Fable! Land of Myth, Menace and Magic! #1

I have started a few campaigns that haven't went anywhere which is fine. Seven in ten games don't make it past session three in my experience and only one in ten make it past ten. Nothing is ever truly wasted in this hobby, however, they'll return one day. 

As such, I've started a new one (surprise surprise) I'd actually like to run at some point, probably for OD&D or some such. And I thought this time rather come at from just a "lore" or "primer" perspective, I'd also document how I set about making the campaign. It's never the same process twice but I'd also like to show some of the awesome things out there other people have made that helped! So here goes.

The Setting

I feel like compared to lots of other people in the GLOGosphere, my campaigns tend to be on the tamer side. Hell most likely isn't coming for you right now and the moon is no centipede's egg*. The Winds have not yet been tamed by the church but that's ok. I still enjoy the gonzo and take a lot from old appendix N stuff which I generally really enjoy reading and worms its way into my settings

Fable is also more specifically framed around a recent song called "No One Left to Kill in the Sky" by Seb Lowe. It's a song about, metaphorically, a mad emperor, who after the war is over and he's conquered the whole world, unlike the metaphorical Alexandre, turns his eyes towards the moon to conquer it instead. Interpreting songs literally for a campaign is great fun. Go listen to it. 

Anywhoosies, in a land of 70-odd hexes, after a terrible war yoked the various peoples of Fable to the Red Emperor, things are mournful and quiet. The Emperor's draconian soldiers have forced order onto the extant roads. Most of the dead, those who choose to remain that way, have been buried. The horses still have not come back and won't for a long time. The Emperor has not yet learned the white apes have killed one of his sons in the White City of Eku and hold the other captive, but even if he did, people would not learn of it. 

If one avoids the Red City of Edu and its dozens of failed towers and ziggurats to climb to the moon, one can almost feel at peace again, besides the ache in one's heart. Just peaceful enough to fear your neighbor. To fear the next war the Emperor plans. And it's this fear that creates giants. Because monsters are a sign something somewhere is fucked up. Good thing they're extinct right?

As Above, So Below

The cloud kingdom of the giants is as real as bedtime stories and things that go bump in the night. It is timeless, an archetype and very very real. To quote Pratchett [1]:

“They were myths and they were real,” he said loudly. “Both a wave and a particle.”

The Cloud Kingdom exists in the heavens, where the upper atmosphere touches the Ether, where the planets roll about in their great crystal grooves, tugging restlessly on the fates of men. They war and ally amongst themselves and the Saturnians, craven and slovenly foul creatures and the Martians, those proud and deadly Tharks of Barsoom. There under the hanging moon, silent and pale as a sun-bleached, they do battle, though few remain, slowly wiping themselves from history. 

They pay little heed to the planet below, wave to their particle, inconsequential to them, carrying on their battles amongst the stars. Until they trip. And fall for what feels like nine days and nights and land in a turnip patch, losing their sword and horn and cussing all the while heaving themselves up, leaving footprints there behind them. At least that's how they myth goes. Time is a flat circle they say, a tightening spiral, where one cannot be certain what came first, the giant or its footprint. 

But beneath the Red Emperor's land which lies beneath the Cloud Kingdom, a kingdom exactly as old as life grows fat on the mildewing results of war. Memento mori! Living Graveyards, growing bolder by the day, take advantage of the supply lines and infrastructure of their de facto Emperor who has made them so rich. Tunnels, cave systems and necropolii all connected via the Mythic Underworld, its ranks swelled with new naive soldier-shades now tax the living! 

The dead who have been around centuries scheme madly. The dead who are new struggle to detach themselves from what they knew. People struggle to mourn for loved ones that scratch at their thresholds at night. Or rage against enemies they are impotent to kill a second time. They look to myths and rituals to aid them, customs the Empire outlaws now. 

Lightning Strikes!

The impetus to write Fable down began as a mix of desires: to make a cool map to just relax, to make a world my wife might like to play in (simple and somewhat familiar), and to get a vison out of my head of three maps laid on top of each other to run an "As Above, So Below" type campaign. I wrote Fable on the map with an exclamation point and later added the tagline "Land of Myth, Menace and Magic" because it sounded fun and I like alliterations. Became important later. 

