Hammondal & Trust

Over on the Dice Camp, groovy questioneer luxet asked a question both compound and substantial, so I'll treat it as a mailbag entry here on ye merrye blogge. The context is Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands, that fantasy city guide I've been working on these last couple of years, and The Hammondal Campaign, a related book I've been working on these last few weeks. I'd recently yammered a bit about that, and included this image of one of the city's 23 neighborhood maps, with numbers scribbled onto sites given entry in the guide:

Knoutside. One of 23 neighborhoods in Hammondal.

This is my development draft of a full-page, text-encrusted district map I'll eventually create, with the site-numbers doodled on by hand. This occasioned the question:

Just found myself wondering to what level of detail Hammondal is being created? I mean is every building mapped out with occupancy/use, or just a smattering of named locations (looking at numbered places here)?  Intrigued, given what I've picked up on your preference for high trust how that balances out when putting together a city? Also, will it be ready to run around it for my next campaign? ;)

The last part is the easiest to answer: Unless you're really dragging your feet on your GMing, the book probably won't be ready as your next thing to run, but it's nice of you to ask! Like Baymax, I am not fast.

The first part is pretty straightforward, too. We're definitely into "smattering" territory. Light of the Candle Islands has (in the current draft, anyway) 500 intramural entries (that is, explicit numbered sites inside the city walls) and a small handful of extramural ones (sites just outside the town proper, like the lighthouse prison run by the church, on an island out in the bay). There are approximately 4,200 buildings and other identifiable features visible within the walls of the city, so I'm only diving into about 1 in 8, with the rest left to be inferred and populated at need.

Importantly, the 500 entries won't all be "mapped out." There will be a small number (probably 5) entries that get an interior floorplan and full-fledged article, but most just get a paragraph or two of text. Most of the book's 35-ish maps will be the 23 neighborhood maps, plus that small number of interiors, plus a basic map of the Candle Islands, stuff like that. And when I say an "article" I mean, approximately, the equivalent of Blind Geoffrey's Barberie & Cauterie, which I wrote for Citybook 7 for Flying Buffalo back in the day. There will be five of those scattered through the book, highlighting a few "anchor" sites more intimately. There'll be other "breakout" articles, too, but mostly the book will be those 500 or so brief, paragraph-scaled site entries and neighborhood summaries.

That middle part, though. About trust. That's a hell of a topic. Even here, there's no time to dig as deep as it goes, but let's dig a little.

Digging into that Middle Part

How does designing for high-trust trad impact building a city, or any other gameworld? Because, make no mistake, Light of the Candle Islands is designed to be a complete, self-contained gameworld. Even if it does a big ol' flopsy-daisy and I never get to follow it up, it'll be a whole-ass thing. For that matter, the problems and opportunities described in The Hammondal Campaign take place entirely in town, or within a literal stone's throw (depending on the trebuchet, and how angry you are at that lighthouse prison). Both books are designed, from the ground up, to support HTT (high-trust-trad) play.

But high-trust design doesn't really require a specific level of detail. Not exactly. It does require certain types of detail, that I like to group into two sloppy buckets: adventure food, and character food.

In high-trust play, the facts of the gameworld are the "core rules" of gameplay. They are the enduring, reliable truths the PCs can always reference and leverage, from the existence of gravity (Hammondal comes complete with Earthlike gravity) to intimate facts like the Metropolitan's (she's kind of like the city's archbishop) open-secret love affair with an actor who plays at the Zorya (the city's most popular theater). If the PCs know about that affair (and really, everyone in Hammondal knows at least something about that affair), they can use it in some way. That's adventure food: facts the PCs can get their mitts on, and that GMs can spin scenarios around.

In high-trust play, Player Characters are tailored creations. Once the players and the GM come to some agreement about what the new campaign is about, everyone creates characters for that campaign, specifically, precisely, deliberately, with care. We make PCs to have those kinds of adventures, in this specific setting. So, if you're running a Hammondal campaign about a troupe of actors dealing with vampires being a total bummer to the theater community, everything about that foundational agreement informs who the PCs will be. They might be from wholly different cultures and be wholly different species, but they were made for this exact campaign, built from what we, as a group, understand about those cultures and species and the shenanigans we want to get up to. So, facts that serve that process of character creation are character food.

And of course, the yummiest facts can serve both roles, be both kinds of food.

Every other kind of information is filler, and filler is nothing to be proud of, so as a high-trust designer, creating Light of the Candle Islands for high-trust play, my design focus is that two-fisted food metaphor: stuff for making characters, and for using in adventures.

But ... doesn't every gameworld have information like that? Yep, pretty much, and that's why pretty much any gameworld can be great for high-trust play, but ... some more than others. The crucial distinction (that most readers will never notice) is that Hammondal is a book designed specifically for high-trust play, and that guides which facts make it into the book, which facts stay in my notes, and which questions I build the book's answers around.

And since high-trust trad adventures depend so completely on motives and values, that exerts a potent gravity on what qualifies as character and adventure food. It means we know about the Metropolitan's love life (and her standing with the Prince, and her dicey dealings with mercantile interests) because that's the kind of thing high-trust adventures need plenty of ... information that other playstyles would think of as filler, in many cases!

Which brings us back to the question of the flopsy-daisy! But, time will tell. And hey: maps!