“I am writing a play. It’s a comedy. There are three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes, a view over a lake; a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.”

– Anton Chekhov

A few years ago I wrote a translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. That translation is now available as a DRM-free Kindle e-book. This, of course, also means that it can be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms. Or transferred to any other e-reader you might care to employ with a minimum of effort.

Buy Now!

The Seagull is the haunting tale of young love, lost dreams, and broken promise. Its unique cast of incomparable characters echoes dully in a perfect balance – each drawn and repulsed in equal measures through an enchanting and terrifying dance choreographed by Anton Chekhov, the master of Russian theater. It is that rare and precious jewel which perfectly reflects a slice of life, finding those moments which are simultaneously comic and tragic; mortal and divine; eternal and common.

This performance-tested translation captures both the comic and tragic elements of Chekhov’s stirring drama. Those wishing to find a text which is both faithful to the play’s original Russian and also capable of achieving lyric truth in English will not be disappointed: The characters speak Chekhov’s words in another tongue.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATION

Back in 2010 I also wrote a series of essays discussing the translation. If you didn’t read them back then, you might find them interesting now:

The Seagull – Proxy Translation

The Seagull – Quoting Hamlet

The Seagull – Jupiter is Angry

The Seagull – (Not So) Virgin Wood

And if you’re generally interesting my playwriting, you might also be interested in John and Abigail:

Go to Part 1

Organization of campaign material is always an interesting topic for me, and I don’t think there’s enough discussion of actual, practical methods. (As opposed to the idealized theoretical stuff you usually see published in advice books.) Although I’m constantly learning new tips and techniques, I’ve also found that no two campaigns ever use the same methods of documentation: Even similar scenarios will often have unique characteristics that benefit from a different approach.

In the case of my Thracian Hexcrawl, I maintain four “documents”:

(1) THE HEX MAP: This is 16 hexes by 16 hexes, for a total of 256 hexes. (If I had to do it again I would either go with a 10 x 10 or 12 x 12 map: Coming up with 256 unique key entries was a lot of work. But I had some unique legacy issues from the pre-hexcrawl days of the campaign that resulted in a larger map.)

(2) THE BINDER: This contains the campaign key. It includes 2 pages of background information (current civilizations, chaos factions, and historical epochs), 8 pages of random encounter tables (one for each of the six different regions on the map), and a 100 page hex key.

(3) THE FOLDER: Each document in this folder details a single location. These are locations with a key that takes up more than a single page and/or any location which requires a status update (because the PCs have visited it and shifted the status quo).

(4) CAMPAIGN STATUS SHEET: This document is updated and reprinted for each session. It’s responsible for keeping the campaign in motion. At the moment, the Thracian Hexcrawl campaign status sheet includes: A list of current events in Caerdheim and Maernath (the two cities serving as home base for the PCs); a list of empty complexes (which I reference when I make a once per session check to see if they’ve been reinhabited); the current rumor table; details about the various businesses being run by PCs; and the master loyalty/morale table for PC hirelings.

Of these documents, the most difficult to prep is, of course, the hex key itself (along with the folder of detailed locations). I spent two weeks of hard work cranking out all of those locations. But the up-side of that front-loaded prep is that, once it’s done, a hexcrawl campaign based around wilderness exploration becomes incredibly prep-light: I spend no more than 10-15 minutes getting ready for each session because all I’m really doing is jotting down a few notes to keep my documentation up to date with what happened in the last session.

DESIGNING FROM THE STATUS QUO

My general method of prep — particularly for a hexcrawl — is to originate everything in a state of “status quo” until the PCs touch it. Once the PCs start touching stuff, of course, the ripples can start spreading very fast and very far. However, in the absence of continued PC interaction things in the campaign world will generally trend back towards a status quo again. (This is something I also discussed in Don’t Prep Plots: Prepping Scenario Timelines.)

This status quo method generally only works if you have robust, default structures for delivering scenario hooks. In the case of the hexcrawl, of course, I do: Both the rumor tables and the hexcrawl structure itself will drive PCs towards scenarios.

The advantage of the status quo method is that it minimizes the amount of work you have to do as a GM. (Keeping 256 hexes up in the air and active at all times would require a ridiculous amount of effort.) It also minimizes the amount of prep work which is wasted. (If you’re constantly generating background events that the PCs are unaware of and not interacting with, that’s all wasted effort.)

