From it’s wargaming roots, D&D has allowed Area of Effect attacks to split fighters in melee with one another. The phrase “I cast the fireball to hit the monster but not my friends” has been around since the beginning. Precisely measuring out squares or inches on a battle-mat to include the monsters and not the characters is a refined skill for grid-tacticians everywhere.
I’ve always hated it. It slows combat to a crawl as players agonize over where the center of their Fireball, or their Cone of Cold, or Entangle Spell should be to get the most enemies and no party members.
For me, this also breaks immersion. The splitting of combattants in melee assumes that two fighters stand still until they move to a new position. Bashing away at one another like a pair of Rock-em Sock-em Robots, anchored to the spot. This is not how fighting happens. Look at MMA fights, or boxing matches, wrestling (both intramural and pro), or even a football play or rugby scrum. Ain’t no one standing still long enough to precisely drop a 20 foot radius ball of fire so one guy gets burned ant the other doesn’t. All fighters in a melee are in constant motion, often grappling or piled up on the ground.
I use the following House Rule in my games with regards to what happens when a spellcaster tries to put the edge of an AoE spell between two fighters in melee with one another.
Area of Effect Attacks into Melee
Anyone who is in melee combat is affected by any AoE that would affect any combatant in that combat in that round. i.e – a spellcaster is not able to position an AoE effect in such a way that one combatant in a melee is affected while others are not. It’s either everyone in the combat or no one in the combat.
There is a “fringe zone” around the edge of an AoE that extends outside the limit of the AoE. Anyone within the fringe (a 5 foot (1.5 meter) border) who is also in melee combat with someone in the AoE is still affected, but in the instance of where a Saving Throw is necessary, the targets in this fringe zone have Advantage to that Saving Throw.
Example: We have three potential targets of a fireball. Target 1 is the intended target of the spell and is within the AOE. Target 1 is affected as normal and makes a Saving Throw as per the rules. Target 2 is in the fringe zone and is in melee with Target 1. Target 2 is affected, but has Advantage to their Saving Throw. Target 3 is in the fringe zone and is not in melee with either Target 1 or Target 2. They are not affected by the spell.
If all combatants are in the fringe zone of an AoE, but none are in the AoE itself, no one in the combat is affected by the spell.
If a target is in the fringe zone but is attacking with a weapon that has the reach quality (like a Halberd), then the target is not affected by the AoE.
Example #2: Same three potential targets of the fireballThe circumstances are the same, except Target 3 is outside the fringe zone, but is in melee combat with Target 2. In this case, Target 3is considered in the fringe zone.
Example #3: as the previous example but with the inclusion of Target 4who is outside the fringe zone. If Target 4is in melee combat with Target 3, Target 4is considered outsidethe fringe zone. If an AoE spell has no Saving Throw (like SLEEP) then anyone affected by the spell is affected normally, whether or not they are in the finge zone. If an AoE has a Magic Attack Roll, and not a Saving Throw anyone affected by the fringe zone has a +5 Bonus to their Armor Class.
There are nights when the dice just hate everyone at the table. Except the DM. Players can’t roll above a 6 and their characters can’t accomplish even the simplest task. Nothing happens and the characters are stuck. The only door blocking their path can’t be opened, the speed-bump combat becomes a slog of swing-and-a-miss, the stream, easily crossed, ends up washing the whole party away. The first time these things happen, it’s kinda funny, “Remember that goblin that no one could hit and we had to just run away?”. But over the course of a game session it looses it’s charm, “Failed AGAIN? I have a plus 12 to the roll and I can’t roll higher than 3! @&#! this dungeon!
Failing forward helps with this. The basic principle is this. Your character succeeds in their roll, but if they fail to score higher than the Target Number, the character suffers a consequence. The classic example of this is “you force the door open, but make such a racket that anyone within a hundred feet hears your entry.” Or, “You knife the guard, but, as he falls, he slaps the panic button at their station” characters can progress, but there’s an added challenge.
Let the Player Choose
Often when a character fails forward, it helps engagement to ask the player what the consequence should be. This helps give the player a hand in the fate of their character, and gives the Game Master a clue as to what the player is expecting from the adventure. The player should express their character’s consequence as briefly as they can. The consequence should be proportional to the degree of failure, and the consequence should never be more effective than success.
The Game Master could alternatively let the player group choose. This helps to avoid putting a player, who might not be comfortable improvising like this, on the spot. The final decision on consequence needs to have the consent of the character’s player, and approved by the Game Master. This encourages everyone at the table to remain engaged with the game as it’s being played.
Keep it Proportional
As mentioned, failing forward should never be a better result than success. Failing forward progresses the adventure at a cost. If the failure is slight, or the task relatively minor, failing forward should apply slight consequences. If the failure is great, or the task critical, failing forward should extract a much greater price.
The goal here is to allow a path forward with a cost. Some of the build up of narrative drama grows from dwindling resources. Dropping your character’s rations down a crevasse or breaking your lantern can be just as tense as loosing 2d10 hit points.
A Brief Word About Combat
I’m not a big fan of brushing off damage as a fail forward. Just having a minimum rolled damage, or half-damage result tends to throw off the balance of monster stats in Dungeons and Dragons. Furthermore, it is not any less frustrating and it doesn’t change anything except to continue to whittle down the adversaries’ hit points. Again I’d fail forward, allowing say a hit on the target, but the character hurts themselves for minimum damage, or they loose some ammunition. Or they don’t do damage but gain a cumulative +1 bonus to hit each time they miss until they do hit. Maybe they do damage, but the GM gets to move their character 5 feet (roughly 1.5 meters) maybe placing the character in a less advantageous position.
My point here is that combat, whether you employ failing forward or not, should be dynamic, even if you’re not playing on a battlemap. Very little is less exciting than endlessly whittling away hit points from one another’s pile. But, that is a whole ‘nother essay.
Things That Should Not Fail Forward
Failing forward is not appropriate for all situations. Saving Throws, Death Saves, All-or-Nohing tasks are but a few. With these situations, one either succeeds, or fails and suffers the consequences. Also, NPCs and adversaries should never fail forward. The GM shouldn’t ever be frustrated by the Players’ Characters’ success in the adventure. TTRPGs aren’t adversarially competitive games (even Call of Cthulhu!). Or at least they aren’t any more.
Remember, the Game Master’s job is to provide challenges to the players who resolve them through their characters. TTRPGs have evolved a long way from it’s wargaming roots. Even if you’re not “telling a story” with your adventure, you are engaging in drama. The purpose, is to have fun, not slog away under a series of cold dice rolls.
Somewhere within the DezzyVerse, the city of Arjenvís is a world unto itself. No one travels to Arjenvís, no one seeks it out. For Arjenvís is alive, and it hungers for mortals and their souls. Arjenvís draws their victims in through dreams, steals them away when they are wandering lost, takes them from the alleys and streets and tunnels.
Founding
Arjenvís was built on the Zyle Wednye cape at a slow bend in the Erixahn river, where the Nozca Kreft empties. The cape rises to a thousand feet above the river. A commanding point that could control the river from the bend all the way to the sea.
The Zyle Wednye ridge held another treasure that would make Arjenvís grow into a metropolis of 125,000 souls at it’s peak. Wegnvia Coal burned hotter and longer than any other feul known. The Zyle Wednye ridge was rich in it. Mining coal built the city into a powerhouse. The Wliajenya mine carved endless tunnels below the ridge, a black maze of stifling heat, fumes and coal dust.
