Sub-Hex Crawling Mechanics - Part 2, Minicrawling

This post is a continuation of an earlier look at how to explore inside wilderness hexes. You can read the first two posts in the series here and here, and you can read Tales to Astound!'s commentary on them here and here, respectively.

My goal is to think about how to model adventuring sites that are too big to represent with 10-foot squares and too small to represent with 6-mile hexes. One method is to use a pointcrawl to map the site in terms of landmarks and paths rather than to any kind of scale. The other method, and the one I want to look at today, is just to use a different scale. If 6-mile hexes are too big, then use smaller ones. This technique doesn't really have a distinct name, but I'm calling it "mini-crawling," short for "mini-hex crawling," because the hexes in question are miniature versions of the 6-mile hexagons used for wilderness exploration.

There seem to be relatively few published adventuring products that use this in-between scale. (Certainly far fewer than the ones that use building maps or continent maps.) Among the products that do use an intermediate scale, it's my impression that pointcrawls are more common and more well-known than minicrawls. While writing about pointcrawls, I kind of convinced myself that pointcrawling is an incredibly flexible mapping technique, and that it's probably underused, meaning that the way it models space probably would be appropriate to use more often than it actually is. I don't know that minicrawling is under-used, but I think it does a very good job of facilitating a particular type of play, and I think that understanding that style of play might make both that style and minicrawling more popular.

I think that minicrawl maps are good for facilitating the exploration of an adventuring site - a ruined city would be my archetypal example - where the referee and the players will use randomization procedures to generate the contents of the site at the table during play. The products I'm familiar with that use minicrawl techniques almost all use them in this way, and almost all use them in ruined cities.



First, a counterexample, and then I'll move on to introducing my main examples. In Discourse & Dragons' original Barrowmaze, the graveyard above the dungeon was represented as a not-to-scale illustration that showed the major tombs as landmarks - the kind of map that (I would argue) functions as a pointcrawl even if it doesn't exactly look like one. You can see the original map below in Figure 1. By the time Barrowmaze Complete was released, the old pointmap had been replaced by a new minihexmap, shown in Figure 2 below. The scale is listed as 50 feet per hex (which is awkward, as I discuss below) which means that characters should move about two hexes per turn.

I don't know for certain the reason Greg chose to switch from a pointcrawl to a minicrawl, but I suspect it was to allow more rigorous tracking of movement rates, something that gets a fair bit of attention inside the Barrowmaze dungeon, and in his follow-up product, The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia. This is one thing minicrawls can facilitate. In a relatively open environment, where movement is unrestricted, it would be time consuming to draw all possible paths between the nodes, and labor intensive to calculate all the travel times and distances. What's tedious in a pointmap is trivial on a hexmap. This mapping technique allows Greg to vary the distances between different tombs without handwaving them away (say, a single exploration turn to move between any two adjacent tombs) and without needing to employ the Pythagorean theorem or draw up a transit timetable.

Fig. 1 - Barrowmounds pointcrawl from Barrowmaze I

Fig. 2 - Barrowmounds hexcrawl from Barrowmaze Complete

My first encounter with minicrawling was in Faster Monkey Games' Lesserton & Mor. Mor is an ancient ruined city, and Lesserton is neighboring trade town, whose residents venture into Mor to recover treasure. The judge uses procedures to first determine terrain type (open, building, vegetation, or rubble), then determine whether "weirdness" is present (2-in-10 chance of weirdness, additional 1-in-10 chance of double-weirdness). If the terrain is buildings, the judge then rolls to determine the number of buildings, to determine the number of floors in each building (including a separate roll to check for basements), then checks to see if each building is occupied, and if so, by a wandering monster, by orcs, or by weirdness. There are 22 weirdness options on a d100 table, ranging from the beneficial (food source, water source) to the hazardous (open pit) to the dangerous (ambush zone, monster lair, orcs again) to the truly weird (haunting, wild magic zone). Almost all of these options require an additional roll to determine the specific form of weirdness (which food, what kind of water) and almost all of them allow the possibility of a wandering monster encounter as a result of this additional roll (which is on top of the ones like "monster lair" that guarantee it). Outside of encounters caused by weirdness, wandering monster checks are once an hour, and there are several lists depending on where the monster is encountered. The mini-hexes are organized on the map into "sept-hexes" or "florets" of one central hexagon and its six neighbors, which I'll talk more about below. The city map contains a handful of landmark buildings (the citadel, the palace) and a handful of territories controlled by larger orc gangs. You can see a section of the map in Figure 3 below. I've actually been using Lesserton & Mor as the basis for the ruined city in my occasional Redlands/Rotlands game. You can see my judge's map of the same section in Figure 4.

Fig. 3 - Selection from map of Mor from Lesserton & Mor

Fig. 4 - Selection from my judge's map of Mor

Probably the best know example of minicrawling is Dreams in the Lich House's Black City campaign. The basic idea is that the Black City is a ruined alien city on a far northern island. Every summer, a group of vikings and traders sail up to the site to try to extract any treasures they can find. There's a map of the city and its surrounding environs shown in Figure 5 below. The city is divided roughly in half by a glacier, the northern half is more dangerous than the southern, and the city itself is more dangerous than the surroundings. Hex stocking uses d10 rolls on tables with 12 entries. Add 1 to the roll in the southern half of the city and 2 to the roll in the north. Since the entries are ordered from beneficial to dangerous, exploring outside the city avoids the worst hazards, and exploring in the north leaves no chance of the greatest benefits. When the players enter a hex the judge first rolls for the major feature (excavation, no feature, building, lair). There's a 25% chance of the major feature having a complication, and if not, then roll again for a minor feature (stash, campsite, battle site, ambush, artifact, no feature, hazard, special, predator). In addition to the low entries being beneficial and the high entries being dangerous, the low entries also represent signs of previous (or current) human occupation, while the high entries represent the risk of monster attacks. The mechanic of adding to the roll is an elegant way to model the effect of moving away from humanity and into danger as you move between the regions. When buildings are present the judge first rolls 1d6 to select a geomorph (I presume this means an arrangement of buildings) and then another 1d6 per building to determine the number of floors from a list. There are also 17 named locations with fixed points on the map, some or all of which are dungeon-sized spaces for the players to enter.

Fig. 5 - Black Ciy hexmap from Dreams in the Lich House

Stormlord Publishing's Brimstone Mine megadungeon from Black Powder, Black Magic, volume 4 uses minihexes to create a sprawling ruined mine, rather than a ruined city. The mine had multiple levels, each with their own name, theme, and a level-specific wandering monster. Each level used the same hexmap template, which then got filled in with detail as we explored. You can see what the blank template looks like in Figure 6 below. When the players enter the hex, the judge makes five rolls. (When I played with Carl, he actually had the players make the rolls, something I copied in when I ran my Redlands game. It worked a little better for Carl though, because it was always the same five rolls for him; I kept having to ask for different number of rolls with different dice each time.) The first roll determines the type of passageways in that section of the mine (typically natural tunnels, mine shafts, and corridors, all of different sizes). The second and third rolls are both features selected from a list of 20. Three of these connect to higher or lower levels of the mine; one is a dead end that cuts the hex off from its neighbors (except the one you came in through). There are a couple of "chasm" entries that could also effectively cut the hex off from one or two neighbors while leaving the others open. There are some water sources, geographic features, hazards, and a 1-in-20 chance of encountering a "point of interest," which could be a demon shrine (for which there's a random-generation table) or any other minidungeon the judge wants to slot in. The fourth roll determines complications, about half of which are hazards or encounters with the level's featured monster. Finding dead bodies, live animals, and running into factions mostly rounds out the list. The fifth and final roll is for treasure, everything from mundane equipment, to cash, to gold ore, to magical demon ore, to finished magic items. As a player, it seemed like this procedure moved fairly quickly, and in the time I played, generated enough variety to keep things interesting. (Carl also used a kind of alternating format - our default action was to explore the mine until we found something - like a dead body, or demon ore - that gave us a quest to complete up on the surface. Then we went on our quest, and when that was resolved, we returned to the mines.)

