Ancient Economies!

I've been trying to find some decent, reliable information on how, exactly, ancient economies worked. It's a bigger pain in the ass than it seems!

First, obviously, the amount of information on the wars, battles, heroes, and tactics are all covered, in exhaustive detail, across a thousand thousand books. Literally 95% of history books are just about wars and generals and kings and conquerers and I can't blame them (warrior-kings are a whole lot more exciting to read about than prudent and responsible ones), but it does mean that when you're trying to be an armchair trader instead of an armchair general, your options are limited.

So imagine my delight when google revealed to me this treasure: Ancient Economies. Don't let the format fool you; it might be a horribly tacky and poorly formatted Tripod page, but the information within in scholarly, well-researched, and just plain interesting. Did you know that they used to collect gold dust with sheep skins? Me neither, but that's something that's good to know now.

It's pretty in-depth, and I hope there's some good information I can mine out of it.

Redesign And: Tweaking Dead Meaty Guys

I redesigned my blog today, which is something you certainly do not care about, but it is a thing that I care deeply about. The header had been bugging me for a long time, but today's the day I did something about it. Now the blog's sporting a regal dark purple and yellow look. It's like the blog of kings. Except better. You dig?

Anyways. I've been peeking around the corners of my blog (nearly spring cleaning, you know) and I've spotted some old, dusty games that don't seem to have gotten much attention. One of those things, as you know, is AIM FOR THE HEAD.

Now, I believe that AFTH is a decent game. Oh no, not perfect by a long shot, but it reminds me of Dead Meat, which is probably the only zombie game that you can read through in one sitting without your eyes glazing with the remnants of some awful d20 hack that's never been playtested and contains almost no interesting rules. Sorry, let me reel myself in. I like AFTH- it's fresh and easy to play. But it needs some love.

The way zombie infection is handled is great- when you're infected but not killed, you halve your attributes and you're pretty much doomed. And the three stat system (Fight, Flight, and Toughness) means that characters get created in the blink of an eye and when they die, that's ok, because here comes another one. Besides, because in the apocalypse, those three things are pretty much what matters. The pseudo-FUDGE task resolution system set in place is good (but for the next edition, I'm turning it into 1-3 is bad and 4-6 is good, to make it more equivalent to FUDGE and leave out the "on a 2-5, nothing important happens" thing that I forget to deal with), but ultimately flawed. I'll probably replace it with a One-Roll Engine inspired idea if I don't go with pseudo-FUDGE.

The way that Stuff is as abstracted as it is doesn't work for me; I believe the game would be better served by more concrete examples for each category of things that are useful. The fact that I neglected things that help you Flee (bikes, cars, helicopters) is nearly criminal. The fact that there aren't any good rules for "don't make noise or you're boned" is bad. The non-existence of rules for battling hordes is nearly as bad. Something as easy as "when there are multiple zombies, add together their Fight and Toughness and roll it as one enormous organism," and bam, you have zombies that are pathetic one on one and nigh-lethal as a horde.

What few bits of setting information are there would have been better left out, so as to give more of a framework for the game, and I think that the PDF deserves to be expanded to five or six pages. What the game really needs is a section on stuff the GM can do to ramp up tension, because that's completely missing anywhere. The bit about not trusting other survivors? There's absolutely no in-game reason to betray anybody else, and there's no hint of even being able to fuck with the other players. There has to be a bit of tension, and I think a better design than the blank floorplan I came up with would highlight that. Things like in The Walking Dead video game- you have six pieces of food, so who do you give them to? Or even something as simple as: one of the people in your party's been grabbed through the window and is going to be bitten. Do you save them and possibly die yourself, or do you leave them?

That's what's important about a zombie game, not some half-assed hints about Other Survivors or A Cure or Destroying Zombies. The game needs a section about Death, Difficult Choices, and Inevitable Death. The tone should be grim, because there's nothing shittier than being in a world where everybody you know is probably dead.

Still, it's good that it was released even in a half-playable state; even in the resounding silence that followed, it's been just long enough that the faults are clear. It's not what I'd want to play, so why should anybody else want to play it?

Hopefully the next revision is better.

No More Weirdness

Is it too much to ask for a decent game about the West that doesn't include demons, spirits, witches, "steampunk," or any other sort of bullshit?

I guess so, because even a quick google search will give you 90 thousand shit steampunk games, 10 thousand weird west games, and then two Old West games that nobody posted the PDF of and nobody is selling because the world's gone shit-stirring, fuck-faced crazy over "steampunk" because everybody likes the hats and goggles and nobody seems to give two shits what sort of game it involves because they don't plan on playing it anyways.

Like, seriously, just write a game where you can stare down some punks, maybe fend off an Indian raid, gamble with some banditos, and get in a shootout with some assholes. But no, people want their overblown pseudo-anime steampunk more.

No robots or goggles or top hats or giant wrench-swords or phlobotinum rays, just  six-shooters and shotguns and rough frontiersmen. (You can keep the shamans if you want, but I wouldn't.)

