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 - 22 July 2017

Characters
Emil Durkheim (shaman 1)
Totem, the raven totem-animal
two wild dogs
Petruccio (human 0)
played by Emily

Hitch Huxley (mage 1)
Gambino, the loyal manservant (human 0)
Scarface (human 0)
played by Corey



Summary
In the third week of spring, Emil Durkheim met up with Hitch Huxley and his manservant Gambino. Hitch was an imposing figure, tall and long-limbed, hairless and wearing a metal skullcap, wearing black and gold robes in a mockery of religious garb. He also spoke in an angry falsetto voice; Hitch was a former castrato singer in the church choir. Since reaching adulthood, he'd abandoned the church, devoted himself to the study of esoteric lore and black magic, and generally transformed himself into one of the scariest men in Lesserton. Gambino was athletic, but easily winded, foolish, and basically useless without Hitch's instructions.

When Emil ran into Hitch Huxley, he was in the middle of trying to set up his own network of spies and informants by co-opting a couple of the messenger boys who spent their days running across town to deliver news and messages. Usually working for a copper coin a message, the boys were awed when Hitch gave them silver, tempted when his promised them the chance to earn gold, and then scared witless when he told them that if they got caught they were fired, and if they talked they'd be killed. The boys, "I-I-I'm Jack Kelley sir, and dis is my friend, D-D-David," confirmed that they knew some other boys they could recruit, "Well, dere's my buddy Spot Conlon, and David's got a little brother, Les." Hitch Huxley ordered Jack and Spot to hang around the Market Square and sent David and Les to the Heights. He commanded them to listen for business opportunities, steal anything they thought they could get away with, and generally report any chance to make money they heard about to him. "And remember, if you talk, you die!" he reminded them before the kids ran off in terror.

Sensing that Huxley was a man of ambition, Emil approached him about heading into the ruins of ancient Mor. Hitch Huxley had recently heard rumors about the great wealth and treasure to be found in the ruins, so he was receptive to the white-robed shaman's sales pitch. (Emil had recently heard that Lesserton had no real thieves' guild, that all the beggars and pickpockets were disorganized and worked alone, and that stories about a thieves' guild were just lies meant to frighten people. For the sake of his new friend, Emil hoped this was true.) They decided to hire some guards to come with them for protection. Emil turned up young Petey once again, now wearing his late brother's old armor and carrying his spear, and going by the ancient name Petruccio. "It'sa me! Petruccio!" Hitch didn't trust loyal Gambino to protect him enough, and hired a menacing-looking young man named Scarface to come along as well. Scarface had a single long scar running diagonally across his face, and spoke with sinister sibilant S's. "Sssure thing, bosssss!"

With these preliminaries taken care of, the next morning the group set out for the ruined city, Emil Durkheim accompanied by Petruccio, two excited wild dogs, and his totem-animal raven, and Hitch Huxley accompanied by Gambino and Scarface. Walking the old road, they made it to the banks of the moat by noon, where the orcish guard seemed thrilled to see Emil and Petruccio again. "Hey! It's Mister Appleseed!" The orcs were happy to let the pair across the bridge for free, and asked them to check in with the boss of the Trollbridger Clan on the other side. Hitch tried to follow close on Emil's heels, but the guard stopped him. "Excuse me. I don't know you. You wanna cross the bridge, you gotta pay the toll." Hitch eyed the length of the rope span across the moat, and decided against intimidation as a tactic. Just before crossing, Emil called out that the orcs were fond of canned food, much to Hitch's relief. "Are those canned yams? Oh, those are exquisite!" One payment later, and the entire group was across the bridge. Once they were through the broken section of the city wall, the leader of the Trollbridgers approached them. He informed Emil and Petruccio that his tribe, although still involved in the lucrative bridge industry, had mostly moved into orchard, where they had adopted the dogs living there. The orcs were concerned, however, about the buildings bordering their new territory. If they could be sure the buildings were empty, they'd like to move in, but if they weren't empty, they didn't want to risk walking into a dangerous situation, or risk being ambushed by something coming out of the buildings in the night. The boss offered free passage over the bridge, and free shelter in the buildings once they were cleared, along with an unspecified financial reward, if Emil and his companions could verify the safety of the buildings. After a brief conference, they agreed, and set out along the clear passage to the orchard.

