Chromatic Dragons, Scale Addicts

THE FIRST PEOPLE COULD NOT CAPTURE THE DRAGON OF ONE BEING

Once, the One Being Dragon ringed the world, moved over pre-creation like a wave.

Come the First People, Ix and Ixiandar, Gilgamesh and Humbaba, many others. They devour mountains, swallow streams, become mountains, streams. They shed lesser life forms like we shed skin cells, flora and fauna the product of blind, random apoptosis. They grow monstrous and stupendous and strange in proportion and size, their eyes pierce high into the once-was-sky to rest greedily on the curlicue circlet of the One Being Dragon, a spiral of light, forever chasing the sun, the gold pit of chaos.

The first and greatest of the First People, Ix, tries to pull down the Dragon, stripping from it reams of flesh and intestines like contrails of light and scintillating radiation. She drapes the Dragon flesh over her head and the heads of her companions and they swing the dragon guts and whoop and dance but the Dragon remains aloof. Try as Ix might, she cannot grasp the Dragon fully around and cannot pull it down. Ixiander and Gilgamesh instead bend the Lens of Nature and the Dragon blurs, a chromatic aberration increasingly fringed until it diffracts and splinters, thus is born the icy, sharp, Dragon of the white aspect, the vicious, plodding, flat Dragon of the black aspect, and then Dragons of each of the other ten aspects.

WE HAVE BEEN BROKEN AND WE MUST BE RESTORED

To be a Dragon is to be diminished. The Dragon forever lists the complaints: bowed limbs, creaking wings, rotting teeth, the grind of massive ball in massive socket, the excruciation of nerve endings and a body growing heavier, more real, less like the old self, the One Being now barely-recalled by a rebellious mind falling from the light of pure thought into reptile emotion. Each dragon longs for a past it remembers incorrectly, longs for gems as large as the stars it once dandled from the point of a single, ephemeral talon, longs to clutch and cavort in gold as bright as the radiance of the pit of chaos it once chased.

Most of all Dragons long for as long a sleep as possible and pursue this goal almost monomaniacally,  consuming everything enormously, carving out caves and gobbling the rock in its hunger, emptying and consuming forests and then falling into a hibernatory peace in which it recalls its once-divinity and only dimly retains the current, diluvial nightmare. To wake from these dreams is to relive its generative sundering and from behind a heavy lid and a crusty lens, the fractioned dragon perceives an increasingly squalid, squabbling, foreign Babels and feels its center slip further away.

A just-waking dragon bellows with fury and self-righteousness, and takes to wings, moving over the countryside in search of food and treasure, moving over towns and villages like the quickening of twilight, carrying with it into the night the souls of dogs, invalids and children.

Above the gate of Uz-Amon, fallen city by the sea, an ancient Dragon of the Green aspect has carved with an unsteady claw:

"EVERYTHING DECLINES, THE PROLIFERATION OF KINDS IS A MERE ILLUSION AND NO ONE KNOWS TO WHAT END"

THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN STEAL AND TARNISH OUR ONLY CONSOLATION

Ix, Many-Named, Queen of us all, towers like a Brocken Bow over us, the Children of the Sun. We build cities on her feet, and at night recline in the strange half-light from above, cast by her dragon-flesh crown. We sharpen weapons and the warriors of the Right and the Left stalk always contested boundaries.

Our bravest warriors ascend the body of Ix to pick clean the celestial lice, Valkyries, infant Sun-Brothers, star-children and foreigners that clamber down the spikes of her crown and nest in her feathers. Should they descend further, many in our cities would die.

These brave warriors are expert Delvers, dungeon-clearers, Dragon-tested they return home before carts of jewelry and gold, knighted in powerful relics but it will take days to clean the ancient lizard's blood from their weapons and skin.

WE RECALL OUR ASPECT, SPURN NAMES, CHANGE OUR SHAPE

A Dragon remembers what it was even as it slowly aligns closer to its own aspect, its new nature. Red Dragons become cruel, impetuous, love torture. Black Dragons ooze acid from every orifice, painfully, are wild, hateful, hate everything. Sap Dragons lair in enormous trees or swamps and their scales shudder as the pores beneath weep oozes and jellies capable of absorbing all the works of the children of the sun, turning them into fertilizer so potent that the Sap Dragon leaves fully-grown forests in its wake. Ultraviolet Dragons are exceedingly rare, speak all the languages of ghosts and gods and are entirely invisible to most of the children of the sun who, to consult or kill the Dragons of this aspect, keep reindeer, butterflies or even stranger creatures like ghosts or celestial lice. 

Dragons of the same aspect avoid one another, while they hunt those of different aspects so that they may harvest from them their scales and create a chime garden on some distant, windswept mountain side.

More ancient Dragons, those still close to their original self can experience the lives of their aspect like a shared memory. The experience is nauseating and most require obscene amounts of payment (a city's worth of "food," or the location of the dens of dragons of a number of different aspects, for example) to be willing to try it.

A Dragon that capitulates and takes a name is spurned at all costs, no Dragon will help it and only the most desperate for its scale will even hunt it. For example, the God-Emperor of the City of Bone and Brass is a Dragon that has long forgotten its original nature. 

No two Dragons of even the same aspect are the same. One may be two-legged, seven-winged and spider-eyed, another may be a nucleus of howling, snapping bear mouths, fur displacing scales. Dragons can freely shapechange from their true form.

