How many potential adventurers are there in your world?

I asked the other day about how you prepare for PCs dying, and a bunch of people said useful things like “I have NPCs ready for them to play in a pinch, so at least they’ve got something to do until the end of the session” or “I try to time climactic combats so if a PC dies, it’s towards the end of the session and we both have time to prepare”. Thank you!

Coincidentally, one of my newsletters also mentioned a recent post about defeat, not death, and a similar post about It Gets Worse as an alternative to death. Forbidden Lands already has the concept of being Broken rather than dead, and I think there’s an interesting amount of mileage in extending that further: let the PCs just defeat the bad guys, and in turn let it be more acceptable for all of the party to be Broken without everyone fearing a total party kill.

What very few people engaged with, however, was the point I made late-on: that I don’t think most villages should have viable PCs.

PCs are weird

First up, the main problem: PCs are not representative of the world in general. This is something that everybody at the table needs to understand and internalise: the PCs in a Forbidden Lands game are not ordinary folks, and they shouldn’t behave like them. So if the GM says “I want to run a game in a post-post-apocalyptic world where the characters are bold, daring and self-directed”, and a player says “my character wouldn’t get involved in the scenario”, it’s fair to say “I asked you to make a character who would be”.

The famous “you are not heroes” quotation

The Player’s Handbook starts off (p. 4) by saying “you are not heroes sent on missions dictated by others – instead, you are raiders and rogues bent on making your own mark on a cursed world.” It goes on to say things like “in the end, you can be the ones to decide the fate of the Forbidden Lands”, “There is no one to hold your hand and show you where to go in the Forbidden Lands”, and “the stories of the game are created by you, they are not written down beforehand” (all p. 5).

What I take from this, first and foremost, is the emphasis on agency: you are not heroes sent on missions dictated by others. You don’t all meet in a tavern, where a mysterious man produces a map of a nearby dungeon and promises to pay you well if you explore it (the first room will be a 10ft by 10ft room with 4 orcs playing cards). To a first approximation, nobody knows where anything is after 260 years of blood mist, and the mysterious man wouldn’t have any money that you could use anyway.

It almost doesn’t matter whether you are, want to be, or will end up heroes in the knight-in-shining-armour sense. Some tables will play a gang of murder hobos, gleefully knifing, poisoning and betraying all and sundry; and sure, if that’s the sort of thing you like, knock yourselves out. I suspect most people will tend towards Neutral Good, but again, that’s not what really matters.

What matters is that PCs are larger than life.

What are the rules consequences of being a PC?

Consider the rules advantages PCs have compared to NPCs and monsters. They have their own pool of Willpower, that they can add to by pushing rolls; they have a Pride that they can trigger once every other session at worst, that also nets them XP; they roll on the critical hit table rather than automatically dying when being Broken. On top of their habit of getting XP for just going to places they haven’t been to before, they have a Dark Secret that can give them even more XP.

So not only do starting characters have intrinsic advantages over pretty much everyone else before they’ve even stepped out of their home village, they’ll quickly become powerful in a matter of days or weeks.

Compare a young adult to an old adult, as per the character creation rules. As you get old you lose a couple of points in attributes, but to make up for it you get 4 skill points and 2 extra general talents. How much XP could it cost, at most, to get old? Let’s say you start with 2 skills at level 3 and another at level 2, and put one of them up to level 5, another to level 4 and the final one to level 3; and you put your level 1 general talent up to level 3. That’s the most expensive way of gaining your extra points, one that hardly anybody will do – most people are going to be generalists and pick up a few points in skills or talents they didn’t already have rather than ruthlessly specialising – and it’ll cost you 4x5 + 5x5 + 4x5 + 3x5 + 2x3 + 3x3 = 95 XP in total.

Anecdotally, that’s about as much XP as players tend to accumulate during the entire Raven’s Purge campaign (some tables get to about 200, but I think that involves character death and resets).

Or, to put it another way: even if you decide to choose the absolutely hardest way of getting old, PCs wandering around the world and fighting monsters will manage to pull off the same trick in at most a year or two, compared to your most of your life.