In the orchard, they saw that the orcs had established camp, and a dozen happy wild dogs were running between the trees. Emil Durkheim's dogs greeted the members of their old pack, but continued to follow the shaman as he and Hitch Huxley headed to the cluster of buildings to the northeast. They saw three structures standing amidst the piles of broken stone and fallen bricks. The first structure they entered was two stories - apparently just two rooms from a larger destroyed house. The group first circled the outside of the structure, then lit a lantern and went inside. They searched the room, then went upstairs and search again. Although they found nothing of note, they took a moment to look out the open doorway that used to lead to an adjoining room, and saw a view of the orchard. Satisfied, they went back downstairs and outside and walked to the next building. Again, they searched outside the lone freestanding room, then went inside and searched again. They found a hole in the floor with a ladder leading down. Gambino dropped to his belly and held the lantern down as low as he could, revealing what appeared to be an old root cellar. Hitch took the lantern and went down alone, checking the crumbling burlap bags and low piles of disintegrated root vegetables. Again, they left and walked over to the final building in the area. They circled the final small structure, and again, deemed the exterior relatively safe. They refilled the oil in their guttering lantern and headed inside. Their search revealed a third safe, empty building, and they left to return to the orchard.

Back among the trees, they talked to the orcs. Emil and Hitch reported that the first group of buildings they'd searched was safe, and asked if there was any reason the orcs were afraid of going in themselves. The orc leader claimed that several members of the clan had spotted a dangerous looking swarm of biting insects in the area. He also pointed out that his group wasn't particularly large, and it was always dangerous trying to claim new turf with so many gangs of unsavories squatting on other portions of the ruins. Satisfied that they had a better understanding of the situation, Emil and Hitch took their group to the buildings southeast of the orchard, due south of the previous block. The first structure they encountered here was a complete house in relatively good repair. The plaster was damaged where the decorative lintels had fallen away from the windows and doors, but the faded red tile roof was still intact. Lighting their lantern again, they went inside. The group immediately noticed that the air in the building was colder than in any of the other buildings, colder than the shade from the roof could explain. It was also unaccountably humid, almost clammy. They saw a staircase leading up, with another set of stairs heading down to the basement under the stairwell. While the others searched the room, Hitch rigged up a short span of twine strung with the cheapest goat-bells he'd been able to find, and tucked the ends between loose bricks to create a makeshift tripwire alarm guarding the basement stairs. Satisfied that he wouldn't be ambushed, he led the others upstairs, where the temperature was normal and the air was dry once again. They went back downstairs, and Gambino led the way into the basement, with Scarface close on his heels. They only made it about halfway down the basement steps though, because the room was flooded with at least 5 feet of rainwater. The lantern light reflected off the flooded basement, casting dancing lights onto the ceiling. Emil's dogs started barking, so the group wasn't surprised when a giant toad surfaced and attacked!

The toad lashed out with its freakishly long tongue, grabbing Gambino by the neck, dragging him into the water, and then biting off the poor servant's head. Hitch responded by shoving Scarface off the steps and into the water. "Gee thanksss." Scarface waded to the center of the room, but couldn't pierce the toad's blubbery hide with his dagger. Hitch headed down the steps to take Gambino's place, and Emil and Petruccio crept down to join the fight. The toad opened its giant mouth and tried to gobble up Scarface, nearly killing him. The wounded hireling floated on his back and paddled himself back toward the stairs to get away. Emil had tied a rope to his rune-carved spear, and threw it at the beast (fumble!) but he lost his footing on the steps, and dropped the end of the rope. Hitch felt worried about the group's chances at this point and cast a spell to summon warriors to his side, singing out in his pure soprano. Upstairs, they heard running footsteps and voices calling out "For glory! For Valhalla!" and four blond muscular men carrying a variety of oversized weapons appeared in the doorway. The men tore off their shirts and swan dived flawlessly into the water. In an instant, they'd hacked the frog into quarters, and at Hitch's command, carried the parts back to him. "For the feast! Tonight we feast!" Hitch urged them to make sure the room was safe, and for several minutes, the four warriors pearl dived to the bottom of the room over and over, finally marching up the steps bearing piles of silver and gold coins in the fabric of their shirts. Knowing that time was short, Hitch called on his warriors to run after him to the next building. "Onward! Onward to glorious battle!" (Emil retrieved his spear, helped Scarface out of the water, collected the and freshly butchered frog meat, and followed at a slower pace behind.)

