Trollsmyth

5kepticism and Intrigue

2012-01-27T11:23:00.000-06:00

DDXP opened yesterday, and the first reports are coming back in. It’s the first public playtests of 5e, plus seminars and whatnot, with bits and pieces being dribbled out. Unlike with 4e, there seems to be more of an effort to explain the core experience, but, as you’d expect, there’s not much in the way of details.

Geek’s Dream Girl is clearly a fan already, so we probably need to take what she says with a grain of salt (unless you happen to know that her tastes mirror yours). She’s posted a rundown of Thursday’s 5e seminar entitled “Charting the Course: an Edition for All Editions.” (You can see a much rougher “transcript” cobbled together from various sources at ENWorld, too.)

You may recall, way back a few years ago, Ryan Dancey talking about his dream RPG. One of his central themes was modularity; each group would basically build their own rules from a list of options, kinda-sorta the way GURPS works in practice, but with a more up-front, compartmentalized collection of building blocks. It looks very much like that’s what the 5e team has in mind here.

That would seem to be a big enough challenge to me, but then they go on to explain how you can have PCs built using different modules (that’s blocks of rules, not adventures, for you grognards who might become confused by their use of the term) playing at the same table. That is, someone playing a bare-bones kinda-sorta 1e style fighter could play at the same table as a push-slide-pull 4e fighter, and they’d both be balanced enough to play together without one overshadowing the other.

That more than raises an eyebrow with me. The issues involved in picking your rules are not just how many pages you want your character sheet to run. 1e combats are fast, simple things, in and out and then dealing with the consequences. 4e fights are long, detailed, involved things. The guy who wants to play a 1e fighter isn’t just saying that he doesn’t want to deal with 5 foot steps, Attacks of Opportunity, and push-and-slide combat maneuvers. He’s also saying things about how important he wants combat to be in his games, how long he wants it to last, and what combat means for the games he’s playing in. I really don’t see how you can mix a 1e-style fighter with a 4e-style fighter and not end up with somebody bored and/or frustrated.

Geeks Dream Girl follows up with some brief comments about getting to play in a 5e game run by Monte Cook. She says some promising things there:

There was a LOT of talk at the table. In character at times! I’ve never been at a D&D table where players were more invested in figuring out their next move.

On that topic, your next move isn’t on your character sheet. You don’t go paging through all your stuff thinking, “Well, I could Bluff this guy.” Nope. We were doing what we thought our characters should do, even if that involved our very NOT charismatic half-orc fighter trying to be a charismatic leader of a band of skeptical savage orcs. Multiple times. In other games, it’s “Okay, who has the highest Charisma? You? Okay, you go talk to those orcs and get them to help us.”

That raises some eyebrows as well, but of interest rather than skepticism. That sounds like a game of D&D I’d enjoy playing.

What if Star Wars Sequels Were Made by Italians?

2012-01-25T15:42:00.000-06:00

No need to guess. Dark Resurrection is on the intrawebs.

I just finished watching "Vol. 0." The writing is ok, the acting is decent, the fight choreography needs some work (maybe they should get some help from these guys) but the effects, props and costuming are excellent. The style is very European; you can be forgiven for not realizing it's the Star Wars universe until the lightsabers come out. (And yes, they continue the notion that Force-users = lightsabers.)

Two thoughts:

- from now on, padawan should refer to their mentors as "Maestro" rather than "Master."

- Hollywood has a lot more to fear from Blender than they do from file sharing.

Hex Mapping Part 19: There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

2012-01-24T13:39:00.000-06:00

We’ve got a map, we’ve got our random tables, and we’ve got a team of players ready to tackle our wilderness hex map. Taking a peek at the view from the players’ side of the DM’s screen, the obvious question for them is: why go?

Dungeons are great for players. They know exactly where the monsters are likely to come from, they are full of treasure, and they are relatively easy to map. In the wilderness, there’s much less treasure per square mile, the monsters are not easily categorized in terms of toughness by your depth beneath the earth, and they can pounce you from nearly any direction.

So why should they go out there?

Seven Cities of Gold: There’s some insanely fabulous treasure out there. If the PCs find it, it’ll easily kick them to the next level, maybe higher since it’ll probably take multiple trips to bring it all back to civilization. It’s brimming with magic in the form of lost spells, swords fabled in the annals of history, and holy relics. If the PCs find it, they can buy their own private island and retire as kings!

If I was going this route with my current map, the big haul would, of course, be in the sheltered valley at the center of the map. But the entire island would be scattered with clues as to its whereabouts, and maybe bits of related treasure would be seen in other hauls. If the campaign begins with some dungeon runs, they’d find hints about the treasure to whet their appetites in those dungeons first.

Of course, if you’ve got seven cities of gold to hunt down, maybe the PCs uncover the smaller ones before working their way to the capital.

The Legolas & Gimli Expedition: Powerful (or, at least, wealthy) interests back in civilization want the wilderness mapped and they’re willing to pay to have it done. Usually, there’s a flat fee for every hex mapped (60 gp or so, depending on the size of the party), which encourages both caution and speed to earn relatively easy money. Bonuses will be awarded for securing resources that are of interest to the PCs’ patron. Maybe they want logging or mining rights, or negotiated trade settlements with the natives. Or, in the case of the classic Keep on the Borderlands, the lords of a newly settled castle need the surrounding territory explored and cleared of monsters, so the bonus is on monster heads.

Missing Persons: There’s somebody out there the PCs want to find: lost family members, kidnapped princesses, or hated enemies the PCs want to track down and slay. Be careful about dragging this one out too much; there’s only so much “your princess is in another castle” most players will put up with.

Lost: I’m a big fan of shipwrecks, defeated armies, or other variations on the theme of being stranded out in the wilderness as a way to start off a campaign. The caveat with these is that, once the PCs find their way back home, they might have little incentive to return to the wilderness.

There’s no reason, of course, you can’t mix-and-match these. In fact, you probably should. “Yes, we know you just escaped from the goblin-infested jungles of the eastern coast after being shipwrecked, but you now know that territory better than anyone, and we’re certain the fabled Tower of the Stars is out there somewhere. Here are the clues we have to its location...”

Don’t fret too much about keeping the PCs out in the wilderness after they’ve spent some time exploring, making friends and enemies, and learning the lay of the land. These are all just baits for the hook of a persistent world that reacts to their presence in it. We’ll talk more about that next time.

1e Back in Print?!?

2012-01-19T13:44:00.001-06:00

Jeff's got the skinny and some excellent analysis. Not sure I need 'em (my original 1e PHB is still in decent shape) but as I and those books get older, I can't help but think that having some "stunt copies" for actual use is a good idea.

If you don't own a copy of the 1e DMG, and you play any sort of fantasy RPG at all, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. It's got a huge range of useful-at-the table info, like the reputed magical properties of various gems (pp. 26-27), the cubic volume of rock miners of various races can excavate (p 106), the healing properties of herbs and spices (pp. 220-221), and those wonderful 1e artifact-level magic items. Plus, some of the best art of the era.

If I could own only 1 RPG book, well, ok, I'd probably go with the 1e PHB. But for running a game, designing campaigns and adventures, or just pure inspirational reading, I've not seen anything yet that can touch the 1e DMG.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the actual product description at WotC's page.

