dmsguild

Last week we talked about Points of Interest and Points of Encounters, drawing on some design techniques from CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series to help add some linearity to the hex crawl. This week I want to expand on that a little bit, and look at how it might work in play.

I want to define some terms a little further in the context of this specific project, so that going forward I don’t have to keep explaining and clarifying things. I may end up using these terms a little differently to how they have been traditionally used. Just be aware of that.

First thing’s first are the two terms we already have – Points of Interest, and Points of Encounter. I’m actually going to wrap them both into the ‘Points of Interest’ label, and split that into two distinct kinds of PoI. These will be Points of Encounters (or Encounter Points) and Points of Discovery. These have the weird role of being both the most and least important sites in what I’m calling the Railcrawl.

Essentially, everything under the Points of Interest banner will be some kind of side quest, discovery, or ‘random’ encounter. These won’t necessarily drive the story forward, but they will all be designed to drip feed the party more information, and to give them more understanding of what is going on. They’ll probably also be used to provide the party with non-essential but useful tools; maybe they’ll find an ancient tome that gives a little more detail about the ritual they need to complete, making the final encounter easier, or maybe they’ll find a series of paintings that provide more information about what the elder god beneath the volcano actually is. Perhaps they can discover a lost treasure of the turtlekin, which might help them rebuild their bridges and thus have more support in the end-game.

These sites will be the things that encourage and reward exploration of the island, for the most part. They will also act as a pacing tool for the GM. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The second category of things I’m going to include will be Points of Story. These are the really important sites, the things that progress the plot of the campaign. Some of them – the turtlekin village, the ruined city, the nesting beaches – will be in predetermined positions on the map, but others will be placed in the same way as our PoIs – on the fly, as the GM sees fit.

I have this feeling that the Points of Story can also serve to provide aspirational views. The next Point of Story is, in general, the target that the party intend to head towards. They might not always be visible – that is, the term ‘aspirational view’ might not always apply. Rather, the party might find a fragment of an old map that will lead them to the swamp temple where they will learn about the ritual, or something like that. Along the way they’ll encounter our Points of Interest, have side-adventures, and do some levelling. And once they reach the Point of Story they were aiming for, we’ll seed the next one.

I’m wondering, too, whether to make the Points of Interest that can appear dependant on the Point of Story the party are working towards. This goes back to node-based scenario design, and particularly the inverted three-clue rule; each PoI will provide clues that point both towards the next POS, but also to either the one after that or to the next set of PoIs. Each PoS will provide clues that lead to the next set of PoIs. Really, I’m building a series of funnels. And really, there’s not a huge amount of difference in what I’m trying to do here and what was described in those articles on node-based design that I keep linking to. In fact, after spending a week playing around with how to design this thing, I ended up with this poorly-drawn diagram:

And that looks rather a lot like the funnel system in this post.

So, really, I’ve put a lot of effort into designing something that The Alexandrian defined for us 7 years ago. If you look closely you’ll see that I’ve tried to seed some of the later PoIs in earlier ones, giving clues that won’t pay off until much later, but I’m not sure there’s a need for that. I think the funnel system will work for me without needing to be changed in that way.

That’s not to say that this has been wasted effort, though. Even if I’ve essentially built something that somebody else has already designed, I always find that figuring things out for yourself rather than simply taking a template provided by somebody else makes for much more rewarding work. When you design something yourself you understand it on a much deeper level, and that makes it much easier to use those tools in interesting ways.

And even if this has been largely wasted effort, spelling out exactly how I’m going to use and present these nodes is definitely going to be of use to me. I know that each central node (or junction. I’m going to call them junctions, because I decided to call it a railcrawl and railways have junctions) is going to be an important story event. These will be where the big dungeons and encounters live.

The other nodes – the stations? No. That’s stretching the metaphor so far that it breaks – will be for smaller encounters and discoveries. In practice, a group could probably cover a few of the PoI nodes in one session, whereas a junctional node may cover a couple of sessions of play.

I mentioned earlier that the PoIs will be useful for pacing. The GM – and the party, to some extent – will always know what the next junctional node will be. They can place these additional nodes as they see fit, allowing the party to gather resources and information and XP before heading to that junction fully equipped to deal with it. Or, if they’re feeling like things are bogging down, they can simply funnel the players straight to the next junction by dropping it in the hex that they’re in.