COME THE SCALE ADDICTS, THE DRAGON-ADDLED, CHIME TONES AND ROARS, THE FURTHER MACHINATIONS OF THE FIRST PEOPLE

A Dragon's roar is like a thunderous, skull-fracturing, orgasmic tone. It peels back the miniscus of the mind, it blasts across several planes of existence. A chime made from a single scale can produce a weaker, but still wildly addictive tone. Many of the Dragon-Killers of the Children of Sun are addicts, ringing little scale chimes in secret over and over again, longing for the next adventure, desperately seeking rumors of a Dragon den willing to sign up with a Dragon cult for guard duty knowing full well the cult will offer them up to a Dragon. Hoping they're offered up, actually.

Dragon cults trudge up foggy mountain trails, bearing enormous wealth to present the Dragon. Once at the Dragon's den, all of the initiated will kneel in supplication and wait for the Dragon's roar, which will leave them convulsive, drooling, littered above the den entrance in orgiastic clumps. They will either try to kill their hired guards themselves or just leave them bound up, with the gold, for the Dragon. Most Dragon cults are insurrectionist, violent, anti-authoritarian, its members criminals, fiends, artists, liberals, the dregs of society. Their religious practices, such as they are, are castigated where they are not outlawed (they are usually outlawed) and Dragons are accordingly often conflated with demons and devils.

The scale of a Dragon, when struck with a rod carved from pure chaos, chimes expansively. Reality trembles as the Dragon-tone moves across it. The larger the scale, the more resounding the tone and the more transformative its affect. Ixiandar has sealed his treasure vaults with wards which surrender only in the presence of correctly played, elaborate dragon-tones. Dragons themselves cannot hear the tone of their own aspect, but are filled with longing and furty upon hearing the chime of another aspect. Dragons covet the scales of other aspects and cultivate chime gardens. The tones produced by these chimes are deeply pleasing and can put a Dragon to sleep (the more the chimes, the larger the scales or the purer the tone, the more powerful the affect on the listener). Playing a chromatic scale in the presence of a Dragon can cause it to denature entirely for a time, become gelatinous piles of light, of a firm but plastic  consistency and capable of withstanding extreme pressures and temperatures. Touching the Dragon with bare skin can lead to translucency, photosynthetic digestion, madness, light-blindness, achromatosis or its opposite, involuntary chameleonic-pigmentation of all tissue of the body (living and dead), the loss of one's mind, the loss of one's body as it melts into Dragon-flesh, horns, the ability to speak to rainbows, and other numerous and various other affects (incidentally, similar after-affects are seen in survivor's of dragon's breath). Many ancient Dragons have cultivated a chime garden plentiful enough to complete this transformation and spend much of their hibernation in this form. 

Ix herself stands transfixed, each of her finger nails and the nails of her two canine teeth enameled with polished Dragon scale; her lips remain curled back to expose the slowly gnashing teeth while her fingers dance, weaving the same spell she has been casting for hundreds of years, her Dragon-nails slicing into various planes, knitting, sealing, unsealing. Her spell will either save the world from some unknown threat (Ogdru Jahad, the Final Dragon) or else end it, bringing on a new golden era for her companions (Ragnarok).

The scales of each of the twelve aspects presents a distinct scale of notes. To produce a purer tone, the scale must be struck with a rod fashioned from chaos. The femur of a swamp mutant might suffice, but the purer the chaos, the purer the tone (an implement carved from the heart of a Sun-Brother is preferable, or, best of all, a rock from the face of the Sun itself).

Pantagruel has been known to pretend to be a Dragon but only in order to fart on cultists. He will also surreptitiously "drop" method diagrams for scale chiming patterns nearby the Dragon-addled and addicted, delighting in watching them "mistakenly" open a portal to gravity-less void or distant hell-planet. He usually kills whatever star creature or demon sallies forth, but not always and especially not if he finds the creature amusing.

pictures: top (unknown), Prophet, Chase Stone, Project Copernicus Concept Art (RIP), Phillipe Druillet, John Blanche, Nico Delort, Stephen Hickman

Alignments and Orders

PCs are Aligned or they don't have any kind of alignment at all (unaligned or whatever).

ALIGNED

Aligned characters have sworn to align themselves with a creed, goal, organization and/or ideal.

Creeds, Goals and Ideals are meant to be a statement or a short list that summarizes the conduct or beliefs the characters values most highly in herself and others. The terms, "creeds, goals, and ideals" are meant to indicate a devotion that, by its nature, highly and broadly impinges on a character's lifestyle. The terms are not used prescriptively: "Bushido" is certainly a creed, but the category could include, "a Devotion to the Rusted Heart of Vorn" as well as, "Sworn to the Dug of Lady America," and also, "Believes in Knightly Virtues," and also, "Lawful Good" or "True Neutral," etc, etc. The choice ought to be cleared with the GM, but broadly should significantly impact character lifestyle. Anything less is "unaligned but with beliefs." Most of this stuff is either already in the player's head or is something that arises out of play. Either source is great.

Organizations are things like orders (religious, monastic, warrior or otherwise), guilds, lodge, confraternities, sororities  bands, tribes or any other social construct that has established rules of conduct and etiquette.

None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive (Evil Samurai: Lawful Evil, Follower of Bushido, Member of the Lodge of the Rotten Lotus), but the more of these the character has, the more they're limited by their oaths. 

