politics of Southsea

On Discord and in the comments I got a few suggestions of where to detail on the last map. I figure out I'll sketch out all of them and follow where intuitions lead. The map itself will keep getting revised as I progress. 

The Hyparchy of Tesz is a decaying bureaucratic theocracy facing the religious and political breakaway its major coastal cities, of which the most important (and in order of radicalism) are Ogremount, Dobjek, and Northpass.

 

Ogremount has become the metropolitan center of a trading empire covering much of the South, something perhaps hybrid between the Hansa League and Hudson's Bay Company, and Royal African Company. These functions feed into each other. Galley worked, hard enough that death is likely, are justified as necessary to ply the Summersea, the fjord system with access to prized natural resources. The Summersea is frozen in all but the month of Flowermoon, however.

Northpass and Dobjek are both results of a recent prophetic movement, started by the martyr/heretic Zuzlinka, calling for the sharing of wealth, the end of slavery, and an insistence that all people should be held to "priestly" standards of behavior. In the new Commonwealth of Dobjek this resulted in major reforms and compromises, with the city fathers passing a gradual emancipation law, creating more consultative bodies, and enforcing stricter morality laws. In the Commune of Northpass the saint-communards are both in control and under siege. As a trading city it's long since acquired a population that outstrips the food resources of its surroundings, and the blockade run by Tesz and Ogremount threatens to absolutely destroy the revolutionary government if the issue is not solved in the near future - by 18 Meadowmoon 547, near the end of the year, stores will run out.

The Empire of Slet is perhaps even more doomed than the Hyparchy of Tesz. Its imperial line, its holiness kept pure through centuries of inbreeding, now produces heirs that can only communicate through dueling parties of oracles, and the bonds of the empire now fray. The Protectorate and Viceroyalty both claim to be the true guardians of holy imperial will;in point of fact these represent regional power centers around the cities of Dogsmead and Purestall, both of which wish to control the trade passing through the canals linking up the Southsea with the Great Lake.

And out on the far side of the mountains from Tesz, there's Merezhech - a keep on the borderlands. 

a man, a plan, a map, a calendar

A calendar, emphasis on utility over originality.

Click me, I'm big! Or check out the .map file.

Plan:

1. Pick a region (you tell me which) and start detailing it. Put all those random tables I have lying around in pdfs and bookmarks to good use. Use a leaflet.js thing embedded in Obsidian.
   
2. Create a thing that generates about two pages of lore that roughly corresponds to what a character of a chosen background would know. Worldbuild around this. Start with the 5e backgrounds and then move on to the hundred Knave 2e backgrounds (will certainly almost never get done.) This simultaneously attacks players not wanting to read lore as much as GMs want to write it, player-character knowledge mismatches, enables in-character reasoning, and forces me to think of the setting from a sort of practical proletarian perspective. 
3. ???
4. Maybe run something.

As absurdly ambitious as the idea is, my hope is to be able to work on this in ten-minute increments. With parenthood incoming I'll need to be really deliberate about time, so the goal here is have something I can waste time on that will work as a creative outlet without much setup - or, at any rate, the setup being done now. 

save vs. True Love

In those days people fell in love much more suddenly than at present, as all ancient stories make manifest: it is not a matter of wonder, therefore, that the hearts of the three cavaliers were completely captured; especially as gratitude was added to their admiration; it is a little singular, however, though no less certain, that each of them was enraptured with a [a different one of the three princesses].

- Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra

Being struck by love in the old stories has a few common features:

•  It's "love at first sight," with criteria that may not be entirely shallow - an intuitive sense of the goodness or innocence of the beloved isn't a contributing factor - but definitely include beauty and exclude, say, a shared history of mutual respect and compatible goals
• There's definitely not a presumption that it's reciprocated; that's for you to figure out, kid. The map of lovers and beloved is neither surjective nor injective and certainly not bjective.
  
