Let’s Make a Hexcrawl Setting

[Sanglorian]

Hi folks,

I've been reading along during the last couple of weeks but not in a position to contribute - it's great to see the new developments! (I'm particularly liking the Witch Clans).

I was interested to read your suggestions for languages, Daztur, but I think we shouldn't fill in details like that at this stage. I think the fact that language hasn't come up organically shows that it's not important to the setting, at least for the moment.

In fact, I think it would be a good rule for the setting to say that only information within hexes, random encounters or stories is canonical - contributors are welcome to add extra thoughts or ideas, but these aren't binding.

Does anyone here know a good content management system? It would be great if we could gather the content we've created in different categories as we need it. For example, I love that the mega-document allows me to search everything we've created, but a document that size slows down my computer enormously even when it's fully loaded. For a lot of things, I'd like to be able to access a smaller file with just the hexes for one region - but it would be a lot of work to keep each smaller file up to date, which is why I thought a content manager could help.

At least, would you be able to spin the appendices into a separate Google Doc, Daztur? I found making the last updates to the index of monsters very difficult because my computer was so slow to respond.

On that note, the index of monsters should be up to date, and I've added a couple of categories to the appendices: the Witch Clans and the Sunset Lands.

I'm loving the pictures to illustrate each region. What good sources of public domain art are out there? I'm a fan of Liam's Pictures from Old Books, though it's difficult to navigate.

At the moment, entries have been mainly in the form of hexes. There were a few of another type - the random encounter - but they got rolled into hexes. Recently, though, we've had a couple of entries of a different nature - what we might call stories or expositions. Is there a way we can standardise these entries (maybe give them a code by region, with the first story about the Cornfields being A1, for example)? I do think it's a good idea to take some stories that are currently within hexes and put them in the greater region description (for example, the Witch Clans region should have the details about the Witch Clans, rather than those being in one of the hexes describing the Dungers).

Finally, I sorted the monsters of the Shrouded Lands by type, as best I could. I've included the results below. Like the maps I made, this is non-canonical and I don't intend to update it.

I think there are some interesting results: we have constructs (mainly golems), chimerics, dogs, worms, no horses (except dead ones), giant insects, talking animals, undead and elementals. Often mentioned but never seen alive are dragons and gods. If there are outsiders in this setting, they are rare.

Humanoids seem to form into a number of categories: essentially human (dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc.), bloodline (genasi, tieflings), having animal properties (gnolls, aarocockra, kobolds, etc.), transformed humans (troglodytes, were-*), giants and fey (I'm lumping goblinoids in with the fey, which I think fits their flavour in this setting).

Maybe those results are typical for a D&D setting, but it seems to me that we have quite an unusual bundle of monsters, even though individually most of them are standard D&D fare.

CATEGORIES
Constructs
Golems (flesh, clay, giant beeswax), the animated sword.

Humanoids
Dwarves (deep, derro, southern), fire genasi (gnolls), gnomes (sand), halflings, orcs (half-orcs), tieflings, trolls (?), Heget, Heget’s Sons

Chimeric (?) humanoids
Aarokocra, gnolls, swine-harpies, homonculi, kobolds, minotaurs,
Transformed humanoids
Dopplegangers, ettins, Rojarshans, time-splintered sages, troglodytes, were-men, were-sharks, were-spider monkeys

Giants
Giants (cloud, frost, hill, stone, storm), ogres,
Fey
Dryads, seelie fey, unseelie fey, selkies, the unicorn (?), elves (high, half-elves, seelie, unseelie)
Goblinoids (fey?)
Bugbears, goblins, hobgoblins,

Chimerics
Goatscorpions, griffons, manticores, mermaids, owlbears, the peryton (?), the xortoise (?), the destroying angel (?)

Animals
Ghost apes, courier bats, blood falcons, ibises, the white raven, boars, cattle (aurochs, night, red), giant crayfish, albino crocodiles, deer, dogs (blind, black, blink (?)), painted elephants, fish, su-giraffes (?), goats, mosquitos, the kraken (?), leucrotta (?), mammoths, spider monkeys, ostriches, wooly rhinoceroses, sheep, snakes (pythons, winged vipers, albino), flying cats, spiders, large squid, stirges (?), giant snapping turtles, warg (?), whales, Widow’s Mites
Worms
Worms (grey, purple, waker)
Giant insects
Ankhegs, fire beetles, giant bees, man-sized centipedes, giant stag beetles,
Talking animals
Nordenbjorn, the mockingbird, talking frogs
Cursed
Razor cats, vampire cattle (also undead), plague mice

Undead
Vampire cattle (also cursed), drow-ghosts, eyes of flame and fear (skeletal minotaurs), ghosts, ghouls, Grey Revenants, flayed hides of horses, liches, arch liches, ice mummies, skeletons

Outsiders
Efreet, snake-demons, the sphere of annihilation

Elementals
Fire elements, water spirits, galeb duhr, sandlings, the being of fire and smoke (?)

