Daughters of Necessity Post-Mortem

After three years of massive multiplayer asynchronous play-by-post domain gaming, I am ecstatic to declare DoN officially DEAD. *champagne pops* *cork crashes thru a window*

The Good

• Incredible players, one and all. The buy-in for Cath is annoyingly high, so I was very lucky to find a dozen freaks who love cultural anthropology and abstract mythopoeisis and time travel bullshit and so on.
• The PCs absolutely ransacked the setting. Soooooo much of Cath got explored, much more than I could have hoped to see with a smaller scoped game.
• Overjoyed the culture/tradition mechanics got so much play, huge win there.
• We almost avoided a peaceful supercoalition of PCs rolling the NPCs.
• The most intense possible stress test for the crucible wizard, and it worked (with a few tweaks)! Let none say my classes are imbalanced!
• A surplus of hype moments and aura. In no particular order:
• hunting a dragon with harpoon cannons
• public marriage to a goth war goddess
• freeing an apocalyptic anteater from the underworld
• dueling a skeleton warlord on horseback
• car bombing a fairy prince
• The vibes were really good. The sense of scale (spatial and temporal) was pretty close to what I hoped. (I think, idk, I didn't send out a google form or anything; I can only speak to how much fun I personally had)
• I got to draw a lot :> (see below) 

I can't stress enough, the highs of this game were VERY high. At the end of the day, DoN was probably my favorite game I've ever run.

The Ugly 

We started with ~12 players, which was the maximum I felt comfortable running for at the time. We ended up with ~8, which was more than enough. (I'll get into it.)

The TBDlike domain game format, as I ran it, has a few pain points. Read Archon's post first, my own experience mostly supports his--

• Adventure bandwidth. It takes a lot of time to write and run the crawls especially, including ease-in and ease-out time. A 10-person TBD is about as much work as 10 weekly solo games.
• Season rollovers (or, syncing up async gaming). When one adventure starts to go on for months, the other players end up waiting on them for time to move forward. I bridged the gap with time travel shenanigans (see below), but people hate missing out on domain actions almost as much as they hate missing out on dungeon loot, so it isn't a frictionless solution.
• Burnout. Never did figure out how to call a hiatus before burning out, but that's what I should have done. The game created too much social anxiety for me to acknowledge when I was tired or out of ideas. Skill issue i guess.
• Content exhaustion. Archon's description of "a sandbox stripped to the bones by a locust swarm" is just so true. And yet! I still don't have a procedure for generating random shrines, which show up when literally anyone goes literally anywhere by road! That's valuable bandwidth I could have used if I wasn't constantly rawdogging the creative process for no reason. Write a table and let the world build itself for once.
• The ending. This game really wanted a predefined endpoint to work towards and I didn't write one.

one day a gentler, more perfect breed of TBDlike will scrap these rules for parts

I tried to manage the bandwidth problem a few different ways. For each adventure, I had players ask me for an omen a season or two beforehand, to give myself time to write a proper dungeon. I also received multiple adventure site submissions from players, to be crawled by other players. My players were incredibly supportive throughout the whole process-- it takes a village.

Still, each adventure required a large dungeon (if you only get one adventure per season, why not go to a large one), hexes to traverse on the way there, and road encounters.

One thing I gained a greater appreciation for was when I got to reuse locations/encounters for multiple PCs. (Recurring merchants, half-looted dungeons, etc.) I wish I'd added a bit more funneling to the map to 1) shrink the workload; and 2) deliver on a looted-but-alive vibe for the whole City-- like one big megadungeon that keeps restocking itself.

[but that kind of defeats the point, right? would shrinking the sandbox damage the sense of scale? we've seen tbdlikes with high player-player interaction slow to a crawl in long standoffs; would a pvp race to first looting rights make the game even more unwieldy?]

As my real life responsibilities became more severe, the number and length of hiatuses increased. (About half of the game's runtime was on hiatus.)

 

The Epilogue

Purple came up with this. To officially close out the game, we finally took a week to freeform rp the events of the near, far, and distant future of the City. Some highlights:

• The sun went out.
• The City's electrical power grid came back online. Invention of the lightbulb.
• The Profundal River became the Glittering River. 
• Decades long campaign against the armies of Hell.
• God-tree launched into orbit via antigravity demon corpse.
• New god-tree installed.
• Wizard-catalyzed self-perpetuating agricultural Cambrian explosion.
• East-v-West culture divergence.
• Surface-v-Deep City culture divergence. 
• Wall between the High and Low City broken. 
• Children sired. 
• Marriage achieved. 
• Sainthood achieved. 
• Wizard-king status achieved.
• Massive lore dump via incomprehensible poem.
• Horticultural literature written. 
• Violent ends met. 

