And Then the Gods Went Mad, or I Went Mad or How the Magpie Goddess Returned to Herself?

The pantheons of 19 deities that arise from using the Neoplatonist method from the last post have a logical consistency to them. That logic should drive understandable behaviour by the deities. The gods are perhaps even knowable. The players and their characters can make reliable assumptions about what the gods favour and about how their followers and the organisations they sponsor will behave. They should inform the cultures they preside over. The gods of Fire and Water predictably have different interests and don’t get on. The gods of Fluidity and Solidification have different but opposite concepts of what is “the good.” Even if you allocate different big concepts to different gods they should oversee those concepts in a way that is linked to their key aspects. A Fluidity god of battles would emphasis cunning, deception, manoeuvre, individual skill and the rapid deployment of combined arms. A Solidity focused goddess of battles would emphasis personal endurance, screwing one’s courage to the sticking place and holding the line, bravery grounded in community and fellowship, the grinding out of an attritional battle with victory coming not from lightning wit but from the slow rolling thunder of will.

 

And this shows up in way different faces of battle are conceptualised by warfighters and the cultures that support them. See, for example, this post from the ever excellent BrettDeveraux at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

But the Gods are Mad and the best laid plans o’ mice and men gang oft agley.

I want something that also operates at right angles to the ordered and predictable schema of the 19 Neoplatonic gods. Something that gives the players, GM included, licence to go off piste if they need. So I turn as my second stage to the Magnificent Seven of the Old and Peculiar Knowing Ones.

I like to throw in a couple of groups of Old and Peculiar Knowing Ones (not necessarily old but coming at the key questions of the universe with a different set of eyes, or being gods and goddesses of prophesy, eye).

So I include a triplex of deities concerned with fate, destiny, and the start and end of life, think Fates, Norns, Moirai or Parcae, the auditors and quality assurance of reality. Aloof from the every day, they have no agenda much beyond things unfolding as they ought to unfold. They are the gods that tell other gods “no.”

Then I add a triplex of deities based the regulation of humanities relationships with the deeper truths of the universe. Firstly a god concerned with order emerging from chaos, which I think of as the God of the Corvids (or other birds which might have a link to augury, Sparrows or Larks or if the prophesy you are expecting is that a large stupid violent whackjob will attack you, the God of the Cassowary). This is a god that examines the connections of everything and sees the emergent order underpinning the seemingly random.

 A god of chaos emerging from order, which I think of as the Green Man, a god that questions the narrowness of humanity's concept of order. A god that supports the upturning of apparant order so that random chance can bring renewal.

A god of the proper ordering of the relationship between humanity and magic, the Lady of the Lake. A god that bridges, or perhaps rations, human understanding and the deep divine and deep magic of the world.

These deities exist in the spaces where the other gods abut. They are the friction in the universe, the conversion of all mass and all energy to heat but also of the self-regulation of the universe in deep time. Working up close with humanity they are the flap of the butterflies’ wings.

The last of these seven is a deity whose remit is Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, The Dweller Within and Without, the Walker Between, the Desiderata. A deity whose job is not necessarily to facilitate change but to facilitate the wisdom to tell the difference between what should be met with serenity and what must be changed with courage.

The job of these gods is to use humanity as a tool to regulate the behaviour of the 19 regular gods. Their job at the gaming table is to inject a different point of view and a bit of dramatic tension and chaos to proceedings and to give the players and the player characters interesting choices about how they want to show up.

Next post I’ll talk a little about tutelary deities, the gods and goddesses of things, and perhaps I’ll be blessed by Pens Fontana, the goddess of ink-stained fingers and bloggers.

The Austere Divinity of a Celtic Cross or How to Wrangle Pantheon Neoplatonist Style?

 

This is my how I guide to building a pantheon. It’s not a How To Guide and it’s certainly not a How You Should guide, but I’d be delighted if you stole it.

 

I like a certain sense of order to my worldbuilding. I like to start with some structure, some order, some underlying system or schema and then, if I’m feeling racy, tweak it, perhaps even break some of my own self-imposed rules. I like to live as quickly as road conditions allow and die in bed reading Roger McGough poetry. Anyway, I’ve come up with a template and process for generating pantheons which I call the Celtic Cross method. I’m drawing some inspiration from the Aristotelians, Empedocleans and NeoPlatonists and their ideas on classical elements. That there are four major elements which were either opposed or sympathetic and the combinations of these elements along with a quintessence informed the nature of all things in an orderly or procedural way. Typical Aristotelian. Yet scoff ye not. 

 

 

My method is to define 4 major base elements and work through a process until I have 19 aspects. Each god or goddess will have responsibility for, interest in, or be concerned by some of these Aspects and also for Parts or Facets of Life linked to those aspects.

