Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VII

For those of you just joining this series, I realized that the default for travel in the wilderness is usually-- nothing happens-- and that there was little to differentiate traveling through one type of terrain from another.  So I set out to try and create strategic games to both, give players something to do while travelling, and to make travelling through the desert feel different than travelling through the jungle.

Because I don't have any typical images in my head for travel through the luminous aether, I made this one a little more abstract.  Also, I don't have any experience DMing folks through planar journeys, but I imagine this could be modifiable to lots of different applications-- travelling through dreams or psionically, for example.  For that reason, though, I have no idea what unit to use here, whether it be time, space, or number of planes jumped.  I leave you to figure out the particulars.  Here we go:

The character that initiated the travel begins in the center.  The rest of the travellers are arranged around the initiator concentrically.

Every unit of travel each traveller must move one position as they are jostled about in the aether.  Before moving each player rolls a d6.  The position they can move to can only be their die roll or lower.  Only one player can occupy a spot at a time. 

If a player rolls lower than all adjacent spaces they must move to the lowest space next to them.  If a player on a 2 spot rolls a one or has adjacent spots blocked, they slip into the void.

Once a journey, players with exceptional intelligence can add their bonus to any persons die roll.

If the party is attacked while travelling, characters receive penalties to combat depending on which ring they have been jostled to: the three spots are -1, and the two spots are -2.  A player lucky enough to be on the six spot receives +1 to combat that round.
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So, it isn't too likely for someone to get jostled off unless the party travelling is large and starts blocking each other.  But with the penalties to combat, players will still want to stay as close to the center as possible.

What does slipping into the void mean?  Seems like a pretty good adventure hook to me, probably they end up in a plane they least expected.  What happens if the initiator of travel slips off?  Ooh, seems like they'd take everyone with them, don't you think?

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VI

The desert is a grueling waste and the best way to deal with it is spend as little time there as you can.  For every three days the party travels in the desert their food and water needs will multiply.  Each day the party will see features that they can choose to explore or ignore.  Exploring them will require an extra day.  The features that might be seen during each three-day-span are linked with dotted paths.  Landmarks are tombs and ruins or ancient stelae which might hold riches in gold or ancient knowledge.  An oasis will provide food, water, and shade to a party for as long as they like; will allow them to re-stock their supplies; and will reset their place on the chart to the start.  Caravans can offer food, water, and unerring transport, but may also be hostile bandits or slavers.  Unfortunately, 50% of the time any of these will be mirages.  And 25% of the time they will be one of the other two features.

Once a party member cannot meet the food and water requirements they must make a save each day to continue.  Failing this save means they are unconscious.  Each day they are unconscious they must save or die.

Every landmark visited will offer a bonus against getting lost on subsequent journeys through the same area.
________

Note: I probably should have put a couple check boxes for local guides or rangers that give you one free non-mirage.

The idea here is that the desert becomes more and more deadly the more time players fiddle around in it.  They may decide to strategically search for an oasis or caravan if supplies start running low.  A DM would need to prepare several landmarks ahead of time.  These could be anything from full blown dungeons to just obelisks.  I envision using my trackless wastes chart to help players know where they think they are going.  I also envision using this with the normal getting lost chances, which could make excursions into the desert very dangerous.

I can imagine situations where a few tougher party members desperately seek out an oasis or caravan with all the rest of the party left behind, unconscious.

Update 10/12:

I simplified the chart to three sections and lowered the multipliers to the still easy to remember but more believable 2,3, and 4x.  I like this better, it looks cleaner. 

I would have the multipliers just apply to water now.  I think it fits the tropes better.  I also added the reminder boxes for rangers and locals getting one free I'm-certain-that-is-no-mirage per journey.  (funny how I put rangers and druids and such on all these charts when I don't even use them in my campaign.  I guess that is just me trying to be helpful to you all-- rangers, druids and equivalent situations-- players with magic items or special backgrounds-- should all work equally well on these simple rules).

