Civilization, Wilderness, and Population Density

I don't really have much to say on the topic of population density in fantasy worlds, but I did recently run into a number of posts on the topic that got me thinking about the relationship between civilization and wilderness in fantasy campaigns again, specifically about the attractiveness of a "Points of Light" setting.

When I think "fantasy world" my brain conjures up images of small villages where peasants work the surrounding fields. In an "established" country, those small villages are fairly numerous (never more than, say, 3-5 miles apart, see the Bavarian example above) and they tend to lie close to roads or rivers leading to bigger towns and cities. There is constant trade and commerce, tolls are collected by local rulers, monsters are generally not too close to civilization unless there's something driving them there, etc.

In a "Points of Light" setting things are vastly different. Small unfortified villages are virtually non-existent because they would be overrun too easily by the hordes of monsters roaming almost everywhere. Instead people cluster into either well-fortified "homesteads" or "castles" and come out to "work the fields" only under guard, or into bigger fortified "towns" that encompass those fields in their defensive perimeter. These settlements are fairly rare, usually 30-40 miles apart, much like the Russian example above. Trade between the settlements is a dangerous undertaking requiring lots of guards, therefore the settlements are much more self-sufficient.

There are many more things differentiating my "default" world from this "Points of Light" world, things like roads and who built them, things like countries or indeed a working feudal system. But I'll have to shelve those for another post. Suffice it to say that I find myself very much attracted to the "Points of Light" idea these days and much less to the "pastoral settled farm lands" version of a fantasy world I grew up with. I guess that means that my fantasy campaign is about to turn into a medieval version of Gamma World?

Ternary Operator in Go

A long time ago someone asked how to do the ternary operator in Go. In C or Java you can write

max = a > b ? a : b;

to select the larger of the two. In Go you have to write an if instruction instead:

if a > b {
  max = a
} else {
  max = b
}

The following is probably my most horrible (public) programming suggestion ever, certainly not worthy of my ambitions as a teacher of clear programming style:

max = map[bool]int{true: a, false: b}[a > b]

But at least it won the "This is beautiful abuse. Simultaneously I feel respect and disgust." and the "That is awesomely disgusting." prices back then. Of course someone else pointed out that it should really be

max = map[bool]int{true: func()(int){return a}, false: func()(int){return b}}[a > b]()

instead, but I didn't think that's worth the effort since we're already evaluating both for the condition. They were, however, correct to mention it.

Why post this? No big reason, I've just been doing more Go hacking again recently and was reminded of this incident. Also my suggestion to include all of this in the FAQ was eventually turned down by the Go folks (probably a good thing in retrospect) but I wanted to leave a record of it behind on the web in any case. :-)

Skills: The d6 in B/X

I faintly remember someone else doing this before, going through B/X and enumerating all the d6 "skill rolls" in that wonderful revision of D&D. But what the heck, can't hurt for me to do it as well, so here we go:

1. Hear Noise (pages B8, B21, X6): Anyone has a 1 in 6 chance, demi-humans have a 2 in 6 chance, thieves start at 2 in 6 and improve to 5 in 6 by level 11.
2. Expert Miner (page B9): Dwarves detect slanting passages, traps, shifting walls, and new construction with a 2 in 6 chance.
3. Secret Doors (pages B9, B21): Anyone has a 1 in 6 chance to find a secret door, elves have a 2 in 6 chance.
4. Hiding (page B10): Halflings have a 2 in 6 chance of staying undetected in dungeons.
5. Opening Doors (page B21): Anyone has a 2 in 6 chance of opening a stuck door, strength modifier applies.
6. Finding Traps (pages B9, B22): Anyone has 1 in 6 chance to find a (non-magical) trap, dwarves have a 2 in 6 chance.
7. Lighting Fires (page X10): Anyone has a 2 in 6 chance of lighting a torch/fire with a tinderbox in one round.
8. Foraging/Hunting (page X51): There is a 1 in 6 chance of finding enough food (or encountering a suitable animal to kill) per day.

I left out d6 rolls that are not usually thought of as "skills", for example the "springing a trap" roll, random encounters, surprise/initiative/pursuit, stocking dungeons, etc. Did I miss another player-facing "skill" use of the d6? Please let me know if I did, I hope this will be the definite post on the subject in the years to come. :-)

Hyborian Summer Post Mortem

So I spent quite some time this summer working on a collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. I can't really say why I did this, my only excuse is that I wanted to read them and that the plain text or HTML versions I could find were not to my liking. So here's the current (incomplete!) draft:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5_s0vx_BCaGTGtmTFdHemVXeU0/edit?usp=sharing

I am really only pushing this out now because the semester is about to start and I won't have much time to work on it until December. If you find problems in the meantime, please feel free to check out the project site here (use the issue tracker):

https://bitbucket.org/phf/hyborian-tales

I am happy to accept pull requests as long as they are easy to merge. What I was working on when I had to stop was getting more of the old art integrated. I also wanted to go back to the original Weird Tales printings of these stories to make sure I have all the blurb that other transcribers may have missed. Alas I couldn't find PDFs of all those Weird Tales issues.

