Four-Way Wilderness Descriptions

David McGrogan recently requests:

People may already have done this, but providing DMs with handy, accessible and beautiful three-line descriptors of what the players can see as they traverse one hex or another, or go from one point to another on a pointcrawl, would I think be a very useful addition to wilderness campaigning. 

Without overdoing things, my suggestion for improvising these in play or writing would be: when breaking new ground, describe three aspects of background (down, sides, up), one of atmosphere (around), and add in "figures" where appropriate.

A 19th century Transcendentalist landscape by Jasper Francis Cropsey

The narrative should tell you what you see and hear from below (the ground on which you walk), to the side (the sightline or blockage of the vista), and above (the condition of the sky). The atmosphere covers the motion, feeling, and scent of the air immediately around you. Figures, then, are any specific landmarks, ships, throngs, or creatures that may be glimpsed among these backing elements, and it's wise to use them sparingly and only double up on special occasions.

One or two things from each of these lists with appropriate detail and maybe a bit of prose imagery should give a rich and narratable description to go on for any given stretch of travel. Then, part of the art is narrating change in the conditions when the terrain or weather themselves change.

Below. Is the ground ...? rising, falling, or level; flat, rolling, uneven, humped, jagged; solid, treacherous, shaky, slippery; muddy (deep, sticky, malodorous, water-washed); earthy (red clay, black loam, dry earth, silt); sandy (packed, drifting, red, pale); rocky (pebbles, shingle, boulders, fissures; slate, chalk, limestone, granite, volcanic); snowy (thin, drifting, deep, ice-crusted, melting); grassy (dry. lush, tall, grazed-down, sparse, weedy); brushy (thorns, berries, holly, chaparral); forest floor (dry leaves, dry needles, moist mulch, ivy). Is the path straight, curving, meandering, winding? If on water, is it salt or fresh, clear or clouded, fast or sluggish, smooth, wavy, or turbulent, strangely dead or teeming with plant and insect life?

To the sides. Is the view clear and unobstructed? On a curved Earth, the horizon stands at 5 km (3 miles) at ground level, but climbing just 300 meters (1000 feet) lets you see ten times that. If anything obstructs your view, what is it? Hills, cliffs, mountains, canyon walls, tall trees, fog, haze, dust. If nothing is in the way, what do you see?

Above. How much light in the sky - sun, moon, stars? How many clouds, what shape, how do they filter or reflect the light? Is it sunrise, sunset, high noon, dusk, night? If the sky is visible, is it clear or hazy? Does the moon show at day? Are there birds, sun dogs, a rainbow?

Atmosphere. Is the temperature bone-freezing cold, breath-clouding cold, chilly, warm, hot, dangerously hot? Is the air crisp, humid, misty, thin, oppressive? Is the air moving, is the wind steady or fitful, the direction constant or changeable? Are there mineral smells - sulfur, mineral oil, chalk dust - or vegetable smells - pine needles, moldering leaves, wild flowers, tree pollen - or, rarely, the scent of a passing animal, a corpse or some dung? Are there intangibles that can be summed up in a word - brilliant, harsh, eerie, serene?

A couple of examples that might have been applied in my current campaign, with an example "figure" in red:

1. The party, on horseback, is proceeding through a valley in an area of scrub and wooded hills, then mounting the end of the valley and descending to where there's a river and a ferry. It's late October.

"Dry fallen leaves and needles crunch under the horses' hooves as you make your way through the valley. The trail winds through low bushes, holly and others with a few quivering leaves in the wind, and to either side the ground rises, pine trees and yellow-leaved birches on the slopes and heights. The sky is deep blue and crisp with a few scudding clouds high up. A chilly wind blows from the west and sets the fallen leaves to dancing and flying with a dusty, papery scent."

2. The party, on a commercial boat, is traveling up-river between the wooded hills and a less covered highland, toward a town near a mountain lake. The season is similar, but the weather is still and overcast.

"The river is dotted with fallen leaves, yellow and brown against the dark water. The oarsmen move confidently against the weak and sluggish current with heaving, steady strokes. To your right, the rising land is masked by pine trees that emerge from a curtain of river willows with strings of sparse yellowing leaves. To your left, the hills are bare, sheer faces of dark granite with grassy shelves. The clouds above are stony and gray, at times letting distant shafts of light down into the still, ominous air. In the gaps ahead, when the river runs straight, rise the black snow-capped peaks of a tall mountain range."