In order to minimise unused content, I may work on designing a system so that these PoIs can be used at any point in the campaign. The information gained at each of these PoIs may well vary depending on which junction the party is heading towards. This will mean that the GM has a pool of potential encounter sites that she can drop into the game at any point, and it will mean that anything that doesn’t get used in the early game isn’t just going to sit and gather dust. There will always be a use for the PoIs, in theory, even if the party don’t go looking for them.

One thing I may have issues with if I’m not careful is that of GMs not knowing what will be in the next hex. I’ve already said that I like the idea of using aspirational views to drive exploration,but if the GM doesn’t know what is in the next hex until it is uncovered, then she can’t describe what the players see. This is probably solvable within the system. Especially in jungle terrain, sightlines are going to be reduced anyway, and an aspirational ‘view’ doesn’t have to be quite so literal as “you see a tower above the trees”.

Going back to that NoClip video I talked about last time, the developers of The Witcher talked explicitly about aspirational views. Rather than dotting their map with lots of tall, interesting things – the kind of level design you see in Ubisoft open world games like Assassin’s Creed, for example – they would place one or two physical landmarks that were visible from a great distance, then fill the landscape in between with smaller sites to uncover. That seems like a workable solution. If I’m placing a number of sites that will always be in the same place, then the almanac for each hex could detail which of those sites are visible from within that hex and in what way.

I did want to get a small sample scenario written up for this week, but I ended up spending a lot of time reading Perilous Wilds for Dungeon World at the suggestion of one of my patrons. If you’ve looking to run a wilderness campaign you could do a lot worse than to look at how that book handles exploration. Rather than building things for this setting I ended up just reading that over and over again, mining it for ideas and systems. I’m hoping to have something a little more concrete to show you for next week; I think I’m reaching a point with this project where I can start building things again, now that a lot of this more philosophical design work has been done.

So, that’s where we’re up to. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your patience with this series. I never expected this project to move particularly quickly, but personally I’m about ready to start producing some actual playable content. We’ll see how that goes.

One of the features I’ve always known I wanted this campaign to have is base building. When the party arrive on the island, the only evidence of civilisation will be the small colony settlement – hastily constructed palisade walls, a few buildings storing supplies and workers/settlers, probably a tavern and maybe a general store. Other than that, the island is wild and untamed (as far as the settlers know).

I’m really keen to have the expansion of this base of operations play a part in the campaign, and for the players to have a hand in its development. I’ve mentioned a few of my recent inspirations for this before – Caed Nua from Pillars of Eternity, Janek Sielicki’s Homeward Bound – but this is an idea I’ve had knocking around for a long time.

This is going to be another one of those posts where I don’t seem to actually achieve anything or make much progress, but if you’ve been following these posts you’ll know that this is just how I work when I’m designing things.

Unlike Chult, my island – which I still need to find a name for – isn’t dotted with hubs of civilisation like Port Nyanzaru. The only safe space in the wilds of the island will be that one hub settlement, and the idea is that that will only be as safe as the players make it. If they don’t spend time building and fortifying, then that safety may not be as reliable.

I’m thinking of the base building as a sort of mini-game, something that will run alongside the main thrust of the campaign that the party can choose to engage with as much or as little as they want to. It will be a source of side quests and resources, and a source of tension and conflict in the later game – especially once the turtlekin declare war on the colonists. I really want the players to become invested in the growth and continued success of this place, so that they will feel compelled to defend it. I want it to feel like home for them.

I think it’s important to think carefully about how this is going to work mechanically. Anything extra that you place into an adventure beyond the base mechanics of D&D is something extra that the GM is going to have to keep track of. GMing can feel like having a full-time admin job at the best of times, and I don’t want to overwhelm GMs with too many balls to juggle. It’s important to remember that the GM is a player too, and that if she isn’t having fun then the game can’t possibly succeed.

My initial thought for this system is that the settlement would probably benefit from having something like its own character sheet, a permanent record of what it looks like, what buildings it has, what resources the players can expect to find there, the kinds of people they can meet there and the relationships they’ve developed over the course of the campaign. I don’t want to get too heavily into the economic side of things – otherwise I’d design a board game, not an RPG module – but I think I need to give some consideration to that aspect of the game as well.

The ‘settlement sheet’ will be a living document over the course of the campaign, and I’m wondering if I can even go as far as to provide a partial map and have the players fill it out as they develop the settlement. I’m already planning to do this with the island itself, providing a mostly blank hex map of the island that the party can fill out as they explore, but in that case everything that they can possible discover is already placed on the GM’s map. In the case of this settlement, I think there’s an opportunity to do things a little differently.