And other juicy shit I'll riff off of for the next era of cathgames. One last week of excellent play before turning the lights out, for which I cannot thank my delightful players enough.

* * *

In the end I did actually accomplish what I set out to do: the setting got richer, the tradition system got a lot of use, and i got to run some primo Dee En Dee for my friends. It sort of feels like I got away with something, considering how poorly I managed DoN in its twilight years. I'm also glad I ran it when I had the opportunity, because I'm not sure when I'll have the time or energy to do something of this scale again.

Okay! All done! Time to do something different!

some doodles from the game

Quick & Easy Climbcrawl

for the Wall, and for my good friend archon who I love very much

Hexermap has been treating me well. Set Water to Landlocked in the Advanced Settings. Smaller maps tend to be more mixed.

• Plains are contiguous tin plating. On clear days, the sun's reflection is blinding, reducing visibility as you move into these sections.
• Grassland is also tin, but jagged and rusty. Any mishap carries a risk of infection (of you, or of your metal tools).
• Forest is metal scaffolding. Horizontal ledges mean you don't need to roll to move side to side.
• Dense Forest is damage from the last war (d6): melted metal; bristling spears; foreign banners; gouged-out craters (balcony); unexploded artillery; foxhole (dungeon entrance).
• Lakes are where roots break thru the wall (dungeon entrance).
• Rivers follow the roots themselves. Animals and Braids are surefooted when walking on roots. 
• Swamp is dense foliage, vines, fungi. Dangerous fauna and flora are more likely to hide here. (+1 climbing die size, random encounters on 6+)
• Hills are exposed concrete and stone. Moving upwards out of these sections means navigating an overhang. (particularly dangerous!)
• Mountains are sacred sites: vertical shrines festooned with gargoyles. (potential dungeon entrance) Any mishap risks a curse.
• Desert is a particularly hazardous section (d6): burning plating; electrified grille; caustic chemifall; dismembering machines; gravitational anomaly; a gap.
• Tundra is iced over by shivers. Cascades thick fog in poor weather.
• Roads are salmon-trails left by other climbers: ropes and pitons and clear indicators.

overhangs, potential routes, in-the-wall routes

These are very Cath-specific but hopefully illustrative. (I didn't even add the big plastic slide that takes you down a level for free.)

Short Campaign Pitch: The Wall

The High Tin Wall is 333 stories tall. Beyond it, Heaven.

You are... (d6)

1. a young psychopomp.
2. a fallen angel.
3. a questing knight. 
4. a pilgrim. 
5. an Orpheus-type bloke. 
6. a demon in disguise! >:D

There are two ways up the wall.

1. You can scale the face. Rusted plating and spiraling roots make firm hand-and-footholds, and climbing equipment is scattered about: remains of climbers before you, or spoils of an ancient invading force. (Long "salmon-trails" mark known paths up the wall; they all peter out before the summit.)
2. You can enter the wall. There is no place in the City where someone has not lived; peel back the plating and you'll find abandoned rooms, seeping tombs, and...! stairs!

The latter is a standard dungeoncrawl. The former is a loooooooong climb.

Climbing Rules
(stolen from Archon's Court: he previously called these rules a "complete waste of time", and now uses these rules instead. I just think they're neat)

A climb is divided into three-story sections. Roll a d6 for each. (Skilled climbers roll d8; disadvantaged climbers roll d4.) 

d6	Omen	Mishap
1	No holds in reach. Turn back or fall.	Sudden collapse. Save or fall.
2	A handhold slips out from under you and clatters below.	Minor collapse. Everyone below you (including your belayer) must run away or take 1d6.
3	Your hands catch on your clothes.	Your hand catches in a hold. You're stuck.
4	Your gear loosens.	Drop a random item.
5	Your head swims.	You look down. +1 Exhaustion.
6	Random encounter spoor.	Random encounter.

If you've already rolled that omen today (doubles), you get a mishap instead.

If you've already rolled that mishap today (triples), you fall instead.