Marketing 5trategery

2012-01-10T13:33:00.000-06:00

Not much to say about 5e yet, but a few of the marketing decisions WotC has made have caught my attention.

First, we had the Big Media Blitz: articles in the NYT, Forbes, and CNN as well as more industry-focused outlets like The Escapist. The nameplates are enough to make it clear that this is "serious news." But the content of the articles is very interesting. They're mostly written in a first-person editorial style. Even the NYT article, probably the most traditional in tone, completely lacks the usual corp-speak infested press release we've come to expect from this sort of thing.

Mingled with the Big News folks were bloggers like Dave Chalker enlisted to spread the word on the 'nets. Phase Two begins at the D&D Experience convention where Dave and the Chatty DM will apparently be running demo adventures for the new edition. Follow up comes through using the weekly Encounters program to get the new rules out there for folks to playtest.

So it's a one-two-three punch combination: Big News media outlets, the D&D blogging community, and the FLGS network. It's very corp-light, very friendly, and at least feels very interactive. It includes people many of us already have relationships with (if only as regular readers and shoppers). And WotC's out-of-pocket costs are primarily made up of flying people out to Seattle and putting them up in a hotel.

Even the apparent fumble of a lack of an announcement on the front of the official D&D web page makes this feel like a friendly, come-around-the-back-door invitation, rather than a proclamation from on high.

Making WotC seem friendly and approachable would seem a Herculean task. Doing it on a shoestring budget smacks of genius.

Somebody involved in this project clearly knows what they are doing.

Confu5ion

2012-01-10T07:00:00.003-06:00

So, 5e is now officially in the works and has, as others have surmised, already had early bits playtested. This means pretty much every single one of my predictions for 5e was absolutely wrong. ;D

I gotta admit, I have no idea what the plan is here. Hiring Monte Cook looks kinda-sorta like an appeal to the 3e crowd, but that would be insane. Those folks are quite happy with Paizo and I know more than a few still feel burned by how 4e was marketed and designed. Does talk about making the game "as simple or complex as you please" mean a bifurcation of the game into D&D and AD&D again? And what are we to make of promises to keep the game's "action focused on combat, intrigue, and exploration as you desire"? One of the themes of this blog is how that sort of choice ought to be echoed in just about every design decision that follows.

Keeping in mind my awesome track record on predictions, here are mine for 5e:

Class-based, with Levels, Hit Points, d20s, and AC
I doubt that's even up for debate. These are considered the most basic attributes of D&D and I doubt the brand is so hurting that they'll touch any of these low-hanging sacred cows.

There Will be Boxed Sets
And there will be a "Basic" intro box sold in stores like Target or WalMart. There will also be coffee-table quality hard backs as well, though how strongly the two are linked remains to be seen.

There Will be a Strong Focus on Tactical Combat
Most folks think that's what D&D is. There will be lots of effort put into balancing combats, combat options, and giving everyone lots of choices in every round. This will continue to make the goal of faster combat elusive.

And hey, since it's my blog, I'm predicting Shields Shall be Splintered will be central to the new design! ;)

There Will be Some Flavor of Social Combat Mechanic
It will be much more rigorous and involved than 4e's lackluster skill challenges. There will likely be class-specific abilities for it as well, and every class will be able to bring something to the "fight," even Fighters. Like tactical combat, it will eat hours like they were potato chips.

Less Hardback, More Monthly
I'm still thinking we'll see something along the lines of Paizo's monthly Pathfinder adventures. It may even been a resurrected version of either DRAGON or DUNGEON magazines. I also think the plan, at first, will be to limit the number of hardbacks published to one or two a year after the original three come out.

This is Only the Beginning
Let the LOLs begin!

Best of luck to Mearls, Cook, and the rest of the team. I suspect they're gonna need it.

Hex Mapping Part 5 Addendum: Moral Landscapes

2012-01-09T12:33:00.000-06:00

Getting back into the swing of blogging, I've been going back through my posts about hex-mapping. Part 5, where I discuss placing the terrain features that exist between mountains and coastline, brought to mind a conversation I had with a friend about alternatives to pseudo-realistic geography.

The guidelines I gave will tend to generate a landscape that is reasonably realistic. This should give you a map suitable for a campaign built around the assumptions that under-gird the stories of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Odysseus. In short, it's designed to fit very well with what most of us consider the default assumptions of the early versions of D&D.

Good 'ol Appendix N has a lot more going on in it than just those stories. Consider the landscape of the Arthurian romances, for instance: trackless forests peppered with magical castles, enchanted pools, and bridges fashioned from giant swords. The lands of Narnia and Oz are like unto it. All of them share a moral component in their landscapes. The moral character of the land's rulers and inhabitants actively shapes the landscape.

In Part 5 of this series, geography informs the location of populations within it. A more Arthurian geography turns that on its head. The twisted and wicked troll king does not choose to live in lands of tangled brambles and sulfurous hot springs. Rather, whatever land the troll king chooses to dwell in will eventually become tangled with thorny brambles and dotted with sulfurous hot springs. Likewise, the lands around Camelot are not rich and fertile due to geography so much as the virtuous nature of the King and his court ("The land and the king are one.") Should that virtue be compromised, the land's fertility will suffer and fair weather will turn foul.

If that's more the feel you're going for, you should place your terrain features after you've decided who lives where. Kingdoms will tend to be small (most seemed to have but one large city, if that many, and it was centered around the capital castle) and there will be little trade between them. It wouldn't be unusual at all to come across some land or castle nobody from back home had ever heard of before. You might even easily cross between worlds without realizing it, a la the Mabinogian.

It doesn't need to be an either-or thing, of course. Tolkien's Middle Earth seems to borrow a bit from column A and a bit from column B here, where the geography itself is anthropomorphized enough to create its own moral atmosphere. Ancient tragedies create modern terrain hazards, but most of the world appears to operate under the forces of geology and meteorology well known to most of us. In such a world, the features of the troll king's kingdom have a certain chicken-or-the-egg mystery about them; does he live there because he chooses, does the landscape follow him, or does he create it somehow?

Cartography Turned Up to 11

2012-01-04T19:45:00.000-06:00

One of the really invigorating aspects of gaming today is how so many people seem eager to take what's been done a hundred times before and do it again but better. We've seen this from industry giants (the index of Ptolus leaps to mind) as well as relative newcomers to publishing.

Here's an example from real-world cartography:

Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

What follows are a few choice examples of how Mr. Imus put more info into his map than most have and made it more legible. Definitely lessons for our hobby here, I'm certain.

Ow...

2012-01-02T23:02:00.001-06:00

Yeah, so this is when I'm supposed to review last year's resolutions and look ahead to this year with some new ones.

Ouch.

I think I managed to achieve just two of my resolutions for 2011. Oddysey did run some Pathfinder for me, and I did do more book reviews.

Everything else?

Ouch.

To say 2011 was not a banner year for this blog is an understatement. It wasn't a banner year for pretty much any aspect of my life. It wasn't the worst year (far from it!) but I can't say I'll look back on it very fondly, beyond a few bright spots here and there, mostly to be found in the first half.

