Pathika Devlog 1: The problems Pathika solved for my game

The material I wrote for Pathika was not originally intended to be put in a setting book. Rather, I wrote up the city to solve a number of problems at once for my old school-ish sandbox campaign. As strange and specific as Pathika might seem, many things about it stemmed from practicality! The city took on its specific shape as I introduced one thing purely for some campaign world convenience, then continually asked “well if this is true, what else would be true?” 

Here are the things I felt would help my sandbox and what they turned into for Pathika:

#1: A ready source of rival adventurers

This might seem like a weird thing to prioritize, but the truth is I think rival adventurers (called “vagrants” in Pathika) are one of the most useful things in the toolbox for a GM running a sandbox. They are first and foremost a class of NPC with an immediately understandable motive that immediately puts their trustworthiness and relationship with the players in question. If other vagrants ambush the party, they can guess why: the other party wants to get to the treasure first! But at the same time, rival parties can be cooperated with, sharing information or exchanging supplies. 

But rival vagrant parties are good even if the players don’t directly encounter them. Need an easy source of time pressure for a dungeon? Let the players know that other vagrants might get to some of the treasures first on a long enough time scale. Give them a good idea of what that time scale looks like (for example, maybe rumors say that a rival guild thinks they can clear the first floor within a week), and now every day spent recovering, even every dungeon turn is ticking a known clock in the background. And that’s all before you get to the options the dungeon itself offers you. While most good dungeons will have their own sources of time pressure, building something like that into the campaign world and basic assumptions of play takes a lot of pressure off. With rival vagrants in the mix, the most bare bones of dungeons can get a little spicier. 

So why did I need the hub town to provide these adventurers? Why not just have them come from all over the world? Well, the other thing I wanted from Pathika was for the players to run into rivals in the dungeon and then have to deal with the consequences of their interactions back in town. Disputes or cooperation arising from chance encounters in the dungeon could thus flower into intrigue or free resources with other adventuring guilds in the city (or vice versa). Plus, by having adventuring guilds in the players’ hub town, they could contract with other guilds before even stepping foot into the dungeon. This is how my players tackled Skerples’s Magical Murder Mansion: they knew a number of guilds had their eyes on the mansion and cooperated with another guild to have as many bodies in the dungeon as possible before others got to it. 

I should also admit I have a soft spot for the “rival” archetype for villains in books, movies, video games, etc. If one of the conflicts in a story is two people who have similar abilities or come from similar backgrounds, I’m goddamn riveted. Green from Gunstar Heroes, Jeanne from Bayonetta, and Shadow Moon from Kamen Rider Black are all great examples. It helps that in the case of adventurers, I don’t really need them to have some kind of world-conquering scheme or access to institutional resources to make them an interesting and understandable opponent. If the players have a reason to be somewhere, it follows that others with similar goals and abilities might be there as well, and so I always had a couple possible enemy factions in my back pocket when I wasn’t sure who else to put at an adventure site.

This simple trick to help me be a lazier and more effective GM is really the foundation of why Pathika exists: by having the hub town’s economy revolve around adventuring organizations, all with their own interguild conflicts and agreements, I would have a steady supply of rival adventurers to populate the game world and cause more trouble for the party. 

#2: A boomtown hub that changes over time 

Once I knew that my campaign would be populated with a lot of rival adventurers, it made sense for the player hub to be a boomtown that would host all these characters. Boomtowns carry some obvious benefits for fantasy adventure games. They allow me to run an unrealistic economy where simple necessities like food or oil can be priced high enough to be relevant to player decisions. They also let me change the prices or availability of various items/services without straining believability too much. 

Pricing Changes

When I first ran the city, I went a step further and took pricing from The Black Hack 2e, which separates items into three categories: Common, Rare and Exotic. Each category assigns a dice value to roll for the price of each individual item in that category (e.g. rare items are 2d8x5 coins), modeling both that goods within the same category have different prices and that the same item will carry a different price week to week. 

Expanding on this for Pathika, I made four categories: Plentiful (basic adventuring supplies like rope and food), Limited (steel weapons and steel or delicate tools), Rare (metal armor, maps, poisons, and tools that need advanced engineering) and Treasured (magic items, plate armor, etc). I then tried to map these categories to price ranges that work for old school D&D-adjacent economies and create some real shopping choices.

