Ashes Part 1

 As I expected, I wasn't able to get it together to get ideas for all 31 prompts for RPGaDay. What I didn't expect is that a whole new set of ideas did jump out at me.

 I've been a fan of Kevin Crawford and Sine Nomine Publishing for quite some time. I found Stars Without Number in a Bundle of Holding and was very excited by it. I've since backed Kickstarters for other games in the line, most recently Ashes Without Number, the post apocalyptic game.

 Once that Kickstarter fulfilled and I got that book in my hot little hands, which happened just a few weeks ago, my brain has been burning with the idea of building an AWN post apocalyptic sandbox setting based on my hometown, Eureka, California.

The first thing to do was assemble the map. I was able to put together a nice map of the area at https://www.map.army/ complete with 5 km hexes. The suggested map dimensions wound up covering all of Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

The second step was placing my Eclaves (communities) and Ruins (adventure locations). For the suggested map area, AWN recommends 4-6 Enclaves and 10 Ruins. This gave me some trouble. That area is distinctly rural, so there's just not enough "there" there for all that to fit into. I could make some stuff up, make some places more important than they really warrant, but I ultimately gave myself permission to do less. I cut those suggested values in half. 3 Enclaves and 5 Ruins. Much more doable.

 My Enclaves were:

1) Old Town Eureka (The city center, the oldest part of the city and home of one of the most photographed buildings in North America, the Carson Mansion) 

2) Ferndale (A farming community that felt very likely to continue into whatever apocalypse there might be.) 

3) Squatch-ville (This is the Pacific Northwest, which is Bigfoot Country. Are they atomic mutants, or did the apocalypse force them to reveal themselves? Who knows! This is located in Del Norte County, not far from Gasquet, just so there would be some bit of civilization.)

My Ruins were

1) The rest of Eureka (my map split the city between two hexes, so this felt very natural)

2) Arcata (home of Cal Poly Humboldt, pioneer in marine biology, eco-friendly technology and marijuana.)

3) McKinleyville (home of the Eureka-Arcata Airport)

4) Crescent City (As much as I was chagrined with how little there is to Humboldt County, Del Norte County has even less. This is the only city they have and it's right on the coast and it's easy to imagine it getting swept by a tsunami in just about any apocalypse.)

5) Hoopa (This was a stretch. Everyplace else of any note was already an Enclave or a Ruin. Also, everything else is very close to the coast, so putting something inland felt right.)

 More to come!

RPGaDay 2025 #14 Mystery

Another genre that I haven't delved too deeply into. Mostly because of one of my rules of gaming: "Never roll the dice unless you're willing to abide by the results." Whether or not characters get the clues they need to resolve the plot should not be a question. I have been interested in the GUMSHOE system because it has the same interest as I do in that regard. Characters always get the clues they need to proceed, so to make the game interesting, that means that you put the clues in front of the players and the game is about them actually solving it.

Some people might have an issue with players being expected to solve the mystery, rather than the characters. They probably also don't care for riddles or puzzles in their dungeons. They are also not me.

My GUMSHOE books are in storage, so I'd have to run it off of a PDF assuming I can get myself together. 

RPGaDay 2025 #13 Darkness

Darkness is not an element I've really dealt with. I've never wanted to run a game or be a character that was necessarily one of the bad guys.

I would like to try out Vampire: The Masquerade, or one of the other World/Chronicles of Darkness games. I've heard some interesting ideas about how you can play the game as a person who is nominally good, but the setting and system put them into compromises, which is probably how I would prefer to approach the material.

RPGaDay 2025 #12 Path

Where is the person I am grateful to for putting me on the Path?

I think I've spent a lot of blog space writing about the people who I have gamed with who have influenced my journey as a player and as a GM. But I will admit that a rather significant influence is a person I have never met. That would be Joe Bloch, designer of the Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon. I had sort of drifted from system to system and was kinda over D&D by that time, but found OSRIC for sale for the cost of printing and I do love a bargain. Coupled with the free version of Castle of the Mad Archmage, before it got a lot of the polish that it has since received, it made the prospect of running an Old School game somewhat appealing.

