Map Monday Sneak Preview

Today's full dungeon PDF may be a little late... might even be delayed until tomorrow, depending on how things go, although I don't believe things will be that bad. But the maps themselves are finished, so for Map Monday, here's the surface map and a sneak peak at the dungeon itself.

Update: Looks like it really will be tomorrow and not today. It's at 25 pages and counting.

Improved Hunting and Foraging

I noticed a couple hits on a couple old blog posts about hunting and foraging. Since I’ve been thinking about the Last-Minute Wilderness as one of the four projects to work on this spring, I thought: “Oh, yeah, I could include an update to those rules in LMW.”

They’d need a rewrite, of course. They wouldn’t be “Simple Hunting and Foraging” anymore, although they’d still be simple enough. I’m thinking of tying it to the Territory Table, which you may remember looks sort of like this:

d10 Scale	Climate	Elevation	Biome
7-9	Arctic	Treeline	V. Arid
6	Subarctic	5k feet	Arid
5	Cool	2.5k ft	Scrub
4	Temperate	1.2k ft	Prairie
3	Warm	600 feet	Lt. Woods
2	Subtropic	Low	Forest
0-1	Tropic	Sealevel	Jungle

The important columns for hunting and foraging for food are Elevation and Biome. Each locale is going to have a 0-9 rating in each. Higher ratings are bad for finding food, lower ratings are better. Use one of the two scores to determine the base time needed to find food or game.

Score	Time Period
0	1 Turn
1-2	1 Hour
3-4	4 Hours
5-6	1 Day
7+	1 Week

An experienced hunter with knowledge of the area, or a barbarian, druid, or ranger, shifts the time up one row. So does searching for small game, or having an Int or Wis score of 16+. Searching for large game, not having a minimum score of 6+ in either Int or Wis, or being cursed all shift the time down one row. This indicates the minimum time needed to find food or game.

The modified procedure is to roll 1d6 once, secretly. On a 5+, the PCs find food or game. Otherwise, the roll indicates how many extra time periods it will take to find food or game. The GM asks the players how long they want to keep hunting or foraging, and if they continue long enough, they succeed.

So, someone searching for food in the jungle will find it in 1 to 5 turns, while someone searching for food in the subarctic will take 1 to 5 days. Having someone with the right training in your party, or changing tactics, may help a lot.

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Barony Development

"Well, it's like in the Army, you know? The great prince issues commands, founds states, vests families with fiefs -- Inferior people should not be employed."
--- Firesign  Theatre

Now here's where I try to get really clever with adapting the magic research rules to all sorts of other things: barony development. Famously, Underworld & Wilderness Adventures brought up the topic of domain management as the D&D "end game", but only offered sketchy details: "Some  possible  investments  are:  Road  Building, Canals, Inns, Hunting, Religion, Armories, Animal Breeding, Farming, Fishing, Exploration, Ship Building, Sea Trade, Land Trade,  Trapping. Successful  investments  will  also  have  the  effect  of  increasing  the  population  of  the investor's  territory,  providing  the  area  of  investment  does  not  specifically  preclude such  (hunting  and  trapping  would  do  so,  for  example)." Many people have tried to flesh out those details, for example the designers of Adventurer Conqueror King, but most aim for logic and realism, working out economic details. I don't want that kind of grief, myself.

The simple way is to again define each feature in terms of levels, much like the holy shrine or the arcane library. In fact, each of those could be considered examples of barony investments. The baron spends money raised by taxes, with the intent of raising the level of the resource, and makes the research roll, with success meaning the level improves, winding up with a 1st level road network, or 3rd level trading.

For commercial resources, the level determines income. Trade, for example, brings in profits, which can be taxed for extra domain income. Since the base tax is 10 gp per citizen, you could figure that 1st level trade brings in 1d6 extra gp per merchant or tradesman. 3rd level trade brings in 3d6 gp per merchant.

The level could also be a target number for 1d20 rolls when trying to produce some specific resource. Say you invest in lumber, and suddenly need a supply of logs to build a palisade. Roll 1d20 less than or equal to your Lumber level to meet that need.

Subhex Coastlines

I wanted to highlight and discuss part of Mphs. Steve's comment on his experience with the Subhex Wilderness Crawl system.

"...The drop die method was better for my purposes since it puts more points of interests on a single sheet. I used two of the paths off the starting point to create a coastline. It ended up being too straight so I used it as a general guide with natural looking irregularity added by using a rule that I borrowed from ICE's Campaign Law for creating coastlines. The end result was a map of a nicely detailed small area with a lot of opportunity for adventure."

I don't know what the rule from Campaign Law was (never had the Rolemaster books,) although I'd be interested in hearing about it. But I can  understand why the subhex system probably wouldn't make satisfactory coastlines.

Theoretically, you can treat a coastline as a path, rolling d12s to establish where the coast changes direction. But the problem is, the path rolls are geared toward the viewpoint of traveling characters. The length of each leg of a journey is based on travel speed modified by terrain. These things should not affect coastlines in the same way. Also, coastlines are more fractal and more "noisy". In theory, what you should do for a coastline would be to roll d12s to establish a rough coastline, then for each segment of the coast, roll more d12s to divide it into smaller segments, and then repeat a couple times, zooming in to smaller and smaller coastal changes.

That's kind of unwieldy.

I haven't fully thought it through, but a good compromise would be to roll some elevation checks -- the roll with three light dice and three dark dice, but use more dice, something like 8d6 light and 8d6 dark. Read them in a line to establish broad details of the coastline: light dice are spits of land or rocky cliffs jutting out into the water, the dark dice are coves and inlets. That's the rough outline, and the places where the first draft of the coastline changes are the defining points. For each pair of defining points, roll 5d12 to establish the deviations of that section of coastline from the straight line. Or, if  you prefer, start at one point and roll 1d12 for every four squares of coastline until you reach the next defining point. That might work better for rolling a coastline on the fly when players decide to follow and map it.

Random Subhex Wilderness Generation PDF

I've done many posts on random wilderness generation tricks, including some recently. But sometime back in 2012, I did a short series about "subhex" wilderness crawls, mapping random wilderness at about the same scale as a dungeon. In other words, mapping individual boulders, trees, hillocks, huts, and roads.

