Tag: Mapping

A Learning Experience

This past Saturday was a day of firsts for me. It had been awhile since I’d been able to get a group together for a gaming session, so many of the things I’ve been thinking about and writing about got a test-run during this weekend’s game. I edited everyone’s character sheets before the game to make note of their current encumbrance, and I made sure all of my treasure had encumbrance noted. I prepared a few hex-crawl sections for the game, complete with detailed encounter tables. I also made an attempt  to include time tracking in my campaign, which I really had no idea how to do, but I tried to work off of some supposition. I also tried a few things which I haven’t written about; including weather in my games, using poker chips to track the party’s resources, and writing down treasure on index cards. I believe those last two were originally proposed by Telecanter.

Like I said, it was an entire day of firsts. Some things worked well, some things didn’t, and most others fell somewhere in between. So now that the game is over, it’s time to review, and revise. Experience is our greatest teacher so long as we take the time to listen to it!

Encumbrance

(Using my Encumbrance system). As I mentioned, I went through everyone’s character sheet and put a red underline under everything which would add to their encumbrance, then put their totals, as well as their light/medium/heavy load ranges on their character sheets. When everyone arrived, I explained the new system to them briefly. I asked them to keep track of their encumbrance during play and let me know if they started carrying a medium or heavy load. I was somewhat surprised that this did not really impact the speed of play even slightly. There were a few conversations about who should carry what, but they were brief, and entirely appropriate. Looking over their character sheets now (this group always leaves their sheets with me, for some reason. It’s not something I normally require), it seems like everybody did a good job. I can tell that the number was erased and increased whenever appropriate.

I don’t feel as though the system has been sufficiently stress-tested, though. Nobody is yet carrying anything other than a light load, so penalties have not come into play. However, for now, I’m completely satisfied with my encumbrance system, and look forward to seeing it in action more often.

Resource Tracking with Poker Chips

I actually did talk about this once before, way back in November when I said I didn’t like it. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems completely reasonable, and the less my objections seemed to be relevant. That’s what I get for doubting Telecanter’s genius. I used white poker chips to represent arrows (and gave the ranger 24, which I only just now remember should have been included in his encumbrance. Whoops!), red poker chips to represent torches/lantern oil, and blue poker chips to represent rations. I had a large bowl on the table where everyone could toss their chips when they consumed a resource, and pull them out when they renewed that resource.

It worked fantastically. Better than fantastically; it worked perfectly! Everyone quickly got into the habit of tossing their rations into the bowl at the end of the day. They even did it when I forgot to tell them to. The ranger and I both forgot to toss his arrows in the bowl, but that’s only because it took a few hours for the party to engage anything in combat. Tracking torches has been a little bit trickier, but only because of my difficulties relating to…

Time Tracking

(Using my suppositions on the subject) Time tracking didn’t work as well as it could have, but it didn’t not work. During the first few hours of the game, while the party was hex crawling, I kept track of the when the day began and ended, which I think is plenty. I didn’t really take into account any time spent in combat, in town, or otherwise interacting with NPCs, but maybe that’s unnecessary. Later in the game, once the party entered the dungeon, my original plan was to keep track of time in 10 minute turns. I was only somewhat successful in this. I took a page from Magic: The Gathering and used a 12 sided die to keep track of time. After the first 10 minutes, I set it in front of me with the 1 facing up. After another 10 minutes passed, I turned it to 2, and so on. Once it hit 12 I would note that two hours had passed, and start the count over. When I decided to turn it was this issue. I typically assumed that each combat required enough rest afterwards to count as 10 minutes, and that if the players spent more than a few moments in a room it should count for 10 minutes. I also moved the counter up twice when the rogue took 20 on a perception check to find traps.

The whole thing felt messy, but I’m not entirely certain how I could do it better. This will require further in-game experience to fully evaluate.

Weather

I totally spaced on this. Didn’t even mention it during the game, let alone have it affect combat in any way. GM fail.

Treasure on Index Cards

I believe this is something I first red on Telecanter’s blog. Before the game I spent $1.18 on a pack of 300 index cards. Anytime I added a pile of treasure or a chest into my notes, I would write everything down on an Index card. A typical card would be headed with something like “Crypt of Bonegut the Stone Fisted; Chest in room 8” and would include the number of gold pieces, gems, and other oddities the characters found. I also wrote a number in red next to any item which would increase a player’s encumbrance.

I really think these cards improved play by a great deal. Anytime they made a discovery, I’d toss a card over the GM screen, and one of them would read off the items to the others. It was really fun to hear them wonder “what are these bottles of blue liquid?” (Healing Potions), and “A stick with a tiny ruby at the tip!?” (Wand of Fireball with 3 charges left). Fortunately the party’s sorceress, Phoenix Dark, was more than capable of identifying all of these objects. Having something visual seemed to help the players in dividing up the loot amongst themselves, and I really don’t think my encumbrance system would have worked anywhere near as well without these cards.

Obviously it would be more difficult to use these in randomly generated dungeons, but they were so useful in this game that they will certainly have a place in any future games I run.

Hex Crawling

(Using my thoughts on how to make travel more engaging, as well as my thoughts on creating an encounter table.) This did not go so well. At least I don’t think so. The players understood the concept well enough, and I won’t say that anyone appeared to be excessively bored. But with all the rolling, marking down of terrain type, and slowly moving the piece one hex at a time, I think everyone was getting a little impatient. More than once the player who was controlling the party’s marker would absentmindedly move it several spaces at once, which says to me that they were more eager to reach their destination than they were to know what they encountered while getting there.

I believe that part of the issue may have been the way I was marking down the terrain type. A friend of mine got me a nice table-sized, wet-erase hex map for Christmas, so I gave the party a little red bead to represent themselves with, and had them move one hex at a time. Once they entered a hex, I would quickly use one of my markers to identify what the terrain type of the hex was. It was a clumsy method of doing things. One of my players suggested that I let her mark the map, which now seems like a much better idea. It would both involve the players more in the process, and would force me to verbally identify each terrain type (which I was failing to do after awhile.)

If anybody has advice on this, or perhaps an audio recording of a successful hex crawl, I would be very appreciative.

Skills

This isn’t exactly new, but it is something I learned. The more I play with skills, the more I agree with my friends in the OSR movement: the elaborate skills system used in Pathfinder is bad. It’s better than D&D 3.5’s, but it’s still in severe need of being redesigned. Not only does it serve as a source of confusion for new players, but it can be a pain-in-the-ass during play. Having the rogue roll to search for traps at every door quickly became a source of exasperation. And often when I knew I “should” be asking for skill checks, I instead simply allowed players to perform tasks. The sorceress was able to identify magic items, the Ranger with Knowledge(Dungeoneering) was able to identify statues of gnomes as being real gnomes under a petrification spell, etc. I’m not ready to completely abandon a skill system, but I’ll certainly be devoting some attention to it in the coming months.

Funny Story…

That’s everything I’d like to share about what I learned from this most recent game. However, before ending this post, I would like to share one funny story / word of warning for other GMs.

The first boss in my dungeon was a skeletal orc with some fancy fighter abilities. When the players entered the room, it would be lying dead on a slab the way a good corpse should. On the floor around it was scattered a great deal of treasure. The idea was that the players would recognize that as soon as they touched the treasure, the orc would come alive and attack them. So they’d prepare themselves for battle, and carefully grab some of the treasure. When the orc never stirred, they’d figure they were wrong, and go on their way. 20 minutes AFTER they took the treasure, the Orc skeleton would come alive, and start hunting for them in the dungeon. It would be particularly good if he found them whilst they were engaged with some other creature.

When my players finally enter this room, they suspect a trap. So my party’s rogue, Poker, inspects the stone slab the orc is lying on. This I had not expected. Given that rogues receive the “trapfinding” ability at level one, which allows them to detect and disable magical traps, I figured the rogue might have a chance to notice something was amiss here. I told him that he detected a very faint, dormant necromatic aura. Upon hearing this, my players did the logical thing:

The Ranger, whose favored enemy was undead, smashed the skeleton’s head with his sword.

All I could do was bury my face in my hands and give the ranger 3 XP for killing the boss.

Behind the GM's Screen: ToKiTiMo 3

First thing is first: If you are one of the four people playing in my ToKiTiMo campaign, you should not read this post. It contains information from this past Saturday’s game, as well as information which may be used in future sessions. I believe at least two of the players in that game do check this blog occasionally, and reading this post will ruin some of the game’s upcoming surprises. Fortunately for me, I don’t play with any child-minded buffoons who would actually cheat at a tabletop RPG, so I can rely on the honor system for this kinda thing.

Moving on; I recently got around to doing what most other GMs did back in the 90s: I started preparing my game notes on a computer rather than by hand. It was a difficult decision. I’ve always loved the tactile feeling of a pencil scratching across paper. Plus, since I don’t own a printer, it saved me a trip to Office Max and a few dollars on prints. The downside, though, is that it can be difficult to make changes. Sometimes mistakes can force you to scrap an entire page and need to re-write it. And with the way I grip pencils, my hand tends to cramp up after a few minutes, which limited the progress I could make in a given evening.

Plus I type about four times as fast as I can write on paper, so there’s that.

Anyway, now that my games are neither trapped on sheets of paper, nor written in indecipherable chicken-scratch, it occurs to me that I can easily share them. The question is: should I share them? Is this something people would be interested in reading? I certainly have fun writing it, but whether anyone else is interested in them is something of a mystery to me. I think I would like to read other GM’s game notes. I could certainly learn a thing or two from GMs who are better than I. And, hell, if somebody wants, there’s no reason they couldn’t just run my adventure for their own group. That last part might just be my ego talking, but I like to pretend that people find my small contributions to gaming helpful.