No great poetic imagination is needed to follow this template more or less freely. Like all narrative devices it has to be applied with tact and moderation -- you don't need to lavish such description when going over the same ground a second time, for instance. However, much like the procedure of considering all five senses when describing a dungeon room, I think this down- sides - up - around procedure has good potentional to add weight and color to your outdoor description.

Night's Dark Terror 7: Hexcrawling South of the River

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror. 

We move to the adventure's next section, South of the River. Here, we see the possibility that the action opens up, leaving the clearly marked sequence of jobs and trails that we've seen so far. But that depends on the location of the Wolfskull goblins' lair, where they're keeping Stefan Sukiskyn, staying a mystery for a while. This uncertainty is the one chance for free exploration and hexcrawling in an otherwise unbroken series of time-critical quests that will take the party right up to the midpoint of the adventure.

Unfortunately, the hexcrawl design here falters. The plan as written is for the party to have a number of encounters which eventually - and not too quickly - give up the location of the Wolfskull lair. But, apart from one suggestion, there's no clear way to get from the adventure material to that goal. We'll explore that avenue first and then consider other possibilities.

The easiest way to find out where any of the goblin lairs is? Worm it out of a captured goblin. It's always a good idea, even if running old-school, to allow some kind of nonlethal combat move; either by taking a half-damage penalty to "subdue," as in my house rules, or just allowing a kill to be a KO, as in 5th. Interrogation should not be that easy, even if using 5th edition's Intimidation skill. Goblins will not give up the location of their own lair without a critical failure of resistance or morale, but they will gladly rat out the general direction and distance of other tribes' lairs, especially after the bitter failure of pan-goblin unity at Sukiskyn. The longest such sequence would have a Wolfskull giving up the Redblade lair to lead the party south and not east, the Redblades knowing more about the Vipers than the Wolfskulls, and the Vipers, close to the Wolfskulls, giving up the final clue.

Having learned the goblins have attacked other settlements, the party could go visit those ruins in search of clues. But there's not much to do in any of these places, except for Ilyakana where the trauma theme continues, as they meet their boatman Kalanos from a few days ago, now driven into a berserk rage by the horror of the goblin attack. There's not even any indication of how those places give better clues to the Wolfskull lair than already existed at the scene of the horse massacre. Based on those tracks, the Wolfskull will be presumed to live deeper in the forest, but there's some misdirection; the riding wolves took off to the southwest, not southeast to the actual lair. 

I suggest that the ruined hamlets at least should give tracks that lead to the previous raid site, and then in the direction of the lair, corroborated by one or two survivors who know where the goblins came from and in what direction they left. The trail of destruction (see map) eventually leads to the final site, Segenyev, whose smoke should have been seen across the plains during the pursuit of the herd. With that in mind, it might be fair to have the tracks from the dead horse encounter lead only a short way, to an empty campsite. From there, the wolves set off again east by northeast, to sack Segenyev at dusk.

Numbers are the days of the month Thaumont the attacks happen

The alternative to gathering intelligence is to just go stomping off into the woods, hex by hex, hoping you stumble across something. This is where the design of the adventure works against itself. There are three small, detailed side adventures in the area (W11, W12, and the tombs W13-15). Each of these adventures is well-designed and intriguing by itself.  But they are all in and around the hills to the east, north of the forest; not at all where the goblins live. None of these sites have clues to the Wolfskull lair. The DM is told that Golthar has recently been to one of them but there is no way for the players to discover that and no useful information as a result. 

Although a better design might have put some side-adventures in the forest, this is the module we have. Altering it further would go past hacking into sheer invention. Also, it is harder for the party to legitimately discover odd sites in the forest, than in the open where lines of sight are longer. Giving out false rumors that the wolf tribe lives in the hills seems unfair as a way to put these sites into play. The writers also suggest drawing the party into the hills with whispers of lore in and around Sukiskyn. But following these rumors would be poor play, given the current, time-pressured quest to rescue Stephan.

A final element in this phase of the module is a series of five wilderness "events" for use in the post-siege section of the adventure, as well as a more conventional random encounters table, designated "optional".  Here, B10 overrides the loose wilderness rules in Expert, which allow for one or several encounter checks a day, random or not, at the DM's discretion, with further discretion to set the numbers encountered. The DM instead is encouraged to use optional encounters judiciously, almost at will, so as not to slow down the action or inconvenience the party in their other adventures. As for the wilderness events, two are set encounters with important NPCs - one hostile, one potentially helpful - but three are truly events, random happenings not involving other living creatures.  

