Tag Archives: Advice/Tools

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Campaign Design

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Back in mid-March +Sophia Brandt posted a query [on a now nonexistent G+ page] seeking advice on tools for beginner DM resources for hexcrawls and building your own campaign.

I recommend reading the full comment thread, but I liked what I wrote, as it is a nice summary of what I have used in my efforts in recent years. I have added other links and information that I could not recall off the top of my head, mostly for my future reference.

+Joe Johnston recently published a free PDF, How to Hexcrawl.

Bat in the Attic, The Alexandrian, Ars Ludi, and  The Welsh Piper all have a series on sandboxes and hexcrawls.There’s another blogger who did something on hexcrawls that I am not recalling.

Bat in the Attic- Hexcrawl Series            The Alexandrian Hexcrawl Series               Ars Ludi: West Marches            The Welsh Piper on Hexcrawls

For building a world, the hexcrawl is generally a bottom up way to do it. Pick a starting town and generate a few hexes around town with various terrain, and objects and places of interests and dungeons and monsters. The world is built as the player’s explore it.

One can also do the top down approach, plan out a world, cosmology, mythos, nations, peoples, cities, etc. and pick a certain spot for the players to start, and use a hexcrawl to detain a smaller area.

For me, designing a detailed mythology of divinities is a challenge, so I use either Greyhawk dieties, or something from Dieties & Demigods.

It is easy to get lost in the details, so I think the DSR episode about world building sufficiency, is right on point. Some of us, like me, can easily get lost in details that will never come into play. Build enough to give color and flavor to your world.

My quick suggestions:

  • Decide which monsters definitely will or won’t be used.
  • Generate a ridiculous amount of names for streets, places, businesses, taverns, and NPCs . (You will be asked for what is the name of this or that all the time!)
  • Stay just enough ahead of the players that you can roll with their sudden course changes. At the end of a session ask if they will continue in their current situation, or go somewhere else, to give you time to prepare for a course change.
  • Make index cards with pre-generated random encounters of the creatures they are likely to encounter, so you can just grab it and go. Just make packs based on your encounter tables, whether it is the default tables in the rules, those by others, or your own. I put stats, treasure, etc. on them so I don’t have to slow play to figure it out. Some monsters I use all the time, I can easily wing them. But I like the cards to make sure that every group of goblins is not the same 10 goblins with spears.
  • Once you get a few sessions under your belt, and you and the players get attuned to this world, it will start to make sense how to proceed.
  • If this is your first campaign, there is no right or wrong way to do it. Everything you do, even if it is never used in play will help you figure out what style of world building works for you.
  • Tables – Tables can help give ideas. The OSR is full of new ideas for tables to flesh out or fill in perceived gaps for different tables. You don’t have to roll on tables or accept the results, but they can give a LOT of ideas you might not come up with on your own.
  • Maps – There is a plethora of online maps for RPGs for dungeons, cities, ruins, and other settings. If you play using theater of the mind, then the maps may only help you to solidify your ideas for a location and its layout.
  • d30 Sandbox Companion – New Big Dragon Games game aid for generating all kinds of things for a sandbox setting.
  • d30 DM Companion – New Big Dragon Games game aid for ideas for fleshing out dungeons, not limited to the dungeon.
  • Weather  – Have a quick and easy method to generate weather.
  • Rumors – Have a few rumors to start and come up with new rumors all the time.
  • Events – Use something like the yearly and monthly events in Oriental Adventures.
  • Festivals & Celebrations – What kinds of parties will be going on?

Another person pointed out a couple of resources that I also turn to:

Jeff Rients’ twenty quick questions for your campaign setting has some interesting ideas to define certain elements of your campaign that your players may ask about, or for some reason tends to come out in game play.

One Page Dungeon Contest (OPDC) Maps to quickly generate where a treasure or other found map leads, or for a quick adventure idea when you are running dry.

I find that as I place monster lairs and determine what is in them, that it is easy to make up a story to explain how they all fit together. Are certain groups of humanoids working together? Is there a big bad who is trying to get them to work for him? Are there monsters that can’t be reasoned with or controlled and the big bad leaves them to guard his flanks, and his minions fear them. For example, a group of owlbears in an abandoned mine?

There are all kinds of ways to determine what the various lairs and ruins are. Place them underground in caves, tombs, dungeons, ruins, mines, quarries, etc. Hills, towers, and other prominent features above ground.

