we plundered the citadel of the undead in Konia which lead to us running from an elven king across ganglegrove where we were consumed by a ship eater that we barely escaped from before meeting one of the creators of the plane who gave us this dryad (my cook, I might add) here to help our quest to recover the Mystical demon bones. Though I will admit, even with the dryad, the quest has been a little bumpy. We've had to defeat a sandstone god on the way and BOY that was tough, but the eye of a deceased lovecraftian horror was a fitting reward and let's be honest, the ancient blue,black, and green dragons that harassed us along the coast were nothing compared to the slaad invasion we stopped in drakenhearth before coming here. What? The Unicorn we used in the assassination of Memory Jaquy? I must have missed how we picked it up in Jianok Sio, the land of giants before the Ganglegrove part as part of a quest from a Storm giant.

-Fleet King Lazarus Honore Dorian Tibeaux-Avisen Bruchev and a whole bunch of other fun factors mixed in with that
 The Tibeaux effect is simple. Put adventurers through enough and they're going to have something to talk about. Things that are of cosmic scale that they fell nose-first into because they were at the right place at the right time and capable enough to survive it. Or Rather, If an adventuring campaign goes on long enough Their stories are going to be a bit over the top. While Good for spreading D&D, it has issues when your party is able to convince people that they're telling the truth, especially if this sort of thing is easily demonstrable. In the Above case, Ghuivere DurFisher, a master spy at Grand Tortuga, was left helpless with a feeling of insignificance. Eof Kveter was incredulous, Luciaria avisen impressed, Slovenka smug and smiling, and Shami Murtuck eager to make a deal. With the exception of that last one, those things don't tend to happen. Be aware of this effect when you run campaign sections that are high in roleplay. 

Lies, But With Evidence

I quite enjoyed the Catharsis I watched my players go through when they landed in Grand Tortuga. Their long and bizzare adventure was a campaign of two and a half years to that point, both in game and out, and it would continue for another half a year out of game and another month in. Suddenly, after months of desolate coast and hostile towns, they came to a place where every person they would meet was at least Level 10. A brawl in a street became a massive cluster of teleporting rogues or Illusion-aided mobsters. I had made sure (or so I thought) that my players were out matched. 

And then a Mouse Roared

More specifically, they managed to get out of a Colville screw thanks to their druid picking up some magic that aided their escape. A unicorn Teleport and a risky alliance later and all of a sudden, they're sitting on a council of Fourteen other pirate captains giving what was more or less the monologue above. Sure you can have people say "I don't believe you" but when your figurehead is the body of one of that sandstone god's own minions, your boat is covered in the colors of Dragonscale that you mentioned, and the people at the table are entirely aware of the extremely nearby Slaadi presence. There's not much that they can say to really express skepticism. The fact that you as a DM have to make their journey interesting vastly conflicts with the ideosphere of  a world of people who tend to get up in the morning, work to fund their next few meals, and then have a pint at the local pub.

True purpose, Right Action

So what do you do, when you players walk into the courts of kings, demanding audience, wielding apolitical power, telling the stories that no one should believe but having proof that no one can deny?

Honestly, I just say that you let them.

This is one of the reasons I make sure that the Density of the towns in my world are high while the spaces in between them are vast. That adventure is out there for them to embark upon. They're probably not the only adventurers to have done these sorts of things, but for those uninundated with endless tales of the number of dragons the local caravan driver has had to kill, or for those markets unsaturated by the seemingly mindboggling amounts of treasure from the surely worrying number of fallen civilizations, these stories are a great feeling for your players. They're having fun. Let them. That's the point.

Tonal Dissonance

The inevitable problem is Tonal Dissonance. Trying to create drama when your characters can clearly handle what has been thrown at them is a seemingly daunting task. Trying to establish a serious threat when "Aggressive Sandstone God" is mentioned in the first person and with past tense. What an average avatar of setting might struggle with thereafter might be a false equivalence. Just because nothing is scary doesn't mean that nothing matters. In the above example, the module that followed was one of the best experiences my players had ever had in a similar game. Things that seemed trivial were dramatic, things that should have been scary were epic, things that were supposed to be intriguing were overlooked in favor of more appealing endeavours. Like becoming the ruling party. 