Characters can start out aligned or can pick up an alignment during play, usually as the result of something major happening to the character or as part of the process of the character joining an Organization. Other than the most simple "conversion," the actual process will vary widely, but will nearly always involve an epiphanic experience and then a more prolonged process of joining the group/being mentored. Starting characters that begin aligned usually won't hold membership in an Organization (perhaps, with the exception of Clerics of a particularly monastic or monomaniacal bent).

HOW IT WORKS

YOU GET POINTS, CHIPS, WEDGES OR SOMETHING

I use points. When a character acts in accordance with the dictates of her alignment, she may earn an "alignment point." Likely no more than one is earned per session and the range here is just from zero to three. If a character earns an alignment point, the player should note it on the sheet and write down a couple words about how the point was earned. I award points at the same time as XP (ie, at the end of the session), but whatever.

Acting against one's alignment generally results in an immediate loss of at least one point.

Instead of points, you can come up with some other metric, ideally one that is tailored a bit to the alignment in question ("oh man, I finally got three Nurgles!" or "Awesome, now my Cthulu is totally colored in"). I like the level of granulation I get from 0-3, but maybe more would work better for you (might be especially useful in campaigns oriented strongly towards aligned characters).

BUT YOU CAN'T USE THOSE POINTS
These points don't translate into anything a Player can pull out and use, but they do indicate to the GM how closely the character has been cleaving to their chosen alignment. A higher score likely means access to more stuff. A highly Lawful Good Fighter might get invited to join an order of Knights Mendicant (and maybe get to become something like a Paladin). A highly Evil Fighter might get an invite to a Chaos Cult or a Assassin's Guild. Deities may take notice of the highly aligned and deign to send signs or messengers to provide quests or even provide boons. Importantly, none of this stuff comes without strings. Not only do you have to act in a certain way to get the points, but the interesting thing that might come from having those points will have some kind of cost or ongoing risk associated with it.

Carousing while aligned will often yield strange and interesting results.

ORGANIZATIONS (ORDERS, LODGES, GUILDS)

Joining an Organization will likely involve time for contemplation, a specific cost and perhaps the performance of certain tasks. Order membership usually comes with a number of perks and services; there is a relatively corresponding cost to join. One of the costs is always adopting an alignment or code or creed (likely one of the latter two).

Time for Contemplation

Can mean time for reflection, devotion and contemplation; may be solitary, may be communal, will almost certainly always be spent with like-devoted people. Could still be spent during rest time at camp; while everyone else is researching spells, poisons or getting fantastically drunk; or even on the march ("cleric, teach me they ways"). It might also be as simple as reading a trusty, dog-eared, book like the Enchiridion or Sir Marveaux's Primer on Conduct Becoming a Knight.

Specific Costs

These might be a large donation, evidence of certain social status (owning land, retaining certain employees), a pledge to tithe a significant portion of future income, or certain, special items (a very well made knife, a jade frog, a breastplate painted green). The GM will likely have ideas here but might solicit input from the table. These may be associated with certain tasks.

Certain Tasks

"Bring me the skull of a virgin," "bring me evidence you have been chosen by our deity," "Bring me a black breastplate and the blood of a lecherous unicorn." These can be simple fetch quests, but really ought to be more cryptic and thematic. If there is a specific location required, it should be only a day or so away. If there is a thing to be brought it ought not be something you can buy over the counter somewhere in town.

Everything in between will require a character's time and perhaps also tasks and costs in some combination. 

pictures: Antrhopofagy Chronicles 1 by Atanasio, still from Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai

Other Frontiers (Dungeons, Megadungeons and Monsters)

Dungeons and monsters are virulent and metastasizing. The below is from this conversation, which was spurred by this and this.

STAY VIGILANT, LOOK FOR THE EYES OF DWARVES

Abandoned buildings left unused for too long grow grow weedy, dusty, strange. The angles twist and the geometry buckles under the barometric pressure of anti-life. Among the dust and cobwebs, traps blossom. A brood of goblins rise out of the earth and shake clods of birth matter from their heads. Exotic, threatening beasts settle down and nest; below these lairs, trap doors lead to newly-formed but entirely ancient and archetypal stairs, dank tunnels with torch brackets that never held a torch. 

Sewers have to be regularly patrolled, newly-budded secret doors smashed and burned. Behind these doors may be shimmering teleporter mist, writhing, glistening gristle or simply mundane wall. The door is destroyed, what lays behind sealed away under rocks and incantations.

Dwarves have a sense for these things, when ancient edifice or natural cave is about to "turn," dwarves appear, clear the dungeon (or die trying), pull up the root and leave Delver's Eyes to mark where they've been. The lashes and pupil of a Delver's Eye indicate certain facts like, "No dungeon here in two years," or, "Goblin nest burned last winter solstice," or "this dungeon cleared by the Bronze Fork." If you know dwarven runes or if you can cast read languages, this is all apparent to you. Dwarves will teach the Eye to others that commit themselves to the cause of dungeon eradication.

Dwarf clans left too long alone in dark become fanatical Duergar, monomaniacal dungeon-clearers. Dwarves live a long time, but Duergar are seemingly immortal, though they grow increasingly old, decrepit and insane. Duergar may watch a dungeon "grow" or even "clear out" settlements to make room for a suitably large dungeon, just so they have something to do or because they believe only the "big ones" are suitable for their own capacities. Know them by their cruelty and their madness.