Factories, mills and workhouses grew within the city to build it’s population. The workhouses especially, prisons really, fed countless lives to the mine to dig Wegnvia Coal. The hunger for more bodies to work the mine developed a brisk trade in the commodity of people. The aristocracy of Arjenvís, the Vlatza who ruled the city, the Boyars who governed it’s 13 canton, the Arzpralak and Praladts of the Vyara Zabor Church bought and sold the undesired and desperate from kingdoms and realms everywhere that the Wegnvia Coal was demanded.
The city became prosperous and wealthy above, and an industrial nightmare of suffering below. The excesses and debauchery of the aristocracy, grown wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, the desperate poverty of the smallfolk crowding the slums of the Brzek Kreft, serfs working the fields of “the shift” on the low shore of the Erixahn, and the suffering and hopelessness of the indentured laborers in the depths of the Wliajenya mine awoke something, foul in the heart of the city.
The twelve canton of Arjenvís, the City of Miseries. Map by the Author
The Black Burning Dawn
The hungers of Arjenvís became so great that the common folk rose up to demand some measure of humanity upon the monstrous inhumanity of the Vlatza and the Boyars. What began as a labor strike, spread from the Wliajenya mine to the workhouses, and to all the desperate poor of Arjenvís. Not since the Beggars’ War have the masses of Arjenvís swollen underclass expressed their anger and rage against their overlords. The labor strike turned into an uprising and then a revolt. Every effort to end the violence only amplified the horror and the evil within the City of Miseries.
A march of striking smallfolk clogged the Prohodt (the wide boulevard that climbed the back slope of the Zyle Wednye ridge to the palace of Kziaze Dwohr) until the armed soldiers of the city guard masacred them. The revolt turned into a revolution with the Noble estates and households under siege and assassinations being carried out almost nightly. Reprisal fallowed reprisal and blood flowed freely in the streets Arjenvís for more than a month.
One morning, before dawn, the Boyars’ army of household soldiers and mercenaries marched on the Wliajenya Gate, the stronghold that controlled both the access to the mines, and the Glenvoky Road that winds down to the north face of the Zyle Wednye to the Trzy Makti (“Three Mothers”) workhouses, center of the strike and the revolt. Supported by new magic from the priests of the Vyara Zabor church and “Mazynik” (Automata), a bloody battle pushed down Glenvoky Road towards the Trzy Makti and into the Wliajenya mine, inflicting terrible casualties on the smallfolk regardless if they were fighting, surrendering, or fleeing.
When dawn came it was different from any sunrise anyone had ever witnessed. It began with a green-blue glow on the horizon. The sun rose as a black circle in the sky burning from below in green, blue and violet flames. Fighting throughout the city abruptly stopped as the horror rose in the sky. Panic washed over the city as people sought a reason for the Black Burning Dawn.
Under that sun, the aristocracy of Arjenvís underwent sudden metamorphosis. As the Black Burning Sun crossed the sky the mortal members of the noble households changed from mortal folk to monsters. They became preadators, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, ghasts, liches and hundreds of others whose curse defies definition. The common mortal folk were reduced to half-alive husks, their souls consumed by the city.
The Curse of Arjenvís
Arjenvís is “alive”. While other realms of terror have a singular figure as the source of evil in their domain, Arjenvís is both the source of evil and the domain itself. The majority of it’s native population, the smallfolk who worked the mines, filled the workhouses and toiled in the fields are now half-alive parodies of their former selves. They provide sustenance (of a sort) to the monstrous fiends that Arjenvís transformed it’s nobility into. Vampires can feed on them, and avoid starving, but they will not grow strong, nor feel the rush of life that they would when feeding on a mortal being with a soul.
The half-alive also are unable to die, even if their corpus is destroyed, or consumed, they will arise as flesh-and-blood from the depths of the Wliajenya Mine and return to their pantomime lives, until misfortune befalls them once more. The monsters are similarly trapped in this cycle of rebirth. Arjenvís never lets it’s people go.
Arjenvís trapped time itself. The same year in the city repeats itself over and over again in a monotonous churn. No new children are born (save for those born during this cursed year away) no one ages, no one dies. Even those who would have died of natural causes during the year find themselves reborn within the Wliajenya Mine.
The unholy hunger of Arjenvís will never be satisfied by the half-alive, or the monstrous aristocracy. The City of Miseries reaches out across the Cosmos and draws in mortal victims and ensnares them into it’s fog-shrouded and blood-drenched streets. Escaping Arjenvís is nearly impossible, approaching the city gates will inexplicably relocate the hostage to another canton within the city. The fugitive will turn a corner, and find themselves in another place, wandering the streets. Escaping on the Erixahn or Nozca Kreft rivers is similarly frustrating. The raft or boat clears a bend in the river and finds itself approaching Arjenvís again. If there are secret ways out, they either remain undiscovered or are jealously guarded by a scant few.
Dark Streets, Dark Hearts
Art by Kazitier
There are several centers of power within Arjenvís, The city is ruled by the Vlatza Juliusz Dzynis, each canton is governed by Boyars, the Vyara Zabor Church is ruled by the Arzykapwan (High Bishop) through their Praladt (Bishops) and their Kziadz (Priests). Even before the Black Burning Dawn, there were feuds and rivalries among the institutions and households in Arjenvís. The Curse has changed very little. The old hatreds have not died.
The Kolegium was responsible for the technological advancements in Arjenvís, Wegnvia Coal burns at temperatures which allow for the wonders of steam power and clockwork engines. The wonders of the Kolegium workshops have become steampunk terrors after the Black Burning Dawn. The Inżynierowie (Engineers) have been transformed in the same manner of the nobility and the church.
Life in Arjenvís is cheap and violent. Even death may not permit escape.
One of my favorite old adventures for D&D is Palace of the Silver Princess by Jean Wells (and re-written by Tom Moldvay). I want to focus on Jean’s adventure, because it is really good and introduces a role-playing element that was missing for those first half-dozen years of D&D, a story.
The controversy surrounding this adventure deserves mention, and it has been the subject of a huge volume of articles and analysis over these past four and a half decades. I won’t rehash it here. It involves that mix of Satanic Panic, Sexual Panic, and Mysogyny that was sweeping the MidWest in 1980 and would consume the country for the next decade. It got Jean’s original published adventure pulled from shelves, then rewritten by tom with some controversial illustrations removed to appease the angry moralists (who wouldn’t ever play D&D because they got far more satisfaction from displaying Moral Fiber).
A cropped image of Illusion of the Decapus by Laura Roslof.
Art by Erol Otus. Soup’s on fam!
I can feel my “moral fiber” fraying at the ends… Again, if you want to explore this early controversy in D&D, there are a lot of very detailed and attributed articles out there.
The thing I like about Palace of the Silver Princess, and why I choose it to adapt it to 5th edition and run it for the new generation of gamers is what Jean Wells brought to D&D through it. Palace of the Silver Princess is a Fairy-Tale Romance. With a hidden valley, a lost princess and a bold knight all under a wicked curse that a group of heroes can break.
I also believe that this is what a woman’s perspective (in 1980, when beardy wargaming dudes were arguing over whether or not a Bec-de-Corbin was more effective against Field Plate than the Bohemian Ear Spoon) brought to role-playing games. The effort was both well appreciated by this blogger, and well punished by executives.
Getting to the Point
When I adapt these adventures to play in 5th edition D&D (but, these principles can be adapted to the game system you prefer) I start with the source material. Most of these old adventures can be found as pdfs for cheap all over the internet. What you’ll need most is a notebook or text file to jot down notes.