It’s important to understand, though, that “status quo” doesn’t mean “boring”. It also doesn’t mean that literally nothing is happening at a given location. For example, the status quo for a camp of goblin slavers isn’t “the goblins all sit around”. The status quo is that there’s a steady flow of slaves passing through the camp and being sold.

Go to Part 10: Stocking the Hexes

Go to Part 1

When designing my hexcrawl, as I mentioned at the beginning of this series, I key every hex on the map and every key entry is a location (not an encounter). The distinction between a “location” and an “encounter” can get a little hazy if you stare at it for too long, but in practice it’s usually pretty obvious: If your key reads “an ogre walking down the road”, then the next time the PCs pass along that road the ogre would presumably be gone (particularly if they killed it). If your key instead reads “an ogre living in a shack”, then even if the PCs kill the ogre the shack will still be there.

Of course, one might argue that the PCs could do some quick demolition work on the shack and make it disappear, too. (That would be an excellent example of staring at the distinction for too long.) But the general point remains: You’re looking to key permanent geography, not ephemeral events.

What follows are several examples from the actual hex key I use for my Thracian Hexcrawl. The goal is to demonstrate the range of different key types that I use, so let’s start with the shortest:

K16 – HONEYCOMB CAVERNS (Secrets of Xen’dik)

No detail.

This one’s pretty simple: I’ve grabbed a pre-existing adventure (in this case selected from the Secrets of Xen’drik sourcebook) and plugged it straight into the hexcrawl. If the PCs encounter this hex, I just yank the book out and start running it.

I’ve actually been doing less of this recently because I’ve reached the point where I find the existing layout and presentation of adventure modules too frustrating to run on-the-fly even when the actual content is good. (They tend to bury way too much information into the middle of lengthy paragraphs.) But I digress. Here’s another simple one:

K13 – RUINED TEMPLE OF ILLHAN

See hex detail.

In this case, the location was too detailed to include in my primary hex key. Much like the published adventure, I’m telling myself to go look somewhere else for the details: In this case, a separate file folder in which I keep separate documents for each hex like this. (The rule of thumb here is that if it takes more than one page to describe the place, it gets a separate detail document.)

The details for the Ruined Temple of Illhan were previously posted here on the site. They can be found here. (The presentation there is somewhat polished from what would have been found in my original notes, but is substantially similar.)

A3 – ORLUK TOTEM

A giant statue, worn by weather. Depicting an elephantine beast of prey with black- and yellow-striped fur. (An orluk.) The yellow and black stone is not painted, but rather two different types of colored granite which have been quarried and then shaped to take advantage of the quarried strata.

This is an example of what I think of as a “landmark”. Sometimes these landmarks are more involved or have hidden features to them, but generally they’re just single points of interest distinct from the surrounding wilderness. Regardless of their other characteristics, they’re almost always useful for PCs trying to orient their maps.

N15 – RECENT FOREST FIRE

Landscape is scorched. No foraging is possible in this hex.

Another short one. This is basically similar to a landmark, but it covers a vast swath of territory. (In this case, an entire hex.)

C2 – WYVERN SHAFT

60 foot deep shaft that serves as the lair of a wyvern. The wyvern has dug an escape tunnel that emerges from a hill a quarter mile away.

WYVERN: Has a large scar on its left side from a spear wound; has preferred to stay away from intelligent prey ever since.

TREASURE: 7,000 sp, 5 zircons (50 gp each)

A simple monster lair. I usually don’t bother with maps for this sort of thing: It’s easy enough to improv any smaller complex of a half dozens rooms or less. (Assuming there’s nothing radically unusual about them, of course.)

F15 – SKULL ROCK (on river)

A rock shaped like a skull thrusts out of the river. Crawling through the mouth leads to a crypt.

AREA 1: Mummified red dragon’s head (huge). Breathes flame that fills most of the room. Secret entrance to treasure chamber under the head.

AREA 2: 5 wights (50% in lair), no level drain but paralyzing strike. The two rooms off this area have been pillaged.

AREA 3 – BURIAL OFFERINGS: 3000 gp, 3 golden spinels (200 gp each)

AREA 4: Trapped hallway. Arrows shoot from wall and alchemist’s fire from nozzles in the ceiling. (Room to the left has an incense burner in the shape of a squat, fat man worth 7000 cp.)

