New Sage Tables, Starting with Cleric

Okay, something new.  Something other than maps.

I am more than aware that I need desperately to get my sage skills concept in better order, while attempts the last few years to do so have been inadequate or misconceived.  I think at last I have a simple solution, and one that can be tweaked over time, particularly with the help of the players.  The initial construction of the rules are going to be hell, however.  That was predictable.  What I like about it now is that a) it clearly defines what a player can know; b) it offers a decision-making angle for the player; and c) as the players think of questions to ask, the question types can be fitted into the existing system, upgrading it steadily.

Here is the rule I've done some work on since yesterday:

FIELDS, SPECIALTIES & STUDIES

A field is a sphere of activity or interest that covers a wide range of knowledge. Each field is comprised of specialties, which are distinctive lines of inquiry or interest. Possible specialties which the cleric does not choose are called studies. Studies within the cleric’s field are called field studies, and those outside the field are called non-field studies.

For example, from the list below, a cleric chooses ‘The Church’ as their field and ‘history’ as their specialty. This would mean that heraldry (etc.), politics & geneology and religious architecture would all be ‘field studies.’ All the other possible subjects, such as art & music, heroes or divination, would be ‘non-field studies.”

Clerics possess four fields: The Church, Legends & Folklore, Power and Theology. The studies within these fields are listed below:

The Church: 1) heraldry, signs & signals; 2) history; 3) politics & geneology; 4) religious architecture
Legends & Folklore: 1) artifacts; 2) beasts; 3) demi-gods; 4) gods; 5) heroes
Power: 1) divination; 2) dweomercraft; 3) medicine; 4) the outer planes
Theology: 1) art & music; 2) astronomy & astrology; 3) law & customs; 4) philosophy & ethics

At 1st level, clerics gain one field, and one specialty within that field. This reflects the knowledge that the cleric was able to gather while studying their religion within monasteries and libraries. This knowledge is then expanded as the cleric increases in level, for it is presumed that the cleric is naturally inquisitive, glancing through books, chatting with other persons along roads or at the inn, even if the character never expresses their intention to gather knowledge.

The knowledge is measured by points, awarded to all possible studies, though in different amounts. The cleric’s chosen specialty is awarded 12 points; each field study is awarded 1d8, which the cleric rolls; and non-field studies are each awarded 1d4.

Upon gaining a level, the cleric increases all non-field studies by 1d4; field studies by 1d8; and specialties (for later on the cleric gains others) by 1d12.

At 5th level, and every four levels thereafter (9th, 13th, 17th, etc.), the cleric gains an additional specialty from the cleric’s field studies (that is, within the cleric’s present field). At that point, the cleric begins rolling a d12 for additional level gains in that specialty. Suppose that a given field study rated 15 points at 4th level, the cleric having rolled 4d8 up until then. At 5th, the cleric chooses that study as a new specialty; a d12 is then rolled (for gaining a level) and added to the original 15.

At 7th level, and every six levels thereafter (13th, 19th and 25th), the cleric gains an additional field. All the studies in that field henceforth become field studies, and increase at 1d8 per level. Clerics may choose additional specialties from any field they possess.

For every 10 points of a cleric possesses in any study, the cleric is entitled to one piece of knowledge about persons, places, objects, creatures, living things or features, the exact knowledge depending upon a) the chosen study; and b) the competence of the cleric.

Competence is graded as follows: possessing 10-19 points in a study defines an enthusiastic amateur; possessing 20-39 points defines an authority; possessing 40-79 points defines an expert; and having 80 points or more defines a sage.

The questions that can be answered, depending upon one’s competence, are listed below. Note that knowledge is not meant to provide any special ability or power. It is employment of knowledge, not the knowledge itself, that offers power through the creation of tactical planning. Some of the below studies, such as astrology. will offer minor skills gained from continued study.

