Pellatarrum: Broken River

Broken River

A Starter City for Pellatarum

by Mike (Rhishisikk) Kochis

Background

I admit it; the world of Pellatarum didn't thrill me the first time I read it. Oh, it had a sense of balance, and was a finely tuned clockwork. Plus, it got rid of all those pesky deities who muck things up. And if I didn't like any particular monster, they just didn't make it through the apocalypse. AND there's finally a link between elementalism, magic, and insanity – which also blends into the religion, if you rub at the edges hard enough with one of those gummy erasers.

But it didn't THRILL me. And I finally figured out why. There was no place for my characters. Everything that needed doing in Pellatarum was literally epic level. When I want epic level, I break out Mutants and Masterminds, or Champions, or some other superhero game.

What Pellatarum needed, I decided, was its own Sandpoint (from Pathfinder fame), a place that didn't just welcome PCs, but grabbed them by the ears and forced them to care whether THIS settlement was destroyed or not.

Erin was busy painting in the broad strokes, and just didn't have time. Everyone posting comments to the Pellatarum development thread looked more like cheerleaders than people inspired to go out and do their own thing (no offense intended, just a poorly disguised elephant-size nudge).

So when you see a problem, and nobody else is doing anything, and it's within your ability to fix, then it's your problem.

Building Broken River

Step One: Name and numbers first

Using Sandpoint as a basis, I decide that 1250 people is actually pretty good. I like river settlements, because you can always have rumors that the Dark Temple is "on the other side", and have all kinds of other fun. Also, I'm tired of towns with immaculate backgrounds, composed of well-behaved colonists. River smugglers, near but not at the river delta. Easy to get to, but not easily seen.

And now, the hardest part of any settlement. The name. Names conjure up purpose, and guide you along the rest of the process. Plus, I had a problem once where the capitol of my empire had 46 pages of background material, character sheets, and adventure seeds – but no name.

So we have a river. And we know that the town founders, when discovered, wanted to keep it low key, so names like Pirateville or Slaver's Cove are right out. Also, they didn't want the town to sound interesting. Thus: Bracken River, just a description that says no good farm land, nothing to see here. It's also too boring. I can see adventurers leaving this for the farming village of Ploxenville, just to see what a Ploxen is.

So, I take liberty with the nation (which I'm not detailing yet). Somewhere in the vast bureaucracy, the notorious clerk Seamus Gantry (7th level commoner, more on that later) got lazy. Change some letters, and you get Broken River. Curse you, Seamus Gantry, for drawing adventurers to our otherwise nondescript village! But more on that later.

Stage Two: Embellishments

In other words, what makes Broken River different than "typical" towns? Why would adventurers call Broken River home?

Start at the basics: food, water, shelter. With salty water, irrigation is out, and so is farming. Fishing can provide some food, but the rest are pastures of food animals: Pigs, goats, cows, and chickens. And maybe, if I get feisty, I'll spice up some dire rats. Yum, yum.

And now on to water. Contrary to popular fantasy, mead and beer do not support and sustain life, although they do wonders at sterilizing water and giving it flavor. We note that we want thriving tavern industry, and return to our water supply. Fortunately, this plays into a later need, fitting places for characters to fit in. Since I know I like Pathfinder, but have problems placing alchemists outside potion shops, we now resolve both problems at once. Squarely on the river – no, on an island in the middle of the river, with short bridges connecting the two shores – I place the Salt Works. Here, our best alchemist supervises a process for extracting salt and other impurities from water. He then separates these "impurities" and sells them. And it resolves our water issue.

Now to shelter. We don't (I decide) have a lot of access to wood, nor is wood (a bulk trade item) the sort of thing that smugglers chuckle in glee at moving in the moonlight. (Also – boring! Move on.) And I don't want wattle and daub, because nothing drives adventurers off faster than an air of poverty. Fortunately, river beds are a great source for clay, which (with straw, which we can produce locally) makes brick. Broken River now produces brick, tile, and pottery (as well as salt) – commodities that can be exported.

And this is what we can do just by making sure the town is able to support its population.

Step Three: Major industry

Since Pathfinder has published rules for building cities, I like doing that. Not just from a sense of OCD, but because I tend to overkill otherwise, and not have enough people left over to actually fill in the unexciting gaps. (Another reason we started with essentials of life.)