AREA 5: Wight, no level drain but can detect magic, life, and invisibility at will. (Sniffs out magic and lusts for it.)

AREA 6: Bas relief skull. Insane. Asks incredibly bad riddles (“What flies in the air?” “A bird.”), but then blasts those who answer with 1d6 magic missiles regardless.

AREA 7: Slain wights.

AREA 8: Staked vampires.

AREA 9: A lich has been chained to the wall. Arcs of purple electricity spark off him in eternal torment.

Notice the “on river” designator next to the key title. That indicates that the location is on the river flowing through this hex on the map: If the PCs are following the river, they’ll automatically encounter this location.

The map here was taken from Dyson Logos’ website. His site proved invaluable for stocking my hexcrawl, and there are a lot of other bloggers offering free maps out there.

This sort of fully-keyed, “mini-dungeon” represents pretty much the upper limit of what I’ll handle in a key entry before bumping it into a separate document.

Go to Part 9: The Four Documents of the Hexcrawl

Tagline: Into the Badlands was one of the first Heavy Gear supplements. It set the pace of excellence which we’ve come to expect from Dream Pod 9.

There comes a point in reviewing Dream Pod 9’s work, I’ve realized, that you begin to run out of ways to say, “This is really great stuff.” After you’ve run through the synonyms of great, brilliant, sublime, creative, innovative, and brilliant (did I say that already?) you begin to worry that people will think of you as nothing but a broken record. I can almost hear your thoughts as you sit there reading through one review after another thinking, “This man has been bought off by Dream Pod 9. Nobody can be that good every single time.”

Ah, but apparently they can.

Let me say it simply one more time: Dream Pod 9 is great. Heavy Gear is great. If you aren’t buying these books you’re missing out on a great thing.

To explain just how great these books are, let’s time travel back to the summer of 1997 and take a look around. In 1997 I’d been into roleplaying games for nearly a decade. Despite the fact that I still loved the games dearly and checked in on the Usenet newsgroups from time to time I hadn’t bought more than one or two roleplaying products in over two years. Nothing in the industry was really getting under my skin the way it used to and my interest was slowly waning.

In the summer of 1997 – nearly two years ago now as I write this – all of that changed. Despite having withdrawn my cash into other areas I had become aware of various titles over the years that had interested me to one degree or another: Feng Shui, CORPS, Theatrix… and Heavy Gear. None of them had caught me interest enough, however, to actually take the time to go out and buy them until one day I happened to spot the first edition of the Heavy Gear Rulebook on the shelf of the local hobby store. The cover, with its gear in extreme close-up, drew me in and the professional lay-out and clarity of the interior sold me. I bought the book there and then.

Over the next few days I devoured it in my free time. By the time I was finished I had become impassioned by roleplaying once again. I travelled back to the hobby store, but they didn’t stock any other Heavy Gear products at the time, so I picked up Feng Shui instead.

Heavy Gear brought me back to roleplaying, and its kept me here ever since. That’s how good it is.

All of which, in a rather roundabout manner, brings us to Into the Badlands — the latest Heavy Gear product I happened to read after running out of ways to say “buy this game dammit!”.

Into the Badlands is the sourcebook covering, as the name suggests, the Badlands: the broad equatorial deserts of Terra Nova. The Badlands are an excellent example of how Dream Pod 9’s ability to incorporate uncommon depth into their products gives the GM a broad palette and selection of tools in creating his adventures. Broadly speaking the Badlands are a mix of the American Wild West and the Middle East. If another company were handling this material it is easy to see how the Badlands would quickly be reduced to this common denominator. There would be a number of different cities, but at heart they would all be mere variations upon this simple theme.

Into the Badlands, on the other hand, takes the simple theme and (rather than simply varying it) begins creating whole new themes which are supported by the basic theme, but also subtly supplement it. Hence you get the frontier qualities of the desert oasis towers, you get the corporate politics of Peace River, you get the militaristic refugee community of Port Arthur, you get the visionary unity of Jan Mayen, you get the religious fervor of Massada, you get rover gangs and dueling circuits and smuggling cartels and gambling communities and polar influence and cold war and… well, you get a lot. Plus you get all the fringe areas where those different cultures come into contact and conflict with each other. All of which is supplemented by a plentiful amount of information about how life is actually lived on a day-to-day basis. (Ever sit down after reading a wonderful setting and realize that you have no idea how to actually get inside the mind of a character living in that setting because everything was dealt with at a macro-level? You’ll never have that problem with Terra Nova.) Tack on a couple of chapters on practical adventuring advice – including a dozen adventure seeds, some NPCs and archetypes, and a look at the creatures who make the Badlands their home – and you’ve got a well-rounded sourcebook.