So here’s the deal: below is act 1 of the third adventure in my ToKiTiMo campaign. Or, if you’d rather, you can download all three acts of the adventure as a PDF file. If you read it, leave a comment. Let me know if you enjoyed it, and if you’d like me to continue posting my adventures. And if you’d rather I not do this again, speak up! I can take criticism, and if nobody tells me they hate this, I’m going to keep doing it.

ACT 1: Journey to Overton

Part 1: Mahudar Kosopske’s Tower

When the previous adventure ended, the players had just returned from the goblin village with the special tree branch the gnomish wizard would need in order to ward the town of Honon against fire. He allowed them to stay the night, and to drink from his curative fountain to restore their health. The game will begin the following morning.

In the morning, Mahudar is eager to begin his journey to Honon. He ushers the players out of his tower. As he locks the tower, he asks the players if they have any pressing engagements. Assuming they say no, he asks them if they would like to do some work for him. If they agree, read the following text.

“There is an artifact–a small golden orb–which I would like you to retrieve. It’s an item of great importance to the gnomish peoples, but is hidden deep within an underground keep which is warded against our entry. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to dispel them. You lot seem to be trustworthy folk, and as humans the wards would have no effect on you. If you would retrieve this artifact for me, I would reward you handsomely.”

  • He intends to pay each party member 200 gold for their trouble, and will allow them to keep or sell anything they find. If the players Haggle, Mahudar offers only moderate resistance. We still want to encourage haggling. He will go no higher than 400 gold pieces.
  • If the players do not mention it themselves, Mahudar offers them 4 days rations, which he pulls from his bag of holding. In the future, rations should be up to the players, but I haven’t been strict about ration tracking in the past, so they should not be punished for not thinking of it this time.
  • Since Mahudar used “teleport” in the last game, they may ask for one. He has not prepared it that day, and he must begin his travels to Honon immediately, so unless they wish to accompany him that far, he cannot help them. If they press, he will require payment for the spell (8,000 gold).

When the players ask how to get there, read the following text.

“You will first need to travel to Overton. Two miles south of my tower is the river Bynt. Follow its northern bank through the forest. Overton is built where the Bynt meets the mighty River Yosregal. Your journey should take no more than four days time if you don’t stray. In Overton you can rest and resupply. Once you are ready, seek out the man known as Geary Therman, and ask him to direct you to Ursnol, a gnomish settlement a few days travel from Overton. In Ursnol, you will have no trouble finding a guide to lead you the rest of the way to the dungeon entrance. After that, you will be on your own.”

Part 2: Hex Crawl

The area between Mahudar Kosopske’s Tower and Overton has long been the domain of a tribe of Gnolls, known as The Spotted Bull tribe, which is led by a minotaur named Korakus. Recently, an evil Wizard named Dheef Gason moved into a nearby dungeon. He has been using unholy magics to merge captured Gnolls with his Ogre servants. He sets the twisted abominations free in the forest, and they have gathered into a loose society, directing their rage at anyone they find.

While winding through the hilly hexes, the river is at the bottom of steep hills on both sides. This makes it a great place for an ambush if combat is rolled. This first leg of the journey will work off one encounter table for the hills, forest, and plains hexes.

Remember to track the character’s food closely. Also track their movement (they should have 24 movement points if they do not attempt to acquire a mount.) Lastly, make sure Rosco (the ranger) rolls survival to avoid getting lost, in accordance with this table:

TerrainExamplesMovement CostBecoming Lost
Easyroad 4 No Check
Averageclear, city, grasslands, trail* 6 Survival DC: 10
Moderateforest, hills, desert, badlands 8 Survival DC: 15
Difficultmountains, jungle, swamp 12 Survival DC: 20

Weather: Day 1 is Cloudy and Windy, Day 2 is Rainy and Windy, Day 3 is Rainy, Day 4 is Sunny, Day 5 is Sunny, Day 6 is Cloudy, Day 7 is Sunny

Time Tracking: This is the first game in which we will be tracking time. For simplicity’s sake, the adventure will start on the first day, of the first month, of the 3999th year of the common era. Day, Week, and Month names can be determined at a later date, but start keeping track now of how many days have passed.

Kobold Adventuring Party: In the first adventure, the players attacked a Kobold encampment. Despite being given an opportunity to negotiate, they attacked. 6 survivors, separated from their clan, have vowed vengeance on the party. They are stalking them. They will not attack the players outright, as they have not yet become powerful enough. However, they do attempt to lay deadly traps along the party’s suspected paths.

Undead: A lich named Erstic Von Kolt lives not to terribly far from here, though he is not along the projected hex path. Years ago, while he was still alive, he passed through this area and created a number of undead goblins. He’s long since forgotten about them, and they roam aimlessly now. If the players investigate the undead, they might discover a distinctive mark on all of their chests. Showing that mark to anyone in a leadership role will get the players some basic information on the lich.

Part 2 Subsection A: Random Encounters

Each day, roll twice. Once for the morning, once for the evening. Roll a third time for the evening, but only accept results which have mobility (such as monsters). All other results for the nighttime roll should be considered “Nothing of particular interest occurs.”

 Monsters: When rolling a monster, use Trollsmyth’s purpose chart. 2d4 for bestial monsters, 1d10 for intelligent monsters:

1. Diplomacy
2. Patrolling Territory
3. Hurt
4. Horny
5. Hungry
6. Napping
7. Fighting (Roll again to see which creatures it is fighting.)
8. Home
9. Raiding
10. Art

Kobold Traps

1. 10ft deep pits. Perception DC: 16
2. Trip wires onto leaf-covered sharp sticks. Perception DC: 17, Attack +8, 1d6 damage.
3. Snare. Perception DC: 18. Failure causes characters to be pulled up 10ft off the ground.
4. Falling tree. Reflex save DC: 14 or be hit for 4d6 bludgeoning damage, and be trapped under the tree until you can be rescued.

Part 2 Subsection B: Fixed Locations

Garok Torar

This dungeon is represented by a dungeon icon in the center of the forest, one hex north of the river, and two hexes east of the large mountain. Parties entering this hex have a 10% chance to encounter this location.

Garok Torar is a collection of ruins in a large clearing. Made of blue-white stone, the ruins are heavily overgrown now, and no structure save one rises above the first floor–or even has a roof. In the center of the ruins, however, is a larger building. A stairway leads up to the large double-doored entrance–though the doors are long gone. Within appears to be some manner of courthouse, or other official building. In the large central room, an ornate staircase winds downwards.

The staircase leads to the first sub level of a 3-level dungeon. This is where the wizard Dheef Gason has taken up residence. His ogre minions can be commonly encountered throughout all of Garok Torar.

Mount Suvisar

The tallest mountain in the region is located near the western edge of the forest, next to the clearing where Overton can be found. The mountain is heavily forested. It is a little known fact that this is where the roost of Kolgoth’Ronnomaktar The Red can be found.

Castle Nalew

This mega dungeon extends 6 levels above ground level, and 15 levels underground, ending in entrances tot he underdark. However, it is currently sealed up tight, and none know how to enter it. It can be found on the southern edge of the Overton fields. Locals know of it, but none have ever been within its walls.

Part 3: Overton

CN Large Town (Population: 3k; 98% Human, 2% Half Elf, 1 Gnoll) Government: Mayor

Basic Info
Overton is built at the joining of two rivers. The town subsists primarily as a fishing village, but also serves as the central hub for the many frontiersmen who live and work in the nearby forest. It also trades with the gnoll and elvish tribes which live there. The people are generally friendly and honest, but hard from a life in the wilderness. The town’s official patron deity is Obad-Hai, but the town’s population is not particularly devout.

Services Available
Carpenter, Butcher, Blacksmith, Small temple (Obad-Hai), Brothel (“The Comely Castle”), Alchemist’s Shop (“The Crimson Elixer”), Stable (6 horses for sale, left by previous adventuring party who didn’t come back), General Store, river transport, tavern/Inn, leatherworker, tanner.
Town’s Total Purchasing: 4k gold

Notable NPCs
Geary Therman – The town’s mayor. A broad-shouldered huntsman with graying temples. Highly respected, always willing to do manual labor, and to help those in need, even outsiders. Tends to be anywhere he’s needed within the town. When the players ask for him, he’s on the docks talking to Ester Thomas about fur prices.
Hyerman Devon – Manager of the general store. One of the scrawniest men in Overton, but polite and willing to haggle. Sticker price is a few gold more than normal costs.
Old Berman – The high priest at the temple of Obad-Hai. Able to cast 4th level spells. Is not very friendly to those who do not follow his god. Will help for a hefty price, unless anyone offends him or his nature deity.
Melina Ayvon – Wizard in charge of the alchemist’s shop. Sells a variety of concoctions, and able to sell 2nd level spells for a fee. Acts more like a wheedling salesperson than a scholarly wizard. If the players seem capable, she might ask them if they want to find a rare herb for her
Anita Whyk – Half-elven Madam at the Comely Castle. Works as an information broker on the side. Advanced in age now, she still cuts a dashing figure, but does not work herself. She’s protective of the sex workers she employs. She’s a little distracted because one of her girls is missing. (Detective sidequest. she was taken by Gnolls. will be dead by day 7)
Ester Thomas – Ferry captain. A six-and-a-half foot tall woman with beefy arms and a bellowing laugh. She can be brutish and rude, but she’s much smarter than she lets on. She and her sailors are spending a week at rest in Overton whilst they wait for a delivery of animal furs to take south.
Bittereye – Geary Therman’s old hunting companion, a gnoll whose tribe is no more. He helps barter with the nearby gnoll tribes, and serves as an enforcer for the town guard when they need some extra muscle. Doesn’t want players help locating missing brothel girl.

When the players eventually seek out Geary Therman, he’s only too happy to direct them where they need to go. Read the following text:

“Well, easy way is ta cross th’ river here, and hoof it due west until you reach The Forest Queen–that’s a big hulkin’ statue of an elf lady. Can’t miss it. From her, ye can go north until ye reach th’ grasslands. Follow them nor-east. Iffun ye reach the forest’s edge, ye’ve gone too far.”

