By Jeff Simpson Buddyscott Entertainment B/X Levels 4-6
The Steaming Sea, full of exotic adventure beckons! Ancient temples overflow with treasure, curses surface from the depths of time. Serve the most wealthy of all Sultans and win his favour by journeying on a Golden Voyage!
This 49 page island crawl has about 25 populated hexes and a few mini-dungeons as well as the main event: twentish rooms on two levels populated by an evil wizard whos captured the sultans daughter. It’s minimally keyed with a lot of fetch quests.
I wish I had a copy of Isle of Dread to compare this to. Instead of steaming jungles you are sailing the seas. You see, the sultans kid has been taken and you’re out sailing trying to find the island shes on. You wander about until you find the right one. Predictably … it’s on the far edge of the map. 🙂 Anyway, along the way you meet a host of people who all kind of want you to do something. “Hey man, go sprinkle some perfume on the idol in the nearby temple and I’ll give you this purple key.” Ok, not quite that bad; it’s actually a magic horn. But, there’s a lot of that going on. Sometimes you get something like “you see a giant birds nest on a mountain peak” and then a couple of hexes of description of the island while you try to get to it. Cause, I guess, that’s where you keep a princess?
As that implies, a lot of this adventure appears somewhat disconnected from itself. You go some place, it’s unlikely that an evil wizard with skeletons lives there with a kidnapped chick, and you move on to the next place. The locations don’t really lead one to another, except in a few isolated cases. This does mimic the basic plot of, say, The Odyssey, but that is literature and this is a D&D adventure. Approaching it more like a hex crawl with a “oh yeah, if you find the princess then that would be cool also” would be a little more in line with what the adventure has going on. That’s not the hook, but that’s what the adventure is.
I’m not exactly enamored with this. It’s not a terrible thing, but, also, it doesn’t really have much going for it. The descriptions are minimal. “A desiccated corpse stands perfectly still against the north wall.” or “This chapel to Set is kept by a spectre that takes the shape of a sha.” or “Storage: A storage room contains several boxes of bath salts” These tend to tell us what hte room is but not HOW the rooms is. Bedroom: This room is a bedroom. It has a bed. There is a minotaur.” That’s only a slight exaggeration of the adventure. Maybe add “it is crying” and you’ll have the completed room and/or hex. We don’t really have the situations that make up a good crawl, dungeon or hex, and certainly don’t have the descriptions that might make the locations come alive for the DM.
The adventure opens with that “It’s up to the DM to bring the adventure to life” Gygax quote. My boundless optimism corrupted to cynicism knows no bounds. This is the realm of making excuses. We all have access to the monster tables. “Just roll on them and make an adventure!” does not an adventure make. And if we can accept that is not enough then we have accepted that some degree of effort is required … and thus our discussion can take us there. The purpose of the designer is to put things together for the DM to make their lives easier. At the table running it, from a pedestrian view, but, also, to inspire them to run it. To bring the rooms and encounters to life. To do things that get the players engaged in the adventure THROUGH the DM. This is the value we seem in a published adventure. This MUST be the value we seek, for everything else is already present in the random tables in the basic handbooks.
If you’re an adventure writer you gotta figure this shit out man. I know you want a Fantastic Voyage, ala The Oddyssey. And that means you need some scope … which I think always means size. But that’s a lot of work and a lot of pages. You gotta really buckle down and figure out how to pack that scope in your page count and in to your number of encounters. How to make them more than minimal and capture the dynamism that all good adventures bring to the table.
For remember: everything every published in the history of the world is now available to be run in the system of your choice. How does one compete with this? The effort is non-trivial.
This is free at DriveThru.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/447571/The-Golden-Voyage-DIGITAL-EDITION?1892600
This is a problem in the classic hexcrawl module I’m running for my players right now. There is a plot with goings-on and people to rescue. Moderately smart players can figure out in what general direction to go and with some luck, end the quest. There are all these locations you can bump into but actually doing so is either bad luck or poor play, because they distract from focusing on the quest. There’s also the risk you’ll wander aimlessly for a long time without finding either the side or main adventures.
Also, man, that is the happiest and most consensual giant scorpion encounter I have seen in ages.
The guys are just so happy the Uber finally arrived to take them down to level 2; bypassing all the one lane, rope-bridge over the chasm, construction delays from the flag-golems directing the backed-up hoards. Now they plan to giggle at the awaiting masses below, as they zip along the open HOV ceiling lanes.
I think hexcrawls are actually a poor game structure.
Wandering around into random hexes to see if it triggers something just doesn’t sound that appealing. I think it’s much more interesting to instead have clues that point to unexplored locations in the wilderness that include just enough information to let players make a meaningful choice in which one they want to check out last. And in those locations, the players also can find more clues to new locations in addition to the regular treasures.
Or you can have unmarked sites that are located on the paths between two other sites and will get discovered if the players decide to make a trip between A and B.
More like pointcrawl, but the players don’t automatically know all the paths that lead out from a point once they get to it.
This is a landmark problem. Important places should be signposted. The easiest way to do that is to make them look all weird on the horizon. Make it impossible to miss, fill in some of the hexes with well known locations, etc. Then we get into the same questions you’re talking about above with point to point travel but now there’s a built in framework to determine relative distances, what players encounter on the way, etc.
YMMV, I think there’s lots of ways to have fun. The problem, like you said, is when its so systematic the tools get in the way of fun.
Pointcrawls FTW! This is how I’m doing travel in my Dreamland RPG. The assumption is players always have a map. Educated choices between different locations you have some clues about are almost always more interesting than “hmm, should I go west, north or south” type random wandering,
That sounds like a poorly written hexcrawl?
I am writing a hex crawl since about a year, maybe more. I obsessed with idea. I read every hexcrawl there is, every hexcrawl review and article too.
I came to the conclusion that it feels fake and artificial if all hexes have something to do with one another. Sometimes a cave is a cave, and it offers treasure. End of story. It doesn’t have major leads to other hexes. But having said that, the majority of hexes need a connecting feature to another hex. A fugitive hides at c01, the guards at c05 ask you to find him, his wife gathers a small army at d07 to rescue him not knowing that he has escaped…. such things. It doesnt have to be “main quest” but it needs to be there, otherwise the crawl feels disconnected.
Anyway, anyone want to take a look before I release ??
Id love to see it!
Oh wow, I didn’t expect any interest. It still requires some work, what with obsessing over it and what not and currently play testing with two groups. But I’ll send you a copy once a rather complete version is available.
Out of fear that I’m going to get spamed by people, here is a throwaway email. If you send me a message there, I will then reply with my real one so I can send you the file and talk about it.
andy.cal3 at outlook.com
Replying here, but Vorshal, it includes you too of course :).
Yes please