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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

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.

2 comments:

  1. I must admit I tried to cobble together a document of your progress and got bogged down trying to put together a series of posts that were often links within links. Then I gave up and figured I'd wait until you released the finished product and as such, I haven't played around with the system yet. I do however like the idea of both a simplified version and an expanded complex version.

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    1. Yeah, when writing about it on a blog, it's simpler to link to older material than to write it all over again... but when I assemble temporary PDFs to work with when I'm away from my computer, they get kind of confusing.

      The proposed second version is probably not going to be more complex, but it will be expanded, at least in terms of detail. Some of the same tables are involved, in expanded form, but it's a slightly different approach to using them.

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