When your Vidience, your audience, your Olfactorience, your proprioence, makes it to this part, they finally have proven they have the agency to accomplish their goals. This is a fantastic turning point. Your players have decided that they can decide. They're big kids now. Finding and hunting down your father's killer? A scry, a teleport, a quick bonk on the head, a couple of well placed fireballs, problem solved 60% of the time. Wanna Restore your temple to it's former glory? You have the funds to build Your god's version of the Vatican. Do you want to become the hero of your village? Shit man, your old village hero was famous for killing two owlbears. Wanna open an interstellar trading company? Go buy the big freighter.

You did it, Character. You succeeded at winning the mission. But what this means for the future is that there are few people who are able to deal with these problems and as mobile as your rag-tag band.

As the Master of this Ceremony this allows you to open up the shape of challenges. Time becomes a threat, you can place literally any challenge anywhere. You're reaching the end of your story in a natural way.  Instead of  Tonal Dissonance, you have feelings of empowerment and agency, and it is at this point that you know your group is in your game. Anything that they choose to tackle will feel good, feel real. Their deaths, should they occur, will feel justified. The hole left by a character leaving will be aching to be filled, and the journey to find their new partner can be quite a fun adventure. Where are they? Some dungeon, rotting away? In an old inn on the edge of the country? Actively assassinating a political leader? Who knows?

The tibeaux effect in the end is a sign that your characters are ready to take the adventure into their own hands, or at least that it's time to up the potency of your villains. The average joe can't even begin to affect your actors, so now, only the big players can. Kings, Archmages, Lich-Bard Princesses that pine away in the skeleton of their empty society, unable to join her people's children, two thousand years removed for fear of the demon they actively paint her as, Their favourite barkeep, Merchants, that sort of person.

Rau Ranoru'u
-Nirrum

My Two Most Successful Encounters

Nirrum has more health than most CR5 creatures

I, on the other hand, might die the next time I level up.

Over my career as Spooky multiparticipant game administrator (5e DM), I've run a lot of encounters. From tremendously terrifying sandstone gods to the most outclassed goblin that has ever existed.

These are my two favourites and why. These examples are from Dungeons and Dragons, but their lessons are system agnostic.

The first example is my personal favourite: One wild Boar crosses the party's path. If you use a battlemat, place your players on it without saying anything then place the boar, "A wild boar crosses your path, do you do anything?"

• Someone in the party desires the boar. This is a universal truth.
• Some people do not care for the boar.
• Some people want the party to stay together
• Someone's gonna run after the boar and every player is going to have to make a decision then and there. What does my character do?
• It's always worked for me, but It might not work for you. This is an excellent encounter to run early in a game when you have new players who are uncertain or people who are uncomfortable with each other.
• This will set up some characters to gel easily and provide a level of context for their in-character relationships

  The second example is a bit harder. One bone devil, Six Skeletons with both lances and bows, one mad wizard. The setup goes like this. The Wizard is being controlled by the bone devil and is trying to resurrect his love. The Six Skeletons constantly get revived by the wizard passively on his turn because of an item he is holding. The wizard only runs away from the party, dashing constantly. The room is large, 70*100, with multiple entrances, Rafters, and four large inanimate statues. The bone devil sits at the back of the room and attacks intelligently, Focusing down key creatures and high-damage dealers. This was run in my campaign by a group of 5 level 5 players, but I recommend a level or two more. Very few parties play like mine does

• The party has to deal intelligently with this combat and it is not hard to contribute.
• Attacking any creature in the room is a good idea
• The wizard doesn't even need to be defeated, he literally is just a passive mob, and all you have to do is get the item out of his hands to stop the skeletons from getting back up. That said, Killing works too
• While the bone devil is up, the wizard will keep trying to get the item back
• Killing the Devil frees the wizard and stops the fight
• Players of all skills are able to contribute in this fight and plenty of utility spells and abilities have use here, anyone that does anything will tend to be contributing unless they are particularly obtuse. The devil does not want to talk unless you're here to give it souls. Hope you write a good contract for that one.
  

