Structured Improvisation for the HDQ Sandbox

I've been thinking about reference material, and my conclusion is: do less.

Having a bunch of stuff to reference is a chore. It makes you look bad, and no one will like you.

You know how one page dungeons are great?

One page other-major-chunks-of-the-game are great too.

So that's the goal here:

• When you're hexcrawling, use the hexcrawling page. 
• When you arrive at town, use the town page.
• When you enter the temple, use the temple page. 
• Etc.

This post is going to be shorter and sketchier than I would like, but I'll either update it or give each bit its own post going forward, and, perhaps, if the stars are right, actually make fancy one pagers. Treat this as a one pager of one pagers. 

For each of these, improvise and write down the stuff on an index card. After the game, you can copy over the stuff for later reference (but by then it'll be in your head pretty well). 

Regions (hexcrawling)

• Visual inspiration
• Use my wilderness board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/wilderness/
• Use my flora board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/flora/
• Use my entrances board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/entrances/
• Procedure
• Think of what they can see; tell them
• Give them ways to go; ask them which
• Check for random encounters; if indicated, interrupt with it at any point
• If they encounter something non-randomly, describe and resolve
• Resolve any special actions (RP opportunities, hunting, crafting)
• Transition energetically into next turn
• Three things
• A distinctive topography
• Something beautiful or terrible
• A resource or danger
• Example: the Greenfields
• ocean of deep green grass, tall and short, undulating, wispy clouds in sapphire sky
• patches of scarlet, dripping flowers like bloodstains where battles have been, bones always beneath the soil, and perhaps monsters and treasure
• it's so peaceful: +proficiency temp hp if you have a picnic or sleep here in the open

Towns

Towns are any settlement smaller than a largish city. They're not meant to be hung out in for very long. No random encounters. 

• How they people are (xenophobic, oppressively religious, oppressively do-goodery, aggressively backward, learned and kind, grunting rather than talking, all dead)
• Aesthetic of town (ruins all about reappropriated to adorn structures far less grand, gothic Warharmmer 40k style, elfy, postapoc wasteland, very English, Hobbiton, so dirty, hovels and mansion)
• The deal with it—exaggerate, please (wonderful wine, everyone into it; the end is night!; marriage fever!; stonerville; normal and boring; tulip mania) 
• First impression: an encounter or description of the entrance
• Procedure: first impression > ask if they want to go to tavern! conduct other business! or something else. 

Taverns

These are the hubs for the town or city. You should communicate to the players that the tavern(s) is where you should go to get access to more game content. But don't say it that way of course.

• name of the tavern (owner or adjective-noun or nonsense)
• quality (fancy with big rooms, terrible with folks piled on in common)
• specialty (something normal, exaggerated, made grotesque, or just gone too far)
• decor (rustic, hipster, country, military, police, memorial, normal, historical)
• secret, usually none (cult-run, cult-extorted, cult-meeting-place, crime front)
• entertainment (bard [q.v.], feats of strength, feats of skill, feats of stupidity, lust, excellence)
• eavesdropping, a possible option (blackmail, rumors, secret of the tavern)
• asking the barkeep and barflies (rumors)

Rumors

• someone (merchant, king, priest) is a cult member
• someone (merchant, king, priest) is being extorted by the cult
• a nearby village has been razed
• a cult camp is nearby
• a cult enclave is nearby (temple, house)
• an institution in the city has been compromised (temple, militia, guard, court, kingsguard)
• a dungeon is nearby
• monsters lair nearby

Shops

Unlikely (1/6) that they'll have something very special (magic item unawares, unique but very useful mundane stuff), or a secret (as tavern)

Bards

• generate as person
• style, as a musician or band or artist you know
• what their problem is (needs money, fame, love, carnal pleasure, to actually good, confidence)
• will write songs about your deeds if you keep with you 
• +temp hp = prof bonus if you spend rest listening to performance
• knows history/religion/arcana, 50/50 or d100% chance to know basically anything

Temples/Courts

• the god(s)/king worshiped/ruling here
• the weird thing (exaggerate an element of worship or doctrine / customs, dress, entertainment)
• the good/awesome thing they do or preserve
• unlikely, a secret
• resource (secured treasure, magic gear or relic, library, zealots / warriors, court wizard, $$$)
• learned people who can read languages and know history
• they want something from the people or rulers or clergy (respect, piety, money, behavior modification)