Some few dwarves may instead fall prey to the whispering of a dungeon far below, slowly becoming Derro. They may befriend the children of the dungeon, or they may keep to their own. Derro colonies often devote themselves to deep dungeon biological studies, creating machines of strange and enormous power, machines that run on the nightmares of an entire city and must be placed deep in the city's sewers or which must be fed all the works of an entire civilization to create an army of firmir-golems, all of whom are haunted by memories of the art they once were. Most of the Derro's creations are incredibly powerful and often quite beautiful. While the Duergar eschews the devotion to craftsmanship common to many dwarves, the Derro are possessed of finely refined aesthetic sensibilities. Know them by their black, paper-thin skin and enormous eye. 

When travelling through an abandoned place and you do not see the eyes of the dwarves or explorers that went before, beware or turn back. 

Maps sold to travelers are concerned less with relative distance than keeping accurate records of which Delver's Eyes the plot safest passage. Explorers will find their own maps valuable, especially if the maps provide relative safe passage to something useful or valuable.

DUNGEON PHYSIOLOGY

THE DAYLIGHT PEOPLE, THE PEOPLE OF THE SUN, THEM THAT SLEEP ABOVE US

This could be just humans, or whatever. Humans, like, work really well, because:

The impulse of the human being en masse is basically: multiply, civilize, colonize, dominate, cultivate, as if the impulse to expand, build and civilize is a design feature. As if human beings are something's solution to dungeons and monsters because: dungeons and monsters are virulent and metastasizing but they can't really grow in the presence of a human. 

THE PEOPLE OF THE SUN ARE TOXINS IN OUR BLOODSTREAM

The presence of a single Daylight Person causes dungeon growth to slow to a crawl if not stop completely. The dungeon is sluggish, confused when humans wander through it and it begins to wake monsters, set traps, and otherwise expel its guts to purge and frighten away the intruder (like a sea cucumber).

OTHER PEOPLE

Dungeon entrances serve as cloaca, both mouth and anus. Dungeons swallow adventurers and belch out orcs. They fart great clouds of goblins and excrete gnolls, ogres, giants and titans. Plenty of dungeons hide their true cloaca by budding off lures, like angler fish casting in the deep (Acererack's tomb has two lures, even).

What's the relationship between these people and the dungeon? It's not clear. They're a bit like an antigen, and they're a bit like a spore. Other People long-since separated from a dungeon will talk about other worlds and other places. Maybe they hail from subterranean civilizations lit by strange suns, maybe other planes, other planets. These New People that can remember their places of origin miss them keenly and are often morose. Few are capable of reproducing, even fewer are interested in reproduction. 

All are highly susceptible to the ambient environment. Orcs left too long in swamps grow moss, ooze poisons, goblins left in plague zones strain against a load of ominous buboes.Giants left in caverns deep are half dirt and half rock. Driven by a mostly stupid, half-god will, crawling, digging slowly through the deep like enormous worms. Their bodies serves as sieves, collecting ants, worms, centipedes and every other thing of the earth and passing it through its dirt until it emerges different, larger, vicious, mandibles dripping venom.

Giants sleeping atop mountains grow trees, put down mineral roots to lure miners, explode in volcanic fury or else elongate and dissipate into the ozone to flood crops and carrying swarms of strange, dancing insects whose touch causes outrageous violence.

Most giants with physical form are partly hollow, gestating dungeons, growing to accommodate the inner structure within.

A titan is a being of cosmological existence, is essentially a megadungon stretched between multiple planes of existence. Most sleep and grow and never wake; they are congenitally unable to survive waking existence very long as they are simply too large and impossible, their constituent, generative magics unable to sustain them upright for very long.

As a waking titan rises from the ground it shakes towns off its forehead and sweeps a city from its belly button. Most collapse at birth, moaning, crumbling, shedding wizard's towers and evil cleric's keeps, flinging dungeon seed hundreds of miles away in their death throes. A few make it to the standing position, their head and shoulders fully piercing the membrane separating space and planet, their head spewing dungeon seed far into the beyond and perhaps becoming a doorway for other, stranger people.

Other planes burble and pop in a titan's guts; their brains are a massive clutch of ab-reality (beware the places where wizard's tower gather in unnaturally close proximity for they likely plumb and quarry a titan's mind below) and they shed monsters constantly, like dead skin cells.

The Other People hear dungeons; they close their eyes and feel the thrum of the dungeon's blood. Its heartbeat is tremendous, throbbing under their skulls like a final migraine. An Other Person kicked into the depths of a dungeon will tumble, jamming hands to ears to stem the growing throb, becoming orc, gnoll, troll, ogre, giant even as brain and blood vacate their skulls and their bodies return to the dungeon's original matter: hatred, madness, cave mud and worms.

At nights, around fires, the Other People sing the songs of the dungeon, it's first incarnation (was not-stream bed), it's growth (oh cube, jelly belly), it's first kills (farmer-digs-too-deep), its mazes, its traps, its first lich. They sing of their new selves: atavism, cannibalism, an occult tumult into chaos, madness, the antidote to creation. 

