“We have bound the spirits of the land, the sea sand the sky. We can bind elementals to our needs. Our industries are productive, our people healthier and wealthier than ever. We have explored the world and delved deep into the earth mining for new resources. We have made the mage obsolete. Only one frontier remains, while we can extend a man’s life we are yet to conquer death. For that we must bind the most powerful spirits. To conquer death we must bind a primal spirit, one of the gods, to our will”

Prenton Hores, Master of Artifice. Speech to shareholders, Prenton Artifacts, 5PrB

500 years have passed since the great primal spirit of nature, Ysgrym, went mad. During the time of the Blight the great forests of the world came alive with activity. Growing at phenomenal rates the forests consumed villages and towns over night and eventually engulfed most cities and kingdoms as well. The elven kingdoms were the first to fall when the fae blood of the elves drove them mad and those few that remain are little more than wild beasts.

Even away from the forests men were not safe, wild beasts gathered together in great herds and stampeded across the plains, crushing everything in their way. Towards the end the fresh waters boiled with spirits and creatures bent on destroying anything that entered and in the last few months even the earth itself convulsed. The last refuge of men was on the seas and oceans where Ysgrym’s powers was weakened by the presence of Pwydion, the primal spirit of the oceans and the islands.

After ten years of madness the spirits of nature driving these forces eventually turned upon each other in their madness and retreated into the forests that now covered most of the world. Little was left of the great kingdoms of man beyond the island sanctuaries and a few isolated desert communities.

Life after the blight was not particularly easy for the survivors. Heavy woods were dangerous to even the most prepared, the forest spirits still haunted and attacked any who trespassed, and the flesh of all but a few domesticated animals was poisonous in large quantities. Thankfully this toxicity started to fade but it is still not a good idea to live for long periods on wild meats.

Most open water ways were now tainted and those without a connection to the fae, domestic animals and the people who keep them, who drank in quantities needed for survival soon succumbed to what is now known as wood blight. The victim’s body hardens into a woody texture, they sprout branches, roots and they eventually grow into a tree. The process is long and painful and the victim never truly dies unless their tree is destroyed. Because of this, most who catch wood blight opt to end their suffering quickly and a grim business, crematoriums, rose around the victims.

Take a look at some of the world’s oldest and most important cities and you will see some very common factors. Most of them started inland, situated on a navigable river with a lot of surrounding farmland. A river has many advantage over other settling sites, most obvious is the provision of clean water for general consumption, irrigation and other agricultural needs. Running water provides power for a mill making the settlement an important gathering point for the surrounding farmland. Less obvious but of significance is that the river provides ready transport to bring in resources, like stone, timber and other important materials for tools and construction that can’t be found in the immediate vicinity.

Rome sits on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, Seoul on the Han, Beijing has the Yongding and Chaobai, there are ancient cities along the Nile. Many, many other cities that can trace their origins back to antiquity share these same river borne origins.

Inland cities, away from major rivers, can grow up around sites of strategic importance, resources, and to a lesser extent cultural landmarks but always where water is accessible with the most basic tools. A settlement also needs to be easy for the surrounding population to reach. Building on a mesa may give you great defense against potential raiders but if the only way to reach it is by a narrow path that a horse can barely navigate then you aren’t going to move enough goods up the side to support a city. Once you have some technological advancement you can get around such obstacles, but odds are that, unless you are settling in less advanced lands, there will already be a nearby city if trade and resources can support one.

Jerusalem is situated on a strategic and easily defend-able plateau with a good water source at the Gihon Spring. The construction of temples and location conveniently between the valuable salt deposits of the Dead Sea and the plentiful fishing of the Mediterranean only served to improve its desirability.

Coastal cities are a little different, they typically start off as inland settlements built on some strategic point within reach of the coast, but not actually on the shore. As they grow they expand seaward to merge with any convenient coastal settlements. Older cities on navigable rivers still reign supreme when it comes to supporting trade and those coastal settlement that are important usually started their life as one of numerous ports serving as little more than way points for trade headed inland.

Classical Athens started as a settlement atop the Acropolis, some 12 miles inland. Surrounded by fertile plains and rivers its connection to the coast was via Piraeus and Phalerum. Although Piraeus itself is now considered a city, in classical times it did not gain importance until Athens moved its fleets an shipyards from the sandy Phalerum beaches to its natural and easily defend-able harbours.

Settlements directly on the coast didn’t really become cities, or powers in their own right, until navigational and seafaring technology was sufficient to make the risks of seaborne trade and deep sea fishing worthwhile. Deep draught vessels unable to navigate the shallower rivers also provided impetus to grow a coastal settlement with a safe deep-water harbour into a city. Cities that do grow from coastal settlements are situated in bays or deep into a river mouth or delta and protected from the worst of the ocean’s weather by surrounding natural formations. Freshwater, either from the river or nearby stream is also a vital resource that allows these coastal cities to grow.

Shanghai started its life as a fishing village. It grew into a market town serving as a trading port and market for Songjiang and communities up and down the coast as well as inland along the Yangtze river. It didn’t really grow into a city until relatively recently, 1600s, when ocean going vessels were permitted and from then it quickly grew into an important port city.

