Rhapsode TTRPGs

[rhapsodeproductions]

By Road and River: an Introduction (at Last)

Apologies my dear weary travelers, after 3 devlogs, I've only just realized that I haven't told you about what all of these are working towards, and I think it's best that I give you an overview of what the finished game is going to be.

What is By Road and River?

By Road and River, or BRAR, is my medieval pastoral tabletop roleplaying game. I started working on BRAR three years ago when I was still in high school, initially inspired by the illustrations of knights fighting dragons in medieval art. However, over time, the game has strayed away from the heavy combat and plentiful duels of its original form and into a game about the lives and trials of the common folk that are so often looked over in our roleplaying, informed by my research as a medievalist and cultural historian in university.

I have always loved classic (western) fantasy, I grew up on stories of kings and dragons and violence, but so many of these stories in the Western European and Neo-European tradition that influence the RPG space focus so strongly on teams of hyper-competent individualists who rise above the peasantry to defeat a great evil. These are not the only stories to tell, and the common folk of these fantasy worlds are itching to be told.

In By Road and River you play the farmers, fishers, weavers, and pilgrims who in most tables would be considered NPCs. There are no divinely ordained heroes in BRAR, just normal people doing their best. It is my goal as the designer to make sure that this fantasy of the mundane seeps into every second of the game experience, making a game that is just as fun, engrossing, and thrilling as games about magic-wielding demigods or giant mech suits.

The Three Core Design Themes of By Road and River

One Among Many

Central to the core of BRAR is the idea that the player characters are not special. They may be strange or unusual, they may possess wonderful and magical gifts, they may be very talented, but they are not special. The richest and most powerful wizard dies to the slash of a knife just as easily as a starving child. Nothing and no one in BRAR is better than anyone else; there is nothing separating a character that a player controls from the rest of their community or world, even in the mechanics. Players of By Road and River have the option to, if they wish, jump between characters from scene to scene to give the stories they are telling more depth.

A Living World

The world of a campaign of By Road and River, brought to life by the collaboration of the players, the Chronicler (BRAR's GM), and the rules, should feel alive and dynamic. Maps will be created for the characters to traverse, your actions in the community will have a measurable, mechanical effect on how you are treated, and you will see the world you exist in grow and change over the years.

In my eight years of playing, reading, and watching TTRPGs, I have fell deeply in love with the art form. I love the pure freedom that RPGs give, more than any other type of media, and I want the people who pick up By Road and River to be able to express their freedom and creativity at the table without the rules getting in the way. The things I write should never hinder the progress of a gaming group, but be a path for them to more easily get to their desired destination.

The rules in By Road and River will facilitate this, being tools for the Chronicler and players to keep track of the small but important things that could very well be forgotten in the high-demand environment of the gaming table, making sure that the world keeps as high a level of depth as possible while making it easy on everyone at the table to keep track.

Magic in the Ordinary

Many RPGs have a pacing problem, this is clear to see. When your character is fighting for their life in a grand battle filled with swinging swords, blasting spells, and volleying arrows, the absolute last emotion the players should be feeling is boredom. And yet, we in the RPG space have seen time and time again these scenes drag and stumble as the rules bog the players down with dozens of "options" that in the end effect nothing. This is why much of the systems of By Road and River are built to give the players a constant supply of meaningful choices that make a scene of whether or not you can complete your chores for the day often more exhilarating and tense than life and death battles in other systems.

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Touchstones:

By Road and River has been inspired by countless works of fiction that have enraptured me over the years, here are just a few. If you're a fan of any of these, I'm certain you'll find something to love in By Road and River.

Actual Plays: - Worlds Beyond Number: The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One

Literature: - The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss - Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales - The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein

Movies: - Wolfwalkers - The Princess Bride - Spirited Away - Hamnet

Television: - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Video Games:* - Pentiment - Stardew Valley - A Short Hike - Outer Wilds

Music: - The Oh Hellos - Spitzer Space Telescope - Hozier

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This blog is my space to give updates on this game, discuss RPGs with you all, and foster the small but growing community around By Road and River. Thank you so much for reading this far, and if any of what I have written so for sparks your interest and inspiration, please give me a follow, I'd love to have you come along on this journey!