Fig. 6 - Brimstone mine from Black Powder, Black Magic vol. 4

In a comment on this blog, Alistair pointed out two final examples of minicrawling, both in intact cities rather than ruined ones: Blood of Prokopius' series of posts about the city of Portown, and Graphs Papers & Pencils' post about a nameless city that I think of as Portown's sister-city. Portown is shown in Figure 7 below, it's sister-city is in Figure 8. Portown consists of districts like The Port, Olde Town, The Monastery District, and others including the Upper and Lower Guildhalls and Upper and Lower Slums, both named for their relative elevation above sea level. Dave has an encounter chart for each neighborhood. If the players enter the district with no plan in mind, roll 1d6, and on a 6, they're lost. If they go in searching for a particular landmark (every district has 5) roll 1d6 and check against the landmark's chance of encounter. In each district two are relatively easy to find (3-in-6 chance), two are more difficult (2-in-6), and one is rather hidden (1-in-6, no easier to find by searching than it is by wandering). In Robb's unnamed city, there are districts like Common Temples, The Wizard's College, The Artisan's Market, and the Guardhouse. The hexes here are explicitly acknowledged to be of different sizes, although travel through them is as abstract as passing through a section of Brimstone Mine or Flux Space.

Both Portown and its sister-city operate more-or-less like pointcrawls, as I argued all neighborhood-maps of living cities do in my previous post. And both cities are pre-drawn by their creators, not procedurally generated at the table. So why include them as examples here? Because they help point out a way you could use a blank map to procedurally generate a city. Both Cörpathium and Dunnsmouth employ a kind of minigame for the judge to play as they generate each city, but it's a game that might be too slow to play at the table with your players watching. One way to speed it up is to standardize the footprint of each neighborhood on the map; the framework provided by a blank hexmap provides exactly the standardization you need to place a district (and its boundaries, and its neighbors) quickly, so that you can keep on gaming. It's the same advantage in speed that Brimstone has over the Ruins of the Undercity or the Mad Monks of Kwantoom - because it uses a hexmap as its framework, generating Brimstone is faster than generating the sewers under Cryptopolis or the 1001 Pagodas of Doom. Filling in blank hexes with fixed locations is probably always going to be faster than open-ended procedural mapping in open space. If the stocking procedures for filling in the hexes can be a little slow, having the mapping procedures for drawing them in the first place be lightning fast is a good way to make up time.

Fig. 7 - Portown by Blood of Prokopius

Fig. 8 - Nameless city by Graphs, Papers, & Pencils

The examples I've chosen don't present any kind of consensus on time and movement, but looking across them, I think it's possible to recognize some best practices. In the ancient ruined city of Mor, each hex is 120 feet across. This is the same as the characters' regular B/X movement rate in the dungeon, although for some reason, none of the movement rates in the text (for regular movement, fast movement, regular exploration, and exhaustive exploration) correspond to the obvious, elegant, one exploration turn per hex. The regular movement rate corresponds to 120 yards per turn or 360 feet, while the fast movement chart allows for 120 feet per combat turn. The size of the hexes in the Black City isn't specified anywhere I saw, although John Arendt mentions that it takes 8 hours to explore a hex. Depending on his view of the proper relationship between travel time and exploration time, he probably enforces either 1 hour per hex or 8 hours per hex to cross them as well. In the mines under Brimstone, each hex is 1 mile across and takes 2 hours to move through carefully or 1 hour to move through quickly. Carl is also the only author I saw to explicitly address how much travel can be accomplished in a day (something people seem to disagree about for wilderness exploration as well) and he recommends using the average of the characters' Stamina scores to determine the number of hours they can spend exploring before they have to rest (so in practice, 10-12 hours, covering either 5-6 hexes carefully or 10-12 hexes quickly). Portown and its nameless sister-city have variable travel times within each hex, depending on whether the hex represents a full neighborhood, a single block, or even just one building.

My strong recommendation for anyone considering minicrawling would be to use 10-minute hexes (either 120 foot / 120 yard, whichever you prefer for outdoor travel) or 1-hour hexes (either 1 mile, or whatever size seems plausible to you). Both simplify time- and record-keeping enormously, and difficult terrain or intensive searches can still always take longer. (In fact, if we take Portown and its sister-city as an example, the travel time of a hex can be a variable characteristic that's set as part of the proc-gen.)



When I started my Redlands game using Lesserton & Mor, my goal was to play something where I could procedurally generate the terrain right there at the table, in real time as my players explored it. For the most part, it works, but I think ideally the procedures would be more streamlined. Let's start with the terrain. There's no necessary relationship among the terrain types, which means that filling in one sept-hex requires rolling for terrain seven times (and my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest there are something like 16,000 different sept-hexes that can be generated this way). You could reduce seven rolls down to two by first determining the dominant terrain type, and then rolling on a visual menu of sept-hexes for that type (or down to one by making all the hexes in one florets share the same terrain, or by having a single menu of possible sept-hexes). This would reduce the variability of the terrain, but dramatically speed up generation. (This matters because the players should at least be able to see the terrain in the hexes surrounding the one they're currently in; if visibility across hexes weren't a consideration, there wouldn't be much advantage to streamlining.)

The nested nature of a lot of the weirdness rolls also adds time. For example, if the weirdness present is a "Food Source," you next roll 1d6 to choose three different possibilities. Each carries the risk of an encounter, so roll 1d6 again to see if there is an encounter, and if there is one, you either roll 1d100 on the "Water Encounter" table, look up the "Hunting Ground" weirdness and then roll 1d12, or roll 1d100 on the "Daytime" or "Nighttime Encounter" tables. Most encounters are stipulated to be lone individuals, but if you got Orcs or Raiders, you would then go to a subtable, roll to see which group of orcs or raiders you're dealing with, then roll to determine the number of individuals in the group. When rolls "explode" like this, it can take some time to move from seeing that the players have encountered weirdness to figuring out exactly what's going on. Two procedures could streamline this. The first is a "roll all the dice" approach where all the rolls happen simultaneously using different dice types and combining information (rather than nesting it) to create the encounter. The other procedure would be to have more weirdness types, so that each type requires no more than one or two extra rolls to resolve. (So, in this example, "Safe Food Source" and "Food Source with Monster" could be treated as two separate entries on the weirdness table, eliminating the need for an independent monster check.) I made the encounter look-ups sound a little worse than they are. Most encounters come from a single table, where you roll d100, look up that number in a column that corresponds to the location (such as "Excavation Weirdness Site" or "Nighttime Wandering Encounter"), and then follow the row over to the far-right column listing the monster you've encountered. It's a very well-done piece of information design.

Streamlining is not an absolute good, not a goal unto itself. Streamlining is a trade-off, and it comes at the expense of variability. Right now, Lesserton & Mor has a good mix of variety and similarity; it's cohesive without too much sameness, it presents novelty without turning into a funhouse. (Like streamlining, neither variety nor similarity are absolute goods. Both entail trade-offs. To get them, you have to give something else up.) Rolling several dice allows for more permutations of things that can happen (like 16,000 different terrain configurations), while condensing down to fewer rolls reduces that variability, and risks monotony. However, if your goal is to be able to run these procedures at the table, during actual play, then some amount of streamlining is probably necessary. On the whole, the procedures in Lesserton & Mor aren't bad. I've used them at the table, and for the most part, they work fast enough to be used in play. The exploding "Food Source" scenario I outlined above is as extreme example. Most of the time, the mini-hex will be stocked much quicker. Remember, only 30% of hexes even have weirdness, the rest are essentially empty - except for the ones with buildings.

Buildings are a problem though, because they're where the procedure becomes too slow to run at the table. Stocking 1-4 buildings with 1-5 floors each (including basements and sub-basements) with monsters, treasure, and weirdness (many of which, you may recall, also include monsters) just takes too long to be feasible during play. When my random terrain rolls revealed a cluster of mini-hexes that all contained buildings near one another, I rolled up their contents between sessions, and it proved to be a good decision, because I never could have done it fast enough to keep the game going. Again, I would think that visual menus, perhaps one to select the arrangement of buildings, and a second to select the layout of each building, would be a quick way to build these clusters without giving up so much variability that they become boring. Mor would probably also benefit from a few setpiece locations like the Black City has - pre-drawn dungeons that go where the old citadel or old palace were on the map.