First, read through the adventure. For most of these early adventures it’s not much. 32 to 64 pages, anything longer would normally be called a “supermodule” even then, Temple of Elemental Evil is only 128 pages long. Read through the whole thing, take notes.
Next, compare the encounters to the resources in the rule set you want to convert to. Most adversaries have stat blocks in the rules you are using. Orcs, for example can be found in every edition of D&D (even the 2024 monster manual see my article about it). For most adventures, the balance of the encounters doesn’t change all that much in the context of the rules. If anything, many encounters get easier. Going back to Orcs for a moment, in first edition AD&D and BECMI, orcs are a hard fight for a first level party, one-to-one. They often have more hit points than most first level classes, and equal hit points to a fighter. They fight like a fighter, and have equivalent armor and weapons. By the time 3rd edition and later, the balance swings towards the player-characters. Same holds true for most other creatures in these early versions.
Adjust the encounters. after reading through the adventure and noting all the encounters as written, take a look in the context of the adventure’s plot. If it looks too hard, adjust some details to make it easier. If it looks too easy, beef it up a little. Don’t just consider the raw stat blocks, look at the context of the encounter. Is it an ambush? Is the adversary asleep, or distracted, or can they be easily fooled. All encounters are not toe-to-toe combats. Consider the encounter’s challenge in light of what it is supposed to do for the adventure. This is also your opportunity as Game Master to tailor the adventure that is published for a wide audience to your group of player characters.
Don’t be afraid to change things. Does one of the characters have a flaw that drives them to hate a monster type, but that monster doesn’t appear in the adventure? Add them in. It’s really easy to take an Orc encounter and make it a Hobgoblin encounter. Do your players not like fighting Zombies? Replace them with a construct of a similar CR. Does your setting not have flashy magic? Change that spell from fireball to a pot of flaming oil that drops in the same spot. Tailoring an otherwise generic adventure to your specific party of player-characters will make the adventure a lot more impactful and memorable.
Finally, take all these notes and make them easy for you to reference during game play. You don’t have to rewrite the whole thing. Just look at the notebook you wrote all these thoughts down on and put it on a format that will help you run the adventure at the table. Don’t rely on having the books at the table, then at the start of the encounter, flip back and forth. That will kill all the momentum that the adventure is building and frustrate both you and your players. My point here is to make it easy on yourself in the way that’s easiest for you to understand. If you are brand new and haven’t developed this skill, don’t worry. Use the format that is printed in the adventure as a guide. As you run more adventures in D&D, you’ll discover what works best for you.
Old Adventures are a Great Resource
There is now a fifty-year library of content for Dungeons and Dragons now. Not just Dungeons and Dragons published by Wizards of the Coast and TSR before that. There are adventures and content published by dozens (if not hundreds) of third-party companies going back to the beginning. There is an inexhaustible supply of adventures that we can choose from.
Lots of these early adventures were touchstones for the D&D community. Adventures like Keep on the Borderlands, Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Village of Hommlet, Slave Pits of the Undercity, Vault of the Drow and so many others were run and played at countless table, and it formed a common reference for players. It didn’t even matter that your table didn’t play in the supported campaign world, you could plug the adventure into your home setting and play it nearly out of the box. When you use these adventures at your table, for your players, who may have not even heard of it, you connect yourself to this legacy.
One More Thing
Converting these old adventures also teach you skills that can be used in your Game Master career. By reading and analyzing adventures, you are teaching yourself how they are designed. You can learn what elements of adventure design appeal to you and use these skills in creating your own adventures.
This is a technique taught to art students for centuries. Go to where the masters’ works are on display, bring your supplies and reproduce it. The student’s effort probably won’t look like the masterwork, but it will teach the student to apply the same techniques and learn skills that their instructor couldn’t teach.
Converting the early adventures for fantasy roleplaying into a modern system will improve your GM skills. They might even inspire you to design your own unique adventures.
Alignment is an artifact of the earliest days of D&D. According to legend, Gary Gygax adopted the mechanic after the players in those early campaigns kept lying, cheating, and murdering one another (and the nearby town) to get treasure and magic items. Alignment was also inspired by Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stories where cosmic forces of Law and Chaos struggled to shape the multiverse. Characters, like the Eternal Champions were agents of those forces. Alignment also served as shorthand, identifying friends and foes, “good-guys” and “bad-guys”. It worked fine for those early development from wargaming, but as players explored the game, it became a crutch, or worse, a straitjacket.
Alignment As Short-hand
How I run alignment currently is as a short-hand to help with character consistency. In a time when weeks or months can pass between game sessions, how we remember our characters drifts. A trait that was central to the character can become neglected, especially of the current multi-session adventure provides little opportunity to express that trait. Sometimes the motivation behind a characters actions looses it’s focus. Having a simple, evocative term to help ground the character has value.
As first edition AD&D defines Alignment, there are two axes that creates the term. One axis is a Law – Neutrality – Chaos (which is also the original Alignment spectrum), the other axis is Good- Neutrality – Evil. The combination of them tells us something about the character. Lawful characters are inclined to order and structure, Evil characters are self-serving and callous, Neutral characters have no strong associations with the poles of that axis.
There is a well known problem with the Good-Evil axis in this system. “Good” and “Evil” in the real world are generally considered subjective based on the consensus of the culture that one is acting within. (an admittedly crude definition, I’m no Philosophy major). In the context of Dungeons and Dragons, Good and Evil are objective and aligned with cosmic forces that reflect in the outer planes. In practical terms, what constitutes Good or Evil is in the hands of the Game Master and the Players in the campaign.
In these early editions, Alignment is restrictive towards what classes players may choose for their characters. Paladins, most famously, must be Lawful Good. Thieves cannot have Good as a component of their alignment, Druids must be “true” Neutral (meaning neutral on both axes). This often led to endless debates over what all that meant. Can a Thief really be Lawful Neutral? Their class abilities, especially Picking Pockets, Sneaking Around and that Back Stab attack are hardly reflective of a Lawful mindset. Are characters following a Chaotic Good Deity simply prevented from being Paladins? What about rebels fighting a tyrannical kingdom? Can they be Lawful and still fight the established order? Can they be Good and still support slavery because it’s legal? It was a murky pool to wade into.
5th ed Personal Characteristics
5th edition added more tools for character definition, Personal Characteristics. Four categories; Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws were one sentence or one phrase descriptors of a character’s persona. They were more detailed than just a simple two axis alignment and since the persona categories used sentences and phrases, players could define their characters much more precisely. They’re no longer simply “Chaotic Neutral”, 5th ed characters are Chaotic Neutral and Have Never Lost Their Child-like Sense of Wonder, Never Sticks to A Single Set of Rules, Does What They Can to Protect the Natural World, and Is Always Changing Their Mind.
The “Ideals” category often has alignment recommendations. Helping the player to choose an Ideal that compliments their Alignment choice.
Finally, ever since 3rd edition, alignment restrictions on classes have been removed, which has removed Alignment from being a requirement to make a character. In modern D&D Alignment has become nothing more than a soft statistic that shapes but not defines a character.
Personal Characteristics as Alignment Replacement
This is the mechanic I’ll be using in my D&D games going forward. The classic alignment axis system still exists, but only as an organizing framework for the outer planes and as shorthand for minions, NPCs and Monsters, not player characters.
For player characters there are three Personal Characteristics that serve the purpose that Alignment did.
Bonds: the connection the character has with others, family, companions, their home village, etc..
Ideals: the character’s motivations, why they continue pursuing adventure even after they experience setbacks and obstacles.