Good Travels,

Nathan

*The new Fate (2026) seems very likely to be a game that will appear on this list once it comes out.

[prokopetz]

Speaking of medieval history, it's fun how the popular accounts are all "the peasantry disliked nobles, but typically loved the King and attributed any harmful decisions to bad advisors", and then the rare examples of surviving testimony from actual peasants are like "I hope the King literally explodes".

[prokopetz]

Popular histories: Medieval peasants understood themselves as inhabiting a cosmic order in which the King was their divinely appointed superior.

Actual medieval peasant: God, please set the King and everyone who looks like him on fire, Amen.

[prokopetz]

Historically, one of the most reliable sources of widespread banditry was rulers ramping up military recruitment for major wars, then cutting their soldiers loose afterwards without pay, leaving a bunch of heavily armed men with military experience floating around broke and homeless.

Knowing this, whenever someone jokingly refers to raccoons as "trash bandits", I get a vivid mental image of, like, a raccoon succession crisis leading to a raccoon civil war, the aftermath of which forced the former soldiers of the losing side (who are all raccoons) to take up the life of the raccoon outlaw.

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

[shredsandpatches]

The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.

[ladytemeraire]

I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?

I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P 

I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers. 

[spiderine]

Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.

[petermorwood]

This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”

Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)

[stitch-n-time]

All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.

[kingfucko]

it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.

[elfpen]

*INHUMAN SCREECHING*

M Y    T I M E    H A S    C O M E

You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.

STORY TIME

Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.

Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.

But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.

BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.

Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:

Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.

For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus. 

With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:

Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.

Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.

Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.

A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts. 

Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.

What an interesting find.

Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:

This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.

It worked well.

It worked extremely well. 

So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.

Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.

Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this. 

To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic. 

Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.

All that to say:  Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Further reading:

The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity

NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments

Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook

Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.

Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:

[elfpen]

So the version of this post that I reblogged with commentary from my master’s thesis has gained some traction, and I’ve seen a lot of comments and tags that are pretty concerning to me, so I just wanted to reblog this again to clarify a few things.

Bald’s eyesalve is an incredible scientific find in a book like this. But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, it is one of the only things in the leechbook that is scientifically super exciting. This recipe is a diamond in the rough. The vast, vast majority of recipes in this book are not scientifically sound or advisable. The best ones do no harm and may work through either placebo or at least preventative measures, like using acidic foods to ward off infection. But a lot of them will, if not harm you or make your ailment worse—like the various applications of animal dung—will certainly set you back time and money for nothing.

The fact that Bald’s eyesalve effectively took on MRSA isn’t shocking purely because of the recipe’s age and historical distance from germ theory, nor because of our own struggle to fight the bug. Likewiae it isn’t shocking just because or our conception of early medieval people’s intelligence is (generally) negative. It is shocking, objectively shocking, because they legit got so much wrong. So the fact that they got this so right is amazing. It means they were trying, and having occasional success and writing it down. We as modern generations do not have negative views of early medieval intelligence because we are bigoted fools (okay some of us are), but because the evidence we’ve seen from early medieval physicians tells us that they were very bad at medicine—and they were.

What Bald’s leechbook tells us isn’t that they actually held all the secrets to medicine that we should use to replace our modern remedies. Rather, it tells us that, amid mudslides of ill-advised treatments, there is clear evidence of attempts, and yes, occasional and isolated successes, to methodically test and adapt treatments and medications, instead of just rubbing some dirt into a wound and praying. This evidence of methodical intent, of scientific thinking, is what is revolutionary, historically and scientifically speaking.