So, back to it! More writing, but most of it won't be at this blog. My goal is once a week here. Why so little? Because I've got a lot of catching up to do. I've got some writing that needs finishing up for Raggi (which should be a fun treat for those of you who have enjoyed what you've read here) plus damn near everything I mentioned last year.

And yes, I will be retuning to the my series on hex-mapping. There's still a lot to say there, including some reflections on earlier bits in the series.

The good news is that it's all fun. I'd love to be finished with it, sure, but I'm looking forward to spending time on it all as well.

Wish me luck!

Pathfinder Does a Beginner Box

2011-10-15T13:04:00.001-05:00

Urgh...

Ok, so a project that was supposed to be due sometime in mid-November is now due by November 1st, which means blogging will be spotty until next month. Even my regular gaming has been thrown off schedule. This is what I get for boasting about how we play nearly every week. For those of you to whom I owe writing, yeah, might be a little late because of this. Basically, work is sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Paizo's decided they wanted to get in on the box action, and they're launching their beginner box this month. It includes a 64 page player's book (nice traditional page-count there) that will get you all the way through 5th level. The pre-gen character sheets are done up to explain how to use the stuff on the sheet to minimize running back to the book. There's also a DM's book that's twice as long that includes an intro adventure that introduces different aspects one-per-room (the first room involves a skill check, the next room has a combat, etc.). It also includes 100+ monsters with a much more strealined statblock (still not old-school simple, but surprisingly sleek for 3.x game) and advice on building your own adventures. Plus other goodies:

Frankly, the neatest parts to me are the character sheets for the pre-gens that give you the basics right on the sheet. For a game as complex as 3.x, that seems pretty vital to me. I'm also intrigued by the implication made towards solo play out of the box (though no details, so possibly I misunderstood that part).

The box comes out in late October and retails for $35. That's probably still in the impulse-buy range for people with jobs and comfortably below the price of a new computer or console game. The challenge for Paizo will be getting it in front of potential new players; their strength has always been in catering to the existing 3.x community, and I doubt they're going to have penetration into WalMart or Target.

Hex Mapping Part 18: In the Hot Seat

2011-10-05T09:33:00.001-05:00

On the subject of random tables, someone recently asked me, "how much is enough?" That really depends on you and your skills as a DM.

The dungeon isn't just easier for players. It's also noticeably easier for GM's. Each room is usually a unique experience. You almost never see dungeons consisting of the same type of room over and over again. Why would you do that to your players? It's boring.

Now let's take a look at our wilderness map. It's got a lot of the same sort of hexes right next to each other. To the west, we have lots and lots of savanna. In the east, it's lots and lots of jungle. In terms of geography this looks right. In terms of running a D&D adventure this looks like a nightmare. How in the world are you going to prevent this hex crawl from devolving into an endless repetition of "another two hexes of jungle"?

If you happen to be one of these amazingly creative types who can come up with interesting stuff on the spur of the moment, you've got no problem. This map plus some wandering monster tables should give you all you need to create interesting terrain and situations for your players to deal with. If that's not you, however, you might want more help. And you can give yourself all the help you need with more random tables!

Keep in mind, however, that were still talking about a fairly gross scale for all of this. So the sort of things we want to be talking about are probably going to be those things that you almost assuredly can't miss if you enter one of our 6 mile hexes. So most of the interesting features we should be talking about need to be at least a mile long, tall enough to be seen from miles away, or extremely flashy.

Any day (but not night) where a random monster isn't encountered, or some other interesting terrain feature (like a village or river) isn't encountered, roll a d12 and consult the following table for the jungle:

1: Nothing.

2: More nothing.

3: Even more nothing.

4: Short cliff of obsidian, measuring 3d4 feet high and 1d4 miles long.

5: Elven ruins built around a circle of massive crystal menhirs. Any magic-user spells cast while standing inside the circle are treated as being cast by a magic-user or elf of 150% their level (round down). If the moon is full, then treat the spell as being cast by someone with twice the level of the caster.

6: Empty monster lair. Roll on the wandering monster to table to see the type of monster, then roll for its treasure as per normal. 1d6 x 10% of the rolled treasure is here. If the monster rolled is sentient, there may be traps.

7: Quicksand! Double movement penalties through one hex.

8: Ancient Goblin Burial Ground. If players search this area, they can collect 2d100 copper pieces, 1d100 silver pieces, and 10d100 gold pieces worth of jewelry every hour, for 1d4 hours. However, for every hour that they actually find something, there is a 1-in-4 chance that they will be assaulted by 1d100 goblin skeletons the following night.

9: PCs stumble across the corpse of a dead adventurer. The human died of disease and/or infected wounds. The corpse will have fairly standard adventuring gear, plus one random potion. There's a 1-in-6 chance the corpse was carrying a map of the area and that this map hasn't been completely destroyed by moisture. It will reveal 1d4 hexes in each direction from the current location (roll separately
for each direction).

10: Ancient Shrine. Roll randomly to determine the alignment of the deities the shrine was dedicated to. Clerics of compatible alignments who meditate or pray at this shrine will be able to cast an additional 1st level spell the next day. Clerics of the opposite alignment will have the next spell they cast with a random component behave as if the lowest possible number was rolled.

11: An especially monstrous tree. If the PCs scale the tree to its top (this will eat 3 hours for up and down) they can map out every surrounding hex.

12: PCs stumble across the entrance to a dungeon!

What You May Have Missed: Romancing the Clone

2011-10-01T13:28:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm still alive! Just busy as all get-out. New text-mapping posts should be showing up next week.

In the meantime, unless you are a fan of 3.x gaming you may have missed what Paizo's been up to lately. Of particular interest to me have been attempts to add rules for romance into the game. As you'd likely expect, they seem heavily influenced by computer RPG tropes. We don't see the actual rules here, but we do see that there is a romance score, preferred gifts, and hated insults. At a guess, you ply your character's object of affection with gifts and services to, in effect, "buy" their romantic interest.

An interesting twist on this idea is the inclusion of a devotion boon. This is the mechanical bonus your character gets when they have earned enough of the NPC's affection. There's also an enmity boon that I assume you acquire if the score goes too far in the opposite direction. It's a neat idea, and I would be shocked if the notion isn't picked up by outfits like BioWare.

In other news, Paizo has also optimized their online rules resource document for viewing via phones and tablets. I imagine this will be a huge boon for their players of their game in the coming years.

Hex Mapping Part 17: You're Everything That a Big Bad Wolf Could Want

2011-09-16T14:46:00.002-05:00

I'm going to assume that most of you are already familiar with wandering monster tables. The idea is pretty simple: you write up a list of monsters you want the players to be able to encounter and then number them so that they can be chosen by a die roll.

The outdoor wondering monster list in Cook's Expert book is a little more complex. It involves nested lists; that is rolling on one list references other lists. The monsters are grouped by similarity. For instance, the lists you can roll for a swamp encounter include Men, Flyer, Humanoid, Swimmer, Undead, Insect, and Dragon. Each of these send you to another list which actually includes the monsters. Not only does this give you a huge variety of monsters without having to resort to d100s, it also makes certain types of monsters more common in one place that in another. In the swamp list Undead appear twice. Animal is listed twice for the woods list, and Men is listed six times for encounters in a hex that includes a city.

