Back to the Hex Map

The idea of a hex map has been back on my mind lately. I've been thinking more generally of running an exploration-based game with no regular player group for a while, mostly because college gamers are flaky and I want to do something diametrically opposed to the dirty hippy indie games/Exalted that usually gets run around here. Since Swords & Wizardry came out, I've been thinking even more seriously about that, because I think it'd be a good fit, better than thed20 Modern that I was originally considering.

Plus, hex maps are cool. I had all kinds of fun making my first, despite never getting to run it. Game prep should be fun, and filling out a hex map is a good way to fill an afternoon.

I've already been doing a bit of thinking about what I would put on this theoretically hex map, despite really needing something other than a list of names from the 1972 census for my NaNoWriMo novel. Things that should be on the hex map so far:

• Alien artifacts
• Tombs of ancient tyrants
• Temples to forgotten evil gods, preferably infested with snake-men
• Several different tribes of goblins that the PCs can screw with and start wars between
• Dinosaurs
• Underwater Atlantean-analogue dungeons and relics
• Robots gone berserk
• Little towns with dark secrets
• A mad wizard in a tower
• Entrances to the Underworld, realm of the Twelve-armed God
• Football-sized ruby
• A dragon
• A crashed spaceship
• Carnivorous apes
• Blind, death-cheese making monks

That covers most of the bases, but is there anything I'm missing?

Lazer-Beam Eyes!

Confound it. It just finally occurred to me how awesome post-apocalyptic sword & sorcery fantasy would actually be.

At least, if "post-apocalyptic sword & sorcery fantasy" means "You are a dude with a sword, or possibly a crazy wizard. You see a robot dinosaur with laser-beam eyes stomping across the blasted landscape on the horizon."

This is going to drive me crazy. Because as much fun as the hex map is, and as weird as it is, it's still very much standard D&D fantasy, with elves and forests and kings in castles. And that's cool, and I made a conscious decision to do it that way, because this if I run it at all it will probably be for a group of people who haven't played D&D before, and I'd like them to get an idea of what the baseline is.

Don't know if that's a necessary thing. It seems like a good idea, but I don't have enough direct experience in the area to know for sure.

This is the sort of thing I would normally subject to a quick poll from the group, but right now, I don't have a group.

Which brings up another point: how much is this something that I want to run at some point, and how much is it something that I'm using to kill time until I get another group together? Also, it's not like I can't keep working on the current hex map, with the intention of running it, and start on a stranger world that's more an exercise in awesome-osity.

Justifying My Rampant Intellectual Kleptomania

What I don't generate randomly or spin off a secret, I steal. Shamelessly.

Partially because it helps maximize content volume while minimizing work. (Though I tend to give everything my own spin, and at the least have to translate it into game-meaningful content, which is the most work intensive part. So it doesn't minimize effort that much.)

Partially because I like the easter egg aspect it lends to the game. This comes up a lot with character names--names are the most easily Google-able. This would probably drive some people crazy, but I think it's funny when the players finally realize exactly where I got the name of that ancient artifact sword.

Mostly, though, I just like using things I think are cool in my game. I prefer roleplaying that focuses on emulation, rather than innovation. It plays more to the form's strengths. Using familiar material helps keep the inevitable misinterpretation that comes with a group of people trying to figure out what's happening through verbal interaction down to a manageable level. And one of the big advantages that roleplaying has over less active forms of entertainment is that you are actually involved, on some level, with what's going on; using material that you already think is cool takes advantage of that.

And, on an even more theoretical level, I am not much for pure and total originality in creative processes. There are hard limits to just how original it's possible to be, and even harder limits on how original it's desirable to be. If I have to choose between innovation in premise and competence in execution, I almost always choose competence.

Secrets, And Products Thereof

One of my major tools in building hex map, and associated setting, is the Second Rule of Dungeoncraft, from Ray Winniger's (excellent) Dungeoncraft column.

Every time I create an important part of my setting, I create a secret about what I just created, and I put it into the deck 'o secrets. (Yes, I use an actual 3x5 notecard. I'm just that hardcore.) When I need something new to put on the map I'll draw a card from the deck, and try to figure out a way to work a clue to that secret into an encounter. This and random generation is how about 90% of what's on the map found origin.

My process works a little differently from the specific one that Winniger describes, because I'm starting very locally, and working my way up from there. I didn't start working on the gods until I had clerics who needed those gods. So most of my secrets are about NPCs and locations rather than fundamental ways the world works.