And that’s Act 1. If you’re interested enough that you’d like to read more, you can download the entire adventure. It’s 22 pages long if you include the three maps. And don’t forget to let me know if you would like for me to continue doing this!

Hex Crawling Encounters


(Order of the Stick courtesy of Richard Berlew)

In Monday’s post on making overland travel more engaging, I discussed how a hex crawl might work in practice. As I noted, the whole concept seems rather dull until you add two elements: survival, and random encounters. I was only able to touch on these concepts briefly in that post, so now I’d like to delve more deeply into the idea of random encounters on a hex map, and how they can work within the context of Pathfinder. I’ll try not to simply repeat Trollsmyth on this issue, since he also covered it in Hex Mapping 17: You’re Everything that a Big Bad Wolf Could Want. Though, while I’m on the subject: if you’ve read my posts and you’re becoming interested in hex maps, read Trollsmyth’s entire series on them. He recently posted part 20, and each post has been thought provoking and informative.

So we’re all at least somewhat familiar with encounter tables, right? They’re not as common as they once were, but sourcebooks are still full of charts to be rolled on, and we’ve all played video game RPGs where walking will suddenly result in a blast of noise and a transition to a battle screen. You’ve probably even had a GM at some point who said they needed to ‘check for random encounters,’ followed by some behind-the-screen dice clattering. But like Vaarsuvius says, these are boring. And it’s true. When the GM “fades to black” anytime the party travels anywhere, random encounters are boring. It’s like being a cardboard duck in a shooting gallery: you’re moving, and you might get hit by something, but you don’t really have much say in it either way. Random encounters only work when the player is in control of their own movement, which in the wilderness, means that random encounters only work when there’s a hex crawl.

Self determination (i.e. PLAYER AGENCY) is not all which is required for a random encounter to be compelling. Before leaping into the construction of an encounter table we need to get two misconceptions out of the way. First, it’s essential to realize that random encounters are not random. There is an element of random determination involved, but whoever creates the encounter table controls the probabilities of each encounter type. Not only that: they control what types of encounters are even possible. It’s not as though you’re obligated to pull monsters from the bestiary without rhyme or reason once you decide to build an encounter table. That would be ridiculous. You populate your encounter table with encounters which make sense. If orcs and trolls are fighting for control of the forest, then the encounter table for the forest will be variations on that theme. There can be troll hunters, orc worg riders, 1d4 trolls on patrol, a battle between orcs and trolls, a wounded orc separated from his fellows, the list goes on. Who knows? Maybe the half-assed “trolls vs. orcs” story will pique your player’s interests. Maybe they’ll take it upon themselves to settle the forest feud.

That’s what you want. Trust me: no matter how brilliant you think your game’s overarching plot is, you will never have more fun as a game master than you will when your players start making up their own quests.

The second misconception about random encounters is that all encounters are combat. Apparently the only reason we’re rolling at all is to determine what type of monsters are encountered, and how many of them there are. If possible this idea is even more ludicrous than the first one. There’s so much to encounter in the wilderness! Abandoned buildings, the bones of a long dead adventurer, a lost child, an undelivered letter, a magical fountain the list could go on. Adventure and exploration have a lot more to offer than hostile creatures in need of a good skewering.

The first step in creating an encounter table is to determine what area it covers. Presumably you’ve already got your hex map, so unless your game world is a homogenous lump, you can look at it and see plains, forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and so forth. Within each of these biomes, a countless number of interesting encounters are potentially hiding, and the manner of those encounters will likely be completely different in one part of the world than they will be in another. While traversing the planes of Gibbledy-Gop, your players might encounter mighty centaurs, but while in the forest of Creepyscaryeek they’re more likely to encounter orcs. And, if your players go south of the river Fishnstuff in the forest of Creepyscaryeek, then they’ll encounter ogres instead, since the orcs are afraid to cross the river. It’s up to you, as GM, to determine how large an area your encounter table will be used for. If you’re working on creating a fully developed world, you may even want to create a second map with color-coded outlines of areas, based on which encounter table that area uses. If you wanted to get fancy, you could even have some areas which were under the effects of two separate encounter tables.

Once you’ve marked your encounter table’s “Area of Influence,” you need to determine what’s going on there. This will inform your decisions later on when it comes time to populate the encounter table. Above I gave an example of a forest where trolls and orcs fighting one another, and that’s as good a place to start as any. But it needs more detail. Let’s say that there’s a number of elven ruins from an ancient forgotten civilization which the two groups are fighting over. Given that trolls are much stronger than orcs, there’s likely going to be many more of the latter than of the former, or else the trolls would have won the ware a long time ago. And, just for kicks, lets say that the orc leader made a deal with a high-ish level wizard who is now supplying the orcs with some basic magical equipment.

At this point we have enough information to start sketching out what the encounter table will look like. There are a number of ways you can set up the chart, using any number of different dice, but I like to keep things simple: 1d20 to determine the type of encounter, and then another 1d20 do determine the specific encounter. This provides enough options that it’s pretty unlikely the players will exhaust all of them within a few hours of gameplay, but so many that it becomes unwieldy to deal with. Of course if you’re working with larger or smaller areas–or longer or shorter amounts of time the players will spend in those areas–it may be prudent to use a more or less complicated chart. If you really wanted, you could roll 1d100 to determine which of 100 charts (each with 100 options of their own) you would roll on. Or you could just roll1d4 to determine which of four different encounter types your players will face. It’s entirely up to you and what you need, but the “1d20 twice” approach provides a nice healthy average, so that’s what I’ll use here.

The first d20 roll, as I mentioned above, will determine the type of encounter, or whether there is an encounter at all. It’s important to make sure that there’s a relatively good chance of the players not encountering anything. Otherwise the hex crawl will slow to…well…a crawl. The players are on an adventure, yes, but they likely also have a goal in mind. Excessive distraction from that goal will annoy them. I like to have about a 50% chance of nothing happening. The nice thing about the d20 is that each number on the die has a 5% chance of being rolled, so if we want to create a 50% chance of nothing happening, we assign the numbers 1 through 10 to “nothing.” And that range can be altered to increase or decrease the probability somewhat, but I would advise not straying too far from the 50% median. Too many random encounters can become frustrating, and a serious drain on the party’s resources. Likewise, too few random encounters makes the hex crawl boring.

50% of the die is left to assign, so lets do combat encounters next. Since the forest is a Trolls Vs. Orcs warzone, combat encounters should be relatively common. 25% seems like a good probability, so we’ll assign numbers 11 through 15 on the d20 to “combat.” Unlike “nothing,” other types of encounters can vary as wildly as you like. The peaceful plains near civilization may only have a 5 or 10% chance of  combat encounters, while a party venturing deep into the territory of an evil empire may face a 30 or 40% combat rate.

With 50% assigned to “nothing,” and 25% assigned to “combat,” that leaves only five numbers left to assign, and there are a plethora of things we could put there. Interesting locations, traps, side quests, treasure, dungeon entrances, as with many things in tabletop RPGs, the limit is your imagination. For this encounter table, I think 16-17 (10%) will be Interesting Locations, 18-19 (10%) will be Special, and 20 (5%) will be Side Quests. And there we go, the first roll on the encounter table is taken care of. Rolling 1d20 will either result in “nothing,” or in one of four different types of interesting encounters. But the type of encounter is only half of the equation. Now we need to populate the second half of the encounter table, where we’ll determine specifics.

Combat: The combat chart should include a variety of different combat encounters. The obvious two are a band of orcs, and a band of trolls, but we can be more creative than that. And, more importantly, since combat encounters have a 25% chance of occurring, we need to be more creative than that. Since players are likely to encounter combat a number of times, we should have maybe 15-20 different possibilities on this table. They can include any number of things. The players could stumble onto a battle already in progress between orcs and trolls, which they could decide to participate in or not. They might encounter orcs riding worgs, or trolls carrying orc prisoners. Normal forest danger, like dire bears,can be on the list as well. Though your players will probably have more fun with the encounters that have a story behind them.

Interesting Locations: We’ve already mentioned that the orcs and the trolls are fighting over some ancient elven ruins, so those should be on this list. If you were so inclined, you could even include a number of different types of elven ruins: homes, government buildings, etc. Perhaps one might hide a dungeon entrance. Other types of interesting locations could include an orc village, a troll village, a reclusive wizard’s tower, an illusory copse of trees that one of the players accidentally walks through, or even just a meadow where the players can refill their water rations.

Special: Special is where you can put all the oddball stuff which doesn’t fit in your other categories. You might include a wounded orc warrior who was left behind by his comrades, or a fellow adventurer who got separated from their party and is now lost. If you are so inclined, you might even give your players a chance to find a treasure chest filled with gold which has been covered with dirt and leaves, or a powerful magic item dropped by some long past adventurer. Finding random treasure should probably be pretty uncommon though, and you may want to require a perception check to notice it.

Side Quests: You may not want to include side quests, but I think you should. First, the main questline is never quite as engaging to the players as we GMs would like to think it is. Providing them with occasional hooks to go off in a different direction lets them know they have alternatives. More importantly, showing that the world has a variety of tasks for them to handle, not all of which are related, helps encourage the players to think of your world as a living, diverse environment. Possible side quests include finding the entrance to a dungeon, finding a dead messenger with an important letter for a nearby king, or finding a village which needs the party’s assistance. And if you’d really like the players to continue on with the main quest before handling the side quest, you can always give them a time limit. E.g. “The world will blow up in 5 days and the dungeon where you can stop it from happening is 4 days away.”