The two major post inspirations were:

Phlox's excellent terrain generator post here.

And Squamousss terribly evocative post on undead here. 

As is I think is usually the case for these undertakings, it was a confluence of events, inclinations and inspirations that leads to campaign.  

Generating a Map

To generate the hex map I used Phlox's post above. It led to me making this:

Took me hours to learn how to figure out I could just skew a hex map in MS Paint

I rolled the dice as directed and sorta placed the biggest regions first and organically placed everything else from there. My understanding is that this is more or less the way to do it and I like it.

For broad inspiration I rolled on these tables from Cairn 2e to get my biomes. Got lots of jungles and savannahs which I thought was cool. I learned what a pampas was and read about those for awhile. here are the raw notes:

long thin regions 14 (3d6) 

Safe and free, not quick 

Prairies, Heart Tree 

 

Prairie Dog King dinner parties are not fun 

He holds court at a great Heart Tree 

 

~~~ 

 

Miniscule region, 1 hex 

Free, not quick or safe 

Cliffs, Land Scar 

 

~~~ 

 

Safe, not quick or free 

Thick regions are vast and broken up by other regions. Irregular, about 2d4 x 2d4 hex (3x8) 

foothills, pit of cold fire 

Mountain trolls  

 

~~~ 

 

Safe, not quick or free 

Inclusion regions are embedded or abutting other regions. 3 (1d4) hexes 

Pampas, land of cowboys, silver face landmark 

 

~~~ 

 

Free, not quick or safe 

Really thick region. Irregularly shaped, about 4d4 x 1d8 hexes. 

Jungles and crystalline forest, crystal land jungles? 

 

Quick, not safe or free 

Moorland, titan's table 

I drew in the rivers by hand, realizing that a few of the hexes in the north-east somehow escaped categorization and made them a shallow sea, which all the river flowed towards. The rivers imply a sort of bowl or valley, mouth opened to the sea, the jungles and moors bordering a valley on three sides. I don't think its important that rivers follow real world rules (We don't seem so bent out of shape about ocean currents or jet streams) but I do think it's important we believe in our worlds to sell our players on them, and if realistic river behavior helps that then more of it I say. 

From here I used the infamous Laws of the Land, rolling once, twice if "not safe", to develop some of these broad regions. I really like these because they force you to interpret them and that's good for the imagination. 

For example, in the crystalline jungle to the south-west I've named the Tiger's-Eye Jungle (probably due to the crystals found in the area) I rolled and got

    YOU MUST BE QUIET
    YOU MUST NOT GO OFF ON YOUR OWN

This strikes me as a very dangerous place. From my notes "The woods are alive here, more so than usual, and they listen. The dense dense foliage makes most creatures hunt by sound and vibration including the drop leeches and hang man's moss. The craven nymphs of the ancient trees will seduce or capture and then kill and eat you if alone, but even large groups of them flee from small parties of two or three or more"

Locales

The final thing I did was populate the map with locations. Rather than one large city surrounded by wilderness, I wanted something cozier, something more extant. Small towns and forts here and there. So I used the rules from 1977's Traveller on making subsectors. In Traveller, each system (hex) has a 50% chance of having a world in it. A series of complex tables from there determine the starport, size, atmosphere and so on from there. I only needed the System Contents Table and a few changes 

I turned the starport rating into locations and changed the rarity slightly to make civilization more likely around rivers (see above about realism)

towns and cities: +1 if river, -1 if not safe biome

 

1. A. Ruin 

2. B. Lair 

3. C. Village 

4. D. Fort 

5. E. Castle 

24. X. City 

I eventually ended up with this monstrosity:

Spreadsheets!

I was not terribly worried about realistic Medieval population demographics when I made this. The world is a billion years old, so old that pterodactyls re-evolved on the jungles of Venus. We've frankly got bigger Cambrian jawless fish to fry. However, per OD&D there's a few hamlets around every castle (in case of the Conan rule), I picked a d5, and each village is going to be its own weird little place like all the weird little places out of Cudgel's Sage or any other Vance novel. The cities will be grand and venal filled with Leiber's smokey dens and surrounded by the weirdness of Howard's barbarians and their antagonists. It'll work ok?