Not that I don't have a few of those. But I did it backwards. I thought to myself, "I need a big, world-changing secret that I can work into the early part of the game." And then I came up with some ideas about how the metaphysics of the setting that would support that, and suddenly I've got a general framework for how the planes interact, a couple new gods, and a rough idea for both a true creation myth and a false one.

A Few More Random Generators

Turns out I posted too soon. Behold: Serendipity! Source of many fine random generators. The interesting site generator is exactly what I need: a spark for an interesting location-based encounter.

Also handy is the Barrel, Crate, and Sack Generator from the Tools section of the Wizards archive. I find it particularly handy for generating treasure captured from merchant caravans and the like; sometimes one needs trade goods rather than gold and jewels, and this utility provides an interestingly unusual assortment.

My Hex Map Is Not Nearly Weird Enough

"This humble mountain republic was noted for its advanced art. It was destroyed by a neighboring country because of the people's extreme perversion, leaving behind only methods of transportation and political theories."

Brought to you by Seventh Sanctum's Lost Civilization Generator

This is going in the hex map. Don't know how. Don't know where. But it needs to be there, and it needs to be there soon.

I really like randomly generating content. I've been doing a lot of it lately, because I want this project to have a kind of wacky scope that I can't achieve independently.

So far I've mostly been using the aforementioned Seventh Sanctum, Slack'n'Hash, and a few of the charts in the Dungeon Masters Guide and the DMG II. Because I haven't yet gotten a copy of the 1st Edition Guide.

Anyone else have any favorite chart sources? Untapped mines of wonder of which I have not yet heard?

A Handy Resource

Something else I'm doing with my hex-map: working in the free Wizards adventures.

They're short and to the point, with one or two locations and an interesting opponent. Exactly what I need for this project. The map is still mostly original material, but these help to get a bit of variety.

Odds, Ends, And More Hex Map!

When it rains, it pours, right? I get four posts one day, and then . . . nothing. I could say that I didn't have anything worth writing about, but I always have things worth writing about.

The current Scary Go Round storyline is quite excellent. Drug (and jam) addled wannabe superheroes is a concept I can always get on board with. To get the full story, you'll want to start roughly hereabouts.

Similarly, progress on the hex map continues apace. I have developed a number of resolutions, regarding the shape of the campaign it will make. I am going to try to include the proper amount of treasure, more interesting and challenging encounters, and the occasional PC death. I had a sharp focus on the story side of my last game, largely because several of my players were interested in that and the others didn't much care as long as they were getting what they wanted out of the game. But there are other skills, and I plan to discover them, and their uses.

In that light, I've resolved not to have an over-arching grand plot. No plans for a final confrontation, no single villain behind all the evils. There will be villains, evil, and plots aplenty, but I won't have any single thread connecting everything from the beginning.

There will be threads, certainly, but I want this campaign to be more free-ranging. Whether or not a villain gets promoted from random underground foe to major arch-villain will, hopefully, be based more upon player interest than long-term GM plan. I do like the over-arching plot technique, but because both of my successful campaigns featured it heavily, I'd like to try something different.

Oh, and gnomes. I think gnomes are going to be a major part of the next campaign I run. Gnomes rock.

Not To Mention The Gnomes

This whole hex-map project? Should have tried it years ago.

Building a campaign from the ground up. Start with the details, work my way out to the big picture. Rather than my usual strategy of starting it top-down because that seems like the logical thing to do, and then getting bored a few pages in and never going back to it ever again. Or, worse, never really getting started, because I can't think of the proper conceptual framework.

Well, no more. Now I'm doing my design at the encounter level. This requires interesting NPCs, who require secrets, which require clues on the map, which turn into more encounters, and suddenly I've got all kinds of crazy happening in this little map of maybe two days travel through a forest. I start out with "this town needs a leader" and I end up with "to the south are lots of elves, who don't like humans and have a serious green dragon problem."

This is fun.

Hexmap-Tastic!

I'm doing something I've never done before.

I have a sheet of hex graph paper. I am filling it with weird things, many of them generated randomly.

Things on the map include:
A clan of circus gnomes in rafts.
Three separate halflings traveling up the river in boats. The second one is named Sam "88 Keys" Clark.
An underwater ogre cave with a spyglass, a silver holy symbol, and an everburning torch. (That last item will make the cave easier to find, I think.)

I thought it would be nice to have a river, so I could put a village I was thinking about making on the river. I spent the next two hours coming up with weird things to be in the river.

Being the DM is fun.