This is one of those things where I have a ‘big picture’ view of the system in my mind without knowing any of the specifics yet. In my mind I’m picturing a map of the settlement that shows the external walls – presumably a permanent structure – and whatever few buildings exist when the party arrives. After that it will sort of work like a game of Battleship as far as new structures go – that is, the GM will have information about the kinds of buildings that can be developed and how much space they take up, what shape they are, etc. If I were designing a board game I’d probably produce these as stickers that can be physically placed onto the map (and if this ends up being something I produce for physical – rather than digital – publication, that might not be a terrible idea).

Again, this is all big picture stuff. I still don’t know exactly how this system might interact with the actual campaign. And if it doesn’t interact with the core gameplay in any meaningful way, there’s no point including it.

One thing thinking about this raises is the issue of the passage of time. In lots of campaigns it often feels like the party go from adventure to adventure without time ever really passing out in the real world. But building things takes time. That’s fairly self-evident. I like the idea of the party venturing out into the jungle, having a few adventures, and then returning to base to find it transformed – bigger, better, stronger, more secure. Or on fire, once the turtlekin arrive.

However it changes, I think that will provide a really tangible sense of progress, and of the time the party have spent out in the jungle. Or I hope it will, at least.

I’m interested to hear from those of you who have done things like this yourself. Do you have any tips for things that worked well? Or – more importantly, arguably – things that didn’t work well, that I should avoid? Let me know.

Over the past couple of months I’ve laid out a plan for what I want this campaign and setting to look like. I’ve developed an over-arching story, and I’ve begun thinking about the kinds of locations that the party might encounter. I’ve even begun to split the whole campaign up into adventuring days, deciding what each individual adventure module might look like.

So far I’ve been thinking mostly in terms of “big picture” stuff, but it’s time to start drilling down into the details. It’s all well and good to say “the party will arrive on the island, help to develop a settlement, discover that they’re monsters eating the flesh of an intelligent indigenous species, and ultimately ruin a ritual that was intended to keep a sleeping elder god imprisoned”, but what does that actually look like at the table? How does that fit into 15-17 levels of play and ~35 adventuring days (which, at a minimum, is 35 game sessions – nearly a year of play if you assume a group given plays once a week).

Because I’m building an entire island, this isn’t quite as simple as just writing a whole lot of adventure modules intended to be strung together. That would be putting the players firmly on a railroad, and I don’t want to do that. I want to encourage exploration, to reward exploration, and to make sure that exploring for the sake of exploring uncovers secrets and answers mysteries that will keep the plot moving forward even if they aren’t necessarily interacting with that main storyline directly. Every good novel or movie contains B stories that feed back on and inform the main A story. I need to seed my setting with those kinds of stories, so that no matter what the party do they learn things about the island and about the events that are developing there.

This means talking about some mechanics, and beginning to lay out exactly how this thing is going to play at the table. Without that knowledge, it’s impossible to know what I need to build – especially as one of the design goals I laid out in the first entry in this series was that I don’t want to build anything that won’t see play.

We’ve talked about hex crawls in the past. In that post I said that I didn’t necessarily want to build a hex crawl, but instead to use those tools to ease the design process of the adventure and the setting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, though, and I think I need to revisit hex crawls and look at how the campaign might work if I simply build a hex crawl like I talked about at the beginning of the project. (Not that there’s anything “simple” about building a hex crawl).

One of the things that’s put me off using hex crawl mechanics is simply that they hearken back to an older style of play, one that’s less proscriptive about what the players do and where they go. It’s a much more freeform style of D&D, one that will see the players get lost and miss things and struggle against random encounters that don’t really add anything to the game. Personally I really love that style of play, but I’m well aware that I’m building this for a modern audience who expect something of a more streamlined game. If I were just building this for myself and my own group I wouldn’t particularly care, but since this is meant to be a commercial project I need to be aware of the way the game looks now and try to update things to fit.

Luckily, much of that work has already been done for me. The new D&D ‘storyline’ Tomb of Annihilation has just come out, and with it a chance to see how Wizards of the Coast are handling hex crawls these days.

Looking through the book, it actually appears that they haven’t changed much. Many of the classic elements of running hex crawls are in place – the players are given a partially filled map of the area, they navigate through hexes each day with a chance to get lost, and they run into random encounters. It would actually be relatively easy for me to simply take those standard rules for hex crawling and drop them into my setting, building the campaign with that kind of travel in mind.

