SUBLIGHT Mars

Here, courtesy of our friends at NASA, is a topographical map of Mars. What you will notice is that the north of Mars is flat lowland plains and the south is crater-pitted highlands. This is important to know if we're going to terraform it.

It's pretty easy to terraform Mars. (This is obviously false but let's play along). All you have to do is pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This will warm the planet, causing the carbon dioxide locked in Mars' dry-ice poles to sublimate back into the atmosphere, thus magnifying the greenhouse effect. It will also raise Martian air pressure above the Armstrong limit, the point at which air pressure is high enough that water no longer boils at human body temperature. Then import some water and oxygen, both of which substances Earth has an overabundance of, and Bob's your uncle. The only concern is that Mars has no magnetosphere, meaning the atmosphere will be constantly eroded away by solar wind, but you can get around that by bringing shipments of extra gas in from Earth or Venus on a regular basis.

(I am not a scientist! I am not even the guy from XKCD. I just read some Wikipedia articles. Although I'm pretty sure that's all the guy from XKCD does.)

What's important here is water and air pressure. All the water is going to drain into the lowlands. That's what happened back in the days when the Martian surface had rivers and oceans. And the highlands might not even have breathable air, especially the red bulge on the right, which is the volcanic plateau of Tharsis. The best Earth comparison to the surface of an only mostly terraformed Mars is likely to be the summit of Everest.

So.

as we know, mars is indistinguishable from utah

Random Encounters in the Apalachees

1. Hogs being driven to market in the South
2. Abandoned Three Sisters garden w/ undead eels in soil
3. Minor devil fiddling on a hickory stump
4. Men of the Ordnung in buggies, looking to buy or steal brides
5. Backwoods trappers in hot pursuit of the Blue Beast
6. The Blue Beast smoking a pipe of finest tobacco
7. Gang of hammer-wielding convicts plotting against a machine
8. Preacher in an apple orchard that has miraculously sprouted overnight
9. Itinerant clan of mothmen
10. Smoke rising from a still, bear-traps hidden in the undergrowth around it
11. Pair of federal agents looking for gunrunners
12. Gunrunners masquerading as miners
13. Coal golem, terrified of being burnt
14. Herd of shaggy, aggressive unicorns
15. Men passing a jug of Black Drink around a campfire, taking bets of who'll vomit
16. Witch's cottage in grove of toxic berries
17. Minor devil chained in furnace of locomotive
18. Snake-handling evangelists offering life eternal to anyone who tries it
19. Inbred kid whose banjo has one string made of gold
20. Old woman dressed in the skin of fresh-killed hogs

America Generator

(font size is being fucky in this post. just ignore it I guess)

I have been thinking a lot recently about making a game where you play as colonists in 17th-18th century America, or a fantasy version thereof. This would somehow dovetail with the Comanche thing I wrote about here. Don't know how yet.

What I would ideally like to do is have a sort of dynamic hexcrawl system where the PCs move around the map founding new colonies, watching them grow organically, doing quests to help them along, defending them from the perils of the wilderness and the darkness of the human spirit. The flipside of this would be playing as the natives of the country, hereafter called "Indians", sabotaging the machinery of empire and trying to drive the invaders back into the sea. It would all be a bit like a tabletop version of Civ.

So here is a way of populating a colonial landscape with towns that develop a history over time, characters that interact with one another and a system of quests that naturally spawn and replenish themselves. The big thing it's missing is a way of handling Indians, who need to be exactly as developed in their characterization as the colonists. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. There's more variety in social organization among the Indians than the colonists - the system below can handle Brazilians or French Canadians with roughly equal fidelity, but I don't have one that does both the Cree and the Maya.

(I'm calling them Indians because literally every source from the era calls them that, using Native Americans would detract way too much from the flavour of the period. What I liked about The Comanche Empire is that it treated Native Americans as basically the same as Europeans, organized differently and in possession of different skills but in many ways doing the same basic shit that Europeans did. I would like this game to capture some of that.)

american colonial history. not pictured: the murdery parts

Comanche Hexcrawl

Loosely based on Patrick Stuart's SAVAGES. Except I wouldn't call a game where you play as Native Americans SAVAGES. Seems like a bad idea.