If you are sitting on these magazines and can produce high-quality scans of the articles/artwork I am missing, I'd be very grateful. For example the first illustration in the Red Nails story is just a small JPG which doesn't look good at all printed (the other two are bigger PNGs and they look alright, at least to my aging eyeballs).

Any volunteers?

LaTeX PocketMod

A few weeks ago I wanted to produce a so-called "PocketMod" in LaTeX. The idea is to print 8 small pages of content onto one actual page of paper and then folding it as shown here to get a little booklet. I've since found several different ways of doing it, but here's what I came up with as a "pure LaTeX" solution.

First: Put your actual content into a content.tex file and use the geometry package to adjust the page size. I used this:

\usepackage[
paperwidth=2.75in,
paperheight=4.25in,
margin=0.1in,
includefoot,
footskip=0.2in,
]{geometry}

I prefer working at the actual size instead of shrinking larger pages down later only to find that the font is unreadable. Use pdflatex to generate the PDF for your tiny 8 pages worth of stuff.

Second: Use pdfpages and the following rotate.tex file to adjust the individual pages appropriately (some need to be upside-down, others need to remain unchanged):

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[final]{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=1,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=2,angle=180,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=3,angle=180,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=4,angle=180,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=5,angle=180,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=6,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=7,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=8,fitpaper=true]{content.pdf}
\end{document}

Of course I should have used a macro to avoid repeating myself 8 times, but copy-paste won and I never refactored. Feel free to post a better version!

Third: Use pdfpages and the following booklet.tex file to put everything on a single letter-sized page in landscape:

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[final]{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages={5,4,3,2,6,7,8,1},frame=true,nup=2x4,landscape]{rotate.pdf}
\end{document}

I like having the thin frame around all the pages but if you want to get rid of it just remove that option. And you're done!

Thieves and Traps in B/X D&D

I noticed two curious things about thieves and traps in B/X D&D, neither of which I had actually fully grok-ed before:

1. The basic rules list "Find or Remove Traps" as a "double ability" but the expert rules only have "Remove Traps" in the table.
2. The basic rules state "(thieves) are the only characters who can ... find traps without using magic..." on page B10 but "any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a trap when searching for one ... Any dwarf has a 2 in 6 chance. (This does not apply to magical traps..." on page B22.

Regarding the first point, note that neither the Greyhawk supplement for OD&D nor the Holmes edition have "Find Traps" as an option: they only list "Remove Traps" just like the expert set.

Regarding the second point, note that only one rule, either B10 or B22, makes sense. If we use B10 as the "correct" rule, than B22 must go away completely: Thieves only have 10% for "Find Traps" at first level and it would make thieves worse than everyone else at finding traps if B22 was also in play. If we use B22 as the "correct" rule, than B10 must go away completely: All characters get a chance to find traps, not only thieves.

I do have a theory about this, but that's really all it is: A theory. The 1981 basic and experts set seem to have been written/edited concurrently: Both list "January 1981" for their first printing and I've never heard that anyone had to "wait" for the expert set to be released (in other words, I am pretty sure they went on sale at the same time, not one after the other).

If that's true, and if they were primarily put together by the person given credit (so Tom Moldvay for the basic set and David Cook for the expert set), then it's also quite possible that each started working on "their" game independently using OD&D and Holmes as their sources. For some reason Moldvay (or Johnson or Mentzer, both of whom Moldvay thanks for "...their dedication in reorganizing and fine tuning this book.") eventually felt that thieves needed a "boost" to make them more important, and hence we get the rule on page B10. It wouldn't surprise me if that was a "last-minute" decision so neither the rule on page B22 nor the expert set was updated to be consistent with page B10.

As I said, it's just a theory. But it has enough explanatory power for me to "house-rule" that thieves in B/X do not in fact get the "Find Traps" ability at all. They get "Remove Traps" but the entire business of finding traps is handled with the "everybody has a shot" rule from B22. I think B/X is on the right track giving every character (regardless of class) a bunch of basic "dungeoneering" skills, and finding traps should definitely be included in that set.

Which leaves magical traps since they are explicitly ruled out on page B22. Personally I never liked the idea that thieves can do something that's clearly more in the domain of clerics or magic-users: spell-casters should be able to figure out magical traps, fighters and thieves shouldn't. True, in a fantasy world where many "worthwhile scores" are protected by magic, one could argue that thieves should develop such powers. However, it seems much more logical to say that they need to use "Wands of Trap Detection" to get this done. In fact, one could even use that to explain that high-level thieves get a "Use Magic Item" ability instead of a "Cast Spells from Scrolls" ability which again seems to encroach too much on clerics and magic-users.

And at least in my B/X game (I split up race and class) this makes the elusive elven magic-user/thieves and dwarven cleric/thieves that much more interesting.

Hexographer meets Blackmarsh

I don't really have anything to say in my defense. Except maybe that I needed to waste excess brain cycles that I would otherwise have spent on harder exam questions for my students. So it's all for their benefit... :-)

Anyways, Rob Conley's Blackmarsh is very cool, and now I have it in funky Hexographer colors. Of course the conversion to "strict hexes" made things a little inaccurate, but maybe I'll find the time to refine a few sections in the future.