Developing a New Campaign Setting: Tagentium Map Finished

Finalized my map of the starting town for my DCC campaign. It was interesting how I began finding a story to match the map.

The west side of the map is the older part of the city and the one where the patrician families are most likely to be found. The buildings are made of brick and concrete, the streets are all paved, and there are many pleasant garden areas to be found. One can see the palace of the administrator of the island, the Comes Fraterculus. Nearby is the old market, still in use where one can find more luxury goods.



The eastern half of the town is the newer part though it is also not in as good shape. A century ago the town was sacked by barbarians and the walls were breached with much of the town destroyed. It was rebuilt, though many of the eastern half of Tagentium consists of wooden buildings and dirt streets. There's a lot less planning to be found on this side of the river as well, with nice back alleys for cutpurses. We've also got the main market and church to the monotheistic deity (in development).

The southeast part of the city is the most rundown, used primarily by fishermen and slaves for the fields to the east of the city. Instead of the solid stone wall protecting the rest of the city it is protected by a "temporary" wooden palisade. There are plans to fully extend the wall but nothing has come of that save a gatehouse and towers which look absurd rising above the rotting palisade.

The island at the mouth of the river has a temple to the former patron of the city, the god Neptune. Though the old religion is no longer the state religion it is still highly revered with a significant minority clinging to the old gods.

I eyeballed the population to be 3,600. This is on the low side for the number of buildings but I wanted to stay in keeping with the urban depopulation that the western half of the Roman Empire experienced in real history. It makes for some ancient abandoned houses that can be used for a quick adventure. I tried to have a compromise between the more planned cities that the Romans built with the more chaotic cities of the Middle Ages. One problem with a lot of gaming maps of pseudo-medieval cities is the amount of open space they have - buildings tended to be crammed as tight together as possible. Streets weren't really planned but were more just a default use of the space between buildings, some main thoroughfares excluded - and often that required enforcement to stop buildings from creeping onto main streets. Even the slums to the southeast are probably a bit more open than a medieval town or city would be.

I'm not certain how much adventure I'll be having in this town - my plan has been to move to the larger Kraken Isle with its Venice-like city but this seemed a useful practice exercise for practicing my urban map-making abilities.

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Developing a New Campaign Setting: The Town of Tagentium

Some dental "fun" (I wonder if clerics can fix teeth) and work-related issues have forced me to delay kicking off my DCC campaign by two weeks. During that time I've been doing some reading on late Antiquity and noodling around with my setting. As I've mentioned previously, my game's feel is inspired by the decades following the fall of the western Roman Empire. I'm not looking to create a 100% historical analogue. But there's a lot about it that screams D&D. You've got your barbarians kingdoms. You've got the eastern half of the fallen Empire that still considers those lost lands part of its territory (paging Emperor Justinian). Now we'll be adding to the mix the undead, dragons, sorcerers, and the like.

I've been giving some thought to the starting town of the game, currently named Tagentium. The idea is the game begins on a small island close to a much larger island. I've not been planning on developing it too much as I expect play will move off the smaller island, Little Brother, after a few adventures. But with a little bit of extra time I've had some time to fool around - a lot of it being an excuse to play with Campaign Cartographer's City Designer add-on. I've done well at overland maps and dungeon maps but I've never been all that good at designing cities. Working on a town has made me think about some elements from the larger campaign. Using S. John Ross' Medieval Demographics article he describes a town as having a population of one to eight thousand, typically around 2,500. They usually are not walled but for this exercise I decided to make a walled town - given the recent violence a walled coastal town seems a reasonable assumption.

After some experimenting I found a map style I liked. I wanted to get a basic idea of what the town looked like and I'm far from complete but I felt sharing a work-in-progress might be illuminating. As with most drawings you can see a bit more if you click on it. Looking at it I realized I was a bit inspired by the town of Threshold in the D&D Expert Rules. Tagentium is at the end of a small river on the island of Little Brother. Keeping with my idea of a town founded during a Roman Empire-like period it has its own amphitheater. You can also see a palace for the ruler of the town and a large building to the east of the river which is a church. I'm still in the process of drawing out the streets. I started out with the main streets which are better planned than the unpaved side-streets. The main streets have buildings made out of concrete whereas the side streets also have wooden buildings. In the empire this would probably once have been unheard of but one of the things that suffered in Western Europe in our world after the fall of Rome was the massive civil engineering of the Empire. I'm guessing this town has been sacked a few times and some of its original concrete buildings have been replaced with lesser quality buildings.