Themes

To fill out all those "empty" hexes I'll also need a spark table for when I get stuck. I've learned filling hexes is a marathon, not a sprint and even the most vibrant imaginations get stuck after a while. So here are mine:

Moron can't even spell sorcerers correctly 

I find spark tables really help me keep thematically organized. If I can't think of a good motivation for an NPC I can choose one that relates to the theme of the setting. You can see here I decided to make the tag line thematically relevant: menaces will be those gonzo things from the weirder side of Appendix N or awesome stuff with cavemen like this adventure

For B7 I got the following: Glory, Portal to the Heavens, Barbarians.

A group of barbarians, Martian in garb and temperament, have set up a hall around a Jotun cenotaph, a portal that can take you to the jungles of Venus, fields of Mars, seas of the moon or the ice fields of Saturn, with the correct planetary stone. Or else at midnight it will teleport you to the planet currently closest to the horizon. It has a rough map on it that shows all the other cenotaphs in the region, accurate to about a dozen miles. 

There are 21 barbarians including priest and leader.  

Next post we can talk about the various regions and important NPCs and how I "stat" them out. Maybe we can use these barbarian guys here to do so. I'll also probably go over lairs and how I used OD&D's Monster's and Treasure and Underworld and Wilderness Adventures to do so. 

*It's actually the carved-out eye of the Chaos serpent or in this campaign a Silurian Paradise full of lovey anomalocarids. 

[1] Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett. Required reading under penalty of having your figgins impaled. 

But I Do Not Think I Would; A Bard

Lovingly inspired by this breathtaking piece, itself inspired by this. Uses bits from many other places. 

Opened by Customs, 1937–8, Kurt Schwitters. Mail art was a thing. Learning is cool. 

I've loved a score, my heart is full
But the touch of flesh has no more pull
Filling aching holes; a void 
When I'm done they're only toyed

with; letters I do so much ignore 
I've decided that I hate your lore
Or some such, closure's yours
I care not for your heart's chores

Just a thing, just a thing
places, things and times and rings
Love, the peel of churches bells 
Tell me more how life is Hell

Dark nights, those hot flashing deeds
Pillow talk it out and bleed
Die for me the little death
And I'll be here now, though even less

[This assumes a system where hirelings can be regularly acquired, have Loyalty scores and are limited in how many you can hire. It also assume you track costs of living which you should.] 

The Flophouse Sweat

The sun and hateful pretender tries to remove you from the room, its sticky heat insistent, sweat pouring down your forehead in errant rivulets. A letter sits unopened, suspiciously straight on the desk amongst the clutter of manuscripts and poems, bills and fan mail, one far outnumbering the others. You, work-obsessed, work obsessed, fingers flying until your ward and lover Lady Moonbeam comes out in full. You're close. 

Cigarette's acrid embrace on muttering mouth longs for the lipstick seal guarding the hard longing within. The typewriter burns hot, cigarette forgotten, the sin burns your lips and you strike up another, raw need rising in your obsessive idle mind. You'll smother it tonight with whoever is willing. You're burning stark and bright and death is on your heels, you know because the stars in their eyes told you long ago. This chapter can wait; it might be your last. You head out. 

Starting Equipment. Two instruments, one old and abandoned, one idly mastered. A satchel with a half-dozen love-letters from as many suitors, and four from someone you can no longer have. A well-maintained portable typewriter. A book of one dozen matches. 

 You are someone who uses people like things. You are also a matchstick, burning up and out fiery and bright. Death is hot on you heels you can feel it.  

Templates

Boon. Switch your highest score with CHA and add +1 per template. It can exceed the maximum. 
Bane. You only regain MD when you burn a love letter (either kind). This is either a casual thing or gives your heart palpitations. 

A). Favored for Heartbreak on High, Bad Habit, +1 MD
B). How Insidious is Notoriety 
C). Dance as they Desire
D). Kiss the Mouth of Death

Favored for Heartbreak on High. God they need you, each one a wet smothering embrace on your fiery candelabra soul. And part of you needs them, burning them up, just pillow talks while Lady Moonbeam watches on. They become wisps of smoke at dawn. 

Anywhere you go, you may encounter suitors who will wish to marry or fuck you, promising wealth, power or aid possibly including lodging and food. You hate them and they write sappy love letters each week for you. Roll [MD] under CHA and as long as you do not outright reject them, they become hirelings at no cost with a +1 Loyalty score for everything you hate about them that you can name.