When it comes to actually listing the monsters, some tables just list the names and often in alphabetical order. Again, redundancy is used to increase the likelihood of encountering a particular type of critter. This is the sort of wandering monster table most of us are used to.

In Vault of the Drow, Gygax gives us a very different sort of list. His wandering monster lists include detailed groups, each of which has a specific purpose or goal that they are pursuing when the PCs encounter them. Zack does something very similar with his expansive random encounter lists in Vornheim.

The great thing about these lists is that they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to guess why this particular band of slaves and drow overseers are wandering through the fungus forest. Gygax lays it all out for you. The bad thing about this sort of list is that you can only roll on it so many times before it starts repeating itself. Zack suggests crossing encounters off in his lists and replacing them with new ones as they are used.

Cook's list is the opposite. Even if your rolls do turn up two different groups of nomads, the lack of details means its very easy for you to make each distinctive. Unfortunately, by that same token, it's entirely up to you, in the heat of the moment, to make them distinctive. If you're good at that sort of on-the-fly encounter creation, this is great. Not everyone is, though, and you're going to be rolling on these tables a lot as you run your hex crawl. There's no reason you can't give yourself a little more help if you need it.

So let’s investigate a compromise option. In addition to a list of monsters, you can also use a list of motivations. This simply tells us what is foremost on the mind of the wandering monster. It serves principally as a springboard for improvisation.

You can roll all the dice at once, but I'd suggest rolling the monster first and then the motivation. I designed this list so that rolling a 2d4 returns a reasonable motivation for bestial monsters. For sentient creatures, roll a 1d10.

- diplomacy

- patrolling territory

- hurt

- horny

- hungry

- napping

- fighting! (roll again on the wandering monster table to see who the monsters you first rolled are, or are planning on, fighting)

- home

- raiding

- art

This list is purposefully vague. “Diplomacy” might mean you’ve encountered an envoy from one tribe to another, or it might mean a caravan carrying tribute, or a craftsman gathering materials to build a peace-offering. “Horny” might mean a couple preparing to get frisky, humanoids raiding to engage in a bit of bride-kidnapping, or a more poetic soul pining for a lost love. “Home” could mean they’re in their lair, or they’re seeking a new lair, or they’re improving their lair in some way.

Now we simply combine this with territory-specific lists of creatures. This list is for the eastern jungles. If the PCs are traveling through the goblin territory, roll a d8. If they are in the Lizardfolk territory, roll 3d4. When they have reached the orc territories, you can roll a 5d4. And you can always roll a straight-up d20 when you want something really random.

1 - goblins
2 - rock baboon
3 - python
4 - giant bees
5 - crab spiders
6 - goblins with (roll a d6):

1 - 2: harmless giant spider mounts (doubles movement rate)
3: black widow spider mounts
4 - 6: tarantella spider mounts
7 - lizardfolk
8 - black widow spiders
9 - basilisk
10 - lizardfolk mounted on tuatara lizards
11 - spitting cobra
12 - orcs mounted on dire wolves
13 - hydra
14 - orcs
15 - ogre
16 - robber fly
17 - orcs
18 - wolves
19 - ogres riding elephants
20 - displacer beasts

There is, of course, lots of room for expanding this list. I didn’t manage to get most of the giant lizards listed in Moldvay’s Basic, for instance, or any fey, etc. But this, combined with our motivations table and the reactions table mentioned last time, gives us a good working list that can provide a wide variety of encounters on the fly.

Hex Mapping Part 16: to Fight the Horde and Singing and Crying...

2011-09-14T00:07:00.000-05:00

Let’s start our discussion of random tables with the classic: wandering monsters.

Mr. Cook writes:

Encounters are usually checked for once per day, but the DM may include planned encounters, or may make additional checks if appropriate. No more than three or four encounter checks should be made per day.

Again, the time scale, like those for distance, is grossly large.The assumption is that the PCs will travel through a hex, jot down the principal terrain type, and then move on. Making only one or two wondering monster checks per day means that you can quickly mark off a handful of days fairly quickly. Cook suggests rolling a d6 to see if an encounter happens; in grasslands and hexes occupied by a civilized settlement, encounters have a 1-in-6 chance of happening. Most terrain has a 2-in-6 chance of generating an encounter, while jungles, swamps, and mountains have a 50% chance of generating an encounter.

That’s not a lot of encounters. Traveling across your fantasy version of the American Great Plains will allow your average group of PCs to cover 18 miles in a day (three hexes) and encounter wandering monsters only once per six days on average (or basically once every 108 miles).

In short, logistical shortfalls are of greater concern than monsters. That D&D is about exploration more than monster-mugging becomes abundantly clear in a hex-crawl. Logistics are a bigger issue than combat (and so we’ll take a closer look at it later, when we discuss hex-crawling from the picture side of the DM’s screen).

But wait, there’s more! If you use Moldvay’s Monster Reactions table (page B24 for those of you following along at home), combat becomes even less likely. That’s because it’s a 2d6 roll with the most common results (a roll of 6, 7, or 8) being “Uncertain, monster confused”. You’re just as likely to roll “Enthusiastic friendship” (a 12) as you are “Immediate Attack” (a 2). (Cook reproduces the table on page 23 of the Expert book when discussing outdoor encounters.)

And, just to lower the chances of combat even further, there is a chance for the PCs to evade the monsters. The table given decreases the chances for larger parties of PCs, and increases the chances for larger groups of monsters. A party of 5 to 12 PCs, hirelings, etc, has a 50% chance of evading a group of monsters numbering between 4 and 8, and a 70% chance of evading groups larger than that. Failure to evade still allows the PCs to flee “in a random direction (no mapping)” with a 50% of being caught if the monsters are faster. “This procedure is repeated until the party successfully evades or is caught. (This may result in the party being chased for several days, if the pursuers are really serious about catching them.)”

Two other things of note on wandering monsters: first, many are bestial, and so won’t be carrying treasure on them, unless the PCs are lucky enough to encounter them in their lair. Second, there is absolutely nothing done to match the levels of the PCs with the toughness of the monsters on the charts. In most terrains, Cook’s tables return a dragon (which could be a chimera, wyvern, basilisk, or salamander in addition to one of the classic color-coded wyrms) in one of eight encounters on average (one in four if the encounter is mountainous, hilly, or barren terrain).

The moral of our story here is that combat isn’t the fun in a hex-crawl. The real fun is exploration and discovery, and even a mid-level party is going to want to avoid most combats and needs to be willing to sacrifice their mounts if they encounter a hungry dragon or the like.

With this in mind, our two goals in creating a wandering monster table need to be 1: a random complication to the otherwise straightforward logistical challenges over overland travel and 2: an opportunity for interesting RPing encounters. We’ll tackle actually building some tables next time.