For thinking about streamlining, it might be instructive to look at how Faster Monkey Games updated their procedures for their next random exploration hexcrawl, In the Shadow of Mount Rotten. The map here is divided up into 8 regions, and each region is presumed to have basically the same terrain throughout. The table for adding occupants to each hex is even better than the one in Lesserton & Mor. Here each region gets a column; the regions are grouped based on harshness; coldness and dryness are indicated through background shading and italics; the terrain is mentioned at the top of the list; and then you simply read down your column to see the result of your d20 roll. Each occupant is a type of tribe, possibly with a herd, possibly living in a ruin or cave, and the number of hexes the tribe takes up is shown as well. This is a great idea, because it means that when you roll to find (for example) "Foot Goblin Emu Herders with Caves (2)", you not only know the contents of the hex you just rolled, you also know the contents of a neighboring hex. It's worth pointing out that the mix of tribe-types, herds, and caves/ruins could have been handled by first rolling occupants, then rolling to check if the occupants have herds, then rolling to see which herd type, then rolling again to see if there are structures, and finally rolling to check the structure type. Instead, those many rolls have been condensed down to one. Any roll of 20 produces an "oddity," which is like the "weirdness" of Lesserton & Mor, but with only 8 major options (although most of these have sub-options as well). In practice, fewer than 5% of the hexes will have oddities, since most of the occupied hexes have tribes that spread over 2-8 hexes. The random encounter tables also have only 20 entries, for day and night, again organized by region. It's a mix of wild animals, herd animals (like emu and reindeer), patrols and raiding parties, natural phenomena (fog, bushes, etc), and a chance (in most regions, only at night) of a spirit encounter, which feels like a great inclusion. In sum, we have terrain organized by regions, hex content listings that include occupants and structures simultaneously (and that typically fill multiple neighboring hexes), and encounter tables that combine mundane events, supernatural visitations, and regular wandering monsters. The inclusion of caves and ruins is also good, since it allows you to pull in a pre-generated structure (the random procedures here still seem a little slow for use at the table) and place it at a random spot on the map.

One thing, I think, that accounts for the difference between Lesserton & Mor and In the Shadow of Mount Rotten (besides applying lessons learned from one to the writing of the other) is that visiting ancient Mor is mostly about exploration, while visiting the Rotlands is much more about interacting with factions. There are factions in Mor. A few orc gangs and their turf are shown on the starting map (although they're distant from the player's start-point) and players can randomly encounter small groups of wandering orc (typically numbering in the 3-12 range) or larger orc clans (numbering 40-160). There's not much advice for assigning names or personalities to orc groups however. Most of the faction attention is given to the stores, NPCs, and power groups back in the "home base" in Lesserton. Lesserton & Mor needs more variability in its exploration tables, because pure exploration is doing the heavy lifting in terms of defining the experience of play. In the Shadow of Mount Rotten has much more information for running factions. Because faction play is much more important in the Rotlands, less emphasis can be put on pure exploration, and so it matters a little less how much variability there is in the exploration outcomes.

In the Shadow of Mount Rotten has ten different types of tribes - and depending on the judge's preference, there could be five species-based factions, ten tribe-type-based factions, or each tribe could be a faction unto itself. Each tribe-type has a standard number of members, complete with a list of the number of members of each type (each Foot Goblin tribe, for example, has 302 goblins, divided into 150 young, 75 tribe-members, 60 warriors, 12 elite-warriors, and so on). It's fine that these are standardized, because different tribes (even of the same tribe-type) are going to be distinguished by their name, their personality, and whatever's preoccupying them at the moment - and not by having different statistics (which would be largely invisible to the players anyway). Each tribe-type gets about a half-page write-up that includes a bolded sentence describing their key behaviors, a short paragraph with tips for how the judge should roleplay them, information about their technology and lifestyle, and the population listing described above. There are lists of suggested names for each kind of tribe, information about how the tribe-types interact, and even a random event generator to see what's going on inside each tribe at the time the players encounter it. Most of the mechanical information is standardized by tribe-type, which reduces variability - but I would argue that the variation that's lost this way is variation that adds nothing to the player's experience of the game, despite imposing a heavy cost on the judge to create it. It's variability that arguably should be removed, for the sake of streamlining, in order to make things run fast enough to run them at the table.

I previously mentioned "roll-all-the-dice" tables and "visual menus" as two ways to speed up procedural generation. Figure 9 below is a good example from Sine Nomine Publishing's free The Sandbox zine, in this case actually rolling up an abandoned building at one go. (The one-page setups for stocking random adventuring sites in Sine Nomine's Red Tide and Monsters & Manuals' Yoon-Suin are also good examples of relatively compact procedures, although both are intended to be used outside of play, and so lean toward the flexible and inspirational, rather than offering one-to-one mapping of room contents.) Unofficial Games suggests "seed charts" for stocking hexes. Roll 1d8 for a sub-location, 1d6 for an encounter, and 1d4 for weirdness, simultaneously. If you get triples (1-4) or doubles (5-6), the max value (4, 6, 8), or a run (1, 2, 3, etc) then there's a special extra result. Because of the way Zzarchov generates these special results, his method does require a bit of extra care in ordering the subtables (for example, you have to put three interesting things together in the 1 value to inspire the "special"). Zzarchov's table for generating random books suggests another technique, in line with John Arendt's "roll 1d10 on a 12 item table" approach described above: on a table with 20 options, roll either 3d6 in the "more common" area and 1d20 in the "more weird" area. The "common" results will mostly cluster around 9-12, while the "weird" results will be all over, and will include 4 options that the 3d6 roll can never produce. (As an aside, Zzarchov also has ideas for running an Iron Age campaign that would be worth reading for anyone considering using In the Shadow of Mount Rotten. Among his ideas, all tribes share a common basis of bronze-age technology, and each tribe gets one random piece of iron-age technology - except the players' tribes, who can choose instead of rolling.)

By "visual menu," I mean something like the table for selecting a random room shown in Figure 10 below. The table is something Frivology made by following the Dellorfano Protocols for random room design. (Dyson's Dodecahedron shows how you can assemble rooms like this into a building.) Lizard Man Diaries' recent table for selecting a random cave, showing in Figure 11 below, is another good example of the visual menu approach.

Fig. 9 - "Roll all the dice" table from Sine Nomine's The Sandbox, vol. 1

Fig. 10 - Visual menu of dungeon rooms from Frivology

Fig. 11 - Visual menu of caves from Lizard Man Diaries

 

The procedures for generating chambers in the Brimstone mines are already quite streamlined. The rhythm of five pre-set rolls made by the same players as they enter each new hex makes the procedures predictable and turns rolling the dice for proc-gen into part of the social experience of playing the game together. It's not a coincidence that I got much more interested in this style of play after being in Carl's game; it's because I had fun. There's not even a separate roll for monsters, they're just there on the "Complications" table alongside typical mining disasters like bad air and ceiling collapses. This is something you could bring to other proc-gen minicrawls. A set number of rolls with predetermined dice happening every time the players enter a new hex is something that, in principle, any minicrawl could take advantage of. If any additional rolls need to be made beyond those, then the referee could simply make those quickly behind the scenes. (I think Carl was actually doing this some. If the "complication" was a primeval ooze, he'd need to roll on DCC's random tables for generating one. If the feature was a faction-controlled mine entrance, or the complication was a faction encounter, he'd need to roll on his own list of factions to determine which one. But those rolls happened out of our sight, and disrupted the rhythm of collective creation that he established.) If most of the rolls are the same every time, it makes a little more room for some quick additional rolls to be nested inside them occasionally. The cost of the Brimstone-style is that these tables have some of the least variability of any of the minicrawls I've considered. Brimstone itself also has about the smallest footprint, and thus needs less variety to avoid too-much-repetition within it enclosed space. Lesserton & Mor and In the Shadow of Mount Rotten have much more variability in their tables, and much (much!) larger maps to fill up, where repetition would be more apparent.