The biggest thing to note here is the sheer difference in mechanical complexity in these two encounters. "BEHOLD, A ROVING RESOURCE-CREATURE DOES NOT LIKE YOU" is hard to simplify further, and all this does is trigger loss reflex. I've never seen a party not come out better off and more well defined after doing this encounter, and as an added bonus, they get a few days rations or some menial item. This is a one-time encounter and it accomplishes a lot of usually clumsy roleplay in a very short time.

The Second encounter is finely tuned but accomplished the same thing.

No one felt left out.

The real trick here is that no matter what the players did, provided they did anything even remotely resembling action, they contributed to the scene and the fun.


Kotsi
-Nirrum

Effective NPCs

Nirrum is 100% real

I, On the other hand, have doubts about my own existence.

Part of creating a world is creating people who live in that world. At least usually. People, thankfully, are extremely predictable. Across time and culture, given the same chance, we will do the same thing. They will associate mostly with their social class, they will congregate in villages, live in safe places, eat good food when they can, make do with what they have, delight in the bawdy, the erotic, and the intoxicating. There will also always be outliers to every aspect here and people who dislike people who like any particular thing. In my particular context we just got out of Marijuana prohibition and are near a hundred years removed from nationwide alcohol prohibition. I can personally attest that the use of such items never stopped and was in fact quite widespread. Figuring out what vices are allowed and how many people use them regardless is a matter for Cultural context (read, Bullshit until it's relevant), but outside of a couple of factors, there's some easy guidelines for making NPCs that

• Have easily expressable personalities
• Easily describable Looks
• easily expressed motives
• Quickly cross-referenced classes

The Formula

Here is a rather full example

The Brawny General Atlas Sowelo (INFP)(Growing One)(Bear Totem Barbarian 6, Light Cleric 6, Brawny)

This Goliath lifts, A god grants him higher levels of strength but he probably doesn't need it

Age: 35
Hieght: 7'0

Weight: 400

Atlas Sowelo is almost certainly the strongest mortal to exist on this plane. Capable of carrying extreme loads, with a carrying capacity of 4800. Atlas can literally carry houses. He spends his time in the Maze with a large cart that he uses to carry out people and treasure. He'll act as a Depot for the other maze runners if they ask him and he'll safeguard the people in the maze himself until it becomes an opportune time to leave. He wears a shimmering shirt made of fish scales and heavy brown linen pants. He carries a Spellguard shield but is cursed by a shield of Missile attraction... Voluntarily. He also wears a barbutte that acts as a helm of comprehend languages. He heads into the maze daily to retrieve those lost in it, just as he was once, armed with a War Pick that glows a soft white light constantly, in protecting others he will hold both his shields.

And now the Formula, the elements of which will be explained later
<Title, Name> (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator*)(School, Faction)(Class levels and Archetype if any)
<Quick one liner >

Age
Size descriptors

This paragraph should basically describe

• how the general populus might think of them without context
• What makes them special
• What makes THAT special
• The Character's Context, what they do and probably why they do it.
• What the character is wearing
• Any notable magic items or effects
• A tidbit about their personality.

Quick and Easy

Names should tend to follow a theme. Similar phonemes or even full concepts, have often been used, to convey connection. People who know the Goliath tribe of the eastern Aegis Mountains might make the connection that Atlas here is one of their people. Aside from having a Predone name list which you can pick from on the fly, my most successful technique has been to slam my hands on the keyboard wantonly and try to make a name of the resulting mess. It's how the Svilsbo family came into existence.

Watch

• wgltnb;psgnmj
• ..Wagalton..fuck the b, Posegnomaji
• What? You haven't heard of the Posegnomaji Family? Their (rolls gender table) Patriarch Wagalton is a Famous Cook!
• NO ONE KNOWS THAT PERSON DID NOT EXIST UNTIL JUST NOW
• bask in the glow of the depth and completeness of your world 

Meyer's-Briggs Type Indicator. 