Hex Mapping Part 15: Getting Random

2011-09-12T01:22:00.001-05:00

Embracing the hex-map-as-improvisational-tool, we’ll want to develop other, similar tools as sort of utility-multipliers for it. The most traditional of these is the random table. And the most traditional random table is the wilderness wandering monster table. But there’s no reason to stop there. You can create random tables for all sorts of things, including:

unusual land formations.
results for hunting, fishing, and foraging.
disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hail storms, etc.
weather.
frequency of and style of the ubiquitous defensive terrain the PCs will always want to camp in.
celestial phenomena like auroras, shooting stars, blood-red moons, etc.
bizarre animal behavior like birds trying to bury themselves or spontaneous sponge migrations.
magical effects, like magic being stronger or weaker, or rivers that steal your memories, or portals to other planes or other spots on the map.

There’s no need to go crazy here; none of these are mentioned in Cook’s Expert book, for instance, and so you can probably get along just fine without them. Still, if there’s any aspect that you consistently find yourself flummoxed on when the players ask about it, go ahead and make a table.

In my Doom & Tea Parties game, the PCs have been very careful to be well-supplied before leaving town, but they’re always asking me about the layout of their camp. A good random table simply helps me not repeat myself too often. Magic is extremely rare (so I don’t bother with a table of wacky magical effects or strange animal behavior, since anything the PCs see along those lines is extremely important and crafted to fit the situation) and the island of Dreng Bdan, like the one we’ve been building for this series of articles, is in the tropics, so the weather is fairly predictable (rain every day during the rainy season, hot the rest of the time).

The key to a good random table is to not put more than you need to inspire you on it. The more detailed the table is, the less flexible it is. Here’s the table I’ve been using to describe defensively-positioned campsites in the jungle:

Roll a d10 1d4 times on the following table.

1: water (stream, river, pond)
2: boulders
3: hollow tree (strangler fig)
4: fallen tree
5: thorn bushes
6: cliff or ledge
7: sink hole
8: quicksand
9: insects
10: tangle of vines.

By rolling on this table, I get a series of barriers that the PCs will use to guard one or more flanks of their camp. Some are potentially as dangerous to the PCs as they are to any attackers (like the insects or the stream if its inhabited by nixies), and I usually describe these features to the PCs to see if they want to accept the site or if they want to keep searching for something a bit safer.

It’s the combination of a random number of randomly generated features that keeps this list from looking like too much of the same thing over and over again. All of these are things you’d expect to find in a jungle, and so a certain amount of repetition is fine, even builds a sense of verisimilitude, but the combos are going to be unique enough to spur my own imagination when necessary. You may find your own imagination needs fewer or more details. As always, season to taste.

Hex Mapping Part 14: What do I See?

2011-09-09T15:07:00.001-05:00

Whether you’ve opted to be a traditionalist and allow your players a few levels in the dungeon, or just decided to throw them straight into a hex crawl, eventually you’re going to have to deal with what, exactly, is in these hexes that we’ve mapped out. Six-mile hexes made sense in terms of long distance travel. In terms of what someone standing on the ground can see, however, they are absolutely absurd.

Our hex map is a gross abstraction. This is where you see the greatest divergence between a hex crawl and a traditional West Marches campaign. In a West Marches map it’s very important to mark minute details of the terrain since that is how the PCs are going to navigate across it. It’s very much a matter of moving from the river to the old, twisted oak, past the toppled menhir towards the ragged ridge.

Hex crawling is not like this at all. The basic unit of time measurement in hex-crawling is not the round or the minute or even the hour, but the day. The scale is not about searching for lost children or combing through forests to find a hidden shrine. It is more on par with the movements of armies, the interactions of nations, and the journeys of explorers.

Your hex map is a tool for improvisation but it cannot answer the question, “What do we see?” It can help you answer that question, and that’s exactly what it’s for. But it’s only a help. The DM of a hex crawl needs to be ready to fill in the fine details from the gross generalizations.

So what can be in a six-mile hex? Doc Rotwang turned to his own neighborhood to answer what could be found in a one-mile hex. I’m going to turn to history for my example. Specifically, what existed in Sherwood Forest?

We have a fairly good idea of the boundaries of Sherwood Forest because the term “forest” was more legal than botanical in medieval England. Using the 1232 borders (unfortunately many years after the death of King John, and so probably after the notorious banditry that would’ve inspired the legend of Robin Hood) we can see that it was roughly 6 miles wide and 24 miles north-to-south. This makes it almost perfectly fit four of our 6-mile hexes stacked atop each other. And what could a traveler in 13th century England expect to find in Sherwood Forest?

According to our map, the following: fourteen towns and villages, three abbeys, five hunting lodges, and three castles. Hardly a deserted and desolate place, even when not harboring a band of Merry Men.

This, then, is the other beauty of the six-mile hex. It’s literally big enough for you to put damn near anything you need in it, from a hidden bandit camp to a lost castle everyone forgot was there. The gross details we’ve plotted on our map are the things that are obvious: the large communities, the dominant terrain, that sort of thing. If you suddenly need a pond or a strange outcropping of mystical crystals, or the pillar of a cranky, misanthropic living saint, there’s more than enough room in each hex for you to include it. Suddenly dropping in a mountain with a 100-foot carving of a skull in its cliff-face might be a bit much, but short of that there’s lots of room for improvisation, the inclusion of new material (like a recently purchased adventure module), or whatever your random tables generate.

Next time, we’ll talk about more about random tables, since they’ll be your best friends when it comes to spicing up the PCs’ journeys across our hexed terrain.

Hex Mapping Part 13: You Take the High Road and I'll Take the Low

2011-09-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Finally, back to the hex-mapping fun. What's the next step? That depends on how traditional you want to get. My game of choice these days is Labyrinth Lord/Moldvay/Cook B/X. The assumption of Moldvay and Cook was the players would graduate to hex crawling at the third or fourth level. Before then, the adventures would primarily be focused on dungeons.

If I was going to do things this way, I'd probably stop building the hex map now and refocus my efforts on one or two dungeon locations near the human city. It's still good to have mapped out the island as we have because I want to seed the dungeons with the promises of the hex-crawl. In this case, at least one of the dungeons would've been constructed by the wicked elves back when they ruled the island. I might also throw in a hint or two about the mind flayers or one of the dragons. I'd probably avoid using goblins since I want those to be one of the special parts of the jungle. I'd probably go with lesser undead, regular humans, and fantastical animals and follow the classic tropes of making each level more dangerous than the one above. I'd also strongly adhere to Moldvay's scheme of dungeon design in which a third of the treasure is in the hands of monsters, a third of the treasure is guarded by traps and a third of the treasure is undefended, though perhaps difficult to get to or find.

Optimally, the dungeons would be in, or very close, to the city. Part of the goal would be to solidify the human city as a home base for the PCs. One of the benefits of starting this way is that the players really learn their way around the human city. By this I don't mean geographically; the human city is mostly a safe place and I don't expect to do any urban crawling through it. I'm more talking about learning what resources the city has to offer and how to get them. They should learn which temples offer which services, what the alternatives to the temples are, if any, where they can (and can't) sleep safely for the night and store their treasure, and, of course, where they can acquire weapons, armor, and other supplies.

