Campaign Scheme -- Legacy Of The Longpaws

It happened in the span of a single night (or day, depending on where you were in the world): all the Earth's animals fell unconscious.  We awoke fully sapient, to a world without Man.  Those in captivity awoke to open cages, unlocked shackles, ajar doors and raised windows.  We were free.

The entire human race had vanished, their great cities empty, their vehicles abandoned.  The world belonged to beasts once more, as many had always hoped it would.

But there are some animals who weren't happy to see mankind gone.  The dogs, mostly, and a sizeable portion of small cats, horses, and farm animals.  They seek to preserve mankind's legacy, to honor the longpaws' wisdom and knowledge.

Others -- led by the apes -- saw the Culling as an opportunity to take Man's place.  They, too, sought to preserve the longpaws' civilization, but only so they could exploit the great power it promises.

The rest... well, they chose to forge civilizations of their own in the shadows of Mankind's ruins.  New nations are emerging, new ideologies and religions developing, new wars brewing.

The world belongs to beasts once more. But the Culling frightens them all.  For if it could happen to Man, it can happen to any species.

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"Legacy Of The Longpaws" (LotL) is a campaign scheme for Great & Small that takes place on modern-day Earth, shortly after the disappearance of the entire human species.  The mysterious event that removed humanity from Earth also gifted all of the planet's animal species with human-level sapience, and freed every animal that been imprisoned or otherwise restrained by humanity's cages and buildings.

The new animal masters of Earth vie for dominance while searching for clues to the fate of humanity, some hoping to avoid it, others to reverse it.

LotL does not use rules for magic or fantasy creatures (though the Healer and Seer niches still exist), and relies on the game's default 2d10 core dice for task resolution, giving it a "reality-lite" feel.

All the maps you need are a Google search away.  All the history can be found at the library or online.  It is our world, today, just without us in it.  The future belongs to the animals.

Required viewing: Life After People.

Some rules revisions & housekeeping

Here's a link (which I'll also share on the Quick Start page) to some revised rules that came about as a result of my alpha-test run of Great & Small.  I have a feeling that most of these will be in the final draft of the game.

The big changes are:

1) Hit Dice are now tied directly to Size rating.  Species determines 0-level starting hit points; adding a niche at character creation takes you to 1st level and gives an additional HD roll to add to this total.  Each time you level up afterwards, you gain a new HD of the appropriate type and re-roll all your hp using the new pool of HD, and only change hp total if the new result is greater than the old.

2) Initiative now uses a Move (MV) score determined by your species. I'll be going through the Featured Creatures to revise them, but in the meantime, MV scores can be converted from the old system by dividing the combat movement rate (the number in parentheses) by 5.  This number is added to a 1d10 roll during combat to derive your initiative. Runner characters add their niche die result as a further bonus to this roll.  This will eliminate the system using Speed ratings for declared actions.

3) I've diversified the saving throws so that each core niche now has its own unique save bonus.  The new categories are Blast (Runner), Charm (Storyteller), Deception (Seer), Device (Scout), Fear (Warrior), Paralysis (Trickster), Poison (Herbalist), and Trauma (Healer).  Discerning readers should be able to tell which old-school save category each of these was derived from.

Next week, I will be diving headlong into arranging, re-writing, and compiling the final draft of the full product, including systems for Scent Battles over territory (based on turning undead mechanics!) and hazards of the wilderness, a re-working of OSR treasure rules to accommodate Resources and spandrels, and hopefully expanding the Herbalism list.  Also, creating more tables, including randomized scenario generation ideas.

Meantime, on the blog, I'll continue statting up Featured Creatures -- which will also all be in the final product -- adding 5e-compatible material, more sample PCs of various levels, more setting details for the three campaign schemes, and reviews of some of the inspirational reading.

Thanks to all my readers for the support and encouragement.  This project really feels like it is starting to take on a life of its own.

Thinking Like An Animal

Noisms over on the Monsters & Manuals blog has an interesting rumination on fantasy dolphins and failures of imagination that bears directly on the Great & Small project.

I've noted before that the best works of animal fantasy don't so much anthropomorphize their animal characters as they zoomorphize their human audience's perceptions.  That is to say, these works don't turn animals into humans with  the serial numbers filed off; instead, they successfully put a human reader's mind into a plausible facsimile of an animal's mind.  Self-centered as we are, we often mistake this for "anthropomorhpizing," but it's a different trick.

One of the reasons Watership Down was such a, well, watershed moment in this kind of fiction is because it de-mystified rabbits, showing human readers that rabbit society was anything but perpetual cuddliness.  A few other animal fantasy works have risen to this challenge, too;  Wayne Smith's horror novel Thor, about the battle of wits between a werewolf and the family dog (told from the titular dog's point of view), really conveys to the reader what it must be like to be a dog: the short attention span, the repetitive thinking, the self-perception of oneself as a member of a human pack, walking through a world dominated by scents, etc.