As noted, we have a thriving tavern and brewery industry – a must for most adventurers. This, in turn, supports a variety of inns.

The Salt Works, I decide, draws on the local pottery industry for jars rather than the rarer glass. So they need some manner of glaze or other sealant. This leads me to wax, and I note that I want a beekeeper as an NPC for later.

Broken river mines clay from what I decide is the "dirty side" of the river. With this, they make excellent pottery, passable brick, and brittle tile. (I like brittle tile, too many martial arts movies where the roofing is improvised into a weapon, I suppose.) I locate these industries on the dirty side also. These wares need a way across the river, and I can easily see the bridges of the Salt Works already swamped. So I add a ferry, which works well with the docks the fishermen need.

Cracking the actual rulebook now, we have 20 spaces of industry, 23 if we really press it. So:

Industry/ Building	Size	Size Remaining	Notes
Inns	1	19	Because: adventurers
Taverns	1	18	Because: adventurers
Brewery	1	17	Because: inns and taverns
Farmer's Market	1	16	Exchange fish, food animals, garden veggies, etc.
Docks	2	14	River, smugglers, and ferry
Expert Crafter	2	12	Salt Works, and associated island
Mine	2	10	For clay, is this actually a quarry?
Smithy	1	9	Again, brickworks
Expert Crafters	2	7	For pottery, glaziers, sculptors, etc.
Shrine	1	6	Shrine of the Light, detail later
Garrison	2	4	For the warriors to train in
Government Center	1	3	For intrigue, politics, trials, etc.
Dump	1	2	Oops, almost forgot people are messy
Graveyard	1	1	And that they die
Mill	1	Done	And that they like to eat, most days

Note that at no point above do I bother with statistics such as Economy and Unrest and such. Not that I don't care about these things – they just don't matter yet. Also, much as I wanted to put in a thriving Black Market, those things are just too expensive for a humble town that had to become respectable whether it wanted to or not.

But we find out what we wanted to – either we make the town into a larger town than intended, or we stop here. So I throw my need for more major structures to the wolverines (for now). Besides, we'll have fun with small structures later.

Step Four: Take a short break

Naturally, I want to jump right in, make my beekeeper and alchemists, and a whole slew of rogues. But those are NPCs, and really deserve their own article. So, even though I did leap into NPCs next, for now I take a short recess, and stick the NPCs into their own article – coming soon!

Editor's Note: Mike was another player in the same campaign as Alys. As such, he's seen my insanity first hand, and seems to have a good grasp on what I want from a campaign world. His assertion that I am thinking "big picture" is correct -- I'm so busy dealing with the larger details of the world that I have difficulty narrowing my focus to something small like Broken River, but this is exactly the sort of thing I both need and want for this setting. 


I'm hesitant to declare Pellatarrum "open source," but if anyone wants to create something for it like Mike has done, please do so and send it to me. You will be credited appropriately!

Monday Gunday: Mosin Humor

One of the things I adore about my Mosin is that if the bolt is sticky, or the bullet doesn't want to feed, not only can I slap it around like a red-headed stepchild without fear of breaking it, but manhandling it is actually the proper course of action. It's a hundred year-old design built to be used by illiterate famers in the harsh Siberian winter. When the bolt would freeze to the receiver, a soldier would grab the heaviest thing he could find -- a chunk of wood, a hammer, his booted foot -- and wail on that bolt handle until it released.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's such a joy to know that if I get frustrated and force it, I won't break it. I can't break it, so I don't have to be all delicate and second-guess myself. I can just say "You're gonna WORK, ya bastard" and put all my strength into it. It's rather like having a car that's already a beater: If you have to bang it up, you won't care.

Apparently I'm not the only Mosin owner to experience "sticky bolt" syndrome, because over at 7.62x54r.net, they have a humor section entitled "AK vs. AR vs. Mosin-Nagant" filled with typical military dark/gallows humor with the following example:

You know you have an AK if... 

You consider it a badge of honor when you get your handguards to burst into flames.

You know you have an AR if...

You consider it a badge of honor when you shoot a sub-MOA 5 shot group.

You know you have a Mosin if...

You consider it a badge of honor when you cycle 5 rounds without the aid of a 2x4.

For the rest of the article, go here. 

L5R Cosmology: The Kami

Let's start small -- very, very small.