To them you are the most beautiful person thy have ever seen. [They gain HD equal to MD spent]

You may also pursue lovers those that the wretched cigarette-stained parts of you need. They can be anyone. They may reject you but this isn't likely. After a walk in the moonlight, a night of amorous activity or a starry passionate fuck, you may ask a favor of them. Roll under CHA but above their HD and if you succeed they will perform a task for you even a dangerous one if its befitting of their character. They will want love in return but you can only have one at a time. When you leave them or acquire a new lover, it will break their heart. They may even write a letter. 

Magic cannot make people love you. If you can name it, it is not love.

Monsters, kings and priests' HD are doubled for these purposes, and it does not work on someone whose heart you've broken. But you already know that.

The referee should add suitors to the random encounter table. I recommend making them somewhat common but not the most common. Perhaps 9 or 10 or 4 or 5 on 2d6. Here's a quick way to make NPCs.

Bad Habit. Wealth is what you see. For each ostentatious article of clothing, jewelry, perfumes, lotions or unguents you wear worth over 100 gp, gain +1 HD. If you don't smoke at least once per watch, gain fatigue which weighs one slot. 

[This could frankly could go for anyone or replace a whole leveling system. Make it 1000 gp or 100 sp, I don't care the economy isn't real. Or make it +1 HP instead of HD. I'm not your dad.]

Δ Acquire 10 suitors or watch 5 die. Burn one of those four letters and gain +1 MD. The dreadful feeling costs 1 slot of inventory. You feel something is crawling across time to get you and you cannot name it. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In bed the kiss, 1892–1893.

 

How Insidious is Notoriety. No longer is it easy to hide, harder to smother at night as the fever pitch of your insides grows. At the cost of an awful fever you are now immune to most diseases and can light matches and kindling with a touch. 

While the Sun, that hated pretender, hangs in the sky you are highly socially visible and invulnerable. Suitors find you easily and you are innocent. You appear as a dandy, bright and virile.

While Lady moonbeam watches over you, you are socially invisible but vulnerable. No one including suitors will not recognize you without a touch, save lovers. You appear as an apparition, hellish and combusting or perhaps just a bit put out. 

While carousing, whatever that means to you, you may choose either.  

Δ Acquire 3 lovers and break two of their hearts at the same time. Burn the second of those four love letters and gain +1 MD. The dreadful feeling costs 2 slots now. You refuse to name it.

Orpheus And Eurydice, by Frederic Leighton (c. 1830-1896)

Dance as they Desire. You begin to grow delirious, sweat pours off you when you think of your lovers and you grow hot to the touch. You are resistant to fire and you can grasp someone and deal 1d12 damage per hand per round, until they shake you off, push you away or kiss you passionately. 

Your sphere of influence grows, the crunching sound of the broken hearts at your feet growing louder all the time. You may pay non-suitor followers and retainers on credit, if you roll x:6 where x is the number of templates you possess in this class. Roll per unique follower or batch of same-profession hirelings.

Suitors never lie to you even by omission, and lovers can only tell the truth. The number of followers you can usually have is doubled. 

Δ Kill someone you love with your bare hands. Read the third letter right after and gain +1MD. You name the feeling. It weighs 4 slots now. 

Magnum Opus.  You finish it that night, as it will soon finish you. The book. The play. The story. Whatever. From now on a busy night's work, something honestly written or soulfully played or falling in love lets you spend MD to:

Make people cry, healing [sum] HP or severe wounds, poisons or spell durations (good or bad) [dice] stages, whatever that means to you. 

Make people laugh, putting a little bit of your love in them. Give them [dice]. They can use the [dice] whenever they want the same way you can.

Change people's minds. If [sum] exceeds their CHA barely, by two or by three you change how they think a step for a day, a year or forever, whatever that means to you.  

Love and Death, Da Loria Norman, 1931

Kiss the Mouth of Death. Once per lifetime, you can literally escape death. When you would die, you don't. It was just a pseudonym and a silly game and you didn't mean it. The next one's for real. Besides, you're burnt out. Everyone forgets who you are except you, who's just now figured it out. 