Bald’s Leechbook is, as all other leechbooks are, chock full of terrible ideas that absolutely no one should try at home. But it’s the intent and the thought and the experience behind the book that makes it incredible. The eyesalve recipe is very much Edison’s lightbulb sitting amongst piles and piles of horrific prototypes.

So for the love of God please don’t use leechbook recipes instead of going to a doctor.

[lillybanana]

Fun magic item idea

Glasses of Intelligence

The glasses dont actually give you intelligence, they instead give a +5 to any deception checks if you're trying to convince someone you're smarter than you are

[rhapsodeproductions]

This is actually a mechanic in my game, By Road and River!

Because the attributes Knowledge (what you know) and Wit (your ability to express your thoughts) are separate, an incredibly dumb character who sounds smart is absolutely an archetype that can (and often will) appear in your games!

[rhapsodeproductions]

BRaR Devlog 03:

Vexed by Hexes

It's done, weary travelers. It's finally done.

Game design is a slow, and sometimes agonizing process, and I have never found that more than the past couple days, which have consisted of me spending pretty much every waking moment in search of a workable travel and exploration system for By Road and River, my pastoral TTRPG. And I believe, my weary travelers, that I have at last created something worthy of posting on tumblr dot com.

Primary Goals

As is tradition on this blog, we need to establish our goals for this mechanic before we can develop them, lest we make a confusing

The world map in By Road and River will be created with hexes, with each hex taking one SPAN* to travel across in good conditions.

The contents of each hex will be determined by a single roll of the dice that contains all the relevant information for travel through that hex, most importantly paths, waterways, and populated spaces.

Populated areas such as a village or town will be spaced out so that you are likely to find one in a single day of traveling

Populated areas are more likely to appear where there are more roads, and ESPECIALLY where roads and water meet.

Following a road (or river) will produce a natural feeling path that makes logical sense.

These goals were shockingly difficult to mesh together, which is why it took me so long. I filled up pages and pages of notes, did statistics calculations, graphed on desmos, and made these insane spreadsheets you see below.

After all that, I have something that might be good, actually.

Why Hexes?

Having the choice to make my map based on hexagons was a simple one. Hexes are extremely popular to make maps in the RPG space, as well as many map-based video games such as the Civilization series, and they provide a much more organic-feeling maps than if I was using squares (and hexagons are, after all, the bestagons). The only issue with them is that it is difficult to have due East-West paths on them, but rest assured, weary travelers, I've accounted for this.

The Roads Go Ever On

In order to fulfill goal #4, there had to be a system that allowed the roads to go on with a seeming purpose, despite them being randomly generated. I decided, after looking at ancient maps of travel routes in the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire, that, obviously, roads are built for a purpose. Real life roads, on a large scale, don't wander and wind, they connect directly with the place they're trying to get to. This is why I decided that every road in By Road and River has a bearing, which determines which way the road goes in order to not make roads that loop over themselves. I decided that there should be some variation as to not make every road be a straight line, but a road can't double back on itself making a random cul-de-sac out of nowhere.

Are We There Yet?

The part of this entire mechanic that was most important for me to get down correctly was the occurrence rate of settlements. The average traveler in the place and time I have been focusing on in my research would reliably come across a place to sleep at night once a day. And since, as was decided by you all in the previous devlog poll (thank you so much to those of you who participated!), a day in BRaR has 10 span, it seemed appropriate that a decently-sized settlement should occur about once every 4 span. Easy, right? Make it a 1-in-4 chance to have a settlement on every tile? WRONG. When taken to account that there is far more likely to be a settlement where a river and a crossroads meet vs just being on a single road, I ended up doing some statistics, which is against my nature as a history student (I am very brave, I know), I've decided the following, feel free to skip to the end if you aren't interested in the hard mathematics of dice.

If I make a 3:2:1 ratio of road to fork to crossroad hexes, make each of them add a 20% chance of population more than the previous (road starting at a .2 rate) and then add .4 if a tile contains water (a 1-in-6 chance), I can have the players roll a d12, d10, and a d6 and have them consult a table I will put in the book to see what they would have to roll on the d10 given the results of the other dice to see if there's a settlement on that tile.