With the free-form approach suggested for both kinds of encounters it's left to a DM to decide how to play it. I like randomness, and think that few of the encounters present much of a challenge at least in 5th edition, so I rolled d6 every two hexes (6 miles) of travel or every 4 hours of resting/camping in the wilderness. A roll of 1 was an encounter from the "optional" table, 2 as usual was a clue (tracks, sound, camp, kill) to one of the encounters, and 6 - if rolled during travel - was a chance at one of the wilderness events, rolled as the lesser of two d6.

Not all the events work. WE1 (finding some dead bodies and some welcome goods) and WE3 (one of the party's horses injures itself) are fine, as is WE4 (a mysterious horse, actually the NPC Loshad, appears to check in on the party's horses.) WE2, though, seems unfair. It involves an item of the party's falling out of their pack for no reason, breaking the assumption that D&D characters can manage their gear competently. That's what leprechauns are for - I suggest using the wee folk as a reason, or substituting some other non-combat complication. 

In WE5, we run into the mid-tier boss Vlack who is on his way north to report back to evil boss Golthar about the failure to take Sukiskyn. This pretext is odd. The encounter is likely to happen several days after the event, and doesn't fit all the locations in which it could happen.  Fortunately, knowing Vlack's business doesn't impact the encounter one bit, so it can simply be a chance run-in that explains why he's absent from his rooms in the Wolfskull lair (W16k, p. 22). Still, if the party kills him, it could be kind of an anticlimax. I suggest taking the line that the hobgoblin captain would bolt on his fast-running ice wolf at the first sign of trouble, perhaps allowing one blast from its breath weapon, but leaving one or two bats and his loyal troopers to delay pursuit at the cost of their lives. This is completely in-character behavior for a middle-management villain.

Next: The Wolfskull lair.

Night's Dark Terror 5: The Wilderness Beckons

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror. 

The siege of Sukiskyn is over. The party has won - else there's no point reading this. Some of the weary all-night defenders sleep, others make plans. The honored dead to be buried in the little cemetery in the woods. The scores of dead goblins are to be burned on a pyre in the meadow, like they do in Rohan. The goblins have been carrying coins (p. 10) which Pyotr will likely divide with the heroes. He would give it all away in gratitude, but lean times loom ahead for his family, now that the hope of great profit contained in that herd of white horses has been rustled away.

So, the next urgent task is to get the horses back. That in turn means overland travel. This kind of play can be handled three ways: as paths between pre-specified encounters, the open-air dungeon approach that we've seen in the adventure so far; or, as free travel between pre-specified encounters, the "hexcrawl" way; or finally, as procedurally generated content, random encounters all the way. For now, the horse quest takes on the first, pathed kind of play. Random encounters don't play a part in the recovery of the herd, if we follow the adventure as written.

Public domain licensed image from pxhere.com

Much is made here in B10 of the party finally acquiring horses from the Sukiskyn stable, and using them to truck around the wilderness. You'll recall that it's an important enough point that the DM is encouraged to deny the party horses before they reach the homestead. But this is where Mentzer-edition B/X D&D and 5th edition diverge. In Mentzer's Expert rules a riding horse is a veritable Harley-Davidson that can carry its rider 48 miles a day, twice the movement rate of an unarmored footman and almost three times that of a character weighed down by metal armor. 

But the 5th edition rules are skeptical of this advantage - the only reason in 5th edition why horses might give a travel benefit, other than acting as visible status symbols and keeping the mud off your boots, is if you gallop them for double-fast speed an hour each day and then rest them = a paltry 18% bonus per day of normal travel.

These rulesets give rise to huge differences in the daily travel rate, with B/X riders making 12 more miles a day then 5e riders over trails and clear terrain, and going over twice as fast through forest and hills. The truth about mounted travel, according to this writer's site, is debatable but probably somewhere in the middle (foot travel +50%, with no bonus in very heavy swamp, mountain, or forest. For the equipment investment in a mount to give benefits, and for B10's horse obsession to make sense, I recommend that 5th edition DMs house-rule a little.

 (An oft-neglected factor in mounted movement seems to be the availability of good grass or fodder in town for the horse to eat. If fodder is poor, the horse needs to spend more time per day grazing and will not be in good condition to trot or canter. Taking horse rations on the journey is not easy; a stabled horse eats 15-20 pounds of grain and hay daily. But if towns and plains allow the best feeding opportunities, that roughly works out to "roads and grassy plains good, other terrain bad" much like the present system.)

In any case, the hoofprints of forty horses are not easily missed, and they lead to the east. I recommend that the eldest son of the family, Taras, come along with the party as the module suggests. There's a part for him to play in the flawed. but fixable, action that follows.

