1, 10, or 1000000

 I’ve been kicking around a design rule recently I’m calling “1, 10, or 1000000.” The idea is that when you’re determining how prevalent something should be in your game there should either be one of them, 10 of them, or a million. 

Maybe not exactly those numbers. More accurately, if you’re thinking about how prevalent something should be in the campaign, any given thing should either be unique, part of a small coherent grouping, or common if not ubiquitous. What this means specifically varies from thing to thing so here are some examples:

Dragons

There is one dragon. Maybe not the only dragon in the entire game world, but for the purposes of the campaign there is only the one. This will likely be the most dragon-y dragon a DM could muster. The players might encounter it in passing or hear about it from time to time as they progress but they wouldn’t hope to have any chance of slaying it (or convincing it to be their ally, subduing it, etc.) until late in the game. The dragon is probably tied to the history of the setting or has some significant influence on the current circumstances. There’s only one dragon, so it has to count. 

There are 10 dragons. They all know each other, and people know about them—if not all then enough to know that there are several dragons in the area. Each dragon has their own domain, goals, tastes, and their own of opinions of one another. Each dragon probably has a couple unique features in addition to the normal dragon stuff that make them distinct both from the other dragons and the stereotypical “fantasy dragon” that exists in the mind of the players. Some of the dragons are mean, some are nice, all are menacing yet for different reasons. 

There are 1000000 dragons. They’re everywhere, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the sea. In every cave there dwells a dragon, in every forest they stalk and prey. Some rule city states, others hide in abandoned cellars. They come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments. This is probably the baseline monster the PCs will be dealing with throughout the campaign.

Sages

There is one sage. She lives somewhere rather inconvenient to get to and it takes at least a session worth of adventuring to find her for the first time. Being the only sage, she’s knowledgeable on just about everything worth asking about, though she exacts a steep price for her services. She's probably an important figure in the setting despite being a recluse. A possible quest for the PCs would be if a powerful political leader tasks them to bribe her so that she gives false info to his adversaries.  

There are 10 sages. They are the current members of a secret order that’s been around for centuries. They’re scattered all over the map, some in settlements, some in the wilderness, some traveling from place to place. In addition to their respective areas of knowledge each one’s got a “schtick:” one’s the mad scientist who wants to do experiments on the PCs, one’s the fogey hermit who might or might not be a badass kung fu master, one’s the eccentric inventor that always has stuff blowing up in his face, and maybe one is like a talking cat or a sentient ooze or something. They definitely have a bunch of secret signs and rites. If the player need information on a given subject and none of the sages they are buddies with know about it, they would tell them who the right sage is to look for and it would be a whole thing like “go to this distant barbarian village and show the chief this special sign and he will lead you to a clearing where in the light of the moon Umru the Clever will appear on the back of a three-horned rhino. At first he will refuse to help you but ask him three times and he will tell you what you seek to know.”  

There are 1000000 sages. You can find one in just about every town, next to the blacksmith’s or the local tavern. They’re on the wilderness encounter table and maybe the dungeon one too, at least for the earlier levels. On the spectrum of background character to fully fleshed out NPC, sages lean toward the former, along with shopkeepers and city guards. Using a sage would be a pretty streamlined process—you pay them some money and they have a percentile chance of answering your question. High level PCs can hire out sages just like any other kind of specialist to have on staff in their stronghold. 

Races

There is one race: the human ra- For the purposes of this kind of campaign there are humans and then everything else. If there are elves and dwarves and halflings they’d be so minor they aren’t relevant to the campaign setting (so you won’t be hanging out in the elf kingdom or helping the dwarves in their war effort against the goblins). Humanoids like orcs and gnolls are soulless monsters in the same category as chimeras and vampires and other things that want you dead. 

There are 10 races. Humans might be the one the campaign is centered around, but demihumans, monstrous humanoids, and a handful of other sapient creatures have a significant presence in the campaign setting. Some are playable, definitely more than one, but probably not all. Within each population is probably a decent amount of variation—there’s more than one type of elf, dwarf, and so on. Each race has at least vaguely defined customs and characteristics that distinguish them mechanically as well as narratively. For instance, if orcs of different tribes encounter each other they may need to save or immediately turn hostile. There may be another, separate intelligent species in a specific adventure location or two, but the point is if you have the four basic races and lizardmen, bird people, and hobgoblins, then the players aren’t going to be regularly running into bugbears, kobolds, and gnomes on their adventures.  