Art & music
Amateur: century of creation, continental origin, means of creation
Authority: name of the creator, quality, regional origin, meaning of symbolism
Expert: monetary value, social importance of work
Sage: hidden qualities, magical relationships

Artifacts
Amateur: recognition of artifacts and items of magic
Authority: capability (melee, magic, etc.), implementation (sans result), regional origin
Expert: identify minor power (sans specifics), origin story, purpose of creation, previous user
Sage: identify primary power, identify special condition, name of creator

Astronomy & Astrology
Amateur: navigate by stars, recognize heavens, superior use of a telescope
Authority: calculate date & time, read & design birth chart
Expert: predict cosmic events; read daily astrological charts
Sage: detect invisibility; recognize non-terrestrial life

(... more to follow)

That is only three topics out of seventeen possible for the cleric ... and then there's a host more for the druid, mage and illusionist to be done.  Please keep in mind that this blog is for ongoing work.  As such, I am certainly interested in feedback or the need to clarify the above rules.  If anyone has any additional questions for the three topics listed (I'll post as I work on additional topics) then shout them out.  I won't use every suggestion, but I'm certainly interested in considering anything thrown out.

As I said, the games themselves that I run will provide plenty of ideas, I'm sure.

Oh, I should add that at the end, a page with all 17 studies will need to be added to characters, so that all the point values can be generated, then increased every time a level is gained.  There's no knowledge that can be gained from having less than 10 points of a subject, but by 2nd to 4th level, a cleric would probably acquire a number of possible topics to inquire about.

Around the B-Ring

I have been working on maps, but there hasn't been much time to post them.  On Saturday, I got completely around the world (with the B-Ring).  So here are those maps (note the pretty maps are on the bottom):

The eastern extension of Baffin island, which comprises no more than isolated villages.  Like
most of these maps, this will look much more familiar when the coast line is added. 

Across the Davis Strait from Baffin, this is the first real coastline that's emerged since Russia.  This
is the west coast of Greenland, which looks busy - but remember the hexes are 20 miles wide
and are therefore still mostly empty.  The three pink hexes on the far right represent a
piece of Greenland's east coast.

This is the Denmark Strait between the east coast of Greenland and Iceland.  That's Iceland on the
right.  The orange line is the 30th parallel west, and the remaining bits are the east coast of
Greenland.  Nearly all the way around.

And this is the east end of Iceland.  I'm not sure what that bit is higher up, left of centre; I'm fairly certain
it's Greenland stretching towards the east.  Jan Mayan land, for those who might be interested,
should be somewhere on the right hand side - but it has no permanent habitation, so
until I create coastlines for this map, it won't appear.

And this is the coast of Norway above Tromso, with part of Sweden to boot.  This part HAS been
made, and what a difference.  I remember how nasty was that coastline when I drew it - and then again
when I upgraded this map.

This, of course, is northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, with part of the Kola Peninsula of Russia.
The eastern shoreline around the White Sea is mostly occupied by an Elven Kingdom, Ulthua,
while northern Sweden is dominated by Gnomes.  But its a comfort that the left areas on this map,
Lansi, Nordland and Angermanland, are parts of human Sweden and Norway.

Last map; this is mostly the Gnoll Kingdom of Bjarmaland, divided between Glu'Bak, Gaa'Kaa and
Yak'Margug.  As a reminder, the darker gray areas are barren mountains, the lighter gray are
barren tundra and the yellow are muskeg swamps.  Jotunheim, at the top, is mythically
the Kingdom of the Frost Giants.  I haven't had anyone visit yet.

Going all the way around the world, then, that's 18 maps in the B-Ring.  The C-Ring will have 24.  Which is to say I haven't hardly begun to add maps ... but most of the ones above did not take much time, just plotting the few occupied hexes on a big empty nothing.  The coastlines for those will take MUCH longer.