I removed those posts along with many others that I planned on overhauling at some point, but I put it on low priority. I didn't think it was all that popular, especially compared to my hex-level wilderness posts. But then Justin Alexander said, "Hey, what happened to those?"

So I redid them as a PDF. Subhex Wilderness Crawls: Random Local Terrain and Landmark Tables for Class-and-Level Exploration Fantasy RPGs.

Turns out I did a lot  more rewriting and creating new material than I'd originally planned. I did several tables that weren't part of the original series, including a revamped version of the Landmarks table from the non--subhex posts. It's a major overhaul, but I think it reads a lot cleaner now and is easier to use than before.

Tricks on the Wilderness Territory Table

I wanted to go back and revisit a passing note on the Last-Minute Wilderness system. As you may recall, there aren’t many direct rolls on the Territory Table, and in fact you can skip those rolls if you already know what the general terrain of an area should be. Mostly, the table is used as a reference scale. The current biome is prairie, a roll on the Locale Table says the vegetation thickens, so we shift the biome down one step to Light Woods.

However, I mentioned a couple optional rules when describing the process of generating a wilderness. To check if a river is present, you could look up the scale number for the current biome and roll a d10, with any result equal to or higher than the scale number meaning yes, there’s a river. Similarly, you could use a d10 check if the biome changes anytime the elevation changes by looking up the current biome scale number: equal to or higher than the scale number means the biome shifts in the same direction on the table as the elevation shifts, getting drier as the elevation rises and wettter as it drops.

What may not be obvious is that you could do many more tricks like this using the scale number on the table. All you need to do is determine which column is relevant to your check, and whether you should roll high (less likely in colder, higher, or drier areas) or low (more likely in warmer, lower, or wetter areas.)

Examples:

• Glacier or Ice Field exists on a roll lower than either Climate or Elevation rating, whichever is higher
• Fog in the Morning on a roll lower than Climate rating - Biome rating
• Mountain Pass exists on a roll higher than Elevation rating
• Lake or Sea exists on a roll higher than Elevation rating
• Digging for Water works on a roll higher than Biome rating
• Chance of Percipitation on a roll higher than Biome rating

You can also check for small local shifts in temperature, height, moisture, or vegetation using 1d6, 2d6, or 3d6, depending on how much variation you would like:

1d6	2d6	3d6	Shift
-1 or less	1 or less	3 or less	Down 3 or -3
0	2	4-5	Down 2 or -2
1	3-5	6-8	Down 1 or -1
2-5	6-8	9-12	No Shift
6	9-11	13-15	Up 1 or +1
7	12	16-17	Up 2 or +2
8+	13+	18+	Up 3 or +3

Pick the appropiate column and read down to find the dice result. The last columnn shows whether you shift the base temperature, elevation, moisture, or vegetation up one or more rows on the Territory Table, or down one or more rows. The two main examples of what you could use this for is weather: roll 3d6 at the beginning of the week for temperature (basically, Climate) and humidity (basically, Biome.) The adjusted Biome rating is the chance of percipitation each day (roll high.)

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Quickie Hexcrawl

I have another dungeon trick/feature finished, and more under development, but there was a recent discussion of wilderness generation that made me revisit the random wilderness rules I was working on last month. (condensed rules and associated wilderness tables.) Now, the process I was describing was geared towards not using a hex map at all, but it evolved out of an earlier series I was writing about random hexcrawls. That series was kind of sprawling and needs to be redone, but with just a couple quick add-ons, we could do hex maps with the current system.

Roll your climate and elevation as normal, or just pick what you want (temperate forest, for example.)

Roll the elevation for each edge of your map, or even for each clock direction (1 to 12,) if you want that much detail.

Roll the info for your central hex (terrain, landmark, and starting settlement.) The terrain for this hex is also the predominate terrain on the map.

Roll for exceptions to the predominate terrain, such as one or two spots of another kind of terrain. Use 1d12, 1d10, 1d8, and 1d4:

• d12 for direction to the spot
• d10 for kind of terrain in that spot
• d8 for distance to that spot in hexes
• d4 for size of spot, in hexes.

This makes circular patches on your map. Two spots are plenty, but you can put as many as you want. For variety, you can also roll for lines of terrain that criss-cross and zig-zag across the map, using a d10 and multiple d12s.

• d10 is type of terrain
• First d12 is direction. Line is 1 hex wide and 3 hexes long, heading in clock direction indicating, starting at edge opposite that direction.
• Each additional d12 is another 3-hex segment heading in a new direction. If it double backs, line ends. If it almost doubles back, making a turn sharper than 90 degrees, it’s a spur; line also continues in original direction from same point.
• Stop rolling d12s when the line doubles back, or start a fresh line.

You can use d6s instead of d12s, doubling each d6 to get a clock direction, if you prefer, as I suggested in the original Last-Minute Hexcrawl. I made several changes to this one to make it easier to understand.

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Solo Random Wilderness Crawls

I’ve talked a lot about using the hexless wilderness tables to set up a sandbox, before play or even during play. But I’ve only barely talked about what started this whole line of thought: playing solo without a map.

It’s mostly the same basic instructions as other random wilderness crawls: set up a territory and its edges, then set up a homebase and the four routes leading away from it. Don’t set up any other locations until you send your character to one of the four surrounding homebase; it’s strictly “roll as you go.”

Since there is no GM, roll 2d6 for the number of months travel to each edge, should you decide to try to reach those (as if they were locations.) If you reach an edge, roll the rest of the location information on the Locale Table, including routes leading beyond the edge. The land beyond is a new territory with three new edges.

You might need clearer guidelines for how to handle additional details and extras, since you aren’t making decisions as a GM, but as a player.

Territory Details

There aren’t many needed.

• If the elevation drops to sealevel, there is a large body of water on 5+ (1d6).
• Bodies of water in Arctic Climate (7+) have icebergs on 5+ (1d6).
• High Elevation (7+) or moderately High Elevation in cooler climates (4+), has a glacier on 5+ (1d6).