You can ride three hexes in a day. You are a warband. There are three or four of you. Your home base is your band, it moves around the map just like you do except in a semi-random way and slower. It spawns other warbands more or less constantly but most of these are not kept track of. There are other bands on the map, they are your allies unless they have some special reason not to be.

There's a few things moving around the map for the GM (Great Mystery) to keep secret track of. Every time a day passes she tallies it up. Bands move two hexes a day, wagon trains one. Trains five a day if the tracks are intact. Train engineers riding out on horseback, two. You could get pretty deep with this but as soon as you start wishing you had a computer to keep track of it you should stop.

The middle of the map is yours. There's little there but bison and the occasional cannibal owl. The edge of the map is also yours but periodically your enemies will seize control of hexes along it. Different factions along different edges - the Pueblo and Navajo to the west, the Mexicans and Apaches to the south, the Texans and Tonkawas to the east, the Pawnees and Osages to the north. Also the occasional French fur trader. Each one of these will in a semi-random manner establish settlements on your territory. If you leave these settlements alone they will grow into towns. If you leave them alone some more they will grow into cities. Different factions do different things - the Texans build forts, the Pueblo all live atop well-fortified mesas, the Mexicans try to convert you, the Tonkawas will fucking eat you, etc. (everyone seems to fucking hate the Tonkawas. Sorry Tonkawas! I don't mind that you used to eat people, I think that that is a rational use of resources).

If you raid the settlements you can take their stuff. If you wait and let them grow into towns you can trade with the townspeople for even more stuff. In either case you can then take the stuff to the other side of the map and sell it for even even more, because you run a transcontinental trading empire that Eurocentric historians will do a splendid job of completely overlooking. If some of the stuff happens to be guns and horses you can use that stuff to raid more and larger settlements. You can just catch horses on the plains also because there's a shitload of wild ones. And you can hunt buffalo and make bows out of their sinews and shields out of their hides. Can't farm guns though. Sorry Comanches.

Anyway there's a obvious feedback loop here and it culminates in you becoming the wealthiest band in your band and getting ten thousand warriors together and driving your enemies back into the sea. Which almost happened a couple of times.There'd be a few different currencies to keep track of, like meat, horses, grain (need those carbohydrates), hides, slaves (to tan the hides), guns, powder, etc. Also respect, which is probably XP. You get it by raiding and by trading (though less so) and by completing missions and hunting buffalo and stealing people's horses and torturing your enemies to death, unless you want to skip that part because you are not thirteen years old. I would also import a "counting coup" system where you get respect for performing specific battlefield stunts like touching an enemy without killing them even though I don't think it was actually a Comanche thing at all.

You're not actually playing Comanches, you're playing fantasy fake Comanches who can use magic and don't have strict gender roles. You don't get to choose your own name, you are given a name based on how much respect you have. Really cool people will be Rides-The-Thunder and people who everyone hates will be Farts-Wetly. Political power is tied directly to how much respect you have. There are no political institutions so everyone just tags along w/ whoever they like the most, and you can always buy respect by giving away slaves and horses and other forms of wealth, so it tends to be tied to that as well. I suppose this doesn't allow for a chief to be called Farts-Wetly, which is a missed opportunity but w/e. You would probably also need a computer to keep track of this, but there's a reason I'm just summarizing a system in a blog post and not actually designing it.

All combat is mounted. You would need a better system for mounted combat than any I currently know about. I'm thinking it's a sort of 4th-edition miniature-y chess-y sort of thing, except on a hexmap and you use that Diplomacy mechanic where everyone writes down their moves in secret and reveals them. You're always facing the opposite side of the hex to the one you entered it on and that side with the two sides adjacent to it count as Forward. It costs a movement point to go Forward and a movement point to turn around so you're facing another side. You get movement points equal to your speed, which is also the amount of hexes you can travel in a day, you and your enemies secretly spend them to do stuff. You can attack your enemies by riding into their square from behind. You can also fire arrows somehow, you can spend points to do other cool manoeuvres. Maybe you can spend a point to save a point so you don't have to use it until everybody else has revealed their moves. Stealth and sneak attacks are also important and everybody gets them. Or maybe something not even like that at all I don't know!!!. Standard disclaimer about needing a computer to keep track of it.

