Traverse Fantasy

I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc —isn’t that the point of a prewritten module, come to think of it? It turned out okay, but I didn’t write a session report because I felt dissatisfied. Everyone had fun, we had good moments, but from my perspective there was friction between the experience we were having and the thing we kind of passively accepted that we were playing. The skeleton of the dungeon is already not the ‘right vibe’ for the campaign but, where at first I was able to make it work because of characters’ own motivations, I struggled because the new characters lacked a reason to be there at all except that the ‘crew’ as an abstract unit had been heading there. The advice sometimes is like, players should invent their own characters’ motivations for being at a place or doing a thing, but I don’t subscribe to a framework of play centered on the se...

Wanted to share two good posts on Illusory Sensorium : " There Is No Light " and " Doom Clock ". Totally agree with the critical dimensions of those blogs, especially about the futility of light-as-resource-management and the disappointment of the hazard die in its attempt to simplify the typical dungeon exploration procedure. Really good reading!! That being said, I phrased the above like that because I care less for his proposal of the doom clock. This is a personal preference thing, not me trying to dog on him. I feel like the basic dynamics of site structure and exploration procedure already increase risk and tension as the game progresses, especially as players lose hit points and delve into deeper parts (i.e., higher levels) of the site. The impact of risk necessarily increases as time passes, even if its frequency does not—and imagine how tedious it would be if the frequency of random encounters did increase. Anyway, light. How do you make light feel like it...

Quoting from FMC because it's on hand: "If the party becomes lost, the referee rolls a die to see in which way the party wanders. The party may then correct their course by one direction change" (p. 136). I also point out that, as a result, there is really only a 3-in-6 chance of ending up in the wrong hex. Which is interesting! Let me break this down some more: 3-in-6: You enter the intended hex. 2-in-6: You enter a hex adjacent of the one intended. 1-in-6: You go totally off-path. The last two results are split evenly between the (relative) left or right directions of the intended hex, because of how the die roll itself works. But isn't that neat? On one hand, it's actually extremely uncommon to end up in the wrong hex. The highest chance of this happening is in the desert where there is a 50% chance of invoking the above rule, and by extension only a 25% chance of ending up in the wrong hex. It's very forgiving. On the other hand, I kind of like the ide...

Expanding upon a comment I posted in reply to hdp on my post about modes of play ! The original thing I said: … I think we would benefit from thinking less about strict/specific mechanics and more about broader principles that can be applied between activities. How much time does something take? What will it cost? What does it risk? Thinking more generally about the impact of character decisions and activities, as opposed to modeling and simulating specific activities (or fitting a variety of activities into the same mold). That’s just my opinion, though! What they asked: How broad are you thinking? Fate-style “everything is one of create advantage/overcome/attack/defend” or more specific? I’m thinking of the way Stonetop has Expedition and Homefront moves, but looking again those all end up with different mechanics so maybe that’s not what you mean. I think those options are all from the standpoint of character actions, but I was referring to the costs/risks/benefits of activ...

The football field is my favorite (informal) unit of measuring length. At least, over here, we compare everything to the length of a football field. The Titanic was almost three football fields long. The Empire State Building is just over four football fields tall. You can fit about three blue whales lengthwise across a football field. And so on. Many of us went to public schools with football fields, or went to college at a super sportsy university where football games were the main event of the fall. So, they're quite familiar. Yet more than being a handy frame of reference, the football field is also just an extremely handy unit of measure for long distances. The field is 100 yards long, with every 10 (and 5) yards demarcated with white paint on the turf. That's equal to 300 feet. When you include the endzones, that's an additional 60 feet or 20 yards. It might be a huge distance when you think about it, but in person it's not really that big of a deal. I was thin...

Arnold K’s recent blog on Goblin Punch has sparked some discussion in my circles on using timers instead of random checks for wandering monsters and similar encounters. Going to throw my hat into the ring by looking at a sort of compromise: an encounter check whose likelihood increases over time. This is similar to something I wrote forever ago , except using a d20 in order to be consistent with a ruleset that uses d20 for resolving most tasks. I’m also going to explore using d20 with constant modifiers that do not increase over time, because I think it might also be useful. Without further ado! Simulations I wrote a simple Python script to simulate a handful of encounter check algorithms: Traditional 1-in-6 check. d20 + 0 ≥ 20. d20 + 1 ≥ 20. d20 + 2 ≥ 20. d20 + 3 ≥ 20. d20 + 4 ≥ 20. d20 + 5 ≥ 20. d20 + T ≥ 20, where T is the number of turns that have passed. The script attempts each algorithm 10,000 times and finds the average of how many checks are made before a rand...

Workbook Now Available On Itch! Bite-Sized Dungeons by Traverse Fantasy Edit: This whole time, I said that a first level dungeon hoard had 100 times d6 gold pieces when it actually has just 10 times d6. This means the average hoard has an XP value of 70 without gems, or ~110 with gems. By extension, the eighteen-room dungeon only has 350 XP without gems, or ~550 XP with gems. That is downright dismal and I don’t think works out with modern play sessions and party counts, so let’s pretend it said 100 times d6 anyway. I just read an article by Yora of Spriggan’s Den about extrapolating a scheme for an eighteen-room dungeon from the procedural generation rules in B/X (1981) [1]. As Yora points out, eighteen rooms is a great size for a mid-to-large dungeon or for a floor of a multi-level dungeon, and the checklist of rooms makes it easy to make sure that the final product has a variety of interesting play interactions. But, being as large as it is, it can still be a tall order on the ...

This is something I wanted to isolate from my post about mosaic worlds [1] because I thought it was worth drawing out and expanding upon. In that post, I talk about organizing the world into modules of four hexes. Although it's built on the assumption that each hex takes a baseline of 4 hours to traverse, I discuss an upper level of abstraction where you instead traverse a whole funny-shaped region in 1 day. This recalls the original hex crawl procedure from OD&D , where a turn is considered as having the duration as one day. The difference is that instead of moving through multiple hexes in one day-turn, you move through one region in one (at a minimum) day. This has the benefit of simplifying the choices you make while making your decisions more meaningful since you can emphasize the various features of the whole region, at least along the vector of travel. It also massively simplifies the resource management problem, i.e. ration consumption. For hex crawl procedures with ti...