I was in the process of changing the three day increments to four but reverted them back, I think, while I had it too brutal before, it needs to feel like a dangerous and slippery slope-- four days of travel equivalent to just being on a normal road was a little too easy to do that in my opinion.

Also, I don't think I ever mentioned that the whole dotted line mess isn't just for aesthetics, I was trying to limit when players might find certain things.  I didn't want a party, fresh and confident, checking to see if every oasis is a mirage.  But as things get desperate there are chances available to get out of the situation, like being picked up by a caravan.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games V

Here's another attempt at a simple way to engage players while they travel the wilderness while making different types of terrains feel different.  (Maybe a better name for these things would be Terrain Challenges, or Travel Challenges Simon?)

This might be the simplest one yet (I'm sure the seed of the idea came from Zak's critical range choice he gives his players):

Each day the party has to move one box.  The idea is that in the dark woods you can either be safe or know where you are, but it's hard to do both.  Running from encounters leads to getting turned around and all the stands of trees look alike.  You can try to mark your way, but your bread crumbs might lead something to you.  Treat each box as a corresponding bonus or minus to the wandering monster and getting lost rolls.

If you have any of the folks at the bottom in your party they can shift one box per day as well.

Depending on how you check for monsters and getting lost you might want to cut each side down to 3 boxes.  I'm assuming a d6 with results on a one, so you would never completely avoid the chance to have encounters or get lost.

No players will want to get lost, but I'm thinking low level characters may push towards safety just to survive.  Hopefully they will stumble upon a road or an interesting ruin before they are finally eaten alive.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games IV

First, I never mentioned that I would consider any kind of road or known track to be civilization and by using them players can avoid these mini-games.  I intend these for going off-road or trailblazing.  I suppose that could lead to boring trips along roads in the wilderness, but I'm thinking we should probably all have charts for terrain-specific road encounters and travel on a road should feel quicker anyway. I imagine hand-waving road trips would be less of an issue than whole expeditions through difficult terrain.

Second, obviously these don't have to be used for the terrain they are named for.  If you have a different terrain that you want to keep interesting as players travel across it, choose the mini-game that fits it best.  So far we have terrains that:

• wear parties down with a single, relentless element (swamp)
• drive hirelings mad through isolation and discomfort (ocean)
• are technically difficult and require gear and planning (mountain)

and today I'll give you:

• consume hirelings with hidden dangers (jungle)

Now, the jungle.  I had a hard time with this one.  While I knew that I wanted something like I remember from watching old Sinbad and Tarzan movies-- porters and bearers dying every step of an expedition into the dark jungle-- I didn't want to interfere with the game's system of playing out dangerous encounters and combat.  I'm hoping this might balance both well enough:

The idea is the jungle devours men and women-- quicksand, silent constrictors, piranha filled streams.  Every other day one hireling will disappear.  Having any of the special folks at the bottom of the chart in the party can save one hireling per journey.

Once per journey, a character with an exceptional strength, dexterity, or constitution can prevent a disappearance.

Otherwise the party must leave the hirelings to the jungle or challenge this cruel fate by rolling a d6.  A result of 5-6 means crisis averted-- you grabbed the hireling's hand just as they were about to slip off the cliff trail. A result of 3-4 means the scene becomes a full-blown encounter-- determine what the hazard is, whether environmental or wandering monster, and play it out.  A result of 1-2 means the scene becomes a traditional encounter as well, but you've escalated the danger of the situation-- 1d4 additional hirelings are knocked into the quicksand, are encoiled by the giant anaconda, etc.

I'm hoping that players that really don't want to lose hirelings can avoid it, but that in tense situations, chases or parties lost in the jungle, they may just let hirelings go to avoid losing even more hands to the wilderness.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games III

And now to the culprit that left me wanting something better, the sea.  I thought about it for a while and I decided a cool archetypal challenge for the sea would be your crew.  What, you think you can drift around in the doldrums for weeks without hearing some grumbling from those shady characters you hired at the last port?  Here's what I came up with:

On the second day at sea with no encounter start the game by placing a marker on the first square (Now that I think of it I should have designed it with the track around the edges so you could use a paper-clip).

