SystemNeutral

Elves, Shipbuilding and Forestry

In my homebrew world I have my elves thriving on a continent they have to themselves. In order to protect it, there is a substantial navy. I read an article about the USS Constitution needing 60 acres of forest to be clear cut to build her (different types of wood for different purposes of course).

Oviously that’s in mid/late 18th century on Earth; in my game, there are only three greatships (think Santa Maria) in various levels of construction and those need rather less wood to build.

That being said, in a magical society that reveres the forest, how would you handle the balancing of the need for vast amounts of wood vs keeping lush forests?  I asked this question in an online forum and here is a post discussing all the answers that came up.

Forestry (with Magic)

By and large, the most common response was some variant traditional mundane forest management supplemented by magical spells available in whatever game system you’re playing in.

Cut to thin, not to clear-cut

The general concept is that some trees are removed to allow nearby trees to flourish. The remaining trees get more of what they need to grow because they are no longer competing for them with the removed tree.  It can be a bit harder to pull out full trees between other trees than clear-cutting but nothing that competent foresters can handle.

Plant as you cut

As you cut trees, plant more.  It isn’t out of the question for some societies, especially those who revere forests, to have their own tree nurseries. Planting young trees as others are cut is a good way to ensure the forest continues to thrive.

Forests grown for harvesting

If thinning isn’t going to provide sufficient wood, or the wood isn’t near where it might be needed, plant forests just for the sake of harvesting. In my campaign, there is such a forest not far from one of the shipyards.  It has a number of different types of trees in it because different parts of the ship need different types of wood. The elves plant them in certain  arrangements beneficial to all the species inloved. I didn’t feel the need to really to think out that arrangement myself, I mean, they’re the elves and they know better than I do, right?

This type of arrangement is very beneficial as it leaves the homeland forests untouched, at least for the potentially great needs of the ship builders. The ship builders, having the forests close at hand, can select the trees they need personally without straying too far from their shipyards.

Magically-enhanced forestry

All of the methods described above can benefit from spells that enhance the growth of plants and trees.  In many fantasy settings and rule systems, there are classes or professions that can enhance the growth of plants, usually something akin to a druid. With spells that enhance the growth of plants or affect the weather, many plants and trees can see exceptional growth, perhaps taking decades off their growing times. Often, these spells have an effective area that increases the more powerful the spell caster is leaving those casters in great demand, possibly even having their training sponsored by families, clans or companies that require large amounts of wood.

Don’t use wood cut from elven forests

The general ideas presented along these lines were about trading for the wood from other cultures and/or using deadwood branches or trees that fell on their own to make whatever is needed. There are more than a few permutations, like anything else really, how this could work but primarily elves have things other races want and could use that to trade for wood they could use to build things without having to despoil their precious forests. Fallen deadwood could then be used to make smaller pieces of the ships such as things in the interior.

Treesingers, Sungwood, and Shaped Growth

Many people pointed out that some fantasy cultures from books and games have those that could ‘sing’ wood into being something useful for building ships. This could be as simple as urging a tree to extra tall, broad, or straight or as complex as asking the tree to grow a specific piece of a ship. Such a piece could be a curved rib that goes between the keel and the deck, to which the hull planks are then attached to.  Communication between the shipwrights and the singers would be crucial as the ribs wouldn’t all be the same size and would vary depending on where they were along the hull.

Depending on what the need is, the singers could use different songs. A simple song of health and strength could be used for accelerating growth or promoting strength or breadth. However, a song asking for a specific part would likely need to be far more complex, needing to describe the details of the needed part. Alternatively, telepathy could be used; the singer could link with the shipwright and the tree to convey the need to the tree in a more exacting way.

The ultimate extension of such techniques would be the entire ship being ‘built’ directly from trees. This would likely entail many singers, perhaps orchestrated a ‘grand master’ singer who guides all of them and is the interface with the shipwright, or is the shipwright themselves.

The ships would likely be built in the middle of, and from, a group of trees of varying types. Evergreens, for example, have been prized over the centuries for masts and could be sung to grow the necessary spars and such as branches in the proper places.  Several ironwood could be persuaded to grow low and parallel to the ground to lay the keel, and so on. Your world could have special woods suitable for such a purpose, or maybe they will after you’re done reading this article.