There are 1000000 races. Everything and the kitchen sink. There’s probably a nice meaty d20 list of races to roll on for character creation and implied even more in the game world. One session the players might be fighting the axolotl-men, the next they might be trying to impress the king of the coatimundi-men, the next they’re stealing treasure from the red-lipped-batfish-men. Here, races are treated less as distinct species and more as distinct people-groups. There’s almost certainly going to be that ren-faire quality some settings have where when you go to the city you’re greeted by a minotaur guard as a family of myconids walk by.

Magic items.

There is (around) one magic item (per player). In this kind of game finding a magic item is a huge, campaign-defining moment. Any magic item that shows up would be an incredible differentiator for the party and also potentially the mcguffin around which an entire adventure is centered. 

There are 10 magic items. Maybe in this circumstance there are 10 of a certain major kind (10 swords, 10 pieces of enchanted jewelry) that have similar provenance and make up the main focus as far as magical treasure is concerned, with other magic items being largely auxiliary. Each item would have one or several open-ended qualities that make them broadly useful while also having some definite drawbacks to limit their utility. Perhaps the drawbacks of one can be mitigated by another, creating a sense of momentum as the players acquire them. The ten magic items could make up the premise of the campaign—"gather each segment of the rod of seven parts"—or they could just be more incidental marks of distinction—"be wary, for the warlord you oppose is said to wield one of the 12 legendary demon blades." The ten magic items don’t also have to have the same origin or be the same kind of object, but they ought to be at least distinguishable as in the same class as one another. Patrick Stuart’s proposed World of 100 Wonders is an example of this kind of setup. 

There are 1000000 magic items. Most are minor, with specific and limited functions that make them handy to have around but not totally gamebreaking. As the PCs explore and find more items it would be like they’re filling out their utility belts, getting more tools to handle incrementally greater challenges and to facilitate new approaches. A lot of these items would probably be consumable like potions or can only be used a set number of times like wands. I’ve never played Numenera but I think it does something like this with cyphers.  

Dungeons

There is one dungeon. The mega one. This is a classic-style dungeon big enough to accommodate an entire campaign. This is where the DM crams every one of their dungeony ideas. There are levels, sublevels, secret levels, and enough interconnectivity between them to make the dungeon less a thing to get to the end of and more an open environment to explore and manipulate. 

There are 10 dungeons. This is like Legend of Zelda, where each dungeon has some motifs that show up in the puzzles and traps and monsters. Despite the preponderance of dungeons in D&D games I feel this is a rather underutilized concept: a set number of dungeons from the outset, each distinctly themed, where in one you’d find an item or a clue that would help you circumvent an obstacle in another. This kind of game might also represent an inversion of the BX game play progression that starts into players in the dungeon until they get strong enough to explore the wilderness—here players may begin the game with wilderness exploration, with the goal of making it to a dungeon, and then progress as far as they can until they get bored or hit roadblock, and then explore the overworld again until they find another dungeon. 

There are 1000000 dungeons. Everything the players that isn’t exploring dungeons is either moving between dungeons, coming back to town from a dungeon, or setting out to go to a dungeon. Aside from a couple prepared ones, the dungeons in this campaign would likely be procedurally generated on an as-needed basis; players enter a new hex, dice determine they find a dungeon, and then the DM pulls out the geomorphs and the party is on their way. The dungeons would probably be pretty short, punchy, and dense, to prevent them from getting stale and keep the players going through them at a decent clip. 

Further elaboration

• Truth be told, in most circumstances I can think of 10 is probably too many of a thing to accommodate in one campaign. Five (+ or - 2 of course) is a much more workable number. But I went with 10 to keep it a consistent powers of 10 thing. 
• If it’s not already clear, the number does not always need to refer to the literal number of people or things—giving knights a 1 could mean there is 1 knight in your campaign or 1 knightly order. 10 could also refer to a knightly order of 10 knights—the difference is that a “1” knightly order would have a strong theme that carries over to every member, but one knight might not be that different than the other. On the other hand in a “10” knightly order each knight is their own character with their own traits and personalities. There might be overlap between the knights to reflect the theme of the knightly order, but each member would reflect the theme in their own way (so if it was an order of space knights, one might have a laser sword and a suit of robot armor, one might be like an astrologer-mystic, one might be a void guy who wears black and doesn’t speak, and so on).
• I use the term “campaign setting” here a lot, which I mean to refer to the specific locale that the campaign occupies—it could be the entire planet, or it could just be a specific region. If all or most of your campaign takes place within the confines of a 12x12 hex map, that’s the campaign setting regardless of what exists elsewhere in that fantasy world. A thing that you assign a 1 to for your campaign could be much more common elsewhere in the game world, but for the sake of your campaign specifically there is only one. 

