Storms

Its a stormy night in Atlanta. My daughter is upset, talking a mile a minute to my wife about how she is scared of the "litenin' an thunders".

It is as good a time as any to talk about some of my ideas about bringing new life to the environment in Novarium.

People don't think very much about the environment in most medieval RPGs. They go to town, interact with NPCs, make a few rolls to move cross country, go into a dungeon or a new town, and so on. We look at maps from the top down, when in reality at this tech level nobody was doing that. Everything was ground level horizonal view.

There is a great paragraph from Von Clauswitz's On War that reads...

Suppose now a traveller, who towards evening expects to accomplish the two stages at the end of his day's journey, four or five leagues, with post-horses, on the high road—it is nothing. He arrives now at the last station but one, finds no horses, or very bad ones; then a hilly country, bad roads; it is a dark night, and he is glad when, after a great deal of trouble, he reaches the next station, and finds there some miserable accommodation. So in War, through the influence of an infinity of petty circumstances, which cannot properly be described on paper, things disappoint us, and we fall short of the mark.

Travel during this time period is not easy. This is not Vampire the Masquerade where you have cars. The only setting I can think of where travel is rougher than medieval fantasy is post-apocalypse.

Yet, we tend to gloss over this. We abstract it out to a few rolls, or maybe none at all.

I don't think that is a good idea. I think the environment should be it's own character. Just like when the Fellowship tries to go around Moria, it should assert itself.

The obvious answer would be tables. Lots of tables. But I am going to try to avoid that path for sanity's sake. It is not elegant enough for my needs. Instead, I am coming up with a few really cools for the GM to adjudicate environmental interactions using a kind of "scene" methodology. It is flexible and allows the GM to custom tailor the interaction.

More details to come as the system takes shape.