The trick is, you’ve got to want to do some crazy shit.

How many people would actually end up adventuring?

For 260 years, the world outside your village has been a terrifying place that will kill you. Now, at long last, that nightmare is over, but you still have no idea what the outside world is like.

Most people will take that.

The blood mist has been a constant presence in everybody’s lives, and cautious people will warn you that this might just be a temporary reprieve. Even if it’s gone for good, for most people all that means is that they can stop worrying about being caught outside after dark, so maybe they can risk going further when hunting. Certainly they can reclaim the old fields that are now overgrown with weeds and brambles, maybe see if there’s still a path down to that lake where it always looked like there could be good fishing.

Leave the village? Why would anyone do that? Most people have children and/or family to support, and they’re going to stay here, thank you very much. Even if the village is ruled by a tyrant, or otherwise dysfunctional, and people would really like to leave, then even if they do pluck up the courage they’ll leave for another village and settle down there. Precious few people will want to leave the village and keep on going.

I’ve mentioned in the past how I think one of the best analogues to a party of PCs is a rock band: typically between 3 and 5 people with different but complementary specialisations, who travel the world doing unusual things and hoping to become rich and famous doing so. Well, think of how many people in our world would have liked to be in a band, and then how many actually started a band, let alone stuck with it during the tough times when they had no gigs and no money? Or to take another example: even though many of the modern-day heroes of our world are people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, James Dyson or even Elon Musk, how many people have actually started their own company?

You know how bystanders in works of fiction accuse the hero of being the sort of person who hears about danger and runs towards it? That’s what the PCs are like.

And that’s weird.

What enables or prevents people from becoming PCs?

This next bit mostly matters for the GM when worldbuilding, but it should inform players as well, when thinking of their character background.

What spurs people to go adventuring?

Forbidden Lands, as noted previously, is very clear that the PCs have agency, and if they’re adventuring it’s because they wanted to do so. So immediately, any kind of “you are the chosen one” / “but thou must” kind of setup is out the window. Your PCs aren’t Harry Potter.

They could be Luke Skywalker, who always dreamed of being something better than a moisture farmer, of seeing the stars. Sure, he needed the arrival of rebels on his boring home world to join the Resistance, to make him realise that he could do something more interesting with his life; but that’s fine: nearly everybody needs a prod to get going. (The people who get going purely under their own steam are often the people we call psychopaths and villains.) Revolutions really start far earlier, as a wellspring builds up of people wanting to do something, but not knowing how or when yet, so they grumble and hope without direction. One day people storm a prison or a guy sets himself on fire in the street, and suddenly loads of people with hope but no direction realise that the time is now: stuff is happening.

The prod, in the Ravenlands, is a fairly simple one: the blood mist is no more. If you were dreaming of venturing outside your boring little village, but you didn’t know how to without dying, well, maybe now it’s going to be easier.

PCs produce more PCs

If there are other likeminded people in your village, especially some with complementary skills (i.e. a balanced PC group), it’s even likelier that you’re going to get together and go looking for adventure. You only get The Beatles because John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were contemporaries and neighbours. Similarly, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were classmates; Genesis, Radiohead and Coldplay started as high school or University bands.

This may snowball, and you may end up with people who end up joining your party because they like the idea of being adventurers, and after all everybody else is doing it. In my current campaign I set up a random friend of the PCs to be the Pete Best: the party got to the first adventure site and he tapped out, saying that adventuring life was scarier than he expected.

And of course the opposite can happen: if you’re the only PC-class person in your village, there’s nobody to go adventuring with. Phil Collins, George Harrison, Phil Selway and Guy Berryman might make for a pretty decent alt-history supergroup, but if they’d each grown up in a different middle of nowhere, what are the odds that they’d have ever made it big?

