IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Agnarr

Today I’m posting the first entry in the campaign journal for Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire. It takes the form of the background for a character named Agnarr (created by David Blackmer).

The common view of character creation is often that of a solo affair: The player creates their character and then brings it to the game. But I’ve always viewed the creation of a player character as a collaborative process.

STEP 0: THE CAMPAIGN CONCEPT

Before any character is created there’s the campaign concept. This can be roughly broken down as the answer to three questions: Who are the characters? What do they do? Where do they do it?

One of the traditional advantages D&D has enjoyed over many other roleplaying games is that it comes with a flexible but clear-cut concept: 99 out of 100 D&D campaigns are about a group of adventurers exploring dungeons and slaying dragons in a Tolkienesque fantasy setting. If someone says, “Hey, you want to play D&D?” You’ve already got a pretty good idea what that campaign is going to look like.

On the other hand, if someone says, “Hey, you want to play Heavy Gear?” The only question that answers is, “Where do they do it?” (The planet Terra Nova in the seventh millennium.) It leaves completely unanswered the questions of who the characters are and what they do: They could be members of a Saragossan terrorist cell; they could be soldiers in a military strike team; they could be mercenaries in the Badlands; they could be arena gladiators; and so forth.

And, of course, if someone says, “Hey, do you want to play GURPS?” They haven’t told you anything about the campaign concept. You could be playing anything from anthropomorphic cavemen to transhuman cyber hackers.

The creation of a campaign concept can, in itself, be a collaborative process. The question, “What do you guys want to play next?” is basically the most simplistic form of that. But in addition to answering the three basic questions (Who? What? Where?), the GM can also create a discussion about specific themes and even events that the players would like to explore.

Even with D&D, it’s still a good idea to communicate a more specific campaign concept. There is a difference, for example, between the characters who will be effective in urban, rural, and subterranean environments. (And, of course, even larger differences are also possible.) You shouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and your players will have more fun if they don’t bring a woodland druid loaded up with Knowledge (nature) and Survival skills to an all-urban campaign with nary a tree in sight.

In the case of In the Shadow of the Spire, the central structure of the campaign is based around a major mystery. That mystery is literally launched in the very first moment of the campaign, and I didn’t want to spoil that initial moment of surprise. This made it difficult to discuss the deeper campaign concept with the players, but I was still able to tell them the big picture:

The entire campaign will take place within the city of Ptolus — a major city-state that serves as Arathia’s only port on the Southern Sea. It’s a cosmopolitan city. There are elven enclaves from the Teeth of Light; a large dwarven population descended from the refugees of the Kingdoms of the East; a rare population of centaurs; and even that strange and enigmatic litorians. In recent years, vast subterranean complexes, laden with treasure, have been discovered beneath the streets of the city. A gold rush of sorts has erupted around the exploration and looting of these complexes.

From a more abstract point of view: In the Shadow of the Spire will be a combination of urban adventures and dungeoneering. There will be a good mix of standard dungeon-crawling, diplomatic intrigue, and complex investigation.

Now, with this campaign concept in hand, it’s time to start working on the actual characters.

Continued…

First: She’s liar.

Second: She’s horrendously unqualified.

Third: She has revealed the seedy hypocrisy of the Republican party.

But probably the most impressive thing about Sarah Palin is that she is, in fact, the entirety of John McCain’s economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy and foreign policy:

He said so himself when he claimed that, whenever Barack Obama is talking about John McCain’s economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, and foreign policy, he’s actually talking about Sarah Palin.

And did I mention that she’s using the same shady tactics of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush in her attempts to impede lawful investigations into her misconduct as governor of Alaska?

So if you want corrupt, unqualified liars, hypocrites, and smear-artists in the White House — Vote McCain-Palin 2008.

Starting tomorrow I’ll be posting campaign journals from my ongoing campaign — Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire. These journals are actually quite long, so I won’t be clogging up the main page with them. (EDIT: On the new website, I’ll be using “Read More” tags.)

What I will be posting to the main page, however, are original essays relating to the journal entries. Some of these will be sort of “Behind the Scenes” commentary, which may only be of interest if you enjoy reading the journals themseles. (Which I hope you will.) But others will spin-off from the journal material to talk about my DMing techniques and adventure design. (Although, let’s be honest, whether those will be any more interesting or insightful is proably open to debate.)

