Balach in 25 words oR less

Balach is the fantasy setting I daydream about when nothing else is on my mind.

Shattered time casts ruins of glass and concrete through trapped land of lost peaks and unseen depths. Anarchist flag city thrives in own corpse. WARCHIMPS.

Why is Nature Wild?

Because its full of EXPLOSIVES.

In the modern world humanity is everpresent. Nature only rules fully in the margins left by our mistakes. The minefields go untouched. They can be cleared, and the mines will decay. But you can never be sure. Flooding and rainstorms move the mines around. There is no set period of decay. We can never walk there again with perfect certainty.

The DMZs, Minefields, Chemical Fields, Underground-Coal-Fires and Chernobyl Zones are the new wilderness, shaping the margins of the world with our mistakes.

So we ask the D&D Autumnal world. Why are there so many empty spaces? If empires fall and rise with such felicity, why only points of light?

Too many margins and too many mistakes. Over long epochs of human history the marginal zones invisibly expand and interlock. We are squeezed ever closer. The wilderness is empty because it is dangerous. We made it that way. We cannot remember why, and we cannot go back.

Turns

Probably the most interesting definition of combat rounds I've seen. From The Marvel Super-Heroes Basic Set.

'Turns are not a precise measurement, they take about five to 15 seconds each, which roughly translates into one panel of a comic book. Your character can perform in one round whatever can comfortably fit into a single panel of a comic book. That's why heroes can deliver a long speech and clobber the Red Skull in a single turn, but only the fastest of them can take multiple actions in the same turn.'

I've noticed in playing D&D and story games that the exact division of time during rapid actions, especially when player opposes player, has a huge effect on the nature of play. Time must be both exact, (because at the momemnt to moment transaction, time is a diminishing resource) and also flexible, in order to allow the narritive power that helps charge events with meaning.

If time is measured too ferociously, events become very closely described in the game, both by the players and as a general consequence of play. This granularity seems sometimes to rob actions of wider meaning. If time becomes too 'fluffy' or soft, then tension is lost and meaningful decisions become harder.

Generally speaking, during a game, the closer you measure time the more Hobbsian and conservative it gets. People play to safeguard and horde whatever they have, both as characters in the game and as players. They play to limit negative results. They can also get much more creative with the things they do have. When you go the other way, things become more relaxed, players improvise, invent differently and add energy to the game in a different way, usually by connecting things over a wider context.

These are both good things and lend emotional and intellectual counterpoint to the game.

(I am not just talking about having losts of small, little, sharply defined events vs a few large fuzzy events but about the level of mixing between the two.)

The decription above of time as a meaningful, but limited dramatic unit is one I will keep in mind when I play next. It also makes immediate intuitive sense.

(But I suppose only really makes sense if you think about is as superhero comics from the 50's to 80's though. Any other kind of comic or even comics from a different period might produce something quite different.)

If I ever get round to statting up the Hours for Balach, I will probably have them each have a differrent approach towards narritive time. Like one has turns like comic panels, another has turns like lines of poetry, another has turns like cuts from a film, another has turns like memories e.t.c. So you will know what time it is in Balach by how time is decribed in the game.

i.e 'Hmm, we're moving from clear moment to clear moment with a straight 4^th edition division of Standard, Move and Minor actions per turn. It must be three O'Clock. Should I get this battle done before it turns Four O'Clock, or extend it so we can kill the orcs while counting time as moving from decison to decision rather than second to second?'

The Character of Time

I bought and played fourth edition because I had money and that's what they had. I had never played D&D before and had no-one to teach me so I had to learn from the 4th Ed Players Handbook.

This is a bit like learning to play the Guitar by reading a biography of Eric Clapton. A bad biography.


Actually I don't think the people who made 4th Ed actually really want anyone playing their game. Not deep down within themselves, or in the forgotten spaces of their thought. They believe they do but I felt the whiff of a kind of strange mind-scattered corporate double-think I have smelled many times before. I'd write about it but that wouldn't be useful and this blog is meant to be useful things.

So I went from there to Lamentations Of The Flame Princess which is about as far from 4th Ed as you can get. James Raggi had a lot of things to say in his game. I'll speak about one of them. Recorded Time.


You count the minutes in the dungeon so you know when the light runs out, and if the torch is black and dead then the players cannot see. And that's that. They are lost. In 4th Ed an adventuring kit packed with glow rods and lamp oil is bought for you and that game specifically says that most underground spaces are kept well lit by the inhabitants, or convenient phosphorescent fungi.


