a linguistic anthropology of fantasy folk

The nice thing about fantasy races is that they give character creation choices with a good degree of granularity and comprehensibility and are a neat way to pull folkloric material into your game. The bad thing about them is that they mean that race science (that is, the false belief that races as understood by society correspond to biologically distinct types of human beings) is true in your fantasy world.

Honestly, the bad part is bad enough to completely sink the goodness of the good part.

This is another in my ongoing struggle to formulate different fantasy folk in a way that isn't race science, but emphasizing the ways that real people saw themselves and others, particularly before the race-scientific idea became prominent in the modern era.

The problem with making things nuanced is that also makes them complicated; race science is conceptually pretty straightforward, which makes it very game-able. Trying to embed fantasy folk in a realistically nuanced web of relationships with each other also buries the conceptual clarity of a player looking at the list of options and saying, "I'm going to play an elf, that means I live in the woods and don't particularly like dwarfs." One runs the risk of overloading the player with world-building, particularly if one chooses to foreground linguistic groups which are among the more salient in-universe distinctions between peoples.

I'm far from a solution to this, but my current idea is to use somewhat-transparent names for languages (or groups of languages) wherever possible, and doing as little "hard" worldbuilding as possible to keep things relatively setting-neutral, while still keeping things complex enough to stop collapsing into the fail state of race science. It's a tall order, let's see how I do.

When making a character, you must choose a people for them to belong to (or at least stem from). A people is defined by a language, a way of life and an alignment, all of which affect how they see themselves and the world.

To make this your own, you only have to identify the peoples in your setting, their languages, ways of life and alignments. You may choose to give every people a distinct ethnonym; I'm not doing this so as not to overload a player with unfamiliar names. Instead, I'm going to organize peoples by language family, grouping setting languages together into four groups (middling, rhuno-buggish, sylvene and foreigner), the first three of which correspond to actual language families. Each family contains a number of peoples with different ways of life and dramatically different outlooks on the world and their place in it.

"correcting" weapon vs armor type from chainmail

Delta recently wrote an excellent post analyzing the origin of the Greyhawk/AD&D weapon vs armor type table and concluding (rightly, in my view) that it is fundamentally flawed. I just wanted to offer a few follow-up analyses of ways that one could try to "correct" the modifiers in there.

Putting the tables below the break.

some game economics for the ancient world

Before launching into a long post about economics of the ancient world, let's put the exciting part at the top, the random treasure hoard generator. These are going to be significantly smaller than typical fantasy adventure hoards, but I've tried to callibrate them to generate the kidns of hoards people actually find from the bronze and iron ages:

d4 d6 d8 d10 d12 d20

Now, for the less flashy stuff. Before we can really talk about economics, let's establish some units of measurement. These are going to be largely based on historical units of mesopotamia and the eastern mediterannean in antiquity. My sources are kind of all over the place on these so I'm not going to be citing much, but the system I'm giving here hews pretty close to the coins and measures used in Talmudic literature.

A talent (kikar, if you prefer) weighs sixty pounds (maneh), each of which is fifty weights (shekel) of about eight and a half grams; this makes a pound of about 425 grams rather than the 453.59 of the avoirdupois pound, but that's close enough to use the familiar word in my book. A wet measure or dry measure are both a unit of capacity approximately equal to 144 medium-sized eggs (about nine quarts).

goods and their prices

The basic unit of money is a weight of silver. Although actual prices vary by place and season, most people will say that a silverweight should buy:

solo dungeoning experiment

I have done very little actual dungeon crawling in my gaming career. I have also done basically no solo gaming, so I was inspired to try to get a feel for both things in a more practical and less theoretical way. So, I made myself some dungeon tiles:

I decided to fill in the empty spaces red after I took this. Passages (round) have about a 1 in four chance of traps and a 3-in-8 chance of being the sometime abode of monsters. Most of the treasure (triangles) is in the larger chambers (square) which are much more likely to contain monsters. And I adopted a probably absurdly basic dungeon crawling procedure:

• For every new tile, roll two distinct dice. If there's a random chance of something bad, that's keyed off the darker die. If there's a random chance of something good, it's keyed off the lighter die. Doubles mean wandering monster.
• If part of a larger chamber is drawn, draw more chamber pieces until the chamber is complete. If there are multiple keyed things in the chamber check separately for each.
  
• When a monster is indicated, roll a die: 1-2, their strength is 1 per monster, 3-5 it's 2 per monster and 6 it's 3. Another die indicates number, divided by strength (round up).
• In a fight, every 2 companions or 1 fighter adds a die. Monsters roll their total strength in dice. Every die hits on 2-in-6 and a hit figure can save on 2-in-6 or die. If you want to escape from the fight roll your opponent's strength or better on two dice.
• A triggered trap hits one figure, who can save or die.
  
• If you find the magic fountain, you can wish. Roll a game of craps; if you win, you get your wish and if you lose a water demon (1x4, takes two hits to kill) attacks you.

With that established, I set about dungeon crawling. We set out with two fighters and four companions. Not all of us would escape the dangers of the dungeon.

1. From the exit we went North to an empty passage.
2. West, we encountered wandering monsters (1x3) whom we defeated without a loss.
   
   
   
3. North, the passage was trapped but we evaded it.
4. North, an empty passage.
5. North, a chamber opened before us with monsters (2x3) but no treasure.
   
   We fled (6+ on 2d6) and escaped back down the passage, evading the trap again.
6. Returning to the exit, we struck East, where a chamber opened again containing monsters (2x3) but no treasure. We chose to fight, took down one of them but lost three of our companions, then fled (4+ on 2d6).
7. West of the exit is the only way left, where we lost our last companion to a trap. Foolishly, we pressed on.
8. South, there was a chance of a monster but none was present.
9. East, an empty passage.
10. East...a magic fountain! We chose to wish, and were immediately rewarded. Being sentimental, we wished our friends back to life. Then, feeling confident again, we pressed on.
11. Returning West and then South, we found monsters (2x2) lying in wait.
    
    We dispatched them with no losses.
12. East, more monsters (4x1).
    
    We fought and defeated them, but they killed all our companions (who had only just been returned to life).
13. South, empty passages.
14. East, more of the same.
15. East...a trap! Which killed one of our fighters.
16. North, nothing.
17. East, we found an alcove with a bit of unguarded treasure!
    
    Now all that remained was to evade the two traps encountered on the way over (which our last fighter did) and finally to escape the dungeon with a bit of loot (but five dead friends...)

I'm not sure what my reflections on this experiment should be. It was pretty fun, but in the future I probably wouldn't document with photos since that took me out of the game a fair bit. 

• The combat worked, I think, but monsters are probably a bit too strong, perhaps monsters with 1/2 (companion), 1 and 2 strength would even things out somewhat. Probably also include a wizard who can toss +2 dice onto a round a limited number of times.
  
• Using some sort of reaction or negotiation options rather than automatic hostility would be good too. 
• Traps felt...ok? I liked the danger of knowing we had to backtrack past them, but losing party members to traps felt kind of arbitrary.
• I liked the wish, although I had not decided when I included it what things could be wished ofr. Having more random magic in the game would be fun.