Post Four

Today I want to look at multiple trackers within a single campaign. This game will take place during the 3 month long Winter Court, a time of political maneuvering and social battles between nobles and other petty rulers when the weather prevents armies from taking the field. In this campaign the Referee has prepared 2 trackers, one each for the main plays of the game.

The first tracker is about a Noble that the party is trying to help. The second tracker is about a Noble that the party is trying to hinder. Throughout these posts I’ll be playing around with different names for game objects and labels as I find what fits best.

Name: War Debts Power: 2

Goals: Noble wants to secure a repayment from the King for expenses from the last war. Needs the funds to pay for next year's campaign. If they fail the army will be of reduced size and effect because they have to come out of pocket to finance the campaign. Weakness: The Noble is out of favor with the Court and is being required to jump through bureaucratic hoops before the King will authorize repayment. Special Abilities: The Noble can demand to be recognized before the Court and introduce people and topics. Increasing Difficulty: At the start of a session, add a Checkmark. Add a Checkmark for each week that passes. When an ally of the Noble is disfavored, add a Checkmark. Objectives: Regain the Courts favor by showing them the Nobles worth. Forge a new relationship with a more powerful Noble.

This first tracker is a slow burn. The party has weeks to accomplish their tasks without the risk of the difficulty increasing. If they manage to avoid embarrassing themselves it could stretch to months.

Here's the second tracker for the Winter Court campaign.

Name: Bishop’s Gambit

Power: 4

Goals: An Order aligned Priest wants the Court to add almost 500 new crimes to the rolls of the magistrates to provide a bureaucratic veneer to their desired inquisition. The Priest has secretly organized a campaign of terror against the Court using his underlings as sacrifices in order to convince them to agree to the expansion of power.

Weakness: The Priest cannot act openly and must obfuscate their identity and role at all costs. Their alignment with Order is actually extremely higher than most people know and the strain is threatening to break their mind.

Special Abilities: The Priest commands the absolute loyalty of Order-aligned fanatics who obey his orders without question.

Increasing Difficulty:

At the start of a session, add a Checkmark.

When an adventurer is disfavored, add a Checkmark.

When an attack happens without interruption, add a Checkmark.

Add a Checkmark for every week that passes.

Add an X for every month that passes.

When a Noble is killed during an attack, add an X.

When an adventurer advances their Order rank, add an X.

Objectives:

Prove that the Priest is the terrorist leader.

Find and clear the cultists hideout.

Calm the fearful public.

Remove the allies of the Priest from power.

This tracker has the potential to become a hydra. The party must focus their attention on multiple tasks at once all while the difficulty has a good chance of increasing.

Let’s take a look at what could happen after a few game sessions. The party has been focusing on the cult problem and knocked out 3 of the 4 objectives. Unfortunately they are not able to accomplish the fourth objective before the tracker’s Power increases. Now a Power 5 Tracker, the Referee must add a 5th objective. What to add? I think that will flow naturally from the play that has already happened. Here’s 4 possible 5th objectives based on which objectives the party has already accomplished. Number One. The party has proved the Priest is the leader, found and cleared the cultists hideout, stopped the public from rioting, but they have not removed the Priests allies from power. The increased difficulty and new threat thereby come from the Priests allies who make false accusations against the party. New objective: Clear your name of the false corruption charges. Number Two. The party has proven the Priest is the leader, found and cleared the cultists hideout, removed the allies of the Priest from power, but they have not calmed the public. The outcry of the public mob threatens to disrupt all civil order and the Court hires a mercenary company to massacre the peasants. New objective: Stop the mercenary company from attacking the town. Number Three. The party has proven the Priest is the leader, calmed the public, and removed the allies of the Priest from power but they haven’t found the cultists hideout. The cultists expand their operations and increase recruitment, magically compelling citizens to join their ranks. New objective: Undo the magical workings powering the cultists recruitment. Number Four. The party has found and cleared the cultists hideout, calmed the public, removed the Priests allies from power but has failed to convince the Court that the Priest is the terrorist leader. Cut off from all his earthly bases of power the Priest calls for supernatural assistance to wreak havoc among his foes. New objective: Defeat the supernatural creatures summoned by the Priest. When adding a new objective because of an increase in Power the task doesn’t have to be significantly more difficult than the other objectives. Most important is that it arises naturally as a result of the actions and inactions of the adventurers. In the last example the Priest is summoning terrible creatures and letting them loose on the populace. This is a last ditch effort that would only make sense if all other options had been closed off. If the party had only managed to accomplish 2 tasks instead of 3 before the Power increased, I don’t think it likely that the Priest would go this route. He’s still got one option available - whichever other task the party hasn’t completed yet in addition to failing to name the Priest the terrorist - so he’s not driven to unleash monstrosities. Yet. As I’m writing these examples I think I’m starting to get an idea of what the Referee section is going to be about. Creating these trackers really seems like it’s a different way of outlining an adventure. I don’t think I have any great insights into ‘how to be a GM’ that others haven’t said already or better. Working on these adventure outlines is interesting to me though, so I’ll keep on that.

Post Three

Here's a draft of the Campaign Record Sheet tracking rules. These aren't in a finalized form or been laid out graphically.
The main part of the Campaign Record / Referee Sheet is a clock tracker. Each Adversary or Faction that's important enough should have a tracker filled out by the Referee.

