Tag: worldbuilding

For large swathes of its history Japan was riven by internecine warfare, notably the periods of ‘feudal anarchy’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [C.E.]. During those years the feudal lords (Daimyo) kept large standing armies which were constantly on the move throughout the country. It stands to reason that adventurers traveling in such a setting would have a relatively high chance of stumbling across one or more military units. This is a system for generating random encounters with such units.

The results will generate encounters with units varying in size from 11 individuals to 10,000 soldiers. Larger armies will include scouts, usually mounted, so DMs should take their existence into consideration when such an encounter is rolled….

— Random Encounters with Military Units in a Feudal Japanese Setting – Monsters and Manuals

Tapestries serve both a functional and aesthetic purpose in castles. Tabletop roleplaying games leave out visual decoration all too often.

Tapestries also imply a wool industry: sheep herding and shearing, weaving, dyeing, et. al.

Let’s consider a campaign setting dialed toward the pagan end of the spectrum. I will mostly be referencing Germanic paganism for this example because it is the historical culture I am most familiar with (note that this includes most of northern Europe from England to parts of Eastern Europe). Pagan gods are not all-powerful, nor are they omniscient or benevolent. They have different goals, biases, flaws and are more often worshipped out of reverence and respect and less out of love and devotion. They are given offerings in exchange for protection, favors, or just appeasement. On paper, this is pretty standard for your traditional D&D setting. But what we don’t really see is the implications and effects of this worldview on the setting. A pagan worldview is not one that is likely to lead to the traditions of medieval Europe nor the fantasy version of it with the holy knights, ornamented cathedrals, and battles between angels and demons.

Firstly, no place of worship was more important than the home, or more specifically, the hearth. Every proper home should have an altar around the hearth where offerings are prepared and daily prayer rituals are done. These alters can contain different shrines to different gods as well as shrines to non-deities such as ancestors and house spirits. That’s right, gods are not the only ones that receive prayers and offerings. It is just as important for a villager to give offerings to their local Kobold house spirit to keep them from causing trouble. On top of that, their ancestors are constantly watching, judging, and influencing from the afterlife. PCs and NPCs alike will want to pray to their ancestors for wisdom and seek to please them.

In general, the objects of worship: gods, spirits, and ancestors should be much more day-to-day than normally seen in fantasy settings. Farmers prayed to Thor to protect their cattle while housewives prayed to Freja to send cats to deal with mice. This doesn’t mean your adventurers can’t also summon the strength of a god to divine smite a giant, only that the gods are for everyone—not just high-level adventurers….

— Heathenizing Your RPG Campaign – Tabletop Tales

The finale of the (someday-I-will-finish) Elmö’s Obligation story will lead to Xenograg recruiting a young orc martial artist as a henchman. He will then recruit others of his species into service with Xenograg, forming a small combat unit (~25). I had envisioned them as heavy cavalry, on horses, but willing to also fight on foot. Their primary duty was to be a bodyguard for Xenograg.

Then the Elmö’s Obligation story gained an unexpected detail while being written: the young bravo (to be named Ingraf) who Xenograg duels was originally to be human but is now hobgoblin. He, too, has a small following of his own people. While not a henchman, this hobgoblin will become a loyal retainer. He will likewise end up leading another small combat unit comprised of his people.

The usual depictions of these species is of hobgoblins being more disciplined than orcs; more soldier than warrior. So should Xenograg’s new heavy cavalry unit instead be the hobgoblins? Do I change the orcs to heavy infantry? Do I leave them both as cavalry, with the orcs being reduced to medium?

I forgot one detail: these orcs are unusual within their own people, specifically that they are martial artists, and are more disciplined from it.

Whether rare or common occurrences, a campaign world will and should have places that are former battlefields. Things to be encountered there:

• mass graves or the remains of large funeral pyre(s)
• Tumuli for fallen leaders or champions.
• stray bones from overlooked corpses
• arrowheads and other military debris
• shrines and/or offerings for honoring the dead

Meat is readily available on the menus of every inn and tavern in your campaign world. Where does it come from?

I already asked about ranches. Those are a relatively recent invention, though.

“From the time of the Norman conquest to the middle of the last century, any traveller in Wales might find his way blocked by hundreds of cattle, large herds of sheep, pigs and flocks of geese. From the eighteenth century, turkeys were added to the stream of beasts on their way east to the rich men’s markets.”

— Encounters with Drovers – Monsters and Manuals

Where there are cattle there should also be cattle rustling.

— The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 4

Even in an RPG campaign world with magic, this is how most news would and should spread. This provides the perfect reason/excuse for bard (classed) PCs and NPCs to travel far and wide. This is their trade and purpose, after all.