There are modern cities that don’t follow the usual patterns. Las Vegas, for example, while it was viable as a small town and rail stop it could not possibly exist as a city without advanced technology. It requires water pumped in from vast distances in great quantities, there is very little in the way of surrounding farmland and its primary resource and trade is money. A settlement that is built for primary purpose of becoming a city requires need some catch to bring in the settlers as well as guaranteed trade routes in order to bring in the essential resources in sufficient quantities to support a city. You could build in the middle of extensive farmland buy the odd are that by the time you have the ability to just create a city all the best places will already have one that grew in the ad-hoc organic manner that cities tend to follow.

From this basic information we can establish a few important ground rules for where a settlement should be located to successfully grow into a city.

• There needs to be a reason for the city to exist where it is, why the original settlers chose that particular spot. You won’t usually find a city out in the middle of nowhere with no local resources and at a location that could never support the basic needs of the original settlers.

• To grow into, and survive as a city, a settlement needs basic resources. Food from farming or fishing or maybe trade if they have something of suitable value. Fresh water from rivers, springs or even just an easily accessed water table, for drinking and agriculture.

• A settlement needs access to resources for tools, construction and defense. Wood or a similar material used for fuel and as a building material. Stone for construction, although clay can fill this need. Materials for tools and weapons. These resources don’t need to be right next to the settlement, they just need to be easily and quickly moved to the settlement. eg. a quarry could serve just as well a half day upstream, sending the stone down on barges, as it would sitting right next to town.

• A city needs good transport routes. That is where river settlements have the growth advantage, the waterways make for ready transport routes without having to develop and maintain trails and roads. Technology can open new trade routes via ocean or over previously inaccessible mountains.

• A settlement needs to be safe. It needs to be easily defend-able if raiders are an imminent threat. It needs to be protected from the worst ravages of typical seasonal weather, while building next to a river is great it is a foolhardy venture to build in the middle of a seasonal flood plain. It needs to be able to survive natural disasters, a riverside village with good fishing is better set to survive should nearby farmland fail due to an unseasonal locust swarm or similar crop destroying event.

In part 2 I will discuss how a city can grow, what it needs and how various events can shape the cityscape.

Out of the box (or book if you must) level progression in 2^nd ed is slow.. really, really slow. A typical reward for a challenging encounter for a 1st level party of 4 characters would be around the 100 to 150 XP mark, total, to be divided among all characters. Compare this with 3rd and 4^th ed where a typical challenging encounter without extra generosity in XP rewards is expected to give out around 100 XP per character.

Then you have the experience table. A 2^nd ed fighter, for example, leveled at 2 000, 4 000, 8 000 etc. up to 3 million XP for level 20. In 3^rd ed the progression is 1 000, 3 000, 6 000 up to 190 000 at 20^th, or not even enough for an 9^th level fighter in 2^nd ed. So not only are the XP rewards more generous in later editions, you need less to make it to the next level, even less for 4^th edition.

This difference in progression through experience gain starts early, from levels 3-5 depending on what class you are playing. A 2^nd ed rogue diverges at level 5 while a wizard diverges at level 3 and a fighter at level 4. The 4^th edition books even suggest that a campaign running about a year should easily reach level 20. Also, once you start rising in levels in the new systems, you gain a boost to your base stats on top of the boosts magic equipment confers.

It is clear that these changes to the system change the whole concept of epic from broad sweeping Tolkienesque fantasy into high power slugfests between god-like beings. While this looks fun on paper, and some players do like the high power games, it does have some serious downsides for the game itself. The rapid power rise means iconic creatures rapidly lose their charm as the player will quickly outstrip their power range. Epic world locations and events quickly become passé as the skill requirements to traverse these obstacles become trivial and minions quickly become little more than speed bumps character’s career*. Epic stories become harder to manage as the encounters have to gain in power at the same pace as the player characters.

Now compare this with the 2^nd edition power progression. A campaign I ran lasted 4 and a half years, around 1 000 hours of game play¹, and the highest character only made it to level 12. I wasn’t miserly with the experience rewards, twice during that campaign I just straight out rewarded a bulk xp, enough to raise a level (6^th to 7^th and then 8^th to 9^th). Yet this game felt a lot more epic than high level 3^rd edition games I have played and run.

The slower progression meant I could work a mini campaign arc around a single creature type, like beholders, or a rival adventuring party². It also meant I could work with the same power range for a lot longer, monsters became a template where I just had to alter the scenario and tactics and I didn’t have to keep bumping up the power levels of the rival party in order to keep them a challenge.

Without the regular and constant power boosts it meant finding other ways to engage and reward the players. Story rewards, special items, extra magic powerful contacts and their own minions more than made up for the much slower power progression. Without constantly having to adjust power levels to keep up with the players I was free to create a more dynamic world with the broad sweeping story arcs that one associates with epic fantasy.

I realise that E6 is an attempt to bring back this sense of broad epic fantasy but the approach it takes just doesn’t feel satisfying for me. I think the main reason for that is you still level quite rapidly and part of the balancing problems actually come from the feats that E6 then use to replace levels. If I were to approach this I would probably start by having steeper XP requirements, half the rewards and completely scrap the stat boosts. I would not go all the way back to 2^nd ed, THAC0 still gives me the heeby geebies and there is a lot of good stuff in 3^rd edition that is worth keeping. But that is all for another day.

¹. This is a conservative estimate based on 8 to 10 hour sessions without any breaks. This is probably low as many of the earlier sessions lasted a good 20 plus hours with maybe 3 or 4 hours break time.

². Imagine, if you will, a pair of dwarves, heavily armoured, magically boosted and hastened, barreling through the streets, crashing through in an epic chase scene that culminated in a high speed chase across the harbour thanks to the generous application of water walking spells.