Sunday, March 28, 2010

wilderness stocking

Back in December Orion Cooper over at the Moldy Vale wrote a neat little piece about randomly stocking hexes on your wilderness map.  I've been looking at various random wilderness stocking techniques because the map I'm trying to fill has about 2,400 hexes.  Without random generation and computer assistance stocking that bad boy would take friggin' forever.  Besides, I love random generation, as it forces me to work with results outside the meager scope of things I could come up with on my own.

After looking over some alternatives, I decided to start with the random dungeon stocking chart on page B54 of Moldvay Basic D&D.


Assume "Monster" lairs include things like Old Man Jenkins, the grumpy turnip farmer, and change "Trap" to "Hazard" and you're good to go.  Next steps include developing random Hazards and Special charts and automating the wilderness encounter charts in the Expert rules.
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Posted by Jeff Rients at 8:56 AM
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9 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:03 AM

    Thanks, Jeff. This is a timely post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1:51 PM

    Erin Smale had a very good 2-part article at the Welsh Piper as well here:

    http://www.welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-1

    http://www.welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-2

    Have fun!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chris T5:39 AM

    What would be a "Special"?

    ReplyDelete
  4. StevenEwing27:26 AM

    Interesting, You could use this kind of idea to solo roleplay. Just an idea though ill definetly be using it.


    Steve

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jeff Rients7:44 AM

    Chris T, I'm still working on that.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Unknown10:01 AM

    I'm guessing that 'Special' would be another (d12?) chart to roll on. Of course THAT chart would certainly have one roll labeled "Really Special" that dropped to some other chart, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Jay10:14 AM

    What about "terrain" for either "empty" or "special"?

    Sometimes the ground itself is treacherous!

    ReplyDelete
  8. John Matthew Stater10:39 AM

    I had the same issue, so I made a quick Excel generator - allows me to set the terrain of each hex, an overall cultural feel for the region, and then populates it with monster lairs, strongholds, villages, maybe a city, two or three "dungeons" and a few natural and man-made wonders to be visited. It took a while to make, but it works pretty well.

    ReplyDelete
  9. P_Armstrong12:27 AM

    Great minds...
    http://ode2bd.blogspot.com/2009/12/hexcrawls.html

    "To stock the hex map I use for the Northern Marches I use the same method to stock a dungeon as given in the Basic Rulebook.
    Roll a d6:
    1-2 Monster - these can either be lairs or dungeons
    3 Trap - I use this for actual traps, difficult terrain such as a river crossing, cliff face, etc., or clues such as trails, totems, footprints, etc.
    4 Special - I often use the Judges Guild Ravaged Ruins table
    5-6 Empty"

    ReplyDelete

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