For over a year, my attention on the Xenoverse/Rhydinspace has been on Xenograg rebuilding his depleted retinue. Not just rebuilding but expanding it to a size not seen since the Monastery of Arra.

Things are different now, though. Not so much with Xenograg as with me. The monastery-as-warband predates my getting married, buying a house, building a retirement nest egg, and being the primary breadwinner for a (very small) family through easy and rough economic times. My perspective has changed, and I regularly notice how different I see the matter of Xenograg’s responsibilities to his ever-growing extended family. Not just the St. Germain’s but a new generation of retainers.

I used to see these non-player characters (NPCs) solely through the lens of the Dungeons & Dragons rules. Primarily, via their weekly/monthly costs. I did not see the value for quite a long time. Then my game master gave Xenograg three henchmen, at once, to help him survive in what is now called a “duet” campaign. I quickly learned their value both mechanically (e.g., combat) and as a spur for actual roleplaying.

One thing that game master did not include, though, was logistics. Like many roleplayers, he was not interested in the realistic challenge of how Xenograg would manage with three more mouths to feed. His simple solution was ensuring Xenograg always had sufficient wealth to render the issue moot.

I kept that same conceit all the way through the Monastery of Arra. I paid lip service to the realistic necessities by including affectations in my roleplay: Xenograg commenting about being low on funds, regularly monitoring the monastery’s cash flow, fretting the cost of keep construction, needing to take a loan, et. al. But he always had enough.

Good times. Simple times. It is not that I want this gritty realism in my roleplay, now. I just feel that it needs to be there. And that it will have upsides, too, creatively.

I have previously described the Rhydinspace plane/dimension as only a single solar system. I am embracing this preexisting lore as an inspiring limitation. This is more than enough real estate for an outer space roleplay campaign.

A single planet can be challenging to a gamemaster as a fantasy setting. Eight planets with numerous satellites and a single star is a truly intimidating canvas size to me. And that is before adding magic and travellers/immigrants from other places. I am not even thinking of space stations here. (Asteroids? Yes, please!)

Galactic Scale is wide but usually shallow and homogeneous. My aim with Rhydinspace is depth and variety.

More importantly, where are all the water mills? Water mills can be much larger than windmills, and are capable of doing more than just grinding wheat into flour.

Civilization’s first automation.

1. Why is the dungeon there?

Is it the lair of a monster? Was it a prison? Did a strange wizard make it? Did it come from ancient peoples who used it for storing potatoes — po-tay-toes!!

2. What has happened to the dungeon since it was built?

Is it still in perfect condition? Are there skeletons of dwarves everywhere? Did they dig too deep? Has someone else moved in? Did an earthquake open a rift to the Plane of Fire? Has part of it collapsed? Flooded?

3. Who lives there now?

Is it a bunch of random monsters or a colony of giant centipedes? Has the Spider-Dragon moved in? Do the monsters get along or do they fight? Is it empty? Don’t make it empty. Is a lich in charge? Why isn’t a lich in charge? Liches are awesome!

4. What do the monsters want?

If a bunch of monsters live in the dungeon, what do they want? Are they just living there? Is it their home? Are they planning to raid the town? Are they doing evil secret things? Are they summoning fiends? Are they just playing card games?

5. Why should the characters go there?

What makes them want to explore? Ancient knowledge? Magical power? Treasure? Evil monsters that need to be slain? Evil monsters that just need a friend? Rumors of a magic sword? A captured prince? To stop a ritual?

6. Why are the traps still active?

It is fun to create traps that have been set off by now dead explorers. That shows it is dangerous and creates a sense of doom! If the traps are still active it means no one has come this way yet… or they have been reset by someone.

7. Why are there secret doors?

Secret doors are fun but they should have a reason to exist. They are no fun if your players never find them. Make them easy to find and hard to open. Do they lead to treasure? Escape paths? Rituals rooms? Don’t make them lead to the toilet.

8. How big should it be?

Huge dungeons are fun to draw and it is scary when you are 9 levels down and monsters are closing in. But it can be boring if you don’t make it a living dungeon. A dungeon with 4 or 5 rooms can be perfect to explore but doesn’t drag on forever.

9. Should you add some puzzles?

Add puzzles if you want to bring your game to a screeching halt and spend an hour listening to your players say the answer ten times but never make a decision. Unless your players like puzzles… then add as many as you want. Make them easy.

10. How should the monsters react to the characters?

If the characters make a lot of noise or drop a bucket into a well, the monsters in the dungeon should react. Do they come in huge numbers and attack the party? Do they set traps? Do they ambush the party? Try to flee?

