Systems in Settings

The ruleset you use for a game has a set of assumptions, and these assumptions, axiom-like, produce a complex emergent world. It’s pretty clear that they don’t produce one world, though, given that AD&D 2nd Edition had output as varied as the Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, Planescape and Dark Sun. And to be blunt, they’re not always followed through properly - indeed, following through leads you to some strange places, as demonstrated by Emily Dresner’s excellent Dungeonomics series, and particularly The Wizards and the Sheep. I don’t follow through properly, or at least I don’t arrive as the same places as Dresner does.

But I want to look at what - at the beginning of writing this - I’m calling systems in game settings, and I might have a different label for them by the end of things. Systems, in this, are (approximately, this is me thinking out loud) methods or objects in the setting which the player characters understand (or can easily understand) and can use. So, in the very basic sense, roads are systems. A navigable river is a system, of a sort; a map or maintenance to dredge channels and clear logjams make it into a definite one. The ones I’m most interested in here, though, are those that are emergent from the rules. So: a network of teleport circles is a system. The standing arrangement that if you bring a rock from a given place to a wizard, they’re able to teleport you there for a price is a system (the price might be the rock). Flying ships on predictable routes are a system. Money is a system, although the idea that gold pieces have inherent value is actually an axiom of many games.

There’s an obvious gradient here from wild setting to civilised setting; the latter has more systems, very nearly by definition. There’s a less obvious gradient from low-magic to high-magic; high-magic settings like Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels or Planescape or Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series are bursting with systems, but you can have a low-magic or no-magic setting with them too; Imperial Rome and medieval China both spring to mind.

Systems can be accessible or not; their existence does not mean everyone gets to use them. Even in the Culture books, it’s clear that the Special Circumstances folk have access to systems others don’t, although it’s otherwise pretty egalitarian. Dark Sun, on the other hand, is largely defined by systems that people can’t access unless they meet some specific condition. Planescape allows everyone access to the portals, but the benefits and systems of particular factions are reserved for those factions’ members. Some (the Harmonium) are almost an anti-system, something nobody can use and which is a disadvantage to most, like an American police department (possibly unfair to the Harmonium).

I’m currently looking at and thinking about this because having two settings in development at the same time is providing interesting contrasts. Utterbaum is full of systems. The player characters are just starting to get access to some of them; they’re building up knowledge of where there are teleport circles, and where there are sources of information. They know that most people in towns and other sites who are teleporting do so from the circles as well as to them - because that’s where the wizards who will teleport you for a price hang out - and so you can hitch-hike teleports if there aren’t many of you and you’re not particular about timing. One of them, as of the last level-up, has access to the sending spell, which is in many ways the communications backbone of the setting.

Sending allows the caster to send a 25-word message to someone else, anywhere on the same plane of existence, and then they can reply. 25 words isn’t a lot, and it costs a third-level or higher spell slot, which isn’t chump change, even in a high-magic setting. So, obviously, some people employ code systems for this. By having each word stand in for a sentence via a code book, you can communicate a short essay about a topic, as long as it’s a topic that has been discussed in advance. And of course, if you haven’t, you can still resort to using actual sentences, presumably starting with an agreed word that means “don’t try to decode this”. The intention here is to compress, not to obscure, but it does obscure, so covert organisations can send messages via wizards and clerics that don’t work for them without the messenger knowing what the message is. Interestingly, druids don’t get access to sending, which means that one of the main (known) semi-covert organisations in the Utterbaum setting, the anti-civilisation druid-and-treant Havnagar, need to send their messages via someone else. Or they can use animal messenger (which is slower, but they totally do, because a cadre of semi-trained sea-otter and osprey messenger beasts is far too cool not to use), or the dream spell (higher level, but allows a full conversation over the course of up to 8 hours). Dream has the interesting note that the recipient remembers the conversation perfectly when they wake up, making that spell also a magnificent teaching tool. You begin to see what I mean by the systems being emergent from the rules.

Heliomar doesn’t have the same degree of systems, at all, despite having the same ruleset. The setting has a context of systems, back in the Empire, and there are a few places where systemic stuff is happening; the city of Soom, on the west coast, goes a little overboard in that regard. But the player characters are currently exploring one specific abandoned/ruined temple somewhere far away from Soom, and the best way they could get there was to be sent to a teleport circle that was something in the region of a hundred miles away from their destination, and to walk the rest of the way. Some of that route crossed over an ancient road, parts of which are being brought back into order by a variety of rangers and stonemasons and in some cases odder creatures, and that’s a system that’s only just getting going.

By virtue of this wild frontier, Heliomar - mostly accidentally - hews close to the original concepts of D&D, where gold was pretty nearly the only established abstract thing that player characters could use, and everything else was the weird logic of the dungeon or the hostile wilderness. It was, of course, a hostile wilderness that had at some stage held civilisation, though, because how else do the treasure and the ruins with the secret doors get there? But you couldn’t buy things from shops there, or reliably travel from one place to another without being attacked.

Systems aren’t civilisation per se, though. Tolkien’s elves definitely had civilisation; they could not be said to have systems. The dwarves did, to some degree; the hobbits absolutely did. And Mordor and Isengard were to varying degrees - Isengard more so, perhaps - composed mostly of systems, which probably shows a little of Tolkien’s thinking.

I’ve played with the idea of systems before, but rarely in the context of them starting to exist; more usually I’ve been looking at what happens when you take them away. A previous campaign, for instance, had a setup for “astral shipping” which was akin to a rail network - scheduled services from one station to another, occasional breakdowns and delays, most journeys not requiring food or accommodation on the ships, but some longer ones having some of that, and loads of freight which was simultaneously a background to the passengers and also the main purpose of the thing.

And then there was an astral storm, and all of that stopped for a few months. Chaos of many kinds ensued. So the situation like Utterbaum, where the systems are, for the most part decentralised and robust, or Heliomar, where they’re just coming into being, make things interesting and different. Utterbaum’s degree of decentralisation has been the cause of some confusion thus far, in fact; there’s an amount of expectation from the players and from some NPCs in the setting that there should be central authorities, and for the most part, there aren’t. This has its own strengths and weaknesses, too.

I haven’t come up with a better name than systems. But it’s after one in the morning, and I have a game to run tomorrow/later today, so I’d better give up on it for now. Thank you for reading this stream of consciousness, and if you’ve any thinking on a better label, let me know!

Drew.