My big sticking point with traditional hex crawls is random encounters. I really, really hate random encounters.

In traditional random encounters you have a table that you roll on, usually filled with ‘wandering monsters’, and if you roll a result then those monsters attack the party and a fight happens. I really don’t like combat for the sake of combat in my games. It’s the equivalent of filler tracks on an otherwise good album, or those mid-series clip episodes of a TV show that do nothing to progress the plot. I feel like if you’re making your party fight because there’s simply nothing else for them to do, then you’ve gone wrong somewhere.

The easy solution to this is to remove combat from random encounter tables. Instead, we could fill them with interesting locations and discoveries that the party can stumble across. This doesn’t work either, though, since what you end up with is a map that’s absolutely filled with ruins and caves and towers and weird stone circles and enormous dead constructs and… etc. etc. You end up with a game that looks like the map of any EA/Ubisoft/WB Games ‘open world’ video game, where you can’t move without stumbling over something. The game becomes so saturated with sidequests and things to discover that, perversely, all of those discoveries start to lose any kind of meaning.

I’m still not sure exactly how I’m going to handle random encounters. I need to strike a balance between discoveries and combats, and I want to make sure that any combats I do include on those random encounter tables are somehow well-designed. I like my combats to make use of the environment, for the enemies to use appropriate tactics, and for it to be more than simply “roll dice until dead”. My other concern is with making sure that the party don’t simply wander out into the jungle and fight tons of things until they level up.

That will all come later, once I’ve fully fleshed out the map of the island, but it’s good to keep that in mind while I’m designing.

As for the navigational parts of the hex crawl, I’m actually pretty happy with the way they’re presented in ToA (and they’re not much different from the traditional mechanics of the hex crawl). In short, each day the party appoint a navigator. That navigator makes a Wisdom (Survival) check (or, ideally, the GM makes it for her), and on a success the party knows exactly where they are. On a failure, the GM rolls 1d6 to dictate which side of the hex the party exits on, and the party only reorient themselves once somebody succeeds on one of the navigation checks. It’s simple and easy to run, and I see no real reason to change it.

One of the other things that ToA – and plenty of hex crawls, but we’re talking about the newest one here – does is to include the effects of weather on the party. This is something I’m going to include, too, because nothing sets the tone of an exploratory campaign quite like weather. Pathetic fallacy has existed in literature for hundreds of years, and for good reason.

The caveat here is that I don’t want weather to detract from the gameplay. Although I want the party to feel at times like the constant rain – or whatever – is making them miserable and making it harder to get to places and do things, I don’t want to make it impossible for them to make progress without good reason. Stranding them on a sandbar in the middle of the ocean, with the mainland in sight but unreachable, and some horror or another crawling up out of the dunes to eat them? That’s fine, and fun. Making them spend a session huddled in a cave waiting for the storm to end? Not fun.

This is actually fixed very firmly in my mind right now, because I’ve been playing a lot of Breath of the Wild recently. I absolutely adore that game, but there are some elements of it that immediately sap all my enjoyment of it. Weapon breakage is one of them. The other is the constant rain.

Don’t get me wrong; I love weather effects in games, and I love that they have a tangible effect on gameplay, but I hate that as the game goes on there’s no real way for the player to mitigate them. Breath of the Wild is built around climbing and exploring – but when it rains, you can’t climb. At all. And, as far as I can see, there’s no piece of equipment or special ability that ever changes that. There’s no real way to know when it’s about to start raining, and no way to know when it will end, and if you’re halfway up a cliff when it begins you’re screwed. The only option is to drop down and wait the storm out, or to fast travel away and come back again.

I’ve spent hours – literally, hours, at a time – in that game huddled under an outcropping on a cliff waiting for the rain and the lightning to stop so I can get to the shrine a few feet above me. In many of those cases it’s been while I was exploring a new region, which meant there were no convenient fast travel locations nearby. I might have already spent an hour slogging across dangerous terrain to get there, using up my resources fighting things, slowly making progress towards my goal only to be thwarted by weather. It’s a crushing feeling, getting so close and then having to make the decision to either spend an hour in real time doing absolutely nothing when I should be playing the game, or else to go do something else and try again later with no guarantee that the same thing won’t happen. (And, in my experience, the same thing usually does happen).