— @redwyrmofficial – Twitter

I could not have said it better, myself.

My personal take on dwarves isn’t all that big of a departure from the classic traditional dwarf, but there’s some notable re-prioritization within their bailiwick, inspired heavily by Raymond Feist’s Midkemia books.

So, yes. Dwarves are on the short side (compared to humans), stocky, physically strong and tough. They live in mountains, where they have mines and process the mines’ output into tools, weapons, armor, and other goods for use or for sale to outsiders. But…the mines and forges are only part of what they do, and not even the most important part. Sure, they’re very good at it, but you can’t eat steel. If push comes to shove, you can sell the forges’ output and use the profit to buy food, but it’s much better to have your own food sources.

So they herd goats. Those big, shaggy, ornery, independent mountain goats that can climb a sheer cliff if given half a reason. The most respected career in dwarf culture isn’t smith, or warrior, or brewer—it’s goatherd. The goatherds keep the lodge supplied with meat and leather for the winter, and chasing after those goats in the high pastures all summer ain’t no job for some wimp. Goatherds are the first line of defense—anyone approaching a dwarven clan’s range in summer will run into a herd of goats long before they find any of the hidden mountain valleys where the dwarves actually build their homes. They also have a few farms in those valleys that they get as much hardy grains and vegetables out of during the summer as they can, but goats are the big thing.

In terms of weapons, Dwarves don’t use hammers and axes because they’re such superior weapons; they use them because every dwarf weapon is a tool first, and a weapon second. They’re just so well made that they work extremely well as weapons anyway. Swords have no place in dwarf society because you can’t use a sword for anything except fighting. Among the herders, the most common weapon is the crossbow—good for bringing down predators, scaring off bandits, or hunting wild game if the chance arises. The most experienced carry big steel-limbed arbalests with mechanical loading systems that only a dwarf properly trained in their operation can load or fire. Let the elves have their longbows—a dwarven arbalest doesn’t care about little things like armor. There are multiple tales of particularly ambitious raiders trying to attack a dwarven village behind cover of a shield wall, only to have the dwarven firing line punch their volley straight through the shields with enough force to kill the men holding them.

In the summer, every dwarf is busy; farming, minding the herds, hunting, trading with nearby human (or elven) settlements…but once the seasons turn and the snow starts to close the mountain passes, they retreat into their secluded villages in the sheltered high valleys; their farm fields become winter pasture for the goats, and most of the clan wiles away the winter in drink and song, waiting for the passes to open again. The winter is also when most of the mining and forging gets done, but even that only accounts for less than half the clan at any given time; there’s just not enough demand for new tools, and they can only stockpile so much at a time.

Most of the dwarves’ reputation comes from a human merchant who was making a late-season visit to a dwarven clanhold to purchase a load of tools, and got snowed in. The dwarves were happy to put him up for the winter, but he had little interest in venturing out to the farms or pastures, so he spent all winter drinking and telling tales and watching the miners and smiths do their work, and then in the spring he loaded up his purchased wares and went on his way before any of the goats got moved down to the lower pastures. So what did he see? Lots of drinking, lots of mining and smithing, lots of axes and hammers, but no goats or farms. And yet, his account is the one that so many humans judge dwarven culture by….

— RPG.net Forums

Author’s emphases.

Ok, as the resident White Dragon fan, I feel I gotta point some stuff out. While White Dragons are the dumbest dragon, they are so much smarter than an animal, being Int 6 whereas your average Orc is Int 8, so not much of a difference there. Where White Dragons differ is in that they are absolutely savage. They don’t care for social niceties, hell they don’t even care to talk to their victims, even to gloat. That is because of one reason and one reason only.

Their environment.

White Dragons live in probably the single most hostile location in a fantasy world, the frozen north. Up here they start their lives as flying housecat-sized dispensers of frozen death. They behave much like Hawks or other flying predators and this lasts up until they hit Young, because now they’re the size of a wolf and can’t really sit on your average tree branch. So begins the next phase of their life.

Once they hit wolf-sized they start to become straight up ambush predators as they can’t rely on being able to swoop down on their larger targets anymore. So they dig a hole or lie in a snowbank waiting for something to come by. Why don’t they just track stuff? The could, but the long range hunter niche is filled by wolf packs, which the dragon can simply avoid competing with by being an ambush predator, which it is insanely good at. This comes to an end once it becomes Large though.