Not being mounted means you can move, like, once every two turns and just fucks you completely.

I don't know about classes. Pretty sure the Comanches only ever needed one type of warrior. If I were actually designing this I would figure out an actually viable combat system and work backward from there. Everyone needs to be combat-viable, the players are expected to do all diplomacy themselves. I like the mechanic where your spells have a secret list of failure conditions and if you fuck up too publicly you lose respect, I would probably have a wizard class based around that. Wizards are also warriors but maybe they have less movement and they lose out on bonus feats or something. Maybe movement points are also like mana points and it's just a single pool that everyone draws from and some classes get more movement but less abilities to use them on.

BUT THE POINT IS

You have these empires encroaching on your borders and you profit from their presence; they're the guys who gave you horses and made all this possible in the first place. Ultimately you do want to drive them into the sea and take over the continent, but they have a few advantages over you:

They can inhabit mountains and mesas and islands and other places where your horses cannot go. In these places you lose all your movement points and they keep their powers because their powers don't rely on movement points.

They can respawn basically forever. They represent the furthest outposts of a distant empire and that distant empire will just keep on sending them until it finds something more interesting to do. Unless they are normal people like you, then you can obliterate them and assimilate their culture and fight the people on the other side of them.

If you allow them to establish themselves they will grow at surprising rates. But allowing them to establish themselves is often the only way to make any real profit from them. You can "farm" one enemy for the resources you need to fight another, and this is the only way to make sure all those fights are actually won. You need the corn and potatoes from your Mexican vassal states to make up for the nutritional deficits of your all-buffalo diet so you can dominate the Apaches (basically what actually happened). As you get more powerful you will be making longer-term strategic decisions about this, deciding when to stop trading with somebody and start raiding them again so they don't get cocky.

They will send dudes after you. Osage and Navajo raiding parties moving around the map at the same speed as you, hunting your buffalo and stealing horses that you probably stole from them in the first place. Maybe with their own special magic powers although it depends if they seem okay with you using their spiritual beliefs, like I wouldn't use any of the Lakota sun dance stuff because from what I have read the Lakota prefer that you don't (if you start an argument about this in the comments I swear to God I will turn this car AROUND). Spanish punitive expeditions, slow but well-armoured but heat-vulnerable. Conquistador-led, bell-ringing clerics calling down minor miracles and dispensing the favour of the saints (I don't have any compunctions about using Catholicism because the Spanish have never had their culture murdered). Engineers armed with good old American know-how, land-surveyors who show up, dick about with a couple of little metal triangles and the next thing you know there's a work gang chopping a hole in the hills to run a train through. Forts that spawn buffalo-hunters who if left unchecked will economically extinguish you (also, in fact, what actually happened). Telegraph poles that allow your enemies to keep track of your movements with irritating precision. These would ideally also be kept track of on the map, moving towards your bands and the communities of your vassals, trying to do to you exactly what you've been doing to them. Except the telegraph poles I guess. Those just... stay still?? No I've changed my mind they are all Telegraph Golems every last one of them.

Your equivalent of a lich is a Texas Ranger. This guy moves as fast as you do, can track as well as you can (with the assistance of her Tonkawa allies), can ride as well as you, has all the advantages you rely upon to make one of you worth five of them. Her horse is better than yours, her gun is shit right now but as soon as Mr. Colt can borrow somebody's factory they're getting these new "revolving pistols" that don't even need reloading and will level the shit out of the playing field. She has learnt all her best moves by watching you do them. You probably killed her brother, her wife, her best friend, the guy who ran the second best saloon in Corpus Christi. I am going to say that each of you has your own personalized one of these, your own nemesis, who has sworn vengeance upon you and who advances in respect exactly as you do. Your legends are bound together. The more people you kill the more determined she becomes to kill you back, the more justified she feels and violent she gets, and the more funding she can snag a hold of. This is also true of your nation. The fuller your power waxes the more your enemies pay attention to you and the more determined they become to destroy you.

