More on hexcrawling (part 2)

Part one here.

I got to use my traces/tracks/spoor/monster/lair table for encounters this week and found out it doesnt work for hex crawling. If you recall, I was rolling every four hours and cleared the encounter track every night. That means I need six (remember there are 2 traces) out of six dice to come up as successes. Why didn't I figure this out? Why didn't you tell me! Well, that's what playtesting is for, my players got off easy!
Ok, we have two options here, decrease the DC or shorten the encounter track. Either should work, but which is better? I want an encounter once every few days, let's say twenty five percent chance per day. If I were rolling one d20 I would set a DC 15, as each increment of a d20 is one twentieth of one hundred, or five percent. Looking at anydice 6d20 output, 72+ is about 25% so I'm guessing a DC of 12 without any fancy probability math. Is there a website that will do that for me? To google!

Lowering the DC means I still need 6 successes. Or I could use a range. Probably based off of the encounter DC. DC 19 encounter, 17-18 is track, 15-16 is spoor, natural 20 is lair.

So looking over this today, I came up with a solution I like and will try. Nat 20 is a lair, encounter DC-1 is spoor, -2 is tracks, -3 and -4 are traces. Now to make encounter tables!

I removed the graph side and pelaced it with a rocketbook page (not shown). Here is the revised tracker in google drive.

More hexcrawling

I’m working on a few new systems for my hexcrawling and thought I’d bring you all on the ride! I mention my time pool and thought I’d explain it here. Every time a player does an action that takes between three and ten minutes I drop a die in the time bucket. Once a sixth die is dropped in there or if they do something that would attract unwanted attention, I roll the dice and check for an encounter. The number of successes correlates (ideally) with the encounter difficulty. OK, time to get to work.

I’m trying something new for my random encounters, traces, spoor, and encounters. I’m also counting successes by setting a base DC for an encounter and then subtracting my roll to get a degree of severity. Each degree checks off a box in order of traces, traces, tracks, spoor, lair, and creature, each step revealing more of the possible encounter. I’ve decided to start this because of how I roll encounters (with a time pool) for dungeons. Right now I’ve set DCs for five categories. Let’s take a look.

Desolate	Unsettled	Frontier	Scattered	Dense
19	18	17	16	15

So if the frontier encounter roll is 19, three boxes are checked (17, 18, 19); so traces, traces, and spoor is found. The next encounter check will add to the same set of boxes and will clear after the encounter roll for overnight. Using six mile hexes rolling once for each hex and once for rest will get me five rolls. Of course, thinking more on that, that’s only on easily traveled land. This leads me to think there will never be an encounter on a mountains hex as it takes one day to cross a mountain hex. Also wild encounters may be more prevalent in unsettled territory than in densely populated areas, but encounters in general may not be. So let’s change some things.  I think I will roll encounters based on time and use these descriptors and DCs instead.

Creature population	Dense	Scattered	Desolate
Encounter DC	19	17	15

That makes it so I can roll every four hours bringing the daily total to six encounter rolls two of which being at night. So this seems to work out for monsters, but in civilized areas there will be more encounters with humanoids. We can count the lair as a camp, outpost, or hideout. I’m thinking we can skip some of the smaller steps in the ladder if we want. Say finding some traces and spore next encounter rolling past lair and heading straight to creature. Switching lair and creature in the order is an option too, resetting the boxes after a creature is rolled.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to keep track of now and the way I’m keeping track of time on my encounter worksheet is not working out anymore. Here’s a list of things I need to keep track of:

·         Time

·         Days

·         Encounter level

·         Encounter DC

·         Rounds

·         Torches/Light (1hour/4hours)

Rounds

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Minutes (mark torch or lantern in top)

5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	55	60

Hours (mark torch or lantern in top)

12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11

Days

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Easy! I’m not sure where to put torches at, I’ll leave them in both hours and minutes for now and see where I use it the most. Hours seem like the most for me because I use a time pool to track hours, but that’s only indoors.  Now I’ll just format, print, and laminate it and have exactly what I need. I printed it out with graph paper on the back and presto, a new tracker for my table, hopefully it lasts through testing.

Seven Hexes For Use In Your Campaign

This is a slightly updated version of the one that appears in my Nuggets #1 zine.

I've been creating a new world seven hexagonal spaces at a time. Here is the beginning of that; an area for your player character to explore around a small village. It is written system agnostic and is easily adapted to any edition of old school role playing games. In fact, I used the tables in Zak Smith's Frostbitten and Mutilated for inspiration! The village, Victoria's Tower, was built around and is named after a the wizard's tower at its center. There was an accident and the sun is frozen at dusk for 20 more days (totaling a month). The village and its surrounding hexes are stuck out of time. Anyone can travel back and forth, but no time passes naturally until the end of the month. Spells and other magical effects work normally.

1) Plains And Village

A mage, Victoria, lives in a tower and a village has evolved up around it. Victoria built here because of the magic contained in the burial mounds from a long dead civilization.  The village provides reagents from the sea in exchange for protection from the wizard. Victoria has frozen herself and cannot fix this. Her tower is protected with glyphs of warding and arcane locks. There are about 20 small crates filled with enchanted fish (see 12) here waiting for Victoria to open her door.

2) Plains And Farms

Mostly farms and the location of the ancient burial mounds, these plains feed the village. There is an underground tunnel connecting the mounds to Victoria’s tower. If the twelve mounds are explored, four are connected to the tower and found emptied, four more are silent, and the last four are haunted by undead. One contains a flail, Beast Render, that smells of patchouli and deals +2 damage to beasts.