Hitch and his summoned warriors ran into the building, saw a staircase, and ran up. The upstairs was empty as well, and for a moment, Hitch worried there'd be no second battle for his berserkers. It was only a moment though, because then the air filled with the sound of buzzing, then tiny biting flies swarmed in through every window, converging in the center of the room and then descending on one of the warriors, who fell dead to the floor as the insects rapidly stripped the flesh from his body. Hitch stepped forward to pour lamp oil over the body and light it, and the flies exploded away from the body, before reforming in a smaller cloud that before. Hitch ordered two of the warriors to secure the basement, then handed the remaining berserker a bottle of oil and told him to pour it over himself. "Witness me!" screamed the warrior, "Tonight I die victorious!" The flies descended on the second man and began biting him, and Hitch set him alight. The warrior grasped the insects toward him, and waved his blazing arms at the ones trying to escape, sending the few surviving insects out into the ruins. Hitch saluted his second warrior as he fell to the ground and was consumed entirely by the flames. Going downstairs, he met up with Emil and the others, where they found piles of gold and silver coins set at the top of the stairs, alongside two gemstones. Taking the lantern from Petruccio, Hitch went down to the basement, searched, but saw no signs of violence and no remaining trace of his warriors. Returning upstairs, Hitch helped the others pack up their supplies as the lantern went out again.

By now the group was tired after hours of searching and fighting, and the sun showed that it was late afternoon, or perhaps early evening. They returned to the orchard, where they presented the frog meat to the tribe. The leader - cheftan Emeril - was pleased, and even more pleased when Emil offered up his garlic. "That'll really kick it up a notch! Bam!" Everyone dined on garlic frog legs with apple sauce, the the humans bedded down, feeling safe surrounded by so many warrior guards. Scarface now had a second scar from the frog bit, forming a giant X across his face.
 
In the morning, they learned that there had been a brief disturbance in the night when a giant rhino beetle landed among the trees, ate some leaves, then flew off again. The cheftan didn't seem worried, "Eh, this kind of thing happens all the time," but Hitch and Emil were quite worried about the danger the beetle might pose to their new comrades. Emil decided to consult his revered ancestors, invoking a ritual that allowed him to commune with their wisdom. (The player, Emily, announced "my ancestors are not from New Jersey!" right before we started the consultation, so I made them ambiguously British and decided to dial back the silly voices a little bit.) Emil praised his ancestors repeatedly while asking their advice, and thanked them profusely for the information they offered. He asked if the rhinoceros beetle could be killed - and learned that his present forces might just barely be up to the task, although it might be a costly victory, and success was by no means assured. He asked if the beetle was alone - and learned that it was not with others of its kind, but it was also not alone in its lair. Finally, he asked if the greatest treasure in the city was nearby - and was told that the city's greatest treasures were obscure, and probably located in the citadel or palace, but that there were treasures nearby to the northeast and the south. To decide which of the nearby treasures to seek, Hitch and Emil questioned the orcs more about the beetle, and learned that it had flown off to the northeast. They set out, first passing the three empty ruins they'd searched initially, before arriving in a section with three intact buildings.