PCs inspire and, eventually, deter more PCs

As soon as you have a party of travelling PCs who go to other villages and don’t kill everyone on sight, you can potentially inspire frustrated wannabe PCs. To continue the band analogy, if the original PC group of Best, Harrison, Lennon and McCartney wanders into a frustrated Ringo Starr’s village, and something happens to Pete Best, Ringo now realises that being in a travelling rock band is a thing that he can be a part of. So if you have just one or two PC deaths, and you’re near a reasonable population centre, it’s quite possible that there are potential replacement PCs that had been champing at the bit, waiting for adventure but never able to actually get going.

This doesn’t need to happen immediately. Pete Best might not be gone yet, but you’ve prepared the ground for Ringo to join, so the party can venture back in a few sessions to pick up a replacement drummer.

And if the party never hires Ringo, he still now knows that adventuring is possible, and eventually as more and more people travel from village to village, he might end up joining another group.

Because the very fact that travelling adventurers are now a thing inspires more individual PCs, and lowers the perceived risk of going adventuring. To take the other analogy, it takes a lot of bravery and/or foolishness to set up your own company, intending to bring a new product to market, when you don’t really have any idea how running a company works. But if you live in a part of the world like Silicon Valley in the 1990s or 2010s, where seemingly everybody’s becoming a founder and venture capital is readily-available, the prospect is a lot less daunting. So if looks like there’s good money in being an adventurer, well, more people will become adventurers.

Up to a point. Eventually there are so many adventurers that it loses its mystique and becomes just another job. People “know” what adventurers are like, and tell jokes beginning with “an adventurer walks into a bar” like they would about farmers or blacksmiths, and you start to think seriously about whether you genuinely are better than all the other adventurers out there. People join an adventuring party as just another job, because a previous PC has died or retired, and before you know it the risk-taking aspect of deciding to head out into the world and see what it’s like is almost non-existant, like how nobody thinks a plumber is an entrepreneur just because they’re a sole trader.

What about people too old to go adventuring?

You can never gain more attribute points in Forbidden Lands, so it follows that min-maxers will make sure they have as many as possible. It also makes sense for people who want to go explore the Ravenlands to be young people champing at the bit, and without any existing ties (needing to care for family, or having children to support) that would keep them in their home village.

That doesn’t mean that only young people want to go adventuring, though; and it’s perfectly possible that the PCs will inspire someone older, maybe who never got married, or who’s now a widow or widower with settled-down children, who suddenly feels the wanderlust. What makes this interesting to me is that (a) such a potential PC clearly could have already accumulated a fair bit of XP, so they don’t have to start from scratch; and more interestingly (b) they’ve got a far more interesting hinterland than wet-behind-the-ears young PCs, which makes for far more interesting Prides and especially Dark Secrets.

Failing that, they could be teachers. Yes, yes, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”; but it was literally impossible to be an adventurer before the blood mist vanished. The previous generation or two of potential adventurers lived off scraps compared to the current PCs. Still, it will have been possible to have journeyed to all six hexes surrounding your village during the summer, maybe fought a monster or two, definitely to have had some low-key adventures during which your Dark Secret and/or Pride were involved. That’s 20-30 XP right there, for the sort of person who would have been an amazing PC if they’d been born 40 years later. That’s more than enough to get to rank 3 in a magical talent if you’ve got a rank 3 teacher nearby willing to teach you, and definitely enough to reach 3 in any non-magical talent.

And yes, it means that the people who can teach you magic are almost certainly clustered together.

How likely it is that people become adventurers determines what your world looks like

There are two knobs that you as a GM can twiddle: (1) how long ago the blood mist vanished and (2) how many adventurers there are. Both of them will determine the nature of the antagonists to the PCs.

How long ago did the blood mist vanish?

The game canonically says it happened “a few years ago” (Player’s handbook, p. 8); 5 years ago (GM’s Guide, pp. 34-35: “The Mist Lifts” is 1160AS and “Now” is 1165 AS); or even at least 11 years ago (ibid., p.179: castles built after the Blood Mist are d6 years old; and Player’s handbook, p. 194: it takes 5 years to build a castle).