Flaws: those aspects of a character’s personality that hinder their own efforts.
At character creation, each personal characteristic is assigned a short statement that describes them. Each characteristic will reflect an alignment component; Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic, or Neutral. Bonds and Ideals cannot be in opposing alignments, one cannot be good, while the other is evil, or one cannot be lawful wile the other is chaotic. Neutral alignment is not considered in opposition with any other alignment. These two personal characteristics can have the statements that invoke the same alignment.
Flaws must invoke an alignment in opposition to at least one of the two other personal characteristics. In the case of Neutral Bonds or Ideals, the Flaw has to be non-neutral.
If the players play their personal characteristics appropriately and in a way that disadvantages the character by the choice, the Game Master may award them Heroic Inspiration, if the character already has Heroic Inspiration they may give it to another character who does not, and if everyone in the party has Heroic Inspiration, the player can increase their character’s Doom Die by 1 die type (maximum of d8)
Seasons change, and so did I
(with apologies to the Guess Who for the line)
Players may choose to change their character’s personal characteristics when the character gains a new Experience Level. They may add an additional Bond, Ideal, and Flaw when they advance to Tier 2, and again at Tiers 3 and 4. These changes and additions are optional to the player and can only be chosen upon gaining a new experience level.
Conclusion
This house rule for Alignment isn’t a straitjacket, and should not be enforced as such. These traits are intended to be tools for character development. Relating them to alignments helps to define a character’s morality and ethics. While the subjective terms “Good” and “Evil” are employed as components of this mechanic, I argue here that those terms, and we’ll thrown in Law, Chaos and Neutrality in there too, are intended for each group of gamers to determine for themselves and agree to amongst one another. These terms of moral and ethical philosophy can and will change for each of us over the course of our lives. Gods only know what I thought was “Good” and “Evil” when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons four and a half decades ago are not the same as they are at the time I’m writing this, and will likely evolve some more before I’m finished playing D&D.
(If I get my wish, that will be another four and a half decades from now, I’m not eager to reach the end of this journey any time soon)
Point being, Dungeons and Dragons (and all tabletop roleplaying games) belong to everybody playing them and we’re allowed to define alignment and personality traits to suit our table just as much as we can decide whether or not Orcs have pig snouts or not. There is no wrong answer, there never was.
…with apologies to Matchbox 20 for using their lyrics in my title.
I was introduced to Call of Cthulhu right after Dungeons and Dragons. My friends and I had all sorts of those thin little boxed editions from Chaosium back in the 80s. The Sanity mechanic they pioneered was, if you’ll forgive me, mind-bending. Our characters weren’t just at risk of death that would remove them from play, they could lose their minds! The horrors of the Mythos could break them beyond the players’ ability to play them.
Over four, nearly five, decades that mechanic has evolved and has been adapted to the point where, “making a SAN check” or “lost some Sanity Points” is a part of our gaming language, beyond horror roleplaying or even tabletop gaming. We can even say it’s part of the fabric of gaming.
But things change…
Those terms; santiy, insanity, crazy, they’re all antiquated at best, and prejudiced at worst. They perpetuate a stigma towards real-world neurodivergent or traumatized people. I kinda get it, this is a game, make believe, there aren’t any Shoggoths, or Vampires, or Secret Math that breaks people’s mental and emotional stability.
There is real world trauma, though. People are subjected to all to real horrors, and just like the body can be injured, so can the mind. People can be born with physical impairments and people are also born with neuro-divergent conditions. These people play tabletop roleplaying games too. They want to portray aspects of themselves in their own stories too.
My change to terminology
I am renaming a lot of the terms in this mechanic going forward in my games. A characters replacement for their sanity pool I’m calling Stability. Damage and checks are re-termed as Stress. Effects of accumulated stress are re-termed as Trauma. Enforced behavior from Trauma I’m calling Compulsions.
The mechanic is the same as that found in all the editions of Call of Cthulhu, or Basic Roleplaying. It’s just the terminology that changes. Instead of making Sanity checks, the player makes Stability checks, they suffer Stress instead of Sanity Damage, and they develop Traumas instead of Insanity.
Delta Green
The Call of Cthulhu based game Delta Green by Arc Dream Publishing adds a new twist to this mechanic that I love. Agents in Delta Green all start with 5 bonds with NPCs, representing family, friends, lovers, contacts and peers. They can develop more through roleplaying during game play, and each bond has a score between 1 and their Charisma score. The higher the score, the stronger the bond is.
Bonds can be spent in place of reducing Stress. For every point of a Bond used in this manner the amount of Stress taken is reduced by the same amount. When a Bond’s score reaches zero, it’s broken, and the NPC is estranged from the Agent. I love how this simulates the toll that a horror campaign takes on the characters, stealing the people in their lives and isolating them. Agents in Delta Green, as they learn more and more secrets become less and less relatable until they are all alone in a dingy, empty room surrounded by corkboard and string.
I’ll be adding and adapting this mechanic to my future horror campaigns.
Conclusion
Tabletop gaming continues to evolve. There was a time, especially in the horror genre where consent was really not offered, and when it was asked for, the player was told (rather condescendingly) that “it’s just make believe, stop being so sensitive”. Shock horror techniques involving blood, gore, violations and over-the-top violence was common, and reflected the media era that tabletop evolved with. It didn’t matter if things like sexual assault or extreme violence harmed some players, it was expected that if you sat down at a table for a game of horror you as the player were agreeing to be exposed to these things.
We’ve come a rather long way in forty years. Consent is a large part of this progress. The recognition of a social contract at the gaming table is transforming our hobby to one of shared experience. I think this adjustment in terminology is a small step in pushing the appeal of gaming forward. If referring to a character’s mental state as being Stable and Stressed helps a player feel less judged for their own struggles, especially if they keep those struggles to themselves, this is a good thing. If everyone at the table is empowered to express what boundaries they have without fear of judgement prevents hurtful mistakes that invokes a trauma that affects the player, then we can tell better stories with one another.
Older gamers, elder nerds are no longer gatekeepers to the clubhouse, checking everyone’s tolerance and understanding of details. We have a responsibility to new and old players alike to use the experience we have earned at the table to make these games a fun escape for everyone who wants to join in.
Veiling our crimes behind a smiling historical mask
I’m designing an Underdark adventure. It’s deep below the surface of the world, closer to the wicked empires of Dark Elves, Grey Dwarves, Mind Flayers and Kuo-Toa. In the setting for this adventure, there is a settlement. A small semi-permanent collection of structures and tents that’s grown up at a crossroads next to an underground lake.
And it has a slave market.
The institution in the Underdark
Within the adventure location there are bands of escaped slaves and posses of slave hunters playing cat-and-mouse in the lightless tunnels. There’s a party of death-worshiping drow more than willing to sacrifice anyone they capture to the Demon Prince of Undeath. Bad people making bad choices and doing bad things. It’s one of the dangers of the adventure that the characters need to overcome.
Slavery and the trafficking of people remain an evil. Simulating this evil in game doesn’t make it better. Worse, making the institution of slavery a part of a role-playing game can trivialize the impact of it.
It’s true that whole ethnicities of people were owned throughout history. The struggle for them to win their freedom is both centuries long and ongoing even today. Just because there’s no antebellum aristocrat in a smart white suit sipping bourbon on the front porch of his plantation, doesn’t mean that slavery remains very real, and remains an ethnically motivated practice.