Circling the first building, the group was unable to discern if it was occupied from the outside. The contrast of the interior shadows was too dark to see inside in the bright sunlight, at least not without holding a lantern through one of the empty windowframes. Instead, they went in as a group through the front door, where they saw a group of three orcish hunters mending a rope net. Hitch invoked the authority of the Trollbridger Clan and tried to frighten the hunters into surrendering, but the toughs picked up their spears instead. Scarface ran forward and shivved the lead hunter in the gut, stabbing him a dozen times in rapid succession. Hitch threw his dagger at one of the other hunters, hitting him in the shoulder, then backed up behind his friends. Petruccio charged forward with his brother's spear, running through the injured orc and slaying him. Emil sicced his two dogs on the last hunter, and they brought him down and mauled him to death before Emil recalled them. Flush from the fast victory, the group checked the bodies and found that they had a bag of loot, holding gemstones, scrolls of ancient writing, and two bottles of unidentifiable liquid. Each hunter also had a crude scarification of a flying insect on the palms of their right hands.
 
A moment later however, the giant rhino beetle burst out of the basement, cracking the plaster around the door as it stormed up the steps. The beast was enormous, its body as long as two people laid end to end, and its horn rising to human head height even when the insect held its head right near the floor. The group backed away as the beetle sniffed and gored the dead orcs' bodies, then turned in several circles trampling the corpses to paste. Emil tentatively approached the giant, offering it his hand. Two nostrils at the end of its horn sniffed Emil's outstretched fist, then snuffed. The insect then turned away from the group, waddled out the front door, and flew off in a buzz of wingbeats. The group breathed a sigh of relief that the giant insect hadn't attacked them, then gathered up the swag, the net, and all three of the orkin spears from the floor. The group then descended into the basement where the beetle had been, and saw that it was basically empty except for some leaf bedding, and another ladder leading down to another root cellar. Searching there turned up a cache of silver coins, which the party pocketed before walking over to the next building and heading immediately inside.

The moment they entered, however, they saw that the sunlight hitting Scarface's back was casting a giant shadow on the far wall, much larger than anyone else's. The shadow began to move menacingly, but Petruccio was ready, throwing his bloodstained ancient spear into the thing's chest. A hole of sunlight opened around the spearpoint, now stuck in the wall, and wisps of shadow stuff drifted away from its sides near the injury. Emil threw his spear of rune-carved white oak, and Scarface threw his new orkin spear, but both weapons clattered off the wall and seemed to have no effect on the monster. Emil sent his dogs forward. One barked and growled at the creature, while the other bit at the shadow and tore away a mouthful of shadow stuff - which it immediately began spitting out. Hitch worried about what would happen if this monstrosity were ever allowed to attack, and called out in his clear high voice, summoning his magical berserkers. Cries rang out behind them - "For victory! For Valhalla!" - and four burly warriors burst into the room from behind, nearly tearing down the far wall as they hacked the shadow creature to pieces which evaporated as soon as they separated from the main body. Hitch called to the warriors to follow him, and again, they ran across the gravel to the next building and rushed inside.


There they found a great green pulsating ooze on the floor. "For the glory of Valhalla! For the glory of victory!" Three of the berserkers hacked at the slime (one fumbled) but ended up coated in the "blood" of the creature without seeming to harm it. Hitch ordered them to secure the basement, then poured oil on the ooze and lit it. Emil and the others entered the room behind Hitch in time to watch the green slime turn black and burn out, leaving an oily black slick on the floor. In the basement, they heard screams of agony that unnerved them. "Witness me! Tonight I dine in Valhalla! I die glad and glorious!" They were further unnerved when they heard a buzz of wings behind them. The giant rhino beetle landed and blocked the front door, sticking its head into the room. Worse, at the same time, three more livid green gelatinous blobs emerged from the basement stairs and began slinking toward the group! Emil turned to the beetle, and began petting its giant horn. Hitch handed out flasks of oil to Scarface and Petruccio. All three lit the wicks on their military flasks and tossed them at the creeping oozes. All three hit and burst into flame! The oozes continued slinking forward, on fire, then stopped and guttered out, leaving nasty burnt oil patches on the floor. The beetle seemed to be focusing on Emil, rather than the battle, and nuzzled the side of the young man's face with the end of its horn, making a pleasant rumbling vocalization, then backed out of the room and flew off again. The group went down to the basement, where they found the last warrior, who handed over sacks of coins before running up the stairs and disappearing. "Witness me!" The group searched the room, but found nothing more.
 