It’s my opinion that game mechanics should work in service to a player’s enjoyment of the game. If the mechanics actively make the player want to stop playing the game, then they’re bad mechanics. I’m not inviting you to tell me why I’m wrong about weather in Breath of the Wild; frankly, I’m sick of people telling me that I’m wrong to not enjoy that part of the game every time I mention it on Twitter. If you enjoy it, that’s fine. I don’t. And I’m going to keep the way those mechanics make me feel in mind when it comes time to decide how I’ll deal with weather in my campaign setting.

Of course, I’m thinking this through a little too much. In D&D it’s easy to simply narrate the misery; to say “the storm rages for hours, and all you can do is huddle for cover until it passes”. The players themselves don’t have to spent half a day doing literally nothing. The difficulty comes in designing a system that will make the players feel some of that misery without making them want to rage quit the game.

So, there are a few discrete systems I need to design for this project. As we’ve discussed, there’s weather, and there’s random encounters. The third system I haven’t touched on much so far, though I have mentioned it briefly in earlier posts in this series.

Starting back on a project that’s been sitting for a while is always difficult. It’s been a few weeks since I did much work on this setting – I’ve been busy with Breaker of Chains, amongst other things – and I wasn’t entirely sure where to jump back into this project. This post is late because, well, this isn’t what I intended to write about, and I scrapped what I’d done and started again late yesterday.

I had originally intended to start defining some of the flora and fauna of the island, but I wasn’t enjoying that work and it felt kind of pointless – like I was doing something for the sake of doing it, rather than because I was enjoying it or thought it would add something of value to the thing I’ve been building.

On Friday Wizards of the Coast released the Tortle Package on DMs Guild. I’ve had a chance to look at it today, and my heart sank a little when I finally got around to reading it. The geography of the Snout of Umgar isn’t hugely dissimilar from the geography of the island I’ve been building (although it’s not identical), and it’s also populated with turtle people. I realised that if I want this setting to be something unique that people are going to want to use in their games – and potentially spend money on – that I’m going to need to ensure that I distinguish it from Chult in obvious ways.

So I decided to revisit my own turtle people and look at what differentiates them from tortles. The turtlekin are one of the most important parts of my setting and the campaign – the story revolves around them, and they’re going to be the primary antagonists for a large portion of the campaign. If they can be easily replaced by tortles, then I’ve failed in making them unique enough to tell a story about them.

I’ll be honest – I’m writing this and I’m still not entirely sure how to present this post. I don’t want to do a straightforward comparison post (“Tortles do this; my turtles do this”) because that seems unnecessarily defensive, like I’m admitting that they’re basically the same and trying to find any difference whatsoever to cling to. I also haven’t developed much of the turtlekin yet, so writing that kind of post would require me to fill in a lot of the blanks that I have and present it as though that information was already developed. I don’t like that.

So, since I have a lot of blanks to fill in, I figure this post will be the place where I remove some of the fog and start defining my turtle people in more detail. Where it’s relevant, we’ll look at where my turtlefolk butt up against the tortle, and see if there’s anything I can tweak to further differentiate my people from the tortles.

Let’s remind ourselves of what we already know about the turtlefolk who live on my still-nameless island.

The Turtlekin

Most of what I know about the turtlekin – or turtle folk, or turtleborn, or whatever I’m calling them this week – comes from this post where I developed some of the history of the island. There’s little point in simply regurgitating that post here, so I’ll just touch on some of the more interesting parts of it here, the parts that I decide to flesh out a little more or that I feel need to be differentiated from tortles in some way. I will say that I’d forgotten a lot of what I wrote in that post, so it was definitely worth rereading (for me, at least). I’ll also give the caveat again that I’m writing this post simultaneously with any development work I do on the turtlekin, so the structure of the rest of this post may be somewhat lacking.

I still really like the idea that there are two distinct subraces of my turtlefolk – those who live on land and don’t swim much, and the sea turtles who are essentially the explorers of the turtlefolk – and that they are a very social, communal society. I liked that the moment that I wrote it, but I like it even more now that I’ve seen what WoTC have done with the tortle. The turtle people presented to go with Tomb of Annihilation are born explorers, filled with a wanderlust that drives them to travel and explore. They don’t really have settlements and permanent structures, and there’s only really one generation of them alive at a time (the tortles only breed when they are coming to the end of their lives, and spend their final moments dispensing wisdom and education to their offspring before they die).