Use the lairs closest to the starting village/town/city as sources to begin interacting with your world. Have a known area of fairly picked over tombs in the hills near town, but with the possibility that there are still tombs that haven’t been found, or that have become the home of something else with treasure.

Plan NPCs for all the PCs to interact with, that have the same classes your PCs will use. If you allow paladins and rangers in your game, plan some low and mid-level NPCs so that your players have someone of their class to turn to for advice, training, support, etc. Having a reason for these NPCs to be in and out of town and sometimes inconvenient for the players to interact with makes them a bit more real. Paladins and rangers tend to be out doing good in dangerous places, or on quests and secret missions. Wizards and illusionists and sages tend to get busy doing their research. If the players can’t afford to pay for information or magical aid, perhaps they can pay in favors.

Then there need to be the other NPCs, tavern keepers, bar maids, street vendors, and other types of vendors that your players will tend to seek out. How many from the starting location will be available for hirelings and mercenaries? Is the supply never ending, or will you define how many are available? Will the players have a hard time finding help if they get a reputation for getting their men killed?

As you get to know your developing setting and your chosen rules, you may find that you are comfortable winging various aspects of play. Perhaps all you need is a list of names or a simple name generator, and some generic stats of hirelings. I have found that I can make up all kinds of stuff on the fly. I am amazed at some of the stuff that I come up with and how the players never know I made it up on the spot. However, the players can be quite inventive and always manage to find some avenue in the course of play that I had not anticipated.

If you tell the players that there is someone in town who sells maps, for example, you better know about the maps. Are they all forgeries made by the map maker, or are they the real deal. Where do they go and do any forged maps actually lead to something, or is the loot still there if the map is genuine?

Whatever you mention, be prepared for the players to run with it, so keep some basic notes of what you have told them, and pay attention to them showing interest in certain things.

I have a few background plots running in my campaign that are affecting their immediate area, the kingdom, and the greater region. The players are seeing a pattern to some events that are just random encounters, but I am able to retcon a story that makes it work, because I built my own encounter tables to fit the lairs I randomly placed and populated. The players are able to influence events through dumb luck, or by choosing to follow or ignore hints of something else going on. Players will start connecting dots from what they see, but these connections are tenuous, coincidental, or circumstantial. It is fun to have your narrative as the DM about what all this means, and see how the players actually interact with it.

With a hexcrawl, you can put as much or as little detail and effort into it as you need to make it work. You can do the just in time generation a few hours before the session, or do it as you play and both DM and players figure out the world at the same time. You can obsess over planning your world and generate tons of information that will never enter into play. Whichever way you prepare, make sure it is focused on preparations that leads to play first, and explanatory, fill in the blanks later. As I mentioned above, as you follow this process, you will discover the style that works for you. If you and the players are having fun, then you are doing it right.

RPGs

Genetic Map of the British Isles

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My interest in genealogy and RPG’s cross pollinate ideas, like any other interest or experience in life, many things influence our creative ideas.

In late March, there were several articles about a new genetic map of Britain and how it shows that much of the regional populations there is very similar to what it has been for 1,400 years!

I am of Scottish, English, and Irish ancestry, so this resonates with me. It shows that even with the sweep of mass migrations, war, famine, and plague, that populations are resilient. Without massive slaughter, populations may only be pushed out of their exiting area. This would show just how hard it is to wipe out all the humanoids, for example. They might be driven out of the area, but not eradicated without a lot of effort.

Three articles with a bit of different information in each can be found at Medievalist.net, The Independent, and The Telegraph.

Genealogical Map of British Isles
Genealogical Map of British Isles

 

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Arbalest vs. Heavy Crossbow

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I did not make note of the article I read this on, but I wanted to get this scrawled note from an index card recorded so I can ditch the index card. I believe this is the article, but there’s no date on it, so I’m not sure.

It discussed the arbalest, a heavy crossbow, that used spring steel arms for the bow and had a range of about 300 meters, longer than 3 American football fields! It also had a fire rate of 2/minute.

They could shoot bolts or stones or shot. I’ll have to dig up the article, but it would be a heavy+ crossbow in D&D terms. Since a longbow is often credited as 12 aimed shots a minute and that is translated to 2 shots per round in AD&D, it makes sense that one shot per round for an arbalest. The heavy crossbow has a more complex cocking procedure, so one shot every other round.

Or is an arbalest just one expression of what the heavy crossbow in AD&D represents?

I mentioned in two past articles (one, two) about my brother, Robert, allowing a Chinese style self loading crossbow that could fire 10 shots a round, and our foolish characters ended up as orc food because we elected to fight with swords instead of our cool crossbows.