Locale Terrain Details

Wetter:

• Pond or oasis on 5+ (1d6). Otherwise, dig for water.
• Fed by a spring on 5+ (1d6)
• Stream on 5+ (1d6) flows from direction of higher ground, or towards lower ground.

Thicker Vegetation:

• “Impassable” thicket in direction you are heading on 5+ (1d6). Path can be cleared with proper tools and labor.

Mountain:

• Volcano on 5+ (1d6).
• Mountain pass in direction you are heading on 5+ (1d6). Otherwise, that direction is blocked. Only roll this if you investigate the mountain or ask those familiar with the area.

Locale Landmark Details

Every landmark has details that need to be determined, but only roll the obvious details first. Things like concealed dungeon entrances are rolled as you explore the locale.

(You could, of course, use these for non-solo play as well.)

Rubble:

• Pile of broken stone blocks surrounded by 1d6-2 statues, 1d6-2 pillars, 1d6-2 fallen towers (Any roll of 0 or less means no detail of that type.)
• Check each structure or under rubble pile for dungeon entrance/stairs down on 5+ (1d6).

Boulders:

• 1d6 boulders.
• Check each for dungeon entrance under boulder: 5+ (1d6).

Dome:

• Stone feature in most areas, wooden construction on 5+ (1d6).
• Stone dome is natural except on 5+ (1d6).
• Cave at base of natural dome or concealed chamber in constructed dome on 5+ (1d6).
• Secret dungeon entrance/stairs down in cave or chamber on 5+ (1d6).

Tunnel:

• Normally slants down, but in rolling hills or mountain locale, slants up on 5+ (1d6).
• Dungeon entrance at end of tunnel on 5+ (1d6).

Face, Mural, or Anthropomorphic Natural Feature:

• Painted (mural, pictographs) on 5+ (1d6).
• Dungeon entrance behind feature on 5+ (1d6)

Lone Hut:

• Hides stretched on frame on 5+ (1d6). Frame is bone instead of wood on 5+ (1d6).
• Solid huts are wood or appropriate local plant, or stone on 5+ (1d6).
• 1d6-2 Inhabitants. Zero or less means abandoned.
• Concealed dungeon entrance/stairs down on 5+ (1d6)

Settlement:

• Same construction rolls as Lone Hut, above.
• On 5+ (1d6), surrounded by earthen rampart (for hide-covered structures) or wooden palisade/stone wall (for wood/stone structures.)
• 1d6-2 base number of inhabitants. Zero or less means abandoned settlement, otherwise multiply by result on Settlement Table.
• 1d6-2 watchtowers around settlement.
• Hamlet has town hall or other communal structure on 5+ (1d6).
• Village has shrine or mill on 5+ (1d6), roll for each. Always has town hall.
• Towns always have tavern, shrine, mill, and town hall, and possibly a tavern on 5+ (1d6).
• Cities have 1d6-2 inns and 1d6 of each of the others.
• Check each major structure for dungeon entrance/stairs down on 5+ (1d6)

Pit:

• 2d6 x 10 feet deep.
• Hand- and footholds carved into wall on 5+ (1d6).
• Dungeon entrance at bottom of pit on 5+ (1d6).

Keep or Fortress:

• Main keep is wood on 5+ (1d6), otherwise it is stone.
• Wall on 5+ (1d6) of same material.
• 1d6-2 additional towers of same material.
• 1d6-2 heroes run the fortress. If there are no heroes, keep is abandoned. Otherwise, there are 1d6-2 x2 mercenaries to support the heroes, and 1d6-2 x2 servants.
• Dungeon under keep on 5+ (1d6).

Graveyard or Necropolis:

• Use the Settlement Table to get a multiplier, then multiply 1d6 for the number of graves.
• 1d6-2 earthen barrows. On 5+ (1d6), these are stone mausoleums instead. Either one has an obvious entrance, but it is sealed.
• Check each mausoleum or barrow for dungeon entrance/stairs down on 5+ (1d6).

Encounters and Dungeons

This series has been strictly about generating random wilderness when not using a map, since support for that has been sorely lacking. In contrast, pretty much every old school Class and Level Exploration Fantasy game has rules for random encounters, and there are several random dungeon generation systems available. Use the ones you are comfortable with.

A custom encounter system to match the hexless wilderness system is probably unnecessary. I might have some suggestions in a future post.
However, if there’s a demand, I could work on a dungeon generation system designed for pure text without a map. I expect it will be pretty hard, though.

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Condensed Random Wilderness Rules

While I mull over specific changes to the random hexless wilderness process, I thouught I’d post some quick notes.

First, I’m renaming the Climate and Terrain Table to the Territory Table, to shorten the name. This also ties into spiltting terrain units into two kinds of geography: territory and locale. Your sandbox is a territory, and the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style entries are locales. Thinking in these terms means we can simplify the process: your sandbox territory is rolled up one way, and all locales are rolled up another way.

This is important because I was thinking about a condensed set of rules that could be combined with the three tables into a one-page reference sheet. When playing solo or running no-prep mapless wilderness exploration, you wouldn’t want to flip back and forth between pages of rules: you’d want everything you need to be instantly available. You might still need to read through a longer version of the rules to pick up all the nuances and possible interpretations, but the reference sheet would be all you need to jog your memory during play.

Here’s a stab at condensed rules that you could use with random hexless wilderness tables as a reference sheet.

A territory is a broad geographical area. A locale is a specific geographical feature with a landmark of some kind. Territories have four “edges”, North, South, East, and West. Locales have four “routes” in the same direction. Your homebase is your first locale and always includes a settlement of some kind.

1. Roll for Elevation (1d10) and Climate/Biome (1d10) of a territory, then roll for Elevation and Biome of each edge, using the Territory Table.
2. Roll for Terrain (1d10) and Landmark (1d10) in a locale using the Locale Table. If a settlement is involved, roll on the Settlement Table.
3. For your first locale (Homebase,) add another settlement (1d6) on the Settlement Table, then roll 1d6/2 for population.
4. For each route, create another locale as in Step 2, then roll 2d6 for the distance (in days) to that locale. Mountains and canyons/cliffs can block some routes.
5. Optional features (river, dungeon): 5+ (1d6) means it exists. Roll 1d6 for how many boulders, towers, etc. in a landmark, or 1d6-2 ifor extras or inhabitants.

