The Year of the Gazetteer: A Retrospective

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With the Year of the Gazetteer behind us, I'd like to think back on how much it has done for this blog in the last twelve months. We went from averaging about two and a half posts a month in 2022 and 2023 to having at least 10 a month, with 2024 having 149 posts - my most productive year by far. I created 13 hex maps (counting Ochsebad) of various regions in my long-running Lunar Lands setting, which has hosted almost every campaign I've run since middle school - altogether detailing 33,543 hexes and 229,233 square miles of setting. That's an area a little smaller than Madagascar if smushed together, although the areas are not contiguous. I also wrote several articles, including lore, adventure hooks, and homebrew game material, that detailed different parts of my setting, fulfilling the purpose I made this blog for in the first place but never knew where to start with. Keep your eyes out for a Lunar Lands index in the future, where I will catalogue this material.

I learned a couple things along the way. Originally, I intended to use three-mile hexes for every map - I'm inclined to agree with Mythlands' points about this scale - but as I expanded beyond Switzerland-sized Lescatie I realized that it would just be unfeasible to keep making maps in that scale on a regular basis. After the undertaking that was Togarmah, I realized that even doing six-mile-hex maps of many regions was too big to do in detail, and most of the maps are only partial segments of their respective regions. Nevertheless, I still think there's more than enough to last a good few campaigns. Maybe some day I'll go back and fill in the gaps with hex maps of the remaining areas, but for now, it's a project I'm quite satisfied with.

Out of all the maps, the one that's gotten the most attention has been that of the Freikantons, which has sat in my list of most popular posts for some time now. I suspect this comes from its links to Ochsebad, which I submitted for the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam at DIY & Dragons, realizing how I could contribute to both projects (which was a lot of fun!). Or maybe bitches just love the Old Swiss Confederacy. Who knows.

From here, I want to go from a big success (at the time of this writing, my post on terrain rules for combat is still my biggest success) to what I consider my biggest failed experiment. This didn't happen last year but the year before, but back then, I wrote a post about how the setting of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica would work well for an OSR campaign. I still think that, but I'm sad to say I don't think that's a campaign that will ever see the light of day. Though the post brought a lot of attention to my blog - even making it onto the OSR subreddit, somehow - a lot of the discourse there made me realize that there is not a lot of overlap between why I enjoyed Madoka Magica and why everyone else did.

I should note that I got into the series very early on in its run, I believe the day it blew up online as soon as the third episode aired (if you know, you know), and at that time, there had not been much in the way of character development; what drew me in was the interesting and very gameable setting and magic system, which seemed like it was going somewhere. I thought that setting would lend itself well to OSR gameplay. However, most of the reception I got was about how OSR systems don't model interpersonal dynamics well, despite me stating this was the aspect of the series I found the weakest. What I realized was that it's been over ten years, and most people now know Madoka Magica for the character-driven show it ended up becoming. I found the setting interesting but the characters unlikeable, whereas the fandom generally finds the characters likeable but the setting uninteresting (or at least unimportant). Nowadays, anyone wanting to play a game in the Madoka Magica universe is probably going to expect a depressed lesbian psychodrama instead of the horror-infused dungeon-delving sandbox about grappling with the limits of your own humanity I wanted to run, and that isn't really the kind of campaign I would be interested in running.

Anyway, I bring all of this up because this experience has taught me absolutely nothing.

Art by Martin Rodriguez

2025: The Year of the Barbarian

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

- Robert E. Howard

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gee, if only I was a half-naked, super-ripped dude who could solve every single problem with one blow from his enchanted blade, THEN maybe I could get some gasoline and a lower interest rate on my home loan.

- Misterkitty's Stupid Comics

Lately, I've gotten deeply into a specific kind of fantasy. Sword-and-sorcery blood-and-thunder barbarian hero pulp heroic fantasy. The likes of Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, Fafhrd, Thongor, we can offer an honorable mention to Dave. While barbarians in the Lunar Lands tend to look more like ancient Celts or Germanics, I can't deny that I don't love myself a good Frazetta or Vallejo mighty-thewed warrior, in its own context.

