Campaign Design Project - 2022 (Part 2)

 

Travel by Map

Week two of the 75 Challenge introduces the concept of the hex map and helps us start designing our basic local region. We're not designing the whole world, just the areas the party will immediately be exploring around their home town and "the dungeon". 

Before we get into it, let’s look at the steps of week 2 (again, from Ray Otus' booklet) :

Get a sheet of hex paper. Draw the following items on it. Name anything worthy of a name.

1. One large settlement (define large however you like)
2. Two other settlements (camps, larger or smaller towns, a keep, the home base of a fantasy race, etc.)
3. One major terrain feature (covering at least three hexes)
4. One mysterious site for exploration
5. One dungeon entrance – at least!
6. Key your map.
7. Extra Credit - Make a random encounter table

So, to start mapping, we'll need a hex sheet. Options will rain from the sky if you just google blank hex map, there are also great computer tools available like Hex Kit or Hexographer. You should have no issue finding a way to make your map, but to start, I recommend going with a print out. When drawing, do as little erasing as possible. Mistakes are okay and letting accidents ride can bring character to your world. When you're done you can copy it to a fresh page, for a cleaner result.

If you go with the old school method and need a hard copy hexmap, my personal choice is the Mausritter Hexmap. No foolin. A map that is good enough for mice and men. 19 hexes, a section for key, rumors, random encounters, and even tracking factions who might be doing their own things on the map. If you're feeling brave and want a bigger map, Lazarus on itch.io has various size hexes with a sparser format, but still includes room for a key. Whatever you choose, I highly recommend the key be part of the same page, so you're not flipping back and forth. At this stage, the map is for you, not your players. You can create a "player safe" version later.

Map Key from D&D Expert (1981)

Regardless of what hex sheet you use, you should also have a consistent iconography for terrain. This example from Dungeons & Dragons Expert. Each icon is symple enough to draw, and cliffs, roads, rivers, and other path-like keys can be rotated or can change shape while still representing the same type of terrain. However, before we start mapping, we also need to decide how big our "basic local region" is. This means math. MATH!

That’s the Power of Math, People!

In most editions fantasy RPGs, parties have a 12 or 16 hour adventuring day activities broken into shifts of 6 or 8 hours; giving a traveling party 2 or 3 activities a day before needing to make camp and rest for 6 or 8 hours . Each "shift" could be considered an action: exploring a hex for points of interest, hunting or foraging for food, traveling to another hex, etc. It is this last one that we must concern ourselves with for deciding on the size of our map. Just how far does an unladen swallow, err, party of adventurers travel in 6 or 8 hours? 

We could do calculations. We could reference DMs’ guides from every edition, for overland travel, or go off combat speed? Or we can keep it simple. I like keeping it simple.

Have you heard of leagues? Not sports, Justice, Of Extraordinary Gentleman, Of their Own, or of Legends. Just leagues. They're a measure of distance. In modern culture, leagues are most commonly associated with the book and movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (ft. Disney). The one with the giant squid attacking the submarine. The title can be a bit confusing, as it makes Leagues sound like a measure of depth in the water, but specifically these 20,000 NAUTICAL leagues are how far the steampunk submarine, the Nautilus, travels in distance while underwater. At the time the book was written, just having a vessel beneath the waters was a feat of science fiction.

So, that is a nautical league, equivalent to 3 nautical miles. A normal, overland league however is more relevant and useful. A league in the classic definition is actually algebraic, in much the same way many imperial measurements were, compared to other potentially variable measures. A mile was 1000 "paces"; whatever a pace was. A furlong was the length of field a plough team could furrow before needing to rest; definitely not variable. A fathom was the distance between both arms outstretched; clearly the same between every person.

For our purposes though, a league's abstract definition is actually useful. The distance an army can march in an hour. Sounds like we've got a useful ratio for overland travel in a distance to time comparison. So with that, we can decide how big we WANT our map. Or rather, how far should our party be able to travel in a day?

D=D^B/X

These decisions not only impact your ability as a GM to figure out where the party is, relative to points of interest, it also can affect the mood and level of "oppressiveness" the party feels from their need for supplies, random encounters, and general attrition. A game meant to lend a feel of dark, survival fantasy could feel like nothing of the sort if the party is blazing a trail across the countryside with little effort.