Like I did for Faster Monkey Games, I think there's value to looking at the publisher's wilderness hexcrawl to mine for ideas for minicrawling. Stormlord Publishing also put out The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad, an island hexcrawl. Each hex on the island has a keyed location (mostly villages, shrines, lairs, wilderness sites that could be run as pointcrawls or minicrawls if desired, and a few dungeon-type locations) - and each hex also uses the random encounter tables for procedural generation. Whenever players enter a hex, there's a chance of encountering nothing by the keyed location, a chance for an encounter (mostly with monsters, but also with mundane animals, bad weather, and island hazards, with separate lists for each terrain type), and a chance to find a tomb. Three fully-keyed tombs (dungeons) are included as part of the adventure, and the more the players explore, the more chance they have to find others, that will need to be created by the judge. The adventure also includes a single random table for generating treasure whenever its needed. Some treasures of the island can be found in unlimited quantities, others have check-boxes for the judge to mark off, and once they're all checked, no more will be found.

While the whole point of proc-gen play is not to have every hex pre-keyed, there are still some lessons we can take from The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad. First, even proc-gen play might benefit from having some pre-keyed encounters. Like the landmark locations in the Black City, the villages and other sites of Zadabad provide known locations (both in the sense that you know what they are, and in the sense that you know where they are) that the players can use as goals to reach, as a change of pace from regular exploration, even just as landmarks to help them navigate. Second, in both Brimstone and Zadabad, there's a chance to run into a minidungeon, and I think this is a good idea. The buildings in ancient Mor end up being like mini-mini dungeons, like the barrowmounds above the Barrowmaze, and the lairs in Zadabad. Those are good and important too, but sometimes you need something bigger than a 1-6 room mini-mini. Having the chance to run into specific types of minidungeons (caves and ruins in the Rotlands, tombs in Zadabad) means that the judge can draw up a couple of each type (or find some that are pre-drawn) and then pull one out (at random, even) when the players encounter that type of 6-18 room minidungeon. Third, I think there's a real advantage to the treasure tables in Brimstone and Zadabad. There's a significant time savings from having the table right there on-hand, rather than having to flip from the monster section of the B/X books over to the treasure section, and then roll up maybe five or six kinds of treasure while the players are waiting to hear what they found. Having the treasure table built-in also means that the treasure helps communicate the feel of the setting. The treasure you're going to find in Mor or in the Rotlands is kind of the same, because it comes from the same B/X treasure tables. The treasure in Brimstone is quite different from the treasure in Zadabad, because they're drawing on two different lists with two different currencies, implied levels of technology, and divisions between cash and objects. Creating a specific treasure list, rather than drawing on a universal one, presents some advantages.



The final topic I want to address here is the technology for drawing and running mini-hex-maps. The "hexnology", if you will. What I'm about to say isn't strictly necessary, because you can just draw a standard hexmap for your minicrawl. However, there's also something else you can do. You can have one map with "large" hexes that gives you the ability to take in the entire adventuring site at a glance on one page. You can then have other maps that divide up these "large" hexes into some number of "small" hexes for the players to interact with. Besides the advantage of being able to take the summary view, when the players are passing through already-explored territory, you the judge can stay up at the level of the "large-hex" map, and only descend down to the "small-hex" map when they start exploring or otherwise interacting with their environment. (I may be wrong, but I think this is the intention in Lesserton & Mor. The 360 feet per turn movement rate I was criticizing earlier would match with moving through that map's "large" hexes at a rate of one per turn.)

So if you like this idea, and haven't already decided it's more trouble than it's worth, then the question becomes "how many small hexes should go inside a large hex?" As I described before, Lesserton & Mor's answer is 7, an arrangement where a single hexagon is surrounded by its six neighbors, forming a shape we might call a "sept-hex" or a floret. This forms a structure that's 3 hexes (360 feet) wide. You can see a simple floret in Figure 12 below, and an example of a sept-hex from Mor in action in Figure 13.

Fig. 12 - Sept-hex, or Floret

Fig. 13 - Sept-hex from Lesserton & Mor

There's problem with using this arrangement though, if you don't want to map every sept-hex individually, if instead you want to create a map at the "small-hex" level of detail. The problem is that the florets don't stack together in neat vertical columns. Individual hexes do stack together neatly. So if you try to have one large-scale map where each floret is depicted just as a single hex, and one small-scale map where the florets are depicted as seven small hexes, the two maps won't align. You can see the problem illustrated in Figure 14 below. Frankly, even if you just like having legible north-south alignment among your hexes, this arrangement might feel a little dissatisfying.

I've come up with an alternative arrangement, shown in Figure 15, that uses 16 hexes instead of 7. It can sub in for a single hex while maintaining the right arrangement, it stacks vertically, with two on either side, just as a single hexagon does. I'm not sure what to call this arrangement. Some simple searching for 16-word analogs to "dodeca-" for 12 or "quadrant" and "octant" for 4-part and 8-part turned up the possibilities "sexdecahedron", "sexdecagon", "sexdeca-hex", and "sedeci-hex".

Fig. 14 - Arrangement of sept-hexes illustrating non-vertical alignment

Fig. 15 - Arrangement of sexdeca-hexes illustrating correct vertical alignment

 

What is this shape? Believe it or not, it's a hexagon. I drew a large hex, 5 small hexes across. Then, instead of allowing any small hexes to be cut in half, I moved them, so instead of 6 half-hexes, you get 3 full and 3 empty. You can see how this works in Figure 16 below.

Fig. 16 - Illustration demonstrating the interchangeability of hexagon and sexdeca-hex

I'm not the only one who's thought about how to subdivide larger hexes. d4 Caltrops has the idea to divide the hex into 12 diamonds, as shown in Figure 17 below. Necropraxis has a different idea for divvying up hexes, this time by using squared laid out like bricks (instead of as a grid), a layout that he notes also mirrors the behavior of hexes. You can see that in Figure 18.

Fig. 17 - Division of hexagon into diamonds by d4 Caltrops

Fig. 18 - Replacement of hexagon with square bricks by Necropraxis

Session Report - Into the Redlands - 8 July 2017

Characters
Paralee (elven enchanter 1) played by Julia

Hirelings
Tony (human 0)
Vinnie (human fighter 1)



In the second week of spring, while her friend Emile ventured into the ruined city of Mor with the elves Fabio and Kierhan, Paralee decided to return to the Imperial graveyard in the hope of finding more money to help pay for her friend Vodka's medical care. Vodka Gimli had given Paralee the scroll of ancient writings she found in a burial mound, and Paralee had managed to translate the writings, discovering that they contained instructions for spells to cast fire from her hands, to cast electricity from her hands, and to create a magical light.

Remembering the skeletons that had nearly murdered her friend, Paralee decided to hire a bodyguard to accompany her into the graveyard. Paralee had been blessed from birth with a charming and magnetic personality, and since learning elven magic, had only become more beautiful and captivating. She had no trouble at all recruiting Tony, and convincing him to join her. They spent the evening listening for rumors and agreed to meet up in the morning. Paralee heard that altars found in the catacombs could be very dangerous. Tony encouraged her to take this to heart, because everything he heard suggested that all the fantastical stories people told about the catacombs, all of them were true.

In the morning, the pair set out along the Path of Sorrows, arriving at the old graveyard around midday. Paralee decided to lead them up the western edge of the yard. At the first burial mound they passed, Paralee thought of her sick friend, thought of her need for money, and decided she couldn't afford to pass up any opportunity that might help. Tony spent an hour digging away the entrance to the mound, revealing another hollowed-out hill like Paralee saw before. Inside were two stone slabs with a skeleton lying on each. The skeletons were dressed in rags, each with a bowl by its head and a jar at its feet. Paralee and Tony cautiously entered the room. Thinking again of her friend, Paralee took the coins from each bowl (50 gold pieces all) and then moved to inspect the clay vessels. The skeletons remained immobile. Paralee inspected the clay jars and saw that they were Imperial-era amphorae, red clay bottles decorated with black painted figures, a level of craftsmanship that no one in Lesserton could duplicate. Knowing that the old pottery would be fragile, Paralee tore pages from her journal to wrap them carefully, then tucked them into her backpack.