A few final notes on using an encounter table:

  • How often? Once you’ve got the chart made, determine how often you’re going to roll on it. You could roll once per hex, once per hour spent within the hex, once per day, whatever you want. Personally, I roll each time the party enters a hex, and roll once more during the night when the party is at rest (ignoring any results which are not capable of self-mobility, such as an ancient ruin.)
  • A Gazebo Appears! Encounters should not simply “appear,” as though you’re playing a console RPG from the 90s. Take a moment to figure out how the players encounter whatever it is that you rolled. If it’s a location, do they see it in a valley as they reach the crest of a hill? Can they see it from a distance, or is it obscured by the treeline until they move closer? If it’s a monster, who sees who first? Perhaps you could figure out a simple third roll to determine whether or not the party is surprised. Trollsmyth has an excellent method for determining what a monster is doing when it’s encountered in the same hex mapping post I linked above.
  • Wow, this forest sure has a lot of wizards… Some things ought to be taken off the encounter table once they’ve been encountered once. For example, if your players have already encountered one reclusive wizard’s tower in the forest, you may not want them to find another. In these cases, re-rolling is fine. However, you might also consider that encountering something twice could lead to an interesting story that you never intended. For example, perhaps the wizard’s tower exists in several locations at once, or teleports around the forest at random, or maybe there are two wizards here who don’t like one another very much. All those options could end up being way more fun than simply re-rolling.

Making Travel More Engaging

As of late, I’ve been pondering how I can make travel more interesting for my players. It’s something I’ve always struggled with in my career as a Game Master. Sometimes I’ve tried just fading to black between points of interest, but that’s no good. If the players don’t somehow experience the travel, then there’s no tangible metric for how distant various locations are. And even if that’s not a problem for you (which it should be), it also deprives players of the opportunity to experience the game world outside of towns and plot events. Imagery of adventurers traveling together through a forest or desert fuels our imaginations, we can’t simply gloss over that part of an adventure because it’s difficult to present in an engaging manner! We can, of course, try to give the illusion distance by determining that a certain journey will require X days to complete, but even if you try to spice that up with random encounters, the players will get bored. After an unfortunate extended hiatus, my group is finally going to be able to get back together for a new adventure soon. The one I’m preparing will have a great deal of traveling in it, which has brought this problem to the forefront of my attention.

Of course, utilizing a hex map helps solve many of these problems, which I’ve talked about before. Making the players responsible for choosing each 6-mile step of their journey helps engage them in travel, because progress towards their destination won’t continue without their input. Giving them these choices also increases their player agency, which will always increase their engagement. And, as an added bonus, once you start asking your players to make choices, they’ll start making choices on their own. Before you know it, your players will be directing the course of their own adventure, and that’s when you know that you’re a good game master.

But how does it work?

I mean, when the whole group is actually sitting around the table, and you’ve got your filled-in hex map behind the GM screen, what happens next? How precisely do the players interact with the hex map. How do they know where to go? Does a single player just point to one hex after another until the end of the day? How are you going to describe each hex when the players enter it? These are questions which need to be considered, lest we be caught with our pants down at the table. We’re the GM after all, we need to give the appearance that we’re prepared for anything the players throw at us.

Step one is figuring out how the players are going to keep track of the map as they uncover it. Of course, I have a filled-in hex map which I’ll keep behind the screen, but there’s no reasonable way for me to show it to them without revealing information they have not yet earned. My map, after all, has notes on it indicating the locations of dungeons, treasure, and towns. So the players need a assign one of their number the duties of mapmaker, and that player will need a blank map which they can fill in as they play. A quick google search for “print hex graph” turned up a site which creates hexagonal graph paper for you. I printed off 25 or 30 sheets myself, just to keep on hand. I also have a very nice hexagonal battle mat which was given to me as a Christmas gift by a friend. It’s wet-erase, so I can actually have a nice visual “world environment” for my players as they explore. The only drawback is that the mat needs to be erased at the end of each session, so the players will need to keep a map as well.

As with most party decisions in RPGs, reasonable adults won’t need any GM guidance with respect to making a group decision. In my experience, a party leader most often emerges naturally, and when it doesn’t, players don’t have trouble coming to a consensus on issues like “which direction do we walk.” If getting the party to agree on things like this is a problem for your group, then your problems are outside the scope of this post. Likely outside the scope of anything I will ever write about, because I’m not from the “here’s how to handle your friends…” school of GM advice.

With that out of the way, the second step becomes determining the best way for players to interact with the hex crawl. What is the conversation that takes place between the players and the GM as they move from hex to hex on the way to their destination. For my purposes, in the upcoming game I’ll be running, the players will receive some very basic instructions. The first leg of their journey will first require them to travel in a certain direction until they reach a river, then they’ll need to follow that river until they reach a village. Pretty straightforward. Straightforward enough that it might end up being boring, but I’ll get to that later.

As the players begin to prepare for their journey, the GM should figure out what the slowest party member’s movement speed is. This will be the movement speed for the entire party, unless the faster party members are willing to leave someone behind. If the players are on foot, the slowest will likely be whatever character is a dwarf or halfling. If the players have mounts (which suddenly become a lot more appealing once you’re hex crawling) their speed will significantly increase. Remember also to consider whether the characters are encumbered or not. If you’re like me, you’ve probably never used encumbrance rules before. However, if we’re trying to make travel engaging, then using encumbrance rules gives the players something they’ll need to pay attention to lest their pace be slowed, and that’s too valuable to pass up. If Pathfinder’s encumbrance rules are too complicated for you, I did a mock up of an alternative a few months back which may be more to your liking. I haven’t got around to putting any spit or polish on it, though.

For simplicity’s sake (and also because this is likely what I’ll have in my game) lets say that the party is made up entirely of unencumbered humans, which have a movement speed of 30. According to Pathfinder’s movement rules (found in the Core Rulebook, on pages 170 through 172), this gives the party a daily movement speed of 24 miles. Now, if you like, you can simply say that since each hex is 6 miles, and 24 divided by 6 is 4, that means that a party may travel 4 hexes in a day–and that’s fine. However it fails to take into account that some terrain is more difficult to travel through than others. Fellow blogger Brendan recently wrote a post entitled “Wilderness Movement Costs,” (which itself was based on a post by Delta). In it, he outlines a basic system for tracking a party’s hex crawling movements which I’ve decided to rip off and adapt for Pathfinder/my own purposes.

Movement Points: Convert the number of miles the party may travel in a day into “points.” So, it the party can travel 24 miles in a day, they have 24 “movement points.” This may seem like a ridiculous extra step. However, its function is that it turns the party’s movement budget into an abstraction, rather than a literal unit of distance. This will help players understand the less-than-literal possible uses for movement points.The party can spend movement points on couple different things:

Travel: Travel is the most obvious function. (That is, after all, kinda the whole purpose of this post). The table below shows the cost in movement points for each of the four terrain difficulties. Since the players won’t know if the next hex will put them over their movement cost, it’s up to the GM to warn them when they’re about to do it, and let them know that continuing forward would constitute a forced march, meaning the players would not be able to move as much the following day. Note that traveling on roads actually allows the party to move at a faster speed than the standard rules would allow. This way, roads have an actual in-game purpose much closer to their real life one.

TerrainExamplesMovement CostBecoming Lost
Easyroad 4 No Check
Averageclear, city, grasslands, trail* 6 Survival DC: 10
Moderateforest, hills, desert, badlands 8 Survival DC: 15
Difficultmountains, jungle, swamp 12 Survival DC: 20

*There is no Survival check required to avoid becoming lost when following a well marked trail.

The movement cost happens to be evenly divisible for our band of unencumbered humans, though it may not be for all parties. If a party has some movement points left at the end of the day, but not enough to enter the next hex, give them some extra time to spend on other activities. Remember that in Pathfinder, a “traveling day” is 8 hours. So if you divide their total allotment of daily movement points by 8, you can determine how many movement points are spent during each hour of travel. From there you can easily figure out how much time they gain. For example, if you divide the human’s daily allotment of movement points, 24, by 8, you get 3. That’s 3 miles every hour. So if they have 3 movement points remaining, they have an extra hour to spend on tasks such as crafting, foraging for food, or researching spells.

Searching: A six mile hex is huge. A character could spend a week or more in the same hex without discovering everything there is to learn there. Every time they enter a hex, they see only a tiny fraction of what the hex has to offer. By spending one half of the movement points required to enter the hex, they can explore a roughly equivalent fraction of the hex. For example, a character entering a forest hex spends 8 movement points to make a beeline through the hex. If the party would also like to spend 4 more movement points in the hex (for a total of 12) then they can explore a little bit on their way through. They certainly won’t see everything, but they’ll earn themselves a second roll on the encounter table. Maybe they’ll find nothing, maybe they’ll encounter monsters, or maybe they’ll find something worth searching for. See below for more information on encounters.

That covers how the party’s movement through a hex crawl is handled, but how is it entertaining? At this point all we have is a mini game where the players point to a hex, and the GM tells them whether or not they have enough movement left, or whether they need to bed down for the evening. This is a structure, but without putting some meat on that structure, the whole thing ends up being completely monotonous, and players will leave. That’s where the final two elements of engaging travel come into play: survival, and encounters.

Surviving in the wilderness won’t be easy. First off, each party will need to rely on the survival check of one of its members. Each time a hex is entered, that player must make a survival check to avoid getting lost. If the character fails their survival check, then when the party attempts to move on to the next hex, the DM should roll 1d6 to determine which hex the party actually travels to. A roll of one means the party travels to the hex they intended to travel to (though they are still lost). Rolling a 2 indicates that the party travels to the hex one-space clockwise of their intended hex, rolling a 3 indicates they travel to the hex 2 spaces clockwise, etc. The party remains lost until their guide can succeed on a survival check upon entering a new hex. Items such as a compass or a map can help characters improve their survival checks to avoid getting lost. Once a character is an experienced enough traveler, their survival skill will likely rise high enough that becoming lost is no longer an issue.

