Tactile Maps: Redux

Yesterday on r/MapPorn (a safe for work part of Reddit focusing on the enjoyment of maps), someone posted another example of tactile maps and how they would be used for navigation.

Tactile Maps

 
Going through the older posts on various blogs I found two posts on Telecanter's Receding Rules and Aeons and Augauries about tactile maps. At its simplest a tactile map serves as a map, but as seen in the Aeons and Augauries post, the map could also be a key, and decoding the instructions on the tactile map could be a mission in and of itself.

I may very well use a tactile map as a seed for one or more of the adventuring parties headed into the megadungeon. It serves as another motivator for heading into the megadungeon beyond the rumors system that I gave as an example in the Rappan Athuk rules hi-light. It also allows for the tactile map to function as a treasure that has a delayed pay off.

West Marches Style Campaigns

Back in May I came upon an old post by Ben Robbins about a campaign he ran called West Marches. I was not aware other people had considered this type of set-up, but that is mostly due to having focused my RPG reading on World of Darkness related ideas rather than more traditional fantasy/dungeoneering sources.

 There are a few key rules that need to be adhered to when running a campaign in this way. First, the town should be safe and the wilds wild to help keep adventuring focused on exploration of the wilderness. Second, the DM should appear to be passive, giving the players a sandbox where they decide what they are going to do. Lastly, there is no set party and any players/characters can group up if they can get together.

Contrary to popular belief, the West Marches were not run as a hew crawl but instead used a vector based map. This front loads a lot of the development onto the DM requiring a high degree of detail when it comes to wilderness and dungeon sites. Especially when you consider that the players would be navigating via direction and landmarks. Personally, this mapping system would be too ambitious for me. As of now I feel more comfortable using a nested hex mapping system, starting off with a map consisting of 25-mile hexes, and then maps for more traveled or important areas consisting of 5-mile hexes, and if more detail is required maps consisting of 1-mile hexes.

Pillars of Eternity Interview with PC Gamer

In an interview with PC Gamer, Josh Sawyer from Obsidian Entertainment talks about the aesthetics of game design and how they tried to inspire nostalgia and capture the feel of old infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate. For many people Baldur's Gate gave them that D&D fix that they may have been missing, either between sessions or because they could not find a group. But whereas the earlier games used a modified version of AD&D 2nd edition, Pillars of Eternity uses its own custom ruleset.

The setting of the game differs from D&D standard, but they try to distilled the archetype of characters down to capture the spirit of the D&D classes without necessarily having the exact same mechanics. Additionally, while the characters still have six ability scores, these scores have been rethought to facilitate the idea that all ability scores should be useful to all characters in one way or another.

The example they give on how ability scores will work is a barbarian that focuses on intellect. In a D&D game intellect would usually less than ideal for a barbarian, but intellect affects duration of abilities and the size of area-of-effect abilities. This is a very interesting direction to take, but it looks like something that would be difficult to implement in a pen-and-paper game, at least to the same level of detail.

Initiative is a fairly useful abstraction, but the use of attack speeds, the ability to interrupt attacks, and casting duration could prove fairly difficult to use in a table top setting without a spreadsheet or a decent amount of math. It is not so much that you would need to find the derivative of an integral and more that either the DM or players would need to constantly add or subtract small sums, which can wear down on you over the course of a long combat.

I do like the idea of a more involved initiative system, and I see how interrupts could add another level of tactical play, but I will have to think long and hard as to whether an increase layer of complexity is a decent trade-off for more involved player. Perhaps more involved play is not actually desirable in and of itself.

Pillars of Eternity's use of six ability scores also makes me reconsider the use of nine ability scores in my own system. Tradition is a powerful force, and an attempt to make all ability scores useful in some way may result in diluting the characters focus too much. On the other hand, I like symmetry, and the power/finesse/resistance and physical/mental/social framework is difficult for me, personally, to ignore.

Mysterious Crater in Siberia

In strange news from around the world, a mysterious 80m wide crater opened up in the ground of northern Siberia. Beware, distorted audio in the later half of the video.



From the article I read, one of the leading theories is that it is related to methane gas release, likely brought on by global warming. If the region where the megadungeon takes place is experiencing a rapid period of warming then the areas that are affected by permafrost melt, making the terrain even more treacherous than you would expect.



 
It is not exactly scientific, but this warming could be triggered by increased volcanic activity in the region. What is causing this increased volcanism? That is one of the great mysteries. It also gives me an excuse to include more elemental based creatures, and have some conflict between those various forces of nature.

In the World of Darkness games that I have recently been playing, the world is mirrored by a world of spirits. Spirits are not the same thing as ghosts, they are instead abstract representations of things that exist in the real world. So you could have spirits of cold or spirits of fire, basically being parralell representations of D&D's elementals.You can also get abstract representations of other things, like spirits of faith in a place that has seen lots of worship, or spirits of pain in locations that have seen a lot of suffering. The changes in the landscape and the conflict spilling out from the spirit world into the physical will likely form one of the layers of conflict within the campaign.

Nonstandard Corridor Cross-sections for your Megadungeon

JDJarvis at Aeons & Augauries has made a great post on corridor profiles. Instead of the same 10' wide corridor your megadungeon could have one of the 240 non-standard cross-sections that he has on his blog. This is not to say that his post exhausts all the possibilities, but it should hopefully get you thinking in three dimensions instead of just two. Sometimes the tools we use can constrain our creativity, and if working out a dungeon gets you stuck in that 2D then just could be just the thing to throw your players for a loop.

See the link for a picture detailing all 240 cross-sections.

Environs of the Megadungeon: Lands of Fire & Ice

While the players will have to deal with nature and savage weather conditions, and the way ice has shaped the land should be readily evident, the presence of a threat underneath their feet should always be present. While this northern region has long had a history of hot springs, there was no record of volcanoes, at least not as many as there are currently active.

Basalt columns give the landscape a synthetic appearance, but are actually evidence of a violent volcanic past.
 

Geysers and hot springs are evidence of the heat beneath their feet, but also form the basis for various settlements in the region.
 

Mountains around the region are actually long dormant volcanoes whose fumaroles and vents now break through their glacial shrouds.



One of the great mysteries is the increase of volcanic activity. There have not been any violent eruptions in the regions closest to civilization, their are worries as to what would happen if some of the volcanoes around the main port were to erupt. There is no easy access to the environs around the megadungeon except by ship.

The contrast between fire and ice will allow for a variety of environmental hazards during a extended delve in the megadungeon. What may begin as frigid conditions in the high mountains may become warmer, presenting problems with water. At the greatest depths heat and poisonous gasses could present threats that have to be overcome. Obviously there can not be any threat that the players magic or technology could not potentially overcome or else there is no actual point to having these threats in the game, unless they are intended to form absolute barriers, but that is not fun and in the end the point of the game is to have fun. Face a challenge, perhaps lose a few characters, but to have fun.