When rolling 2d6 for distance to a locale, a 2 means the population density on the Settlement Table shifts down (towards Wilderness,) while a 12 means it shifts up (towards Urban.) Elevation and Biome mostly stays the same, but some Terrain results on the Locale Table will shift Elevation or Biome or both up or down on the Territory Table.

Note that I changed a couple things. Climate, Biome and Elevation are rolled with a d10, even though I think a d6 is better, because that makes the territory roll parallel the locale roll, making things easier to remember. The quantity roll for things like population, statues in the rubble, and other “extras” relating to a landmark, is changed to 1d6-2 for pure aesthetic reasons: there’s now a 1 in 3 chance that a village is abandoned or there are no statues in ruins, exactly as there is a 1 in 3 chance (5+ on 1d6) that there is a river at the bottom of a canyon or a dungeon at the end of a tunnel. When I get around to publishing a random wilderness document, it will spell out a lot of possibilities, and the rolls to make, but you will basically be able to wing it with just the reference sheet. Any question that can be phrased as:

“How many of these things are here?”

Will be answered one of four ways:

• Exactly one.
• Zero or one (5+ on 1d6)
• 1 to 6
• (1 to 6) - 2

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Example of Hexless Wilderness Creation

To help explain the previous hexless terrain generation post, I’m going to walk through the process of making a hexless setting.

Homebase Format

It’s sort of like an Infocom Interactive Adventure game. In fact, Telecanter suggests numbering the locations, like in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I suggest using three- or four-letter mnemonics for each locale.
An electronic document on a tablet or laptop works great; just add new locations at the end of the list. Start each locale with a hashtag: Camelot would start with #Cam , and Rivendell with #Riv. This makes it easy to search.

In a traditional GM notebook, give each locale its own page: Name and Mnemonic at the top, one-or-two-line summary description below, followed by a list of compass directions and where they lead. This lets you insert more info later.

Page One and Page Two is basic information you need to start with. The rest of the world can be put off until when needed.

Page One

This is the general setting information: name of the region and name of any kingdoms in the region, perhaps with one-sentence summaries, like “Chaotic lich-worshippers”.

General geography goes here, too. I suggested rolling a single d6 and referencing an entire line on the Climate and Terrain Table, but two rolls are better: one for Climate and (linked) Biome, one for Elevation.

• I roll a 4 and a 2. Our climate zone is Temperate, prairie or grasslands, and the elevation is Low.

Optionally, roll all three separately, or use a d10 for one or more, to create really varied geography.

Next is the “distant geography“, the “edges” of the local world. Climate stays the same, but the terrain can be very different, so roll a d10 for each compass direction.

• I roll a 0 for North; it’s a sea with a coastal jungle
• I roll a 3 for East; it’s 500-foot high wooded hills
• I roll a 3 for South; more wooded hills
• I roll a 5 for West; it’s 2,500-foot highlands with thin vegetation or scrub

Optionally, again, you could roll separately for elevation and biome, for more variety.

The Land is almost a bowl, with hills and light woods along the east and south, a mountain range to the west, and the land generally slanted north to the sea.

Distances to the “edge” can be skipped for now, or roll 2d6 for the number of weeks or months of travel it would take to get there.

Page Two

I’m calling miy first real location Homebase, mnemonic “Home”, hashtag #Home. Roll 2d10 on the Locale Table to get what’s different about the local terrain and any landmark.

• I roll 0 and 6, so my Homebase is located on rocky ground, and there’s a (second) settlement less than a day’s travel away.

Roll 1d6 on the Settlement Table for the size of any settlement. If there are two settlements at the same locale, one will be one size smaller. If the larger settlement is abandoned, the smaller one is our homebase.

• I roll 5 for settlement size; it’s a village, population x100.
• I roll 1d6-3 for population and get a 1; population is 0, the village is abandoned.
• Second settlement, our real homebase, is automatically a hamlet (one size lower than village,) population x10.
• I roll 1d6/2 for population and get a 2: ten or so people in the hamlet.
• We could roll 1d6 for every 10 people in the hamlet for the number of buildings, or we could roll 1d6 for the number of people living in the first building, and keep rolling until we have a total of 10 or more inhabitants.

The main village could have been abandoned because of a poisoned water source, a plague, or some kind of curse, but the old standby of “a dungeon did it” will probably be your preferred answer, since the players will be looking for dungeons anyways.

Compass Directions

The simple way to handle what’s nearby is just to roll for each major compass direction, much as you did to fill in the distant geography. However, you use the Locale Table instead of the Climate and Terrain Table, and you roll 2d10, one die for the terrain feature, one for the landmark. You also roll 2d6 for the number of days of travel it would take to get to that landmark.

• I roll a 7 and a 5 for the first direction and a total of 9 on the 2d6 roll. Nine days north of here is a small mountain and a lone hut.
• For the number of people living in the hut, I roll 1d6-3 and get a 2. It’s empty, although no one knows this.

Who would live alone in a hut near (or on) a mountain? Probably some hermit. We’ll call the localed “The Mountain Hermit’s Hut (mnemonic MHerm)” On Page Two, we record the direction, distance, and details.

North 9 days to The Mountain Hermit’s Hut (MHerm)

Page Three will have the details. Or, in a digital file, we’d scroll down and add #MHerm to add the details there.

• I roll a 1 and 4 for the next direction, and a total of 6 on 2d6. Six days east of here is a cliff or chasm with a face/mural feature.

“Cliff/Chasm” is supposed to represent a short, sharp difference in elevation. I opt to change it to a canyon, which means there’s a chance there’s a river or stream in the bottom.

“Face/Mural” is meant to be a single large feature, such as a natural cliff-face that looks like a human face, or rock paintings. If we go with the latter, we have The Painted Canyon, with one wall of the canyon decorated with a long depiction of a mighty battle. Our notes would read:

East 6 days to The Painted Canyon (PCan)

And we would scroll down or add a Page Four for #PCan.