They returned upstairs, where they saw another giant toad, this one staring wide-eyed at the four smoldering patches of burnt slime. The shocked-looking toad turned its gaze from the floor to the party, then looked back at the floor, then back at the party, then hopped quickly away. The group gave the room a once over, but found nothing new, then returned to the house where they found the shadow and searched there as well.

Satisfied that they had cleaned out the inhabitants of another block of buildings, they returned to the orchard and related their tale to the orcs. Cheftan Emeril agreed with the group's opinion that although those buildings were now empty, they were not necessarily safe, especially since the giant rhinoceros beetle seemed to be living in one of the ruins. He also explained that the scarified fly hunters probably belonged to a gang from the far east side of the city. The leader called for his group to bring forward their latest proceeds to pay the group for their help. They had 5 gold coins, "Sorry, the bridge business has been a little slow lately," and what looked like a silver tiara. Hitch Huxley made a shocked face as he examined the tiara. He realized it wasn't silver, it was platinum, and set with several flawless pearls. The group happily accepted their payment, and bagged it before the cheftan could notice its full value, then returned the half-day's march to Lesserton.

Next time - the fate of Vodka Gimli!



Gains
2200 silver coins
95 gold coins (including 5 in payment from the Trollbridger Tribe)
5 gemstones of unknown quality
1 platinum tiara
2 scrolls with ancient writing
2 bottles filled with unknown liquid

(This comes out to 1975 gp worth of treasure, plus the magical items. Divided into 2½ shares, each share is 790 gp, meaning that Petruccio and Scarface will each want 197 for their ¼ share. Assuming that Emil Durkheim and Hitch Huxley keep the tiara for now, they have enough in cash and gemstones to pay their hirelings, but they'll either need to sell the crown, or one of them is going to have to either borrow money or write the other an IOU to settle things between them. Or who keeps the crown can figure into their negotiations about how to divide the magic items. One of the scrolls has a lot more writing on it than the other, so that may figure into their decisions about how to divvy the loot.)



Losses
Gambino (eaten by a giant toad)
5 magical berserkers (2 eaten by insects, 3 transformed into slime)



XP
1975 from treasure
71 from the giant toad
65 from the insect swarm
30 from the Fly Hunter orcs
83 from the shadow
152 from the green slime

(This is 2376 XP total. Divided into 2½ shares, each share is 950 XP for each player, and 237 XP for each of the hirelings. In retrospect, I wonder if I only should have awarded 38 XP for the original green slime, with no additional experience awarded for fighting the berserkers who were transformed. It's something I'll try to consider the next time the sort of monster that can make copies of itself.)



Postmortem
(Corey is probably my most experienced player. He plays Laetoli, Beastmaster, Will, and Kerhs in my Island of the Blue Giants campaign. He also comes to the table with a lot of previous experience as a player. In chatting, I've learned that his resume includes the Red Dragon Inn chatroom, Werewolf: The Apocalypse LARPing, and the new Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game. He actually hasn't played using the B/X or ACKS rules before, but he's obviously familiar with the tactics of old-school play, as evidenced by his decisions to buy and then deploy so much lamp oil. Corey is the first player in this campaign to roll a "failed character" - the ill-fated Gambino had slightly above-average Strength and Dexterity, but the rest of his ability scores were very low, so he became a free henchman instead of a player character. I also offered Corey the option to either accept the standard starting equipment, or to roll for the chance at better or worse equipment. He got the "eunuch sorcerer" template, which paid off very well the summon berserker spell and 95 starting gold. Summon berserker comes from the ACKS Player's Companion, so in this campaign, it's possible for elves to learn that spell at random, but human casters use the shorter lists from the Core Rules. So receiving the spell in his template is pretty much the only way Hitch Huxley could learn the spell, which unarguably affected the group's tactics throughout the night. All that extra starting money paid for lanterns, a lot of military-grade lamp oil, and some other useful equipment that didn't come into play. The eunuch sorcerer is a master of intimidation, which is what let Hitch Huxley attempt to start up his own network of spies and pickpockets by screaming at a bunch of children.)

