The Kernel of a Game: Setting II (Home Base)

Inside your focus area, choose one section of it equal to the next-smallest focus area. The following table details what that section is for each of the focus areas we discussed in the last installment.

Focus Area	Home Base
Geographical Region	City
City	Community
Community	Building

(Note that "Building" is just that: a single building. Additionally, feel free to go farther down the chart than it mandates: city-based games often use single buildings as home bases.)

This home base is simply where your players' characters are always safe. Here, they can rest and regroup before journeying off into the great unknown.

A home base's ruler and general atmosphere should be safe for the characters: don't put CG characters in an LE city, or thrust Carthian neonates into a community of Invictus. Additionally, any player-owned real estate will be here (havens, sanctums, strongholds). Your players are going to spend a lot of time interacting with the people in this focus area, so flesh it out: spend time detailing the characters in the area.

You'll likely want to take these narrative uses into account when designing the home base:

Story Catalyst: Most any character can be turned into a plot hook if you need to, but in the home base, include some mechanism by which you can insert new plot hooks without using other characters in the process. Good examples might be a mentor, news reports, or immediate superiors who give the characters assignments.

Wolf In Sheep's Clothing: At some point, you're going to want to hit the characters right where it hurts: in their place of safety. To do that best, give them a character to know and get used to, who can turn on them in a moment of opportunity. Good examples would be a mole, a disgruntled comrade looking for alternatives, or someone with a hidden grudge.

Support Services: One important aspect of a home base is what the players have access to with which to refuel themselves. Just by virtue of it being a safe spot, players can usually refuel in some (limited) method (usually resting to regain health.) Think of your home base as being under siege, then ask yourself what you want the players to have access to without having to fight for it. Each resource you place outside the home base limits the players' refueling capacity (a negative, usually) but gives you one pre-made story. No matter the game, characters usually have some limited resource or commitment they must deal with. Let's go over each case by case:

Healing: Dungeons & Dragons characters, and Awakened, often need medical or religious assistance to aid them after the last battle. It's generally not a good idea to not include some sort of healing resource, as it not only detracts from the possibilities characters have in a siege, but often makes it near-impossible for them to break out of the siege. (For Awakened, a hospital often isn't feasible to shove in just anywhere. But what about an apostate down the hall with Life 4 and a growing interest in archaeomancy? [See Secrets of the Ruined Temple.])
Items: Adventurers need some place to sell and buy equipment. Specialized equipment is often a good thing to deny the players, and it lends itself to some wonderful roleplaying when the warrior is down to ten crossbow bolts, but give the players a bit of a break by including some merchants that sell and buy cheap items. (Save yourself a lot of trouble: never draw up an exhaustive list of what a merchant has; establish maximum prices on what they'll buy and sell, and what types of goods they deal in. From there, just treat them like any other NPC.)
World of Darkness characters deal with merchants less, but the "scarcity of crossbow bolts" control still applies: what if Jack the arms smuggler gets indicted by the feds and his car gets impounded? (See Essentials, below, for details on Mana and Vitae.)
Knowledge Acquisition: Quite often, characters need to look up specific information (Velgran the Great's weakness, the death certificate for the Prince, if there are any Seers in Brooklyn). In and of itself, knowledge acquisition resources should never be in the home base, unless the resource in question can be acquired through discussion with pre-existing elements in the home base. Argaen the Priest of Tarn should be willing to talk about Tarn's precepts, while Greg the bum downstairs probably does know where that crack den is. Municipal Records isn't likely to be across the street, though.
Why? Just the journey to find Municipal Records or Adeia the Sage can give you ample opportunity to throw in assorted leads, red herrings, or just to describe more of your setting. And that's a good thing.
Essentials: Each main supernatural group in the World of Darkness has some consumable resource they care a lot about. (I'm fairly sure there are a few for Dungeons and Dragons, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.)

A few things to keep in mind when looking at restricting access to this resource:
1) Each of the groups loses a lot of power when you cut them off from their resource. In fact, unless you really want to push the characters into torpor (and probably at least one case of diablerie), don't ever shut Kindred off from Vitae. The hunt for blood is so integral to Vampire that it really can't ever end.
2) Each group also has a Merit that gives them free amounts of this stuff. It's okay to temporarily negate that Merit, but not in the same time period as you make it near-impossible to acquire through other means, or else your players will be screaming for your blood.

Associated Baggage: A lot of game options bring along concepts that you should consider in the context of the home base. Mage is full of this stuff in the form of magic bound within the land: save yourself future headaches by deciding where the local Verges, Hallows, and ley lines are with relation to the home base. (For a D&D example in the Forgotten Realms, any wild magic or dead magic zones? What about manifest zones in Eberron?)

Postscript: Despite all the talk of sieges above, it's not recommended that you really ever set siege to your players' home base. It is, however, likely that there is going to be at least one period in which they won't want to go outside of their home base, and then you'll be glad you have all this sketched out.

Related to this is the concept of the "war on your doorstep". Use attacks or crises within the home base sparingly. Once the players have formed a connection to it, they will guard it fiercely, because of the emotional investment, but that emotional impact will be dulled if you use it too often. Only have someone strike at the home base when you really want to hit them where it hurts. (See the D&D supplement Heroes of Horror for more of this, and see the Law & Order episode "Confession" [first episode of season two] for a great example of it in practice.)

The Library: Supplement Reviews

Things have finally settled down enough on my end that I can post again, which I am commemorating by introducing a new section to the Gaming Garden: sourcebook reviews for GMs.

I'll be grading each sourcebook in five categories, each with a rating from 1 to 5:

Pick Up And Go: How much work do you need to do to introduce this supplement to your game? Can you pick it up at lunch and use it at your game that night? Or do you need to carefully read over the new [mechanics/guidelines/arcane instructions] to make sense of it?

Depth of Ideas: How much inspiration can this give you for your own games? A sourcebook that has a good rating in this area will contain enough to spark multiple long campaigns or chronicles, while a premade adventure will score poorly in this category.

Prose: Is the text readable and free of spelling or grammar mistakes? Did the editor cut out all the developers' notes?

Readability: A lot of sourcebooks are useful in games, but fall flat as material to kill a few hours by reading. Can I pick this up and enjoy the sourcebook as an experience in and of itself?

Rules: This is a sort of catch-all category, responsible for the value of specific supplementary rules and statistics contained within the volume. The Rules category counts quantity and quality: high-quality, low-quantity rules in a sourcebook do not earn an automatic five in this category.

Finally, materials where artwork and presentation matters will also have a Style category.

It should be noted that many different gaming sourcebooks are different types of beasts, and that due to their nature, good sourcebooks will often score poorly in up to three categories. Consider the purpose of the sourcebook, and your reason for looking to purchase that sourcebook, when reading reviews. The following is an example of exemplar game materials for each score, one each for the World of Darkness and Dungeons and Dragons.

Pick Up And Go: Reign of the Exarchs / Red Hand of Doom
Depth Of Ideas: Requiem Chronicler's Guide / Manual of the Planes
Prose: Tome of the Watchtowers / Heroes of Horror
Readability: Invictus / Lords of Madness
Rules: World of Darkness Armory / Player's Handbook II
Style: World of Darkness Chicago / Monster Manual III


Additionally, I'm taking suggestions/requests for reviews. Just pop them off to the email on the right of this post.