Recovering from vacation

recovering from disney vacation. playing on mog tonight after missing two sessions. last session ended on a cliff hanger...

Of Swords & Wizardry

It's Swords & Wizardy Appreciation Day. On this day it's only fair to share one of the best evenings I ever had and Swords and Wizardry was part of it.

My family has always been into playing games, cut throat multi-board games of scrabble have been played into the wee hours, Diplomacy was played way back in the day, and Dungeons and Dragons was a regular part of our household for years. My father had been a regular member of my D&D group for decades.

One day back in December of 2009 my regular D&D game was cancelled becasue of a bout of scheduling-madness but my oldest son was really in the mood to play some fantasy RPG. I broke out my printout of Swords & Wizardry White-Box edition, and a level of the dismal depths and we rolled up characters using my variant races of Pygmy, Amazon and Cyclops.

The most unique part of the night was who the player were: my teen age son, my 14 year old son, my 12 year old daughter, my wife, and 5 month old son. The baby played a Pygmy cleric that could only speak the pygmy language and by convenient coincidence my wife played the only member of the party able to communicate with him. Of course my baby boy couldn't read, write or roll dice at the time but he got involved by the emotion and excitement of the group and was involved. He got into the fights and amusingly enough argued with my wife at one point over the course of action in the game. It was a magical evening for the whole family made possible by Swords & Wizardry.

Lot's of people play games as a means of escape, relaxation, intellectual challenge, but they are also a time to get together with people to build friendship and family.  Thanks Swords & Wizardry.

My personal gaming history has become a tiny part of other folks games.

Thanks to the SRD and my submitting monsters when folks wanted new monsters for various old school retro games a small piece of my personal gaming history has become a tiny part of other folks games.

The Gump and Leper Zombies were first written up for my D&D campaign played back in 82-83. This was an epic period of D&D youth for me. We played D&D once or twice a month on Sundays and the group included family members, co-workers of my father, and school-mates of mine. The Leper Zombie was a written up to be a considerable undead problem that was still defeat-able at low levels with limited resources.  The Gump was inspired by a mutant monster from one of the Hiero's Journey books and served as meant to be a threat between ogre and troll in power. Leper Zombies only have to be hinted at and some of my old timers still shake and groan, and Gumps get a recognition of "oh yeah, these guys".

They live on here in the S&W SRD
Gump
Leper Zombie
they could be in thw Swords & Wizardy Monstrosities book as well, I'm not sure as I haven't seen that work but it's shown as the source on the S&W SRD page.

and here for the Basic Fantasy RPG
The Basic Fantasy Field Guide to Creatures Malevolent and Benign

If anyone has ever earned a few experience points fighting one or lost a loyal henchman of player character to one I'd love to hear about it.

Building Mog Hexcrawl Phase 4

The terrain is done on the Midlands of MOG map.

We got wasteland, wasteland oasis, wasteland with insect mounds, dry hills, dry hills with insect mounds, dry tumbles, rocky mountains, forested mountains, open forest, forest, dense forest, thorn forest, thistle forest, hills, forested hills, twisted woods, swamp land, mud flats, and open terrain (savanna, plains, etc), along with rivers, coast,  lakes, and sea.

Going to have to name the cities and towns. Encounter tables for each terrain type shall be complied and hex encounters developed.

Building MOG Hexcrawl Phase 3

Development continues on the map of the midlands of MOG. Rivers and lakes have been placed on the map, cities and town nudged a bit and roads and routes have been blazed.

The forest of Teeth has been reduced in size, the cutoff segment will need a name. The howling wilderness down the northern middle of the map needs a name, that name may follow the determination of the residents of the region.

Building MOG Hexcrawl Phase 2

Demographics, who, where, how many? I've put 14 citiy hexes and 31 town hexes on my Midlands of MOG map.  How many people will there be?

A 30 mile hex is about 780 square miles in size. There are 640 acres to a square mile. That's 499,200 acres per hex. Let's say it takes the folk of MOG five acres of land use to feed a person (which is not so great), a fertile while managed hex is going to support   99,840 people.  That's a lot of people.

For my purposes I'm round up here for ease of math so 100,000 people in the most productive hexes.
I'm declaring those to be the city hexes of which there are 14 on the map. I'm going to halve productivity of  the town hexes to 50,000 of which there are 27. Near these are the rural hexes which produce food for 25,000 and there are 53 of these, around those there is  another ring of productivity of 12,000 per hex of the 78 i'm calling hunting hexes.

Let's see here 100,000 x 14 + 50,000 x 27 + 25,000 x 53 + 12,000 x 78 = 5,011,000 mouths can be fed.  That's not accounting for the 108 completely wild hexes which support 780 people each (one per square mile) on the average. All told 5,095,240 "people" eating in the Midlands of MOG.

Here's a map showing all that  (possibly with a mistake or two but not worth worrying about yet).

How many are 1st level or higher?   If 1 in 20 folk are over 0-level there are about 254,762 that are 1st level or higher.Half of those are level 2 or higher and half each tier because I'm feeling like keeping it simple.
so here's the numerical breakdown per level halving (roughly)  each step of the way
1st Level..... 127,381
2nd level.....63,690
3rd level.... 31,845
4th level.... 15,500
5th level..... 7,750
6th level.... 3,875
7th level.... 1,937
8th level.... 968
9th level.... 484
10th level... 242
11th leve1.... 121
12th level.... 60
13th level...30
14th level..15
15th level....7
16th level...3
17th level...2
18th level...1    (funny here as the highest level  a PC can reach on MOG is 18)
note: that's 50,502,100 exp worth of NPCs when figured at 100 exp per level.
I know who one of the 17th level characters is, as I do 2 of the 16th level characters, I don't know who the 18th level character is yet.

Now I must admit I'm in a quandary, should the numbers above be simply "civilized" folk?  I could certainly fit in food for 780 monsters/uncivilized creatures per hex without destroying the food budget for the campaign.  218,400 monsters could be out there and under there on the Midlands.

1 HD or less..... 109,200
2 HD................ 54,600
3 HD.................27,300
4 HD...............13,650
5 HD............... 6825
6 HD................ 3412
7 HD .............. 1706
8 HD ..............  853
9 HD.............. 426
10 HD............ 213
11 HD............ 106
12 HD.............53
13 HD.............26
14 HD.............13
15 HD..............7
16 HD.............4
17 HD.............2
18 HD.............1
note:  43,677,000 exp worth of monsters out there in the Midlands of MOG.

Hmmm... notice there's more exp to be earned fighting "civilized" folk if I keep to the demographic figures above?

How much treasure is out there?  Good question...  Well a 1st level character starts off with 105 Silver Shekels on average.  In my play group everyone is still 1st level after the 3rd session but they have over 800 shekels in loot each now (well the survivors do).   so let's say 1000 silver shekels per character and monster and about a dozen silver shekels in loot per 0-level and we get about 1,013,162,000 silver shekels worth of loot in the whole of the Midlands of MOG.  (That would be about 84,400,00 g.p. more or less in a typical D&D setting). That's a lot of exp for treasure hunters and thieves. I'd say only about 10% of that is floating about the cities, accounting for 72 silver shekels per occupant of a city hex, most folks will seldom have 20% of that.

A whole lot of deducing to get a feel for the campaign and what the players wealth means, what their relative might means, and what is out there.

Working on more Castle Geomorphs

Working on series B castle geomorphs. It's all about 10x10 square sections for gatehouses.

Pretty tiny.  I draw a whole mess of these up in Adobe Illustrator export sections I like, import them into Photoshop add textures and there you go.