Sometimes a new-born dungeon simply comes into being complete with traps and monsters. In these first moments of their new life, before the dungeon's song has truly taken hold, Orcs draw blasters and peer in confusion into the dark, all are confused, in pain, frustrated, frightened or else enrage. And then the dungeon's life becomes their own and they blink, and set about digging latrines. 

The archives of a lich-explorer contain reports of watching a dungeon-becoming, the sandy floor fusing into stone, the beholders unfurling from a few rotting pillbug corpses to swivel eyestalks in panic, the pit fiend bellowing far below.

The larger the creature, the harder it is to shed the dungeon's hold. Goblins independent of a dungeon are civilized in months. In generations, they no longer hear a dungeon. Orcs take longer. Ogres are never properly, fully civilized; their minds unable to totally adjust. Giants and titans are carry dungeons within themselves or are dungeons, never "away" from a dungeon.

THE CLEARED DUNGEON

Has to be civilized (turned into a hideout for characters, converted to a mine, used as a storage cellar for a keep) or systematically pulled down. Some municipalities, those far from the frontiers, retain sappers for the purpose, but most frontier settlements need help keeping the dungeon clear. Every room must be explored, cleared of treasure, traps and monsters, every secret door unlocked or else the dungeon will slowly reconstitute itself, perhaps where it was, or perhaps somewhere else. It will likely return meaner, with foreknowledge of the characters and their methods.

THE LOST AND THE DREAMING

Dungeons dream in forgotten places and long to be born. In the liminality of the taking form, the dungeon's dreams and fantasies blow like a hot breath from its hiding place and cause confusion and nightmares. Where abandoned sewer lines and city intermingle, usually in the poorest places, dungeon birth is foretold when the poor suffer from madness & mutation, plot riots and insurrection.

Dungeons also appear in uncivilized minds, in items of power too-long unused. Wizards have dungeon-bent minds, cultists, punk priests, chaos Catholics all find themselves compelled to live by nascent dungeons, total capitulation to the dungeon and it's reigning deities. Wizards summoning monsters are essentially just wizards peeling back the difference between this place and the cloaca that first ripped open their minds.

THE MEGADUNGEON, OTHER PLACES, OTHER HELLS

Effectively, every dungeon is somehow connected to every other dungeon by a network of ideas, deities and tunnels. Some dungeons are too small to grow fully navigable tunnels to other dungeons and transport between them requires acts of veneration and sacrifice to the governing malignant deities. Dungeons are also connected by certain conceits, the dream-contents of the dungeon made coherent: the sulfurous dungeon of precarious rock dancing in churning magma is connected by dream-song to the volcano dungeon which is likely connected to the hotter hells. 

The more potent and dungeon-minded traveler simply need to close their eyes and fill their minds with the entire song/spell/dream of a dungeon. The more broken and dungeon-bent the mind is, the easier such travel becomes.

Older, deeper dungeons bud misdirection- sublevels or full on symbiotic relations with stranger planes, alien planets and other hells.

pictures: Dali from Spellbound, Blake, Zumart and Blake Again

Scarcity, Population, Maps, Shopping Trips and Item Quality.

This is less focused than I like to normally post, but here it is.

THE MAP

Session one, I show the PCs a piece of paper with a dot in one corner. This is a city. Closer to the city there are towns and villages and further out there are just villages. Even further out it's basically just outposts, a few villages along the border and the like. I don't know how many, we've not been there yet.

So, let's pick a town and a village, where are they?

Let's make some character thumbnails, three each (including the me, the GM), and they'll be from either the village or the town. Now, everyone creates a single character based on one of those thumbnails, etc, etc.

You'll likely start play in whichever of the two locations is further out from civilization.

In the next session, I'll have  hexmap of the immediate environs sorted out (thanks, Welsh Piper!), but we don't need to worry about that yet.

THINGS ABOUT SETTLEMENTS

When I say "settlement" I mean, "a place with some kind of at least semi-permanent structure and people living in it," which can mean a whole slew of things.

Assuming the GM knows about as much about a settlement as the players, there are some immediate questions about what the place looks like.


SIZE/POPULATIONS
You could rely on the Pathfinder SRD for Settlement size or you could just pull stuff largely out of your ass, which is what I like to do, because I'm much less concerned with how many people there are in a given settlement than how many people it "feels like" are there. There are camps, outposts, villages, towns, forts and cities.

Camps have about 20 or fewer people and are hunter-gatherers/subsistence farmers, maybe a religious/political commune, maybe refugees, maybe a village in serious decline, maybe a hunting lodge or the like. (Reaction to adventurers: Neutral or Chaotic Needy)

Outposts have as few people as camps but maybe more (as many as a town in rare circumstance) and are dedicated to very specific tasks and are usually built in an ad hoc manner. The more common are military outposts, outposts for scientific or magical research and outposts dedicate to some kind of labor like quarrying, foresting, mining, etc. Research or labor outposts are often quite noisy. (Reaction to adventurers: Neutral Indifferent)

Villages have enough people to form some moderate degree of hierarchy and there is usually a religious leader, political leader, maybe a couple of trade specialists, while most people aren't living terribly far above subsistence farming. (Reaction to adventurers: Neutral Wary)

Forts include castles held by nobility, large military installations, and fortified wizardly or clerical enclaves. They likely have fewer people than a village and are highly idiosyncratic. Usually have a single reliable point of access to trade. (Reaction to adventurers: Neutral Wary or Indifferent, unless the head honcho of the fort is a total dick, in which case, AVOID)