Each following day move one square, encounters don't matter any more.

When you land on a square with a black spot your crew has become unhappy and is grumbling.  Roll 1d6 to see how they challenge you.

If one of the party members has an exceptional score in the ability challenged the crew is appeased and you halt their descent into darker moods. An exceptional ability can only be used once a journey. 

If you don't have the right ability bonus you can offer up the secondary item: a change of scenery, wine women and song, or cold hard cash.  As long as you meet their challenge you can hold the crew's discontent on that square.  But every day you'll have to roll for another challenge.

Fail the challenge and the marker moves to the next box.  Once you get to the fork, a challenge failed for 3 starts the crew spiralling into madness, depression, and possible suicide.  A failed 4 or 5 will head them toward angry revolt, and either assaulting or marooning the party.

Keep in mind, successfully meeting the challenges will only stall the inevitable.  Once the game is started the only thing that can reset the board is port, or at least having the majority of the crew go ashore somewhere.

Trackless Wastes

This is related to the last couple of posts about the abstractness of wilderness travel in our game.  It isn't a mini-game so-to-speak, but could work with the mini-game idea.  Think of this as an attempt to help players and DM share a visualization of a hex of wilderness.

I ran into the problem of abstractness in my own game.  The players had an idea of the direction an island was in.  They headed that way.  But the ocean hexes I'm using are 72 miles across.  Do they encounter the island?  Even with a visibility of miles, will they be close enough to see it?  I have no idea and had no idea how to even begin adjudicating that.  So I just said they found it.

Now I know one solution is to map my world down to the mile so I would know exactly where the island was.  But, no, I have no intention on mapping a world to that degree when there is no guarantee players will ever venture there.  But more importantly, even my knowing my world that intimately doesn't translate into my players being able to benefit from it.  Players can't see your map, they don't necessarily see in their head what you see in your head when you say "swamp," and they certainly don't see the difference between swamp hex 1 and swamp hex 2.  I suppose it's possible to describe in such detail-  "This swamp hex is filled with purple flowers that start giving way to Spanish moss"-- and if you want to do that I have nothing against you.  I just think there are probably easier, less work-intensive ways to achieve similarly blurry images of landscape in the minds of players.

So, one way is to use landmarks-- when they encounter the big cairn of bluish rocks, they'll know where they're at.  I learned this from ckutalik, he calls it a pointcrawl.  I think it's cool and plan to try it.  But you're still left with the empty abstract spaces between those landmarks, especially in the ocean.  So why not embrace that abstractness for the benefit of the players and the game?

How about something like the old Battleship game.  Instead of hexes within hexes within hexes, you just have keyed abstract points that players can maneuver by.  Something like this:

(The dots in each area should probably be numbered from 1-6 but I'm too wiped to do it right now.)  The idea is that the party enters the hex from a particular point, let's say D6.  Then, in searching for Animal Island they tell me where they head.  Maybe they'll head to D3 towards the center of the hex.  As long as I pick one of these locations for the island and have an idea of view distance it should work great.

I can decide on a certain number of dots moved depending on whether they are fighting the wind or not.  And obviously the more they have to wander around the hex searching the more chances to encounter wandering monsters and interesting local encounters.

Keep in mind, this isn't a map, so players can still get lost.  If the navigator fails a check or something maybe they think they are at D3 when they've actually drifted to C6. 

It should be a snap to randomly place things: 1d6 for the area, 1d6 for the point in that area.  With this image as a foundation and something you don't have to worry about, you can turn your attention to other things like view distance varying in different terrain types.  Maybe in the forest the characters won't see the old Empire road until they walk onto a point that is on it.  Then they can follow the road with its movement rate advantages.  But maybe on prairie they can see a dwelling whole areas away and head for it or circle around it.

