The Gaming Den

So, nation writeups. They are each getting a flag. And I mean literally every single country on the planet. But while that is cool, it's just a single rectangle (in most cases) with some colors and/or symbols on it. The countries are going to need text. Now a full World Factbook entry is rather more information than any of the countries need. Especially history sections, because people can check wikipedia for that shit. World leaders don't need to be in there because it doesn't matter to players who the president of the Far East Republic is and in any case those things would be expected to change fairly frequently enough that a few dozen of them wouldn't even be the leader of their country by the end of 2075.

But the question is what information does need to be in there? My thoughts:

• Capital City - definitely.
• Currency - definitely.
• Population - definitely.
• Prominent Paths - probably.
• Most major city - probably.
• Major Industries - probably.
• Military Ranking?
• Demitype Percentages?
• Legal System?
• Human Rights Ranking?

It gets fuzzier after:

Commonwealth
Population: 19 million
Currency: Commonwealth Dollar (CWD)
Capital: Philadelphia

What else is top priority in there?

-Username17

primary language?

and would commonwealth be the name, or the type of country?

also you need to know major goods/exports/agriculture, etc. whatever makes the reason to travel there...if that is the purpose.

A reason to go there and a reason to avoid going there/problem you can encounter there. This should be 2 to 4 lines labeled some combination of Exports, Imports, Threats, and Opportunities. If we're sticking to just two lines I recommend Exports and Threats.

So you have things like

Aztlan
Exports: Consumer Goods
Threats: Secret Police

Amazonia
Exports: Magical Drugs
Threats: Insane Spirits

Hong Kong
Exports: Cybertech
Threats: Maoists

Commonwealth
Exports: ???
Threats: Deep One separatists

or whatever.

Of the things on your list, I think Major Industries, Demitype Percentages, and Legal System would be most relevant to PCs--what does this place make that I can buy/steal/tweak/infiltrate/etc., how much will my pointy ears and green skin stand out in a crowd if I need to go to ground, and who do I bribe for how much if I screw up and get caught?

I second Orion's suggestion for threats and opportunities information. Whatever you might otherwise think of them, locations like Sharn in Eberron with its "fantasy New York or Chicago where everything flies, including buildings" vibe or Sigil in Planescape with its "you can get to fucking anywhere from here, and the stereotypical party of mismatched wacky races actually kind of makes sense here" atmosphere are definitely better for adventure plots and interesting hooks than FR's Magocracy #47. Looking at Orion's list, I see "Deep One separatists" and immediately get more ideas than I do after seeing, say, "This place has a strong military and lots of guns."

Well, there are at least 2 world factbook categories which I think you want to include

Area (maybe just square km, maybe also the comparative area)

Transnational Issues


I'm on the fence about having parts of the Transport section included or not. One the one hand a number of locales do have signature transit modes ( German Autobahns, California Freeway, London's Double Decker Busses San Francisco Cable Cars, Alpine Ski Lifts, Venetian Gondolas, PGH's Inclines, Hong Kong Harbor, etc ) that make for interesting firefight or chase scene settings in a heist-based RPG - but that sort of tourist flavor is very different than the cold factual listings that an atlas-style writeup about highways, airports, rails and ports would provide.

I suggest starting with one or two continents in detail , and everything else vague. Like, "name, flag, general outline on a map" vague. It saves you effort now, and my impression is that people just don't care about places they aren't playing. I know I don't.

That isn't "no-one cares about Africa", it's "no-one even cares about New York".

I'm sympathetic to Fectin's stance but I think broad strokes like language and a bit of demographic information should be fine for the areas that are not extensively written up in the core book. Ideally, I'd err with keeping things vague in most areas and assign an asterisk to any regions/cities that you intend to really fuck with in upcoming setting books. That way you deftly accomplish a bit of self-promotion while also giving GMs an idea of where they can run wild with local plots and still be only minimally divorced from any big plots you introduce over time. After all, even epically stupid shit like the Ghostwalker fiasco wasn't so bad an addition if you were running your games in Jonestown or Minneapolis-St. Paul instead of Denver. Given the potential for jetsetting in a modern game I think it'd actually be sort of cool to run jobs in your GM brewed home city and then go do work in Seoul or Essen every now and again without any hitch.

religion
style of dress
notable customs

I like Orion's idea about threats and exports. They're a pretty good summary of a nation's character.

You must include some information about where the nation draws the line between person and unperson. If the PCs are going to be fugitives the instant they set foot inside national borders, they need to know about that. That simple statistic also conveys a huge amount of information about the nation's feel, so it'd be a good candidate for inclusion even if it weren't mechanically critical.

As for other possible ideas, how about an indication of where the nation falls on the asymmetric-threat scale? Modern USA would be max force, Vietnam, Iraq, or Ireland would be max insurgency. Also serves to inform readers about how powerful the local government is and how the major players operate.

Why should(nt) you go here, and what can you expect to do here. Those are the big things honestly. Everything is else is just nice.