As a middle-aged, masc presenting white person, it is cruel to pretend that slavery, even in game, is normalized. Especially if I have players at my table whose families may well have been enslaved in the not-to distant past. It is likewise cruel to place a player in the position of being a slave owner, appeaser of slavery as an institution or have their character be a slave without the player’s active consent.
Gaming and Consent
Since I mentioned consent, I should expound. Tabletop Role Playing is a communal experience. At least two people interacting to tell an improvised story about the Game Master’s adventure and the Player’s Original Character. Because of that, the players and Game Master need mutual, and active consent when playing.
This extends to most interactions in game. But where it runs into the question of humanity, that interaction is critical. If any party at the table doesn’t want to be confronted with dark or transgressive subject matter, those wishes need to be respected. This includes enslavement and institutional slavery.
Real World Institutions vs In-World Lore
For as long as I’ve been gaming, there has always been this loud, obnoxious, background noise advocating for more “Historical Realism” in Tabletop role-playing. Everything from disparaging Hit Points, to weapon space, and for the modern and future settings, the minutae of guns. I’ve seen hundreds of systems and house-rules. Most of them bogging down the game as the table comes to a screeching halt as we figure out what body-part just got hit by which attack.
The other historical rabbit-hole is environmental realism. Great Lords ruled over peasants, the aristocracy were allowed to do whatever they wanted because they were the rulers. Gods, after Braveheart roared through the community like so many screaming extras, the term Prima Noctis started cropping up everywhere. Of course, enslavement of every historical stripe has long been a yardstick by which “immersion” was measured. Lawful and Good alignments were construed to support the institution. It was deemed, “ok” and “natural” and because it was imaginary roleplay, wasn’t really real. Like I mentioned up in the consent section, if that’s what the table agrees to, then enjoy your game. I’m not trying to police your table.
But, when you hear my game in the FLGS, or play at my table at convention, don’t expect to go to the market and buy yourself a slave. I don’t have fun being a GM who plays the slaver, or the enslaved. I don’t care for “historical realism”. At best it’s whitewashed History, at worst it’s a power fantasy about owning people.
What about those Slavers hanging out in the Underdark?
I started this essay with the adventure and setting I’m designing. By having slavery as an institution in the background, I’m hoping to allow the tables who utilize my adventure some freedom to adjust it’s impact to suit their taste. There’s a group of escaped slaves and there’s a band of hunters chasing them, it’s up to the players and their characters to react to that set of encounters. It’s up to the Game Master to determine it’s importance. Slavers have made great antagonists in fiction for a very long time. One of the first series of adventures published for AD&D was the A-Series of modules, collectively known as “Against the Slave Lords”. One of the classic cues that there is something “bad” about a given realm is the presence or absence of legal slavery. I’m not saying “don’t use slavery at all in D&D”, I’m asking to put some thought into whether or not it contributes to the story that’s being made at your table.
And, for the Seven Heavens, don’t justify it behind the excuse of “slavery was common in 3rd Century Rome (or 16th century France, or choose your historical era here)”. Tabletop roleplaying isn’t about historical accuracy, it’s about having fun with your friends, and making new ones.
Your characters have done it! You’ve journeyed deep into the earth below the ruined castle. Overcame traps and foes alike, solved ancient puzzles, and killed the Great Beast in it’s lair. Your characters gaze over the accumulated wealth of centuries, jewels and coin and gemstones. Your hirelings start scooping treasure into heavy sacks to carry to the surface, and then home. Everybody is rich!
Except you’re not, not yet.
Currency and taxation
This is getting a bit into the weeds with regards to worldbuilding. Where the adventurers find treasure can be important. Finding a centuries-old cache of coins leads to a problem,the realms that minted those coins may no longer exist. This leads to an issue when the characters try spending the coin back in town.
One reason currency is minted is to attest to its purity. Gold in particular is more valuable the more pure it is. 100% pure (24 karat) gold is worth more than 75% pure (18 karat) or 50% pure (12 karat) gold. When a realm stamps their mark on a coin it’s a guarantee of purity in the metal. Everyone who trades in the coin of the realm can be confident that the gold is of a minimum purity (usually 75% or 50%, depending on the wealth of the realm minting the coin). Coins from elsewhere don’t enjoy that confidence. Especially old coinage. Instead of valuing the coin based on it’s declared value, coins are valued on the weight and purity of the metal in the coin.
If the adventurers have their treasure appraised, they can either pay a fee (usually 10% of the value of coins appraised) to a Jeweler to value the coins based on the metal they contain. If the adventurers have access too and proficiency with Jeweler’s tools they may appraise their own treasure by making a Intelligence check with proficiency against a Difficulty class set by the Game Master. Adventurers who know the appraised value of their treasure have Advantage on Charisma checks when negotiating a sale of the coin.
Ancient coins from realms lost to history, can also be valued as historical or collectors’ pieces. To the right buyer, a box of 3,000 year old coin from an extinct empire might be worth far more than either the value of metal, or the declared value stamped on the coin. This can add detail and steps to cashing in on your treasure hoard that players may not be interested in. Not every player of Dungeons and Dragons enjoys haggling with money-changers over the relative value of copper. To keep things simple, and to minimize accounting, it’s recommended that the Game Master simply assign a percentage that treasure is worth in currency (usually between 50 and 80% .
The coins can be melted down and sold by weight. The price for precious metals will always be less than the currency value of the coin that can be minted or the jewelry that can be made from it and depends on the purity of the metal. Appraising the precious metal will give the adventurers Advantage on Charisma check when negotiating a sale.
Using Treasure to Pay for Goods and Services.
Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, treasure is the only resource that is available to pay for a room and meals at the roadside inn, or when purchasing a mule and cart from a local homestead. Or maybe the characters want to avoid entanglements with the local government. In this case, the characters need to persuade the merchant or inkeep to accept their coin. After all, gold is gold, even if it doesn’t carry the stamp of the ruling sovereign. This would be a Charisma (Persuasion) check against the NPC’s Intelligence (or Charisma, depending on the scene) bonus plus 10. Give Advantage if the characters know the value of what they’re trading (having someone appraise their treasure qualifies). Or Disadvantage if the source of the treasure has a bad reputation. No one wants to take cursed silver from the haunted halls.
At best, the treasure shouldn’t be worth more than their declared value, even on a natural 20. Otherwise, a successful Persuasion gives the characters their asking value, and a failed Persuasion gives them only half that. A natural 1 throws other complications into the transaction.
But bartering treasure isn’t like shopping at Ye Olde K-Marte. If a patron isn’t taking legitimate coin, they aren’t too keen on giving exact change in coin of the realm. Accepting illegitimate currency is a crime in most settled areas. At best, it’s just a minor crime and a fine will reconcile the legal issue. At worst, it’s counterfeiting, or espionage, and the characters face imprisonment, or the headsman’s axe.
Money as a Motivator
In the early days of D&D, characters earned experience points, in fact, most of their experience points from the gold piece value of the treasure they brought out of a dungeon. One gold piece = one experience point. Fighting monsters and ad hoc experience was at best one quarter or one third of your character’s experience total.
As Matt Colville once said, “how a game rewards it’s players is what the game is about.” In the case of early D&D, that meant getting treasure. Your characters advanced based on how much treasure they “won” or earned or stole. This led to players to scouring every inch of the adventure for every single coin or item of value. Later editions abandoned this experience point method, which is overall a good thing. Getting better at adventuring because you’re rich, or the instances where novice adventurers become superheroes because they found a treasure hoard worth more than a kingdom was kind of silly.