So I made price of Plentiful 2d6, which is a little more expensive on average than basic stuff in B/X, but still cheap enough to warrant buying for every expedition. Then I made Limited 10x the cost of Plentiful (averaging 70 coins), reasoning that most OSR players probably use starting gear packages and that the more unique  items found on those would fall into this category. Rare was 20x the cost of Plentiful or double the cost of Limited, creating a second, slightly more expensive category for the highest cost mundane items which would average around 140 coins. Treasured is set at 200x the cost of Plentiful (averaging 1400 coins), creating a category of goods that will offer some uses of money for when players have a couple thousand gold sitting around. 

By creating the categories and pinning them to dice to roll rather than hard values, I now had two “levers to pull”, so to speak, whenever something impacted the economy. As Pathika got overall poorer or more wealthy, I could change the die values to a d4 or d8 base. If the players blew up one of the city’s few granaries, I could make rations Rare. The first example of this in my actual campaign was steel: the players all had bamboo, wood or pig iron weapons, and anything made of steel was Rare. If they wanted to secure some source of good iron for the city, they’d need to adventure for it. 

Instability

Boom towns also let me involve light town-building and town-destroying elements that the players can get as invested in as they choose. Due to the volatile nature of such a place, choices like who to ally with or who to sell a piece of loot to can become significant. It’s a sandbox they can have more influence over than might normally be expected. While I don’t normally think of my campaign world as immutable anyway, having the bulk of the changes occur in one place makes it easier to run and react to player actions since it’s happening in a smaller area. 

This evolved into the crisis stack, a procedure wherein some new disaster is afflicting the town every time the players visit it. This is obviously a very exaggerated idea that has more to do with the specific fantasy adventurer-focused subject matter of Pathika than a boom town, but I felt it reflected the volatility of a place where everyone is bringing in fireball wands, portal scrolls, etc. Weapons of mass destruction flow in and out of Pathika at an alarming rate, and I wanted the players to feel like it mattered if they sold a scary-looking spellbook to someone they thought might misuse it. 

#3 An aesthetic centerpiece

This final desire was primarily one of cultural aesthetic and grounding for the campaign. Rather than heavy metal or things from Appendix N, my home games take a little more influence from Wuxia, East and South Asian myth, and 90s Japanese RPGs on the SNES and Playstation. So once I decided that Pathika would be a melting pot with transplants from all over the game world, that instantly meant the city would have a fusion of these cultures. 

As the idea behind the city developed though, it took on influences from two things that weren’t necessarily part of the greater game world but were definitely true to the feel of Pathika specifically: Trinidadian culture and hip hop. I took inspiration from Trinidadian culture because Pathikans are a passionate and flamboyant group of people and could not think of a better real world analogue to give a voice and look to that. The hip hop influence felt right to me because of the place Pathika inhabits in its world: a great thing built upon scraps without permission, existing in defiance of the imperial powers of the “real” world, chopped up and remixed from the backgrounds of the diverse people who inhabit it. I don’t know how obvious it will be to my audience in the final text, but I can confidently say that hip hop guided my hand quite a bit in designing the city and its people. 

That all said, I don’t think these influences will make it hard to understand the book or fit it into a more Euro-fantasy, heavy metal game world. There’s still European plate armor and what not, but it’s kind of flipped: where you’d see foreign samurai or warrior monks in a typical D&D game, here the warriors from distant lands are English knights or Norse vikings. People remark on nickname characters with fair skin or natural blonde hair. The result is somewhat like the original Suikoden for Playstation, and that’s not an accident! The book takes a lot of inspiration from Suikoden and the novel it’s based on, Water Margin. 

Overall this book has one foot in the conventions I felt were minimally necessary to let me use all my euro-fantasy D&D modules, and another in a complicated and messy masala of my personal interests and the cultures I was raised in. My hope is that the familiar bits will guide people through the things they don’t understand, and that my audience will feel comfortable looking up or just guessing on the things they find more exotic. It’s a weird, indulgent microsetting but one I hope will be as convenient your campaign as it was to mine! 

P.S. If you’re interested in this book, by the way, be sure to join the mailing list for updates, previews and news.

(Header image is from the classic Shaw Brothers movie, “Water Margin”, based on the novel of the same name which is a major inspiration for this book)