This matters, because the longer it’s been since the blood mist vanished, the more likely that people have started travelling and trading. If you wanted to speedrun all of the adventure sites on the map, you could probably do it in about three months, assuming an optimal path and not stopping to explore. Now, nobody’s going to actually do that, but it does mean that plenty of people can easily have explored smaller but still significant parts of the world, and swapped stories with others who have done likewise.

Every year that goes by since the blood mist vanished increases the amount of knowledge about the Ravenlands, by anyone, anywhere. The less likely it is that any previously-hidden artifacts are still hidden, and the more likely that adventure sites have been cleared out and turned into strongholds by adventurers.

How many adventurers are there?

If the PCs are the only adventuring group, they have all the time in world to e.g. find Stanengist, if you’re playing Raven’s Purge. Even if there are a few more, everyone who’s not already a friend of an adventuring group will want to find one to be friends with, because they’re a rare ally who could tip the balance in many conflicts. The feel of a world with few PCs is that of a mythical or fairy tale world where legends are told about ancient artifacts of power, and as the years go by legends are in turn told about the brave few who dared to try and find them.

If there are loads of other adventurers, though, chances are good that someone else will find Stanengist first, and the challenge then becomes stealing it off whoever currently has it, and not getting it stolen off you in turn. The presence of an adventuring group in a village will be a mixed blessing, because they’re typically military / diplomatic units in the service of established powers like Zytera, Zertorme, various dwarf cities, the Viraga, Raven Sisters, Maidenholm, even Farhaven; unless they’re freebooters looking for trouble and easy pickings. When two adventuring groups turn up in a village, the wise lock away their children and livestock and shut their shutters, because a fight’s about to start and if you’re lucky it’s only adventurers who will end up dead. This world feels more like a western, and after a while a number of people will start to lament the loss of the blood mist and the peace and quiet it brought about.

Let’s back-of-the-envelope it. There are about 10,000 people in the Ravenlands, but we need to get rid of young children and people who have settled down, so let’s say we’re looking for just Young people. For humans, that means people between 16 and 25; looking at a modern-day pyramid of ages from Nigeria, which seems a plausible match for what a Ravenlands village would look like, we can pick the 15-19 and 20-24 ranges, which gets us a total pool of roughly 10% of the population in the desired age rank, so 1,000 candidates.

I think an upper bound is going to be that 1 in 5 of those candidates goes adventuring, because after that village elders will put their foot down and say things like “who’s going to harvest crops for us to eat, and produce the next generation, if not the youngfolk?” And obviously your village needs to be large enough that there even are 5 spare younglings. If the overall population is 30 or less (that’s half of all villages in the Ravenlands, as per GM’s Guide p. 168), then there are a fair number of people who were directly or indirectly depending on you sticking around: people like your family or friendly elders who were confident of being able to, if not retire, then at least hand some of their duties to you; and whoever you were going to end up married to and their family and friendly elders.

1 in 5 gives you 200 adventurers, or 40 adventuring groups, but with this many people vying for the same thing, there’s going to be a fairly significant cull early on, so let’s say we settle down into 30-odd groups as our upper bound.

If you want to say “everybody knows an adventurer, or wannabe-adventurer”, a more plausible ratio is 1 in 30: same as how there might be someone you went to school with who ended up being famous or special or something. That gives you 33 potential adventurers, and probably only 20 were close enough to form groups with each other, so there’s 4 adventuring groups that your players may eventually become aware of, and 13 potential spare PCs.

If you make adventurers even rarer and posit a 1:40 ratio, that’s 25 adventurers and 3 groups. 1:50 gives you 20 adventurers and 2 groups. And of course you could decide to make adventurers even rarer.

If you’re not sure, consider that all of the official campaigns talk about a small number of Key Players: 9 in Raven’s Purge, 8 in the Bitter Reach, 10 in the Bloodmarch. The assumption is that your PCs are another Key Player; and a powerful one at that.

What does it do to the balance of the campaign if there are significantly more adventuring groups? OK, you can say that some of the NPC adventuring groups are in service to some of the key players, so they don’t count, but that feels like a fudge. It’s more likely that the campaign reckons that there will only be one PC group; and certainly not more than a small handful.