Finally, when I run hex-crawls, it can be important to have some idea of who the political and economic movers-and-shakers are in the civilized border area. There's an aspect of first contact in my hex crawls. The PCs are likely to find themselves ambassadors and go-betweens for both the human city and the monster civilizations they encounter. So there will at least be opportunities to explore the dungeons on behalf of, or under the patronage of, someone important in town.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because there are already some great resources for writing dungeons. With an eye on the above issues and prepping the campaign for the hex crawl to come, the dungeon should follow the usual design advice that works for low-level dungeoneering. That's not to say that they can't be unique. Only that there are well known methods for crafting a successful low-level dungeon and there's no reason not to use those here.

Next time, we go back to the hexes as we prepare to unleash our players upon them.

Ryan Dancey Thinks the Kids are All Right

2011-08-31T23:03:00.000-05:00

Ryan Dancey did his second pod-cast interview with "Fear the Boot" and, as always, he has some interesting stuff to talk about. Probably the most interesting thing is the younger, more gender-balanced demographic seen at GenCon '11. (They really get into this around minute 44.)

The idea of gaming being more a cultural thing than a pastime thing is fascinating. I can see it, though; there is gaming music and gaming fashion and all of that now, in a way there's never been before, even when TSR was trying to sell official D&D wood-burning kits.

On the face of it, that would appear to be a good thing from the viewpoint of the pen-and-paper RPG hobby. However, as Dancey points out, the new generation doesn't play like we used to. There is no strong commitment to one game for years of time. They're interested in playing a wide range of games for brief periods, hopping from game to game not in a sort of gamer ADD, but rather in a more planned manner: "Ok, Jen will run Traveller over the summer, and then in fall we'll start Dave's Pathfinder Game, and Mike can run his Kobold's Stole My Baby one-shot over the Labor Day weekend."

This seems to fit very well with what I've seen from the 20-somethings I've been playing with. They like my games because it's a change of pace from these short-term games that seem to dominate their usual play. Long-term commitment doesn't seem to happen much. Getting people to commit to even four hours weekly seems to be a challenge. Gaming is part of the air they breath, but there doesn't seem to be a strong need to make it happen, if that makes sense?

Ok, no, it doesn't to me, either, but that seems to be what I see happening in a lot of groups.

Of course, we're all talking from personal experience, and the plural of "anecdote" ain't "data," so YMMV and all of that. Still, it does appear to be what I'm seeing. And that kinda implies that the future of RPGs is the FUDGE model, where you have simple-to-learn rule set that can be picked up quickly, but then ported to all sorts of different genres and styles. A core mechanic that bridges many different games is good because it means you don't have to teach a brand-new game to everyone when you want to play something different, but these core rules need to be extremely simple and bare-bones because you want to be able to run everything from traditional dungeon-delving to fantastical western to space opera to angsty-teenagers-dealing-with-mutant-powers-and-typical-highschool-drama. True20 or Savage Worlds might really flourish in this sort of environment, but my gut suspicion is that even these games are too complex to be portable to the variety of games the new generation will be eager to play.

What is Best in Life?

2011-08-31T15:30:00.002-05:00

Whew!

This troll spent the last week and a bit moving to a new cave. Eventually, a troll's cave gets so funky all you can do is set it on fire and move to a new one. Now that it's done, I should be getting back to the hex mapping articles soon. Maybe by Friday, but certainly by Wednesday.

In the meantime, to celebrate having moved all my loot to a better cave, I treated myself to the new Conan movie. It's not bad, and I can understand why some folks might even compare it favorably to the Schwarzenegger film from the 80s. I'm not quite willing to go that far just yet, but it wasn't horrible. It was much better than "Sucker Punch" for instance.

What follows isn't a review of the movie. Frankly you probably already know if you're going to see it and reviews are unlikely to sway you one way or the other. You know if you are this movie's audience. And after you see it, you'll know whether or not you liked it. I did, however, want to point out a few interesting things I noticed.

(Spoilers follow, so if you don't want to know too much before seeing the flick, stop here.)

First, something silly that amused me: adult Conan does not wear pants. It's a sartorial choice he shares with John Carter when the latter is on Mars. So let the ladies have their pants! The look of today's masculine fantasy hero is a layered kilt and boots.

There were a lot of missed opportunities in this film, and I suspect most of them are the fault of the writers. There are three writers listed, and I suspect it was a matter of rewriting rather than collaboration. Toss in the cutting-and-editing process, and who knows what was originally intended?

Early in the second act, we are treated to a scene of the bad-guy army dragging a boat through a forest. It's a neat visual and immediately makes you wonder why they're doing that. It's intriguing. Unfortunately, it's also never explained. The ship on wheels is never used in the water, it's never demonstrated to have magical powers, and ends up just seeming kinda silly.

The villain's sorceress daughter (apparently rewritten from an original male version) has a neat look and a creepy vibe. We get one brief interaction between her and her father with Electral undertones. It makes both of them a lot more interesting. Dad has a goal that isn't just the typical take-over-the-world, and Daughter is a little conflicted about bringing Mom back from the grave. Again, this is set up in the second act and nothing is ever done with it. I was kind of hoping that these issues would explode into some really interesting dynamics in the final confrontation. That never happens. Instead, we get a fairly bog-standard mano-y-mano fight at the end.

If you get inspired to throw in little twists in the story or adventure, be sure to do some follow-through. Make it matter! This is at the heart of old-school improvisation. You just rolled hobgoblins on the wandering monster table. Sure, you could just have a randomly generated band of hobgoblins sitting in the middle of the road waiting for the PCs to arrive so they can fight.

BOOOOOOOORINNNNNNNNNG!

Why are they here? Are they part of the larger tribe? Is it nearby? Are they renegades? Survivors of genocide? Scouts looking for a good target for a raid? Heroes seeking some lost hobgoblin relic? Even if all you want is a brief little battle, you can at least have them ambush the party.

On the other hand, if the players really are not that terribly interested in your hobgoblins, there's no reason to beat them over the heads with whatever clever idea came up with. Not everything needs to be explained or make sense. But if your players do seem intrigued you should absolutely take advantage of that.

What Works For Me

2011-08-20T00:46:00.000-05:00

...and may not work for thee, but hey, I can't make it down to the South Texas mini-Con and there's a good chance I won't be posting much next week as I slay a few Real Life hydra that have been creeping up on me for a few weeks now. So, three "best practices" and how they work, etc.

1) Play Every Week.

We play (almost) every week. Every Thursday is game day, and my group game plays. Yes, I make that commitment to the game up-front, and I ask it of my players as well. We'll move stuff around on rare occasions when necessary, and cancel for holidays, but otherwise, we play every week.

This keeps the game fresh in everyone's minds. There's less fumbling around for what we were doing last time, and what everyone's goals are. There are also fewer cancellations or arguments about scheduling; everyone knows that Thursday is not open. We play, we play regularly, and we play for years.

Sometimes I can't play with great folks because they can't make that kind of commitment. That sucks, but I think it's worth it. Besides, I have a huge pool of players to pick from because...

2) I play online, via text-chat.

The entire world is my hobby shop. I've had players from as far away as Japan in my game. And no matter if I'm at home in Texas or visiting family in New Jersey, if I can find access to the intrawebs, we can play.