This particular post will probably end up being a little bit of both, as I talk a little about the origins of the campaign.

STEP 1: THE SEED OF AN IDEA

I started my first full-fledged 3rd Edition campaign in the summer of 2001. The impetus for that campaign was the desire to run John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill. I spent a couple of weeks sketching out the map of a campaign world, roughing in the history and mythology of the setting, and then developing the broad outlines of a five act campaign (starting with the events of Three Days to Kill).

That was the origin of a setting I refer to as the Western Lands. Since that time, the Western Lands have served as the setting for most of my D&D games.

My desire to run a Ptolus campaign actually dates all the way back to 2002. That was the year that Monte Cook released The Banewarrens mega-adventure. I knew as soon as I read The Banewarrens that this was a campaign I wanted to run — it combined an evocative mythology; a unique setting; and a flexible, open-ended design. I actually started laying down the groundwork immediately: The PCs in that first Western Lands campaign traveled through Ptolus, allowing me to establish both the city and the distinctive Spire.

One thing led to another, however, I ended up running several other campaigns before my attention returned once more to The Banewarrens. And then I hit one more delay because I heard that Monte Cook was developing the most ambitious city supplement ever published, describing the city of Ptolus in exuberant detail.

STEP 2: THE BACKBONE

By 2007, Monte Cook had published over 1000 pages of material for Ptolus (including the deluxe 660 page sourcebook). Improperly done, that much material could have acted as a straitjacket — choking any life or spontaneity from the setting. But, impressively, Cook designed the material to maximize its usefulness at the game table. The richness of the setting really excited me.

The other thing that excited me was the adventure material. In addition to The Banewarrens, I also had the sample adventures from the Ptolus sourcebook and the Night of Dissolution mega-adventure.

This material, with a fair degree of restructuring, became the backbone for the first two acts of a five-act campaign structure focused around a fusion of Ptolus mythology and the mythology of the Western Lands.

STEP 3: PUBLISHED ADVENTURES

Opinions on using published adventures tend to vary quite a bit: Some people are for them as time-savers; others criticize them for lacking creativity.

I tend to fall somewhere in the middle of this debate. For me, a well-designed adventure module is like a well-written play. Part of the entertainment value is in taking someone else’s creative material and interpreting it. There’s also something I really relish in the concept of a common experience shared disparately among many different gamers.

We tend to think of creativity as something that begins with a blank canvas and disparage anything that “rips off” something else. But the reality is that lots of valuable creative work doesn’t start with a blank canvas, and this type of creative interpretation is widely recognized in many artforms: Thousands of actors interpret the words of Shakespeare every year. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and elements of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman have all drawn from mythology. John Howe and Alan Lee interpret the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in their paintings.

On the flip-side, while I will strategically use published adventures in my campaigns, they seldom define my campaigns. For example, in the case of In the Shadow of the Spire, Monte Cook’s material forms the backbone of the first three acts of the campaign… but only about 25% of the adventure material I’m using is pre-published (and only some of the material is Cook’s).

(Although working in Ptolus has been interesting because so much of the original material I’m generating is still, quite naturally, being heavily influenced by the unique mythology and history of the city.)

Perhaps one of the reasons I have success with published modules is because my use is governed by desire instead of need. For example, I didn’t decide to run The Banewarrens because I was looking for a mini-campaign that would take the PCs from 6th to 10th level. I decided to run The Banewarrens because I thought it was a pretty awesome adventure.

And that’s pretty typical of how I use published adventures in general. On my shelf I’ve got a couple dozen or so published adventures for a variety of RPGs that I think are pretty nifty (for one reason or another). A few of those will serve as the impetus for an entire campaign that will grow up around them, like an oak growing out of an acorn. But most of them will see use for the opposite reason: I’ll be designing a campaign and I’ll see a place where I can slot them in.

For example, Act II of In the Spire of the Shadow revolves in part around pursuing a network of cults. It just makes sense to go out and grab a couple of the cult-oriented adventures I’ve got hanging around and seeing if I can make them work within the larger structure of this section of the campaign.

