14 April 2023

Westmarch Crawl Format

I've been going through all my 6-mile hexes and assigning each a wandering monster table, an adventure and a wonder. The one-mile hexes are numbered 1-30 so we can randomly determine where in the hex various features reside - just in case it's important later, which it might be. 

Each hex (Except for the castle hex) ought to be an adventure site of its own, and many of them will be suitable to return to over and over. 

As the several players explore and level up, I will suggest to them that their characters ought to fortify areas out in the world as staging areas. There will be towns and villages; some will be adventure sites in their own right and some will be neutral or friendly. By fortifying these areas, the characters will be able to travel farther as well as tame the land. If they have to return to 0800 every day, they won't be able to go much farther than the first adjacent hex.

This will also prepare the people for their new lords, who will (hopefully?) be PCs. 

Here are the charts we use to determine 1) what the encounter is about and 2) what the Special will be. You can see that the Special gets hoarier as the land gets wilder. 
Here we have the Landmark generator. It's very complicated. I'm sure there is an easier way to do it but this is the procedure I will use when we start. Landmarks are not going to come up all that often, but when they do, they should be true and interesting landmarks and not something generic. 


Finally, here is the hex worksheet itself. One per page, all the info you need to generate encounters, and a diagram of the hex so I can draw in the features as they pop up. 


You will see that each hex has a dominant terrain type. In this case "Settled." It also has an N number. In this case, N = 1. That refers to how often we check for an encounter. For this particular hex, we would only check which exploring, but for other hexes we would check while traveling through. 

(Recall that overland travel requires N checks per hex on 1d6, checked upon hex entry; exploring a hex requires one check per hour, with 1-N on 1d10 resulting in an encounter.)

This particular hex has no adventure in it. I don't want the players stopping here - this is safe home territory. 

Question for the penny groundlings: shall we give the several characters a chance to get lost, or shall we forego that part of the crawl? It seems punitive to me tbh. 


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