What this solves

Every now and then when I’m coming up with stuff for the campaign I struggle to establish how much weight a concept ought to have. Usually I sort of get attached to one approach but then don’t want to close the possibility of a different approach and then I end up with a noncommittal in between that lacks any kind of satisfaction, so I scrap it all and start over. 

The 1, 10, or 1000000 rule is a nice little creative constraint to bounce off of. It provides a concrete metric of prevalence so there's no more having to sort through competing visions for an ambiguous desired outcome, that being the sort of attention I want something to have in the campaign. 

If I, say, want a lot of different kinds of mercenaries in my game but I’m also mostly just excited about one specific idea I have for a mercenary band, I would have once had that mercenary band be the most fully fleshed out and only vaguely gesture at the existence of other mercenary armies through random encounters and rumors the players may not even pay attention to. The 1, 10, or 1000000 rule resolves this by dictating that mercenary bands should either be ubiquitous enough that any distinction is no more than window dressing, there should be a defined amount of different mercenary bands in the area, or there should just be the one band that about every mercenary in the campaign belongs to. Each is a valid course, and more importantly they do away with the ambiguity that exists between my concept for the mercenary band and how mercenaries actually show up in the campaign. 

Ultimately, the rule is for clarity and decisiveness. Using it lets each choice feel intentional.

It might go without saying but this rule isn't applicable to every circumstance. Sometimes it's fine to have a group of things somewhere in the middle of 1 and 10 or 10 and 1000000. Traps in a dungeon, for instance—the should be prevalent but not everywhere, they don't need to be put into a categorizable, and there shouldn't just be one trap or kind of trap unless your dungeons really small. 

So like most rules of thumb, it's best to use when you get stuck or want to try a new approach.   

Whale's breath

The long-awaited conclusion to the Flying Island adventure. The final session may have been many months ago but the memories last forever or something. Part I, Part II

Classic scenario: you and your buddies are exploring the undercroft of a temple complex only for one of them to get bisected by a giant halberd-wielding statue after he tried to open a sarcophagus. 

The party took a moment to rifle through his belongings mourn their lost ally and then chiseled off the mechanical statue arms. Then it was onto the sarcophagus. Ignoring the disarmed statues' futile swings they found a sallow corpse adorned in fine chain burial shroud (snagged), a golden death mask (also snagged), and a dusky pendent clutched in the corpse's hand (snagged, and then donned by Slyq the thief whose player immediately was like "this is definitely cursed isn't it"). The tomb, further searched, yielded no more secrets. 

As one exploration turn passed to the next, a rustling was heard from back passageway. The party looks and lo—two tengu-men lurk in the darkness, unsure of whether to engage while the party is occupied or retreat and gather more of their brethren. But before they have a chance to act, Gront icily sends one to the hereafter with an arrow through the throat. The other lets out a terrified "yip!" as it flees into the darkness. The party takes a moment to assess what just happened, decides they better get a move on, and makes for the nearby stairway leading deeper into the crypts.

Emerging into a spacious corridor, the party takes stock of the scene. The air in the great crypt is choked with ash and rockdust. Shattered ceramics and masonry litter the floor. Walls that once held ordered rows of funerary urns are scored by deep claw marks and smashed by heavy impact. All signs indicate a recent rampage of some great and terrible beast. In the distance, lit by some gap in the ceiling an indeterminate span above, a great pile of treasure glistens temptingly—more wealth in one place than anyone in the party, as well everyone they've ever known, has ever seen in their lives. Nearer though, just beyond the edge of torchlight, a lone figure sits crosslegged, facing away toward the distant hoard. 

Now finally the party meets that darn wizard they've heard so much about. After some whispered debate about how to approach, they decide to call out to Zazomel (don't think I've mentioned his name yet) and find that he doesn't immediately turn their insides into outsides or whatever they fear evil wizards do. 