(Being able to summon magical, suicidal vikings who want to die gloriously in battle once a day certainly affected how the group played! It feels like a very powerful spell, but in a way, the effect it creates is also not very far beyond what the group could create for themselves by really spending big on their retainers. The biggest effect the berserkers have on play isn't just that the players are suddenly able to win in battle, it's that they suddenly have an incentive to pick as many fights as they can, as quickly as they can, knowing that the berserkers will vanish whether they die in combat or not. I think that combat should always take up a full exploration turn no matter how many rounds it lasts, so the "30 minute" duration - 3 exploration turns - means that he berserkers can be in two, or at most three combats before vanishing. The berserkers were one factor that let the characters win so many fights in this session. Another was the fact that the hirelings rolled really well in combat. They players were rarely surprised, won initiative almost every time, and Petruccio and Scarface both got in some impressive hits. The group might have done nearly as well, even without their magical reinforcements. A third factor leading to their success was the liberal application of flaming oil, a time-honored old-school tactic. I'm not particularly enforcing any kind of encumbrance rules, but I should think about any upper limits I want to set on how much oil a single character can carry. One thing I've been thinking about recently is how, for a rule to matter at the table, it has to be simple enough to remember and enforce regularly. Any kind of complex rule just gets replaced with the ultimate alternate rule, "ignore this." You would think that making movement rates and encumbrance matter would call for more detail, but I'm thinking it might call for more simplicity instead. Using the character sheet itself as a reminder or enforcement mechanism probably helps a lot too. Anyway, the other effect that the berserkers had - beyond me getting to do a lot of warboy viking voices - was that their deaths really heightened the tension in both fights where they died. Pitiful Gambino getting eaten by a toad was a little scary, but it really freaked my players out when the insect swarm skeletonized one of the vikings, or when they could hear the whole group of them screaming in agony from the basement after they touched the green slime. The monsters this week were relatively dangerous for 2-3 HD creatures, but still - they had unusual attacks and invulnerabilities, but what they didn't have was that many hit points. Showing the monsters killing the strongest warriors the team has had on their side so far really amplified their appearance of threat and difficulty.)

(For the most part, I had this session's encounters mapped out ahead of time. It was a nice slow simmer of tension that the first block of buildings they entered was completely empty, but the dice decided that, not me, and if they'd gone somewhere else first, they'd have found whatever was there. Lesserton & Mor had me roll a d4 to determine how many buildings were in a group, a d% to determine the size of each buildings, a d2 to decide if there was a basement, another d2 to decide how deep, a d20 to determine if each building was occupied, and then a d6 to determine what kind of occupants. I also followed the Labyrinth Lord dungeon stocking advice to give each empty basement a 15% chance of containing unprotected treasure on the lowest level. I'm glad I took care of it ahead of time, because I think it would have been too much time watching me roll dice if I'd tried to do it during play. When the players first asked the orcs if they'd seen anything dangerous in the area, I just rolled on the wandering monster table, expected that whatever I got would be the next thing they encountered when they finally came upon a wanderer. The fact that I got the insect swarm - which was in the next group of buildings they went to - was a happy coincidence.)

(I was surprised that the fleeting overnight appearance of the giant rhinoceros beetle from the wandering monster table grabbed my player's attention so much. First, they were afraid of the beetle as a threat, then it kind of became a sympathetic figure, and even a potential future ally. I rolled a d12 to determine the clock direction the beetle flew off in overnight, so it ending up in one of the remaining hexes of unexplored buildings was a coincidence, although a nice one. The group of orcs I'd rolled up as the occupants for that building were described as "fly hunters," so it made sense that they'd be hunting the beetle, and since I knew it flew to that hex, it made sense that the reason the orcs were in that building was because they'd cornered the beetle in the basement. The second time the beetle showed up, it's because the group was set to encounter a wandering monster, and the result on the table was roaming orcs. Since they'd just beaten a group of roaming orcs, I decided that meant the beetle showed up instead. The beetle becoming affectionate was the result of Emil Durkheim rolling high on the 2d6 reaction rolls. The beetle flew off overnight in the first place because of its reaction roll, and the giant toad that showed up after they killed the slime kept on hopping for the same reason. Lesserton & Mor recommends that neutral reactions in the ruins are likely to result in the wanderer giving the party their space unless they make trouble, which I think is good advice. Some combat may be unavoidable - although you can run from it! - but not every encounter has to turn into a fight unless the players themselves are feeling bloodthirsty.)