Magical items intended for ships could be incorporated into grown ships. Something like having vines grown out of a tree to hold such an item in place until the trees assimilate them into the overall ship entity, which would then gain the benefits from the item. If this were to be in my own campaign, I would probably have extra, and higher, difficulty checks to do this kind of thing, probably scaling with the power of the items to be incorporated. To avoid this check, the items themselves could be created with this kind of melding in mind, and the extra difficulty is on the item being made, and not the incorporation into the ship.

Ships as a Living Being

Another popular suggestion was to have the ship themselves be alive, which doesn’t automatically mean sentient. There wasn’t a lot of input in how it exactly became alive although some attributed it to the above process of outright growing the ship.

Alternatively, various rites and rituals by druids and elders of the elves could be used, imbuing the ship with Olde Magicke or some such. This could be done as each piece is harvested or grown, if it is an assembled ship or if a grown ship, periodically during its growth.

An extreme example would be an elf willingly giving up his or her life and having their soul bound to the ship. Some cultures could have such elves identified in prophecies, at birth or in childhood, by means of some desirable trait and thereafter the elf is raised with the purpose of being bonded to a ship. Special training could be imparted on the elf that could be transferred to the ship like self-healing or direction sense, allowing the ship to repair itself or never be lost.  Something less drastic would be an elf, tired of living, could choose to bond with a ship willingly and thus escape the (im)mortal coil yet with a new purpose.

Captain Bonds with Ship

A related idea that I really liked was that the captain bonded with the ship, Likely would need some sort of blood ritual or other significant means to do so. This would then allow the captain and ship to ‘feel’ each other. This might allow the ship to wake the captain if it detected, say, a skiff with a boarding party in the dead of night trying to sneak aboard or, perhaps, the presence of large or unnatural creatures nearby as it traverses the boundless ocean, far from shore.

Such things are not without a cost, however, and the ship and captain cannot be separated by too much distance or each will suffer ill effects. If the captain dies (especially suddenly), the ship will surely suffer deep mental anguish and perhaps its own soul will perish as well unless extreme measures are taken. If the captain wanted to retire, the captain would have to find a replacement that would have to be approved by the ship. The bonding rituals for the new captain would need to be performed and, perhaps, some for the separation of the retiring captain from the ship. There are so many possible situations that the GM would likely need to make it up on the fly (which is, of course, what GMing is all about).

The Kitchen Sink (or the Galley Basin)

There were many other ideas/concepts that were tossed out that I thought deserved a mention as they may spark ideas for your campaign so here is where they’re presented.

What’s the Hurry?  Elves and trees can live centuries, so what’s the rush? In truth, there’s a lot of merit to this concept and definitely there are elven cultures that would definitely do this.

Trunks Grow Anew  One idea I thought was interested that a trunk of a cut tree could be coaxed into growing a completely new tree. In theory, since the root structure was already in place, the tree could devote most of its energy in growing up rather than some up and some down as a tree normally does. Likely, this concept would need some special care during the harvesting of the tree to allow the trunk to do this, and then further encouragement for a year or five to get the process going.

Crystal Ships/Don’t Use Wood  A number of people mentioned various game systems and rule sets that had ships made of crystal or other substances.  Other substances mentioned included silver or a light stone.

I protest!  Several people mentioned protesters that were objecting to, or trying to protect, various facets of the discussion. Reading the topics above, there are a number of them that could easily be the subject of protests. The binding of souls to a ship, making a ship living in the first place, even the use of trees from the sacred forests in armed ships – all of these could be grounds for a protest of some sort.

Carve It / Enlarge It – There were a couple of people who suggested some sort of a carving/manufacturing of a small version of a ship and then using spells to increase the size of it.  There’s only so much one can do with a something so small so likely some refitting would be necessarily once the correct size was achieved.  Multiple spells may be needed, if allowed, to get it to the proper size.

Polymorph / Fabricate / Something? – The suggestions for this idea were basically take something else and magically transform it into what you needed. Nothing fancy but the scope of a full-sized vessel might be a bit daunting for these spells.