Towns have plenty of hierarchy  likely multiple religions, and some bureaucracy, possibly taxes/levees, etc. There are likely lower, middle and upper classes here. To survive as such, a town has to be associated with some nearby farming villages and communities and are often intermediaries between food sources and cities; accordingly, Towns are always central to the maintenance of trade routes. Most towns have walls, somewhere, though they may have long grown beyond their walls. (Reaction to adventurers: Neutral Disgusted)

Cities are large, with a much greater distance between the upper classes and the rest of the citizenry. The bureaucracy is bloated and byzantine, taxes are often oppressive and arbitrary, and there are usually a whole lot of really poor people. Cities may or may not be walled and any such defensive structures are probably out of date and in disrepair. Cities are generally well-positioned near large, reliable food sources - usually there are a lot of farms nearby and/or they're on the water. (Reaction to adventurers: Neutral Unreliable or Dangerous)


WHAT'S THAT SMELL?
Camps, outposts, villages and forts are all likely built largely out of ambient material (if near a forest, wood; grasslands, likely poor quality brick; near stones, likely piled rock). Forts and outposts may have central structures built with more modern, refined materials, but these are likely in disrepair and decay if the settlement has been around for long.

Villagers, and possibly some townsfolk that deal in livestock, likely share their sleeping quarters with their animals.

Towns might have cobbled streets and Cities almost always do, but anything smaller is usually just dirt roads and mud (and of course, excrement and rotting food). Towns might have a sewer and Cities almost always do, but, of course because dungeons and monsters are metastatic and virulent, the sewer is likely a haven of Old One trans-dimensional spider monsters or chaos cultists or punk priests or vampire gangs. Similarly, as trade routes are cut off by war, dungeon or monster incursion or other natural disasters, towns, villages and even cities contract and die off, ceding the remaining edifice to dungeons and monsters.

Really new settlements may stink of the building materials (sap, sawdust, mud, dust). And most have that delightful beast of burden smell. Likely everything larger than a village smells a bit like a latrine (including Forts). In towns and cities, the poor likely like in the oldest, crummiest buildings, likely closest to areas of employment and lowest to sea level.

WHERE YOU SLEEP
It's always safe to assume that there is a place to stay. If you've got enough valuable stuff (more on that in a second), the locals might even offer you their beds while they go bunk outside or with the neighbors. It's not always safe to assume that they've got stuff you need or can afford to give you money for what you want to sell.

AVAILABILITY (EQUIPMENT)

The B/X equipment list has like twenty things on it. Here is my take on it:

1. Portable containers (Backpacks, large sacks, small sacks, drinking skins)

2. Food (Standard Rations, Meals)

3. Small Hammer

4. Wooden Pole (10')

5. Wine/water/beer (quart)

6. Torches (6)

7. Tinder Box

8. Rope (50' length)

9. Flask of Oil

10. Iron Rations

11. Lantern

12. Mirror

13. Thieves' Tools

14. Holy Symbol

15. Vial of Holy Water 

16. Specialty items (herbs, medicinal potions, or anything else not included in the above)

CAMPS AND OUTPOSTS

Camps and Outposts at any given time have d6 of items 1-6 for sale and they likely can't buy much of anything off of you (or even barter). You likely aren't buying from a store, but a quartermaster or foreperson who likely has none of the items to sell you, but has to buy them off the locals herself. You can get one of 7-12 by successfully begging and rolling d6-1 for quality. They've got about 50 gp on hand.

WANDERING SALESPERSONS

Treat wandering salespersons, swamp-witches and members of less reputable guilds as having d3 of items 1-6 for sale, but they don't "use up" what they've got for sale and they likely have d2 of a single uncommon item for sale (roll d10+6 and consult the above). You can probably get items 7-12 by successfully begging and rolling d6-2 for quality. Alternatively, you might get a magical (ahem, cursed) item, depending on the vendor. They've got coins jewels, gems or jewelry worth about 200 gp squirreled away for exchange.

VILLAGES AND TOWNS

You ought to be able to find and buy anything from 1-16, however:

9-12 are available for sale in limited quantities (if you're in a Village, there's one of each, in a Town, d6). The shopkeep knows where you can get more, but you'll have to roll on the quality table (standard roll). You're probably buying Uncle Jed's lantern he's had for twenty years or a cracked and tarnished mirror his wife keeps.

13. Is always available from the local Guild and shopkeeps in more disreputable areas might have one or two "lying around." Of course, asking for them from people that aren't disreputable will prove problematic.

14-15. Are only available from religious institutions, but might be picked up at un-manned shrines (drop a donation in the box), or perhaps purchased from pious villagers (you'll likely need to convince them of your need and demonstrate your association with their deity).

16. Is unavailable in Villages and available in limited supplies in towns. Likely available outside of towns from a swamp-witch or half-man.

All the villagers could likely pool have 100-200 gp, but mostly in bartered goods (grain, etc). Town shops will be able to draw on letters of credit to pay you thousands of gold for stuff. No real concern there, though they're likely not interested in any single thing worth more than about 100 gp.

FORTS

Work just like Camps and Outposts, but you can get items 1-8 and some uncommon items as a Wandering Salesperson. Might be able to get multiples of 13-16, depending on the nature of the fort, otherwise, there's one of 9-16 with a standard quality roll. Probably have a couple thousand gp to buy stuff off of you, but they're only interested in what they think is important.