Finding the proper scale so that one isn’t dropping a combat changer into the midst of the game is the only part of balance I am concerned with.

RPGs

Earthquake!

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I live in Southwest Michigan, about 15 miles south of Kalamazoo. Today, we had an earthquake of magnitude 4.2.

I live across the street from the houses next to the train tracks. It is an active freight line and big, heavy trains can shake the house. This shaking was much different. We have 5 crossings through town and federal law requires them to blow the horn at each crossing. The Wednesday night, AD&D campaign I play in can hear the whistles if I forget to mute my microphone until they pass. If the windows are open in warm weather, I have people in phone calls ask me if I am standing on the tracks.

I was in my house, built about 1920 on sandy soil. The shaking was slightly similar to a big, heavy train going by, but it felt deeper and more powerful, and lasted just a few seconds.

I swore I heard a boom/roar/loud noise that preceded/coincided/followed the shaking. I can’t explain that. It was over so quickly that I didn’t have time to make sense of it. My thoughts were, there is no train, did a tanker truck explode? That has to be an earthquake.

About ten or fifteen minutes later, there was a very brief aftershock.

This is the first earthquake that I know I’ve experienced. My recollection is that an earthquake needs to be a 2.5 to 3.0 for most people to feel it and know it’s an earthquake. What I found using my google-fu is that it has to be a 3.0 to notice it.

A 4.2 was interesting. Since the scale increases an order of magnitude, a 5 would be impressive! A 6, 7 or more would be mind blowing.

My son took his girlfriend and their daughter to a neighborhood garage sale and met up with some friends. He said that he was sitting on the ground and that the ground beneath him felt hollow. His girlfriend said that she was standing up and that her feet were vibrating and she noticed that the trees were moving one direction and the houses another. Their daughter is 3 1/2 months old and she did not seem to have any reaction.

In addition to an interesting experience, I have a better understanding and thus more able to describe an earthquake in my writing and DMing.

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Worlds Beyond Ours – Curtis International Library of Knowledge

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Worlds Beyond Ours [Amazon Affiliate Link] is a book I have from my parents. It is copyright 1968, so I am only a few years older than this book. It mentions the Apollo program and if all goes well, man will set foot on the moon in a decade.

It is interesting to see color photographs of stars and planets in the age before the Hubble Telescope.

It talks about man looking to the stars and planets and the development of telescopes and rockets and has some maps of planets.

We can get much better pictures and maps from NASA online now. I didn’t have regular internet access until I was a few years past 30. Before then, one either had a set of encyclopedias to refer to at home, or you made a trip to the library.

I was blessed to have a 1969 set of Encyclopedia Britannica in my home growing up. My siblings and I would pulls out a volume and read about a topic and any related topics that caught our interest, much like surfing from article to article on Wikipedia, or I suppose the online Encyclopedia Britannica.

Seeing this old Worlds Beyond Ours emphases just how much the world has changed. Especially one that was published so close to Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Such old books I find fascinating.

If you want a science fiction based game, these things can be interesting. The number of planets and the number of moons around those planets has changed drastically in my lifetime. The true number did not change, we just discovered it.

I recall the Viking Landers on Mars in 1976, Voyager I and II making their way past Mars to Jupiter, then Saturn, and now on the far edges of the solar system. Is it still debated if one of the Voyagers has left the solar system yet?

I am old enough to remember the last Apollo missions to the moon. What I recall most is how SLOW the Atlas rocket ascended. It was quite the shock when the first space shuttle launched and it was so FAST! The movie Apollo 13 was NOT realistic with how fast those rockets actually left the launchpad. I remember my parents and siblings and I all having the same reaction to just how quickly the space shuttle leapt off the pad.

Old books like this can be found at garage sales and used book stores. Like many DMs and players, we tend to collect odd bits of information in the form of books and other things that serve as a basis for our own worlds and games.

I ran some of the science fiction games that my high school group played, mostly Metamorphosis Alpha or Gamma World, but we were predominately a AD&D group. I still love science fiction as well as fantasy.

My recent forays into reading the original Metamorphosis Alpha from DriveThruRPG has me digging out my old books. I wish I still had all of my science fiction collection of paperbacks. Moving from a house to a small apartment years ago forced me to get rid of so much. I can’t easily re-build it, but I have the memories of what I read and the books I want to read again, I can track down.

Perhaps I’ll run another science fiction related game or campaign. At least enough to scratch the itch….