Dragons
Drakes, dragons (beyond the Edge)

Legendary, rumoured or extinct
Demi-gods, dragons (blue, red, topaz), phoenix

Unknown
Aboleths, firebirds (animal? elemental?), burning eagles (elemental?), gilded butterflies (animal?), geas eaters, gloomwings (animal? not a monster at all?)

 

[Nellisir]

The map has been updated.
Here's the PDF of the new compilation (just the beginning, a lot more work to do): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6z-iUIH4P8aTm8wNGFWZkZ5em8/edit

How does the format look? I'll be adding in more art and region maps but you can see the basic structure here.

I'd go with a standard font, smaller font size, and two column layout. Right now I feel like printing it out would just be a waste of paper.

 

[Daztur]

I've got a few ideas bouncing around my head for more hexes, but haven't gotten around to writing them up yet:
A. The ruins of Bergolast with a write-up of what caused its fall.
B. A write-up of the Lords Sanguine, who connect into the Doom of Bergolast.
C. A small human outpost on the south shore of the Keening Sea and its relations with the local gnolls.

I'd go with a standard font, smaller font size, and two column layout. Right now I feel like printing it out would just be a waste of paper.

Yeah, looking it over I'd have to agree. I'll include that in the next update.

Sanglorian: good to have you back

Yeah, the document is huge but maybe a downloaded PDF would be easier on your computer? Alternatively there's always a wiki, but I do most of my writing offline on the subway so I need something that I can edit easily offline.

About language: I'm a huge history geek and I've been trying really hard to avoid writing up long treatises about language families, ethnic stocks, land tenure systems, kinship structures, etc. etc. since in my experience those just put a series of stumbling blocks in front of players know matter how much I like doing so.

Thanks for the link to the images, I'll be adding them in. The bulk of the color pictures will be Pre-Raphaelite paintings and my go-to source for black and white illustrations for each individual hex will be the Burne-Jones Chaucer woodcuts (which I love insanely) or 19th century woodcuts in general (Pre-Raphaelite when I can find them). That'll hopefully maintain a consistent feel and I think that the dreaminess of Pre-Raphaelite stuff suits the setting and it's all public domain. However, I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to art history so input from art types is very welcome.

At the moment, entries have been mainly in the form of hexes. There were a few of another type - the random encounter - but they got rolled into hexes. Recently, though, we've had a couple of entries of a different nature - what we might call stories or expositions. Is there a way we can standardise these entries (maybe give them a code by region, with the first story about the Cornfields being A1, for example)? I do think it's a good idea to take some stories that are currently within hexes and put them in the greater region description (for example, the Witch Clans region should have the details about the Witch Clans, rather than those being in one of the hexes describing the Dungers).

Yeah, I've been doing that some (for example I moved a bit chunk of the City of Smoke entry into the general Burning Lands write-up) but will have to do more of that.

So the description that fits the region in general rather than a specific hex within it gets moved to the region heading, but what to do about the stories contained within individual hex entries that are more specific (such as my Sleeping Beauty story), we could:

A. Leave them inside the hex descriptions as-is.
B. Move the stories into a "tales" section. Perhaps at the end of each region write-up there could be a "Tales of X" section with all of the narrative bits from that region dumped there. One downside of this would be that a lot of hex description information is contained in those stories, so separating out the stories and the hex descriptions would lead to some redundancy. Also while some stories are clearly narratives in others there isn't a clear line between narratives and background information.
C. Something else.

What do you think?

Interesting analysis of the critter types. As you note outsiders are very rare, humanoids of all types are quite common and twisted or magical animals are everywhere. It gives me a kind of The Hobbit turned up to 11 feel since the main types of critters in the Hobbit are all very well represented here (aside from dragons mostly being on the margins), which I like.

 

[Sanglorian]

I've got a few ideas bouncing around my head for more hexes, but haven't gotten around to writing them up yet:
A. The ruins of Bergolast with a write-up of what caused its fall.
B. A write-up of the Lords Sanguine, who connect into the Doom of Bergolast.
C. A small human outpost on the south shore of the Keening Sea and its relations with the local gnolls.

I'd forgotten all about the Lords Sanguine, and I've been wanting to find out what happened to unhappy Bergolast. It'll be interesting to see what you come up with.

Yeah, the document is huge but maybe a downloaded PDF would be easier on your computer? Alternatively there's always a wiki, but I do most of my writing offline on the subway so I need something that I can edit easily offline.

I think that's the main problem with a wiki - and the fact that it's slower to edit and harder to cut-and-paste large chunks from than a Google Doc. Maybe we should stick with the Google Doc for now but stick the appendices in a second doc.