(Besides the encounters with the rhino beetle, the other really unplanned event of the evening was the size of the payout for investigating those buildings. Before the start of the session, I knew a couple things. I knew that young Petey was going to change his name and become much more interested in Imperial history and culture. And I knew that the bridge orcs were going to move into the orchard, adopt the wild dogs, and start thinking about hiring the players to check out the buildings. I hadn't thought much about what kind of payment they'd have, so I decided that they would just offer up one standard share of orc treasure from the Labyrinth Lord rulebook. I knew from stocking the buildings that this could result in a very variable payout - just look at all the magic items the fly hunters were carrying! - but I hadn't seriously considered the possibility that it would amount to all that much. So imagine my surprise when, at the end of the session, I had the players get out their d%s so we could roll up the orc treasure together, and they end up rolling a 1500 gp item of jewelry! For all the fighting, and all the basement hordes they uncovered, the players had cleared less than 1000XP for the evening up to that point - still good compared to their first ventures! - and with one roll of the dice, they end up closing in on 2500. Petrucio and Scarface are definitely promoted to 1st level fighters at this point, and even with their quarter shares, they've got enough experience to be on a path to 2nd level, and enough cash to really get into trouble back in town.)

(Speaking of town, at the moment, I'm not sure how I'm going to handle Hitch Huxley's sneakernet of child sneakthieves. The easiest solution would simply be to make the kids another source of rumors. Another obvious option would be to roll on some kind of "town events" or "campaign events" table, but unfortunately, Lesserton & Mor doesn't supply one of those. So far, I've avoided having players roll on a town events table because they keep going out adventuring. I conceptualize town events as being like wandering monsters - as a potential hazard that threatens you when you spend downtime in the city. Because I haven't tried to have the players roll on the town events table yet, I hadn't noticed that I don't even have one. Lesserton does have a table to determine if attempts to search for adventure are successful, unsuccessful, or result in a mishap, along with a list of the potential mishaps. What it does not have is an obvious list of occurrences for a successful search. In the Shadow of Mount Rotten has a "what happened to the tribe?" table that might work, although it's intended to be campaign events affecting stone-age orc tribes, not dark-age human neighborhoods, so I'll have to see if I can make it work. Otherwise, I will probably try to consult some of my other gaming materials to see if I can find something serviceable. I've been thinking about what you need to run a successful campaign, and I think that a random table of hirelings and a random table of town events should probably make the list of necessities. I think anytime one of Hitch Huxley's teams suffers a mishap, that pair of kids is probably going to retire. Long term, if he wants to make himself the head of a criminal network, he's going to need to hire some actual criminals. There could also potentially be some repercussions from press-ganging a group of children into a life in intrigue, but I'll let the dice decide that. If Scarface or Petruccio get into any trouble carousing, the newsies will probably bring word of it back to the party.)

