Rangers Upon the Coast - Quartermaster's Retrospective

Released this week was Whale Roads, a phenomenal labor of love and (in my entirely biased opinion) an extremely cool compilation of play reports, GM asides, player notes, and game materials, from the year-long West Marches / open table game of Wolves Upon the Coast, by Luke Gearing, organized through the Ranged Touch discord server. I was one of 30+ players, I wound up serving as the table's "quartermaster," and I was one of a handful of editors who worked on assembling the final zine, so I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my experience!

I joined the game with reservations (I'm not all-in on the OSR), but the most open heart I can manage. I was interested, but mostly I was excited because a friend of mine had suggested we play together! Players were instructed to roll up characters and not to commit too much to a backstory, so that characters could emerge via play. Cutting against this, slightly, was that the first thing everyone was doing was introducing their characters with a few paragraphs of roleplaying, to hint a little at how we wound up in the starting scenario - enslaved rowers, captured by raiders around the north of Albann (Wolves' Great Britain analogue). I had been reading a little bit about Visigoths in Spain (and particularly, how Judaism fared under visigothic rule), so I decided I'd make my own visigoth. Thus was Gundemar born, a sailor in the employ of a wealthy Jewish merchant (named Abraham Zacuto - this never came up in play). Gundemar himself had converted to Judaism, taken his master's ship full of goods up north to trade, and been captured. I rolled a rather remarkable 16 in Dex, a respectable 14 Con, and a middling 8 Str. I imagined him as a roguish fellow, probably thief-y or a bow n' arrow type. I wrote up a little description for the discord server, the second of its kind to be posted in the appropriate channel:

Gundemar wishes he were back in the gentler climes of his home, but alas the winds of fortune blow ever on, heedless to the wishes of men. In those days, he was a layabout, quick with his fingers and quicker to laugh. He found employment accompanying the trading ships of a wealthy merchant, Master Zacuto. His voyages took him north, to Albann, where he was captured and thus brought into this company of wolves.

He doesn't show up much in the reports of the first sessions he took part in - I fell pretty quickly into the role of an observer and pragmatist, a behind the scenes kind of actor. This doesn't make for very dramatic gameplay in the moment, and it's a hard fit for this kind of west marches game, where I didn't have much of a relationship yet with either the GMs or the other players, and often subsequent games were played with entirely new players (and likely a different GM)! Sessions were pretty short, too. As Danni, one of the refs, observes, this led to two basic kinds of sessions, those that were about gathering information, and those that acted on known information to accomplish a specific goal. Setting out with a goal but lacking information usually meant that the session turned into the first type - you'd be stymied by a surprise, or otherwise encounter something unexpected and have to regroup.

So, Gundemar tags along for some light political action that goes nowhere, trying to ingratiate the group with Count Drest, an awful petty ruler of a region near our starting point, and he travels to an island where he got to observe the first real intra-group dispute (which you can read all about in the session report for Flodaigh). His first appearance in the text of these reports is trying to acquire eggs for food supplies, but the session report that appears in Whale Roads leaves out some of the more conversational gameplay that was interesting to me. Gundemar supported the faction who wanted to kill the man we encountered on the island, in the hopes that we might earn favor with Count Drest - but unable to come to consensus, he let the issue drop.

Just before that session, the character Vrede, played by the friend I had much hoped to play with, was killed by the bone hoarding ogre. This was the end of my friend's involvement with the game, and presented something of a challenge for me. I liked playing the game, but the biggest factor in my investment was the hope that I'd get to play with my friend! I resolved to avenge Vrede, and see how that shook out. Either a noble death or heroic feat would have suited me just fine as a way to go out of the game.

As it happened, the session to slay the bone ogre was a blast, and convinced me to at least try a few more games, especially if they leaned more towards the "specific goal" kind of session.

Seizing The Means of Production

Before Gundemar could go on another mission, though, the flotilla experienced a big shakeup - Thargol, our nominal leader / GMPC was slain by a player character. Things had been moving this way for some time (intentionally - kudos to the refs for making Thargol so utterly insufferable), and players had been informed that 1. replacing Thargol was on the table, but would require players to take on some responsibilities and 2. that anyone could declare they killed Thargol, and no player could stop them. I had genuinely been toying with committing Gundemar do it! But decided he probably wouldn't want that kind of heat.

In the aftermath of Thargol's, death, after a few months of deliberation, the group decided on a scheme for self governance: three players, chosen by vote if necessary, would act as officers, supported in their duties by any number of volunteers. As it happened, no vote was necessary (and neither really were the volunteers), due to lack of competition for the offices. I indicated an interest in taking on the responsibilities of quartermaster, whose duties were enumerated thusly: 

• Update the timeline document after each event that causes time to pass in the fiction
• Track consumption of food stores and funds in coffers, making any prioritization decisions between different resources
• Account for acquisitions of food and funds from expeditions
• Keep track of encroachment on external communities, time remaining, and great deed effects
• Work with the referees to clarify details on encroachment, including community size and whether a great deed has been performed
• Act as the secondary backup for both the Lawspeaker and the Reeve players

Later, the flotilla would vote to grant the quartermaster the additional power to disburse funds from a shared pool. I think it's worth mentioning now, that the constitution document laying these duties out made explicitly clear that "quartermaster" was a role that I was taking on, me the real human being, not the or any character I played in the game. Commendable in principle I think (it would be bad to have a quartermaster who, for example, disbursed funds only to players they liked), but in practice, I was too enamored of the idea that Gundemar, once a sailor for a wealthy merchant, now a known killer, had turned his idle interest in keeping people fed into a major responsibility.