Or More accurately, the stereotypes. This one requires a bit of study to do fluidly and takes some quick googling to do dynamically. You can easily replace this one with the name of someone who you want this NPC to be. People are far more complex than an MBTI can really tell you, but knowing the stereotypes can really help you nail down some reactions that you hadn't thought of already, as an example (and I won't fill all these out, it would take too long), here's a couple

• ENTP - Verbose, Capitious, Snivelling malcontented shitlords, Also adventurous, clever, witty and despite being obtuse and abrasive, quite caring when they're not oblivious, They're also notoriously creative while being absolutely terrible at executing long term plans. They tend to forget a lot of what they're doing. These people have too much energy to argue with and don't really care who wins or loses. You'll find Characters as varied as Jack Sparrow and Deadpool all the way back to Mordin Solace, Nirrum, Doc Brown, Elodin, or Bugs Bunny.  
• INFP - Quiet, caring, the best daydreamers, some joke that they're made of pre-cracked glass emotionally. Where the ENTP can create a solution to a problem, the INFP can make something new, they make fantastic storytellers and unparalleled musicians.  Kermit the frog, Gohan of Dragonball z fame, Hyuuga Hinata, Alphonse Elric, Fred Rogers. They love to be loved and really, don't need much more than support from others.

I really recommend searching around and getting a feel for these characters and stereotypes, Do a bunch of tests yourself. Atlas is actually just based on a friend of mine. Guy doesn't talk much but he'll work himself to death to keep someone safe. And while these are stereotypes, they really help when you're not sure of a character's quirks or what makes them unique. There are 16 types and you could probably break them down into subtypes. Personally, I enjoy experimenting with the dynamics between two types. Making characters with different types interact is how life works and, from an audience perspective, can make worlds seem massive and dynamic, even though they're only thin shells.

School or Faction, Where they is what they be

Atlas here is part of the school of the Growing one From Danzuishan. In this case, it highlights the most key aspect of his character, in that he intends to hone himself and his talents to their highest possible extent. In other cases, it will help keep faction agents separate during political problems. This could be as simple as a country, their military rank, or even their disposition to the players if they've been encountered already.

Classes, Feats, a quick note on the way they fight or don't/

As mentioned in my post on Balance, I frequently level my NPCs like Players, meaning their powers are predictable and that the players know what sort of balance they're facing if they manage to glean that information. It also means that if I give them special power, ability or item, it makes it all that much more dramatic. For other systems outside of 5e, this might just be their archetype or what *sort* of thing they are. I often include race here if it matters. If it's tertiary then I include it in the description.

Snappy One-line description

• An exciting and Charismatic Leader of the Kholirahi's Ground forces
• A wild force of nature, Some say he is the very spirit of the valley 
• The Summer Archfey of Eyes is known to grant nightmares in the form of one's own faults 

This one-liner is a dense description that should tell you the tone they should set and might be something another character says to introduce them

Physical descriptors

There's not much to say for these, but they'll tell you if they look up or down  to your players, if they tip a boat when they get in it, or how to do their voices, should you need to. 

I already covered the Paragraph so I think that's it for now. Next up I'll probably talk about The two best encounters I've ever run

Mishali, betlysvil'u'lo sho oosha saven. 

-Nirrum

Balancing Power: Just Run with it

Nirrum is painfully unaware of the value of Dust of Dryness

I, on the other hand, am Painfully aware of the artificial tidal wave that wiped out Berpsin,

Power creep and pacing in Dungeons and Dragons is hard to manage. Do you starve your players of magic items, or risk unbalancing the game with them? Is it poor sportsmanship and poor writing to take away those magic items without deep narrative mechanisms? Should you disallow classes or spells that make it difficult to force a narrative, or allow your audience the agency to lend a hand in curating their (and your) experience? The answer to all of these questions is yes.

Agency and Consistency

You can get away with just about anything so long as you are consistent. 1+1=3? It's unusual but hey, the god of mathematics is saying that's what it is so that's how we do things here. But players, audience members, experientomancers of all sorts tend to come prepacked with all sorts of Silly baseless assumptions.  As a designer, you might have expectations for the outcome of your players interactions with the world. If you're designing videogames, you have far more control over that than if you're writing or Mastering a game, as you can easily enforce the rules mechanically. 

There's only a problem with this when your agonists end up going where you didn't expect them to go or, didn't want them to go, or have something that you didn't think they should have. When you haven't told them about the rules changing before critically tense points, particularly The moment it matters. But you're not a god, and being able to see the future isn't something that we Human-worms are particularly good at. There are styles and methods which will allow you to get by without seeming too mortal. 

Anything you can do, I can do better

fancier, and retroactively before you did it.