(The other thing I'm not completely sure how to handle is Emil's interactions with the giant rhinoceros beetle. As a shaman, Emil has the power to take on animals as hirelings. I think that places most insects off-limits, but that's not really my main concern here. The problem is that the thing has 12 HD. I feel like it would be out of the question that a human NPC who was nearing the apex of wealth and worldly power would agree to let themselves be hired on as the personal assistant to a novice adventurer, particularly not on any kind of long-term basis. On the other hand, I think that if the beetle shows up again, and if Emil gets another good reaction roll, it should maybe follow him around until the end of the session - or until it fails morale, but I doubt that will happen since it should take a lot to scare something this dangerous. Of course, if Emil rolls badly, it might also try to kill him and his friends - but it would have to be a pretty bad roll since he's fairly charismatic, and I think he gets an additional reaction bonus with animals. So the issues to decide become whether the beetle is only wandering or if it has established a lair, what the chances are of encountering it inside its lair if they visit that, and what the chances are of encountering it as a wandering monster. I feel like encountering it again should be more likely than simply rolling "giant rhinoceros beetle" on the encounter table again - there's only a 1% chance of that happening - but I'm not sure how much more. I'm tempted to say that there's a 2-in-6 chance of finding it in its lair, and that there's a 1-in-6 chance of each wandering monster turning out to be their beetle, but I'm not sure if that's too high or just right. I suppose the only way to find out for sure is to try. And honestly, wandering monster encounters haven't happened that often so far. Anything lower than a 1-in-36 chance per in-game-hour of encountering the thing, and it will probably never happen, and that's not what I want either. I don't want a certainty of finding it again, but I do want the chance of it happening at random to be large enough to be meaningful, and 1-in-600 per in-game-hour just isn't large enough.)

(One final consideration. I've been running each session as 1 week of game time. I wonder if I should be incorporating a week of downtime between outings however. The pros of doing this would be a more realistic adventuring schedule, so Emil Durkheim, for example, would have gone on 3 adventures in a month-and-a-half, not 3 adventures in three weeks. Another pro would be that if I did want to incorporate town events, the week of downtime would be the sensible opportunity for them to happen. The con of allowing for downtime - at least in this campaign so far - is that Vodka Gimli is currently set to make her first save against death at the end of next session. Stephanie, Vodka's player, hasn't been available for the last couple sessions, but might be free next time, and able to take a proactive role in saving her character's life. If I were letting two weeks pass each session, then Vodka Gimli would have had to survive one save already, and would be about to make another, all without Stephanie having much chance to get her character any medical treatment. I'm not sure how much weight to give this con, however, since this feels like a unique problem, not a common occurrence.)

Redlands Campaign - Preview of the Buildings of South Central Mor

Below is a map of a district of mostly-intact buildings that my players found on their first voyage into the ruined Imperial city of Mor.

The orchard the players found is in the Hex marked T17, and the two clusters of buildings they could see from the planting are to the east, still inside the same grouping.

I thought that stocking those buildings using the guidelines in Lesserton & Mor would take longer than I wanted to spend mid-session, (and it did!), so I decided to prep them ahead of time. I also decided to randomly generate the contents of the adjoining hexes to see if any additional buildings turned up (and they did!)

The result is that amidst the piles of rubble, the relatively clear spaces, and the sections of vegetation, there are 7 hexes with buildings, totaling around 20 structures. But what are those two different grey areas? And what kinds of inducements might tempt my players to venture into any of the ruined buildings? Stay tuned!



(I like the idea of the sept-hexes as an organizing device, but in practice, I find their layout - in not quite horizontal rows - a little counter-intuitive. They aren't laid out in either a standard grid or in the way we ordinarily read hex maps, which means that it's hard for me to make any kind of mental map that matches what I've drawn on paper. Also, while there is a certain convenience to looking at the hexes in groups of seven, since each hex within the sept-hex can have its own terrain, it's not that much more convenient than just looking at them individually.)

(The procedures for randomly generating hex contents in Lesserton & Mor are also maybe not quite as streamlined as they could be, particularly the procedures for generating buildings. A small amount of that may be because I was using pdfs and the random.org website, which makes things like flipping through the pages, cross-referencing information from the Labyrinth Lord rulebook, and even changing dice sizes a little slower than if I were using the print books and physical dice. But even bearing that in mind, I can't help but think that it must be possible to write a set of procedures that create similar results a little faster.)

(Because of the way they were generated, some of the buildings are empty, some contain monsters, and some contain treasure - and of course, some contain monsters and treasure. I treated any building with a basement as an "empty room" and applied Labyrinth Lord's recommended 15% chance of unprotected treasure. Some of the monsters inhabiting the buildings are quite deadly, and some are protecting a fair bit of treasure as well. If my players decide to explore the buildings in this cluster, and if their characters survive the exploration, they're likely to find more money and more magic than they've uncovered up until now.)