Δ Optionally with a few spells you could be a Fool. With that murder, you could be even more Violent. All you have to do is burn the final letter. 

 

Tools For Referees: Filling out a Sector Map

(This has been in the draft for god only know how long but was inspired many moons ago by this excellent post. Its also based on an earlier draft of my heartbreaker but I've tried to salvage it here )

The Heartbreaker has several goals, one of the main ones being "be a TTRPG for referees with very small CPUs". This is a response to 5e D&D where I felt like my brain was always on the verge of overheating from tracking details. 5e is a fun game but very detail oriented. My brain simply can't handle it. It can barely handle being a brain. 

So, I have tried to design the game with as little mechanical things for a ref to think about as possible. Players roll to hit and defend with the ref only setting the stakes. Rolls are also consolidated as much as possible. All that good ItO/GLoGness. And when players make characters their ability scores correspond to locations on a map!

The Map

Behold! A very strange heavily abstracted map!

My first time DMing was in a blind panic at a club on my campus. 15 people showed to play D&D and only 1 wanted to DM and I said "how hard can that be?" In 15 minutes the other DM helped me create a continental map (terrible idea) and a 5-room dungeon (much better idea). A system that aids the DM in setting up locations early on would be helpful I think. 

Player's rolls bleeds into setting up the map. As players roll for their Ability Scores during Session Zero, they're also filling out the map, a strange circular thing set up into quadrants and sectors. The map is abstract, the relationship between sectors positional not spatial. Each sector is a biome with its own Laws and roads connecting the places within, points of light in dangerous locales. As you move further from the center where the Grand Venal City lies, the places get wilder, more removed from civilization though all are, of course, dangerous. You could say each sector takes a week to travel though or perhaps one week per sectors distance from the center e.g. the outermost ring would take three weeks to traverse. You can move inward/outward and anti/counterclockwise but not "diagonally". It's a heavy abstraction. 

As players generate their characters they roll 1d6 to determine their three Scores for a total of 3d6. These rolls also determine their starting equipment (the first 2d6) as well as three locations (each of the d6s) near the Grand Venal City where they might have "acquired" said equipment. So, if you have three or four players, you get 9-12 locations: a random mix of Castles, Towns, Villages, Ruins (dungeons), Lairs and Forts. If the players roll doubles for their Scores, they were accused of a crime in that locale and they may retroactively acquire an extra piece of equipment if they decide they did do the crime.

< Ruins are dungeons and Lairs have a monster in them. Towns have a temple generally and villages are small towns full of small minds but both protect a Resource. Forts have soldiers/mercenaries and castles have princesses and all that entails>

Additionally, they start with a small sum of coin which they can shrink or grow as they approach the center of the map, determined by rolling under their new Score and subtracting/adding the difference (this teaches the roll under mechanic that powers the system). If they run out of coin, they get into trouble and go into debt there, something they must repay, especially if a monster and its Lair are involved. So, by the time character creation is done they are likely to be Wanted, Hunted or Cursed (from trouble in Castles, Lairs and Ruins) e.g. with ready-made plot hooks for you. No more awkward "what do we do" starts. "I owe a dragon a shit ton of money from character creation" is sessions 1-3 done. 

This obviously, naturally leads to point crawls. Part of the referee's next job is doctoring up the map they've just created with the help of some tables. 

1. Determine the Foe or problem character of each Sector in each Quadrant (or Tri-rant or Quint-rant if you have 3 or 5 players) of the map. 

2. Determine Foe Relationships. Sector Foes in the same Quadrant have a relationship with one another whether it be antagonistic or not. The Goblin Foes in Sector 1 obey the Evil Wizard Foe in Sector 2 who is working off a debt to the Dragon Foe in Sector 3. 