Still, moving the experience motivation away from treasure had a drawback. D&D rewarded encounters and combat, so that’s what players focused on, and that became rather boring. It also cut off one of the classic reasons that people take up adventuring in the first place. Finding treasure.
TANSTAAFL
Players should be motivated by something more than experience points. We’re in the year 2025, computer gaming can scratch that itch just fine if all the player wants is to level up their characters over and over.
During Session 0 of a campaign, the Game Master ant the Players should set expectations and define the role of treasure in the story. During this stage, you can establish the importance of money in the setting and in the campaign. There is a big difference between a band of dirt-poor adventurers doing everything necessary to scrape enough coin together to buy their next night at an inn and a court romance of aristocratic adventurers for whom money isn’t an issue, but treasure can buy prestige and power.
Once established, the role of money and treasure should be used. Don’t handwave the important expenses for the campaign. In the campaign where the characters are scraping for coins, charge the characters for every round of drink, and every transaction, no matter how trivial. The characters are struggling, and their players should be always aware of that fact. In the campaign of noble adventurers seeking status or glory, the minor costs, like buying a round for the house in the tavern to loosen tongues, or flipping the minstrel a couple of gold to (quite literally) sing their praises doesn’t need to be tracked. However, the value of treasure is of critical importance as well as the conspicuous consumption. Keeping up a Aristocratic Lifestyle, paying for an entourage, keeping up with courtly fashion (no one wants to be seen at this season’s ball wearing last years fashions!) the accounting may be different, but the fundamental is the same, Treasure is important, and will affect the characters’ advancements.
Money Is Money
Players sometimes only care about gold pieces, or platinum pieces. Silver, copper or electrum are simply not valuable enough to be bothered with. Just remember, most large amounts of treasure is not going to be neatly divided by coin. It takes time to sort through hundreds of coin to pick out all the gold or platinum, which are much rarer than copper or silver. Also, platinum and silver are pretty similar in color, and with the really poor lighting in dungeons separating the platinum from the silver would be s-l-o-w. In dungeon lighting conditions (such as those defined as “bright light” in the 5e rules, it will take 1 hour to sort through 500 coins. In dim light, that time doubles.
In a similar manner to the current change problem as described earlier, tossing around gold for every purchase is going to cause problems. Most communities smaller than cities don’t have enough coin to break gold and platinum down to lower value coin. When the tavern’s house ale cost 5 copper pieces for a pint, slapping a gold piece down, even for a round for the house is twenty pints. Consider this, if the local tavernkeep is selling fare for copper pieces, they’re not going to have an abundance of coin to make change.
But it’s Not All Taxes and Crime
Don’t go overboard with relieving the adventurers of their hard-won treasure. Part of the fun of finding mounds of treasure is spending it. Let the adventurers commission magic items, specialized armor, purchase noble title or church ranks. Large purchases like a stronghold, or ship can be planned and enhanced. Wizards need sanctuaries, Priests need temples, Warriors need fortresses and Thieves need hideouts.
The Síoraí (pronounced “see-or-EYE”) were born from mortal people whose spirit had been displaced by a spirit from the Fæ realms. Though their bodies remain mortal, albeit with extended lifespans, their Færie spirits reincarnate into newborn bodies after their former body expires. Since time in the Fæ realms passes differently than it does in Fahr Ryasc, a given Síoraí’s Færie spirit may reincarnate quickly, or ages will pass before the spirit sees the world through mortal eyes again.
Over the centuries as the Síoraí developed as a people, the influnce of the Færie spirits has become more pronounced. The Síoraí have grown more distinctive among themselves, assuming a physical form more pleasing to the Færie who live within their mortal vessels. While, in some regards, this continued metamorphosis of the moral bodies are considered beautiful by other mortal peoples, they have grown inceasingly inhuman by contrast.
The Færie spirits inhabiting the Síoraí have long memories, sometimes being able to recall events from past incarnations. However, their time as spirits within the Færie realms is hidden from them, and they can only remember the fullness of their many lives when existing as spirits there.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Síoraí are humanoid in appearance, though they are taller and thinner on average. Síoraí have two sexes and reproduce heterosexually. Their physical bodies go through puberty before reaching maturity and women experience menopause during middle-age.
Síoraí also have two folk, which derive from the Fæ courts their spirits belong to. The Deasíoraí are connected to the Deadí Færie court of Long Days. The Bansíoraí are connected to the Banyte court of Long Nights. The Fæ are ruled by the Deadí from the Spring Equinox through the Autumnal Equinox and the Banyte from the Autumnal Equinox through the Spring Equinox.
While the Deasíoraí and Bansíoraí are the same people, they each vary in complexion and hair color. Deasíoraí tend towards deeper brown and ruddy complexions coupled with fair red and yellow hair and light eyes of green and blue. Bansíoraí tend towards pale skin coupled with black hair and dark eyes.
Genetics and Reproduction
Síoraí reproduce sexually, most often births are singular, but dual and multiple births are not unheard of. Infants are not yet possessed of Færie spirit at birth, but by the time the child reaches it’s second anniversary, about the time they begin to learn how stand and take their first steps, their Færie spirit fills the mortal vessel and they develop into Deasíoraí and Bansíoraí as appropriate.
Growth Rate & Stages
Síoraí grow similarly to other mortal peoples, reaching maturity in 18 to 20 years. Once reaching adulthood, they age half as fast due to their Færie nature. Thus, Síoraí reach Middle Age by 60, and old age by 100. They survive for another 50 years, with a natural lifespan of 150 years.
Behavior
Síoraí often seem indifferent to others, and self-centered. They have an unusual perspective on events and relationships due to their multiple incarnations through out ages. Even though the mortal body they inhabit may be only decades or a century old, their spirit, being of the Færie, can recall memories from multiple lifetimes. The Síoraí have difficulty relating to the here and now, or to people who will inevitably become only distant memories of past lives.
There is an exception in other Síoraí. Síoraí recognize and can empathize with other Síoraí in ways that are simply not possible with other mortal people. Síoraí are among the very few people in Fahr Ryasc who have the shared history of experiencing multiple lifetimes over the course of ages, and can form tight bonds with the inherent promise of those bonds renewing in future incarnations. Síoraí are able to share with one another first-hand experiences of events that no other living mortal could have been through.
This also makes Síoraí rather archaic as a people. They derive a certain comfort from the familiar, being grounded in habits and environments of their previous lives. They tend to speak with outmoded diction, being accustomed to the language they have been conditioned to speak over dozens or hundreds of lifetimes.
Additional Information
Social Structure
The Síoraí develop their societies as a mirror of their courtly civilizations within the Fæ Realms. They Organize based on their Færie nature as Deadí and Banyte Fæ and their positions within those courts, whether Noble or Small (or Common) Fæ. However, other mortals who live among the Síoraí are appointed into social positions, but are always treated as lesser, since their mortal contributions are perceived by the Síoraí as “temporary by nature”.
Síoraí who live among the other mortal realms of Fahr Ryasc, often live so apart from the established social structures. Their multiple lives and sense of mortal impermanence extend even to the great empires of Fahr Ryasc. They can’t help but see the achievements of other mortal people, even nations, as fleeting. The Síoraí find “progress” distasteful, especially the rapid progress of mortal people, unless, of course, that progress compliments themselves or their aesthetic concerns.
Physical characteristics
There is a definite sense of the otherworldly about the Síoraí. They are at once beautiful and distrubing to behold, especially as they mature, their mortal bodies exaggerating the mortal form, growing tall, willowy and deft with long, delicate fingers and toes.