So at Last: The By Road and River Map Making Mechanic (or The BRaRMMM)

Roll a d6, d10, d12, and a d20

d6: 1-3, the road continues without branching. 4-6, the road forks. 6, you come to a crossroads.

d20: 1-6, the road turns left. 7-14, the road continues towards it's bearing. 15-20, the road turns right. A road can't turn left after turning right or vice versa

d12: 11-12, there is a body of water in the hex, ie a lake, a pond, or a navigable river.

d10: If you roll a 9 or higher, than a settlement appears on the hex. This decreases by four if there is water on that hex, and if there is a fork or crossroads on the hex, it decreses a further two or four respectively.

These mechanics still need to be playtested and fleshed out (biome differentiation is something that is very important for this game but needs further work, for example), but I hope that it will prove to be a reliable mechanic that I can use for as long as I play this game.

I now call on you, my weary travelers, to please help me! I am only one man, so I would love it if you would try making your own worlds with this map, using hex paper or online programs such as this one. Community input is vital for a game of this size, so if any of you would try out my rules, I would be incredibly grateful.

Lucky Rolling,

Nathan

*For more information on the mechanics of SPAN see Devlog 02

[rhapsodeproductions]

BRaR Devlog 02:

How Many Hours in a Day?

One of the core pillars of By Road and River (my pastoral TTRPG inspired by my work as a medievalist) is time. Whether it be in how long a playgroup spends traveling along the winding roads of the countryside or how they choose to spend their day in the routine of life at home, the clock is incredibly important for me to pin down.

Just like any game mechanic, it's important that I first establish my primary design goals when fleshing out the time system, which I have determined to be:

Primary Goals

Each day is broken up into segments called SPAN. Each SPAN is enough time to do one discreet activity or enough to move one hex on the map (we'll get back to this later)

The SPAN are divided up into day and night, which will allow the characters to choose for how long they want to sleep, staying up longer if they wish to be able to attempt to do actions at night.

The day and night SPAN will change as the year progresses, making the changing of the seasons something felt in the mechanics, not just the flavor.

It's important to pare down your primary design goals as much as possible in order to allow yourself a proper degree of flexibility. You don't want to be working with 8 design goals that end up preventing a really cool or elegant mechanic later down the line. It's good to keep these in mind, though, so it's good to create a list of secondary design goals, which are in this case:

Secondary Goals

Like much of BRaR's development, I don't want this to be a game in which you can only tell stories rooted in Western European culture. There are many, many cultures who don't use the four-season model (some going up to six seasons or some going down to two) and much of the worlds population live in places where the time of day isn't changed much at all throughout the year. This game is rooted in the idea of interaction, intersection, and connection between differing cultures, and it would be incredibly counterintuitive for me to not include the wonderful variety of experiences we find here on Earth, especially given that the tabletop space has been and continues to be dominated by the experiences and culture of Western Europeans. However, since this is a game inspired by my study of Medieval Western Europe, I want to stick to my expertise and not overshoot my scope, but with the hope that I will be able to add non-European seasons later on. (On this note, if anyone has any good scholarly resources for non-western, particularly Middle-Eastern and African, travel and society around the 12th century, PLEASE send them my way.)

Furthering this idea of removing ourselves from the dominant cultural assumptions in the tabletop space, I would also like to include our natural sleep patterns, which means rising with the sun and ESPECIALLY biphasic sleep, which is our natural pre-industrial sleep pattern consisting of two seperate sleeps with a period of gentle wakefullness in the night. I haven't seen this represented in fiction anywhere, so I would love to include it in my game.

These secondary design goals are not ones that I will be happy about cutting, they are just ones that are most likely to be cut if I either can't find a better solution or don't have the time or resources to implement it properly.

So! Onto the designing.