For a campaign of mythological adventure, we want to split the difference. Supplies matter, but our adventurers are not quite afraid of the dark, they're braving the unknown. So, the feeling of travel should exist, but any one action should not take them far. So lets go with 6 hour shifts. This gives us 4 actions a day. This can also be paired with 6 league hexes. 1 hour per league. From the center of a hex to an edge is 3 leagues, so from center to center is 6 leagues, 6 hours. If you wanted to treat your hexmap like a board game, you could move a pawn or other meeple type game piece from hex to hex with each shift the party travels. So now we have our scale, 6 league hexes, or 18 miles (1 league to ~3 miles).

Is this realistic? Debatable. Historically armies marched somewhere in the range of 20 miles per eight hours. Of course, few traveled overland, through the wilderness, which would slow down any traveler. Then again, the opposing argument is that a smaller, less burdened group would also travel faster than a battalion with siege equipment, and supplies for hundreds, marching in column formation. For an abstract adventure, it is acceptable as a baseline. You can penalize for rough terrain, requiring 2 actions for the same distance, or allow exploration as part of their travel action should the party obtain horses or other forms of faster travel.

These ratios can be tweaked of course, best suiting what feels right to your personal campaign. Just note that how far the party can move, and the distances they cover can change not only the thematic scale, but also the gameplay requirements for survival needs like water, rations, rolling random encounters, etc. These can all change the play style of your group if it is too easy or too hard to make the journey out of town. Are they setting out on a grand adventure? Or are they preparing for a deadly expedition? Is one the correct answer and the other wrong? depends on your group, and how you collectively want to play. 

Playing with Scale

Making changes on the hex size could have other consequences as well. If we say the hexes are only 3 leagues (~9 miles) instead of 6. This lets us “zoom in” on a smaller area, but our party now moves 2 hexes per 6 hours. In 12 hours, they can move 4 hexes, and then still take an action before resting for the last shift.

Using our map from Mausritter, with 19 hexes, if we set our town in the center hex, our party can reach an edge hex in 1 day with two actions. For a starting area, a full day's travel might be okay for a start, but a half day’s is too little, we’d have to make the map bigger for the “crawl” part of hex-crawl to have any relevance. 

I swear we're almost done with the math. With our 6 league scale, our local region ends up being about 60 miles end to end and ~3600 sq miles. Not too shabby. Bigger than Rhode Island or Delaware, smaller than Connecticut at 5543 miles. Okay, math done. (For now....)

We got our map, a scale, and now we can start filling the map. We have a set of ingredients we want to put on here so that our little playground will have activities for the players. To refer back to that list at the top again: 

1. A large settlement
2. two smaller settlements
3. a major terrain feature taking up at least 3 hexes
4. a "mystery site"
5. an entrance to our dungeon.

Taking inspiration from Mediterranean coastlines, I'm putting a big port city smack dab in the middle. Getting a random, lesser known city from the region, Caralis of Sardinia becomes Coralis, just so the Sardinians don't sue. We key it to #1 using the Mausritter map, (or 3C if it was using a classic grid coordinate system) and we have our anchor point for other features. I already imagine Cassardis from Dragon's Dogma in my head, a limestone coastal city with tiered levels into the walls of a cove. But we will have to add our own touches to it...Later.

In my original brief to my players, I talked about a Mining town inland. So let’s set that in the southwest on #16, the town of Kiton Hills. A mining town needs to take the ore to a port town to trade, so we put down a road connecting the two, weaving through a mountain range, using consistent, simple iconography in each hex. For now, I give these hexes vague names Kiton Peak, Kiton Range. Later, I can put interesting features, encounters, or dungeons there, or leave them for random encounters as I choose. 