D&D fails on this project a lot, either treating animals as boring stat blocks with no distinctive traits of their own (sword-fodder, in other words), or playing them up as tropes rooted in pop culture.  As Noisms points out, the AD&D 2nd edition treatment of dolphins has way more to do with human projections than with actual cetacean behavior.  Which would be fine -- gaming is rooted in and reflects pop culture, after all -- except that treating dolphins realistically might have made them more interesting.

My humble project is an effort to bridge that gap.  When I get around to statting dolphins as PCs, (soon...), they're not necessarily going to be romanticized lifeguards for humans and sea elves.  They are a hell of a lot  more interesting than that.

But I think Noisms goes a bit too far in his analysis of animals as inscrutable.  He writes:

We have a failure of imagination when it comes to cute or intelligent animals. We have a natural tendency to impute them with emotions and ideas that are not their own. Animal lovers (I count myself one) are especially guilty of this. It's odd that the more time one spends thinking about and looking at animals, the more one tends to develop this blind spot about them. It often does them a disservice: it infantilises them. It reduces their complex and fundamentally alien nature.

Animals are very different from us, to be sure, but they are not "fundamentally alien."  At least, mammals aren't. 

Evolution is a thing. And there is a thing within that thing called homology, which tells us that related species will share many traits thanks to common ancestry.  We know that the brain structures and functions that govern our emotions and behaviors are homologous within mammals, and some are even homologous across greater taxic expanses (the hippocampal system, for instance, appears to do pretty much in birds what it also does in mammals, which tells us that the last common ancestor of birds and mammals probably had this trait, too).

In short, animal minds are not a complete mystery to us.  Their most recent evolutionary changes create important differences, of course, but our shared heritage as fellow earthlings means that we still have a great deal in common, even mentally.  We actually can plausibly infer a great deal about what it is like to be a bat, as Kenneth Oppel does in his Silverwing trilogy.

The key to animal fantasy is striking the right balance for your audience.  You can find works that almost completely anthropomorphize their animal characters, to the point of dressing them up and putting swords in their paws (Redwall, Mouse Guard, some of the Chronicles Of Narnia...).  You can also find works in the genre that try to complete zoomorphize the reader's perception of the world (as in Robert Bakker's Raptor Red, written entirely in the present tense, with no dialogue at all).  Most animal fantasy falls in the middle somewhere, humanizing their characters enough to make them both sympathetic and empathetic, but also giving the audience a feel for what it must actually be like to be one of those animals.

In the Great & Small game, I plan to have options for all of these interpretations except for completely-anthropomorphized animals.

In the Trucewood Vale setting, the animals are all as sapient as longpaws, can speak fluent Common, and often adventure alongside humanoids.

In the Creepy Crawlies setting, the animal characters are capable of understanding humans with great effort and can talk among themselves, but remain largely in a world of their own.

And in the Legacy Of The Longpaws setting, there will be no magic, no humans, and the animals' cultures will be as realistic as possible.

Stay tuned for all of that later this year.

Campaign Styles & Core Dice

Most versions of the original fantasy game on which the G&S rules are based used a single 20-sided die (the 1d20) for combat and task resolution, instead of the 2d10.  Some players and BMs might prefer this old-school method over the default one.  That is, of course, a perfectly valid way to play Great & Small, but some insight into why this change was made might be helpful in making the decision to switch to a more classic style.

Great & Small aims to capture a reality-lite feel like that reflected in classic works of animal fantasy like The Lion King or Duncton Wood; that is, a world more or less like our own, with animal characters who behave more or less like their real-world counterparts.  As such, using 2d10 instead of 1d20 creates a game in which most core dice results will fall within an average range.  Dramatic successes and failures will be rare.  Lower-level threats would become less challenging more quickly, while making it harder to get lucky and score big against threats that outclass you.  Individual skill and training (like character lore levels, or niche dice) can thus count for more and make a bigger difference.  Sort of like reality.

However, these "reality-lite" stories are not the only kind of animal fantasy.  There are other flavors of the genre, like The Book Of The Dun Cow or the Valdemar stories of Mercedes Lackey, in which magic and monsters reminiscent of classic fantasy role playing are integral to the plot and setting.  Players and BMs looking to capture the feel of these animal fantasies could do quite well using the classic 1d20 method.  This will create a game in which all possible results between 1 and 20 fall on an even distribution (that is, they each have an equal chance of occurring).  Dramatic successes and spectacular failures thus become more common, and lend a more epic feel to the shared story.

The rules for Great & Small work just as well using either method, but groups should be aware of the implications before deciding on one or the other method for their campaigns.

In general, it's a good idea to use the standard 2d10 method for campaigns that feature minimal to no magic or monsters, such as the Legacy Of The Longpaws campaign scheme I'll be describing in the near future.

For higher fantasy settings that recall the classic old-school experience, such as The Trucewood Vale (also forthcoming), a 1d20 method would probably be better.

But, you can also mix & match, using the 2d10 method in combination with access to limited or secret magic and monsters.  This "occult" style best suits a campaign like the Creepy Crawlies scheme you'll also be seeing in more detail soon.

Stay tuned to the blog for further information on playable species, game mechanics, details on the campaign schemes, and reviews of some inspirational material.