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"Behold, a map!" - Diogenes, holding a plucked Christmas goose |
Scale: 3 miles (1 hour) per hex. I like
this one-page system
for random encounters: once per hex, roll a d20; it determines whether an
encounter occurs, and which nearby hex you should look in to see what it is.
v2, at the bottom of the page, is much easier to understand. Jack Frost shows
up anywhere on an encounter roll of 19.
5,7 (0A, Holly 1/1, pear tree 1d6/12; 2D Perry 1/1). Holly's orchard.2,6 (1D, gingerbread man 1d6+1/*). Village of the Gingerbread Men, and the 2 turtle doves.
8,6 (2D, farmer 1d8/*). Village of peaceable humans, whose ladies have been abducted by the Sugar-Plum Fairies in 2,4, and the milkmaids by Abubléeth in 9,1. Presumably, there are only menfolk and crones remaining.
6,4 (2A, nutcracker 2d4/*, leaping lord 1d4/10). Battlefield of the leaping lords, and the 3 French hens.
2,4. (1A, sugar-plum fairy 2d4/*) Reverie of the Sugar-Plum Fairies.
3,5 (0A, misfit toy 1d6/8). Secret hideout of the Misfit Toys, and the first calling bird to be sacrificed.
7,3 (0A, misfit toy 1d4/6). Mountaintop altar of the Misfit Toys, and the second calling bird to be sacrificed.
4,1 (0A, misfit toy 1d4/6). Icy cave of the Misfit Toys, and the third calling bird to be sacrificed.
9,5 (0A, misfit toy 1d4/10). Dark temple of the Misfit Toys, and the last calling bird to be sacrificed. If three of the four sacrifices are completed by midnight on the fourth day, Krampus will appear in 6,3. He knows the location of all Evil-aligned or otherwise naughty creatures within 3 hexes.
3,3 (1D, elf 1d8/*; 2A goose 1d4/6). Village of the Elves, and the 6 geese.
5,1 (2N, yeti 1/1). Lair of the Yeti. Piles of bones contain the treasures of past adventurers. 40% chance in lair.
9,1 (1A, milkmaid 1d4/8). Icy caves of Abubléeth, his milkmaid thralls, and the 7 swans.
White, empty: snow fields
Light gray, bumps: hills
Dark gray,
triangle: mountains
Blue, empty: lakes
Light green, single tree:
forest (conifer: evergreen, lollipop: deciduous)
Dark green, several
trees: deep forest
Light green, conifer and bumps: evergreen forest and
hills
Dark green, conifer and triangle: evergreen forest and mountains
With
my sincere apologies to any reader who happens to be colorblind. The color
palette is a very nice cool blue that screams icy weather, but it's not at all
useful for a map.
This is my first time making a hex map! I used HexTML, which was decent but I have some problems with it. For one thing, I couldn't export the full map (and it wasn't even a large one), despite trying two browsers. The one above is a screencap. The default icon packs are not great; they don't match the style of the terrain icons, and they aren't very visible on a lot of backgrounds (just look at the target icons for the calling birds - a 1-pixel black outline would make them stand out so much better). I would also love the ability to set a palette, or define custom colors. Every time I changed the terrain type of a hex, it also reset the background color, and I had to go in with the color picker (which was also hard to find) and change it again. Separate tools for background color and terrain symbol would be ideal. Apart from all that, it was usable and fun, and I'd try it again.
I also have no idea how to key a hex map. How dense should keyed locations be? (Probably more dense than these are.) How much information should the key have? (Probably more than this.) What order should keys go in? (I went approximately south-to-north, but only because when I scrolled down to type it out, I could see the southern bits on my screen. Also, it's approximately in the likely story order.)
But in spite of that, I think it works. I feel like I could run this. It would probably even be fun. I'm very curious how the random encounter system works in play - it looks good, but I'm not sure how easy it is to use. I can see myself struggling to reference the d20 encounter chance table, the d6/d12 dice, the hexmap key, and the bestiary, all for every hex (and since most hexes are empty, the party can move through them fairly quickly - that puts the bottleneck on me, which I absolutely hate). It would speed up a lot once I've used the table a bit and internalize the probabilities, but that could also be an argument for a more intuitive system with a smaller die, possibly a d8 (1: this hex, 2: range 1, 3: range 2, 4: clue in hex, 5: clue range 1, 6-8: nothing) or d10 (1-2: in hex, 3: range 1, 4: range 2, 5: clue in hex, 6: clue range 1, 7-10: nothing). But that's something I could only figure out by using it in-game.