How Long, How Lo-o-ong is a SPAN?

Since SPAN are so important to the game, one of the most important things to nail down is two fold: how long they are, and how many of them there are in a day.

So how long are they?

Like stated in the Primary Design Goals, a SPAN is enough for a character to do one activity (work, explore a location, go to a party, etc.) as well as traveling one hex across the world map. I also don't want there to be too many SPAN in a day, as each unique action taken across a day would be accompanied by a roleplay scene, and it's a tough ask for both the players and Chroniclers to perform too many of those per character per day. For this reason I think that the sweet spot would be around 1.5-2 hours per SPAN. That range is enough to complete a significant task, and enough that you can get through the day quick enough without too much detail bogging you down. One hour would be too much detail, and three hours would too much time. This would mean that each hex on the map would be around 3-6 miles across, which seems a good range to refine down later when we're going to be talking about travel mechanics.

Now, how many of them are there?

Now that we have an amount, it seems clear how many SPAN would be in a day; if it's between 1.5-2 hours, divide 25 by that and get 16-12 SPAN per day? Right?

WRONG

One of the biggest issues I had in determining how many SPAN there would be is the adherence to the 24 hour day. 16-12 is just far too much for the table to keep track of and it sounds like hell. So we need to reduce it. The world of the game, isn't Earth after all, and we shouldn't let the real world stand in the way of an engaging game experience.

So how many should there be?

I mentioned back in devlog 01 that there were 8 SPAN in a day, but when I was trying to figure out the seasonal change, it ended up being a little clunky, so I decided to try and shifting up the SPAN count to 10. So here's the two side by side:

One of the things that I wanted there to be with the day in BRaR is having the ability to stay up a little later for parties, celebration, or socializing at a pub or tavern, but also making sure that the player could still get a full night's rest if they choose to stay up that little bit later. I also wanted there to be dawn and dusk periods to further immerse the players in the day cycle, as I don't want a Chronicler to shift dramatically between night and day without a period of transition.

If we have the full day be 8 SPAN, the waking hours contains 4 SPAN that increases or decreases by one throughout the season. If I go with this, a healthy night of sleep will be 3 SPAN. I originally included a dawn and dusk period for the 8 SPAN day, but that led to the summer clock to only have 1 SPAN of night, which didn't seem right. However, I can imagine that in the summer, people go to bed at dusk and sleep through the dawn.

If we have a 10 SPAN day, the scenes go up by 2, but we're allowed a dawn and dusk scene that serve as that transition. If this is implemented, I might keep the sleep requirement at 3, but it might also go up to 4 in order to deal with the more amount of SPAN at the player's disposal.

Both of these days have their advantages and disadvantages, and I'm truly at a crossroads here to determine which I should do.

So now I leave it up to you:

Which Do You Prefer?

8 SPAN Day

10 SPAN Day

Voting ended onJan 27

Lucky Rolling,

Nathan

[rhapsodeproductions]

Medievalist problems: I would love to call this game Annals due to it’s focus on the passage of time in a community, but I’m not going to have my passion project be one letter removed from Anal

[rhapsodeproductions]

BRaR Devlog 01:

All Work, All Play

While developing By Road and River, my ttrpg focused around simulating the everyday lives of people and their community, one of the earliest things I decided to do was have the core loop of the game not be in the action-downtime cycle that so many of my fellow designers have clung onto, but the common, everyday routines that the normal people that the players inhabit have. Given that this is a heavily simulationist game and I am currently at university studying ancient and medieval history and culture, I wanted to give the peasants and commonfolk that the rpg space is so quick to discard (and often murder in cold blood) a space to become the protagonists of their own story, to have their real lives be played out on the table.

Just one problem: ~Real life is boring as SHIT~

Many of the problems with a lot of the most popular rpgs on the market is that even the most pivotal and important mechanics in the game that should be packed with hollywood-level excitement end up being mind-numbingly boring (such as a certain game concerning Ouroboroi and Oubliettes)

So how does the intrepid game designer take something that is already boring and make it interesting enough that players actually want to engage with it? For this, I turned to the world of video games.