Use in Campaign

For me, I was doing some fictional writing and that’s where most of what I came up with will be used. One of the elven characters in my campaign knows the family who runs the shipyard I was writing about but that’s about the extent of it.  For you and your campaign, it could be a similar thing; a small blip of background but it could also be so much more if the bent of your campaign(s) were more aligned.  A couple of thoughts on that are:

The party encounters an adolescent teen who is running away from her family and culture. as she doesn’t want to endure her destiny of being the soul of a ship

The party encounters trees of seriously bizarre shapes. As they examine them, they encounter a tree signer who explains what she does and then mentions an odd magic blight, and maybe you can help?

The party is asked to sail on a ship bound for elven lands to protect its cargo of wood.

The party encounters some druids distraught over some trees in the forest that they claim are too precious to be cut, and are putting their lives between the trees and those who would harvest them.

Wrap Up

The information in here, like so many other gaming material, can be used in so many ways. Nothing above has to be used as is, and I’d be honestly shocked if it was. I have this premise in my mind that there are very few truly new ideas/concepts. Rather, it is which ones you choose to use, how you combine them, and how you implement them in your game. So take the ideas above, toss them into the wondrous pot known as your brain where you have all your gaming stuff, the books you’ve read and smoothly mix it into your campaigns, stir gently and then let it simmer and see what comes out.

What’s in a Village? (part 2)

Intro

Part one delved into many of the places that might be in a village and a bit on how a village might be placed in relation to larger communities or perhaps castles. This part will explore the people who populate a village.

The Basics – People in the Places

It goes without saying that most of the places you put in your village will need to have people placed in them.  How deep you make them is, of course, totally up to you just like anything else in your campaign. Few things are more frustrating than creating an amazing setting, full of life, people living their daily lives while underneath are plots, rumors and undercurrents for the party to explore only to have them fixate on some insignificant NPC that was just passing through that you never even assigned a name to. In a later post, making your villages reusable will be explored so as to preserve your hard work when this happens.

It goes without saying that most of the places you put in your village will need to have people placed in them.  How deep you make them is, of course, totally up to you just like anything else in your campaign. Few things are more frustrating than creating an amazing setting, full of life, people living their daily lives while underneath are plots, rumors and undercurrents for the party to explore only to have them fixate on some insignificant NPC that was just passing through that you never even assigned a name to. In a later post, making your villages reusable will be explored so as to preserve your hard work when this happens.

As previously discussed, it’s nice to have ‘something’ stick about each village (or town, etc) your party passes through, so try to make at least a couple people or places stand out in some manner or fashion. Think of your family, friends, coworkers, or even strangers you interact with throughout the day. What makes each unique? There are so many things to choose from. Some examples: how they dress, laugh, walk, or talk are different mannerisms someone might have. What about personal appearance? Hair or eye color, hair style, tattoos, missing body parts can all highlight one NPC over the rest. Watching random people can be very inspiring for creating your world’s cast of characters.

When you go to create the people in your places, you want to keep your world’s background and concepts in mind. For example, in earlier centuries in the Real World, people had (much) larger families than they do today. There were a number of reasons for this, but largely due to infant and childhood mortality rates being very high. Sometimes only one in five children would make it to adulthood. Whether or not you consciously have this in your world, you may want to have an idea of average family size for each race just to make it smoother creating later.

As morbid as it might sound, it’s also an opportunity for roleplay encounters. For example, after passing by Grick’s pig farm, you inform your party that they see a screaming and crying boy of about ten years old yelling ‘Ma! Pa! Jynnie got stuck bad!’ as he races down the road. The party hurries to investigate and you find a teen girl on death’s door, huge gashes in her side, being hugged by other kids screaming ‘Please don’t die!’. Your party now has the chance for a simple heroic deed, probably with the simplest cure spell your cleric has.

Getting back to family size, when you create a family-run farm for example, you’ll want to have an appropriate number of kids, more younger than older. You may also want to consider multiple generations under the same roof, or at least on the same property; grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins are all possibilities. “Ye need potatoes? Go round back of the small barn and see old Sarl. Go easy with him, he’s my mom’s brother and ain’t been right after that bugbear smacked him in the head twenty-odd summers back”

It goes without saying that most of the places you put in your village will need to have people placed in them.  How deep you make them is, of course, totally up to you just like anything else in your campaign. Few things are more frustrating than creating an amazing setting, full of life, people living their daily lives while underneath are plots, rumors and undercurrents for the party to explore only to have them fixate on some insignificant NPC that was just passing through that you never even assigned a name to. In a later post, making your villages reusable will be explored so as to preserve your hard work when this happens.