Next: Tragedy and treachery in retrieving the herd.

Night's Dark Terror 2: Surprise on the Volaga River

Image by leafbreeze7 on DeviantArt

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and fan improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror. 

However long the wait, we are now at the eastern docks of Kelven in the gray dawn of 7 Thaumont (the Thyatian calendar's March), looking for Kalanos and his boat to take us upriver. But hold on a minute! Even if Eastern Karameikos is a temperate climate with little snow, and the rivers seldom freeze over, Thaumont -- "thaw month" -- should be the worst time to travel upriver. The Volaga, whose watershed is fed by mountain runoff, ought to run fast and swollen with melting snow.

Not to blame B10. It's just choosing not to apply part of the Expert D&D travel rules, which give a fixed rate for river travel, but state the movement up- or downstream may be reduced or increased, respectively, by 7-12 miles a day. River boat = 60' = 12 miles a day (close to 5th edition's 10 miles for a rowed keelboat), so strong currents can completely prevent movement upstream (and see 5th edition's rule, "These vehicles can’t be rowed against any significant current").

What's the problem with this slow pace, or even the no-current pace of 12 miles a day? For one, the timetable of the module's action requires the boat to get to Misha's Ferry, 27 miles from Kelven, by "late afternoon" on the very same day. That, plainly, is not happening. It's odd that in a module so dedicated to promoting naturalism -- "Everyday matters such as travelling long distances, finding food and shelter, and so on, need to be taken care of" -- this detail goes by the wayside.

Let's say with the current, the boat progresses 6 miles a day - we are talking late afternoon on the fifth day (11 Thaumont), or on the third if the current's disregarded. To keep up with the planned events, a better DM's choice might be to push the initial departure back to 3 or 5 Thaumont.

But before then, we have our first encounter, which should take place "a few miles upriver" of Kelven where the river narrows, and woods crowd the southern bank. It will happen in the morning if you're going at the module's motorboat speed, or midday at the more realistic pace.

It's an ambush by mysterious black-clad goons! They're hiding in "the woods on the south bank" - well, the map shows no such woods but we can assume it's a small local thicket. In a clearer failure of editing, though, their numbers are ambiguous. The text lists one figure and the stat-blocks list another. As this is only the first encounter I suggest using the less challenging numbers in the text if playing old-school rules, and the larger numbers if playing 5th edition.

First. the boat hits a chain pulled across the river, blocking the way. It's not clear how in broad daylight the boat's pilot misses seeing that chain. We can assume it is just below the waterline, enough to stop the boat's keel, with the ends secured and hidden under brush and sand on the bank. You can further set this up by remarking on the murky and turbulent water.

Then, archers in the trees open up, 80 feet away on the bank -- implying that the boat cruises up the middle of the river, the deepest spot, which is natural for a keeled boat. Also, swimmers with daggers approach to try a boarding. When they do - surprise! - one of the rowers on the boat reveals himself as an enemy agent and joins the attack.

This is a terrific setup, with many moving parts that individually look easy to handle but join into a tough tactical dilemma. The archers may pick off one or more boatmen or wound a party member (if you want to play them extra smart and cruel, have all of them target an unarmored spellcaster!) But once hidden behind the walls of the boat, the defenders are safe, unless they want to return shots. If it were just the boarders, they would be easily decimated by shooting as they approach the boat. They swim at half their movement rate by the Expert rules, so it will take four combat rounds for them to get there, or (swimming at half move but using Dash) three combat turns in 5e. The survivors, once there, lose another round in boarding. However, the suppressive archery from the bank makes both kinds of defense dangerous. The temptation is to hunker down and minimize risk until the boarders are at the boat, but then the odds shift as the agent aboard reveals himself.

Some details that are not obvious from the writing:

* The ambush is led by a higher-level goon who, as a card-carrying member of the Iron Ring bad villains club, should stay hidden and flee if failure is impending. He has a role to play in waking any archers who are felled by any sleep spells heading their way, if he is not felled himself by a lucky sleep roll, which is quite possible in Basic, less so in 5th. It is also in-character for him (but none of the minions) to have a horse ready to make a getaway.

* A DM who wants to play the minions to the fullest might consider having some of the swimmers proceed underwater and out of sight. It is completely in keeping with the ethos of their organization to have four expendable splashing guys head for the front of the boat as a distraction, while five others slip into the water behind a bush and proceed underwater to the stern. We've already established they can't see very well underwater, so they might pop up at random places within 20' of the boat.