Thanks for the link to the images, I'll be adding them in. The bulk of the color pictures will be Pre-Raphaelite paintings and my go-to source for black and white illustrations for each individual hex will be the Burne-Jones Chaucer woodcuts (which I love insanely) or 19th century woodcuts in general (Pre-Raphaelite when I can find them). That'll hopefully maintain a consistent feel and I think that the dreaminess of Pre-Raphaelite stuff suits the setting and it's all public domain. However, I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to art history so input from art types is very welcome.

You might also find Europeana useful for finding pre-Raphaelite stuff - I did a search and got a few pages of results.

So the description that fits the region in general rather than a specific hex within it gets moved to the region heading, but what to do about the stories contained within individual hex entries that are more specific (such as my Sleeping Beauty story), we could:

A. Leave them inside the hex descriptions as-is.
B. Move the stories into a "tales" section. Perhaps at the end of each region write-up there could be a "Tales of X" section with all of the narrative bits from that region dumped there. One downside of this would be that a lot of hex description information is contained in those stories, so separating out the stories and the hex descriptions would lead to some redundancy. Also while some stories are clearly narratives in others there isn't a clear line between narratives and background information.
C. Something else.

What do you think?

Hmm, I think it's a difficult call to make. To be useful to DMs - particularly on the fly - the hexes need to be fairly quick to read. But the stories are often key to the contents of the hexes. Maybe do it on a case by case basis?

 

[chutup]

The new compilation is looking good - I love the illustrations. The only thing I don't dig is the font. It looks cool at first but becomes grating on my eyes after a while, so personally I'd prefer a less evocative but more readable font.

The Gates of Official Travel Pass Sanction (50.29)

Some way out into the desert from the City of Smoke, there are two enormous black buttes standing side by side, with a wall between them and a pair of huge iron gates. For a thousand years, these were known as the Gates of Blood, and it is still believed that their rusty colour derives from the blood of the thousands who have died trying to breach the wall. In the time of the Gnawbone Wars, the invading armies broke themselves against this wall, yet they knew an even worse fate awaited them if they tried to go around the buttes.

Such defenses are long gone, however, and the gates now have only a ceremonial function. They are presided over by a Thringish exile named Messeren Talbote, one of the three human advisors gathered by the gnolls' Great Mother. Talbote has given them the more modern title of the Gates of Official Travel Pass Sanction. All non-gnollish visitors to the City of Smoke must pass through these gates and receive a Travel Pass in order to go unmolested into the city. The Travel Pass is a token fashioned out of a rat skull, and despite Talbote's best efforts at education the gnolls still refer to them as such, rather than using the correct terminology.

In order to qualify for a rat skull (er, Travel Pass), visitors must prove they have something of value to trade or offer in the City, and they must also divest themselves of all weapons, which become property of the Great Mother. In practice, nobody ever arrives at the gates with weapons to be confiscated, and a cottage industry has sprung up on the west side of the gates with regard to storage of travellers' weapons and armour.

There is another way to gain a Travel Pass, which is by challenging the Keeper of the Gate to single combat. The Keeper of the Gate is selected from the strongest male gnolls. Those who defeat him are considered by ancient law to have gnollish blood and are thus allowed free passage in the City. Few men choose this option, however, for the duel must be fought with flindbars, a form of spiked nunchaku developed by gnolls. Those untrained in the weapon's use are likely to stab themselves before the enemy can even get to them.

Hooks:
- Who were the armies attacking the City of Smoke during the Gnawbone Wars? Did they ever breach the Gates of Blood?
- Why couldn't they just walk around the Gates? Was there a wall there, or some other danger?
- How exactly does the weapon storage work? Can you really rely on these people to look after your crap while you're in the City of Smoke? Do any of them offer to smuggle the weapons through to you on the other side?
- Has anyone defeated the Keeper of the Gate and gained free access to the City? What do the gnolls think of him/her?
- Is it true that some people might have gnollish blood, or is that only a myth?

 

[chutup]

The Pit of the Waker Worms (25.20)

Upriver from the city of Blind Midshotgatepool, the river branches off and flows on through the mountains, eventually leading to the Fanged Cliffs (27.18). Some way down the branch, one may find a deep pit of water that seems unnaturally dark and smells faintly metallic. This is the current resting-place of the waker worms.

When the founders of the five villages arrived on the shores of the Keening Sea, they found it teeming with enormous and awful worms that could swallow a man whole. Furthermore, they were known as the waker worms for the fact that, no matter how thoroughly they were destroyed, they would always wake and rise again at the moment of nightfall. Luckily, the Thringman Ban the Clever (future founder of Banshot) discovered that the waker worms could be permanently laid to rest if their bodies were buried under running water.