Even on Stack Exchange, all they've got is the massive Aces and Eights, which I plan on checking out despite the nut-bustingly thick tome it is in, then some shitty generic games (GURPS, HERO), Coyote Trail, and then the old-n-crusty Boot Hill. That's about it, apparently. The only shining light might be Dust Devils, but c'mon.

Looks like I'll have to strip entire chunks out of, say, Deadlands if I want to get any decent non-supernatural frontier games out.

Hero Quest

This is an allegro version of  Hero Quest  that apparently runs pretty well in DOSBox. I'm putting it here so that I don't lose it anywhere without having to bookmark it.

That's the kind of guy I am.

Owlbear

This is apparently from the D&D Next playtest. While the system seems like a load of shit, at least this picture is pretty cool.

You know, it makes one wonder why there aren't more interesting hybrids of creatures. I mean, all you ever hear about are the human-animal hybrids, but why not owl-squids, or hawk-dogs, or hyena-cats. Well, we sort of have some of those, I guess, but, still.

Less drawings of elves, and more drawings of monsters, say I.

Aleshar: World of Ice

Not anything I'm working on; this game stopped being made in 1997.

When I get DOSBox working on the ol' laptop, I think I'll give it a download. I've never heard of it, but it seems well-made enough. I can forgive it for having tiny graphics if that's its only real flaw. Apparently you're required to use your in-game sextant to navigate, which seems charming, and I do enjoy keyword-based conversations. I think it's an elegant solution to the "I want you to shut up now please" since if you aren't interested in reading you can just click the words, but if you want to know more about the world about you, you can actually read it and ask about things that are only tangentially related.

Also apparently you've got to hunt for food and stuff. It kind of sounds like an old tabletop game, which shouldn't be too surprising. These sorts of games wore their inspirations on their sleeves, after all.

Wonder why I haven't heard of this before.

Ancient Libya in Swords and Wizardry

This could be you, if you work hard enough

If you wanted to play D&D in ancient Africa, what kinds of changes would you have to make?


You'd want to excise the Cleric almost entirely, I think; a warrior-priest with healing magic isn't really a thing in the early African worldview, I don't think. It isn't really in any worldview, when you think about it, but I'm not here to complain about the Cleric. That's for another time.

If you took out the healing spells from the Cleric's list and gave them to the Magic User, you'd have a pretty good mystic or shaman. He'd have the detecting spells (can sense evil spirits), can purify water (an old mystic trick), can charm people (hypnotism), that sort of thing. And since, under Whitebox rules, you don't get actual flashy fireballs and lightning bolts until 5th level, there's really nothing else to change. And honestly, when you're at 5th level, you can throw a fireball once in a while.

I'd probably want to give the mystics something cool they can do, and some sort of ritual or taboo they have to obey. Something like "Must never bathe, but can always find food, given time," or "Must wear white face paint to ward off Bambu-Paku's ghost, but can find water with a dowsing rod." You know, that sort of thing.

Next, you reduce armor choices, but make padded armor more effective, like it historically was. I understand it could block arrows? So give it medium armor statistics, and you're done. You have naked (-0), light (-2), and medium armors(4), and then of course you have shields. Double their value (-2), and you're left with about the same armor values as before, except now everybody's carrying shields.

For weapons, just have everything deal 1d6, since everybody was using knives and spears and bows and slings and they didn't seem to notice too much of a difference between them. It's not important to the game anyways, what weapon does what. Maybe you can give a penalty to crap weapons and a bonus to great weapons, but I think it's fine. Magic weapons can be the only ones to deal extra damage, which suits me just fine.

The Fighter is fine as written, and so is the Thief, if you feel like including that guy. Doesn't really matter; there were sneaks and skulks around just as often as there were archers and spearmen in legends and armies.

Campaigns can be drawn from mythology; there were lots of monsters and spooks and spirits and shit running around their legends, so include a couple. "Mundane" threats like a man-eating tiger are pretty easy too. A curse from a wandering, mad mystic could be a great hook; now you've got to go find the shaman of the next town and get him to lift the curse before it's too late. Or maybe something as universal as "You're being raided! What do you do?"

If you make it long enough, you can raise your own cities. Remember, in ancient times, it wasn't an enormous desert. Ancient Greek travelers knew Libya as an incredibly verdant and fertile region with an ancient and highly civilized people. I don't know of any really good domain rules off the top of my head, but it's certainly more appropriate than continuing to adventure in caves and dungeons and kill chimeras and other beasties. Certainly, B/X has some decent rules, and I think they'd be appropriate enough for our purposes.

Anyways, I've spent far longer on this than I had intended to. Please, enjoy.


Also, on a completely unrelated note: Happy Communism day today, everybody. Yes, on this day in 1848, Karl M. published his famous Manifesto. I'm sure you've heard of it, it was quite popular for a time.

Interest seems to be flagging though, for some reason. Wonder what that's about.