Remember that these are pretty big maps - 600 miles by 700.  Yet it takes many dozens to even map the upper part of the globe. Thankfully, much of the globe is covered by empty ocean, which does not require detailed coastlines or even islands.  The B-Ring is, I think, the only one where all the way around the globe there are no sea-only maps.

But of course I'll have to see.

Empty Maps in Canada

So little to show, so little to show.  Was working heavily on my book last night.  Worse, I am working my way across northern Canada, which is sadly bereft of inhabitation:

It's very difficult even to imagine what part of the world this might be.  In fact, it is an area called
the Barren Grounds, stretching across what was once the Districts of Mackenzie and Keewatin,
 largely taken up by Nunavut today.  Empty.  Staggeringly empty. 

And this ... the 90th Parallel west, which would be approximately the north-west shore of Hudson Bay,
which I can use the European name for because it was discovered 40 years before the time of my world.  The map
(I think) would also include part of Baffin Island, along with Foxe Basin and the island of Southampton.
I wonder what on earth a party would be doing here?

City Workbooks, with Maps B-11 & B-12

There are a couple of maps further down, that I'm adding as I continue to work my way east around the world, between 62 and 73 degrees north. First, I've been doing some prep work for Spain, with the expectation of mapping it, and a very little bit of research work for Britain (specifically Ireland); those files can be found on the wiki.

A lot of the work I do has no immediate sexy impact, which is part of the reason I wanted to start this blog. I wanted to give a sense for how much time some of these things take, plus the fairly worthless way I spend my life (heh heh).

I admit that I probably do spend too much time mapmaking, when I could be working on redesigning the spells or characters like I was last year, or getting myself together to get work done on upgrading the monsters - but heck, I like maps. So here they are:

Here is the 60-degree turn in the hex map that matches the 150th Parallel west (or as I call it, 210 E).  This cuts
right through the middle of Alaska.  The square in the upper left is the previous map, B-10, overlapping.  The
top of the map would be the Beaufort Sea.

A dismal map, for certain.  Only the left side of the map is actually taken up by the Yukon territory.  The
drift of inhabited hexes (pink) from the bottom right to top middle follows the giant Mackenzie River, which
I'll end up calling something else for my D&D world ... if I ever figure out just what lives here.
A lot of big animals, probably.  And maybe stone giants.

Tunguska III & East

Over the weekend, apart from other activities, I worked on the five maps below.  I'll write some notes for each to help them make sense:



Tunguska, completed.



Immediately east of Tunguska, the Arctic Ocean coast has been added to the top of the map;
The large white vertical area in the centre is the Verkhoyansk Range in Siberia, known to be one
of the coldest places on earth. 

The diagonal rectangle in the upper left is where the Verkhoy map overlaps this one, which has the
150th East parallel through the center.  The map turns 60 degrees at is point.  The cluster of pink
hexes on the left is the Indigirka River basin; the cluster of pink hexes on the right is the
Kolyma River basin, the largest source of gold in the world outside of South Africa.

This seems very much like a group of scattered dots, I know; this is east of the Indigirka/Kolyma basins
(the Kolyma River debouches into the Arctic where there's a cluster of pink hexes at the top left).
On a map, you might be able to identify this with the narrowing of the eastern stretch of Siberia
between Kamchatka and the Arctic Sea.

This is the meeting between the far eastern point of Siberia and Alaska.  Alaska is on the right, and the
coastline for it can be dimly grasped if you're familiar with it.  The extension of Russia is more clear,
mostly because (I think) Russia was more adamant about settling people in forced camps along
the Bering Sea, where today they exist as a string of fishing villages.

I grant, not the most interesting of maps.  It does give a sense for how BIG the empty stretches of Siberia really are ... and that even at this latitude, it takes 18 maps at 20 miles a hex, and 30 hexes a map, to go around the world.  I'm always struck by how truly big the whole world is, and how much of a task I took on in daring to map it to this scale.  Still, it's a labour of love, so it's all good.