How about a little box with flash stats under the flag with:

• Order Level
• Gini Index
• Military Strength
• Something else that can be expressed as a letter or 2 digit number. Currency symbol?

The monster writeup needs population, and that is going to be a number too big to put in there. GDP could fit in there, but likewise is too big for the flash stats box. Land Area could go in there, but it honestly seems like just displaying the country on the map would be plenty to get that information across. Population density seems similarly unnecessary - the population is written down and the country is drawn on the map.

Verbyast wrote:You must include some information about where the nation draws the line between person and unperson.

Agreed. The question is what format that is to include. I'm leaning towards a simple:

• Personhood: Vampires Only

(obviously: that's Romania, other countries would have different criteria).

Orion wrote:Exports, Imports, Threats, and Opportunities

Rather than exports and imports, how about a list of three "major industries" for each country? As for threats and opportunities, how about "major issues" - which is the three things that polls say are the most pressing political issues of the country. That way countries that have border disagreements and existential threats can have those as their major issues. Vietnam has "Montagnard Separatists" as a major issue, for example.

For the legal system, should there be numeric or letter codes? How much information is needed?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:For the legal system, should there be numeric or letter codes? How much information is needed?

A DnD Alignment style grid could work there. Rule of law opposed to rule of man, and idealistic versus corrupt:
IL IM
CL CM

Then maybe another number, 1-9 for how pervasive laws are. So a corporate board that only enforces infractions of corporate code, and does so based on who pays the biggest bribe would be CL1, and Good King Steve who personally regulates every aspect of everyone's lives, but is basically a good guy interested in being fair could be IM9.

FrankTrollman wrote:[*] Something else that can be expressed as a letter or 2 digit number.

The monster writeup needs population, and that is going to be a number too big to put in there. GDP could fit in there, but likewise is too big for the flash stats box.

You can do large numbers on a log scale to fit them in; if the format is already sufficiently obtuse to require a writeup somewhere (that is, it isn't labeled in the box itself), you can even get two digits of precision cutting out the decimal point.

Country	GDP (millions)	Population	log10(GDP in millions),log10(pop)
Modern USA	14e6	314e6	72,85
Launch Loop Land	10e6	800e3	70,60
Modern PRC	6e6	1340e6	67,90
Romania	160e3	20e6	52,70
Starvationland	3e3	80e6	34,80
Sealand	1	4	00,05

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FrankTrollman wrote:

Verbyast wrote:You must include some information about where the nation draws the line between person and unperson.

Agreed. The question is what format that is to include. I'm leaning towards a simple:

That seems pretty good. It also works pretty well for stress ("stress < 50 only") and negations ("Not SAIs").

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FrankTrollman wrote:For the legal system, should there be numeric or letter codes? How much information is needed?

I'll propose a digit plus a letter from a table. Digit gives you how bad the punishments are for a given crime, and the letter is a mnemonic for a defined response/judicial type. Possible examples, thrown out randomly:

• Modern USA: "5J" for "basically fair, jury of peers"
• Romania: "9F" for "highly disproportionate, feudal rulers"
• Atlantis: "3O" for "lax, communes with oracle for guidance"
• Hong Kong: "5C" for "basically fair, corporation in charge"

Problem with this is that it depends on a table and can't really tell you how invasive or well-intentioned a system is. In particular, there isn't really any differentiation between Good King Steve's well-intentioned, incredibly invasive feudalism and The Absent Monarch's well-intentioned, hands-off feudalism.

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Alternatively, we could avoid the mechanics of the law entirely and only list what the players care about: how strong is the police department, how easy is it to get them on your tail, and how hard is it to get them off your tail? Three digits is probably best here. Good King Steve is something like 397, since he isn't very strong, but he has cameras observing every corner of his kingdom and he really cares about seeing justice served. Romania would be 823: Count Dracula is an ancient, unbelievably powerful vampire and if you piss him off he just eats you, but he really doesn't care about much and you can run him off (temporarily) with a bunch of garlic.

FrankTrollman wrote:How about a little box with flash stats under the flag with:

• Order Level
• Gini Index
• Military Strength
• Something else that can be expressed as a letter or 2 digit number. Currency symbol?

Something like the Corruption Perception Index value?

For the legal system, should there be numeric or letter codes? How much information is needed?

My interest as a player would be:
How bribable are the cops/customs agents? Are bribes expected or bad?
What are the laws about weapons and other cool stuff you want?
What is the reality about weapons and other illegal stuff? (example, UK, where guns are banned and yet thugs commit street robberies with SMGs)
How aggressive and effective are the cops?
Is there a particular hot point or police service that you don't want to mess with?

You could abstract that into a code. For example:
First number 0-9 crime prevalence - 0 means extremely rare, 9 means everywhere.
Second number 0-9 general police effectiveness 0 means essentially none, 9 extremely. There would be some sort of correlation between 1 & 2.
Third is corruption. Which is somewhat correlated to the first two numbers.
Fourth Weapons: A no significant restrictions, B significant restrictions in public, C significant restrictions everywhere, D, only security forces have weapons, E weapons very restricted even to security forces. The weapons index isn't related at all to crime or police effectiveness. (examples: Mexico is C, Switzerland is A, Japan is D)
etc

While it might be too much to write for literally every nation on the planet I think this list would benefit greatly from having a paragraph of information conveying threats and plot points of interest for each nation.