Faction Contacts

• randomly determine which factions have contacts here
• will meet you in a tavern, church, or place of entertainment (amphitheater, garden, museum)
• takes your info, gives you aid (money, henchmen, hirelings)
• has rumors
• to get more info, do objectives (q.v.)
• the particular faction flavors the objective: when the Order of the Gauntlet wants you to assassinate a cultist, it's probably a priest known for heresy (but maybe he's innocent)
• introduce uncertainty and ethical choices into the objectives given by the factions (target is sympathetic, target has family, eliminating target will have drastic consequences)

People

• Use this to get a name, face, and style: http://imdb.com/random/name
• Use my characters board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/characters/
• general description (tall, blonde) and one unique thing (cataracts, missing arm)
• choose body part (brain, heart, eyes, loins); person wants something associated with it
• either speak normally, change meter, change accent, change timing of speech
• make a particular facial expression and hold it: let that expression direct your speech and manner
• do things that invite judgment or admiration

Monsters

• Use my monsters board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/monsters/
• What fear, perversion, or grotesqueness does it embody? 
• Where is it strong and where, if at all, is it weak? 

Treasures

• Use my treasures board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/treasure/
• Make them boring (coins, gems)
• Make them mysterious (you don't need to know what's up with them at first)

Dungeons 

• Visual inspiration
• Use my maps board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/maps/
• Use my caves board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/caves/
• Use my dungeons board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/dungeons/
• Use my objects board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/objects/
• Use my lore board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/lore/
• Procedures
• Check for wandering monsters; if indicated, interrupt with encounter during this turn
• Tell the players their options, ask which way they go
• Resolve stuff they encounter
• If there's nothing interesting there, don't hide it; say there's nothing interesting there
• Most rooms in a big dungeon should be boring and only there to confuse mapping
• End turn when they've crossed ~100' or explored a room or two thoroughly
• Mark off light sources
• Decide and Do
• Who built this and who inhabited it?
• How did it come to ruin?
• Show what you know in your descriptions
• Give awesome, then boring, then AWESOME
• What awesome treasure or knowledge does this place guard? 
• What horror runs this place now? 
• What else will kill the PCs here? 
• If they are proceeding carefully, always give warning of traps; otherwise, sorry
• Make your warnings diegetic and give false positives to make it interesting

Lairs

• Use my caves board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/caves/
• What lairs here?
• What are the signs of it (stench, bones, markings, droppings, screams)?
• What does it feel like (cramped, expansive, vertical, mossy, damp, echoing)?
• What parasites or hangers on are about?
• Is it small or expansive, straightforward or mazy?
• What main treasure or secret or mystery lies hidden here? 
• Does it connect to a dungeon? 

Cities

• Use my cities board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/city/
• Use my interiors board: http://www.pinterest.com/antulana/interiors/
• Create the districts of a city like towns (q.v.)
• Create random encounter tables (crime, shock, cult, injustice that is normal here, delightful entertainment or festivity)
• Cities are corrupt and oppressive and always infiltrated by the cult; a merchant, temple, or court will always be extorted or loyal to the cult; to deal with the cult, do objectives

Objectives

• Assign an action (assassinate, sneak in to get proof of, set up, track down, capture for interrogation, capture for ransom or deal, make public display of, tail, discover loyalties)
• Assign a target (king, merchant, priest, courtier, general, captain, grunt, commoner, faction member or contact, slave)
• Sometimes layer ethical problems or hard choices onto this objective, per faction contacts (q.v.)
• Color the objective's action and target by whoever is giving the objective
• To resolve an objective, ask how they're going about it; if they don't know, have them ask around at a tavern or with a faction contact or whatever
• Either make a skill check (DC 15) or a reaction roll; can give advantage or disadvantage
• On a fail, the worst thing happens; on a DC+5, the best thing happens; otherwise, some complication arises
• For the reaction roll, 2-5 = worst, 6-8 = complication, 9-12 = best

Pathcrawl

(This is a repost of something I wrote a year and a half ago. I don't know how much I'd change now; I'm just posting it here for future reference.)

In sandbox RPG design, we’ve got basically two methodologies:

1. the hexcrawl
2. the pointcrawl

Neither seemed to satisfy the particular aesthetic I was seeking. So here’s another variant, which I see as a kind of mashup of the two.