Feeling fortunate, Paralee and Tony exited the mound and continued walking north along the edge of the yard. They passed several more mounds until they came to the marsh, then turned inward toward the center of the graveyard. As they walked, three figures came toward them out of the swamp. They looked like preserved corpses, and though their movements were clumsy, they seemed to walk as quickly as anyone alive. Tony was alarmed. "Boss, what should we do? I don't like the look of these guys!" Paralee agreed. "Run!" They turned and sprinted toward the center of the yard, slowing to a jog after their initial burst of speed, but intent to lose the walking corpses. After some time, they came to an area that was thick with mounds, although they no longer hand any idea exactly where they were within the yard. They could see burial mounds surrounding them thick in every direction, including one that seemed to have collapsed long ago. Paralee picked one near the fallen mound, and Tony began digging again.

After an hour of digging, Tony had cleared away the grass and soil from in front of a stone door sealing the entrance to the mound. Some deft sledge hammering reduced the stone door to rubble. "Eh, badda-bing badda-boom!" Behind the stone door, instead of a single burial chamber like she'd seen before, Paralee instead found stairs leading underground into a crypt. She insisted on going first, telling Tony to guard the door. Feeling rather winded, Tony was happy to give Paralee some time to explore. At the bottom of the stairs, she emerged into a chamber with piles of rubble where the stone ceiling tiles had fallen away, along with some of the earth and dirt they were supposed to hold up. She saw two doors leading out of the entry chamber, as well as a hall branching off to one side. Paralee first checked one room to find a stone sarcophagus, then another where she saw burial niches cut into the walls. She went down the hall to check the third and found another stone sarcophagus, this one in a circular room, surrounded by four marble statues of beautiful women, serving as pillars to hold the ceiling up. Paralee decided this must be the most important chamber, and called to Tony to come down. Together, they began pushing the lid from the sarcophagus, revealing a skeleton dressed in the withered rags of Imperial garb, and a velvet sack that seemed miraculously preserved, as though it had been buried only yesterday. Unfortunately, while they attention was on the tomb, three of the statues came to life. Two of the statues beat Tony to death with their heavy arms, and with her guard down, the third attacked Paralee, but barely missed as she ducked backwards out of the way. Paralee heard the tomb rumble and felt the ground shake, and she ran out into the main room where more of the ceiling was collapsing. She tried to shield her head from more falling tiles as she ran, taking a few nasty cuts to her cheeks and forearms, but making it out of the crypt alive. Either because she had left or because of the collapse, the statues didn't follow, and Paralee, ragged and bloody, walked back to town alone to recover.

The next morning, Paralee took stock of her gains, and found that the amphorae had somehow survived the collapse, no doubt protected by their careful wrapping in paper. She went into the Lesserton market, and found a buyer for the amphorae at the Platonic Order. He initially offered her 50 gold pieces for the pair, but Paralee poured on her charm, and talked him up to 75. She then went to where her friend Vodka Gimli was on bedrest and spent the rest of the day, and all of the next, convalescing beside her. Then, feeling recovered, Paralee went to buy her own shovel and hammer, and sought out another hireling to accompany her. Still feeling guilty about Tony's death, Paralee looked this time for a soldier, a man who could defend himself as well as her. She found Vinnie, a young tough wearing beat-up old Imperial armor and carrying an ancient spear, and hired him to join her the next morning. Both spent the evening asking about the catacombs. Paralee heard that an evil wizard once used the catacombs as his base of operations, and might be living down there still. Vinnie heard that orkin had come across the mountains from the Redlands and were now living amongst the burial mounds, just as they did in the ruins of Imperial Mor.

Together, Paralee and Vinnie made the four-hour march to the graveyard, and this time Paralee decided to follow the southern edge along the marshlands, heading in the same direction she and her friends had ventured the week before. They stopped at the first mound they passed, one Paralee thought her friends had chosen to bypass before, and she and Vinnie spent the hour digging away at the entrance. They found another set of stairs leading down and descended together, although Paralee stopped short on the bottom step, inspecting the lone room carefully before setting foot inside the crypt proper. She saw four stone sarcophagi, and there, on the ceiling, a half dozen giant centipedes clinging to the tiles. As she and Vinnie watched, the centipedes dropped to the floor and began scurrying toward them. Paralee knew that similar insects in the woods were often poisonous, and warned Vinnie. "Plus, they got us outnumbered, boss!" They ran back up the steps, and dashed deeper into the graveyard, still hugging the marshy perimeter.

After a time they stopped, and Paralee thought they might be somewhere near the first tomb she and her friends had robbed together. She saw many more burial mounds in the grassy land just past the marsh, and one mound tucked back into the swampy area of the yard. She and Vinnie dug again, the wet soil practically sloughing away from the hill as they worked. They uncovered another set of stairs leading down, and Paralee once again insisted on going first. She went down one staircase, only to find another, and followed it down to a surprisingly dry and crisp antechamber. Paralee thought this was odd, since the ground above was so wet. Before them stood the remains of a marble statue, but it was so pitted and pocked that she couldn't decipher its original shape. She saw a door on the current level, and another set of stairs leading down. At the bottom of those stairs, Paralee came to another door, which she entered, revealing a large chamber, its sides lined with burial niches, its far wall dominated by a giant statue of a skull-headed figure of death, standing in a triumphant, conquering pose. Fearing that this statue too might spring to life, Paralee hurried back up the stairs, and checked the only other door in the crypt.
 
Unfortunately, as she entered the room, the body of a dead warrior sprang toward her, and as its hand touched her she saw herself as a child, learning to use a bow, all her happy memories of elven archery, and then her eyes clouded over with cataracts, and she knew she would never be able to aim so well again. She began making a fighting retreat to avoid opening herself up to another attack. Vinnie lept down the stairs with his shield to protect her. "Don't worry boss, I'll save you!" Vinnie swung at the creature with his short sword, but was unable to make contact with the supernatural foe. Paralee told Vinnie to get out, too. "I'll cover you, boss! Don't wait for me! You get to the top of those stairs, just run!" Unfortunately, during his own fighting retreat, Vinnie too was touched by the monster, and saw his life pass before his eyes, his childhood in Lesserton, his time in the militia, and he collapsed at the top of the stairs. Paralee pulled him the rest of the way to the surface, and supported him as they limped as quickly as they could away from the death right behind them.

Some distance away, Vinnie collapsed again. Paralee thought they were very near the mound she'd entered the week before, but couldn't be sure. Vinnie asked for some water and some time to catch his breath. They sat for an hour, then began their journey back to town. On the way, they passed the first tomb they'd opened before. The centipedes were no longer outside, and when Paralee checked, they weren't inside the tomb anymore either. Remembering her friend in need, and not wanting to come away with nothing to show for her troubles, Paralee entered the tomb, Vinnie following close behind. Together, they pushed open the largest of the sarcophagi, and found a skeleton, dressed in rags, wearing a golden ring and a jeweled necklace. Feeling a little bolder, they checked the second, and found another skeleton, this one wearing the remains of a dress, a golden ring, a gold tiara, and a silver bracelet. The final two sarcophagi were slightly smaller, the tombs perhaps of very young adults. In one, they found the skeleton of a young woman buried with her silver ring and ivory comb. In the other, a young man, buried with his ivory-handled dagger. Paralee collected all these goods, and then she and Vinnie returned to town.

Arriving around nightfall, Vinnie asked for his share of their treasure, requesting both gold rings and the dagger. Paralee thought of the dangers they'd faced, the dangers that were likely still to come for her, and said that she needed the dagger, but offered to pay off the rest of his share in cash, which he accepted. "You're a tough lady, boss. I hope to never see no death like that again, but if you need muscle on another job, you know where to find me." Knowing that the jewelry was almost as good as coinage for most transactions, Paralee opted to keep her haul in its current form before finding a bed to collapse. She knew she'd need a least a week to recover from her ordeal, but she had come through it richer, and closer to paying for Vodka Gimli's medical care.