Now, the White Dragon has just spent the first 100 years or so of its life being some sort of ambush predator, and at no point was it the top of the local food chain, unlike how many other dragons can be. The fact that so many creatures up north can be resistant to its breath weapon means that it can’t punch up as effectively as its relatives and so it had to avoid stuff like Winter Wolves. Now that it’s large those things aren’t as big of a threat, but it also needs more food, so they will often head to the ocean to eat seals and small whales. Except now its in direct competition with Frost Giants and other large sea-dwelling predators. Most of which are either highly resistant or outright immune, to its breath weapon. So it becomes a high speed, hit and run predator, returning to its origins as a mostly aerial hunter. Swooping down on prey and getting out before anything else gets close.

This continues until the dragon is at least a Mature Adult, as at that point it should be able to effectively take on multiple Frost Giants. Now, the White Dragon is, arguably, at the top of the land-based food chain, though it has to watch out for some waterborne predators. Its 400 years old, and only now is it at the top of its local food chain. Most dragons have been here for quite a while.

So what does it do from here? Continue what it’s always done, be a large ambush predator, using ever more sophisticated tactics as it springs on its prey, possibly using bait and other lures to bring things into its reach. It may have found various ways to actually leverage its breath weapon, maybe it has an Energy Substitution feat for its Breath or it can Pierce Immunity? Each White Dragon will have carved out its specific hunting style and niche with blood, sweat and the shattered bodies of its prey. And each one will be a savage and implacable foe that will not be deterred. Because past Mature, the White Dragon only gets worse. Once it hits Gargantuan it knows that it is finally, at long last, the true Alpha Predator of the North and nothing will force it back into hiding.

Blue and Green Dragons can be bargained with, Black Dragons bribed or impressed, Red Dragons can be flattered, seduced, or otherwise have their egos stroked. White Dragons? White Dragons can’t be negotiated with. You have nothing they want, nothing they care for, because nothing other than its survival matters to it, and you are its prey, and nothing gets away from a White Dragon.

— Giant in the Playground Forum

[NB: The following are threads or other sources that you might want to read as background material. Or because at least some of them contain great posts.]

• Some thoughts on Mad Max
• So who wants to talk about OD&D?
• The Opposite of Zipper GMing
• The Original D&D Setting by Wayne Rossi, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
• The West Marches

In the search to further differentiate one’s own classic D&D¹ campaign from others, it’s possible to mutate the setting assumptions in a lot of different ways without actually changing the rules much. I think we’re mostly familiar with those ideas. What’s maybe not as familiar, though, is that D&D can feel a hell of a lot different if you go back to original or later classic D&D and follow the game’s rules as written, and figure out what the world looks like given that.

In the run-up to the newest Mad Max film being released, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it would take to make D&D feel post-apocalyptic. Most of my campaigns have already been what I like to call “polyapocalyptic,” which means that they clearly take place after an indefinite series of world-altering and civilization-destroying disasters. At a certain point, people might take a somewhat nihilistic point of view about the phenomenon, and accept that everything they’ve ever built might be destroyed by insect deities or meteor strikes tomorrow. If you love the Dying Earth books as much as I do, this might feel familiar.

The thing is, you don’t have to do a whole lot different. The DM builds a hexmap and doesn’t show it to the players. There are few cities, far apart and with very little communication between each other. The PCs have at best rumors of where those settlements might be. You could walk through the wastelands for days and see nobody, or you could run into a rampaging tribe of 300 orcs/bandits/whatever. Seriously, look at those wilderness encounter charts, they are insane.

If your horse dies while you’re out in the middle of the desert, we hope you like walking. So, if you really wanted to make things look more like this kind of setting, the following are things that I would do.

1. Bands of marauders are important and need to happen. However, if the PCs do in fact run into 300 orcs that turn out to be hostile, this doesn’t mean that 300 orcs jump out from behind a bush and attack. It probably means that the PCs stumble into a scouting party or part of the vanguard, and the main body is over a ridge or something. This gives you a fight with some stakes or an opportunity to run away, makes things feel a little more realistic, and also prevents the entire party from being slaughtered quite so suddenly. Also, now you have a plot thread dangling. The marauders led by Renf the Red-Handed have seen the party’s face, and may track them across the wastelands in addition to sacking any settlements that might happen to be out there.

2. Treasure takes a nose-dive in practical value. I think that gems and jewelry are still at least somewhat important, because bling (more on this later) is a vital survival tool. However, huge chests of coins are not useful outside the largest cities. In any smaller settlements, with their relatively narrow survival margin and slim expectations of seeing a traveling merchant any given month, something you can use to stay alive is worth more than coins. Now, if you can get back to one of the few large cities with a big score…you might have hit the jackpot.