Sector Foes

1. Uproarious Goblins
2. Misanthropic Wizard
3. Starving Orcs
4. Stingy Dragon
5. Rampaging Chimera
6. Desperate Men
7. Something Else You Find Cool

Sector Relationships

1. The former devoutly worships the latter
2. The former chafes near violently under the latter's direction
3. The latter has blackmail on the former
4. The former has sworn dark fealty to the latter
5. The former and the latter are using each other for personal gain
6. The former is wholly dependent on the latter for survival
7. Something else you find compelling 

Sector Foe Goal and Method (roll twice; the first is the goal and the second is the method)

1. Eliminate all Opposition
2. Steal a Princely Sum
3. Score a source of Vice
4. Settle a Score
5. Steal an Artifact
6. Tap into a source of Power
7. Some other Means and Goal 

Lets roll for Sector 1 and 2 in Quadrant 1! We get:

Foes: Uproarious Goblins (sector 1), Starving Orcs (sector 2)

Relationship: Dark Fealty

Goal and Method (Goblin): Steal an Artifact to Steal a Princely Sum 

Goal and Method (Orc): Tap into a Source of Power to Steal a Princely Sum

Obviously, the goblins have sworn fealty to the much stronger orcs, as they are wont to do. The goblins plan on stealing an artifact, in this case a funeral shroud which grants invisibility to steal from a local lord's castle coffers. The orcs are tapping into a source of power now, a geyser that temporarily sets their sword's aflame, to coincidentally, do the same thing.  

This alone is more than enough to power several sessions I think. 

Inventory Management as Diegetic Milestones; or Angband Fangirling

There is little I can say about inventory management in the GLOGopshere that hasn't already been said. Arnold Kemp's inventory was the best first solution I saw while I was still a neophyte with Inventory and Inventory Jr, but always shall we iterate. Mausritter has its adorable and supremely diegetic item tokens and backpack grid.  While I am typically opposed to the abstraction of inventory management such as the usage of Usage Dice in Blackhack and dislike the wealth abstraction system of Prismatic Wasteland's design, there are certainly tables that love it. I even chafe against Blades in the Dark's retroactive load rules though within the game own's framework it keeps the games ad-hoc breakneck high-stakes pace moving. 

Similarly, light in the dungeon remains up for debate, even recently. Though I agree that "torches should last 1-hour and weigh 2 lbs" Kaponkie's idea for light as saving throws is delightful and very keen and has something I think we all desperately crave and scrabble for in our heartbreakers and home games. 

Elegance. 

I am one of those bizzaroids from the Cambrian that thinks Elfgames are best played with an Excel file and yet I understand that while such solutions are brutally effective, they are, in a word inelegant. I think we all long for the "hit point revolution", a magical imaginary rule for inventory management as good and enduring as HP has been for health. A solution that is both simple and effective and easy to remember and despite the everlasting cries of "it makes no sense!!!" nevertheless, stays. 

I do not have such a solution. But I do think I have a way to make managing inventory rewarding. But first we have to go back to 1993 and discuss ANGBAND!

Gorgeous. 

Angband is super fucking cool. It is also the hardest game I have ever played. Long story short it's one of those early Roguelikes, coming out 13 years after Rogue and being based on the game Moria. In the game you take on the roles of a race/class adventurer combing through the first 99 procedurally generated ASCII dungeon levels of Angband, an evil fort from Tolkien's Silmarillion to find Sauron and kick his ass. Then you can go to level 100 and kick Morgoth's ass and be crowned king of Silmarillia or something. I'm not sure because out of like 50 characters I've only had one make it past dungeon level 50 and he only got to level 79 before a pit fiend disintegrated him.  

Rest in peace gentle Garg XVI

This is what the game's inventory management screen looks like:

Harrowing. 

Here's what your equipped screen looks like

Harrowing-er.

If HP is to elegance, this is to getting clubbed over the head in a dark alley by a very very blunt, very strange instrument. Like a flugelhorn. It's a simple list, conveniently color-coded, and fiercely efficient. It eschews reality (you can simultaneously wield a bow and sword and carry potions in stacks of 40) but its own internal logic is very sound. 

What makes it interesting is this the most efficient this character has ever been and he's only getting more so. Let me explain. 
 
When you first make a character, you begin with very little. You carefully scrounge around the uppermost reaches of the dungeon armed with only a torch and some sling stones and if RNG is kind, a dagger. You crawl, space by space, slowly lighting up your path and revealing the shape of the dungeon. You test unnamed potions, read bizarre scrolls and hope they don't poison you or teleport you five levels lower. You collect everything and your inventory quickly fills up and all the while you can't even see the shape of the dungeon level and until you've been everywhere. And then you find a Scroll of Mapping. 