I'm also wondering if the game should keep track of the phases of the moon, because full moons are best for raiding and there ought to be a sort of cyclical aspect to it. But maybe that's too neckbeardy IDK. (Actually maybe the basic unit of time is moon phases, i.e. weeks, instead of days, I just thought of that. Might be less granular and allow you to get more stuff done in one.)

NOW GO PLAY THIS AND PRESUMABLY REPORT BACK TO ME.

The People Who Try To Fight You All The Time

Your people have two chiefs. PEACE CHIEF and WAR CHIEF. PEACE CHIEF makes decisions about where you will ride next and who you will trade with and whose allegiance you will seek and whose authority you will acknowledge. WAR CHIEF makes decisions about where you will hunt next and whose settlements you will raid and how many horses and cattle and slaves you will take. These decisions are made independently.

You depart from camp with two missions. One from PEACE CHIEF, one from WAR CHIEF. Sample missions:

PEACE CHIEF

1. Our people are running low on carbohydrates. Bring this travois of buffalo hides to the great fair at Taos and exchange it for potatoes and corn.
2. The commander of Fort Sutherland is offering ten strong horses for the return of her husband. Find out who owns her husband and convince him to leave.
3. The missionaries at Viscaya are offering food and fine clothing to anyone that surrenders their weapons and swears fealty to the Father of Bells. Pretend to do this.
4. Convince the fur merchants who camp along our northern border that we would make finer trading partners than our enemies, the Heavy Eyebrows.
5. The Flower Eaters are preparing an attack on the settlers at San Mateo. Even though the Flower Eaters are our friends, our treaty with the Tejanos demands that we warn them.
6. The governor of the Louisianos has drawn a number of lines on a piece of paper. She promises dire consequences if we do not obey the lines. Understand this.
7. The Men-Going-East wish to join our nation. They have many fine guns but they are of the blood of our enemies. Find a way we can forgive them.
8. One among us has murdered her father and fled to the high canyon. Decide upon her justice, then enforce it.

WAR CHIEF

1. Impose a tax on the fair-goers at Taos. Allow no-one to trade without paying us our tribute.
2. Bring to me the red banner that the Tejanos have raised over Fort Sutherland. We will anoint ourselves with its ashes and gain its power.
3. Steal the largest bell of the missionaries at Viscaya and bring it to me so I can turn it into a cook-pot.
4. Steal the hide of a polar beast from the fur merchants who camp along our northern border. Make it into a cloak and dye it with the blood of the Heavy Eyebrows.
5. Join the Flower Eaters in their attack on the settlers at San Mateo. Take more slaves than they do.
6. The governor of the Louisianos has offended us with her presumption. Find something she values and burn it in front of her. She must see it burn or you have failed.
7. Our enemies, the Men-Who-Are-Men, squabble among themselves. Take advantage of their division, but do not give them cause to unite against us.
8. The Peaceful People have built a clay fortress on the rim of the high canyon. Leave not one house of it standing.

If you please either chief you will earn slaves, respect and horses. If you fail either chief you will lose respect. If you lose too much respect you will no longer be a warrior. This is death.

You are surrounded by enemies. Your enemies want your land. They send their power and might and wealth and citizens into your land. They think that this will give you their land. But you take those things and then they are your things. Your enemies are idiots. They do not understand you exist. They think they are the only people. You may not be geniuses but you understand that you are not the only people.

Your enemies had a name to insult you. You took it and made it your name. Your enemies had a weapon to kill you. You took it and made it your weapon. Your enemies had a plan to enslave you. You took it and made it your plan. As long as you can keep taking things you will be invincible.