3. Make encumbrance matter. I would suggest importing one of the more closely-tracked encumbrance systems from any retroclone you like. Food and water need to be heavy. Carrying enough water to get through a desert is a big, big deal. Animals need water too! Your horse is vitally important for carrying more weight than you could by yourself, but that means you need to spend an appropriate amount of effort taking care of them. The next town you encounter might not be willing to let a horse go for mere gold.

4. Market Classes: One of the oddities of D&D is that it isn’t uncommon for a gold ring to be worth 100gp, when that amount of coins might weigh ten pounds. I have generally assumed this to mean that the coinage is highly debased, whereas the metal used in jewelry is close to pure. I’d stick with that, and maybe say that coins are worth even less than usual. You could use something like the market classes from ACKS, and rule that a market counts as one or two classes lower if you are trying to buy things using coins. This means that, basically, you won’t be able to buy much stuff if all you have is GP. However, markets could be treated as their actual class if you are using gems/jewelry, and maybe one class higher if you are attempting to barter with things that people can use to live. A sack of gold coins and an oxcart full of steel ingots might have the same theoretical value, but in fact people are much more willing to trade goods for the latter, since you can do things like make a plow out of it. Now, that isn’t quite the way that supply & demand work, but it’s a starting point for a post I’m writing off the cuff.

5. Bling: One of the things that D&D has historically not paid enough attention to is playing dress-up. I don’t mean that the players should show up in costume. I mean that the PCs should be spending much more time on fantastical Vancian couture, terrifying battle-masks or makeup inspired by various parts of real-world history, necklaces made of their enemy’s teeth, and actually wearing the jewelry they’ve pulled out of various tombs in order to advertise that they are successful stone-cold badasses. I’ve instituted a rule in a lot of my campaigns that if you openly wear articles of jewelry, they don’t count towards your encumbrance. Ten CN worth of encumbrance here and there can make a big difference when you want portable wealth. Also, you can use it to modify reaction rolls (people can immediately tell that a sorceress with a 5,000gp crown of onyx and platinum is a VIP, and they’d probably better not fuck with her, or anyone else who can accumulate and keep that kind of wealth) and morale rolls (enemies might fight harder for a chance to loot the PCs’ goods.) So! Add rules for this. I suggest moving reaction rolls and morale rolls to 3d6 instead of 2d6, so you can make the range bands a bit wider and have room for a 1 or 2 point modifier without breaking the tables.

6. Goods. Going back to market classes. There are tools in ACKS (and probably other systems) for converting treasure into trade goods. So, if the PCs beat some bandits and the treasure table gives them 3,000gp, then what you might actually want to do as the DM is to say that in fact they just have 3,000 gp worth of trade goods, and then convert all of that to incense sticks, spices, valuable monster parts, wine, furs, et cetera. In a literally postapocalyptic campaign, I can’t recommend that highly enough. One, it makes encumbrance way more of a problem. They can’t just run off into the night with a purse full of jewels, they really need to get to that next big city while guarding a caravan of ox-carts full of whatever if they want their XP.

7. Slaves. This is kind of important. Forced labor is a huge economic driver, and also it gives you a powerful excuse to take PCs captive. You might want to insert some variant of the rules that let PCs survive being reduced to 0HP, so that they can wake up in shackles with all of their shit stolen. Furthermore, it’s close to always justifiable to kill off slavers, and lets you thematically wonder about if civilization is really worth rebuilding after all.

8. Constructions from different eras. I would strongly recommend a bit of historical grounding that the PCs can use to get a practical read on things. New settlements are wooden palisades, earthworks, log cabins, sod houses, crap like that. They’re crude but honest. The newer but still decadent cities are made of big stone blocks, quarried and hauled into place by slaves that live in thatch longhouses or something. Probably a lot of dry masonry there. The perimeter of the old civilization might have well-mortared fortresses or similar types of structures that are still standing, maybe occupied by tribes of people who couldn’t rebuild it if they wanted to. The dungeons underneath them are possibly still intact. The actual cities of the ancients might have glowing towers of crystal that are hard as steel, domes of pearlescent glass, remarkable types of concrete that none now know the making of. Those places aren’t typically squatted in because they’re full of weird alien horrors. It’s also where the miraculous devices of the ancients are to be found, of course, or piles of gold simply laying where it was left, never more than a bauble in the first place to the High Men who once lived there.

Well, that was a huge post, and I’m not sure if I actually said much of anything useful. I just wanted to get some more of my weird ideas written down while I had a bit of time.

¹ OD&D with or without supplements, Basic Set, B/X, BECMI, most retroclones.

— RPG.net Forums

Author’s emphases in italic. Mine are in bold.

This is too good not to post the full text.