RPGs

Kingdom of the Dwarfs

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I bought the book, Kingdom of the Dwarfs [Amazon Affiliate link], by Robb Walsh [Now a food writer and critic in Texas. Made me hungry for some good BBQ….] and illustrated by David Wenzel, back in the 1980’s. The copyright date is 1980, so I’m not sure what year I bought it. I know it was before I graduated high school, so sometime between 1980 and 1983.

I keep it with my RPG materials. I was trying to think of something to post about, and I remembered this book. I have not read it probably since I first read it after I got it home three plus decades ago.

I have looked at the art since then, and marveled at the skill of the artist, and wished I could do the same. Perhaps with intentional practice and some art classes I might do better than my present attempts.

I strongly identify with dwarves for some reason. I really liked the dwarf character from The Sword of Shannara  [Amazon Affiliate link].

Oddly enough, my favorite character is a half-elf. Although I play a dwarf in my Wednesday night online AD&D game.

The Wikipedia article about David Wenzel calls this a children’s book. As I recall, it was in the fantasy/science fiction section of the bookstore, so it was not marketed or sold in that store like a children’s book. I don’t think the theme is of a children’s book.

I remembered the basic story, but of course, the details eluded me. So I read it again.

It is a fast read. The text is mostly a set up of the book and then brief blurbs to set the scene for the art. The art tells a very detailed story.

Now I’m in the mood to detail the dwarven realms in my campaign. There’s never enough time to do it all!

If you want to build a dwarven kingdom or lost kingdom, this is a great source book!

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Day 25 Y is for You Owe

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Y – You Owe – fines, taxes, tariffs, fees, tolls, etc.

If there is a fine, fee, or tax, where are the tax collectors? Where might the remnants of ancient taxes be today? This ties in with X Marks the Spot and with Vaults.

If a living city, where are the points where the government or local gang imposes fees for its services?

If a fallen city that is now occupied by new inhabitants, do they impose taxes and fees? If inhabited by ogres, they will just take all your stuff as the fee, as will most other humanoids and intelligent monsters. The ones that don’t eat you, will likely enslave you, or just kill you for the sport of it.

Intelligent monsters might impose exorbitant fees on passing caravans to let them pass mostly unharmed. This would affect the price and availability of certain goods.

If the city is not fallen, how far beyond the city walls to taxes and fees begin to be imposed? Is there a fee for every bridge and ferry, beyond the operator’s base fee? Are their toll booths at key locations along the road? If you have never had to pay a fee to cross a bridge or to drive on a tollway, this concept might be foreign to you. The AD&D DMG has a good overview on this. If the PC’s hang around civilization, they will run into lots of taxes and fees, which might induce them to go seek further fortunes.

For fallen cities, will random coins be found periodically near abandoned toll booths? Will the coin box be lost and found in some random location?

Will a tax collector have a hidden stash of his share, legal or illicit? In the ancient world, taxes were collected by tax farmers who bid how much they could collect, and they got to keep what they collected beyond that point, thus making them quite disliked by the taxpayers.

 

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Day 24 X is for X Marks the Spot

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X – X Marks the spot.

Note important locations, map it out – It does not have to be fancy, even a node map and rough idea of where things are will suffice.

With all of the free maps from so many talented artists and map makers in the OSR, and via many various websites, like Cartographer’s Guild, one can easily come up with a map. There are also lots of maps from the medieval and renaissance periods that are available online to give one ideas. There is more than one G+ community for maps and world building ideas. There is a surplus of riches in maps and adventure ideas, thanks to the internet.

For some city and town maps, I have taken something I found online that was close to what I had in mind, and used that to help craft something for my own needs.

Where is the important stuff? Where is the treasure in relation to the palace or the temple?

Have the rich buried or hidden their wealth when they fled, is it still there? Is it inside the city, or somewhere outside the walls?

If an abandoned city for hundreds or thousands of years, what groups, monsters, wizards, cults, etc. have made a home or base? Is that base still there? Is it inhabited by the original founders of the base or has it changed hands over the years?

All of the other articles in this series mention many different things that will have a location. Each of those things will have a quality of the original construction, degree of routine maintenance given when in use,  and the use, damage, neglect, etc. that these things have undergone if the city is abandoned.

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2015 One Page Dungeon Contest – My Revised Submission

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I re-did the map for my OPDC submission, The Dire Druids of Delver’s Deep. I did the new map by hand and scanned it. The only thing I put on the image with a program, are the numbers for the rooms/areas.