For the first few generations of the villages, it was accepted that the dead waker worms lay beneath the estuary, and once or twice a foolish fishermen even dredged one of the worms up. This eventually led to a dispute between the men of Pontgate and Banshot over who had responsibility for the slaying of such beasts. To avert further conflict, the councillors of Midton exhorted the swift sailors of Sepool to dredge up the waker worms during the day and deposit them further upriver before night fell. This worked for several years, until the people of upstream Blindsnake began to complain that their water was tainted by the blood of the worms. So the worms were relocated again, to their current resting-place where they can no longer contaminate the five villages' water supply.

The lands downstream of this pit are harsh and wild, and it is rumoured that those who drink from the dark waters develop an uncanny connection to the world of the dead. There are some reports of people emerging from these lands with black lips and a newfound disregard for danger, as if death itself held no terrors for them any longer.

Hooks:
- Have any of the waker worms escaped over the years?
- Any other tales of Ban the Clever, or his four companions?
- What wild dangers dwell downstream of the pit? (Other than the flying snakes, which we already know about.)
- What happens if you drink the dark water?

 

[Daztur]

I'll set up a separate doc for the appendix and replace the font of the body with Century Gothic, which is easy on the eyes and printers.

As far as the stories, after some thought, what I've realized is that our entries are really far far far far too verbose for on the fly use. What I'll do is keep the narrative bits in place and keep the concise hex listing (mentioned in the table of contents but not written yet) for on the fly use. The concise hex listing will basically be a lot like Wilderlines of High Fantasy, just a line or two of evocative description and (maybe later) some game stats (5ed if I like 5ed, ACKS if I don't like 5ed, some other edition if someone else wants to stat it out).

 

[Sanglorian]

Daztur: That sounds like a great compromise. I've been eying a number of retroclones for which one would suit the Shrouded Lands best: I think Dark Dungeons, Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy Role-Play are all strong candidates.

Licensing
Is now a good time to revive our discussion of whether we should license the Shrouded Lands and - if so - which licence to use?

I think Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported is the best choice. I have a few reasons for this, but the main one is: I'd love to see someone publish Beasts of Shuttered or Down and Out in the Burning Lands, and there's no way that a publisher would clear rights with every contributor to this project.

There are a few other reasons I support CC BY-SA:

• It allows us to use all the text and artworks contributed to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
• The NonCommercial CC licences are unclear and poorly defined, and may be very restrictive
• It opens up a few more RPGs that could be converted to the Shrouded Lands, including indie favourite Donjon, retroclone Wizard & Warrior and the recently released Critical!
• CC BY-SA is a free culture licence, so it reigns in a lot of the excesses of modern copyright law.

Finally,


Some fun/useful hexcrawl posts I've stumbled across:

• From The Hydra's Tunnel, 'How Much Adventure in One 6 Mile Hex?' (Answer: the entire setting of Skyrim, or the entire setting of Oblivion, "89 caves, 50 forts, 15 Shrines, 16 Inns and Stables, 23 mines, 30 settlements, 31 camps, 12 cities/castles/walled towns, and 50 ruins")
• From I Waste the Buddha with My Crossbow, 'This is What a 1-Mile Hex Has in It' (What does it have in it? "part of a marina, a load of condos, couple ponds, a goodly chunk of a 10,750 acre lake (biggest in the state, as it turns out), some tennis c- no, a lot of tennis courts, bunches a'trees and some undeveloped land.")
• From Papers & Pencils, 'Making Travel More Engaging' (rules for travelling through and exploring hexes)
• From Vaults of Nagoh, 'The Howling Emptiness of the 5/6/8-Mile Hex' (rules for finding things within a hex)
• From Monsters & Manuals, 'The Contents of Hexes' (rules for finding things within a hex, and an argument that about three discoverable things per hex is a good idea)

Also, a request: does anyone know how to overlay a hex template over Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps? It would be fascinating to look at my hometown and see how much of it fits in a 1/6/25 mile hex.

 

[Nellisir]

Yeah, looking it over I'd have to agree. I'll include that in the next update.

I don't mind the funky font as a header, but body text should be something vanilla. Times New Roman is just fine.

I've got a few more weeks of grad school before the semester is over; I intended to start contributing something then. I might be able to do something with the files as well.

Is the file size reference to the google doc?

 

[Nellisir]

Daztur: That sounds like a great compromise. I've been eying a number of retroclones for which one would suit the Shrouded Lands best: I think Dark Dungeons, Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy Role-Play are all strong candidates.

I prefer Swords & Wizardry. It's simple and easy to upgrade to any or all of the above.

For hexcrawl blogs/posts, I'm hoping you've seen Land of NOD? It's amazing.

Also, a request: does anyone know how to overlay a hex template over Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps? It would be fascinating to look at my hometown and see how much of it fits in a 1/6/25 mile hex.

I can do it, but not for a week or two.