I've been getting into not only 30s barbarian pulp, but also 70s barbarian comics, a surprisingly deep genre that Trey at From the Sorcerer's Skull has written plenty about. He's even done some writings of a game meant to emulate that milieu. I have him to credit for introducing me to Arak, Son of Thunder, which would have gotten into the Lunar Lands Appendix N had I not discovered it so recently and had there not been other, longer-standing influences to include It got me thinking of how I could do something like that myself - and, in particular, there are a few settings I've looked at that I feel would lend themselves well to such an approach. Neither are my own creation, but both I feel tap into the well of sword and sorcery goodness in their own ways.

One is a setting from the second big wave of pulp fantasy that I find incredibly gameable, and which has had a much bigger influence on the tabletop RPG world than many people realize, most likely due to its (in my opinion undeserved) bad reputation. The other is a setting I have talked about here on the blog several times already, one which, despite its association with another popular comic artist (to the point where most people overestimate how much involvement he had in it), I think would shine with a reinterpretation in the Mighty Marvel Manner under the theoretical pen of Roy Thomas. I intend to explore each of these in a forthcoming series of posts.

I'll still be posting the occasional Lunar Lands lore, of course - but we'll take a detour that will ring in the Year of the Barbarian! Stay tuned for what's to come!

Freeport By Way of Mexico City

While I intend to focus on in-universe material for the Year of the Gazetteer, I wanted to give a closer look into the thought process behind Valossa, because in the development of my setting, I find its story one of the more interesting ones - and one that opens up some new avenues into how we think about worldbuilding.

As some of you may have recognized, Valossa and its capital Porto Libre are adapted from Green Ronin's excellent Freeport: City of Adventure line. When locking down details of my setting, the idea of a setting-neutral city with plenty of locations, NPCs, and adventure hooks to drop down into an existing campaign world appealed to me, and it was something I decided was worth tracking down. I'm pretty happy with the results. There's easily enough in the Pirate's Guide to Freeport alone to fill multiple campaigns, and that's not even the most recent version of the book; it's just the one I have.

There's one problem, though.

See that? That is Freeport, Maine. My home town.

It's not like it's a particularly obscure place as far as Maine goes, even. We get tons of tourists every summer. It's where LL Bean was founded, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time just hanging out at their flagship store in my youth (they have a fish tank). The point is, the images evoked by the name "Freeport" in my mind are hilariously mundane, and not at all what the fine folks at Green Ronin were going for.

Also, there's not really an English-influenced culture in my setting anyway, so I don't use direct English names often.

So obviously, if I was going to use it, the name had to go. And my first thought was to translate it into another language. I started thinking about other places that produced a lot of pirates, and my mind went to the Spanish Main. Porto Libre it was, then. Less Caribbean, more Gulf. Less rain-soaked streets and powdered wigs, more tiled roofs and sunny balconies.

An aside: Yes, before anyone asks, I know it should be Puerto Libre. I didn't catch that mistake until it was too late, and it stuck.

Naturally, this led me to place the city and its island environs off the coast of Taldameer, the resident Spain stand-in in my world. I still wanted Porto Libre to feel distinct from the mainland without losing its Spanish character, though. For a while, I was leaning toward drawing inspiration from the Balearic Islands (and I still do a little of that); conveniently, they themselves have a long traditon of piracy. But then I got an idea just stupid enough to work.

Porto Libre, I decided, would be the Lunar Lands' equivalent of colonial-era Mexico.

This period in history is a fascinating one, and one that gets little attention in the Anglosphere. You can see the last vestiges of feudalism in the noble estates and their industries, making it fit surprisingly well into a medieval framework. And the collision of indigenous mythologies with Catholicism gave rise to a rich folkloric tradition that continues to this day, even beyond the stuff everyone knows about like the Day of the Dead. That gives me plenty of material to work with already.

As I gave Porto Libre a facelift, I soon realized that the material given the Freeport books wasn't going to contain everything I wanted to explore. Lifting a name from the background, I expanded the Serpents' Teeth into the larger island of Valossa. I could still have sweltering jungles, but there would also be room for all the desert bandits, lonely cattle ranchers, isolated mission houses, and dashing swashbucklers one could ask for. If I run a campaign in Valossa there will be at least one NPC played by Danny Trejo and you are going to like it dammit.