* While the rowers are hiding and not rowing, the boat naturally drifts downstream. Working backwards from the amount it slows upriver travel, the river current is "stealing" 6 miles of travel from a 8-hour travel day (with frequent rests) in our generous interpretation, so it's running 3/4 a mile per hour, about .4 meters per second. So, drift is 8 feet per 5th edition turn (6 sec) and 12 feet per Basic D&D combat round (10 sec). This, again, makes a case for the distraction swimmers to approach from the prow (losing a round as the boat slips away) and underwater swimmers to approach the stern.

* Advancing or retreating to get off the boat might be rational. The archers will be hard to reach and their 20 arrows (or 12, if you're merciful) can last a long time. We can assume they're smart and don't shoot at hiding defenders they cannot hit. The problem with landing is that, to row or maneuver the boat to the bank, the rowers need to expose themselves, and they're paper-thin. 

* Even if the boarders and false oarsman are defeated, the encounter might end up in a stalemate as the boat drifts down the river. If the archers' cover is only a small thicket, they will want to keep to it. Eventually, the party will drift to the bank and can proceed to engage the archers.

* Terrified of their boss, the archers are likely to stand their ground in the final act of the encounter, serving as a screen even if they're out of arrows, as the leader makes his getaway. Even if one is captured, they know little of the mission, which was evidently called up when an armed group of adventurers was seen consorting with Stefan and taking passage upriver. The Iron Ring wants no interference with their plans!

* Remember, the river water is icy cold. This should reinforce that the swimmers are toughened and past caring, as they emerge from the river with gray and clammy flesh. The cold water might also test characters who happen to fall in without preparing, maybe with a few HP damage if they fail a Poison/CON save.

The aftermath of the combat is not spelled out in the writing. It's likely that several boatmen will lie dead from the combat. Worse, and especially if they're 2nd level, the less sturdy party members are at risk from the surprise archery and backstabbing thief attack. Don't sell the Iron Ring short - the agent on the boat will be out to kill. Party members may have to pull an oar to make speed if more than one rower is dead. Replacement characters can always join up, looking to cross from the north side of the river at the next encounter - Misha's Ferry.

Hex Crawl 23 #248: Lost in the Badlands?

Four hexes southwest, eight northwest of Alakran.

 

Badlands are a region of steep, eroded hills with little soil or sand. In this hex, branching spurs of badland ridges coexist with gentler slopes. There is no vegetation on the crags, and precious little in the low places, vropped up by herds of goats from Ekkhusa as soon as it appears. Not just the famous greenish clay of Ekkhusa pottery, but another, beige clay with the property of growing six times its volume when water is added, can be found at the bottom of these ravines.

The region of badlands west of Targatana is known as the Khepu. This hex is only its northwestern extremity. We have until now seen terrain of this type only close by the Scarp, which provides a convenient landmark of direction. The Khepu, though, stretches for many miles, and travelers not skilled in survival lore (DC 13) risk being lost within its mazy channels as they travel through. If this happens, roll d8 for the direction of travel that, unknown, is actually being followed: 1-6 being the hexsides clockwise from north and 7-8 indicating a circle within the hex. 

One remedy for being lost is to get an higher view, either through magic or by climbing one of the precipices. The latter solution, however, takes time, can be dangerous, and generally will only reveal the way through the present hex.

Hex Crawl 23 #216: Seeing Far

Four hexes southwest, five northwest of Alakran.

 How far can we see from this empty dry plain? 

On Earth things would be complicated by curvature, and the horizon would be three miles away to someone standing on the plain  (12 miles on a hill, over 100 on a mighty mountain). 

But this is Mittellus, whose surface is flat. Still, we have three things to contend with: atmospheric haze; light extinction, or the tendency of light rays to scatter and blur; and the effect of a rising or falling slope, whether shallow or steep,  to block view of the surface beyond.

All told, with clear air the line of visibility is incredibly long in our five-hex map world, 140 miles or so under good conditions in a dry climate.. Rain, heat haze, and dust are all likely to cut the maximum visibility, but on a sunny day after rain has cleared the air, our observer in this hex can look:

• East, and see the Scarp and its protrusions that flank Alakran; 
• South, and run against the green hills that rise five miles away
• West, and after five miles run into jagged badlands;
• North, and contend with the lowering of the land parallel to the northern range of the Dhuga, that hides the district of Eryptos from view;
• Northeast, and see Sutekh's Knee standing like a shepherd over the hills of Dhuga and the Ship Rock. 

All in all, world builders might be better advised to construct their continents on a sphere that modestly hides its secrets from the explorer by curving away just beyond, approximately, the perimeter of a five mile hexagon.