The Pathcrawl

Here are some principles, with elaboration.

Pathcrawls are hex-blind.

That is, as a player, you don’t think in hexes or squares or grids. You don’t have a hex map. Instead, the GM presents navigational information to you verisimiltudinally, in terms of:

1. pathed routes
2. and unpathed routes

For example, the GM doesn’t say, “Okay, it’s the next day. Which hex do you enter?” Instead, the GM says, “Okay, it’s the next day; which way do you go? Continue on down the forest road [or whatever], take that game trail you spotted earlier, venture out into the wilderness, what?

Navigation is presented as if it were in-character. Your choices as a player are your choices as a character. Get it? (This also presents a challenge for the party’s mapper, but I think it’s a fun one.)

Paths are polymorphic.

There are different kinds of paths:

1. roads
2. rivers
3. landmark chains
4. game trails
5. naturally occurring clearances
6. supernatural guidance

Paths are prepped and static.

You don’t wing paths. You need to know where they are in your hex or grid and where they lead. This is true for the main paths of your map, the big roads and rivers.

Paths are interesting-thing-connectors.

You intentionally place at least one interesting thing along at least one of the paths in each hex.There is always something cool on a path, and the players will realize this. It replicates the feeling of exploration-temptation in sandbox FRPGs like Skyrim. Sure, you’ve got this quest, and you need to keeping heading south by southwest along the road in order to get your next orders for whoever, but, man, there’s this deer run leading up to a cave in the foothills, and I wonder what’s up there? We could always go check that out and get to the city afterward. . . .

To determine what to place along your paths, you’re going to need some random tables. These will vary depending on your setting. For a baseline, I’d take the dungeon stocking rules from D&D Basic and tweak them a little. Like this:

1. Ruin
2. Lair 
3. Settlement 
4. Wonder 
5. Landmark(-) 
6. Landmark(+) 

A ruin is a typical dungeon. I’d make a subtable to determine, in general, what kind of dungeon. Then drop in a module or a pre-made map or whatever.

A lair is something more natural than a dungeon proper, which indicates some past level of civilization. A lair is mostly natural. It could be the home of a dragon, the cave-complex housing the local goblin tribe, whatever. Again, subtables: what kind of lair? How big?

A settlement is some outpost of civilization, whether a lone hermit or a metropolis. I think having big cities pre-placed is a better idea than having them randomly generated, but, if you’re doing it randomly, you could use this result to plug in your big cities. Settlements aren’t necessarily friendly, but they’re not lairs either. Settlements have to be populated. If they’re not, they’re ruins. Subtables: what kind of settlement? How big? What’s the problem here? Possible quests?

A wonder is whatever weirdness you want to toss in. Tie in your supernatural bits or lore right here. Put something unexplained here. Put something maybe even you don’t know the answer to. In a TES-inspired game, here’s where you put shrines that grant you blessings and stuff. Subtables: what kind of wonder? What advantages? What history?

A landmark is some natural or manmade feature that reveals (a) the beauty or horror of the region or (b) the history of the region. There may be treasure here (1/6 chance). If so, hide it somewhere, or leave it out in the open, as you please. You can use the landmark to reveal history evocatively or in detail. That is, there can be symbols that even you don’t understand, or you can use this to give your players some actual detail in the form of, say, hieroglyphics on a ruined megalith.

The (-) and (+) signs indicate an optional feature of the landmark. If you want, a landmark(-) can present a danger, like a trapped or hazardous area: exposed, literally trapped, unstable, haunted, cursed. A landmark(+) can represent an area that offers the PCs are a resource (clear vantage, fortified position, food and water, resupply, secret shortcut). Or you can simply treat either result neutrally, as it seems best to you: it’s just a statue with words on it; okay.

Subtables: what kind of landmark? Natural? Manmade? Terrain feature? Item? Sculpture? Ruin (that doesn’t house a dungeon and thus doesn’t qualify as a ruin proper per #1 above)?

To determine how many to place along your paths, you’re going to have to take into account the size of the hex you’re dealing with. I’d say a default of 1d6 things per hex is fine. If you want it really packed like a TES game, you could get away with 1d6 things per mile. But that’s at the extreme side of the spectrum. For my game, I’m going with 1d6 things per 24-mile hex.