Yes, it's a bit anachronistic. I know it's outside the late-medieval-Europe scope of the majority of my setting, and even more separated by space than it is by time. Yes, I know that I try to be relatively non-Flinstonist in my approach to worldbuilding, and the presence of Mexico within a couple days of Greece is going to raise a few eyebrows. But who cares? This is a fantasy setting - one heavily inspired by history and folklore, yes, but even though there's an attention to authenticity, it's not meant to be shackled to it. I've already mashed together parts of different time periods, if the fact I have a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and an Abbasid Caliphate is any indication. A Mexico on top of that doesn't feel that weird.

It isn't like this is particularly new, either. Robert E. Howard, the man who pioneered fantasy worldbuilding because he liked writing historical fiction but took the "historical" part of that as a suggestion more than anything else, wasn't afraid to throw aspects of the colonial era and even later into the Hyborian Age - Pictland might be named for an ancient Scottish tribe, but it draws more influence from the frontier settlements found in Westerns. He himself might have based Zamora off of Mexico, as this article theorizes - and my discovery of that article was a big influence on deciding to go this route with Valossa.

In short - don't be afraid to think outside the box with your worldbuilding. Even if the majority of your setting is based on a particular region or era, there's no reason you can't incorporate pieces of another. In fact, it might help set your setting apart. A lot of people have expressed a desire to do something different from standard medieval European fantasy for their games, but many players find a complete departure from the norm jarring and difficult to adjust to. But if you decide to go halfway, and dump 17th century New Spain off the coast of 15th century Europe, suddenly you have something that feels different, but with all the comfortable touchpoints within reach.

From here on out, the Year of the Gazetteer's Valossa entries will largely focus on the parts of the Republic beyond Porto Libre itself. For information on the capital, I would recommend you go to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, and just mentally replace everyone's names with the closest Spanish equivalent and all entries of "Sea Lord" with "Doge" (I prefer my silly one-off titles historically accurate, thank you). But there's far more to Valossa than just Porto Libre, and I hope you're ready to exploring it with me!

2024: The Year of the Gazetteer

Let's not beat around the bush. This blog was designed, at least in part, as a repository for lore on my setting, and while there's undoubtedly been that sort of material posted here, I haven't been doing as much as I would like to.

In no small part, that's due to the fact that I don't really know where to start. Cosmology? The nature of magic? Any particular region? Will any of that even be of use to the people who read my blog? As such, the worldbuilding stuff has taken somewhat of a backburner in favor of my musings on game theory and inspirational material. But I do have a setting I want to put out there. And this place is Tales of the Lunar Lands, after all.

Luckily, I've figured out a solution.

We have a new year right around the corner. And in the interests of putting out more content for my blog, and putting more setting information to paper (pixels?), I declare 2024 as the Year of the Gazetteer.

I've always enjoyed gazetteer materials for RPG settings. They're worldbuilding in its purest form - no story, often no game mechanics, just lots and lots of ideas. There's a reason the Mystara gazetteers are so fondly remembered, and the gazetteers White Wolf put out for Ravenloft back in the 3e era remain the definitive version of that setting for me. Even if you aren't intending on running those settings, you can flip through the pages of a gazetteer and soak in the details, imagining what life in the setting might be like or what stories could be told there. As a worldbuilding nerd, I love that stuff. Some of my favorite Star Wars publications are the Essential Guide series, after all. And I feel like it would be just the sort of format I would want if I was to publish more setting material.

How's this going to work? I'll devote each month in 2024 to a different region of my setting, and my output for the blog for that month will be a gazetteer for that area, with details on the local culture, the points of interest, and relevant factions and personalities. I also intend to put out hex maps of each area, or at least parts thereof, because my setting has gone way too long without one. This way, I have the inspiration I need to post more, and I can get more setting content out into the world in the process.

Regular features like Friday Encounter will still continue, but if possible I'll try to relate the encounters to the themes of the spotlighted region that month (they will, of course, still be usable anywhere, for the sake of utility). I'll still post my thoughts on gaming and DMing, too, but they'll be mixed in with the gazetteer posts.