The time has come. They have destroyed the Drama of a situation by being incredibly powerful when they should not be. Time to fight fire with fire. Whatever they did that made them powerful, you, the great spirit of dramatic enterprise, can do as well! An assassin strikes the would-be assassin. The Wombo-combo they have is suddenly reversed! Before them now stand creatures that would actually pose a challenge.  Entire armies might use the same strategy that your players employ, industries set up on a quirk of the wording of a spell, a planet of hats where the hat is "whatever that one player just did"

Remember that as a curator of experience, you are unbound by stats, or even most rules. The less you abuse this, the better of a Storyteller you will be. By using the same mechanics that your players or viewers use to create an expected result, you have the opportunity to create not only deep literary themes of self-discovery, but you also remain consistent. You can throw your hands up and say "I'm just playing by the rules."

Don't get me wrong, your people know what you're doing. Twists should be sparse, just so that they preserve narrative impact. The important message here is to not fear the power creep for yourself, you, and by extension the story, will be fine. You are a god after all. Ho ho, see what I did there? Subversion! Ha-HA!

Morse Code: Telegraphing and Loss Reflex

Anger is the most powerful emotion humans experience. It is the one that drives us to act the fastest, and the easiest way to make us angry is to take something away. Loss reflex is probably the most powerful motivator on the planet, and agency, the ability to act for oneself, control of one's circumstances, is the most devastating loss. 

When your players think that they're being railroaded, when your audience thinks that there's no point in paying attention, you've lost as a storyteller. Part of the power balance is balancing your own power to achieve a desired result. Just as twists should be sparse, telegraphing should be frequent. Your captives need to know what being wrong looks like, what impending terror is so they can change before it hits. Fun is serious business. See, there's no skill in being blindsided. A person dying to something they didn't know about isn't fun because really, they don't even need to be there for it. They were just the person that it happened to. Telegraphing that they don't know things by hinting mysteries or even showing them that their preconceived notions were wrong before it happens is how you end up with tension, because now avoiding those things becomes their goal. This is drama. Surprise is only dramatic when they have the chance to react. 

But telegraphing has its own issues that we'll talk about later. The important thing is to understand that consistency allows your players to solve problems in their own way, but also gives you important tools for being able to manage that so that you don't feel powerless in trying to keep your story interesting. Personally all of my villains are rolled up characters, this way my players know what sort of things they're getting into if they find out what their opponent can do. It grants a character that is familiar with that world the ability to adequately judge in character what their enemy is capable of. It also creates a game of seeing who can out-munchkin who, but this isn't the only way.

Having a villain show up in an early sequence is a particularly common tactic. This is fine so long as the villain has a method of leaving that can't be interrupted by the players. A villain or counterparty whose only real schtick is that they run away becomes predictable. A villain or counterparty who doesn't run away runs the risk of being untelegraphed danger. A merciful villain might not be realistic, killing one company member and leaving the rest is a tactical mistake. A powerful villain who manages to show up and kill everyone doesn't add anything to the story, as your protagonists are all now deceased. A villain whose Modus Operandi is to pit-and-forget, allowing the players a chance to escape must be careful to ensure that the player's escape takes long enough for the villain to leave. Much the same theme shows up with traps. A player falling into a trap is all fine and dandy but a trap that's lethal should always be telegraphed by the presence of clever enemies, the parts for more of that trap, or signs that the trap is there.

There's always the option to "Just be a dick" but your actors will resent you for it. Remember, you are a curator of experience, presumably one people wish to enjoy. The skillful path is the preferred one in my experience.