For awhile longer I'm going to be making this sort of map, just tagging the individual hexes for the data I have for each, as it helps with both my organization and setting something up on the fly, if needed.  In awhile I'll be swinging back around to Europe and then moving one map ring south.

(Incidentally, as an aside, the bottom of these maps is about 62.5 degrees north).

Coastline Mapping

Cooked this up today to demonstrate the technique I use for making the coastlines on my hex maps, those I've been posting all week:

Tunguska II

So, I should put up an old picture of what Tunguska had looked like, before changes:

Funny that, formerly, I liked the strong colors ... but since, I've changed my mind about it.  Gets to be hard looking on the eyes.

Here's today's image, after the work done since posting yesterday:

The right half of the map, where it is white, would represent the western edge of Yakutia, or 'Yakutsk' as the RISK board calls it.  This is the border between what I've mapped and what I haven't ... so that much of this map, all that which is right of the hard gray line down the middle, has no work done on it at all except that I've identified with numbers what hexes would be inhabited.  Extending this further eastward is the goal for the next two weeks, so this new blog is going to be awfully boring for most people (I'm not getting much feedback, but I can't blame the reader).  I think in the long run, if I keep this up for several years (which would be the plan), the pile of data will get quite meaningful ... so I'm not worrying right now that all I'm adding are some empty maps of a pretty obscure part of the globe.

For those who really can't picture where this above is (and let's face it, that is virtually everyone), I'll offer these two maps.  First, an image of approximately the same area, gained from Google:

Yeah, no doubt that is TOTALLY not helpful.  Also, the features don't quite match up, but I've said many times, my world is only 'like' earth ... the rivers sometimes have a different shape.  Still, the small lake in the middle is recognizable and so is that bit of the sea at the top of the map.  I didn't include that big pond at the top left, though, because the map I originally worked from (a National Geographic map) didn't show it.  Perhaps its something we know about now, post cold war (I've caught the N.G. being wrong before), or perhaps it's a case of a section of permafrost melting due to global warming (which I've also seen when comparing old and new maps).  Either way, I'm probably not going to add it to my game map.  Or I might.

Perhaps this might help the reader get their bearings:

Is that better?  Can we see where we are now?  Granted, the bigger map shows a lot of 'Tunguska' is in fact west of the map above (in fact, the principal knot of Tunguska is off the above map altogether), but it sounded like a better name than 'West Central Yakutsk.'  Believe me, if you do a lot of maps of a world, you want to stay away from calling everying North That and East This.  After awhile, it gets confusing.  Best to have a code tag for every map (Tunguska is B 06) just to keep everything straight.

Okay, I'm going to let go of this post; I'm going to write a bit more on the main blog, however, so you might want to have a glance at that.

Tunguska

I'm starting a new map today, the next one over that's directly east of the Lower Yenisey map I've been working on. This one is called Tunguska. I want to start with my hex map template, and these can be downloaded from the wiki. These are 30 squares by 35, making for a nice big map, and if you use your Microsoft Office editor for pictures you can pare off the white space so that they can be overlapped to make even bigger maps. Beware of printing them, however, because the hexes are almost an inch in diameter, so the hex map will be multiple sheets if printed. Here's a png of the hex map (the boxes on the file are without borders, so the boxes won't appear:

Even though I darkened the hexes quite a lot, they're still dim - I prefer the hex lines to be quite soft, because in fact this makes the colors of the map seem brighter and the overall effect more aesthetically pleasing. I feel its important that things like this look good, as we're naturally drawn, and thus fascinated, to things that are easy to stare at.

For my own use, I prefer the hexes be colored pink to start, as pink is very definitely a color that doesn't appear anywhere on the map when I'm done ... thus, I can easily see what I haven't changed or fixed.