(Since we added a river through the canyon, we could extend it this direction and place the hamlet on one side of the river, the abandoned village on the other side. Optionally, instead of arbitrarily adding the river, we could roll a d10; if the roll is equal or greater than the scale number for the current biome on the Climate and Terrain Table, there’s a river or other water source. Thus, drier locales are less likely to have rivers or springs.)

Exploring Routes

Each compass direction is a route to a new locale, which will also have four routes: one leading back to #Home, and three leading to new locales. Repeat the instructions for Compass Directions for each new locale when needed.

If you need to know the next town in a given direction, but the landmark result isn’t “Settlement”, it’s a waypoint, the first in a chain of landmarks on the way to the town. Just keep rolling for locales in the chain, recording the distance to each in a locale entry, until you get to a settlement.

Optionally, roll 2d6 for distance to the nearest town, and if that roll is less than or equal to the distance to the first landmark in that direction, the distance to the town is in weeks instead of days. This lets you answer the question quickly without needing to roll repeatedly. Example: The Painted Canyon is six days east of Homebase. I want to know how far it is to Easton, the nearest town to the east.

• I roll 2d6 for the distance to Easton and get 5. That is less than 6, so Easton is 5 weeks journey east.

If you are looking for dungeons, every single landmark on the table has the possibility of a dungeon concealed in it, under it, or behind it. You can use a simple 5+ on 1d6 roll to determine if there is a dungeon. This is in addition to any “wilderness encounter” roll specified in your preferred rules.

Some routes run into barriers. If you are heading East, for example, and reach a mountain, you can’t continue East, you must go around the mountain. If you reach a cliff or canyon, a 5+ on 1d6 means you are at the top and can’t cross without climbing; otherwise, you are at the bottom and can only go forward or back, unless you climb.

Terrain Changes While Exploring

In general, don’t roll again on the Climate and Terrain Table. Instead, use it as a reference; the current Elevation shifts up or down when you roll Higher or Lower Ground for a locale, and the current Biome shifts down when you roll Wetter or Thicker Vegetation, with Wetter also adds a spring, stream or pond. If there is a river or stream in the bottom of a canyon, that also shifts the Biome down one, thickening the vegetation in the bottom of the canyon.

When the Elevation rises to the treeline, shift the Biome up to Thin or higher. When Elevation drops, don’t shift Biome back down. Optionally, there’s a chance the Biome will change any time the Elevation changes, based on the scale number of the Biome on the Climate and Terrain Table; roll a d10 and shift the Biome in the same direction as the Elevation change if the result is equal or higher than the scale.

• When heading to Higher Ground from Low Prairie, I roll a 6 on 1d10, which is higher than 4 (for Prairie;) the elevation is now 500 feet and the vegetation is Thin (scrub.)
• When heading from the scrublands down to the lowlands again, I roll a 5, which is equal to the rating for Thin; the vegetation becomes Prairie again.

I have some further ideas on this for a future post, but the next topic will probably be about using this specifically for solo games.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Random Hexless Terrain Tables

A post at the Hill Cantons blog raises the question “are there any random terrain generation methods useful for visually-impaired GMs who are not using hexes, or possibly even a map?” It’s not just of interest to the visually-impaired. What if you want to run a game in a situation where maps would be inconvenient, such as while on the road, or walking?

You could do it with a list of locations connected by routes – roads, rivers, or whatever. The problem is: there are few tools available for random terrain generation without hexes. They are all hex-focused. And most of those make no attempt at sensible geography: no gradual transitions from low swamps to arid highlands.

I’ve been thrashing around for a couple days, designing and re-designing a system for this, but it keeps getting too comlex. It should probably be reserved for a PDF, but in the meantime, I’ll split what I have into a couple posts and try to keep it simple.

It all starts with a re-design of some tables I’ve done before.

(Edit: Some minor corrections, based on later posts. For example, see the notes on the condensed random wilderness rules.)

Territory Table

Scale	Climate	Elevation	Biome
7-9	Arctic	Treeline	V. Arid
6	Subarctic	5k feet	Arid
5	Cool	2.5k ft	Thin/Scrub
4	Temperate	1.2k ft	Prairie
3	Warm	600 feet	Lt. Woods
2	Subtropic	Low	Forest
0-1	Tropic	Sealevel	Jungle

The first column is Latitude/10 and is also used for die rolls for the last two columns, which can be read together or used to cross-reference changes. Wetness tends to increase as you move downhill. Above the treeline, vegetation will be in the Very Arid to Thin range, never thicker.

Locale Table

d10	Terrain Type	Landmark Type
0	Rocky	Rubble
1	Cliff/Canyon	Boulders
2	Wetter	Dome
3	Thicker Plants	Tunnel
4	Flat	Face/Mural
5	Lower Ground	Lone Hut
6	Sandy	Settlement
7	Mountain	Pit
8	Higher Ground	Keep
9	Rolling Hills	Graveyard

• Higher/Lower Ground shifts elevation up or down on the Climate and Terrain Table
• Wetter shifts biome one row down and adds a spring, stream, or pond
• Thicker Vegetation also shifts biome one row down, but water source is ground water/rain
• Mountain adds a small mountain, 2d6 x 100 feet. Terrain at base remains the same.

(Edit: Changed "Chasm" to "Canyon", although chasm is still an acceptable alternative for this result. Also changed the height of mountains to 2d6 x 100 feet, so some "mountains" will  just be large hills. At high elevations, these will be mountain peaks in a mountain range.)

Landmarks are mostly self-explanatory, but:

• roll a d6 for the number of boulders or pits,
• roll 1d6-2 each for statues and pillars in rubble (zero or less means that item is not present,)
• roll 1d6-2 for the occupants of a hut, or inhabitants for a settlement (zero or less means abandoned.)

Settlement Table

1d6 Roll	Settlement	Pop. Modifier
0 or less	Outpost	double
1-3	Hamlet	x10
4-5	Village	x100
6-7	Town	x1000
8+	City	x5000

• Subtract 1 from the roll for Sparse populations, 2 for Wilderness.
• Add 1 to the roll for Dense populations, 2 for Very Dense.

(Edit: I changed the numbers to make hamlets more common than villages. Also made the population density ajustments clearer.)