Finally, I intend for most, if not all, of my gazetteer postings to be useful at the table. I understand that not everyone has much interest in listening to me ramble about my setting. That's okay - I'm not expecting anyone to start playing in it. I merely want to get some of my thoughts out there, and to have a place where it's stored online for easy reference. But whenever possible, I'll try to include dungeons, quests, NPCs, and magic items that might be useful for any DM to borrow, whether they're using the rest of the setting material or not. And of course, I often find myself getting inspired by reading the musings of other DMs - I'd be honored to provide that inspiration for others.

Without further ado, I'd like to announce the schedule for the Year of the Gazetteer:

January: Lescatie - The Holy Kingdom

February: Valossa - Isle of Swords

March: Togarmah - Land of the Golden Peace

April: Ukiah - The Howling Steppe

May: Al-Riyah - Emirate of the Winds

June: The Freikantons - Dominion of the Swordbrothers

July: The Sonderlunding Highlands - The Ancestral Lands

August: The Levic Marches - Seat of the League

September: Golnir - Kingdom Among the Ruins

October: The Crownlands - Heart of the Empire

November: The Green Downs - The Halfling Heartland

December: Tennurhaf - The Sea of Teeth

We'll see you then - and in the meantime, happy gaming!

The Perfect D&D Movie Already Exists

 And it's not the one with Jeremy Irons, either.

Well, it finally happened. The fabled D&D movie is finally out of development hell. I'm sure you've already seen the news about Honor Among Thieves, and no doubt a considerable amount of both praise and excitement and terror and disgust alike.

For my part, I'm not going to watch it.

You might have already realized this from my previous post on the subject, but I'm not the biggest fan of TRPGs having official tie-in fiction. When I got into D&D, what drew me to it was its potential to spark the imagination and to tell stories like the ones that inspired me - fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and classic fantasy. The rules were just a framework to build off of, and every DM had the potential to make the story and the setting their own.

But that doesn't sell in the age of cinematic universes. I'm afraid that what we're going to get is just going to be some generic fantasy flick with the D&D name slapped on it because Wizards desperately wants to be Marvel, and if the movie proves a success we're only going to get more of that. I already feel like the way the lore has been handled in 5e is pivoting away from promoting the limitless potential of the game in favor of turning it into one other appendage of the Forgotten Realms metaplot. And if new players come to D&D because they want to be Drizzt or Elminster or Chris Pine instead of wanting to be Odysseus or Robin Hood or Bilbo Baggins, all we're going to see is the snake eating its tail, and the "official" D&D promoted by Wizards will grow more and more corporate, self-referential, and uninspiring. No amount of morbid curiosity I might have is going to make me put my box office dollars toward making that a reality.

But that's not what we're here to talk about today. If we're going to talk about D&D movies, I would say that we don't need one. And not just because it's going to give people ideas of what D&D should and shouldn't be - but because it already exists.

The Princess Bride is a 1987 fantasy action-adventure comedy film based on the 1973 novel of the same name. You've probably already heard of it. Chances are that even if you haven't seen the movie you can already quote at least half of it (I certainly could, before I saw it for the first time during a college movie night that ingrained it in my mind for the rest of my life). Pretty much every line has become iconic, and been quoted at gaming tables and in forum signatures around the world. It's one of those movies.

It's also, out of every work of fiction I've seen, the one that most resembles a tabletop RPG campaign.

Think about the last RPG session you've been in. What was the mood at the table? Chances are that - even if the characters were facing a serious matter of life and death - everyone was joking around, quoting memes established among the group, and mocking the DM's decisions about the plot (hopefully in a good-natured way). The Princess Bride carries this tone throughout. There are jokes woven throughout the movie, through its witty dialogue and its meta-humor poking fun at the tropes of the swashbuckling period pieces that came before it. There are memorable running gags threaded through the narrative. There's a fourth-wall-breaking frame story about the story being read by a grandfather to his grandson, with occasional cutaways to the grandson urging that the boring parts be skipped over or questioning inconsistencies. Many of their asides would hardly be out of place at a gaming table.

But that doesn't mean that The Princess Bride is a cynical deconstructionist screed about how people who enjoy this kind of thing are actually idiots. It has a heart and soul that makes it enjoyable for what it is. And it knows exactly when to take itself seriously, and when to give the plot real weight and stakes. Just like even the most irreverent gaming group should still have an investment in the story being told and the characters they're portraying, The Princess Bride treats its narrative with respect, and when the Dread Pirate Roberts overcomes the obstacles in his way to defeat his foes and rescue the princess, we root for him the way we would a Luke Skywalker or a John McClane.