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Edit: player version with no icons |
I think some terrain effects would help make this pop, but I think they need to hook into a more robust travel/exploration system (trudging through those deep snow fields is great for your line of sight, but tiring - double rations that day, and save vs exhaustion). For now, I would just limit it to some basics:
ReplyDelete- To move out of a mountains hex, you have to roll DC 10 Athletics, with a +5 bonus for each hour you've already spent traversing it. This is to simulate being slowed by climbing over rocky terrain. The character with the lowest bonus rolls.
- Like wise, snow field hexes have to roll DC 8 CON+Athletics, to simulate how exhausting it is to trudge through unbroken snow. The character leading the marching order rolls.
- Forest hexes impose a -2 penalty to passive Perception, heavy forests -5. Likewise, hills -2, mountains -5. These effects stack; (3,2), which has pine forests and mountains, is at -7, since you can never see over the next ridge.
- Water is treated as impassible, unless you build a boat or something.
Weather conditions will also be useful. A hex power flower would be ideal, but seems like a lot of work to make right now. Instead, roll 1d8 for starting weather, and 1d4 every 4 hours. 1: move down one step, 2-3: stay at the same weather, 4: move up one step. If you would go off the end, turn around instead.
ReplyDelete1. Just warm enough to melt and refreeze. Snow field DC goes down to 5, since you're not breaking through the surface with every step. You also have disadvantage against being knocked prone.
2. Light snow drifted around by the wind. Encounter roll 9 is a clue to the current hex, 10-18 are nothing.
3. Cacophonous winds. You have to shout to be heard, and have disadvantage on Perception checks (which also means -5 passive).
4. Flurries and fog. You can't see very far; same Perception penalty as #3, and encounter distance is halved.
5. Permafrost sinkholes. Encounter roll 12-13 means a sinkhole opens up beneath the party and they have to avoid being caught in it. But, there's also a colony of ice toads down there, and if you can steal their amethyst idol then they must obey you.
6. Crushing heavy snow. Fill 1 encumbrance slot per hour, until you can rest somewhere inside and shake the snow out of your clothes. Tents & makeshift shelters collapse and bury you. Avalanches occur in the mountains.
7. Frozen stasis. No mechanical effects, but it's quiet, too quiet...
8. Crunchy frost. Loud to walk across, disadvantage on Stealth. Crops die.
Bah, there's no edit button but #6 should also remove all clues from the random encounter roll.
DeleteAfter a very brief playtest, my impression is that this needs keyed content in every or nearly every hex in order to work. With only a 20% chance to encounter whatever's in the current hex, and only 55% to encounter anything at all, it's very likely to go through a fairly large, dense area without finding anything. I found that most of my encounter rolls were either nothing, or pointed to a hex that had nothing in it - in fact, during the whole playtest (only about a dozen hexes, so not a huge sample) I only had one roll that actually turned up a valid result.
ReplyDeleteI want it to be much more likely, realism be damned. Sure, a 3 mile hex is a huge area, and realistically you're not that likely to stumble into one building, but we're playing a game here, and a game needs content. I would shift the probabilities up to about 40% for the current hex, 20% for a nearby hex, maybe 10% for a more distant hex, leaving about 30% uneventful, instead of nearly 50%.
In fact, on a d100:
1-10: Lair in hex
11-30: Encounter in hex
31-40: Clue in hex
41-52: Encounter in adjacent hex (2% per hex, about the same as 1.67% previously)
53-58: Clue in adjacent hex (1% per hex, up from 0.83%)
59-70: Encounter in distant hex (1% per hex, up from 0.83%)
71-75: Roll twice
76-00: Nothing
This also has the benefit of reducing it to a single roll, instead of maybe having another d6 or d12 roll, which should make it quicker and easier. It still needs more keyed content, but I could get away with, say, twice as many, instead of ~6 times as many.
Also, this should have been obvious, but I plopped that map into roll20 with all the icons on it, which kinda defeats the purpose of exploring. I've updated the post with a terrain-only player version.