Here's the deal with Zazomel: he's on the flying island to steal the dragon's egg. His plan was to locate lair, find the egg, and use a modified version of Drawmij's Instant Summons to transfer it to his floating tower once he has leaves the island. From an adventure design perspective he was meant in part to provide another way for the players to escape the island if they didn't want to pursue the main adventure. I was inspired by Cave Story, where you get the option to just finish the game 2/3rds of the way through.

Anyway all he tells the party that he came to the island to crush this tiny gemstone here onto the dragon's egg just beyond that pile of looted funerary treasure and be on his way. Innocuous, right? He was going to wait for the dragon to go on its crepuscular hunting sweep but for whatever reason (PCs look around awkwardly) the dragon was woken up a few hours ago. Now not only could be back at any moment but it's whole schedule might be thrown off and Zazomel here hasn't another day to lose. If someone in the party would just be willing to assume the small risk of getting swooped on by the dragon to just push the aforementioned gemstone into the egg, Zazomel would happily give them a lift on his magic tower. 

Now, the party has ample reason not to go along with this guy: aside from the clear danger and suspiciousness of it all, they had encountered his henchman a few sessions ago who told them all this guy was a jackass and not to be trusted. But on the other hand, this is exciting and when you're level 1 it's pretty easy to say "why not?" Party decides to help Zazomel and in return he would make sure they get to the Mistral Horn safely. 

Slyq the thief's time to shine. There is a not-insignificant chance the dragon might come back to its hoard since the runaway tengu may have informed it that the intruders were in the undercroft. But the dice decided that was not to be. Gem in hand, Slyq circumnavigated the hoard and entered the small offshoot chamber with the egg. Pausing for a brief moment for dramatic effect, she cast the gem upon the pearlescent egg's shell and then scampered cat-like back to the party (but not before swiping a handful of gold and jewels from the hoard, 1d50x10 sp in the bag). With that over Zazomel says "great follow me to the Horn."

The wizard ally drops an Invisibility 10’ Radius to get everyone around the tengu now patrolling the undercroft and then the party uses a twisty key they picked up a few rooms back to activate a giant cube elevator.

It leads them too... a pavilion atop a tower, enringed with ornate columns. On the eastern edge of the pavilion: a giant bone alphorn covered in intricate silvery etchings. the Mistral Horn! But wait—the gale picks up, the sky thunders but no lightning's in sight. Suddenly, the green dragon swoops in from out of view and tears off a portion of the roof to make space for it to land. A brief pause to spread its wings menacingly, and then it addresses the party: It's all "you have the honor of beholding the majesty of Smaragd, the Poison Storm; forfeit your treasure and swear fealty to me." The players are in a conundrum. To one side, 20' away, the Mistral Horn. To the other, also 20' away, a dragon glares at them expectantly. Zazomel is nowhere to be found. 

As the players desperately scan their character sheets for inspiration, someone's like "how about that stinky cloud potion?"  There's a moment where everyone's all "should- should we throw it?" but then, of course, they go for it. Slyq tosses the potion at the ground directly in front of the dragon, Amos the Cleric makes a break for the horn. The dragon fails its save and begins to wretch. Amos gets to the horn, takes a deep breath, and empties his lungs into the mouthpiece. The blast splits the air, clearing the sky of clouds. Moments later, another tone could be heard as though in response, coming from something far away. An undulating fish-like form manifests in the sky, approaching the tower. The Ancient has awakened from its slumber. 

The winged whale unleashes another low, resonant call. The party feels but a gentle breeze, but the dragon, still reeling from the stinking cloud, gets blasted away team-rocket style. The Ancient regards the party for some minutes, and then in a low resonant voice it thanks them for waking it. That marks the end of the session, and the conclusion to the Flying Island adventure. 

---

The session ran pretty late already but I wanted to give the players a conclusion, so I emailed them some end cards like you see in old video games where the epilogue changes based on your decisions. 

And a little bonus:

Somewhere, in a black tower sailing through the sky...

Zazomel withdraws from his robe a small, clear gem. Once it had a perfect twin, but just the one remains. He stands in a darkened room, cleared of all furnishings save for a motley arrangement of pillows and cushions that loosely encircle a chalk "X" marked upon the floor. He allows himself a second to savor the moment—all the searching, all the scheming, all the sacrifice has led to this. In a sudden movement he casts the crystal upon the chalk-marked floor. Sparks of weird energy fly as it shatters, and in the same instant a pearlescent dragon egg appears in its place.