The first thing I do with a new map is first include a two-hex overlap for areas that have been previously upgraded. Thus, in this map of Tunguska, the previous done parts are the lines at the top (north) and of course west (Lower Yenisey):

Here is some sincere advice: overlap your maps. Don't just draw them so they synch up along the edges; overlapping them will help with continuity from map to map, and will better the experience of being able to look at only one map at a time, and not needed to pull out two or four sheets when the party happens to be at the corner of the map you've drawn. Overlap them! Well, it's not much, but that hex map should be useful to some of you. More tomorrow.

Earth Hex Plotting

This finishes the reformat, so that the color scheme and hex reshape has been completed:

At some future point I'll take another pass at this and insert more descriptive labels and properly layer the elements.  Recently I've just been interested in trying to sort out old work and plot all the maps as they would appear everywhere on the globe.  This is a big task, one that I'm not going to complete anytime soon.

I tend to go at my world in phases, so that for a couple of weeks I will work on just one thing to the exclusion of all else.  The blog won't just be about maps, that just happens to be what I'm doing at the moment.

There is something I wanted to show.  These files are the backbone of my map building system. Here's a shot showing partial Rings 66, 67 & 68:

The reader can compare this to the map above. Note the numbers at the right side of the map; these are the ring numbers. Two rows down form line 65 is line 67 ... and there one can see the numbers from the image above, all of them showing '104.'  On the image, the numbers next to Ring 67 show "(70.48-70.76)" are the latitude numbers. The numbers that read in three columns, "90.45 to 91.33", are the longitude numbers east of Greenwich.

Now, this is important. Any hex with a river will show the LOWEST number. Thus these are all 104, even though the lines read 104-269, 104-265, 204-656 and so on. 269, 265 & 656 are the highest elevations those hexes possess (that I have data for).

This next part is tricky. It will seem to the reader that there's been an error; that there should be a '98' to the left of the string of 104 elevation hexes with the river in it. But here's where the hexes change the game. BECAUSE the world is round, and because the center is a hex, every 60 degrees all around the globe the map must 'bend' to fit. This map of the Lower Yenisey includes that bend.

Note that the left most 104 hex corresponds to the longitued 89.55 to 90.44. That's the 90th Parallel, where the map bends. The bend is shown on the map above by the orange line. That is why, in fact, the '98' elevation hex (longitude 88.66 to 89.54) is UP and to the left - and shows '108' on the map, because it doesn't contain a river so the HIGHEST number is used.

I know that's not very clear, but it all makes perfect sense to me. I've been doing this for awhile. If you want to get it, and it's just not evident, please ask a question and I'll do what I can to get this across to you.

My point is from the linked files above (those that go to my wiki), that the whole world is already plotted. I know what is in every hex, everywhere, and what latitude and longitude anywhere corresponds to what hex. This is what makes the mapping possible, and helps keep everything straight and controlled.

Is this beyond normal D&D mapmaking? Oh yeah. But frankly, I think this would make for a spectacular computer generated environment scheme, if I had the money to make it. Imagine a computer image of every elevation, world-wide, plotted using these tables, then merely 'adjusted' for aesthetics. Google Earth would be helpful for that.

But really, I'm not interested in Google Earth for mapping purposes. Google Earth is pretty and lovely, but it doesn't offer me the control that this template offers, where I can plop in what I want and create the 3D world that is my own.

Lower Yenisey II

A day's work on the Lower Yenisey map:

This is far from anywhere; Biyetia is part of the goblin kingdom of Magloshkagok.  Samoyadia is a gnoll kingdom
far to the north on the Arctic Ocean.  Lungos Nad is an extension of the Vostoch Empire, a vast hobgoblin
collective occupying what we would call Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and the Tomsk Oblast.  Finally, Nissi An
is an obscure, reclusive Bugbear tribal enclave occupying the Tunguska Plateau.  What a place for a party!

Adding a few labels, finishing the rivers and some of the hex fill.  Still need to redraw the borders (orange lines) in gray, then make sure the different elements are layered correctly (text over water features, water features over border, everything over background, etc.