It maps but not lights out about a quarter of the dungeon in rough circle around you. It weighs half a pound and only works once so you treasure it. You only use it for hard or confusing levels, and you soon stack as many as you can and weight be damned, you'll drop that sick Flail of Demon Slaying before you'll leave those scrolls behind. The same goes for Scrolls of Treasure Location to efficiently find loot, Potions of Heroism to counter fear-based status effects and Wands of Hold Monster for obvious reasons. 

So you ration them all. Weigh the odds every fight. These are valuable resources after all. And then you find a Rod of Mapping. It weighs half a pound, and besides a short cooldown it never runs out. Now you never need scrolls again. You're free! And you dump them on top of the nearest corpse. That's a valuable slot and you weigh less so your speed goes up and you survive fights better. And the game is doing this kind of thing all the time!

Heavy one-time use scrolls are replaced by rechargeable wands and staves and eventually rods. Resistances (to the games various and extensive elemental effects) begin with temporary potions and rings in coveted ring spots and weak shields, and eventually unique legendary armors cover several at one time freeing up spots for more powerful shields and rings and potions. Even your class can aid you. Warriors become immune to fear at level 30, negating the need in your equipment. I've found some cool artifact weapons that make you immune to some effects, a rare treat indeed that eschews the need for potions of resistance. 

Light too, that ever-present 10 HD bugbear, is improved with treasure acquisition. Torches, which only last a cool 5000 turns can be replaced with a lantern that light up more space and last a hefty 15,000 turns. Lanterns too are replaced with magical counterparts that need no oil or are enchanted with Brightness, showing more of the dungeon. Eventually you'll find the Phial of Galadriel which needs no fuel and can also cast Light Room. I am sure as I progress deeper I will find yet more treasure which exist as superior or at least lateral equipment. 

In short, treasure of all stripes, makes managing your inventory easier by making you need less. That is the reward. 

~~

While this certainly isn't a novel idea, to some degree, I think Elfgames miss the mark on this. D&D 5e, obsessed with progression, replaces many core parts of the game with class abilities and spells and whole classes (looking at you Ranger) very early on, robbing you of the joy of becoming more efficient. Banning Goodberry is infamous amongst modern DMs seeking to make inventory tracking matter, in a game that seems largely disinterested in tracking much of anything. Goodberry should be a euphemism for druid kidneys and should be a mid-level reward for brutally massacring a druid. 

The OSR of course has done much better, with our slots and stones and encumbrances and so forth. But I think the scene has not considered the next question of inventory management progression (what a phrase). We know copper becomes silver becomes gold becomes gems but what of our torches and lanterns? What of all this mapping talk of late? Drawing maps by hand is fun (I make my players do it) but would I or perhaps you be so brave as to give them a Rod of Mapping? How would you even make that work? Rations are great to track but what treasure exists out there makes it so you don't need to eat anymore? 

Already diegetic progression exists in the phyletic tree that begins with B/X and its grandfather OD&D. The fighter and the cleric get their castles and churches, wizards find their spell scrolls. Obviously, we expect gold and treasure to make their lives easier in the fiction but I think equipment too, needing less and less of it can be its own reward. 

I challenge you to challenge inventory management in your game and to make things that make inventory tracking worth it, if only so eventually you don't have to. 

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A Bit About Hirelings

I love hirelings. In my fantasy heartbreaker you will abound with hirelings to feed the ego of your venal and vice-ridden character, all tracked on your handy dandy Wretched Lot sheet (the only people worse than you wretches, are arguably those wretches who follow you). They fill an interesting and to some degree frustrating, middle ground in inventory management. They don't make managing it easier (you're just offloading the work onto either a separate sheet or heaven forbid the referee) but they give you more room to carry stuff. They only "matter" insofar as they can be threatened by the world they exist in and the players attachment to them. These things must exist in tension, and the rules should support that tension; Peasants wanting to live (morale) balanced against player greed and a system that doesn't let you churn through NPCs (reputation?) makes for fun gameplay. 

In short, I think hirelings are not necessarily a reward that makes inventory management easier, but something to play around with more that can be rewarding. Convincing an ogre to join the Wretched Lot is fun and badass (especially when it has its own desires) and certainly a kind of reward (think how much food he can carry (or eat)). 