As previously discussed, it’s nice to have ‘something’ stick about each village (or town, etc) your party passes through, so try to make at least a couple people or places stand out in some manner or fashion. Think of your family, friends, coworkers, or even strangers you interact with throughout the day. What makes each unique? There are so many things to choose from. Some examples: how they dress, laugh, walk, or talk are different mannerisms someone might have. What about personal appearance? Hair or eye color, hair style, tattoos, missing body parts can all highlight one NPC over the rest. Watching random people can be very inspiring for creating your world’s cast of characters.

When you go to create the people in your places, you want to keep your world’s background and concepts in mind. For example, in earlier centuries in the Real World, people had (much) larger families than they do today. There were a number of reasons for this, but largely due to infant and childhood mortality rates being very high. Sometimes only one in five children would make it to adulthood. Whether or not you consciously have this in your world, you may want to have an idea of average family size for each race just to make it smoother creating later.

As morbid as it might sound, it’s also an opportunity for roleplay encounters. For example, after passing by Grick’s pig farm, you inform your party that they see a screaming and crying boy of about ten years old yelling ‘Ma! Pa! Jynnie got stuck bad!’ as he races down the road. The party hurries to investigate and you find a teen girl on death’s door, huge gashes in her side, being hugged by other kids screaming ‘Please don’t die!’. Your party now has the chance for a simple heroic deed, probably with the simplest cure spell your cleric has.

Getting back to family size, when you create a family-run farm for example, you’ll want to have an appropriate number of kids, more younger than older. You may also want to consider multiple generations under the same roof, or at least on the same property; grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins are all possibilities. “Ye need potatoes? Go round back of the small barn and see old Sarl. Go easy with him, he’s my mom’s brother and ain’t been right after that bugbear smacked him in the head twenty-odd summers back”

People Outside of the Places

There’s almost always going to be people outside of the ‘usual places’ that you’ve already whipped up for your village. Some of examples of these people are reclusive mages, rangers and druids in the woods, healer on the edge of town who concocts remedies from local plants, woodsmen who hate civilization, maybe even a lady of the evening somewhere.

Like the people around town, each of them will have their own life going on with a roof (probably), a family (perhaps), talents, daily routines, likes, and dislikes so you’ll probably want to fill those in as you’re writing.

Making your Village (or something else) Reusable

Rotate the Map / Directions

One of the easiest things you can do is rotate the village map, which your region map may force you to do anyhow.  If your players are heading northwest towards the Nvelk forest and come through the village,  the main road will likely go something like southeast to northwest.  If your party decides to push right through and not stop for all the roleplay goodness you packed in there, you can place it again near the Ospaa Swamp, where the road is generally west to east.

Flip the map

This is easier if you have your maps in electronic form, but you could just flip to a mirror image of your map. You can flip it either horizontally or vertically. Your road that was going 60 degrees left off the main road is now on the right.  The small river on the top side of the map is now on the bottom, etc.  It may be hard to do a key at the top of your notes for this, so just carefully go through them and change any references to the changes you made.

Placeholder Labels

When you write your notes, instead of putting in a reference to the Eldt River, just put in RIVER.  The same for things like roads, forests, notable landscape items.  Then, when you go to place your village, you can fill the various landmarks near it.

Move Roads or Landmarks

Side roads, notable hills, or similar landmarks can be moved around if needed to alter the look and feel of a village. This really only needs to be done if you mentioned the item while the party was busily ignoring the awesomeness of your creations.

Extra Names/NPCs

When you’re creating your village for the first time, you might consider creating extra names for NPCs. It could be a pool of extra names or extra names for each specific NPC.  Generally, the more individualized or significant NPCs should have a pool of their own so you can choose those with more care. Farmers, their kids, tavern/inn staff members, and other more generic NPCs would be more likely to pull from a pool of extra names.

Where Did I Use This?

If your memory is anything like mine, you may want to consider a page/entry at the beginning of your notes on the place to log different things mentioned below.  Consider it similar to a changelog page in a technical document.  This way, you can better keep track of what you put where and not confuse the players, especially that one who has the ridiculously sharp memory.