If it was just numbers and basic information this list would be of literally no value to me. If however each country can give me some piece of pre-made plot hook to start me being able to describe the state of the country then I can actually just flip to "New Guinea" when my players arrive and be ad libbing some relevant information about the countryside within 15 seconds.

Now as I said one to two paragraphs per country might well more than double the word count of this project but it would take it, in my view as a DM, from "useless" to "life saving". So I think it's worth considering

OK, as it happens, with a <100 word essay on a country, I can fit about 7 or 8 on a page, and without the essay I can fit about 14. Without the essay it works out to just:

Country Name [Flag Image]
Capital: Cityname
Population: Number
GDP: Number {Money Type}
Industries: Thing1, Thing2, Thing3

The essay might be something like this:

Rlyeh is a pirate nation that exists primarily under the ocean, with only a few islands and floating platforms existing above ground. With a population that is over 90% deep one, they nevertheless make efforts to kidnap and indoctrinate other demihumans who display conjuration talents. Their state religion demands a constant state of war against all unbelievers, and their navy conducts terrorist attacks all over the world.

At that length I can fit 8 per page, and it falls to 6 or 7 if I increase it much. If we go with the 14 per page option, the "text" underneath would be profoundly limited to something dumb like:

Malaysia is a federal republic of seven sultanates.

It is also possible to mix and match, having "focus areas" where the countries get a full paragraph and show up 6 to a page, and list regions, where they just get basic stats and a tag line.

-Username17

Another information that can be useful is the dominant mega-corporation(s) in the country and their degree of influence on the government.

Wait, hold on. Why do nations matter again? I thought it was all megacorp dominated anyway. While there might be some local flavor, are the countries really anything more than lines on a map?

fectin wrote:Wait, hold on. Why do nations matter again? I thought it was all megacorp dominated anyway. While there might be some local flavor, are the countries really anything more than lines on a map?

Countries represent the extent of political will and regional currency.

So your Commonwealth Dollars can be spent in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, but not in San Francisco or Boston. When you influence political reality in Pittsburgh, you are affecting and affected by Commonwealth Issues, and not by Union Territories or Polaris issues.

Since the game is about doing things to the political landscape, the country borders are important. They represent the extent of your influence and the limitations of your money.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: So your Commonwealth Dollars can be spent in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, but not in San Francisco or Boston. When you influence political reality in Pittsburgh, you are affecting and affected by Commonwealth Issues, and not by Union Territories or Polaris issues.

So they don't take my Ares Express card in SF? Why?

kzt wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote: So your Commonwealth Dollars can be spent in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, but not in San Francisco or Boston. When you influence political reality in Pittsburgh, you are affecting and affected by Commonwealth Issues, and not by Union Territories or Polaris issues.

So they don't take my Ares Express card in SF? Why?

Several reasons. The first is that your Ares Express card comes from some bank in Detroit. And it's issued in Canadian Dollars guaranteed by the treasury of Ontario in the Great Lakes Republic:


So you wave a pile of GLR money at people in SF where they use Alta California American Dollars, and you have a problem. The second issue is that the bank back in Detroit is in a Mirror Network, so that it will actually take quite a while (like 2 minutes) for your money to clear, even if you're lodged with a large bank that can make good on foreign currency debts for you. So if you're in someplace like a grocery store where there are a lot of people in line, they will tell you to go fuck yourself.

-Username17

It seems like land-only connections such as intra-Europe or intra-North America should be fairly fast, since they're not constantly being terroristed because they're buried under 30ft of concrete when they're placed.

FrankTrollman wrote:So you wave a pile of GLR money at people in SF where they use Alta California American Dollars, and you have a problem. The second issue is that the bank back in Detroit is in a Mirror Network, so that it will actually take quite a while (like 2 minutes) for your money to clear, even if you're lodged with a large bank that can make good on foreign currency debts for you. So if you're in someplace like a grocery store where there are a lot of people in line, they will tell you to go fuck yourself.

Having worked in many a grocery store, they will pull you off to the side and politely but irritably conduct the transaction somewhere that it's less inconvenient for other customers and firmly suggest that it might be more convenient for you to do this transaction at a bank first next time.

If you play it off well, you seem like you're too rich or busy to care about niggling shit like that, like the person (today) who wants to put their groceries on a platinum American Express when the grocery store doesn't take that. If you play it off wrong, you're either a bumbling tourist or just an asshole, like the guy (today) who wants to pay for $100 worth of groceries in coins. The latter case would be a good example of a fault in making a Buying Things montage roll.

That is a good idea. Having foreign currency gives you extra penalty dice when trying to buy stuff.

-Username17

Penalty dice are an elegant mechanic that vaguely remind me of Ironclaw's opposed die pools mechanism.