Gains
50 gold coins
2 amphorae (sold for 75 gp)
2 gold rings
1 gold tiara
1 jeweled necklace
1 silver bracelet
1 silver ring
1 ivory comb
1 ivory-handled dagger

Losses
Tony the guard

Kills
none

XP
14 for encountering the zombies
125 for the gold coins and amphorae
250 for encountering the caryatid columns
(Since Tony died, the first venture's 389 XP all goes all Paralee.)

3 for encountering the centipedes
110 for fighting the wight
255 for rings, tiara, necklace, comb, and dagger
(In the second venture, the experience is divided into 1½ shares, with Paralee getting 1 and Vinnie getting ½. Of the 368 total, she gets 245.)



Postmortem
(Only one of my players turned out to be available for this session, because the others were sick or out of town or had family obligations, but she and I headed to a local bar and had a good time. Since there was no overlap in the characters for this session and the one before, I decided that they took place at the same time, during week 2 of the campaign. Aside from using the weeks to track how long the characters on bedrest are laid up for, I have no immediate plans to make use of the passage of time, but maybe some ideas will come to me later.)

(I liked that so many of Julia's decisions for Paralee were motivated by her wanting to find money to pay for Vodka Gimli's medical care. Having some kind of in-game rationale for the risks she was taking pushed her to be a bit more bold in taking chances to find treasure. Her other clear motivation, of course, was staying alive, which again provided clear in-game reasons to help her decide when to run from combat, and when the leave the graveyard entirely.)

(I realized as I was looking something up mid-session that I'd been making the digging too easy. The author of Barrowmaze suggests that it's supposed to take between 4-12 hours, determined randomly of course, and can be decreased down to 2 if you have a whole team of workers digging together. This is probably much more realistic than what I've been doing, but honestly, I'm not sure it's the kind of game I want to run right now. Making my players hire entire work crews, or spend between half-a-day and a-day-and-a-half waiting to enter a single burial mound, is not really how I want this particular campaign to go. I'm just not interested in running something that hardcore right now, especially not with mostly new players. So for this session least, I'm stuck with 1 hour of digging - and a wandering monster check - to get into each covered mound. Actually, Paralee getting a shovel of her own has given me the idea that perhaps it should be 2 or 3 hours for a single person to dig, but 1 hour if there are two or more diggers. This would also be consistent with the Barrowmaze instructions for breaking down bricked-over doorways and the stone slabs covering burial entrances.)

(I had to look up the chase rules for the first time this session, and they're pretty favorable to a small group fleeing from a larger one. In general, I think that Paralee's player made the right decision to run away each time she did. She and her hirelings might have been able to defeat the zombies, and probably could have beaten the centipedes - although the poison from the centipede's bites would have made it much harder to escape from anything else - but the caryatid columns and the wight certainly would have killed the 1st level spellcaster. The caryatids, in fact, would probably still have had the upper hand, even if Paralee had brought an army of 15 to fight on her behalf. Considering that the author of Barrowmaze has said that he thinks OSR should stand for "oh shit, run!" I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that Paralee kept ending up in so much danger. Really, in a game where it's possible to find yourself so badly overmatched, learning when to run is an important player skill. At the table, I wasn't able to find any advice in my rulebooks for awarding experience for monsters that are encountered but not fought. I decided to give half the XP for facing a single member of the group for the ones Paralee ran away from immediately, and full XP for escaping after she was already engaged, as she did for the wight.)

(Speaking of the wight, I'm not really a fan of level drain as a mechanic. Maybe I'm too soft as a referee; I'm certainly not killing off many player characters yet. As written, one touch from the wight should have killed Paralee and Vinnie, no save allowed, and they should have both risen as wights themselves after they fell. Instead, I gave them each a saving throw vs death. Paralee failed hers and had to roll on the ACKS Mortal Wounds table. Her result said partial blindness, and I decided to interpret that as cataracts rather than as some kind of violent disfigurement. With her elven glamour, it's possible no one else will ever tell that Paralee can no longer see over distances. Vinnie made his save - which is good news for Lesserton, which will not be terrorized by an undead soldier boy - and so felt he'd barely survived a brush with death. In retrospect, the ACKS resurrection side-effect table might also make for a good substitute for level drain if the issue ever comes up again.)

(All in all, I felt like this was a good session. Both times Paralee chose to retreat to Lesserton made perfect sense. The first time, she was down to 1 hp and her hireling was dead; the second time they'd both just barely survived meeting a wight. In general, the dice were pretty good to her. She only got one wandering monster the whole night; a ceiling collapsed but her amphorae survived - although that was partially due to her protecting them; and she made all her rolls to escape from pursuit. Plus she got the group's first big score thanks to the family tomb and its four sarcophagi. Between her loot and the monsters she faced, Paralee just jumped way out in front of her friends in terms of XP. Unfortunately, due to her mortal wound, she'll have to sit out week 3, although she can rejoin the adventuring life in week 4 - and at the end of week 4, Vodka Gimli will have to make a save vs death to avoid dying of complications from her injury, unless she's received medical care before then.)

(At the bar where we were playing, the bartender serving us told us that she and a coworker were into the recent Star Wars rpg, and afterwards another customer told us that he'd always wanted to play but never had the attention span. I had an interesting chat with Julia about the materials I was using for the game. I explained about Barrowmaze being a completed map, while the other books were just instructions for generating the map as you go. I told her I'd spent an hour or two earlier in the day, figuring out how many buildings the other characters spotted near the orchard in Mor, and stocking the contents of those buildings. We talked about how younger people can sometimes spend all day, or entire weekends, playing D&D, while for older payers, 2-3 hour sessions were more common. She asked what kinds of goals players hope to accomplish in those long sessions, if it's just leveling up, or if they want to defeat some final enemy. I talked about how every campaign is different, how I didn't have any particular plans for the ruined city of the monster-run wilderness, but that the catacombs have a giant bone dragon way off in the back where they would probably never meet it. She asked what players did when they finished defeating the big enemy, and I said that for myself, I thought it was okay to sometimes finish things, and be ready to move on to something else.)

(Spending part of my day using the procedural-generation rules to create one part of my campaign world, and the next part running a player though the finished Barrowmaze crypts really got me thinking that while I genuinely like all these materials, they're not exactly perfect for what I want. They're all too big, for one thing. Mor, and the Rotlands, and Barrowmaze - they're truly enormous. I suppose there's a desire, when designing products like this, to create a sense of wonder - and a sense that you're getting your money's worth - by making things that are too big to ever finish exploring, too big to ever even get close. And I appreciate that you don't want something that's supposed to be big to feel too tiny. But on the other hand, it would be nice to have something where my players could kind of finish it, or at least finish some section of it, and feel a sense of accomplishment from that too. We're not playing every weekend, we're not playing 8 hours a day, or staying up all night, but it would be nice to think that in the game, unlike in real life, we could do more that scratch the barest surface of the world. The Mario games actually feel appropriate here. The levels aren't huge, but they don't feel tiny either. There's a lot of world to see and explore, and a lot of secrets to find, but you can get all the way to the final castle. And even if you're not good enough at the game to make it all the way to the very end, you can at least get close enough to see the goal posts, you can take in the lay of the entire field even if you can't get all the way across it. The other complaint I have is that the procedures for generating Mor and the Rotlands are both kind of long and not very streamlined. I suppose if I ever feel very ambitious, I might try my hand at making my own version of this setting, one that matches more exactly what I wish it was like. Or maybe I won't. In the mean time though, I'd rather just be able to play than to feel like I can never start the game because I haven't finished prepping, and I'm serious when I say that I like these products and I'm glad that I'm getting the chance to use them.)

Session Report - Into the Redlands - 3 June 2017

Characters:
Emile Durkheim and his crow totem animal, Totem (shaman 1, played by Emily)
Vodka Gimli and her automaton, Rosie (dwarven machinist 1, played by Stephanie)
Fester the Footpad (thief 1, played by Jason)
Paralee (elven enchanter 1, played by Julia)



The session opened in Lesserton, one of a few human communities clinging to the southwest coast of the island that houses the Redlands, a great swath of goblin, orc, and troll territories that cover the north side of the island. From Lesserton, the villagers can see Mount Rendon, the tallest peak on the island, said to be near the Goblin Market, where anything might be sold or bought. Lesser sits between two sites of ruin. Just to the west, the ancient Imperial city of Mor, once Empire's farthest north outpost and the seat of human civilization on the island, now a gravel pit littered with the broken remains of its Imperial owners. Just to the east of Lesserton are the catacombs, the underground burial vaults for the citizens of Mor, covered over by a graveyard of barrows and cairns.