Conan the Barbarian is my go-to Christmas movie, and some new things really stood out to me at this year’s viewing.

I want to talk about this moment and this guy.

This is the story of Red Hair.

Red Hair isn’t much present—and that, quite different—in the latest script draft I can find, which is the John Milius third….

The final film is another story: he’s huge.

It’s Red Hair who chains Conan to the Wheel of Pain, who turns him into a pitfighter, who educates him and uses him as breeding stock, and who finally, unexpectedly, sets him free.

This is a man who matters enormously in Conan’s life, and in the story.

For Conan, who makes no decisions in any part of this sequence, this part of the film is a series of barely-connected experiences. For Red Hair, it’s a complete narrative arc in a chunk of the picture that you could legitimately argue is a standalone short film about him.

So who is Red Hair?

To understand that, you first have to understand where he comes from, which requires revisiting the raiding scene at the film’s opening. The raid on Conan’s village is carried out by three different kinds of people.

The first kind are the cultists of Set, led by Thulsa Doom, whose flunkies are Rexor (big mustache) and Thorgrim (big hammer). These guys are easily distinguished because they are a) in charge b) all about snakes. They put snakes on everything: armor, helmets, shields, weapons.

The second kind of people at the raid are Picts. These are the guys with painted faces and/or tattooed bodies, as seen in the background here and in closeup in the form of Arnold’s friend and fellow bodybuilder Franco Columbu as a Pictish scout.

The third kind are Vanir. These are Red Hair’s people. They’re a northern people, like the Cimmerians, but they wear furs where the Cimmerians wear skins, and fight on horseback while Cimmerians fight afoot.

Note that the Picts and the Vanir are doing their own thing, style-wise. They’re not all about snakes. Meaning they’re not in Thulsa Doom’s cult.

This makes sense. Remember, “two years ago it was just another snake cult.” So in Conan’s boyhood, Thulsa Doom’s set must have been even smaller.

Which raises the obvious question: what are the Picts and the Vanir even doing there?

The Wizard’s voiceover says that no one knows why the raiders came, but later in the picture Thulsa Doom tells Conan why: in his youth, he was mad for steel, and fought to get it.

Given his then-paltry followers, to fight for steel, Thulsa Doom would have needed allies. And to get allies, he had to give them something. We don’t know what he gave the Picts, but the Vanir got slaves: the children of Conan’s village.

Red Hair isn’t in on the raiding of Conan’s village. He’s just a boy himself, a few years older than Conan. The first time we see him is as part of the small group of Vanir riding off with the slaves afterward.

He goes with them all the way to their destination. Note that Red Hair is the only one without a helmet. Milius wants you to see that mop of hair. He’s marking that character.

Digression: marking a character is a film technique that isn’t talked about much but is used a lot; and feels like it’s become almost obligatory in the last couple of decades, if there’s a chance of the audience not recognizing a returning character who is important.

For example, if the character is one of a number of similar-looking characters/creatures, or is played by multiple actors because the story makes a time jump. Think of Lurtz’s big palmprint makeup in Fellowship of the Ring (2001) or Amleth’s necklace in The Northman (2022).

The first time we get a really good look at Red Hair, and see his face, he’s securing the chains binding twelve-year-old Conan to the Wheel of Pain that Conan is going to push for at least a good ten years. Maybe more.

There’s a reason both kids get closeups. They’ll meet again.

But in the intervening decade plus, this is Conan’s office.

The movie never gets into what the Wheel of Pain is actually for, but it’s clearly a mill, probably for a salt mine; in closer shots there’s some scattered white powder around the base, and if you look to the bottom right of the frame there are some additional facilities.

And the mine is not a very productive one, because over the course of Conan’s tenure slaves reassigned, sold off, or deceased don’t get replaced. By the end of his time there Conan is the only one pushing it.

The garrison is drawn down, too: by the end of its run it’s literally one guard and Conan, which sounds like a premise for a bizarre sitcom.

This is when Red Hair returns.

Again, that’s what the big bushy mop of red hair is for: telling you this is the same guy. He greets Conan’s one guard with respect, but also warmth. Then he leads Conan away, and the wheel stops. Probably forever.

Why Red Hair matters: long involvement with the Wheel of Pain and evident closeness to its personnel suggest that the facility is part of his family concern.

Red Hair isn’t buying Conan; he already owns him, and he’s repurposing a small asset, part of a failed larger asset.

This is how Conan’s new career as a pitfighter begins: either Conan’s a winner, or he’s one less mouth to feed. (Red Hair evidently doesn’t much care which, as he doesn’t even bother explaining to Conan that Conan is about to be in a deathfight.)

But Conan wins.