In Rokugan, samurai priestesses known as Shugenja commune and interact with spirits known as kami. This very simple word has a very complex definition, because it can mean both "god" and "spirit" and has no sense of scale whatsoever; pebbles contain kami, as do rocks, boulders, and mountain ranges. The clan founders are also kami, as well as the sun goddess Amaterasu, the moon god Onnotangu, the Seven Greater Fortunes, and the many Lesser Fortunes.

 The easiest way to explain a kami is also the most vague:

[A kami is] any thing or phenomenon that produces the emotions of fear and awe, with no distinction between good and evil.

For purposes of simplicity,  the kami we are discussing today are the mikokami, a.k.a. beautiful tiny gods. These are the "eight million gods" of folklore. We'll discuss the other kinds of kami later, but right now, when I say kami, be aware that I mean "elemental spirit" or "divine force of nature".

Kami live inside all material things, and at the same time are those things. If you can't conceive of something being a thing, and yet not being that thing because it is really the force which lives inside the shell of the thing, then you're going to have severe trouble from here on out. If it helps, think of your mind/soul/sense of self as a kami; without that, your body is just a shell, but at the same time your body is such an extension of yourself that it is you.

Now here is where things get complicated. If we assume that every river is Rokugan has a kami -- which every shugenja will tell you is true -- what happens if you draw a cup of water from that river? Is the river spiritually diminished? Does a new "cup of water" kami spring into existence? What happens when you drink it? Or when the river runs into the sea?

This is a riddle which baffled the Rokugani for centuries, and there are essentially two answers to it, one philosophical and one practical. The philosophical answer, which came about in the early days of the Empire, is that all are one: You are the cup, which is also the water, which is also the riverbank. Everything, everything, is linked and interconnected to the point where it doesn't matter, all of us are also all of creation, one giant god-soul, and once you realize this, you are able to live in harmony with the world because the world is you and you are the world, and the soul always lives in harmony with itself. This is known as enlightenment, and it's also very, very hard to achieve, because humans have all these senses telling them that no, I am completely different from that tree over there. A good chunk of enlightenment is un-learning concepts such as "I am an individual" and "I can trust what my senses tell me." [1]

The practical answer is that kami are infinitely divisible. Take two ladles of water, each containing two water kami, and pour them into a teapot. How many water kami do you have? Just one. Boil some tea, and pour that tea into four cups. You now have four water kami (possibly five if there's still some left over in the pot). Dump it all back into the river, and boom, it's all one kami again. They are aggregate spirits who seek concentration, yet lose none of their power if you divide them up. The smallest drop of water contains the same amount of power as the entire ocean. [2]

Now if you combine these two answers into one thought -- "all is one" and "potency is not lost through division" -- you arrive at a frighteningly powerful conclusion: every single droplet of water in Rokugan is linked to every other droplet of water, meaning that all water everywhere is a single, massive kami. This monstrously powerful kami is what is known as the Water Dragon, and there are other Dragons for the other elements. (Please don't ask about the Void Dragon right now, it'll just break your brain.)

While all kami may technically be called "gods", these Dragons are what humans think of when they hear the word god: powerful, alien, and distant. The Dragons are as far removed from humanity as humans are from bacteria, and understand them about as well. Therefore, every Dragon has an Oracle: a human whose soul is linked to that Dragon, and therefore shares a fraction of its power (and a fraction of nigh-infinite power is still a lot). These Oracles serve as eyes and ears for the Dragons, enabling them to understand from a human perspective all that happens on Rokugan and subtly influence events. [3]

What is interesting about Dragons is that they are dichotomous and somewhat contradictory. On one hand, what separates the Dragons from the Fortunes (other gods which will be explained later) is that they embody concepts that don't require human agency to exist. Objectively speaking, air always has been air and always will be air, and no amount of worship (or lack thereof) is going to change that. But on the other hand, air is more than just literal gas; it also represents connection and empathy. Fire is flame but is also burning passion; earth is determination and resistance in addition to being rock and soil; water is liquid as well as the strength that erodes rocks. It is entirely possible that this embodiment of abstract concepts is the result of the Dragons seeing themselves through human eyes.

Therefore: in Rokugan, there are lots of tiny spirits which are actually big spirits which are actually Dragons who then take human avatars who try to understand the humans who are trying to understand the tiny elemental kami spirits, and in so doing, influence the Dragons which influences the elements which influences the people.

All are one.



Footnotes:
[1] This will be discussed in greater detail under the "Shintao" entry.

