What every parent should know about the Cyfandil campaign

Cyfandil is pretty close to vanilla d&d. The tweaks are minor. But in this sociopolitical climate, “vanilla d&d” as the greybeards know it is fraught with potential misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and ideas that some folks won’t be ready for. 

Take a look to see what potentially-controversial topics we will cover. 

1. There are three human cultures; rough analogs of White Europeans; rough analogs of North African nomad types; and rough analogs of East Asians. 

They are not meant to be real world peoples. The cultures, names, places are a pastiche. I do this to better resemble the real world (but in miniature.) 

The land we will start in and perhaps spend most of our time in is the Europe of the world. Very few nonwhites. 

However anyone can decide to play any of the human cultural traditions without penalty. 

2. There are elves, dwarves and hobbits. Elves and dwarves are not unheard-of but neither are they common in the realm of men. 

Thematically, adventuring is a particularly human pursuit. Other races join men, but only rarely. Elves don’t like to slum it with people; Hobbits consider adventuring scandalous. 

Therefore I will enforce a strict limit of 40% or less of the main characters being non human. Just how you divide that up is up to the players. 

3. There will be off-screen romance. Nothing acted or role played, but a character might pick up a spouse or paramour.  

If someone wants to opt out of this part of the game, they may do so. The reason I have it at all is twofold: it presents the prospect of having children and starting a dynasty; and marriages can be politically or economically valuable. 

In any case, there are no half-elf, half-dwarf or half-hobbit babies. They are not biologically possible in this world. 

4. Characters, including those played by players, will die. Perhaps frequently and perhaps not, depending on how aggressive the several players are in the game world. 

But these deaths are not a defeat for the players. They are a part of the story. Character death is a learning experience, and it often makes for a good tale in the later telling. 

Consider the Mario Bros. franchise. Mario dies all the time and for many reasons, whether by player mistake or bad luck. But he always comes back and the player can continue playing.

It’s the same concept here, except that the character won’t be like the immortal Mario, but instead a different character every time. 

In some ways this is better, because everyone gets to try out different kinds of characters. 

5. The realm of Aluvia is Christian. Not Christian-analog, but Christian. The good guy clerics are delegates of God, like from the Bible. The bad guy clerics get their powers from the Devil and other related evil beings. 

5a. There are other religious traditions. While it is not a pluralist culture, we will not discriminate if you want a Buddhist or a disciple of Odin. 

5b. I will not be preaching.  At all. I do not run my game as a tool for evangelism, nor conversely one for social commentary. The church is just one power center in a world of many power centers, and there happen to be holy men who go adventuring.  

6. Finally, players will be responsible for playing their own character, but also assisting in the maintenance of the world. 

Time passes. Events happen. The characters and others change the world in many ways. These gallant paper men eventually grow old and retire or die. 

When the several characters are exploring the unknown, then among the characters, someone has to track their limited supplies. Someone has to navigate. Someone has to map. Someone has to manage the treasure they collect. Someone has to chronicle the tales for posterity. 

Therefore, each of the players will take on these administrative roles on behalf of their characters. 

There are two reasons for this: one is to take some of the burden from the referee, who has a lot going on; and two is to reinforce the concept that this is a shared world and shared experience that we are building and maintaining together. 

Who is D&D Good For?

I got a question in another setting about what kinds of people can play D&D. Obviously, anyone can try it, but I decided to drill down a little and answer a similar question: what kinds of people would benefit from the hobby?

The following is what I wrote, more or less verbatim, with a couple of edits for clarity.

People will enjoy D if:

They can sit still for a while 

And if one or more of the following is true:

They like board games or cards

They have a dramatic flair

They like to be social but prefer their social time structured

They like to problem-solve

They have a sense of imagination and wonder; they have enjoyed it would enjoy imagining fantasy-medieval adventures, Greek epic tales, survival-horror tales, and other kinds of fantasy adventures. 

What to expect? Well, you will probably feel a little silly (at first) and you will probably play with at least one person on the spectrum, because d&d is popular with harmless weirdo types. 

If you’ve never played tabletop RPGs before: 

This is a game of adventure. Instead of a board, the playing field is our imagination. One player, the Referee, provides the premises of the world. The rest of the players invent fictional characters and imagine what those characters would do in the world. In this way, we can tell a story in common with one another. 

Most of the time, the Referee will use his knowledge and judgment to tell you what’s happening and how the world reacts to your characters. Sometimes he will consult the dice to see what they think. Sometimes he will turn to the players and ask them what they think should happen. 

The special part about this kind of game is that there is no pre-written story or presumption about how things “should” happen. You and your friends are allowed to try anything within the realm of the game world, and then deal with the consequences. 

If you’ve played modern RPGs like D&D 5e: 

We play the world, not the rules. Our characters are people, not builds. Your player skill is much more important than the skills on your character sheets. We play face-up, toward one another, and not face-down, looking at our sheets, because the answers we seek to the problems we pose are not on that sheet. It’s only a reminder. 

As we play, we forego and even reject the notion that there is a rule set that can overrule the Referee. And if the Referee lets that go to his head, we will call him out, because we’re all playing together and all deserve to have fun. What we won’t do is call on some higher authority. 

The game will go faster than you are used to for it is more efficient. It will also be more deadly, since the world exists as it is, and not as a playground for your well-balanced party, and because the rules are less death-averse. 

Balancing Encounters the OSR Way - Part 2

There are two other parts to balancing encounters the old school way that we need to talk about. They are allowing the several players agency to set the goals for their adventure session, and giving the players game space to make decisions.

What? No Cleric?

A lot of other writers have discussed and defined agency better than I have but let me give it a shot: Player agency means that the several players, and not the Referee, decide what will happen in a session, an adventure, or a campaign.  The players are not tourists in the Referee's world being shown this and that passively.  Nor are they pushed down an adventure path that they are meant to finish. At most, they are given several adventure "hooks" and allowed to choose which to pursue and in which order.

There is a text book's worth of analysis and basic and advanced rules for playing in this way, but the most important thing to remember is that the animating force of the adventures has to come from the player's side of the screen and not the Ref's side.  If the Ref is telling the players what to do with their characters, that's a red flag.

So that's agency.

The other part of balancing encounters is that you need to leave room for the characters to progress slowly as well as quickly.  For instance, the first dungeon level should have much more treasure and many more monsters and traps than it would take for the party to achieve second level.  They don't hit second level and DING! head downstairs.  That would be the Ref telling the players what to do! It's so critically important for the players to be able to keep their characters in the "shallow end" and for them to have meaningful content there as well.  

That may mean putting five times as many rooms and five times as much treasure as they would need to hit level 2.  It may mean restocking that dungeon level through some mechanism, such as new monsters from deeper in (but in this case, not tougher) lairing up closer to the surface.  In reality, it's probably good to use both of these methods in tandem. In the Wilderlands, it's easy to say that the characters missed something on their first survey and there was more to be found after all, so that's a third way for you the Ref to provide more room for the characters and more agency for the players. Additionally, because of the open nature of a hexcrawl, there should be plenty of opportunities for characters to backtrack to unexplored areas they missed because of their direction of travel - more so than even in a dungeon.

And that's space.

Along with the critical relationship between risk, reward, and distance, player agency and the game space for characters to work in make it possible for old school encounters to balance in a different way from new school encounters.  It happens in real time at the table and may result in real character death. These are exciting prospects which will bring your players back again and again.