More than that, however, is the depth of play you get in text chat. Verisimilitude is heightened not only by the engrained habits of life-long readers, but also by access to everything that was said and done in character from the log files of previous games. Players also find it a lot easier to speak and act in-character via text. It's not at all rare for players to banter back-and-forth in-character in my text-chat games. Players interact with the world and the characters far more than they do at the table. It's just easier to suspend disbelief.

Understand that you also lose a lot playing this way. You lose body language and non-verbal ques and the way suddenly rolling the dice behind your DM screen focuses everyone's attention. The game is also slower, which is why it's vital that we play every week.

But it's absolutely worth it, because it really allows me to leverage my writing skills. Descriptive passages, characterization, mood and atmosphere are all much easier for me to conjure via text than I could at the table.

3) I play with topics that interest me.

In junior high and starting in high school, I was obsessed with the Arthurian legends and kept trying to invest my D&D games with that feel. I failed miserably.

But I never lacked for players or for ideas.

If you do it right, you'll be playing your new campaign for a long time, so it best be what you want to play, not what you think (for whatever reason) you ought to play. Enthusiasm is infectious, it builds quickly under reinforcement, and can weather criticism (especially of the constructive sort). "Ought-to" and "should" will just make the thankless task of GMing an unmitigated burden.

These days, I'm most interested in pre-Roman ancient civilizations. Apparently, including terror birds was one of the aspects that attracted Oddysey to my game. Be honest about your passions, and you'll be far more likely to find folks who share them.

Hex Mapping Part 12: Workin’ in a Coal Mine, Workin’ Downtown...

2011-08-19T00:25:00.001-05:00

Last weekend somebody asked me, "do you really do this much work before starting a campaign?"

My reply: oh, heck no!

What I have posted so far would be the work of a lazy afternoon. Over the span of 2 to 3 hours I would have scribbled out a map with pencil and paper and jotted down maybe a page or two of notes. I could have just shown you that, but would you have been able to make any sense out of "orcs" and "mind flayers" with an arrow pointing between them?

So I downloaded Hexographer and wrote up fairly detailed descriptions, or, at least, much more detailed than I would have written for just myself. If you've been at this for any period of time, you certainly have already developed a shorthand for describing places and monsters and situations your players are likely to encounter.

Evan at In Places Deep touches on this when discussing this picture of Gygax at the gaming table. You also see a lot of this in the Zak's Vornheim. We don't really need to be that detailed. Hex crawls are primarily powered by improvisation. What we've done so far is just give ourselves enough of a framework to build on as the players explore our island. We'll be hitting this point a lot. Most of the tools that we're going to develop are aids to improvisation. This includes the map I've been talking about for the past two weeks, the random encounter tables we’ll be tackling in the future and any other bits and bobs that invoke randomness (like random weather tables) or terrain details.

Unlike a West Marches game, classic hex crawls are not about going over the land with a fine-toothed comb. It's more on par with the Lewis and Clark expedition, exploring the terrain at a land-eating pace where one of the primary motivations is discovering what cool things the DM has hidden just beyond the horizon. The double-sided purpose of the map we have made is to both inspire and leave room for cool things to tantalize and dazzle our players with.

Hex Mapping Part 11: Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright

2011-08-17T08:00:00.001-05:00

“Oh,” say those who have played in my campaigns before, “here’s where he’s putting in the rakshasa.”

I'm a big fan of rakshasa, whether you're talking about the tiger-headed sorcerers of D&D or the shape-shifters of Hindu and Buddhist lore. There are a handful of monsters I just really love using, and I try to include them in every campaign. I doubt I'm unique in this, so when building your own hex crawl be sure to keep your favorites in mind.

In this case, I'm putting them in a city in the hills where the river bifurcates. It was originally built hundreds of years ago by the elves, and was one of the last abandoned by them. (Note that this also gives us an excuse to cover the countryside with abandoned elven ruins.) It's ruled by a family (or perhaps feuding families) of rakshasa. Most of the inhabitants, however, are less dangerous humanoid monsters, probably gnolls (another favorite monster), minotaurs, and maybe unusual merochi families.

Along the river exist small communities and individual freeholds of thri-kreen. These were left behind by the elves when they abandoned this area. South of the city, in the swamps along the coastline of the delta, are hidden villages of turtlefolk. Both avoid the city as much as possible.

In the plains on either side of the river wander clans of wemic. In the hills to the north and east are small clans of hill giants. Both of these prey upon the thri-kreen to keep as slaves for themselves or to sell in the rakshasas' city. Moon beasts may also be involved in this trade.

The broken lands to the west and north are a veritable maze of shattered stones, defiles, ravines, small canyons, and lava tubes. This territory is claimed by a number of minotaur clans. Successfully navigating this maze will lead you to the active volcano at the southernmost tip of our secret plateau. Here, a fortress inhabited by fire giants guards the entrance to the plateau.

What's in the plateau? No idea just yet. But there's still no rush to fill that in. On Friday, will back up, survey what we've done, and discussed how I would actually accomplish this much for normal game I was planning to run.

Hex Mapping Part 10: Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

2011-08-15T01:33:00.000-05:00

We’re now to the southern end of our island, the sections furthest from the human lands and our PCs’ starting zone. These should be the most challenging sections as well as the most fantastical, just as you’d expect at the deepest parts of a dungeon.

In the southwest we have our corridor of active volcanoes, grey ash, and giant fungus forests. The smoldering (or even actively erupting volcanoes) constantly belch smoke and ash into the sky, and the prevailing winds and shape of the valley cause it to blanket the area between the mountains. It’s not unusual for the sky to rain flakes of ash or dustings of very fine grey-black powder from the sky. Drifts can be as deep as four feet, and speeds will likely be reduced to a mere third of normal. Just walking through this landscape can be dangerous.

Even breathing can be a challenge, because the dust is shot through with magical particles (perhaps the magma pushes up through a vein of mithril or some other magical mineral). Breathing this dust without some sort of protection or filter will result in strange magical effects or even mutations. For every half-day the PCs spend traveling through this terrain without the proper protections, roll a 2d6 and consult the following table.

2-3: the character’s skin sprouts (roll a d4): 1 - iridescent scales (+2 to AC), 2- golden feathers, 3 - porcupine quills (+1 damage in melee) 4 - a glistening lair of slime (+1 to AC, -1 to reaction rolls, +2 on saves vs. poison or to resist fire or magical fire).

4-5: the character acquires (roll a d4): 1 - nictating membranes over the eyes (+1 to saves vs. blinding or gaze-attacks), 2 - a prehensile trunk (may be used to wield an additional weapon at -4 to hit), 3 - a forked tongue, 4 - a prehensile tail.

6-8: the character develops a hacking cough. So long as they are exposed to the dust, they get a -1 to all dice rolls.

9: character behaves as if under the influence of a confusion spell for 1d2 hours.

10: roll for a random insanity. Only a lengthy clerical purification ritual will remove it.

11: character gains ESP for six hours. At the end of that time, roll a save vs. spells to see if the character acquires a random insanity due to the thoughts of others intruding upon their mind.