A Síoraí’s face is long and oval, with sharply angled almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, a sharp blade of a nose, long tapered ears and a narrow mouth. There are further distinctions between the Deasíoraí and Bansíoraí. Síoraí men can grow facial hair, but it’s normally thin, fine and short, matching the hair covering their head and it usually comes in after middle-age. Síoraí women do not normally grow such facial hair. Both sexes grow sharp angled eyebrows, and tend towards high foreheads. Neither sex develops wrinkles or sagging until very late in life, 130 years or older.
Síoraí hair remains a consistent color throughout their lives, seldom going grey or white with age.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
The Síoraí can be found nearly everywhere in Fahr Ryasc, but are most common in their realms located in the Tanglewild forest in the South, the Elderwild forest in the North, and beneath the Auborobua mountains.
Average Intelligence
The Síoraí possess typical mortal intelligence. However their Færie spirits provide them access to knowledge from their past lives and a perspective that is more supernatural than the average mortal experience. This gives the perception that Síoraí are more knowledgeable than most people (also are eternally irritating to sagacious professions that deal in secretive information as a Síoraí, after an evening of meditation can recall some bit of esoterica which takes others days or weeks of research in archives).
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Síoraí, being born from mortals, have senses of smell, taste and touch that are similarly sensitive as their cousins throughout Fahr Ryasc. However, their Fæ ancestry makes their senses of sight and hearing almost supernaturally sharp.
Civilization and Culture
Major Language Groups and Dialects
Lazáqo is the primary language spoken in the Síoraí’s homeland of Záqu, hidden deep in the Tanglewild forest. The Elderwilde forest is home to the northern realm of Taur Ymagar, speaks a dialect of Lazáqo named Vakláno. The Síoraí realm of Berízal deep below the Auborobua Mountains speaks a dialect of Lazáqo known as Berxáno, which is the most widespread common language of the underworld civilizations beneath Fahr Ryasc
I’ve been playing and running the first Science Fiction Role playing game since 1985. My high-school buddy Chuck R ran an amazing multi-session adventure based on the Aliens movie released in ’86. It was brutal and so much fun. We made so many characters during that game. Xenomorphs are freakin’ deadly.
So are player-characters. We killed as many PCs as the Xenos did. One of our players was super-proud of the Armored Fighting Vehicle he custom-designed, and the first time he rolled it out, his character lost control of the vehicle and ran over five characters he was coming to rescue.
Good times!
Life-Path Characters
Traveller was also the first game to use a life-path method of character generation. Instead of generating a bunch of stats, choosing a class and diving into the life of an adventurer, Traveller characters start as 18 year old (or the age of majority for their species and culture) young adults. Players then start choosing career options. Choices are not guaranteed, the player has to make a check for their character to qualify for and join a career. If this check fails, the player can subject the character to the Draft, start a background as a Drifter (think “Space Hobo”), or can just begin game play with the background skills their character earned growing up. Players then roll checks for their characters in four-year terms, earning skills, advancing in their careers, having life-events, and most infamously, rolling Survival checks.
In the early editions of Traveller, failing the survival check during character generation means the character died in their career. Start over, roll some new stats, make a new 18 year old character. This made character generation into a mini-game of it’s own. Because the careers that offered skills and benefits most effective for adventures were often the most dangerous, such as Marines or Scouts, there is a risk/reward decision. Every term spent in a dangerous career can return coveted skills like Pilot (Starship), Gun Combat, Recon, Heavy Weapons, you know all those cool action-adventure skills. But every term runs the risk of the character dying in service and all those skills are lost. But, they died a hero! Probably. Maybe.
In latter-editions of Traveller, the survival check has been re-contextualized as less lethal. Failing a survival check now results in a “mishap” and often the end of a career or character generation. But, the character is alive and with an interesting story in their history.
There are also less risky careers, just Citizens of the galaxy. Administrators, Academics, Scientists, and the like. Survival rolls are easy to succeed with (though there almost always is a slight chance the character fails and is “hit by the Space Bus”) and though the skills are really useful (try to get your Marine friend out of the local lock-up without any Advocate skill), they won’t cover shooting guns, stabbing goons, or flying space-fighters. Players can also choose to change careers during this process, and with that, the diversity of character options is, well… galactically huge.
This often resulted in beginning adventurers having long histories and high skill values. It wasn’t unusual to see a group of Travellers start campaigns in their 30s and 40s, with high military ranks and contacts throughout Charted Space.
In more recent versions of Traveller, the concept of character connections have been introduced. So instead of a half-dozen random strangers being thrown on a tramp-freighter, characters can be old service buddies, ex-lovers (or ex-spouses), and all sorts of other potential connections. This encourages players to not just care about their own character, but about the other players’ characters at the table. It’s easier to abandon some guy you met an hour ago in the spaceport bar to the ravenous tooth-beasties than it is to leave the person you served with during the best times of your life.
Charted Space and the Third Imperium
The default setting for Traveller is called “Charted Space”. Located in a slice of the Orion Arm of our galaxy and including Terra, it echoes the universes of Asimov, and Niven, Herbert and the sci-fi fiction just before Star Wars changed everything. Traveller was first published in 1977, the same year Star Wars entered theaters. The Third Imperium is a feudal interstellar empire that rules over eleven-thousand worlds. Charted Space includes the Imperium as well as empires of alien soceities such as the Aslan (Kzinti-inspired feline aliens), the Hivers, Vargr (terran wolves uplifted by an ancient alien culture), K’kree, and dozens of others.
While many sci-fi settings use “galaxy” as a short cut to a large interstellar setting, Charted Space illustrates just how big space is, and how unwieldy a galactic empire would be. I’ve been playing in Traveller for 40 years and in all of that time I’ve barely scratched the surface of Charted Space. Fifty years in this sandbox has created a setting as deep as those of the Foundation, Known Space, DUNE, the Star Wars Galaxy, or the Star Trek Galaxy.
To me, one of the fundamental technologies of Traveller that is strongest is communications. There is no “Subspace” or “Hyperspace” real-time communications. Instead communications travel at the speed of the fastest ships carrying them. There are dedicated couriers called Express Boats (or “X-Boats”) that deliver the mail and communications along established X-Boat routes between systems. However, not all inhabited systems are along the X-Boat routes, and it falls to smaller courier outfits to take the mail to the backwater systems (which is an opportunity for adventurers to earn some quick credits). This results in news taking weeks or months to cross the Imperium before it arrives at a given destination. This makes the Imperial frontier a bit like our world before the Telegraph was adopted. This also allows for people to outrun their past, or to make a living tracing those who hope to do so
IMTU: In My Traveller Universe
Traveller can be run in nearly any science fiction genre, not just the Third Imperium. Over the years it’s been adapted, inspired, or been incorporated in all sorts of setting. I’ll borrow a page from the creator of Traveller, Marc Miller and ask the rhetorical question, “How many different worlds can you think of?”
Most of us can imagine different biomes grown to planetary scale, desert planets, forest moons, jungle worlds, swamp worlds, worlds covered in oceans and ice, so on and so forth. But, this method is ultimately limited. There are only so many forest planets that we can design until they all start looking and feeling the same. (Star Wars really has this problem, Tattooine, Jakku, and Pasaana are different worlds, but they all feel like the same desert world.)
For Traveller, the solution was a game mechanic where the profile of a given world can be randomly generated. Instead of classifying worlds by biome, or by it’s ability to support live (like the class M planet in Star Trek), Traveller designs worlds by Size, Atmosphere, Hydrographics, Population, Government, and Law Level. Different combinations of World Profiles can identify different, multiple trade classifications such as agricultural, or industrial, or garden worlds, offering details that can make worlds feel different, and more diverse. Referees (the Traveller title for Game Master) can fill in entire subsectors of worlds for exploration in the course of an evening. Or, if necessary, on the spot.