I know that you could do essentially the same thing if the dots were smaller hexes (and I'm betting some of you do), but in my mind a hex is still a boundary encompassing other things and my mind is constantly confused at what zoom level its at.  With the dots I'm hoping to avoid that confusion for me and the players.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games II

Some more thoughts on spicing up travel through the abstract wilderness.  Keep in mind I intend these in addition to encounters and in addition to terrain-based encounters.  I'm just trying to shift the default from nothing happens to- there is some slow-burning tension.

One thing I've done in the past is add npcs to converse with on a ship.  But that takes some prep and players don't seem to want to interact with anything that isn't explicitly a boon or a hook.

After my last post I was worrying that all terrain might be seen as an element wearing you down: thirst in the desert, cold in the tundra, etc.  So I pushed my brain trying to think of a different approach for a mini-game.  Here's an idea for steep and rocky terrain:

Once a day (or hex, whatever works best for your scale) the treacherous mountain terrain will consume a random piece of equipment.  Ropes and spikes used to cross ravines will need be left behind.  Poles will be lost into deep drifts.  grapnels irretrievably wedged on ascending rock faces.  If the party has a dwarf, ranger or local in it they can absorb one of these losses per journey.  Characters with wisdom or intelligence bonuses can substitute one item for another once per journey-- think of it as cleverly rigging something up: the torches melt through the ice wall they can't scale, a pole is used to clamber up a steep spot.

As long as the party has one of the item type that the roll says is consumed, then things are okay.  If not, movement decreases (halved?) and things start getting harder (food and water consumption double?).

Well, it's similar to the swamp travel in that it's still wearing away at the party which I guess is what all resource management amounts too.  But I was hoping with this, the party could be shown the chart before travelling, see what is consumed more commonly, and try to prepare for the trip accordingly, to give the feel of a big expedition.  It could even make finding the remains of a previous expedition, with spikes and rope, treasure-like.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games

Hill Cantons just posted about the tedium of wilderness travel and I was recently struggling with the same thing (you think a hex crawl is boring, try the ocean!).  The first default answer to this is to include terrain-based encounters on the wandering monster table.  That's fine, but if you don't roll an encounter  . . . the default is still nothing happening. 

Weather charts try to balance interest with plausibility, so usually you have the kind of weather you'd expect for the season and it doesn't change much.

You could just make something happen each day of travel and prepare a big chart.  That's how I handle my abstract city Nidus.  Every trip into the city rolls on the table, often these are more exciting things than what the players intended to do in town.  But two things, 1) players entering Nidus are playing a mini-game (they have to roll dice to find what they want), so it's more interesting than just something happens guaranteed and 2) a teeming fantasy city should feel different than the trackless wastes.  Do we really want something happening every day of travel or every hex travelled in the wilderness?

So how do we avoid the boredom of nothing happening while giving the feeling of travelling through vast, treacherous territories?  I think a mini-game is the solution.  Almost exactly a year ago today JDJarvis suggested a roll-to-get-out-of-hex-mechanic to spice up wilderness travel.  I think he was on the right track.  I think it should be a little more involved than that though-- complicated enough that players can make decisions and devise strategies.  I also think each kind of terrain should have a different mini-game.  The challenges of travelling through the Arctic are different than the challenges of the swamp.

What the games would be I haven't quite figured out yet.  Maybe you could help.  But here is a proof of concept I whipped up for swamps:

I think the biggest ongoing threat from wetlands is . . . well, the wet.  The damp gets into food, ruins boots, and wears down pack animals trudging through soft, sticky earth.  So you might make every day in the swamp (travelling or not) give 1+ 1d4 squares of dampness damage.