What power creep looks like

Levels are a really good place to start when talking about power creep. Should your desired media have levels, the most important ones to think of are the first, second, third and last levels. In most cases, the second level is a whopping double the potency of the first level, you are literally on whole 'nother level. In one campaign we went from fearing for our lives, hiding behind barrels to avoid gunfire to starting armies with our suicidal valor. It took a year for us to reach second level and when we did? Hoo boy. We felt like the bees knees then, but what'd we get? About 4.5 hp, a minor ability that we could use once in a while, One guy multiclassed, we made it work. In Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, Level 3 is where a lot of classes get their archetypes, The power jump is surprisingly small with some exceptions (looking at you, assassin). The real sneak is in the spells. "Fuck your map" spells like Detect thoughts, Find Traps, Healing spirit, Hold Person, Invisibility, Knock, Lesser restoration, Misty step, pass without trace, see invisibility, silence. and zone of truth,  are all capable of taking your well-planned puzzle and just... ignoring it. Especially knock and Detect thoughts. Entire murder mysteries are built around the idea that you don't know who did it, but when your wizard pops "detect thoughts," and all of a sudden they know who did it. When did this happen? How did this happen? All of your prep time undone by a single spell. There was no creep, it was "SUDDENLY, POWER!" Which is terribly unfortunate if you had put any amount of time into planning the whole thing out. Sure you could use a ring of mind shielding, and risk your players getting one (which is more creep), you could make that spell not work against your villain or target (and invalidate player agency. This is like buying a ), orrrrr you could just let them waltz through what should have been a tense moment and enjoy being badasses. None of these are particularly appealing are they? While it was your lack of knowledge about the capabilities of your munchkins that lead to this, how are you supposed to keep track of the constantly changing landscape of power in your medium?

Worse is what happens when you are the cause of the creep. When you've given your costumers a gift and it's too good. You need to find a way to get it back from them don't you? I'm gonna be honest, in my experience, it's too late now, you'll have to steal it back from them and let them get it back when the power scaling evens out or won't matter much in the future, near the end of a story or at least nearing the end of a chapter. 

The effect the players have on your campaign shouldn't be the issue.

Spotlight: Really, You must learn to balance your goons against eachother

You may have noticed that some players seem... better than others, for lack of a superior term. A hack'n'slash fighter in a target rich environment is having a great time compared to the utility musician/pack mule. Your Sneak's sneaking skill doesn't really matter if everyone charges forward before they can get into position or accomplish their goal, or conversely, while your sneak does all the work, everyone else just picks their ears clean waiting for the day to be done.

This isn't really what your adventurelings are here for. They all want to be important (although some may want it less than others, though that's another topic). The important thing is that, as the creator of the world before them, you should learn to enable them all, especially if you can do it simultaneously. As someone who can adjust the world on the fly, your balancing job is fairly easy. The hard part is making sure the party is balanced against itself.  Spreading the spotlight to where it is wanted is your greatest task, and for this, I have a couple of points. The first is my Traffic Signalling Technique. 

It takes place after you, the storyshaman, do something that the group can react to

1. Ask the most relevant, usually the closest to the action, player what they're going to do, make eye contact with only them, indicate to the others to be silent. Listen
2. Look around for the most excited person who wants to act. They'll be trying to make eye contact usually. If nothing needs to happen to immediately respond to the first player, act on the second. Repeat this step until you've gone through everyone
3. Ask anyone who hasn't acted or reacted what they're doing right now.
4. Do something again, repeat process from 1. If you reach step 3 again and the others don't react to the current situation, whatever they're doing now becomes the thing you talk about.
5. Use discretion at all steps in this process to keep narrative flow. Try to keep time equal.
6. Don't force anyone to act when they don't want to, they'll have their own fun.

The second point is to talk to your thespians. They have things to say.

Building up: Don't Tell A Story, Tell The News

Your villains want to win, your forces wish to conspire, your machinactions wish to become godly. These things are forces that exist in a world that might be fictional but should function with verisimilitude. Villains make mistakes, Adventurers come up with clever ideas. People get blindsided by things they didn't think of.

I build my worlds in such a way that I try to think like my NPCs beforehand, how they build their houses, what precautions they take against intruders, how they organize their forces and what they've encountered and know how to deal with. It's pretty front heavy, but once you've got your prep done, you don't need to lift a finger to change anything while your tourists take a romp through a real and dramatically significant world that was built to react in a limited but impactful manner. You don't need to adjust the Drama, you only need to say what just happened. While this isn't the only way to DM, this design philosophy has proven extremely effective for the people I know who have used it. The Unexpected things your players do are now funnier and more significant. The things they do that are expected have their intended effect and increase drama. The things they do that cause detriment were always going to cause detriment, and you can rest assured that what just happened probably wasn't hot bullshit.

Considering these thoughts, you should find it a lot easier when designing your playing field to take what's given to you and then to Run With It.

Mishlia,  betlysvil'u'lo


- Nirrum