3) Plains And Lakeshore

A body of water where fishermen catch gillies and stuff them into enchanted scarecrows on the shore. After four days the fish are removed and delivered to the wizard. There is also an island where reagents and medicinal herbs are grown. Barren mothers (unknowingly cause by Victoria’s experimentation with ancient magics) come here with their husbands to tend the area while the men fish.

4) South Tower Hills

A well traveled road has signs of a fight and two dead worgs killed by a piercing weapon. There is a woman nursing her wounds under a small rocky overhang away from the road. Lune, an elven warrior, is armed with 2 short swords. She stands her ground if threatened, but seeks to be left alone. She is bringing the remains of two humans to add to the scarecrows in area 3. Once a month the scarecrows need to be refilled with fresh kills. Only Lune and Victoria know of this dark deed. Lune will not let players know about this unless her life depends on it. She will say that the remains she carries are from her family and she is making a pilgrimage to the lake to bury them at sea.

5) Moonlit Hills

These tree barren hills hide a duchess, Lady Em Winter-Borough, waiting under the moonlight for a clandestine meeting with one of the clerics, she is dying and has a book of secrets to trade for a cure. The players will not recognize Lady Em, as she is from a kingdom far away. She claims to be Dass Whitehall, a noble from a nearby kingdom and is waiting for her slower coach, with her luggage, to catch up. Her coach is hidden here and can be found if players search the hex. If the players search within the coach they can find a diary and a contract that reveals Lady Em’s true identity and the fact that she is dying.  Her family made a pact with a devil that has cursed her with disease. She is looking to find a cure or a loophole in the contract.

6) Ogre Hills

An ogre, Rockgrinder, make his home here in an out of the way cave that players can find if they search this hex well. He hides if seen and has promised a raven (actually Victoria) to keep the town safe. Rockgrinder has a ring that lets him talk to animals and uses them for information. In addition to hunting predators, the raven leads him to food, but has been absent for over a week.

7) Plains Of Dissonance

The wizard’s apprentice stays with a group of traveling men. These are clerics of an uncaring god and they seek to destroy the wizard because she is tampering with ancient magics. The clerics have no names. The apprentice can locate all the wards in the wizard’s tower and is being charmed by the clerics to give them the information. The apprentice has not entered the tower in eleven days for fear of accidentally setting the wards off.

Encounter table

2d6	Encounter
2	Ogre hunting (d4+4 on this table) or traveling home with his kill at night.
3	1d4 clerics (from 16) performing a blood rite
4	Clerics (from 16) foraging for food
5	2d4 boars
6	Bear foraging
7	2d4 Wolves; aggressive at night
8	2d4 elk (day) or two giant owls (night)
9	Swarm of ravens (day) or swarm of bats (night)
10	2d4 giant goats
11	2d4 goblins
12	A hobgoblin and d4 goblins

Richard Fraser has been roleplaying since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons and started with the red box in the eighties. He currently prefers to DM fifth edition D&D, though reads a lot of OSR and PbtA. He currently has podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets and maintains this blog.

Sewer Crawl

I've been working on an abstract means of exploration for dungeon, city, and other small areas I don't feel like mapping as we go at the table. The need comes from wanting to prep less and have more surprises at the table. I've always liked random dungeon generation, in fact I rarely make dungeons by hand without my 1st edition DMG.

1st edition DMG

I decided on hexs, as I am going for the wilderness hex crawl feel, but I could have just as easily gone with squares. Using hex size based on my maps (City of Zobeck) and preference of sub hexes (six per hex) I came up with hexes approximately 144 feet from flat to flat. Exploring a dungeon at my table takes ten minutes for two hundred feet, or a dungeon turn. I abstract that further to say a turn is between 3-10 minutes and keep track of it with six dice I drop into a cup at the table and roll for encounters when it is full or when they make a lot of noise. This abstracts nice to my 144 foot hex assuming it is not a straight corridor, which I am. I broke out my 5e DMG (gasp!) and rolled up a dungeon on a hex that size for a visual sample of what the players are navigating. 

Random sample dungeon hex

I've been using the Tome of Adventure Design for my last six sessions. It has extensive tables, that I am using, for random dungeon creation. Basically my plan was to strip out the corridors and use it as is. Of course, as is is never enough for me, so I started customizing table. The table gives a 50% chance for an empty hex (good average for an average adventure) and a 10% chance for an encounter. Normally I'd roll every so often for encounters, but this has it baked in so every turn (10 minutes, remember?) there is a 1 in 10 chance for an encounter, that's equal to the average hostile wilderness or dungeon area in many supplemental RPGs. In addition to rolling on the table I am using a d6-1 to account for exits from the hex a roll of 0 has a 30% chance (1-2 on a six sider) for a secret door.  After my initial plan, I got to generating a sample map; not only to see how my distribution looked in practice but to show my players should they choose to map. I started off with a d10 table, but I didn't like how often some things (like level changes and large monuments) were coming up. I changed to a d12, but eventually settled on a d20.

OneNote tables

Exit locations are just placed how I like on my sample, but I plan on rolling a d6 for direction at the table. At this time I am not sure how I like it, but am going to generate a sample with a d4-1 for number of exits to see how that looks. I also like the idea of rolling 3 dice every time, what's here (d20), number od exits (d4-1), and exit location or secret door chance (d6). Although typing that out I'd need to roll up to two times more for extra exits.

Too many stairs

Numbers are locations (roll of 1-10) and dots are explored areas. So far its looking pretty good, but I have some more testing to do today and we need to see how it stands up at the table!

Update: I'm liking the d4-1 for exits, but stairs are coming up scarce!