Players can choose where to put this dampness damage: on boots and armor or on pack animals.  The idea is you can privilege your gear, keeping it dry by overloading your animals or save the animals by trudging through the wet muck yourself.  When the dampness bar is full, the animals are through.  They are lame.  They've been left in sinkholes.  For the boots/armor I'm not sure.  You could say all armor becomes worthless, but that's pretty harsh.  Maybe start taking dampness damage off of AC, once the bar is full, one a day.  Loss of boots should mean slower movement rate too.

You can reset the bar by finding a dry enough spot to camp-- one square cleared per day of fire and rest in camp (props to Wilderness Survival for that idea).

The squares on bottom are if you have a one of any of the labelled folks in the party.  You can sink one square of dampness damage per day into them. The idea is that through know-how and experience they help the party avoid some of the most difficult terrain.

So what choices would this give a party?  Well, in an emergency they could work the animals so hard they sacrifice them, but then you would need to be strict about encumbrance to make that matter.  Or if they are going to need their animals on the other side of the swamp they could store all their armor, sacrifice their boots and travel very slowly.  But if nothing else I'm hoping there would be tension as they split dampness between both bars and looked for a decent camping spot.  You could even set a minimum elevation ahead of time and use this technique as a sub-mini-game.

What do you think?  Can you invent entirely different games for desert/tundra/ocean that would be interesting and "feel" like those places?

Procedural Lockpicking

Arkhein asked how to make lockpicking interesting.  Here's my attempt:

Your thief knows four ways to manipulate locks:

• Bump
• Probe
• Rake
• Twist

And that's it.  She knows the wrong actions might Jam the lock permanently preventing it from being picked or opened with a key.  She also knows some locks have a Trap with bad things happening to those that set it off by failing to pick properly.

But maybe she also knows you never Bump a Dwarven lock, ever.  And you never start a brass lock with a Twist.  And maybe as she gains experience (levels) she can Bump and still recompose herself when she realizes that was the wrong thing to do.

In this picture, a correct choice will move along the grey track to the next choice.  A wrong choice will result in the lock feeling stiff (a warning) and the thief can either choose the correct action from there or face the consequences.

A DM might have a whole folder full of locks-- different difficulties, different makes. The players would not see these images, but hear a description-- "It is a heavy brass lock, with a D inscribed on it."


Update: I got all excited this morning because I woke up with what I thought was a solution to generating these easily and then I realized Zak had already proposed it in his comment. Anyway, yeah, assign a number to each of the lockpicking verbs, the "moves," roll 3d4 and the results tell you which the thief has to use.  Use dice in a color progression and you know the order the lock requires them in:

So, for that roll, starting from white we get Rake, Probe, Bump, Bump.  But that just gives us a very simple (and unforgiving) lock that assumes it jams if the thief uses the wrong verb.  To complicate this, it seems like it depends on how common you want traps to be.  On a wrong move by the player, we might then roll a 1d6 and a 5=jammed, a 6=trapped, and the other numbers indicate a move to avoid jamming: "Oh, she was supposed to Bump and didn't, now she can salvage this attempt with a Rake otherwise it Jams."

But, all this fiddling is not getting us much for the player above just rolling a 25 on d%, so it would be essential that you as DM:

• Have locks of certain types, that players can gain expertise on.  This is contradictory to our method of generation, but if you say that all brass locks start with Probe, you could then just randomly determine the other tumblers for that lock.
•  Give some kind of advantages with level, that would allow for some skill at the game.  Like "one free get out of a Jam," or "Reveal the move on one tumbler in any lock."

Zombiecowboy asked about Bump and Rake.  The verbs here are just abstractions, but abstractions that are conceivably related to lockpicking so you can hang your roleplaying on them (those two provisions bulletpointed above.  You could use any verbs that would help you do this in your world.  I actually needed a fourth verb and just looked at the lockpicking page on Wikipedia to find "rake." But Pry, Tap, and Spin could work just as well.