For the starting location only, if the settlement population indicates an abandoned settlement, there is an additional settlement one size smaller with d6/2 x the population modifier for inhabitants. The first, abandoned settlement will likely have some kind of curse or monster keeping it from being re-occupied.

Process

1. Roll 1d6 and read result off Territory Table. Use entire line, don’t roll individual columns. This is your Homebase.
2. You can roll 1d6 on the Settlement Table for the size of your Homebase, or just pick what you want.
3. You can also roll 1d10 for each column on the Locale Table, if desired, to further describe Homebase.
4. Roll 1d10 on the Territory Table for distant terrain in each of the four major compass directions. Only use the last two columns, but read them together. This is the land features that are very far away (“The sea is to the east, and there’s a mountain range that way.”) You don’t need to set distances unless needed.
5. Any time players ask what is nearby in a given compass direction, roll 1d10 for each column on the Locale Table to find out what’s there, then roll 2d6 for the number of days travel to reach it.
6. Population density starts as Normal. When you roll 2d6 for the distance to a settlement, population density decreases to Sparse or Wilderness on a 2, increases to Dense or Very Dense on a 12.

There will be a second post about optional details.

(See, for example, the walkthrough and elaboration in this post.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Get Lost

Discussion on the forums about wilderness hexcrawls and subhexcrawls prompted another forum thread about getting lost. It seems this is one of those topics that really bothers one group of gamers. Actually, two groups: the storytellers think that a random roll to get lost is "de-protagonizing", while the hardcore superhero types think that it is demeaning for their character to flub a roll when their teammates are able to raise the dead and throw lighting bolts.

First of all: Stop thinking of it as a skill roll. In the original rules, there isn't even an adjustment for high intelligence or having a guide. You don't get lost because you are a failure as a human being; you get lost because of circumstances beyond anyone's control.

Second: It's mostly a matter of messing up your map. The clue is that there is a 1 in 6 chance of getting lost when starting in a river hex. How could you get lost following a river? You can't, but rivers aren't straight; the multiple twists and turns may confuse you about where you are on the map.

Nevertheless,  I would definitely not apply the rule about getting lost to every travel situation. The rule is in a section about traveling through unmapped wilderness. It's not meant for following a road, or traveling n a known area. This is when I would roll:

1. Unknown Territory: Always.
2. Unknown Territory, Heading Towards Landmark: Only when landmark obscured.
3. Known Territory With Guide: Only in unusual circumstances (caught in storm, evading savages.)
4. Known Territory With Ranger: Never.

A ranger only counts if the terrain is the ranger's specialty (not every ranger is woodsy...) Rangers in their specialty terrain shift down the list to the next item, so a prairie ranger leading the party through unknown territory towards a visible mountain peak on the horizon will only roll to get lost when a blizzard strikes; even clouds obscuring the horizon won't thwart the ranger.

On the other hand, magic or a curse shifts up the list at least one item; a ranger at best can only eliminate mild magic.

Wild and Distant Heroes

I had an idea about the distribution of high-level NPCs and villains.

I've said in the past that I like keeping the number of "leveled" characters low, mostly limited to player characters and their henchmen. But on the other hand, I like the way random castles for high-level types feel. Wayne's post a few days ago about the implied setting hidden in the tables and procedures of Underworld & Wilderness Adventures sparked a discussion on the ODD74 forums; one of the topics was the way the castle inhabitants seem to behave like the encounters for questing knights in Arthurian romance.

I think the only "real" leveled characters should be henchmen. Everyone else in the known, settled territories can be the equivalent of a given level, but aren't actually a leveled character. Just set the hit dice and what abilities the character can access, like "4 HD swamp witch can make potions for any spell of 1st or 2nd level."

But how to set the hit dice? For dungeons, just use the dungeon level (or wandering monster level.) For wilderness encounters, wanderers and hermits have 4 HD, leaders have 6 HD, distant castle owners have 10 HD. Halve these numbers for magical types; make patriarchs and heresiarchs halfway between the two. For settled areas, halve these numbers again.

The Density of Hex Keys

Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse has an article on six-mile hexes, mostly about differences in density of things found in hexes, with a suggestion of using different dice sizes for encounter rolls based on the density. I'm not sure why the things he talks about suggest six-mile hexes instead of five-mile hexes, but the irreconcilable religious differences over hex size is one of the reasons why I started talking about two league hexes instead.

Anyway, he brought up examples of how a single hex may actually contain several settlements, not just one. This reminded me of something I read in the First Fantasy Campaign recently: Dave Arneson talks about stocking hexes for wilderness exploration and suggests that each hex should have 0 to 4 possible encounters. It's interesting how we went quickly from that to just one encounter per hex.

I think a lot of the sparseness in classic and OSR products is mostly an artifact of space considerations. There's not much room on a standard map to note the names of more than one settlement per two-league hex, so we fell into the habit of just labeling one per hex, or more often one every few hexes. Recording a unique encounter chart for every hex would take up more space, so we fell into the habit of just one encounter listing per wilderness hex. It might be worthwhile to explore ways of adding back that variety without creating cumbersome map keys.

Terrain Clock Shortcut

While fiddling with text in a massive rewrite of the Last-Minute Hexcrawl rules, I started thinking about the "terrain clock". During terrain generation at each map scale, the type of terrain that criss-crosses the map depends on the clock direction that the terrain line comes from. So, there's a step where you figure out what terrain is associated with each clock direction. For barony-scale and local-scale maps, that information is transferred from higher-scale maps. For the kingdom-scale map, however, this is explicitly rolled for during the off-map terrain step.

What occurred to me was that you could use a shortcut to make this go faster. The six grand hexes adjacent to the central grand hex on the kingdom-scale map correspond to the even-numbered clock directions: 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock, 6 o'clock (South,) 8 o'clock, 10 o'clock, and 12 o'clock (North.) You use even results on the d10 terrain table (reading 0 as 10) as a "standard terrain clock", which means that you only need to roll one die (d10) for the 12 o'clock position.

It lacks the variety of the full roll, but it does guarantee that there will be at least one lowland wet area (swamp or lake) and one area of higher ground.