Players will also need to monitor their rations in order to survive in the wilderness. If you’ve never forced players to keep track of their food supply before, now’s the time to start. Once the players run out of food 4 days into a 10 day journey, you’ll find they’re much more engaged in figuring out how to reach their destination before they die of starvation. Foraging and hunting are always options, but what if they can’t find anything? Will they eat their mounts? Will they eat…each other? That’s the fun! And don’t forget the elements. If the character’s journey takes place during the colder months, they may regret not spending the encumbrance points on those extra blankets when it begins to snow, and they start to freeze to death.

Lastly, there’s encounters. There are all types of encounters your players can have, which you can roll on a random chart. I won’t take the time to come up with a chart here, but I would say the chart should probably be about fifty percent “nothing,” which will allow the players to avoid getting bogged down in every single hex. The other half of the chart should be some combination of combat encounters, and ‘other.’ Other types of encounters can include walking in on a druidic ritual, finding the entrance to a random dungeon, coming upon a village of friendly or neutral wilderness dwellers, discovering a magic well, or any number of things you can come up with on your own. And for those times when combat encounters are rolled, there’s no need for them to be as boring as the standard “monsters appear” nonsense. Whose to say whether the monsters notice the players or not–or whether it’s a few monsters, or an entire village of them! Trollsmyth once posted an excellent chart which GMs could use to determine what monsters were doing when they were encountered. And don’t forget my Spicing Up the Battlemat series of posts to help make these combat encounters more interesting! (I really ought to do another of those. The last one was in December!)

As I’ve said a million times, keeping your players engaged is the number one duty of a game master. And whether want it to or not, travel is likely going to make up a large part of your game. You can either ignore it, or you can try to use it as another opportunity to challenge and entertain your players. After writing this post, I for one feel a lot more confident about running travel for my players in our upcoming game.

Negune: The Nation of Regalia

The nation of Regalia is by far the largest of the five nations on the continent of Negune. Founded eight centuries ago by the legendary bard Horatiana The Beloved, Regalia is a benevolent monarchy, so named because Horatiana was fond of wordplay, but lacked any talent for it. Regalia controls the entire eastern coast of the continent, providing it with the easiest access to the only other known landmass, the continent of Kalimesh. Regalia also boarders every other nation on the continent, except Ribanko, which has become completely isolationist and refuses to engage with the other nations; and Stekett, which, despite not sharing a boarder with Negune, is still most easily reached from Regalia rather than any of the other nations. Given these two significant advantages, Regalia has become the center of culture and trade on the continent.

Regalia is comprised of seven provinces: Centralia, Volpan, Pyensal, Sextent, Shield Haven, Garvain, and Tonshire. One for each of the seven adventurers who united the peoples of Negune eight hundred years ago. Though the seven continents are not explicitly named for one of the companions, each of the seven capitol cities has a bronze statue of one of the heroes just inside the town gate, along with an inscribed plaque penned by Horatiana herself.

Government
Regalia is a monarchy guided by the traditions put forth by Queen Horatiana. Though no formal constitution has ever been drafted, in true Bardic style, Horatiana had every wall of the sprawling royal palace engraved with lessons she had learned, and her philosophies for leadership. These engravings do not legally bind the monarch. In fact, Monarchs often ignore certain engravings when they do not suit their needs or plans. However, the engravings are respected, and on three separate occasions, monarchs have been removed from power for violating the spirit of these philosophies. The wisest of Regalia’s monarchs, it is said, spend their lives strolling through the halls of the royal palace, carefully studying the engravings left by their ancient forbear. So respected is this wisdom, that it has been disseminated throughout the seven provinces, and “Take wisdom from the walls” has become a common saying among Regalians.

The current monarch, Queen Byethen, is particularly devoted to these teachings. In accordance with them, she has established a council of seven advisers–one from each of the provinces–which are drawn from the town mayors, and cycled out after one year to make room for a new adviser. She has also assembled a council of 33 scholars, wizards, clerics, soldiers, and government clerks whose primary duty is to argue with her. To “Play Asmodeus’ Advocate,” if you will. They may respond to her ideas only with argument, or silence. Though they have no power to overrule her, the walls discourage her from taking any action she cannot defend. Queen Byethen also spends one week of each year living and working in a random town within her kingdom, so that she might never forget the hardships her people face.

Something which the walls are most emphatic about, and which no ruler has yet ignored, deals with the royal succession, and the separation between the nation of Regalia, and the seven provinces which constitute it. At any given time, there must be seven potential successors to the throne. Each of these successors is made the ruler of one of the provinces. The monarch may replace a successor at any time, based on any criteria, or completely arbitrarily. However, so long as the successors have the confidence of the monarch, they should be allowed to rule their provinces as they see fit. When the monarch has died, or otherwise cedes the throne, whatever advisory councils they formed during their reign gathers, and selects one of the seven to take the crown of Regalia.

Economy
Regalia is a fantastically wealthy nation. In terms of resources, it has an ample amount of forested area, plentiful fishing, rich mining, and expansive farmland. Regalia is so rich in natural resources, that no necessary commodity needs to be imported from any other nation–though the provinces themselves do need to trade with one another. The surplus of resources has also made Regalia rich in the gold and platinum of other lands through trade. Regalia’s prosperity has reinforced the native legend that Negune was blessed by the gods to make it a place worthy of heroes. That legend has even spread across the sea, to Kalimesh.

Culture
Though the specific culture varies from province to province, a few common themes unite Regalian culture as a whole. Despite being governed by a monarchy, Regalia fosters a meritocratic culture. The nation’s wealth has allowed education and other opportunities to be offered to most of the people. At present, two of the seven provinces are ruled by people who were born on the lower rungs of society: one a farmer, the other a miller. And as province governors, these two will both be considered as potential monarchs when Byethen leaves power.

Negune: Historical Overview

If you recognize the map above, you may just pay more attention to my posts than I do. I posted it once before (sans political notations) in an October update about methods for generating maps randomly without using a computer. As the sloppy handwriting in the upper right indicates, this is the continent of Negune, location of my Ascendant Crusade campaign. Normally when I start a new game, I start a new game world, and its geography and locals are developed as the players travel further and further abroad from where they start. But Negune is special.

You see, several years back I had no job, no close friends living nearby, and most importantly, no Internet. My TV was broken as well, so I couldn’t play any of my console games. From September through to December of 2009 I did two things: Watch Star Trek The Next Generation over and over again, and work on developing the world of the Ascendant Crusade. It may sound very sad–and truthfully it wasn’t a pleasant time in my life–but I must confess I miss the absolute focus my isolation provided me. It’s remarkable what one can get done without the Internet.

So where am I going with this? Well you see, I miss working on Negune. I had a lot of ideas which I never had a chance to develop beyond concepts. I want to write about this place. Hell, it’s already started seeping into my recent writing. Even while I wrote the Gravewhisper’s Claw post, I knew that the dozen made-up ‘fantasy words’ I was dropping were going to be gibberish to my readers. So from here on I’ll occasionally be doing posts which develop my Negune campaign setting. Maybe we’ll even learn something about creating a living breathing world along the way. Who the fuck knows.

History of Negune

Many thousands of years ago, the god, Valor, looked upon the world of Tyrgaren and saw that it had no heroes to rival those of other worlds. “This will not do!” he bellowed, and struck the oceans with his hammer. Opposite his blow, a new continent rose from the sea. “Here will heroes worthy of me be born! Let any who seek my favor come to Negune, and prove themselves!” To this, Valor’s brother Strife replied “If heroes are to be made here, there must be challenges to test them!” With this, Strife sowed across the land challenges unlike those seen before on the face of Tyrgaren. Hearing her brothers, Abundance approached. “You fools.” she chided “Who will fight for this land? Who will struggle so hard against challenges so great simply for the favor of a distant god?” And Abundance caressed the land of Negune, bestowing it with a fertility and richness seen nowhere else on Tyrgaren. The three gods embraced, proud of their work, and turned their attention away from their creation. It was then that Evil approached, and blew his dark breath over the land of Negune. “And now,” he whispered, careful not to be heard by the three creator gods “my darkness shall always guide this land’s fate.”

–Creation myth, found scribed on an obsidian tablet in the central Arganian forests.

The earliest civilizations of Negune organized themselves into city-states. Not much is known about this period or what came before it. What is clear is that these city states had a variety of cultures, some quite different from each other. During this civilization’s peak, there were several hundred of these city states, frequently warring with one another and vying for land and resources.

It was during this peak that a woman named Eganaptyc arrived in the city state of Oriac. History is unclear on precisely where she came from, and many recovered texts from this period suggest a supernatural origin. However, the people of Negune at this time had not yet managed to construct ships capable of crossing oceans, therefore it is more likely that Eganaptyc arrived on Negune from one of the other continents, which were much more technologically advanced during this period. No effort has yet been made to search the ancient libraries of other lands to discover her origins.

Eganaptyc was a Wizard of not insignificant skill, if tales of her magical demonstrations are to be believed. Though, given that the people of Negune at this time had very limited experience with magic, their accounts are highly suspect. None the less, Eganaptyc’s magical prowess and apparent benevolence quickly elevated her within Oriac, and she was made an adviser to the city’s king. The king had no children, and upon his death the people demanded that Eganaptyc take the throne.

Under her rule, Oriac began to aggressively expand its boarders. First by securing powerful alliances with other city states in the East, then by conquering the city states to the West. Once her control there was established, Eganaptyc turned on her Eastern allies and conquered them. So did Eganaptyc’s wars of conquest continue for many years. Wars which were continued by her son when she became too old to devote her full attention to matters of state. Eganaptyc lived just long enough for all of Negune to be brought under the rule of Oriac during her granddaughter’s reign.

With no enemies left to fight, Eganaptyc’s granddaughter, Retyac the Benevolent, turned her attention to strengthening her empire by spreading education to its furthest reaches. This is the beginning of Negune’s golden age. It was marked by unprecedented prosperity in every corner of the Eganaptyc Empire. Technological advancement and learning accelerated, and within ten generations the once primitive Negune had become one of the most advanced societies in the world. The capital city of Oriac came to be widely known as the greatest city in all the world, stretching out to cover the entire island of Argania.