12: character gains the ability to cast a single, randomly determined first-level magic-user spell at will so long as it is cast in the next 24 hours.

The western line of mountain and the broken lands at the northern point of the territory are inhabited by wandering tribes of nomadic gnolls. They wear complicated masks with filters to catch most of the dust, but incidents of mutation are still fairly common among them.

In the fungus forests along the river live myconids and similar critters. These have no need to protect themselves from the ash and soot falling from the sky. In fact, their lives may very well depend on the stuff.

At the river’s end, where it flows sluggish and silty into the sea, is a large elven city. These are Melnibonean-style elves, wicked and cruel and wracked by ennui and caprice. They are most assuredly not likely to be allies of the PCs, and any alliance they do make will last only long enough to allow the elves to betray the PCs at the worst possible moment. It’s rare to meet any of these elves outside their city, but occasionally their sleek corsairs are sent out to raid along the coast or seek out merchant ships for plundering.

Over half of the city’s population are slaves. This far out, they don’t need to worry about the effects of the ash (though nobody drinks the water if they can avoid it), but the elves themselves delight in “improving” their slaves. Most of the slaves are thri-kreen, imported to the island because they appear to be largely immune to the worst of the ash-fall’s effects. However, members of nearly ever population on the island, including some humans, are represented among the city’s enslaved.

Long ago, the elven empire laid claim to the entire island. As their numbers dwindled, they’ve been forced to abandon all but this last bastion. Still, they consider the island to be theirs and theirs alone, and treat humans or other recent arrivals (and by “recent” they mean anyone who’s landed in the last 600 years) as interlopers. Luckily for everyone else, those elves who don’t spend most of their time indulging their depraved vices are too busy squabbling among themselves for lordship of the city.

Still, the city and the fungal forests to the north are rich in magical resources. Characters interested in rare herbs, psychedelic fungi, and exotic flora will find a veritable cornucopia of varied species along the river’s banks. Ever hour spent exploring beneath the towering mushroom caps will reveal one of the following (roll a d8):

1: random lotus type

2: tangerine smut: grows on other fungus. Horribly toxic to touch, causing nerve damage on contact with bare skin, resulting in the loss of 1d4 points of Dexterity. (Powerful clerical magic can undo this damage.) If the smut is dried, it will produce a bright orange powder with anesthetic properties (heals +2 hit points per level of the wounded when used in bandages on open wounds; each found collection of the smut results in 1d6 such uses when dried).

3-4: cleric’s wort: a small plant with silvery fuzzy leaves. If these leaves are dried and added to 100 gp worth of incense which is inhaled by a cleric who is meditating or praying to prepare spells, the cleric will be able to prepare one additional spell of their highest level available that day. However, there’s also a 1 in 12 chance that the cleric will also permanently lose one point of Constitution. Each plant found gives enough leaves for only two such uses.

5-6: berserker pods: red and green puff-balls that grow in wet, sheltered spots. If a pod is crushed under someone’s nose so that they inhale the spores, they will be filled with amazing strength, (treat as a 19 strength or a +4 to hit and damage bonus) for 2d3 rounds. However, every round they are under the influence of the spores, there is a 1 in 10 chance of the character behaving as if subject to a confusion spell. Harvesting results in the collection of 2d4 viable pods, but they lose their potency after a week.

7: Tartarus’ slime: a blackish-purple slime mold. If coated on a blade it will render anyone even scratched by the weapon catatonic for 1d4 hours if a save vs. poison is failed. Each crop found will be enough to coat 2 swords, six daggers, or eight arrows. Tartarus’ slime loses its potency 2d6 days after being harvested.

8: A shrieker: roll on the wandering monster table.

Hex Mapping Part 9: Valley of the Avians

2011-08-12T11:59:00.001-05:00

Hopping back to the eastern side of the mountain, we’ll next populate the broad, long valley south of the jungles. Starting in the far east, there’s a tower built by the orcs. It’s not as necessary as it used to be, but its primary purpose remains to guard against large forces moving through the gap between the mountains and the sea. I suppose the hidden lair of the mind flayers could be below it as well, but I haven’t really decided just where I want that to be, and it would make more sense if it was further north and west in the range, I think. At this point, there’s no need to force the issue.

Moving west up the valley, we see a village marked on the southern range. This is actually an ancient monastery that’s fallen partially into ruin. The current inhabitants are a community of kenku. Assuming the PCs can put up with their antics, they could serve as potential allies for the PCs, but knowing the way most players deal with thieving kenku, this is likely to turn into the target of a vengeful raid. ;p

Moving up (to the west in) the valley, we find a village in the plain between the mountains, alongside the river. These are orcs, captured from across the mountains and enslaved to toil here by the batfolk who live in deep caves where the town is marked on the map to the north and east of the village. (What are batfolk? Not entirely sure just yet. I’ll probably throw up stats and such next week.)

Finally, all the way up the valley is a castle. It was built by cloud giants in ancient times, but the current inhabitants are stone giants. In a massive aviary on one side of the castle they keep rocs, and they use them to raid all across the island. Most of their slaves are ankeri from the eastern side of the island, though they also have gnollish mamluks and a few hill giants among their menials.

Most of these creatures are neutral (or under the thumb of neutral monsters) and so any could conceivably serve as allies to the PCs. At the same time, none are obvious allies for the PCs. The players could easily end up antagonizing all of them which will make life very difficult, especially if they’re moving clockwise around the mountains. This is their last best chance to make powerful friends for a while.

Finally, there’s that one, single mountain south and west of the dead volcano. That was an oops on my part when I way plopping down mountains, but I left it, and I’m still tempted to do something with it. Perhaps it’s the home of reclusive, xenophobic dwarves? Again, there’s no rush to drop something in there now, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind for later.

A Hamsterish Bestiary

2011-08-11T07:42:00.001-05:00

I mentioned Taichara's Hamsterish Hoard of D&D yesterday. She's got a great assortment of imaginative, original critters for BECMI (which means you can pretty much use any of them as-is for any TSR edition of D&D). Going through it, I made this annotated and incomplete list of monsters that might make an appearance on my example hex-map island.

Alraune - carniverous mandrake (plant)

Ankeri - gazelle-men (humanoid)

Brass Jackal - clockwork jackal (clockwork guardian)

Briarbones - aggressive vine wrapped around skeleton (plant)

Cepes - fungus-men (plant)

Cricipter - flying hamsters! (cute)

Dreamsnake - memory-stealing serpent (snake, reptile)

Greenfang - carniverous cabbage (plant)

Heartbriar - carniverous, ambulatory plant (plant)

Iaret (Cobra Lord) - snake-man (snake, reptile, humanoid)

K'kithil - sapient scarabs (insect, humanoid)

K'sshir (Nightmist) - carniverous cloud (phenomena)

Lithira (Pearl Gazelle) - magical gazelle (herd animal)

Lurru - large locust (insect)

Marrowlight - carniverous pumpkin (plant)

Raintiger - magical, stormcalling feline (elemental, water, feline)

Sau'inpu - necrophagic humanoid jackals (canine humanoid)

Sshian - snake-men (snake, reptile, overlord)

Thief-of-Hues - color (and emotion) stealing snake (snake, reptile)