Have an Island

Part of me doesn't want a map because it feels each detail cuts off a multitude of possibilities (thus the abstract city of Nidus).  But I'm at the point where it isn't really fair for players, now that there are several locations they've encountered, to not let them know how places are situated in relationship to each other.  I could have drawn my own map but the old simulationist in me starts whispering: "But what of the geology? The scale?" and I start researching island geology and I end up spending hours and still have no map.  So hell, I'll just use a real map and give myself freedom to fudge any details on it that don't work toward my ends.

In tracking pictures that were sources of inspiration for Nidus, one place I ended up was this old map of Santorin Isalnd that struck me as just the right style.  I was ignorant at the time that it was the quite interesting ancient island of Thera. Here is the public domain map from 1848:

Here is a version where I've removed most of the place names and some details to allow for customization:

I always imagined Nidus as a cliffside city facing the open ocean, but here the water inside the ancient caldera is the much safer harbor, so I'll probably say Nidus is located where Thera actually is, although it's bigger and climbs higher.

One thing cool about using a real location is that you can find actual satellite pictures. So, if the party finds a magic carpet or tames a flying beasty I can show them this:

Of course, I'd probably want to edit out that airstrip first.  :)

Sandbox Happening Escalation

On the Year of the Dungeon a small dungeon was posted with a rumor/encounter escalation chart for a curse, depending on whether the player characters get involved with stopping that curse or not. I thought it was a brilliant idea. And I thought you might abstract out a more general escalation pattern for use with any sandbox happenings. (I use the word "happenings" because "event" sounds like discreet and limited things but these are on-going in the background as pcs merrily explore caverns and tombs).

So here is an abstract way to think about and maybe keep track of these happenings in 5 stages:

1. Rumors
2. First-hand Tale
3. Personal Experience
4. Witness a Mass Event
5. Unavoidable Consequences / Civilization Interrupted

Rumors are clear. Stage 2 has pcs encounter a person who has witnessed the happening themselves and can give an eye-witness account. A stage 3 things are becoming so common that the pcs are the ones to witness something. Stage for the pcs witness something again, but now it is bigger and more dire. By stage 5 even if the players have avoided interacting with this event for session after session they can't now, merchant, towns, trade, lodgings, even camping safely in the woods will be affected.

When do stages escalate? I say that's up to you as DM. The simplest of course would be to kick it up a notch each session of play. But you could make some happenings build slowly to a boil over the course of a year of real gameplay too.

I don't think every happening would have to end at stage 5; if every happening has unavoidable consequences, eventually the players will realize this and say “Ah, screw it, we've got to go deal with this war.” Happenings could resolve themselves, or be resolved by other parties. Or in an evil campaign a happening may never escalate past a certain level unless players push it gleefully along.

Now, I don't have any experience running a sandbox, so if this is all old hat forgive me. Here are some ideas off the top of my head of things that might happen in the background:

Possible Dire Happenings

War
Seems pretty straightforward even if players never get involved in actual fighting they'll experience raids, looting, and the wreckage of places armies have been..

Mania
Check out the Vaults of Nagoh's memestorms and ideocults for great ideas regarding this category. I think the idea of the Dance of Death is really archetypal of the dark ages too.

Disaster
While many disasters are eye-blink fast, I think a few would work well with escalation: the earth has been rumbling for weeks, faults have been opening up underneath people, before the big quake hits. Or, the mountain has been smoking, someone saw some lava streaming down the opposite face, before the huge eruption. Or maybe, for some reason, it . . . just . . . won't . . . stop . . . raining.

Plague
I sort of like the idea of deciding ahead of time that the player characters will be immune to whatever pestilence is spreading, and having them deal with the envious npcs and any guilty feelings they might have that they are unscathed.

Great Beast
My first thought was dragon, but this could work for a Giant or a Vampire and his followers, anything that can progressively become more of a problem.

Not-So-Dire World Events

Not everything that happens in the world is potentially world-ending, maybe there is just a fad of people wearing Red-checked hose. So, what might happen that would be interesting/important enough to notice but not so dire?