CITIES

Have everything and magical stuff too and you never need to worry about getting your stuff sold.

Note: Rogues in a Guild have access to fences. So long as they can get stuff back to a settlement, they can signal for an occult courier to take good to a fence. The fence takes 5% and the Guild another 15% of the sale.

AVAILABILITY (ARMS & ARMOR)

I'm using B/X here again, but I think the breaking point is obvious.

CAMPS, OUTPOSTS, VILLAGES, TOWNS AND FORTS

A. If the settlement is a Camp, Outpost or Village and local law enforcement is a police body (likely the settlement is unwalled, agrarian and close to trade routes) then anything costing more than 25 gold (Crossbow, Long Bow, Silver dagger, Chain and Plate) just isn't for sale or maybe even to be had by less-than-legal means.

B. If the settlement is Camp, Outpost or Village and local law is generally more interested in defending the settlement than policing it or if the settlement is a Town or Fort (likely the settlement is walled, pseudo-military and further from trade routes or is a town), anything costing more than 25 gold is absolutely and totally unavailable for sale without rolling for quality. Even then, they've probably only got one to spare at any given time.

CITIES

Have everything and things need not necessarily be subject to a quality roll.

ROLLING FOR QUALITY

A modified d6. You might be able to get a point in your favor if you're a particularly charming or convincing haggler but some places have better stuff than others...

1: Junk. No resell value. If you're playing with these encumbrance rules (part one, and part two), then this kind of stuff is the first thing that breaks. Likely negatively affects reaction rolls if the item is worn or carried regularly (write "Junk" on your character sheet, by your Charisma score)

2-4: Crummy. It works ok, but it looks terrible and is only worth a handful of coin (usually 1 gp for anything cheaper than 25 gp, and 10 gp for anything worth more). Might negatively affects reaction rolls if the item is worn or carried regularly (write "Crummy" on your character sheet by your Charisma score)

5: Well worn. Looks OK. You can re-sell it for half list price.

6: Good. Works like it should.

pictures: top is by (I think) Pablo Clark,  whoops, no, +Cédric Plante from Le Chaudron Chromatic, I can't remember/find who did the middle and LC picture by Gerald Parel

Affordanaces and the OSR (& Joesky Tax)

FLUNCH

Brendan describes Affordances here. It's highly interesting and I think he's right. As +Richard G notes, Affordances (gameable elements, elements in a text that can be used as/translate easily to elements of play at the table) are basically that old "crunch"/"fluff" thing.

What comes immediately to mind is that the people I like, respect and look up to as designers and people-who-think-about-rpgs-on-the-web often work to maximize the number of Affordances  in a given chunk of text while reducing or eliminating all together the non-Affordances.

For example, I'd suggest all of the below are meant to be pure Affordance:
A.  +Alex Schroeder's +One Page Dungeon Contest
B. +Jack Shear's use of pastiche in setting description (see Gothic Earth or any of his other settings [there's a free pdf of Gothic Earth on his blog, check the right-hand column])
C. Noisms's 25 word description of Yoon Suin
D. +Wayne Rossi's exegesis of Volume 3 of OD&D
E. +Jeff Rients's Encounter Critical for Star Wars (or nearly anything Jeff does)
F. Both +Brendan S and +Talysman the Ur-Beatle seem to actively endeavor to limit their posts to only Affordances or ideas about/for Affordances (their blogs are here and here, respectively).
G. +Zak Smith's whole "let's find good things in old modules" thing (AKA reviews) is basically looking for really good Affordances in the otherwise barren field of over-written, professionally produced D&D modules. 

D. is really an extended effort to demonstrate how much evocative stuff you can get out of a few mechanics and some tables without ever going into the usual setting book's wall of text (in other words: an argument for the power and elegance of an Affordance-heavy approach to design).

JOESKY TAX

OK, I'm intentionally misapplying the tax here, but whatever.

SETTING GENERATION RULES
1. Write down the main concept of the setting. Can't be more than five words.
2. List everything about the setting. Or maybe do like a web-looking brainstorm thing. Whatever. You need at least 23 ideas and each idea should be no more than a couple of words, but the ideas should be evocative and can be names of spells, general things, a monster, etc. Just write them all down.
3. Take the 23 best ideas, the ideas which are most evocative, interesting and which most closely cleave to your notion of the setting and write them down as a list, one thing on each line.
4. Number them 2-24.
5. Find a blank hexmap. Somewhere in there is the home hex. This is where play starts. Roll 2d12 and write down the number on that hex. That's whatever idea is operative here.
6. Each time the players hit a new hex, roll 2-24 again and assign accordingly.
7. Make several sublists from your 23 options for rolling wandering monsters, city encounters, wilderness encounters, what kind of dungeon it is, etc, etc. Obviously, most of these entries are not necessarily going to point to something obvious (you've rolled "Magic" on a city encounter, what does that actually mean? [Figure it out GM]).
It'll be tricky at first but as more and more gets filled in/figured out, it'll become easier.

What's a Hit Point?

This is a companion to this post about death, dying, critical hits and Wounds and this discussion has been raised a couple of times recently, so:

HIT POINTS

Fighters start with 6 Hit Points, Clerics and Rogues with 5 and Magic Users with 4. 