And wins.

And keeps winning.

“In time, his victories could not easily be counted.”

Red Hair is making bank. Conan is, surprisingly, a profitable asset. So what do?

Red Hair chooses to reinvest in his asset. Conan goes east to learn from the warmasters.

This is a sensible choice. Conan is a great pitfighter. If he learns to fight with battlefield weapons, he’s got some new career options. Maybe a gladiator, fighting for big bucks in actual arenas. Maybe even a soldier, to win real gains for Red Hair’s family and people.

Conan surprises again. He impresses the warmasters. The instructor corrects him, slaps him around a bit, sure… and nut-kicks the other guy. It’s a hard school, but—as a watching Red Hair sees—Conan is a hard worker and a good student.

And Conan learns well.

Very, very well.

So Red Hair invests further. He takes his biggest step yet.

He teaches Conan to read.

Why teach a pitfighter, a gladiator, even a soldier to read? Why give him access to “the poetry of Kitai, the philosophy of Sung?”

It shows Red Hair has started to dream big. He realizes Conan isn’t just a fighter. He’s potentially an officer. A captain. Maybe even a general.

Red Hair lives in a martial society, and he has found himself, quite by chance, the manager of a remarkable martial talent. (One he is breeding “to the finest stock,” probably [because] all of this talent development far from home is expensive and Conan’s stud fees are supporting them.)

But then Conan meets the Turanian Khan, and Red Hair—who has been making money off of Conan and reinvesting that money back into him—suddenly decides to sacrifice any hope of profit, to write entirely Conan off his balance sheet, and to send Conan off to make his own fortune.

Why does a shrewd investor like Red Hair do that?

The answer lies in the scene everybody remembers in Conan the Barbarian. Because Red Hair is in it, and it’s important that he is.

So let’s talk about the khan scene.

People forget the first line in that scene, delivered by the khan: “My fear is that my sons will never understand me.” Or treat it like it’s a dubbed-in joke.

It is not a joke. It is not a bit of goofy ADR.

That line is the reason the scene exists.

The khan announces his fear that his sons will never understand him. He mentions some names, evidently a couple of sites of victory: “We won again!”

Everyone cheers.

“This is good,” says the khan. “But what is best in life?”

One of the younger men answers, “The open steppe. A fleet horse. Falcons at your wrist. And the wind in your hair.”

The Khan bellows: “Wrong!!!! Conan, what is best in life?”

Whereupon Conan answers: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

“That is good!” cries the Khan.

The talk about that scene tends to focus on Conan’s answer. Here’s what that overlooks:

Why does the scene open with the Khan worrying his sons will never understand him?

Because that’s how you know the guy who gives the wrong answer is the khan’s son.

And it is not on its face a terrible answer! Imagine doing that! Falconing on the open steppe from horseback, wind in your hair? That is actually pretty freakin’ boss!

But that is not a khan’s answer.

That is a nobleman’s answer.

And here’s the thing: Red Hair is, in his rough society, a nobleman.

I bet the khan’s son’s idea of the good life sounded pretty reasonable to him. It sounds pretty good to me. But if you are a khan, this is wrong.

Khans do not make war so that they may live. They live so that they can make war. Hearing of victories is not great in the way that winning the victories for yourself and being there at the victory is great.

So consider how this scene unfolds from Red Hair’s perspective.

Red Hair has gained an audience with the Turanian khan. (This is a feat!) Conan is seated higher than everyone else, in a central position. He’s on display.

Red Hair is pretty clearly looking to impress the Turanian khan with Conan.

Red Hair’s goal in this is probably either 1) an alliance, with Conan leading Vanir troops in alliance with Turanians, or 2) selling Conan’s services or Conan himself to the khan. And so far, things are looking good.

But then the khan worries his son doesn’t understand him. To test his fear, he asks a khan’s question of his son, and gets a nobleman’s answer. The khan is disappointed.

So he asks a slave.

Asked a khan’s question, Conan gives a khan’s answer.

If you’re Red Hair, this poses a bit of a problem: what do you do when you realize that you’re holding as a slave a man who is, by the dictates of your society, your unquestioned better?

This is not about anti-slavery enlightenment, with Red Hair seeing himself and Conan as moral equals. Red Hair is a man who lives in a society of power, hierarchy, and honor. Conan thinks about these things the way the most powerful men of this society think. And Red Hair does not.

There is absolutely no way that Red Hair can keep such a man as Conan as a slave. He couldn’t look himself in the mirror, if he had one.

More: it’s not just about how Red Hair sees himself. There are real practical problems here.

Red Hair is keeping a natural king as a pet, and the only reason he can get away with it is that the king hasn’t realized that he is a king…yet.