The presence of a church has me thinking about the religion of the Empire. On our world both halves of the Roman Empire were officially Christian by the time of the fall of the west. It should be noted there were some massive doctrinal disputes that made the Christian religion far from unified, many of them concerning the divine vs. mortal nature of the Christ. Interestingly, my readings has taught me that the barbarians who came to rule over the lands of the western empire were typically Christian though the common people were often pagan. For this campaign I'm going to assume that the Empire did indeed move towards a monotheistic religion. I believe this is also in keeping with some of the assumptions of AD&D - consider for example the illustrations of clerics in raiments reminiscent of Christian priests. However, I'm thinking it would be interesting for it to have been less than universal and in this campaign, like in our world, the barbarians have still to have been converted. Plus I'd like to make some use of Roman religious beliefs - my research revealed all sorts of things about Pluto, Orcus, and Dispater that I'm planning on using in my first adventure. As far as the monotheistic religion goes I'm keeping it vague until the game starts - if a player wants to be a cleric of this religion I'd like to give him an opportunity to have some say in it.

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Developing a New Campaign Setting - Welcome to Kraken Isle

I've spent a bit of free time working out the details for my campaign setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics. It actually took a bit of debate going back and forth between that and Adventurer Conqueror King System. In the end I decided on DCC, largely due to its somewhat lighter workload for the Judge, though I definitely want to run or play a game of ACKS at some point. I've posted some previous musings on this setting and this may contradict some of them - as the game gets closer to its first session the setting is becoming more concrete as some ideas are modified or discarded.

As I mentioned previously I'm inspired by what I consider to be TSR's old "mini-sandbox" adventures. I don't foresee running a "true" sandbox game with everything wide open but I do want to incorporate a large element of player control. This is what I observed TSR doing in several of their early adventures. While the Lendore Isle series of adventures remains a big inspiration, I am going with a time period of Late Antiquity instead of the Middle Ages as the inspiration for the feel of the cultures. To me that seems more true to the "Appendix N"-ishness of DCC. It seems a setting that has barbarian tribes, decadent cities, slave markets, battles between city-states, and ancient ruins.

I've been bouncing back and forth between starting the game on an island chain off the coast of a main continent or one in a sea resembling the Aegean branch of the Mediterranean. Regardless, I've mapped out the islands themselves:

You can click on it for a bigger version of the map. I'd originally named it Chronos Isle, named after the Greek god of time (and an homage to Lendore Isle from the World of Greyhawk, named after the Suel god of time). However, one of my players got a look at the island and immediately called it "Cthulhu Island". I wasn't about to rename it that but it did get me thinking about its squid-like look which led me to renaming it "Kraken Isle". The main port is on the bay at the northwest quadrant of the island - Rel Kelenan. The naming style is inspired by the World of Greyhawk's Great Kingdom, which often prefixed Aerdy city names with "Rel". This is definitely a city, albeit a smaller sized one, possibly akin to early medieval London in size. I decided I wanted it to have a little bit of character so it is built over a lagoon and therefore resembles Venice in character, with traffic going along its canals and providing protection from ay marauders and invading armies. There are several villages and towns in its vicinity to support the city with crops and there is a another grouping of settlements on the island around Turin's Pasture, on the other side of the Central Highlands. There isn't as much trade as there might be between the two groupings given the marauding tribes that dwell in the woods and mountains of Kraken Isle.

Lets talk about the marauding tribes. If you're like me, when you read that you probably pictured orcs and goblins. (Or you came here to learn about illegal drugs of the 1970s, one of the oddest search terms to ever reach this blog...) James Raggi's The Random Esoteric Creature Generator makes a most excellent suggestion regarding humanoids (and demi-himans):

Eliminate them from the game. If it has two legs and two hands, remove it and replace it with humans. The important thing is – don’t change the cultures or characterizations involved! The ones that were “dwarves” are now mining clans, short and stocky, the “elves” are forest-dwelling hunters, “orcs” are remorseless and savage barbarians, etc. Perhaps they should even keep their special racial abilities (now labeled “cultural abilities”), although it might be difficult to justify seeing in the dark. But really, is there any reason to use an ogre when a human warrior with a few levels on him will do? Is that adding to the danger, the suspense, or the mystery of the game? Details don’t even have to be changed in doing away with non-humans. Normal unclassed humans have roughly the same stats as goblins in most of the individual systems, so there would be no real balance issues in doing this. Don’t make the converted humanoids any more cultured, either.