So we go from a dungeon lit like American Television to one with a hungry darkness. And from dramatic time to a cold measurement.


Like a lot of Raggi's advice I was both attracted to and repelled by this. His slightly aggressive puritanism is like a sharp block in the road of fun. It challenges but the challenge suggests a promise, that the road is deeper and longer if you get past.


Or maybe that's bullshit and there is no road.


I wanted to keep time in the dungeon but that is boring so I renamed the Hours.


In Balach the Hours live. Each individual segment of the day has a quiet thought, a mind and a relationship with the other Hours. As each hour passes, somewhere in Balach, they duel in physical form. One hour will die and pass on, the other will live for sixty minutes and rule in the spaces between moments. Always the same way.


Unless you meet them by chance. And change the result.


If you can befriend an Hour, you can also become the enemy of one. So time can have both personality and politics. 

The Hours have names, eventually I plan to give them Stats.

Encounters in the Corridor

There is a strand of Afghanistan shaped as a buffer between two competing empires. A long finger of road reaching out in the mountainous region between Tajikistan and Pakistan.

It used to hold the only direct road from Afghanistan to China, but the border has been closed for some time and now the abandoned road leads nowhere.

I saw this on a map and was enraptured by the thin, strange tentacle of land. I decided to set my games there, or at least, in it's geography if not in our reality.

I threw in lots of ideas from other people. I have linked where is seemed appropriate. 

I still don't know what a Daemon of mathematics is or why they are hunted but I do know you catch one on a mobius strip of paper that hangs from a spiderthread inside an empty jar.

Random Encounters in the Wakhan Corridor

1. Tabir Salil foot courier.
2. D6 Wild pack scarabs
3. 3D8 Maggot people writhe from the soil if the party rests on earthen ground at night.
4. D6 Skeleton Killers
5. A Daemon of Mathematics scratching itself along on the ground. (Wild Theorem.)
6. Ambush! D8 Guerrilla War Chimps.
7. Secret Badass. Roll Twice.

Looks Like	But Secretly Is
1. Old Woman	1. Jason Bourne-style ultra spy, on the run from organisation of the same.
2. Ancient Man	2. Level ten wizard who has sworn never to do evil and has been cursed never to be seen to do good.
3. Juggler/Clown	3. Totally insane serial killer
4. Total Idiot	4. Kung-Fu master whose hands are D8 weapons. Party level plus D4. Will try to stop any violence, by anyone, against anything. Will never kill but only knock-out.
5. Lost young girl/boy	5. Vampire who will drink once from one of the party as they sleep and then move on, never to be seen again.
6. Craftsman, or Doctor or Priest. Of whatever kind the party needs most.	6. Ghost but doesn’t know it. Carrying a terrible wound beneath clothes. Will lead party to scene of own murder and grow afraid when no evidence is found.

8. The Hours duelling as they pass.
9. A party of mildly decadent elves passing in a small apartment grown into the shell of a vast tortoise.
10. A thriving tavern built inside a decayed concrete building from the future.
11. Ulfire Carcosan Sorcerer in Palanquin with Dolm servants and a 1hp Spawn of Shub Niggerauth on a lead.
12. Mass courier for the Tabir Salil. Iridescent Pack Scarab loaded with dreams.
13. Cleric of Vorn. Party level plus D6. On a mission directly related to the last intelligent thing the PC’s killed.
14. Arkady Babchanko, a traumatised but effective lvl 4 contract soldier looking for a new life in the wilderness.
15. Theorem tracker from ‘The Grey Lady’. Vornheim’s best University.
16. Ant Attack! D100 Ants which are, roll a D6

1-2 Normal sized,

3-4 Dog sized (1hp),

5 Man Sized (1 D6 hd each) or

6 Horse Sized (2 D8 hd each)

17. A strange distance in the view. The road empties. The landscape seems featureless. You fill with fear, yet for no discernible cause. Look into the sky and name five shapes of clouds that you can see or lose D4 hp till next rest due to stress and loneliness.
18. Ruined ground and a knot of the sorrowful dead, D8.
19. Millipede wagon trader from, roll a D4
    1. Vornheim
    2. Solint
    3. Carcosa
    4. Otherpool
20. Climate Hawk feeding on the body of a, roll a D6
    1. Man
    2. Goat
    3. Scarab
    4. Mantis in full harness
    5. War Chimp
    6. Tortoise-House