• Memestorms/Ideocults could fit here too
• Religion on the Rise (the cult of the Red-Checked Hose)
• Cultures Mixing (An Influx of Dwarves)
• Guild Strife
• Newly Chartered City
• Trade Shortage
• Noble Intrigues

Of course you could have multiple happenings . . . um, happening at once but with staggered start times. Players may have just seen a group of plague-ridden peasants when they hear the first rumors of war.

What background happenings have you had going on in your sandbox?

A Month of Dungeons

I haven't followed Year of the Dungeon closely, I've stumbled across it a few times in my blogoramblings. But a recent compilation of Tony Dowler's microdungeons is really something worth looking at.

These dungeons are small and uncomplicated. In the past some of them have seemed more like puns or more lighthearted than is to my taste. But the dungeon above, The Old Crypt, caught my eye.

First, the way each room has a word or two as a description fits the One Page Dungeon philosophy to a T. Only what needs to be said is said: screams here, this is sealed, candles here. That makes sense and I'm sure you have maps that have similar notations to remind yourself.


I think the "Here" and "There" above is a wonderful example of this. I imagine it means the doorway at "There" leads to the isolated room at "Here." But it's such a clean way to note it. How would I have done it? Numbers, letters, matching symbols if I was particularly thoughtful. So these dungeons have this efficient evocativeness about them.

But what led me to write this post was something more. Do you see the word "brittle" in the Old Crypt? Maybe Tony has a clear sense of what that means. Maybe in the terseness of the notes it just doesn't get translated to me, the reader. But whatever caused it I don't know what the hell "brittle" means here, and I love it.

Maybe this is all pretty obvious, but I think it might be a great spur to me as a DM to have that kind of brief abstract note about dungeon chambers to help me generate or improvise. Maybe what that would look like wouldn't be much different than the dungeon dressing tables in the 1e DMG appendix I.

But in those, each table was for a specific subset of descriptors (sounds, container contents, clothes). I'm thinking of more general adjective; "brittle" in my mind could apply to scrolls in the room, to a crust or ice over a pool characters have to walk across, or even to the tension in the air.

How about:

1. bitter
2. strong
3. faint
4. sticks
5. cracks
6. teeth
7. pick
8. bark
9. stalks
10. broad
11. early
12. fair
13. light
14. open
15. crook
16. rasp
17. ripe
18. ill
19. calm
20. weak
    

I tried to pick words with multiple meanings and words that can functions as more than one part of speech. If you get stumped on a particular dungeon room you could roll on this table. If you have any suggestions of good words put them in the comments and we'll compile a bigger list.

Anyway enough of that, go check out Tony's microdungeons. Here's the compilation of a month of them.

Simple Ammunition Tracking

Using poker chips as a means of tracking isn't a new idea. Lord Kilgore blogged about it here. But I don't know that I've heard anyone talking about using them to track ammo on an encounter basis.

Arrows, sling bullets, and darts are an important part of the resource management aspect of adventure gaming. But you don't want to get bogged down keeping tallies of everything. And you certainly don't want to end up rolling saving throws for every arrow to see if a player can recover it after use.

Here's an easy solution. Like many of them for adventure gaming it involves abstraction. Give the player five poker chips and have them give you one after every encounter. When they're out of chips they're out of ammo.

You can adjust the number of chip up a little, but keep in mind an archer can get 2 arrows off a round and if you have multiple round encounters they may be using quite a few arrows. So, I think it is a fair trade off for the ease of use in play.

You might do something similar with spell components if you want to be a stickler with magic-users.

Shopping in Nidus

This is still a work in progress. I've tweaked the numbers a little added local guides and now that I have my campaign's first rogue, figured I'd give him a bonus too.


I'm still thinking about making regions-- The Grand Bazaar, The Docks-- or landmarks-- The Bronze Statue of the Laughing God, The Plaza of Forgotten Gods-- that might affect the likelihood of finding certain things. But I'm hesitant to pin Nidus down too much. I want it to be bigger than life, and mapping seems to work against that.