Raggi indicates going this far out may not be for everyone:

Such issues may not be of interest to every referee or player group. And perhaps the classic fellowship of characters as presented by Tolkien, his peers, and followers is the basic lure for fantasy gaming in the first place. Fine. Use the races, but go back to the source if you do so – Tolkien brought his races together only in the direst of circumstances. 

Assuming a humanocentric focus to the game, every other demihuman and humanoid should be very rare. This does not mean limiting your players’ character choices! Let them be as they wish, but a referee should always be sure that the players are aware that their non-human characters are unusual and never trusted by more superstitious members of the population.. The average human never came into contact with elves or dwarves.

Raggi also goes on to discuss how humanoids such as orcs and goblins appeared only rarely in Tolkien and in special areas. This is a model I want to use. I want to include the classic races (species really, but the term race is perhaps unavoidable in gaming) but I want them to be special. Where are they on my island? I don't know. If there are no PCs of the given race they might not even be there. As far as orcs and goblins go, I'm going to hold off using them at the start. That doesn't mean I won't be using the stats for such races as he suggests if I need quick stats for brigands or barbarians. But I want to save orcs and goblins to be the servant of some wicked sorcerer who may have been responsible for their creation in the first place.


So back to the island. It is nominally part of the empire on the mainland but the empire isn't likely in the best of shape and is far-off. It isn't going to be sending troops to help with marauding humanoids in all likelihood. The ruler of Rel Kelenan is in charge of the archipelago but his control is limited to the settlements - the regions between are wild. And his control of the settlements isn't incredibly powerful either, given his lack of ability to clear the island of threats. But it is a good place for adventurers, with a volcano-destroyed city in the center of the island and ruins to the north reclaimed by wetlands.

But this scope is still a little on the large size. Which brings us the island known as "Little Brother" to the south of the island. I sized it so I would be able to map it in its entirety at a small scale. The map shown here is at a scale of one mile per hex.

The hex grid is a little tough to make out unless you click on the image to see it at actual size. Little Brother is an island that is lightly settled along its southern side with a main town and several villages close to it. To the north I created contours to show a hilly forested region that surrounds a swamp. Some ruins in both the swamp and the hilly region with bad reputations. To me this felt like a starting point for low level adventurers.

However, I'm a constant tinkerer and to be honest I was less than thrilled with the way the map came out. I liked how Kraken Island came out (using Campaign Cartographer) but the map I generated for Little Brother didn't quite feel right. So I went ahead and traced an image of it into Hexographer and tried making a pure hex map, making use of contour lines to show different degrees of hilly and mountainous terrain. I liked this result a bit better:

Again it needs to be expanded to see it in detail. Interestingly, when I tried to generate the map in Hexographer initially I had little luck - my creativity wasn't sparked. However when I started with a Campaign Cartographer 3 drawing as my starting point I found I was better equipped to make the map I wanted to of Little Brother.

My plan is for the characters to begin on Little Brother and those who survive will make it to 1st level. They will in short order go adventuring on the larger Kraken Isle, allowing me to exchange a tiny sandbox for a medium sized one.


One final note. My DCC campaign is currently scheduled to start on Monday June 25 at 7 PM Eastern Time using Google Hangouts. We probably have room for another player if anyone is interested - give me a holler.

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Fantastic Real-World Terrain

White Mountains of New Hampshire

Having lived most of my life in Connecticut and Massachusetts, there's certain things that come to my mind when I think of "wilderness". First and foremost, there's trees. In most fantasy settings there are certain sections of the map labelled as "forest". Here in southern New England one gets the feeling were it not for urbanization, pretty much every "hex" would be forest terrain.

Moving further north to northern New England we find ourselves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Green Mountains of Vermont. Before having kids, my wife and I would go hiking in the White Mountains several times each spring and summer. There the terrain was very forested and very mountainous - no surprises there. You'd have tree-covered mountains and more rocky mountains, such as what you'd find in Franconia Notch. The notches themselves are the valleys between ridges of mountains. For me it is one of the most beautiful and relaxing places to go to.