Interactions between adventuring parties: a worked example

The standard campaign for Forbidden Lands is Raven’s Purge; it’s also the one that I’m running, so that’s what I’ll use as an example. Still, the basics should be similar for Bitter Reach or the Bloodmarch.

What is it that adventurers even do?

Our hobby owes a lot to D&D, especially when we play fantasy games, but it’s worth considering how weird early D&D was. The initial idea was arguably a cod-American frontier / colonisation game where there’s no existing social order to worry about, and you could just wander around looting and pillaging without having to worry about the inferior people (orcs, goblins, Native Americans etc.) who, in their fatuous words, “lived here already”.

This isn’t the case in the Forbidden Lands: yes, wars and the blood mist means that population density has cratered and any feudal-type ability to project power and compel obedience has mostly crumbled (apart from in Harga and the dwarven cities), but the game is very clear that whenever you go wandering and find a settlement, the people there are just like you. You can’t just kill them and steal their stuff, then move on to the next adventure site. You need people to feed you, shelter you, not murder you in your beds, and hopefully not send word to your enemies where you could be found.

More importantly, they have existing concerns: friendly relationships with some villages, tentative or even hostile relationships with others, all on top of a possibly-imperfect memory of past conflicts. Where adventurers make their home or base will determine how they see the world and what they decide they need to do.

Let’s pick our median scenario of four adventuring groups. Population levels in the Ravenlands are such that the places we’d expect them to emerge are, in order of likelihood, (1) Harga, (2) the dwarf cities around the Coldwater and in Belderand, (3) the orc forests of Arina and the Feulenmark, and (4) the plains of Moldena and Margelda.

An adventuring group in Harga will be mostly human, and either working for the Rust Brothers or, more likely, running a guerrilla resistance campaign against them. If your players started out here, consider a rival, counter-group emerging part way through the campaign, as Zytera, Krasylla and/or Kartorda realise the military efficiency of a commando unit that can launch lightning raids on patrols, then hide among the peasantry until the Rust Brothers stand down the emergency patrols and admit that the goddamn heroes have gotten away from them yet again. Even if you want to say that Zytera and Kartorda between them have something like 900 troops, killing a handful of them every now and again is going to end up putting a significant strain on the Rust Brothers, especally when it’s compounded by more and more peasants (or even more skilled fighters) joining the rebellion, people who worked for the Rust Brothers because it was a kushy job having second thoughts, and of course the need to defend the suddenly-open borders with Zertorme on one side and the orcs on the other.

A dwarf party has to have a stone singer as one of its number, and the natural thing for them to do will be to wander the land repairing abandoned dwarven tunnels and investigating ancient dwarven outposts and even cities abandoned during the Alder Wars. Wailer’s Hold will be an ultimate aim for these guys. If this is your party, they should meet Arvia early on and be inclined to respect and follow her, only to hopefully realise how batshit crazy she is; but by that time she’ll have attracted the attention and service of another rival adventuring party. If your players are mostly non-dwarves, one of the other parties are great friends of Arvia’s and believe her every word. This solves the one problem with Arvia being so entertainingly annoying: that the PCs might want to straight up kill her. That’ll be harder if she’s got an adventuring group of her own to back her up.

An orc party will probably be directed by the Viraga to secure the orc lands, investigate neighbouring lands and make friends. This will typically be a combination of diplomacy and skulduggery, as unthreatening gelded males or female orcs who can pass for human try to persuade dwarves and humans that the orcs can be trusted; failing that rob or sabotage them; and if all else fails break out into a violent and cathartic orgy of death and destruction (which is what the big guy with the tusks has been more-or-less-patiently waiting for).

A party from further East will probably be a mixture of humans and elvenspring, and should gravitate towards Amber’s Peak, where Zertorme will provide them a base and subtle direction. Their focus will probably be on exploring the villages between Amber’s Peak and Haggler’s House, and making sure they’re favourable to Zertorme.