Brief Last-Minute Hexcrawl Notes

So, while looking at the Last-Minute Hexcrawl to see how I could simplify it and eventually write it up in a stand-alone, step by step document, I came up with a few things.

First, I'm going to split and sort the steps into three groups: terrain, territory (i.e. kingdom and village placement,) and the actual hexcrawl. The way it's set up now, the terrain and territory steps are intermingled and the actual hexcrawl process (filling in more details via rumors or travel) is at the end. That's probably the way you want to do it in practice, when using all three together.

But, of course, you aren't always going to want to use all three together. Sometimes, you're using pre-defined terrain, like the Outdoor Survival map or a real-world map, and you just want to place some fantasy kingdoms on it. Sometimes, you know the area is going to be unsettled, so you won't place any settlements at all. Sometimes, you're going to use both terrain and territory on one scale, but only one on another, for example by modifying real-world terrain at the barony scale, or by only using territories on the barony scale to create lonely outposts of humanity. Besides, it's easier to explain each part in isolation. For example, terrain generation becomes just three steps, which you repeat at every map scale you use.

The other reason to split and sort the steps is more practical. I haven't forgotten my plans to do the ezine. But problems have delayed it: technical problems, which I should have fixed soon, and also "content paralysis". I still haven't quite decided what to put in the ezine. But I also need to do a document for these sandbox prep tools. I *could* just make that document one of the ezines, couldn't I? But that would be rather boring, an ezine that was only about one thing... so instead, I could describe each of the three sections in a separate ezine along with other content that supports the theme.

1. A wilderness-themed issue, containing the terrain generation process, sample wilderness maps, and some other wilderness material, like maybe a cleaned-up version of the hunting and foraging rules, some wild beasts, and the beast-master and hunter classes.
2. A civilization-themed issue, containing the territory placement process, the improv territory and settlement tables with instructions, sample kingdoms and settlements, and other material that fits the theme.
3. An exploration-themed issue, containing the hexcrawl rumors and travel procedures and other related material.
4. ... And maybe an urban-themed issue, depending on whether I feel like splitting it from the civ material.

Obviously, the first two themes are better thought-out and the last two are sketchier, which is why I've put them in that order. I've got plenty of material for the first zine; it mostly just needs re-writing. I have a substantial amount of material for the second issue, but might have to write some monsters and classes that specifically fit that theme. I might have enough material written already for #3, but I have to rummage around to see what would really fit. #4 is vaguer, especially since I could theoretically put the city map material and the bard and necromancer in issue #2. Other tentative issue themes are an underworld-themed issue and a "cosmic" issue based around my "non-planar" material and rewritten extraplanar entities.

Another thing I'm considering are the replacements for some steps in the hexcrawl process. I've settled on a replacement for the terrain-blob procedure, which maybe I'll rename "spot terrain" to make it sound more dignified. The problem with the old procedure was that there wasn't enough guidance for placement of terrain blobs, and the shape interpretation was a little vague. So, instead, let's just go with a simple dice group that looks like this: d12, d8, d4, d10.

• The d12 is the clock direction from the center hex.
• The d8 is the distance, in hexes, from the center hex.
• The d4 is the radius, in hexes, of the spot.
• The d10 is the terrain type.

That's a nice, simple procedure. If you have two colors of each of those dice, you can roll all of them together to place two spots of terrain. The spots are now circular, although overlaps and low-level exploration can make the spots less uniform. You can also adapt this to other needs, like rival territories: d12 and d8+d4 are the direction and distance, d10 is territory size.

I'm not completely married to my replacement for intruding terrain lines, but here goes: roll 5d6 and read them from left to right. Double each die result to get a clock direction: the first d6 tells us which direction the terrain is coming from (and thus which type of terrain is intruding into the grand hex.) The line of terrain extends three heses from that direction towards the center, then the second die tells us which direction the line turns or bends, and so on, in three-hex increments. If the direction doubles back, the line ends there and the rest of the dice are read as a second or possibly a third line. If the direction almost double back (turn is sharper than 90 degrees,) the line doesn't turn at all; instead, there's a spur extending back in that direction for three hexes.

You could, of course, use 5d12 to avoid needing to double the dice results and to allow finer detail, but I picked d6s because (a) people are more likely to have lots of those, and (b) I'm trying to make it do you can roll the spot terrain and intruding terrain simultaneously. However, I need to test this a couple times to see how well it works.

OK, I guess this post wasn't so brief after all.

Last-Minute Hexcrawl: Demo Map III

The third demo map for the Last-Minute Hexcrawl zooms in on the town of Goskold and the area near it. Towns are generally too big for a local scale map, especially if we want to detail nearby points of interest, rather than boring rows of houses.

The demo map thus does not cover the entire two-league hex shown on the close-up to the left. It instead focuses just on the northern edge of the town and some of the countryside to the north, as well as the eastern bank of the river.

What we see are a rocky terrain intrusion, or rather two rocky terrain intrusions superimposed. The larger element is a field of medium boulders, while the smaller element is a huge outcropping of solid rock near the middle. One of the landmarks, a standing stone, coincidentally wound up next to the rock field.

We also see two terrain blobs that turned out to be cliffs or mesas. Since the other landmark roll resulted in a keep, I placed the keep on one of the cliffs, with a ramp leading up to it. Presumably, this was the original settlement established by the baron who cleared this territory. The town later grew up to the south.

I've already mentioned that the local map revealed a few more problems with the procedure. Particularly, the way the terrain modifications get placed.

Simplifying the Last-Minute Hexcrawl

At this point, I should be posting the third demo map for the Last-Minute Hexcrawl (first demo map here, second demo map here.) But there's actually a lot going on in it, and I'm still working on it.

But as I work, I keep noticing things that need changing. Some could in theory just include a few extra notes on special cases that arise, like when two terrains of an identical type overlap. Others, though, are things I want to simplify further. And, surprisingly, there are a lot of these. I'm thinking most of the terrain lines can be simplified way, way down, and the terrain blobs could use some simplification as well. There needs to be more top-level terrain generated, to make things interesting (Demo Map I is kind of bland, even if I had pictured the full area generated instead of a 5-hex diameter circle.) The local terrain map might actually be unnecessary until generating the area around a lair, dungeon entrance, or landmark.

