Monday, April 17, 2017

Repurposing Like a Boss

I'm getting my West Marches style hexcrawl prepped. I've got a wilderness map, and thanks to Enworld's Phineas Crow and OSR bloggers Dyson Logos and Matt Jackson (among others), I've got a plethora of lair/ruin/small dungeon maps to sprinkle here and there, along with a few classic TSR modules I plan to plop down in a few select places.

I started stocking the map over the weekend, and decided it would be nice if there was a good randomizer for deciding the contents of a hex if I didn't already have anything special planned for it...and then it hit me. I've had one for years! It's the random dungeon room contents chart in the Basic Set.

For a wilderness setting, it breaks down a little differently, and in addition to potential treasure there's also a potential for discovering an exploitable resource (if the players bother to look for that sort of thing). My revised version looks something like this:

Roll a d6 for Hex Contents:
1-2 Empty
3 Hazard (quicksand, rock fall, lava flow, sentient thorn bushes, whatever)
4-5 Lair (animal den, monster lair, human or demi-human outpost, etc.)
6 Unusual (all the weird unnatural stuff, special ruins relating to the backstory, etc.)

Then roll another d6 for Valuables
Empty: 1 Treasure, 2 nothing, 3-6 resource
Hazard: 1-2 treasure, 3 nothing, 4-6 resource
Lair: 1-3 treasure, 4 nothing, 5-6 resource
Unusual: 1-4 treasure, 5 nothing, 6 resource

Not quite exactly the version passed down from Gygax, Moldvay and Mentzer, but close enough.

I've got some tables from an old hex crawl that I can use for determining chances to locate the above contents/treasures/resources in a hex when passing through, depending on how much time the party spends interacting with each hex. Just passing through, not much chance. Spend most of the day there, you're nearly guaranteed to find something.

No comments:

Post a Comment