• Despite the shallowness of its causes, it's not shallow in its effects; you want your beloved to love you back forever. Any basically decent person will want to enter into a mutually happy and permanent marriage with their beloved. Evil tyrants and other bastards with no sense of mutuality will kidnap and abuse the victim of their infatuation, but even they will be frustrated if the beloved  withholds (as they typically do) the assent of their heart even as their body is stolen. 
• There's an unlimited range of language springing from a very limited range of metaphors: to be struck by love is to be enchanted, bewitched, or completed; to be with the beloved is to have the greatest treasure; to be without is to be sick or struck dead.  

Here are a few OSE-comptaible rules, easily adapted to similar systems:

1. When you encounter a potential love, save vs. Spells with advantage to avoid becoming Lovestruck. "Potential" here takes account of age, species, and if appropriate gender; it definitely requires (1) that you not already be Lovestruck and (2) that this is the most beautiful potential love that you've ever seen (or, if you hear them singing unseen, heard). (Hence why the young are so much more likely to be lovestruck than the old, though the latter is still quite possible.) Players are welcome to set in advance criteria for whom their character might fall in love with, but once this is set, it’s down to the throw of the dice, not convenience to the plot or anyone else.
   
2. Marrying your true love is a treasure worth 1,000 gp, doubling every year that they're alive, faithful, in love with you back, and not imperiled. Them ceasing to be any of these things may result in XP debt.
3. If your beloved becomes definitely not alive, faithful, or in love with you back, save vs. Poison each full moon or suffer the effects of a Cause Disease spell. The death of such a disease is a deep depression that can only be cured, of course, by True Love's Kiss, though mournful elf-song, perhaps, can abate it.

With the consent of the lovestruck person only, being Lovestruck can be obviated with a Dispel Magic or Cure Disease.

simple Δiegetic advancement

With apologies to PbtA, Sam's Zouave achievements, and Justin's Quester.

• Whenever failing at a roll gets you in trouble, make a little mark next to it.
  
• Each time you waste more loot than you have before on carousing/charity/training/something else fun, improve all of those things by one. 
• Or if incrementation by one is a huge deal, maybe flip a coin or somethingto see if any given one advances.
  

Technically this is not Mosaic Strict. But it's light and portable and organic and I hope fits the same spirit!

overloading the ability score roll

The best part of 3d6 in order is that you get to spin a story out of the wacky results - okay, so this person has a high str and low con, so they're like, built like one of those resistance-focused athletes that have trouble with long-distance, and they have a high int and low wis, which means... or whatever. 

But sometimes everything is between 8 and 12 and you have to be subtle, and I myself am terrible at subtlety. That's where this chart comes in - you don't even have to roll any new dice!

	STR			DEX
1	waifish	reclines most waking hours	no intuitive sense of Archimedes' principle	klutz	shaky hands	reacts slowly
2	short	asks others to open jars	lifts from back	no sense of rhythm	left-handed (and uses right to conform but has never really developed it)
3	lanky	dominant arm much stronger than the other	often has a sprained muscle	can't pat head and rub belly at same time	missing a finger	easily startled
4	stocky	firm handshake	rises from sitting without hands	can wiggle ears	double-jointed	fidgety
5	barrel-chested	carries around large set of gear	loves to tell people about kegels	can always land on feet	ambidextrous (or left-handed and has learned to compensate)
6	huge	strict lifting regimen	practices yoga	parkour player	reflexively plays cat's cradle	reacts instantly
	CON			INT
1	rare disease	wheezy	fragile bones	illiterate	innumerate	incurious
2	the clap	gets terrible sleep	squeamish	aliterate	forgetful	reflexively credulous
3	sweats profusely	hates exercise	used to comfortable surroundings	uses same phrases over and over	perfectly capable of math, but excuses laziness by being "not a math person"	reflexively dismissive
4	decent immune system from filthy surroundings	raised in mountains	iron liver	keeps journal	memorizes lists and categories	reflexively believes experts
5	never gets the cold	can hold breath prodigiously	gets into bar fights	obsessed with puns	enjoys pointing out fallacies	reflexively suspends judgment
6	gets sick rarely enough that they're unfamiliar with what it feels like	long-distance runner	relishes pain	composes poetry	obsessed with riddle contests	always curious to hear a new argument
	WIS			CHA
1	never dreams	missing an eye	drinking habit	just plain fugly	walks with a slouch	actively tries to alienate people
2	religious skeptic	absent-minded	no tolerance for boredom	halitosis	stutters	cranky
3	religious but not spiritual	colorblind	gets excited for projects and has no follow-through	awkward proportions	opens up on favorite subject	aloof in a studied way, like a pickup artist or sable-clad poet
4	spiritual but not religious	perfect pitch	reflexively refuses to give up	not universally good-looking, but definitely some people's "type"	opens up when drinking	unrelentingly positive
5	prays daily	fastitiously clean due to keen sense of smell	infinite patience	fashion conscious	brashly confident	kind smile
6	prophetic dreams	practiced meditator	ascetic	model-good looks	brashly confident... if the situation requires it	intuitive sense of what others want