STEP 4: THE PLAYERS

In the Shadow of the Spire actually started as an online game. My primary motivation for this was David Blackmer. David had been one of my players in the original Western Lands campaign, and that campaign had actually come to an end when he moved to Indiana. David is an amazing roleplayer, and I had missed playing with him ever since he left.

So I put together a suite of tools including ScreenMonkey and Skype so that David and I could play together. When all was said and done, I’d also picked up players in Arizona and Iowa. Adding a couple of locals to the mix gave me a group with five players.

STEP 5: GETTING STARTED

Which is where we’ll pick up tomorrow…

Yesterday I wrote about the role the agricultural revolution played in oppressing women. While exploring that subject, I ended up wandering off on a rather large tangent that I eventually deleted when it became large enough to sufficiently defocus the essay. But I think it’s a sufficiently interesting to discuss it here.

Jared Diamond has made the argument in several books and essays — most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel — that the move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies was the “worst mistake” in history. To support this conclusion, he cites various evidence which indicates that the larger families of early agricultural societies actually resulted in poorer nutrition, hygiene, and even longevity compared to the hunter-gatherer societies they replced.

But Diamond’s thesis makes little sense: No one would willingly choose a less appealing lifestyle. Diamond argues that these societies were “forced” into this lifestyle due to their inability to control their birth rates. But this contradicts the known facts: For tens or hundreds of thousands of years, mankind was able to regulate their birth rates just fine while continuing to live in hunter-gatherer societies. And, in fact, modern hunter-gatherer societies manage to similarly regulate their birth rates.

I suspect the reality is that the agricultural lifestyle was preferred specifically because it allowed for larger families. This is a point of view which is probably difficult for a scholar from the latter half of the 20th century to understand, given that contemporary western society puts a very low premium on children compared to previous epochs of history.

Oh, we still like our children… we just tend to like them in moderation. The idea of a single woman bearing 20 children seems unspeakably alien and even slightly distasteful to most of us… but would seem incredibly desirable to most cultures of recorded history.

So those early farmers may have been hungry, dirty, and short-lived… but it wasn’t a mistake. They were gaining something that they valued even more.

Recently I’ve been reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. The book, as a whole, attempts to provide a universal overview of women — biologically, historically, culturally, and socially — from the dawn of time down through the mid-20th century (when it was written). It’s a stunningly ambitious project and, to its credit, succeeds far more often than it fails.

In the historical section of the book, Beauvoir analyzes how and why women came to be subjugated in almost every culture from the beginning of recorded history until the present day. If it was a matter of pure chance or a cultural artifact, she argues, we would not expect it to appear so reliably in cultures with little or no connection to each other. Nor would we expect to see the subjugation continue with such unmitigated persistence in all of these disparate cultural traditions while every other aspect of those cultures could be seen to shift dramatically.

Beauvoir makes a rather worthwhile argument that the key moment of change lies in the shift from hunter-gatherer societies (in which women are frequently seen as societal equals or even superiors) to agricultural societies. In short, no matter where agriculture arose, women were almost simultaneously subjugated. This indicates that the subjugation of women is neither a biological imperative nor some cultural oddity, but rather the result of something systemic to early agricultural societies.

Unfortunately, Beauvoir ends up muddying her argument rather thoroughly with heavy doses of mysticism, existentialism, and bald assertion. (These features may also be the result of a poor translation.) So, to try to straighten this out in my own mind, I wanted to put it down in a clearer form and then expand upon it.

THE PREMISE

Prior to the invention of agriculture (roughly 10,000 years ago), women were mythologically venerated. The degree to which this translated to daily life is somewhat unclear, but based on a variety of information (including the study of primitive tribes) it seems clear that men and women in hunter-gatherer societies were generally considered equals. There was a division of labor in these societies (usually with the men hunting and the women gathering) based on the physical differences between the genders, but not subjugation.

But with the invention of agriculture, things shifted. Mother goddesses were shoved out of power and replaced with male gods. And by the time written records begin to appear, women have almost universally been shoved into a second-place status.

Something had changed.

CHANGE #1: PROPERTY

Agriculture created a sense of ownership in the land. And I think, from that, a stronger sense of property in general developed. Property is a form of power and allows for the extension of the personal will. The desire for control seems pretty deeply ingrained into humanity, and property is one way of asserting control.