[2]  The only difference is how well they apply that power, which is a combination of perception (smaller spirits don't notice as much) and leverage (smaller spirits don't know where best to focus that power). This is typically how shugenja achieve spell effects, by telling the spirits "You can achieve an awful lot if you do X thing at Y time and Z place for me."

[3] As a brief aside for fans of the card game: this "Dark Oracle" business is nonsense. Just because something resides in Tengoku doesn't make it virtuous, as Lord Moon aptly demonstrates. The Elemental Dragons find morality to be a strange, alien concept. Fire is neither good nor evil: it simply is. The waters that flood also irrigate. Air gives breath but also creates storms. Earth shelters, but also quakes.

Also, I pretty much ignore everything that happens after the Clan Wars anyway.

Towards a coherent L5R cosmology

As much as I love the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, I have to confess that its mythology makes no sense to me. And I'm not even talking about how the creation story is basically that of Zeus vs. Cronus, but with the names changed to Japanese, I'm talking about the deeply weird and contradictory stuff that you notice only after digging through some the history.

Now, normally I am a fan of the weird and contradictory, but I have a deep-seated need for things to make sense within my games, even if none of the players ever see it. Perhaps this is why I prefer to GM rather than play, because that way I can make sure things make sense to me. And frankly, L5R's mythology makes me so crazy that I actually mailed a letter to John Wick (one of its original designers) wherein I asked, essentially, What the fuck, dude?

Mr. Wick, I hope you'll forgive me for messaging you, but I am a longtime fan of L5R and there is something that's always puzzled me about its theology.

Specifically, how can Togashi be both a kami-who-fell-to-earth-and-thus-lost-his-divinity and a (literal) dragon? The same question applied to Shinjo and ki-rin.

Osano-wo is the Fortune of Thunder, but there is also a Thunder Dragon. I read somewhere they are both aspects of something greater. What would that something greater be?

It's almost like being a dragon or a ki-rin or whatever is more of a spiritual evolution than being a physical thing.... so perhaps Shinsei was the first Thunder Dragon?

Is Amaterasu a dragon? Is she something else? Both? Neither? Cheeseburger?

I love this setting but I can't figure out some of the theology. I get that, in the broadest sense, Fortunism = Shinto and Shinseism = Buddhism, but after that I get very lost. What are the differences between fortunes, kami, and dragons?

Again, I apologize for pestering you with questions about a game you made over 10 years ago. If you'd rather not answer, I understand, and will quietly go away.

To his great credit, Mr. Wick wrote me back:

Hi Erin,
Although I don't get paid to answer these questions anymore, I'll give you a quick one that should solve everything.

Rokugani theology *doesn't make sense*. Much like Japan, who tried to combine various religious traditions, there is overlap, redundancy and outright contradiction. That's why it is so confusing.

Hope that helps!

Well, then. On the one hand, this is great, because now I know I haven't missed something critical. On the other, telling myself "It's not supposed to make sense" doesn't work with me, because of my knee-jerk and admittedly non-Discordian desire to organize things coherently. So what this did was, in essence, tell me "If you think you can make it make sense, go for it."

And I did. Amazingly, my crazed gibbering is hardly noticeable these days.

At any rate, I think I've worked it out, and now I'm going to inflict it upon you, because A), this is my blog, and 2) I like giving back to the RPG community. I hope you like this sort of thing, because it's what you're going to get from me for the next few days.

Kanpai!

WNW: HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER

OK, forget what I posted earlier tonight. THIS is one of the greatest videos of all time, and has has replaced Fluttershy's "Evil Enchantress" as my favorite WTF THAT VOICE? song.

I weigh in on "Dungeons and Dames"

So, there's a bit of a kerfuffle going on at Jeff's Gameblog regarding historical accuracy of racism & sexism vs. the fun of inclusion rather than exclusion.

This post isn't so much a rebuttal or a "you're both idiots" post; I just wanted to make a comment that I felt was relevant and felt that if I posted it there, it would be swallowed by the flamewar and never seen again. Plus, if I'm going to wax eloquent, might as well do it here and increase my post count by one.

As anyone who's read my Pellatarrum series knows, I'm a big fan of fun over accuracy, to the extent that one of my mantras is essentially "Please keep your filthy realism out of my game of epic magic and elves and dragons and bigass swords, thank you very much." But I'd like to take a moment to describe a game I'm currently running where there is, in fact, a high degree of sexism, and I think it works within the setting. That game is Legend of the Five Rings.