Falling deals 1d6 damage per story fallen (not per section). A rope, piton, and belayer can reduce the distance you fall. (A three-story rope will, at most, deal 6d6. That's almost survivable! if you're lucky!)

i dont know anything about climbing btw

 

Before you climb, you may force your long-suffering gm to create a full and proper hexmap of the climb ahead by surveying the route. This may include alternate routes, as well as high- and low- risk sections like overhangs, balconies, electrified walls, gaps, chimneys, unexploded artillery shells, etc etc

Smth I random rolled off Hexermap. Off the top of my head: the road is a well-marked salmon-trail (+ die size); the water is slick with chemical spill (- die size); the forest is horizontal ledges (no roll to move side to side); ivymere is an abandoned hanging village, anvilwood is a harpy nest, and granitepit is an entrance into the wall.

a 36 story climb

Inventory limits are much stricter than usual, so this would be a counting-rations-type game (perhaps even an eating-monsters-type game). Still deciding how gear-focused it should be.

Ideally, the dungeons break up the climbing, and the climbing paces out the dungeons.

The Table of Circumstances (for Dogs)

this image contains WARRIOR CATS SPOILERS

When you roll up a Doggerlands PC, you must roll on the Table of Circumstances.

1. You are betrothed.
2. You have a child.
3. You are disinherited.
4. You are inbred. 

 

Betrothal means a looming arranged marriage. Brides are bought and sold by their parents, sometimes at very young ages, sometimes even before conception; scions of lesser houses are very often born into bridedebt. (Thus, the overwhelming demand for fertility drugs, and the tyrannical parenting practices that safeguard against defaults.)

Betrothal can carry significant stigma-

• To a second- or third-cousin: you're upright and traditional. Dogs prefer to marry within their capital-H Houses.
• To a member of another House: you're transgressive and modern. These sorts of affairs were forbidden until recently by laws prohibiting miscegenation.
• To a twin: you're very important, mysterious, possibly a wizard. Self-marriages are rituals reserved for those with very high CHA, but some find the practice confusing or strange. (It's a bit like being an elf; people will think differently of you.)
• To a foreigner: you're deficient in some way, or else your family is in a lot of debt. Either way, they were pretty desperate to marry you off.
• To a fairy or spirit: you make people veeeeeery nervous. Nobody wants to touch a spirit's property. (Betrothals are not recorded in the laws of men, but in the ancient language of Contracts, to which even fairies are beholden.)

The betrothed rarely meet until their wedding day, except in dreams, which they share from the day of betrothal.

(An arranged marriage date can demarcate a hard stop to a game, which is always useful.)

A child is a valuable resource (and Dogs are not shy about terming it such). Betrothal sweetens any deal, entrenches any alliance. It is (sometimes literally) a get-out-of-jail-free card in Doggish society.

Better kids make better deals, so make sure yours is as close to the breed standard as possible: for Norburys, fat and tattooed; for Devinsens, tall and skeletally pale. (This is approximated by your child's natural CHA. Nothing a little make-up can't fix.)

Most parents aspire to join a kennel club: a high society organization dedicated to maximizing the genetic potential of their children.

(And it is known that betrothing one who is healthy to one who is sick can invigorate the latter. Young and old, rich and poor: this ancient folk magic is well known to the Dogs.)

Traditionally, legal inheritance passes by simulgeniture, to the child who most closely resembles the parent in all miens.

The proper legal method (when a will and testament cannot be found) is to directly compare their ability scores. Dogs have 8 ability scores, while foreigners only have 6. (Bastards sometimes have 7; especially inbred children can be born with as many as 10.)

The Houses typically eschew these rickety legalisms in favor of a written will and testament, which is to be politicized and weaponized against one's children as one sees fit. Being disinherited is a very big deal; a life of (relative) squalor awaits the failscion. (Many families have a parasite uncle or aunt, to whom much seething and scheming is attributed.)

 

Inbred PCs start with at least one mutation (I like this list). Gawking is impolite, but you're also at fault for not covering it up. The higher you climb in society, the more inbred people tend to be.

Dogs consider inbreeding a "strong, albeit eccentric, parenting decision"; they'll judge you for it, but won't argue with results.

THE GUEST STARS

For GLÅUGUST 2026, I asked 128 gloggers to write one room each for a community dungeon: no prompt, no theme, no rules. Of those initial 128, a whopping 82!!!!!! submitted rooms.

Thank you all so much for your submissions, and for your patience.

click here ^^^^^^^ for the dungeon

(the links may not jump you around unless you download the pdf) 

 

09/01/26 - Fixes to names and attributions, placeholder room references filled in. (if I messed up your name, let me know and I'll get it fixed asap)