For three thousand years this unprecedented prosperity continued, and the Eganaptyc Empire flourished. But as Eganaptyc’s descendents became more and more removed from the teachings and philosophies which had made their ancestors great, they began to lose touch with their people. When the people questioned them, these rulers resorted to oppression. And almost suddenly, within twenty years, millennia of good was undone. Oriac was sacked, anyone who had represented law and order was subjected to the rule of the mob, and civilization was lost.

Alternative governments were tried, but the incessant squabbling and vying for power in these governments led to constant wars, which invariably resulted in groups that were even more fractured, and required even smaller forms of government. Within a few centuries, Negune had descended from a continent-spanning empire, to a loose confederation of states, eventually returning to city states, and then descending even further into tribalism, and finally to barbarism. And there it remained for an eon.

Two thousand years after the fall of Oriac, five adventurers came to Negune. Many adventurers had come before them, but all had either returned home or perished. But these seven would prove different. Their names have become legendary: Korrik Anribo, the mighty elven wizard; Shorn Ironteeth, the dwarven axemaster; Horatiana, the human whose songs could soften even a titan’s heart; Grephar, the human paladin; Norak the wild man; Bronsond the elven ranger; and Carrifeist, the half elven rogue.

For over thirty years, these seven traveled to every land of Negune. They slew monsters, saved villages, and bred good will throughout the land. Then, while exploring the Cold Iron Mountains in central Negune, something happened. Not a one of them would ever speak of it during their lifetimes, but when they descended from the mountain Bronsond was not with them, and they immediately parted ways.

Korrik settled in the far North, on a small island which he named Ribanko. He never spoke with any of his compatriots again. Shorn united many disparate and primitive dwarven clans, and settled in the ore-rich mountains in the North, founding the dwarven city he called Shornholm. Grephar traveled far to the West, to the most defensible position in the party had found in all of their travels. He united the people there, and called his nation Stekett. Carrifest settled near the sea. When people came and built a city around her, and begged her to rule it, she named it for her fallen comrade: Bronsond. Horatiana, the party’s public face, had gained the most good will during their travels, and people flocked to her banner when she chose to settle down. So many swore allegiance to her that she had to break her nation, Regalia, into seven provinces: Tonshire, Shield Haven, Garvain, Centralia, Volpan, Sextent, and Pyensal. One for each of her former comrades. Before the group parted ways, Norak asked only that his friends never civilize all the land, and that they leave plenty of space for him to run free.

Eight hundred years have now passed since the Seven Heroes parted company. All have long since died–save Korrik, who still broods on his isle to the North.

Designing a Village in Detail

Not too long ago, Zalekios conquered a small village. It’s something I’ve wanted the character to do for some time. And, in our last game, my GM was gracious enough to include an opportunity for conquest. To be honest, I have no grand and evil scheme to further overpower my character through corrupt governance. Certainly, I have plans on how I’ll make use of my subjects, but the ways in which the town will benefit Zalekios are much less interesting to me than the challenges and opportunities ruling over a town will provide. The need to fortify it, defend it, and ensure that my subjects are unable to oust me while I’m out adventuring, all sound like interesting and entertaining challenges to me.

So once I had the town under my thumb, I asked my GM if it would be alright for me to make a detailed map of the village. He agreed, and we spent some time going over what my limitations were. Geographically, the village is located in a large area of plains, with no major shifts in elevation or terrain type for several miles around. Neither are there any significant bodies of water, or forested areas nearby. Honestly, I think he just made the environment as simple as possible because he’s afraid of my ingenuity. But that’s okay with me. I like a challenge.

I was also told that I had a total of 377 villagers, 27 of which could be level 1 experts, adepts, warriors, or aristocrats. The rest are level 1 commoners. Other than that, he left everything up to me. I’ve checked in with him periodically throughout the town creation process, but he hasn’t vetoed any of my decisions yet. Of course, I’ve kept everything in line with what one would find in a dirt-poor town, so he hasn’t had much to say “no” to. He and I have been playing games together long enough that we have a pretty good sense of what the limits are in each other’s games.

Now, even as a GM, I don’t often have the opportunity to truly build a thoroughly detailed community. Normally it’s simply not an efficient use of time. It’s much easier and faster to simply plot out the most basic outline of what the town is like: what kind of government it has, what its economy is based on, whether it has any unusual traditions or culture, and whether it has any noteworthy landmarks or NPCs. Everything else can be generated on the fly. Even with more detailed cities which my players return to often, I rarely do more than sketch out general “districts,” and identify the location of the main roads through the town. The port city of Niston, which the players in my Ascendant Crusade game have visited in between adventures for several years now, is still just a rough collection of squares marked “Affluent Area,” “Merchant Section,” “Slum,” “Docks,” and so on.

As a player preparing to govern this town, however, I find the idea of exacting detail appealing. Knowing precisely how many warriors are in the town guard will help me plan my defenses. And since the character in question is Zalekios, knowing just how many commoners I can eat before my breeding stock gets too low is important! Additionally, a large part of my plans involve modifying the town, in the form of watch towers, walls, work camps, etc, so I want to know precisely what I have to work with.

I decided to start by figuring out what kind of population I have. I broke my population into three age based groups. First would be children, defined by Pathfinder as anyone under 15 years old. Last there’s the elderly, which I defined as anyone over 55. In between those two groups are the adults. So out of my 377 total population, I needed to figure out how many people fell into the three groups. I decided to use a population pyramid to work out a basic percentage. I spent some time looking for one which applied specifically to medieval villages, but didn’t have any luck finding one. So I just stuck with the closest to average I could find. What I wound up with, using some very rough estimation, is 91 children, 260 adults, and 26 elderly. I figure that, to keep things simple, I would split the genders evenly. Since my population is an odd number, I flipped a coin, and determined that the odd person out is a woman named Old Ms. Dyterran, by far the oldest person in the village at 84 years. Her children are dead of old age, but she lives with her grandson and his family. She likes to tell scary stories to children.

Outliers such as old Ms. Dyterran aside, I find these numbers to be telling of the type of community this is. With a max population of 377, it’s a very small community. People’s lives will be interconnected. But I would estimate that the community is still too large for everyone to know everyone else. Even acquaintance level relationships are difficult to maintain when there’s several hundred of them. However, when you break things down by age, the numbers get remarkably smaller. If there are only 91 children under the age of 15, then how few must there be between the ages of 8 and 12? If there’s only ten or twenty kids your age in town, you probably know all of them. That goes doubly so for the old folks, who probably all know each other quite well by now.

Moving on, I estimated that there would be 89 households, based on the adult population. That’s assuming that every household is centered around an adult couple. Children and elderly would live with said couples, as would a number of dependent adults who are over the age of 15, but have not yet struck out on their own. This would mean that there are 2.9 adults per household, 1.02 children per household, and 0.29 elderly per household. So if you walk into one of these 89 homes at random, the odds are that there are two wedded adults there, who live with one young child and one adult child. And there is a roughly one-in-three chance that one of the couple’s parents is still alive, and also living in the house. So most homes contain 4-5 people.

Once I had some ideas on what the population numbers looked like, I moved on to economics. Fun fact, if you google “Plains People,” all you really come up with are the Plains Indians, and they were nomads, so information on them was no help in this project. However, Wikipedia has a great deal of information on plains which I found extremely useful in this endeavor. While it may not be an ideal source if you’re looking for facts you can rely on, Wikipedia more than accurate enough if you’re just looking to inject a little realism into your role playing games. Turns out “plains” is an exceptionally broad category, which covers dozens of terrain types.

I decided that my GM’s goal in providing me with an endless flatland of plains was probably closest to the American prairie. Which, I learned, is excellent for farming. However, farming there required more advanced farming equipment than was available when it was first settled. Apparently, up until that point, farmers used wooden plows, but steel plows needed to be developed to handle the tougher earth. I decided one of my experts would need to be a dedicated toolmaker. Animal husbandry is also an option for people living in an area like the American prairie. Using that information, I decided that farming would be the main source of food and income for this village, with pigs and chickens providing them with some dietary variety.

The only major landmarks of note are the homes of the mayor and wizard, both of whom Zalekios killed in his secret coup. Since Zalekios is impersonating the mayor, he’s taken up that residence, and billeted his small army of 33 goblins in the Wizard’s home. I mocked up this “Town Character Sheet” in open office writer.

From there, it was time to draw the map. As with the previous steps, I decided to do some research first. I dug through a number of sources for maps, including my own books, the Cartographer’s Guild, and just plain old google image search. I saved a few dozen samples to reference as I went to make my own map, and used elements from several of them. However, this map, from the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, was my biggest aide. It is at the same time both extremely simple, and extremely detailed. If you step back and look at the whole map, you see what appears to be a birds eye view of a large city. Each building and side street is distinct, and you get a sense of what the town is like from a street view. There are clearly affluent areas near the parks, with larger houses, etc, along with poorer areas of much smaller buildings clustered together. Yet for all its detail, the map is drawn quite simply. Each individual building is little more than a brown shape with either an “X” or an “I” drawn on top of it to indicate the slant of the roof.

To start with, I sketched out a “districts” map, like the ones I mentioned above. It looked like a series of circles, like a bulls-eye. The small, center circle was designated for important buildings, like the mayor’s residence. It’s also the location of the town square, where meetings would be held. Around that is the residential area. This was a much larger section, which would contain most of the town’s buildings, arranged around the center of town roughly evenly. The largest circle, by a significant margin, is the farmland, which surrounds the entire town.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

The areas of brown within the town indicate pig pens, whilst I imagine many homes have chicken coops next to them. The small circles in the center of the two ancillary “town squares” represent wells. The two white buildings are the Mayor’s residence and the Wizard’s home. The crosshatch patterns surrounding the town represent farmland.