About the only bad thing about the book is the lack of an index, but I could wax rhapsodic for a while longer about many things (like the way that they manage to cover everything you’d expect in a regional sourcebook, plus about twice as much that you wouldn’t – particularly in a book this size), but I won’t because it would be largely repetitious of my other recent reviews of Heavy Gear products. Buy the book.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $18.95
Page Count: 108
ISBN: 1-896776-02-7

Originally Posted: 1999/04/26

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Tagline: Crisis of Faith was a masterpiece. Blood on the Wind is better.

The simple summary of content: The world goes to hell and Dream Pod 9 takes you along for the ride.

The short summary of quality: Dream Pod 9 just keeps making great things even better. Don’t let them get their hands on chocolate – they might turn it into an addictive narcotic.

The big concept: Crisis of Faith was a masterpiece. Blood on the Wind is better.

Within the last week I have found the time to plunge once more into the wonderful Heavy Gear game setting after a long absence compounded by “real life”. To ease myself back into things I took a look at the eye candy which is Making of a Universe. Then I devoured the second edition of Life on Terra Nova (a book which has sat, neglected, on my shelf for far too long). Then I took the time to re-read Crisis of Faith. Pausing briefly to write reviews of each of these products (all of which can be found elsewhere on RPGNet) I picked up Blood on the Wind, the second storyline book and one which has been taunting me for over a month now.

I thought Crisis of Faith was a pinnacle of excellence. Much to my surprise I discovered that Blood on the Wind had not only built upon that success, but improved upon it.

First, what has remained the same. The story is still told through the collected notes and data of Nicosa Renault – a master spy who has “retired”, but remains interested in understanding why things happen on Terra Nova. As a result you get to hear the story of Terra Nova told through the thoughts, conversations, video logs, and journals of Terranovans – all gathered by another Terranovan who has an actual personality (and is not merely an excuse for Dream Pod 9 to gather up a bunch of useful stuff).

The product still tells a meta-story of immense proportion, power, and potential – taking full advantage of the roleplaying medium (see my review of Crisis of Faith for a fuller discussion of this). It accompanies this with a visually stunning presentation which demonstrates, once again, that Dream Pod 9 knows how to put a book together. (There aren’t quite as many images as in Crisis of Faith, but if quantity is all you’re interested in your still going to find more here than anywhere else you might care to look.)

So, what’s different? The smaller format of Crisis of Faith has been abandoned in favor of an 8.5 x 11 format (although it is turned on its side, so to speak, from your typical roleplaying supplement). Additionally, an appendix has been added including a detailed timeline of events and a “Who’s Who on Terra Nova” – both valuable resources for any roleplaying or tactical campaign (moreso the former than latter, but that’s to be expected). Also, the color sections found in Crisis of Faith have been abandoned in Blood on the Wind — probably due to cost considerations. I am sorry at their loss, but can understand that the Pod People simply had no choice in light of the negative market performance of Crisis of Faith due to its format. Finally, the layout and organization of this product is clearer than in Crisis of Faith. It’s a subtle improvement. If Blood on the Wind had never existed you’d never have known that anything was “wrong” with Crisis of Faith, because its really just a matter of degree in quality – not a “have and have not” situation.

I could go on at length about the wonders of this product, but I would largely be reduced to either repeating what I said in my review of Crisis of Faith and providing spoilers of the material found within. I choose to do neither.

So you’re wondering if you’ve understood me correctly: Crisis of Faith was one of the best products ever produced in the roleplaying industry. Blood on the Wind took every one of those strengths, eliminated the two small problems which might mar it in the opinion of some, and the only drawback is that I lost the full-color sections of the book? Plus I get more material? Plus it’s cheaper?

Yes, that’s right.

Plus if you thought the last six pages of Crisis of Faith were mind-blowing, wait ‘til you check out the first two pages of Blood on the Wind. Those are big. Then you get to the last four pages of the storyline book proper…. Welcome to a whole new level.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $17.95
Page Count: 80
ISBN: 1-896776-27-2

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.