Before I continue anything else, I draw a soft line along the north east border of Coralis' hex, extending out to have a wedge shaped coastline. I have settled on using parts of Module X1 - Isle of Dread as my dungeon, so we're looking at an island location to travel to. In the wedge, at Hex #9, I draw a rudimentary island with a spoooooky skull to represent my dungeon. As a port town, Coralis will have watercraft that can take the party to the nearby isles, so I put a smaller archipelago in #8, some swampy marshlands on the bottom right of the wedge, and leave the rest as Bay waters.  This gives us our 3 hex terrain feature as a focal point. I sneak in TWO "mystery spots" because I'm an overachiever. A big forest south of the marsh, because swamps are great for mystery spots and a road BENEATH the hills, I label "Echo Cave Ways". What that means right now, I have no clue. But I sort of imagine crystal growths, dripping water, and getting easily lost. While I have one of the additional settlements already thanks to Kiton Hills, I decide Coralis should also have some suburbs, so to speak. nearby villages that service the bigger city. A farm to the north, and a smaller fishing harbor and dockyard along the coast. Both of these could easily be near the edge of the hexes, within half a day's ride, letting travelers make it there and back for business.

While terrain design can be mostly erratic, the placement of civilized works should have a sort of logic to them. Why does a town exist where it does? What advantages does it receive? Would it be better served else where in the local region? Commonly cities are on rivers, coasts, oases, or major resources, but can also arise in places that allow for ease of trade. Villages and smaller towns can afford to be more remote, as long as there is even a minor cause for their existence. A cross road, a religious site, a strategically defensible location, good waves for surfing.

One last detail of note: Unless your world defies physics (perfectly fine thing for a fantasy world to do), water flows from high altitude  to low altitude, collecting moisture as it goes and naturally feeds into larger bodies rather than splitting into smaller ones. The notable exceptions would be river deltas approaching coast lines and wetlands spreading out along flat terrain. So draw your rivers down from mountains, merging together as they head out on to plains or grasslands, and then just dividing a little at the coast. Or don't, I'm not your mom. But you know you'll get that one player who is going to complain about their sense of realism being broken. You know it to be true.

With all our hexes filled in with some type of terrain, mapping out roads, rivers, and other sub-features is relatively easy. As we put such details in, we can also think about keying each hex. For now, a simple idea is enough. When you're looking to fill these places in later, watabou's dungeon generator, or the One Page Dungeon event are great sources. 

Judge my art harshly at your peril.

Okay, I'm not attending art school anytime soon, and you don't have to be an artist either. As long as YOU can understand what you're looking at, you're good. Especially with a handy key to pair with the hexes. You can start thinking of what you want to fill each locale with, I've started collecting a few too many dungeons from free sources which I'll share as we go along later. 

Of course, you can also leave some hexes "empty" of specific encounters, and when the party explores those locales, or rests while traveling overland, you'll need that extra credit assignment; Random Encounters!

There is a mindset, one I held, and had a tough time breaking, that Random Encounters are bad. They just add more combat to slow the game, add nothing interesting to the story and delay progress. Each of these is a problem with badly thought out Random Encounters, their implementation, and a mindset of the story being something the GM is TELLING the players. I'll go into a longer diatribe on random encounters in another post. 

For now, we have a choice of the style of table to use. We could use a linear or weighted table. Ah, crap. Math is coming back. Sorry. When you roll a die, no matter how many sides it has, each result has as much chance to come up as any other. So if you make a chart of 12 encounters, and roll a d12, each result has a 8 1/3 % chance to occur. Now, if you roll TWO dice, and add the results together, we have weighted results, meaning certain results are more likely than others. Lets say we want to do ~12 encounters again, so 2d6 gets us 11 encounters, 2-12. BUT! Certain results have more combinations of dice rolls that can create that result. But, which ones are they?

Lets head to AnyDice for a second. Useful for statistics nerds or those writing their own game material. Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff right there. The link provided generates the probability of 2d6 rolling any particular result. Notably, 7 is the most common, followed by 6, 8, 5, and 9. So if we go with a weighted table, these results should written to be interesting because they will come up more often, but also should be designed to easily remix because they will come up more often. No one wants to run into the same band of goblins five times. UNLESS...That's a discussion for the Encounter article.

So, let’s make a pretty standard encounter table with 2d6. Obviously I've already done all the work, so I'm going to skip to the end.