There are still a number of problems with this map. My scale is way off, for one thing. The more important buildings near the center of town should be much larger, while the residential buildings can be relatively small. The farmland was also truncated due to the limited size of the paper. Normally I’d remake the map before posting it, but at this point I’m not sure I’ll bother remaking this map. Even though it’s not “to scale,” it effectively demonstrates the layout of the town.

Anybody else have experience detailing small towns? Any tips on how to improve my process?

Why Hex Maps Need to Come Back

Above is a selection from the wilderness map created for “The Endless Stair,” a TSR module for 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons originally published in 1987. Prior to the release of third edition D&D by Wizards of the Coast, maps such as this were commonplace. With that release, for reasons unknown to me, Wizards of the Coast apparently thought it was best to completely sever the connection between D&D and the noble hexagon. As a tabletop role player who started with D&D 3.x, I spent a number of years vaguely aware that some people liked hexes, but had to context as to how they could be beneficial.

It was Trollsmyth’s superb series of hex mapping posts which finally drove home for me the importance of hex maps. They are not intended as a replacement for maps constructed using squares, but rather, are intended to supplement those maps in situations where squares are less appropriate. Squares work best for dungeons and other structures, where walls and rooms and corridors often snap neatly into a square grid anyway. In fact, the module I mentioned above, The Endless Stair, contains a number of dungeon maps printed on a square grid.

What hex maps are intended for is the outdoors. Squares have no place measuring nature. If any of my readers are old enough to have played the original Dragon Warrior game for the NES, they know what I mean. The game was great fun, but the squared-off overworld map looked silly even in those days of primitive technology. And while the righteous hexagon may not necessarily be a more ‘natural’ shape, it certainly approximates a natural shape more efficiently than its brutish cousin the square. Through the use of its two additional sides, the hexagon is more uniform in size than the square. The the distance between the center of a hex, and the center of any adjacent hex, is equal for all six sides. Whereas the square, with its 8 adjacent spaces, allows characters to travel much greater distances when moving diagonally than when moving up, down, left, or right. The only way to compensate for this extra distance is to penalize a character somehow for moving diagonally. And while this may be a simple matter on a small scale map (each space moved diagonally is counted as 1.5 spaces.), it becomes more difficult on a larger scale.

Which brings us to the next point regarding hexes: scale. Maps of dungeons or other areas which utilize squares are generally done on a small scale. The most common measurement is that 1 square is equal to 5 square feet. It’s simple, and when a room is only thirty feet square, it’s effective. However, wilderness travel require a larger scale by definition. No one in their right mind would try to map a forest, a mountain range, or a continent, in five-by-five foot increments. To even attempt it would be ludicrous. The standard size for a single hex on a wilderness map is six miles across from flat side to flat side. While a GM can use any scale he or she pleases, the six mile scale has a good balance. It’s small enough that overland travel can be measured in a meaningful way (with most characters being able to travel between 12 and 18 miles in a day), but large enough to allow a good sized continent to fit on a piece of 8 1/2 by 11 graph paper.

The largeness of a six mile hex comes with other benefits as well. At over 30 square miles*, it’s impossible for a party to fully explore every hex. They can mark down the primary terrain, and any items which they come across, but there will always be more. This means that even a hex which has already been explored can offer new challenges for players. From wandering monsters which they didn’t encounter the last time, to dungeon entrances, or perhaps an entire community or fortress which was 2 or 3 miles away from the route the party took last time they passed through. The blog “I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow” has a great post which gives you an idea of just how large this scale is.

For all the arguments I can make demonstrating the benefits of hex maps, there’s one which I keep returning to time and again. An argument which, in my mind, is irrefutable proof that the D&D community needs to re-embrace hex mapping:

We don’t have anything better yet!

It baffles me why Wizards of the Coast would abandon a perfectly good system without at least attempting to provide a replacement for it. But they did nothing of the sort! Wilderness travel was downplayed significantly in 3.x, and that hasn’t been remedied in Pathfinder. On the rare occasion that wilderness maps are included in adventure modules, the best they can do is indicate scale with a measuring stick. Take a look at this map from one of my favorite D&D 3.5 modules, “The Standing Stone:”

What about this map is improved by the lack of a hex overlay? Nothing! Refusing to include an overlay of mighty hexagons forces the GM to add measuring tape to the already cluttered area behind the GM screen. And while it may be argued that the map is too small in scale for six-mile hexagons to be of use, I would reply that the map is perfectly scaled for three-mile hexagons. Wizards of the Coast had better options. Options which they chose to ignore for reasons I cannot even begin to guess at.

Hex maps provide us with the metric which makes world exploration possible. Without it, completely open-ended, sandbox exploration can seem like a daunting task to players and GMs alike. I know I certainly never had the guts to provide a world exploration game to my players before I learned about Hex mapping–despite being very proud of the maps I’d created! Nor have I ever been given much choice as a traveling player. Travel is always handled by indicating where I’m going, and then fading to black as I travel there. And you know what? That’s sad.

As the old saying goes: “The journey is more important than the destination.” Isn’t that the essence of an adventure?

*Yes, I am aware of the irony of using square miles as a measurement in a post decrying the use of squares as a unit of measure. Stop mocking me!

Deadly Dungeons: Scholomance Part 1

It may be seen as a black mark in the tabletop gaming community, but I spent several years as an avid World of Warcraft player. For all its flaws, the game is damned good at being what it is. My favorite game activity was Instancing, or dungeon-delving to use the tabletop terminology. My favorite dungeon in the entire game, bar none, is Scholomance (Naxxramas being a close second). Before the numerous nerfs it has gone through over the years, it had everything I love. The grim undead motif, the unique challenges presented by each room, the numerous bosses, involving quest lines, and compelling lore all combined to make Scholo perfect for me. I’ve probably logged more hours inside Scholomance than I have in any other five instances combined.

So much do I love Scholomance, that a couple years back I sketched down the map, wrote up some quick stats for the various monsters and enemies found within its halls, and ran it as a D&D dungeon. The short session was a blast, and ever since then I’ve been determined to put more detail into the dungeon so that it can serve as the centerpiece for a truly challenging adventure. The project is a large one, though, so I’ve broken this post into 3 parts which will be put up over the next few weeks. Part 1, which you’re reading now, will include the maps, and room descriptions. Part 2 will cover monsters, enemies, bosses, and treasure found withing Scholomance. Part 3 will cover role playing details, as well as several of the quests which can be done in Scholomance.

As a disclaimer before I move on to the content of the post, not everything is precisely as it can be found in World of Warcraft. Scholo has changed a lot over the years, and here I’ve combined my favorite elements from all of Scholo’s long history. Additionally, since [Tape of Measuring] never drops for me, some of the rooms may be scaled incorrectly. I’m confident, however, that this does not adversely affect dungeon design whatsoever. Finally, I have not included Caer Darrow island, or the mansion which leads into scholomance. If I do include them, they will likely be altered to fit into my game world, and be found in part 3.

Without further ado:

Scholomance B1-1

B1-1 A: The descending stairs are made of dark stone, lit only by torchlight. Dusty skulls and rib cages are strewn sparsely on the landing. Rats and other vermin occasionally scuttle in and out of view.

B1-1 B: The stone stairway gives way to a wooden platform edged by deteriorating railings. The room extends ten feet beyond the platform, and the walls are densely packed with burial drawers, many of which appear to have been forced open. Elaborate candelabras, and skull-laden chandeliers light the room, and an iron gate across from the entrance leads into the next. Four armored skeletons guard the way forward.

GM’S Note: If the players look over the edge of the railing, they will be looking into room B2-1 E

B1-1 C: This is a balcony looking over a large room below. (GM’s Note: Room B2-1 A) A stairway on either side of the balcony leads down into the room below.

Scholomance B2-1

B2-1 A:Five large chandeliers and numerous candles light this massive library. Book shelves of varying sizes are spaced along lower walls, while stone shelves containing mummified remains dominate any wall space too high to be reached. Under the stairs in the south of the room is an alcove with a balcony looking over another room below. (GM’s Note: Room B2-1 E) Necromancers and undead gather around tables, or in the large open space in the center of the room, discussing hells-knows what. A succubus wanders amongst them, as if overseeing their conversations.

B2-1 B: More bookshelves boarder his low-ceilinged room. Six small pits in the stone floor are filled with the remains of numerous dead creatures. Around the pits stand small groups of necromancers–a teacher and one or two students. Two armored skeletons and a drider patrol the room.

B2-1 C: Stairs lead down to a small wooden platform which opens onto a small balcony extending from the cliff face. The balcony overlooks the lake below. A large iron bowl rests on the balcony’s edge, without any obvious purpose.

GM’S Note: Pouring the blood of an innocent into this bowl summons Kirtonos the Herald, a powerful vampire.

B2-1 D: The walls of this massive room are covered in stone shelves, many of which still contain mumified remains. Others have been converted into storage for books, potions, scrolls, or candles. Various bookshelves have also been set up around the room. On the north side of the room, two alcoves end in balconies which look over another room. (GM’s Note: Room B2-1 E) Here, again, groups of young necromancers converse with each other, and with their undead tutors. A skeleton the size of a hill giant patrols this room, along with three skeletons in more ornate armor than those in previous rooms, and a drider.

GM’s Note: The southern door is covered behind a tapestry. When the players walk past it, a number of rats should scamper out from behind the tapestry. Perception DC 15 to notice that the rats seem to come from nowhere.

B2-1 E: This room is a teeming pit of mindless undead. Simple skeletons, zombies, and ghouls jostle each other as they aimlessly wander within the confines of this room. A drider walks amongst them, acting as shepherd to the horde. A heavy portcullis blocks access to a chest in a small alcove on the east side of this room. The door on the east side is thick, and has an ornate lock on it.