Doing my map old school, i.e. like I did when I was a teenager and before we had our first computer, microwave, or cable TV.

I’m not that good at getting the result I want out of a graphic’s program, so hand drawn it is. Being out of practice with the details on hand drawn maps doesn’t seem to be a problem for this small one. If I had time before the deadline to fiddle with it and get a cutaway effect of The Deep and the cavern, I would.

 

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Day 23 W is for Waste Disposal

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W – Waste Disposal/Toilets/Outhouses/Sewers/Drains/Teleporters/Gelatinous Cubes/Otyughs/etc.

Water, food, and other things come into the city. This results in an unpleasant production that needs to be handled to avoid unpleasant odors and disease in the close quarters of a city. Even with clerics and paladins running around to cure disease, they could not heal everyone in a major plague.

Disintegrators could be used for the most hazardous waste, gelatinous cubes could be an invention for waste disposal and they become a menace in the collapse of a fallen city. Otyughs and other carrion eaters could be placed in the sewers to deal with waste, and could still be down there.

Breaking a barrier between the water supply and the sewer system could be more dangerous than mere exposure to disease. It could allow carrion eaters to get to other places. It could flood the sewers and drown the players, etc.

I can see a waste disposal/sewer system that is “dry”, that is there is not large amount of water coursing through it, if storm drains shunt water elsewhere. Gelatinous cubes and carrion eaters would go from one concentration of waste to another, removing what nutrients they can get from it. Even a fallen city, where the sewers are mostly intact might have some form of occupation that leads to waste, small animals, lost humanoids or adventurers. The sewers with such critters to handle the waste would have areas of near pristine, floors walls, and ceilings as all the contents of the sewer is picked clean. Any minimal accumulation of waste will “move” or “appear” and “disappear” as any PC’s explore.”Something” is down there but what?

I mentioned a series of teleporters to move about the ancient cities and empire. Such technology need not move people and goods. Using teleporters to move waste elsewhere could have interesting results. The location that receives the waste could have a huge number of carrion eating monsters. Anyone transported by this means, will have a nasty surprise both in waste and in what eats the waste. Such teleporters could either be constant, whatever enters the area of the teleporter is instantly transported, or it could cycle every so many hours or days.

Finally, disintegrators could be used for the most dangerous waste. Poof, it’s gone. Anyone or anything wandering into these areas would have some signs of warning, perhaps bars to block access. Bars might indicate blocking something valuable. It could be interesting to see characters break in to check out a room that is a disintegrator. Much like the teleporters, are the disintegrators always on, or do they have a cycle of so many hours?

Is the rain water/flood control using the same channels as the sewers? In an arid climate, minimal water would be used to move waste, as much water as possible would need to be gathered for later consumption.

Are there public latrines? Do people have latrines in their homes and businesses, or do they use chamber pots and haul the waste to a neighborhood waste pit? If gelatinous cubes and other dangerous carrion eaters are used to deal with waste, there would need to be some mechanism to prevent them attacking the populace. Only someone foolish enough to go into the sewers would counteract such safety measures.

Maps and adventures don’t often touch on the actual waste and chamber pots and latrines. However, if one is to use carrion based monsters, many of them presuppose waste. For villages, and even towns, they wouldn’t go to the efforts to deal with waste that is needed in the crowded confines of a bustling city. Chamber pots, outhouses, a back corner of the yard, or area outside the town limits is where human waste would be collected. Human waste can be composted for use in gardens, but it has to be extra hot in its composting method to use it on food crops. When human waste is used for fertilizing food crops, it often leads to the spread of disease.

What do guards on watch use? A latrine in the corner of the guard tower, or a chamber pot, or just over the outside of the wall? How common is it to be walking down the street and someone toss out their chamber pot to the street below? What is the chance that someone rises in the middle of the night to take care of business and dumps the chamber pot, with bleary eyes, to the street below and it hits the thieve(s) sneaking about on their way to or from their latest heist? If on their way to their heist, are they “marked” so well, that they decide to postpone, either long enough to get cleaned up, or for another night? Is the nature of the heist one that they can’t re-schedule? If this happens after the heist, is it close enough to the location of the heist that it makes them easier to track?

UPDATE: May 31, 2015 – I found this article at the Register about London’s sewer system. the key point is that it still dumped into the river, just not where there was a large enough concentration of people to complain about the stink. Also, the capacity of the system when originally built 150 years ago, was such that a large part of the current sewage system of London still uses it.