Any other parties, lacking an obvious patron and power base, should be far more random and more like traditional purely self-motivated adventuring parties.

Alliances and rivalries between adventuring groups

Obviously, if one group of adventurers finds Stanengist but another finds the extra elven rubies, they’re both at an impasse. If one party has four rubies, but one of them is Viridia, there’ll be pressure from Merigall for them to steal (his preference) or swap (maybe their preference) a ruby with the other party. An obvious solution might be “see you at the final battle in Vond”, if that’s the finale you want for your campaign. The other party might even uphold their side of the bargain!

A mostly-human party in Harga might intercept a Galdane Aslene with an Arrow of the Fire Wyrm intended for Krasylla. When another party realises what happened to it, there might be negotiations along the lines of “OK, we agree that killing Krasylla is a good thing, but first let’s you prove your skills to us by helping us out on our raid”. The human party is conscious, after all, that any shenanigans in Vond, no matter how satisfying, might lead to a security sweep discovering the secret ways they have of getting into Zytera’s fortress, which will mean that it’ll be more difficult for them next time they want to go poking around in there.

The Rust Brother counter-party in Harga might look perfectly plausible at first if they encounter another party. They can blame one of them being obviously misgrown on “you had to do it to serve, but they realised the error of their ways, and they’re now our way of sneaking inside / pretending to be Rust Brothers just long enough for the rest of us to bash the guards on the back of their heads”. When it turns out the others are also misgrown, just more subtly, there’ll be a need for another excuse.

Arvia’s party will be infuriatingly devout and convinced by her every word, but the PCs should have enough information about what’s really happening in the world to sow a few seeds of doubt in the minds of at least one of them. And where one goes, others could follow, until the final confrontation with Arvia where she says “to me, my followers!” and they step backwards and leave her to her fate?

A party backed by Zertorme will similarly be disinclined to believe rumours about “he’s secretly part-demon”, but if they’ve got any sense they should understand the nature of his subtle court, and should be in a position of relative trust that makes it easier for them to investigate rumours. Of course, they might then say “Zytera and Krasylla are worse, so we’re not turning on him for now”, but it means that if he tries to double-cross everyone during the finale at Vond they’ll be ready for it.

The actions of adventurers, especially your players, set a tone for the world you want to build

The Raven’s Purge campaign wants to end in a huge battle, followed by a more small-scale but still utterly dramatic final showdown where every Key Player gets a moment to give a speech and do some skulduggery. There should be twists and turns, people pulling out magical weapons and saying “aha, but I know your only weakness!”, key players betraying other key players and so on and so forth.

This feels like one of those final confrontations in a castle where, after all the excitement is over, whoever is still standing ends up being King; or, in our world, the sort of dramatic diplomatic summits like Yalta or some of the more energetic Cops. And there absolutely should be tactical uncertainty. Will the Arrow of the Fire Wyrm fly true? Will our Fighter manage to unsheath Asina and hit Zytera with it, and if so what will happen? Will Merigall maintain their side of the bargain? And so on.

But strategically, the important conversations will have happened before that, as the PCs and their potential allies talk about how many forces each are prepared to commit, and, more importantly, the sort of world that they each think they are preparing to build when all of this Zytera and demons nonsense is over.

As adventurers spread out into the land, tales of their deeds will spread; and not just what they did, and to whom, but how and why. This will influence existing adventurers, potential new adventurers, and more importantly the other Key Players.

If the PCs are the murder hobos from earlier, they’re fairly obviously not going to get many people to trust them. And if there are so many adventuring groups that nobody can really keep track of them, then a wise ruler will make sure they still have a sizeable army left at home, to fend off any tricksy adventurers thinking of grabbing themselves a fortress while the boss is away.

But if there are only a few adventuring groups, and it’s known that adventurers go about unearthing hidden treasures, discovering the solutions to ancient mysteries and trying to knit the old shattered communities into something new and better, then they have a case to make for deserving a place at the high table. And their legacy might be even more impressive than “we found a few magic artifacts and killed a bad guy”: they might be the people who helped build a new world.