If Conan realizes he is a king in waiting, Red Hair is dead.

If Red Hair sets Conan up with the planned Turanian gig, the khan’s son is certainly not going to be pleased to have around a man who understands his father better than he does.

If not murdered, Conan and Red Hair could be swept up in a Turanian civil war that they caused.

If Red Hair tries to kill Conan himself—and good luck with that; he’s totally physically overmatched—he’s looking at either his own death at Conan’s hands, or incurring the ire of a khan who now likes Conan better than he likes Red Hair.

If Red Hair frees Conan and keeps him in company, the best-case scenario is that Red Hair will in short order become a man following his own former slave.

So Red Hair does the only thing he can do: he strips Conan of his pit-fighter’s headdress, cuts his chain, and boots him out into the night.

Given sudden freedom, Conan doesn’t know why. But Red Hair does, and he trusts that a man who is obviously a misplaced king will find his own way.

As he does.

Look how much that character accomplishes, how important he is, how many meaningful choices he makes, and how much meat there is to talk about when it comes to this guy.

In Conan the Barbarian, the sum of Red Hair’s spoken dialogue comes to less than twenty words.

— @hradzka – Twitter

Author’s emphases.

Roleplaying games rarely address flaws like poor eyesight. Or hearing.

The only case I know of is the pre-generated magic-user character in the H1-H4 Bloodstone Pass series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons modules. He is near-sighted and has eyeglasses. His character description lists a die-roll penalty for vision-related actions performed when not wearing the eyeglasses.

As I read more classics I find that different mythologies seem to present entirely different worlds. The world of the Iliad, for example, is so different in certain ways from that of the Irish Fiona, that the systems which run these mythologies would have to be in some ways intrinsically different. For example, the handling of magic. In the Irish World of the Fiona, magic is imbued into the very living substance of the universe, and the question is how easily one can migrate between our world and the Otherworld (tir na nog). In the Iliad, however, there is no sense of humans transporting between worlds, but rather it is the Gods who step down from on high and invade ours. Rare is the hero who enters the Otherworld in Greek Myth. Common is he who does so in the Celtic Mythos.

Were I to create a world for running an “Iliad” game, that world would have Gods of non-infinite powers, who act directly in the game, who can be wounded by mortals (such as Diomedes, who causes Aphrodite to bleed the famous Ichor of the Gods), and who scheme and connive their way throughout the entire fabric of the story. In fact it is a story about the competitions and victories of the Gods, and almost incidentally about the Heroes. This world would require strong rules for handling God-like Powers, and for it to be reasonably sporting, the Player Characters would pretty much need to be Heroes and the children of the Gods. Conversely, you could play it low level, in the same world, where the Player Characters come within approximate range of the Heroes, get occasionally swept up (dangerously so, I should think) in their Quests, and perhaps return to the village either a richer or wiser or stronger somehow. Either way, it would be an interesting world, but the rules would have to support it.

On the other hand, when we look at such fairy tales as Kil Arthur, the son of the King of Erin, I think we’d find that a different set of rules would be required. Or if not the rules themselves, at least the parameters of those rules in which our game would operate. It could certainly be played at almost any level, as what influence the Gods may have in these stories, there is little obvious to tell. An impulse to go here, a ship perhaps sent on the wind to a magical island, or the appearance of a giant over the edge of a hill…none of which seem named to occur by the dictate of any particular deity as in the Greek mythos. No, rather it is the Character who has chanced to enter, perhaps, the Otherworld, and knowingly or otherwise, has entered upon some quest. The mood is mysterious and vague and clouded, unlike the Greeks, whose tales were starkly brilliant in their divine clarity. We know each of the Gods and all of their motives, arguments, stratagems, and follies with the Greeks.

I wonder if anyone here has attempted to put these kinds of worlds to the test in their RPGs, and how did you go about GMing for it, and how did it work out?

— The Iliad as Source Material – Literary RPG Society of Westchester

Alas, that forum is gone, and the Internet Archive does not have a copy of this post. I have copied the entire text here for posterity.

One of the interesting effects of enforcing encumbrance is that you realize how useful porters and linkboys can be. Hireling loyalty is a fun mini-game in and of itself.

— Dragonfoot Forums

What’s your favourite kind of encounter in a roleplaying game?

One or two word answers only.

— @StoutStoatPress – Twitter

Fellow travellers: lost merchants, questing knights, itinerant wizards, philosopher-vagrants, lonely pilgrims.

Philosopher-vagrants are a whole thing I invented for Lendal so I could add more of these.

— @JellyMuppet – Twitter