All combat takes place on horseback. Not being on horseback is like being crippled or blind. Most of your enemies are not on horseback. Your enemies have a kind of soldier called a "dragoon" who rides to the battlefield then gets off their horse and fights on foot. When you first saw this you thought it was a trick and you were a little scared of it in case they were secretly incredibly powerful, but you soon realized that they were just very stupid. Then you stole their horses and rode away and left them stranded on the plains to starve to death. The enemies whom you are most scared of are the enemies who have best learnt to imitate you.

You are better at horses than anyone else in the world has ever been, ever. It is your only technology. Your environment is so simple that it is the only one you need. You have one terrain type and one food source. Your enemies have many technologies but none of them are relevant. For some reason they think this makes them better than you. They think that you are subjects of their empire. Their great-great-grandchildren will think this also. This is very funny to you.

You measure your wealth in horses, slaves, cattle, weapons. You own a lance, a bow, a shield. The lance is tipped with feathers, the bow is backed with sinew, the shield is two layers of fire-hardened hide with paper packed between them. You hold arrows in one hand and the bow in the other. You hang from the side of your horse and if it is killed you land on your feet. You ride in circles as you attack. Your bows are better than guns, you take your enemies as they reload. Your arrowheads are iron and bend as they hit bone. You respect the fashions of your enemies - you take their braided jackets, their medallions, their feathered bonnets. You stake them out and pile cinders on their bellies. You skin the soles of their feet and chase them home. You earn respect in this way.

You must touch enemies without killing them. You must touch their fortifications. You must touch the first man to die in battle. If you do not do these things you will be given a humiliating name.

You will not eat fish. You will not eat birds. You will drink the contents of the stomach of a horse.

You are a nation of prophets and great liars. Your prophets stand above the clouds and challenge the Great Mystery to explain itself. Your prophets can vomit up cartridges and swallow them again. Your prophets can send hail and thunder against their enemies. Your prophets can raise the sick and heal the dead. Your prophets can make you immune to metal by painting you yellow. Your prophets' magic will fail if the wrong bird flies south on the wrong day or the wrong man says their names with the wrong intonation. The Great Mystery has a secret list of conditions which will cause your prophets to fail and your prophets will have great difficulty working out what they are. Your prophets and your liars are impossible to distinguish. Many liars bear the names of triumphant prophets and many prophets bear the names of contemptible liars.

A force has been marshalled against you. They keep track of your misdeeds and plot you a vengeance for each. They learn your skills, one by one. They fight from horseback. Their guns need no reloading. They know where you are. They have cannibal servants to track you. They are paladins of the atlas and they gain power for each square mile they conquer. You must keep them disrespected and ill-funded, you must anticipate their traps, you must undermine their economics. You are the demons of their faith and as your deeds become more fearsome your hunters become more practised, more determined. You cannot use their own techniques against them because they are already doing that to you. You can only attack their respect, you can only kill them by killing their myth. They are empowered to make new laws. They believe any strike against you will be justified. There are always more of them.

(So I've been reading books about the Comanches. Empire of the Summer Moon was racist and had too many sentence fragments, The Comanche Empire is less well known but much better. Not all of this stuff is Comanche and I don't vouch for the historical accuracy of any of it. The guy in the third picture is Pawnee and the Pawnees didn't even like the Comanches. Look at him though. What a legend.

The stuff about the prophets is all based on a guy called Isatai. The deal with Isatai is that he told people he could make them immune to bullets, they went and attacked some dudes with guns and got shot, the survivors rode back and were like, your name is not White Eagle any more, it is Isatai now, also Isatai means "coyote's vagina". And everyone called him that for the rest of his life. So if your players fuck up you should give them stupid new names and make them actually write the stupid new names on their character sheet and carry them around forever. The paladins of the atlas are the Texas Rangers, who it seems were invented to kill Comanches mostly.

Also the hypothesis of The Comanche Empire is that the Spanish attempt to subjugate North America was foiled when the Comanche got hold of horses and figured out how to use them and set about subjugating the Spanish right back. Like New Mexico and Texas were basically Comanche vassal states. Which is cool and good to know I think. And D&D with an American colonial theme is called Dugouts & Dragoons and it's too late and the decision's been made and there's no longer anything you can do about it.)

this is your campaign's ultimate villain. you should steal his feet