9 Comments

  1. Thomas
    July 14, 2017 @ 4:45 pm

    The Point Crawl is rocking my mind right now. It seems so obvious in retrospect! Excellent stuff. Always a pleasure to read the philosophical stuff just as much as the nuts and bolts here.

    Reply

    • loottheroom
      July 16, 2017 @ 12:23 am

      It really does seem obvious, doesn’t it? I wish I’d had an extra week to play around with it before writing this post, in all honesty. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with it now that I know about it!

      Reply

  2. grumpyturtle1
    July 16, 2017 @ 4:42 pm

    When I was a boy in rural Washington state, USA I spent most of my free time exploring a relatively young forest that was adjacent to my home. I knew the roads that bound this forest in from my bus route. I learned the larger trails (old overgrown logging roads from excursions on horseback. Some areas of this forest I knew quite well, from exploring on foot and playing with the neighbor kids. we found shortcuts and game trails. Eventually we started cutting our own trails through the brush to go from point a to point b. One day I sat down and mapped it from my knowledge of this forest. It was ugly, obviously, but it was functional. It was not however close to accurate or scaled. That day I learned the difference between perceived space and measured space. Needless to say asking adventurers to make their own map fascinates me.

    Reply

    • loottheroom
      July 16, 2017 @ 6:39 pm

      I did something similar as a kid with the woods that I grew up near. I probably still have those ‘maps’ lying around somewhere, too.

      Having the PCs map as they go is something that I used to do a lot of when I first started playing D&D. It doesn’t seem as common now, and I’d really like to bring it back.

      Reply

  3. Let’s Build A Campaign Setting: Story Time – Loot The Room
    July 21, 2017 @ 11:00 am

    […] Last week I talked about hex crawls and point crawls. My plan for this week was to go away and start actually building some things – laying out the points in the point crawl, the beats of the story that we’re going to attempt to tell. I started on that process, but I’m not entirely finish at this point. Still, I think I’ve got a few interesting things to talk about, so let’s get into it and see where we end up. […]

    Reply

  4. Let’s Build A Campaign Setting: How Will This Thing Play? – Loot The Room
    October 3, 2017 @ 10:44 pm

    […] 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). […]

    Reply

  5. Wil
    October 8, 2017 @ 4:20 am

    A couple things. I’m just finna tangent, because I’ve read the most recent post, and now I’m catching up, but I feel like what I have to say might…help. Maybe. I don’t know.

    First thing. I also grew up in rural Washington state, like the commenter above me, and I have to say that my maps, while disrupted by development, and not necessarily topographically accurate, were FOLLOWABLE. Meaning, I drew maps of this are in question numerous times, for other people, and they were able to meet me at the specified location with no prior knowledge or experience every time. This means that, however bad the players maps seem to be, they’re probably accurate enough, which ties nearly into the “first colonists” idea for this setting.

    Thing two. Yep. That.

    Jerry Holkins is doing a base building type mini game in his Acquisitions Incorporated The “C” Team game. His is, very clearly, tied to milestones sitting the campaigns story, which is also very clearly tied to his character’s backstory. I think, with regards to the base-building mini game that you introduce a few months from now, just do that. Your PCs have been exploring the hi for for a couple weeks or a month, in game? When they return, the settlement that they are inextricably dependent on has developed and advanced to a certain point. They will always ALWAYS need to “return to town” for supplies, to turn in a “quest”, what have you, and so tie the development of the settlement to that. You don’t have to make it overly obvious, like saying “oh you cleared this dungeon, now the base has developed this much.” But you can, and probably should, for ease of mind during gameplay, say, okay, you’ve been gone this long, another ship has arrived, walls have been reinforced, now there is a town guard of trained soldiers, and now there is a legit colonial governor. Something like that, that alludes to this being a living world, but that is more or less obviously tied to their progress in exploring the poiintcrawl (which is fucking genius, btw) is, at least to me, the most legit explanation for The Thing. Another example from “Teh ‘C’ Teamz”; each improvement of the home base provides a mechanical boost to the party. Bonus one: cleaning the stable grants your cart and horse a ×1.5 speed bonus when traveling over land. Maybe consider tieing the bonuses in to your specific campaign. So it takes less time and less resources to fully “clear” a hex, or it requires fewer “random encounters” you want to avoid anyway. That way, the players have incentive to continue exploring, and to keep returning to town, to see what new things have developed, and what mechanical bonuses they may have accrued from said development.

    Reply

  6. Mark Katerberg
    January 13, 2021 @ 3:50 am

    Really love this article as I’m working on my first Hex Crawl. Random note for you: the tweets aren’t showing up anymore.

    Thanks for the content and the read!

    Reply

  7. Let’s Build A Campaign Setting: Story Time – Loot The Room
    February 27, 2024 @ 3:03 pm

    […] Last week I talked about hex crawls and point crawls. My plan for this week was to go away and start actually building some things – laying out the points in the point crawl, the beats of the story that we’re going to attempt to tell. I started on that process, but I’m not entirely finished at this point. Still, I think I’ve got a few interesting things to talk about, so let’s get into it and see where we end up. […]

    Reply

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