The 19 Aspects are made up of 4 Major Aspects, 1 Fundamental Aspect and 14 Minor Aspects The aspects are schematically arranged in a cross shape (like Celtic Cross) 

 

 

    1 Major Aspect A or Element (next to Major Aspect B and Major Aspect D, Opposite Major Aspect C)

2 Major Aspect B or Element (next to Major Aspect A and Major Aspect C, Opposite Major Aspect D)

3 Major Aspect C or Element (next to Major Aspect B and Major Aspect D, Opposite Major Aspect A)

4 Major Aspect D or Element (next to Major Aspect A and Major Aspect C, Opposite Major Aspect B)

5 Fundamental Aspect or Quintessence S (in the centre of the Major Aspects A, B, C & D)

6 Minor Aspect (or Property) E Confluence of Major Aspect A and Major Aspect D

7 Minor Aspect (or Property) F Confluence of Major Aspect A and Major Aspect B

8 Minor Aspect (or Property) G Confluence of Major Aspect B and Major Aspect C

9 Minor Aspect (or Property) H Confluence of Major Aspect C and Major Aspect D

10 Minor Aspect (or Property) I Opposition of Major Aspect A and Major Aspect C

11 Minor Aspect (or Property) J Opposition of Major Aspect B and Major Aspect D

12 Minor Aspect (or Property) K Interface Between of Major Aspect A and the Fundamental Aspect

13 Minor Aspect (or Property) L Interface Between of Major Aspect B and the Fundamental Aspect

14 Minor Aspect (or Property) M Interface Between of Major Aspect C and the Fundamental Aspect

15 Minor Aspect (or Property) N Interface Between of Major Aspect D and the Fundamental Aspect

16 Minor Aspect (or Property) O Interface Between of Minor Aspect (or Property) E and the Fundamental Aspect

17 Minor Aspect (or Property) P Interface Between of Minor Aspect (or Property) F and the Fundamental Aspect

18 Minor Aspect (or Property) Q Interface Between of Minor Aspect (or Property) G and the Fundamental Aspect

19 Minor Aspect (or Property) R Interface Between of Minor Aspect (or Property) H and the Fundamental Aspect

So looking at the classical elements of Fire, Earth, Water, Air and a Quintessence such as Time or Aether you would get position A Fire B Earth C Water D Air E Hot F Dry G Cold H Wet. Then extending it for all of the nodes in the scheme I get

Major Aspect A: Fire

Major Aspect B: Earth

Major Aspect C: Water

Major Aspect D: Air

Fundamental Aspect S: Time or Aether

Minor Aspect E: Heat (Confluence of Fire and Air)

Minor Aspect F: Dryness (Confluence of Fire and Earth)

Minor Aspect G: Cold (Confluence of Earth and Water)

Minor Aspect H: Moisture (Confluence of Water and Air)

Minor Aspect I: Balance (Opposition of Fire and Water)

Minor Aspect J: Tension (Opposition of Earth and Air)

Minor Aspect K: Transformation (Interface Between Fire and Aether)

Minor Aspect L: Solidification (Interface Between Earth and Aether)

Minor Aspect M: Fluidity (Interface Between Water and Aether)

Minor Aspect N: Vitality (Interface Between Air and Aether)

Minor Aspect O: Fusion (Interface Between Heat and Aether)

Minor Aspect P: Preservation (Interface Between Dryness and Aether)

Minor Aspect Q: Dormancy (Interface Between Cold and Aether)

Minor Aspect R: Growth (Interface Between Moisture and Aether)

Each deity is given Foundational Aspect of 1 of the 19 Aspects (the main focus of the God or Goddesses attention), a Major Other Aspect which is  a different 1 of the 19 Aspects (a significant but secondary focus of the God or Goddesses attention), then a Specific Aspect of Interest = A different 1 of the 19 Aspects (a important but tertiary focus of the God or Goddesses attention, where they are interested in some Parts or Facets of Life associated with the Aspect)

Drawing on a bit of Laban’s movement theory I also try to use some oppostional descriptions as a foundation for their personality and how they go about their business as a deity.

1 Subtle versus Dense

2 Sharp versus Blunt

3 Mobile versus Immobile

4 Transient versus Persistent

5 Heavy versus Light

6 Vertical versus Horizontal

I’m trying to end up this template filled out for each deity.

 

 

Pantheon Template

1. God or Goddess Name
• Foundational Aspect: [One of the 19 Aspects]
• Major Other Aspect: [Different from Foundational Aspect]
• Specific Aspect of Interest: [Different from Foundational and Major Other Aspect]
• Opposed Aspect: [Different from Foundational, Major Other, and Specific Aspect of Interest]
• Areas of Interest:
• Foundational Aspect: [Significant Parts or Facets of Life]
• Major Other Aspect: [Significant Parts or Facets of Life]
• Specific Aspect of Interest: [Significant Parts or Facets of Life]
• Minor Aspects (4 minor Parts or Facets of Life): [Reasons for patronage]
• Personality Description:
• Subtle versus Dense: [Choose one]
• Sharp versus Blunt: [Choose one]
• Mobile versus Immobile: [Choose one]
• Transient versus Persistent: [Choose one]
• Heavy versus Light: [Choose one]
• Vertical versus Horizontal: [Choose one]
• Outlook on Existence and Role as a Deity: [Description]
• Origin Story: [Description].