For anyone who doesn't know, L5R is basically a samurai game with monsters and magic (or if you're old school, it's Oriental Adventures, only better.) One of the key features about this setting is that the structure of the Emerald Empire hasn't changed for over a thousand years. To western eyes, that would appear suffocating and petrified, but to the Rokugani, it's a sign of stability and evidence that their civilizations works properly, thank you very much.

But the thing about structured, conservative caste systems is that they're rather the opposite of the typical "anything goes" style of western fantasy adventure. That means, if a GM is going to make the setting ring true, there needs to be a certain amount of prejudice and -ism in order to make it seem authentic; otherwise it's just D&D with funny names. On the other hand, too much prejudice makes the game un-fun for a significant chunk of the player base. How does a good GM balance this?

It's with no small amount of irony that I haul out a phrase from the Civil Rights era: make things "Separate but equal." This is a lot easier to do in a game system in real life, as mechanical systems are easier to segregate and balance. In L5R, for example, there are only 4 kinds of PCs (character classes, if you will): Bushi, Shugenja, Courtiers, and Monks.

Monks are easy. Anyone can become a monk; just shave your head, join a monastery, and seek enlightenment. Technically female monks are called nuns, but other than that are treated no differently than their male counterparts.

Bushi are warriors of the samurai caste. As history has shown, war is predominantly a man's occupation, and with their greater upper body strength and large reserves of testosterone, they're perfectly suited for it. So in my game, nearly all bushi are male. Note that I said nearly.

Shugenja are the priests of the samurai caste, part wizard and part cleric. They are rare and command immense power. I have made shugenja in my game predominantly female, for much the same reason that bushi are male:

• It provides a counterbalance.
• Magic in L5R is elemental in nature, so linking "the moon and the tides influences menstrual cycles" to "women are better at elemental magic" makes perfect sense to me.
• While the men are at war, the women will be staying home studying.
• First born sons are going to be pressured to be warriors regardless of their ability with the spirits.

Courtiers are politicans, faces, and bards. Since this job is based more on people skills than swordsmanship or spellcasting, both males and females may perform its duties. 

Now let's look at this. Out of 4 classes, two are completely gender-neutral. The other two -- the two most common in PC parties-- are biased strongly in opposite directions. This gives the illusion of in-system sexism while actually only restricting one option in four. 

But wait a moment! I said nearly up there, didn't I?

Yes, if you really, really want to play a female bushi, or a male shugenja, you may. And you might even get away with it if you come from a family that supports such things, like the Utaku Battle Maidens of the Unicorn. But unless you do, you're going to be treated very, very funny.

At first glance this may not seem like a big deal. The only drawback is social in nature and not mechanical?

This is true. Mechanically speaking, a female bushi is mechanically no different than a male bushi. But in the stratified society of Rokugan, this is a huge deal. But a female bushi is regarded as butch and unmarriable, and a woman who will not bear children brings shame upon her family. Shamed familes are huge, huge deals in this setting; it's the kind of thing that can result in angry ancestors, curses, and being cast out (declared ronin). 

Male shugenja don't have it any better. They're regarded as effete crossdressers -- not only unmarriable, but also unmanly in that gay, swishy sense. They will be mocked by "proper" samurai until they are miserable, their abilities doubted and mocked (the equivalent of "Get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich!") until they finally snap and do something impulsive. And in Rokugan, impulsive samurai end up dead more often than not. 

In conclusion, my point is this: while I understand that sometimes it's necessary to "pick on" certain genders or cultures or races or whatever for the sake of campaign flavor, there are ways to do it that give the simulate unfairness without actually being unfair. Simulation is what is key here. We don't actually want realism in games, we want verisimilitude, the appearance of realism. The same should be done for all the other -isms in your games. 

WNW: Too soon?

In an effort to stay topical and relevant, I present you with this. While I am aware it is tasteless (and I embrace that completely) I do hope it's not perceived as being insensitive. However, I have been assured by a Briton that

I think it's hilarious, but then I have a functioning sense of humour, of the 'if you can't laugh at your enemies they have won' variety. 

In that vein, I'd like to wish all of my UK readers a safe Verwirrung, along with best wishes for a happy and productive Ordnung!





Still, if I've offended anyone, I apologize.