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I am told there is a tax. Here are my (not novel) equipment tracking rules and d7 things that suck to track and their magical reward replacements

Equipment 

You can carry a number of stones/slots of equipment between your Flesh (FLSH) score (1d6-1) and twice your Flesh score with neither malus nor bonus. A stone is 15 lbs. or the size of a cantaloupe, whichever is less convenient. Write each discrete piece of equipment on a note card and put them in a stack. You can quickly and easily access a number of the top cards/equipment equal to your FLSH. 

Conan Rule: If you carry less than your FLSH, you gain a +1 bonus to damage and initiative. Your speed is incremented one size (1d4 => 1d6=> 1d12)

Hoarder Rule: If you carry more than twice your FLSH score, you gain a -1 malus to damage and initiative and you look like a fool or worse, a miser. Your speed is decremented one size (1d12=> 1d6 => 1d4). 

Armor Rule: Armor uses slots equal to DR. Heavy cloak =1, gambeson=2, chain =3, shield =+1. The system eschews plate for players but it's a whopping +5 DR for heavily armed foes. 

Rule of 3: Light things that can be bundled are three to a stone
Rule of 20: Tiny things that can be grouped are twenty to a stone

Write each discrete piece of equipment on a note card. When you take damage that would destroy items (acid, fire, android lazer beams), draw a card from the stack counting up from the bottom equal to the sum of the damage. It is destroyed if the destruction makes sense. 

D7 Rewards
(I'll add to this if anyone has any additional ideas!)

1.Mapping.  Mapping Imp, fits in a pocket. In exchange for doing nothing when the opportunity to do good presents itself (as the best devils offer) and when supplied with chalk and slate, it will scout ahead and map out the next few rooms for you in perfect if verbose and exacting detail due to their quixotic minds. Also due to their quixotic minds they will not note extreme temperatures, deadly vacuums or intense radiation since they are unaffected by it. When slighted it may omit key details like a large ogre, pit trap or the like. Can be found in the servitude of witches and hags, or in the bottoms of chests they've been locked in, bored for a century, in which case the first gig is free. 

2. Food. Elf Pellets, Rule of 20. These golf ball sized pellets are swallowed whole and give you nourishment for as long as three days. Actually, the nutrient dense droppings of cockatrice and basilisks, who eat stone and bone to extract minerals. The unnecessary fats and proteins are thusly extruded. 

3. Ammunition. The Thirteenth Arrow of Misfortune. It greedily fills a quiver. A single dark arrow said to be whittled from the Tree-Prison of the Chaos Serpent (whose one put-out eye is the moon) and tipped with one of its teeth. When placed in a full quiver of 12, it binds them all together, becoming indistinguishable from the rest. The thirteenth arrow fired always crits and always causes the greatest disaster and chaos an arrow could cause, ricocheting around corners to do so. For everyone person in the room you declare you Hate, this arrow ricochets once more. This could be severing ropes, killing lovers or destroying something precious. No one will ever forget what you wrought and you are glad for it. 

It is not a specific arrow, just the 13th fired. When the quiver is depleted, it magically regifts you with 12 ordinary, blood-soaked arrows. 

4. Ammunition. Rod of Zapping, Rule of 3 when strongly bound for such mighty rods are like opposing magnets. When activated it fires ZAPS that do the damage of a bow with a maximum range based on its length (they can be stacked like markers). It can fire however many ZAPS you need in a ten-minute cycle but then must recharge. I'd link the recharge time to the Underclock; when the sum of Underclock rolls equals the number of ZAPS fired, it recharges. 

5.  Food. Gastrolith of the Tyrant King. A large stone once in the belly of a great crocodilian king. If swallowed, a mighty task indeed, you need only eat once a week. 

6. Travel. Snapsticks, Rule of 3. A pair of sort of thin wooden doweling rods, favored amongst thieves. When the first of the pair is broke over the right knee nothing happens. When the second is broken over the left knee, you and some friends are teleported back to the where the first was broken. 

7. Weight, Amour.  Maille of the Elytra Prince. DR3, 1 stone. This dark lightweight armor scintillates a rainbow of colors in the light, made of the carapace of a former beetle knight. Exceedingly rare as it cannot be given away and dead beetle knights rarely die peaceful deaths. To wear it is to honor that knight and owe allegiance to the Elytran throne.