 

This gives a deity with some areas of concern where they are the lead deity, some areas where they share or overlap responsibility and some areas where they oppose some other deity yielding tension, conflict, overlap, collaboration, opposition and orthogonal engagement.

I’ve run this process for aspect sets for 4 Major Aspects and a Quintessence

1)    Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Time (Classical elements)

2)    Love, Fear, Joy, Anger Dependability, Empathy (emotions)

3)    Void, Matter, Energy, Consciousness, Reality (states of existence)

4)    Wisdom, Curiosity, Understanding, Knowledge.  Intellect (mental acuity)

5)    Justice, Mercy, Honor, Compassion, Virtue (ethical compass)

6)    Liberal, Authoritarian, Collectivist, Individualist, Political (political compass)

I’ll post some examples of the outcome in subsequent posts.

This process gives a nice, structured logical schema for a pantheon, which to be honest sounds more like humanity than the divine. It needs some mess, some arbitrariness, some Madness of the Gods. I’ll cover that in the next post

A Halfling Baker's Dozen or What Is This Blog About?

What is this blog about? What even is this? Why, and more importantly, wherefore?

It is about my relationship with the design of table top roleplaying games. I have 5, or maybe 6, probably 7 projects underway at the moment where I try to develop roleplaying game tools for fun and profit. More accurately, for fun and understanding, for wisdom bringeth more profit than gold, even in a gold for XP system.

I am going to undertake half-a-dozen RPG related projects to help me understand the design principles of roleplaying games. It would be nice if these project lead to something useful and tangible or engagement with other people but mostly these are my notes about what I’m thinking and learning about RPGs. I’m going to try and write these as if they were for an external audience. Two reasons, firstly a bit of self-discipline, secondly, if anyone wants to engage I’d like them to have something of a reasonably quality to engage with.

A common feature in my work is the use of procedural generation as a tool to provoke improvised structured content. I want to be able to produce useful gameable content. Content which supports player lead engagement whilst reducing the burden of preparing and running that content and supports collaborative and imaginative emergent gameplay.

Let’s see if that turns out to be a manifesto or an indulgence.

Over the next few years I am going to pursue the following RPG projects

Pavements and Princes – the eponymous and original purpose of this blog. Pavements and Princes is a project to develop a system agnostic ruleset for generating and operating urbancrawls as a sandbox campaign. I’d like to be able to support someone running a West Marches style hexcrawl campaign or a Barrowmazes dungeoncrawl style campaign in a city. I was tempted to call it Easthome. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps one day my sons and brothers will. What I think makes this different from Dungeon 11011 and Hexnut is that I don’t think a fully worked up set of processes exist for urbancrawls. They are the most under developed of the three milieu. Let's see if that is a problem with the author or the material.

Dungeon 11001 is my spin off from failing to get very far with Dungeon 23. This is my project to collect or develop a toolkit for generating, presenting and running a sandbox dungeoncrawl, at least a small one. This was my intent with the original Dungeon 23 and one of the reasons why I didn’t make much actual progress with that. I was distracted by trying to understand the how and why and wherefore rather than generating any actual content.

The Octarchy is my RPG setting project. It’s an Italian Renaissance themed Old School Revival setting with an emphasis on espionage, intrigue, trade, factionalism, the seeking out of new knowledge and lands and the industrialisation of magic. I want to poke around in the design principles of what makes a setting work and the design choices you can make to make a setting easy and compelling to take to the gaming table.

Walk on Part in a War is design project for a series of adventures. These adventures share two common elements. Thematically they all involve the player characters starting as minor players in a wider more complex conflict. They are also what I am going to call Unfolding Fractal adventures. That is adventures that start with an initial scenario and a set of procedures to generate longer, deeper enduring content that the players can interact with and the player characters can inhabit.

Chassis is my attempt at an RPG ruleset. This is definitely one that I’m doing to understand the way RPG’s work. I want to come up with a working set of rules for a crunchy semi-classless fantasy-themed RPG system. I’m currently looking at magic systems and skill systems and how character advancement can follow a Do It to Advance It ethos. If it works I'll be, more baffled than surprised.

Lastly, Hexnut, which is to hexcrawls what Pavements and Princes and Dungeon 11001 are urbancrawl and dugeoncrawl sandboxes. Like Dungeon 11001 plenty of material already exists, so this is more a project about me finding it, understanding it and applying it as a tool to help me codify it for me.

So that’s what this blog is about, a half-a-dozen projects to help me work out how to be the sort of the roleplaying game designer that I want to be by learning how RPG systems work by building my own.