Every Referee applies the Traveller rules differently in their own campaign. In the community, we refer to this as “In my Traveller universe” (IMTU). My favorite part of this, is that the Traveller Univers is large enough to contain all of this diversity in setting and campaign. Mechanically, everything in Traveller, whether it is Classic, TNE, Mongoose, or 5.1 is similar enough to be useable with nearly everything else. Honestly, in that high school campaign where I played in Chuck’s adaptation of Aliens, I played an Aslan. Big ol’ lion dude with a pulse laser and RAM grenade launchers fighting Xenomorphs. If you want to make a Wookie, or a Vulcan, or a Geminon from Battlestar Galactica, they can fit into Traveller alongside the standard Vilani/Solomani human characters and the Vargr. IMTU becomes the shorthand for the setting differences that the player can expect from this particular instance of Traveller. It has been this way for 50 years almost.
IDTU: In Dezzy’s Traveller Universe
I should give you all a little bit of context here. When I first started playing Traveller in the ’80s, it was the first “Classic” version. The Third Imperium was set in Year 1105 (1107, by the time the Fifth Frontier War started). I mostly ran my games in the Solomani Rim sector because my two go-to Alien Modules, Aslan and Solomani were set near this area.
In 1987, Traveller’s publisher, Game Designer’s Workshop and their partner Digest Group Publications produced the next version of Traveller, dubbed MegaTraveller, this expanded the mechanics, updated them a bit and advanced the Third Imperium to the year 1116. It also introduced a major change to the setting, dubbed the Rebellion, or the Shattered Imperium.
In MegaTraveller, the Emperor Strephon is assassinated by the Archduke of Ilelish doman, Dulinor, and the stable Imperium fractures into a multisided civil war. Like all major changes to RPGs (and pop culture for that matter), this was a huge controversy. Even back in 1989 gamers were really eager to dive headlong into arguments and fights over the media they felt ownership of. In My Traveller Universe, I’d chosen to ignore the Rebellion War, and continue my Solomani Rim campaigns without jumping the timeline ahead nine years. It was still 1107 (or so) and the events taking place in the Rim were still in a (relatively) stable Third Imperium.
1n 1991 I saw a supplement for MegaTraveller that caught my imagination.
It was the Hard Times, and that cover just scratched all my Sci Fi Adventure itches. I still have my now 33 year old copy. The Hard Times advanced the Third Imperium timeline nine more years to 1125. The Rebellion War never ended with victory for anyone. Instead, all the factions fighting one another had exhausted their resources, and in the last years of war, had destroyed the infrastructure that allowed the Imperium to run. Economies collapsed, worlds failed, and communications broke down.
Library Data, the thing that the Imperium kept up to date so Travellers would have some idea of what to expect as they journeyed from system to system, lost it’s regular updates. Travel data stopped being accurate. The system you left three months ago, might be completely different when you return. It might be dead. It might have had a change in government and isolated itself from the rest of the sector. It might have become part of a Pocket Empire, and no longer recognized Imperial Law. A rival fleet could have flown through and saturation-bombed the main world. The most valuable asset that a crew could have was often the records of the recent systems they visited. Hell, in the Hard Times, even the X-Boat Routes became unreliable. The mail couldn’t get through.
My Traveller Universe advanced to the Hard Times on the spot.
Then, I moved to California and GDW changed Traveller again! Another controversy, another round of edition wars. This time it was 1993. I was excited to find a new Traveller version to go along with my new city and new state.
The New Era advanced the Third Imperium timeline to the year 1201. The collapse of the Hard Times had become a complete Apocalyptic catastrophe in year 1130 with the release of a superweapon, VIRUS. Essentially VIRUS was self-aware, weaponized software that spread through computer networks. So long as a given system was powerful enough to host an iteration of VIRUS, the weapon would turn that system against the societies that used it. Think Skynet from the Terminator Franchise. A malicious, aggressive, weaponized artificial intellect that desired the genocide or enslavement of all organic sentience it could find. VIRUS would infect a starship, and without warning purge all the airlocks (and crew) then if it were in proximity, turn any weapons on any nearby un-infected ships it could sense. VIRUS would set powerplants to overload, open habitats to vacuum, or poisonous atmosphers, or the ocean. Even most household appliances in the Imperium had enough processing power to host a fragment of VIRUS. Maybe your toaster couldn’t kill you on it’s own, but it certainly could infect the rest of your home, or vehicle and find something to murder you and your family with.
By 1201 the survivors of VIRUS had started the long road to recovery. That’s what the New Era was about, reconnecting interstellar civilization and avoiding Vampire Fleets and Murder Warbots. There were parts of the New Era I enjoyed, and there were parts I really didn’t. For me, it had changed too much. The adventures and setting supplements presupposed that Traveller was specifically taking place in this setting with these environments. If you wanted to play Traveller In Your Traveller Universe and not in The New Era, you’d have to do a fair amount of extra work. In short, The New Era didn’t feel enough like Traveller for me to really enjoy it.
My appreciation for VIRUS would come later.
I was surprised to see the 4th edition of Traveller “Marc Miller’s TRAVELLER” when I found it in my FLGS in 1996. I picked it up on the spot, but it’s setting “Mileu 0” had the same issues for me that The New Era had. It was just too different from the Traveller I enjoyed, and the game mechanics had been changed again from the system used in TNE, which was different from the system used in MegaTraveller. For me, TRAVELLER 4 wasn’t the Traveller I wanted.
Quick Link Interactive adapted Traveller to the d20 OGL in 2002. It drew me back to Traveller for the first time in almost ten years. I’d been running a lot of 3rd edition D&D in this time and Traveller20, as it came to be known, was really effective in introducing a whole new group of D&D gamers to the universe of Traveller. One of the elements of Traveller that was carried over to Traveller20 was the Life-Path mechanic adapted to the d20 system. Which I really adored!
Mongoose Publishing came to my rescue in 2008 with it’s retro-design of Classic Traveller. I remember finding a copy of Mongoose Traveller in the dealer room at KublaCon. The hardback cover was an homage to the original little black books of Classic Traveller. That became my new go-to version of Traveller. I blew the dust off My Traveller Universe and happily returned to the Far Future.
Since then, and the date of this writing, Marc Miller, with Far Future Enterprises published a Fifth Edition of Traveller, TRAVELLER5, in 2013 and a cleaned up revision 5.1 in 2019. Mongoose updated their version of Traveller into a Second edition in 2016 and published updated revisions in 2020 and 2022.
In Dezzy’s Traveller Universe, I’m mainly using the 2022 version of Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition with a fair amount of the crunchy menchanics from TRAVELLER5.1 in the background. I am setting my next campaign in Diaspora sector during the Hard Times of 1125.
Conclusion
If it’s not clear by now, I really enjoy Traveller. It’s my favorite Sci-Fi game, and I think it’s enjoying a renaissance among the older generation of gamers. Recently, Mongoose Publishing has purchased the rights to Traveller from Marc Miller and Far Future Enterprise, which places the game in good hands for the foreseeable future. I’m excited to see what Mongoose Publishing does with their stewardship.
As a role-playing community I think Traveller players have an opportunity here. We can introduce a whole new generation of gamers to Traveller and it’s rich history. Show them Your Traveller Universe.
Lore and Legends of the Dezzyverse 