Don't roll on everything at once; that way lies madness. But you can pick a few at your leisure that give you a better sense of who this person is to hit the ground running.

classroom teaching and GMing

I've been doing a lot of the first, recently, which is why I haven't done much of the latter, or blogging. (Hooray, not being unemployed!) I'm far from the only person in this sphere who teaches for my day job, so nothing in this is original - but I don't know whether I've seen the analogy enumerated at length elsewhere, so here's a stab at it.

Differences

• Classroom teaching serves purposes other than the mere entertainment of the participant 
• People are coerced into classrooms, which kinda changes everything
  

Similarities

• Classroom teaching and the gaming table are formalized social situations, and in general, you know when that situation is happening or not. These sessions are typically stretched together into something bigger (class ⊆ unit ⊆ course, session ⊆ arc ⊆ campaign) but need not be.
• The classroom and the gaming table feature a distinction between, typically, one participant (the GM or teacher - from here on out, "you") and others. (Rejecting this is seen as avante-garde, or as a different kind of activity.)
• The relationship between you and the other participants is one of *asymmetric antagonism*: you present challenges to them, which they go about solving. Straightforwardly, they want to win the challenges, and "defeat" you. You want them to win, but not without struggle. (The player and the intrinsically interested student wants to struggle, too, but this is a case of what C. Thi Nguyen calls "submerged identity," the player wants to be challenged, and so places themselves in a challenging situation and then tries to solve it with all their might.)
• A major axis of differentiation is the degree to which you present them with material where their input is minimal ("railroading," "direct instruction") vs allow them to set the agenda ("sandbox," "constructivism.")
• Presenting material may involve showmanship, voices, all of the storytelling arts. Despite this, doing too much direct presentation can leave people bored, fidgety, unengaged. 
• Presenting them with lots of agency can be very engaging, but requires more player buy-in, as well as an understanding of how the thing they're working with works. Lacking either can result in "going nowhere," "feeling lost," and the like.
• A second axis of differentiation is how much prep you do, both at the level of the individual session and long-term planning
• You can create your own material from scratch, which is a lot of work
• You can get things from a very active community of GMs/teachers who by and large like sharing content, buy things from a thriving market of content makers, but you'll have to adapt it to your group and to your context.
• You can improvise, which can work well or, well, not well.
• Relationships form in the process, including relationships that can be antagonistic in the actual rather than submerged-agency sense. 
• Good relationships are rewarding in and of themselves
• Bad relationships are miserable in and of themselves and *will* fuck everything else up
• Spotlight management is a thing. Some participants are more participatory by default than others; you want to get everyone involved without drawing people out (much) more than they're comfortable with.
• Knowing the group and its individual members guides all of the decisions above. What are people into, how much energy do they have, etc.
• Surprises in what people are interested in, or what people's energy levels are, means you'll have to throw out prep and shift to improvising on the fly.
• Anything you get from others will likely have to be adjusted to your group
• The crudest method used to manipulate behavior is a straightforward points system.
• Enough buy-in and you can ignore this entirely
  
• It's fun! Also lots of burnout, but still, rewarding and fun! 

Joesky tax