Human Swashbuckler, Halfling Assassin, Goliath Barbarian.
Not pictured: the other Human Swashbuckler.

Even the core cast of The Princess Bride feels like a D&D party in the hands of a good DM. Each character is very different, with their own unique personality, concept, and goals. Westley wants to marry Buttercup. Inigo wants revenge for the murder of his father. Fezzik is going along for the ride, but discovers friendship among his companions along the way. It feels as though they were developed by different people, much like how each player in a group brings their own perspective and wants to their characters. But in the end, each character gets their arc paid off in a way that feels satisfying and earned. The writer, much like a skilled DM, was able to weave each character's personal backstory and motivations into the quest, giving them all a reason to be together and making their journeys seem worthwhile. Even if Wesley is the main character, everyone else sees their arc paid off too. It's actually done better in this regard than some of the campaigns I've seen, and DMs would be wise to take note.

Hell, it's even a plot point that when one of the party members hits 0 HP, they need to find a healer to bring him back to life. Sure, I don't like resurrections being easy in my games (and, to The Princess Bride's credit, this is handled as an admittedly off-screen sidequest, which is more to my liking) - but when's the last time you saw that happen in something that wasn't an RPG?

In short, The Princess Bride does the one thing I would want out of a D&D movie: it feels like you're watching someone's D&D campaign. And that's something I feel gets left out of many discussions on the subject. Sure, you could make a generic fantasy yarn and throw in a beholder or namedrop Waterdeep, but that's not a D&D movie. That's a Forgotten Realms movie. And the trappings (and trademarks) aren't enough to capture the true tabletop experience.

Hello World!

Hello!

When it comes to the TRPG blogosphere, I've been a long-time lurker, but it's only recently that I've decided I have insights I would like to contribute myself. So, consider this my entry into the scene!

I have been a fan of tabletop gaming for many years, ever since my childhood fascination with myths, legends, and monsters led my parents to buy me a strange little game that came in a funny box from the town bookstore.

RIP Borders

That was my introduction to what I would discover was the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons - not yet 3.5 - and with it, the world of tabletop roleplaying games. It was here that I first learned what a Dungeon Master was, and what it entailed.

The timing couldn't be better. I can't remember a time I haven't been enamored with mythology and folklore - I grew up on the classic fairy tales before moving onto the gods and heroes of ancient Greece, Might and Magic VII was a fixture of our Windows 98 desktop (and even if I barely understood how to play it and never got off the island at the start of the game, that was well enough for me to pore over the manual and maps that came with the game and imagine what might lie beyond), and I had just finished a book by the name of The Hobbit, just before The Fellowship of the Ring hit the cinemas. Couple that with growing up in the Maine woods, just off a system of forest trails that I spent many hours hiking and imagining what strange creatures and hidden treasures might lie around any corner, I was already prepared to bring life to my own stories, and the worlds that they inhabited.

Not to mention having this as a view from a hill on one of those trails - and I was disappointed to learn that it was the remains of a hotel that burned down in 1914.

My love of storytelling, worldbuilding, and gaming only grew from there, guiding me through a hobby of creating my own fantasy setting I've used to set my games ever since my teen years, and keeping it alive and growing ever since. As I grew older, I found the blogs people like me set up to share their musings on gaming and game design - and now, I'm creating this blog to share my own.

This blog will primarily be a mix of lore dumps for my setting (which my players have dubbed Three Moon Land in lieu of any better name, but the Lunar Lands will work fine) and my thoughts on playing and running games. Most content will center around Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, as that's the system I work with most frequently, but by no means is it going to be exclusive. Despite my first exposure to the game being 3e, you'll find that my tastes tend to run more "old school" - you could call this an O5R blog if you wanted to, but that won't quite be fully accurate either.

Do I expect anyone else to play in my setting? Well, no, not really (although I would be flattered to know if that was the case) - but I hope that me sharing my ideas might inspire others to follow along with their own creations.

And if all else fails, I hope that everyone here can enjoy.