I'm also thinking ahead. I'm planning on collecting all the steps together into a free download, but I've also got an idea for a more detailed version that might wind up as a hobby press product. Already started the new tables for that, but it will take a while, since that will be about 96 to 128 pages. But right now is a good point for people who have been following these posts to warn me about things that seem too confusing vs. things you'd rather see kept the same.

Last-Minute Hexcrawl: Demo Map I

I wanted to do a demo map for the Last-Minute Hexcrawl procedure as it now stands, in the same style as the other demo maps I did when I reviewed other random hex map procedures. I did an entire sample terrain, but since I wanted to do a map with the same number of hexes as the other demos, some of the generated details aren't visible on this demo.

The primary terrain is semi-arid scrub lands in a subtropical, sealevel area, but there's a nice grasslands terrain blob near the center, which dominants this tiny excerpt. To the northwest is a plateau. Arrows point to significant off-map features. The central political territory is a 2-hex diameter principality; it's hard to see at this scale, but there are three road "stubs" heading out from the central town/city. A river cascades off the plateau to the north, passes through the principality, and then turns seaward.

As an experiment, I tried using 6d6 instead of 4d6 for the terrain blobs. The effect isn't visible in this map, but it does provide a little more variety, at the cost of more clutter. I think 4d6 was the proper choice.

I will be drawing the barony scale and local scale maps in a different style. Since those will be a bit larger, they would be extremely tedious to do in AutoREALM using the style I used for the other demo maps.

Last-Minute Hexcrawl, Mark II

This post summarizes a new draft of the Last-Minute Hexcrawl. The core ideas are to simplify the off-map step, prep for the kingdom scale map in a different manner, redefine dice rolls so that the d12 is used consistently for directions and the d10/d20 is used for table look-ups, and arrange it so that terrain and settlements are all handled the same way on each step. I re-did the tables, merging some results:

General/Gradients Table

d10 Roll	Climate	Elevation	Biome/Vegetation
7+	Arctic	Treeline	Very Arid (none)
6	Sub-Arctic	High (above 5k feet)	Arid (sparse)
5	Cool Temperate	Medium	Scrub (thin)
4	Temperate	Medium	Prairie
3	Warm Temperate	Medium	Scattered Woods
2	Sub-Tropical	Low (below 500 feet)	Forest
0-1	Tropical	Sea-Level	Jungle

Blob/Landmark Table

d10 Roll	Terrain Type	Landmark Type
0	Rocky/Rugged	Rubble (d6 pillars)
1	Cliff/Sharp Drop*)	Boulders (1 to 6)
2	Wetter*	Dome
3	Thicker Vegetation	Tunnel
4	Flat*	Face (natural feature
5	Lower Ground	Lone Hut (1d6-3 people)
6	Sandy	Statues (1 to 6)
7	Mountain*	Pit
8	Higher Ground	Keep
9	Gently Rolling*	Graveyard/Necropolis

Settlement Size Table

d6 roll	Barony	Kingdom	Road
1 or less	hamlet	village	outpost
2 to 5	village	town	hamlet
6+	town	city	village

The Prep Procedure:

1. Off-Map Terrain Step: Roll 3d6, 2d12, 2d4, 2d8, and 2d10 simultaneously. Read d6s left to right as base Climate, base Elevation, and base Biome for center of map. Each d12 an elevation gradient: elevation increases in that clock direction and decreases in the opposite direction. The direction towards the lowest elevation is seaward, while the opposite direction is inland. The remaining dice are read together, left to right as the terrain type on the blob/landmark table, starting with the 12 o'clock direction and going clockwise in two hour steps around the edge of the map.
2. Off-Map Politics Step: Roll 2d12 for directions to large, off-map kingdoms. If both dice indicate same direction, there's only one. Roll 2d6 for reaction of each kingdom to home base.
3. Kingdom Scale Terrain Step: Roll 2d12 and 2d8 of different colors, plus 2d10 and 4d6, all simultaneously. d12 and d8 pairs represent off-map terrain from indicated clock direction intruding d8 hexes into the kingdom map. d10s and d6s represent terrain blobs. 
4. Kingdom Scale Rivers/Vegetation Step: Add rivers at this point, one for each High or Mountain terrain point, flowing towards the nearest lower terrain and eventually seaward. Include appropriate vegetation for biome, but increase aridity as you cross mountains moving inland. (Use this as a reference, but I have to swap the bonuses and penalties for the final version.)
5. Kingdom Scale Settlement Step: Roll 2d12, 2d8, 2d20 of different colors, plus 1d10 and 4d6, all simultaneously. The d10 is the size of the home base political unit, in hexes, and also the type: kingdom (5+), principality (2-4), or barony (1.) Each d6 represents the direction of a road heading out of the home base hex for 4 hexes (double the d6 result to get a clock direction.) Each d12 represents the clock direction to a neighboring settlement, with the matching d8 as the distance in hexes from the map edge and the d20 read as a d10 for political size, in hexes.
6. Barony Scale Terrain Step: Same as Step 3, but using terrain from adjacent "grand hexes" transferred from the kingdom map to the barony map. Transfer roads and rivers that run through or near central hex to barony map.
7. Barony Scale Settlements Step: Roll 1d6 of one color and 4d6 of another color for a "settlement blob" and 2d8+2d10+2d12 as two landmarks up to 8 hexes away in the direction indicated. Sketch in roads, connecting them to main roads if possible.
8. Local Scale Terrain Step: Same as Step 3, using terrain from transferred from adjacent hexes on the barony map to define the terrain that can intrude from each direction. Transfer roads and rivers, applying the twisty lines technique if desired.
9. Finishing Touches: Roll 2d8+2d10+2d12 for landmarks on local map. Sketch in layout of home base.

The Play Procedure:
Use Rumors I, Rumors II, and exploration rules, as appropriate. For an extremely quick start-up, you can do just a local map for prep (steps 1 and 2, roll d10 for home base politics and pick appropriate-size settlement as capital, then skip to steps 8 and 9, and finish by providing rumors about all roads leading out of town.)