Hex 0500 - Cradle Wood

Here is a sample page from the hex crawl booklet I am building for the Westmarch campaign. The upper left quadrant has the name and terain type. N = 3 means that we check for encounters three times on 1d6 when traveling across the hex; we check encounters once per hour, with 1-3 on 1d10 meaning an encounter occurs while exploring in the hex.

The wandering monster table has only four monster entries. This is because 1) there really won't be that many chances to roll on the table, which obviates the need for variety and 2) to enforce the idea that "this hex contains X" for any given hex.  

When a monster entry comes up (or in some cases, the Faction entry I suppose) we roll on Table 1 as well to see what kind of encounter it will be.

The Faction entry shows who controls the hex, or in the case of a wild hex, the most likely named NPC or faction the party will encounter. This hex is adjacent to the fort ruled by Lord Atlan, so it is most likely you would meet his men or even himself (and I would shade toward the latter, because it's cool to meet named NPCs.)

The Special tells us that there is some feature in the hex; a town, village, landmark of note or wondrous locale. 

Cities are placed and marked on my map. Any time we roll a wonder for the second time in a hex, it is a landmark instead. 

Her is my landmark generator. It is overly complex; I'm not sure what to do about it except just make stuff up at the play table. Maybe I should use it to generate some landmarks beforehand so I have a list? Here is a stable link to the .pdf.

Different Hexes Taste Different

In the Westmarch sandbox, I've decided each hex will have a short encounter table with only four monsters plus a Faction entry (based on nearby power centers) and a Special entry (based on the terrain, population, and unique features.)

At the start, I'll only be building 

• 12 or so of these little encounter tables, 
• plus the subtables we talked about yesterday (largely unedited from that post),
• plus a Behavior table to help me flesh out the encounter. 

Why only four monsters on the encounter table? I want to be able to make a strong theme for each hex and then beat the players over the head with it, so that they are immediately aware of "oh, we're in a new area." 

The Scrybwood is going to be strongly faerie-flavored. The Durkwood will be strongly pig-flavored. The Ironwood will be dense with ents and ent clues. The Forest of Regrets will be filled with elfs and their allies. 

etc. 

If I have only four entries, I can make one be the main creature type, one be a subsidiary of it (dire boar and wereboar for instance,) have one boss-fight type (wyvern, stone giant, bandit army) and one undead or lycan type. This way, hex taste will be reinforced with many of the encounters. 

When the character of the hex changes, I will substitute one or more of the listings. When the party kills the green dragon in hex 0204, I'll replace it with a family of hippogriffs or an army of orcs or something. 

Each entry will have the (number appearing) of (creature name) and (lair %.) Probably something I would be willing to fudge for the purposes of verisimilitude, but not to "fix" it for the players. 

So here's that Behaviors table: 

So with this table, I can roll the entity encountered, what that entity is doing, and what problem it might have. These will just be suggestions, but suggestions that will prevent the "Orc-And-Pie" problem popping up with every encounter.

Special Nested Encounter Tables

 In the Westmarch sandbox I’m building, each hex will have a unique, very short encounter table. There will be four listings for monsters, plus a Faction, plus a Special. That makes for a 1d6 table. 

A Message For You, Rudy

I think the Specials should be hex features: some landmarks, some wondrous locales, and some towns and villages. That means there have to be different charts for more-civilized and less-civilized regions. 

I already use three levels of civilization for my domain rules so I’ll use the same ones here: civilized, borderlands and wilderlands. So I will have three subtables for the Special result, SC, SB and SW or S1, S2 and S3 (haven’t decided yet.) The correct subtable will be indicated on the appropriate main table. 

Nested Special tables 

Table SC Civilized

1 town

2 village

3 village 

4 landmark

(Cities are always placed)

Table SB Borderlands

1 village

2 village

3 landmark

4 landmark

5 wandering merchant

6 wonder

Table SW Wilderlands

1 homestead

2 fort (landmark)

3 demihuman village 

4 wonder

5 wonder

6 landmark 

In any individual hex, there is a maximum of one wonder to discover. Once that hex’s wonder is discovered, that listing becomes a landmark instead. 

Octagon Crawl

PROTIP: Weird headlines draw eyeballs. 

I’m working on my Westmarch campaign sandbox now, building simple and flavorful generative content for each hex. Of course much of that is from the random tables. 

My random encounter tables will have four listings for monster encounters, one marked FACTION, and one marked SPECIAL. These each lead to other subtables. 

FACTION will give me a chance to bring names NPCs into the picture to give the players a feel about the geopolitics, give quest hooks, and maybe make friends or enemies. I will almost always know which faction(s) are in the region.

SPECIAL is a landmark (wonder or natural feature), a settlement, or a merchant. 

The idea is that the first 2/3 of the table gives hyper-local flavor and the last 1/3 is broader details of the world and logistical support. 

On its own this suggests a heck of a lot of wandering tables, but I don’t need to make them all up ahead of time. The several players are only going to chew through a few hexes a night in any particular direction and I suspect there will be a lot of times when they stay in one hex. Furthermore, each only has four entries (with four auxiliary entries to use if the first ones don’t make sense.) it’ll be more formatting hassle than anything.  

NPC Adventurers You May Meet

 What character class is this NPC adventurer?

1d8

1-3 fighting-man

4 cleric

5 magic-user

6 elf

7 dwarf

8 hobbit

The People of Cragstone

The starting town for the campaign will be the village of Cragstone in the principality of Aluvia. The town is named for the ancient hero Thorsten Cragstone. The town square has a statue of him, but nobody really knows what he actually looked like.  

What handsome children!

Here is an utterly useless list of the 45 townspeople that the PCs might interact with in town. Of course there are a lot more people in Cragstone - I think the number will be 500 (100 families.) That gives us enough folks to farm and raise cows. 

But here, should there be some Hobbit families mixed in with the people? Cragstone is the kind of place Hobbits would like. Bucolic. 

The authority figures in town are... I guess... Lieutenant Kenneth and Oswent the Town Crier, with Sergeant Shanks in there somewhere. People probably just solve their own problems, mostly, and there probably isn't a lot of crime. Frs. Berry and Gildenhearn are probably pretty helpful too. 

There's also a docks area, since Cragstone is on the river, but it isn't a commercial hub. There isn't even a regular ferry service. If you want a ride, you have to get someone to sail or row you. I don't know whether I should make up some NPCs for the dock area or not. Probably at least one cartoonish sea captain. I'll keep thinking. 

If I were to randomly assign an appearance and a personality trait to each of NPC, I would use Table 1. It's also useful if you need a name on the fly. Say! Maybe one of these people is the aforementioned sea captain or a dock worker? Who knows!

If you're wondering how you can make up your own passel of commoners, you might consider this site: 

https://codepen.io/isaacwilliams/full/MoMNVK/ 

or this site: https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/07/horrible-peasant-npc-generator.html