Each entry would include at least:

* Where the village was placed.
* What was the village name.
* How the map was oriented.
* What were the placeholder names.
* Where you put the roads/landmarks
* Names of encountered NPCs.

Wrap Up

There’s a whole lot of ideas in here. Some of them will resonate with you and some won’t; it’s the way of things. Like any other game concepts or methodologies, use what you think works best for you and discard the rest. I certainly don’t prepare the same way I did two, ten, or twenty years ago. It’s an always evolving process, and I hope that some of this is useful enough to you to add into yours. Happy Gaming!

What’s in a Village? (part 1)

Intro

Of all of the types of places you have in your world, few will be more numerous than the common village. Communities of roughly four to nine hundred people, they exist near crossroads, water sources, and natural resources. Some will eventually grow into towns and some will dwindle away into a collection of abandoned, overgrown, buildings and others may simply exist for centuries as they are.

One of the hardest things in running a game is to make common things distinct and memorable and have people and places make an impression with the players. Not every place needs to do that, of course, but it’s always nice when you mention a name of a village, you see blank faces, and then someone says ‘Oh yeah, where Baclan lives!’ and everyone’s face lights up with recognition.

The Basics – The Places

In the era in which fantasy games are run, there is no refrigeration, fast transportation of goods or any modern conveniences whatsoever. This is obvious, of course, but what it means is that almost everything perishable for daily life has to be brought to market (if not sold directly from the source), wait to be sold, brought back to the buyer’s place, and used before it spoiled. Generally, this isn’t a concern, but if you’re laying out a region, say around a castle or city, you may want to keep this in mind.

Everyone needs to eat, so there’s a lot of farms. They likely grow a little bit of everything, have a variety of livestock so that they can have their own supply of food and then extra to sell. The proximity of your village to a large town or city may affect just how many farms there are, how big they are, or both. The reason for this is that such towns and cities will need to import most of their food from nearby farmers. Some farmers will specialize in something, whether it’s a certain type of livestock or specific crop, that’s up to you. You don’t have to really make a point about trying to figure everything out but if you want, you can have your party ride past a spacious fenced-in area of sparse forest and see several sizeable hogs fattening themselves up, and then meet Grick, the pig farmer as you pass his barn.

Like food, everyone needs water, so put a well in a few central locations. Many farms will also have their own so if you’re detailing a specific farm then add one in. Unlike in larger communities, the water in a village is probably reasonably clean and safe to drink, especially if the townsfolks have a druid or wizard/sage advising them to have the tanner and other such businesses downstream from the village or on the fringe of the community.

Various shops and laborers will be in a village as well. Weavers/seamstresses, leatherworkers, tanners, ropemakers, smiths, sawmills, cart makers – all may be in a village but each village may not have everything. For some things, your players might hear ‘Nay, ye need to visit Alzid over in Baer’s Crossing east of here. She’s on the far side of town, mind ye’.

There’s going to be at least one tavern, probably two or three depending on how spread out the village is, and likely an inn as well. The inn will likely be along the main road going through town to be easily accessible to travelers passing through. Each of these locations is a possible location for you to put a community board for quests, rumors, etc.  It’s up to you if each of these has their own brewer or not. It’s also possible there is at least one independent brewer in town. In the Real World, many brewers in the medieval period were women (hence the word alewife), so these brewers may be the wife of someone else or a single woman making her own way in your world. Similarly, you can add a distiller or even a vintner to your village. You might also add a cooper to the village to provide containers for the beverages, rain water, nails, etc.

Many villages have a larger building or two in the center of town that can be used for different purposes throughout the year. For instance, a sizeable room could be used for festivals, parties, or village meetings but also for group protection in a weather emergency or goblinoid invasion.  Smaller rooms in the same building could be used by village elders for basic government functions. If the geography allows for basements to be dug out, that could hold emergency food or equipment stores, maybe even a jail cell or two. These types of buildings are also possible locations for a community board.

Also in the center, you may find some fields set aside for mutual grazing, often called ‘commons’, one of the previously mentioned wells should be located here if you add them.

Other miscellaneous buildings that might be found in a village is a granary to store community food, mills (water, wind or both), or shrines to various beings or forces.

Next up: What’s in a Village? The Basics – The people
A look at the people you might consider putting in your village to help it come to life.