Gygax and Arneson suggest using the map from Outdoor Survival as a default wilderness map for GMs starting a campaign. The suggestion is to start with just local maps of a starting town, outside of a dungeon, and actual dungeon levels, then fill in details of the rest of the world as you play, using the Outdoor Survival map as a terrain guide, stocking or describing castles and towns on the map as they are encountered. On the OD&D 74 forumes, there's a discussion about other maps you could use in the same way, like the one from Barbarian Prince. I suggested Magic Realm could be an option, since the individual cardboard hexes mean each GM can have a unique wilderness map.
That got me thinking: what if you had a set of tiles -- wilderness geomorphs -- with well-drawn terrain and generic labels like "town", "keep", "cave" or "ruins" on them, plus a few blank wilderness geomorphs to customize, so that you could create your setting piece-by-piece, laying out tiles for the players as they explore so that they can get an idea of what they can see, while you would take notes of which tiles you placed and what the generic elements contain? You could start out just placing a 3x3 arrangement of tiles, with the starting location in the center, and offer basic notes of general terrain in each direction beyond that. The players decide whether to explore locally or head towards one of the surrounding tiles, or beyond.
Hex tiles like those in Magic Realm seem like a lot of work, so maybe it would be easier to use simple square tiles with a staggered square grid, which provides features similar to a hex grid.
Last year I built my own set of small hex tiles with all the "canonical" terrain types from the Outdoor Survival map. I own a copy of Magic Realm, but hexes of that size would pretty quickly cover the entire floor with the movement rates given in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. I used 1" bathroom finishing tiles instead, which scales to something much closer to the size of the 5/8" Outdoor Survival map. Carefully pasting printed terrain to the tiles took a couple evenings.
ReplyDeleteEven then, parties on horseback can pretty quickly burn through several stacks of tiles!
I used the tiles from Kids of Carcasonne to create a village setting for a swashbuckling campaign - it'll be on my blog starting next week.
ReplyDeleteEdward, thanks for sharing. I really like that idea of hex tiles you used. I would probably pick them up when they get out of visual range of any tiles though, (idea that struck me from something I read on other blogs about how far you can see terrain, based on the terrain your in) and shuffle them back into the mix.
ReplyDeleteBlack Vulmea, great idea. There are a bunch of hex tile board games that could be liberated.
I'm really interested in preparing a sandbox with interesting travel choices and locations that are designed for a certain level of play. But I'm also interested in using randomness to generate the world and improving what those results might mean. For the latter, your idea is probably the best way to do it.
ReplyDeleteYou might want more than a single "deck" of geomorphs to draw from for terrain, specials, and travel routes. Then you could have simple rules (routes continue unless you roll a 1 on d6, every 6 tiles of route see if there is a special village/castle/etc tile).
If these are abstract enough, they could function at multiple scales.
whoops meant improvving. Also, line of sight is a good idea. the Bane.
DeleteIf we could harness a tenth of the collective OSR blogosphere energy that went towards geomorphs to put out varied, detailed wilderness hexes I think we'd have something really cool here.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking into it, but I have so much on my plate right now, I can make no promises.
DeleteSettlers of Catan comes to mind.
ReplyDeleteIt is not done by cards or wilderness geomorphs but is still worth noting that Champions of ZED is like this by default: you create a small environment (a few hexes); if the players set off to a direction yet unmapped, the DM expands the world using tables provided in the book.
ReplyDeleteI've seen the article in Fight On!, and it's similar to some of the suggestions I've made about random wilderness-buidling. But I'm thinking here about cards/geomorphs as a simpler option for those who don't want to whip out the tables.
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