The four characters started the game fully outfitted for adventure, but with little in the way of pocket money, and so began by picking up pieces of gossip about where best to find treasure. They quickly decided to try exploring the cemetery. Like everyone in town, they already knew that teenagers and other foolish types sometimes made the half-day journey over to the graveyard to prove their bravery or look for gold, but not everyone who went there always came back. They also knew that the Imperials had imposed both their government and their state religion on the human communities of Red Island, that like their fellow Lessers, they mostly believed in the older spirits and had their own burial practices. They knew that any gold the Imperials buried wasn't helping anyone in the afterlife, it was just being wasted in the ground, and any bodies they disturbed belonged to the very decadents who'd brought ruin to the land. But asking around turned up some other rumors - that a death cult calling themselves "the Chosen" had moved in to the catacombs, that runic tablets found in the maze of tunnels curse everyone who reads them, that the catacombs go four levels deep, and of course, that all the rumors people spread were just folk tales meant to scare away children from an essentially harmless old burial ground.

They arrived at the entrance to the old graveyard around noon, and saw that it was bounded on its north and south sides by difficult marsh. The yard itself was covered with small hills and low mounds - burial places that might hide an entrance to the catacombs below. They decided to ignore the mounds closest to the entrance, assuming those had been raided long ago, even if they now looked covered over again. They passed a stele, and made their way closer to the center of the yard, where the mounds were placed thick and dense together. Picking one close to the southwest corner of this central area, Fester got out his shovel and started clearing away the grassy turf from the entryway.

After half an hour of digging, Fester finished uncovering two stone slabs supporting the hollow earthen mound. They saw a pair of human skeletons laying on the bare dirt floor, but nothing else. Vodka Gimli and her diminutive dwarf-shaped automaton, Rosie, ventured inside to give a more thorough search. While Vodka patted the walls and examined the stonework for seams, Rosie posed and flexed her biceps, and encouraged her builder in her task. <<BZZT WE CAN DO IT BZZT>> Vodka eventually found a drawer hidden in one of the slabs where it met the floor, and pulled it open to reveal a pair of small wooden funerary figures (perhaps representing the buried duo), a bejeweled silver dagger, and a roll of parchment covered in strange and seemingly ancient writing. As she tucked these items into her pack, Vodka felt her skin go to gooseflesh and all her hair stand on end. She turned around and saw both skeletons rising to their feet, trapping her inside the mound!

Vodka Gimli brandished her war hammer at the skeletons, and Rosie performed a riveting rock-em-sock-em maneuver that cracked on the skeletons' ribs. The other lurched forward and wrapped both hands around Vodka's neck, chocking the life out of her! For a moment, she thought sure she'd be dead, but after blacking out awoke on the ground with a broken neck, her entire body feeling of pins and needles. Satisfied with the damage they'd inflicted, the skeletons turned to attack the group outside!

Emile Durkheim raised his sickle-sword in self-defense, and had his crow, Totem, carry a dagger over to his friend Paralee. Paralee used her staff to give a solid smack to the skeleton that had nearly killed Vodka Gimli, knocking off one of its hands and putting its head at a crooked angle. She then took the dagger from Totem and joined Emile in holding the skeletons at bay. Fester used his short sword to fell one of the skeletons, and Rosie guarded the prone body of her builder and friend. The remaining skeleton menaced Emile and Paralee, but with its crooked head and missing hand, it couldn't manage to connect with them. Fester quickly put the second skeleton down as well, severing its spine and then stomping on the skull.

After taking a little time to recuperate and get Vodka Gimli back to her feet, the group decided to abandon the graveyard and return to town. Emile Durkheim vowed to consult his ancestral spirits to learn how to restore Vodka to heath. Leaving the yard mid-afternoon, they arrived back in town around sundown, weary and wounded, but somewhat wiser and somewhat richer as well.



Gains:
pair of wooden funeary figures
jewled silver dagger
scroll with mysterious writing

Losses:
Vodka Gimli (almost!)

Kills:
2 skeletons

XP:
35 from the silver dagger
26 from the pair of skeletons
Divided by 4 characters, this came to 15 XP each.



(This was a short play session because we started out rolling up the characters. Two of the players had never played D&D before, and a third said he hadn't played since the early 1980s. We went around in a circle rolling up ability scores, choosing classes, writing down class abilities, rolling for templates of proficiencies and equipment, and then writing those down too. I printed out and stapled each class separately, so I could hand those printouts to the players, which worked very well. There are two things I wish I'd done differently with the templates. First, I wish I'd stapled the template list for each class to the rest of the handout, rather than having them separate. Second, since ignoring the default templates and then rolling for them on a separate table was a little confusing for the players, and since three of the four characters ended up with default template anyway, I wish that I'd just said that first-time characters get the default template. Then, when a player is on their second or third character, I can tell them that they have a choice to accept the default template or roll for a different one. For those unfamiliar with Adventurer Conqueror King, the template takes the place of rolling 3d6x100 for starting gold and individually selecting starting proficiencies. Vodka Gimli was the one character with a high enough Intelligence score to get a bonus proficiency, which she used to select Personal Automaton. This is the reason she was able to start the game with Rosie, rather than having to spend 7000 gp and two weeks trying to draw the blueprint and another 7000 gp (and another two weeks) on construction.)

(I used Adventurer Conqueror King and the ACKS Player Companion for my character generation rules. The starting village and the ruined city come from the book Lesserton & Mor, which provides details on the village, and a series of rules for procedurally generating the contents of the city. One idea I really like from that book is 120' hexes for ruin-crawling. Essentially, the characters can cross one hex in one 10 minute exploration turn, which I think is a great scale for exploring an outdoor (or outdoor-ish) area in detail. The rest of the island come from In the Shadow of Mount Rotten, which has a series of rules for procedurally generating the contents of a goblin- and orc-controlled wilderness. There's a challenge with using this book that I hadn't thought about until I started drawing the island map: first, the territory in question is just enormous, large enough that it's hard to fit a map on a single sheet of paper; second, and probably relatedly, the hexes are unnumbered on the original, which creates challenges for copying correctly. I made one hand-drawn copy for my own reference, a simplified hand-drawn copy for the players, and then started work on a 4-sheet judge's map. I got that whole thing drawn and cut out (although not numbered) in time for the game. Spending so much time on the island map though meant that I had to rely on printouts for the ruins and the cemetery. The cemetery, I should mention, is Barrowmaze Complete, which has a ruin-crawl hex map of the graveyard, and then a standard dungeon map of the catacombs. I think I need a player map of the graveyard next, and then maybe maps of the ruins and island that are large enough to lay out on the table and fill in as the players explore.)

(I usually like to get a little more exploring in a single session, but the characters had good reason to head back to town when they did. When the skeleton hit Vodka Gimli, and I rolled 5 damage against a character with 3 hp, Stephanie asked me "Wait, is that it? Am I just dead?" Fortunately, she looked amused / horrified, not angry or sad. I pulled out ACKS's "Mortal Wounds" table, and had her roll on it. All in all, I think that she and my other players all had a good time. And while they may not have found any cash, a silver weapon is a useful thing to own, and Paralee, as a magic-user and a historian, can probably translate the scroll and find out what's written on it.)

(I realized in retrospect that I read the Mortal Wounds table slightly incorrectly, and that since the party had no way to restore even 1 hp to her until they got back to town, that she should have died one combat round after being maimed. That part was my mistake, but I'm still going to enforce that Vodka Gimli needs a month of bedrest before she can adventure again. Her "mortal wound" is a broken neck, which has three consequences: first, it reduces her Dexterity to 3; second, she can't move, fight, use items, or cast spells; and third she has to save vs. death once a month or die of complications. Stephanie wants to try to save Vodka Gimli's life, and I think the rest of the party wants that too, so I've been looking into the options for that.)

