I Made a Dungeon!

Jog Brogzin and I did a little bit of a fun collaboration project soon after I did this post Here. In keeping with the snail theme, we decided to make a travelling snail temple.

The map was the original collaborative project, and is individually licensed under Creative Commons, so feel free to use it for whatever you want.

I also used the map to make my own dungeon, you can check it out below.

Wrath of the Hydra Link

Hexcounter Tables

Previous Rules Found Here:

Exploration Rules

Each hex has a d12 encounter table (maybe this is too much?), the first six things are the interesting and cool hard to find stuff, so a town isn’t going to be on this list, but the secret shrine to the blasphemous blood god in the surrounding woodlands would be. When you choose to explore rather than just wander through the hex, remove the last six entries from this encounter table. This means that you are guaranteed to encounter at least one interesting thing.

- - -

There are a few problems with this. Mainly being that I was right when posting that. Thats way too many entries per hex, even trying to key a small hex map would take ages.

So I came up with a solution. That being Unification.

An Explanation

Alright, so to start with, take your world map, and divide it into a set of regions. You can do this based on climate or theme. The jungle will be separated from the desert, and the fairy tale land with knights and dragons will be separated from the place with samurai and giant skeletons that eat people.

Taken from Here.

After that you write an encounter table with the following entries:

(1d12)

1-4. Regional Encounter Omen

5-8. Regional Encounter

9. Tool Encounter

10. POI Omen

11-12. POI

Omens

Regional Encounters

For the most part these are just like any other encounter table you'd see, a list of things that you'd be likely to see in the area, and have the potential to turn deadly.

You're going to want to either make it 

vague, or put a small list of subtables. The idea is that you can generate plot hooks or a mini story element off of what's going on in the region, making repeated rolls more interesting.

Tool Encounters

Sort of like regional encounters, but these ones are only ever useful. Something like abandoned adventuring equipment in the ditch. Or perhaps a wandering minstrel you can get information from, while getting your own name out there.

POIs
The points of interest, these aren't fixed entries on the table. Basically whatever the interesting part of the hex is is on here. And if you get an omen of it, you'll have a much better idea of what's going on, giving them more information for later.


If the players arent using their explore action while in the hex, you roll a d10 instead of a d12 for any encounter rolls made during that watch.

There are certain things that should never be put on the encounter table though. Settlements, lakes, rivers and other auch things are not as easily missed as an abandoned mineshaft covered in vegetation which now houses a haunted pile of unrefined gold, or the secret underground murder chamber of the seemingly nice village idiot.

- - -

Thoughts, comments, questions? Better ideas? Put them in the comments part of this post to help me and others steal from them.

Revised Armor System: Introducing Chaos!

I've been thinking a lot about armor lately, and by extension my armor system. It's too complicated, Nobody wants to remember three seemingly random numbers which attempt to mimick real world armor. Its clunky, and ugly. Which is the opposite of what armor is. Armor is pretty and elegant. So a pretty and elegant system is better at mimicking armor, right?

The Old System

The New System:

Okay, the first step, it to make your players describe their attacks. From there you can determine what weapon they're using as well as how they use it. Any weapon can use any type of attack as long as the player can justify it adequately.
After damage is rolled, the defender rolls resistance, which is based on the armor type as listed below.

Textile:
Blunt-d6 , Cut-d4 , Stab- d6

Chain:
Blunt-d6 , Cut-d8 , Stab-d6

Plate:
Blunt-d8 , Cut-d10 , Stab-d8

You do not gain any resistance to melee weapons while you are prone, because at that point any dude can just walk over and stab you.

The average damage tends to rest somewhere between 1-3 pretty consistently based on my current weapons system. And that feels pretty alright to me. Obviously these aren't based on the attacks monsters would necessarily be making, which are much more likely to deal higher amounts of damage, but armor will do a good job of protecting you against other humans.

Why Chaos?

There are a few advantages rolling has over static numbers in this case.

For starters, it gives us a wider range. Previously, I had proposed that Plate reduced all damage by 8, meaning the attacker, at maximum damage with the highest damaging weapon type, deals 2 damage. Which straight up does not work. With this new system, the damage is reduced by a die roll, which means the damage you deal usibg the highest damage weapon type can be anywhere from 9 to 0, which occurs less than half the time unless the die rolls are equal, in which case it's exactly half the time.

The other benefit is that it doesn't force you into doing anything. Previously you were shoehorned into using polearm weapons against anyone wearing plate. Which doesnt make sense. While a polearm would be ideal against an armored opponent, its not like it's invulnerable to everything else.  On the otherhand, its not gonna be as easy on you to take your tiny dagger against a fully armored opponent.

I dunno, maybe my armor system in general is a bad idea. Here's another picture.

All the art in this post was done by Eol, a talented artist who draws people in armor. If you like what you saw, consider checking out his Twitter or Youtube Channel.