This expansion of the concept of property eventually led to other humans being controlled as property. Slavery is the most egregious form of this concept, but the concept is also expressed in the idea that a daughter belongs to her father and is given to her husband.

What determines the difference between master and slave? Power. And in a society ruled by physical strength, who gains the power and who becomes the object to be owned? Statistically speaking, it’s the male who has more physical strength than the female.

In this way, the expansion of the concept of personal property leads to the opportunity for the subjugation of women.

CHANGE #2: LEGACY AND IMMORTALITY

The expansion of property rights also created the ability to pass on a greater and more meaningful legacy to your children.

The nascent desire to achieve immortality through our children (so that some part of us might continue throughout eternity) is a pretty basic building block of human psychology. But being able to give our children property acts as a kind of force magnifier on our genetics: Now we’re not just passing on our flesh and blood, but also all that we have achieved in the course of our own lifetimes.

(The ultimate futility of this is demonstrated by Ozymandias, for example, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting it.)

But there’s a catch here: Without property, we’re perfectly happy to spread our genetic material far and wide and hope that some of it will endure. With property, however, there’s suddenly a desire to give it to the most worthy of our heirs. And, even more importantly, make sure it goes to one of our heirs and not somebody else’s heirs.

Unlike women, however, men have no surety of paternity. Which means that they have no inherent surety that they’re giving their property to their own kid or to the kid of some guy just down the street.

In order to gain that surety, the female mate must be controlled. And this creates the motivation for the subjugation of women.

CHANGE #3: FAMILY SIZE

There is plenty of evidence — both archaeological and anthropological — indicating that the movement from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society resulted in larger families. This is either because the agricultural lifestyle required a larger workforce (which was obtained by having a larger family) or it was because the predictability of the agricultural lifestyle allowed for more children (which was desirable because of the legacy and sense of immortality they created).

However, for women having more children means spending more time in the non-productive state of biological reproduction (i.e., pregnant or recovering from pregnancy). Because women become less productive, they become more dependent on the production of men.

There are two edges to this sword: First, dependence allows for control. To put it in crude terms, if leaving your husband means you’ll starve to death, you effectively can’t leave your husband.

Second, because men are the breadwinners, they have a natural inclination to believe that the resulting wealth belongs to them alone. (Even if, in point of fact, their own productivity is heavily ennabled by their wife’s partnership and the children she is sacrificing her own productivity to bear and raise.) Since it is their wealth — not their wife’s wealth — the desire to make sure it goes to their own child (and not the progeny of cuckoldry) becomes even stronger.

(These impulses, it can be noted, explain the common laws prohibiting women — particularly married women — from owning property. It is a simple and expedient way to make sure that they can’t lay claim to any of the wealth which their husbands believe belongs rightfully to themselves and to their sons.)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This is all simplified to its most basic components, of course. But that’s pretty much inherent in the exercise: We’re looking at the broad similarities created in society and economy by the agricultural revolution. Those broad similarities result in certain cultural patterns, of which the oppression of women is one.

And that’s why the oppression of women appears in tandem with the agricultural revolution, even when cultures are discovering agriculture independently.

On the flip-side, this does lead to the interesting observation that women’s liberation groups first began meeting with widespread success right around the time of the industrial revolution. In other words, the oppression of women appeared with agricultural economies and began disappearing as the agricultural economies gave way to industrial economies.

Is that mere coincidence?

From a philosophical standpoint, the women’s liberation movement is commonly understood to grow out of the Enlightenment-era focus on liberty. But were those philosophies only able to find fertile soil because the economies created by the industrial revolution de-emphasized inheritable property, reduced the need for large families, and made it possible women to obtain gainful employment?

This, ultimately, opens a much larger discussion of whether culture influnces economy; or if its the economy that influences culture. I suspect that, to one degree or another, both are true. I also suspect that it’s probably more insightful to look at how the necessities of an economy create certain social structures, and then look at the cultural impact those social structures have. (For example, the agricultural revolution may have subjugated women, but that subjugation manifested itself in very different ways across a wide swath of cultures and classes.)