(According to ACKS as written, the only way to undo a "mortal wound" is with the Restore Life and Limb spell - the same one that can bring a dead body back to life. Restore Life and Limb is a 5th level spell, which means accessing it as 1st level characters is going to be tricky. Lesserton & Mor suggests that the town church is willing to perform miracles in exchange for service or gifts (or cash, if you can persuade them to take it.) A 5th level spell is supposed to require taking on a quest to expunge an evil cult, or the gift of a major magic item, or 10,000 gp in donations. If the church believes Vodka Gimli is willing (and able) to root out one of the cults in the catacombs, they might task her with that quest. They might also accept the gift of the automaton Rosie, (who would become a mechanical church servant, I guess) although they'd want a promise to either build up her body or add another special ability sometime in the future. The availability of spells in Adventurer Conqueror King depends somewhat on whether I consider Lesserton to be a Class III or Class IV marketplace. A 5th level divine spell has only a 50% chance of being available in a Class IV market, although if it can be bought, costs only 500 gp, which seems surprisingly low. I'm thinking the other two major-ish human towns on the coast are roughly the same as Lesserton, but the Goblin Market might have someone able to cast the spell. For sure though, a goblin would want a favor as well as gold in exchange for healing a dwarf. The ACKS Player Companion adds the spell Regeneration, but it's a 6th level divine ritual, and so likely a dead-end.)

(On the other hand, maybe I disagree that Restore Life and Limb is the only way to heal Vodka's injury. One thing I like in Dungeon Crawl Classics is a set of guidelines for using healing magic to treat other injuries (like the kind you get from DCC's brutal critical hit tables.) Receive 1 HD of healing magic for example, and you can repair a broken bone, although you won't recover any hp when the magic is used to treat the injury. Organ damage (another possible interpretation of a spinal injury) requires 2 HD of healing, and paralysis requires 3 HD. (Incidentally, curing a disease takes 2 HD of healing, and neutralizing a poison takes 3.) Coincidentally, ACKS has a Medicine proficiency with 3 levels of expertise, corresponding to 3 types of medical specialists - healers, physikers, and chirugeons. As written, they can't do anything for mortal wounds, but if we take some guidance from DCC, perhaps they should be able to. They heal 1d3, 1d6+1, and 2d6+CL hit points of injuries respectively, and physikers can cure disease, while chirugeons can neutralize poison, all of which maps rather well to the guidelines laid out in DCC. ACKS doesn't give much advice regarding paralysis. The only two things that cause it (by name) are ghouls and the spell Hold Person. The monster description for the ghoul suggests that the spell Cure Light Wounds should remove ghoul paralysis, which seems like a bargain compared to DCC, and something that a healer or physiker could do.)

(So, with all this in mind, I would say that Vodka Gimli is suffering from the effects of a broken bone, and organ damage, and paralysis, but that a skilled chirugeon could treat her, restoring her Dexterity (maybe), restoring her ability to move and adventure normally, and removing her once-a-month chance of dying of complications. The chirugeon would need to retain a healer and a physiker for the delicate operation. Class IV markets have a 33% chance of finding a chirugeon, which means that one of the three human cities on the island should have one. The three day operation should cost 12 + 6 + 3 for the three workers, or a total of 21 gp, making this by far the most affordable option. Since it is ACKS, I would still make Stephanie roll on the "Tampering with Mortality" table even if it's medicine, not magic, saving her character's life. If I were following the DCC guidelines, I would probably also rule that Vodka gets a permanent -1 to her Dexterity or Constitution (her choice) as a result of the ordeal. The medical staff will also have to make a proficiency throw to pull it off correctly. If they fail, Vodka Gimli will have to survive a save vs. death ... and they probably won't be willing to make a second attempt.)

(So, those are the three answers Emile Durkheim will receive after consulting his ancestral spirits: the church in Lesserton for 10,000, the Goblin Market for 500, or the best surgeon on the island for 21. As a machinist, Vodka Gimli would also be aware that she could re-fashion Rosie into a kind of supporting exo-skeleton instead of being healed. Dropping Rosie to ½ HD and adding the vehicle special ability would cost 4000 gp in research materials to design a blueprint for, and that's because she's altering an existing automaton - it would cost 11,000 gp to design this from scratch. Rebuilding Rosie as a power armor would also another 4000 gp in parts, plus, since she's paralyzed, Vodka would have to hire skilled laborers to do the work for her. Retirement is also an option here. Especially if she can get healed enough to eliminate the risk of complications, Vodka could simply become an eccentric villager with a robot maidservant. I'll let Stephanie decide how she wants to proceed, although in terms of price, demands on her independence, and safety of travel to the healing location, one of these options stands out to me as the most likely choice.)

My In-Person Summer Campaign - Into the Redlands

One of my in-person players is spending the summer abroad, so our adventures on the Island of the Blue Giants is taking a hiatus until he gets back.

In the mean-time, I've been thinking about how to try to get people together to play under the following conditions:

• Not every player can or needs to attend every session

• (this means that the millieu needs to be something less outre than the Blue Giants)

• (this also means that the structure of play needs to be expeditions: out and back each session)

• The campaign setting needs to be low-prep on my end

• (this means that I will be using a combination of pre-packaged adventuring sites, and procedural-generation rules to create the setting as we play)

• (this also means that both the rules and the feel need to be fairly consistent between the various components of play to limit the prep-time needed to convert rules or re-skin setting details)

• The rules need to be basic enough that my players can grasp them easily, clear enough that I can make rulings without having to keep looking up details, and interesting enough that I'm not tempted to waste a lot of time bolting on fiddly bits as options

• (this means that actual B/X and Labyrinth Lord are out as rulesets, I'm afraid, and it also means I'm not going to try to cobble together my own preferred BX-ish house rules for this)

So, I've decided that I'm going to use Lesserton & Mor to establish a home-base for players to launch expeditions from, and to provide their first potential adventuring site: a ruined ancient city, which will be procedurally generated during play. I'm also going to use In the Shadow of Mount Rotten to provide the second source of adventure: expeditions into the procedurally-generated monster-occupied wilderness. And finally, I'll be using Barrowmaze as the third main adventuring site, the giant necropolis of the ancient city. Treasures and dangers abound in all three locations, and each session's players can decide where to set out. There may be other adventuring sites (particularly in the wilderness) that are discovered during play.

I'm going to be using Adventurer Conqueror King as my ruleset for character creation, and I should have little or no trouble integrating the monsters and other setting details from my three Labyrinth Lord setting books. I find the way ACK handles attacks (essentially, roll higher than THAC0 plus ascending AC) to be easy enough to grasp to avoid slow-downs during play, and I'm particularly fond of the some of their classes and especially the templates in the Player's Companion.

Human adventurers can choose from the following character classes:

• Assassin
• Bard
• Cleric
• Explorer
• Fighter
• Mage
• Shaman
• Thief
• Venturer

Creating a dwarf character requires having Constitution 9 or higher. Dwarves can choose from the following:

• Dwarven Delver
• Dwarven Machinist
• Dwarven Vaultguard

Creating an elf character requires having Intelligence 9 or higher. Elves can choose from the following:

• Elven Courtier
• Elven Enchanter
• Elven Ranger

The town of Lesserton sits on the southern coast of what its human inhabitants call either Red Island or the Redlands. The Lessers eke out a living farming a narrow strip of fertile land along the southern coast. Red Island itself is far to the north of the continent, rarely visited by other humans except for occasional visits by missionaries, merchants, and raiders. Just to the west of Lesserton sits the ruined Imperial city of Mor, once a great metropolis, now a reminder of the Empire's collapse and the dark days that followed its fall. Just to the east is the Maze, a great underground necropolis dotted with above-ground barrows and cairns where citizens of Imperial Mor buried their dead. To the north lies the towering visage of Mount Rendon and the great expanse of the Redlands, an island mostly occupied by monsters, who in their own tongue call the peak Mount Rotten and the island itself the Rotlands.

Sessions will take place in-person, usually on Saturday evenings, as often as I can get at least two players able to meet at my house or host me at theirs.