Fighters use a d8 Hit Die and everyone else uses a d6. 

From levels two through seven, upon level advance a Character's total HP is increased by rolling the appropriate HD and adding the result.

At level 8 and upon attaining any future levels, Fighters gain 2 HP and everyone else gains 1 HP.

(Monsters, in case you're interested, generally use a d8 Hit Die)

HEALING 

The word "heal" is used here to as in, "to make sound or whole" and not necessarily to indicate rectifying actual physical damage.

OUT OF COMBAT
So long as you can take a breather, you get back 25% of your max HP. A breather is a few minutes of relatively unthreatened, unoccupied rest. (Like, if you run from some orcs, fight for a bit then retreat, bar the door and rest for a couple of minutes while the orcs hack down the door: everyone gets back 25% of their HP except for the orcs hacking down the door; if someone has to hold the door, everyone but the person holding the door and the orcs hacking it down get back Hit Points).

A good nights sleep gets you back 100% of your max HP (keeping in mind that being Wounded reduces your HP to 50% of its original amount and that being Wounded is pretty damn common).

IN COMBAT

In combat your options for healing are limited to magic, except when it comes to Hideous Wounds.

Hideous Wounds come with a risk of bleeding out (d6 HP loss a turn). Bleeding can be relieved by magical means (magical healing, regardless of how it's applied, stops bleeding), but also by simple triage:

Applying a tourniquet can be done in a round and lasts as d3+1 hours but cannot be re-applied.

Patching up a Wound takes 2d4+2 rounds and these patches generally stick around, logic of the situation permitting. 

MAGICAL HEALING (IN OR OUT OF COMBAT)
Cure Light, Serious and Critical Wounds become Cure Wounds, Improved Cure Wounds and Greater Cure Wounds. Take a round to cast, require touch, and...

Cure Wounds
Grants an automatic save v poison for Wound recuperation and reduces convalescence by a week or it heals 1 HD+1 HP; always stops bleeding.

Improved Cure Wounds
Grants two automatic saves v poison for Wound recuperation and reduces convalescence by two weeks or it heals 2 HD+1 HP; always stops bleeding.

Greater Cure Wounds
Heals 1 Wound completely or heals 3HD+1 HP; always stops bleeding and mends bones.

RATIONALE

I think of HP as the character's capacity to actively and intentionally forestall what would otherwise mean death. So a Hit Point is composed of a little bit of luck but is mostly evidence of superior endurance and previously gained combat experience (or experience points, in the case of characters past the first level). 

That's not to say that HP are purely probabilistic and not at all descriptive, just that they're probabilistic first and it's in that light that they ought to be considered descriptive. So, if a Character is struck by a knife and loses a third of its HP, that's exegetically probably a nasty but shallow slash; on the other hand, if a Character is struck by a knife and loses only an eighth of its HP, then it's likely just scratched or it got smacked in the face by the attackers elbow, etc, etc.

The cinematic application of HP loss could include: scrapes, bruises, a broken nose, black eyes, lost hair, a good bit of skin missing, loose or lost teeth, fingernails broken, a blow to the funny bone; and would not include: most broken bones, any serious wound, frostbite, major burns, large wounds, sucking wounds, or anything else that would represent actual impairment of the Character in their general role as ersatz hero, delver and murderhobo.

I see four consequences of this perspective:

1. At Character creation starting HP is awarded in a non-random way because I assume that a character of a certain Class has likely had a bit more or less experience or training in combat and other strenuous activities. OD&D models this in a similar way by giving Fighters HD+1 at level 1.

2. When a Character advances in level, they are handed a packet of new mechanical advantages. These advantages are directly tied to what sort of stuff the character, being of a Class, has been up to, both during the active parts of the game and during down-time. Fighters spend much of their time hauling the heavies stuff around, wearing the heaviest armor, carrying the heaviest weapons, spend more time trying to draw fire while also avoid immanent death  than anyone else (hopefully), and then spend their free time doing cardio, martial arts or the like. Accordingly, Fighters get a Hit Die one size larger than anyone else. As everyone else spends most of their time trying to be useful in a way that involves not carrying the heavy stuff, not trying to breaking down doors and not being in the middle of melee, they get the same d6 Hit Die.

3. Throughout play there are certain events and classes of damage for which Hit Points are an entirely unsuited metric of probable death. Instead, in these instances, death is highly certain regardless of Character combat experience and endurance; the only way to avoid death is by some kind of miraculous "save." So: saving throws. What precisely happens when a character makes a save is up the GM. My personal take is that they survive but come back suffering a Wound, usually as a direct result of what would have otherwise killed them. Wounds are what happen when the damage caused is so total, persistent or catastrophic that it cannot possibly be totally avoided or complete mitigated in a meaningful way.

4. HP is really easy to recharge because it's much less a descriptor of the condition of a character's body and much more a descriptor the character's capacity to actively and intentionally avoid dying.

Also: Mathematically, my HP advancement scheme works out such that, on average a level 7 character in my game has as much HP as a level 10 character of the same class in OD&D, but level 10 characters in both systems have nearly the same HP. I've found the early "artificial" increase in HP and increasing the Fighter HD size makes being Wounded interesting and not so burdensome that everyone wishes the Character would just die already, otherwise I would have just stuck with the OD&D HD advancement scheme.

picture: Kimitake Hiraoka/Yukio Mishima's St. Sebastian