There are so many video games that have mastered the art of making the potentially boring into riveting gameplay. Stardew Valley, for example, serves as one of my big inspirations for By Road and River. I love the fishing in Stardew Valley, so I asked myself: how do video games, like Stardew Valley make me WANT to go fishing, despite being one of the most boring activities to do in real life? And I got my answer:

Minigames!

Minigames are awesome. When applied right in a videogame, they provide a break from the monotony of the normal game loop and if its a particularly good minigame, can grab your attention for much much longer than you expected. I can think of nothing better to make work fun in By Road and River than by turning it into a game.

Adding a minigame like this into an RPG is risky: it can fail due to its friction with the other mechanics, its difficulty to grasp and understand, and its verisimilitude with the world. If it doesn’t feel like it meshes with the mechanics, a minigame can feel like suddenly playing a completely different game. And no one wants to start playing Uno in the middle of a game of Battleship. If the minigame isn’t intuitive, the players will bounce right off of it. And if it doesn’t feel like it fits in the world, the immersion the players feel in the world, one of the fundamental design pillars of By Road and River, can quickly be eroded. Thankfully, with this new mechanic, I have something I’m pretty sure will be engaging and pull all the design goals I had together.

Because work varies wildly depending on what your profession is, I have made a couple different types of work minigames, and hope to develop a couple more as the development process continues (hunting/gathering is something I hope to expand more on). I’m going to explain one of the work mechanics for the Laborer in my game, which is anyone whose work is relatively simple (not easy, but simple) and repetitive tasks done for long hours. This could be a farmer, a builder, or even an office worker, if done in the modern world.

The Laborer: Working Hard or Hardly Working

The Laborer is expected to work hard and support the other laborers they work beside, but must also remember to keep their health and wellbeing in mind. At the beginning of every span* that they choose to work, the Laborer will roll 4d4, and assign each die to either Working or Rest. At the end of the day, the Laborer will add up all the dice in Working together. If the result is above 30, then they have completed all the work required of them that day. If they don’t, then they face earning the reputation tag “Lazy.” If the problem continues, a Laborer may be docked pay, fired, or given some other punishment. After Working is determined, add up all the dice in Rest. If the result is above a 10, they have properly rested in order to preserve their health. If they don’t, then the character must make a successful Brawn test in order to not succumb to a workplace injury.

In the short time I have had to playtest this mechanic, I have seen a lot of positive reaction from my players. Giving characters a choice in how they work, whether to prioritize work or play, allows them much greater control over their characters and make a possibly boring mechanic into a, based on the playtests, surprisingly heart-pounding push and pull between your job and reputation and your health. Although you will often go through a work day with no problems whatsoever, the days in which you barely squeak by with a 30 in Working and a 10 in Rest are nail-bitingly tense.

Hopefully this illuminates the process of designing and RPG and how to deal with problems you have in your game. Feel free to take anything from this post, or this blog in general for your home game or personal campaign.

Lucky Rolling,

Nathan

*Span is a mark of time in By Road and River. A full day and night is 8 span.

[rhapsodeproductions]

Welcome to the Official Blog of Rhapsode Productions!

Hi, I'm Nathan. I've been playing and GMing TTRPGs ever since middle school and over the years they have helped me and my best friends in the world to create stories that delight and move us. The RPG bug bit me and bit me good, to the point where I wasn't satisfied playing other people's rules, I wanted to create my own. So about three years ago, I decided that I should design my very own Tabletop Role Playing Games to play with my friends, and I cannot wait to share with all of you what I've been working on here at Rhapsode Productions. I hope you'll follow along as I post on this blog the trials and tribulations of my current primary wip, By Road and River, which I will be writing about more later. Let's make some great games together, shall we?

Lucky Rolling,

Nathan