For each thing, you’ll roll on the above tables. Then you’ll place them, as in the image at the top of this post. For this hex, I rolled 1d6(3), and so I place three things, arbitrarily, along the paths. In this case, I place one thing on each of the roads in the hex and one thing on the westernmost branch of the river. The settlement of Branchmont was already there on the map; it doesn’t count against my 1d6 things.

Pathed locations always have a path that leads to them. 

That is, not every (or even most) pathed locations need to be right on the path or even visible from it. They can be off in the wilderness, but the key is that there is a path from the path that leads to the location, whatever it is.

You can call this particular kind of path a lead. Here are some leads:

1. game trail 
2. river 
3. landmark chain 
4. road 
5. naturally occurring clearance(s) 
6. supernatural guidance 
7. actually on the path 
8. visible from the path 
9. audible from the path 
10. smellable from the path 

For example, your ruin you rolled up could be actually on the path, as in, in the way, or just off to the side, or you could say it’s visible from the path: the sculpted head the open mouth of which is the entrance is on a mountainside that the PCs can just make out through the tree cover and the fog.

Pathed locations may lead to further paths. 

Each generated location has a 1/6 chance of leading to another path. This second-order path either:

1. meets up with an extant path, creating a detour 
2. meets up with an extant path, creating a shortcut 
3. leads to another location to be generated 

Unpathed areas are unprepped and dynamic. 

You don’t know where things are, if there are things of interest at all, in unpathed areas. Since going off-path is generally a bad idea, you don’t want to waste your prep there.

Instead, create a random encounter table of appropriate locations. When the characters explore the unpathed wilderness, add a chance to encounter a random location to your normal chance of having a random encounter.

For instance, if the characters normally have a 1/6 chance of having an encounter per “turn” of wilderness exploration (and I like a “turn” of 4 hours), add a 1/6 chance of a location encounter from your unpathed location encounter table. This effectively creates a 2/6 (1/3) chance of something interesting occurring in the unpathed wilderness: either something from your general encounter tables or a special “what kind of place am I going to find out here?” encounter.

Unpathed areas are dangerous. 

There are two primary dangers of going off-path:

1. getting lost 
2. finding things 

Check for getting lost however you want, say checking for a 1/6 chance at the beginning of an exploration turn to see if they’ll get lost that turn and in what direction they veer off course. You keep this to yourself, of course.

When I say finding things are a danger, I mean that, in general, stuff should be nastier and weirder in the unpathed wilderness. Rewards should also be greater out here.

Unpathed locations remain unpathed unless the PCs take action. 

If the PCs want to find the location again, they must take some action to leave a path back to the location they’ve discovered, which you should then place on the hex, permanently. Otherwise, give them a 1/6 chance of finding it again for every wilderness exploration turn they expend trying to locate it again.

Navigation in unpathed locations is by compass direction.

When the players tell you they want to head off into the trackless wastes, ask them what direction they’re going (if it’s not obvious). Keep them navigating this way, and be sure, if they get lost, not to tell them they’re lost but to track the variance of where they think they’re going and where they’re actually headed.

Use my simple overland movement rate chart. 

This thing is perfect for tracking movement in a pathcrawl scheme. Use it for great justice.

Miles per hour, walking. Find the intersection of your path and load (q.v., below).

Path	Load
	Easy	Hard	Dire
Easy	3.0	2.5	2.0
Hard	2.5	2.0	1.5
Dire	2.0	1.5	1.0

To handle forced marches and stuff, just think: what would tire them out? If they’re pushing their limits, just give them a choice: rest now, or have penalties when the baddies come to visit.

The scheme is conceptual. Translate into the terms of your game as it suits you. For example, road and clear grassland would be easy terrain; swamps and jungles would be dire. Stuff in between is hard.

Light armor and no armor and minimal gear is easy encumbrance/load. So leather armor and no armor is easy. Chain and banded is hard. Plate is a dire load for long distance travel.

For carrying stuff, a few things well secured is easy. Some awkward stuff and heavy stuff strapped onto you is hard. Carrying something really awkward or heavy (a person, say) is dire.

Horses! For simplicity, keep them at the same rate, unless you’ve got some kind of pony express or want to run the thing until it dies. They can carry more than you can without increasing their load. Maybe give oxen and such a base of 2.0, but the load they can carry is way higher than you; so it kind of evens out, right?