Given it is what I know it tends to be what I think of when I'm designing a fantasy setting. And I'm not alone. When one things of a fantasy realm like Middle Earth you've got forests such as Mirkwood, lots of mountain ranges, rivers running through them, etc. There's nothing particularly wrong with that - these are places that exist in the real world after all.

However, over the past few years I've been tinkering with making use of terrains that I'm not familiar with. The mountains I think of aren't the snow-capped peaks of the younger Rocky Mountains. I've tended not to make maps with vast plains on them like those that can be found in the United States nor have I made much use of badlands like one can find in Montana. Swamps have a tendency to be a wetland near the coast vs. a location for entire campaigns.

I'm not going to enumerate every type of interesting terrain in this posting. "Alien" terrains tend to vary in any case - someone from Nevada is going to have a very different idea of what looks unusual than someone from Maine. But what I will do is run through a few terrains that my google-searches and perusals of wikipedia have given me ideas to reflect upon.

Stella Lake, Great Basin (Public Domain)

Great Basin

One of the places that just looks incredibly odd to my New England eyes is the Great Basin which dominates much of Nevada. Made up of what is called the Basin and Range topography it has incredibly varied terrain. From a reading of wikipedia on the Great Basin we learn that the lowest point in North America, within Death Valley, is within 100 miles of the highest point in the 48 contiguous states, Mount Whitney. 

Black Rock Desert Field Utah
(Creative Commons, David Jolley)

Made up of varying low and high points (hence the term basin and range), the Great Basin has deserts such as the Mojave Desert and it also has woodlands. These are not the woodlands we usually picture elves inhabiting, but often more shrublike terrain such as Pinyon-Juniper Woodalnds.

Pinyon-Juniper Woodland Example
(Creative Commons, John Phelan)

This is the sort of terrain I often picture in the opening chapters of Stephen King's The Gunslinger as Roland begins his journey in the Mohaine Desert. I can visualize dwarves dwelling under mountains mining for their gold, valley-dwelling halflings, semi-nomadic humans, elves, and humanoids. Its a land where the terrain can prove deadly as characters keep a close eye on their provisions and on extremes of weather. It makes for a good place to have abandoned settlements. It also seems a good place for a borderland between civilization and the wilds or between two rival nations.

Okefenokee Swamp

Okefenokee Swamp
(Creative Commons)

As it turns out, rivers don't just get their start from mountains. The Okefenokee Swamp, straddling Florida and Georgia, is drained by the Suwannee and St. Marys Rivers.

Let's talk a little bit about wetlands. That source of wisdom tells us there are four types of wetland - swamps, marshes, bogs, and fens. All of them represent land that is saturated with water.

• Swamp - A forested wetland, usually found along rivers or lakes where periodic flooding helps provide nutrients for the trees.
• Marsh - A wetland dominated herbaceous plant (plants with leaves and stems that have no woody stem above ground).
• Bog - A wetland that accumulates peat (dead plant matter), typically found in cooler climates.
• Fens - A wetland defined by its neutral or alkaline water chemistry, usually dominated by grasses.

Canoe Map (Creative Commons,
Scott Breshears)

So with that out out the way, lets talk about the Okefenokee Swamp. It is truly a swamp, with large forested areas over a watery terrain. It isn't all forested, with islands consisting of dry prairies and more wet prairie areas.

One thing that struck me about the Okefenokee Swamp is its inhabitants were so isolated that elements of Elizabethan English remained in their speech until well into the 20th century. From a gaming perspective, for some reason that gives me an image of elves who have lived there for millennia, largely unchanged as empires rise and fall around them.

The Okefenokee also has its own collection of wildlife, including your friendly American alligator. I'm betting black dragons would love it there.

Göreme, Cappadocia

Fairy Chimneys (Creative Commons,
Benh Lieu Song)

Göreme is a town within Cappacocia, located in modern Turkey. It is located among what is referred to as "fairy chimney" rock formations, or to use the proper term, hoodoos. These are thin spires of rock protruding from basins or badlands. They are rather abundant in Utah and in Road Runner cartoons.

Göreme (Creative Commons Bjørn Christian Tørrissen)

The reason I chose the fairy chimneys of Göreme is that its inhabitants realized the chimneys could be carved to contain houses and other buildings. In the image to the right you can see a mix of traditional buildings and buildings carved right out of these chimneys. This is the sort of place that just screams adventures, lost tombs, etc.

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