The Age of Quartermastery

with apologies to Tom McHenry

With Gundemar established as quartermaster, there were now two things I knew about the character - he liked to think about food and money, and he liked to go on revenge quests. He would go on a few other revenge quests, notably the session in which we slew the gorgon and the session in which we encountered but did not slay Boudicca, vampire queen-ascendant. But I also got a job (and then a second job), which meant that most of my time playing the game was via my quartermasterly duties.

For several months, my gameplay looked like this:

• Hey! Just checking in. Did you want to donate each of those 10 suits of armor to the flotilla's general inventory? How about the bars of gold - are those being turned into food or kept for value?
• Quartermaster here! For folks who haven't perused the encroachment system too closely, we'd probably most want to find a big city and stay there - we can't split up encroachment amounts. Once we start encroaching, we can't encroach again (unless we commit a Great Deed).
• Food check in! We have X days of food stockpiled and Y days of encroachment left. If we don't want to pay for food, we might want to think about moving soon.
• Quartermaster approves 250 sp to fund a bribe of Marc's finest Pyorran wines, to bribe any centaurs that the expedition might encounter. 

Or, here's one that I made a lot in the "governance" channel, where the officers could ask questions to the refs:

• How many days was that adventure again?

And, just to make absolutely clear - both in terms of frequency and sustained activity over time, these kinds of posts make up the huge majority of my "play." Not super riveting, perhaps! But I was having a blast. In particular, this way of playing (plus my responsibilities) meant that I was reading every session report, and paying particular attention to all the items and money that were coming in. I'm sure this made for a kind of funny focus, but I found it to be genuinely interesting.

The other major mode of play I engaged in, of course, was shitposting. Thank you Brendan for this very funny example.

By far the most time consuming piece of this was making sure that the timeline document was kept up to date and accurate, but it also was a place for some self expression - as the person who was adding session reports (and money and food amounts, and tracking days), I wound up also being the person who wrote the short blurbs for the timeline most often.

Sessions 23, 24, and 25, as they appear in the timeline.

Eventually we added a "rumors" spreadsheet, to keep track of threads we'd encountered in sessions and highlight them as potential fodder for other sessions. Since I was reading every session report for other information, it was pretty simple to also take on adding the rumors from the session report to the rumor spreadsheet.

The other trend that emerged fairly naturally out of this style of playing was that I started wondering about "bigger picture" kinds of play. Especially since the flotilla had come into possession of a dragon's hoard of wealth. I floated (and did some limited historical research and in-game economy planning about) the prospects of building our own keep & establishing a self sustaining settlement (this is foreshadowing). Other players had also expressed an interest in this, but it was not widely popular, and would have been a large task for the refs, so the flotilla did not pursue it. 

But I kept thinking in that direction - the next session I proposed was an alliance building / soft power threat against the pirate queen we had encountered very early in our journey. That wound up turning into more of the "learn things" kind of session, although I had gone in with pretty strong hopes of it being a "do things" session. Oh well! Sometimes you just have to learn things. We never did do anything about those pirates.

The other thread that emerged around this time was Atiq, the sorcerer. Atiq had befriended Faris, another player character, and sent Faris home with a book of ancient egyptian accounting practices. This led to some fun-for-me RP wherein Gundemar got to practice math. When Atiq sent out a logic puzzle for players to discern his new location, Gundemar and Faris (via their players) got together to try and find the answer (and I think we were the first to solve it).

The End

I was oddly convinced that the Knarr would be returnable - luckily no one has demanded repayment

In the latter days of the game, with sessions becoming less frequent, I had a little more time for playing via roleplay. That trend started with the examples above, about learning algebra and solving logic puzzles. But it was also a time for retrospection, and I got to write a few posts from Gundemar's perspective towards the end, reflecting on how he had changed. One of the final things the flotilla did was hold an enormous feast, for which Gundemar made latkes, and relished, perhaps for the last time, the idea of having more than enough to share.

Gundemar did go on a few other adventures not recounted here, but really the big final move was the establishment of a moon colony (if you haven't read the relevant stuff in Whale Roads, just know that this wasn't a totally random idea). It seemed like a perfect encapsulation of the things the character had been about, to me - tired of revenge killing, but interested in making big swings (while accounting for the little things). Down here, my friends die and are beset by tyrants at every turn. Time to go to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by feudalism - space!

This turned out not to be true. And actually, I was deeply ambivalent in my expectations - establishing a settlement on the moon did genuinely sound extremely cool, but it seemed just as likely to me that the endeavor would fail spectacularly, and be an enormous waste of a significant fraction of the flotilla's dearly obtained wealth. And that would also be fun! I wasn't even sure that there would be oxygen on the moon, so I was slightly anxious that I was wasting everyone's time.

I needn't have worried. I had a marvelous one-on-one session with Danni, whose lush and bizarre descriptions of the lunar landscape and the horrible people there made the whole endeavor absolutely worth it, and the epilogue we settled on was the perfect payoff.

One must imagine the quartermaster happy

That was the game! The only quartermasterly thing I have to say about the creation of Whale Roads was that the very final thing I did was go through each edited session report and double check that the correct amount of stockpiled food was listed (the timeline lists food stockpiles for the end of the associated session - which meant that the session reports of Whale Roads, which gave the food stockpiles as of the day the journey began, needed to report the food stockpiled as of the previous session's entry). Hopefully I did a good job!

In the Ranged Touch Patreon episode with the referees, they mention something to the effect of "player agency is getting to do the bookkeeping yourself." For my part, I can report that, indeed, doing the bookkeeping oneself makes for an interesting and unique form of play.

At the end, I want to extend my sincerest thanks once again to all my fellow players, our patient and brilliant referees Danni, Michael, and Moose, and my fellow editors, with a special thanks to Brendan who put in an incredible amount of work organizing and initiating the project, and took charge of the layout and final edits as well. Thank you all!! What a special thing.

May we find each other's company again soon.