The components of each tracker are:
 - Name of the Adversary or Faction
 - Their Power rank
 - Goals
 - Weakness
 - Special Abilities
 - Actions that Help the Adversary
 - Defeating the Adversary

How to Use the Tracker
The boxes will be marked during game play and when all the boxes are marked the Adversary advances its Goals in some manner. A box can be marked with either a Checkmark or crossed out with an X. Checkmarks are temporary while X’s are permanent.
The tracker begins with a number of boxes crossed out equal to its Power. Different game events will either add a Checkmark or an X to the tracker, which one is dependent on the severity of the event and its relation to the Adversary.

How to Defeat an Adversary
For each rank of an Adversary's Power the Referee should determine an action or outcome that will reduce its influence and strength. If the Adversary increases its Power before the adventurers are able to defeat it then the Referee should create a new objective to correspond with its new Power rank.

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Here is an example tracker for the Caves of Chaos from B2: Keep on the Borderlands.

Name: The Caves of Chaos

Power: 3    [ X ][ X ][ X ][   ][   ][   ][   ][   ][   ][   ]
When all the boxes are filled with either X’s or checkmarks, increase the Power by 1 and erase all checkmarks. Cross out a new box and advance the goals of the Caves. 

Goals: Spread the corruption of the star seed across the land. Increase uncertainty, distrust, and war between humanoids.

Weakness: The Caves monsters falling under the control of Order aligned creatures; The Caves monsters being killed or forced to flee.

Special Abilities: As long as the star seed is in the Caves, new monsters will move into empty sections of the Caves within 1d10 weeks.

Helping the Adversary Gain Power: 
- At the start of a session, add a Checkmark.
- When an adventurer dies within the Caves, add a Checkmark.
- When monsters outside the Caves fall under the star seeds influence, add an X. 
- When an adventurer advances their Chaos rank, add an X.

Defeating the Caves of Chaos:
[   ] Expose the human agents in the Keep that are aligned with the Caves.
[   ] End the conflict between the monsters of the Caves and the people of the Keep.
[   ] Remove the star seed from the Caves of Chaos.
Once each objective is met the Referee should mark the box. When all objectives have been completed the Caves in their current form are no longer a threat. The star seed will likely cause problems wherever it is taken or the manner of its destruction my cause new problems to arise but the Caves of Chaos have been dealt with.

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Power

0  Faction has meager influence over a few blocks of a town or one village.
1  Faction has a strong influence on a town or multiple villages.
2  Faction controls a major part of a town.
3  Faction has complete control of a town and major control of countryside.
4  Faction is able to take and defend territory from other towns.
5  Faction controls an entire nation.
6 Faction is the controlling force of the world.

In the example of the Caves of Chaos, the star seed is in control of the Caves themselves and exerts a strong influence on the surrounding countryside. If the Caves Power increased to 4 I think it would fit the scenario to have the human agents of the Cave take control over the Keep, incognito or in force.

Post Two

I found LE COSTUME HISTORIQUE through the illustration credits of another book whose name I don't recall as I didn't write it down. Thanks to the Internet Archive I was able to download all six volumes of the work in the original French that I don't read. I spent an evening and extracted each page that had an illustration on it from each volume and have about 500 pages of compiled illustrations. The image in the previous post had three other illustrations on the same page. Today and yesterday I isolated them from the book and will post them here.

I like these. I don't know if I'll use them for the game but they're nice and extracting them is good exercise with the Affinity digital tools. Just like the image in the previous post, these are from LE COSTUME HISTORIQUE, Vol 6, pg 21, illustrated by M. A. Racinet.

Post One

Battleaxe Fantasy Role-Play is a fantasy medieval tabletop role-playing game that I'm writing. It's a project I work on in between jobs, sometimes in the evenings and on the weekends. I've been playing role-playing games for almost 30 years and think that I enjoy thinking and talking about role-playing game design more than actually playing them. Maybe that's because I haven't had a regular gaming group in 5 years. It's easier to think about how a game works than go through the steps necessary to form a group and play.

The name is a rip on those other role-playing games with weapons in the titles, a light-hearted joke. It's a skills based game that uses the d10 roll and keep system. All the adventurers are Human and are split by their Homelands (Town or Wilderlands) and their Family (Clergy, Nobility, Outcast, Peasants). Medieval history is an interest of mine but this is not a medieval life simulator; Careers for the adventurers include the mundane Fighter and Rogue as well the fantastical Artificer and Sorcerer.

All of the art in the game is from the public domain. I've spent a lot of time tracking down the sources of the images used to properly credit the artists. Some evenings, as way to unwind from work, I'll spend a few hours isolating an image from a source book. Here's one I did this evening, from LE COSTUME HISTORIQUE, Vol 6, pg 21. The designs are from the 18th century but I think they could work as spot artwork in the game.

There's an Any% version of the game hosted at itch.io at the link above. I find that it's easier to make progress on the game by writing different chunks at a time. For example, I first wrote out all of the spell names I wanted, then I wrote a one sentence description of each spell. After that I wrote full descriptions for them. The most recent additions are the item and monster generation tables and rules. The monster descriptions themselves are mostly blank spaces right now.

I want to make a character sheet that the Referee uses during play to track the party and the campaign. When I play a game I often look to what's on my character sheet for what I can have my character do. I make cheat sheets for myself when I GM that fulfil a similar purpose and think the Ref/Campaign sheet can be a really useful living document for playing the game.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog and my game.