What started as an experiment in a period where I might expect to try a new system for a few months before moving on to the next turned into 5 years of fun memories and at least one new gamer. It also led to an interest in the OSR as a whole and a number of my own attempts to create an Old School setting or dungeon (still trying!).

RPGaDay 2025 #10 Origin

The origin story of a favorite accessory.

The Great Salt Flats. Steve Jackson Games had a series of maps of various locales, such as floorplans of a haunted house and similar, but the only one I bought was the set called The Great Salt Flats. Partly because I enjoyed the joke (it was a set of blank maps sheets with square grid on one side and hex grid on the other) and partly because buying the haunted house would obligate me to run a haunted house adventure at some point, but blank maps were useful for anything.

Though there wouldn't be much of a story if it was just a matter of buying a cleverly named product. In order to make sure that I was fully confident marking them up, I took them to Kinko's to have the sheets laminated. This is, of course, back when it was still called Kinko's, so I know I'm dating myself.

I don't remember how much it cost, but I don't think I had a lot of money and had to do the lamination in stages, one or two at a time as I could afford it, until all 6 sheets were laminated and from there on infinitely reusable.

But those 6 blank map sheets were what got me through a lot of gaming. It was definitely part of my megadungeon campaign, with sheets sliding in as the party's exploration took them off the edge of the old sheet. They were also a good size for placing on a coffee table to aid in visualizing a set piece battle from campaigns even before that time.

I still have them around somewhere, though it has been a while since I've taken them out for a game.

RPGaDay 2025 #9 Inspire

Inspiration is always very difficult for me. In spite of the fact that I do things for fun that are considered very imaginative, I don't have the same experiences that other people seem to. I've often heard that people enjoy reading because they get to imagine the story in their heads. I love reading and stories, but I don't imagine the stories. I simply read and enjoy them. I enjoy science fiction and mysteries because the narratives offer logic and challenge. From what I've read, it's something called "aphantasia" that seems to describe some of my experience.

When I get an idea, it often starts as a piece of logic. "If NORAD really were able to track Santa, what would happen if Santa was prevented from completing his annual rounds?" I recently backed Sine Nomine's Ashes Without Number Kickstarter, so as I've been spitballing a setting for it, my logic has come from "What would a post-apocalyptic version of my hometown look like?" That's been an interesting exercise.

It's another reason that random generators are great for me. Without inspiration of my own, a random generator gives me a starting point and interesting juxtapositions to try to make sense of.

It may not be anyone else's idea of creativity, but it works for me.

RPGaDay 2025 #8 Explore

Even though it's one of the pillars of D&D according to 5e, it's also one of the hardest to define. We often think of exploration as being about going somewhere new and finding something there that no one else has. But exploration can be quite small, as well. Looking at the early game, many monsters were intended to be explored as well. Many of them incorporated an odd trick or exploitable quirk that would have to be discovered by someone. It's old hat now, but someone had to be the first to learn that the only way to permanently defeat a troll is with fire, for example.

When thinking about encounters, it's easy to identify Combat encounters, or Interaction encounters, but what is an Exploration encounter? In a dungeon, Exploration encounters are traps, puzzles and secrets. Things that have something to manipulate and discover.

I also thing it's useful to think about encounters using different pillars as a manageable way to think of how PCs might interact with them. So what does it mean when the players try to Explore a Combat encounter? Typically, I think that means using the environment to overcome the encounter. So the party might try to evade the squad of orcs rather than face them directly. Or maybe using the environment to kill them, like causing a nearby boulder to crash on top of them. Then there's the possibility of exploiting a trap elsewhere in the dungeon, like luring the orcs to follow them into a pit trap or spear trap.