Random Encounters (2d6)

2 - A Bard looking for a muse
3 - A thief trying to undo a curse
4 - 2d4 Harpies scavenging on a titanic mythical beast
5 - Traders from Kiton (Dwarves, Halflings)
6 - 2d6 Twisted/Warped Humanoids, 50% = already dead
7 - 3d6 Wild Satyrs in raiding band, 50% = returning w/ loot
8 - 3d4 Coralian Soldiers fighting 4d8 Lemurians (Sea people)
9 - A Djinn seeking mana to heal itself, willing to deal 50% = cheats
10 - Evil Sphinx gatekeeping a pass with riddles, eats failures
11 - Abandoned Trade Caravan, 50% = Ambush
12 - An injured, toxic hydra seeking a meal, 3d3 heads remaining.

Alright, let’s look at the mess I made. We've got a mix of NPC encounters, combat encounters, and some things in between that could go either way. Roleplaying becomes more interesting when the default reaction for every situation is not COMBAT! Most creatures put survival ahead of winning. Even among humans, few are willing to fight to the death, even in groups of zealots. Treating encounters as opportunities to roleplay will also allow your players to engage more with the world, and potentially learn of quest hooks, or useful information.

The first time you meet this bard, he may have heard of a mysterious songstress or a poet that can inspire others. The thief could have been cursed by some beast in the dungeon, or set off a trap and provide info about it...for a price. The exact details are left vague enough that you can fill them in as you go. Keep a NPC name generator handy so every NPC your party meets isn't named Bill, or just an index card with a list of pre-generated names ready to go.

Round-about Table

So that’s a weighted table. We could also do an unweighted table. Is one better than the other? Well, I would say yes, and I’ll point you to Baron de Ropp for the in-depth discussion on that, as this article wasn’t even meant to be about Encounter Tables. I sort of tricked you into making the bad table before letting the Baron teach you how to do it right. Give him a follow.

As these encounters get ...encountered, you can change them up, and more importantly, think about how they affect the world state. Did you spare the Lemurians in their battle with the Coralian soldiers? If not, one of them might have been a noble, and now you've got a war with an undersea kingdom! This also works backwards from your encounters. Their existence should be informing the world state to begin with. Lemurians fighting soldiers from Coralis tells the party that something has caused the sea dwellers to come up on land, the problems facing the party may not just be exclusive to air-breathers. The hydra missing several heads had to have lost them some how. Unless this world's equivalent of Heracles is wandering around hacking off hydra heads, it could be dangerous to run into whatever the beast lost a scrap with (if it is Heracles, it still could be, he wasn't the best person).

You can also take this mentality with you to other content. When a module provides you with a random table, think about why each item exists. The designer may or may not have had intent behind it, but you sure as heck can put your own into it. I'll be picking apart Isle of Dread later to make what I want out of it.

End of article segue: You may be realizing that if 2d6s result in a weighted scale, then so do 3d6s. You're right, high and low results are less likely than results in the middle. MIND BLOWN? - You can see that your character creation methods are not coming out with purely randomized characters. It can be novel to think about the different ways to tweak character generation. I recommend testing out AnyDice for that: see if your group finds a more interesting spread for 3-18, maybe your campaign calls for super humans, or starving weaklings? I'm still contemplating my ideal, across-the-board method. That's yet another discussion for another day, though.

Again, I'm sorry for all the math. (I'm not sorry.)

(Note - This originally was posted on my wordpress blog paired with images meant to compliment the text, those were lost in transition to blogspot. My apologies, I hope the context remains understandable.)

Further Reading

• Mausritter - Mausritter is just a delightful OSR-style game about medieval-esque fantasy mice, featuring a fun item card inventory system. The world is to-scale in a human world, so a megadungeon might be a person's home while monsters could be crows or villainous rats. Wonderful Redwall and Mouse Guard vibes. The Estate Campaign set alone is worth your attention.
• Lazarus - A rather prolific supplement creator, they've done 3rd party work for a number of games including Mothership and Mork Borg. I personally like their paper craft "Tiny Spellbook" fun little craft project. The magic users in your party might like a flavorful way to keep track of spell details without having to flip through the player's guide.
• AnyDice - MAAAAATH. It can do functions as well, try “output [highest 3 of 4d6]” for a modern D&D character's statistical probabilities. 
• Dungeon Masterpiece - Baron de Ropp (technically a real Baron) does great short-form video essays on RPG design, and I recommend the follow. You'll definately feel classier just listening to him.