GM’s Note: Rattlegore has the key to the heavy door. Lockpicking DC is 35. The portcullis can be raised by finding the secret torch lever in room B3-2. Lifting it is nearly impossible, requiring a strength check of 32.

Scholomance B2-2

B2-2 F: The floor in this large, open room is uneven, sloping gradually downwards towards the east. Like every room, the floor is covered with dusty bones and broken coffins. Dozens of student necromancers stand or sit around the room, listening to an elaborately robed skeleton give a lecture on the effects of negative energy on dragons. The skeleton stands on a raised platform filled with bookshelves, and tables covered in scrolls and urns. In the shadowy corner of the platform stands an armored zombie wielding a large sword.

B2-2 G: Bubbling cauldrons and tables filled with steaming beakers fill this room. There are fewer students in this alchemical laboratory than there are in other rooms–only three groups, each guided by a professor. Four large glass cylinders filled with green liquid hold the floating bodies of various undead creatures. Tables with straps obviously intended for humanoid creatures are positioned around the room, though none of them are presently occupied. At the far end of the chamber, surrounded by hundreds of candles, a lich in ornate robes paces.

B2-2 H: This room is filled with newly hatched dragons, each fluttering unstably on untested wings. All of the have a pallor which leads you to believe they must be quite ill, but this does not appear to concern the three handlers which patrol the room. Unlike most rooms and corridors within this crypt, no bookshelves line the walls. However, every 5 feet there is a recess in the wall, with a hole dropping into the room below.

Scholomance B3-1 & 2

B3-1: Heaping piles of bones fill this dirt-floored room. Most of the piles are situated under the holes to the room above. In the center of the room is the largest pile, reaching almost to the ceiling. Bone constructs with crude blades instead of forearms mill about the room. Atop the central bone heap stands the largest of the constructs, twice the size of the others, mindlessly overseeing the wanderings of his subjects.

B3-2: This room is devoted to shelves for the dead. There are even three rows of open shelves which separate the room into four “aisles.” Unintelligent zombies and skeletons wander between these aisles in groups. A small alcove on the far side of the room is filled with hundreds of candles. Within, a single spectral woman in noblewoman’s robes reads from a book.

GM’s Note: One of the torches in this room, near the alcove, is a lever. Characters with 5 ranks in Knowledge(Architecture) are entitled to a Perception check DC: 20 to notice that the sconce for the torch seems to hang oddly on the wall. Pulling it opens the portcullis in room B2-1 E. If a character reads the book which the spectral woman is reading, they will find plans for a bag of devouring.

Scholomance B3-3 & B4-1

B3-3 A: You emerge onto a walkway surrounding the edge of a two-level room. Like many rooms before it, the walls are covered with open shelves displaying mummified remains, while the walls below the walkway are covered in burial drawers. Six rooms can be accessed from this one, with each doorway marked by a raised portcullis.

B3-3 B: The entrance of this room is 10ft above the rest of it. Twin sets of stairs allow access to the pit below. Dozens of zombies fumble and bump into one another there. At the far end of the room, standing stock still in a small nook, is one zombie which seems somewhat amused by the poor motor skills of his brethren.

B3-3 C: The entrance of this room is 10ft above the rest of it. Twin sets of stairs allow access to the pit below. Bloody meat hooks hang from the ceiling, and stone tables covered in rotting carcases give off a horrible stench. Half a dozen ghouls pace across the blood stained floor. Across the room, with his back to the entrance, stands a man garbed in scarlet skillfully hacking a corpse to pieces with his meat cleaver.

B3-3 D:The entrance of this room is 10ft above the rest of it. Twin sets of stairs allow access to the pit below. Eerie purple flames in braziers around the room cast unsettling shadows. Three groups of necromatic pupils are gathered here, guided in their studies by a strikingly beautiful elven woman.

B4-1 A: (See description for B3-3 A)

B4-1 B: Stairs at the entrance of this room descend into water which is about a foot deep. Several sarcophagi rise above the water, and four skeletons wielding staffs and wearing robes pace amongst them. Across from the entrance, another set of stairs rises into a small alcove, where a spectral woman stands, as though waiting.

B4-1 C: A large sarcophagus dominates this room, flanked by two armored skeletons. On either side of the sarcophagus are stairs which lead down into water which is about a foot deep. Numerous smaller sarcophagi rise above the water here. Amongst them stands a man with pale skin and sunken eyes wearing full plate armor, and wielding a massive sword which glows blue. He is flanked by two armored skeletons.

B4-1 D: Five sinister looking skeletons, each with bones of an unusual hue, paces about this room. Behind them stands a hunched corpse golem, with skin as pale as snow, and powerful arms hanging at its sides like battering rams. Three 10x10ft sections of this room are lower than the rest of it, and covered under about a foot of water. A handful of Sarcophagi dot these low areas.

And there are the maps & room descriptions for Scholomance. I’ll be working on parts II and III, and you can expect to see them in the coming weeks. If my spelling or grammar errors are particularly egregious today, I apologize. Preparing this post has been more draining than I might have expected.

Non-Digital Random Map Generation

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I like to generating things randomly, and that includes maps. However, despite being heavily invested in technology in most areas of my life, for some reason I prefer to keep it out of my gaming. I’m not quite sure why, but there is certainly a kind of tactile pleasure I derive from scratching pencil against paper to create stat blocks and adventure notes. I may occasionally write up character sheets in Open Office, or experiment with tools like Hexographer; but I do my best to minimize my reliance on computers. At least where RPGs are concerned.

Below I’ll be detailing the various methods I’ve devised for randomly generating maps by hand. I would like to preface this, however, by saying I’m far from an expert on map making. There are GMs out there who’ve blown my mind with the amount of realism they’re able to bring to a map. Anybody interested in making really good maps should check out Trollsmyth‘s hex mapping posts, or the Cartographer’s Guild. There you can learn how to make good maps. This is just about how to make random maps.

With that out of the way, lets get started. Here’s a picture of my current campaign world to provide a sense of what results might look like:

And here’s a close up of the primary continent, which my group hasn’t ventured off of yet:

All of these were created using the Paper Drop Method, which requires just a few very basic tools I was able to gather from around my apartment:

1) Two sturdy surfaces of even height, like two chairs.
2) A sturdy piece of glass. I pulled the door off of an old stereo cabinet for mine.
3) A good lamp which can be moved around without much trouble.
4) Paper. If you don’t have this, you may be in the wrong hobby.

Once you’ve got these items, place the glass across the two sturdy surfaces, and position the lamp underneath the glass, facing upwards towards it. Congratulations, you’ve constructed a tracing table! It’s not fancy, but it’s effective.

I’m unable to take a photo of a tracing table at the moment, however you
can see one on the right side of this old photo of my workstation.

At this point, rip up a few sheets of paper. The pieces should be relatively small, but not so small they become a nuisance. I would so no bigger than a palm, no smaller than a fingernail. Try to vary the shapes as best you can as well. Squares, triangles, circles, long pieces, squat pieces, any shape which strikes your fancy. Continue tearing up paper until you’ve got a nice little pile of it. Two or three sheets is usually sufficient.

Now, shredded paper in hand, drop it onto the tracing table from at least 2 or 3 feet high. It should rain down onto the glass, creating the shape of your continent. It’s up to you whether you want to pick up the pieces which land on the floor and re-drop them, I prefer to let just remove them.

With the paper on the surface of the glass, the shape of the continent is established. You can now place another piece of paper over the pile of shredded pieces, turn on the light, and outline the shadow your pile of shredded papers makes. This step can be something of a pain in the ass, since the shredded pieces are easy to jostle around while you’re tracing, no matter how careful you try to be. The easiest solution, I’ve found, is to put another sheet of glass between the shredded paper and the drawing paper.

Once you’ve got the outline of the map completed, repeat the earlier paper-dropping process with fewer pieces of paper. One drop for your forested regions, another for your mountainous regions. Mountains whose paper-shadow extends beyond the coast could potentially become islands rather than mountains, or simply be ignored as you prefer.

The placement of water on the map is best not done randomly. Even the least aware player may give you a cockeyed look if your rivers flow through mountain ranges rather than around them.

For smaller scale maps, I sometimes use the Atlas Jumble Method. My grandfather has mountains of local map books he accrued during his career as a backhoe operator–maps which cover most of the geographically diverse state of Washington. He gave me one which was published in 1995, and after finding it among my things recently, I struck upon an idea.

I took a few pages of maps, photocopied them, cut the copies into roughly 1″ square pieces, and dropped all the pieces into a bowl. I then drew the squares out one by one, and arranged them from top left to bottom right on my tracing table, forming a shape roughly 8.5″ x 11″. After placing another sheet of glass on top of the pieces so as not to disturb them, I started drawing the map I had created onto a piece of paper.

Not a single one of the pieces matches up with any of the others, of course. Roads and rivers begin and end ever inch, and elevations and climates change without reason or warning. But this is where I’m able to exercise creativity by adding or removing elements from the map. Some roads to stop at dead ends, perhaps because there is untamed wilderness beyond the last town. I alter the course of other roads, so that they can meet up with roads on the next piece. And then I come up with a reason why the road needed to be built with such a meandering course.

The atlas jumble method isn’t as simple as the paper drop method. It requires creative applications of all the “connect the dots” skills we haven’t had much use for since we were children. But if you need an adventuring map and you don’t know where to start, this method is an excellent springboard for creativity.

Last, I want to talk about a method I’ve never attempted, but am eager to try someday, The Paintball Method.

Essentially, I want to shoot a sheet of glass with a paintball gun a bunch of times, then flip the glass around, stick a light behind it, and trace whatever shapes I’ve got. I figure I could potentially even use paint balls with colors corresponding to geography. Green paint for forests, brown for mountains, yellow for planes, blue for waters.

I’ve got no idea if it will work, and unfortunately paint ball equipment is expensive. I still would love to try it, though.

And yes, I did pull all the method names out of thin air just to make the post sound more authoritative. How did you guess?