That’s dramatically different to the society that I’m building. Once the eggs hatch and the hatchlings that survive make their way south, they join society and live among their family. And by family, I mean the community as a whole; it seems a little farfetched that the turtlekin would recognise which hatchlings are theirs when they weren’t there to see them hatch, and the hatchlings’ journey south probably takes a fair amount of time.  

I wonder now if the breeding season is marked by a festival of some kind that coincides with the first hatchlings finding their way home? There could be a particular status bestowed on those hatchlings that reach the safety of the commune first, or expectations placed on them by society to continue to outshine their peers.

I also wonder if this could be an interesting part of their culture to mine for things like turtlekin folk stories/legends, as well as potential adventure hooks if I decide that the reveal about the nature of the colonial diet has to come a little later, once the players have spent some time with the turtlekin and developed a relationship with them. Maybe there’s a story about a hatchling who never made it home, who has grown in solitude in the jungle and who has watched his people from outside for years. Perhaps that story is one of those memetic tales, an urban legend of sorts that seems to be shared by all generations – but if we want an adventure out of it, we simply decide that this time the story is true, and introduce it to the players as something worth investigating.

I still don’t really know what their architecture looks like, and I think that’s going to be important. WoTC’s tortles don’t really construct buildings other than very utilitarian stone forts that they use to protect their young while they are educated, before the older generation die. Once that happens the young tortles abandon these structures.

That isn’t the case for my turtlekin. I decided early on that I want them to be a mostly settled society, and I want their settlement (or settlements – there may be more than one turtlekin settlement on the island) to be fairly alien in its construction. A turtle’s real home is his shell, so the architecture doesn’t necessarily have to provide shelter. And due to the communal nature of their society, there isn’t any need for lots of individual buildings to house distinct family units. I mentioned briefly when I first wrote about these people that I’d like their society to be fairly religious, and religion has always inspired impressive architecture, so there’s definitely scope for some structures of religious significance. Their young need to be educated, too, so I’ll need spaces for that to happen.

So, we’re talking lots of functional spaces, but I don’t want them to be visually boring. I like the idea that just as my turtlefolk decorate their shells to express themselves, they also build visually striking structures. There’s also the fact that they have some affinity with water – they’re amphibious, after all – so many of the structures could incorporate both water and land into their construction and design.

Let’s talk about multiple settlements for a minute, too. Up to this point I’ve always just assumed that there’s only one turtlekin settlement on the island, but there’s no reason for that to be the case. In fact now that I’ve thought about this for more than two minutes, I don’t know why that would be the case at all. If I include even one more settlement, I immediately have an added element of conflict that I can use in the campaign – politics. There must be some reason why the turtlefolk don’t all live in one place, after all, and there’s no reason to assume that the separate settlements don’t have contact with one another – either friendly or hostile.

One aspect of my larger plot that I’ve been struggling to resolve is how the characters are going to discover the means to stop the elder god from waking. Once the conflict with the turtlekin begins, it’s going to be difficult for the players to gain the information that they need. If i introduce a second community of turtlefolk, then there’s scope for the players to discover their existence later in the campaign and for them to form an alliance. Maybe this second society don’t believe the stories about the god beneath the volcano – they see the first group as religious fundamentalists and don’t give their stories and rituals much credence. If the players can convince them that the threat is real and that the first group aren’t going to be able to complete the ritual, they can maybe enlist the second group to help them complete it and save the island.

A Playable Race?.

Last time I was talking about the turtlekin, I floated the idea of writing two concurrent campaigns – one where you’re the colonists and accidentally ruin the Very Important Ritual, and one where you’re turtlefolk and humans arrive, eat your young, and endanger the world. I still really like that idea, but I think it’s a little too ambitious. It can maybe come later, but for now it’s a huge amount of extra work that will only make this project take longer than it’s already going to. At the most I might write a one-shot optional turtlekin adventure that sets up some of the lore of the island and ends with the turtle seeing the first colonial ships arriving, but that’s not definite.

What this means in a practical sense is that I’m not going to write up the turtlekin as a playable race. Instead, when we get to the time for mechanics and crunch, I’ll stat them up as monsters. In fact, that might well be what I aim to do for next week’s post.

This isn’t a huge amount of work to have done given how long I’ve let this project sit idle, but I’m not overly concerned. It’s good to get back into the project and to feel like I’ve made at least a little bit of progress, and if all goes well this week I’ll have some actual playable content ready to present next week. (I have to write my MA dissertation this week, so we’ll see whether I manage to get that post up on time or not.)

Thanks for reading, and welcome back!